Thanks. Since it's Fedora Core 6, Beta 2 that had the problems, I damn well HOPE the kernel and X server weren't too old!:) Mind you, I'm running the absolute latest Gentoo (so recent, the glue between the component wrappers hasn't set), and it barfs on starting X. (udev isn't creating the expected mouse driver and it complains about framebuffers.)
At this rate, I may be forced to make my own distribution and offer it over the Internet. Believe me, you do NOT want that to happen. So, spare the Internet the agony, and get the distro vendors to check the more fundamental components.
All of the extreme cooling & overclocking sites talk about moisture prevention. Except at extreme cold temperatures (-40c or below), eliminating moisture should be the biggest problem. The solutions I've seen vary, but one popular method is simply to immerse the computer in a fluid that won't freeze, won't mix with water, won't conduct and won't corrode. There's a bunch of synthetic fluids (such as fluorinert from 3M) that meet these requirements. For a major corp, using "proper" tools is probably the best approach. (Cheapos would just use mineral oil.)
Of course, if the air is guaranteed dry, then it's another situation entirely. Dry air can be any temperature above the minimum functioning temperature of the components, and everything'll be just fine. A warehouse keeping things that could get damaged from condensation or ice, for example, is going to be extremely careful to keep the moisture out. If that's the case, you don't need to repeat the process. Let the computer chill out.
Immersion methods won't work well if you have mechanical components, such as hard drives. You also have a major problem of the bearings freezing up. So, if these are "traditional" PCs with mechanical devices, you have to go for a different approach. In these sorts of cases, you really want to have the computer lagged to the hilt (no, I don't mean run slowly) and have some form of active homeostasis - a heat pump that can transfer heat in or out as needed, for example. Under most conditions, a very passive form of homeostasis is sufficient - have cold air or a cold fluid pass by hot components. That's fine, because heat won't generally flow against the gradient, so the temperature of the air/fluid is the minimum temperature the system can ever reach.
When you're varying the amount of heat you're generating, but the amount you're losing is fixed - particularly if the ambient external temperature is too cold for one or more components - then that is useless. The system will sometimes run too hot and sometimes too cold. That's not good. In those cases, what you want is somewhere you can dump extra heat you don't want when the system runs hot, and somewhere you can pipe that heat in from if the system starts getting too cold. Then you can always keep things just right.
The long and the short of it is this: It all depends on circumstances. Not all cold is created equal, nor are all machines the same.
Just fill in the unknowns in the following equation:
(Mass of Lawyer) x (Mass of Lawyer's Paralegal Team) x (Mass of Lawyer's Bill) x (Mass of Lawyer's Favourite Pick-Axe) / (Witnesses Brains Eaten) = (Righteousness of Lawyer's Case)
Whoever has the greatest righteousness owns the music. This is true even when there IS no music. A guy got sued in England for copying silence - and lost. On the other hand, there have been lawsuits over sampled music used by scratch and rap artists for years, and the copiers usually win. Issues such as interpretation, fair use, etc, have not made the situation clearer. Rather, they have become so stuffed with subclauses, exceptions and exceptions to the exceptions that it is impossible to be sure of anything.
(Some ancient Greek music has yet to be deciphered - nobody is quite sure of the notation of the really early stuff. They are also very clearly out of copyright. But I'll bet you anything you like that if any of the pieces is ever solved and is any good by modern standards, music execs will try to claim ownership somehow.)
I know enough to know that some of the meds I take dangerously lower my seizure threshold, so have to take other meds to counteract that. One big danger for me is that a lot of meds do weird shit (I lost colour vision on Zyprexa) and the interaction is unstable and does shift - sometimes very dramatically. For that reason alone, I wish there was more solid research on seizures, brain chemistry and related meds. (How hard could it be to add some tracer isotopes to lithium salts, then use fMRI to see exactly what happens from start to finish?)
I have not studied neurology, so apologies for any/all ignorance on my part, but it seems to me that we're only now learning some of the basic mechanics of the brain and are often restricted to a purely qualitative assessment of symptoms (and a purely qualitative assessment of the patient doing the initial qualitative assessment) to determine what is happening.
That we understand the thalamus to any degree is impressive, if I'm correct in my understanding, but I can find no rhyme or reason for my understanding to be the way things actually work. We're far more technologically advanced, but in all of my visits to neurologists or pdocs, I have never seen any meaningful technology in use.
I don't like to come across as discriminating, so I install the whole of Gnome, KDE, xfce4, Motif, all the OpenGL and other SGI toolkits, at least three additional window managers, Open Office, KOffice, -every- font in the portage system, all foreign language support (just in case I ever choose to learn one), all possible security systems (just in case), at least five different terminals for X, at least six graphical web browsers (and three text ones), at least three graphical e-mail clients (and two text ones), every database engine in portage, eclipse (plus every available add-on), every java implementation that can co-exist, every Perl and Python extension available, every cryptographic package available, every multimedia player, every codec, every server for the wide range of hardware monitor/control protocols out there, emacs AND vi, every game I can find, every server I can think of that I can abuse to accelerate network access, every language interpreter and compiler available, and finally any package I think I might actually want to use.
