It would seem to make more sense to have 4 virtual cores, where all have access to all computing elements. That way, you don't put such tight limits on the hyperthreading (where that would be beneficial). It would also be much easier to add more virtual cores, as it would not require any additional physical computing elements, so massive parallelization in cases where very different behind-the-scenes work would be needed would benefit further.
(Here, I'm using the term "virtual core" to mean a complete physical set of internal registers for each "core", but with no directly attached computing elements. Hence it is not a physical CPU, as it doesn't process, it's not central and it's distributed rather than being a unit. If you had a memory pool for such a purpose, where what was left was available as L1 cache, you could dynamically change the number of cores to suit the work you were doing. That would seem to be the "ultimate" design.)
It's not just the recent past that archaeologists have been guilty of gold-digging. There are many documented cases of "amateur" archaeologists plundering sites for artifacts with little regard for what they might destroy in the process. A site near where I used to live in England was completely destroyed by a local Bishop in the 1800s who had heard there was gold buried inside a burial mound. He didn't find any, but there's now not a chance in hell of anyone finding anything meaningful there.
Let's say you find a tomb with artifacts and a body, from a few thousand years ago. Ok, you photograph and blueprint the artifacts, you do all kinds of material science analysis and ultrasonic tests for detecting imperfections, you run elaborate tests on the body (X-Ray, MRI, DNA analysis, dental studies, forensic analysis, blood typing, anything you care to think of). You're now in a position to produce museum-quality replicas (which should be used anyway, to deter theft and prevent vandalism or accidental damage), you've all that really matters when it comes to understanding the history, and if there's anything you've missed out, you've been non-destructive enough that there's an excellent chance future generations will be able to fill in the pieces.
I'm perfectly willing to accept that many sites are in extreme danger of vandalism, despoiling, etc, and that it is essential to protect what you can. In cases where protection is best done by removal, hey, that's fair, but even in those cases it helps nobody to have the originals on display (and therefore exposed to risk of damage and risk of theft, whilst also being unavailable for any kind of actual study).
The Paul Getty museum is believed to have more than a few stolen artifacts (probably innocently on their part, though one can never be certain of that) and that's just one part of a massive, roaring trade in such stuff. That's another reason to produce replicas, though - produce enough and make it the norm for display purposes (where Joe Q Public doesn't care if they're seeing a 2000 BC original or a 2000 AD copy, so long as it looks identical) it could cripple the prices and therefore potentially cripple the thefts.
History is so important that turning it into a commodity is a perilous thing. How do you market something that exists only once and will never happen again?
I'll accept that your sister is probably doing a good job out there, and as it's not every grad student that gets to be involved in a major discovery, I see no reason for you to feel anything but pride in her work.
That, however, is as far as I'm willing to compromise. Archaeology is a field with too many slap-dash methods, sometimes caused by massive underfunding, sometimes caused by horrific time pressures, but usually caused by recklessness. It's often possible to identify which is the case. In the town I grew up in, which is now 12,000 years older than previously thought, the problem is funding. The area of interest is about 9 square miles, but they can't afford to hire more than three archaeologists for more than three months at a time, of which less than 1 month is usable for actual digging. Over the course of 9 years, they've managed to do little more than one person's back yard.
(Hey, the quality of work is amazing. The finds are staggering. But if they plan on doing a full study of the site before another 12,000 years have passed, they're going to need between a hundred to a thousand times the manpower, vastly superior surveying techniques, and a small army of researchers to cross-reference finds with information from other sites in the UK.)
Sea-Henge was an example of a disaster caused by time pressure. The site was in extreme danger, because the wooden remains had risen above ground level and because it was attracting too many visitors. The archaeologists cut corners in their excavations, causing an uncertain amount of damage. They cut corners on the legal and local issues, causing considerable and unnecessary problems. They made no backups of field notes, so when their warehouse (which was poorly maintained) burned to the ground after an electrical fire, they lost virtually everything. All they had left were some 3,000 year old lumps of wood.
The Rose Theatre is another example of time pressure. Damage there is unclear, but when you have to excavate a huge Elizabethan site (it was a playhouse very closely linked to Shakespere personally) because a hotel wants to build over it... Gnnnn! The hotel, as I recall, opted to build "around" the archaeological site - preserving it to some degree - which was better than many had feared. Even so, the sheer rush will undoubtably have resulted in the loss of much that could have been learned.
A third example of time-pressure has to have been a magnificent valley of cave paintings - I believe in Portugal, ranging in date from some of the earliest ever recorded, through to very late on in Stone Age times. Many miles of them were found. Shortly before the valley was dammed up to be turned into a reservoir. There is absolutely no way that all of the paintings could have been recorded, and there was certainly neither time nor money nor resources for any kind of excavation in the area to learn more of the painters. The site is now totally destroyed for all time, the paintings will almost certainly have perished within moments of the valley being flooded, and perhaps the most important ancient site in Europe was obliterated. All for the sake of local politics.
So it is by no means entirely the fault of archaeologists. Nonetheless, those cases they are at fault on, they should say so and admit fault. They will never improve if they never admit a need to do so. They should also work considerably harder than they are on raising awareness of what has been knowingly lost forever - as much in recent times as any other - and what that really means for our understanding. What DOES it really mean, for society to lose a few hundred thousand cave paintings? What IS the best way of preserving our awareness of the past, without interfering overmuch with the present or future?
I don't know all the answers. So what? Nobody can even begin to work on answers until we know what the questions are, and I do feel that I've made progress understanding those.
