Do you get tired of the trekkies?
on
Ask William Shatner
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I was in Vegas during a convention (unrelated to Star Trek) when I saw the oddest assortment of people coming out of an adjoining conference hall... Pointy ears, green faces, goofy face grooves (you know the sort), and I knew immediately who and what they were about. To my astonishment, I saw you signing autographs at the front while peering curiously through the door. You didn't look very happy as a gapped toothed fem-nerd asked you a bunch of questions in a staccato barrage.
Are you happy about the whole trekky thing, or is something you just endure?
I guess you've never been forced to sit next to the obsessive compulsive yacker yet.
I once had the misfortune of sitting between a nicotine kamakazi (obsessive chain smoker) and a flatulant gabber on a long flight to Germany. I couldn't tell what was worse, stale pre-breathed smoke from a raving soap opera afficianado, or the green, fetid brapting from an obese nose picker whose interests ranged from public policy (child support) to culinary skills (looked so intensely at my caustic airline fare, that I gave it to her in self defense).
I figure having the same sort of person next to me yacking on the cell phone might not be quite as bad as having them focused on me.
I never, ever, go on an airplane without headphones, strong pepermint breathmints (used defensively since they mask other peoples odors effectively), and a good fat novel. Don't even think about taking a laptop out without getting a bunch of questions about your occupation and requests for computer tips.
If I am forced to work on the plane, I always inform the infobegger, of my rates and office hours. Heck if lawyers can do it, why can't I?
The truth is, there are many times I would have loved to be talking to ANYONE but the person on my left or right, and a cell phone would have been good at those moments, even if I was only pretending to talk to somebody, so the drooling troll next to me would leave me out of thier universe.
Patent law has a condition which makes this whole thing somewhat moot: If the holder of a patent does not protect it, they simply lose it. JPEG has been implemented by companies too numerous to mention without a peep from the patent holder, and a judge will ask the plaintiff what, if anything, they did to protect their rights.
Even if the patent was a "submarine" patent, the enforcement of the patent is still the responsibility of the patent holder, as supported by patent law.
In all likelyhood, somebody in the holder's organization inventoried the currently held IP and found this gem. To prove "prior art" the defendant(s) of any case should cite the various browsers, apps, other digital artifacts and hope the judge isn't a total luddite.
The term 3rd world is not a form of slander or ridicule in the strictest sense, it merely denotes those regions discovered after the "New World" (eg: 2nd World), by the European powers of the World (1st World). In typical fashion, things that have been around for a long time, get the assignation when the were rediscovered by European and New World colonialists, and exploited for economic purposes.
So get to it, you 3rd world countries and go about discovering the 4th world to keep the trend going in full history recursion.
There's the rub. The distinction between criminal and civil case validity is one which should never exist. According to the constitution innocence is assumed regardless of context. The legal pretext used for this distiction is based on lax precidence and certainly not on constitutional law.
Guilt in any case should always be proven beyond doubt, and not be subject to.
The following applies to ANY firm which uses threats to gain audit access:
Allowing these sort of guys access to your facility to do an audit is problematic, at best, financial suicide, at worst. It's merely a shakedown linked to future information gathering. If they get into your site and install all sundry software on your machines, the time between installation and lawsuit will likely be only as long as it takes for them to find a freindly judge.
If I went to your house and insisted on putting a camera in your bedroom, I think you would have some very choice words for me. Use those same words with these folks and all will be well...
Re:One teensy weensy problem though...
on
Lunar Power
·
· Score: 1
It is this single word response which is so used by the true morons among use. Having nothing truly productive to say they merely prove their own stupidity by using the crass and self delfating term "Idiot"
Same to you bucko!
One teensy weensy problem though...
on
Lunar Power
·
· Score: 1
Let's say you have 13,000 terrawatts coming from the moon, in the form of an energy beam to some location on Earth, like a power antenna farm or something similar. Wouldn't having an humungous beam of microwaves or laser light be sorta counter productive, seeing how it would have to punch through the atmosphere somewhere and most likely near the ecliptic where we have all of those nice geostats?
