My favourite way of hiding data on the PC was to copy the FAT entries inthe the final sector (which nothing ever used, as it was "reserved" for diagnostic tools), then mark the sectors as bad. To unhide, just reverse the process.
I looked into the possibility of using "dead space" (space left at the end of programs and other fixed-length files that canNOT be used by anything else), because when you load a program, you actually load complete sectors. It would have been easy to attach something to the disk interrupt which skimmed the dead-space off, look for start and end markers, and then use anything between as binary code.
I reckoned you could store a good megabyte of program for every twenty megabytes of disk space, with this method, quite safely. On an old-fashioned drive, you had 4K sectors, which meant you'd have 2K on average of dead-space per program. A little of that would be used for markers and an index number to define where the code block belonged in the entire sequence. But that would leave over 1.5K for a code block.
(The loader would read the index and build the program by feeding in that block into the right element in a large array. Once the array was filled, the program would be able to be run. I was looking at using TSRs to hook the program to a function key.)
The reason for all of this? I wanted to write something comparable to the Norton Guides, but required no logical disk space. Hard drives, back then, were small and expensive, so using dead-space as pseudo partition would have been great. It would also have been a great way of hiding programs, images, etc, that were not school or University safe. As viruses were on the increase, and everyone had virus scanners, this method had the added benefit that it was (and still is) totally invisible to most scanners. Scanners read logical files, for the most part, and only specially-designated sectors in full. As a result, anything loosely-bound isn't seen.
I don't write viruses and I'm surprised at the primitive nature of the viruses that are out there - they're skript-kiddie works. I know of nobody who stores data in inter-sector gaps - yes you can do this, dead-space or any other damn-near-invisible part of the disk. I know of no stealth virus that acts as a hypervisor, although we are now starting to get warnings that that is possible. Twenty years after it was technically doable and obvious, but at least the warnings are now out there.
I'm also surprised at the primitive nature of computer systems in general. Hard drives could very easily have 25-33% additional capacity, with an increase in performance, for negligable extra cost, by being more imaginitive about the designs. CPU designs are horribly inefficient and crude. Things could be so much more advanced, with so little effort.
I believe that there may be situations in which there is an exploit into a contained part of the system, where that containment may be broken out of by exploiting this bug. I cannot think of any practical way this could be done that would actually add anything that wasn't required to perform the exploit in the first place, though.
Having said that, I believe B3 security mandates that memory and other system resources have mandatory access controls for precisely this sort of reason - a user who already has system access would then be unable to exploit that to gain control of other parts of the computer. Typically, such containment is through hardware, so unless you embedded a suitable driver into the virus code, interrupting the OS wouldn't gain you anything.
On a side-note, the Broadcom Sentosa system (based on the BCM1250 processor) has a bug such that any fast maths routine will reboot the system. Explains why a lot of people hate Broadcom.
The "Good Times" scare was a hoax, but it had an ancestor - the Headbanger virus - which actually could destroy the hard drive. It worked because neither DOS nor the drives had any kind of input validation. It was easy to derange the read heads - or break them entirely - by trying to go past the drive limits - first on one side of the drive, then on the other, repeatedly, as fast as the drive could operate.
It was also based a little in reality - CPUburn could theoretically destroy an improperly heat-sinked CPU by running massively heat-generating instructions in a tight loop that was entirely in L1 cache.
So, physical destruction could happen. It was extremely rare - most OS' are designed to place limits on program activity, and I know of only two Real World examples of such software that existed in the wild - but it was NOT unknown.
...all that happens is that all the major companies buy an identical set of names in ALL top level domains of any significance, eliminating any value in having them. You shouldn't need a.com and a.com.au, because one is merely going to be a pointer to the other. It doesn't add anything of value, but does cost money and does use up namespace.
Although you don't say, I'm going to guess that all four records point to the same physical AND virtual server, AND that your weblogs do not record significant traffic on all four, but that almost all of it comes in on a single name. The other three would then be of historic interest, but not much more.
