I think the order here is wrong. Michael Eisner makes more in one year than Michael Jordan did over the full term of his most generous contract. Sure, professional atheletes are overpaid. But they don't hold a candle to these CEOs who not only make more annually, but also have longer careers than atheletes.
Again, admitting my limited knowledge, the main effect is not induced current, but the "dionization" of the plate. Remember that a "valve" is a device that varies voltage by a static charge on a grid that "decelerates" the electrons flying from the filament to the anode. The photons from the EMP knock the electrons out of the grid and, effectively, "turn up" the amplifier (if it is an amplifier tube) or "unbias" the diode (if it is a diode tube). The field would come back, however.
As for these devices burning out tubes, I think it is unlikely, even if the voltage transient is VERY high. Why? Every proposed weapon desing I've seen produces a transient of very short duration. A very high voltage that lasts only milliseconds won't have much effect on a tube becuase the filament can't heat up that fast. You have to burn out the filament to destroy the tube.
This is unlike semiconductors, which are (in general) very susceptible to overvoltage, even of short duration, because high voltages break the molecular bonds that give the semiconductor its junction in the first place. Change the chemistry, make a semiconductor into an insulator. And the voltages required are not large. Tens of volts induced at the junction are enough for many CMOS devices. This is why people wear wrist straps when they work on delicate electronics.
You belt a vacuum tube device with 10,000 volts of static electricity (not an unusual amount for a sneaker-wearer crossing a carpet to build up) and basically nothing happens. Do the same with a semiconductor device and it is all over. That's the difference here.
The only EMP weapon with which I am familiar uses a shaped charge in a powerful eletromagnet to very rapidly compress the magentic field, building up a fairly massive RF burst. This burst is necessarily short in duration (since the explosion soon pulverizes the device). This can produce an effect at quite some distance very similar to a lightning strike. Very high voltages. But it doesn't last long.
So, my semi-informed opinion is that tube devices would be disrupted but not destroyed.
The point is fairly moot since vacuum tubes are hard to come by and most devices today use semiconductors, and EMP weapons are not enough reason to move away from such devices. There are countermeasures to E-Weapons. They're inconvenient, but they work. Vital military stuff is pretty well protected.
Civilian infrastructure? Not so much. Is this a potential threat in our "motivated nutcase" world? Yes, it is.
Whilst I admit I have only a ham radio/computer geek knowledge of EE, it seems to me that vacuum tube equipment would be disrupted by an EMP from a nuke or a E-weapon. The difference is the hardware would not be destroyed. But the pulse would mess with the plate voltage of a tube too. The disruption would be temporary, but it would still happen.
The problem with semiconductors is that high voltage transients actually destroy them.
I'm no solar scientist, but I don't think it is even remotely reasonable for anyone to say anything about the sun is "unprecedented." The percentage of the sun's life that human beings have been observing has to be less than 0.01%
Maybe everything we've seen up to now has been atypical and this represents a return to the norm.
Re:Hacking And Overclocking - What?
on
Hackers On Atkins
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Now here's someone to mod up!
I think this is exactly the right answer. No one "diet" fits all. It is universally agreed that increasing exercise (at least from the typical American computer programmer level -- totally inert) is good for you. Now, if you are obese, you need to change the way you eat.
When I was quite young, I balooned up to just shy of 300 pounds. I went on Weight Watchers and dropped wieght like a stone. I got down to 190 pounds. Over the next 15 years, I gained wieght steadily (inert programmer lifestyle) up to about 270 pounds. Less than my max, but I got back to where just standing up for an extended period would make me perspire.
That is just not right.
Back on Weight Watchers I went. But I didn't lose wieght. I stopped gaining, but I didn't lose. Any fluctuation I saw in the scale was not only within normal variance for water weight, but frankly within the accuracy of the scale.
Atkins worked for me. I'm down to 210 and losing weight slowly.
I feel good and I look good (well, better than my former walrus-self).
The point is that to lose wieght, you must go into ketosis. Diets vary on how often and for how long. The insight that I think Atkins has that the rest of the world hasn't quite caught on to is the effect of wildly oscillating blood sugar levels on the pacreas and on the habituation of cells to insulin. I think his insight that it is better to eat lower on the glycemic index than higher, and better yet to let the body find its glucose through the longer slower lypolitic reactions is his main acheivement.
I scold him, though, for not being a scientist. He made an industry out of it, and more power to him, there's no reason not to profit from a good idea, but he didn't do the science. His work amounts to a collection of anecdotes.
His book cites a vast amount of scattered research that tends to support his thesis, but he had an opportunity to use his patients as a source of research data, and he never bothered. Heck, he could have had med students do the hard work.
Fortunately, studies on this approach are underway. The data will be there. But it will be ten to fifteen years yet before the data are in on possible negative effects (cancer rates, kidney disease rates, etc.). There's data on how it is good for heart disease, diabetes, artery disease. But there are long-term questions about cancer, kidney disease, and stroke that are simply not known.
That annoys me.
However, the risk of premature death from heart disease is so much greater than all other health risks (apart from toboacco -- the number one killer), that it seems reasonable to trade a small increase in colon cancer risk for a huge risk of heart attack.