I can see the headlines now: ...and now on CNN, an update today on...fzzzt
What we need is a theme park where bad mistakes in judgment are generally fatal. For instance, in the grenade throwing attraction, throwing the pin instead of the grenade, results in a bad-things-happen sort of situation.
Sounds like a natural selection filter. Buy game, bcome addicted, stupidly ignore life, punch out, end of story. Wonder where he thinks he is going to end up? Neriak maybe? Some would say the plane of fire... Dibs on his stuff.
Trees have been doing for a long time, just on a smaller scale. They may actually have to adopt a tiered design with multiple orbital nodes in geostat each connected at lower and higher points from the orbital node. This way the center of mass is always on-orbit, while lunar tidal forces (actually quite small even for an object this size), are laterally compensated for. The only serious problem I see is the longitudal drift caused by the moon.
It can be built in place by adding from the orbital node up and down. Using small counterweights at each end, the ballance could be kept (though what keeps them from orbitting faster at the bottom and slower at the top escapes me...)
High voltage problems? Use insulators every kilometer or so and use the differential to power the lift. I'm sure we have insulators with a much better dialectric than air.
NIMBY is no problem at the equator if you build in at sea. (what's a kilometer of water after 100000 Km of vacuum and air?)
You are right. Weight is the issue. If you could cast a strong enough gravitational shadow, you could put something outside of the atmosphere at which point you could add the required delta-v to get it into orbit.
The only problem is that the gravitons have to go somewhere, and if the disk is reflecting them down, special care has to be taken not to build launch facilities on faulty rock.
From what I have read about negative energy volumes in a cassimir gap, the weight of the disk should not change much since the negative regions (poosible millions of pockets in the composite) essantially reflect the gravitons like a mirror due to similar time reveral and elasticity. The mass of the disk should increase a small amount, but the temperature of the superconductor should also rise more rapidly.
Since gravitons are bosons there should be some sort of boson fermion relationship in energy, which might mean the productions of a new class of fermions not previously detected which interact strongly with gravity. Their decay products (if any) should interact with the mass of the disk to produce heat.
In a nutshell, this is the theory behind this: If photons are absorbed by matter to cast a shadow proportional to the absorption rate, then gravity must as well under the right circumstances. Problem is: matter generates gravity, hence a fancy way to mask gravitons (which by the way have never been detected) is needed to cast a weight reducing shadow.
If their claims are correct, the weight of an object will be reduced, but the mass itself will remain unchanged since that is a property of the object itself.
They beleive the cooper pairs in the superconductor are somehow responsible for this absorption, though I have a hard time believing this is true since amorphous superconductors have been spun up and exposed to large RF pumping with no effect.
My idea is it is more likely an effect brought about by the alternating conductive and insulating layers of the composit superconductor that might produce the effect, creating a pseudo cassimer barrier with a negative net energy ballance which could attenuate gravitational flux.
By the way: any attempt to measure the mass will not find any mass reduction, though the weight will decrease due to the gravitational shadow being cast by the device. I imagine that the 2% reduction is optimistic at best, since the umbra and penumbra of any gravitaional shadow would be rather acute, due to an inability to mask the gravitation coming from mass off-center to the device.
Then again it could be another cold fusion episode, though NASA lends it more credibility, though Pod could held and give them the real scoop.
Tell me, when have you started feeling inferior? What is this problem you have with the male sex organ? Have you always had this secret compulsion to become a homsexual?
That particullar factiod happens to be the basis of simple axiomatic truth: If you change the taxation rate the response in GNP is directly related. The reverse is not so.
Increases in economic performance create a short term increase in tax revenue, but if the tax rate is raised in response, then the economy will decline. The delay may be months, or even years depending on the affected sector, but the response always happens.
