What's the textbook illustration of a "vexatious litigant"?
Is SCO better or worse than that textbook example?
Is there a strategic advantage to IBM in not filing a motion for sanctions? If so, what is it?
What are some possible reasons why a judge might act as though SCO were a legitimate plaintiff?
Do SCO's lawyers have grounds for walking away from the case? Aren't attorneys entitled to "fire" their clients if the clients have materially misled them?
It's good to have information from someone in the field, but people were building radio transmitters long before they were building processors, you could use a shorter than resonant antenna (at the cost of desperately needed effiency, true), and the antenna could be a slot instead of a wire, backfilled with colored plastic to match the coin.
Re:Another fine example of military "inteligence"
on
Bugged Canadian Coins?
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· Score: 1
>Can anyone here imagine a better way to make an RFID useless than putting it in the middle of a coin?
Since you made a challenge of it, the magnetron cavity of a microwave oven would be more useless.
>What I do think however is that in a small percentage of coins they resonate at the same frequency as an RFID which would appear as though they were magical.
The Cryptic Article just says "transmitter" and goes on to speculate that it might be RFID. To look like an RFID without being one, the coin would not only have to resonate but also transmit a 128 bit number. Another problem is that the usual RFID wavelengths are way bigger than a coin.
And yes, RFID in a metal object doesn't make sense. Inside, it's shielded: outside, it's visible.
>Net neutrality is fraudulent, because no one knows what the market will want tomorrow.
Net neutrality is _vital_ because no one knows what the market will want tomorrow.
If huge and stupid companies get to decide what internets go over their tubes(*), we won't get innovative new services coming out of nowhere. If the huge and stupid companies simply sell bandwidth for us and the innovators to use as we please, then tomorrow's applications can thrive.
Libertarian theory is that government is bad because it's violent and because you can't take your business to another government.
Telecom companies haven't been out there committing genocide, but they are often monopolies and duopolies. They have power that the market doesn't control. They're in a position to limit other people's freedom and have announced plans to do so. Minarchist libertarians, as opposed to anarcho-capitalists, see a role for government in fighting other enemies of freedom.
Libertarians, by and large, also see a role for government in policing fraud. Verizon has said that Google is getting a "free lunch" on bandwidth. Lies poison a free market.
>Shouldn't need any fancy expensive controllers for that.
Betcha the reference was to charge controllers for the batteries as opposed to sun tracking systems.
You need a charge controller. Draw too much or too little current from a solar panel and you lose efficiency, something you really can't afford. The batteries also need some coddling: you'd be surprised how involved a good charging algorithm is.
Suggestions: o Standardize the generator on whatever fuel is being shipped into the disaster area. The Army has standardized on diesel, maybe they'll share some. o Consider a hybrid system: smaller, lighter generator with longer runtime that you can turn off during sunny weather. Or run flat out to charge batteries and then turn off for a while. Investigate RFI issues before you buy a generator (or a charge controller for that matter). o Take a long, unsympathetic look at the communications equipment. Is it using the least possible amount of transmit power? Are you sure you can't drop it 3dB? A few more dB with a higher gain antenna? Another dB or two using lower-loss cable in the feed line? o Your supplier is completely reasonable suggesting 10 peak watts for every continuous watt you need. $6/peak watt is reasonable for just the panels, add in the batteries and electronics and there you've got their estimate. o Use AGM batteries. Gel cells are prima donnas about how they get charged, flooded batteries would leave you hauling acid in a disaster area, other chemistries are unaffordable at the sizes you'll need. o Go to the disaster site in a Prius, leave it in Park and on Ready, and pull up to ~800 watts off the 12-volt subsystem (the DC-DC downconverter is fused at 100 amps and drops out of regulation a little over 60 amps). When the 12V battery gets low, the computer recharges it from the high-voltage battery that propels the car. When that gets low, it starts the gas engine at a very efficient setting. You then have a quiet generator that runs only when needed, makes the best use of limited fuel, cleans up its carbon monoxide, and which gives you mobility too.