Still, I think the person who "discovers" something like this should feel obligated to do the science.
Of course, I'm no MD. I get the impression this is a common dividing line: Research doctor versus practicing doctor -- similar to the line between law professor and practicing lawyer. It seems academic medicine and practice medicine are often separated.
Still, it is sad that Dr. Atkins' data aren't useful for population studies.
There's a famous quote, wish I could remember who said it (someone leap in with attribution!) (and I'm quoting from memory, so I'm sure I'm misquoting...)
"It is axiomatic that every program contains at least one bug and can be reduced in size by at least one instruction, therefore, every computer program can be reduced to a single instruction which does not work."
There's the singularity on your asymptotic curve;-)
Ah. I misunderstood your point. You seemed to be saying that you both could not influence consumption nor regulation. You seemed to me to be counseling despair.
I also participate in government. I attend my precinct caucases (which has their own problems - notably entrenched powers), I write, and I vote.
But when I say don't buy these BIOSes, I'm not calling for a boycott per se. I'm suggesting that you buy machines that do not have this feature and that you counsel your less tech saavy friends to do the same. Products that don't sell don't get made. In fact, I think calling for a "boycott" or any other active consumer action is likely to backfire, since I think there are a large number of people who go out of their way to break boycotts.
The failures of DAT and disposable DVDs were not the result of boycotts. They were the marketplace in action. I'm just suggesting that we, as people who understand what is at stake, try to educate the market. I think people, once they understand the invasiveness of this technology, will actively avoid it.
I apologize for any offense my previous remarks may have given. I obviously misunderstood your intent.
I guess I just plain don't agree with the "I gave up hope and died, and it worked!" school of thought. We beat the divx "disposable" DVD. DAT as an audio medium died because of copy controls. Sure, there are bad laws, but companies listen to the marketplace or they cease to be companies. Give up hope and die if you'd like. I plan to listen, learn, decide, and speak.
And I *still* say I won't buy a machine with one of these BIOSes.
I'm well aware who make the BIOS's. My point is that you should vote with your dollars and recommend that others do the same. Educate the, as you so condescendingly put it, drooling masses. Tell your friends what this means. I didn't read anything here that said this feature would be in all BIOSes. If they do not sell while those without it *do* sell, I assure you, the product will go away.
The fatalism some people express on these issues amazes me. Yes, corporate power is going bananas, but you are the consumer. Yes, government is in the pockets of big business, but the forms of democracy are atill there. "The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing." said Edmund Burke. He's right.
And you're wrong about flying to Mac. If everyone did fly to Mac when DRM came to PCs, marketers would research why. They would find that this was the reason. Again, it would change.
Vote with your dollars. You have more power than you realize.
I recognize that the key to this is information. A lot of people do not know what this means. So tell them. Mention this casually whenever you talk to someone who is buying a PC. Explain it to them. You know about six degrees of separation, right? Either from mathematics or from the play, movie, or the Kevin Bacon game;-)? Well, I'd bet that everyone who owns a PC is less than six degrees from a geek who knows this issue. If we just tell our side of the story, the bulk of the market could shun this technology.
You may right, resistance may be futile. But not doing anything makes it certain. Tell your friends.
Metaprogramming can be a useful and time-saving technique. It can also really mess up maintenance and future refactoring of a project. The time saved one developer isn't a good measure of the utility of a technique.
When I first learned lex and yacc, I got tempted to turn every single useful C/C++ library into a scripting language. "Think how much time I could save!" I thought.
Well, while I still think developing an application specific language (to basicially make pseduocode functional) is an occasionally useful technique, what I found was that it usually made project transfer and maintenance more difficult and more expensive.
Using XML and XSLT to do the same thing as lex and yacc doesn't inherently add much. The exception would be the evolution of an industry standard DTD for, for example, common UI constructs. I can see value there. But rolling your own metaprogrammer strikes me as rarely of real benefit. The metaprogram becomes another thing that must be documented, explained, maintained, and transitioned. It adds something that may not be easy to integrate into a present or future automated build process.
I guess I'm coming down firmly on both sides here. My point is that the cost/benefit analysis for a single developer doesn't necessarily align well with the cost/benefit analysis for the project as a whole. I think we have all seen projects that are in "tool and library hell" where developers have included their favorite libraries and tools willy-nilly (a technical term I like very much -- so concrete, so precise) so that no one can actually get the project to build. The GnuCash project was like that for the longest time (and it is still a bit messy if you ask me).
Faster isn't always better or cheaper.
In other words, I have seen metaprogramming do more harm than good in my experience. And the few successes come when the metaprogrammed portion was well analyzed and understood, and a standard could be made that would apply to an entire enterprise and not merely to a single project. More often than not, the inclusion of metaprogramming became the first reason to rewrite an application -- no one wanted to figure out or maintain the metaprogram. So they chucked it.
Just don't buy it. Refuse. I believe in this so much that I'll live with my present collection of CPUs. Also consider adding your support to one of the number of free BIOS projects out there (OpenBIOS, LinuxBIOS, etc.).
These projects are at various levels of maturity (OpenBIOS seems to be just getting started, LinuxBIOS already boots Linux on a number of motherboards).