The economy follows three primary factors along with numerous secondary ones. 1) Productivity An ecomnomy which produces more needed goods has better spending power and hence a greater stability. 2) Available Assets Liquid and durable assets such as money and resources give the ecomomy momentum, another stibilizing factor. A region with a small money supply eventually resorts to bartering, and one with too much money gets inflation. Crop failure, mining accidents and other resource affecting elements fall into this category. 3) Friction Taxation, war, crime, and labor disputes, all contribute to instability since they are signs of social, political, and fiscal mismanagment. Though factors outside of a region's control might produce war may help the economy as long as the war does not affect available assets.
As far as a definition of money: Money is a symbolic replacement for an asset, which may be time, service, or substance. Period. It is used to replace heavier and more cumbersome things like houses and boats which are harder to carry arround in your pocket. The only role goverment should play with regards to money is the proper distribution of currency as the old becomes worn and tattered, as a common currency reduces barriers to trade between communities.
Taxation is ANTI-MONEY, not money. Since it effectively destroys the asset the money symbolizes without a proportionate reciprical asset in exchange.
Since the government is the entity responsible for manufacturing the money, and the people are the consumers of that money, then why does the government need the money back? Sounds rather inefficient to me.
Taxation is used to govern the rate at which an economy expands and contracts. Too much taxation and the economy contracts, too little and it expands. Rapid expansion creates inflation, while depression lies in the opposite direction. The government does not NEED the tax money, any more than cows NEED hamburgers.
Controlling the money supply is the better way to throttle the economy and has been shown over the last few decades. As a matter of fact, the ultra low interest rates are due to compensation for the ultra high tax rates. If we eliminated tax rates all together, and adjusted the cost of money to a more realistic value, the economy would be a great deal more stable since the primary instability in any ecomomy is fluctuations in taxation.
If you count all of the various direct and indirect taxes you pay in this country, (user fees, windfall taxes, etc) you will find Americans pay a much larger proportion of their income than the pundits will admit.
90% of the time spent in Congressional debate has been related to one tax or another, all on the taxpayers dime. Establishment of a budgetary system proportional to the economy and binding on congress, state, and local gonverments is the best way to go in my veiw.
If the amount of money they receive is directly proportional to economic health and stability of their region, the politians will be more motivated to selecting sound laws and policies as opposed to the parasitic ones they foist on us now.
It's not like we aren't taxed too much already. Taxation is just a form of subjugation. Cities which enact this sort of legislation, are going to lose their software industries, and a few elections to boot.
If you want to see what happens to a city which overtaxes its workers and businesses, look at Philadelphia. Whole sections of the city are empty of people since the jobs needed to occupy those homes are not available due to the presence of Tax and Spend operatchiks who drove the companies away.
Every city, without a single exception, that engaged in this punitive behaviour has found its revenues going down and its crime rate going up. This party responsible for this behaviour has nothing to lose since they are merely adding to their constituency by creating more miserable people who are likely to vote for them.
Taxing software development is just another form a class warfare enacted by the jealous upon the talented for the socialist robber barons to create homogenous misery.
If you really want to put a web server and compiler on something outside the fire wall do the following: 1) Buy another machine, call it OUTSIDE. 2) Put OUTSIDE between your DSL hub and the world. 3) Put the firewall between OUTSIDE and your intranet (call it INSIDE).
If you want to manage anything on OUTSIDE, just do a cable swap for temp access and then swap back to put it back in the world.
OUTSIDE will be exposed to hazards, but the firewall will keep INSIDE fairly secure, as long as you don't pull a boner and put code generating or executing resources on the firewall. Oh, and by golly, don't log into OUTSIDE when it is exposed to the world, there are venders who make perfectly good hardware switches which can switch single or multiple connections.
Gee, maybe somebody already said this, if so just ignore...
I can understand Steve's misdirected trust for John "Captain Crunch" Draper, but is there any network administrators out there who would stake their reputations, and possibly their jobs on a firewall written by this guy? Having reviewed code written by this man, I beleive I am accurate in saying he should stick to hardware design, and leave the software to the pros.
