Oh, I understand that concern, particularly in the US where ambulance-chasing is a career for many lawyers. Motor racing is notorious for spectator injuries - particular rally racing and rallycross - but there are sufficient waivers and warnings that successful suits are all but non-existant. I use rally racing as an example, rather than NASCAR, as NASCAR is a controlled environment. You have safety fencing, debris catchers, concrete barriers, designated seating areas, etc. If that environment fails - particularly through negligence - then NASCAR arenas are likely to have problems. Rally races are uncontrolled environments, where there is often nothing more than some caution tape or a plastic cone between the cars and those watching. Watching a rally race, particularly if off-road, is extremely dangerous even when nothing goes wrong. Spectators know this and the ones who plan on living to a ripe old age do NOT place themselves along likely trajectories of cartwheeling vehicles. (The British also have the TT races around the Isle of Man, where it's an unusual year if deaths are below double figures.)
I see these public rocket areas as being about on-par with rally racing or maybe the TT races in terms of the dangers involved, and so long as that was made painfully obvious, should be protected somewhat by the fact that there are precidents to people being right up close to extreme danger, knowingly, conciously and deliberately. It would not be so clear these areas would be safe from lawsuits if they were "managed" beyond a minimal degree, as then the courts could argue that the environment was controlled but controlled in a way that was dangerous, setting up an expectation of safety that did not exist.
Of course, there is another possibility. I believe there is a gap between the official US and Canadian national boundaries. You could just build a whole bunch of rocket sites there, based on the above notion, but declare them as being outside of US jurisdiction for the purpose of lawsuits. There are also going to be those who believe amateur rocketry (with its attendant hazards) should be actively promoted, now the US population has exceeded 300 million. Not sure how well these would go down, though.
Cloning, at present, is unreliable and unstable. Few clones survive, but it is not fully understood why. Dolly the sheep aged rapidly and it is still not fully understood what mechanism caused this. Because we know about mitochondrial DNA and have now seen bacteria on the verge of becoming totally integrated with cells, we can conclusively say that cells are highly complex chimera. Simply copying one bit of the cell - even if it is the nucleic DNA - may be insufficient to produce an accurate clone. (In fact, attempts to clone cats have yielded very mixed results. The animals have identical nucleic DNA, so are technically clones, but share almost no other characteristics including eye and hair colour. The ability to predict anything was so infinitesimally small that the company doing this folded a few days ago.)
Until there has been a lot more research on how the internals of the cell interoperate, and thus raise the limits on what they can predict, the science simply doesn't exist to be able to back the argument that this is either safe or useful. I'm not saying that cloning can't be made safe, what I am saying is that the success rate for predicting what will happen is so abysmal that we cannot simply assume that cloning will be safe.
Forcing companies to label doesn't work in the US, perhaps. In the UK, the labelling is somewhat better enforced and standardized. I'd consider a box of eggs in the UK marked as "free range" as having a much higher probability of actually being so than anything comparable in the US. Consumer watchdogs aren't perfect in the UK, but do have more bite. (So much so that when "Top Gear" rated one car company as junk, it virtually abandoned all operations in the country.) Specialist stores, such as the "Real Meat Company", do their own research, which places limits on what farmers feel they can get away with. After the BSE (and nvCJD) scares, where farming malpractices nearly bankrupted the farming economy, people aren't quite so willing to cut corners. They do anyway - that's a built-in self-destruct mechanism - but just not as often. It's unclear whether Prince Charles advocating better farming practices helps or hinders the practice.
In the US, if a producer can get away with something, they will probably try and will likely succeed. The US is the only country I know of where a producer of goods can successfully sue consumer protection groups to prevent publication of anything unfavourable, even if that puts consumers at risk, and where "quality control" is so much of an obscenity that the marketroids now talk of "assurance" instead. The US is also the only country I know where farmers have been successfully sued because their fields have been contaminated with genetically engineered material. The UK is far from perfect - they tried to keep caterpillers genetically modified to produce scorpion venom in a field by putting a barbed-wire fence around it. Stupidity at heights hitherto unreached by mankind. But that is my entire point. Those involved - in any of these countries - are stupid, corrupt, negligent and/or greedy, and should not be trusted with anything sharper than a beanbag. They should definitely NOT be permitted within a thousand miles of a cloning facility.
Cloning is also very very expensive, going to the last point, and has something like a 1% success rate. This means that not only will you have much less certainty over the quality, consistancy or safety, but it'll also be hundreds of times more expensive, in order for the farmer to get any kind of profit from the deal.
Given the wastage in the syatem, in which a lot of meat rots before it sells, you'd get vastly superior yield (and therefore vastly lower prices) by improving refrigeration techniques and having stores manage their stock better. Meat is trasnsported frozen in a way that will likely cause cellular damage, then placed on shelves in a way that inevitably causes thawing and decay. You'd waste much less by using radiation treatment to eliminate bacteria OR freezing with liquid nitrogen, then keeping shelves at -30C or so.
Purchase: Next to nothing. There's lots of scrub land that has virtually nil market value, and derelict land that is too contaminated to be safe for anything conventional. In the latter case, the owners might even pay the State to take it off their hands, so as to avoid any cleanup penalties.
Upkeep: Drystone walling lasts pretty much forever and thatched roofing lasts 100 years plus. I think your tax bill can stretch to buying a basket of australian water reeds once a century, and stones you can find anywhere for free. Sure, it wouldn't be environmentally controlled. That would be for the user to deal with, or it isn't own-risk. The launchpad would be merely a flat concrete slab. If the land was previously used, the foundations of an old building would be quite sufficient.
Security: My proposal had no security. That was the entire point. It was entirely own-risk, which means the individuals there would need to handle amny security themselves. All they'd get is a site where it's safe to use rockets - Kennedy Space Center it's not.
The total cost of such a site - including buying the land, building rudimentary huts and laying out a concrete launch pad - might be as high as a few thousand dollars. That's $50,000 if you have one in each State. At 300 million people, that comes to one six thousandth of a cent a year. That is not a fraction of wages, that is the actual sum total you'd need to pay to cover something like this. However, by offloading some fraction of the amateur rocket storage, you reduce taxes for covering the risks to firemen, and reduce the insurance costs that have to factor in the possibility of rocket fuel next door. If the combined total of what you save exceeds how much it would cost, you have a net gain. If you counted the combined total of all the loose change that falls out of people's pockets onto the sidewalks, you'd just about have enough to cover all of the costs I'm talking about, in which case you'd pay bugger all and would still save from the reduced risks (real or perceived).
I want to make this very clear - I'm not suggesting that the Government set up mini-NASA space flight centers for private use. I'm talking the crudest, most primitive, most rudimentary structures imaginable (as they tend to be the ones that last longest and cost almost nothing to build), with EVERYTHING else provided by those involved in rocketry. This would merely be a location in which - if things go wrong - the only ones at risk are the ones who have voluntarily accepted that risk and are solely responsible for dealing with it. It's a location that, if it explodes, burns down, or blows up, nobody else is at risk and it's nobody else's problem to solve. The worst that can happen is that someone needs to spend an afternoon rebuilding a hut or two (drystone walls are just rough rocks piled on each other so they don't fall over), maybe hose a little blood off the launch pad, perhaps even scoop a trowel of cement into the smoking crater. That's it. They would not be responsible for cleaning up someone else's mess, whether that's discarded soft drink cans or the half-fried livers of careless experimenters. What I am picturing is "State-run" only in the sense that they own the property and fix those things they've provided, which would be virtually nothing for a simple store-and-launch site.
The only reason I'm suggesting State-ownership at all is because the regulations concern individuals and private organizations. The only way to keep within the regulations AND provide a totally free, unencumbered environment for R&D is to eliminate as much of the "private activity" designation as possible (which is easy if something is done under the umbrella of a public organization), without impacting the freedoms or activities of those involved (which is easy if the individuals are responsible for all non-communal work). In the UK, at the time of land enclosures, some areas of land were declared "commons
In many States, it is entirely legal for apartment complexes to be in commercial or even industrial zones. What's more, that's where they often are, as it's cheaper. In one place I lived in South Carolina, there was a fireworks factory inside of a cluster of apartment buildings because the streets were just wide enough to not violate the industrial zone regulations. The first anyone even knew of the zoning was when the factory announced it was moving in, and because it was entirely legal, there was bugger all anyone could do about it.
(South Carolina is an interesting place to live, if you like conspiracy theories.)
To argue that a few ounces of rocket fuel - which, if correctly stored, is not prone to spontaneous combustion - is more dangerous than a huge stockpile of explosives that are liable to turn a sizable area into a smoking crater is plainly laughable. This has nothing to do with it being "residential". What an area is labelled is of no consequence. It is how the area is used that matters. A "residential" hilltop that's a hundred miles from the next house would still require these restrictions, but it is still perfectly legal to place hundreds of lives at risk when people find loopholes that allow them to make more money. THAT is what I object to.
I would certainly not want more than a few ounces of potentially explosive OR high-temp incendiary material anywhere near a highly populated area, unless emergency crews are damn certain of where it is and experts in such matters are absolutely convinced that all the proper precautions are being taken, WHATEVER the area may be designated as. Designations that mean nothing are worth nothing. Equally, if someone is reasonably isolated (given the total mass of material stored), then I don't see that it's anybody's business how it is kept. That is strictly between them and their insurance agency.
The maximum mass, however, should not be some random amount, no matter what the circumstances. That sort of regulation is way too easy for abuse all around. Rather, I would say that the maximum mass of explosive or incendiary material should be strictly determined by how much mass would be required to place the nearest uninvolved person at an unreasonable extra risk. In the case of incendiary material, this might be how much would be required to make a reasonable evacuation of an ajoining building or apartment (if there is one) impossible within an accepted timeframe. If there's nothing that could catch fire directly from the material, then it is utterly irrelevent as to how much there is, from a safety standpoint.
