Ok, I know this is off-topic, but what exactly do you think a tsunami warning system is, if not a system "designed to quickly get emergency messages to people on a geographic basis"?
Let me see if I can spell it out even more clearly for you:
A 'tsunami warning system' is a system for warning people about tsunamis.
An 'emergency warning system' is a system for warning people about emergencies.
It is pointless to construct a system that is only capable of warning people about tsunamis. What is needed is robust, extensible protocols (rather like the Internet) that can adapt to any emergency. If the sensors and monitoring for tsunamis is integrated into an overall emergency warning system, the same infrastructure can also be used with other emergency information.
But that's not what will probably come of this. Instead, there'll be a hugely expensive system that is only capable of sending one kind of message, because governments reacting to crises always try to prevent the last crisis.
it's the same mentality the apparently caused countries in the indian ocean region to decide that a tsunami warning system was not a high priority.
It's not a high priority. Tsunamis are very rare events, and it is ridiculous to create a system just to warn people when they're coming.
OTOH, a communication system designed to quickly get emergency messages to people on a geographic basis (like our Emergency {Broadcast|Alert} System, and the NOAA weather radio that can automatically signal people on a county-by-county basis) would be a great idea. Whether the emergency were a tsunami, typhoon, tornado, terrorist attack, toxic chemical spill, or whatever, the warning system would cover them all.
By the same token, the media was completely wrong to talk of 'the Y2K bug' as a single entity. There were hundreds of thousands of bugs in programs written over decades by people who never dreamt that they'd still be in use when Y2K rolled around.
I had the eye-opening expirience of throwing together an application for a semi-relational database at my wife's office about 15 years ago. I figured they'd get something better at some point, but she told me recently that they still have it running because it's doing what they need done. Fortunately, that application doesn't have any Y2K issues, but if it did, I'd have heard about it.
In fact they generated a huge surplus, workers paying in far more than was being paid out
Well, duh. Since each individua worker pays in far more than he draws out for most of his life (just to put round numbers on it, pay in for 50 years and draw out for 20) with the Boomers working the system needs to run a 'surplus' to have enough to pay us off when we retire. (Yes, I'm at the tail end of the Boom, which means if they don't fix things, I won't see a dime of it.)
Did the government invest the money so that it would be there when the system went in red. Well yes but they invested it in themselves, which means they handed themselves this large pile of paper of worthless paper and just spent it.
This is what Social Security has done since Day One. It purchases USGOV securities from the Treasury. Now, it would be really nice if they'd let us put it somewhere else. I think the President even called on Congress to let us take just part of this 'surplus' and make real investments with it. The reaction, of course, was predictable. Evil Repos trying to starve Grandma.
This is just the logical conclusion of the Linux Standards Base, including the File Hierarchy Standard. Fundamental to FHS is the division of the file hierarchy according to two orthogonal criteria:
A file/directory is either
Static (not changed except by action of the system administrator), or
Variable (subject to change at any time
and either
Shareable (multiple machines can have a common copy), or
Unshareable (each machine needs a separate copy).
In an effort that is conceptually equivalent to the separation of the kernel tree into architecture-dependent and -independent subtrees for the Alpha port, which made subsequent architectures far easier, a lot of people have devoted their efforts to determining just how little of what goes into the file hierarchy really has to be unique to the machine.
The 'aha moment' comes when you think of groups of workstations with identical hardware, which are candidates for having a common image from which they can be built, and realize that you can build a relational database that correlates MAC addresses (possibly to some other locally-unique but shorter machine number) to the HW configuration. Now, conceptually all of those cookie-cutter-identical machines are a single entity for the purposes of configuration. A lot of what FHS considers 'unsharable' is now quite 'sharable' within such a HW config group.
As workstations age, the IT department brings in a couple samples of the next HW configuration, loads drivers, tests against the app suite, and when they're ready for primetime, the vendor delivers them, the MAC addresses are added to the database, the workstations boot up, find Mommy (bootp server), and Just Work. The user can log out of an old computer and into a new one, and find all his 'stuff' right where he left it. It's the only sane way to compute in an institutional environment.
Debian isn't 'boycotting' anything. It didn't even really 'reject' anything. In classic 'Soviet Russia' fashion, the editors got it backwards. It should be more like
Debian Project (recognizes that) Sender-ID Rejects
it
Anyone who can read simple declaratory English sentences can see that the Sender-ID licence terms are incompatible with the GPL. Full stop. Go directly to Jail, do not collect $200. This parrot has ceased to be!