I have to admit, he is rather good at "networking", but not the sort used in telecommunications. Social engineering skills do not qualify a person for the hairy task of writing an unbreakable firewall, and unless his skills in the hard sciences have dramatically improved in the last 10 years, I figure there will be plenty of opportunities for buffer over-run and DOS attacks in the near future.
Prove me wrong John, put your source in the public domain, under the same open source scrutiny as OpenBSD, and if it is a secure (and not through obfuscation either) as you say it is, I'll sing your praises instead.
You can't tell me the current neilson box doesn't skew things. In order to get one and keep it, you can't have a life. At least with a PVR I can record the program and watch it when I want, and not when it plays.
If the PVR makers dropped the price on the low end models and advertised more to Joe Sixpack, the ratings yeild will still be crap.
Why would you want to do that? Replay TV could be a better neilson box than the peice of trash they use now. This would give the advertising companies an incentive to show even MORE of Brittney (though you might need an MRI to do that by now;>) Wouldn't it be nice to have a button on the remote which could give a thumbs up or down to the commercial as well, skipping any recording of it if you disliked it, as well as sending the approriate signal to the polyester person (PP) who thought it up?
I once worked for a company which makes computers named after fruit, and a "well respected" engineer on staff, took all of our design and test plans and wrote a book, for which this company paid him handsomly. He took credit for every line of it, but me and a freind counted only 15 lines of origonal text in a book of 280 pages.
The only good thing about it was the fact that one of the engineers was about to get fired so he wrote a bunch of bogus stuff, which was published right along with the rest...
Slashdot Mirror
I was in Vegas during a convention (unrelated to Star Trek) when I saw the oddest assortment of people coming out of an adjoining conference hall... Pointy ears, green faces, goofy face grooves (you know the sort), and I knew immediately who and what they were about. To my astonishment, I saw you signing autographs at the front while peering curiously through the door. You didn't look very happy as a gapped toothed fem-nerd asked you a bunch of questions in a staccato barrage.
Are you happy about the whole trekky thing, or is something you just endure?
I guess you've never been forced to sit next to the obsessive compulsive yacker yet.
I once had the misfortune of sitting between a nicotine kamakazi (obsessive chain smoker) and a flatulant gabber on a long flight to Germany. I couldn't tell what was worse, stale pre-breathed smoke from a raving soap opera afficianado, or the green, fetid brapting from an obese nose picker whose interests ranged from public policy (child support) to culinary skills (looked so intensely at my caustic airline fare, that I gave it to her in self defense).
I figure having the same sort of person next to me yacking on the cell phone might not be quite as bad as having them focused on me.
I never, ever, go on an airplane without headphones, strong pepermint breathmints (used defensively since they mask other peoples odors effectively), and a good fat novel. Don't even think about taking a laptop out without getting a bunch of questions about your occupation and requests for computer tips.
If I am forced to work on the plane, I always inform the infobegger, of my rates and office hours. Heck if lawyers can do it, why can't I?
The truth is, there are many times I would have loved to be talking to ANYONE but the person on my left or right, and a cell phone would have been good at those moments, even if I was only pretending to talk to somebody, so the drooling troll next to me would leave me out of thier universe.
Patent law has a condition which makes this whole thing somewhat moot:
If the holder of a patent does not protect it, they simply lose it. JPEG has been implemented by companies too numerous to mention without a peep from the patent holder, and a judge will ask the plaintiff what, if anything, they did to protect their rights.
Even if the patent was a "submarine" patent, the enforcement of the patent is still the responsibility of the patent holder, as supported by patent law.
In all likelyhood, somebody in the holder's organization inventoried the currently held IP and found this gem. To prove "prior art" the defendant(s) of any case should cite the various browsers, apps, other digital artifacts and hope the judge isn't a total luddite.