...was definitely impressive for the time. I still wouldn't consider it to have been good, though. Damaging poor King Tut's head, by prizing the death mask off, though... That really wasn't subtle and certainly made it much harder for scientists to interpret the recent MRI scans.
They could improve on the techniques, though. Throwing out rubble??? Most of that "rubble" was described as having been put there only 100 years after the tombs were dug. That means there may well have been valuable archaeological data in that "trash".
(This style of archaeology was common in Victorian times, when the only "important" things were trinkets and other artifacts. Bones - especially animal bones - were often just ignored as unimportant. In consequence, a lot of what is now considered "essential data" to an archaeologist is lost forever. Egyptology, from the sounds of it, is still back in those Victorian days.)
Other posters wondered why they didn't use X-Rays, etc. Ground penetrating radar is great and invaluable as a tool, but it's only good for a few feet at most. Where there's a lot of rubble sending back fractured images, it would be next to useless even for that small distance. The recent discoveries in Worcester Cathedral (such as the tomb of Edward the Confessor and several mysterious underground chambers) were done using GPR.
This certainly required excavation, but it was evidently done in a manner that was ham-fisted and incompetent. How do I know that? Because they're already in the chamber AND already drawing conclusions from pathetically little data.
A careful, thorough site study would have taken considerably longer, obtained much more data, caused far less disruption, need not have "robbed" anything (all you need is information, not objects - the objects are merely that which carries the information you're wanting), drawn far fewer conclusions yet - once fully analyzed - been vastly superior.
I don't agree that archaeology is "grave robbing" - we are quite capable of taking portable labs to the site to conduct all the analysis you could ever want, so the idea of actually taking objects is unnecessary. It has nothing to do with the studies or science in question.
I will make one exception. If you're using imaging techniques, like the ones used to get Archimedes writings off a palimset by using a particle accelerator and X-Ray fluorescence, you're not going to be able to lug a linear accelerator into these small chambers. By and large, though, that kind of work is unusual. Although there are many damaged ancient manuscripts, I know of no other read by this method.
By and large, you're doing routine work that involves precise measurement and precise imaging. For organic remains, you might want to use DNA testing. A pair of ultra-sterile tweezers and a 100% airtight, sterile, DNA-preserving sample tube should be sufficient.
I believe that much of the degredation recently noted for King Tut during his MRI scans was caused by exposure to modern contamination and slap-dash handling. I believe that was 100% avoidable.
I don't believe in avoiding damage out of respect for a person who died 3,000 years ago. They're past caring. Their civilization is past caring. This does NOT equate to having no respect at all - respect is important, but it is the person who deserves the respect, not organically-deposited lumps of calcium and phospherous. Likewise, true respect for an artifact comes from respecting the care, skill and artistic "personality" placed upon it, not from any copper, iron or gold atoms that may be attached.
Further, I do believe in avoiding damage out of respect for history. You've only got one history - you can't take it to WalMarts and get a replacement if you damage it. I also believe in avoiding damage out of respect of the future - they've a right to learn, too. We should not deprive them of that, out of greed or negligence.
Many monuments in England have been destroyed to make way for roads, or to be used as construction material. Laws in Greece requiring archaeological surveys before construction are routinely ignored, with untold masses of knowledge wantonly destroyed as a matter of course. Do I like that? No. Wanton destruction, in
I tend to split society three ways - technological progress, social progress and communication/artistic progress. I hold the view that all three must be close to being in step, or the disparity will create tensions that will ultimately destroy the system. From that standpoint, I would very much prefer social and communications skills to progress rapidly, as I'm of the opinion that the strain created is the cause of many of the current problems.
I'm also of the opinion that that sort of change is extraordinarily unlikely to occur. The best we can seem to hope for is that the depravity that exists in Government is used as often for the benefit of others as it is in ways that harms society. The only social progress in the last few hundred years has been to hide problems better - almost everything else has been technological. Stepping back a few hundred years in Government would be barely noticeable.
They already own the root servers, so in effect they own everything under them. Any TLD that doesn't like it is out of luck, as their license to operate the TLD is granted solely by ICANT, which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the US Government (hence the outcry last year.)
The second problem is that the US "owns" US technology, whether it is on US soil or not. That's how they get to have so much control over who can buy what from whom. Chances are, most servers are using software from the US running on hardware that was either made in the US or made by a US company. The US State Department considers that to therefore be US territory.
(This fuss first came to my attention when a nuclear research center in England tried to sell a Cray supercomputer to the University of London. It was prohibited by the US Government, on the grounds that British Universities might have communist students. Most recently, aircraft sales from Spain to Venezuela were banned by the US, as some of the parts were American. The parts were eventually replaced, if I recall, and the sale went ahead anyway.)
When you've got total dominion over the Universe (or act like it), might as well use it for something useful and productive like killing off Spam and Adware.
What someone fears, they will seek to destroy. The Government already fears the public. The results are obvious. No, the Government fearing the public will ALSO lead to tyranny. It will be the only way for said Government to deal with those fears. (Tianaman Square wasn't a result of the public fearing the Government...)
Mutual respect is the obvious answer. Respect doesn't threaten and doesn't fear threats. Getting mutual respect is going to be tough - I'm not convinced any existing system is capable of it - but I can see no valid alternative that can be stable in the long term. It seems to me that instead of working on yet more methods of instilling fear of one group into another, we need to be working on methods that eliminate the need for a fear-based system (which is inherently unstable).
Of course, this requires intelligent life on Earth. NASA tried looking for some, once, but didn't find any.
First, there's a possibility that the FCC will charge for some names, or not include them at all - especially if asked by a nice gentleman with a large check in his hand. Second, said gentleman may also nicely request certain competitors be listed to damage their credibility. The FCC can always say it made a mistake, or claim that a media outlet added to the list.
