No. Only the public is afraid of nuclear power. It is an political problem, not an engineering problem.
While it might be possible to operate a nuclear power plant safely under an ideal political organization, that is not an achievable situation. As an engineer you have to take all factors into account, including the possible incompetence of human operators and the corruption of inspectors, owners and contractors.
Currently plans for new nuclear power being considered are all based on the discredited light water design that led to the Chernobyl disaster. It is not a fail safe design, but it is described as such. Meanwhile genuinely fail safe designs such as CANDU and Pebble Bed are ignored.
The fact that a non-fail safe design could be built next to New York City at Three Mile Island speaks volumes for the deception that was practised in the 60s and 70s.
Not the same issue at all. When the general public is more concerned than scientists, it is born of a combination of things: ignorance, poor reading comprehension, poor listening skills, or emotion.
Not necessarily. Back in the 50s you would be hard pressed to find a scientist worrying much about nuclear power, specifically the threat of nuclear waste or a meltdown.
Today you would find that the consensus position amongst scientists is highly skeptical of nuclear power, in particular the nuclear waste issue is a major concern as is the safety issue in the wake of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.
In fact one of the biggest reasons to avoid nuclear power today is the fact that the population at large was lied to throughout the fifties, sixties and seventies by the old nuclear power establishment. That makes any new investment in nuclear power a pretty risky proposition. Sure people can propose new technologies such as pebble bed but they are still going to have to face the fact that the light water reactors were neither as safe nor as efficient as claimed.
You don't need to be an economist to be suspicious of a hedge fund called 'Long Term Capital Management' that is exclusively engaged in highly leveraged short term arbitrage speculation, or banks that trade in Leveraged Super Senior debt, or companies like Enron that post huge profits based on raptor vehicles.
An observation is determining the eigenstate of a system. If the system was previously in a superposition of eigenstates this will resolve into one of those possibilities. This isn't a very satisfying definition, but describes any measurement that can be made on a quantum mechanical level.
Well you are right about it being wolly thinking. Lady Tottington from curse of the Were-Rabbit was capable of clearer thinking.
So when particle A interacts with particle B you think that the mechanics of the interaction depends on whether someone is watching. Funny me, never saw that switch in GEANT.
Now the wolly thinking has shifted to the definition of 'determining'. Iteraction of any kind will determine the eigenstate of the system whether or not someone is watching.
Exactly how you interpret these results a a matter of meta-physics, but your mechanism doesn't work, at least without positing the faster-than-light transfer of information.
Faster than light interaction does not require faster than light transfer of information. All attempts to use faster than light interaction to cause transfer of information have failed to date.
Positing that particles behave differently when being 'observed' would require you to provide a testable definition of 'observation' whic I don't think you can.
The theory that nothing can travel faster than light is just that, a theory. The theory that particles behave the same whether or not they are under experimental conditions is an essential precondition for science.
All experiments are to a degree a measurement of the phenomena under test and the experimental apparatus. But saying that the decision to observe by itself changes the outcome is bad metaphysics.
All QM tells us is that it is impossible to set up an experiment that measures two complimentary variables at the same time. The interaction necessary to measure one will disrupt the other. QM does not tell us that the decision to record the results of an experiment changes the outcome.
You do know that Mahmoud Ahmadinjad is not the commander in chief of the Iranian armed forces and can't order an attack on the US or Israel any more than you could.
True but he can make bellicose statements and so can Bush and it only takes an itchy trigger finger on either side to start a war.
Mr Ahmadinjad is the Zaphod Beeblebrox of Iran, he is there to distract people from the real source of power. Getting back to Putin, the reason he is so dangerous is that he has devised a scheme to allow him to continue as de-facto President after his term limit has expired. He is going to be like Iran's supreme leader, the guy that cannot ever be removed.
Its not quite the same as during the Soviet era. Virtually all the former Soviet satelites are free today and about half of the former Soviet states.
To be rational about it however, I can only think of a few reasons why he would say this.
Occam's razor suggests option #3:
3) Bush is an almost complete moron and says things he knows nothing about.
It can hardly have escaped notice that the Bush campaign to bring democracy to the middle east is based around the Dictator Musharaff who was one of the principal backers of the Taleban and came to power in a military coup in 1999 he organized after the civilian government attempted to sack him for his backing of the Taleban.
