I didn't see SystemC, either, but may have missed it. But the real question is what the stats would look like if you only included Wishbone-compliant usage?
There should have been modifiers for typical bugs per kloc and security holes per kloc.
Also, there are many more layers to the industry. Scientific computing? Avionics? Publishing?
The subdivisions between languages are also a bit... strange. Java/Oak isn't truly uniform, whatever anyone claims. C and C++ have standards that aren't always backwards-compatible - if you ignore such changes, why bother listing C# or D as distinct? Lump the lot, together with B and BCPL under a single header.
My guess is that accurate representation of languages isn't possible (when does a dialect become a distinct language?) but that if it was, none of the so-called "big three" languages would be in the top 10. Computer languages are as bad as natural languages when it comes to classifiers.
Last, but by no means least, people rarely directly code any more. They code within engines, usually using some weird fringe language nobody has ever heard of that turns out to be Lua or Visual Basic with the keywords words renamed for the theme. Real programmers (as opposed to integer or complex programmers) tend to be in the minority, have become rarer after Qualcomm outlawed them, and are mostly in mourning for Freshmeat. But as a lot are Goths anyway, it's hard to tell.
Most of the Info pages are rips of the Man pages. Only a handful of programs have "real" Info documentation. Not that this matters, you just need to run man first for the summary and then info for more detailed stuff. The heavy documentation is only useful for really obscure stuff.
Of course it's an exercise in mystical frustration! Linus Torvalds was declared God at the first Linux conference, Richard Stallman is head of the Church of GNU (that's what it says on his website) and Eric Raymond runs a bazaar outside a cathedral.
You are correct that nothing abridges that right. (I take the highly deviant and unpopular line that rights are inalienable, that that is why we don't just call them permissions.)
To say that it is an unmitigated good is, though, perhaps not a conclusion you can safely draw. It carries the implication that all contributing causes were also good, which is self-evidently false. The right is good. The requirement that things be properly documented is good. The staffing levels are bad (police officers should be providing the raw information, not reconstructing it to fit a specific system - have data entry specialists handle data entry). The system sounds very very bad - and unstable (who wants HAL running a criminal justice system?).
Releasing the individuals was correct, but correct for the bad reason that every level of the system failed.
That they couldn't manage in three days what police in Britain were once expected to do within 24 hours (now expanded to 48, as computer technology has been added, which seems kinda weird) shows that the wrong people are doing work that is wrong. If a manual system could do the job in one day, a computer-based one should be faster. Yes, there's more complex analysis to be done, but mass spectrometers can be thrown into the back of a van and give you results in minutes. DNA analysis for a tiny handful of markers (typically 12 for criminology, versus the 150 often needed for genealogy) can be done in an hour, tops. In-the-field DNA sequencers designed to look for specific information can also be thrown into said van.
Actually searching and finding things is the slowest part, but you shouldn't be looking for evidence to convict someone, you should be looking for evidence in order to determine who it is who should be convicted. In that case, search and lab time should only ever precede an arrest, which means everything that matters will already be known and in the computer.
In that case, the only new information is that surrounding the arrest and any supplemental information provided by the suspect. Confirming that supplemental data should not be relevant to the case, if the case warranted bringing the person in at that point. Even if it is, you're looking at three or four hours in parallel with the data entry. Raw data is raw data, that can be delivered live from a mobile lab or detective, so it's merely the time to get there, find the supplemental evidence and run the analysis.
With a modern setup, the time between initial arrest and completing the filing should never exceed 6 hours. Three days is stupid.
If six hours isn't enough time to do everything, do more (much, much more) beforehand and parallelize the shit out of everything after. If you don't have the money, find it. If necessary, reduce coverage until you can afford it, then demand taxes pay to cover everyone else correctly. If a couple of extra people get robbed or murdered, you've reduced false convictions by far more than that, so there's a net reduction in deprivation and death. You trade a negligible bit of extra crime in the streets for a massive reduction in crime by cops and/or in prisons. You get a miniscule dash of extra cynicism in the populace, but carve vast chunks of cynicism and contempt within the constabulary.
Seems an acceptable price to pay in order to have acceptable cops and acceptable standards.
The unknown effect involves the mysterious overlords.
Seriously, they need to spy on employees to figure out that attention spans are finite, fatigue limits effectiveness and water cooler chat revitalizes the mind? Perhaps espionage will also help directors discover that sick leave reduces illness. It may be bloody obvious to even those of us who are borderline human, but apparently it will take hidden cameras and infrared imaging for senior management to figure it out.