I'm going to say something here that will please M$ astroturfers and might displease the majority of the/. constituency.
This and the story yesterday about Longhorn delays could be bad news for us Linux/Free Software advocates. This could very well be evidence of the "new Microsoft committment to security."
The terribly security of MS's products has always been one of the most popular ways to advocate Free Software and to attack (yes, attack) MS software. I don't think this is a good advocacy strategy in the long run. Why? Because although this looks like more of the same old, it and the delay story could well be the result of a genuine effort to find and fix the flaws. We could soon be up against an opponent that is much more difficult to attack on this basis.
But even if this is not the case, gloating over the shoddiness and weakness of MS products is not the best sort of advocacy. I think the better approach is to play to our strengths. Cost and Freedom. These are the areas where Microsoft simply cannot compete. Sure, we stomp them on security now, but they really can fix that. We shouldn't work so hard on attacking them there. In fact, we shouldn't work on attacking them at all. Just educate on the financial and productivity advantages.
No, simply because I do not believe that any such monolithic group actually exists. "The open source community" is a coincidental intersection of interest between people who otherwise diverge vastly in interests, politics, and temperment.
I tend rather more to the philosophy espoused by Stallman and the FSF than to ESR's views. The key difference, to me, is that Stallman says: "This is what I think is right. I think you should think so too." while ESR seems to be presuming my faith and allegiance.
The world is full of people with messiah complexes. It is also full of people looking for a messiah to follow. I don't have a problem with either. What I have a problem with is the presumption of this particular person claiming that he speaks for me. The mere fact that I tend to agree with him doesn't give him the right to speak for me. In other words, agressive rhetoric with a strong point-of-view: no problem. That's the 1st Amendment, baby. Putting words in my mouth? I respectfully dissent. He's free to write that way. I'm just politely saying that, in my case and only my case, he goes too far if and only if he presumes my membership in the set of "his people."
He is an "open source" advocate. He has, by virtue of his work, earned the attention of a singificant number of well-informed people. To that extent he can presume his voice deserves attention. It is only when he teeters over into claiming to speak for some ill-defined people, and to do so with a possessive pronoun that I believe he exceeds himself.
This point has nothing to do with truth of his statements or the validity of his arguments. That can be debated through the traditional methods of public discourse. I am only disputing his ability to define "his people" and to be assured that, when he presumes to speak for them, he actually does.
Let me start by saying that I respect Mr. Raymond's acumen, accomplishments, and writing. His work is seminal and important. Thoughful people have leveled many criticisms at his works, but no matter what criticism is merited, "The Cathedral and the Bazzar" started a technological, economic, and philisophical discussion that continues to this day. His is the argument that frames the debate.
So, with all due respect, may I just say how abominably arrogant ESR is to refer the community of Free Software developers and users as "his people?"
My one and only criticism of ESR is the ever so slight note of messianic tendencies that seems to weave in and out of his writings. He is the Saint Paul to RMS's Saint Peter. Now, I may be misinterpreting the remark. He may merely have meant to include himself in the way one does when one says something like "I want to go home to be with my people." Or, "I'll send over some of my people to help with your project." But the tone to me always seems to be "beware the wrath of My People should you oppose me!" A different kettle of fish.
I, too, am against this idea, but I find people's reaction to it here a bit curious. A lot of people think this is some sort of slippery slope that will start with the homeless and eventually come to the homes of whitebread America.
I'm here to tell you, folks, that this is the END of the slippery slope, not the start of it. You and I are already tracked and trailed like you wouldn't believe. Employment records, insurance records, banking records, telephone records, ISP logs, credit card records, etc., etc. ad infinitum. Whitebread America is already trackable to great degree. The only people who are not are the people who have fallen out of the economy; the people who lie beneath the society.
Side note: I get angry when I see people bashing the law and lawyers here on/. Your privacy and the protection of these records is a purely legal construct. The only thing that keeps government from tracking your every move is the fact that they cannot do anything to you with them, not that they can't see them, but that they can't use them in court without obeying the legal protections on them
The only things that worry me about the new "post 9/11" era are:
1) Supra-legal tribunals (military courts) 2) PATRIOT Act erosion of those aforementioned protections.
For me, "Liberty" is what our country is about. Items 1 and 2 above may be good for our safety, but I don't think they are good for our Liberty. I, for one, do not want to destroy America to save it.
Let's remember that only two things stand between Liberty and Tyranny: The law, and force. Me, I choose the law. I think we are tipping the wrong way, but I have high hopes in the citizens of this country. I have high hopes that we have not forgotten that government serves the people and not the other way round. I have high hopes that fear will not make sheep out of us, and that we will remember that freedom, liberty, the Bill of Rights, are the reasons we love this country, not the accident of having been born here.
I have high hopes because every citizen in government employ, from the lowliest private in the Army to the President of the United States swears an oath of loyalty, not to the state, not to the country, but to The Consititution of the United States of America, and to defend THAT against all enemies, foreign and domestic. That oath was written by people who recognized that what defines America (or at least, what should define America) is a love of the fundamental rights of human beings as articulated in the Declaration of Independence, The Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, and that the loyalty of Americans is measured not by geography, love of nation, or obedience to a ruler, but by fealty to the principles embodied in those documents.
