Just because you've patented it doesn't mean that you have to try to make money charging royalties for it. You can release your claims to it, just like if you own the copyright to something you can release/offer it for free. Believe it or not, commercials are copyrighted, and the copyright holders PAY to have others see it.
The clause is a simple deal to make sueing over the software more painful for the sueing party. It's not like most free software organizations can afford hordes of ravening attack lawyers.
The US is scared about many of the countries getting WMD because they don't necessarily care about their own continued existence more than the destruction of the USA. MAD worked with the USSR because, ultimately, the USSR cared less about the existence of the USA than their own existence.
There are factions in, say, Iran, that would happily give nukes to terrorist networks, even in the face of us possibly carpet-nuking the country. That's what we're scared of.
2. If you make the ballot human & computer readable (just like your account number on checks) you can verrify the ballot and not have to assume that the bar code the ballot machine produces matches the text.
No barcodes. Barcodes are not human readable, and there are plenty of ways to make unified human and machine readable printouts. This is necessary because otherwise they could just mess with the barcodes.
Because Scantron ballots are still human readable. Easily so. You take a random sample and manually count it. You can easily do this, for example, by selecting by lotto a number of precincts each election and handcounting it. Also, you don't just feed all the votes through the machine, you do it by precinct, then add them up by hand or calculator (and you triple verify that).
This is the main problem with pure-electronic voting systems. Somebody can deliberatly induce an alteration in the vote, and it'd be undetectable.
What I consider a good voting system:
1) Human countability 2) No seperation of the Human/machine portions. People can't read a barcode, and scanotrons can read bubbles, which humans can also read. 3) No confirmation of how person voted, and no removal of ballets from the polling station. This is to prevent voting coercion/purchase. 4) Constant oversight and random investigations/verification. All interested runners may place representatives in polling and counting stations. For any hand counting you have at least three people. A neutral counter, and each party involved has a verifier. If anybody sees something that's not right, they can raise the problem flag, and have it investigated, corrected, and if necessary, prosecuted. Have roving patrols. Have experts analyze the system for vulnerabilities, and correct any problems. Have your ballet boxes be tamper-proofed, and tamper-evident to the extent possible. Make them tough to open without the proper key/combo, and any tampering to be obvious.
This may seem to be alot to ask for, but to ask for less is like asking for your business to use microsoft access instead of a professional-grade database system for your mission critical needs.
As for cost goes, all you need is to print up ballets (which you need to do anyways), and printing gets cheap in bulk. For the scanners, use the school systems. No need to maintain seperate counting machines.
Oddly enough, most of the businesses that posted those signs ended up taking them down because they experienced a higher robbery/assault rate than businesses that didn't. Oddly enough, the criminals ignored the signs. Not to mention the loss of business.
If businesses get bad enough about banning/jamming/blocking cellphones, then people who want to use phones in those areas will have to choose whether to accept the blocking, or take their business elsewhere.
Some these jamming devices are rather simple, so a emp gun is more likely to fry cell phones, and given the complexity of the new generation of phones, probably rather permanently. Not to mention that the guns tend to be rather large. A short-range jammer doesn't have to be very big, it can be even smaller than a cell phone. All you need is a couple components and a battery. No need for all the other power draining equipment in a cell phone. The other point is that they can be rather hard to find. So you'd end up having have even more equipment to find the location of the jammer.
The work-around would involve getting higher-power phones (better antenna, higher max strength).
I've read that industrial hemp already has so much less THC than marijuana that you'd pretty much be dead of smoke inhalation before you'd get high.
I admit that the political pressures on the 'product' are such that you can't really get a good review of the benefits/costs. Kinda like how when I see cost estimates for nuclear power I ask how much of the costs are imposed because of how people are afraid of 'nuklear power'.
Aren't you forgetting that there are any number of OS's that don't need a writeable boot partition? Heck, you can do it with windows with some modifications. Just look at CD boot disks. Heck, look at the recent Linux CD's that boot the computer and have a browser/office system all on one CD.