The current planning for the war with Iran is based on the following two propositions:
1) That Iran is an aggressive militaristic state that threatens it neighbors
2) That Iran will not make any response to an unprovoked US attack despite having the developing world's second largest missile arsenal and the strongest imaginable strategic position, controlling the Straits of Hormuz and the oil that the West depends on.
The fact that #1 and #2 are incompatible should be obvious, but not it appears to the administration. Not that anyone sensible is meant to believe #2 of course, it is merely a repeat of 'it will be a cake walk' just as #1 is a repeat of "WMD". The only people who are expected to believe it are the people who can't work out that #3 is the case.
Bush is an almost complete moron but he is somewhat cleverer than the people who still beleive him.
>Explaining Stern-Gerlach by reference to observation is an uhga-buhga approach to Quantum Physics.
A widely held one, though.
Your "defocusing" theory is fine, but is not born of any kind of physical observation or force. It is therefore no more or less "uhga-buhga".
40% of Americans think that the world is 6000 years old. Who holds an idea is rather more important as how many.
I have worked/studied at Oxford University Nuclear Physics Lab, DESY and CERN. Nobody has ever suggested the interpretation you suggest to me.
Claiming that particles behave differently under 'observation' as opposed to interaction would require you to define observation. That was Shroedinger's point. Is the cat an observer?
I don't need to do an experiment to determine that a theory is inconsistent or ambiguous.
I am sorry, Wikipedia was not on the reading list at Oxford.
Explaining Stern-Gerlach by reference to observation is an uhga-buhga approach to Quantum Physics. OK if you want to take the poision that the universe computes using lazy evaluation you can make an unfalsifiable theory out of it.
A much simpler interpretation is that the interaction in the z plane causes the x plane to defocus and vice versa because the two are aspects of a single attribute which is kind ow what you would be expecting if you thought about the fact that we model electrons with TWO spin states, not FOUR which is what you would need if the x and z polarizations were independent.
Electrons having only two spin states is kinda intrinsic to the standard model thingie.
No, electrons do not say 'whoops I just hit a measurement instrument, I have to remember to do something wierd'. Electrons behave the same way whether someone is watching or not.
It isn't observation by a sentient being that causes the wave function to collapse, its interaction. The point being made by Schroedinger is that observation inescapably means interaction and thus affecting the quantity being measured.
light from the supernova would be interacting with the earth regardless of whether scientists were there.
Zeinfeld, you're not paying close enough attention. I am anything but exceptional, yet I make great effort to support artists and innovators directly, completely circumventing the copyright system.
I am paying attention, I am paying attention to what people do, not just what they say.
Man, I'm sick of this strawman argument. The only people who want everything free, forevah, are retarded 12-year olds. The rest of us just want to pay a fair price, which basically means premium price for new/popular stuff, and a lot less for everything else. You know, how the market works.
It is the argument repeated time and again on Slashdot. Evul medja execs, blah, cheat artists, blah, get my movies from bit torrent via the Pirate Bay.
The objective of the Priate Bay is not to make content available at a 'fair' price, it is to make the content available for free. Same for Napster 1.0. Its not a straw man argument, its the business model of the copyright busting companies whose activities are routinely justified and defended on Slashdot.
I'm increasingly of the belief that the morality of file sharing is irrelevant. Right or wrong, I doubt even the government can stop it, as easy as it's become. And we're already at the point where companies' pursuit of profits are inhibiting the good of society, and stopping file sharing (if we are to assume that is even possible) would go much further than that, with a result a lot worse than starving artists and media executives.
Society is not held together with technical security measures. It is held together by accountability and honesty.
The critical mistake of the RIAA is that they engaged in a whole heap of unethical practices such as the returned rights grab at the same time that they were demanding ethical behavior from others.
The RIAA made it socially acceptable to commit file sharing. People don't see the behavior as criminal, they don't see it as wrong.
This should not suprise people, after all President Thumscrews is doing the same in Iraq, preaching to the world about the benefits of democracy while actively encouraging the use of torture.
One important option is that the copyright should never be transferable - the creator shall always be in control. There may be multiple creators involved in a work, but that's still possible to handle.
OK I have just finished writing a book. If copyright was not transferable I would have had no choice other than to self publish.
