So how does wired.com know this ? In fact, some German TV show shortly after the attack claimed that Bin Laden does not use any high-tech at all for communication, rather his subordinates would come to him and he talks with them personally.
Just today El Reg runs a story that essentially claims the same. They say that their source is a "retired intelligence operative" and that Bin Laden uses
this tactic for years already.
Interesting question indeed.
Atmospheric pressure on the surface of Mars is about 6 millibar, which on Earth corresponds to
a height of 35 km above sea level (4 times higher
than Mt. Everest).
Obviously at least the lungs must be pressurized, but what about the rest of the body ?
There is some information on the consequences of
such low pressure for the human body at
this page (also some real cases discussed). Apparently some water vapor will evolve in the soft tissues and cause swelling of
the body. This can be prevented by "a properly fitted elastic garment" at pressures as low as
20 millibar. It is not clear whether this would
work at the 6 milibar on Mars.
The strength of the current (i.e. amperes) depends on the resistance (about 500 to 1000 Ohm for the human body, AC 50 Hz): ampere = volt / ohm.
The resistance depends on AC vs. DC, and also the frequency in case of AC (usually 50 Hz in Germany).
In general, DC is more dangerous than AC (because the body is a better conductor for DC).
The main danger for the body are muscle cramps,
which may lead to respiratory or cardiac arrest
at strengths of more than 20-50 mA after few
minutes. A few 100 mA may cause
cardiac arrest if lasting longer than a full
heartbeat (about 0.8 sec).
A static discharge will last only a very brief moment, so in most cases there is little reason
to worry...
German law has provisions against overbroad disclaimers of warranty. However, you might have problems to sue, first because the product (IIS) might be just as bad as the market standard (read: you get what you should expect), and second, because MS has provided a patch long ago.
And yes, the GPL disclaimer of warranty is void in Germany. However, as coder, giving away the app for free, you are only responsible for malicious intent and gross neglicience (like deleting the whole disk if the user only wants to delete a single file). Things are different - and more liability is put onto you - if your GPL app would be part of a
buisiness plan (think GPL install software of commercial Linux distribution, coded on behalf of the distributor).
Read the e-mail exchange between Blair and the
Russians here. Plenty of details on the problems with
MS SQL server, and apparently both
sides agree that this is pretty low quality software.
My wife has a Ph.D., and she certainly is in the
more intelligent half of the population, yet she
has A LOT of problems with MS Windows. If MS is
spending big bucks on user interface, then obviously most of it is completely wasted.
My personal experience is: if you know MS Windows FOR YEARS, then it is pretty useable. If you are confronted with it the first time, it is exactly as (un-)useable as any Linux desktop. I have never seen a non-geek user who was able to use MS Windows productively without a decent introduction and some occasional help by an experienced friend. Anything else is a myth.
It is not at all self contradictory. Quite the
contrary, Open Source could never be a valid
business model without trademark enforcement.
Anyone can take the source and (re-)distribute it, so the only thing you can charge money for is
the brand name that comes with the product, and
which suggests things like support, reliability
and accountability to those who are buying into the product. Without the brand name, there is
absolutely zero you can sell to potential customers.
There are per-country stats (now ?), and those
for the US do not look significantly
different, except for the salaries maybe (it seems also that RedHat/GNOME are leading in the US).
The stats on gender confirm what I found recently
by investigating freshmeat a bit: there are
almost no female developers. The US is even below
average.
I am missing some social questions that might be
interesting (married ? childs ?).
You forget that this is in the US of A, where
almost all human rights (free speech, due process, whatever else comes to mind) are commodities that
you can sell off to your employer, to Acme,
or whoever else is interested in them.
Fact is, probably you already have sold yours
unwittingly because you didn't mind to read the TOS...
The analysis clearly shows one of the biggest
problems of PGP: the "web of trust".
Only about 11 per cent of the
keys have outside sigs, so for most of the keys
you cannot trust the identity of the keyholder at
all.
From a mathematical point, the "web of trust" is
certainly a nice idea, as it scales very well.
In practice, however, it is obviously too difficult to get one's key signed. How would
you do it ? Travel to a key-signing party ? Too
expensive, except if you live in some blessed
place. Ask around in your neighbourhood, like "Hey, do you have a PGP key, and if yes, would you sign mine ?" - not very likely to work. I have
considered using a CA nearby, but they only sign
PGP 2.6.3 keys...
It would be nice if someone
(gnupg.org ?) would run a list where people can enter
their name and address, indicating that they are willing to sign, such that others could look up
a potential signer in their area. I know Debian has something like that, but there a just a handful of people on their list, spread all over the world - not really too useful.