The usual (imperfect) example of this class of problem is used cars. The seller knows the condition of the car. The buyer knows it's either OK or a lemon. The buyer doesn't know which, doesn't want to get burned, and therefore won't pay the price of an OK car. The seller doesn't want to sell OK cars at lemon prices. The market fills with lemons. Dealers in used cars get a bad reputation as a class.
Cars are a bad example because the buyer can pay $65 to a mechanic and get a pre-purchase inspection. Software buyers don't have that option. Imagine paying for an audit of the Firefox code base. If the software is closed source, then the pre-purchase inspection goes from prohibitively expensive to outright impossible.
So buyers can't force the suppliers to provide good software, because the buyer's don't know what it is. Especially since the people approving the purchases know even less about the software than the users do. Software suppliers can stay in business shipping junk like $YOURFAVORITEEXAMPLE. Suppliers who take time to do a good job go out of business competing with hack shops. It's not coincidence that some of the best software is non-commercial.
>If you were told to write a program to add two numbers together, and that was all, you'd have a pretty easy time rejecting "hacky" options, too - because you know all of the requirements.
Can the sum of the numbers exceed MAXINT? MAXINT on what platform? Should overflows set a flag, throw an exception, or be reported in-band?
Can the numbers be floating point? If one is much smaller than the other, how large a fraction of the smaller number's precision are you willing to lose?
Can the numbers be multiple-precision? Is the multiple-precision library you're using compatible with the rest of your system? Does it fit into your memory requirements?
Do the numbers come from some real-world source that need to be checked for sanity, for example the output of a sensor?
In what form does the output need to be? Encoded in ASN.1? BCD? IBM "unpacked decimal"? String? If output is variable length, is there a maximum size that must be enforced to prevent buffer overflows? If the maximum size is exceeded, should the result be truncated, or should the function throw an exception, or...
The sickening thing being that I've probably left out some important issues. Like thread safety.
Look up the bug history of "IEFBR14", originally a single return instruction that required four or five revisions to meet shifting requirements.
>Instead of trying to keep good coders coding, most organisations try promoting them and making them managers.
Whereupon it turns out that they have exactly the wrong skill set to be managers and things get even worse.
I once saw a deep-thinking and productive coder promoted to management. The result was a catastrophe of Biblical proportions. In terms of morale alone, when employees got together to compare notes they found that they'd independently been thinking of where to take cover if the guy went postal.
>He is free to travel by foot, bike, motorcycle, car, boat, or other device himself while not violating applicable pedestrian or traffic laws, or by bus or train, entirely anonymously.
Flight 93 proves that "superior training in combat" still results in hijackers losing when the passengers fight back. Flight 93 also proves that passengers fighting back without weapons may result in the total loss of the airplane and everyone on board.
The real objection is that for every flight in which armed passengers prevented a horror, there would be millions of flights on which there might be an armed and unstable passenger.
The hope, on a superficial analysis, is to reduce parts count on the analog side. The CPU is already there to drive the non-radio functions of the phone.
But yes, the more you look at the claim the more doubtful you get. First, you really want a DSP chip and not a general CPU. Second, demodulating RF is not something that takes cabinets full of circuitry any more.
Now, if cell phones use a heterodyne system to tune the RF (do they?), then you might get rid of the local oscillator, and save some power, savings which would then become unnoticeable as soon as the phone had to transmit.
The only usable way to control Javascript is site by site, and turning it off by default slashes a whole army of exploits out of your life. Every browser should have this functionality built in.
Is that because disks are usually in service all the time? Has anyone seen numbers on the failure rate of disks sitting still in climate-controlled storage? There have been reports that the spindle lubrication gets sticky if left to sit for too long. Is that fact or rumor?
