Coverity has been scanning the Linux kernel for a while now and have been sending in periodic bug reports. I cannot be sure they are scanning all architectures, though, as I've been trying for some time to get a MIPS64 version of their checker and that has been proving difficult. In consequence, I am unsure how much of the architecture code and architecture-specific drivers are currently being monitored. As unusual architectures don't get much testing under normal conditions, I hope Coverity can clear this up - preferably by guaranteeing that they cover the more obscure parts of the kernel.
Historically, Coverity's software has been used for some considerable time. It was first used under the name of the "Stanford Checker" and made an absolutely staggering difference. I believe it was first used in the 2.1.x era, though Linux historians can feel free to correct me on that.
Because it is not a run-time check, but a compile-time check, it is unclear to me what (if any) tests they have for violation of invariants, probable infinite loops, validating the parameters of functions passed as pointers, and other strictly run-time gremlins.
Because its documentation does say it's only really good for large programs, it is also unclear how effective it will be for debugging strictly external drivers or small pieces of support code. Many of the libraries and utilities out there for Linux are way too small to be reliably tested with this program. (IIRC, they recommend a minimum of something like half a million lines of code.)
Although the Linux kernel has been tested, bugs in compilation will render testing worthless. I do not know how extensively either GCC or the binutils package have been checked. I'm not even sure there is anything in binutils big enough to be checked. Presumably Gnu libc should also be tested - otherwise it's unclear if the checker or the compiler can be trusted... and how do you make sure that the absence of errors in libc aren't due to a problem in the checker caused by a bug in libc?
(Checking the checker is relatively easy. Checking longer loops is a harder problem, as there are more interdependencies.)
Front-line ISPs - the guys who provide Internet access to the home. The bandwidth supported is generally trivial, the number of connections is generally very high, the number of features offered is usually negligible.
Middle-tier ISPs buy bandwidth from the Internet Backbone providers and sell it to front-line ISPs and businesses.
Backbone ISPs have a peering arrangement with each other, with most of their income coming not from other backbone providers but from the middle tier.
Front-line providers, like DSL or cable carriers, have a monopoly on the format. It's VERY hard for multiple DSL services to co-exist in the same area. Because DSL can only run over dry copper (you can't have fiber in there ANYWHERE), cable companies can disenfranchise DSL providers by simply getting phone companies to "upgrade" sections of their infrastructure. All it would take is for them to use fiber in a junction box or a patch panel, and all DSL past that point will die.
Broadband-over-power causes way too much radio interference to be usable. Even if this could be resolved, all it would take is for some existing ISP to sweet-talk the power company to install a noise filter and the entire system is kaput.
WiFi is fine, but WiFi is slow. Ethernet gets up to 10 gigabits per second, with 100 gigabits coming soon. Optical networks are already at the 100 gigabit level, and 4 terabit network switches exist. Wifi isn't even remotely close to these kinds of speed. It never will be. For true broadband, 802.11 WiFi is a dead-end technology.
(Hell, DSL is dead-end, as optic fiber becomes more widespread. Also, SDSL is generally not sold to domestic users, only corporate users, and ADSL sucks for providing any content.)
I believe that's for liquid mirrors, rather than solid ones. However, it could certainly be used to pre-shape a solid mirror. Normally, I believe, you would take a flat slab or a partially-shaped slab and grind it into the appropriate shape. A lot of amateur astronomers take portholes from decomissioned cruise ships, for example, as they're already basically the right shape, but it would merely be a longer process to use something more basic. It depends on the amount of work you want to do.
Of course, if you want to do this using gravity shaping, there's nothing easier in space. Gravity is just acceleration. 9.8 m/s/s worth, to be precise. For small mirrors, the capillary effect within the container will also alter the shape - depends on the fluid and the walls. When the glass is still slightly molten, just fire the rocket engines and you'll have essentially artificial gravity of whatever amount you like. For large mirrors, I'm not sure this buys you much. Spinning a massive semi-liquid would be next to impossible - far too much drag.
Diamond and tungsten-carbide are much harder than glass and could easily be used to cut, then grind, a large glass block into a perfect mirror, totally from scratch. (Pun intended.) One of the benefits of this is that in a microgravity environment that is 100% free of atmosphere and particles (the ultimate in Clean Room environments), it would be possible to get the mirror very close to mathematically flawless.