Having said all that, it's close enough to the two or so name limit I suggested that I'd consider it passable, just not good practice.
But four names isn't where the real problem lies. There are companies with many tens or even many hundreds of names. This is where namespace pollution is a serious problem, and where no amount of justification could possibly excuse all of those names. When you get that many names bought, it is typically for defensive or hostile purposes, it is NOT for the object of making things easier or more rational. I would argue that the DNS tables are no more a place for inter-corporate warfare than the phone directory, and that those who would seek to use DNS for such purposes should be turfed off the DNS heirarchy altogether. The infrastructure is far too important and valuable to sacrifice to corporate IT militias.
If Microsoft can show anything that is both genuinely "innovative" (and using the BSD TCP/IP stack is not innovative) and compatible with non-Windows systems (excluding Samba, as that was reverse-engineered), I'd say the EU should be willing to listen and should perhaps reduce or suspend the fine. (So that regular Slashdottians don't suffer a heart attack, I don't consider this remotely likely.)
If Microsoft is appealing on flagarantly fraudulant grounds that lie somewhere between making false statements to a court of law, deceptive advertising, and wilful abuse of the appeals system, then the EU should seriously examine if the law would allow them to increase the fine. Doubling it would seem suitable.
This needs to be settled, once and for all, in a way that is fair but decisive.
Nobody has any business buying more than one or two domain names anyway. Most things would be far better off in a subdomain (movies, for example), where they won't pollute the namespace AND it is explicitly clear as to who does the owning. (This would also eliminate most trademark issues, as then differentiation would be built into the system and deceptive naming would become considerably harder. For this reason, coincidental similarities in names would not be so significant as trademark issues, as it would often be provable that no confusion exists.) It also encourages cybersquatting and typo-squatting.
The clutter isn't helped by lazy, inefficient admins and registrars who don't maintain records correctly, but that's another issue altogether.
I can't help but think it would save everyone a lot of grief if all TLD admins, registrars, cybersquatters and ICANN members were just rounded up and sent to Siberia for a couple of decades.
This is true, but not exactly "user friendly". "User friendly" means having the options in the menu, since all the code has to be present for the options to be usable in the first place. It also means they're still missing many of the other filing systems Linux supports.
..the dental instruments and drillings discovered rival any modern technique - and almost certainly superior to any dentistry in the Middle Ages through to at least the advent of self-powered drills. (A saw-powered drill would be smoother, faster and more predictable than any foot-powered drill. Flint, although not great, was also likely superior to low-grade metals. The lack of conductivity may also have helped somewhat.)
There is one part that intrigues me more than all of this put together, though. Flint is not a strong material. It can be made into an edge very easily by striking it at the right angle and knapping it into shape. But those edges will only be any good for cutting. I have seen NOTHING in any of the articles which explains how you would knapp a flint into a rotatable cutting edge, needed for a drill. Flint breaks into a pair of concave/convex shapes, you can't make any kind of corkscrew shape or uniformly rounded point. You could make an edge that looked like the top of a Phillip's screwdriver, but that's about it, and my guess it would be too fragile to cut through something as hard as a tooth.
The flint drills could carve holes just as good as a modern dental instrument in less than a minute. That's an awful lot faster than modern procedures. Although technology (x-rays, etc) have undoubtably improved in some respects, it seems evident that other aspects of modern dentistry are essentially unchanged from this primitive form, or perhaps even less sophisticated in some cases.
If it's mandatory, then if a department's staff fail, they should be let go. Mandatory means "this is what you need to do". Mandatory isn't a choice. If it's the fault of IT staffers, sack the staffers. If it's the fault of management, sack the management. Do what it takes to meet mandatory requirements and cut out the dead wood.