Oh, and the USE statement enables every option relating to a package I've installed (whether or not I'll ever use that connection), plus every option that might be useful to be, plus every option that I have no idea what it does but sounds cool.
The result is a computer that takes easily half an hour plus to finish booting, uses a good three quarters of RAM with everything shovelled in by init, routinely suffers memory leaks that will become catastrophic over a few days or so, and regularly requires me to unmerge stuff because some dependency in some obscure package changed to break the gigantic web of terror I have inflicted on my machine.
Oh, monthly? I do an emerge --sync;emerge --update world daily. The sheer number of packages installed make it unwise to go for much longer than that, or it would take too long for the update to complete.
...but FC6 RC2 won't run on my Dell. It gets the network settings wrong and fails on detecting the (i810) graphics chip. This is something that changed towards the end of RC1 (which worked OK) and shortly before RC2 came out. At the moment, I've switched to gentoo. It's a nice distro but I've managed to break the dependency system twice since I've installed it. (Fedora Core is no better on dependency tracking, and can be a whole lot worse, but it's depressing that gentoo is still as fragile as it is.)
I've often considered ripping apart all existing package managers and produce something sane, stable, robust and fast. My big concern is that as nobody else has achieved such a goal, I am unsure what my odds are of success. On the other hand, the systems that are out there are all but unusable.
My comment was merely that the confession alone really doesn't mean a whole lot, that there are alternative explanations which would fit the facts as they are known (to the public). The updated reports are now saying the guy had developed an obsession about her, which had developed from some school assignment. This would definitely lend credibility to the notion that he's a good 52 cards short of a full deck (with only the jokers left).
However, you are absolutely right in your points, that plenty of criminals have been caught by doing something stupid, and that police do sometimes give out misleading or inaccurate information. That would seem to be a little unusual for a coroner, but not necessarily impossible in the case of a seriously sick case.
You are also right that we won't know enough until the Colorado police interview the guy - assuming they tell us what they're told. And even then, based on what is known, I'd still want to hear from a mental health professional after a serious period of observation.
The vacancies are clearly left when the transistor dentists lose their jobs. The clusters are an obvious reference to the dentists all going by the name Beowulf.
Normally I'd agree with you. There ARE psychiatric illnesses that will cause people to confess to crimes they didn't commit - there was one famous case in England where a person admitted to killing one of the people he was confessing to. There are also cases where pressure is applied to obtain a confession, but there wouldn't really have been the time in this case. Having said that, it's impressive that there are multiple official versions of his arrest - including who had originally arrested him and what for. Things like that usually get written down at the time.
I'm 50/50 between thinking the guy is guilty and the guy is suffering from the illness I mentioned. The reason? His confession conflicts with every publicly-revealed fact, suggesting that he is completely ignorant of the case. Further, the parents say they don't know him, which would seem to be unusual - we're usually told by police and psychologists that crimes of this kind are by people known to the family.
In light of these discrepencies, I believe that a complete and thorough psychiatric evaluation (30 days or more, not a 15 minute interview) would be required before such a confession can be accepted at face value. If, after such an evaluation, it is determined that he is not suffering from a mental illness capable of creating a false confession, then we can think about accepting it.
We know such an illness is possible, so presumption of innocence isn't horribly unreasonable, but it also sets a fairly high bar for the defence in a court case. In fact, if such an illness was diagnosed, it will make any case almost impossible to try as he would be mentally unfit to plead.
My conclusion is that we should be wary of reading anything into what is said or done until there is information that is semi-coherent and hangs together. Right now, there's more static than anything, and you should never read anything into static.
Sedna is believed to be part of an "inner Oort cloud", theorized because it's far too far out to be almost anything else, but can't be part of the "regular" Oort cloud because it's far too close. I think this is on the Sedna wiki page and maybe Brown's page as well, and I think it gets a brief mention on the Oort wiki page on top of that. But the combined sources say next to nothing beyond talking of this "inner Oort cloud", so I can't put in anything beyond a brief mention that it is theorized and -if the theory is correct- that Voyager 1 would need to be getting close to such a cloud.
Voyager 1 is 100 AU away. 2003 UB313 is 97 AU and Sedna is only 90 AU away. Thus, Voyager 1 is further out than the furthest positively-identified objects in the solar system and is getting close to a theorized inner Oort cloud. I'm sure that I read that it has passed the heliopause - a shockwave that marks the end of the solar winds and the start of the interstellar wind, which would mean that the outermost planet of the solar system is outside the heliosphere. Of all the planets (and plutons) in the solar system, it alone will never feel a single breath of the solar wind.