With explosive material, it's slightly tougher, but the same basic standards should apply. If an explosion occured, what would this ACTUALLY mean to those in the vicinity? It takes far more force to propell a solid stone wall outwards with significant momentum than, say, for vinyl or chipboard walls. As stone doesn't generally burn very well, the risk of a fire spreading is also much less. It should be simple enough to calculate the force that the outside wall could take before being a safety hazard and then derive the maximum safe mass of any explosive you liked from that.
The practical upshot, however, is that regulations are required to keep people safe but excess regulations actually keep people unsafe by promoting abuses. The easiest way to resolve this, in my humble(ish) opinion, would be to have State-run storage facilities and launch facilities for amateur rocketeers, where those facilities are guaranteed to be isolated enough to not impact the population at large, but where anyone can carry out high-power rocketry with no further intervention. By "no further", I mean that. No surveilance, no special permits, no unlawful searches, no harassment of any kind whatsoever, and no compulsion whatsoever for amateur rocketeers to use them. Such a location should merely be a site that all and sundry could be absolutely and unconditionally assured were absolutely at own-risk where the only thi
How the hell am I supposed to stay miserable and depressed if you keep integrating everything I want into the kernel? You don't make it easy on me, do you?
Seriously, this is cool stuff - I was thinking we were only going to get the earlier soft real-time stuff that I was seeing from Timesys a few years back - which was pretty good, but was not of the RTAI ilk. I don't know what you spiked their water with to get hard real-time code, but it must've been damn good stuff.
Those who play music will hear less skipping. Those who watch videos will see fewer frame jumps. If it was "hard" real-time, then you could guarantee that these would never occur at all, because you would be able to guarantee that the application always had the necessary timeslice to do what was needed.
For servers, real-time guarantees each process (or each thread, depending on implementation) a deterministic amount of time, so guarantees that denial-of-service to those who are currently having queries processed is impossible. (You are guaranteed your time on the server, no matter what.) However, because execution time is bounded, it also guarantees that response time can never be below some pre-defined threshold, either. A lightly-loaded machine will provide precisely the same response times as a heavily-loaded one.
For most servers, this is a pretty useless thing to guarantee - well, unless you're about to be Slashdotted. There are some exceptions. A server providing financial information would not really need to be able to respond faster off-peak, but must not fall over under stress. A networked storage device can't afford massive fluctuations in access time if it is to be efficient - mechanical devices don't have a zero seek-time. The better the device can guarantee an operation will take place at a specific time, the better the device can order events to make use of what time it has. Network routers that are hard real-time should never fail or deteriorate as a result of network congestion, it should merely hit the limit of what it can handle and not allocate resources beyond that point. (A router or switch that is not real-time will actually deliver fewer packets, once it starts getting congested, and can fail completely at any point after that.)
Real-time is not going to be generally useful to the majority of individuals the majority of the time, although it will be useful to most individuals some of the time (eg: multimedia), and to some individuals a great deal of the time (eg: those setting up corporate-level carrier-grade VoIP servers, unmanned computer-controlled vehicles, DoS-proof information systems, maglev trains, etc). All classes of user will have some use for real-time. Even batch-processing needs some degree of real-time - jobs have a well-defined start-time and must never be given so much time that the next cycle of the same job is incapable of starting on time. It's not "hard" real-time, but it's still real-time in that it is still a very well-defined set of bounds on when a process is executed and how much time it gets.
"No improvements" is therefore entirely incorrect. No noticeable improvements - maybe, depends on the situation. Some situations will improve significantly, others may actually deteriorate. No overall, on-average improvement would be closer to the truth. As for tiny systems - I run Fedora Core in full desktop mode on a MIPS, RiscOS was designed for the ARM, and I've seen plenty of embedded systems that need real-time on Opterons. For that matter, VxWorks - the "classic" hard real-time OS - is designed around the Motorola 68040 architecture and is often used by military and science labs to handle bloody huge applications (think of something of comparable size and complexity to Windows Vista as it was going to be before all the interesting bits got chopped out).
Also, when you think of "tiny systems", you generally picture something the size of a matchbox that can be powered by a watch battery. In practice, data collection systems (a heavy use of real-time) will usually use VME crates that might easily have 16 CPUs, 128-bit instrumentation busses, a few tens of gigabytes of RAM, a fan that sounds like it was pulled out of a jet fighter, and power requirements that would seriously strain a domestic power grid. The last time I saw a truly small real-time system was at a micromouse tournament, although undoubtedly there are people who use them on tiny systems. The biggest money and the heaviest demands are to be found in areas needing much bigger iron.
Real-time, these days, provides a certain guarantee of service. The "harder" the real-time, the more firmly defined and the more firmly guaranteed any paramater can be. For example, you may want to guarantee that process X has a timeslice of T1 to T2 milliseconds that must start within a range of S1 to S2 milliseconds after the start of every wall-clock second, no matter what. This means if a hardware interrupt occurs that would prevent the guarantee being met, too bad. The interrupt will have to wait.
Typically, it is indeed used in simulations, but very rarely on a 1:1 simulated-time-to-wall-clock-time basis. Simulating the formation of a solar system, or the results of runaway nuclear fission cannot be done on a 1:1 basis. Instead, real-time's guarantees permit you to firmly quantify a constant ratio between wall-clock time and simulated time - provided the programmer can firmly guarantee that a given simulated time interval will never require more than a certain amount of wall-clock time to simulate and a barrier can always be established to prevent more than the desired amount from being simulated. This rules out all event-driven simulations, herustics, variable N-body problems, fixed-precision variable-mesh CFDs, etc.
As soon as the number of variables or steps becomes indeterminate for a given simulated unit of time, you cannot pre-determine the wall-clock time needed to simulate it. If, however, the guarantees are enforced, it is STILL real-time in the accepted sense, even though you have no idea prior to running the program as to when a simulated unit of time will occur. An OS does not stop being real-time if it is fed a non-computable problem, it merely stops being able to tell you when it'll get done.
ADEOS - the microkernel used in RTAI - is "hard real-time", as is VxWorks. TimeSys' Linux patches are soft real-time. Soft real-time is good for audio/video, but is pretty naff when it comes to providing any guarantees. It's usually faster than hard real-time, as it can spend more time processing than synchronizing, so is more useful on a desktop system. With suitable patches (nanosecond timers, real-time clock chip drivers, etc), Linux can be a damn good hard real-time system, but there are performance penalties. Besides, broadcast-quality images are 30 fps in the US and 25 fps in the UK. Being able to align a frame on a nanosecond boundary is thus a complete waste of time. It's damn useful if you're running a particle accelerator ring or even a maglev train (350 mph requires absolute sub-microsecond guarantees on timings), but not many home users have these yet. A pity - it might be fun to have a synchotron source.
Does Linux need hard real-time, then? Oh, certainly. It's popular in the very groups of people who are interested in nuclear science, mass transit or quantum cosmology. I firmly believe that patches that provide such mechanisms are not merely useful but extremely desirable. Bleeding-edge needs drive technology precisely because that is where technology isn't, so keeping in reach of those folk is vital.
Does Linux need real-time in the kernel? Certainly, though the soft real-time that has been added is probably sufficient. (I hate saying things like that. I'm a geek and I'm proud of it, and therefore want Linux to have the maximum flexibility possible. However, poorly maintained code is worse than no code at all, and there just isn't the userbase to keep hard real-time in the kernel at an acceptable standard.) As I said, soft real-time is all you need for multimedia. It's also all you need for games and other stuff that Linux hasn't been nearly hot enough in in the past.
Hard real-time distributions are another matter. For that matter, a distribution that provided a good set of hard real-time tools, clustering tools and CAM drivers would probably be very popular nor only with the scientific community but also with industry. A distro that pushed Linux into markets that couldn't be reached without effort from any mainstream project would undoubtedly be a good thing. It would be very much a minority effort, and yet would require far more sophisticated QA and technical support, so no sane person would attempt such a thing. Of course, I've never been accused of being sane...
...the Liberal Democrats weren't either the "party in power" or the "party out of power", but hold something like a quarter of the seats in the Commons - more than enough to control the outcome of even moderately divisive vote. In the past, they HAVE held power and might potentially do so again given the serious mistrust of both Conservatives and Labour. The Liberals DO control a very significant number of the local councils - comparable to the State-level Senators in the US - and therefore have overwhelming influence as to how policy is actually enacted. The UK has a very real three-party system.
The US has citizens that form "coalitions"? Where? The top 1% of the population has 95% of the wealth, and any "coalitions" that may exist will exist within that 1%. The Unions have long since been broken and spat out - State employees can't even strike in New York without asking permission from their employers! You can't even protest within a few miles of Congress! In the UK, you can protest where you damn well like, including outside the Houses of Parliament. (Well, you could. Blair changed that, although the new rules seem to be ignored.) America may have "freedom of speech", but you'll hear stuff at Speaker's Corner that would get the speaker shot or locked up for life in the Land of the Free. And what of the media? Air America is bankrupt and virtually all other media is owned by a handful of moguls and financed by a handful of advertising executives.
You mention websites. I think the Russian experience with their MP3 reseller (who isn't even selling US music) raises some questions on how free those are. Blue Frog certainly got shown the infinite ability to be heard over the Internet. And the setting up of a website offers no guarantees of it being seen, being seen by someone other than a drunk websurfer who mistyped the URL, or of there being any exchange of views even if your page is seen by someone significant. If you visit your MP in Britain, you KNOW you are getting heard by the person your message is intended for, and you WILL get an exchange of views. Maybe not views you like or agree with, but there WILL be an exchange, and you WILL have made some impact on the listener. The only impact I ever see being made in the US is when protesters get gassed and beaten by cops. (Sure, that happens in the UK as well, but frankly nowhere near as often.)
