What happens if you repeat the cycle of: {snip} an infinite amount of times? You run out of water.
There are a few reasons to not worry about this:
(1) The volume of the earths oceans is enough that if we were destroying water in them at the rate at which we burn oil, it would take a few hundred million years to run out. We wouldn't be destroying it at that rate (I would guess, since you can make a lot of hydrogen from just a little water), but even if we were we have a while to figure out a solution.
(2) Hydrogen and ozone react really well -- the hydrogen wouldn't make it out of the atmosphere before it got bound back up as water.
Sadly, if you don't get it in writing, you can't really prove anything More than 20 years ago I took Business Law in college, and one of the tidbits that stuck in my head was that under the Uniform Commercial Code (law in every state except Louisiana) oral contracts for less than $500 are legal and binding.
I could go on about the customer service rep being an agent of Verizon and able to make a contract, but IANAL, and, in the end, you have to go to court to enforce a contract.
Another memory from that class is that the court doesn't require absolute proof for these things, just the preponderance of the evidence (I think this is a general rule for civil cases). I think multiple recordings of this rate being stated to him, and them refusing to be corrected, would probably work to provide a preponderance.
Virtual PC will run *much* faster. No more cpu emulation is needed.
Vmware will run on a mac....
WINE will run on a Mac. This is *HUGE*. Imagine running any Windows software, at native speeds, with OpenGL support, on Mac OS X.
And WINE/VirtualPC running so well may be the biggest disaster for MacOS -- why should Microsoft continue to support MSOffice/Mac when you can just run the Windows version in WINE? Why should Adobe build Acrobat for MacOS, when the Windows version (runs just as fast in WINE!) has more features and costs less??
Good Windows emulation is probably what killed OS/2, it can kill OS X too...
The last time I checked, "Apple" was a brand name. I hope that this OMB policy applies only to large contracts (my group tends to buy our Macs one at a time....).
... it's in the Student Newspaper office. Quite frankly, I can understand the decision... it's a LOT cheaper to get PCs than Macs, and when you're on a budget, you err on the side of getting MORE computers, not less.
Interesting...I would guess that in fact the goal is to have as many working computers as you can, and if you have a software monoculture (of any type) then sometime, some day, that number will be zero.
I've heard a story, which I can't confirm, that some DoD facility had a strict computing monoculture (the exact same versions of the exact same applications running on the exact same hardware). Somebody broke in, and the entire facility was down for ten days. How much did that cost? I'd love a link to confirm this story....
A few years ago (2002 IIRC) we got some free few-year-old Dells from which ALL (non-BIOS) software had been removed (I believe the term on the stickers was "sanitized").
I installed RH on one (my first Linux install onto Intel hardware, my ~3rd Linux install period), a co-worker of mine (who fancies himself a fairly experienced Windows user) installed NT.
Time for my co-worker to install NT: 4 days.
Time for me to install RH: 30 minutes
Being able to gloat about it until the end of time: priceless
For the record, NT choked on the SCSI drivers. I'm sure that when they originally came from Dell everything worked perfectly.
Hybrids are better, but if you factor in the amount of resources utilized in it's creation,...
I've been wondering for awhile about how much it takes to produce a car, ever since I saw photos of a LNG bus that melted when the LNG tank blew. Here's a reasonable shot at overestimating the resources required:
Assume a 2000lb car (sorry, I use metric at work but everything I found on the web was in stupid units, so this post will be as well)
Assume it's 2000lbs of aluminum, made from ore and not recycled. I'm doing this because aluminum is VERY energy intensive to produce.
Each pound of aluminum takes the equivalent of 1.5 gallons of gas to make it (I found a web page that said that throwing away a 0.5oz aluminum can was equivalent to wasting 6 fluid ozs of gasoline).
So, it would take about 3000 gallons of gas to produce a car under the worst possible assumptions. Reasonable mileage on a used car will be 30mpg, whereas the prius supposedly gets about 50. After 60000 miles in the used car, you've lost the balance of resources, again, under the worst possible assumptions.
If you more correctly assume that the aluminum will be (mostly) recycled, the resource price drops by a factor of 20. Of course, my assumtions that using aluminum as a stand-in for everything else that goes into a car would probably fail then too.