(Name-and-shame suffers from two big problems. First, there's no actual requirement for there to be any evidence of Adware. The FCC doesn't have to prove a case to anyone, it only has to write down a name. Second, if a name is put down that shouldn't be there, redress will be next to impossible. The media outlets can claim - justifiably - that they're not responsible for official statements from Government. I know of nobody who has sued the Federal Government in civil court for slander or libel, and they've probably got immunity to such suits anyway.)
Actually, there is a better method and the Supreme Court provided it. The Government is allowed to seize private land for the purpose of boosting the economy in a region, under a recent interpretation of Eminent Domain. Adware companies damage the Internet economy. It would seem to follow that the Government can seize those companies and sell them to other, less malign, individuals. (It's less messy than the hung-drawn-and-quartered method someone else proposed, too.)
...free advertising, which is the entire onject of adware in the first place. That being the case, name-and-shame would seem to be self-defeating. (One city in the US tried using name-and-shame to cut down on prostitution, but the scheme was abandoned when those involved twisted the scheme into promoting the services instead.)
This is not a useful method of solving adware - or anything that depends on publicity to thrive. I'm not sure what remedy would work, but you're never going to feed Adware to death.
New York is investigating scams in which hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent in buying extra airtime for specific songs. I did not know this, but this is actually a crime. There are a lot of companies involved, apparently, but two very familiar names stuck out... Clear Channel and Sony. Sony has apparently settled, not sure if Clear Channel has.
Part of the problem with media conglomerates is that you can buy a LOT of media outlets in a single transaction. Clear Channel, I believe, owns numerous radio stations in every State in the US. Cross-media ownership (eg: radio, TV and newspapers) rules have been relaxed, so the problem will likely get much worse before it gets better.
The easy answer would be to limit media ownership. One outlet in a city and/or two outlets in a State (for the US) or County (for England) should be ample and would make it much harder for labels to purchase airtime. Or, at least, more expensive and more tedious. It would neither inhibit freedom of speech nor commercial viability if "playlists" were banned, as well. "Top 40" charts and emphasis on those songs is fine, but essentially banishing all others (or banning artists for political reasons, as has happened) has little to do with any definition of freedom I'm aware of.
On the other hand, it might be easier to just clone the late John Peel and require all music stations to give him an hour's airtime per day. That would definitely work wonders for bringing the real talent out there to the listeners.
They look ok, the GUI is fine, etc. I don't see any way of conversing with my bank, though, or any e-commerce system (billing systems, store accounts, etc) or commercial database (currency exchange, etc). Those would be great. Mondo support would be cool, if only someone used their cards, as it would be convenient to be able to download cash. (For those who don't remember them, Mondo released a "smartcard" called the Mondex, which stored cash on a smartcard. Unlike debit cards, it didn't connect to a bank, transfers were direct to and from the card itself, which - if I recall correctly - had its own RSA hardware, CPU and a bunch of other hardware. They were useless purely because they were never in wide enough use to be a practical method of paying for anything.) There aren't any meaningful micropayment systems left, so support for them wouldn't help. Paypal support would be good, but I guess that still really comes under banks.
I'm not saying GnuCash is bad - it's very good at what it does, it's just not doing enough for what I'd want.
Local phone calls are free, but AT&T and Bell aren't exactly poor.
Google is "free" to use as a search engine, but any company that can "report revenue of $1.919 billion" for a single quarter can probably afford to pay the staff. I wouldn't advise asking your CEO when he last made almost two billion in a four month timespan, though.
Linux is "free" (as in price) if you get no assurance and minimal support. If, on the other hand, you want EAL4-rated Linux (certified for commercially-sensitive and confidential information for Government use in Europe and the US) with 24-hour support, fine-tuning of hardware and software, etc, then you pay a bit more. Same software, different parameters.
I'd argue that there are examples even the dimmest PHB can understand - some have been around long enough to just be accepted, others are so stinking rich that the arguments self-evidently don't hold.
I agree completely with what you're saying. It all comes down to an important distinction between having standards and having uniformity. "Wait!" I hear some cry, "Aren't the two the same?" Well, no. A standard translates, in pseudo-code terms, to "if X then Y". Uniformity translates to "always Y".
What needs to be standardized, then, is not the language per-se, but the rules by which a language is selected. The IF statements. If you read through the standards documents on the IETF's website, you are not looking at a single, all-encompassing rule. You are looking at possibly a few thousand rules, with enough logic behind them to determine which rule applies.
In the case of a company picking a programming language, you probably don't need a few thousand rules. A single side of paper should be more than sufficient to cover all the meaningful languages and the cases they apply in.
Rule 1 might be: "If a more precise rule is not defined, programs should be written to the ANSI dialect of C, revision C-99 with all threading assuming the POSIX threading model and other parallelisms within a single computer assuming OpenMP extensions. Where a more precise rule exists, that rule takes precedence over this default action."
For embedded code in web pages, the rule might be: "Except where a specific project requirement dictates otherwise, embedded code within web pages should be written in PHP, revision PHP-5.1"
For transportable bytecode, you might say: "Web-enabled applications, applications needing to run on clients without installation and applications needing to run on otherwise unsupported platforms should be written in Java and compiled to bytecode using a standard Java SDK version 1.5"
For configuration code, you might say: "Automatic configuration files should be written to the standards specified by Gnu Autoconf and Gnu Automake, using the applicable Gnu M4 macros" (Hey, M4 is a language too!)