The term 3rd world is not a form of slander or ridicule in the strictest sense, it merely denotes those regions discovered after the "New World" (eg: 2nd World), by the European powers of the World (1st World). In typical fashion, things that have been around for a long time, get the assignation when the were rediscovered by European and New World colonialists, and exploited for economic purposes.
So get to it, you 3rd world countries and go about discovering the 4th world to keep the trend going in full history recursion.
There's the rub. The distinction between criminal and civil case validity is one which should never exist. According to the constitution innocence is assumed regardless of context. The legal pretext used for this distiction is based on lax precidence and certainly not on constitutional law.
Guilt in any case should always be proven beyond doubt, and not be subject to.
The following applies to ANY firm which uses threats to gain audit access:
Allowing these sort of guys access to your facility to do an audit is problematic, at best, financial suicide, at worst. It's merely a shakedown linked to future information gathering. If they get into your site and install all sundry software on your machines, the time between installation and lawsuit will likely be only as long as it takes for them to find a freindly judge.
If I went to your house and insisted on putting a camera in your bedroom, I think you would have some very choice words for me. Use those same words with these folks and all will be well...
It is this single word response which is so used by the true morons among use. Having nothing truly productive to say they merely prove their own stupidity by using the crass and self delfating term "Idiot"
Same to you bucko!
Let's say you have 13,000 terrawatts coming from the moon, in the form of an energy beam to some location on Earth, like a power antenna farm or something similar. Wouldn't having an humungous beam of microwaves or laser light be sorta counter productive, seeing how it would have to punch through the atmosphere somewhere and most likely near the ecliptic where we have all of those nice geostats?
I can see the headlines now:
...and now on CNN, an update today on...fzzzt
Sounds like a meaningful job for advertising execs and graffiti artists alike. Imagine if you will...
NEWSFLASH!...GIANT ASTEROID WILL HIT EARTH!!!...
later:
...BRANDX COLA SAVES DAY BY USING BRIGHTLY COLORED LOGO TO DEFLECT ASTEROID FROM IMPACT WITH EARTH...
even later:
...GRAFFITI TERRORIST HAS DEFACED BRANDX LOGO WITH DARK SKULL AND CROSSBONES, THUS NULLIFYING PREVIOUS RESCUE ATTEMPT...
woosh!!!
What we need is a theme park where bad mistakes in judgment are generally fatal. For instance, in the grenade throwing attraction, throwing the pin instead of the grenade, results in a bad-things-happen sort of situation.
Oops! We do this in war already.
Sounds like a natural selection filter. Buy game, bcome addicted, stupidly ignore life, punch out, end of story. Wonder where he thinks he is going to end up? Neriak maybe? Some would say the plane of fire...
Dibs on his stuff.
Trees have been doing for a long time, just on a smaller scale. They may actually have to adopt a tiered design with multiple orbital nodes in geostat each connected at lower and higher points from the orbital node. This way the center of mass is always on-orbit, while lunar tidal forces (actually quite small even for an object this size), are laterally compensated for. The only serious problem I see is the longitudal drift caused by the moon.
It can be built in place by adding from the orbital node up and down. Using small counterweights at each end, the ballance could be kept (though what keeps them from orbitting faster at the bottom and slower at the top escapes me...)
High voltage problems? Use insulators every kilometer or so and use the differential to power the lift. I'm sure we have insulators with a much better dialectric than air.
NIMBY is no problem at the equator if you build in at sea. (what's a kilometer of water after 100000 Km of vacuum and air?)
You are right. Weight is the issue. If you could cast a strong enough gravitational shadow, you could put something outside of the atmosphere at which point you could add the required delta-v to get it into orbit.
The only problem is that the gravitons have to go somewhere, and if the disk is reflecting them down, special care has to be taken not to build launch facilities on faulty rock.
From what I have read about negative energy volumes in a cassimir gap, the weight of the disk should not change much since the negative regions (poosible millions of pockets in the composite) essantially reflect the gravitons like a mirror due to similar time reveral and elasticity. The mass of the disk should increase a small amount, but the temperature of the superconductor should also rise more rapidly.