OK so you didn't quite mean that I guess, you meant that the author's share is not transferable. But that means that I have no option other than to rely on income from royalties. I can't get an advance from the publisher because doing so would mean transfering the rights.
Copyright only has a value to authors if it can be traded. If I have an annuity income stream from any reliable source I am going to be able to find someone who is willing to factor it and give me a lump sum.
The fact that the labels and the studios take assinine positions on copyright does not mean that opponents should. There was relatively little wrong with the state of copyright law in 1950. Its only recently that it went pear shaped. The studios and labels made the mistake of making a land grab at the same time that new technology was threatening their traditional revenue models.
This is such an unattractive debate. I have less than zero sympathy for either pole.
On the one hand we have media execs that demand tougher copyright laws "to protect artists" while having clauses inserted in the same bill to cheat them of their returned rights.
On the other we have a bunch of folk who want to have everything for free and construct elaborate explanations as to how this is great for the artists.
Copyright is a legislative issue. The chance of a Presidential veto of copyright legislation is quite small. The opinions of the candidates are pretty well irrelevant.
It is rather hard to decipher, but it seems the 3500 comments given to ECMA are a subset of the 10,000 submitted to ISO? Perhaps only 3500 had substantive issues for ECMA to respond to? On the other hand, this article says ISO doesn't allow anyone to view comments, whereas groklaw includes them in a zip file, so maybe they aren't even the same comments?
The IETF was recently the target of a clueless lobbying 'campaign' by the FSF. Post after post appeared on the IETF mailing list saying 'no standards based on proprietary technologies', often they were cut and past jobs of the same text.
Saying 'X should not be ratified' is not a response in the standards world, it is an attempt to cast a ballot. To make a response you have to say 'X is deficient because of Y'.
Lobbying a standards process en-mass tends to be counterproductive, particularly if like the FSF people the points you make are not relevant to the issue at hand. IETF policy allows for proprietary technology to become a full IETF standard. In this particular instance the IETF had already had a lengthy discussion of the patent issue and decided to demote the proposal to Experimental as a result.
Sure we know that RMS has people who respond to his lobbying campaigns, that does not make the opinion of RMS carry any more weight. Anyone can drag six people in off the street to make the same point six times.
If the number of comments is going to be the test there is nothing to stop Microsoft, Cisco or the like simply telling their 100,000 odd employees to all submit a comment in favor of their position. Its called an astroturf (fake grass roots) campaign.
Its the same story at the Whitehouse. When I was working on the mass listening project I was told that the way that letters from constituents in Congress get evaluated is that they score telephone calls and handwritten notes highest, form letters and emails get a negligible score (unless an email is clearly a considered response from an individual).
Because, with virtual server architectures being on the rise, a new data centre can mean one or two large and very generic servers and simplified connections.
Thats it, plus you get the whole thing built and assembled in the factory at factory labor rates rather than on site at consultancy rates.
If you have a scheme that requires a large deployment of like equipment it could well be attractive. The key would be to build in enough redundancy into the basic box that the hardware never needs to be touched after the box is closed.
Very attractive if you are doing something like installing an Internet backbone in Afghanistan. Less interesting if you are working in downtown Mountain View.
The idea of data center plus power plus cooling in a package is definitely attractive for many applications. Rig the thing in Mountain view, send it off to Niagra Falls or some other place with real cheap power to operate it.
Good thing you're not a lawyer because you're wrong.
TPB doesn't make copies of anything. They host.torrent files. That's it. You can use the torrent file to get pirated material, sure, but you're not downloading the actual files from TPB.
Nor are you a lawyer by the looks.
First it is a really bad idea to apply the principles of US Law to predict the outcome in Sweeden.
Second there is a principle called agency in most jurisdictions. If you do something to enable or facilitate an outcome it is just the same as if you actually did it directly.
Hosting.torrent files is the same thing as hosting the bits in effect.
Its pretty obvious why they would follow them round, find out what assets they have and whether they might be worth siezure.
Clearly not everything they do is digital. They have atoms as well: servers, laptops, flash drives. And clearly they are making a living somehow and someone is funding their activities somehow.
If I was investigating them I would have PIs on their tail. If nothing else it is certainly causing them enough concern to comment on it.
A $500 vista machine runs like absolute shit. I don't care if your "good" system runs vista fast and slick, I'm tired of the $500 pieces of shit being sold at the stores with vista installed. The $500 computers can barely boot the os in a reasonable time. Install a few apps and get a little spyware by mistake and the $500 computers don't have the horsepower to be useable at all...