The only reasons you need a writable boot partition is if it has temp/swap space there (poor design?), or updates. Even flash would last plenty long enough if the only changes to the partition is when you patch/update it.
As for swap/temp, like other posters said, if you're spending the money to do this, you'll spend the money to increase RAM enough so you don't need swap.
Even if it's a hostile place to be, the cost of boosting a new telescope up into an orbit is huge compared to just getting some replacement parts up there. Also, the gyroscopes that are used in the Hubble telescope are among the most sensitive ever made; but that doesn't mean that their performance won't be eclipsed by new technology in the near future.
You're forgetting that part of the cost of 'sending replacement parts' is sending a shuttle with astronauts to install them, which adds a huge weight penalty, potential loss of life, and training for said astronaughts to do the installation. And the satellite has to be built so that it can be serviced (weight and size penalty).
If you use a plain rocket to send up the satellite, all you have to boost is the weight of it. Much cheaper than the $500 million cost of just launching a shuttle.
You think that's great. There was a teacher in my college that wrote a book for his class with rip-out homework assignments/quizzes. And no photocopies were allowed! Talk about pure profiteering.
I also think that they'd come under some buoy clause (structure not designed to be manned). After all they were never MANNED, so you could say that they were never abandoned. They're remote sensors, thus, only the owner can 'salvage' them.
Actually, I'd say it's a good choice. After all, it does involve mathematical operations on large numbers. Many websites use it on their servers for sales, passwords, and account access, as well as other security concerns.
The computing power demands of one SSL connection might not be much, but when you get into hundreds of connections, this gets to be a major strain on hardware. If going 64 bit reduces the number of cycles needed to process a thread, it can reap major benefits.
This seems to be a better choice than gzip and MySQL, as gzip is often assosiated with fetching things from off-board storage (network/HD/something else slow), And MySQL is often memory limited as you're messing with massive amounts of data. So your left with doing complicated things to a data set that will fit in main memory. I think that what you're doing, and what kind of data you're working on, being a large factor in the results (if the data's 32bit or smaller, the 32bit app might take the lead, where if the data's larger than 32 bit, the 64bit app takes the lead).
Why anyone would want to live on a barren lifeless rock is beyond my comprehension. People have been programmed by Science Fiction to think that alien worlds are exotic and adventuring.
My point is that out of a population of billions, you'd be able to find eager and capable individuals willing to go. Make sure they understand the risks, responsabilities, and rewards in 'boot camp'. After all, their names will be up there with Armstrong.
Target recruing audience... couch potatos. Active people ho would be the MOST fit for colonization would be the most likely to go mad en route.
You wouldn't want to send couch potatos. They'd be useless by the time they got there. You actually need to activly exercies in space to maintain. As for the size of the transport, it'd depend. They'd have lots of support, and you could keep them busy on the way over.
If anything our training had us often seeking cover when just plain concealment would have done just as well and still allowed us a lane of fire.
This was the part he was talking about. When you loose the 'war training' aspect of the 'game', tactics that work in the game that would get you slaughtered in a real fight come into existance. You were sacrificing opportunities for firing lines where the cover was adequate for paintballs, but not for assault weapons. You still won because the other's had no idea about real tactics. They probably didn't prepare like you guys did (It's your life vs their fun).
Space Station: The ISS has turned out to be an explensive kludge. It might be salvagable, but there are all sorts of compatibility problems. Most of the science that was proposed for the station ended up being dropped, and the people manning the station mostly just do maintenance on said station.
The Shuttle: TWO out of seven shuttles have been lost. They're outrageously expensive to refurbish. It's time to find a better way. Personally, I believe that seperating the cargo/human parts of the shuttle into different missions, or a return to capsules, would be better than trying to launch the mass of the shuttle every time, then have to rebuild the shuttle before you launch it again. Launch a lab on some Saturn-5 equivalent, then when the orbit is stable, send the astornaughts up in a smaller 'space plane'. Designed right, you could quickly have a better space station than the ISS.