Use a non-glass-based mirror and send the thing as a series of segments which you then recombine
Make the glass in space (microgravity allows for purer products) and then use a robot arm to grind it a-la the Hubble mirror, only using a computer simulation for the template (so you don't get imperfections from a defective template, as happened with Hubble)
Same as for 2, but use moon dust - it's much higher quality silica and you won't have to use so much fuel to get it into space.
Send a very large number of very small flat panel mirrors into space, then use software correction to adjust for the errors that would creep in. Since I'm assuming the use of software correction anyway, this adds minimal overhead.
The Internet backbone should not be a plaything for any monopolistic organization and where a company acquires a monopoly through chance (eg: being the first provider for an area) it should be completely incapable of maintaining that.
I also agree 100% that legislation is often the only way to deal with such problems. I'm not afraid of so-called "Big Government" or adding more laws. I do feel concerned that the proposed law may be too easy to bypass - corporations are notorious for finding loopholes - and I do feel that this issue is SO pressing and SO urgent that loopholes are completely unacceptable.
If the only solution to this is to terrify corporations into being honest, by simply confiscating equipment and handing it to competitors when an abuse occurs for example, then I would be far less afraid of such a solution than I would be in the existing monopolies and the threatened hijacking of Internet bandwidth.
My number one concern is that, at the end of the day, the Internet is safeguarded against what amounts to corporate banditry and bandwidth hijacking. It might be best to simply confiscate the entire US side of the Internet backbone and place it back under the control of DARPA. As much as I distrust quangos, I distrust unfettered industry far more.
South Carolina, specifically Charleston. They use a thick layer of plain sand, add a thin layer of gravel (which they crush) and then they spray the pulverized rock with blacktop. Or it might be coffee grounds. Hard to tell.
They'd have to fire scientists who won't come back, projects that are suspended have a very low probability of being restarted, anything Europe picks up will likely have to be totally abandoned by NASA due to the lack of experts (but at least it'll still be done), etc.
If you lose the skillset, you won't get it back. Once the retroactive budget cuts take hold, there'll be a LOT of scientists who will find themselves burned. Even if NASA gets more money at a later date, few will take the risk of going back, knowing that the money could be taken from them after a project has been started. Why take the chance on such poor job security?
If NASA's budget isn't increased substantially (enough to cover ALL existing projects, plus enough extra to provide a buffer for overruns), the agency will cease to have any meaningful operational status within the next 10-15 years. It'll still be around for a lot longer, but they won't be able to do much more than sweep the floors of their HQ.
A trivial example - Langley will likely be shut, if there are deep real-term cuts. That means ALL of the lucrative aerospace engineering contracts - NASA's largest source of funds outside of the Government - will go elsewhere. That is going to seriously raise the cost of building the shuttle replacement, as they won't have the engineering talent in-house, they'll have to outsource.
Why would they do that? Because Langley isn't as politically sensitive as the other bases. Eliminating one of the others will have a bigger impact on NASA's representation in Congress. The impact on operations would be far less important than the impact on their ability to stay afloat the budget after next.
The scattering from air pollution is random and localized. It is going to be hard for computers to compensate for such stuff. It's bad enough to compensate for relatively uniform atmospheric distortion.
Secondly, light pollution isn't just a localized problem. Light bends and reflects in the atmosphere very effectively. So much so, in fact, that the moon is still very clearly visible in a full lunar eclipse (it has a rusty brown colour) and car headlights are forever being mistaken for UFOs at a distance.
Personally, I think we should have giant space telescopes anyway. Enough of the 9' junk we call Hubble, we need a good 100' optical space telescope. The mechanisms we use to compensate for atmospheric effects should work just as well for the distortion in space due to dust and crystalline particles in interstellar clouds.
Actually, the way I'd do it is to have a set of giant space-based telescopes on a polar orbit around the moon such that they were always visible from Earth. Less atmospheric drag, so won't have as many problems as Hubble, and the orbit is much less crowded.
Well, the green (little g) ones with lots of zeros on them, anyway. Besides, Frist is probably not the only one to have stock, and it would only take a few to have stock in companies investing in synthetic fuel for that 9 billion to work out to be a hefty profit, even without a single kickback. (Which we all know they're likely to get anyway.)