That's if it's mandatory. If it's optional, then they don't need to meet the standards and all is well with the world. But if it IS optional, then the Government should state so and not claim that they're mandatory. Optional is a choice, no matter what CYA the lawyers want to put onto it.
There is much that is provided as standard in the software supplied by Red Hat that is not as available as one would like. You STILL cannot install to any filesystem type other than Ext2 or Ext3, even though it is pretty obvious that Reiserfs, XFS or JFS would provide superior performance. You've no obvious way of picking with display manager you want to boot with.
Other niggles: There is no support for the Pentium 2, 3 or 4 architectures. RPM is configured to reject anything with an arch above i686, you have to instruct it to specifically ignore architectures for RPMs. It's simply a case of modifying the arch compatiblity test, but they haven't done that.
(I know, most of the code won't change, but it would be nice if they made the effort to compile to architectures people use in practice. Since they've already got an "unsupported" unit, it would also be possible for them to rig up cross-compilers to most of the standard architectures and make an "experimental" distro for a bunch of platforms. Linuxfromscratch is good, but tedious.)
There's actually one very important consideration in what you said that gets missed by a lot of people (including talk.origins!) - and that is that evolution DOES make predictions that can be tested. Very often, you will hear arguments about the impossibility of testing evolution - including from evolutionary scientists. This is something I've attempted (in my own limited way) to counter, by pointing out that we can predict what intermediate fossils would look like and therefore have a hypothesis we can test.
(Even though the events have "already occured", as we have not yet seen the fossils they are still "predictions", as the observation has NOT already occured, and when it comes to testing theories, it is when the observation is made that really matters.)
This proves, once and for all, that this viewpoint is the correct one - that evolution is a "true" science. It DOES make testable hypotheses* and it CAN be invalidated through observation**.
*These predictions are interpolations of the data set, rather than extrapolations, but they're still predictions. If the data was discontinuous or chaotic, it would be impossible to make predictions as it would be impossible to produce a coherent chain.
**It's very important that a theory be subject to tests that could break the theory. In the case of evolution, finding an intermediate fossil in an impossible location (eg: in igneous rock, in completely the wrong location, etc) would falsify evolution. A trivial example of location - limestone is predominantly formed in shallow, warm oceans (although cold, deep-water coral does exist). If you were to find something that could never, ever reach such water, you'd have something that could potentially break the theory.
If you were to find plant or animal life that could only occur in extremely deep oceans (megalodon springs to mind), the Arctic tundra, or in the middle of continents, excluding anything that could simply be very very lost (trees don't generally get lost a whole lot, for example), in any significant amount in limestone rock, you'd have a good argument that the predictions of evolution don't match observation.
It is significant that whilst predictions demonstrably HAVE matched observation, no such falsifying observation has occured. (Claims of such observations are either known to be fakes or are so carefully protected against examination that they are usually seen as fakes by default.)
Ok, then their numbering scheme sucks. A revision of 5.0 implies five major revisions of the system, rather than a core plus four extensions. (Hey, naming policies can have bugs too - the SunOS/Solaris confusion proved that.) Their distribution method - single file, as opposed to one core plus each extension - is also confusing and harder to work with.
Having said that, between this thread and a previous one on Unicode in which I debated the merits of the vatious bit-lengths, I'm now satisfied that Unicode isn't a monsterous carbuncle*.
*Besides which, only the Prince of Wales gets to say that.
I've never been fond of Unicode (admittedly in part because I had much the same idea around about 1986, as it was pretty obvious that you could include language coding to a wide character). However, Unicode is unquestionably an "open standard". Anybody can download the definitions and all Unicode text should be 100% interchangable with the same revision and width of Unicode on any machine.
(Unicode has gone through a few revisions, which I am also a bit concerned with. Once you have a formal specification laid down, everything else should be definable as extensions to the skeleton.)
The characters from 128 through 255 are implementation-specific, the standard does not define them. (For this reason, any ASCII character set that goes into the undefined region may not be compatiable with other implementations, as it would be entirely possible to add things like continuation bits, etc, without violating the ASCII standard, but breaking all portability.)