You'd then have a few more cases for specific types of work the company does a lot of. This may include additional rules requiring C, but that's fine. You want the specifics in there, so that if you want/need to change the default action, it doesn't screw everything up.
If you're defining standards for languages, I'd also define in the same document some standard coding practices (eg: keep namespaces distinct, if you're using javadoc or something similar then comments should follow javadoc's rules, if you're using a code validator that uses comments to embed commands then state what commands should be used and when, if you're using a SCM - a very good idea - then comments to embed details like revision notes, date, etc, should be included in a standard location, etc.)
The upshot is that there's a lot of different things to consider, nobody can just pick one language for all occasions. Well, they can, but the only language that will ALWAYS work for ALL cases is assembly, and I don't think many people really want to write entire applications in assembler any more.
Design from top down, test from bottom up. The lowest-level components won't care how they're called, only that they're called with the right parameters. That, alone, won't be enough but will give you a good starting point. Test harnesses can also be used, as they can simulate events.
Look for invariants and ensure that they hold true where they are supposed to. That doesn't require fine analysis, but will detect problems in the logic when you're running the full system. Use profilers and coverage analysers to make sure that when you DO do invariant checks that you're actually checking all the areas they're supposed to hold up.
Test "normal" values, borderline/extreme values (that's where overflows, underruns and other assorted nasties are likely to show up), and completely erronious data. Borderline can include borderline values, but since this is a network app, it can also include extreme volumes (very little or vast amounts of traffic, or even massive variations). Erronious data can be data that is invalid in and of itself (malformed packets, for example), or data that has no rational meaning (a non-existant codec, or a value that decodes to something absurd - I doubt many people will be doing 11.1 audio streams for VoIP, for example!)
Beyond that, it's all much of a muchness. There's very little that is async specific to testing, so long as you concentrate on the logic rather than the means of getting there.
I wonder if SuitSat did indeed have a problem with cold (hence the long absence of signal) but warmed up (the atmosphere must surely be still too thin to provide significant heating, though I may be wrong on that). I guess the reason for wondering is whether - as SuitSat begins the final stages of its firey plunge, but not after ionization blocks the signal - the signal might actually get louder than the spec implies. Presumably the power available would rise, as the battery gets hot, and NASA would have no reason to keep the brakes on - it's not like saving power would do any good at that point.
I guess it's interesting, in a historic kind of way, that it is a Russian satellite that is beaming signals for anyone on the ground whilst on a self-destructive trajectory, given that it is - in many ways - a re-enactment of Sputnik. The biggest difference seems to be that this one was launched from space rather than from the ground, but the intended signal and audience seem to be essentially the same.
...that the ice they are talking about is frozen H2O. NASA is horrifically low on money, so when its administrators start talking about locating stashes of "ice" and "snow", one has to wonder...
I was hoping there was a chance of 100 gigabits to the home, or at least the one gigabit the Japanese get to their homes. Who cares what hard disks can handle, if you're using streamed media, Grid Computing or just an old-fashioned RAM disk? (Besides, if you use multiple hard drives in a striped array, you can get far higher throughput than from a single drive.)
I would argue that some doctorines are closer to mathematical axioms, in that they are assumed to be true for the purpose of a specific argument. I would put virtually all Pauline doctorines into this category, along with any argument made in any of the texts (not just those accepted by one church or another) which is assumed to be true because it is stated.
Arguments for which there is some reasoning or rationale (however strange it may seem) or where a prediction can be made would be parallel to a theory. There are plenty of if-then stories, examples of cause-and-effect, etc, which would (by this standard) be theories for the former reason. (They are testable in that you can see if the "if" clause was met and what happens when the "if" clause is met at other times. You don't know, however, what happens when the if clause is false.) It's an incomplete mapping, so can be disproved but never proved.
Jesus' two commandments would also be a theory, for the latter reason. The claim was that all of the Law and all of the Prophets are based on those two commandments. That's a much more definitive relationship, in that it states both the "if" and the "else". It also states that there are no "or" cases in the "if" that would allow you to escape the parameter he was describing. Because it's a complete mapping, it can be either proved or disproved.
A parable, on the other hand, might be best described as a hypothesis or a postulate. It is not really a theory, in that it doesn't describe an abstract relationship, but it is not an axiom in that there's usually some rationale and a stepping through of the logic, otherwise it wouldn't be useful for teaching anything.
I would not suggest these as being 100% accurate translations of the terms, especially as there are no 100% accurate translations of the texts in order to determine either what was said or what was intended. There are remarkably few 100% complete texts. However, if the theoretical nature of science is to be emphasised, then it would only be fair and balanced to state the hypothetical nature of religion.
I guess you could argue that Hulme and Moss Side are probably about as dangerous as Papau New Guinea during an armed riot by berserkers. On the other hand, the Arndale Centre is generally considered safe (well, unless it's being blown up) and there are parts of Salford that don't require viking chainmail armour.
In terms of type of criminal activity, I'd rate anywhere around the Medlock and between UMIST and Picadilly Circus as about on-par with the worst of Thailand or the Philipines.
Sulpher hexafluoride was used at Daresbury Laboratory for the 20 MeV tandem particle accelerator. The control room was directly below the tower which housed countless tonnes of the stuff. There were sensors in every room and every corridor, capable of detecting a few parts per billion. What struck me as odd was that there were only two oxygen masks in the entire complex and the emergency escape route was downhill.
Mind you, I guess that it would have avoided injury lawsuits.
I saw some photos of arcs they've had when even the SF6 breaks down. Sheesh! There are many far more powerful accelerators today, but even at 20 MeVs, you can get some serious violence. If you could get some really good film footage, it would make for a superb sci-fi special effect.
