Network IPs are clustered in so called subnets, slices from the cake which contains all possible IP addresses. To have two IPs talking together, you have to route the information between them. This is done by having large tables in every router, which tell you, which router handles which slices. Every ISP which hands out IP addresses gets some of the slices. The IP addresses for the customers are then taken out of the slice and assigned to the customer. All routers know: Those slices are handled by this ISP, so this ISP's router is the one which gets the information intended for the IP addresses. If you have many ISPs and lots of little slices, those tables containing the routes are getting bigger and bigger. If everyone can take his assigned IP addresses to another ISP, the tables in the end have to contain an entry for each single possible IP address. This means: Tables of about 4 billion (2^32) entries. So every router on the Internet has to be fitted with at least the capacity to store a table of 8billion entries (the single IP and the IP of the router handling the IP), and because each IP is 4 bytes long, this means: 32GByte will be the minimal memory required for an Internet Backbone router. Just to handle the table. No one wants to pay for this. The system with the subnets (slices) of grouped together IP addresses was invented to prevent exactly this. But this becomes futile as soon as the judges decide that single IP addresses are to be taken out of the slices and moved arbitrarily to other subnets.
Ironically it has been proven that contests like the ACM programming contest teach people to code better and with less errors. Why? Debugging takes time. So a good strategy to come up fast with a good enough solution is to introduce less errors from the beginning.
The security flaws are programming errors like any other error too. They just don't get that easily detected, because in a closed environment there are no malicious intend or out of control running computers firing incorrect messages. If you want your programmers to come up with less security flaws, teach them to get it right the first time. And you teach it, if you have them do little program jobs in very short time.
Unfortunately in a commercial environment you don't have lots of little jobs, you have large projects with complex interdependencies. So you can't train them on the job. You have to have workshops where they can excercise with those little jobs to increase their ability to fastly recognize the pattern of the job, find the correct solution and see the potential flaws and avoid them.
The plural form for virus is virus, with the accent on the last syllable. Same as in casus, sinus, bonus and status. So both viruses and virii are just made up plural forms, which are false from a latin point of view.
You can charge money. You just have to provide the sourcecode.
See the GNU FAQ. You can't change the license because you got other people's work with this license and THEY have to agree to the change.
Not until software patents are valid in Germany. There is still a certain way to go. Of course Microsoft could stop the distribution in the U.S. by legal means, but SoftMakers market right now is Germany, and they are slowly expanding to the E.U.
In this case the question is simply wrong. SoftMaker is around longer than most software companies. I remember the first SoftMaker adverts in a PC magazine in 1987, where they announced their TextMaker for 149,- DM (Deutschmark), which was a 5th of the usual price for a text processing software at the time. Germany had always several small office productivity companies, and one of them brought us on the road to OpenOffice (StarDivision, now bought by SUN), and SoftMaker is also still alive and kicking, working from the beginning with a "sell cheap, sell enough" model for their software.
They survived all the storms of time by getting large contracts with public administrations like towns and counties. And there they probably got most of their bugreports from, because a town administration can be sure to get lots of quite strange documents, in content and in form.
You could use a different approach. Consider a geometrical inversion of the world at the surface of the earth, thus the center of the earth gets mapped to infinity, by setting the radius of the earth to 1 and mapping every vector of the length d to a certain point A to the vector in the same direction, but of 1/d length, thus pointing to A'.
For instance the moon is about 50 times the radius of the earth away, so his image would be projected somewhere at 1/50 of the earth's radius, or just 85mls from the center of the earth. You can use other scaling functions but you will always end with a similar discrepancy. If you use 1/sqrt(d), A' will be somewhere at about 700mls from the center of the earth... still far away from everything we reached until now.
There have been men on the moon, but no one deeper than 8mls from the earth's surface. Basicly we barely have scratched the surface of the earth yet, with even the deepest holes ever drilled lurking somewhere at the 7mls point (don't have the current number right here).
On the other hand: All parasites, virii and bacteria in this pool are completely adapted to the lifeforms in this pool for millions of years and thus probably completely unable to cope with lifefroms from the outside. Ergo: No infection, because of far reaching incompatibility.
It is technically no splitting of the atom, it's just a changing of the nucleus by adding a proton or a neutron. Even though this is a change of the chemical properties, both the atom cores have nearly the same weight (+1). Same is to be said for the Rutherford experiments, where atom nuclei were bombarded by alpha radiation (Helium nuclei). In this case you even change the mass number of the targeted core (the number of baryons) by four, and you even have at first an addition of mass and then a second reaction to get the new core into a stable state (mostly by sending out beta radiation, sometimes also neutron or proton radiation).
Ernest Rutherford is thus recognized as the person to first demonstrate the change of atom cores. John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton were the first to use protons, which are quite easy to generate (they are basicly positively charged Hydrogenium or Hydrogenium nuclei).