A patriot loves the USA to the extent that the USA, and its citizen-government continues to adhere to the freedom of man (by which I mean "humanity" in modern inclusive language) as stated in those documents. The courage that our founders showed in putting ideas at the core of our national being, and suggesting that the natural loyalty of a US citizen should be, not to man, not to a state, not to a place, but to those ideas is the great gift that they gave to posterity.
It is up to us whether our nation remains worthy of their trust in us.
To get any but the lowest level ham license ("ham" isn't an acronym, it isn't capitalized) you must learn morse code. Also, good radio amateurs have MOVs and/or glow-discharge tubes in their antenna feeds so high voltage transients are grounded away and deflected from the transceivers. Sure, our handhelds will probably all be blown out by an EMP, but our base stations are going to be up and running just fine, thank you. Not only that, but we're notorious pack-rats. I've got some very old vacuum tube radio equipment that will just plain laugh at an EMP.
I'm genuinely curious where this hostility to ham radio comes from. It was *the* geek hobby before home computers came along, and a god-awful lot of the early work on microprocessors AND packet networks was done by hams (Phil Karn's name and KA9Q callsign leap to my mind at once, but there are many others).
Not only that, but if you to get an Advanced or Extra class license, you have to learn enough radio engineering that you could build a CW SSB transceiver from scratch parts if you had to. Give a good ham a soldering iron and an electronic parts store and (s)he'll have you communicating over distances in a few hours.
Of course, most of us have only General or Technician class licenses, but even a lot of those folks are EE's who haven't bothered to get their morse code speed up to the level required for the higher level licenses.
I'll take the poster's word for it that card counting is legal. My amusement remains unaffected -- that when the math favors the house, it is good. Use math to favor you, it is bad. I never said "bad casinos." And I agree completely about the power of not playing.
While we've got the crowd, the one time I did play blackjack in Vegas, I watched after each shuffle as the dealer discarded 1 card. I asked why and they told me "house advantage." Can any of the probability inclined here explain to me how discarding a single card favors the house? The likely loss of a ten point card would seem tohave the same effect for all players...
What has always amused me is how it is legal for the casinos to, in essence, use statistics and probability to skew the game in their favor, but for a patron to use the same mathematical techniques to even the odds or to skew them in the player's favor is a crime.
I'm not saying this should change, I just find it amusing.
You beat me to it. I was going to say what my secret was: Bad credit! Just like my defense against being cracked: 386SX CPUs! (and a 50MHz Sparc).
Seriously though, the original submission raises the spectre of people crying fraud to erase their real debts. I don't know if anything has changed, but I had a checkbook stolen a little over a decade ago. When I went in to deal with it, I had to fille out an affadavit (a witnessed, sworn statement) of forgery for every single check the miscreant wrote. Sure, I could have lied, but if I did, I added purjury and fraud to my bad debt. Both felonies. Not a good idea.
I don't think we have to worry about false claims of fraud. There's a legal way to get out of debt called "bankruptcy." It may scar your credit for a long time, but it beats the hell out of felony conviction.
...seeing as the internet WAS designed to withstand a nuclear attack!
I don't recall seeing this in any DARPA specifications. It was designed to provide network communications over unreliable links. And before people go off bashing ham radio, consider that Karn's Algorithm, a critical component of TCP/IP without which the Internet would have died long before the present number of hosts, was developed by Phil Karn, KA9Q (a ham radio operator) to solve problems with TCP over AX.25, the ham packet radio protocol.
"The Internet" would not survive a nuclear strike. Hell, as we have seen great swaths of it can be taken out by a clumsy backhoe operator. Ham radio definitely has uses. In fact, ham radio could quickly be brought to bear to provide TCP/IP links to replace damaged infrastructure.
Ham radio is often used to provide communications following disasters like hurricanes.
No doubt the Internet is more important, and more capable than ham radio in general, but with my ham gear and a 12v battery I can provide significant communications for a lot of people. How much of the internet functions when a whole city's power grid is out?
Of course, I don't see myself as a "Java programmer" or a "carpenter" or a "brick layer". I wouldn't take any pride in that. I have a degree in computer science. The day you will get a college degree, or at least some formal qualification, you won't need to go around saying: I am a "Java programmer".
"Thank you, Dr. Science. Send your science questions to 'Ask Dr. Science.' Remember, he's not a real Doctor!"
"I have a Master's Degree."
"In SCIENCE!"
With all due apologies to the Duck's Breath Mystery Theater.
The memory effect is a myth (as your link indicates). I have talked to several chemists and electrical engineer involved in battery design and manufacture and not a single one I've talked to thinks there's anything to it.
The advice you are given by people who claim the "memory effect" exists is to periodically run your batteries flat. I am told by these chemists and engineers that the more often you "deep cycle" your rechargable batteries (of any type, lead-acid, Ni-Cd, NiMH, Li-ion, whatever), the shorter the total AH life of the battery, guaranteed.