Just make sure to audit the source code before using such programs - I don't know about the ones in Debian (if makepasswd uses/dev/random, it should be secure), but there is a bunch of such programs on Freshmeat, and some of them use time() to seed
the random number generator - meaning you can reproduce the generated passwords if you stat() the program to get the time of last access, which
will be equal to the seed..
Contrary to some popular belief, scientists
do care about money - they need results to
justify their funding, and they need to get the best possible results with the limited funding available.
Which is why most scientist would prefer unmanned space
missions for scientific experiments. They are much cheaper, because they don't
suffer from the huge overhead of life support and
enhanced security concerns, and they allow much
more precise measurements, because there are
less disturbing factors (air, movements, temperature and humidity fluctuations).
The only scientific experiments for which manned
missions are good are experiments with human beings themself (e.g. life support in space, or whatever). Everything else is just politics.
Try to find out whether you are can file
suit in a country with advantageous laws.
AFAIK, if it is a German company, or possibly a US company with a German branch, you can claim (under German jurisdiction) their revenues instead
of your (nonexistant) damages. And they will have
to pay your attorney, if they loose in court.
The future of life both in closed and open universes has been the subject of some physical/mathematical analysis already.
For a closed universe, for a (non-existent ?) outside observer, the final collape will be quite fast, while for an observer within the universe the final collapse will stretch infinitely (this is
a relativistic effect), and energy will not be a problem. If there is some way for an information
processing (eventually intelligent) system to
survive under such conditions, it may become immortal (and eternally entraped) in the final
microsecond of the collapse.
This is basically the Omega-Point theory of Tipler
and Barrow (read 'The anthropic principle' by F.J. Tipler and J.D. Barrow, or 'The physics of immortality'
by F.J. Tipler).
For an open universe, there is a paper from 1979 by Freeman J. Dyson (Review of Modern Physics, Vol 21, Nr. 3), which is also available
online. Basically, he shows that life may exist forever by using an activity/hibernation cycle.
If a proper hibernating strategy is used, where
the relative length of the hibernating phase
is increased with time, subjective time can become
infinite, while the total energy required will remain finite.
In the US, the constitution only says that the
government cannot abridge the freedom of speech. Everybody else is allowed to do.
In other jurisdictions (e.g. Germany) the constitution guarantees the freedom of speech.
I.e. in the US, free speech is only a limitation of the government's power, while elsewhere it may
be regarded as a human right that should be
protected by the government (whether
this is done successfully is a different story).
They don't disappear. Black Holes are only detected indirectly, by the radiation of matter falling into them (a significant fraction of that matter can be radiated away rather than ending in the BH, which makes BHs very efficient cosmic power plants).
As soon as there is no matter left in the surroundings of the BH, it will become 'quiet',
i.e. undetectable. When looking at distant
galaxies, we look back in time, when the universe was younger, and galaxies with BHs still had much
gas and dust in their central regions to feed the BH, resulting in the spectacular energy output
of Quasars. Once this supply has ended, the BH would become virtually undetectable, and from a distance, the galaxy would appear just as a 'normal' galaxy like the Milky Way (which is known to have a BH in its centre).
By the way, BHs can also radiate away via Hawking radiation, but this will take much longer than the current age of the Universe for massive BHs like those in the centres of galaxies.
So presumably this was a lot of smaller
exposures that were summed to total the 15.5
days that would normally take?
Yes. The press release says it is the sum of 11 exposures.
As to the length of individual exposures, for optical detectors (CCDs) you are normally limited by the amount of high-energy cosmic rays collected by the detector, which spoil the data. Thus, individual optical images are rarely longer than one hour.
With X-ray detectors, you can usually seperate low-energy X-ray photons from high-energy cosmic rays. The limiting factor is the orbit of the spacecraft (if the target ever is behind the earth during the orbit), pointing limitations (the telescope should look at least XYZ degree away from the sun), and radiation in the Van Allen belt around the earth. Uninterrupted exposures of several hours or even days are quite common for x-ray space observatories.
Believe it or not, but in astronomy there are about two big standard software packages for image analysis, both open source, and at least
one of them (IRAF) uses the tek as the standard device for graphs (not images, of course).
You can bet that a HUGE fraction of all these pretty
Hubble Space Telescope images are analyzed using
the tek emulation in xterm.
In our institute, KDE is installed by default on
all boxes (we have SuSE...). Nobody (well, maybe
one out of ten) understands the difference
between KDE and a simple window manager like fvwm,
in fact most people do not even understand that
a kvt is not an xterm (there is no tek support
in kvt - just had to explain someone that his
app will not run in an kvt for this reason...).
In practice, there are two camps in our institute: those who know how to replace
KDE with a simple window manager, and those who
don't. As for the features KDE offers, none of
the two camps cares. Personally, I would rather
use GNOME than KDE, just because KDE looks too
much 'buissness-like', but I have no use for either
of them, so it's just enlightenment 0.16 for me.