I would love to see a better estimate of the energy resources required to make a car, so feel free to criticize (this is slashdot, so I'm sure you will);-)
The problem is that the boundary for defining "forcible extraction" has just moved. With this technique, they can extract your DNA very easily, and won't need a court order at all. The can just lift it from a (carefully prepared) pen that you use to sign a traffic ticket, or the glass of water you request after several hours of questioning. The courts will probably not consider that "forcible extraction" but your DNA will end up on file without your knowledge anyway.
I think that requiring consent to nab DNA in this way should be required, but I'm not betting more than five cents that this will happen in today's political climate.
We now know that low-level radiation is simply far less harmful (and far better understood) than we thought it was in the 1950's.
This statement is a bit optimistic. The data for the amount of harm caused by low doses of radiation is murky at best, and isn't good enough to reach any conclusions.
The "straight line extrapolation" (known in the business as the "Linear No Threshold" theory) is a conservative policy position while waiting for enough data to pile up that we can understand what is safe and what the effects of low doses are.
There is a pretty balanced discussion of our lack of understanding of low doses of radiation at this site.
Yeah, I was worried about that. I'm glad to be educated about the entrapment thing.
It still seems, though, that you could snare the **AA's representatives this way; only actual law enforcement personnel could legally "decrypt" the password. Assuming the **AA was calling the police, they would have to admit breaking the law. But they have better lawyers than most individuals do.
Rhubard is right -- this won't do it. You need to do something a little more involved.
First, you do what pubjames suggested -- encrypt your files strongly and share them via P2P. Be sure to put something to which you own the copyright in each file (a small image of a tree or something like that)!
Second, give instructions for finding the password on your web site. The URL you put in should point to a click-through where you promise you are not a law enforcement agent (DMCA has a law-enforcement exclusion that this will close off).
That click-through will take you to a page where you have the password. The password should also be encrypted, but very badly. I suggest rot13. This page gives permission to decrypt the password only to individuals wishing to view content for their personal pleasure.
Law enforcement agents can't look at the page because of the click-through (otherwise it's "entrapment"). I'm not sure that this is true in an on-line context, so don't blame me if it goes wrong!
Any geek worth their salt will be able to tell that the password is rot13 and have access to the content. If someone from the **AA "decrypts" it, they've violated the DMCA.
Security (for your users, or at least me) is one aspect of an overall goal: getting our jobs done. If someone hacks into my system and trashes all of my files, that will time and energy away from other work. If I have to unlock the safe under my desk, pull out the notebook containing 16-character one-time passwords and punch one in every time I want to check my e-mail, that also will take time and energy from other work.
Remember always to balance the security you use with the value of the secured valuables. For a health-services company the value of the information is (perhaps) much higher than for your average "senior civil servant".
Also, don't put 15 deadbolts on the (virtual) front door while leaving the (virtual) window next to it wide open. I would guess that a lot of organizations have lost more proprietary information by viruses attaching documents to outgoing e-mails than by crackers breaking in.
This really does make sense to replace the artifact with something independent -- they have a bunch of "voodoo" every time they measure the current kilo to try to get the same answer.
I would guess that a lot of the reason the OSS community isn't putting a lot of effort is the "schism" between OSX beta and Darwin mentioned by Somogyi. If there's a two month delay between releasing OSX beta and the equivalent Darwin, then there's two months of work that's happened at Apple that isn't in the current Darwin.
How much effort would you put into fixing two-month-old code that you knew a large group of people were modifying daily?
At least in the real (i.e. not software) world, standards are enforced by people who buy products based on the standards. I work at one of the places mentioned in this post measuring devices for conformance with standards, but I certainly don't "enforce" them. The companies that make the devices present a copy of their certificate of conformance to potential buyers, who then use that in their purchasing decision.
The other thing we do, of course, is settle disagreements between users and producers. The users say "[producer's] widget doesn't work" and send it to us. We check it out (for a price) and tell them whether or not it conforms to relevant standards. They then have a basis to complain to the producer, if it doesn't conform.