If you look at the fate of HOTOL, which bears a striking resemblance of the fate of the Avro Arrow, and the total lack of recent development on the Australian hypersonic engine, you get the definite impression that someone isn't keen on competition in the supersonic/hypersonic military arena.
(Yeah, I know HOTOL wasn't designed to be military, but if the engine design had been finished then those engines would have been used in military aircraft, and HOTOL would certainly have been used to put up spy satellites independently of the ESA or NASA.)
The US attempted to build a version of the British "Grand Slam" bomb. Fixing some of the aerodynamic issues and making assorted other "improvements", they ended up with a 44,000 lb. conventional unguided bomb. The Tallboy/Grand Slam series of bombs worked on a very simple principle - you send a gigantic shockwave through the ground as a result of an impact very close to mach 1, and a second shockwave through the ground as a result of a shaped charge.
This type of bomb destroys pretty much anything at the boundary between two different materials. So if you dropped one of these bombs on a reinforced concrete bunker, you'd pulverize the inside of the bunker without having to actually punch a hole right the way through. They were superb at taking out dams, far better than the bouncing bomb (Barnes Wallis designed both), because you didn't have to hit the dam at all. The interface between dam and valley was a weakpoint that, if shredded, would achieve exactly the same effect the bouncing bomb did - far more reliably and without the vulnerability.
The British version worked brilliantly. If, by "brilliantly", you mean removing all the armour, defences and bomb bay doors from a Lancaster bomber. Ok, to be fair, it did exactly what was intended. It destroyed ships, dams and factories in a way that no bomb before could.
So, what did the US version do?
What it should have done is make a mess of bunkers with 22' of reinforced concrete or less, and severely disrupt heavier bunkers than that.
What it actually did was nothing. The B-52 carrying the prototype managed to get to the end of the runway before running out of fuel.
What it did next was also nothing. The US abandoned all further work on it, as tactical nuclear weapons would have had more punch at a lighter weight.
Would it have changed warfare? It might have reduced the number of survivors from Tora Bora by a small amount, but the US had gas/incindiary bombs and air pressure bombs that could reach into the deepest caves there. An earthquake bomb might have reduced the time needed, but that's it. It might also have changed the Iraq invasion. A bomb that could pulverize deep bunkers would have made it much harder for neocons to claim WMDs were being stored in such bunkers. If you can target them directly, conventionally and reliably, your obvious next question is to ask where these bunkers are. Since US intelligence knew of no such bunkers, it would have had no positions to give.
Would it change the dynamics with Iran? The Iranians have placed their nuclear technology in bunkers with walls too thick for most conventional bombs and smaller tactical nukes. The concrete also uses a recipe that was, when last demonstrated in a technology exhibition in the US, around a hundred times stronger than the reinforced concrete used by the US military. However, strength doesn't matter here. The whole idea of sending a shockwave is that a hard, consistent medium delivers the shockwave that much better to the other side. And modern explosives are rather better than torpex. Having said that, there is still no US bomber capable of carrying such a weapon and there's no guarantee such a bomb would do anything worthwhile.
The next US project was also a variant of a Barnes Wallis design. They built a variant of the bouncing bomb. Originally, the bomb was never intended to attack things like dams, it was intended to lift ships out of the water. Military ships, especially, are not self-supporting structures. Lifted, even briefly and by a small amount, would be sufficient to break the back of a ship. Even if that didn't work, placing a bomb directly under a ship would likely crack the hull anyway. It would then sink almost immediately. Sinking at that speed would also pretty much guarantee no survivors. Barnes Wallis was incredibly sensitive to human cost, but his military inventions (only a small fraction of all the work he actually did) were designed to perform a specific task extremely well.
Doesn't matter if everything is an algorithm. You aren't patenting an algorithm when you patent a real invention. If I patented a machine that did X and then built a hundred machines off that patent, not a single one of those machines would share the same algorithm as the machine in the patent, nor would any two share the same algorithm. There would be common elements but that is it.
If someone else designed a machine that did X, in a fundamentally different way, that would have yet another algorithm, where there would be even fewer elements in common with anything I'd done.
If I design an algorithm to do X, all implementations will be precisely that algorithm and no other.
If someone else designed an algorithm to do X, no matter how hard they tried to make it fundamentally different, it would be provably identical to mine. It can be nothing else.
Do you now see why your argument simply doesn't hold up?
Software patents are not recognized in much of the world. Interestingly, said parts of the world are currently leading the US in just about every aspect of software development. Why would anyone want to continue a model that is a proven failure?
No, not all inventions can be described in the form of mathematical algorithms. Only computable ones are reducible to such a form and only computable problems with a unique solution will reduce to the -same- mathematical algorithms.