Enrico Fermi got interested in those experiments and was using neutrons because he hoped that neutrons would be easier to add to the core, because they don't get rejected by the positive charge of the atom core. On the other hand you can't get neutron radiation that easily, you need radioactive elements which send out neutrons during their reaction.
The big breakthrough for Otto Hahn, Lise Meitner and Fritz Strassmann was to realize that neutrons don't just get added to the atom cores, but they cause the cores to swing and in this process to split into two about equal sized smaller cores. And Otto Hahn got the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for exactly this: To discover the splitting of the atom.
It is not only factual incorrect for the british pint, it is also incorrect for the Prussian pound, which was created to help the people to mentally convert to the metric system. The american pound is about 455g, which is quite close to half a Kilogram, so the Prussian State created the Tax pound as being 500g or exactly half a Kilogram. Thus the people were able to easily estimate how much a given weight in Kilogram would weigh in their hands, by just doubling the number.
Until now you see the results in Germany: Coffee is sold mostly in 500g packets, the usual size of a piece of butter is commonly referred to as "half a pound", and nearly every baker knows what I am talking of if I ask for a "four pound bread". Interestingly the pound is used only for food, and it is only used verbal, no one would ever write it on a piece of paper.
Oops... the last paragraph was about Lise Meitner being the first woman to get a Doctor's Degree in Physics from University of Vienna.
There have been other women with a doctor's degree from UoV before, but not in Physics, and there have been other woman with a doctor's degree in Physics from other universities though.
The first country in which a controlled split of an atom took place was Italy, and it was performed by Enrico Fermi (yes, the same Mr. Fermi) in 1934. Ironically Enrico Fermi at first didn't think about a split, he rather assumed, that the neutrons he was sending to Uranium were added to the Uranium cores, and he were creating Transuranium atoms.
Otto Hahn, Lise Meitner and Fritz Strassmann were continuing those experiments in the following years and were proving chemically, that indeed there were new cores produced by shooting neutrons on Uranium. But the physical results (density et.al.) didn't fit the expectations for Transuranium. In 1937 Lise Meitner, who was physicist, found the right explanation and concluded that the neutron had rather split the atom core instead of being added to it.
Mr. Hahn in lieu for the whole group got the Chemistry Nobel prize in 1944 for this achievement. Lise Meitner should have been awarded the Physics Nobel prize though, which never happened.
Enrico Fermi, after being exiled to the U.S. was starting a fission reactor project in 1942 in the basement of a stadium and invented the carbon-water moderated reactor.
I remember to have read in an Otto Hahn biography, that the idea to explain the phenomenom as split of atoms has been suggested before 1937 in a conference, where Otto Hahn was presenting his results as proof for creating Transuranium, but the scientist, being a woman from Yugoslavia, didn't have enough credit with the audience.
(There is another prominent case of mistrusting women in science in the first half of the 20th century: When Lise Meitner was the first woman who got awarded her Doctor's degree from the University of Vienna, it was anounced in the local newspapers as a thesis about "Problems in cosmetic physics". Indeed she wrote her thesis about "Problems in cosmic physics".)
There is as always another side: There are real faults in the system, which can't be fixed, because the fix is equivalent to breaking an application, which was working around the fault in a murky way. There were design mistakes you can't fix, because there are applications which expect exactly this misdesigned behaviour. There were books out there talking about some "hidden features", which were never to be exposed to the developpers, but the developpers found out and some started coding with those "hidden features". Now you can't remove them anymore, even though they made only sense for a special environment present at the moment of their design, and they should have been hidden forever behind the official API.
There is only one way to get out of this mess: Start anew. Screw those people who were trying to be clever. Define a stable subset of used API routines you know are quite bug free, useful and abstract enough to live along some architectural changes. Tell everyone that outside this API nothing is supported. It may be time for Windows developpers to learn how to write portable code.
The world of the 8086 based PC as defined by IBM and evolved from there was always about being "more or less compatible". I remember the articles in the computer mags of the Mid-80ies being full of compatibility tests for the IBM clones and awarding points for supporting even obscure utilities and games.
It was always a balance between keeping to the official interfaces and produce slow, kludgy software, which was assured to run on the next generation of PCs too, and to use nonofficial but common features, which made the life easier, saved on processor cycles, allowed for elegant code, but broke with a slight change in the underlying architecture. Most programmers were even able to write kludgy, slow applications by using nonofficial features, and maybe it's time to have a more Darwinian rule around: Adapt or die. The environment is changing.