Put those puppies on the charger as often as convenient, and NEVER run them out flat if you can avoid it.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the order here is wrong. Michael Eisner makes more in one year than Michael Jordan did over the full term of his most generous contract. Sure, professional atheletes are overpaid. But they don't hold a candle to these CEOs who not only make more annually, but also have longer careers than atheletes.
Even though it was a joke...
Again, admitting my limited knowledge, the main effect is not induced current, but the "dionization" of the plate. Remember that a "valve" is a device that varies voltage by a static charge on a grid that "decelerates" the electrons flying from the filament to the anode. The photons from the EMP knock the electrons out of the grid and, effectively, "turn up" the amplifier (if it is an amplifier tube) or "unbias" the diode (if it is a diode tube). The field would come back, however.
As for these devices burning out tubes, I think it is unlikely, even if the voltage transient is VERY high. Why? Every proposed weapon desing I've seen produces a transient of very short duration. A very high voltage that lasts only milliseconds won't have much effect on a tube becuase the filament can't heat up that fast. You have to burn out the filament to destroy the tube.
This is unlike semiconductors, which are (in general) very susceptible to overvoltage, even of short duration, because high voltages break the molecular bonds that give the semiconductor its junction in the first place. Change the chemistry, make a semiconductor into an insulator. And the voltages required are not large. Tens of volts induced at the junction are enough for many CMOS devices. This is why people wear wrist straps when they work on delicate electronics.
You belt a vacuum tube device with 10,000 volts of static electricity (not an unusual amount for a sneaker-wearer crossing a carpet to build up) and basically nothing happens. Do the same with a semiconductor device and it is all over. That's the difference here.
The only EMP weapon with which I am familiar uses a shaped charge in a powerful eletromagnet to very rapidly compress the magentic field, building up a fairly massive RF burst. This burst is necessarily short in duration (since the explosion soon pulverizes the device). This can produce an effect at quite some distance very similar to a lightning strike. Very high voltages. But it doesn't last long.
So, my semi-informed opinion is that tube devices would be disrupted but not destroyed.
The point is fairly moot since vacuum tubes are hard to come by and most devices today use semiconductors, and EMP weapons are not enough reason to move away from such devices. There are countermeasures to E-Weapons. They're inconvenient, but they work. Vital military stuff is pretty well protected.
Civilian infrastructure? Not so much. Is this a potential threat in our "motivated nutcase" world? Yes, it is.
Whilst I admit I have only a ham radio/computer geek knowledge of EE, it seems to me that vacuum tube equipment would be disrupted by an EMP from a nuke or a E-weapon. The difference is the hardware would not be destroyed. But the pulse would mess with the plate voltage of a tube too. The disruption would be temporary, but it would still happen.
The problem with semiconductors is that high voltage transients actually destroy them.
I'm no solar scientist, but I don't think it is even remotely reasonable for anyone to say anything about the sun is "unprecedented." The percentage of the sun's life that human beings have been observing has to be less than 0.01%
Maybe everything we've seen up to now has been atypical and this represents a return to the norm.
Now here's someone to mod up!
I think this is exactly the right answer. No one "diet" fits all. It is universally agreed that increasing exercise (at least from the typical American computer programmer level -- totally inert) is good for you. Now, if you are obese, you need to change the way you eat.
When I was quite young, I balooned up to just shy of 300 pounds. I went on Weight Watchers and dropped wieght like a stone. I got down to 190 pounds. Over the next 15 years, I gained wieght steadily (inert programmer lifestyle) up to about 270 pounds. Less than my max, but I got back to where just standing up for an extended period would make me perspire.
That is just not right.
Back on Weight Watchers I went. But I didn't lose wieght. I stopped gaining, but I didn't lose. Any fluctuation I saw in the scale was not only within normal variance for water weight, but frankly within the accuracy of the scale.
Atkins worked for me. I'm down to 210 and losing weight slowly.
I feel good and I look good (well, better than my former walrus-self).
The point is that to lose wieght, you must go into ketosis. Diets vary on how often and for how long. The insight that I think Atkins has that the rest of the world hasn't quite caught on to is the effect of wildly oscillating blood sugar levels on the pacreas and on the habituation of cells to insulin. I think his insight that it is better to eat lower on the glycemic index than higher, and better yet to let the body find its glucose through the longer slower lypolitic reactions is his main acheivement.
I scold him, though, for not being a scientist. He made an industry out of it, and more power to him, there's no reason not to profit from a good idea, but he didn't do the science. His work amounts to a collection of anecdotes.
His book cites a vast amount of scattered research that tends to support his thesis, but he had an opportunity to use his patients as a source of research data, and he never bothered. Heck, he could have had med students do the hard work.
Fortunately, studies on this approach are underway. The data will be there. But it will be ten to fifteen years yet before the data are in on possible negative effects (cancer rates, kidney disease rates, etc.). There's data on how it is good for heart disease, diabetes, artery disease. But there are long-term questions about cancer, kidney disease, and stroke that are simply not known.
That annoys me.
However, the risk of premature death from heart disease is so much greater than all other health risks (apart from toboacco -- the number one killer), that it seems reasonable to trade a small increase in colon cancer risk for a huge risk of heart attack.
