The question isn't "who would want to nuke the US," but rather, "who would want to nuke the US using an ICBM?"
I'm not an expert on military hardware or capabilities, but it's practically certain that the US has the ability to detect a rocket launch from anywhere in the world. I say that it's a practical certainty because, without that capability, the principle of mutually assured destruction couldn't have been effectively implemented against the Soviets.
The bottom line is that, before an ICBM even hit American ground, the source would be known and a barrage of missiles would be headed there. A nuclear attack on an American city would be met with a counterattack of unimaginable lethality.
Given this, there is no conceivable scenario under which the US would be attacked by a ballistic missile. Supposing that Kim Jong-Il is completely insane, he's still a dictator, and dictators generally aren't interested in presiding over a scorched radioactive wasteland.
The US nuclear defense policy must be aimed at non-state actors, principally through the control and monitoring of nuclear material everywhere in the world.
To merely say that sitcoms show men as sex-crazed idiots is understating the severity of the problem. Far worse, sitcom men are ineffectual, incompetent, and willing to endlessly abase themselves in pursuit of sex.
It may have been funny at some point, but the prevalance of these roles has reshaped the definition of man from a competent and capable individual to a blithering buffoon who, despite his deficiencies, manages to fuck scores of vapid women. He has the intellectual and emotional maturity of a teenager. He is considered successful if, in addition to women, he has pointless material things of status.
Truly, this is what we should all strive to emulate.
Just a note: coal mining is a very safe profession in North America and Europe. It's only in places like China, where labour is considered expendable, and is sometimes actually prison labour, that death rates in coal mines are high.
Some stats: according to MSHA, the organization responsible for regulating all mining activity in the USA, there were 30 fatalities in coal mining throughout the entire nation in the year 2003. That number could be lower of course, but it's probably comparable to any inherently risky profession, such as construction contracting.
A nuclear reactor is just a big process control design problem: it's not very different from a large chemical plant. If you think that nuclear reactors have magic in them that no mortal should ever mess with, then you're blissfully unaware of what kind of energies the chemical industry keeps bottled up every day, all over the world. In and around every major city are chemical plants with tanks of high pressure sulfur dioxide, ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, sulfuric acid, benzene, and a million other deadly chemicals. Accidents are rare, and when they happen (Bhopal anyone?), they can be a LOT worse than the worst conceivable nuclear disaster. Yet, for some reason, no one seriously suggests that chemistry is too dangerous a beast for man to tame.
[A note on Bhopal: 2000 people dead immediately, 6000 dead later, estimates of 150 thousand injured. Chernobyl caused orders of magnitude less human damage.]
Curious: does the light turn green only when a gap opens up into which you can merge? Or is it simply on a timer? If it's the latter, why don't Californians start ignoring the lights and just treating them as standard onramps?
For the next few years, we've essentially run out of clock speed increases, so the general improvement in computer power will come from parallelization - dual core and potentially quad. This will be the case even for the consumer market. To have a strategy of charging more for dual core chips would thus be analogous to charging more for CPUs of higher clock rate. It would serve to slow down the growth of the entire computer industry, or drive the move to less restrictive platforms.
It seems that clock rates aren't really scaling any more... expect future CPUs to be offered in a narrow range of speed grades, with upgrades coming less frequently and being partial core redesigns rather than clock increases driven by improved yields. Case in point: Prescott.
Let's say that the US government has indeed overstepped its bounds to a ridiculous degree. Fair enough - public healthcare can just as easily be implemented at the state level. In fact, Canadian public healthcare is provincially run, with partial federal funding. We also have premiums - in BC they're $54/month per person, with discounts for families. That's the provincial contribution, and indeed, the rest comes from taxes. In America, you have many states with populations comparable to our entire nation, so a state-run public healthcare system is certainly feasible. For that matter, it may be preferable - we both acknowledge that there are inefficiencies in government, and administrative overhead is probably less when you have, say, 15 million people rather than 300M.