The only way that Debian could accept Sender-ID is to reject the GPL. At that point, having denied its own soul, it would cease to be 'Debian' by any meaningful definition - it would be ex-Debian.
Just as demand for hard-drives has pushed down hard-drive price, and demand for increasing amounts of RAM has pushed down RAM prices,
This has got to be one of the dumbest things I've seen on/. in a while. That's not how things work - the Law of Demand says exactly the opposite. An increase in demand (with no change in supply) causes an increase in the market price, not a decrease.
What in play here is the Law of Supply: the increase in supply without any corresponding increase in demand. The manufacturers of these devices have found ways to make them for less, which has the effect of increasing the quantity of them each is willing to produce at any given price point (that's what an increase in supply means). It is only an increase in supply that can allow for the quantity produced to increase and the price at which that quantity is produced to decrease.
However, when there is an email notifier logging on every five minutes checking for new emails, this creates increased server load for Google's servers.
Well, there's a few obvious ways to resolve this.
Gmail could offer a checkbox in the logon screen (a parameter to pass to the input form) that says in effect "show NEW email only".
Alternatively, they could show the list of new emails along with the captcha, so that third-party notifiers would have the info they need without requiring the heavy load
Google could publish an API for third-party notifiers to register the IP address:port pair to which the user wants a new mail notification to be sent, converting from a polling to message-based mechanism.
These would be good things to do with software during beta-testing...like now.
Or how Malkin can go on TV and say Kerry shot himself for his medals?
You mean how she can go on TV to promote her
book, but only if first she'll do a segment talking about the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ad campaign and the accompanying book Unfit for Command which includes the idea that two of his Purple Heart injuries were the result of Kerry firing a machine gun and lobbing a grenade at nearby targets, which were so close that he actually caught shrapnel indirectly from his own actions.
You'd never know that from Chris Matthews' shameful attempt to portray her response to Willie Brown's comment about shrapnel circumstances as an accusation that the self-inflicted wounds were deliberate. Having set up this straw man, rather than allowing her to explain the details (he seems unable to allow anyone to speak for five seconds without interrupting them) he followed by cancelling the segment to discuss her book, which would have been good TV.
He's a tech reporter who hasn't investigated the situation much and wrote the first thing that occurred to him
Yeah - I got to the first paragraph after the ad blurb, including this [emphasis mine]:
Intellectual-property questions about Linux came to the forefront after the SCO Group (SCOX ),
which acquired the Unix trademarks, launched a series of lawsuits against alleged infringers of its rights.
I can't take seriously a word of an article that gets something so spectacularly wrong.
So is SCO going to sue Microsoft for infringing on their claim to sudo
They already have prior art in the form of asroot in SCO OpenServer. For those who aren't familiar with it, asroot allows an adminstrator to authorize certain users to run certain commands, well, 'as root'. Since it requires a 'data store' of which users are authorized to run which commands, there is definitely prior art.
Of course, it's quite possible that the prior art involved is that of the programmers working on the original Xenix product for MS.
There is no such regulations, there never have been, and there most likely never will be.
The regulations that do exist are the ones that required Google to fill out the same kind of paperwork that public companies do. Basically, they figured they had to do the homework, so they might as well enroll in the class and get credit for it.
The CIA factbook says "Fuerstentum Liechtenstein"
which I've always translated as Principality.
When I google for "Königreich Liechtenstein" I find no hits other than the juxtaposition of "Vereinigtes Königreich" (United Kingdom) with Liechtenstein in some comparison or other.
So if someone in the TSA thinks there's a King of Liechtenstein, I can't figure out where they'd get the idea.
"jury nullification" which means a jury can find in opposition to the facts of a case
What it means is that the jury may find that the law itself is unjust and refuse to convict. See the Zenger case for details. Since nullification predates the Constitution, the references there to the right to trial by jury imply the right of trial by a jury that (knowingly) possesses the power of nullification.
The problem with that is that the name Gmail has already been widely-publicized, making it more difficult to simply change the name
So? They either announce the new name as another abbreviation, (Gpost or whatever) or just say that gmail is an abbreviation for Google<tm>Mail; in the former case, anyone who sends mail to a user@gmail.com address automatically gets it forwarded to user@gpost.com - there is NO way that Google loses the gmail.com domain, because they had it before anyone tried to register a trademark on it.
