...Yahoo, an widely used index of web sites in general, has agreed to take down any links to sites that the government of China asks them to, no questions asked? No burden of proof needed, or system of challenging decisions made?
From on point of view, this seems a pretty dumb decision on the part of Yahoo. But on the other hand, if Yahoo just agrees to the contract to get the support of the Chinese government, then happens to drag it's feet and "forget" to censor things, it's a nice beaurocratic turn around until the Chinese government catches on and cancells the agreement, by which time more Chinese citizens will have taken a liking to Yahoo.
So, depending on how it's used and "enforced", this might yet be a good thing.:^)
I can't download any files through "Save target as..." in Internet Explorer for the past half a day. Even attempting to right-click links to save web pages that load normally results in a 7-second wait followed by "Internet Explorer was unable to open this internet site..." I was wondering what was happening.
Ironically, I CAN still use Kazaa Light - it's working perfectly. I've been able to download several techno songs mentioned in a recent slashdot article. Incidently, happy hardcore is a fun little sub-genre, though I still prefer video game remixes - which I can't download now from overclocked!
I'm located in central Florida. Perhaps the local Time Warner folks are just experimenting now. I'll call tech support monday if nothing resolves itself.
It appears that another peice of evidence that ISP's can't police intellectual properties and still be expected to provide a stable service, if that's what they are doing in my case.:^)
The audio in the realaudio stream is getting really flakey, switching between stereo and mono, but much worse - it occasionally just stops with a loud *pop*, which is actually painful when you have headphones on, not to mention the microphone feedback. Download the show afterward if you have headphones.
Approximately how long until there's a windows version of a player, and some demos to check out? It'll be interesting to see how well the quality turns out once the algorithm is put into action.
Even if it means having to pay for overseas shipping, I'll never buy a peice of hardware designed to prevent copying of software. It's just too counter-intuitive a concept to spend that much money on. The ability to back up software in an unlimited manner is a fundamental property of hardware that I will not do without. I find it insulting that there is a presumption of guilt about being able to copy software, especially after discovering that some of my favorite software on CD has been lost due to use and age.
If this initiative begins to make it into the hardware market, I encourage all of you to explain what it means to anyone you know considering the purchase of hardware. Explain why being able to backup software is such an important aspect of hardware, and why it would be worth even paying more, if needed, to have this ability.
I meant the only disadvantage [compared] to CD/DVD's in response to the first complaint, not that CD's were at all vulnerable to magnetics as HD's are.
The "true history" would mean that you get a real snapshot of what was on the drive at that time, each day's image kept on record. With source control, for instance, older versions may even be removed or altered. Having distant history kept on CD would also prevent damage from having files deleted long ago that weren't discovered until much later, and were outside source control. The problem with a rotation of HD's would be that you lose this long-term history.
Really. The cost per gig on an extra hard drive is no longer prohibitive to just use one to back up your data, then store it in a safe location. It's faster in transfer than a CD, and depending on setup, could work very well with a central server in your network used to back up files. There are various caddy's available from various companies, so the process would be to plug in, and synch up with the server.
If I needed to set up a comprehensive backup, I'd definetly choose a secure central server for important data with a nice RAID setup, and have a set of external HD's synched up daily and stored offsite.
The major disadvantages to CDr/DVDr's would be vulnerability to magnetic damage, and lack of a true history due to the write-once nature of CDr/DVDr's. You'd still want a CDr drive also, for things like mailing data to people, and perhaps for special backup situations with limited data. I still see no major role for a DVDr drive though.
Ooh - indeed. Endless potential finantial pain. Another related question is if the domain of this ruling only applies to the Internet, or if it applies to all networks, private or not. For instance, if you set up a network in your household, or even between households using a radio-style music server, would you have to pay? Would a small gaming voice-chat application have to start charging if it discovered users playing music in a radio-like manner?