1930s technology (if unaltered) would work just fine. People would be getting a quality analog signal, there would be minimal interference, everyone would be happy. The problem is using y2k technology overlaying 1930s technology.
This is not unusual in the US, in any area of technology. I've seen USians build major roads with nothing more than sand for a foundation - 2000AD cars running on 2000BC infrastructure. Sure, the roads break up badly, and I'm certain there are many accidents and deaths on US roads as a result, but cheap & quick seems to be the in-thing. Thomas Telford these guys are not.
Having said all that, is there any fundamental reason why a digital signal over AM should cause any interference at all? After all, it's simply a matter of signal spread and drift. If you're in a narrow enough band and have no drift, then it makes no difference if your technology is analog, digital or purple.
It would seem to follow that the digital layer is inferior in design. Of course, this does beg a question - in order to receive a digital signal and decode it, you need a radio capable of decoding digital data, which means a 1930s radio isn't going to work. Given that the consumer is going to use a new radio anyway, it makes no sense to use AM for the modulation. AM works great for analog, but NASA doesn't use AM for digital signals, and I'd rather trust them for radio design than Clear Channel.
There may be others I'm not thinking of, but the modulation schemes I know of are: Amplitude Modulation (AM), Frequency Modulation (FM) - but isn't good for long range, Phase Modulation, Pulse Modulation and Polarity Modulation. NASA, IIRC, uses Pulse Modulation for digital signals, which seem to work just fine over long distances and variations in velocity, requiring relatively simple, power-efficient decoders.
The other benefit of using a different modulation scheme is that you should get less interference and it should be easier to filter that interference out. Of course, filtering interference would be a non-issue if the FCC mandated that anyone generating such interference had to pay all analog radio manufacturers 100% of the cost of upgrading all equiptment in production and in use with the necessary additional filters. Hey, if you generate the pollution, you should pay to clean it up.
Using a dedicated band for digital radio would work too, and would be the best solution if the net range of frequencies in use does not grow significantly or shrinks as a result. I'm a little concerned that the spectrum is getting very cluttered with not a whole lot of gain. Of course, if the tax payer wants to put Aricebo and Jodrel Bank's Lovell Telescope into space, then it wouldn't be a big problem. However, it seems to me that Clear Channel and Sirius Radio would rather generate the problem than fix it.
Differentiated Services (the ability to route packets differently according to type of service) and Integrated Services (the ability to group packets together according to the relationships between types of service) are theoretically unaffected by this. As most QoS is done through Diffserv/Intserv classification and not by source or destination, it follows QoS should be unaffected.
HTB, HFSC, SFSC, CBQ, etc, predominantly use the type of service and not the endpoints as the basis for packet classification. You can specify endpoints, and the LARTC HOWTO has examples on how to do this, but it's not an exceptionally useful application of the technology.
RED, GREEN, BLUE, BLACK and the other packet-dropping schemes either use type of service or select packets at random. It makes no sense to drop packets more for one source than another, except as a DoS jamming scheme.
ECN, FECN and BECN use endpoints to cap excessive streams and are only impacted in that the law would prohibit anti-competitive abuse of these algorithms.
It might make buying RSVP'ed bandwidth illegal, but RSVP doesn't scale over the Internet and should only be used on local networks anyway. Besides which, RSVP is probably the least-known of all QoS technologies.
If backbone providers kick up too much of a fuss, intermediate providers will likely switch to a mesh-based Internet, which could kill off the backbone entirely. The backbone will only endure so long as it can provide better service for less money than a mesh would. With copious amounts of dark fiber around for relatively little money, repressive ISPs are a short-term threat to America but a long-term threat to themselves.
Personally, I would not do this through the specific legislation suggested. Crippling the Internet by holding IP traffic hostage is clearly bad for the economy. The Supreme Court has already ruled the Government can seize property via Eminent Domain on economic grounds. If one or two States were to seize the pipelines and routers of beligerant backbone providers and sell them at discount to ones that are more open, the arguments would tone down rapidly.
Is this gross interference? Sure. But so is any law, and at least this wouldn't be a sustainable thing. A law, once in the books, is much harder to get rid of, once it becomes a detriment. Is it totally evil, satanic and everything anti Free Market? Sure. But it would be a one-time correction to an abberition in the Free Market that threatens the Free Market over a much longer term and in a much more insidious manner.