The US citizens have no voice. That is why they don't bother speaking up. Why should they bother? They don't matter. Homelessness in the US is something like 30 million people, excluding refugees (say from Katrina). What can these people do? They have no home address and most have no ID, so can't vote, can't get insurance and probably don't qualify for welfare, even though the bulk will be multi-generational Americans. Even if websites worked - and the last US preidential election proved they did not - how many homeless can afford their own server and split T1 line?
Venture Capital is great if your primary purpose is to make money. The VCs have a percentage of the control, not the profits. The replies said that marketshare is important - and it is, you can't sell anything without a market to sell it to. However, marketshare is only a key factor if you have most of it. The difference between having 0.1% and 0.2% marketshare is very small, as far as the market is concerned, but might easily work out to be the amount you need to make that profit. It is also true that maximum profits won't necessarily happen at maximum marketshare. However, ignoring the market entirely is a Bad Idea if you want that same market to buy something. Those who pay the piper call the tune.
I know of no VC at all who has ever invested in a "blue sky" research group, even if there's a decent chance of producing valuable intellectual property. 99% of the time, in blue sky work, there is no defined market. The remaining 1% of the time, the market is exactly 1 - whoever buys the technology from you. The reneissance was almost entirely "blue sky". Venture Capital is neither geared towards, nor capable of, backing the Hookes', Huygens' or daVincis' of the world. This is a Bad Mistake, in my opinion - many revolutionary developments in everything from art and culture through to science and technology have their origins in "blue sky" work. The only place such research exists on any scale, these days, is with military establishments. They may turn up some interesting stuff, but the nature of the beast precludes all but some very narrow fields of interest - and by the time it does reach the average person, most of the real strengths have been watered down or eliminated.
DARPAnet is a good example. That was designed to keep military facilities and labs connected in the event of a nuke war. The modernday lovechild of DARPAnet can barely survive the background traffic levels and the times a conventional war or disaster has occurred in a wired region, the Internet is one of the first pieces of infrastructure to go. It got so bad even ten years ago that most of the DARPAnet sites were running their own private "Internet 2" (with IPv6 and IPSec) in preference to continuing to mourn the desecrated skeletal remains of an unsalvageable wreck - mostly made unsalveagable by corporations squeezing the strengths out of the system in search of gold.
But the real abstract ideas? The inventions that can't be implemented for another 10, 20, 30, 300 years? Who funds the research that will be the bedrock for the next generation, or the next 15 generations, of developers and corporations? Observations of kettles boiling ultimately made the internal combustion engine possible. The equations of motion for non-linear springs made international travel reliable and safe, and made international communications possible. But if you'd tried to get James Watt a research grant or financial backing from any modern institution, they'd tell you to go take a long walk off a short plank.
Took me a bit aback, too. Neoconservatism is heavily tied up with nationalists, supremecists and certain right-wing Christian sects, but historically the Jews' greatest enemy has been the conservatives. ("Passion of the Christ" was not what I would call the most pro-semitic movie ever made, yet was not only made by neocons, but neocon churches were almost the entire audience. I'll avoid mentioning Bush's grandfather and how that affected the Jews of Europe.) Sure, they fund Israel, but so do the Democrats. And if the Jews were in such coherts with the neocons, why did they have agents in the DoD to covertly manipulate neocon policy? They'd have just asked. The fact that they felt they couldn't is all the proof I need that no conspiracy exists in any meaningful sense. Sure, there are bound to be neocons who work with Jews and vice versa. There are neocons who work with astrologers (Ronnie Reagan) - does that mean there's a huge conspiracy between the White House and the Psychic Hotline? (And if so, who could have forseen it?)
Interest groups are part and parcel of democracy, but they need to be a carefully regulated part. Cash for questions, cash for policies, cash for any damn thing that is designed to pervert the system should be 100+ years behind bars, with no possibility of parole. Why so severe? Because everything - including the legal system - is ultimately in the hands of whoever has the money to buy power. Democracy doesn't function - at all - if you can game the system. It is dependent utterly on the premise that all are represented (directly or indirectly) equally and without prejudice. Otherwise you're no better off than you would be with a theocracy, meritocracy, ogliarchy, monarchy or some other system in which a pre-selected group (usually a minority) hold absolute sway over everyone else. If a self-selecting group naturally holds power, then elections are a drain on time and money. We'd be better off without them. If, however, you hold that elections serve a function beyond amusement value, then it would be a contradiction to assert any form of advocacy which essentially renders those elections into mere jokes.
I like the House of Commons system where ANYONE can see their representative pretty much on demand. That allows all viewpoints to be heard. In the US, why should a politician bother to see a client who isn't willing to hand over a few million in gifts? (Preferably in a hard-to-trace form, though donations to keep them in power seem to be acceptable too.) I have no opposition to advocacy groups, but they should get equal hearing and wield equal influence. Decisions should be based on the needs of the country, which advocacy groups can identify, not on the needs of one specific advocacy group.
We only have your word for it that you're not dead. Why should we believe you on that? You might have been trying to trick us.
Seriously, it is certainly possible there is an innocent explanation. For example, she may have cut herself and been driven to the emergency room in his car. The DNA will remain viable for testing for some time, and mitochondrial DNA can be salvaged even after tens of thousands of years. Without knowing a little more about how they tested and what they tested, we really don't know what sort of timescale the bloodstains could apply to.
I don't particularly want to think bad of Hans - he has had his share of bad breaks in life, from what's been said about his life. Furthermore, as others have noted, he should be presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond all reasonable doubt to the satisfaction of a jury of his peers. (And even then, he may actually be innocent - that happens more often than people like to admit.) On the other hand, many people go free who are guilty, as well. That's why double jeopardy was abandoned in the UK. (A bad move that will certainly get abused, but an inevitable one given the failure rate of the system.) Because Hans has posted some fairly angry stuff on the Internet, he is unlikely to get a fair trial, though we can all hope he will. And whether he is innocent or guilty, released or imprisoned, it will do nothing for anyone. Nobody benefits from the penal system as it exists. This is not to say it should be scrapped - nobody has much of an idea as to what it would take to make a system that was beneficial. No point replacing something defective with something worse. The best one can hope for is that the truth will out, because that's the only thing that can happen now that has any positive aspect.
It's ok. Those cybermen are all in bodystockings and have been subjected to endless reruns of Up Pompeii. It's the cybermen with the air-conditioning unit on the chest that you've got to watch for.
Navier-Stokes turns chaotic is you sneeze the wrong way, which makes me think that no analytic solutions exist for the problems likely to be of interest. There is a flip-side to that. If an analytic, computable solution does indeed exist to the completely generalized Navier-Stokes, then it goes far beyond any "applied" solution (such as the solution of compressible or incompressible flows, say in aerodynamics, climate modelling or even canal maintenance!) - this would smash into the heart of chaos theory and fractal geometry. If it is possible, by any means whatsoever, to transform or convert some example of a chaotic system into a non-chaotic system and then transform/convert the results back to obtain the solution to the original problem, then a general solution may exist to handle chaotic functions directly, rather than using potentially infinitely-looping iterative methods. Assuming everything up to this point is correct, then if you meander down this twisted path of dubious reasoning, you'd eventually conclude calculus would have to be a special case for a much more general approach which could analytically solve a much broader range of problems.
Much more likely, the result of the published work will prove that certain classes of Navier-Stokes problem that have not previously been reducible can now be reduced to something that is solvable, but will not be able to do much with the flows aircraft contend with, where even the best algorithms in use (which are horribly complicated) are absurdly over-simplified simulations based around oversized meshes that has a passing resemblance to a physical system at the level of an operator but certainly not to your average air molecule.
(Aircraft are designed using CFD, but most designs are then tested by sticking on bits of tinfoil, placing it in a wind tunnel, and recording the rattling sounds, and/or using smoke. Even once all that is done, the consensus is that test pilots will report results wildly different from anything predicted and as the DeHavilland Comet proved, even test pilot reports don't tell you that much about what an aircraft will do under "real" conditions. If this new work can improve any/all of this process, it will be a gigantic leap forwards, but I'm inclined to think that whilst it might tell you more about very specific cases, it's unlikely to help much in the general case.)
I would add one other thing, though. CFD software can sell upwards of a few tens of thousands of dollars. Well, since that's for a per-year license, I guess that should really be "rent", not sell. Someone comes along with a simpler, quicker, easier solution - doesn't matter if it only applies in certain cases - it could utterly crush companies who rely solely on selling this kind of uber-expensive software. The reason they can charge so much is that it's a hard problem with very few people who can both understand it and write good code that's fast enough to be worth using. Someone makes CFD easy and more accurate at the same time, who is going to bother with code that needs a dedicated mainframe to get anything done that week?
Sure, when all is going well. My point is that things usually don't go well, particularly when you want guaranteed time on a free-for-all multitasking OS. And that's true of any such OS. When you absolutely must have a frame done within a thirtieth of a second, that absolutely cannot be an average interval, that must be a guaranteed interval. Which is not an easy thing to guarantee, when there are a bazillion signals, housekeeping operations and other diversions the kernel can get into. You only need an unexpected interrupt to throw your end-of-frame time off by a small amount before you distort the image noticeably. That's one reason why MPEG players on computers generally suck. even when the computer is easily powerful enough, allowing unexpected events to screw up the timings WILL make a huge difference. It absolutely must not be permitted.
Realtime doesn't make things faster. Putting things in the FIFO queue won't make them noticeably faster. But each of these techniques WILL reduce the possibilities of the unexpected wrecking havoc.
The drives and the network are another matter. They will ALWAYS be much slower than the computer and there is absolutely no way to prevent unexpected events on either. In consequence, you have to estimate the worst likely case and have both be capable of being fast enough to compensate. The buffering is for the same reason. It's pure compensation - mostly for the inherent variations in timing from mechanical devices and best-effort networking, but also for machine failure. It takes 5 seconds to reboot a machine that is running LinuxBIOS, so you require an absolute minimum of 5 seconds worth of processed data to make the failover totally invisible to the audience.