(2) However, very often the license of a program
says something like 'GPL version 2.0 or any
later version...
(3)...which may be void in some countries.
AFAIK, there has never been a lawsuit in Germany
involving the GPL, but there is a group of lawyers
(www.ifross.de - German only) who have studied
the issue, and one of their conclusions is that
the 'or any later version' clause may be void under German law.
Simply not true. NS 4.x is incredibly slow when rendering pages with nested tables. mozilla 0.6 does it instantaneously. I have used mozilla 0.6
for some time now, and was very pleased by its speed.
Also, with ns 4.x you cannot develop web sites on Linux, because it will happily render nice pages
from buggy HTML code that will look like crap on other browsers. With mozilla 0.6, if the page looks ok, you can be reasonably sure that the code
is ok.
Slashdot Mirror
Just today El Reg runs a story that essentially claims the same. They say that their source is a "retired intelligence operative" and that Bin Laden uses this tactic for years already.
Obviously at least the lungs must be pressurized, but what about the rest of the body ? There is some information on the consequences of such low pressure for the human body at this page (also some real cases discussed). Apparently some water vapor will evolve in the soft tissues and cause swelling of the body. This can be prevented by "a properly fitted elastic garment" at pressures as low as 20 millibar. It is not clear whether this would work at the 6 milibar on Mars.
The main danger for the body are muscle cramps, which may lead to respiratory or cardiac arrest at strengths of more than 20-50 mA after few minutes. A few 100 mA may cause cardiac arrest if lasting longer than a full heartbeat (about 0.8 sec).
A static discharge will last only a very brief moment, so in most cases there is little reason to worry ...
And yes, the GPL disclaimer of warranty is void in Germany. However, as coder, giving away the app for free, you are only responsible for malicious intent and gross neglicience (like deleting the whole disk if the user only wants to delete a single file). Things are different - and more liability is put onto you - if your GPL app would be part of a buisiness plan (think GPL install software of commercial Linux distribution, coded on behalf of the distributor).
Read the e-mail exchange between Blair and the Russians here. Plenty of details on the problems with MS SQL server, and apparently both sides agree that this is pretty low quality software.
My personal experience is: if you know MS Windows FOR YEARS, then it is pretty useable. If you are confronted with it the first time, it is exactly as (un-)useable as any Linux desktop. I have never seen a non-geek user who was able to use MS Windows productively without a decent introduction and some occasional help by an experienced friend. Anything else is a myth.
Anyone can take the source and (re-)distribute it, so the only thing you can charge money for is the brand name that comes with the product, and which suggests things like support, reliability and accountability to those who are buying into the product. Without the brand name, there is absolutely zero you can sell to potential customers.
The stats on gender confirm what I found recently by investigating freshmeat a bit: there are almost no female developers. The US is even below average.
I am missing some social questions that might be interesting (married ? childs ?).
You forget that this is in the US of A, where almost all human rights (free speech, due process, whatever else comes to mind) are commodities that you can sell off to your employer, to Acme, or whoever else is interested in them.
Fact is, probably you already have sold yours unwittingly because you didn't mind to read the TOS ...
Only about 11 per cent of the keys have outside sigs, so for most of the keys you cannot trust the identity of the keyholder at all.
From a mathematical point, the "web of trust" is certainly a nice idea, as it scales very well. In practice, however, it is obviously too difficult to get one's key signed. How would you do it ? Travel to a key-signing party ? Too expensive, except if you live in some blessed place. Ask around in your neighbourhood, like "Hey, do you have a PGP key, and if yes, would you sign mine ?" - not very likely to work. I have considered using a CA nearby, but they only sign PGP 2.6.3 keys ...
It would be nice if someone (gnupg.org ?) would run a list where people can enter their name and address, indicating that they are willing to sign, such that others could look up a potential signer in their area. I know Debian has something like that, but there a just a handful of people on their list, spread all over the world - not really too useful.
Just make sure to audit the source code before using such programs - I don't know about the ones in Debian (if makepasswd uses /dev/random, it should be secure), but there is a bunch of such programs on Freshmeat, and some of them use time() to seed
the random number generator - meaning you can reproduce the generated passwords if you stat() the program to get the time of last access, which
will be equal to the seed ..
No, it isn't. Most sites load not much slower. What really is painful is downloading huge files.
Which is why most scientist would prefer unmanned space missions for scientific experiments. They are much cheaper, because they don't suffer from the huge overhead of life support and enhanced security concerns, and they allow much more precise measurements, because there are less disturbing factors (air, movements, temperature and humidity fluctuations).
The only scientific experiments for which manned missions are good are experiments with human beings themself (e.g. life support in space, or whatever). Everything else is just politics.