Here it becomes pretty clear what your game is. If a system is compromised by malware it is not going to run fast regardless of what O/S is running. Boted Linux is just as bad as boted Windows.
I don't notice any problem booting Vista, seems to boot faster than XP to me. And unlike XP it seems to be ready to do work when its booted rather than some time later.
Been a while since I booted a Unix box, in those days it took about ten to fifteen minutes but that was twenty years ago.
It may well be wishful thinking amoungst the Linux faithful but there is a growing impatience with the endless Microsoft upgrade cycle.
Oh yes, people are equally furious about 1) Microsoft continuously introducing new versions and 2) Microsoft not providing the features they want and need.
And whats more its the same people and they don't use Windows anyway.
Vista runs just fine. I have been running it since May and not had any problems apart from a couple that are pretty squarely third party issues. Vista is fast and slick on my hardware.
Admittedly I would probably not recommend a Vista upgrade but thats mostly because the cost of the Vista upgrade is so close to the cost of a new machine anyway. I have two vista machines and three XP machines in the house. One of those is a three year old Vaio that is dropping to pieces anyway. Another is a Dell box I paid $500 for including the monitor and the other is the machine I use for surfing while I am working out on the treadmill.
Why pay $160 to upgrade when the machines are 2 years old and I can have a whole new machine thats much faster for $500? I certainly would not consider buying a new XP machine though.
The industry does not want Vista whine is wishful thinking. Many companies took two years or more to roll out XP. If you have a hundred or so users you would be a fool not to adopt a wait and see approach. But that does not say anything about the quality of the product.
Vista has higher hardware requirements than past versions. That does not make them unreasonable requirements. But most IT depts want to support a single version of the O/S so that means that they can't do the upgrade till they can afford to end-of-life the legacy machines that don't support the new version.
It seems something to do with the way they implemented dynamic linking. Each executable/data page could be shared between multiple processes, with each process having a different set of permissions on that page. On current systems, the permission codes would be associated with that executable/data page, not the process itself.
Its not an issue, modern hardware is so much faster than the hardware of the MULTICS era an interpreter can emulate the processor and the memory management in one go.
A bigger issue would probably be the 36 bit word but even that is just an efficiency issue. Memory is cheap and MULTICS era machines did not have many Mb.
The bigger question is why go to the trouble. The answer is prior art. MULTICS has been mined as prior art in patent disputes for decades. If its in MULTICS its out of patent.
Yeah, they already have found a way around it. They use unofficial email addresses to discuss their dirty work. They aren't under any obligation to preserve emails sent or received via, say, their Republic National Committee email address.
On the contrary, every communication they make regadless of media is subject to the Presidential records act.
I have some personal experience of this, during the Clinton administration every communication had to be surrendered to the arcivist, even if it was nothing more than a comment scribbled in the margine of a printed paper. The use of an external mail system from the Executive Office of the President was completely forbidden.
The difference between using the Whitehouse system and the RNC email servers is that the Whitehouse systems are privileged for an initial five years after the President leaves office and can be extended for a further seven. The RNC email system is not a government system, is not covered by any form of privilege whatsoever.
The other difference is security. The Whitehouse email systems are subject to security review by the NSA. The RNC system was not, they didn't even do security reviews of employees. The systems were not partitioned from systems serving other customers either. So as a result I would not be at all suprised if when the RNC denies having copies of some embarassing email or other if the Ambassador from Venezuela, Cuba, Iran or the like would 'helpfully' turn up with a hard drive full of the missing messages.
Slashdot Mirror
While it might be possible to operate a nuclear power plant safely under an ideal political organization, that is not an achievable situation. As an engineer you have to take all factors into account, including the possible incompetence of human operators and the corruption of inspectors, owners and contractors.
Currently plans for new nuclear power being considered are all based on the discredited light water design that led to the Chernobyl disaster. It is not a fail safe design, but it is described as such. Meanwhile genuinely fail safe designs such as CANDU and Pebble Bed are ignored.
The fact that a non-fail safe design could be built next to New York City at Three Mile Island speaks volumes for the deception that was practised in the 60s and 70s.