Also, are copyright owners required to give warning before charging "damages" if what the user thought was telephone-like usage ends up being qualified as radio-like usage?
Eek - you are correct. How annoying. I just tend not to associate the word "right" in any way with "copyright", subconsciously. I've corrected myself dozens of times when writing the word also, yet when I'm just stream-of-consciousness writting, it comes out as copywrite.
Remixes: I'm a big fan of video gameremixes, for instance. In cases like those, there's next to no legal issues involved, and there should be no charge. Similarly though, would other types of remixes be immune, even if they extensively used clips from existing songs?
Unusual selections: If a radio station had, for instance, old audio commercials, which although possibly copywritten, would generally raise no major issues over lost income for the owners, would those follow similar charges? How about theme songs, or approved short song clips?
On a related note, would station creators be responsible for metering just what was being played at all times, and to how many people? The sheer processor use and disk space required to keep such a log alone would bankrupt most online radio stations, I'd think.
Notes on this phenomenon go back to at least 1771, with the publishing of the book "L'Aveugle Qui Refiise deVoir." By 1932, there was a book "Space and Sight" that concluded that "every newly sighted adult sooner or later comes to a 'motivation crisis', and that not every patient gets through it." Fortunately for this guy though, this problem seems to be more linked to people who lost their sight early, and then regained it much later, having to radically change their lives down to the tiniest mannerisms. It might have something to do with the time limitation they are putting on him, and the scientists choice of Jans, for his positive attitude.
Definetly an interesting topic on human psychology though. Hopefully with future inventions along this line, no one will be forceably blind long enough for such depression to occur along these lines. It makes one wonder though - will more distant technology create a new sort of "Motivation Crisis" in us if perception enchancements become widely available and used.
Ryan Fenton
Should make the future of 3d modelling more fun...
on
3D TV For The Masses?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Imagine being able to import such images. It would require either work to edit the 3-d shape so it had a "back" & smooth the shape a little, or else software to interpolate multiple images from different angles into one high resolution 3-d shape - but the opportunity to get a wide variety of shapes to start the process of modelling would be of great benefit to many artists and designers.
Of course, the flip side to all this would be that individuals and organizations may start copyrighting shapes in addition to images. The first court cases over something "shaped like" a copyrighted object will be very interesting.
Perhaps when bandwidth is cheap...
on
P2P Television?
·
· Score: 2
...at least not yet for all channels.
I doubt many people are going to be willing to pay thousands, if not millions, per month, so that anyone may see the weather channel in it's pristine glory over the internet - especially when there's much more efficient weather web sites that already exist. Well, that is, unless the weather channel starts hiring supermodels to introduce the weather... with very special forms of weather simulations, etc.
I still remember the rather painstaking process of writing down many derivation and integration formulas into my TI85 graphing calculator. I justified it on the basis that if I was actually deriving or integrating in the real world, I'd have a book next to me anyway, while I still knew I was cheating.
In the process though, I got used to typing words and various macros into the graphing calculator, and over a break was able to make a fun little Might & Magic-style maze walking game using four images and a matrix for the maze layout. It's part of why I'm a programmer now.
So, even though it is cheating to use these tools in several situations- learning to cheat with such tools can be a useful learning experience in itself! As long as you don't get caught.
If EULA enforcement and reinforcement in the courts becomes widespread, we will see a rash of programs devoted to automatically eliminating and otherwise blocking EULA agreements from the user's point of view.
If they're going to take that many rights anyway, they may just as well have to do it completely against the user's will. That, and over the course of thousands of installations, it will probably save days of computer time per user over a lifetime.
You'll forgive my honest ignorance - but I'm having a bit of a hard time finding more than indirect evidence pointing to the expectation that gravity should act like other recognized massless particle just because it travels like it has 0 mass - since that's just assuming it can't be different in any way in order to stick with one form of relativity.