This would seem to be such an obvious thing to do that it's difficult to understand how a patent could be granted on the combination. Such patents as already exist on DVDs (including the two-sided variety) and CDs would cover everything about the 'invention'.
Oh. I forgot we're talking about the USPTO here. They'll grant a patent on a patently absurd application.
To pretend that all content in a new, less expensive medium is inherently inferior in quality to all content in the older, more expensive media, is arrogant, and (if I must say it again) elitist.
Read it . . . online? Why? Since it's not a book, it's not actually 'reading'. Besides, all they really care about is the readers of 'Literature', because those are the people most likely to consume NEA content, and therefore vote for more funding thereof.
I wonder... Maybe if I send the.pdf to a printer, and he binds it in a nice hard cover... Naah. It still wouldn't be 'Literature'.
The bourgeoisie is the evil industrial class that has to be overthrown. I think you mean the proletariat
Not really. Gutenberg's books were way too expensive for the working class to own many of them. (They might scrape together enough for a Bible.) I meant the bourgeoisie: the middle class, especially small business owners and Guild master craftsmen who were able to afford small luxuries like Gutenberg books but not big ones.
I suspect that the reading we do on the Internet doesn't count, perhaps because it's so difficult to quantify, but I suspect it's because of an implicit elitist arrogance:
PhD's debating sophisticated cultural nuances amongst themselves are 'better' than talk radio/TV
Newspapers are 'better' than web pages.
Glossy magazines are 'better' than pulps.
Hardcover is 'better' than paperback.
Hand-crafted illuminated manuscripts, slaved over by monks, that could only be owned by the Church or a wealthy nobleman, were 'better' than Gutenberg's mass-produced works that the bourgeoise could purchase.
I hate it when the media gets scientific terminology wrong.
It would be incorrect to say the house was hit by a 'meteorite' (definitions taken from dictionary.com):
meteorite
n : stony or metallic object that is the remains of a meteoroid that has reached the earth's surface
unless it's been shown that it bounced off the surface of the earth prior to punching holes in the house.
I believe it would me more accurate to say that it was hit by a 'meteor':
meteor
n : a meteoroid that has entered the earth's atmosphere [syn: shooting star]
Then, after the meteor punched the holes in the roof and couch, and came to rest, it could be accurately described as a meteorite.
Re:Do not underestimate the power of "Power Cycle"
on
Is Caps Lock Dead?
·
· Score: 1
(as well as waking up when you hit the switch on the front panel or even a certain button on some models of keyboard)
Except that I wouldn't call it "off" in those states... I'd call it in "standby". If it can Wake on LAN or what have you, then it's not "off".
Well, that's really my whole point. 'what have you' includes hitting the 'power' button on either the front panel of the computer or one one of the newer-style keyboards. Until the power supply switch is shut off, the computer isn't completely off. The BIOS generally includes a setting for how to respond to a power failure and subsequent restoration:
Always power up.
Never power up
Only power up if it was up before the power failure.
This means that when the unit is plugged in, or the power supply switched on, something in that box has the smarts to check a bit in CMOS to see if it's supposed to power up now, or wait for an appropriate button to be pushed. Even if Wake on LAN or Modem is turned off, something is alive. And that means it isn't really off, but just Mostly Off.
Slashdot Mirror
- A 'tsunami warning system' is a system for warning people about tsunamis.
- An 'emergency warning system' is a system for warning people about emergencies.
It is pointless to construct a system that is only capable of warning people about tsunamis. What is needed is robust, extensible protocols (rather like the Internet) that can adapt to any emergency. If the sensors and monitoring for tsunamis is integrated into an overall emergency warning system, the same infrastructure can also be used with other emergency information.But that's not what will probably come of this. Instead, there'll be a hugely expensive system that is only capable of sending one kind of message, because governments reacting to crises always try to prevent the last crisis.
OTOH, a communication system designed to quickly get emergency messages to people on a geographic basis (like our Emergency {Broadcast|Alert} System, and the NOAA weather radio that can automatically signal people on a county-by-county basis) would be a great idea. Whether the emergency were a tsunami, typhoon, tornado, terrorist attack, toxic chemical spill, or whatever, the warning system would cover them all.
By the same token, the media was completely wrong to talk of 'the Y2K bug' as a single entity. There were hundreds of thousands of bugs in programs written over decades by people who never dreamt that they'd still be in use when Y2K rolled around.