Expense is a problematic term, because you have to look at long-term as well as short-term. Let's say that you're budgeting for 10 years and - after hurricanes, tornados, snow, drunk drivers, trees and earthquakes - your total maintenance cost is comparable to your initial construction cost if you build overhead, but your total losses (lost sales, lost power, etc) is about the same again.
Let us now say that a GOOD underground solution costs three times as much to construct, but your choice of materials means that maintenance is minimal and you lose next to no power. The total cost is about the same in both cases over that timeframe.
Now, let's weigh them up. The first solution mixes costs and income, so a chart showing net profit over time is going to be somewhat chaotic and relatively shallow. On the other hand, you have more cash in hand, which means you can invest that money elsewhere and get money in that way. There will be some degree of edginess - failures will be more obvious and more common - and it would not surprise me at all if high-end executives in critical infrastructure have absurdly high blood pressure. Those who gamble and win, though, will likely have enough in the bank to deal with such inconveniences.
The second solution has virtually all the costs up-front. Virtually no expense thereon out. Your profits chart will show a big initial dip but rise much more sharply and much more steadily. You won't have as much cash, and any you do have will be from investors, but you won't need it. You won't end up rich this way, but you should end up more relaxed and saner.
Users are a tough one. Assuming that the latter case raises the cost of power only by enough to make the interest payments work out in the long-run, the second solution will be more expensive. More reliable, less likely to suffer brown-outs or black-outs at the high end of power consumption, and probably better for the environment. But would you pay the extra to get the convenience and the conservation? Some would, some won't.
It could well be that a back-of-the-envelope calculation will show that 10 years is not enough. That you'd need much more expensive materials for the latter solution and much higher quality engineering. So you just change the timescale (up or down). The costs aren't linear, in either case. There will be some combination of durability and quality of service for which, over the timescale involved, the second solution is actually the cheaper.
It is possible that the initial costs, in such a case, would be so high that private companies can't afford it. Fine. The Federal Government is designed to be the ultimate bank, in which it'll manage the initial costs and recoup the investment through taxation. That solution is even better, because loans of that kind are vastly cheaper than those from any regular bank, so the whole thing could be made to be self-supporting much more quickly.
Run a few hundred million volts through a powerline and you need NEVER worry about backhoes again. What's more, the manufacturers might be willing to give you a cut of the money they make selling replacements.
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An electron emitted at random from certain radioactive isotopes. Well, you have to admit that it does sound like some Microsoft products.
If it sucks up all the system resources, it does guarantee that viruses have no CPU cycles, so it is technically anti-virus...
(Here, I'm using the term "virtual core" to mean a complete physical set of internal registers for each "core", but with no directly attached computing elements. Hence it is not a physical CPU, as it doesn't process, it's not central and it's distributed rather than being a unit. If you had a memory pool for such a purpose, where what was left was available as L1 cache, you could dynamically change the number of cores to suit the work you were doing. That would seem to be the "ultimate" design.)
Let's say you find a tomb with artifacts and a body, from a few thousand years ago. Ok, you photograph and blueprint the artifacts, you do all kinds of material science analysis and ultrasonic tests for detecting imperfections, you run elaborate tests on the body (X-Ray, MRI, DNA analysis, dental studies, forensic analysis, blood typing, anything you care to think of). You're now in a position to produce museum-quality replicas (which should be used anyway, to deter theft and prevent vandalism or accidental damage), you've all that really matters when it comes to understanding the history, and if there's anything you've missed out, you've been non-destructive enough that there's an excellent chance future generations will be able to fill in the pieces.
I'm perfectly willing to accept that many sites are in extreme danger of vandalism, despoiling, etc, and that it is essential to protect what you can. In cases where protection is best done by removal, hey, that's fair, but even in those cases it helps nobody to have the originals on display (and therefore exposed to risk of damage and risk of theft, whilst also being unavailable for any kind of actual study).
The Paul Getty museum is believed to have more than a few stolen artifacts (probably innocently on their part, though one can never be certain of that) and that's just one part of a massive, roaring trade in such stuff. That's another reason to produce replicas, though - produce enough and make it the norm for display purposes (where Joe Q Public doesn't care if they're seeing a 2000 BC original or a 2000 AD copy, so long as it looks identical) it could cripple the prices and therefore potentially cripple the thefts.
History is so important that turning it into a commodity is a perilous thing. How do you market something that exists only once and will never happen again?
That, however, is as far as I'm willing to compromise. Archaeology is a field with too many slap-dash methods, sometimes caused by massive underfunding, sometimes caused by horrific time pressures, but usually caused by recklessness. It's often possible to identify which is the case. In the town I grew up in, which is now 12,000 years older than previously thought, the problem is funding. The area of interest is about 9 square miles, but they can't afford to hire more than three archaeologists for more than three months at a time, of which less than 1 month is usable for actual digging. Over the course of 9 years, they've managed to do little more than one person's back yard.
(Hey, the quality of work is amazing. The finds are staggering. But if they plan on doing a full study of the site before another 12,000 years have passed, they're going to need between a hundred to a thousand times the manpower, vastly superior surveying techniques, and a small army of researchers to cross-reference finds with information from other sites in the UK.)
Sea-Henge was an example of a disaster caused by time pressure. The site was in extreme danger, because the wooden remains had risen above ground level and because it was attracting too many visitors. The archaeologists cut corners in their excavations, causing an uncertain amount of damage. They cut corners on the legal and local issues, causing considerable and unnecessary problems. They made no backups of field notes, so when their warehouse (which was poorly maintained) burned to the ground after an electrical fire, they lost virtually everything. All they had left were some 3,000 year old lumps of wood.