If, as seems possible, this amateur radio astronomer can detect signals from Voyager 1, it may also be possible for amateur radio astronomers to detect the presence of very faint signals coming from the furthest objects in the solar system, as the iron within them cuts through the charged particle stream of the interstellar winds, which is all you need to generate a radio wave.
Quick answer: I'll gladly write a testcase generator that will generate all test cases needed to validate the browser and I won't even charge you my full standard rate.
That's why you test the individual elements, a reasonable sample of permutations and a reasonable sample of corner cases, rather than absolutely every possible permutation.
Nonetheless, a comprehensive test would be possible to build. Of those millions of possible cases, there can at most be a few hundred rules defining how those test cases are constructed. It would be trivial to write a program with those few hundred rules that then generated the million or so test cases. I'd be comfortable writing a meta-testbed that could put a browser through the millions of test cases. Sure!
Provided you spot-inspect a reasonable random sample, it is unimportant to observe that all render correctly. If none of the test cases crash AND all primary tags work somewhere AND commonly-processed attributes work in at least one case AND some random sample of other cases are ok, then you can reasonably assume that the other cases have a high probability of working.
So how many cases could you examine, anyway? Over a single working day, you aught to be able to visually inspect something like 5,700 cases. It's not millions, but it's a damn-good sample size. And it assumes a single person over a single day. Ten people over a working week should be well over the quarter-million mark. That's perhaps not viable for volunteers - it's a lot of processing time - but how long has Internet Explorer been in beta? If they had run through a quarter-million test cases and fixed those that didn't work, I would be willing to bet that there would be no complaints.
Over the course of a month, a group of ten professional QAers with such a suite should be able to fully automatically eliminate all fatal bugs and manually eliminate up to a million visual glitches, putting the browser in the provably 100% compliant bracket for typical usage and for all individual operations, 100% free of fatal errors where non-compliant and 90% compliant bracket for fringe and extreme cases, with 99% confidence.
Objective figures. Ok, here's the way to come up with an objective figure:
For each non-interacting standard defined...
...For each defined non-interacting element in that standard...
Test that element with each individual attribute definable for it, with each well-defined corner-case and with a random selection of invalid cases.
For every valid case that tests correctly, score 1 for complance. For every invalid case that is rejected safely, score 1 for compliance. For every test that causes the browser to crash, score 1 for instability. Unimplemented cases are always treated as non-compliance, even when optional. (The instability value starts at 1, not 0. A stable browser doesn't have infinite quality.)
...For each defined interacting element, repeat the above test with typical, corner-case and invalid combinations that test every element - but not necessarily every permutation - at least once in combination with another element that it can interact with.
...For a random selection of totally invalid tags, repeat the above test with a selection of short and excessive invalid tag sequences.
Normalize the results by dividing the totals by the number of tests that have been executed and multiply by 100 to convert to a percentage.
For each interacting standard, apply the above test program for typical permutations and corner-case permutations, such that all interacting standards are tested at least once in combination with another standard that it can interact with.
Sum up the totals and divide by the number of standards and standard interactions tested.
Divide the total compliance by the total instability to get the overall quality.
Calculate the theoretical values that would be obtained for a browser that met only the required elements of the specification, as a fraction, to get the compliance threshold value. Determine the ratio of the total compliance with the compliance threshold to get the baseline compliance.
The overall quality of the browser will tell you how reliable the browser is, when trying to follow the standards as defined. The baseline compliance will tell you how close the browser is to meeting the obligations of the specification. The total compliance will tell you how close the browser is to meeting the full specification.
It's a simple enough algorithm and is based on the usual testing procedures used by a million software engineers the world over. You test the typical, the corner-case and the error cases. In any specification, these cases are well-defined and should be easily tested.
Do these numbers mean anything? Yes. Due to the sheer volume of specifications out there, it is impossible to physically list every permutation that needs to be validated, but you CAN say what fraction of those permutations have been validated.
A superior method to this is to use an octal mask, where the value of each position represents the number of permutations (up to 7) that have been tested against a specific element, and each position represents one element. If you want to interpret half a screen of octal, go for it. It will give you more information, if you can process it, but will tell you less than the three suggested numbers will tell you unless you're prepared to do a lot of data crunching.
It's too generic. I prefer many labels which are narrowly defined, where a label instantly implies certain characteristics that will always be true that lie beyond the definition. In other words, a definition should be functional. I have no objection to aesthetic or poetic adjectives and feel that's a good place for the human side of such analysis. (Inner planet is boooring and tells you little - particularly as it may not even have a meaning for some systems, so use terms that tell you something that MIGHT actually be meaningful elsewhere!)