Not necessarily. Back in the 50s you would be hard pressed to find a scientist worrying much about nuclear power, specifically the threat of nuclear waste or a meltdown.
Today you would find that the consensus position amongst scientists is highly skeptical of nuclear power, in particular the nuclear waste issue is a major concern as is the safety issue in the wake of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.
In fact one of the biggest reasons to avoid nuclear power today is the fact that the population at large was lied to throughout the fifties, sixties and seventies by the old nuclear power establishment. That makes any new investment in nuclear power a pretty risky proposition. Sure people can propose new technologies such as pebble bed but they are still going to have to face the fact that the light water reactors were neither as safe nor as efficient as claimed.
You don't need to be an economist to be suspicious of a hedge fund called 'Long Term Capital Management' that is exclusively engaged in highly leveraged short term arbitrage speculation, or banks that trade in Leveraged Super Senior debt, or companies like Enron that post huge profits based on raptor vehicles.
Scientists are people as well, and people lie.
It did twenty years ago.
Well you are right about it being wolly thinking. Lady Tottington from curse of the Were-Rabbit was capable of clearer thinking.
So when particle A interacts with particle B you think that the mechanics of the interaction depends on whether someone is watching. Funny me, never saw that switch in GEANT.
Now the wolly thinking has shifted to the definition of 'determining'. Iteraction of any kind will determine the eigenstate of the system whether or not someone is watching.
Faster than light interaction does not require faster than light transfer of information. All attempts to use faster than light interaction to cause transfer of information have failed to date.
Positing that particles behave differently when being 'observed' would require you to provide a testable definition of 'observation' whic I don't think you can.
The theory that nothing can travel faster than light is just that, a theory. The theory that particles behave the same whether or not they are under experimental conditions is an essential precondition for science.
All experiments are to a degree a measurement of the phenomena under test and the experimental apparatus. But saying that the decision to observe by itself changes the outcome is bad metaphysics.
All QM tells us is that it is impossible to set up an experiment that measures two complimentary variables at the same time. The interaction necessary to measure one will disrupt the other. QM does not tell us that the decision to record the results of an experiment changes the outcome.
True but he can make bellicose statements and so can Bush and it only takes an itchy trigger finger on either side to start a war.
Mr Ahmadinjad is the Zaphod Beeblebrox of Iran, he is there to distract people from the real source of power. Getting back to Putin, the reason he is so dangerous is that he has devised a scheme to allow him to continue as de-facto President after his term limit has expired. He is going to be like Iran's supreme leader, the guy that cannot ever be removed.
Its not quite the same as during the Soviet era. Virtually all the former Soviet satelites are free today and about half of the former Soviet states.
Occam's razor suggests option #3:
3) Bush is an almost complete moron and says things he knows nothing about.
It can hardly have escaped notice that the Bush campaign to bring democracy to the middle east is based around the Dictator Musharaff who was one of the principal backers of the Taleban and came to power in a military coup in 1999 he organized after the civilian government attempted to sack him for his backing of the Taleban.
The current planning for the war with Iran is based on the following two propositions:
1) That Iran is an aggressive militaristic state that threatens it neighbors
2) That Iran will not make any response to an unprovoked US attack despite having the developing world's second largest missile arsenal and the strongest imaginable strategic position, controlling the Straits of Hormuz and the oil that the West depends on.
The fact that #1 and #2 are incompatible should be obvious, but not it appears to the administration. Not that anyone sensible is meant to believe #2 of course, it is merely a repeat of 'it will be a cake walk' just as #1 is a repeat of "WMD". The only people who are expected to believe it are the people who can't work out that #3 is the case.
Bush is an almost complete moron but he is somewhat cleverer than the people who still beleive him.
Don't worry. George Bush has looked at Putin's soul and pronounced it excellent.
A widely held one, though.
Your "defocusing" theory is fine, but is not born of any kind of physical observation or force. It is therefore no more or less "uhga-buhga".
40% of Americans think that the world is 6000 years old. Who holds an idea is rather more important as how many.
I have worked/studied at Oxford University Nuclear Physics Lab, DESY and CERN. Nobody has ever suggested the interpretation you suggest to me.
Claiming that particles behave differently under 'observation' as opposed to interaction would require you to define observation. That was Shroedinger's point. Is the cat an observer?
I don't need to do an experiment to determine that a theory is inconsistent or ambiguous.