The Rose Theatre is another example of time pressure. Damage there is unclear, but when you have to excavate a huge Elizabethan site (it was a playhouse very closely linked to Shakespere personally) because a hotel wants to build over it... Gnnnn! The hotel, as I recall, opted to build "around" the archaeological site - preserving it to some degree - which was better than many had feared. Even so, the sheer rush will undoubtably have resulted in the loss of much that could have been learned.
A third example of time-pressure has to have been a magnificent valley of cave paintings - I believe in Portugal, ranging in date from some of the earliest ever recorded, through to very late on in Stone Age times. Many miles of them were found. Shortly before the valley was dammed up to be turned into a reservoir. There is absolutely no way that all of the paintings could have been recorded, and there was certainly neither time nor money nor resources for any kind of excavation in the area to learn more of the painters. The site is now totally destroyed for all time, the paintings will almost certainly have perished within moments of the valley being flooded, and perhaps the most important ancient site in Europe was obliterated. All for the sake of local politics.
So it is by no means entirely the fault of archaeologists. Nonetheless, those cases they are at fault on, they should say so and admit fault. They will never improve if they never admit a need to do so. They should also work considerably harder than they are on raising awareness of what has been knowingly lost forever - as much in recent times as any other - and what that really means for our understanding. What DOES it really mean, for society to lose a few hundred thousand cave paintings? What IS the best way of preserving our awareness of the past, without interfering overmuch with the present or future?
I don't know all the answers. So what? Nobody can even begin to work on answers until we know what the questions are, and I do feel that I've made progress understanding those.
...was definitely impressive for the time. I still wouldn't consider it to have been good, though. Damaging poor King Tut's head, by prizing the death mask off, though... That really wasn't subtle and certainly made it much harder for scientists to interpret the recent MRI scans.
(This style of archaeology was common in Victorian times, when the only "important" things were trinkets and other artifacts. Bones - especially animal bones - were often just ignored as unimportant. In consequence, a lot of what is now considered "essential data" to an archaeologist is lost forever. Egyptology, from the sounds of it, is still back in those Victorian days.)
Other posters wondered why they didn't use X-Rays, etc. Ground penetrating radar is great and invaluable as a tool, but it's only good for a few feet at most. Where there's a lot of rubble sending back fractured images, it would be next to useless even for that small distance. The recent discoveries in Worcester Cathedral (such as the tomb of Edward the Confessor and several mysterious underground chambers) were done using GPR.
This certainly required excavation, but it was evidently done in a manner that was ham-fisted and incompetent. How do I know that? Because they're already in the chamber AND already drawing conclusions from pathetically little data.
A careful, thorough site study would have taken considerably longer, obtained much more data, caused far less disruption, need not have "robbed" anything (all you need is information, not objects - the objects are merely that which carries the information you're wanting), drawn far fewer conclusions yet - once fully analyzed - been vastly superior.
I don't agree that archaeology is "grave robbing" - we are quite capable of taking portable labs to the site to conduct all the analysis you could ever want, so the idea of actually taking objects is unnecessary. It has nothing to do with the studies or science in question.
I will make one exception. If you're using imaging techniques, like the ones used to get Archimedes writings off a palimset by using a particle accelerator and X-Ray fluorescence, you're not going to be able to lug a linear accelerator into these small chambers. By and large, though, that kind of work is unusual. Although there are many damaged ancient manuscripts, I know of no other read by this method.
By and large, you're doing routine work that involves precise measurement and precise imaging. For organic remains, you might want to use DNA testing. A pair of ultra-sterile tweezers and a 100% airtight, sterile, DNA-preserving sample tube should be sufficient.
I believe that much of the degredation recently noted for King Tut during his MRI scans was caused by exposure to modern contamination and slap-dash handling. I believe that was 100% avoidable.
I don't believe in avoiding damage out of respect for a person who died 3,000 years ago. They're past caring. Their civilization is past caring. This does NOT equate to having no respect at all - respect is important, but it is the person who deserves the respect, not organically-deposited lumps of calcium and phospherous. Likewise, true respect for an artifact comes from respecting the care, skill and artistic "personality" placed upon it, not from any copper, iron or gold atoms that may be attached.
Further, I do believe in avoiding damage out of respect for history. You've only got one history - you can't take it to WalMarts and get a replacement if you damage it. I also believe in avoiding damage out of respect of the future - they've a right to learn, too. We should not deprive them of that, out of greed or negligence.
Many monuments in England have been destroyed to make way for roads, or to be used as construction material. Laws in Greece requiring archaeological surveys before construction are routinely ignored, with untold masses of knowledge wantonly destroyed as a matter of course. Do I like that? No. Wanton destruction, in
I'm also of the opinion that that sort of change is extraordinarily unlikely to occur. The best we can seem to hope for is that the depravity that exists in Government is used as often for the benefit of others as it is in ways that harms society. The only social progress in the last few hundred years has been to hide problems better - almost everything else has been technological. Stepping back a few hundred years in Government would be barely noticeable.
The second problem is that the US "owns" US technology, whether it is on US soil or not. That's how they get to have so much control over who can buy what from whom. Chances are, most servers are using software from the US running on hardware that was either made in the US or made by a US company. The US State Department considers that to therefore be US territory.
(This fuss first came to my attention when a nuclear research center in England tried to sell a Cray supercomputer to the University of London. It was prohibited by the US Government, on the grounds that British Universities might have communist students. Most recently, aircraft sales from Spain to Venezuela were banned by the US, as some of the parts were American. The parts were eventually replaced, if I recall, and the sale went ahead anyway.)