In the end, it comes down to this: Cthulhu or Lawyers. It seems very clear to me which is going to be worse for the country.
The most important part of having strong immune systems is to allow illnesses to run their course, keeping controls on activity so that it doesn't get out of hand. However, the economy will suffer as you'd have a massive fall in the workforce that could work at any given time, and it would also force businesses to massively increase the number of available sick days.
(Some businesses will sack you if you fall ill. That won't work, in a society that promotes strong immune systems. Indeed, businesses would have to be required to provide a minimum of a month out of every year for sick leave, with mandatory leniency on those with long-term illnesses.)
The next-most important part is good nutrition, with a healthy environment coming next. This means that minimum wage must NEVER be below the sum of the cost for buying sufficient food of sufficient quality to meet all applicable standards and requirements, PLUS the cost of correctly storing and preparing that food, PLUS the cost of living in a suitably maintained environment. My guess is that this will triple the minimum wage. Oh, and there can be NO businesses or sectors that can claim exemption.
The net impact on the economy would be gigantic. True, after a decade or so, you'll get more people able to work more, be more productive, live longer, fall ill less, etc. Eventually, over a long enough term, there would be a net benefit to the country. In the meantime, though, it will be very painful and no politician is going to do something that could be painful to their votes.
If they won't remove and wash the lab coats & ties themselves, then hospitals and doctor's offices should install gigantic washing machines. The staff should force the doctor into the washing machine every four hours, but should refrain from using the hot wash setting. Once the wash cycle is complete, you drop them into a giant tumble drier. The problems with bacteria are now solved and, for those who survive, there's an excellent chance they will wash their own clothes more often.
Time wasted on Slashdot should be given in days, not minutes, to prevent bankrupting the economy.
Line 54 has an extension asking how many Slashdotings (sites taken down through being linked to Slashdot) you were involved with in the past year. This is a multiplier for the hilarity.
Calculating the Slashdot UID also involves counting the number of albums/singles from The Who, the number of times CowboyNeil has been picked as a poll option, and the number of installations that claim to use Linux kernel 2.7
Zack doesn't scale. Linus didn't scale. Linus fixed said scaling problem by getting help on filtering and pre-processing, reducing the amount of work he had to do. Ergo, all Zack needs is volunteers who can filter stuff into an "important", an "interesting" and a "junk" category. Zack can then spend time on the "important" stuff and if that's not meaty enough can move onto the "interesting".
I'm not joking when I say your post was a few hundred times more precise and meaningful than the entire original article. Now, all you have to do is get an article that is uniformly of that quality published on the mimivirus, and you'll be set for life.
It was stated as a direct inference that because the precursor to mimivirus would have infected proto-cellular life, that it must be related to the formation of eukarytes. Now, I can certainly buy the argument of different types of life merging, but there is no cause-and-effect mechanism given. It is stated, but no mechanism or evidence is presented.
Then there is the issue of mitochondrial DNA, which is non-nuclear DNA that has merged into modern cells late on in the cellular picture. Are they implying that mitochondrial DNA was a virus that got stuck in a nucleic cell, or that the nucleus is the foreign part that infected a non-nucleic mitochondrial cell? Or maybe those were two independent cells where one had been infected by this virus, and then the cells (as cells) combined to form a chimera.
Three ways to interpret a single article, with minimal knowledge of what possibilities exist. An expert might easily find hundreds, if not thousands, of interpretations of events. Of course, there is the question of whether that matters. I would say yes. If you have a totally generic theory like that, it is unfalsifiable, because no matter what evidence you come up with, you can twist the meaning of the theory to fit.
Am I saying that they're wrong? No. It is self-evident that "life" and "non-life" are two regions on a continuum that has no discontinuities. There is therefore a third region, which I'll call "semi-life", which exists between those two regions. Whatever point you pick in the "semi-life" region, you will find something that has non-life attributes between that point and the start of the "life" region. Likewise, there will also be something, somewhere, that has life attributes between that same point and the "non-life" region. Given that, it would seem fairly obvious that viruses are probably a major component in the "semi-life" realm and probably had some role in the stepwise refinement process we call evolution.