I'll also point out that most TV stations have glitchy images and outage, although it's usually infrequent and relatively minor. What I'm talking about, therefore, is a system that is SUPERIOR to typical commercial-grade television, although I would personally consider inferiority by design to be a deep insult to those who use the service. The system I'm proposing would be quite capable of providing a level of service that users should reasonably be able to expect from an organization with a decent budget. What I'm saying is that you can provide that level of service on a shoestring and have cash left over.
For that matter, many TV stations use horrifically bad compression ratios, creating lines around all of the cells in the MPEG-compressed images and other artifacts that are horrible to look at. If you want quality compression and decent colour dynamics, though, your deadlines are much tighter and you have far fewer opportunities to recover from errors. On the other hand, who wants to watch a movie that looks like it was run through xv's oil-painting filter?
Yes, but it will require a little tweaking. You'll definitely want hard real-time, or you'll skew the frame updates. Check to see what RTC clocks Linux supports and see if it would be viable to go in that direction. If not, the machine for playing must absolutely not run anything other than the player, then using the scheduler tools to set the program to run in the FIFO queue. (ie: make it totally non-interruptable).
If you're running off remote disks, then the NAS MUST be capable of greater output than is required to transmit, as you absolutely must allow for dropped packets and other glitches that force a retransmit. If there's not enough time to fix the problem, then you're going to transmit a picture with noise.
ALWAYS work ahead and cache pre-processed frames. There should be enough processed frames (encoded, digested and all ready to blast to the mast) that in the event of a failover (you DO have failover, don't you?:), you can be transmitting without interruption until the machine on standby is up and running. That way, you can almost (but not entirely) eliminate all possibility of downtime. Downtime is a VERY good thing to eliminate.
Your NAS should use a striped RAID array (although each stripe may also be mirrored). Striping is essential in keeping the data flowing fast, and your hardware should be geared to maximizing that throughput. Let the realtime handle the scheduling.
Don't bother using cron, or some other such userland service to start things. Exploit the FIFO queue. It won't run the next thing in the queue until the previous thing is finished. So long as you guarantee the stop time, you implicitly guarantee the next start time. You can then use cron to kill programs that overrun.
The problem is the switching equiptment. Nobody had built a switch that can go much above 2 terabits per second, making all extra bandwidth useless unless you lob on a whole bunch of extremely fast demultiplexors to split the 14 terabit speeds 8 ways. (Powers of 2 are Good.)
On the whole, fiber is cheep. Ultra-high-speed multiplexors and demultiplexors are not. A typical bundle of fibers might easily have 128 or 1024 fibers running through it, and the extra quality needed to go from a few terabits to a few tens of terabits won't be significant compared to the cost of running really long fiber in that speed range in the first place.
The ideal, then, is to run a full bundle from each State to every other State. (ie: 49 lines should be sent from each of the 50 States.) At each end, you plug on an agreed-upon switch at an agreed-upon speed. This would start at 2 terabits/second. Each switch is also connected to a large pool of extremely fast routers. Those routers would then have lines to the routers from each of the other 48 multi-terabit State-to-State lines. All remaining connections from the 49 pools of routers would go to the Internet backbone for that State, any metropoliton networks and any State-financed rural networks.
As the switches increase in performance, you only have to replace the switches, not the fiber, since it's stipulated at the beginning that you'd go for the highest-grade fiber available. As soon as 14 terabit switches existed, you'd have an effective bandwidth of 686 terabits. (Since you can do multi-path routing, you can distribute that 686 terabits as you like.)
Wouldn't this be expensive? Sure. However, we've just burned half a trillion dollars for no obvious benefit. Burning another half trillion on providing nuke-resistant, DDoS-proof, meltdown-resistant data infrastructure that would at least serve a provable, verifiable purpose and would eventually reimburse some/all of the costs would seem reasonable enough.
The fastest switch out there is only about 2 terabits/second and most routers are stuck in the hundred gigabit range. How're you going to pool the pipes?
It's better than not to tax, and spend anyway. Or to tax, then not spend (there's no return if there's no investment). I'd rather have a sensible tax-and-spend system - provided the spending was going to produce a return to the community and not to a specific individual or corporation - than have no tax and no investment outside of high-profit sectors. I'd also rather see a tax that reflected the true cost of the commodity it was taxing. Oil is expensive on the environment and on the infrastructure, and someone eventually ends up paying for the repair work. What's so wrong with placing the burden on those who create the burden?
I would argue that any Government entity that assumes that because they have not published something it is still a secret from any enemy that matters is so naive as to be a threat to national security on a far greater scale than any release they could possibly do. (Since you can only know for sure what such an enemy has published, you cannot - by definition - know everything they have acquired from you and have not published. Whatever intelligence you gather by any other means is guaranteed to be partial and is necessarily whatever said enemy was sufficiently unconcerned with you knowing that they didn't take better care of it.)
For this reason, "national security" has no validity as a reason to withhold information, as it is impossible to know what measure of security you are achieving for the nation by withholding it. This doesn't mean they should publish everything, and there are plenty of times when it would be far more hazardous for the public to know something than any perceived or real enemy. After all, there are far more corporations investing in Congressmen than foreign Governments.
There are some things that are secret out of habit and for no legitimate reason at all. Ciphers and hashing functions, for example. Those secure information in transit, but it's insane to assume the plaintext is secure at either end - the US caught an Israeli spy in the highest echelons of the DoD, and they're an ally! (And, from what was published, it sounds like the guy got careless, and that was the only reason for being found out.) You've then got to consider that each and every cryptoanalyst on your side that is testing for vulnerabilities could either deliberately or accidently expose any such weakness, or that the if an enemy obtained the algorithm, they could figure it out and not tell you they'd done so. (You think they would?!)
For these reasons, keeping algorithms secret really doesn't buy you a whole lot. Again, it prevents Joe Public from using those same codes to keep commercial information private, but the NSA really should stop spending so much time on Airbus. There are genuinely important things to be watching, guys! If the NSA and DoD published all of their cryptographic functions tomorrow, the risks of any serious damage being done that wouldn't have happened anyway would be minimal, and the added attention may even serve to boost the security of such algorithms. That does happen. Rarely, bit it does happen. Even the RSA has released bugfixes and dropped methods, and they're far from stupid.
I can see some of the apparently "nonsense" papers being more of a concern. ET messages are unlikely as a reality, but as a scenario designed to study information extraction from an undecrypted message in an unknown language - damn, that's potentially hot. If the NSA can extract meaningful amounts of information from something that cannot be decrypted or interpretted directly, or even has a working group studying methods of doing so, then that is something that the NSA probably wouldn't want to publish. In a case like that, then Joe Public is most definitely a major threat, as there are far more paranoids than there are Governments, and even protecting the slimmest chance of such a method from leaking to even the friendliest of nations would definitely have some major advantages.
Historical texts, such as Pearl Harbour intelligence failures/successes, disinformation in the Vietnam era, the menu at the caffeteria during the NSA's opening ceremony, etc, are probably someting that barely need glancing at before releasing. If there's any substantial lesson unlearned after 50 years, nobody is going to suddenly learn it tomorrow, and the odds are high that most organizations being monitored learned it by rote the day after whatever the disaster was. And, again, if they didn't, they're too stupid to learn it now, so screw 'em.
Of course, none of my conjectures or speculations here are worth a damn. We know the NSA reads Slashdot, 'cos their m
Have you compiled a copy of Gentoo, recently? For that matter, have you compled Emacs recently?
Seriously, clusters suffer from a big problem - the I/O bandwidth is extremely limited compared to the CPU power. This means that sharing data over nodes (especially if you're using coherent memory) is where the problems lie. By shrink-wrapping the cluster onto a wafer, you eliminate the network I/O bottleneck, but introduce a whole bunch of other bottlenecks instead. (Ever seen 80 CPUs try to access the same piece of memory at the same time? The locking mechanism is a nightmare, the scheduling gives hardware engineers brain tumors, and avoiding being prosecuted for violating Amdahl's Law is enough to give any manager the night terrors.)
Really, at 80 cores, I don't believe Intel is capable of the imaginitive leaps required to beat the engineering problems. The problems are certainly solvable, but they are not conventionally solvable. Intel thinks conventionally far too often and their imagination tends to be filled with Cthulhu Mythos.
...if they're going to use a single shared bus using point-to-point, you're absolutely right. The Transputer had four serial busses from each processor, which allowed you to build any size of structure. As I recall, a hypercube worked pretty well. For any SIMD process, being able to multicast the instructions would also conserve bandwidth, though that wouldn't help you with MIMD. Another option would be to use a multi-level star topology, the same way most networks are designed today. Then, traffic is not unnecessarily distributed. (If you had a second layer which acted as one gigantic high-speed switch, you could get some really nice performance numbers.) This wouldn't help a whole lot with memory access, but it would prevent core-to-core traffic from blocking memory access, and it would also prevent massive timing issues on a multi-core system that big.
To fix memory issues altogether, you need to move main memory onto the CPU wafer. This is a variant of the theme pursued by the processor-in-memory hardware advocates. If you alternate cores and memory cells and then use NUMA-like coding to make the memory look like a single unit (ie: the SGI Origin model), the number of cores directly connecting onto a piece of RAM would be very small - four cores to be precise - which is very manageable. Or, at least, more so than all eighty cores. You can also have simultaneous updates over many cells, which is not possible on a streamed bus. Ideally, you'd also use very high-speed transistors. This would be expensive, sure, but when you're talking 80 cores, you're already talking expensive. This ain't gameboy territory. In turn, this means L3 cache becomes meaningless and L2 would only be useful for remote memory accesses. My guess is that you could punch bandwidth up by an order of magnitude or better, by using parcelled-out high-speed RAM in this way. Well, SGI seemed to think it was worth it, as their entire brick technology was based on the concept, albeit at the macro level and not the wafer level.