Still, I think the person who "discovers" something like this should feel obligated to do the science.
Of course, I'm no MD. I get the impression this is a common dividing line: Research doctor versus practicing doctor -- similar to the line between law professor and practicing lawyer. It seems academic medicine and practice medicine are often separated.
Still, it is sad that Dr. Atkins' data aren't useful for population studies.
There's a famous quote, wish I could remember who said it (someone leap in with attribution!) (and I'm quoting from memory, so I'm sure I'm misquoting...)
;-)
"It is axiomatic that every program contains at least one bug and can be reduced in size by at least one instruction, therefore, every computer program can be reduced to a single instruction which does not work."
There's the singularity on your asymptotic curve
Only if you've removed your last particle of common sense.
Shouldn't
insert(&mouth, FOOT);
be written as:
mouth.insert(FOOT);
?
Just a suggestion for the less objecty out there...
Ah. I misunderstood your point. You seemed to be saying that you both could not influence consumption nor regulation. You seemed to me to be counseling despair.
I also participate in government. I attend my precinct caucases (which has their own problems - notably entrenched powers), I write, and I vote.
But when I say don't buy these BIOSes, I'm not calling for a boycott per se. I'm suggesting that you buy machines that do not have this feature and that you counsel your less tech saavy friends to do the same. Products that don't sell don't get made. In fact, I think calling for a "boycott" or any other active consumer action is likely to backfire, since I think there are a large number of people who go out of their way to break boycotts.
The failures of DAT and disposable DVDs were not the result of boycotts. They were the marketplace in action. I'm just suggesting that we, as people who understand what is at stake, try to educate the market. I think people, once they understand the invasiveness of this technology, will actively avoid it.
I apologize for any offense my previous remarks may have given. I obviously misunderstood your intent.
"All politicians are evil."
This is an astonishing statement. Do you really think it is true?
I guess I just plain don't agree with the "I gave up hope and died, and it worked!" school of thought. We beat the divx "disposable" DVD. DAT as an audio medium died because of copy controls. Sure, there are bad laws, but companies listen to the marketplace or they cease to be companies. Give up hope and die if you'd like. I plan to listen, learn, decide, and speak.
And I *still* say I won't buy a machine with one of these BIOSes.
I think that's what I said.
;-)? Well, I'd bet that everyone who owns a PC is less than six degrees from a geek who knows this issue. If we just tell our side of the story, the bulk of the market could shun this technology.
I'm well aware who make the BIOS's. My point is that you should vote with your dollars and recommend that others do the same. Educate the, as you so condescendingly put it, drooling masses. Tell your friends what this means. I didn't read anything here that said this feature would be in all BIOSes. If they do not sell while those without it *do* sell, I assure you, the product will go away.
The fatalism some people express on these issues amazes me. Yes, corporate power is going bananas, but you are the consumer. Yes, government is in the pockets of big business, but the forms of democracy are atill there. "The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing." said Edmund Burke. He's right.
And you're wrong about flying to Mac. If everyone did fly to Mac when DRM came to PCs, marketers would research why. They would find that this was the reason. Again, it would change.
Vote with your dollars. You have more power than you realize.
I recognize that the key to this is information. A lot of people do not know what this means. So tell them. Mention this casually whenever you talk to someone who is buying a PC. Explain it to them. You know about six degrees of separation, right? Either from mathematics or from the play, movie, or the Kevin Bacon game
You may right, resistance may be futile. But not doing anything makes it certain. Tell your friends.
Metaprogramming can be a useful and time-saving technique. It can also really mess up maintenance and future refactoring of a project. The time saved one developer isn't a good measure of the utility of a technique.
When I first learned lex and yacc, I got tempted to turn every single useful C/C++ library into a scripting language. "Think how much time I could save!" I thought.
Well, while I still think developing an application specific language (to basicially make pseduocode functional) is an occasionally useful technique, what I found was that it usually made project transfer and maintenance more difficult and more expensive.
Using XML and XSLT to do the same thing as lex and yacc doesn't inherently add much. The exception would be the evolution of an industry standard DTD for, for example, common UI constructs. I can see value there. But rolling your own metaprogrammer strikes me as rarely of real benefit. The metaprogram becomes another thing that must be documented, explained, maintained, and transitioned. It adds something that may not be easy to integrate into a present or future automated build process.
I guess I'm coming down firmly on both sides here. My point is that the cost/benefit analysis for a single developer doesn't necessarily align well with the cost/benefit analysis for the project as a whole. I think we have all seen projects that are in "tool and library hell" where developers have included their favorite libraries and tools willy-nilly (a technical term I like very much -- so concrete, so precise) so that no one can actually get the project to build. The GnuCash project was like that for the longest time (and it is still a bit messy if you ask me).
Faster isn't always better or cheaper.
In other words, I have seen metaprogramming do more harm than good in my experience. And the few successes come when the metaprogrammed portion was well analyzed and understood, and a standard could be made that would apply to an entire enterprise and not merely to a single project. More often than not, the inclusion of metaprogramming became the first reason to rewrite an application -- no one wanted to figure out or maintain the metaprogram. So they chucked it.