The closest thing to direct evidence I've found for gravity travelling at light speed is in observation of the changing orbits of binary pulsars, and the like - but this is not really a satisfying set of evidence for me. It assumes so many aspects of gravitational ratiation escaping and the like, that it really doesn't seem a clear picture so much as a loose interpretation based on existing assumptions.
Also, in another part of this thread, I posted this link:
, which seems to be a frequently-posted link in discussions like these. I find that the path of discussion in that link has at least a few points valid enough for me to realistically doubt that gravity must act like a conventional form of radiation. I'd definetly be interested in any evidence, and I'm not at all attached to the notion that gravity acts in one way or another - so, if there's some argument or logic I'm missing, lay it on me!
Nah - the 9.81 m/s/s value is just the average acceleration in freefall for an object within a few miles of the surface of the earth, not counting the effects of atmosphere. It's the effect of gravity, not the speed of gravity itself. On heavier planets, this value is generally higher, because more mass is exerting gravity, thus pulling objects faster. Here's a link to a page with one discussion on the speed of gravity I'm talking about:
Again, I'm not acting as a scientist proper in this thread - but the speed of gravity in this context is meant to mean the speed at which the force itself "moves", not the speed at which objects affected by it move. The question essentially is: At what rate does the pull from one mass end up having an effect on another mass' acceleration?
Note: I'm not especially expecting this to be true, just wondering what it would mean if it WERE true. I'm also just a computer science student, and am acting more as a philosopher than a scientist proper.
If it were true that gravity can be "generated" from matter by setting it up in a special super-conductive state, then sending energy at it, then we could learn several things.
First, we could learn if gravity is faster than the speed of light. This also means that faster-than-light communication would be possible, and eventually a form of faster-than-light information-conversion-based travel.
In addition, a new form of travel may be possible by just sending a small gravity generator where you expect to go, and have the smaller object pull you towards your destination at a cheaper net fuel cost. There's a LOT of assumptions here though, and the very idea itself seems to go against many principles of energy conservation.
It would also mean that humanity would have an interesting opportunity to attract matter, and eventually counter the effects of universal expansion.
Through learning about the speed of gravity, if we find that it is "instant", it may be possible to learn the time scale of the universe.
We may also learn of the nature of the range and shape of gravity over distance. Things such as if it travels as waves that may miss particles, and if there are "weak" spots in it's eminations relative to the polls of an atom, and how often these waves may be emitted if they exist as such.
Of course, nothing says that even if this were true, that it would be in any way efficient to use energy to generate gravity. Perhaps there is no way we could even generate gravity fast enough through energy conversion to match the effects of a marshmellow. Or much worse, perhaps it would be ironically simple to make a device that would slam a distant asteroid, planet, or star into our world within a few decades of the first exeriment!
So, what else might this mean, either if it is true or false?
I really hate getting a used book that someone has taken a highlighter to. The light yellow/green/pink really distracts my eye when trying to concentrate. Even worse when the previous owner has a really bad highlighting technique. Far less annoying are the standard food stains/coffee cup marks, even when half the book in stained.
Anyone know of any online bookstores that at least check a few pages of used books for highlighter marks and the like, and mention if they found any in the book description?
From my distant memories of the dummy terminals at the University of North Dakota's CS department, one person starting a series of forked processes can leave a big hurt on everyone. Not that the setup would be anything like the server-terminal configuration at UND, or that there won't defenses against such problems... but users will find, either directly or indirectly, ways to at least take down individual systems down due to the freedom that such systems have to allow to be useful to a general audience.
That said, Windows and other public systems have all these problems too. If you've ever been in a general student computer lab more than a few times, there's just going to be dead systems every few dozen chairs. You're still going to want to scan any writable medium you've used on the system for malicious programs before you use it after bringing it home, and there's still just going to be problems with the configuration acting differently than even experienced users expect.