I know there are lots of people out there, who have invested huge sums of money or time or sweat in software, that is now about to break with the installation of SP2. I know that those people will be pissed of. But they can run their legacy application on their current system, and they are not forced to change it. They just have to make sure it has a welldefined and controlled interface to the world out there, maybe transferring data only via CD-ROM or having the access to the systems heavily guarded by firewalls or whatever. It's basicly the same that happens to the old database applications running on old S/370 somewhere.
But there are more people pissed of by the security lapses aboundant, by strange and illogical designs in the API, and by the loss of money if something breaks because of the faults. So who do you want to please? The people with the legacy applications, who can't or won't upgrade, or the people dealing everyday with the problems arising from old legacy bugs and holes, which can't be fixed?
A ballot box containing 200 votes has been found almost an hour after a local council ward result was announced.
Easily correctable: Count the 200 votes, and you are done. The significant advantage for paper ballots: Errors ARE correctable.
the final days of campaigning were marred in some areas of the country piloting all-postal votes by allegations of fraud and voter intimidation
Voter intimidation that influences the outcome of a paper ballot election also influences a voting machine election. So there is no principal advantage for either. All-postal votes are not the same than paper ballot votes cast in a voting office. There is indeed a certain possibility to commit fraud in voting if you have access to the postal service and thus can get your hand on postal votes. But this is something you can't help either with voting machines. People who cast postal votes are not present at voting day.
In all election I ever took part, casting votes early or via postal service was strongly disencouraged for exactly this reason: You can't check the whole voting process anymore. It's the same reason I strongly disencourage the usage of technology you can't check with your eyes.
John Hemming, Lib Dems leader in Birmingham, said he wanted some 500 votes from a key ward put aside for further scrutiny because he was not satisfied with how they had arrived at the count.
Isn't it cool? You can actually LOOK at the voting ballots, if they seem suspicious to you. Normally the counting is done in the local voting office, so paper ballots are counted before they get somewhere, so the local residents can have a look at the count itself, if they want. Then the counted votes get resealed and sent to the central counting place, where the counting starts again. Double bookkeeping, you could say.
And two candidates in Slough were forced to roll a dice to decide the outcome of the election after two recounts failed to split them.
So both candidates got the same number of votes. It happens. Even with modern technology. Deal with it. Recounts are there to check the result if there is any doubt. If the result says: Tied then maybe this was the outcome of the election?
It works. It leaves a paper trail for later recounts.
It can be observed by everyone who is interested in the whole process, from printing the ballots to handing out the ballots, from getting the ballots back and counting them, from sealing the voting box to bringing it at the central voting office for recount, thus minimizing the possibility of rigging the election.
It keeps the single vote anonymous while at the same moment make every vote count. It keeps the voting and counting process at a speed a human eye can watch it and thus it's the most secure thing against voting fraud.
There is nothing wrong with voting per paper and pen. People not able to handle paper and pen have to get special support with all the other voting systems too. And you can easily design a voting machine that just pens the right point on the ballot for them. It's as complicated than a stancing machine with levers, a touchscreen or a device for people who can't see or read the ballot (noting wrong with Braille script on the voting ballot at all).
I guess,.NET was just a result of the attempt to enhance VBscript in the suggested way. Microsoft noticed then that they had to generate a completely new sandbox concept to add at least a little security to VBscript, and when they were pondering about the sandbox, they surely also thought about what else the sandbox could do.
So in the end they came to.NET. Because this is basicly the container for all the scriptings, objects and programs, which talk via a defined interface to the underlying system. Basicly it is like a HAL as WinNT introduced to have an abstract access to the underlying machine (Hardware Abstraction Layer), it is a OSAL (Operating System Abstraction Layer). This became necessary because until then the Abstraction Layer laid on the operating system, the Microsoft Foundation Classes, proved to become more and more unmaintainable for Microsoft, and the different small abstraction layers by the different dialects of VBA were screaming for unification..NET is more or less the result of trying to revamp the whole development environment on Microsoft's operating systems. It was probably born out of the problems arising in further developing and maintaining MFC, enhancing VBscript, securing the Windows Scripting Host, advancing VBA and countering Java (which for the first time proved to be a successfull abstraction model for the underlying operating system, all other attempts before were limited in their reach).
Is it right for a discredited man to have his pHD removed? Is it right that popular opinion can determine how qualified someone is to make a statement in their field?
The Dr.rer.net (Doctorus rerum naturae) he got from the University of Constance. And this university has written down in their regulariae, that a Dr. can be removed, if the person who got the title awarded, proved itself unworthy to have the title. Mr. Schoen proved unworthy in his scientific life, faking or completely making up results, erasing all evidence (There is no raw data available from his experiments, he erased it 'because space was running out on his computer') and knowingly publishing false results.
They are called Bundeslaender in Germany. While most of the northern Bundeslaender are of artificial nature (a result of the redrawing of Germany's map after WW II) and were mostly designed to abolish the old prussian state, the southern states follow old, traditional borders. After 1989, when the new german Bundeslaender were restated, there were some local votings which state the local people wanted to belong to, which made the local borders follow old tribal lines.