Hubble: See the Shuttle. Manned missions to refurbish the hubble are too risky in terms of human life, and we don't have the shuttles to both keep the ISS supplied and the Hubble repaired, among other things. There are a number of replacement telescopes, some orbital, some not. Just think about how easy it would be to set up a telescope on the moon, and the value of observations from it!
And who says that the Hubble is being given up? Or the decision is by the president? Part of the article:
From: rwo@gemini.astro.Virginia.EDU
Subject: Cancellation of SM4
Dear SOC:
You've just heard from Randy, and I just finished a long conversation with Dave Leckrone. O'Keefe decided, apparently almost purely for reasons of Shuttle safety, to cancel SM4. Budget was not a driving concern, nor was the new Bush space initiative. (Only the timing was related to the President's announcement.) Code S opposed the decision and had identified sufficient funding to cover the SM4 slippage.
Basically, the problem was that a Hubble Shuttle mission would require special safety procedures to be developed (inspection, etc) that would not be necessary for an ISS mission. (This point seems to be disputed by people in Houston, who were eager to do SM4.) Only ISS missions will be carried out in the future.
John Grunsfeld, the Chief Scientist, was apparently as surprised as most everybody else at the decision. Dave's first inkling was the email sent out by Rogier yesterday. This has been held very close to the vest.
The decision is such that it looks like there is no recourse.
We have been encouraged to think of other productive ways to use WFC3 and COS---maybe on MIDEX's, etc. Looking for bright ideas to salvage something from these excellent instruments.
If the President's initiative is approved, even in its first phase, there will be significant science involved, in which GSFC hopes to participate.
Despite our own fundamental disappointment, we were on the periphery of the project, and our main concern should be for those who spent the last six years of their careers working on it and doing such a beautiful job.
There are plenty of issues to work through, and we should still plan to hold our February SOC meeting.
Regretfully --- Bob
See? Canceled for safety concerns, and a new policy that the shuttles will only be doing ISS missions. And these comments are "flamebait" if you are a far-right whacko, kids. You have a pretty encompassing definition of 'far-right whacko' then.
On the other hand, it makes a valid point. Send a group of *volunteers*, who fully understand the consequences. The biggest cost is the return vehicle. We send supplies/more people there every 2 years. Eventually, they should be relativly self-sustaining. Getting hydroponic hothouses set up and working would be a major step.
For something this big, you can find highly qualified volunteers who will compete for the mission. The article even mentions the popularity of extreme sports that are very risky by nature, and that people of this type would be more than happy to sign up.
Or you could work like some power customers who get a discount for pulling their power from off peak times. During the slow times, you get full bandwidth, but when the email/web surfers come home, you get throttled back so they can happily check their stuff.
And the previous poster's point still applies. Each leader taken out has to be replaced, and finding SKILLED terrorists is more difficult than taking any random zealot. Admittedly, there is currently a number of skilled terrorists, but that's because we took so long to take out the training camps. Would September 11 still of happened if we had taken out UBL? After all, he was fairly rich, trained as an engineer, and charismatic(in the get others to do what I want way). Maybe, maybe not. If nothing else, you're going to have organizational problems every time you have to change leaders. New way and all that.
As far as 'Plenty of Replacements' goes, the idea that there are more to take the place of each slain terrorist depends on us pissing off the population that terrorists are drawn from faster than we kill off the terrorists. If we're surgical and thorough enough, the population will be 'go against the USA? Why? That'd only get me killed, and or my home bombed/invaded.' Currently in Iraq, the insurgents have mostly been eliminated. They've been replaced by outside terrorists who are pissing off the IRAQIES more than the americans are. Definitions: Insurgents are Iraqies who target USA/coalition forces, and are entitled to POW status. Terrorists target the people of Iraq more, and are mostly from another country. They are plain criminals.