It's not hard to find a hard disk with a non-operating shock rating of 900 g. That's before you pack it for shipping. And the magnetic material won't flake off in storage.
The word "skeptic" comes from a Greek work, "skepsis", which refers to looking at something and examining it. Skepticism is that the person from Missouri does when they say "show me".
A skeptic isn't a denier. A denier says the scientests are making it all up to curry favor with government grant issuers, you know, the rabid environmentalist Bush administration. A skeptic asks how big the error bars are on the temperature measurements and finds http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature_record. A skeptic asks how a huge computer model of a system which is incompletely defined can ever be validated (and finds annoyingly little in the popular literature). A skeptic asks whether increased solar output could account for the changes and finds out that nights are getting warmer and the upper atmosphere is getting colder, both of which point to heat getting trapped in the lower atmosphere.
A skeptic refuses to be rushed into policy choices. A skeptic asks the question Bjorn Lomborg has been exploring, whether it's better to mitigate the results of climate change than to uproot the foundations of the world economy trying to prevent it.
At $399, you could buy a bunch of them and use them in a rotating backup, periodically sending one offsite. Or use it as the destination for nearline backups of everything else on your network.
And the voter's abusive husband's scrutiny, and the records of the person trying to buy the vote, and any union, employer, or church that wants to coerce the voter. The need to keep the vote anonymous and secret seriously complicates the job of designing a voting system.
Governments are a form of technology. They're quite important and sometimes they do things like creating TCP/IP networks. Sometimes they malfunction and murder people by the millions, probably including nerds.
This story isn't about "politics", it's about far-reaching design changes to constitutional government done without appropriate change control.
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What's the textbook illustration of a "vexatious litigant"?
Is SCO better or worse than that textbook example?
Is there a strategic advantage to IBM in not filing a motion for sanctions? If so, what is it?
What are some possible reasons why a judge might act as though SCO were a legitimate plaintiff?
Do SCO's lawyers have grounds for walking away from the case? Aren't attorneys entitled to "fire" their clients if the clients have materially misled them?
It's good to have information from someone in the field, but people were building radio transmitters long before they were building processors, you could use a shorter than resonant antenna (at the cost of desperately needed effiency, true), and the antenna could be a slot instead of a wire, backfilled with colored plastic to match the coin.
>Can anyone here imagine a better way to make an RFID useless than putting it in the middle of a coin?
Since you made a challenge of it, the magnetron cavity of a microwave oven would be more useless.
>What I do think however is that in a small percentage of coins they resonate at the same frequency as an RFID which would appear as though they were magical.
The Cryptic Article just says "transmitter" and goes on to speculate that it might be RFID. To look like an RFID without being one, the coin would not only have to resonate but also transmit a 128 bit number. Another problem is that the usual RFID wavelengths are way bigger than a coin.
And yes, RFID in a metal object doesn't make sense. Inside, it's shielded: outside, it's visible.
>Net neutrality is fraudulent, because no one knows what the market will want tomorrow.
Net neutrality is _vital_ because no one knows what the market will want tomorrow.
If huge and stupid companies get to decide what internets go over their tubes(*), we won't get innovative new services coming out of nowhere. If the huge and stupid companies simply sell bandwidth for us and the innovators to use as we please, then tomorrow's applications can thrive.
(*) Poor Ted Stevens
Libertarian theory is that government is bad because it's violent and because you can't take your business to another government.
Telecom companies haven't been out there committing genocide, but they are often monopolies and duopolies. They have power that the market doesn't control. They're in a position to limit other people's freedom and have announced plans to do so. Minarchist libertarians, as opposed to anarcho-capitalists, see a role for government in fighting other enemies of freedom.
Libertarians, by and large, also see a role for government in policing fraud. Verizon has said that Google is getting a "free lunch" on bandwidth. Lies poison a free market.
>Shouldn't need any fancy expensive controllers for that.