The actions taken as a result of characters from 0 through 31 are specific to the implementation and circumstance. (An embedded motherboard is unlikely to have a bell, for example.) This means that although the syntax is defined, the semantics are not. The semantics are part of what makes a format "open". Thus, ASCII is only an Open Format between characters 32 and 127. All others may have proprietary interpretation.
We already know that some "dark matter" calculations were thrown off by using Newtonian mechanics and not Relativistic ones. Any failure to account for the mass of neutrinos may also have created an illusion of more "dark matter" than actually exists. Now, I agree that it is possible that the correction is very small. However, alterations in the modelling may result in a significantly different understanding of the role of the Cosmological Constant (if one exists) and "dark matter" (if any is needed) and therefore may result in a very different theory of what these actually consist of - or even alter the requirement for them to exist at all.
Yes, neutrinos are important in understanding the interior of the sun. They are not the only method, however, as "holes" do occur through which we can see very limited snapshots of segments of the interior. They are also not perfect, as less than half of the expected number of neutrinos ever reach the Earth, presumably through changes in flavour or through being absorbed.
Neutrinos are also very important in understanding the mechanics of radioactive decay. Remember, the entire premise from which neutrinos came from was that decay needed a massless particle that could carry with it rotational momentum. Since neutrinos have M amount of mass, then the sum of all other actual and effective masses being emitted must be reduced by M, for the calculations to still balance out.
(You're also much more restricted in the energy a neutrino can have, as you must now not only balance momentum but also kinetic energy. For things to equal out, this will place significant constraints on the state of a neutrino.)
All in all, this sort of work generally has massive repercussions and it will only be truly known what significance the mass has when ALL physical systems involving neutrinos have been adjusted accordingly. Again, the magnitude of the mass is totally unimportant. What matters is whether it breaks an existing model (eg: by violating the requirement for quantized states) or whether it eliminates any variables or constants (because they are no longer needed).
I am a great proponent of science, but I am getting tired of the complacency that has slowly been creeping in - the Victorian illusion that we are approaching the end of knowledge. If neutrinos having mass throws huge chunks of the physics community into disarray, I believe it will be a Good Thing and about time. We need something that will cause a major headache and a revolution in thinking.
...the green got eaten by the weevils from the best BBC april 1st stunt of all time (and possibly one of the best april 1st jokes anywhere of all time).
However, it's not a simple plasma. It would have to be a high energy density plasma, in order to look solid and act solid.
The example I found of a Tocamac plasma is only red, but is 20-30 million degrees C. However, the lightsabers in the original (and therefore One True) Star Wars were white. This means they must be considerably hotter. The page I found on near-solid high energy density plasmas also talks about tens of millions of degrees - my gut feeling would be that to produce totally solid white plasma would require 40-50 million degrees C.
Now, plasmas at that kind of temperature could quite reasonably be expected to slice through almost anything - steel included. Furthermore, anything that was vaporised would be repelled by the magnetic field and thus travel AWAY from the wielder. This does mean that if you are fighting someone with a lightsaber, you will get sprayed with high-energy plasma every time they hit something.
There is one minor problem, though. Energy. If you want to maintain something at 50 million degrees, AND a containment field, a couple of duracel batteries won't cut it. Even lithium batteries will go flat very quickly. My guess is that the handle of the lightsaber, therefore, contains a wormhole linked to a gigantic anti-matter reactor.
All you REALLY need to do, then, is find out where your opponent's reactor is hidden and turn it off. Their lightsaber will then be useless.
Most customers have bugger all idea of how much bandwidth their applications use, or what bandwidth would be required by the services they are demanding (CD-quality VoIP, movies-over-IP, things like that), or what bandwidth will be needed by applications invented next week on Thursday.