The lack of a testable hypothesis, the wooliness of the conjecture, the lack of discussion on mitochondria - these tell me that the paper is grossly inadequate. NOT necessarily "inaccurate", just inadequate. The quality of the work may well be there, but you cannot determine this from the quality of the writing, which read like tabloid journalism. People whose idea of news is the UK's "The Sunday Sport" are unlikely to be interested in microbiology and the chimerical nature of modern cells. It is unclear how many could even spell "microbiology" or "chimerical" with their concentration absorbed on the pictures.
Slashdot and K5 have excuses for stories that aren't "perfect" - they're not supposed to be. Nobody (sane) subscribes to Slashdot in the expectation of the next Einstein or the next Arthur C Clarke publishing vivid, powerful, truly revolutionary stories there. Although said stories would almost certainly be covered. Maybe twice in the same day. When science journals start to resemble a cross between a teenager's blog and some advertising hype for a paperback novel, though, I have to wonder why they're bothering. Those who can understand the subject well enough to appreciate it fully will be repulsed by the pop style. Those who like the pop style are unlikely to understand a word of what was said.
Probably the greatest hope for scientific journalism is if a law is passed banning the writing of academic papers when under the influence of hallucinogens.
IANAL, I don't even play one on TV, but as an obsessive collector of trivia and arcane information, I believe I know a part of the answer.
Technically, the Magna Carta did have a clause stating that when the king violated the law, the barons and land-owners were authorized to seize such compensation as entitled under the law, by whatever means were necessary. Under this clause, the confiscating of the northern Americas from the British Crown could be argued to have been within British law and to have precedent by means of the rebellion leading to the Magna Carta, the granting of Cornwall its own parliament, and the independence of a small town on the border between Scotland and England whose name I forget. English Common Law also has the theory of the "reasonable man", which basically raises the bar on legal cases by asking if a theoretical "reasonable man" would have done exactly the same thing under the same circumstances.
Would the British of the time have been satisfied by any of this? Hell, no. The Government wanted blood, legal or otherwise. Mind you, so did Mr. Washington - Ghandi he was not.
Ok, well would any of these apply in the Diebold case? I'd say it's very arguable that a reasonable man would indeed highlight by whatever means possible a clear violation of both trust and law. Indeed, to not do so would likely have made him an accessory to the crime. In a case where a "crime" would result regardless of what you do, it must surely be the case that the "reasonable" response is necessarily lawful to avoid an absolutely impossible situation.
The Magna Carta doesn't apply in the US, but if it did, the confiscation clause could be interpreted to assert that obtaining the information proving electoral fraud was protected as punishment for a crime within Government.
Slashdot Mirror
Historically, Coverity's software has been used for some considerable time. It was first used under the name of the "Stanford Checker" and made an absolutely staggering difference. I believe it was first used in the 2.1.x era, though Linux historians can feel free to correct me on that.
Because it is not a run-time check, but a compile-time check, it is unclear to me what (if any) tests they have for violation of invariants, probable infinite loops, validating the parameters of functions passed as pointers, and other strictly run-time gremlins.
Because its documentation does say it's only really good for large programs, it is also unclear how effective it will be for debugging strictly external drivers or small pieces of support code. Many of the libraries and utilities out there for Linux are way too small to be reliably tested with this program. (IIRC, they recommend a minimum of something like half a million lines of code.)
Although the Linux kernel has been tested, bugs in compilation will render testing worthless. I do not know how extensively either GCC or the binutils package have been checked. I'm not even sure there is anything in binutils big enough to be checked. Presumably Gnu libc should also be tested - otherwise it's unclear if the checker or the compiler can be trusted... and how do you make sure that the absence of errors in libc aren't due to a problem in the checker caused by a bug in libc?
(Checking the checker is relatively easy. Checking longer loops is a harder problem, as there are more interdependencies.)
Front-line providers, like DSL or cable carriers, have a monopoly on the format. It's VERY hard for multiple DSL services to co-exist in the same area. Because DSL can only run over dry copper (you can't have fiber in there ANYWHERE), cable companies can disenfranchise DSL providers by simply getting phone companies to "upgrade" sections of their infrastructure. All it would take is for them to use fiber in a junction box or a patch panel, and all DSL past that point will die.
Broadband-over-power causes way too much radio interference to be usable. Even if this could be resolved, all it would take is for some existing ISP to sweet-talk the power company to install a noise filter and the entire system is kaput.