Combining a switched network and local-wafer RAM, the machine would generate some serious performance. Serious heat, too - you'd need the combined wisdom of everyone on ExtremeCooling to be able to build a system that was stable. On the other hand, nothing on the macro-scale would come close this side of 2100.
I have no objection to a Government insisting on a right to a fair hearing. I have no objection to a Government objecting to the innocent being found guilty. I do object to ANY Government insisting that the guilty be found innocent, or to demand a punishment that clearly does NOT fit the crime. Any Government whatsoever. The Europeans tend to take attempts to pervert the course of justice somewhat seriously. Mind you, that was largely because Governments and Government-sanctioned forces routinely DID pervert the course of justice in Europe. By and large, those British who were not staunchly conservative to start off with were shocked by the revelations leading up to the release of the Birmingham Six, were aghast by British politicians not only admitting but practically boasting over how they'd been "economical with the truth" in the Spycatcher saga, and absolutely nobody believed the excuses made during the Stalker escapade. These were not economic, but they were politicians looking after their own special interests.
(For those interested in ancient history, it's also why the original version of the Magna Carta authorized the legal system to use force against the Government whenever the Government violated the law. The original authors were very likely of the opinion that Governments would indeed make every effort to pervert things in their interest, and were not keen on the idea that they should be given such authority unchecked.)
If Apple attempts to sue European companies over the term "pod", then Apple (the older, EUROPEAN Apple, the one that has the sole rights to use the name Apple in conjunction with music) might find itself winning a lot more court battles, particularly if the US Government tries to interfere.
Mind you, this is NOT the first time the US Government has been involved in a commercial dispute. Airbus was monitored by the NSA, with commercial secrets then being sold to Boeing. Industrial espionage is most certainly not acceptable - by the US or by anyone else. That the US was caught and every other Government involved in such acts has (so far) escaped unscathed does not mean we should forgive the US. Rather, we should demand total accountability of each and every case, no matter who it is by, and demand that independent observers be given suitable powers and authority to police economic crimes by Governments, no matter which Government that happens to be.
Do I hate Microsoft? Not really. I hate some of their products, I hate some of their attitudes, and I certainly hate their contempt for the legal nicities, but I don't hate the company. Why should I? Actions are by individuals, and it is the actions that I truly despise. Policies are a collective decision and so the collective identity is appropriate to take responsibility, so fining Microsoft for illegal policies is entirely appropriate. If the crime has occured, then hating Microsoft is irrelevent. You could love Microsoft and still accept that if you do the crime, you should do the time. Why should feelings play any part in this? Feelings won't tell you if action A is illegal, and should NEVER tell you if action A is excusable. These should be rational decisions by rational people. This is why Common Law makes such a big deal over "reasonableness". Would a reasonable person consider this to be acceptable? Is this a reasonable act? Not "did they deserve it?", or "which is the home team?".
Other have talked about the founding of America and the Boston Tea Party, so I'll only cover the aspect of the revolution not brought up - under the Magna Carta, King George had no authority to inprison people without trial, to bear false witness, to deprive people of their livlihoods, or any of the other crimes that actually were carried out on his orders. Again, going back to the original version and the stipulation that authorized rebellion to exact punishment on the Government to the value of the damage done, then the Revolutionary War was arguably authorized under British law as understo
I have, however, a personal opinion, but that is for Saturday night.
"In a startling new development, Microsoft's appeal against the record anti-trust fine is to be heard this Saturday, at 7pm GMT. Early reports indicate that the judges hearing the appeal had been seen buying Linux t-shirts and double-bladed battle axes."
Banks (or any organization, venture or activity involving people) are never going to bother doing more than they have to, so simply waise the bar on what they have to do. Doesn't sound that hard to me. Simply require that on first power-up the sys-admin code MUST be different from the default, and/or requires a dongle to be plugged into a port that can only be reached inside of the machine for the sys-admin code to work (but, in having it plugged in, all other codes are disabled).
Security of physical kiosks is trivial stuff, it has been done to death, and people understand the pros and cons of the different technologies. Personally, I'd abandon the ATM and switch to the Mondo card, or something similar, as the risks are generally lower all-round and the security is far better distributed. (We're not talking what vain PHB's refer to as a smart card - which is a bit of non-volatile RAM and the processing power of a seedless grape. We're talking asymetric strong encryption with full-blown key exchange algorithms, transaction processing and - if the device is to be meaningfully secure - transaction logging, event logging and data validation. Such a system should be totally decentralized with all transactions being 100% local, not indirect via half a dozen organizations with dubious security.)
The basic technology for a totally secure, totally impervious financial system has existed for a decade and a half, maybe two, with far better response times and far lower risks to those involved. If it were updated to the technology that exists today, and enough funding was made available to get the technology in place, you could eliminate 90% of all the points of vulnerability in the banking system and eliminate 50% of the related services which - these days - serve no purpose at all.
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I see these public rocket areas as being about on-par with rally racing or maybe the TT races in terms of the dangers involved, and so long as that was made painfully obvious, should be protected somewhat by the fact that there are precidents to people being right up close to extreme danger, knowingly, conciously and deliberately. It would not be so clear these areas would be safe from lawsuits if they were "managed" beyond a minimal degree, as then the courts could argue that the environment was controlled but controlled in a way that was dangerous, setting up an expectation of safety that did not exist.
Of course, there is another possibility. I believe there is a gap between the official US and Canadian national boundaries. You could just build a whole bunch of rocket sites there, based on the above notion, but declare them as being outside of US jurisdiction for the purpose of lawsuits. There are also going to be those who believe amateur rocketry (with its attendant hazards) should be actively promoted, now the US population has exceeded 300 million. Not sure how well these would go down, though.
Until there has been a lot more research on how the internals of the cell interoperate, and thus raise the limits on what they can predict, the science simply doesn't exist to be able to back the argument that this is either safe or useful. I'm not saying that cloning can't be made safe, what I am saying is that the success rate for predicting what will happen is so abysmal that we cannot simply assume that cloning will be safe.
Forcing companies to label doesn't work in the US, perhaps. In the UK, the labelling is somewhat better enforced and standardized. I'd consider a box of eggs in the UK marked as "free range" as having a much higher probability of actually being so than anything comparable in the US. Consumer watchdogs aren't perfect in the UK, but do have more bite. (So much so that when "Top Gear" rated one car company as junk, it virtually abandoned all operations in the country.) Specialist stores, such as the "Real Meat Company", do their own research, which places limits on what farmers feel they can get away with. After the BSE (and nvCJD) scares, where farming malpractices nearly bankrupted the farming economy, people aren't quite so willing to cut corners. They do anyway - that's a built-in self-destruct mechanism - but just not as often. It's unclear whether Prince Charles advocating better farming practices helps or hinders the practice.
In the US, if a producer can get away with something, they will probably try and will likely succeed. The US is the only country I know of where a producer of goods can successfully sue consumer protection groups to prevent publication of anything unfavourable, even if that puts consumers at risk, and where "quality control" is so much of an obscenity that the marketroids now talk of "assurance" instead. The US is also the only country I know where farmers have been successfully sued because their fields have been contaminated with genetically engineered material. The UK is far from perfect - they tried to keep caterpillers genetically modified to produce scorpion venom in a field by putting a barbed-wire fence around it. Stupidity at heights hitherto unreached by mankind. But that is my entire point. Those involved - in any of these countries - are stupid, corrupt, negligent and/or greedy, and should not be trusted with anything sharper than a beanbag. They should definitely NOT be permitted within a thousand miles of a cloning facility.
Cloning is also very very expensive, going to the last point, and has something like a 1% success rate. This means that not only will you have much less certainty over the quality, consistancy or safety, but it'll also be hundreds of times more expensive, in order for the farmer to get any kind of profit from the deal.
Given the wastage in the syatem, in which a lot of meat rots before it sells, you'd get vastly superior yield (and therefore vastly lower prices) by improving refrigeration techniques and having stores manage their stock better. Meat is trasnsported frozen in a way that will likely cause cellular damage, then placed on shelves in a way that inevitably causes thawing and decay. You'd waste much less by using radiation treatment to eliminate bacteria OR freezing with liquid nitrogen, then keeping shelves at -30C or so.
The total cost of such a site - including buying the land, building rudimentary huts and laying out a concrete launch pad - might be as high as a few thousand dollars. That's $50,000 if you have one in each State. At 300 million people, that comes to one six thousandth of a cent a year. That is not a fraction of wages, that is the actual sum total you'd need to pay to cover something like this. However, by offloading some fraction of the amateur rocket storage, you reduce taxes for covering the risks to firemen, and reduce the insurance costs that have to factor in the possibility of rocket fuel next door. If the combined total of what you save exceeds how much it would cost, you have a net gain. If you counted the combined total of all the loose change that falls out of people's pockets onto the sidewalks, you'd just about have enough to cover all of the costs I'm talking about, in which case you'd pay bugger all and would still save from the reduced risks (real or perceived).
I want to make this very clear - I'm not suggesting that the Government set up mini-NASA space flight centers for private use. I'm talking the crudest, most primitive, most rudimentary structures imaginable (as they tend to be the ones that last longest and cost almost nothing to build), with EVERYTHING else provided by those involved in rocketry. This would merely be a location in which - if things go wrong - the only ones at risk are the ones who have voluntarily accepted that risk and are solely responsible for dealing with it. It's a location that, if it explodes, burns down, or blows up, nobody else is at risk and it's nobody else's problem to solve. The worst that can happen is that someone needs to spend an afternoon rebuilding a hut or two (drystone walls are just rough rocks piled on each other so they don't fall over), maybe hose a little blood off the launch pad, perhaps even scoop a trowel of cement into the smoking crater. That's it. They would not be responsible for cleaning up someone else's mess, whether that's discarded soft drink cans or the half-fried livers of careless experimenters. What I am picturing is "State-run" only in the sense that they own the property and fix those things they've provided, which would be virtually nothing for a simple store-and-launch site.