Betcha the reference was to charge controllers for the batteries as opposed to sun tracking systems.
You need a charge controller. Draw too much or too little current from a solar panel and you lose efficiency, something you really can't afford. The batteries also need some coddling: you'd be surprised how involved a good charging algorithm is.
Suggestions:
o Standardize the generator on whatever fuel is being shipped into the disaster area. The Army has standardized on diesel, maybe they'll share some.
o Consider a hybrid system: smaller, lighter generator with longer runtime that you can turn off during sunny weather. Or run flat out to charge batteries and then turn off for a while. Investigate RFI issues before you buy a generator (or a charge controller for that matter).
o Take a long, unsympathetic look at the communications equipment. Is it using the least possible amount of transmit power? Are you sure you can't drop it 3dB? A few more dB with a higher gain antenna? Another dB or two using lower-loss cable in the feed line?
o Your supplier is completely reasonable suggesting 10 peak watts for every continuous watt you need. $6/peak watt is reasonable for just the panels, add in the batteries and electronics and there you've got their estimate.
o Use AGM batteries. Gel cells are prima donnas about how they get charged, flooded batteries would leave you hauling acid in a disaster area, other chemistries are unaffordable at the sizes you'll need.
o Go to the disaster site in a Prius, leave it in Park and on Ready, and pull up to ~800 watts off the 12-volt subsystem (the DC-DC downconverter is fused at 100 amps and drops out of regulation a little over 60 amps). When the 12V battery gets low, the computer recharges it from the high-voltage battery that propels the car. When that gets low, it starts the gas engine at a very efficient setting. You then have a quiet generator that runs only when needed, makes the best use of limited fuel, cleans up its carbon monoxide, and which gives you mobility too.
The usual (imperfect) example of this class of problem is used cars. The seller knows the condition of the car. The buyer knows it's either OK or a lemon. The buyer doesn't know which, doesn't want to get burned, and therefore won't pay the price of an OK car. The seller doesn't want to sell OK cars at lemon prices. The market fills with lemons. Dealers in used cars get a bad reputation as a class.
Cars are a bad example because the buyer can pay $65 to a mechanic and get a pre-purchase inspection. Software buyers don't have that option. Imagine paying for an audit of the Firefox code base. If the software is closed source, then the pre-purchase inspection goes from prohibitively expensive to outright impossible.
So buyers can't force the suppliers to provide good software, because the buyer's don't know what it is. Especially since the people approving the purchases know even less about the software than the users do. Software suppliers can stay in business shipping junk like $YOURFAVORITEEXAMPLE. Suppliers who take time to do a good job go out of business competing with hack shops. It's not coincidence that some of the best software is non-commercial.
>If you were told to write a program to add two numbers together, and that was all, you'd have a pretty easy time rejecting "hacky" options, too - because you know all of the requirements.
...
Can the sum of the numbers exceed MAXINT? MAXINT on what platform? Should overflows set a flag, throw an exception, or be reported in-band?
Can the numbers be floating point? If one is much smaller than the other, how large a fraction of the smaller number's precision are you willing to lose?
Can the numbers be multiple-precision? Is the multiple-precision library you're using compatible with the rest of your system? Does it fit into your memory requirements?
Do the numbers come from some real-world source that need to be checked for sanity, for example the output of a sensor?
In what form does the output need to be? Encoded in ASN.1? BCD? IBM "unpacked decimal"? String? If output is variable length, is there a maximum size that must be enforced to prevent buffer overflows? If the maximum size is exceeded, should the result be truncated, or should the function throw an exception, or
The sickening thing being that I've probably left out some important issues. Like thread safety.
Look up the bug history of "IEFBR14", originally a single return instruction that required four or five revisions to meet shifting requirements.
>Instead of trying to keep good coders coding, most organisations try promoting them and making them managers.
Whereupon it turns out that they have exactly the wrong skill set to be managers and things get even worse.