The only way I can see to truly prevent many types of problems in a public setting would be to not allow user executables, have a limited interface for most users, and logically ensure that at no path along the bootup, use, and shutdown of a system can a user do anything outside of expected things with the system. That means no boot-from-CD or disk, no systems with access to BIOS settings on bootup, etc, until after login to ensure security - which is likely not possible with most hardware.
Anyway, I have no suggested solution - just issues I see with any public system, including Linux ones. They're not big issues either, considering that most public systems now seem to work fine with their limited security. But not all the advantages touted for Linux will be automatically present in a public system!
At least from the evidence of the above link provided, gravity does not appear to be limited as you might think. It's effect doesn't even appear to be limited to the speed of light according to many observations! Rather, it may be more of an inherant pull of space-time, a structural effect, if you will. Of course, there are also unknowns such as the accellerating expansion of the universe which help confuse understanding even further.
Anyway, these are just simple observations from someone who is not a physicist, but is instead a college programmer who tries to understand the universe as far as simulation of forces is concerned. It still appears that there are essential types of forces out there, whether basic or not, that we still can't recreate with known observations. The effects of gravity in all it's incarnations still fits that category.
I'd definetly be interested in counter-arguments though!
Slashdot Mirror
From on point of view, this seems a pretty dumb decision on the part of Yahoo. But on the other hand, if Yahoo just agrees to the contract to get the support of the Chinese government, then happens to drag it's feet and "forget" to censor things, it's a nice beaurocratic turn around until the Chinese government catches on and cancells the agreement, by which time more Chinese citizens will have taken a liking to Yahoo.
So, depending on how it's used and "enforced", this might yet be a good thing.
Ryan Fenton
I understand the "I Am Not A Lawyer" portion of ObIANAL, but what's the "Ob" prefix mean?
Yeah, yeah - perhaps offtopic, but I must ask. My karma is already 50... wait, "excellent", what's up with that?!
Ryan Fenton
I can't download any files through "Save target as..." in Internet Explorer for the past half a day. Even attempting to right-click links to save web pages that load normally results in a 7-second wait followed by "Internet Explorer was unable to open this internet site..." I was wondering what was happening.
Ironically, I CAN still use Kazaa Light - it's working perfectly. I've been able to download several techno songs mentioned in a recent slashdot article. Incidently, happy hardcore is a fun little sub-genre, though I still prefer video game remixes - which I can't download now from overclocked!
I'm located in central Florida. Perhaps the local Time Warner folks are just experimenting now. I'll call tech support monday if nothing resolves itself.
It appears that another peice of evidence that ISP's can't police intellectual properties and still be expected to provide a stable service, if that's what they are doing in my case.
Ryan Fenton
The Infamous 419 Scam
It's a billion dollar industry in Nigeria, and has paid for the careers of much of that nation's government.
It has, however, allowed for some very interesting counter-scams:
The "Buddy Weiserman Counter-Scam
The "David Lee Roth" Counter-Scam, with cache
The "Kieron Dykes" Counter-Scam
:^)
Ryan Fenton
The audio in the realaudio stream is getting really flakey, switching between stereo and mono, but much worse - it occasionally just stops with a loud *pop*, which is actually painful when you have headphones on, not to mention the microphone feedback. Download the show afterward if you have headphones.
Ack - my ears!
:^)
Ryan Fenton
Approximately how long until there's a windows version of a player, and some demos to check out? It'll be interesting to see how well the quality turns out once the algorithm is put into action.
:^)
Ryan Fenton
Even if it means having to pay for overseas shipping, I'll never buy a peice of hardware designed to prevent copying of software. It's just too counter-intuitive a concept to spend that much money on. The ability to back up software in an unlimited manner is a fundamental property of hardware that I will not do without. I find it insulting that there is a presumption of guilt about being able to copy software, especially after discovering that some of my favorite software on CD has been lost due to use and age.