I also believe that as systems are heirarchical by nature (X forms from Y, Y forms from Z, M orbits N, and so on) that some adjectives should also be functional and that inheritance should be defined in terms of the inheritance of one or more adjectives as a fundamental property of the resultant object. That way, if you have a known, identifiable object, you can infer something about the environment in which it exists and in which it originated.
This ability to store information in a classification is no different from what we already do in other sciences. In chemistry, the Periodic Table classifies elements and from that classification we can infer a lot of the properties of that element and its abundance in the Universe. In biology, the old Latin classification by appearance has been partially replaced by classification by genetics or structure.
Science is abandoning the surface in favour of a deeper understanding of how things are, how they came to be and how they interact. How, not hue, is the guiding light. I believe that any meaningful definition of planet that can be sustained over time must follow suit.
What is needed is not a generic definition, such as the one the IAU came up with. What is needed is a very narrow definition of different objects, such that these definitions are mutually exclusive. Something cannot belong to two or more categories. Once you have those baseline definitions, you layer on adjectives to fine-tune the definition. Baseline definitions should be fundamental to the object but may also be inherited adjectives of some other object. Adjectives should be something that is a result of one or more baseline properties.
An example that I have given before:
I would define a planet as being an object formed out of an accretion disk of a stellar object (and is thus an adjective of both the disk and the star as well as being baseline to the planet), where that object is gravitationally rounded, has a single core, has well-defined strata and is of a non-uniform composition that is a direct function of the orbit, the type of star and the abundance of the elements in the Universe.
Let's take each of these in turn. It is formed from an accretion disk. In other words, I am saying that if you had asteroids from multiple solar systems plunge together to form a large body (ie: it is formed from multiple disks) OR a failed/collapsed star somehow became small enough (ie: formed from no disks at all), it should NOT be called a planet, no matter how rounded it was.
It also should not be formed from a planetary accretion disk. Those are moons, Star Wars jokes aside.
Gravitational rounding - well, it's gotta be large enough. Planetoid is a good name for anything that meets the rest of the description but fails to meet this.
All comets (and therefore almost anything built from comets) have multiple cores. Ergo, to make sure that comets and cometary objects are completely excluded, you should ban all objects that exhibit a fundamental characteristic of comets.
All meteorites and many asteroids show very uniform composition and/or a lack of strata. They are either congealed lumps that have never seperated out, or they are pulverized remains of such lumps. There is no organized structure and only a subset of elements are present. (The asteroids in the asteroid belt aren't known for their abundance of hydrogen, helium, carbon, oxygen, etc. They are much heavier elements. The lumps of ice in the Kuipier Belt seem to be mostly lighter elements and contain almost nothing that is heavy.)
The eight objects we can all agree on as being planets all meet the definition. (We know the gas giants have highly complex layering, for example, and as all eight rotate evenly rather than tumble, it's a fair bet they all have a single core.)
Objects that cannot be classified (insufficient data) should be marked as planetary candidates and not as planets (or any other object) until there is enough firm data to make such a classification.
Since something is utilized in direct proportion to it being present and utilizable, it is disengenuous to talk about implementing widely-used components of CSS. That's like a car manufacturer saying that their engine implements the widely-used components of self-sustaining fusion reactors. If a phrase has no useful meaning, then it would make a great line for a Sir Humprhey Applebey character, but it has no place in a technical discussion.
If - as is implied - he's the ONLY person at Microsoft who gives a damn about standards, then given the sheer number of standards that web browsers either would be expected to comply with or really should comply with, it would be utterly beyond the efforts of a single person to identify, prioritize, reify and program each and every single one of those standards.
IF he is being unfairly blamed, then he has my sympathy on that and that alone. But to turn around and say "hey, we ARE standards-compliant - give or take up to 50% on the standards I even know about" is not a way to win friends and influence people. If he lacks the time to even establish which parts of the specs are implemented, then he might be better spending his time on figuring that out -or- listening to those who have, rather than complaining that the reviews make him look bad.
He should also stop and bear in mind that since he himself states he does not know the actual level of compliance (he only thinks it is over 50%) then he has absolutely no grounds for complaining about other people's estimates. For that matter, the lack of knowledge on compliance would suggest that the browser is improperly tested. Standards compliance tests are not really optional, since they establish a list of well-defined behaviours for well-defined cases. At the very least, you want to be absolutely certain that those cases won't cause the browser to crash or go rogue. The only way to know this is to try them out. And if you're trying them out, you know which standards are met and by what amount.
Ergo, his uncertainty establishes firmly that testing and QA is somewhere between poor and non-existant, AND that Microsoft has no software with which to determine when the standards are met. His complaint of being a lone voice establishes firmly that these are not being fixed and never will be.
...I am inclined to agree. I don't believe other countries are much better, though, as they often don't have even the few meagre safeguards present in the UK. (The Prime Minister can't tag a note onto a law saying he's entitled to ignore it, and Prime Minister's Question Time can be effective at getting answers.)