Thuringia was founded in 534, that is now 1470 years ago, and the current state of Thuringia is quite close to the old tribe territory of the Thuringians long ago. Bavaria even has a quite sophisticated informal system to ensure, that the three different tribes (Bavarians, Frankonians and Suabians) are equally represented in the different institutions.
In Germany we have even a second people, the Sorbs, which have their own central authority. Sorbs speak their own languages (three different ones), which aren't related to German at all (they are slavic languages, related to Polish and Czech), have bilingual street signs and a right to constitute themselves in the constitutions of both Brandenburg and Saxonia, where they live.
The Frisians in the Northwest have similar rights, but they are living not only in Germany, but also in the Netherlands. The danish people in North Germany are a national minority, so called because there is a danish nation (Danmark), but they aren't under danish juristiction. They have the right to be represented in the Landtag (local parliament) of Schleswig-Holstein with at least a representative. For the South Schleswig Electoral Association, their political group, there is no 5% minority block, like for all other political parties.
The main difference between Iraq and Germany at the moment is, that Germany has a working central government, so there is someone actually representing Germany to the world. If I were in Iraq right now, with a weak provisionally council without real executive power, I would also feel better represented by a local leader who I happen to know, and who I may be related to by either a common ancestry or by a common set of believes. It doesn't mean that Iraq is in any way "tribal", it just means that it lacks a central authority that is accepted through the country.
3/4 of all Germany identify themselves with a tribe (bavarian, hassian, suabian, saxon...) German language is one of the most diffentiated by tribal traditions. It's called dialect. There are sometimes stories in the local news when the local youth was again beating someone up for talking the wrong dialect. In a recent surview Bavarian won the crown for being the most erotic of all german dialects, with churpalatian coming in last.
It's called "tribal" in the american news. It's called local patriotism in Germany.
This is simply wrong. When North America was inhabited by tribes, and Europe was a patchwork of single tribal and feudal micro states each fighting each other, the Arab world was interconnected with a common language, a common administration system and a common law. Far away from the "tribal structure" you are thinking of. Of course there were different states, and they waged war against each other. Just like the Europeans fighted each other (and did it until recently, and the Kosovo is still at a civil war), and the U.S. was in a long standing feud with Mexico.
Ethnic, religious or nationalist conflicts are abundant even in todays oh so civilized western democraties. Think of the Basques in North Spain, the anglo-irish conflict in North Ireland, or the bashing of all things french in the U.S. (and vice versa the official loathing of everything considered american in France.)
The arab world is not much different in this regard. There are ethnic minorities in the mainly arab states (berbers, kurds, turks...), there are different interpretations of Islam (Sunni and Shiia as the most prominent, Ismaelites and other smaller sects). There are non arab islamic states, which get always mixed into the arab soup in western news (Iran for instance is partly persian in the south and turk [asari] in the north, with kurds spread everywhere. So it is not even an arab country at all.) The largest islamic country in the world is not even in the Middle East. Indonesia is located in the Southeast asian archipel.
But to call this a "tribal system" is just an offspring of a theory of an own superiority theory we should abandon as soon as possible, because it doesn't help us in any way. The state of the arabian world is quite similar today to the state of the western world at the begin of the 20th century: Old, dying monarchies, some quite questionable democracies, civil wars either boiling or going on under the surface. The western world managed to kill more than 100 Mio people in the conflicts between 1850 and 1950. Compared with this achievement the arabian world is a place of piece and security.
Let's talk about things like sending and receiving instant messages.
Because I learned Instant Messaging on UNIX (way back in 1990 on HP-UX 7.*), I am always using Instant Messaging from UNIX. Even if I sit at a windows machine, for Instant Messaging I am sshing out to a FreeBSD box and use the client there. Why? Because of screen(1). I just let my client running and check in later for messages coming in in my absence. I am used to this. I like it this way. This is how Instant Messaging works for me.
Does explain the SAPDB sale to MySQL a little more rationally though. That was one piece of baggage MS would not have tolerated.
SAPDB itself is not an original SAP product, it was developped from Adabas database (by Software AG), which is still supported by SAP R/3 as RDBMS. Adabas also came with StarOffice (up until 5.*, don't know for now, I am using OpenOffice since then.)
As a matter of fact, I have children. And my stomach would twist if I got to know that they were abused and their photos posted. But my stomach would be rotating if the police, instead of prosecuting the involved parties, is busily updating the webfilters.
One of the most important facts is: The child abuse was already done, when the pictures got posted. With the open web, potentially everyone can look into it and notice it. I don't want child abuse happen to anyone... But it being back in the dark rooms no one has access to is the worst. Bring it to light, so we know, there is a problem out there, and we can do something about. If it gets blocked, then it goes on unnotified.