I do agree that the backbone is lagging behind, but don't butcher the users' capabilities simply because the telecos can't get their fingers out. Especially as it seems to be the telecos who are complaining. Doubly so, when it is the lack of multicast at the home that prevents users from making better use of what backbone there is.
A gigabit to the home is about the most that can usefully be used using current technology. None of the providers listed do full-duplex gigabit. Until that time, everything is excuses. If home computers can push/pull ten gig before even a single gig is on tap, then that would be the new minimum before excuses can possibly be acceptable.
When the providers don't provide, don't blame the users if they don't use. They can't, whatever their choice might be, even if they knew what that choice would be.
They probably make more than that a day in sales. If you include how much additional money they make in stock - well, if you've 200 million shares, you only need them to go up a euro a day. This doesn't include how much they have in an investment account - a high-interest business account would probably give Microsoft that amount of cash in interest alone off whatever spare change Microsoft has invested.
But what if they never sold a single program again, their stock froze in value, they had no investments whatsoever and their land value stayed constant? Then they'd have enough reserves to last about 50 to 60 years, assuming they paid every single day and neither side backed down.
If we assume the youngest employee at Microsoft is in their early 20s, that would be enough cash to see them through their entire career and the first 15 years of retirement and pensions.
Given that a fine is unlikely to alter behaviour if it inflicts no effective consequences, I'd argue that this fine is not nearly enough. I'm not sure a stronger penalty would help much, though - Microsoft is at the point where their reserves are so vast that it is utterly impossible to exact a penalty that would change their conduct without utterly destroying their business in the process.
The only possible way I can see this doing any good is if the EU rolls some reasonable percent of all the fines collected into a fund for Open Source development/sponsorship of some kind. It won't hurt Microsoft directly, but at least it can mitigate the anti-competitive actions by boosting one of the more dangerous competitors Microsoft has.
(As much as I have developed a dislike of some of the OpenBSD developers for their trolling tendencies on Slashdot, I would be the first to encourage the EU to donate perhaps 10% of the first day's fine to the OpenBSD group. I think that could make a real difference to IT security worldwide and - because it's from a fine - it wouldn't effectively cost the EU anything to do.)
What's the worst that could happen, if CmdrTaco takes over the world? Well, besides all construction projects being duped, traffic jams being replaced with the Slashdot Effect and SSN's being replaced with the person's UID?
Slashdot Mirror
I looked into the possibility of using "dead space" (space left at the end of programs and other fixed-length files that canNOT be used by anything else), because when you load a program, you actually load complete sectors. It would have been easy to attach something to the disk interrupt which skimmed the dead-space off, look for start and end markers, and then use anything between as binary code.
I reckoned you could store a good megabyte of program for every twenty megabytes of disk space, with this method, quite safely. On an old-fashioned drive, you had 4K sectors, which meant you'd have 2K on average of dead-space per program. A little of that would be used for markers and an index number to define where the code block belonged in the entire sequence. But that would leave over 1.5K for a code block.
(The loader would read the index and build the program by feeding in that block into the right element in a large array. Once the array was filled, the program would be able to be run. I was looking at using TSRs to hook the program to a function key.)
The reason for all of this? I wanted to write something comparable to the Norton Guides, but required no logical disk space. Hard drives, back then, were small and expensive, so using dead-space as pseudo partition would have been great. It would also have been a great way of hiding programs, images, etc, that were not school or University safe. As viruses were on the increase, and everyone had virus scanners, this method had the added benefit that it was (and still is) totally invisible to most scanners. Scanners read logical files, for the most part, and only specially-designated sectors in full. As a result, anything loosely-bound isn't seen.
I don't write viruses and I'm surprised at the primitive nature of the viruses that are out there - they're skript-kiddie works. I know of nobody who stores data in inter-sector gaps - yes you can do this, dead-space or any other damn-near-invisible part of the disk. I know of no stealth virus that acts as a hypervisor, although we are now starting to get warnings that that is possible. Twenty years after it was technically doable and obvious, but at least the warnings are now out there.