I seriously doubt that we'll see the massive outpour of rage and fury that absolutely blew the Poll Tax into so many subatomic particles, and I can't see any Union out there pulling a Scargill and shutting the country down for a year plus, and the the events of Runnymeade - where King John was forced to sign the Magna Carta, granting civil liberties to all - are merely dusty memories in archaic history books that few read or remember.
(I'm surprised such books aren't banned, now that it's illegal to own terrorist literature in the UK. The barons at Runnymeade, Robin Hood - even if fictional, Queen Bodecca of the Icini, and most definitely Guy Fawkes, were all deemed terrorists at the time and many of the accounts certainly promote such activities, which must surely violate that law.)
I do not like the way things are going in Britain today. It has shown greater civil rights awareness throughout most of the past 10,000 years than it does right now. I do believe that there are many wonderful things about Britain and I do hope that treatment becomes available soon.
I also believe that countries throughout Europe and the Americas should definitely look at the more ancient mechanisms devised in Britain to maintain accountability and integrity to see what they could learn from. Learning is good. Likewise, Britain should most definitely stop with the head in the sand and learn from other countries what mechanisms are neither useful nor desirable.
There have been many terror groups operating in Britain and throughout Europe, throughout all of recorded history. Name a single one that has stopped or been defeated through draconian laws. Now name all those that have stopped of their own accord through mediation, dialogue, mutual recognition and/or mutual respect. I will be willing to bet that the second list is a damn sight longer. In fact, I'd be willing to bet that the second list is the ONLY list with any entries on it at all.
Well, that's perhaps an oversummarized version, but you're essentially correct. Satire is directionally proportional to the ability of individuals to question authority figures. The more you can question, then more likely you are to do so, and the less fundamentalist the nation becomes. A lack of dispute is extremely unhealthy.
The other part is the presence of a massive amount of American media (the Americans -own- most of the British outlets) and the Americanization of what little is left in Britain because the only way to survive is pandering to what American media will permit. (The one British institution that is free of such commercial taint is the BBC, and guess who is pressuring to have the BBC lose its license fee?)
Britain has also bought a lot into the "special relationship" stuff, where Britain gives America its money, blood and brains, in return for which it gets the rights to show repeats of the A-Team. Britain has very little real science left. What it hasn't sold, it has scrapped, and usually due to pressure from the US, Europe or Japan. It is extremely frustrating. I left, not because I didn't like the country, but because it had been gutted years earlier and I rather like being able to eat.
I agree, but we shouldn't hang them. Well, not until we've taxed them of all their money, at least, and only if the business execs can't claim for reasonable wear and tear on the rope.
Slashdot Mirror
?morf emoc eltsac cisalp looc taht did erehW !yeH ...ood ...ood ...ood
At this rate, I may be forced to make my own distribution and offer it over the Internet. Believe me, you do NOT want that to happen. So, spare the Internet the agony, and get the distro vendors to check the more fundamental components.
Of course, if the air is guaranteed dry, then it's another situation entirely. Dry air can be any temperature above the minimum functioning temperature of the components, and everything'll be just fine. A warehouse keeping things that could get damaged from condensation or ice, for example, is going to be extremely careful to keep the moisture out. If that's the case, you don't need to repeat the process. Let the computer chill out.
Immersion methods won't work well if you have mechanical components, such as hard drives. You also have a major problem of the bearings freezing up. So, if these are "traditional" PCs with mechanical devices, you have to go for a different approach. In these sorts of cases, you really want to have the computer lagged to the hilt (no, I don't mean run slowly) and have some form of active homeostasis - a heat pump that can transfer heat in or out as needed, for example. Under most conditions, a very passive form of homeostasis is sufficient - have cold air or a cold fluid pass by hot components. That's fine, because heat won't generally flow against the gradient, so the temperature of the air/fluid is the minimum temperature the system can ever reach.
When you're varying the amount of heat you're generating, but the amount you're losing is fixed - particularly if the ambient external temperature is too cold for one or more components - then that is useless. The system will sometimes run too hot and sometimes too cold. That's not good. In those cases, what you want is somewhere you can dump extra heat you don't want when the system runs hot, and somewhere you can pipe that heat in from if the system starts getting too cold. Then you can always keep things just right.