Fact is: Since pictures of abused childs are aviable on the web, the number of childs killed in abuses has dropped remarkably in Germany. From 40 per year in the Eighties down to six last year. That's 34 children rescued.
Slashdot Mirror
Network IPs are clustered in so called subnets, slices from the cake which contains all possible IP addresses. To have two IPs talking together, you have to route the information between them. This is done by having large tables in every router, which tell you, which router handles which slices.
Every ISP which hands out IP addresses gets some of the slices. The IP addresses for the customers are then taken out of the slice and assigned to the customer. All routers know: Those slices are handled by this ISP, so this ISP's router is the one which gets the information intended for the IP addresses.
If you have many ISPs and lots of little slices, those tables containing the routes are getting bigger and bigger.
If everyone can take his assigned IP addresses to another ISP, the tables in the end have to contain an entry for each single possible IP address. This means: Tables of about 4 billion (2^32) entries. So every router on the Internet has to be fitted with at least the capacity to store a table of 8billion entries (the single IP and the IP of the router handling the IP), and because each IP is 4 bytes long, this means: 32GByte will be the minimal memory required for an Internet Backbone router. Just to handle the table. No one wants to pay for this.
The system with the subnets (slices) of grouped together IP addresses was invented to prevent exactly this. But this becomes futile as soon as the judges decide that single IP addresses are to be taken out of the slices and moved arbitrarily to other subnets.
Ironically it has been proven that contests like the ACM programming contest teach people to code better and with less errors. Why? Debugging takes time.
So a good strategy to come up fast with a good enough solution is to introduce less errors from the beginning.
The security flaws are programming errors like any other error too. They just don't get that easily detected, because in a closed environment there are no malicious intend or out of control running computers firing incorrect messages. If you want your programmers to come up with less security flaws, teach them to get it right the first time. And you teach it, if you have them do little program jobs in very short time.
Unfortunately in a commercial environment you don't have lots of little jobs, you have large projects with complex interdependencies. So you can't train them on the job. You have to have workshops where they can excercise with those little jobs to increase their ability to fastly recognize the pattern of the job, find the correct solution and see the potential flaws and avoid them.
Yes, there are 13 intervalls to the base tone.
But you forgot to count the intervals between the other tones.
Not really. Only the association with a small nearly-lifeform is new. "virus" itself just means "slime" or "poison" in the old Latin.
The plural form for virus is virus, with the accent on the last syllable. Same as in casus, sinus, bonus and status. So both viruses and virii are just made up plural forms, which are false from a latin point of view.
You can charge money. You just have to provide the sourcecode. See the GNU FAQ. You can't change the license because you got other people's work with this license and THEY have to agree to the change.
Not until software patents are valid in Germany. There is still a certain way to go. Of course Microsoft could stop the distribution in the U.S. by legal means, but SoftMakers market right now is Germany, and they are slowly expanding to the E.U.
In this case the question is simply wrong. SoftMaker is around longer than most software companies. I remember the first SoftMaker adverts in a PC magazine in 1987, where they announced their TextMaker for 149,- DM (Deutschmark), which was a 5th of the usual price for a text processing software at the time. Germany had always several small office productivity companies, and one of them brought us on the road to OpenOffice (StarDivision, now bought by SUN), and SoftMaker is also still alive and kicking, working from the beginning with a "sell cheap, sell enough" model for their software.
They survived all the storms of time by getting large contracts with public administrations like towns and counties. And there they probably got most of their bugreports from, because a town administration can be sure to get lots of quite strange documents, in content and in form.
You could use a different approach. Consider a geometrical inversion of the world at the surface of the earth, thus the center of the earth gets mapped to infinity, by setting the radius of the earth to 1 and mapping every vector of the length d to a certain point A to the vector in the same direction, but of 1/d length, thus pointing to A'.
For instance the moon is about 50 times the radius of the earth away, so his image would be projected somewhere at 1/50 of the earth's radius, or just 85mls from the center of the earth. You can use other scaling functions but you will always end with a similar discrepancy. If you use 1/sqrt(d), A' will be somewhere at about 700mls from the center of the earth... still far away from everything we reached until now.
There have been men on the moon, but no one deeper than 8mls from the earth's surface. Basicly we barely have scratched the surface of the earth yet, with even the deepest holes ever drilled lurking somewhere at the 7mls point (don't have the current number right here).
On the other hand: All parasites, virii and bacteria in this pool are completely adapted to the lifeforms in this pool for millions of years and thus probably completely unable to cope with lifefroms from the outside. Ergo: No infection, because of far reaching incompatibility.