I'm also surprised at the primitive nature of computer systems in general. Hard drives could very easily have 25-33% additional capacity, with an increase in performance, for negligable extra cost, by being more imaginitive about the designs. CPU designs are horribly inefficient and crude. Things could be so much more advanced, with so little effort.
Having said that, I believe B3 security mandates that memory and other system resources have mandatory access controls for precisely this sort of reason - a user who already has system access would then be unable to exploit that to gain control of other parts of the computer. Typically, such containment is through hardware, so unless you embedded a suitable driver into the virus code, interrupting the OS wouldn't gain you anything.
On a side-note, the Broadcom Sentosa system (based on the BCM1250 processor) has a bug such that any fast maths routine will reboot the system. Explains why a lot of people hate Broadcom.
It was also based a little in reality - CPUburn could theoretically destroy an improperly heat-sinked CPU by running massively heat-generating instructions in a tight loop that was entirely in L1 cache.
So, physical destruction could happen. It was extremely rare - most OS' are designed to place limits on program activity, and I know of only two Real World examples of such software that existed in the wild - but it was NOT unknown.
Although you don't say, I'm going to guess that all four records point to the same physical AND virtual server, AND that your weblogs do not record significant traffic on all four, but that almost all of it comes in on a single name. The other three would then be of historic interest, but not much more.
Having said all that, it's close enough to the two or so name limit I suggested that I'd consider it passable, just not good practice.
But four names isn't where the real problem lies. There are companies with many tens or even many hundreds of names. This is where namespace pollution is a serious problem, and where no amount of justification could possibly excuse all of those names. When you get that many names bought, it is typically for defensive or hostile purposes, it is NOT for the object of making things easier or more rational. I would argue that the DNS tables are no more a place for inter-corporate warfare than the phone directory, and that those who would seek to use DNS for such purposes should be turfed off the DNS heirarchy altogether. The infrastructure is far too important and valuable to sacrifice to corporate IT militias.
If Microsoft is appealing on flagarantly fraudulant grounds that lie somewhere between making false statements to a court of law, deceptive advertising, and wilful abuse of the appeals system, then the EU should seriously examine if the law would allow them to increase the fine. Doubling it would seem suitable.
This needs to be settled, once and for all, in a way that is fair but decisive.
...is post a link to the information! How else are we to know if the data is genuine?
The clutter isn't helped by lazy, inefficient admins and registrars who don't maintain records correctly, but that's another issue altogether.
I can't help but think it would save everyone a lot of grief if all TLD admins, registrars, cybersquatters and ICANN members were just rounded up and sent to Siberia for a couple of decades.
That's an extension of the Russian Vodka GutROT-105% algorithm.
This is true, but not exactly "user friendly". "User friendly" means having the options in the menu, since all the code has to be present for the options to be usable in the first place. It also means they're still missing many of the other filing systems Linux supports.
There is one part that intrigues me more than all of this put together, though. Flint is not a strong material. It can be made into an edge very easily by striking it at the right angle and knapping it into shape. But those edges will only be any good for cutting. I have seen NOTHING in any of the articles which explains how you would knapp a flint into a rotatable cutting edge, needed for a drill. Flint breaks into a pair of concave/convex shapes, you can't make any kind of corkscrew shape or uniformly rounded point. You could make an edge that looked like the top of a Phillip's screwdriver, but that's about it, and my guess it would be too fragile to cut through something as hard as a tooth.
The flint drills could carve holes just as good as a modern dental instrument in less than a minute. That's an awful lot faster than modern procedures. Although technology (x-rays, etc) have undoubtably improved in some respects, it seems evident that other aspects of modern dentistry are essentially unchanged from this primitive form, or perhaps even less sophisticated in some cases.