To use the example of an elevator, if you vary the shape, mass, composition, dimensions, enclosure, counterweights, or medium travelled through, you have changed the system of equations. Thus, an elevator in the abstract cannot be reduced to a mathematical description, only a specific elevator in a specific context can.
Where is the inventor? The algorithm already existed, and had done so a few milliseconds after the Big Bang. That's very much prior art.
All anyone does, when they play with mathematical systems, is record the properties the system already had. The observer has added nothing and has invented nothing.
I can see certain merits to copyrighting a specific implementation, and expecting trivial variants to be covered. That is no different from writing a book and having rights over translations.
But a patent goes beyond a specific implementation and restricts ALL algorithms that are functionally equivalent. Patents are not supposed to ban all competition, just unfair competition.
I don't see how that's a problem. I don't even see how that's a surprise, given that Turing and von Neumann were saying the same thing before there was a computer industry and back when biotech meant experiments with mould.
You can patent an elevator because you invented it. You cannot patent gravity because you didn't.
Everything that ever was, is or ever will be, in mathematics, always has been and always will be. Nothing in mathematics is invented, only discovered. (You cannot patent Antarctica, either.)
You can patent an elevator because it isn't obvious. You cannot patent a spring because it is.
Everything in mathematics is ultimately obvious. See "Spiked Maths" for details. Or, if you prefer, consider the fact that everything is built from statements already proven to reduce to fundamental axioms. Everything in mathematics is ultimately true, though not necessarily at the same time. There is no innovation, no creation. Nothing has been added. All you have done is taken two truths and constructed a composite truth. You can add whatever physical theory you like to gravity, you will never construct an elevator.
You can patent an elevator because there are multiple solutions to the same problem. You cannot patent sodium chloride because there is only one chemical that is sodium chloride, it is unique.
Any two mathematical statements which yield identical results (which implies both operate over the same domain and range) are provably identical. Thus, there is a unique solution to a given problem.
You can patent an elevator because it is man-made, artificial. You cannot patent a star because it is not.
Ok, this is my one controversial statement. However, those who disagree are wrong, so I don't care. Mathematics is natural. It exists in the same form throughout the universe. If multiple universes exist, mathematics will be the same in all of them. Including the ones in which no life can exist to make use of it. There are bits of mathematics that cannot coexist, ensuring it cannot be both complete and correct (blame Godel), but there's lots in the natural world like that. That's normal for the natural world.
No wrongdoing was acknowledged and it was settled, so there's no case law involved. The police have long since become a corporate entity rather than a public service, so this is just marked up as cost of doing business. The police have been sued before for precisely this kind of retaliation and it hasn't made any difference yet.
No, if you want law enforcement to change, you have to eliminate the market economy within it. You get nothing for issuing fines, you get no rewards for arrests made or cases closed. You should get penalties for things undone, but nothing for doing what you should be doing to begin with.
You also have to demilitarize it. Guns should be limited or eliminated. Using fear and intimidation to control should be banned entirely. The use of violence of any kind should be limited or eliminated - there is almost never any need and if you're a cop, you have no business claiming you were in fear. Cops are paid to go into danger. If you're so wimpy you have to go in guns blazing, you're not a cop, you're a wimp with a badge.
I've no interest in people telling me I've not been there, I've not been paid to walk into the lion's den in a long time. And when I have, I went. Sane, rational and sober. Which, apparently, US police aren't capable of being.
If you're not cut out to face danger and the possibility of death at any time, don't even bother going to a motor race.
Your outermost gateway should be a simple NAT/port-forwarder/load balancer and a honeypot server. Web traffic goes to the front-end servers, all else goes to the honeypot server. There should be no live DNS. Computers don't need readable names, strings are often where mistakes are made and replying to an IP doesn't require name resolution. The NAT/load balancing would be per-inbound-packet at this level, not per-session or per-time-interval. That means attacks on server resources (if they get through at all) are divided across your cluster evenly. Buys the machines time to detect and counter the problem.
Your front-end servers should be not much more than static content delivery systems, proxying the rest through your outer defences. OpenBSD is ideal for this - fast, simple, bullet-proof. Middle level defences should be a very basic firewall (maximum stability and maximum throughput) and an Active NIDS running in parallel (so as not to slow down traffic).
Inside that, you have at least two load-balancers, one on hot standby, farming dynamic requests to mainline servers. Mainline servers have no static content, only dynamic content. If dynamic content changes slowly (eg: BBC), have a cache server sitting in front of the actual content server. No point regenerating unchanged content.