Since gravitons are bosons there should be some sort of boson fermion relationship in energy, which might mean the productions of a new class of fermions not previously detected which interact strongly with gravity. Their decay products (if any) should interact with the mass of the disk to produce heat.
In a nutshell, this is the theory behind this:
If photons are absorbed by matter to cast a shadow proportional to the absorption rate, then gravity must as well under the right circumstances. Problem is: matter generates gravity, hence a fancy way to mask gravitons (which by the way have never been detected) is needed to cast a weight reducing shadow.
If their claims are correct, the weight of an object will be reduced, but the mass itself will remain unchanged since that is a property of the object itself.
They beleive the cooper pairs in the superconductor are somehow responsible for this absorption, though I have a hard time believing this is true since amorphous superconductors have been spun up and exposed to large RF pumping with no effect.
My idea is it is more likely an effect brought about by the alternating conductive and insulating layers of the composit superconductor that might produce the effect, creating a pseudo cassimer barrier with a negative net energy ballance which could attenuate gravitational flux.
By the way: any attempt to measure the mass will not find any mass reduction, though the weight will decrease due to the gravitational shadow being cast by the device. I imagine that the 2% reduction is optimistic at best, since the umbra and penumbra of any gravitaional shadow would be rather acute, due to an inability to mask the gravitation coming from mass off-center to the device.
Then again it could be another cold fusion episode, though NASA lends it more credibility, though Pod could held and give them the real scoop.
Tell me, when have you started feeling inferior? What is this problem you have with the male sex organ? Have you always had this secret compulsion to become a homsexual?
That particullar factiod happens to be the basis of simple axiomatic truth: If you change the taxation rate the response in GNP is directly related. The reverse is not so.
Increases in economic performance create a short term increase in tax revenue, but if the tax rate is raised in response, then the economy will decline. The delay may be months, or even years depending on the affected sector, but the response always happens.
The economy follows three primary factors along with numerous secondary ones.
1) Productivity
An ecomnomy which produces more needed goods has better spending power and hence a greater stability.
2) Available Assets
Liquid and durable assets such as money and resources give the ecomomy momentum, another stibilizing factor. A region with a small money supply eventually resorts to bartering, and one with too much money gets inflation. Crop failure, mining accidents and other resource affecting elements fall into this category.
3) Friction
Taxation, war, crime, and labor disputes, all contribute to instability since they are signs of social, political, and fiscal mismanagment. Though factors outside of a region's control might produce war may help the economy as long as the war does not affect available assets.
As far as a definition of money:
Money is a symbolic replacement for an asset, which may be time, service, or substance. Period.
It is used to replace heavier and more cumbersome things like houses and boats which are harder to carry arround in your pocket. The only role goverment should play with regards to money is the proper distribution of currency as the old becomes worn and tattered, as a common currency reduces barriers to trade between communities.
Taxation is ANTI-MONEY, not money. Since it effectively destroys the asset the money symbolizes without a proportionate reciprical asset in exchange.
Wait till somebody finds the frequncy needed to stop a persons heart...
Nasty scenarios here.
Assassin puts ultrasonic version under the chair victim is to sit upon; Pushes button; Cancel Christmas.
Since the government is the entity responsible for manufacturing the money, and the people are the consumers of that money, then why does the government need the money back? Sounds rather inefficient to me.
Taxation is used to govern the rate at which an economy expands and contracts. Too much taxation and the economy contracts, too little and it expands. Rapid expansion creates inflation, while depression lies in the opposite direction. The government does not NEED the tax money, any more than cows NEED hamburgers.
Controlling the money supply is the better way to throttle the economy and has been shown over the last few decades. As a matter of fact, the ultra low interest rates are due to compensation for the ultra high tax rates. If we eliminated tax rates all together, and adjusted the cost of money to a more realistic value, the economy would be a great deal more stable since the primary instability in any ecomomy is fluctuations in taxation.