When you've got total dominion over the Universe (or act like it), might as well use it for something useful and productive like killing off Spam and Adware.
Mutual respect is the obvious answer. Respect doesn't threaten and doesn't fear threats. Getting mutual respect is going to be tough - I'm not convinced any existing system is capable of it - but I can see no valid alternative that can be stable in the long term. It seems to me that instead of working on yet more methods of instilling fear of one group into another, we need to be working on methods that eliminate the need for a fear-based system (which is inherently unstable).
Of course, this requires intelligent life on Earth. NASA tried looking for some, once, but didn't find any.
(Name-and-shame suffers from two big problems. First, there's no actual requirement for there to be any evidence of Adware. The FCC doesn't have to prove a case to anyone, it only has to write down a name. Second, if a name is put down that shouldn't be there, redress will be next to impossible. The media outlets can claim - justifiably - that they're not responsible for official statements from Government. I know of nobody who has sued the Federal Government in civil court for slander or libel, and they've probably got immunity to such suits anyway.)
Actually, there is a better method and the Supreme Court provided it. The Government is allowed to seize private land for the purpose of boosting the economy in a region, under a recent interpretation of Eminent Domain. Adware companies damage the Internet economy. It would seem to follow that the Government can seize those companies and sell them to other, less malign, individuals. (It's less messy than the hung-drawn-and-quartered method someone else proposed, too.)
This is not a useful method of solving adware - or anything that depends on publicity to thrive. I'm not sure what remedy would work, but you're never going to feed Adware to death.
Part of the problem with media conglomerates is that you can buy a LOT of media outlets in a single transaction. Clear Channel, I believe, owns numerous radio stations in every State in the US. Cross-media ownership (eg: radio, TV and newspapers) rules have been relaxed, so the problem will likely get much worse before it gets better.
The easy answer would be to limit media ownership. One outlet in a city and/or two outlets in a State (for the US) or County (for England) should be ample and would make it much harder for labels to purchase airtime. Or, at least, more expensive and more tedious. It would neither inhibit freedom of speech nor commercial viability if "playlists" were banned, as well. "Top 40" charts and emphasis on those songs is fine, but essentially banishing all others (or banning artists for political reasons, as has happened) has little to do with any definition of freedom I'm aware of.
On the other hand, it might be easier to just clone the late John Peel and require all music stations to give him an hour's airtime per day. That would definitely work wonders for bringing the real talent out there to the listeners.
I'm not saying GnuCash is bad - it's very good at what it does, it's just not doing enough for what I'd want.
Google is "free" to use as a search engine, but any company that can "report revenue of $1.919 billion" for a single quarter can probably afford to pay the staff. I wouldn't advise asking your CEO when he last made almost two billion in a four month timespan, though.
Linux is "free" (as in price) if you get no assurance and minimal support. If, on the other hand, you want EAL4-rated Linux (certified for commercially-sensitive and confidential information for Government use in Europe and the US) with 24-hour support, fine-tuning of hardware and software, etc, then you pay a bit more. Same software, different parameters.
I'd argue that there are examples even the dimmest PHB can understand - some have been around long enough to just be accepted, others are so stinking rich that the arguments self-evidently don't hold.
In "Aztecs", Hartnell states that you cannot rewrite history. Not so much as one word. At the very least, this doesn't violate causality.
What needs to be standardized, then, is not the language per-se, but the rules by which a language is selected. The IF statements. If you read through the standards documents on the IETF's website, you are not looking at a single, all-encompassing rule. You are looking at possibly a few thousand rules, with enough logic behind them to determine which rule applies.
In the case of a company picking a programming language, you probably don't need a few thousand rules. A single side of paper should be more than sufficient to cover all the meaningful languages and the cases they apply in.
Rule 1 might be: "If a more precise rule is not defined, programs should be written to the ANSI dialect of C, revision C-99 with all threading assuming the POSIX threading model and other parallelisms within a single computer assuming OpenMP extensions. Where a more precise rule exists, that rule takes precedence over this default action."
For embedded code in web pages, the rule might be: "Except where a specific project requirement dictates otherwise, embedded code within web pages should be written in PHP, revision PHP-5.1"
For transportable bytecode, you might say: "Web-enabled applications, applications needing to run on clients without installation and applications needing to run on otherwise unsupported platforms should be written in Java and compiled to bytecode using a standard Java SDK version 1.5"
For configuration code, you might say: "Automatic configuration files should be written to the standards specified by Gnu Autoconf and Gnu Automake, using the applicable Gnu M4 macros" (Hey, M4 is a language too!)
You'd then have a few more cases for specific types of work the company does a lot of. This may include additional rules requiring C, but that's fine. You want the specifics in there, so that if you want/need to change the default action, it doesn't screw everything up.
If you're defining standards for languages, I'd also define in the same document some standard coding practices (eg: keep namespaces distinct, if you're using javadoc or something similar then comments should follow javadoc's rules, if you're using a code validator that uses comments to embed commands then state what commands should be used and when, if you're using a SCM - a very good idea - then comments to embed details like revision notes, date, etc, should be included in a standard location, etc.)
The upshot is that there's a lot of different things to consider, nobody can just pick one language for all occasions. Well, they can, but the only language that will ALWAYS work for ALL cases is assembly, and I don't think many people really want to write entire applications in assembler any more.
Look for invariants and ensure that they hold true where they are supposed to. That doesn't require fine analysis, but will detect problems in the logic when you're running the full system. Use profilers and coverage analysers to make sure that when you DO do invariant checks that you're actually checking all the areas they're supposed to hold up.