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There are a few reasons to not worry about this:
(1) The volume of the earths oceans is enough that if we were destroying water in them at the rate at which we burn oil, it would take a few hundred million years to run out. We wouldn't be destroying it at that rate (I would guess, since you can make a lot of hydrogen from just a little water), but even if we were we have a while to figure out a solution.
(2) Hydrogen and ozone react really well -- the hydrogen wouldn't make it out of the atmosphere before it got bound back up as water.
The down side of (2) is that we could damage the ozone layer with leaked hydrogen (http://gcep.stanford.edu/research/factsheets/effects_climate.html)
I could go on about the customer service rep being an agent of Verizon and able to make a contract, but IANAL, and, in the end, you have to go to court to enforce a contract.
Another memory from that class is that the court doesn't require absolute proof for these things, just the preponderance of the evidence (I think this is a general rule for civil cases). I think multiple recordings of this rate being stated to him, and them refusing to be corrected, would probably work to provide a preponderance.
And WINE/VirtualPC running so well may be the biggest disaster for MacOS -- why should Microsoft continue to support MSOffice/Mac when you can just run the Windows version in WINE? Why should Adobe build Acrobat for MacOS, when the Windows version (runs just as fast in WINE!) has more features and costs less??
Good Windows emulation is probably what killed OS/2, it can kill OS X too...
The last time I checked, "Apple" was a brand name. I hope that this OMB policy applies only to large contracts (my group tends to buy our Macs one at a time....).
Interesting...I would guess that in fact the goal is to have as many working computers as you can, and if you have a software monoculture (of any type) then sometime, some day, that number will be zero.
I've heard a story, which I can't confirm, that some DoD facility had a strict computing monoculture (the exact same versions of the exact same applications running on the exact same hardware). Somebody broke in, and the entire facility was down for ten days. How much did that cost? I'd love a link to confirm this story....
A few years ago (2002 IIRC) we got some free few-year-old Dells from which ALL (non-BIOS) software had been removed (I believe the term on the stickers was "sanitized").
I installed RH on one (my first Linux install onto Intel hardware, my ~3rd Linux install period), a co-worker of mine (who fancies himself a fairly experienced Windows user) installed NT.
- Time for my co-worker to install NT: 4 days.
- Time for me to install RH: 30 minutes
- Being able to gloat about it until the end of time: priceless
For the record, NT choked on the SCSI drivers. I'm sure that when they originally came from Dell everything worked perfectly.These comments alone would not gain a +5, however, the self-referencial nature of this comment will.
Was the spelling mistake part of the self-referential nature of the comment?
I've been wondering for awhile about how much it takes to produce a car, ever since I saw photos of a LNG bus that melted when the LNG tank blew. Here's a reasonable shot at overestimating the resources required:
Assume a 2000lb car (sorry, I use metric at work but everything I found on the web was in stupid units, so this post will be as well)
Assume it's 2000lbs of aluminum, made from ore and not recycled. I'm doing this because aluminum is VERY energy intensive to produce.
Each pound of aluminum takes the equivalent of 1.5 gallons of gas to make it (I found a web page that said that throwing away a 0.5oz aluminum can was equivalent to wasting 6 fluid ozs of gasoline).
So, it would take about 3000 gallons of gas to produce a car under the worst possible assumptions. Reasonable mileage on a used car will be 30mpg, whereas the prius supposedly gets about 50. After 60000 miles in the used car, you've lost the balance of resources, again, under the worst possible assumptions.
If you more correctly assume that the aluminum will be (mostly) recycled, the resource price drops by a factor of 20. Of course, my assumtions that using aluminum as a stand-in for everything else that goes into a car would probably fail then too.
I would love to see a better estimate of the energy resources required to make a car, so feel free to criticize (this is slashdot, so I'm sure you will)
The problem is that the boundary for defining "forcible extraction" has just moved. With this technique, they can extract your DNA very easily, and won't need a court order at all. The can just lift it from a (carefully prepared) pen that you use to sign a traffic ticket, or the glass of water you request after several hours of questioning. The courts will probably not consider that "forcible extraction" but your DNA will end up on file without your knowledge anyway.