That's if it's mandatory. If it's optional, then they don't need to meet the standards and all is well with the world. But if it IS optional, then the Government should state so and not claim that they're mandatory. Optional is a choice, no matter what CYA the lawyers want to put onto it.
...that page 3 of the Sun might turn a profit, but none of the rest of it would.
Other niggles: There is no support for the Pentium 2, 3 or 4 architectures. RPM is configured to reject anything with an arch above i686, you have to instruct it to specifically ignore architectures for RPMs. It's simply a case of modifying the arch compatiblity test, but they haven't done that.
(I know, most of the code won't change, but it would be nice if they made the effort to compile to architectures people use in practice. Since they've already got an "unsupported" unit, it would also be possible for them to rig up cross-compilers to most of the standard architectures and make an "experimental" distro for a bunch of platforms. Linuxfromscratch is good, but tedious.)
(Even though the events have "already occured", as we have not yet seen the fossils they are still "predictions", as the observation has NOT already occured, and when it comes to testing theories, it is when the observation is made that really matters.)
This proves, once and for all, that this viewpoint is the correct one - that evolution is a "true" science. It DOES make testable hypotheses* and it CAN be invalidated through observation**.
*These predictions are interpolations of the data set, rather than extrapolations, but they're still predictions. If the data was discontinuous or chaotic, it would be impossible to make predictions as it would be impossible to produce a coherent chain.
**It's very important that a theory be subject to tests that could break the theory. In the case of evolution, finding an intermediate fossil in an impossible location (eg: in igneous rock, in completely the wrong location, etc) would falsify evolution. A trivial example of location - limestone is predominantly formed in shallow, warm oceans (although cold, deep-water coral does exist). If you were to find something that could never, ever reach such water, you'd have something that could potentially break the theory.
If you were to find plant or animal life that could only occur in extremely deep oceans (megalodon springs to mind), the Arctic tundra, or in the middle of continents, excluding anything that could simply be very very lost (trees don't generally get lost a whole lot, for example), in any significant amount in limestone rock, you'd have a good argument that the predictions of evolution don't match observation.
It is significant that whilst predictions demonstrably HAVE matched observation, no such falsifying observation has occured. (Claims of such observations are either known to be fakes or are so carefully protected against examination that they are usually seen as fakes by default.)
Having said that, between this thread and a previous one on Unicode in which I debated the merits of the vatious bit-lengths, I'm now satisfied that Unicode isn't a monsterous carbuncle*.
*Besides which, only the Prince of Wales gets to say that.
(Unicode has gone through a few revisions, which I am also a bit concerned with. Once you have a formal specification laid down, everything else should be definable as extensions to the skeleton.)
The actions taken as a result of characters from 0 through 31 are specific to the implementation and circumstance. (An embedded motherboard is unlikely to have a bell, for example.) This means that although the syntax is defined, the semantics are not. The semantics are part of what makes a format "open". Thus, ASCII is only an Open Format between characters 32 and 127. All others may have proprietary interpretation.
Yes, neutrinos are important in understanding the interior of the sun. They are not the only method, however, as "holes" do occur through which we can see very limited snapshots of segments of the interior. They are also not perfect, as less than half of the expected number of neutrinos ever reach the Earth, presumably through changes in flavour or through being absorbed.
Neutrinos are also very important in understanding the mechanics of radioactive decay. Remember, the entire premise from which neutrinos came from was that decay needed a massless particle that could carry with it rotational momentum. Since neutrinos have M amount of mass, then the sum of all other actual and effective masses being emitted must be reduced by M, for the calculations to still balance out.
(You're also much more restricted in the energy a neutrino can have, as you must now not only balance momentum but also kinetic energy. For things to equal out, this will place significant constraints on the state of a neutrino.)
All in all, this sort of work generally has massive repercussions and it will only be truly known what significance the mass has when ALL physical systems involving neutrinos have been adjusted accordingly. Again, the magnitude of the mass is totally unimportant. What matters is whether it breaks an existing model (eg: by violating the requirement for quantized states) or whether it eliminates any variables or constants (because they are no longer needed).