You cite the crossing of the American border by Canadians for healthcare as the ultimate failure of our system. Your system has its failures too... For one, people who don't get treatment for serious conditions because they can't afford it. Actually, I can think of no failure more dramatic than that. Then you have your discriminatory insurance policies that put high burdens, or even refuse to cover, those that need it most (the unprofitable). This is actually a symptom of the fact that you allow the young and healthy to be uninsured - they're the ones who are supposed to subsidize the old and sick. Insurance companies refuse to cover the old and sick so that consumers have some incentive to buy insurance when they're still healthy.
If you're a free market capitalist, the very idea of subsidies is an offense to you, but then, that's almost the definition of insurance. If subsidizing the poor is wasteful, why bother with anyone? We might as well just make it the responsibility of each person to save enough money for their potential healthcare needs.
The free market is indeed the best way to provide a nation with food, boots, and televisions. Maybe it's not the best way to deal with electricity, roads, or healthcare though. There may be room for private hospitals and clinics - actually, hospitals competing on cost, efficiency, patient survival rates, and advances in the medical sciences can and do benefit America. (You do need regulatory safeguards in place to make sure that competing on cost doesn't compromise the quality of care.) Really, it's the insurance system that needs to be made public.
This is a case where the profit taken by the insurance companies themselves should be seen as an inefficiency, because the pool of dollars provided by the people for their mutual benefit is having a percentage taken away, above and beyond what it costs to maintain the system. Government can do better simply by not taking a profit.
- I'm a Canadian, and therefore not an expert on American law, but I'm pretty sure the constitution doesn't explicitly give the federal government the power to build highways or run a space program, but you still have the interstate highway system and NASA. By precedent, it would seem that the constitution doesn't have to explicitly state every power of the federal government.
- Paying for a smoker's lung removal or a drunk driver's broken back may be an offense to your sense of justice or something, but the fact is that people make mistakes. So you think drunk drivers and smokers shouldn't be covered... what about morbidly obese people? America is certainly full of those... what about people who hurt themselves mountain biking, or playing tennis? They knew the risks, why should we pay for their self-inflicted injuries? For that matter, old people knew they were going to get old, so why the hell didn't they save for their medical expenses? This line of thinking is really quite absurd. We all have frail human bodies, and either we do stupid things to screw them up, or they just fail on their own. We all need fixing, eventually.
- Health insurance companies employ thousands... of beaurocrats. Yes, they're generally good people, and they need to eat too. But it's been shown time and again that a poorly designed government program can't really be justified based on job creation; similarly, neither can the horrendous American health insurance industry.
- Drug companies should be able to recover development costs and make a healthy profit, you'll get no argument from me on that. In the Canadian system, they can do that. Drugs are cheaper here, but that's because America has rolled over and allowed drug companies to do as they please - they get away with truly absurd profit margins.
- America has completely forgotten what insurance is supposed to be about. Everyone pays into a pool, and takes from that pool what is needed. We all pay to support our fellow citizens, and to insure that, should something happen to us, we're covered too. Allowing the young and healthy to be uninsured completely screws this up. So does charging more for smokers, the disabled, those with chronic conditions, old people, etc. That's not insurance anymore. It's especially not insurance when a percentage of the pool goes to profit. Everyone gives, and the guy we trust to hold on to the money takes a cut? I'm not talking about administrative overhead, but rather about pure profit. Again, it's not really insurance if you're paying, but you're not covered in case of X, Y, or Z.
- The Canadian system is not perfect - and that's a symptom of our reluctance to put enough money into it. Canadians want American-level taxes and European-level government services, so it's always tricky balancing these things. The system has its ups and downs... right now, non-critical care is suffering, and that's why you have Canadians showing up in America. It's just an issue of money. The bottom line is that a government healthcare system is non-profit. Private health care isn't. It's well established that government tends to be inefficient, but in this case, your tangled mess of private health insurers, private hospitals, and rediculous litigiousness is far worse. Bottom line: you're getting less healthcare for your money.