The only reason I'm suggesting State-ownership at all is because the regulations concern individuals and private organizations. The only way to keep within the regulations AND provide a totally free, unencumbered environment for R&D is to eliminate as much of the "private activity" designation as possible (which is easy if something is done under the umbrella of a public organization), without impacting the freedoms or activities of those involved (which is easy if the individuals are responsible for all non-communal work). In the UK, at the time of land enclosures, some areas of land were declared "commons
(South Carolina is an interesting place to live, if you like conspiracy theories.)
To argue that a few ounces of rocket fuel - which, if correctly stored, is not prone to spontaneous combustion - is more dangerous than a huge stockpile of explosives that are liable to turn a sizable area into a smoking crater is plainly laughable. This has nothing to do with it being "residential". What an area is labelled is of no consequence. It is how the area is used that matters. A "residential" hilltop that's a hundred miles from the next house would still require these restrictions, but it is still perfectly legal to place hundreds of lives at risk when people find loopholes that allow them to make more money. THAT is what I object to.
I would certainly not want more than a few ounces of potentially explosive OR high-temp incendiary material anywhere near a highly populated area, unless emergency crews are damn certain of where it is and experts in such matters are absolutely convinced that all the proper precautions are being taken, WHATEVER the area may be designated as. Designations that mean nothing are worth nothing. Equally, if someone is reasonably isolated (given the total mass of material stored), then I don't see that it's anybody's business how it is kept. That is strictly between them and their insurance agency.
The maximum mass, however, should not be some random amount, no matter what the circumstances. That sort of regulation is way too easy for abuse all around. Rather, I would say that the maximum mass of explosive or incendiary material should be strictly determined by how much mass would be required to place the nearest uninvolved person at an unreasonable extra risk. In the case of incendiary material, this might be how much would be required to make a reasonable evacuation of an ajoining building or apartment (if there is one) impossible within an accepted timeframe. If there's nothing that could catch fire directly from the material, then it is utterly irrelevent as to how much there is, from a safety standpoint.
With explosive material, it's slightly tougher, but the same basic standards should apply. If an explosion occured, what would this ACTUALLY mean to those in the vicinity? It takes far more force to propell a solid stone wall outwards with significant momentum than, say, for vinyl or chipboard walls. As stone doesn't generally burn very well, the risk of a fire spreading is also much less. It should be simple enough to calculate the force that the outside wall could take before being a safety hazard and then derive the maximum safe mass of any explosive you liked from that.
The practical upshot, however, is that regulations are required to keep people safe but excess regulations actually keep people unsafe by promoting abuses. The easiest way to resolve this, in my humble(ish) opinion, would be to have State-run storage facilities and launch facilities for amateur rocketeers, where those facilities are guaranteed to be isolated enough to not impact the population at large, but where anyone can carry out high-power rocketry with no further intervention. By "no further", I mean that. No surveilance, no special permits, no unlawful searches, no harassment of any kind whatsoever, and no compulsion whatsoever for amateur rocketeers to use them. Such a location should merely be a site that all and sundry could be absolutely and unconditionally assured were absolutely at own-risk where the only thi
Seriously, this is cool stuff - I was thinking we were only going to get the earlier soft real-time stuff that I was seeing from Timesys a few years back - which was pretty good, but was not of the RTAI ilk. I don't know what you spiked their water with to get hard real-time code, but it must've been damn good stuff.
For servers, real-time guarantees each process (or each thread, depending on implementation) a deterministic amount of time, so guarantees that denial-of-service to those who are currently having queries processed is impossible. (You are guaranteed your time on the server, no matter what.) However, because execution time is bounded, it also guarantees that response time can never be below some pre-defined threshold, either. A lightly-loaded machine will provide precisely the same response times as a heavily-loaded one.
For most servers, this is a pretty useless thing to guarantee - well, unless you're about to be Slashdotted. There are some exceptions. A server providing financial information would not really need to be able to respond faster off-peak, but must not fall over under stress. A networked storage device can't afford massive fluctuations in access time if it is to be efficient - mechanical devices don't have a zero seek-time. The better the device can guarantee an operation will take place at a specific time, the better the device can order events to make use of what time it has. Network routers that are hard real-time should never fail or deteriorate as a result of network congestion, it should merely hit the limit of what it can handle and not allocate resources beyond that point. (A router or switch that is not real-time will actually deliver fewer packets, once it starts getting congested, and can fail completely at any point after that.)
Real-time is not going to be generally useful to the majority of individuals the majority of the time, although it will be useful to most individuals some of the time (eg: multimedia), and to some individuals a great deal of the time (eg: those setting up corporate-level carrier-grade VoIP servers, unmanned computer-controlled vehicles, DoS-proof information systems, maglev trains, etc). All classes of user will have some use for real-time. Even batch-processing needs some degree of real-time - jobs have a well-defined start-time and must never be given so much time that the next cycle of the same job is incapable of starting on time. It's not "hard" real-time, but it's still real-time in that it is still a very well-defined set of bounds on when a process is executed and how much time it gets.
"No improvements" is therefore entirely incorrect. No noticeable improvements - maybe, depends on the situation. Some situations will improve significantly, others may actually deteriorate. No overall, on-average improvement would be closer to the truth. As for tiny systems - I run Fedora Core in full desktop mode on a MIPS, RiscOS was designed for the ARM, and I've seen plenty of embedded systems that need real-time on Opterons. For that matter, VxWorks - the "classic" hard real-time OS - is designed around the Motorola 68040 architecture and is often used by military and science labs to handle bloody huge applications (think of something of comparable size and complexity to Windows Vista as it was going to be before all the interesting bits got chopped out).
Also, when you think of "tiny systems", you generally picture something the size of a matchbox that can be powered by a watch battery. In practice, data collection systems (a heavy use of real-time) will usually use VME crates that might easily have 16 CPUs, 128-bit instrumentation busses, a few tens of gigabytes of RAM, a fan that sounds like it was pulled out of a jet fighter, and power requirements that would seriously strain a domestic power grid. The last time I saw a truly small real-time system was at a micromouse tournament, although undoubtedly there are people who use them on tiny systems. The biggest money and the heaviest demands are to be found in areas needing much bigger iron.
Typically, it is indeed used in simulations, but very rarely on a 1:1 simulated-time-to-wall-clock-time basis. Simulating the formation of a solar system, or the results of runaway nuclear fission cannot be done on a 1:1 basis. Instead, real-time's guarantees permit you to firmly quantify a constant ratio between wall-clock time and simulated time - provided the programmer can firmly guarantee that a given simulated time interval will never require more than a certain amount of wall-clock time to simulate and a barrier can always be established to prevent more than the desired amount from being simulated. This rules out all event-driven simulations, herustics, variable N-body problems, fixed-precision variable-mesh CFDs, etc.
As soon as the number of variables or steps becomes indeterminate for a given simulated unit of time, you cannot pre-determine the wall-clock time needed to simulate it. If, however, the guarantees are enforced, it is STILL real-time in the accepted sense, even though you have no idea prior to running the program as to when a simulated unit of time will occur. An OS does not stop being real-time if it is fed a non-computable problem, it merely stops being able to tell you when it'll get done.
ADEOS - the microkernel used in RTAI - is "hard real-time", as is VxWorks. TimeSys' Linux patches are soft real-time. Soft real-time is good for audio/video, but is pretty naff when it comes to providing any guarantees. It's usually faster than hard real-time, as it can spend more time processing than synchronizing, so is more useful on a desktop system. With suitable patches (nanosecond timers, real-time clock chip drivers, etc), Linux can be a damn good hard real-time system, but there are performance penalties. Besides, broadcast-quality images are 30 fps in the US and 25 fps in the UK. Being able to align a frame on a nanosecond boundary is thus a complete waste of time. It's damn useful if you're running a particle accelerator ring or even a maglev train (350 mph requires absolute sub-microsecond guarantees on timings), but not many home users have these yet. A pity - it might be fun to have a synchotron source.
Does Linux need hard real-time, then? Oh, certainly. It's popular in the very groups of people who are interested in nuclear science, mass transit or quantum cosmology. I firmly believe that patches that provide such mechanisms are not merely useful but extremely desirable. Bleeding-edge needs drive technology precisely because that is where technology isn't, so keeping in reach of those folk is vital.
Does Linux need real-time in the kernel? Certainly, though the soft real-time that has been added is probably sufficient. (I hate saying things like that. I'm a geek and I'm proud of it, and therefore want Linux to have the maximum flexibility possible. However, poorly maintained code is worse than no code at all, and there just isn't the userbase to keep hard real-time in the kernel at an acceptable standard.) As I said, soft real-time is all you need for multimedia. It's also all you need for games and other stuff that Linux hasn't been nearly hot enough in in the past.
Hard real-time distributions are another matter. For that matter, a distribution that provided a good set of hard real-time tools, clustering tools and CAM drivers would probably be very popular nor only with the scientific community but also with industry. A distro that pushed Linux into markets that couldn't be reached without effort from any mainstream project would undoubtedly be a good thing. It would be very much a minority effort, and yet would require far more sophisticated QA and technical support, so no sane person would attempt such a thing. Of course, I've never been accused of being sane...