WiFi is fine, but WiFi is slow. Ethernet gets up to 10 gigabits per second, with 100 gigabits coming soon. Optical networks are already at the 100 gigabit level, and 4 terabit network switches exist. Wifi isn't even remotely close to these kinds of speed. It never will be. For true broadband, 802.11 WiFi is a dead-end technology.
(Hell, DSL is dead-end, as optic fiber becomes more widespread. Also, SDSL is generally not sold to domestic users, only corporate users, and ADSL sucks for providing any content.)
Of course, if you want to do this using gravity shaping, there's nothing easier in space. Gravity is just acceleration. 9.8 m/s/s worth, to be precise. For small mirrors, the capillary effect within the container will also alter the shape - depends on the fluid and the walls. When the glass is still slightly molten, just fire the rocket engines and you'll have essentially artificial gravity of whatever amount you like. For large mirrors, I'm not sure this buys you much. Spinning a massive semi-liquid would be next to impossible - far too much drag.
Diamond and tungsten-carbide are much harder than glass and could easily be used to cut, then grind, a large glass block into a perfect mirror, totally from scratch. (Pun intended.) One of the benefits of this is that in a microgravity environment that is 100% free of atmosphere and particles (the ultimate in Clean Room environments), it would be possible to get the mirror very close to mathematically flawless.
I also agree 100% that legislation is often the only way to deal with such problems. I'm not afraid of so-called "Big Government" or adding more laws. I do feel concerned that the proposed law may be too easy to bypass - corporations are notorious for finding loopholes - and I do feel that this issue is SO pressing and SO urgent that loopholes are completely unacceptable.
If the only solution to this is to terrify corporations into being honest, by simply confiscating equipment and handing it to competitors when an abuse occurs for example, then I would be far less afraid of such a solution than I would be in the existing monopolies and the threatened hijacking of Internet bandwidth.
My number one concern is that, at the end of the day, the Internet is safeguarded against what amounts to corporate banditry and bandwidth hijacking. It might be best to simply confiscate the entire US side of the Internet backbone and place it back under the control of DARPA. As much as I distrust quangos, I distrust unfettered industry far more.
South Carolina, specifically Charleston. They use a thick layer of plain sand, add a thin layer of gravel (which they crush) and then they spray the pulverized rock with blacktop. Or it might be coffee grounds. Hard to tell.
...a copy of Jurassic Park had travelled back in time and they'd misheard "raptor".
You're just being paranoid.
The original article is testing out the spoofing services.
The US Government just has to make sure to seize the credit card company's computer under Eminent Domain afterwards.
If you lose the skillset, you won't get it back. Once the retroactive budget cuts take hold, there'll be a LOT of scientists who will find themselves burned. Even if NASA gets more money at a later date, few will take the risk of going back, knowing that the money could be taken from them after a project has been started. Why take the chance on such poor job security?
If NASA's budget isn't increased substantially (enough to cover ALL existing projects, plus enough extra to provide a buffer for overruns), the agency will cease to have any meaningful operational status within the next 10-15 years. It'll still be around for a lot longer, but they won't be able to do much more than sweep the floors of their HQ.
A trivial example - Langley will likely be shut, if there are deep real-term cuts. That means ALL of the lucrative aerospace engineering contracts - NASA's largest source of funds outside of the Government - will go elsewhere. That is going to seriously raise the cost of building the shuttle replacement, as they won't have the engineering talent in-house, they'll have to outsource.
Why would they do that? Because Langley isn't as politically sensitive as the other bases. Eliminating one of the others will have a bigger impact on NASA's representation in Congress. The impact on operations would be far less important than the impact on their ability to stay afloat the budget after next.
Secondly, light pollution isn't just a localized problem. Light bends and reflects in the atmosphere very effectively. So much so, in fact, that the moon is still very clearly visible in a full lunar eclipse (it has a rusty brown colour) and car headlights are forever being mistaken for UFOs at a distance.
Personally, I think we should have giant space telescopes anyway. Enough of the 9' junk we call Hubble, we need a good 100' optical space telescope. The mechanisms we use to compensate for atmospheric effects should work just as well for the distortion in space due to dust and crystalline particles in interstellar clouds.
Actually, the way I'd do it is to have a set of giant space-based telescopes on a polar orbit around the moon such that they were always visible from Earth. Less atmospheric drag, so won't have as many problems as Hubble, and the orbit is much less crowded.