I don't have any specific data on the Koenigstein mine, but in general, uranium ore grades are roughly comparable to finely disseminated gold deposits. The bottom line is that you have to mine many tonnes to get even a few grams of uranium metal. Digging in the hills is not going to do it.
There are a few high-grade deposits (~20% Uranium - an absolutely remarkable ore grade) in northern Saskatchewan. As far as I know, those are the only ones.
Whatever you mine will be largely U238 of course - enriching it presents major technical challenges. I lack any expertise in this area, but I can say with a reasonable degree of confidence that milk processing equipment won't quite do it.
The reason you can't do that is the same as the reason you can't make a 1.5V rechargable cell - there is no anode/cathode combination that makes 0.75 volts and can be recharged many times while providing high current when needed, reasonable self discharge rates, and a manageable memory effect. It's a matter of electrochemical effects, not a vast conspiracy or the widespread incompetence of battery companies.
Opera's user-agent string, when emulating IE, is "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.0) Opera 7.01 [en]"
The user-agent string seems to be a very bad hack. IE calls itself mozilla because it was forced to do so years ago, largely to keep stupidly-designed websites from automatically rejecting its connection attempts. But it still wanted to make itself known as IE, so it appended things in brackets that most stupidly-designed web sites didn't bother looking at.
Jump ahead a few years, and we have the same thing happening with Opera. It pretends to be IE (pretending to be mozilla), but adds its own signature after the end of the brackets, where modern stupidly-designed websites don't bother to look. My guess is that most scripts just stop parsing the user agent string once they hit the last bracket. The website referred to here looks at the whole thing because it's outright malicious and wants to "punish" opera users.
According to the article, this technology has been developed for creating master discs for the upcoming blue laser optical standards. Currently, this is being done with UV lasers.
This will probably never be used as the basis of a consumer recordable format - we don't even have consumer-level blue laser drives yet. Furthermore, we could realize a significant increase in capacity over blue laser by using UV lasers, which will probably be the trend after blue proves to be too limiting.
This article has practically no applicability to the average slashdot reader - it's not an "electron beam dvd" as the title of the article suggets. Editors should really read the articles they post...
This one goes into more detail about the changes from the user perspective rather than the developer one - it's a much better read, and considerably more concise.
Now that this issue is in the public consciousness, TurnItIn will probably add the equivalent of a click-through license agreement to their system, wherein the user specifically grants permission for long term archival and royalty-free use. This assumes that this isn't already the case.
The notice on your paper won't do much good in the face of a contract to which you agreed (after all, you clicked "I Agree"). Your notice is passive, while you have to actively click on something to agree to the hypothetical TurnItIn license agreement. It could be argued that you made a conscious decision in managing your intellectual property, and thus, the license agreement supercedes the disclaimer on your paper.
More importantly, you can't just make laws. To use an analogy (I know, just bear with me)... If you make a product, you can't say "This product is not to be used outside your bathroom. Kitchen use is explicitly forbidden." Well, you can say it, you can stamp it on the product, but it won't have any legal meaning.
Likewise, the notice that you suggest putting on the paper would hold no legal weight. You can state that it's your copyright, but it's yours even if you don't. You can state that all rights are reserved, but those rights remain yours even if you omit that standard line. There is no magic phrase that makes copyright valid - if you made it, you own it.
If you decide to enter a legally binding contract with TurnItIn, one that gives them unrestricted use of your copyrighted work, then the law will see that as your mistake. Don't agree to something unless you're prepared to accept the consequences.
[At this point it should probably be said that I'm not a lawyer; far from it, I'm applying what I think to be common sense to the situation.]
[Of course, a reality check is in order: the balance of power between the individual and a larger corporate entity like a university is so skewed that the idea of you signing a mutually negotiated contract is a joke. The act of "agreeing" to a license in a situation like this is like agreeing to something with a gun to your head. One could argue that this makes such a contract unenforcable, but the reality is that the law doesn't see it that way. You went through the motions of agreement, so the contract is valid. To rule otherwise would invalidate the system of EULAs that the entire tech industry is based on.]