If this initiative begins to make it into the hardware market, I encourage all of you to explain what it means to anyone you know considering the purchase of hardware. Explain why being able to backup software is such an important aspect of hardware, and why it would be worth even paying more, if needed, to have this ability.
Thank you.
Ryan Fenton
I meant the only disadvantage [compared] to CD/DVD's in response to the first complaint, not that CD's were at all vulnerable to magnetics as HD's are.
The "true history" would mean that you get a real snapshot of what was on the drive at that time, each day's image kept on record. With source control, for instance, older versions may even be removed or altered. Having distant history kept on CD would also prevent damage from having files deleted long ago that weren't discovered until much later, and were outside source control. The problem with a rotation of HD's would be that you lose this long-term history.
:^)
Ryan Fenton
Really. The cost per gig on an extra hard drive is no longer prohibitive to just use one to back up your data, then store it in a safe location. It's faster in transfer than a CD, and depending on setup, could work very well with a central server in your network used to back up files. There are various caddy's available from various companies, so the process would be to plug in, and synch up with the server.
Just one example of such a product
If I needed to set up a comprehensive backup, I'd definetly choose a secure central server for important data with a nice RAID setup, and have a set of external HD's synched up daily and stored offsite.
The major disadvantages to CDr/DVDr's would be vulnerability to magnetic damage, and lack of a true history due to the write-once nature of CDr/DVDr's. You'd still want a CDr drive also, for things like mailing data to people, and perhaps for special backup situations with limited data. I still see no major role for a DVDr drive though.
Ryan Fenton
Ooh - indeed. Endless potential finantial pain. Another related question is if the domain of this ruling only applies to the Internet, or if it applies to all networks, private or not. For instance, if you set up a network in your household, or even between households using a radio-style music server, would you have to pay? Would a small gaming voice-chat application have to start charging if it discovered users playing music in a radio-like manner?
Also, are copyright owners required to give warning before charging "damages" if what the user thought was telephone-like usage ends up being qualified as radio-like usage?
Ack - "copy", "right" indeed.
:^)
Ryan Fenton
Eek - you are correct. How annoying. I just tend not to associate the word "right" in any way with "copyright", subconsciously. I've corrected myself dozens of times when writing the word also, yet when I'm just stream-of-consciousness writting, it comes out as copywrite.
:^)
Ryan Fenton
Remixes: I'm a big fan of video game remixes, for instance. In cases like those, there's next to no legal issues involved, and there should be no charge. Similarly though, would other types of remixes be immune, even if they extensively used clips from existing songs?
Unusual selections: If a radio station had, for instance, old audio commercials, which although possibly copywritten, would generally raise no major issues over lost income for the owners, would those follow similar charges? How about theme songs, or approved short song clips?
On a related note, would station creators be responsible for metering just what was being played at all times, and to how many people? The sheer processor use and disk space required to keep such a log alone would bankrupt most online radio stations, I'd think.
Ryan Fenton
The molecules involved in making the transistors, metal vanadium, are individually the size of golf balls.
;^)
Ryan Fenton
There's been a long-recognized phenomenon discovered among people who have sight restored after long periods of blindness: Motivation Crisis
http://psych.wisc.edu/vision/courses/recovery.htm
http://216.239.35.100/search?q=cache:ZD8gWmH2aEYC
Notes on this phenomenon go back to at least 1771, with the publishing of the book "L'Aveugle Qui Refiise deVoir." By 1932, there was a book "Space and Sight" that concluded that "every newly sighted adult sooner or later comes to a 'motivation crisis', and that not every patient gets through it." Fortunately for this guy though, this problem seems to be more linked to people who lost their sight early, and then regained it much later, having to radically change their lives down to the tiniest mannerisms. It might have something to do with the time limitation they are putting on him, and the scientists choice of Jans, for his positive attitude.
Definetly an interesting topic on human psychology though. Hopefully with future inventions along this line, no one will be forceably blind long enough for such depression to occur along these lines. It makes one wonder though - will more distant technology create a new sort of "Motivation Crisis" in us if perception enchancements become widely available and used.