As a possessor of a US passport, I will not say that it can't be forged, however, it would be extraordinarily difficult to forge.
a) It's a special form, available only at one facility. It'd be like getting ahold of US currency stock paper. Complete with holographs, watermarks, background printing and high-quality non-standard paper.
b) Color glossy printed image of the individual, printed by computer, so the images can very easily be in a database. Some pages are glossy, some aren't.
c) The passport has a serial number, and is machine-readable. So when they scan the passport, it would be easy to access a database and pull up the name and face of the person on the passport. So even copying the machine code from a valid passport would cause alarms with any half-way alert customs official.
There are a number of other features, but I don't have it on me. It's easier to get a fake social security card, then work your way up to a passport.
The sad things people do because of lousy exchange policies. Most stores today keep track of returns, so he wouldn't be able to return the unopened one (his receipt notes it as a defective exchange).
The no-return, no try before you buy policy is why I don't buy many music CD's.
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Just because you've patented it doesn't mean that you have to try to make money charging royalties for it. You can release your claims to it, just like if you own the copyright to something you can release/offer it for free. Believe it or not, commercials are copyrighted, and the copyright holders PAY to have others see it.
The clause is a simple deal to make sueing over the software more painful for the sueing party. It's not like most free software organizations can afford hordes of ravening attack lawyers.
Because the ISS isn't designed for the constant thrust that would be needed. Also, it isn't shielded as heavily as it would need to be.
The US is scared about many of the countries getting WMD because they don't necessarily care about their own continued existence more than the destruction of the USA. MAD worked with the USSR because, ultimately, the USSR cared less about the existence of the USA than their own existence.
There are factions in, say, Iran, that would happily give nukes to terrorist networks, even in the face of us possibly carpet-nuking the country. That's what we're scared of.
2. If you make the ballot human & computer readable (just like your account number on checks) you can verrify the ballot and not have to assume that the bar code the ballot machine produces matches the text.
No barcodes. Barcodes are not human readable, and there are plenty of ways to make unified human and machine readable printouts. This is necessary because otherwise they could just mess with the barcodes.
Because Scantron ballots are still human readable. Easily so. You take a random sample and manually count it. You can easily do this, for example, by selecting by lotto a number of precincts each election and handcounting it. Also, you don't just feed all the votes through the machine, you do it by precinct, then add them up by hand or calculator (and you triple verify that).
This is the main problem with pure-electronic voting systems. Somebody can deliberatly induce an alteration in the vote, and it'd be undetectable.
What I consider a good voting system:
1) Human countability
2) No seperation of the Human/machine portions. People can't read a barcode, and scanotrons can read bubbles, which humans can also read.
3) No confirmation of how person voted, and no removal of ballets from the polling station. This is to prevent voting coercion/purchase.
4) Constant oversight and random investigations/verification. All interested runners may place representatives in polling and counting stations. For any hand counting you have at least three people. A neutral counter, and each party involved has a verifier. If anybody sees something that's not right, they can raise the problem flag, and have it investigated, corrected, and if necessary, prosecuted. Have roving patrols. Have experts analyze the system for vulnerabilities, and correct any problems. Have your ballet boxes be tamper-proofed, and tamper-evident to the extent possible. Make them tough to open without the proper key/combo, and any tampering to be obvious.
This may seem to be alot to ask for, but to ask for less is like asking for your business to use microsoft access instead of a professional-grade database system for your mission critical needs.
As for cost goes, all you need is to print up ballets (which you need to do anyways), and printing gets cheap in bulk. For the scanners, use the school systems. No need to maintain seperate counting machines.
Oddly enough, most of the businesses that posted those signs ended up taking them down because they experienced a higher robbery/assault rate than businesses that didn't. Oddly enough, the criminals ignored the signs. Not to mention the loss of business.
If businesses get bad enough about banning/jamming/blocking cellphones, then people who want to use phones in those areas will have to choose whether to accept the blocking, or take their business elsewhere.
Some these jamming devices are rather simple, so a emp gun is more likely to fry cell phones, and given the complexity of the new generation of phones, probably rather permanently. Not to mention that the guns tend to be rather large. A short-range jammer doesn't have to be very big, it can be even smaller than a cell phone. All you need is a couple components and a battery. No need for all the other power draining equipment in a cell phone. The other point is that they can be rather hard to find. So you'd end up having have even more equipment to find the location of the jammer.