I once saw a deep-thinking and productive coder promoted to management. The result was a catastrophe of Biblical proportions. In terms of morale alone, when employees got together to compare notes they found that they'd independently been thinking of where to take cover if the guy went postal.
A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.
You're worried about loss of property when they review your political leanings?
>He is free to travel by foot, bike, motorcycle, car, boat, or other device himself while not violating applicable pedestrian or traffic laws, or by bus or train, entirely anonymously.
"Since 9/11, Amtrak now requires ID on many of its routes, and it is the only long-haul passenger train service in America."
"There is a single nationwide bus service today (Greyhound)... I have seen a friend be refused passage on Greyhound because they lacked an ID. "
Flight 93 proves that "superior training in combat" still results in hijackers losing when the passengers fight back. Flight 93 also proves that passengers fighting back without weapons may result in the total loss of the airplane and everyone on board.
The real objection is that for every flight in which armed passengers prevented a horror, there would be millions of flights on which there might be an armed and unstable passenger.
Was it deliberate humor to use chickens on a multiprocessor system?
There's a famous quote from Seymour Cray, If you were plowing a field, which would you rather use: Two strong oxen or 1024 chickens?
The hope, on a superficial analysis, is to reduce parts count on the analog side. The CPU is already there to drive the non-radio functions of the phone.
But yes, the more you look at the claim the more doubtful you get. First, you really want a DSP chip and not a general CPU. Second, demodulating RF is not something that takes cabinets full of circuitry any more.
Now, if cell phones use a heterodyne system to tune the RF (do they?), then you might get rid of the local oscillator, and save some power, savings which would then become unnoticeable as soon as the phone had to transmit.
The only usable way to control Javascript is site by site, and turning it off by default slashes a whole army of exploits out of your life. Every browser should have this functionality built in.
Is that because disks are usually in service all the time? Has anyone seen numbers on the failure rate of disks sitting still in climate-controlled storage? There have been reports that the spindle lubrication gets sticky if left to sit for too long. Is that fact or rumor?
It's not hard to find a hard disk with a non-operating shock rating of 900 g. That's before you pack it for shipping. And the magnetic material won't flake off in storage.
The word "skeptic" comes from a Greek work, "skepsis", which refers to looking at something and examining it. Skepticism is that the person from Missouri does when they say "show me".
A skeptic isn't a denier. A denier says the scientests are making it all up to curry favor with government grant issuers, you know, the rabid environmentalist Bush administration. A skeptic asks how big the error bars are on the temperature measurements and finds http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature_record. A skeptic asks how a huge computer model of a system which is incompletely defined can ever be validated (and finds annoyingly little in the popular literature). A skeptic asks whether increased solar output could account for the changes and finds out that nights are getting warmer and the upper atmosphere is getting colder, both of which point to heat getting trapped in the lower atmosphere.
A skeptic refuses to be rushed into policy choices. A skeptic asks the question Bjorn Lomborg has been exploring, whether it's better to mitigate the results of climate change than to uproot the foundations of the world economy trying to prevent it.
Skepticism clarifies issues, astroturf campaigns and phony think tanks obscure issues.
Easy. Delegate the backups to your worst enemy.
At $399, you could buy a bunch of them and use them in a rotating backup, periodically sending one offsite. Or use it as the destination for nearline backups of everything else on your network.
>Paper print out for voter's records
And the voter's abusive husband's scrutiny, and the records of the person trying to buy the vote, and any union, employer, or church that wants to coerce the voter. The need to keep the vote anonymous and secret seriously complicates the job of designing a voting system.
No investigation needed. The voting machine vendor pays for the certification tests.
Governments are a form of technology. They're quite important and sometimes they do things like creating TCP/IP networks. Sometimes they malfunction and murder people by the millions, probably including nerds.
This story isn't about "politics", it's about far-reaching design changes to constitutional government done without appropriate change control.
Full disclosure debate.