The long and the short of it is this: It all depends on circumstances. Not all cold is created equal, nor are all machines the same.
lspci -v:
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 82845G/GL[Brookdale-G]/GE Chipset Integrated Graphics Device (rev 01) (prog-if 00 [VGA])
Subsystem: Dell Unknown device 0160
Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 169
Memory at e8000000 (32-bit, prefetchable) [size=128M]
Memory at feb80000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=512K]
Capabilities: [d0] Power Management version 1
00:02.0 0300: 8086:2562 (rev 01)
Subsystem: 1028:0160
(The rest is as above)
(Mass of Lawyer) x (Mass of Lawyer's Paralegal Team) x (Mass of Lawyer's Bill) x (Mass of Lawyer's Favourite Pick-Axe) / (Witnesses Brains Eaten) = (Righteousness of Lawyer's Case)
Whoever has the greatest righteousness owns the music. This is true even when there IS no music. A guy got sued in England for copying silence - and lost. On the other hand, there have been lawsuits over sampled music used by scratch and rap artists for years, and the copiers usually win. Issues such as interpretation, fair use, etc, have not made the situation clearer. Rather, they have become so stuffed with subclauses, exceptions and exceptions to the exceptions that it is impossible to be sure of anything.
(Some ancient Greek music has yet to be deciphered - nobody is quite sure of the notation of the really early stuff. They are also very clearly out of copyright. But I'll bet you anything you like that if any of the pieces is ever solved and is any good by modern standards, music execs will try to claim ownership somehow.)
I have not studied neurology, so apologies for any/all ignorance on my part, but it seems to me that we're only now learning some of the basic mechanics of the brain and are often restricted to a purely qualitative assessment of symptoms (and a purely qualitative assessment of the patient doing the initial qualitative assessment) to determine what is happening.
That we understand the thalamus to any degree is impressive, if I'm correct in my understanding, but I can find no rhyme or reason for my understanding to be the way things actually work. We're far more technologically advanced, but in all of my visits to neurologists or pdocs, I have never seen any meaningful technology in use.
Oh, and the USE statement enables every option relating to a package I've installed (whether or not I'll ever use that connection), plus every option that might be useful to be, plus every option that I have no idea what it does but sounds cool.
The result is a computer that takes easily half an hour plus to finish booting, uses a good three quarters of RAM with everything shovelled in by init, routinely suffers memory leaks that will become catastrophic over a few days or so, and regularly requires me to unmerge stuff because some dependency in some obscure package changed to break the gigantic web of terror I have inflicted on my machine.
There's nothing you can thumb that can't be thumbed
Nothing you can hit that can't be ultracricket
Nothing you can drink except for gargle blasters....
Improbability!
All you need are towels, all you need are towels,
All you need are towels! Towels! Towels, that is all you frood.
Oh, monthly? I do an emerge --sync;emerge --update world daily. The sheer number of packages installed make it unwise to go for much longer than that, or it would take too long for the update to complete.
I've often considered ripping apart all existing package managers and produce something sane, stable, robust and fast. My big concern is that as nobody else has achieved such a goal, I am unsure what my odds are of success. On the other hand, the systems that are out there are all but unusable.
However, you are absolutely right in your points, that plenty of criminals have been caught by doing something stupid, and that police do sometimes give out misleading or inaccurate information. That would seem to be a little unusual for a coroner, but not necessarily impossible in the case of a seriously sick case.
You are also right that we won't know enough until the Colorado police interview the guy - assuming they tell us what they're told. And even then, based on what is known, I'd still want to hear from a mental health professional after a serious period of observation.
The vacancies are clearly left when the transistor dentists lose their jobs. The clusters are an obvious reference to the dentists all going by the name Beowulf.
I'm 50/50 between thinking the guy is guilty and the guy is suffering from the illness I mentioned. The reason? His confession conflicts with every publicly-revealed fact, suggesting that he is completely ignorant of the case. Further, the parents say they don't know him, which would seem to be unusual - we're usually told by police and psychologists that crimes of this kind are by people known to the family.
In light of these discrepencies, I believe that a complete and thorough psychiatric evaluation (30 days or more, not a 15 minute interview) would be required before such a confession can be accepted at face value. If, after such an evaluation, it is determined that he is not suffering from a mental illness capable of creating a false confession, then we can think about accepting it.
We know such an illness is possible, so presumption of innocence isn't horribly unreasonable, but it also sets a fairly high bar for the defence in a court case. In fact, if such an illness was diagnosed, it will make any case almost impossible to try as he would be mentally unfit to plead.
My conclusion is that we should be wary of reading anything into what is said or done until there is information that is semi-coherent and hangs together. Right now, there's more static than anything, and you should never read anything into static.
The rapture-seekers are waiting for it to be 666 AU away...
Sedna is believed to be part of an "inner Oort cloud", theorized because it's far too far out to be almost anything else, but can't be part of the "regular" Oort cloud because it's far too close. I think this is on the Sedna wiki page and maybe Brown's page as well, and I think it gets a brief mention on the Oort wiki page on top of that. But the combined sources say next to nothing beyond talking of this "inner Oort cloud", so I can't put in anything beyond a brief mention that it is theorized and -if the theory is correct- that Voyager 1 would need to be getting close to such a cloud.