Content servers send through another firewall (it can also be simple) to your database servers. Unrelated data should be on distinct servers for security and seek time. Since the content servers are read-only, they need hit only database cache servers with actual databases behind those. If you absolutely have to have FQDNs, zone transfer the critical stuff. Bounce all other DNS requests via the internal network to the regular DNS source. That way, your at-risk gateway doesn't contain stupid holes in the wall.
The internal corporate network would have a firewall and switch linking up to the content servers and cache servers, then a different firewall to the database servers. These would be heavier-duty firewalls as the traffic is more complex. Logins of any kind should be permitted only over an IPSec tunnel. All unused ports should be closed.
For the outermost systems, logins should be by IPSec only from a cache server. (Content servers have three Ethernet connections, none going to the firewall.)
This arrangement will take punishment. The arrangements where everything (database included) is in the DMZ with no shielding against coding errors, THOSE are the ones that fall over when people sneeze.
Ok, so my topology would cost a few thousand more. To Amazon, the BBC, any of the online banks, any of the online nuclear power stations - a few thousand might be spent on an executive lunch, but considerably more than a few thousand would certainly be spent and/or lost in a disaster. My layout gives security and performance, though the better corporate giants might be able to do better in both departments.
Doesn't matter if they can. What matters is that nobody at that level should be less secure than this. This is your minimal standard.
The diameter is 2.3x. The mass is around 20x. The density is about 1.5x. The length of year is a shade under 1/3. The surface temperature is estimated at 10x. The gravity is around 4x. The magnetic field at Earth's current age was probably 3.375x. Tea time is a universal constant.
At 11 billion years of age, it clearly hosts one of the oldest civilizations in the universe. At an apparent mass of 20x Earth, which is quite impossible for a planet of this vintage, it is clearly a Dyson sphere built round a black hole constructed by the stellar engineer Omega as a power source for Rassilon's space-time capsules.
The reason it is in Draco is that it was shunted from its original universe into ours during the Third Time War.
Seriously, I have used IT skills in archaeology. You are basically examining a system where some components are black-box and some are white-box, where you have fragments of state information at given points in time, a library of studies into systems containing similar components, and another library of studies into system dynamics.
Archaeologists trained only in archaeology have only recently started to grasp the importance of systems analysis and reverse engineering. They are still not too clued-up on how to perform rigorous testing of black-box environments, which is why most of them view the subject as a pure humanity and haven't quite figured out that pure humanities don't actually exist.
They are also not very good at understanding how to store, retrieve or correctly associate vast amounts of information. A rather essential skill, one might think, when you can be gathering hundreds - sometimes thousands - of fragments in a relatively small area. It's why reassembled objects tend to be rare, even though pieces that fit together are a lot more common. The data is incompletely collected or never examined for patterns.
I do not recommend barging in and telling them how to do their job. Even though sometimes I wish someone would. Not Invented Here Syndrome and the usual evil of Office Politics applies just as much to the Mediocre Outdoors as to the Even More Mediocre Indoors.
On the other hand, applying the skills, making the necessary observations, making the necessary records, installing a database with just a tad more oomph than Microsoft Access (though leave the basic card entry screen) - that will help you not miss the blindingly obvious.
Hardware Engineer? Pffft! It is not that complex to convert the Open Source hardware spectrometer into an Open Source hardware thermoluminescence ceramic dating device. Might not be as good as the high-end commercial rigs, but high-end commercial rigs are very expensive to buy time on and archaeologists don't have the cash to even afford a decent hat and bull whip any more. But if you can, through decent approximation, show that there's something interesting going on, cash will materialize.
Please bear in mind, though, that although it's not complex to do the conversion, it's not hard to screw it up either. Do test things and do use a better camera than the one the prefab kit comes with.
The calculation was done by NASA and published in a peer-reviewed paper in New Scientist in 1988, I think. As best as I can recall, the solar sail was assumed to also have an initial mass of 5 Kg and to gain mass at a constant rate (since the remnants of the accretion disk should be thinner the further out you go, but you travel through more of it per unit time). I forget what the rate was. As I recall, the paper noted that there would be extreme difficulty in having a sail of such a size that was structurally capable of withstanding impacts at the velocities involved within the permissible mass.
Space is filled with dust, so yes, as you travel away from the sun, as the solar sail cools (since less heat is reaching it, inverse square law) it does indeed get heavier. It also gets heavier as it accelerates, due to relativity. It would be interesting to determine what the precise function is. The density of space dust is given in Carl Sagan's book, Cosmos, that was a companion to the series.
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't see SystemC, either, but may have missed it. But the real question is what the stats would look like if you only included Wishbone-compliant usage?
There should have been modifiers for typical bugs per kloc and security holes per kloc.