AFAIK, if it is a German company, or possibly a US company with a German branch, you can claim (under German jurisdiction) their revenues instead of your (nonexistant) damages. And they will have to pay your attorney, if they loose in court.
For a closed universe, for a (non-existent ?) outside observer, the final collape will be quite fast, while for an observer within the universe the final collapse will stretch infinitely (this is a relativistic effect), and energy will not be a problem. If there is some way for an information processing (eventually intelligent) system to survive under such conditions, it may become immortal (and eternally entraped) in the final microsecond of the collapse.
This is basically the Omega-Point theory of Tipler and Barrow (read 'The anthropic principle' by F.J. Tipler and J.D. Barrow, or 'The physics of immortality' by F.J. Tipler).
For an open universe, there is a paper from 1979 by Freeman J. Dyson (Review of Modern Physics, Vol 21, Nr. 3), which is also available online. Basically, he shows that life may exist forever by using an activity/hibernation cycle. If a proper hibernating strategy is used, where the relative length of the hibernating phase is increased with time, subjective time can become infinite, while the total energy required will remain finite.
- it is not required to register
- at your choice you can collect the profit the infringing party has made instead of actual damages (interesting for open source)
- copyright infringement is a felony that can get you in jail for at most three years
Disclaimer: IANAL, consult a lawyer if need arisesIn the US, the constitution only says that the government cannot abridge the freedom of speech. Everybody else is allowed to do.
In other jurisdictions (e.g. Germany) the constitution guarantees the freedom of speech.
I.e. in the US, free speech is only a limitation of the government's power, while elsewhere it may be regarded as a human right that should be protected by the government (whether this is done successfully is a different story).
ESO has also issued a press release on this topic, which IMHO is better than the NASA press release (more facts, less marketspeak).
As soon as there is no matter left in the surroundings of the BH, it will become 'quiet', i.e. undetectable. When looking at distant galaxies, we look back in time, when the universe was younger, and galaxies with BHs still had much gas and dust in their central regions to feed the BH, resulting in the spectacular energy output of Quasars. Once this supply has ended, the BH would become virtually undetectable, and from a distance, the galaxy would appear just as a 'normal' galaxy like the Milky Way (which is known to have a BH in its centre).
By the way, BHs can also radiate away via Hawking radiation, but this will take much longer than the current age of the Universe for massive BHs like those in the centres of galaxies.
So presumably this was a lot of smaller
exposures that were summed to total the 15.5
days that would normally take?
Yes. The press release says it is the sum of 11 exposures.
As to the length of individual exposures, for optical detectors (CCDs) you are normally limited by the amount of high-energy cosmic rays collected by the detector, which spoil the data. Thus, individual optical images are rarely longer than one hour.
With X-ray detectors, you can usually seperate low-energy X-ray photons from high-energy cosmic rays. The limiting factor is the orbit of the spacecraft (if the target ever is behind the earth during the orbit), pointing limitations (the telescope should look at least XYZ degree away from the sun), and radiation in the Van Allen belt around the earth. Uninterrupted exposures of several hours or even days are quite common for x-ray space observatories.
You can bet that a HUGE fraction of all these pretty Hubble Space Telescope images are analyzed using the tek emulation in xterm.
In our institute, KDE is installed by default on all boxes (we have SuSE ...). Nobody (well, maybe
one out of ten) understands the difference
between KDE and a simple window manager like fvwm,
in fact most people do not even understand that
a kvt is not an xterm (there is no tek support
in kvt - just had to explain someone that his
app will not run in an kvt for this reason ...).
In practice, there are two camps in our institute: those who know how to replace KDE with a simple window manager, and those who don't. As for the features KDE offers, none of the two camps cares. Personally, I would rather use GNOME than KDE, just because KDE looks too much 'buissness-like', but I have no use for either of them, so it's just enlightenment 0.16 for me.
(1) Generally yes.
...which may be void in some countries.
(2) However, very often the license of a program
says something like 'GPL version 2.0 or any
later version...
(3)
AFAIK, there has never been a lawsuit in Germany
involving the GPL, but there is a group of lawyers
(www.ifross.de - German only) who have studied
the issue, and one of their conclusions is that
the 'or any later version' clause may be void under German law.
On the other hand, there is still a remote chance that it might not be impossible to prove that Bruce Schneier is not God herself.
Simply not true. NS 4.x is incredibly slow when rendering pages with nested tables. mozilla 0.6 does it instantaneously. I have used mozilla 0.6 for some time now, and was very pleased by its speed.
Also, with ns 4.x you cannot develop web sites on Linux, because it will happily render nice pages from buggy HTML code that will look like crap on other browsers. With mozilla 0.6, if the page looks ok, you can be reasonably sure that the code is ok.