I find it amusing to read about an IP address shortage. Here are some highlights from that list:
Bolt, Beranek, and Newman has 3 class A ranges with a total of 50.33 million addresses, the vast majority of them unused. While they did create ARPANET, they are no longer a relevant entity on the modern internet.
GE has a class A, but decided that it wanted nothing to do with the internet.
Xerox, HP, Apple, DEC: all own class A ranges. They're all huge tech companies, but neither one of them actually has anything to do with the infrastructure of the global internet. They make hardware, but they don't run the net - they're just consumers of bandwidth like any other large company.
Halliburton, DuPont, Boeing, Ford, and Prudential all own class A ranges. They're all huge companies, but I can't imagine either one of them requiring more than 3 class B ranges.
The Defense Information Systems Agency owns 67.11 million addresses. Other government or military agencies own a large portion of the IP space as well.
A full class A is reserved for amateur radio. The legal technicalities of amateur radio make it practically impossible for a HAM operator to be a functional node on the global internet. 44.* isn't really routable, to the best of my knowledge. It's just 16.7M addresses wasted.
ICANN should develop a spine and forcefully divest these companies of their class A ranges unless they can display a reasonable near-term allocation need. They can be given a dozen class B ranges each as a consolation prize.
To talk of an IP address shortage, and put half the computers in the world behind the broken hack that is NAT, while these agencies sit on hundreds of millions of addresses, is nothing short of a joke.
I believe that there is a realistic solution to waste disposal. The solution hasn't been implemented, but it's there, it's workable, and all it takes is some initiative.
Basically, you create underground storage chambers, up to 1km below the surface of the earth, in a geological formation known as a batholith.
A batholith is essentially a solid igneous rock formation, ranging from a few to hundreds of square kilometers. Such a chunk of rock is completely impermeable to water, making groundwater contamination an impossibility. Some batholiths are billions of years old, having survived eons without metamorphosis or faulting; as such, these geological formations can be assumed to be stable for as long as humanity will exist.
So, you'd use standard hard-rock mining methods to sink a shaft and create underground workings. A nuclear waste storage facility that would suit our needs for hundreds of years would be small in comparison to underground base metal mines that are operating today.
When we're done with the whole thing, all we do is backfill it with clay and rock. We then backfill the access shaft, replace the overburden, revegetate the area, and forget about it.
It is in fact that simple - we can forget about it completely. Drilling through the cemented backfill would be as difficult as drilling through the rock itself. Security is thus a nonissue.
We can also be assured that it's safe for all generations to come. Even in a worst case scenario, where humanity reverts to pre-industrial levels of knowledge, it is idiot-proof.
Hard-rock mining methods, especially ones capable of creating a shaft 1km in depth, are inaccessible to a culture unless it has developed both explosives and engineered materials (carbides). Thus, accessing the disposal site requires technologies that only a nuclear-capable society (or one that is on the verge of nuclear capability) would have.
Furthermore, the dump site is essentially hidden. It could be detected by advanced geomagnetic or gravitational sensors, but any culture advanced enough to have those, as we do today, would understand nuclear radiation.
If we leave no indication of what lies underground, the waste disposal site can only be detected by pure accident (unlikely in, for example, the barren wilderness of northern Canada).
This is a far better arrangement than making your dump site obvious and trying to warn future generations of the hazards of radiation, for the simple reason that it is completely impossible to satiate human curiousity. The more you warn people, the more curious they will be. Designing an effective warning is a complete and total impossibility.
I am of the opinion that this is the solution to the nuclear waste issue, and that it is safe, effective, and idiot-proof.
What those of you who do not live in Vancouver don't know is that our driver's licenses contain magstripes and PDF417 barcodes (two dimensional; they store as much as a magstripe in a slightly smaller area).
I've scanned both the PDF417 and the magstripe, the former using a digital camera and some freely available software, and the latter with a magstripe reader.