Also, there are many more layers to the industry. Scientific computing? Avionics? Publishing?
The subdivisions between languages are also a bit... strange. Java/Oak isn't truly uniform, whatever anyone claims. C and C++ have standards that aren't always backwards-compatible - if you ignore such changes, why bother listing C# or D as distinct? Lump the lot, together with B and BCPL under a single header.
My guess is that accurate representation of languages isn't possible (when does a dialect become a distinct language?) but that if it was, none of the so-called "big three" languages would be in the top 10. Computer languages are as bad as natural languages when it comes to classifiers.
Last, but by no means least, people rarely directly code any more. They code within engines, usually using some weird fringe language nobody has ever heard of that turns out to be Lua or Visual Basic with the keywords words renamed for the theme. Real programmers (as opposed to integer or complex programmers) tend to be in the minority, have become rarer after Qualcomm outlawed them, and are mostly in mourning for Freshmeat. But as a lot are Goths anyway, it's hard to tell.
Already done. Check the Slashdot archives for the Vi vs Emacs paintball fight.
When I were a lad, we had to program in 96 bytes! In the snow! Uphill! Both ways!
Most of the Info pages are rips of the Man pages. Only a handful of programs have "real" Info documentation. Not that this matters, you just need to run man first for the summary and then info for more detailed stuff. The heavy documentation is only useful for really obscure stuff.
Of course it's an exercise in mystical frustration! Linus Torvalds was declared God at the first Linux conference, Richard Stallman is head of the Church of GNU (that's what it says on his website) and Eric Raymond runs a bazaar outside a cathedral.
You are correct that nothing abridges that right. (I take the highly deviant and unpopular line that rights are inalienable, that that is why we don't just call them permissions.)
To say that it is an unmitigated good is, though, perhaps not a conclusion you can safely draw. It carries the implication that all contributing causes were also good, which is self-evidently false. The right is good. The requirement that things be properly documented is good. The staffing levels are bad (police officers should be providing the raw information, not reconstructing it to fit a specific system - have data entry specialists handle data entry). The system sounds very very bad - and unstable (who wants HAL running a criminal justice system?).
Releasing the individuals was correct, but correct for the bad reason that every level of the system failed.
That they couldn't manage in three days what police in Britain were once expected to do within 24 hours (now expanded to 48, as computer technology has been added, which seems kinda weird) shows that the wrong people are doing work that is wrong. If a manual system could do the job in one day, a computer-based one should be faster. Yes, there's more complex analysis to be done, but mass spectrometers can be thrown into the back of a van and give you results in minutes. DNA analysis for a tiny handful of markers (typically 12 for criminology, versus the 150 often needed for genealogy) can be done in an hour, tops. In-the-field DNA sequencers designed to look for specific information can also be thrown into said van.
Actually searching and finding things is the slowest part, but you shouldn't be looking for evidence to convict someone, you should be looking for evidence in order to determine who it is who should be convicted. In that case, search and lab time should only ever precede an arrest, which means everything that matters will already be known and in the computer.
In that case, the only new information is that surrounding the arrest and any supplemental information provided by the suspect. Confirming that supplemental data should not be relevant to the case, if the case warranted bringing the person in at that point. Even if it is, you're looking at three or four hours in parallel with the data entry. Raw data is raw data, that can be delivered live from a mobile lab or detective, so it's merely the time to get there, find the supplemental evidence and run the analysis.
With a modern setup, the time between initial arrest and completing the filing should never exceed 6 hours. Three days is stupid.
If six hours isn't enough time to do everything, do more (much, much more) beforehand and parallelize the shit out of everything after. If you don't have the money, find it. If necessary, reduce coverage until you can afford it, then demand taxes pay to cover everyone else correctly. If a couple of extra people get robbed or murdered, you've reduced false convictions by far more than that, so there's a net reduction in deprivation and death. You trade a negligible bit of extra crime in the streets for a massive reduction in crime by cops and/or in prisons. You get a miniscule dash of extra cynicism in the populace, but carve vast chunks of cynicism and contempt within the constabulary.
Seems an acceptable price to pay in order to have acceptable cops and acceptable standards.
The unknown effect involves the mysterious overlords.
Seriously, they need to spy on employees to figure out that attention spans are finite, fatigue limits effectiveness and water cooler chat revitalizes the mind? Perhaps espionage will also help directors discover that sick leave reduces illness. It may be bloody obvious to even those of us who are borderline human, but apparently it will take hidden cameras and infrared imaging for senior management to figure it out.
If you look at the fate of HOTOL, which bears a striking resemblance of the fate of the Avro Arrow, and the total lack of recent development on the Australian hypersonic engine, you get the definite impression that someone isn't keen on competition in the supersonic/hypersonic military arena.