I think that requiring consent to nab DNA in this way should be required, but I'm not betting more than five cents that this will happen in today's political climate.
This is getting off-topic, but I'll bite anyway.
The "shareware utility" is called Prefab Player -- it still exists, and there even seems to be some movement toward bringing part of it to X. I used it to script a frame grabber for some very low tech data acquisition needs....
We now know that low-level radiation is simply far less harmful (and far better understood) than we thought it was in the 1950's.
This statement is a bit optimistic. The data for the amount of harm caused by low doses of radiation is murky at best, and isn't good enough to reach any conclusions.
The "straight line extrapolation" (known in the business as the "Linear No Threshold" theory) is a conservative policy position while waiting for enough data to pile up that we can understand what is safe and what the effects of low doses are. There is a pretty balanced discussion of our lack of understanding of low doses of radiation at this site.
Yeah, I was worried about that. I'm glad to be educated about the entrapment thing.
It still seems, though, that you could snare the **AA's representatives this way; only actual law enforcement personnel could legally "decrypt" the password. Assuming the **AA was calling the police, they would have to admit breaking the law. But they have better lawyers than most individuals do.
Rhubard is right -- this won't do it. You need to do something a little more involved.
First, you do what pubjames suggested -- encrypt your files strongly and share them via P2P. Be sure to put something to which you own the copyright in each file (a small image of a tree or something like that)!
Second, give instructions for finding the password on your web site. The URL you put in should point to a click-through where you promise you are not a law enforcement agent (DMCA has a law-enforcement exclusion that this will close off).
That click-through will take you to a page where you have the password. The password should also be encrypted, but very badly. I suggest rot13. This page gives permission to decrypt the password only to individuals wishing to view content for their personal pleasure.
Law enforcement agents can't look at the page because of the click-through (otherwise it's "entrapment"). I'm not sure that this is true in an on-line context, so don't blame me if it goes wrong!
Any geek worth their salt will be able to tell that the password is rot13 and have access to the content. If someone from the **AA "decrypts" it, they've violated the DMCA.
I wouldn't try this myself, but it *might* work!
Security (for your users, or at least me) is one aspect of an overall goal: getting our jobs done. If someone hacks into my system and trashes all of my files, that will time and energy away from other work. If I have to unlock the safe under my desk, pull out the notebook containing 16-character one-time passwords and punch one in every time I want to check my e-mail, that also will take time and energy from other work.
Remember always to balance the security you use with the value of the secured valuables. For a health-services company the value of the information is (perhaps) much higher than for your average "senior civil servant".
Also, don't put 15 deadbolts on the (virtual) front door while leaving the (virtual) window next to it wide open. I would guess that a lot of organizations have lost more proprietary information by viruses attaching documents to outgoing e-mails than by crackers breaking in.
(one of) NIST's own web page(s) on this is at http://www.eeel.nist.gov/811/elec-kilo.html. There's a lot more technical detail there than at the link given in the article.
This really does make sense to replace the artifact with something independent -- they have a bunch of "voodoo" every time they measure the current kilo to try to get the same answer.
I would guess that a lot of the reason the OSS community isn't putting a lot of effort is the "schism" between OSX beta and Darwin mentioned by Somogyi. If there's a two month delay between releasing OSX beta and the equivalent Darwin, then there's two months of work that's happened at Apple that isn't in the current Darwin.
How much effort would you put into fixing two-month-old code that you knew a large group of people were modifying daily?
At least in the real (i.e. not software) world, standards are enforced by people who buy products based on the standards. I work at one of the places mentioned in this post measuring devices for conformance with standards, but I certainly don't "enforce" them. The companies that make the devices present a copy of their certificate of conformance to potential buyers, who then use that in their purchasing decision.
The other thing we do, of course, is settle disagreements between users and producers. The users say "[producer's] widget doesn't work" and send it to us. We check it out (for a price) and tell them whether or not it conforms to relevant standards. They then have a basis to complain to the producer, if it doesn't conform.
- Man would I love to have a tank of Helium 3.
So, get out your credit card and call Isotec and order some!It'll probably only set you back ~$100 for a liter.