If, as seems possible, this amateur radio astronomer can detect signals from Voyager 1, it may also be possible for amateur radio astronomers to detect the presence of very faint signals coming from the furthest objects in the solar system, as the iron within them cuts through the charged particle stream of the interstellar winds, which is all you need to generate a radio wave.
That's why you test the individual elements, a reasonable sample of permutations and a reasonable sample of corner cases, rather than absolutely every possible permutation.
Nonetheless, a comprehensive test would be possible to build. Of those millions of possible cases, there can at most be a few hundred rules defining how those test cases are constructed. It would be trivial to write a program with those few hundred rules that then generated the million or so test cases. I'd be comfortable writing a meta-testbed that could put a browser through the millions of test cases. Sure!
Provided you spot-inspect a reasonable random sample, it is unimportant to observe that all render correctly. If none of the test cases crash AND all primary tags work somewhere AND commonly-processed attributes work in at least one case AND some random sample of other cases are ok, then you can reasonably assume that the other cases have a high probability of working.
So how many cases could you examine, anyway? Over a single working day, you aught to be able to visually inspect something like 5,700 cases. It's not millions, but it's a damn-good sample size. And it assumes a single person over a single day. Ten people over a working week should be well over the quarter-million mark. That's perhaps not viable for volunteers - it's a lot of processing time - but how long has Internet Explorer been in beta? If they had run through a quarter-million test cases and fixed those that didn't work, I would be willing to bet that there would be no complaints.
Over the course of a month, a group of ten professional QAers with such a suite should be able to fully automatically eliminate all fatal bugs and manually eliminate up to a million visual glitches, putting the browser in the provably 100% compliant bracket for typical usage and for all individual operations, 100% free of fatal errors where non-compliant and 90% compliant bracket for fringe and extreme cases, with 99% confidence.
For each interacting standard, apply the above test program for typical permutations and corner-case permutations, such that all interacting standards are tested at least once in combination with another standard that it can interact with.
Sum up the totals and divide by the number of standards and standard interactions tested.
Divide the total compliance by the total instability to get the overall quality.
Calculate the theoretical values that would be obtained for a browser that met only the required elements of the specification, as a fraction, to get the compliance threshold value. Determine the ratio of the total compliance with the compliance threshold to get the baseline compliance.
The overall quality of the browser will tell you how reliable the browser is, when trying to follow the standards as defined. The baseline compliance will tell you how close the browser is to meeting the obligations of the specification. The total compliance will tell you how close the browser is to meeting the full specification.
It's a simple enough algorithm and is based on the usual testing procedures used by a million software engineers the world over. You test the typical, the corner-case and the error cases. In any specification, these cases are well-defined and should be easily tested.
Do these numbers mean anything? Yes. Due to the sheer volume of specifications out there, it is impossible to physically list every permutation that needs to be validated, but you CAN say what fraction of those permutations have been validated.
A superior method to this is to use an octal mask, where the value of each position represents the number of permutations (up to 7) that have been tested against a specific element, and each position represents one element. If you want to interpret half a screen of octal, go for it. It will give you more information, if you can process it, but will tell you less than the three suggested numbers will tell you unless you're prepared to do a lot of data crunching.
I also believe that as systems are heirarchical by nature (X forms from Y, Y forms from Z, M orbits N, and so on) that some adjectives should also be functional and that inheritance should be defined in terms of the inheritance of one or more adjectives as a fundamental property of the resultant object. That way, if you have a known, identifiable object, you can infer something about the environment in which it exists and in which it originated.
This ability to store information in a classification is no different from what we already do in other sciences. In chemistry, the Periodic Table classifies elements and from that classification we can infer a lot of the properties of that element and its abundance in the Universe. In biology, the old Latin classification by appearance has been partially replaced by classification by genetics or structure.
Science is abandoning the surface in favour of a deeper understanding of how things are, how they came to be and how they interact. How, not hue, is the guiding light. I believe that any meaningful definition of planet that can be sustained over time must follow suit.
An example that I have given before:
I would define a planet as being an object formed out of an accretion disk of a stellar object (and is thus an adjective of both the disk and the star as well as being baseline to the planet), where that object is gravitationally rounded, has a single core, has well-defined strata and is of a non-uniform composition that is a direct function of the orbit, the type of star and the abundance of the elements in the Universe.
Let's take each of these in turn. It is formed from an accretion disk. In other words, I am saying that if you had asteroids from multiple solar systems plunge together to form a large body (ie: it is formed from multiple disks) OR a failed/collapsed star somehow became small enough (ie: formed from no disks at all), it should NOT be called a planet, no matter how rounded it was.
It also should not be formed from a planetary accretion disk. Those are moons, Star Wars jokes aside.
Gravitational rounding - well, it's gotta be large enough. Planetoid is a good name for anything that meets the rest of the description but fails to meet this.