(Yeah, I know HOTOL wasn't designed to be military, but if the engine design had been finished then those engines would have been used in military aircraft, and HOTOL would certainly have been used to put up spy satellites independently of the ESA or NASA.)
The US attempted to build a version of the British "Grand Slam" bomb. Fixing some of the aerodynamic issues and making assorted other "improvements", they ended up with a 44,000 lb. conventional unguided bomb. The Tallboy/Grand Slam series of bombs worked on a very simple principle - you send a gigantic shockwave through the ground as a result of an impact very close to mach 1, and a second shockwave through the ground as a result of a shaped charge.
This type of bomb destroys pretty much anything at the boundary between two different materials. So if you dropped one of these bombs on a reinforced concrete bunker, you'd pulverize the inside of the bunker without having to actually punch a hole right the way through. They were superb at taking out dams, far better than the bouncing bomb (Barnes Wallis designed both), because you didn't have to hit the dam at all. The interface between dam and valley was a weakpoint that, if shredded, would achieve exactly the same effect the bouncing bomb did - far more reliably and without the vulnerability.
The British version worked brilliantly. If, by "brilliantly", you mean removing all the armour, defences and bomb bay doors from a Lancaster bomber. Ok, to be fair, it did exactly what was intended. It destroyed ships, dams and factories in a way that no bomb before could.
So, what did the US version do?
What it should have done is make a mess of bunkers with 22' of reinforced concrete or less, and severely disrupt heavier bunkers than that.
What it actually did was nothing. The B-52 carrying the prototype managed to get to the end of the runway before running out of fuel.
What it did next was also nothing. The US abandoned all further work on it, as tactical nuclear weapons would have had more punch at a lighter weight.
Would it have changed warfare? It might have reduced the number of survivors from Tora Bora by a small amount, but the US had gas/incindiary bombs and air pressure bombs that could reach into the deepest caves there. An earthquake bomb might have reduced the time needed, but that's it. It might also have changed the Iraq invasion. A bomb that could pulverize deep bunkers would have made it much harder for neocons to claim WMDs were being stored in such bunkers. If you can target them directly, conventionally and reliably, your obvious next question is to ask where these bunkers are. Since US intelligence knew of no such bunkers, it would have had no positions to give.
Would it change the dynamics with Iran? The Iranians have placed their nuclear technology in bunkers with walls too thick for most conventional bombs and smaller tactical nukes. The concrete also uses a recipe that was, when last demonstrated in a technology exhibition in the US, around a hundred times stronger than the reinforced concrete used by the US military. However, strength doesn't matter here. The whole idea of sending a shockwave is that a hard, consistent medium delivers the shockwave that much better to the other side. And modern explosives are rather better than torpex. Having said that, there is still no US bomber capable of carrying such a weapon and there's no guarantee such a bomb would do anything worthwhile.
The next US project was also a variant of a Barnes Wallis design. They built a variant of the bouncing bomb. Originally, the bomb was never intended to attack things like dams, it was intended to lift ships out of the water. Military ships, especially, are not self-supporting structures. Lifted, even briefly and by a small amount, would be sufficient to break the back of a ship. Even if that didn't work, placing a bomb directly under a ship would likely crack the hull anyway. It would then sink almost immediately. Sinking at that speed would also pretty much guarantee no survivors. Barnes Wallis was incredibly sensitive to human cost, but his military inventions (only a small fraction of all the work he actually did) were designed to perform a specific task extremely well.
In this case, he was off by a bit. The bouncin
Doesn't matter if everything is an algorithm. You aren't patenting an algorithm when you patent a real invention. If I patented a machine that did X and then built a hundred machines off that patent, not a single one of those machines would share the same algorithm as the machine in the patent, nor would any two share the same algorithm. There would be common elements but that is it.
If someone else designed a machine that did X, in a fundamentally different way, that would have yet another algorithm, where there would be even fewer elements in common with anything I'd done.
If I design an algorithm to do X, all implementations will be precisely that algorithm and no other.
If someone else designed an algorithm to do X, no matter how hard they tried to make it fundamentally different, it would be provably identical to mine. It can be nothing else.
Do you now see why your argument simply doesn't hold up?
Software patents are not recognized in much of the world. Interestingly, said parts of the world are currently leading the US in just about every aspect of software development. Why would anyone want to continue a model that is a proven failure?
There is nothing that software can do that a physical implementation of the model cannot do. See Turing for details.
No, not all inventions can be described in the form of mathematical algorithms. Only computable ones are reducible to such a form and only computable problems with a unique solution will reduce to the -same- mathematical algorithms.