If you count all of the various direct and indirect taxes you pay in this country, (user fees, windfall taxes, etc) you will find Americans pay a much larger proportion of their income than the pundits will admit.
90% of the time spent in Congressional debate has been related to one tax or another, all on the taxpayers dime. Establishment of a budgetary system proportional to the economy and binding on congress, state, and local gonverments is the best way to go in my veiw.
If the amount of money they receive is directly proportional to economic health and stability of their region, the politians will be more motivated to selecting sound laws and policies as opposed to the parasitic ones they foist on us now.
It's not like we aren't taxed too much already. Taxation is just a form of subjugation. Cities which enact this sort of legislation, are going to lose their software industries, and a few elections to boot.
If you want to see what happens to a city which overtaxes its workers and businesses, look at Philadelphia. Whole sections of the city are empty of people since the jobs needed to occupy those homes are not available due to the presence of Tax and Spend operatchiks who drove the companies away.
Every city, without a single exception, that engaged in this punitive behaviour has found its revenues going down and its crime rate going up. This party responsible for this behaviour has nothing to lose since they are merely adding to their constituency by creating more miserable people who are likely to vote for them.
Taxing software development is just another form a class warfare enacted by the jealous upon the talented for the socialist robber barons to create homogenous misery.
If you really want to put a web server and compiler on something outside the fire wall do the following:
1) Buy another machine, call it OUTSIDE.
2) Put OUTSIDE between your DSL hub and the world.
3) Put the firewall between OUTSIDE and your intranet (call it INSIDE).
If you want to manage anything on OUTSIDE, just do a cable swap for temp access and then swap back to put it back in the world.
OUTSIDE will be exposed to hazards, but the firewall will keep INSIDE fairly secure, as long as you don't pull a boner and put code generating or executing resources on the firewall. Oh, and by golly, don't log into OUTSIDE when it is exposed to the world, there are venders who make perfectly good hardware switches which can switch single or multiple connections.
Gee, maybe somebody already said this, if so just ignore...
I can understand Steve's misdirected trust for John "Captain Crunch" Draper, but is there any network administrators out there who would stake their reputations, and possibly their jobs on a firewall written by this guy? Having reviewed code written by this man, I beleive I am accurate in saying he should stick to hardware design, and leave the software to the pros.
I have to admit, he is rather good at "networking", but not the sort used in telecommunications. Social engineering skills do not qualify a person for the hairy task of writing an unbreakable firewall, and unless his skills in the hard sciences have dramatically improved in the last 10 years, I figure there will be plenty of opportunities for buffer over-run and DOS attacks in the near future.
Prove me wrong John, put your source in the public domain, under the same open source scrutiny as OpenBSD, and if it is a secure (and not through obfuscation either) as you say it is, I'll sing your praises instead.
You can't tell me the current neilson box doesn't skew things. In order to get one and keep it, you can't have a life. At least with a PVR I can record the program and watch it when I want, and not when it plays.
If the PVR makers dropped the price on the low end models and advertised more to Joe Sixpack, the ratings yeild will still be crap.
Why would you want to do that? Replay TV could be a better neilson box than the peice of trash they use now. This would give the advertising companies an incentive to show even MORE of Brittney (though you might need an MRI to do that by now ;>) Wouldn't it be nice to have a button on the remote which could give a thumbs up or down to the commercial as well, skipping any recording of it if you disliked it, as well as sending the approriate signal to the polyester person (PP) who thought it up?
I once worked for a company which makes computers named after fruit, and a "well respected" engineer on staff, took all of our design and test plans and wrote a book, for which this company paid him handsomly. He took credit for every line of it, but me and a freind counted only 15 lines of origonal text in a book of 280 pages.
The only good thing about it was the fact that one of the engineers was about to get fired so he wrote a bunch of bogus stuff, which was published right along with the rest...