I am sorry, Wikipedia was not on the reading list at Oxford.
Explaining Stern-Gerlach by reference to observation is an uhga-buhga approach to Quantum Physics. OK if you want to take the poision that the universe computes using lazy evaluation you can make an unfalsifiable theory out of it.
A much simpler interpretation is that the interaction in the z plane causes the x plane to defocus and vice versa because the two are aspects of a single attribute which is kind ow what you would be expecting if you thought about the fact that we model electrons with TWO spin states, not FOUR which is what you would need if the x and z polarizations were independent.
Electrons having only two spin states is kinda intrinsic to the standard model thingie.
No, electrons do not say 'whoops I just hit a measurement instrument, I have to remember to do something wierd'. Electrons behave the same way whether someone is watching or not.
I have a degree from Oxford University Dept. of Nuclear Physics.
Sounds like the most ridiculous idea since Fliechmann and Ponsi tried to do cold fusion to me
It isn't observation by a sentient being that causes the wave function to collapse, its interaction. The point being made by Schroedinger is that observation inescapably means interaction and thus affecting the quantity being measured.
light from the supernova would be interacting with the earth regardless of whether scientists were there.
I am paying attention, I am paying attention to what people do, not just what they say.
It is the argument repeated time and again on Slashdot. Evul medja execs, blah, cheat artists, blah, get my movies from bit torrent via the Pirate Bay.
The objective of the Priate Bay is not to make content available at a 'fair' price, it is to make the content available for free. Same for Napster 1.0. Its not a straw man argument, its the business model of the copyright busting companies whose activities are routinely justified and defended on Slashdot.
Society is not held together with technical security measures. It is held together by accountability and honesty.
The critical mistake of the RIAA is that they engaged in a whole heap of unethical practices such as the returned rights grab at the same time that they were demanding ethical behavior from others.
The RIAA made it socially acceptable to commit file sharing. People don't see the behavior as criminal, they don't see it as wrong.
This should not suprise people, after all President Thumscrews is doing the same in Iraq, preaching to the world about the benefits of democracy while actively encouraging the use of torture.
Hypocrisy has a corrosive effect on society.
OK I have just finished writing a book. If copyright was not transferable I would have had no choice other than to self publish.
OK so you didn't quite mean that I guess, you meant that the author's share is not transferable. But that means that I have no option other than to rely on income from royalties. I can't get an advance from the publisher because doing so would mean transfering the rights.
Copyright only has a value to authors if it can be traded. If I have an annuity income stream from any reliable source I am going to be able to find someone who is willing to factor it and give me a lump sum.
The fact that the labels and the studios take assinine positions on copyright does not mean that opponents should. There was relatively little wrong with the state of copyright law in 1950. Its only recently that it went pear shaped. The studios and labels made the mistake of making a land grab at the same time that new technology was threatening their traditional revenue models.
On the one hand we have media execs that demand tougher copyright laws "to protect artists" while having clauses inserted in the same bill to cheat them of their returned rights.
On the other we have a bunch of folk who want to have everything for free and construct elaborate explanations as to how this is great for the artists.
Copyright is a legislative issue. The chance of a Presidential veto of copyright legislation is quite small. The opinions of the candidates are pretty well irrelevant.
The IETF was recently the target of a clueless lobbying 'campaign' by the FSF. Post after post appeared on the IETF mailing list saying 'no standards based on proprietary technologies', often they were cut and past jobs of the same text.
Saying 'X should not be ratified' is not a response in the standards world, it is an attempt to cast a ballot. To make a response you have to say 'X is deficient because of Y'.
Lobbying a standards process en-mass tends to be counterproductive, particularly if like the FSF people the points you make are not relevant to the issue at hand. IETF policy allows for proprietary technology to become a full IETF standard. In this particular instance the IETF had already had a lengthy discussion of the patent issue and decided to demote the proposal to Experimental as a result.
Sure we know that RMS has people who respond to his lobbying campaigns, that does not make the opinion of RMS carry any more weight. Anyone can drag six people in off the street to make the same point six times.
If the number of comments is going to be the test there is nothing to stop Microsoft, Cisco or the like simply telling their 100,000 odd employees to all submit a comment in favor of their position. Its called an astroturf (fake grass roots) campaign.