I am a great proponent of science, but I am getting tired of the complacency that has slowly been creeping in - the Victorian illusion that we are approaching the end of knowledge. If neutrinos having mass throws huge chunks of the physics community into disarray, I believe it will be a Good Thing and about time. We need something that will cause a major headache and a revolution in thinking.
"From the Citadel of Ultimate Darkness, oh Silver Dragin, bring forth to this plane PomyPuff, demonic spawn of cuteness, to do thy will!"
...the green got eaten by the weevils from the best BBC april 1st stunt of all time (and possibly one of the best april 1st jokes anywhere of all time).
The example I found of a Tocamac plasma is only red, but is 20-30 million degrees C. However, the lightsabers in the original (and therefore One True) Star Wars were white. This means they must be considerably hotter. The page I found on near-solid high energy density plasmas also talks about tens of millions of degrees - my gut feeling would be that to produce totally solid white plasma would require 40-50 million degrees C.
Now, plasmas at that kind of temperature could quite reasonably be expected to slice through almost anything - steel included. Furthermore, anything that was vaporised would be repelled by the magnetic field and thus travel AWAY from the wielder. This does mean that if you are fighting someone with a lightsaber, you will get sprayed with high-energy plasma every time they hit something.
There is one minor problem, though. Energy. If you want to maintain something at 50 million degrees, AND a containment field, a couple of duracel batteries won't cut it. Even lithium batteries will go flat very quickly. My guess is that the handle of the lightsaber, therefore, contains a wormhole linked to a gigantic anti-matter reactor.
All you REALLY need to do, then, is find out where your opponent's reactor is hidden and turn it off. Their lightsaber will then be useless.
I do agree that the backbone is lagging behind, but don't butcher the users' capabilities simply because the telecos can't get their fingers out. Especially as it seems to be the telecos who are complaining. Doubly so, when it is the lack of multicast at the home that prevents users from making better use of what backbone there is.
A gigabit to the home is about the most that can usefully be used using current technology. None of the providers listed do full-duplex gigabit. Until that time, everything is excuses. If home computers can push/pull ten gig before even a single gig is on tap, then that would be the new minimum before excuses can possibly be acceptable.
When the providers don't provide, don't blame the users if they don't use. They can't, whatever their choice might be, even if they knew what that choice would be.
But what if they never sold a single program again, their stock froze in value, they had no investments whatsoever and their land value stayed constant? Then they'd have enough reserves to last about 50 to 60 years, assuming they paid every single day and neither side backed down.
If we assume the youngest employee at Microsoft is in their early 20s, that would be enough cash to see them through their entire career and the first 15 years of retirement and pensions.
Given that a fine is unlikely to alter behaviour if it inflicts no effective consequences, I'd argue that this fine is not nearly enough. I'm not sure a stronger penalty would help much, though - Microsoft is at the point where their reserves are so vast that it is utterly impossible to exact a penalty that would change their conduct without utterly destroying their business in the process.
The only possible way I can see this doing any good is if the EU rolls some reasonable percent of all the fines collected into a fund for Open Source development/sponsorship of some kind. It won't hurt Microsoft directly, but at least it can mitigate the anti-competitive actions by boosting one of the more dangerous competitors Microsoft has.
(As much as I have developed a dislike of some of the OpenBSD developers for their trolling tendencies on Slashdot, I would be the first to encourage the EU to donate perhaps 10% of the first day's fine to the OpenBSD group. I think that could make a real difference to IT security worldwide and - because it's from a fine - it wouldn't effectively cost the EU anything to do.)
What's the worst that could happen, if CmdrTaco takes over the world? Well, besides all construction projects being duped, traffic jams being replaced with the Slashdot Effect and SSN's being replaced with the person's UID?