I had the eye-opening expirience of throwing together an application for a semi-relational database at my wife's office about 15 years ago. I figured they'd get something better at some point, but she told me recently that they still have it running because it's doing what they need done. Fortunately, that application doesn't have any Y2K issues, but if it did, I'd have heard about it.
A file/directory is either
- Static (not changed except by action of the system administrator), or
- Variable (subject to change at any time
and either- Shareable (multiple machines can have a common copy), or
- Unshareable (each machine needs a separate copy).
In an effort that is conceptually equivalent to the separation of the kernel tree into architecture-dependent and -independent subtrees for the Alpha port, which made subsequent architectures far easier, a lot of people have devoted their efforts to determining just how little of what goes into the file hierarchy really has to be unique to the machine.The 'aha moment' comes when you think of groups of workstations with identical hardware, which are candidates for having a common image from which they can be built, and realize that you can build a relational database that correlates MAC addresses (possibly to some other locally-unique but shorter machine number) to the HW configuration. Now, conceptually all of those cookie-cutter-identical machines are a single entity for the purposes of configuration. A lot of what FHS considers 'unsharable' is now quite 'sharable' within such a HW config group.
As workstations age, the IT department brings in a couple samples of the next HW configuration, loads drivers, tests against the app suite, and when they're ready for primetime, the vendor delivers them, the MAC addresses are added to the database, the workstations boot up, find Mommy (bootp server), and Just Work. The user can log out of an old computer and into a new one, and find all his 'stuff' right where he left it. It's the only sane way to compute in an institutional environment.
The only way that Debian could accept Sender-ID is to reject the GPL. At that point, having denied its own soul, it would cease to be 'Debian' by any meaningful definition - it would be ex-Debian.
What in play here is the Law of Supply: the increase in supply without any corresponding increase in demand. The manufacturers of these devices have found ways to make them for less, which has the effect of increasing the quantity of them each is willing to produce at any given price point (that's what an increase in supply means). It is only an increase in supply that can allow for the quantity produced to increase and the price at which that quantity is produced to decrease.
- Gmail could offer a checkbox in the logon screen (a parameter to pass to the input form) that says in effect "show NEW email only".
- Alternatively, they could show the list of new emails along with the captcha, so that third-party notifiers would have the info they need without requiring the heavy load
- Google could publish an API for third-party notifiers to register the IP address:port pair to which the user wants a new mail notification to be sent, converting from a polling to message-based mechanism.
These would be good things to do with software during beta-testing...like now.You'd never know that from Chris Matthews' shameful attempt to portray her response to Willie Brown's comment about shrapnel circumstances as an accusation that the self-inflicted wounds were deliberate. Having set up this straw man, rather than allowing her to explain the details (he seems unable to allow anyone to speak for five seconds without interrupting them) he followed by cancelling the segment to discuss her book, which would have been good TV.
Of course, it's quite possible that the prior art involved is that of the programmers working on the original Xenix product for MS.
OK. Here's one I did ( Windows Survivor ) that might be popular with this crowd
When I google for "Königreich Liechtenstein" I find no hits other than the juxtaposition of "Vereinigtes Königreich" (United Kingdom) with Liechtenstein in some comparison or other.
So if someone in the TSA thinks there's a King of Liechtenstein, I can't figure out where they'd get the idea.
Oh. I forgot we're talking about the USPTO here. They'll grant a patent on a patently absurd application.
I wonder... Maybe if I send the .pdf to a printer, and he binds it in a nice hard cover... Naah. It still wouldn't be 'Literature'.
And I thought for a moment that someone was fixing a Gyro for dinner.
I hate it when the media gets scientific terminology wrong. It would be incorrect to say the house was hit by a 'meteorite' (definitions taken from dictionary.com): meteorite n : stony or metallic object that is the remains of a meteoroid that has reached the earth's surface unless it's been shown that it bounced off the surface of the earth prior to punching holes in the house. I believe it would me more accurate to say that it was hit by a 'meteor': meteor n : a meteoroid that has entered the earth's atmosphere [syn: shooting star] Then, after the meteor punched the holes in the roof and couch, and came to rest, it could be accurately described as a meteorite.
- Always power up.
- Never power up
- Only power up if it was up before the power failure.
This means that when the unit is plugged in, or the power supply switched on, something in that box has the smarts to check a bit in CMOS to see if it's supposed to power up now, or wait for an appropriate button to be pushed. Even if Wake on LAN or Modem is turned off, something is alive. And that means it isn't really off, but just Mostly Off.