Well, the green (little g) ones with lots of zeros on them, anyway. Besides, Frist is probably not the only one to have stock, and it would only take a few to have stock in companies investing in synthetic fuel for that 9 billion to work out to be a hefty profit, even without a single kickback. (Which we all know they're likely to get anyway.)
This is not unusual in the US, in any area of technology. I've seen USians build major roads with nothing more than sand for a foundation - 2000AD cars running on 2000BC infrastructure. Sure, the roads break up badly, and I'm certain there are many accidents and deaths on US roads as a result, but cheap & quick seems to be the in-thing. Thomas Telford these guys are not.
Having said all that, is there any fundamental reason why a digital signal over AM should cause any interference at all? After all, it's simply a matter of signal spread and drift. If you're in a narrow enough band and have no drift, then it makes no difference if your technology is analog, digital or purple.
It would seem to follow that the digital layer is inferior in design. Of course, this does beg a question - in order to receive a digital signal and decode it, you need a radio capable of decoding digital data, which means a 1930s radio isn't going to work. Given that the consumer is going to use a new radio anyway, it makes no sense to use AM for the modulation. AM works great for analog, but NASA doesn't use AM for digital signals, and I'd rather trust them for radio design than Clear Channel.
There may be others I'm not thinking of, but the modulation schemes I know of are: Amplitude Modulation (AM), Frequency Modulation (FM) - but isn't good for long range, Phase Modulation, Pulse Modulation and Polarity Modulation. NASA, IIRC, uses Pulse Modulation for digital signals, which seem to work just fine over long distances and variations in velocity, requiring relatively simple, power-efficient decoders.
The other benefit of using a different modulation scheme is that you should get less interference and it should be easier to filter that interference out. Of course, filtering interference would be a non-issue if the FCC mandated that anyone generating such interference had to pay all analog radio manufacturers 100% of the cost of upgrading all equiptment in production and in use with the necessary additional filters. Hey, if you generate the pollution, you should pay to clean it up.
Using a dedicated band for digital radio would work too, and would be the best solution if the net range of frequencies in use does not grow significantly or shrinks as a result. I'm a little concerned that the spectrum is getting very cluttered with not a whole lot of gain. Of course, if the tax payer wants to put Aricebo and Jodrel Bank's Lovell Telescope into space, then it wouldn't be a big problem. However, it seems to me that Clear Channel and Sirius Radio would rather generate the problem than fix it.
Boeing only handles the right wing.
Personally, I would not do this through the specific legislation suggested. Crippling the Internet by holding IP traffic hostage is clearly bad for the economy. The Supreme Court has already ruled the Government can seize property via Eminent Domain on economic grounds. If one or two States were to seize the pipelines and routers of beligerant backbone providers and sell them at discount to ones that are more open, the arguments would tone down rapidly.
Is this gross interference? Sure. But so is any law, and at least this wouldn't be a sustainable thing. A law, once in the books, is much harder to get rid of, once it becomes a detriment. Is it totally evil, satanic and everything anti Free Market? Sure. But it would be a one-time correction to an abberition in the Free Market that threatens the Free Market over a much longer term and in a much more insidious manner.
In the end, it comes down to this: Cthulhu or Lawyers. It seems very clear to me which is going to be worse for the country.
(Some businesses will sack you if you fall ill. That won't work, in a society that promotes strong immune systems. Indeed, businesses would have to be required to provide a minimum of a month out of every year for sick leave, with mandatory leniency on those with long-term illnesses.)
The next-most important part is good nutrition, with a healthy environment coming next. This means that minimum wage must NEVER be below the sum of the cost for buying sufficient food of sufficient quality to meet all applicable standards and requirements, PLUS the cost of correctly storing and preparing that food, PLUS the cost of living in a suitably maintained environment. My guess is that this will triple the minimum wage. Oh, and there can be NO businesses or sectors that can claim exemption.
The net impact on the economy would be gigantic. True, after a decade or so, you'll get more people able to work more, be more productive, live longer, fall ill less, etc. Eventually, over a long enough term, there would be a net benefit to the country. In the meantime, though, it will be very painful and no politician is going to do something that could be painful to their votes.