It is technically no splitting of the atom, it's just a changing of the nucleus by adding a proton or a neutron. Even though this is a change of the chemical properties, both the atom cores have nearly the same weight (+1). Same is to be said for the Rutherford experiments, where atom nuclei were bombarded by alpha radiation (Helium nuclei). In this case you even change the mass number of the targeted core (the number of baryons) by four, and you even have at first an addition of mass and then a second reaction to get the new core into a stable state (mostly by sending out beta radiation, sometimes also neutron or proton radiation).
Ernest Rutherford is thus recognized as the person to first demonstrate the change of atom cores. John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton were the first to use protons, which are quite easy to generate (they are basicly positively charged Hydrogenium or Hydrogenium nuclei).
Enrico Fermi got interested in those experiments and was using neutrons because he hoped that neutrons would be easier to add to the core, because they don't get rejected by the positive charge of the atom core. On the other hand you can't get neutron radiation that easily, you need radioactive elements which send out neutrons during their reaction.
The big breakthrough for Otto Hahn, Lise Meitner and Fritz Strassmann was to realize that neutrons don't just get added to the atom cores, but they cause the cores to swing and in this process to split into two about equal sized smaller cores. And Otto Hahn got the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for exactly this: To discover the splitting of the atom.
It is not only factual incorrect for the british pint, it is also incorrect for the Prussian pound, which was created to help the people to mentally convert to the metric system. The american pound is about 455g, which is quite close to half a Kilogram, so the Prussian State created the Tax pound as being 500g or exactly half a Kilogram. Thus the people were able to easily estimate how much a given weight in Kilogram would weigh in their hands, by just doubling the number.
Until now you see the results in Germany: Coffee is sold mostly in 500g packets, the usual size of a piece of butter is commonly referred to as "half a pound", and nearly every baker knows what I am talking of if I ask for a "four pound bread". Interestingly the pound is used only for food, and it is only used verbal, no one would ever write it on a piece of paper.
Oops... the last paragraph was about Lise Meitner being the first woman to get a Doctor's Degree in Physics from University of Vienna.
There have been other women with a doctor's degree from UoV before, but not in Physics, and there have been other woman with a doctor's degree in Physics from other universities though.
The first country in which a controlled split of an atom took place was Italy, and it was performed by Enrico Fermi (yes, the same Mr. Fermi) in 1934. Ironically Enrico Fermi at first didn't think about a split, he rather assumed, that the neutrons he was sending to Uranium were added to the Uranium cores, and he were creating Transuranium atoms.
Otto Hahn, Lise Meitner and Fritz Strassmann were continuing those experiments in the following years and were proving chemically, that indeed there were new cores produced by shooting neutrons on Uranium. But the physical results (density et.al.) didn't fit the expectations for Transuranium. In 1937 Lise Meitner, who was physicist, found the right explanation and concluded that the neutron had rather split the atom core instead of being added to it.
Mr. Hahn in lieu for the whole group got the Chemistry Nobel prize in 1944 for this achievement. Lise Meitner should have been awarded the Physics Nobel prize though, which never happened.
Enrico Fermi, after being exiled to the U.S. was starting a fission reactor project in 1942 in the basement of a stadium and invented the carbon-water moderated reactor.
I remember to have read in an Otto Hahn biography, that the idea to explain the phenomenom as split of atoms has been suggested before 1937 in a conference, where Otto Hahn was presenting his results as proof for creating Transuranium, but the scientist, being a woman from Yugoslavia, didn't have enough credit with the audience.
(There is another prominent case of mistrusting women in science in the first half of the 20th century: When Lise Meitner was the first woman who got awarded her Doctor's degree from the University of Vienna, it was anounced in the local newspapers as a thesis about "Problems in cosmetic physics". Indeed she wrote her thesis about "Problems in cosmic physics".)
You are just lighting the one side of the medal.
There is as always another side: There are real faults in the system, which can't be fixed, because the fix is equivalent to breaking an application, which was working around the fault in a murky way. There were design mistakes you can't fix, because there are applications which expect exactly this misdesigned behaviour. There were books out there talking about some "hidden features", which were never to be exposed to the developpers, but the developpers found out and some started coding with those "hidden features". Now you can't remove them anymore, even though they made only sense for a special environment present at the moment of their design, and they should have been hidden forever behind the official API.
There is only one way to get out of this mess: Start anew. Screw those people who were trying to be clever. Define a stable subset of used API routines you know are quite bug free, useful and abstract enough to live along some architectural changes. Tell everyone that outside this API nothing is supported. It may be time for Windows developpers to learn how to write portable code.
The world of the 8086 based PC as defined by IBM and evolved from there was always about being "more or less compatible". I remember the articles in the computer mags of the Mid-80ies being full of compatibility tests for the IBM clones and awarding points for supporting even obscure utilities and games.