Its the same story at the Whitehouse. When I was working on the mass listening project I was told that the way that letters from constituents in Congress get evaluated is that they score telephone calls and handwritten notes highest, form letters and emails get a negligible score (unless an email is clearly a considered response from an individual).
Thats it, plus you get the whole thing built and assembled in the factory at factory labor rates rather than on site at consultancy rates.
If you have a scheme that requires a large deployment of like equipment it could well be attractive. The key would be to build in enough redundancy into the basic box that the hardware never needs to be touched after the box is closed.
Very attractive if you are doing something like installing an Internet backbone in Afghanistan. Less interesting if you are working in downtown Mountain View.
The idea of data center plus power plus cooling in a package is definitely attractive for many applications. Rig the thing in Mountain view, send it off to Niagra Falls or some other place with real cheap power to operate it.
Nor are you a lawyer by the looks.
First it is a really bad idea to apply the principles of US Law to predict the outcome in Sweeden.
Second there is a principle called agency in most jurisdictions. If you do something to enable or facilitate an outcome it is just the same as if you actually did it directly.
Hosting .torrent files is the same thing as hosting the bits in effect.
Clearly not everything they do is digital. They have atoms as well: servers, laptops, flash drives. And clearly they are making a living somehow and someone is funding their activities somehow.
If I was investigating them I would have PIs on their tail. If nothing else it is certainly causing them enough concern to comment on it.
Here it becomes pretty clear what your game is. If a system is compromised by malware it is not going to run fast regardless of what O/S is running. Boted Linux is just as bad as boted Windows.
I don't notice any problem booting Vista, seems to boot faster than XP to me. And unlike XP it seems to be ready to do work when its booted rather than some time later.
Been a while since I booted a Unix box, in those days it took about ten to fifteen minutes but that was twenty years ago.
Oh yes, people are equally furious about 1) Microsoft continuously introducing new versions and 2) Microsoft not providing the features they want and need.
And whats more its the same people and they don't use Windows anyway.
Vista runs just fine. I have been running it since May and not had any problems apart from a couple that are pretty squarely third party issues. Vista is fast and slick on my hardware.
Admittedly I would probably not recommend a Vista upgrade but thats mostly because the cost of the Vista upgrade is so close to the cost of a new machine anyway. I have two vista machines and three XP machines in the house. One of those is a three year old Vaio that is dropping to pieces anyway. Another is a Dell box I paid $500 for including the monitor and the other is the machine I use for surfing while I am working out on the treadmill.
Why pay $160 to upgrade when the machines are 2 years old and I can have a whole new machine thats much faster for $500? I certainly would not consider buying a new XP machine though.
The industry does not want Vista whine is wishful thinking. Many companies took two years or more to roll out XP. If you have a hundred or so users you would be a fool not to adopt a wait and see approach. But that does not say anything about the quality of the product.
Vista has higher hardware requirements than past versions. That does not make them unreasonable requirements. But most IT depts want to support a single version of the O/S so that means that they can't do the upgrade till they can afford to end-of-life the legacy machines that don't support the new version.
Its not an issue, modern hardware is so much faster than the hardware of the MULTICS era an interpreter can emulate the processor and the memory management in one go.
A bigger issue would probably be the 36 bit word but even that is just an efficiency issue. Memory is cheap and MULTICS era machines did not have many Mb.
The bigger question is why go to the trouble. The answer is prior art. MULTICS has been mined as prior art in patent disputes for decades. If its in MULTICS its out of patent.
On the contrary, every communication they make regadless of media is subject to the Presidential records act.
I have some personal experience of this, during the Clinton administration every communication had to be surrendered to the arcivist, even if it was nothing more than a comment scribbled in the margine of a printed paper. The use of an external mail system from the Executive Office of the President was completely forbidden.
The difference between using the Whitehouse system and the RNC email servers is that the Whitehouse systems are privileged for an initial five years after the President leaves office and can be extended for a further seven. The RNC email system is not a government system, is not covered by any form of privilege whatsoever.
The other difference is security. The Whitehouse email systems are subject to security review by the NSA. The RNC system was not, they didn't even do security reviews of employees. The systems were not partitioned from systems serving other customers either. So as a result I would not be at all suprised if when the RNC denies having copies of some embarassing email or other if the Ambassador from Venezuela, Cuba, Iran or the like would 'helpfully' turn up with a hard drive full of the missing messages.