Ryan Fenton
Imagine being able to import such images. It would require either work to edit the 3-d shape so it had a "back" & smooth the shape a little, or else software to interpolate multiple images from different angles into one high resolution 3-d shape - but the opportunity to get a wide variety of shapes to start the process of modelling would be of great benefit to many artists and designers.
Of course, the flip side to all this would be that individuals and organizations may start copyrighting shapes in addition to images. The first court cases over something "shaped like" a copyrighted object will be very interesting.
:^)
Ryan Fenton
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/05/27/00252
Much of the comments from that story apply here.
:^)
Ryan Fenton
...at least not yet for all channels.
I doubt many people are going to be willing to pay thousands, if not millions, per month, so that anyone may see the weather channel in it's pristine glory over the internet - especially when there's much more efficient weather web sites that already exist. Well, that is, unless the weather channel starts hiring supermodels to introduce the weather... with very special forms of weather simulations, etc.
:^)
Ryan Fenton
I still remember the rather painstaking process of writing down many derivation and integration formulas into my TI85 graphing calculator. I justified it on the basis that if I was actually deriving or integrating in the real world, I'd have a book next to me anyway, while I still knew I was cheating.
In the process though, I got used to typing words and various macros into the graphing calculator, and over a break was able to make a fun little Might & Magic-style maze walking game using four images and a matrix for the maze layout. It's part of why I'm a programmer now.
So, even though it is cheating to use these tools in several situations- learning to cheat with such tools can be a useful learning experience in itself! As long as you don't get caught.
:^)
Ryan Fenton
If EULA enforcement and reinforcement in the courts becomes widespread, we will see a rash of programs devoted to automatically eliminating and otherwise blocking EULA agreements from the user's point of view.
If they're going to take that many rights anyway, they may just as well have to do it completely against the user's will. That, and over the course of thousands of installations, it will probably save days of computer time per user over a lifetime.
:^)
Ryan Fenton
You'll forgive my honest ignorance - but I'm having a bit of a hard time finding more than indirect evidence pointing to the expectation that gravity should act like other recognized massless particle just because it travels like it has 0 mass - since that's just assuming it can't be different in any way in order to stick with one form of relativity.
The closest thing to direct evidence I've found for gravity travelling at light speed is in observation of the changing orbits of binary pulsars, and the like - but this is not really a satisfying set of evidence for me. It assumes so many aspects of gravitational ratiation escaping and the like, that it really doesn't seem a clear picture so much as a loose interpretation based on existing assumptions.
Also, in another part of this thread, I posted this link:
http://www.ldolphin.org/vanFlandern/gravityspeed.
, which seems to be a frequently-posted link in discussions like these. I find that the path of discussion in that link has at least a few points valid enough for me to realistically doubt that gravity must act like a conventional form of radiation. I'd definetly be interested in any evidence, and I'm not at all attached to the notion that gravity acts in one way or another - so, if there's some argument or logic I'm missing, lay it on me!
:^)
Ryan Fenton
Nah - the 9.81 m/s/s value is just the average acceleration in freefall for an object within a few miles of the surface of the earth, not counting the effects of atmosphere. It's the effect of gravity, not the speed of gravity itself. On heavier planets, this value is generally higher, because more mass is exerting gravity, thus pulling objects faster. Here's a link to a page with one discussion on the speed of gravity I'm talking about:
h tml
http://www.ldolphin.org/vanFlandern/gravityspeed.
Again, I'm not acting as a scientist proper in this thread - but the speed of gravity in this context is meant to mean the speed at which the force itself "moves", not the speed at which objects affected by it move. The question essentially is: At what rate does the pull from one mass end up having an effect on another mass' acceleration?