It was always a balance between keeping to the official interfaces and produce slow, kludgy software, which was assured to run on the next generation of PCs too, and to use nonofficial but common features, which made the life easier, saved on processor cycles, allowed for elegant code, but broke with a slight change in the underlying architecture. Most programmers were even able to write kludgy, slow applications by using nonofficial features, and maybe it's time to have a more Darwinian rule around: Adapt or die. The environment is changing.
I know there are lots of people out there, who have invested huge sums of money or time or sweat in software, that is now about to break with the installation of SP2. I know that those people will be pissed of. But they can run their legacy application on their current system, and they are not forced to change it. They just have to make sure it has a welldefined and controlled interface to the world out there, maybe transferring data only via CD-ROM or having the access to the systems heavily guarded by firewalls or whatever. It's basicly the same that happens to the old database applications running on old S/370 somewhere.
But there are more people pissed of by the security lapses aboundant, by strange and illogical designs in the API, and by the loss of money if something breaks because of the faults. So who do you want to please? The people with the legacy applications, who can't or won't upgrade, or the people dealing everyday with the problems arising from old legacy bugs and holes, which can't be fixed?
Easily correctable: Count the 200 votes, and you are done. The significant advantage for paper ballots: Errors ARE correctable.
Voter intimidation that influences the outcome of a paper ballot election also influences a voting machine election. So there is no principal advantage for either. All-postal votes are not the same than paper ballot votes cast in a voting office. There is indeed a certain possibility to commit fraud in voting if you have access to the postal service and thus can get your hand on postal votes. But this is something you can't help either with voting machines. People who cast postal votes are not present at voting day.
In all election I ever took part, casting votes early or via postal service was strongly disencouraged for exactly this reason: You can't check the whole voting process anymore. It's the same reason I strongly disencourage the usage of technology you can't check with your eyes.
Isn't it cool? You can actually LOOK at the voting ballots, if they seem suspicious to you. Normally the counting is done in the local voting office, so paper ballots are counted before they get somewhere, so the local residents can have a look at the count itself, if they want. Then the counted votes get resealed and sent to the central counting place, where the counting starts again. Double bookkeeping, you could say.
So both candidates got the same number of votes. It happens. Even with modern technology. Deal with it. Recounts are there to check the result if there is any doubt. If the result says: Tied then maybe this was the outcome of the election?
There is a working alternative.
It's called pen and paper.
It works. It leaves a paper trail for later recounts.
It can be observed by everyone who is interested in the whole process, from printing the ballots to handing out the ballots, from getting the ballots back and counting them, from sealing the voting box to bringing it at the central voting office for recount, thus minimizing the possibility of rigging the election.
It keeps the single vote anonymous while at the same moment make every vote count. It keeps the voting and counting process at a speed a human eye can watch it and thus it's the most secure thing against voting fraud.
There is nothing wrong with voting per paper and pen. People not able to handle paper and pen have to get special support with all the other voting systems too. And you can easily design a voting machine that just pens the right point on the ballot for them. It's as complicated than a stancing machine with levers, a touchscreen or a device for people who can't see or read the ballot (noting wrong with Braille script on the voting ballot at all).
I guess, .NET was just a result of the attempt to enhance VBscript in the suggested way. Microsoft noticed then that they had to generate a completely new sandbox concept to add at least a little security to VBscript, and when they were pondering about the sandbox, they surely also thought about what else the sandbox could do.
.NET. Because this is basicly the container for all the scriptings, objects and programs, which talk via a defined interface to the underlying system. Basicly it is like a HAL as WinNT introduced to have an abstract access to the underlying machine (Hardware Abstraction Layer), it is a OSAL (Operating System Abstraction Layer). This became necessary because until then the Abstraction Layer laid on the operating system, the Microsoft Foundation Classes, proved to become more and more unmaintainable for Microsoft, and the different small abstraction layers by the different dialects of VBA were screaming for unification. .NET is more or less the result of trying to revamp the whole development environment on Microsoft's operating systems. It was probably born out of the problems arising in further developing and maintaining MFC, enhancing VBscript, securing the Windows Scripting Host, advancing VBA and countering Java (which for the first time proved to be a successfull abstraction model for the underlying operating system, all other attempts before were limited in their reach).
So in the end they came to
The Dr.rer.net (Doctorus rerum naturae) he got from the University of Constance. And this university has written down in their regulariae, that a Dr. can be removed, if the person who got the title awarded, proved itself unworthy to have the title. Mr. Schoen proved unworthy in his scientific life, faking or completely making up results, erasing all evidence (There is no raw data available from his experiments, he erased it 'because space was running out on his computer') and knowingly publishing false results.
The answer is yes for Germans.