The US has citizens that form "coalitions"? Where? The top 1% of the population has 95% of the wealth, and any "coalitions" that may exist will exist within that 1%. The Unions have long since been broken and spat out - State employees can't even strike in New York without asking permission from their employers! You can't even protest within a few miles of Congress! In the UK, you can protest where you damn well like, including outside the Houses of Parliament. (Well, you could. Blair changed that, although the new rules seem to be ignored.) America may have "freedom of speech", but you'll hear stuff at Speaker's Corner that would get the speaker shot or locked up for life in the Land of the Free. And what of the media? Air America is bankrupt and virtually all other media is owned by a handful of moguls and financed by a handful of advertising executives.
You mention websites. I think the Russian experience with their MP3 reseller (who isn't even selling US music) raises some questions on how free those are. Blue Frog certainly got shown the infinite ability to be heard over the Internet. And the setting up of a website offers no guarantees of it being seen, being seen by someone other than a drunk websurfer who mistyped the URL, or of there being any exchange of views even if your page is seen by someone significant. If you visit your MP in Britain, you KNOW you are getting heard by the person your message is intended for, and you WILL get an exchange of views. Maybe not views you like or agree with, but there WILL be an exchange, and you WILL have made some impact on the listener. The only impact I ever see being made in the US is when protesters get gassed and beaten by cops. (Sure, that happens in the UK as well, but frankly nowhere near as often.)
The US citizens have no voice. That is why they don't bother speaking up. Why should they bother? They don't matter. Homelessness in the US is something like 30 million people, excluding refugees (say from Katrina). What can these people do? They have no home address and most have no ID, so can't vote, can't get insurance and probably don't qualify for welfare, even though the bulk will be multi-generational Americans. Even if websites worked - and the last US preidential election proved they did not - how many homeless can afford their own server and split T1 line?
I know of no VC at all who has ever invested in a "blue sky" research group, even if there's a decent chance of producing valuable intellectual property. 99% of the time, in blue sky work, there is no defined market. The remaining 1% of the time, the market is exactly 1 - whoever buys the technology from you. The reneissance was almost entirely "blue sky". Venture Capital is neither geared towards, nor capable of, backing the Hookes', Huygens' or daVincis' of the world. This is a Bad Mistake, in my opinion - many revolutionary developments in everything from art and culture through to science and technology have their origins in "blue sky" work. The only place such research exists on any scale, these days, is with military establishments. They may turn up some interesting stuff, but the nature of the beast precludes all but some very narrow fields of interest - and by the time it does reach the average person, most of the real strengths have been watered down or eliminated.
DARPAnet is a good example. That was designed to keep military facilities and labs connected in the event of a nuke war. The modernday lovechild of DARPAnet can barely survive the background traffic levels and the times a conventional war or disaster has occurred in a wired region, the Internet is one of the first pieces of infrastructure to go. It got so bad even ten years ago that most of the DARPAnet sites were running their own private "Internet 2" (with IPv6 and IPSec) in preference to continuing to mourn the desecrated skeletal remains of an unsalvageable wreck - mostly made unsalveagable by corporations squeezing the strengths out of the system in search of gold.
But the real abstract ideas? The inventions that can't be implemented for another 10, 20, 30, 300 years? Who funds the research that will be the bedrock for the next generation, or the next 15 generations, of developers and corporations? Observations of kettles boiling ultimately made the internal combustion engine possible. The equations of motion for non-linear springs made international travel reliable and safe, and made international communications possible. But if you'd tried to get James Watt a research grant or financial backing from any modern institution, they'd tell you to go take a long walk off a short plank.
Interest groups are part and parcel of democracy, but they need to be a carefully regulated part. Cash for questions, cash for policies, cash for any damn thing that is designed to pervert the system should be 100+ years behind bars, with no possibility of parole. Why so severe? Because everything - including the legal system - is ultimately in the hands of whoever has the money to buy power. Democracy doesn't function - at all - if you can game the system. It is dependent utterly on the premise that all are represented (directly or indirectly) equally and without prejudice. Otherwise you're no better off than you would be with a theocracy, meritocracy, ogliarchy, monarchy or some other system in which a pre-selected group (usually a minority) hold absolute sway over everyone else. If a self-selecting group naturally holds power, then elections are a drain on time and money. We'd be better off without them. If, however, you hold that elections serve a function beyond amusement value, then it would be a contradiction to assert any form of advocacy which essentially renders those elections into mere jokes.
I like the House of Commons system where ANYONE can see their representative pretty much on demand. That allows all viewpoints to be heard. In the US, why should a politician bother to see a client who isn't willing to hand over a few million in gifts? (Preferably in a hard-to-trace form, though donations to keep them in power seem to be acceptable too.) I have no opposition to advocacy groups, but they should get equal hearing and wield equal influence. Decisions should be based on the needs of the country, which advocacy groups can identify, not on the needs of one specific advocacy group.
Try to take over Venus, Mars and the small red spot on Jupiter.
Seriously, it is certainly possible there is an innocent explanation. For example, she may have cut herself and been driven to the emergency room in his car. The DNA will remain viable for testing for some time, and mitochondrial DNA can be salvaged even after tens of thousands of years. Without knowing a little more about how they tested and what they tested, we really don't know what sort of timescale the bloodstains could apply to.
I don't particularly want to think bad of Hans - he has had his share of bad breaks in life, from what's been said about his life. Furthermore, as others have noted, he should be presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond all reasonable doubt to the satisfaction of a jury of his peers. (And even then, he may actually be innocent - that happens more often than people like to admit.) On the other hand, many people go free who are guilty, as well. That's why double jeopardy was abandoned in the UK. (A bad move that will certainly get abused, but an inevitable one given the failure rate of the system.) Because Hans has posted some fairly angry stuff on the Internet, he is unlikely to get a fair trial, though we can all hope he will. And whether he is innocent or guilty, released or imprisoned, it will do nothing for anyone. Nobody benefits from the penal system as it exists. This is not to say it should be scrapped - nobody has much of an idea as to what it would take to make a system that was beneficial. No point replacing something defective with something worse. The best one can hope for is that the truth will out, because that's the only thing that can happen now that has any positive aspect.
It's ok. Those cybermen are all in bodystockings and have been subjected to endless reruns of Up Pompeii. It's the cybermen with the air-conditioning unit on the chest that you've got to watch for.
Much more likely, the result of the published work will prove that certain classes of Navier-Stokes problem that have not previously been reducible can now be reduced to something that is solvable, but will not be able to do much with the flows aircraft contend with, where even the best algorithms in use (which are horribly complicated) are absurdly over-simplified simulations based around oversized meshes that has a passing resemblance to a physical system at the level of an operator but certainly not to your average air molecule.
(Aircraft are designed using CFD, but most designs are then tested by sticking on bits of tinfoil, placing it in a wind tunnel, and recording the rattling sounds, and/or using smoke. Even once all that is done, the consensus is that test pilots will report results wildly different from anything predicted and as the DeHavilland Comet proved, even test pilot reports don't tell you that much about what an aircraft will do under "real" conditions. If this new work can improve any/all of this process, it will be a gigantic leap forwards, but I'm inclined to think that whilst it might tell you more about very specific cases, it's unlikely to help much in the general case.)
I would add one other thing, though. CFD software can sell upwards of a few tens of thousands of dollars. Well, since that's for a per-year license, I guess that should really be "rent", not sell. Someone comes along with a simpler, quicker, easier solution - doesn't matter if it only applies in certain cases - it could utterly crush companies who rely solely on selling this kind of uber-expensive software. The reason they can charge so much is that it's a hard problem with very few people who can both understand it and write good code that's fast enough to be worth using. Someone makes CFD easy and more accurate at the same time, who is going to bother with code that needs a dedicated mainframe to get anything done that week?
Realtime doesn't make things faster. Putting things in the FIFO queue won't make them noticeably faster. But each of these techniques WILL reduce the possibilities of the unexpected wrecking havoc.
The drives and the network are another matter. They will ALWAYS be much slower than the computer and there is absolutely no way to prevent unexpected events on either. In consequence, you have to estimate the worst likely case and have both be capable of being fast enough to compensate. The buffering is for the same reason. It's pure compensation - mostly for the inherent variations in timing from mechanical devices and best-effort networking, but also for machine failure. It takes 5 seconds to reboot a machine that is running LinuxBIOS, so you require an absolute minimum of 5 seconds worth of processed data to make the failover totally invisible to the audience.
I'll also point out that most TV stations have glitchy images and outage, although it's usually infrequent and relatively minor. What I'm talking about, therefore, is a system that is SUPERIOR to typical commercial-grade television, although I would personally consider inferiority by design to be a deep insult to those who use the service. The system I'm proposing would be quite capable of providing a level of service that users should reasonably be able to expect from an organization with a decent budget. What I'm saying is that you can provide that level of service on a shoestring and have cash left over.
For that matter, many TV stations use horrifically bad compression ratios, creating lines around all of the cells in the MPEG-compressed images and other artifacts that are horrible to look at. If you want quality compression and decent colour dynamics, though, your deadlines are much tighter and you have far fewer opportunities to recover from errors. On the other hand, who wants to watch a movie that looks like it was run through xv's oil-painting filter?
If you're running off remote disks, then the NAS MUST be capable of greater output than is required to transmit, as you absolutely must allow for dropped packets and other glitches that force a retransmit. If there's not enough time to fix the problem, then you're going to transmit a picture with noise.
ALWAYS work ahead and cache pre-processed frames. There should be enough processed frames (encoded, digested and all ready to blast to the mast) that in the event of a failover (you DO have failover, don't you?
Your NAS should use a striped RAID array (although each stripe may also be mirrored). Striping is essential in keeping the data flowing fast, and your hardware should be geared to maximizing that throughput. Let the realtime handle the scheduling.
Don't bother using cron, or some other such userland service to start things. Exploit the FIFO queue. It won't run the next thing in the queue until the previous thing is finished. So long as you guarantee the stop time, you implicitly guarantee the next start time. You can then use cron to kill programs that overrun.