All comets (and therefore almost anything built from comets) have multiple cores. Ergo, to make sure that comets and cometary objects are completely excluded, you should ban all objects that exhibit a fundamental characteristic of comets.
All meteorites and many asteroids show very uniform composition and/or a lack of strata. They are either congealed lumps that have never seperated out, or they are pulverized remains of such lumps. There is no organized structure and only a subset of elements are present. (The asteroids in the asteroid belt aren't known for their abundance of hydrogen, helium, carbon, oxygen, etc. They are much heavier elements. The lumps of ice in the Kuipier Belt seem to be mostly lighter elements and contain almost nothing that is heavy.)
The eight objects we can all agree on as being planets all meet the definition. (We know the gas giants have highly complex layering, for example, and as all eight rotate evenly rather than tumble, it's a fair bet they all have a single core.)
Objects that cannot be classified (insufficient data) should be marked as planetary candidates and not as planets (or any other object) until there is enough firm data to make such a classification.
Since something is utilized in direct proportion to it being present and utilizable, it is disengenuous to talk about implementing widely-used components of CSS. That's like a car manufacturer saying that their engine implements the widely-used components of self-sustaining fusion reactors. If a phrase has no useful meaning, then it would make a great line for a Sir Humprhey Applebey character, but it has no place in a technical discussion.
IF he is being unfairly blamed, then he has my sympathy on that and that alone. But to turn around and say "hey, we ARE standards-compliant - give or take up to 50% on the standards I even know about" is not a way to win friends and influence people. If he lacks the time to even establish which parts of the specs are implemented, then he might be better spending his time on figuring that out -or- listening to those who have, rather than complaining that the reviews make him look bad.
He should also stop and bear in mind that since he himself states he does not know the actual level of compliance (he only thinks it is over 50%) then he has absolutely no grounds for complaining about other people's estimates. For that matter, the lack of knowledge on compliance would suggest that the browser is improperly tested. Standards compliance tests are not really optional, since they establish a list of well-defined behaviours for well-defined cases. At the very least, you want to be absolutely certain that those cases won't cause the browser to crash or go rogue. The only way to know this is to try them out. And if you're trying them out, you know which standards are met and by what amount.
Ergo, his uncertainty establishes firmly that testing and QA is somewhere between poor and non-existant, AND that Microsoft has no software with which to determine when the standards are met. His complaint of being a lone voice establishes firmly that these are not being fixed and never will be.
I seriously doubt that we'll see the massive outpour of rage and fury that absolutely blew the Poll Tax into so many subatomic particles, and I can't see any Union out there pulling a Scargill and shutting the country down for a year plus, and the the events of Runnymeade - where King John was forced to sign the Magna Carta, granting civil liberties to all - are merely dusty memories in archaic history books that few read or remember.
(I'm surprised such books aren't banned, now that it's illegal to own terrorist literature in the UK. The barons at Runnymeade, Robin Hood - even if fictional, Queen Bodecca of the Icini, and most definitely Guy Fawkes, were all deemed terrorists at the time and many of the accounts certainly promote such activities, which must surely violate that law.)
I do not like the way things are going in Britain today. It has shown greater civil rights awareness throughout most of the past 10,000 years than it does right now. I do believe that there are many wonderful things about Britain and I do hope that treatment becomes available soon.
I also believe that countries throughout Europe and the Americas should definitely look at the more ancient mechanisms devised in Britain to maintain accountability and integrity to see what they could learn from. Learning is good. Likewise, Britain should most definitely stop with the head in the sand and learn from other countries what mechanisms are neither useful nor desirable.
There have been many terror groups operating in Britain and throughout Europe, throughout all of recorded history. Name a single one that has stopped or been defeated through draconian laws. Now name all those that have stopped of their own accord through mediation, dialogue, mutual recognition and/or mutual respect. I will be willing to bet that the second list is a damn sight longer. In fact, I'd be willing to bet that the second list is the ONLY list with any entries on it at all.
The other part is the presence of a massive amount of American media (the Americans -own- most of the British outlets) and the Americanization of what little is left in Britain because the only way to survive is pandering to what American media will permit. (The one British institution that is free of such commercial taint is the BBC, and guess who is pressuring to have the BBC lose its license fee?)
Britain has also bought a lot into the "special relationship" stuff, where Britain gives America its money, blood and brains, in return for which it gets the rights to show repeats of the A-Team. Britain has very little real science left. What it hasn't sold, it has scrapped, and usually due to pressure from the US, Europe or Japan. It is extremely frustrating. I left, not because I didn't like the country, but because it had been gutted years earlier and I rather like being able to eat.
I agree, but we shouldn't hang them. Well, not until we've taxed them of all their money, at least, and only if the business execs can't claim for reasonable wear and tear on the rope.