They are called Bundeslaender in Germany. While most of the northern Bundeslaender are of artificial nature (a result of the redrawing of Germany's map after WW II) and were mostly designed to abolish the old prussian state, the southern states follow old, traditional borders. After 1989, when the new german Bundeslaender were restated, there were some local votings which state the local people wanted to belong to, which made the local borders follow old tribal lines.
Thuringia was founded in 534, that is now 1470 years ago, and the current state of Thuringia is quite close to the old tribe territory of the Thuringians long ago. Bavaria even has a quite sophisticated informal system to ensure, that the three different tribes (Bavarians, Frankonians and Suabians) are equally represented in the different institutions.
In Germany we have even a second people, the Sorbs, which have their own central authority. Sorbs speak their own languages (three different ones), which aren't related to German at all (they are slavic languages, related to Polish and Czech), have bilingual street signs and a right to constitute themselves in the constitutions of both Brandenburg and Saxonia, where they live.
The Frisians in the Northwest have similar rights, but they are living not only in Germany, but also in the Netherlands. The danish people in North Germany are a national minority, so called because there is a danish nation (Danmark), but they aren't under danish juristiction. They have the right to be represented in the Landtag (local parliament) of Schleswig-Holstein with at least a representative. For the South Schleswig Electoral Association, their political group, there is no 5% minority block, like for all other political parties.
The main difference between Iraq and Germany at the moment is, that Germany has a working central government, so there is someone actually representing Germany to the world. If I were in Iraq right now, with a weak provisionally council without real executive power, I would also feel better represented by a local leader who I happen to know, and who I may be related to by either a common ancestry or by a common set of believes. It doesn't mean that Iraq is in any way "tribal", it just means that it lacks a central authority that is accepted through the country.
3/4 of all Germany identify themselves with a tribe (bavarian, hassian, suabian, saxon...) German language is one of the most diffentiated by tribal traditions. It's called dialect. There are sometimes stories in the local news when the local youth was again beating someone up for talking the wrong dialect. In a recent surview Bavarian won the crown for being the most erotic of all german dialects, with churpalatian coming in last.
It's called "tribal" in the american news. It's called local patriotism in Germany.
This is simply wrong. When North America was inhabited by tribes, and Europe was a patchwork of single tribal and feudal micro states each fighting each other, the Arab world was interconnected with a common language, a common administration system and a common law. Far away from the "tribal structure" you are thinking of. Of course there were different states, and they waged war against each other. Just like the Europeans fighted each other (and did it until recently, and the Kosovo is still at a civil war), and the U.S. was in a long standing feud with Mexico.
Ethnic, religious or nationalist conflicts are abundant even in todays oh so civilized western democraties. Think of the Basques in North Spain, the anglo-irish conflict in North Ireland, or the bashing of all things french in the U.S. (and vice versa the official loathing of everything considered american in France.)
The arab world is not much different in this regard. There are ethnic minorities in the mainly arab states (berbers, kurds, turks...), there are different interpretations of Islam (Sunni and Shiia as the most prominent, Ismaelites and other smaller sects). There are non arab islamic states, which get always mixed into the arab soup in western news (Iran for instance is partly persian in the south and turk [asari] in the north, with kurds spread everywhere. So it is not even an arab country at all.) The largest islamic country in the world is not even in the Middle East. Indonesia is located in the Southeast asian archipel.
But to call this a "tribal system" is just an offspring of a theory of an own superiority theory we should abandon as soon as possible, because it doesn't help us in any way. The state of the arabian world is quite similar today to the state of the western world at the begin of the 20th century: Old, dying monarchies, some quite questionable democracies, civil wars either boiling or going on under the surface. The western world managed to kill more than 100 Mio people in the conflicts between 1850 and 1950. Compared with this achievement the arabian world is a place of piece and security.
Because I learned Instant Messaging on UNIX (way back in 1990 on HP-UX 7.*), I am always using Instant Messaging from UNIX. Even if I sit at a windows machine, for Instant Messaging I am sshing out to a FreeBSD box and use the client there.
Why? Because of screen(1). I just let my client running and check in later for messages coming in in my absence. I am used to this. I like it this way. This is how Instant Messaging works for me.
As a matter of fact, I have children. And my stomach would twist if I got to know that they were abused and their photos posted. But my stomach would be rotating if the police, instead of prosecuting the involved parties, is busily updating the webfilters.
One of the most important facts is: The child abuse was already done, when the pictures got posted. With the open web, potentially everyone can look into it and notice it. I don't want child abuse happen to anyone... But it being back in the dark rooms no one has access to is the worst. Bring it to light, so we know, there is a problem out there, and we can do something about. If it gets blocked, then it goes on unnotified.
Fact is: Since pictures of abused childs are aviable on the web, the number of childs killed in abuses has dropped remarkably in Germany. From 40 per year in the Eighties down to six last year. That's 34 children rescued.