The work-around would involve getting higher-power phones (better antenna, higher max strength).
I've read that industrial hemp already has so much less THC than marijuana that you'd pretty much be dead of smoke inhalation before you'd get high.
I admit that the political pressures on the 'product' are such that you can't really get a good review of the benefits/costs. Kinda like how when I see cost estimates for nuclear power I ask how much of the costs are imposed because of how people are afraid of 'nuklear power'.
Aren't you forgetting that there are any number of OS's that don't need a writeable boot partition? Heck, you can do it with windows with some modifications. Just look at CD boot disks. Heck, look at the recent Linux CD's that boot the computer and have a browser/office system all on one CD.
The only reasons you need a writable boot partition is if it has temp/swap space there (poor design?), or updates. Even flash would last plenty long enough if the only changes to the partition is when you patch/update it.
As for swap/temp, like other posters said, if you're spending the money to do this, you'll spend the money to increase RAM enough so you don't need swap.
You're forgetting that part of the cost of 'sending replacement parts' is sending a shuttle with astronauts to install them, which adds a huge weight penalty, potential loss of life, and training for said astronaughts to do the installation. And the satellite has to be built so that it can be serviced (weight and size penalty).
If you use a plain rocket to send up the satellite, all you have to boost is the weight of it. Much cheaper than the $500 million cost of just launching a shuttle.
Nope, sorry. Cyanide is 5 times more poisonous than plutonium. Botulism is over a thousand times more deadly.
You think that's great. There was a teacher in my college that wrote a book for his class with rip-out homework assignments/quizzes. And no photocopies were allowed! Talk about pure profiteering.
I also think that they'd come under some buoy clause (structure not designed to be manned). After all they were never MANNED, so you could say that they were never abandoned. They're remote sensors, thus, only the owner can 'salvage' them.
OpenSSL might be kind of arbitrary
Actually, I'd say it's a good choice. After all, it does involve mathematical operations on large numbers. Many websites use it on their servers for sales, passwords, and account access, as well as other security concerns.
The computing power demands of one SSL connection might not be much, but when you get into hundreds of connections, this gets to be a major strain on hardware. If going 64 bit reduces the number of cycles needed to process a thread, it can reap major benefits.
This seems to be a better choice than gzip and MySQL, as gzip is often assosiated with fetching things from off-board storage (network/HD/something else slow), And MySQL is often memory limited as you're messing with massive amounts of data. So your left with doing complicated things to a data set that will fit in main memory. I think that what you're doing, and what kind of data you're working on, being a large factor in the results (if the data's 32bit or smaller, the 32bit app might take the lead, where if the data's larger than 32 bit, the 64bit app takes the lead).
Actually the turbines on an abrams can burn just about any liquid hydrocarbon.
Why anyone would want to live on a barren lifeless rock is beyond my comprehension. People have been programmed by Science Fiction to think that alien worlds are exotic and adventuring.
... couch potatos. Active people ho would be the MOST fit for colonization would be the most likely to go mad en route.
My point is that out of a population of billions, you'd be able to find eager and capable individuals willing to go. Make sure they understand the risks, responsabilities, and rewards in 'boot camp'. After all, their names will be up there with Armstrong.
Target recruing audience
You wouldn't want to send couch potatos. They'd be useless by the time they got there. You actually need to activly exercies in space to maintain. As for the size of the transport, it'd depend. They'd have lots of support, and you could keep them busy on the way over.
If anything our training had us often seeking cover when just plain concealment would have done just as well and still allowed us a lane of fire.
This was the part he was talking about. When you loose the 'war training' aspect of the 'game', tactics that work in the game that would get you slaughtered in a real fight come into existance. You were sacrificing opportunities for firing lines where the cover was adequate for paintballs, but not for assault weapons. You still won because the other's had no idea about real tactics. They probably didn't prepare like you guys did (It's your life vs their fun).