Just don't buy it. Refuse. I believe in this so much that I'll live with my present collection of CPUs. Also consider adding your support to one of the number of free BIOS projects out there (OpenBIOS, LinuxBIOS, etc.).
These projects are at various levels of maturity (OpenBIOS seems to be just getting started, LinuxBIOS already boots Linux on a number of motherboards).
I'm going to say something here that will please M$ astroturfers and might displease the majority of the /. constituency.
This and the story yesterday about Longhorn delays could be bad news for us Linux/Free Software advocates. This could very well be evidence of the "new Microsoft committment to security."
The terribly security of MS's products has always been one of the most popular ways to advocate Free Software and to attack (yes, attack) MS software. I don't think this is a good advocacy strategy in the long run. Why? Because although this looks like more of the same old, it and the delay story could well be the result of a genuine effort to find and fix the flaws. We could soon be up against an opponent that is much more difficult to attack on this basis.
But even if this is not the case, gloating over the shoddiness and weakness of MS products is not the best sort of advocacy. I think the better approach is to play to our strengths. Cost and Freedom. These are the areas where Microsoft simply cannot compete. Sure, we stomp them on security now, but they really can fix that. We shouldn't work so hard on attacking them there. In fact, we shouldn't work on attacking them at all. Just educate on the financial and productivity advantages.
No, simply because I do not believe that any such monolithic group actually exists. "The open source community" is a coincidental intersection of interest between people who otherwise diverge vastly in interests, politics, and temperment.
I tend rather more to the philosophy espoused by Stallman and the FSF than to ESR's views. The key difference, to me, is that Stallman says: "This is what I think is right. I think you should think so too." while ESR seems to be presuming my faith and allegiance.
The world is full of people with messiah complexes. It is also full of people looking for a messiah to follow. I don't have a problem with either. What I have a problem with is the presumption of this particular person claiming that he speaks for me. The mere fact that I tend to agree with him doesn't give him the right to speak for me. In other words, agressive rhetoric with a strong point-of-view: no problem. That's the 1st Amendment, baby. Putting words in my mouth? I respectfully dissent. He's free to write that way. I'm just politely saying that, in my case and only my case, he goes too far if and only if he presumes my membership in the set of "his people."
He is an "open source" advocate. He has, by virtue of his work, earned the attention of a singificant number of well-informed people. To that extent he can presume his voice deserves attention. It is only when he teeters over into claiming to speak for some ill-defined people, and to do so with a possessive pronoun that I believe he exceeds himself.
This point has nothing to do with truth of his statements or the validity of his arguments. That can be debated through the traditional methods of public discourse. I am only disputing his ability to define "his people" and to be assured that, when he presumes to speak for them, he actually does.
Let me start by saying that I respect Mr. Raymond's acumen, accomplishments, and writing. His work is seminal and important. Thoughful people have leveled many criticisms at his works, but no matter what criticism is merited, "The Cathedral and the Bazzar" started a technological, economic, and philisophical discussion that continues to this day. His is the argument that frames the debate.
So, with all due respect, may I just say how abominably arrogant ESR is to refer the community of Free Software developers and users as "his people?"
My one and only criticism of ESR is the ever so slight note of messianic tendencies that seems to weave in and out of his writings. He is the Saint Paul to RMS's Saint Peter. Now, I may be misinterpreting the remark. He may merely have meant to include himself in the way one does when one says something like "I want to go home to be with my people." Or, "I'll send over some of my people to help with your project." But the tone to me always seems to be "beware the wrath of My People should you oppose me!" A different kettle of fish.
I, too, am against this idea, but I find people's reaction to it here a bit curious. A lot of people think this is some sort of slippery slope that will start with the homeless and eventually come to the homes of whitebread America.
/. Your privacy and the protection of these records is a purely legal construct. The only thing that keeps government from tracking your every move is the fact that they cannot do anything to you with them, not that they can't see them, but that they can't use them in court without obeying the legal protections on them
I'm here to tell you, folks, that this is the END of the slippery slope, not the start of it. You and I are already tracked and trailed like you wouldn't believe. Employment records, insurance records, banking records, telephone records, ISP logs, credit card records, etc., etc. ad infinitum. Whitebread America is already trackable to great degree. The only people who are not are the people who have fallen out of the economy; the people who lie beneath the society.
Side note: I get angry when I see people bashing the law and lawyers here on
The only things that worry me about the new "post 9/11" era are:
1) Supra-legal tribunals (military courts)
2) PATRIOT Act erosion of those aforementioned protections.
For me, "Liberty" is what our country is about. Items 1 and 2 above may be good for our safety, but I don't think they are good for our Liberty. I, for one, do not want to destroy America to save it.
Let's remember that only two things stand between Liberty and Tyranny: The law, and force. Me, I choose the law. I think we are tipping the wrong way, but I have high hopes in the citizens of this country. I have high hopes that we have not forgotten that government serves the people and not the other way round. I have high hopes that fear will not make sheep out of us, and that we will remember that freedom, liberty, the Bill of Rights, are the reasons we love this country, not the accident of having been born here.