If they won't remove and wash the lab coats & ties themselves, then hospitals and doctor's offices should install gigantic washing machines. The staff should force the doctor into the washing machine every four hours, but should refrain from using the hot wash setting. Once the wash cycle is complete, you drop them into a giant tumble drier. The problems with bacteria are now solved and, for those who survive, there's an excellent chance they will wash their own clothes more often.
Problem solved.
I'm not joking when I say your post was a few hundred times more precise and meaningful than the entire original article. Now, all you have to do is get an article that is uniformly of that quality published on the mimivirus, and you'll be set for life.
Then there is the issue of mitochondrial DNA, which is non-nuclear DNA that has merged into modern cells late on in the cellular picture. Are they implying that mitochondrial DNA was a virus that got stuck in a nucleic cell, or that the nucleus is the foreign part that infected a non-nucleic mitochondrial cell? Or maybe those were two independent cells where one had been infected by this virus, and then the cells (as cells) combined to form a chimera.
Three ways to interpret a single article, with minimal knowledge of what possibilities exist. An expert might easily find hundreds, if not thousands, of interpretations of events. Of course, there is the question of whether that matters. I would say yes. If you have a totally generic theory like that, it is unfalsifiable, because no matter what evidence you come up with, you can twist the meaning of the theory to fit.
Am I saying that they're wrong? No. It is self-evident that "life" and "non-life" are two regions on a continuum that has no discontinuities. There is therefore a third region, which I'll call "semi-life", which exists between those two regions. Whatever point you pick in the "semi-life" region, you will find something that has non-life attributes between that point and the start of the "life" region. Likewise, there will also be something, somewhere, that has life attributes between that same point and the "non-life" region. Given that, it would seem fairly obvious that viruses are probably a major component in the "semi-life" realm and probably had some role in the stepwise refinement process we call evolution.
The lack of a testable hypothesis, the wooliness of the conjecture, the lack of discussion on mitochondria - these tell me that the paper is grossly inadequate. NOT necessarily "inaccurate", just inadequate. The quality of the work may well be there, but you cannot determine this from the quality of the writing, which read like tabloid journalism. People whose idea of news is the UK's "The Sunday Sport" are unlikely to be interested in microbiology and the chimerical nature of modern cells. It is unclear how many could even spell "microbiology" or "chimerical" with their concentration absorbed on the pictures.
Slashdot and K5 have excuses for stories that aren't "perfect" - they're not supposed to be. Nobody (sane) subscribes to Slashdot in the expectation of the next Einstein or the next Arthur C Clarke publishing vivid, powerful, truly revolutionary stories there. Although said stories would almost certainly be covered. Maybe twice in the same day. When science journals start to resemble a cross between a teenager's blog and some advertising hype for a paperback novel, though, I have to wonder why they're bothering. Those who can understand the subject well enough to appreciate it fully will be repulsed by the pop style. Those who like the pop style are unlikely to understand a word of what was said.
Probably the greatest hope for scientific journalism is if a law is passed banning the writing of academic papers when under the influence of hallucinogens.
The signal to noise ratio will go down, but the quality of the noise will skyrocket.
Because people would use up all their mod points too quickly.
Technically, the Magna Carta did have a clause stating that when the king violated the law, the barons and land-owners were authorized to seize such compensation as entitled under the law, by whatever means were necessary. Under this clause, the confiscating of the northern Americas from the British Crown could be argued to have been within British law and to have precedent by means of the rebellion leading to the Magna Carta, the granting of Cornwall its own parliament, and the independence of a small town on the border between Scotland and England whose name I forget. English Common Law also has the theory of the "reasonable man", which basically raises the bar on legal cases by asking if a theoretical "reasonable man" would have done exactly the same thing under the same circumstances.
Would the British of the time have been satisfied by any of this? Hell, no. The Government wanted blood, legal or otherwise. Mind you, so did Mr. Washington - Ghandi he was not.
Ok, well would any of these apply in the Diebold case? I'd say it's very arguable that a reasonable man would indeed highlight by whatever means possible a clear violation of both trust and law. Indeed, to not do so would likely have made him an accessory to the crime. In a case where a "crime" would result regardless of what you do, it must surely be the case that the "reasonable" response is necessarily lawful to avoid an absolutely impossible situation.
The Magna Carta doesn't apply in the US, but if it did, the confiscation clause could be interpreted to assert that obtaining the information proving electoral fraud was protected as punishment for a crime within Government.