The Shuttle: TWO out of seven shuttles have been lost. They're outrageously expensive to refurbish. It's time to find a better way. Personally, I believe that seperating the cargo/human parts of the shuttle into different missions, or a return to capsules, would be better than trying to launch the mass of the shuttle every time, then have to rebuild the shuttle before you launch it again. Launch a lab on some Saturn-5 equivalent, then when the orbit is stable, send the astornaughts up in a smaller 'space plane'. Designed right, you could quickly have a better space station than the ISS.
Hubble: See the Shuttle. Manned missions to refurbish the hubble are too risky in terms of human life, and we don't have the shuttles to both keep the ISS supplied and the Hubble repaired, among other things. There are a number of replacement telescopes, some orbital, some not. Just think about how easy it would be to set up a telescope on the moon, and the value of observations from it!
And who says that the Hubble is being given up? Or the decision is by the president? Part of the article:
See? Canceled for safety concerns, and a new policy that the shuttles will only be doing ISS missions.
And these comments are "flamebait" if you are a far-right whacko, kids.
You have a pretty encompassing definition of 'far-right whacko' then.
On the other hand, it makes a valid point. Send a group of *volunteers*, who fully understand the consequences. The biggest cost is the return vehicle. We send supplies/more people there every 2 years. Eventually, they should be relativly self-sustaining. Getting hydroponic hothouses set up and working would be a major step.
For something this big, you can find highly qualified volunteers who will compete for the mission. The article even mentions the popularity of extreme sports that are very risky by nature, and that people of this type would be more than happy to sign up.
And think about the fumes from a felt tip in an extremely closed enviroment, for the problem with them.
Try reading this sentence, then think about the legality of banning books under this clause:
Seems pretty simple to me. The first part is an explanation, the second part the rule.
Or you could work like some power customers who get a discount for pulling their power from off peak times. During the slow times, you get full bandwidth, but when the email/web surfers come home, you get throttled back so they can happily check their stuff.
And the previous poster's point still applies. Each leader taken out has to be replaced, and finding SKILLED terrorists is more difficult than taking any random zealot. Admittedly, there is currently a number of skilled terrorists, but that's because we took so long to take out the training camps. Would September 11 still of happened if we had taken out UBL? After all, he was fairly rich, trained as an engineer, and charismatic(in the get others to do what I want way). Maybe, maybe not. If nothing else, you're going to have organizational problems every time you have to change leaders. New way and all that.
As far as 'Plenty of Replacements' goes, the idea that there are more to take the place of each slain terrorist depends on us pissing off the population that terrorists are drawn from faster than we kill off the terrorists. If we're surgical and thorough enough, the population will be 'go against the USA? Why? That'd only get me killed, and or my home bombed/invaded.' Currently in Iraq, the insurgents have mostly been eliminated. They've been replaced by outside terrorists who are pissing off the IRAQIES more than the americans are.
Definitions: Insurgents are Iraqies who target USA/coalition forces, and are entitled to POW status. Terrorists target the people of Iraq more, and are mostly from another country. They are plain criminals.
As a possessor of a US passport, I will not say that it can't be forged, however, it would be extraordinarily difficult to forge.
a) It's a special form, available only at one facility. It'd be like getting ahold of US currency stock paper. Complete with holographs, watermarks, background printing and high-quality non-standard paper.
b) Color glossy printed image of the individual, printed by computer, so the images can very easily be in a database. Some pages are glossy, some aren't.
c) The passport has a serial number, and is machine-readable. So when they scan the passport, it would be easy to access a database and pull up the name and face of the person on the passport. So even copying the machine code from a valid passport would cause alarms with any half-way alert customs official.
There are a number of other features, but I don't have it on me. It's easier to get a fake social security card, then work your way up to a passport.
The sad things people do because of lousy exchange policies. Most stores today keep track of returns, so he wouldn't be able to return the unopened one (his receipt notes it as a defective exchange).
The no-return, no try before you buy policy is why I don't buy many music CD's.