:^)
Ryan Fenton
Note: I'm not especially expecting this to be true, just wondering what it would mean if it WERE true. I'm also just a computer science student, and am acting more as a philosopher than a scientist proper.
If it were true that gravity can be "generated" from matter by setting it up in a special super-conductive state, then sending energy at it, then we could learn several things.
First, we could learn if gravity is faster than the speed of light. This also means that faster-than-light communication would be possible, and eventually a form of faster-than-light information-conversion-based travel.
In addition, a new form of travel may be possible by just sending a small gravity generator where you expect to go, and have the smaller object pull you towards your destination at a cheaper net fuel cost. There's a LOT of assumptions here though, and the very idea itself seems to go against many principles of energy conservation.
It would also mean that humanity would have an interesting opportunity to attract matter, and eventually counter the effects of universal expansion.
Through learning about the speed of gravity, if we find that it is "instant", it may be possible to learn the time scale of the universe.
We may also learn of the nature of the range and shape of gravity over distance. Things such as if it travels as waves that may miss particles, and if there are "weak" spots in it's eminations relative to the polls of an atom, and how often these waves may be emitted if they exist as such.
Of course, nothing says that even if this were true, that it would be in any way efficient to use energy to generate gravity. Perhaps there is no way we could even generate gravity fast enough through energy conversion to match the effects of a marshmellow. Or much worse, perhaps it would be ironically simple to make a device that would slam a distant asteroid, planet, or star into our world within a few decades of the first exeriment!
So, what else might this mean, either if it is true or false?
:^)
Ryan Fenton
I really hate getting a used book that someone has taken a highlighter to. The light yellow/green/pink really distracts my eye when trying to concentrate. Even worse when the previous owner has a really bad highlighting technique. Far less annoying are the standard food stains/coffee cup marks, even when half the book in stained.
Anyone know of any online bookstores that at least check a few pages of used books for highlighter marks and the like, and mention if they found any in the book description?
:^)
Ryan Fenton
From my distant memories of the dummy terminals at the University of North Dakota's CS department, one person starting a series of forked processes can leave a big hurt on everyone. Not that the setup would be anything like the server-terminal configuration at UND, or that there won't defenses against such problems... but users will find, either directly or indirectly, ways to at least take down individual systems down due to the freedom that such systems have to allow to be useful to a general audience.
That said, Windows and other public systems have all these problems too. If you've ever been in a general student computer lab more than a few times, there's just going to be dead systems every few dozen chairs. You're still going to want to scan any writable medium you've used on the system for malicious programs before you use it after bringing it home, and there's still just going to be problems with the configuration acting differently than even experienced users expect.
The only way I can see to truly prevent many types of problems in a public setting would be to not allow user executables, have a limited interface for most users, and logically ensure that at no path along the bootup, use, and shutdown of a system can a user do anything outside of expected things with the system. That means no boot-from-CD or disk, no systems with access to BIOS settings on bootup, etc, until after login to ensure security - which is likely not possible with most hardware.
Anyway, I have no suggested solution - just issues I see with any public system, including Linux ones. They're not big issues either, considering that most public systems now seem to work fine with their limited security. But not all the advantages touted for Linux will be automatically present in a public system!
:^)
Ryan Fenton
http://www.ldolphin.org/vanFlandern/gravityspeed.
At least from the evidence of the above link provided, gravity does not appear to be limited as you might think. It's effect doesn't even appear to be limited to the speed of light according to many observations! Rather, it may be more of an inherant pull of space-time, a structural effect, if you will. Of course, there are also unknowns such as the accellerating expansion of the universe which help confuse understanding even further.
Anyway, these are just simple observations from someone who is not a physicist, but is instead a college programmer who tries to understand the universe as far as simulation of forces is concerned. It still appears that there are essential types of forces out there, whether basic or not, that we still can't recreate with known observations. The effects of gravity in all it's incarnations still fits that category.
I'd definetly be interested in counter-arguments though!
:^)
Ryan Fenton