Test "normal" values, borderline/extreme values (that's where overflows, underruns and other assorted nasties are likely to show up), and completely erronious data. Borderline can include borderline values, but since this is a network app, it can also include extreme volumes (very little or vast amounts of traffic, or even massive variations). Erronious data can be data that is invalid in and of itself (malformed packets, for example), or data that has no rational meaning (a non-existant codec, or a value that decodes to something absurd - I doubt many people will be doing 11.1 audio streams for VoIP, for example!)
Beyond that, it's all much of a muchness. There's very little that is async specific to testing, so long as you concentrate on the logic rather than the means of getting there.
I guess it's interesting, in a historic kind of way, that it is a Russian satellite that is beaming signals for anyone on the ground whilst on a self-destructive trajectory, given that it is - in many ways - a re-enactment of Sputnik. The biggest difference seems to be that this one was launched from space rather than from the ground, but the intended signal and audience seem to be essentially the same.
I wonder if it'll have the same impact, though.
...that the ice they are talking about is frozen H2O. NASA is horrifically low on money, so when its administrators start talking about locating stashes of "ice" and "snow", one has to wonder...
I was hoping there was a chance of 100 gigabits to the home, or at least the one gigabit the Japanese get to their homes. Who cares what hard disks can handle, if you're using streamed media, Grid Computing or just an old-fashioned RAM disk? (Besides, if you use multiple hard drives in a striped array, you can get far higher throughput than from a single drive.)
Arguments for which there is some reasoning or rationale (however strange it may seem) or where a prediction can be made would be parallel to a theory. There are plenty of if-then stories, examples of cause-and-effect, etc, which would (by this standard) be theories for the former reason. (They are testable in that you can see if the "if" clause was met and what happens when the "if" clause is met at other times. You don't know, however, what happens when the if clause is false.) It's an incomplete mapping, so can be disproved but never proved.
Jesus' two commandments would also be a theory, for the latter reason. The claim was that all of the Law and all of the Prophets are based on those two commandments. That's a much more definitive relationship, in that it states both the "if" and the "else". It also states that there are no "or" cases in the "if" that would allow you to escape the parameter he was describing. Because it's a complete mapping, it can be either proved or disproved.
A parable, on the other hand, might be best described as a hypothesis or a postulate. It is not really a theory, in that it doesn't describe an abstract relationship, but it is not an axiom in that there's usually some rationale and a stepping through of the logic, otherwise it wouldn't be useful for teaching anything.
I would not suggest these as being 100% accurate translations of the terms, especially as there are no 100% accurate translations of the texts in order to determine either what was said or what was intended. There are remarkably few 100% complete texts. However, if the theoretical nature of science is to be emphasised, then it would only be fair and balanced to state the hypothetical nature of religion.
In terms of type of criminal activity, I'd rate anywhere around the Medlock and between UMIST and Picadilly Circus as about on-par with the worst of Thailand or the Philipines.
Mind you, I guess that it would have avoided injury lawsuits.
I saw some photos of arcs they've had when even the SF6 breaks down. Sheesh! There are many far more powerful accelerators today, but even at 20 MeVs, you can get some serious violence. If you could get some really good film footage, it would make for a superb sci-fi special effect.
Expense is a problematic term, because you have to look at long-term as well as short-term. Let's say that you're budgeting for 10 years and - after hurricanes, tornados, snow, drunk drivers, trees and earthquakes - your total maintenance cost is comparable to your initial construction cost if you build overhead, but your total losses (lost sales, lost power, etc) is about the same again.
Let us now say that a GOOD underground solution costs three times as much to construct, but your choice of materials means that maintenance is minimal and you lose next to no power. The total cost is about the same in both cases over that timeframe.
Now, let's weigh them up. The first solution mixes costs and income, so a chart showing net profit over time is going to be somewhat chaotic and relatively shallow. On the other hand, you have more cash in hand, which means you can invest that money elsewhere and get money in that way. There will be some degree of edginess - failures will be more obvious and more common - and it would not surprise me at all if high-end executives in critical infrastructure have absurdly high blood pressure. Those who gamble and win, though, will likely have enough in the bank to deal with such inconveniences.
The second solution has virtually all the costs up-front. Virtually no expense thereon out. Your profits chart will show a big initial dip but rise much more sharply and much more steadily. You won't have as much cash, and any you do have will be from investors, but you won't need it. You won't end up rich this way, but you should end up more relaxed and saner.
Users are a tough one. Assuming that the latter case raises the cost of power only by enough to make the interest payments work out in the long-run, the second solution will be more expensive. More reliable, less likely to suffer brown-outs or black-outs at the high end of power consumption, and probably better for the environment. But would you pay the extra to get the convenience and the conservation? Some would, some won't.
It could well be that a back-of-the-envelope calculation will show that 10 years is not enough. That you'd need much more expensive materials for the latter solution and much higher quality engineering. So you just change the timescale (up or down). The costs aren't linear, in either case. There will be some combination of durability and quality of service for which, over the timescale involved, the second solution is actually the cheaper.
It is possible that the initial costs, in such a case, would be so high that private companies can't afford it. Fine. The Federal Government is designed to be the ultimate bank, in which it'll manage the initial costs and recoup the investment through taxation. That solution is even better, because loans of that kind are vastly cheaper than those from any regular bank, so the whole thing could be made to be self-supporting much more quickly.
Run a few hundred million volts through a powerline and you need NEVER worry about backhoes again. What's more, the manufacturers might be willing to give you a cut of the money they make selling replacements.