I have high hopes because every citizen in government employ, from the lowliest private in the Army to the President of the United States swears an oath of loyalty, not to the state, not to the country, but to The Consititution of the United States of America, and to defend THAT against all enemies, foreign and domestic. That oath was written by people who recognized that what defines America (or at least, what should define America) is a love of the fundamental rights of human beings as articulated in the Declaration of Independence, The Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, and that the loyalty of Americans is measured not by geography, love of nation, or obedience to a ruler, but by fealty to the principles embodied in those documents.
A patriot loves the USA to the extent that the USA, and its citizen-government continues to adhere to the freedom of man (by which I mean "humanity" in modern inclusive language) as stated in those documents. The courage that our founders showed in putting ideas at the core of our national being, and suggesting that the natural loyalty of a US citizen should be, not to man, not to a state, not to a place, but to those ideas is the great gift that they gave to posterity.
It is up to us whether our nation remains worthy of their trust in us.
To get any but the lowest level ham license ("ham" isn't an acronym, it isn't capitalized) you must learn morse code. Also, good radio amateurs have MOVs and/or glow-discharge tubes in their antenna feeds so high voltage transients are grounded away and deflected from the transceivers. Sure, our handhelds will probably all be blown out by an EMP, but our base stations are going to be up and running just fine, thank you. Not only that, but we're notorious pack-rats. I've got some very old vacuum tube radio equipment that will just plain laugh at an EMP.
;-)
I'm genuinely curious where this hostility to ham radio comes from. It was *the* geek hobby before home computers came along, and a god-awful lot of the early work on microprocessors AND packet networks was done by hams (Phil Karn's name and KA9Q callsign leap to my mind at once, but there are many others).
Not only that, but if you to get an Advanced or Extra class license, you have to learn enough radio engineering that you could build a CW SSB transceiver from scratch parts if you had to. Give a good ham a soldering iron and an electronic parts store and (s)he'll have you communicating over distances in a few hours.
Of course, most of us have only General or Technician class licenses, but even a lot of those folks are EE's who haven't bothered to get their morse code speed up to the level required for the higher level licenses.
Enough of the anti-ham QRM already!
I'll take the poster's word for it that card counting is legal. My amusement remains unaffected -- that when the math favors the house, it is good. Use math to favor you, it is bad. I never said "bad casinos." And I agree completely about the power of not playing.
While we've got the crowd, the one time I did play blackjack in Vegas, I watched after each shuffle as the dealer discarded 1 card. I asked why and they told me "house advantage." Can any of the probability inclined here explain to me how discarding a single card favors the house? The likely loss of a ten point card would seem tohave the same effect for all players...
What has always amused me is how it is legal for the casinos to, in essence, use statistics and probability to skew the game in their favor, but for a patron to use the same mathematical techniques to even the odds or to skew them in the player's favor is a crime.
I'm not saying this should change, I just find it amusing.
You beat me to it. I was going to say what my secret was: Bad credit! Just like my defense against being cracked: 386SX CPUs! (and a 50MHz Sparc).
Seriously though, the original submission raises the spectre of people crying fraud to erase their real debts. I don't know if anything has changed, but I had a checkbook stolen a little over a decade ago. When I went in to deal with it, I had to fille out an affadavit (a witnessed, sworn statement) of forgery for every single check the miscreant wrote. Sure, I could have lied, but if I did, I added purjury and fraud to my bad debt. Both felonies. Not a good idea.
I don't think we have to worry about false claims of fraud. There's a legal way to get out of debt called "bankruptcy." It may scar your credit for a long time, but it beats the hell out of felony conviction.
I don't recall seeing this in any DARPA specifications. It was designed to provide network communications over unreliable links. And before people go off bashing ham radio, consider that Karn's Algorithm, a critical component of TCP/IP without which the Internet would have died long before the present number of hosts, was developed by Phil Karn, KA9Q (a ham radio operator) to solve problems with TCP over AX.25, the ham packet radio protocol.
"The Internet" would not survive a nuclear strike. Hell, as we have seen great swaths of it can be taken out by a clumsy backhoe operator. Ham radio definitely has uses. In fact, ham radio could quickly be brought to bear to provide TCP/IP links to replace damaged infrastructure.
Ham radio is often used to provide communications following disasters like hurricanes.
No doubt the Internet is more important, and more capable than ham radio in general, but with my ham gear and a 12v battery I can provide significant communications for a lot of people. How much of the internet functions when a whole city's power grid is out?
"Thank you, Dr. Science. Send your science questions to 'Ask Dr. Science.' Remember, he's not a real Doctor!"
" I have a Master's Degree."
"In SCIENCE!"
With all due apologies to the Duck's Breath Mystery Theater.
The memory effect is a myth (as your link indicates). I have talked to several chemists and electrical engineer involved in battery design and manufacture and not a single one I've talked to thinks there's anything to it.
The advice you are given by people who claim the "memory effect" exists is to periodically run your batteries flat. I am told by these chemists and engineers that the more often you "deep cycle" your rechargable batteries (of any type, lead-acid, Ni-Cd, NiMH, Li-ion, whatever), the shorter the total AH life of the battery, guaranteed.
Put those puppies on the charger as often as convenient, and NEVER run them out flat if you can avoid it.