To use the example of an elevator, if you vary the shape, mass, composition, dimensions, enclosure, counterweights, or medium travelled through, you have changed the system of equations. Thus, an elevator in the abstract cannot be reduced to a mathematical description, only a specific elevator in a specific context can.
Where is the inventor? The algorithm already existed, and had done so a few milliseconds after the Big Bang. That's very much prior art.
All anyone does, when they play with mathematical systems, is record the properties the system already had. The observer has added nothing and has invented nothing.
I can see certain merits to copyrighting a specific implementation, and expecting trivial variants to be covered. That is no different from writing a book and having rights over translations.
But a patent goes beyond a specific implementation and restricts ALL algorithms that are functionally equivalent. Patents are not supposed to ban all competition, just unfair competition.
I don't see how that's a problem. I don't even see how that's a surprise, given that Turing and von Neumann were saying the same thing before there was a computer industry and back when biotech meant experiments with mould.
You can patent an elevator because you invented it. You cannot patent gravity because you didn't.
Everything that ever was, is or ever will be, in mathematics, always has been and always will be. Nothing in mathematics is invented, only discovered. (You cannot patent Antarctica, either.)
You can patent an elevator because it isn't obvious. You cannot patent a spring because it is.
Everything in mathematics is ultimately obvious. See "Spiked Maths" for details. Or, if you prefer, consider the fact that everything is built from statements already proven to reduce to fundamental axioms. Everything in mathematics is ultimately true, though not necessarily at the same time. There is no innovation, no creation. Nothing has been added. All you have done is taken two truths and constructed a composite truth. You can add whatever physical theory you like to gravity, you will never construct an elevator.
You can patent an elevator because there are multiple solutions to the same problem. You cannot patent sodium chloride because there is only one chemical that is sodium chloride, it is unique.
Any two mathematical statements which yield identical results (which implies both operate over the same domain and range) are provably identical. Thus, there is a unique solution to a given problem.
You can patent an elevator because it is man-made, artificial. You cannot patent a star because it is not.
Ok, this is my one controversial statement. However, those who disagree are wrong, so I don't care. Mathematics is natural. It exists in the same form throughout the universe. If multiple universes exist, mathematics will be the same in all of them. Including the ones in which no life can exist to make use of it. There are bits of mathematics that cannot coexist, ensuring it cannot be both complete and correct (blame Godel), but there's lots in the natural world like that. That's normal for the natural world.
But ultimately nothing to see here.
No wrongdoing was acknowledged and it was settled, so there's no case law involved. The police have long since become a corporate entity rather than a public service, so this is just marked up as cost of doing business. The police have been sued before for precisely this kind of retaliation and it hasn't made any difference yet.
No, if you want law enforcement to change, you have to eliminate the market economy within it. You get nothing for issuing fines, you get no rewards for arrests made or cases closed. You should get penalties for things undone, but nothing for doing what you should be doing to begin with.
You also have to demilitarize it. Guns should be limited or eliminated. Using fear and intimidation to control should be banned entirely. The use of violence of any kind should be limited or eliminated - there is almost never any need and if you're a cop, you have no business claiming you were in fear. Cops are paid to go into danger. If you're so wimpy you have to go in guns blazing, you're not a cop, you're a wimp with a badge.
I've no interest in people telling me I've not been there, I've not been paid to walk into the lion's den in a long time. And when I have, I went. Sane, rational and sober. Which, apparently, US police aren't capable of being.
If you're not cut out to face danger and the possibility of death at any time, don't even bother going to a motor race.
...why?
Your outermost gateway should be a simple NAT/port-forwarder/load balancer and a honeypot server. Web traffic goes to the front-end servers, all else goes to the honeypot server. There should be no live DNS. Computers don't need readable names, strings are often where mistakes are made and replying to an IP doesn't require name resolution. The NAT/load balancing would be per-inbound-packet at this level, not per-session or per-time-interval. That means attacks on server resources (if they get through at all) are divided across your cluster evenly. Buys the machines time to detect and counter the problem.
Your front-end servers should be not much more than static content delivery systems, proxying the rest through your outer defences. OpenBSD is ideal for this - fast, simple, bullet-proof. Middle level defences should be a very basic firewall (maximum stability and maximum throughput) and an Active NIDS running in parallel (so as not to slow down traffic).
Inside that, you have at least two load-balancers, one on hot standby, farming dynamic requests to mainline servers. Mainline servers have no static content, only dynamic content. If dynamic content changes slowly (eg: BBC), have a cache server sitting in front of the actual content server. No point regenerating unchanged content.