On the whole, fiber is cheep. Ultra-high-speed multiplexors and demultiplexors are not. A typical bundle of fibers might easily have 128 or 1024 fibers running through it, and the extra quality needed to go from a few terabits to a few tens of terabits won't be significant compared to the cost of running really long fiber in that speed range in the first place.
The ideal, then, is to run a full bundle from each State to every other State. (ie: 49 lines should be sent from each of the 50 States.) At each end, you plug on an agreed-upon switch at an agreed-upon speed. This would start at 2 terabits/second. Each switch is also connected to a large pool of extremely fast routers. Those routers would then have lines to the routers from each of the other 48 multi-terabit State-to-State lines. All remaining connections from the 49 pools of routers would go to the Internet backbone for that State, any metropoliton networks and any State-financed rural networks.
As the switches increase in performance, you only have to replace the switches, not the fiber, since it's stipulated at the beginning that you'd go for the highest-grade fiber available. As soon as 14 terabit switches existed, you'd have an effective bandwidth of 686 terabits. (Since you can do multi-path routing, you can distribute that 686 terabits as you like.)
Wouldn't this be expensive? Sure. However, we've just burned half a trillion dollars for no obvious benefit. Burning another half trillion on providing nuke-resistant, DDoS-proof, meltdown-resistant data infrastructure that would at least serve a provable, verifiable purpose and would eventually reimburse some/all of the costs would seem reasonable enough.
The fastest switch out there is only about 2 terabits/second and most routers are stuck in the hundred gigabit range. How're you going to pool the pipes?
It's better than not to tax, and spend anyway. Or to tax, then not spend (there's no return if there's no investment). I'd rather have a sensible tax-and-spend system - provided the spending was going to produce a return to the community and not to a specific individual or corporation - than have no tax and no investment outside of high-profit sectors. I'd also rather see a tax that reflected the true cost of the commodity it was taxing. Oil is expensive on the environment and on the infrastructure, and someone eventually ends up paying for the repair work. What's so wrong with placing the burden on those who create the burden?
For this reason, "national security" has no validity as a reason to withhold information, as it is impossible to know what measure of security you are achieving for the nation by withholding it. This doesn't mean they should publish everything, and there are plenty of times when it would be far more hazardous for the public to know something than any perceived or real enemy. After all, there are far more corporations investing in Congressmen than foreign Governments.
There are some things that are secret out of habit and for no legitimate reason at all. Ciphers and hashing functions, for example. Those secure information in transit, but it's insane to assume the plaintext is secure at either end - the US caught an Israeli spy in the highest echelons of the DoD, and they're an ally! (And, from what was published, it sounds like the guy got careless, and that was the only reason for being found out.) You've then got to consider that each and every cryptoanalyst on your side that is testing for vulnerabilities could either deliberately or accidently expose any such weakness, or that the if an enemy obtained the algorithm, they could figure it out and not tell you they'd done so. (You think they would?!)
For these reasons, keeping algorithms secret really doesn't buy you a whole lot. Again, it prevents Joe Public from using those same codes to keep commercial information private, but the NSA really should stop spending so much time on Airbus. There are genuinely important things to be watching, guys! If the NSA and DoD published all of their cryptographic functions tomorrow, the risks of any serious damage being done that wouldn't have happened anyway would be minimal, and the added attention may even serve to boost the security of such algorithms. That does happen. Rarely, bit it does happen. Even the RSA has released bugfixes and dropped methods, and they're far from stupid.
I can see some of the apparently "nonsense" papers being more of a concern. ET messages are unlikely as a reality, but as a scenario designed to study information extraction from an undecrypted message in an unknown language - damn, that's potentially hot. If the NSA can extract meaningful amounts of information from something that cannot be decrypted or interpretted directly, or even has a working group studying methods of doing so, then that is something that the NSA probably wouldn't want to publish. In a case like that, then Joe Public is most definitely a major threat, as there are far more paranoids than there are Governments, and even protecting the slimmest chance of such a method from leaking to even the friendliest of nations would definitely have some major advantages.
Historical texts, such as Pearl Harbour intelligence failures/successes, disinformation in the Vietnam era, the menu at the caffeteria during the NSA's opening ceremony, etc, are probably someting that barely need glancing at before releasing. If there's any substantial lesson unlearned after 50 years, nobody is going to suddenly learn it tomorrow, and the odds are high that most organizations being monitored learned it by rote the day after whatever the disaster was. And, again, if they didn't, they're too stupid to learn it now, so screw 'em.
Of course, none of my conjectures or speculations here are worth a damn. We know the NSA reads Slashdot, 'cos their m
Seriously, clusters suffer from a big problem - the I/O bandwidth is extremely limited compared to the CPU power. This means that sharing data over nodes (especially if you're using coherent memory) is where the problems lie. By shrink-wrapping the cluster onto a wafer, you eliminate the network I/O bottleneck, but introduce a whole bunch of other bottlenecks instead. (Ever seen 80 CPUs try to access the same piece of memory at the same time? The locking mechanism is a nightmare, the scheduling gives hardware engineers brain tumors, and avoiding being prosecuted for violating Amdahl's Law is enough to give any manager the night terrors.)
Really, at 80 cores, I don't believe Intel is capable of the imaginitive leaps required to beat the engineering problems. The problems are certainly solvable, but they are not conventionally solvable. Intel thinks conventionally far too often and their imagination tends to be filled with Cthulhu Mythos.
To fix memory issues altogether, you need to move main memory onto the CPU wafer. This is a variant of the theme pursued by the processor-in-memory hardware advocates. If you alternate cores and memory cells and then use NUMA-like coding to make the memory look like a single unit (ie: the SGI Origin model), the number of cores directly connecting onto a piece of RAM would be very small - four cores to be precise - which is very manageable. Or, at least, more so than all eighty cores. You can also have simultaneous updates over many cells, which is not possible on a streamed bus. Ideally, you'd also use very high-speed transistors. This would be expensive, sure, but when you're talking 80 cores, you're already talking expensive. This ain't gameboy territory. In turn, this means L3 cache becomes meaningless and L2 would only be useful for remote memory accesses. My guess is that you could punch bandwidth up by an order of magnitude or better, by using parcelled-out high-speed RAM in this way. Well, SGI seemed to think it was worth it, as their entire brick technology was based on the concept, albeit at the macro level and not the wafer level.
Combining a switched network and local-wafer RAM, the machine would generate some serious performance. Serious heat, too - you'd need the combined wisdom of everyone on ExtremeCooling to be able to build a system that was stable. On the other hand, nothing on the macro-scale would come close this side of 2100.
(For those interested in ancient history, it's also why the original version of the Magna Carta authorized the legal system to use force against the Government whenever the Government violated the law. The original authors were very likely of the opinion that Governments would indeed make every effort to pervert things in their interest, and were not keen on the idea that they should be given such authority unchecked.)
If Apple attempts to sue European companies over the term "pod", then Apple (the older, EUROPEAN Apple, the one that has the sole rights to use the name Apple in conjunction with music) might find itself winning a lot more court battles, particularly if the US Government tries to interfere.
Mind you, this is NOT the first time the US Government has been involved in a commercial dispute. Airbus was monitored by the NSA, with commercial secrets then being sold to Boeing. Industrial espionage is most certainly not acceptable - by the US or by anyone else. That the US was caught and every other Government involved in such acts has (so far) escaped unscathed does not mean we should forgive the US. Rather, we should demand total accountability of each and every case, no matter who it is by, and demand that independent observers be given suitable powers and authority to police economic crimes by Governments, no matter which Government that happens to be.
Do I hate Microsoft? Not really. I hate some of their products, I hate some of their attitudes, and I certainly hate their contempt for the legal nicities, but I don't hate the company. Why should I? Actions are by individuals, and it is the actions that I truly despise. Policies are a collective decision and so the collective identity is appropriate to take responsibility, so fining Microsoft for illegal policies is entirely appropriate. If the crime has occured, then hating Microsoft is irrelevent. You could love Microsoft and still accept that if you do the crime, you should do the time. Why should feelings play any part in this? Feelings won't tell you if action A is illegal, and should NEVER tell you if action A is excusable. These should be rational decisions by rational people. This is why Common Law makes such a big deal over "reasonableness". Would a reasonable person consider this to be acceptable? Is this a reasonable act? Not "did they deserve it?", or "which is the home team?".
Other have talked about the founding of America and the Boston Tea Party, so I'll only cover the aspect of the revolution not brought up - under the Magna Carta, King George had no authority to inprison people without trial, to bear false witness, to deprive people of their livlihoods, or any of the other crimes that actually were carried out on his orders. Again, going back to the original version and the stipulation that authorized rebellion to exact punishment on the Government to the value of the damage done, then the Revolutionary War was arguably authorized under British law as understo
"In a startling new development, Microsoft's appeal against the record anti-trust fine is to be heard this Saturday, at 7pm GMT. Early reports indicate that the judges hearing the appeal had been seen buying Linux t-shirts and double-bladed battle axes."
Security of physical kiosks is trivial stuff, it has been done to death, and people understand the pros and cons of the different technologies. Personally, I'd abandon the ATM and switch to the Mondo card, or something similar, as the risks are generally lower all-round and the security is far better distributed. (We're not talking what vain PHB's refer to as a smart card - which is a bit of non-volatile RAM and the processing power of a seedless grape. We're talking asymetric strong encryption with full-blown key exchange algorithms, transaction processing and - if the device is to be meaningfully secure - transaction logging, event logging and data validation. Such a system should be totally decentralized with all transactions being 100% local, not indirect via half a dozen organizations with dubious security.)
The basic technology for a totally secure, totally impervious financial system has existed for a decade and a half, maybe two, with far better response times and far lower risks to those involved. If it were updated to the technology that exists today, and enough funding was made available to get the technology in place, you could eliminate 90% of all the points of vulnerability in the banking system and eliminate 50% of the related services which - these days - serve no purpose at all.