Content servers send through another firewall (it can also be simple) to your database servers. Unrelated data should be on distinct servers for security and seek time. Since the content servers are read-only, they need hit only database cache servers with actual databases behind those. If you absolutely have to have FQDNs, zone transfer the critical stuff. Bounce all other DNS requests via the internal network to the regular DNS source. That way, your at-risk gateway doesn't contain stupid holes in the wall.
The internal corporate network would have a firewall and switch linking up to the content servers and cache servers, then a different firewall to the database servers. These would be heavier-duty firewalls as the traffic is more complex. Logins of any kind should be permitted only over an IPSec tunnel. All unused ports should be closed.
For the outermost systems, logins should be by IPSec only from a cache server. (Content servers have three Ethernet connections, none going to the firewall.)
This arrangement will take punishment. The arrangements where everything (database included) is in the DMZ with no shielding against coding errors, THOSE are the ones that fall over when people sneeze.
Ok, so my topology would cost a few thousand more. To Amazon, the BBC, any of the online banks, any of the online nuclear power stations - a few thousand might be spent on an executive lunch, but considerably more than a few thousand would certainly be spent and/or lost in a disaster. My layout gives security and performance, though the better corporate giants might be able to do better in both departments.
Doesn't matter if they can. What matters is that nobody at that level should be less secure than this. This is your minimal standard.
The diameter is 2.3x. The mass is around 20x. The density is about 1.5x. The length of year is a shade under 1/3. The surface temperature is estimated at 10x. The gravity is around 4x. The magnetic field at Earth's current age was probably 3.375x. Tea time is a universal constant.
At 11 billion years of age, it clearly hosts one of the oldest civilizations in the universe. At an apparent mass of 20x Earth, which is quite impossible for a planet of this vintage, it is clearly a Dyson sphere built round a black hole constructed by the stellar engineer Omega as a power source for Rassilon's space-time capsules.
The reason it is in Draco is that it was shunted from its original universe into ours during the Third Time War.
Ha! Fooled you! I never post short answers!
Seriously, I have used IT skills in archaeology. You are basically examining a system where some components are black-box and some are white-box, where you have fragments of state information at given points in time, a library of studies into systems containing similar components, and another library of studies into system dynamics.
Archaeologists trained only in archaeology have only recently started to grasp the importance of systems analysis and reverse engineering. They are still not too clued-up on how to perform rigorous testing of black-box environments, which is why most of them view the subject as a pure humanity and haven't quite figured out that pure humanities don't actually exist.
They are also not very good at understanding how to store, retrieve or correctly associate vast amounts of information. A rather essential skill, one might think, when you can be gathering hundreds - sometimes thousands - of fragments in a relatively small area. It's why reassembled objects tend to be rare, even though pieces that fit together are a lot more common. The data is incompletely collected or never examined for patterns.
I do not recommend barging in and telling them how to do their job. Even though sometimes I wish someone would. Not Invented Here Syndrome and the usual evil of Office Politics applies just as much to the Mediocre Outdoors as to the Even More Mediocre Indoors.
On the other hand, applying the skills, making the necessary observations, making the necessary records, installing a database with just a tad more oomph than Microsoft Access (though leave the basic card entry screen) - that will help you not miss the blindingly obvious.
Hardware Engineer? Pffft! It is not that complex to convert the Open Source hardware spectrometer into an Open Source hardware thermoluminescence ceramic dating device. Might not be as good as the high-end commercial rigs, but high-end commercial rigs are very expensive to buy time on and archaeologists don't have the cash to even afford a decent hat and bull whip any more. But if you can, through decent approximation, show that there's something interesting going on, cash will materialize.
Please bear in mind, though, that although it's not complex to do the conversion, it's not hard to screw it up either. Do test things and do use a better camera than the one the prefab kit comes with.
If you're wanting to get out of Dodge, what could be better than removing Dodge?
The calculation was done by NASA and published in a peer-reviewed paper in New Scientist in 1988, I think. As best as I can recall, the solar sail was assumed to also have an initial mass of 5 Kg and to gain mass at a constant rate (since the remnants of the accretion disk should be thinner the further out you go, but you travel through more of it per unit time). I forget what the rate was. As I recall, the paper noted that there would be extreme difficulty in having a sail of such a size that was structurally capable of withstanding impacts at the velocities involved within the permissible mass.
Space is filled with dust, so yes, as you travel away from the sun, as the solar sail cools (since less heat is reaching it, inverse square law) it does indeed get heavier. It also gets heavier as it accelerates, due to relativity. It would be interesting to determine what the precise function is. The density of space dust is given in Carl Sagan's book, Cosmos, that was a companion to the series.