Both the magstripe and the barcode contain the same data: your driver's license number, full address, name, height, weight, sex, eye and hair color, date of birth, and probably a few other pieces of information that I can't recall.
Swiping your magstripe or having the barcode read gives away many of the critical pieces of information required to steal your identity.
If you're thinking of going to a place that does this, just don't. Do you really trust your critical information to the brutish sub-morons that are known as bouncers?
The photo in the Vancouver Sun article shows the card readers they're using: these are devices you can buy for $90 or less if you look around a little. There's basically nothing to stop a crooked bouncer from buying his own and swiping everyone's ID through it for a whole night.
Go somewhere else. Just something to consider: bars and clubs are there to make money. They're usually not owned by huge corporations. They don't have infinitely deep pockets, and if the atmosphere they set isn't right, people will go elsewhere. More than in most industries, capitalism works here: consumer choice wins. Boycotting establishments that do this can actually be highly effective.
Finally, if the potential for fraud doesn't bother you enough, just oppose this on general priciple.
What if i take a mechanical black box like a boat engine throttle control, see that it has two levers at the top and four cables at its base, and I make a device that actuates the cables in response to the levers in the exact same way as a competitor's product? This is perfectly legal, it's competition, and it's done all the time.
Now, changing the example above: what if I take a semiconductor device, and through comprehensive analysis of its inputs and resulting outputs, I create a functionally equivalent device and try to sell it? The DMCA says this is illegal. Same situation as above (known inputs and outputs, recreating the insides of the black box in my own way), but totally different laws govern it.
Now what if I take the plot of a best-selling book and rewrite it in my own words, keeping the story, characters, and scenes the same but telling it in my own voice? If we consider story, characters, and scenes to be the interface specification, and the words I use to tell the story to be the workings inside the black box, then this situation is comparable to those above. Is this illegal? Can I sell Henry Patter and the Wizard's Rock and profit from it? Probably not.
So where does software fall?
Is code speech - like a guy ranting on a soapbox - as the DeCSS people will try to claim? But you can copyright speech. Is it pure math - an algorithm - and can you copyright or patent that? Should you be able to? Is the LZW patent legit? Does that question matter, considering that it's been awarded and successfully enforced? Could I have patented bubblesort if I got there soon enough and no one could dig up prior art?
If someone puts out an amazing boat control that works in a totally innovative way, I'm actually free to rip it open and make an exact copy, unless it's been patented. But why am I not free to make an exact copy of large parts of unpatented software? If code is speech and it's copyrightable, but it's also an algorithm, and an algorithm is patentable, can I patent other types of speech? And why not?
Now, this entire post has been full of rhetorical questions, some rather absurd, and none of them really need to be answered. My point is only that making comparisons between software and some other case for which laws have been firmly established is not going to lead to any definitive answers. There's an enormous and contradictory mess of ideas surrounding the legal status of software, and I think this is a situation where trying to set guidelines based on precedent fails miserably.
I realize that's not a useful or constructive statement, but I have no brilliant insights in to the matter so I'll simply leave it at that.
What's the time frame in which the $10000 has to be withdrawn in order for the CTR to be necessary? If I withdraw $5000 on January 1, and another $5000 on January 15, do alarm bells still go off?
I can't be sure how it works in your area of the world, but here (BC, Canada) the doctors don't actually know you're an organ donor when you're dragged into an emergency room. There is no driver's license decal or any other sort of identification you carry with you as an organ donor. Rather, if you're ever in a situation where you're braindead but stable on life support, they'll check the registry and see if you're on it. Then, they'll verify that you're actually braindead, and take your organs.
In theory, that's how it works. You can, of course, claim that that's a lie. In that case, I can't prove you wrong, but I can only say that your opinion of the medical profession rather low.
I know someone who died "on the table" and came back, she is not a donor, but if she was, she wouldn't be alive today.
Well, that's just speculation, and once again, it only reflects a strong bias against the medical profession on your part.
But to put a lighter spin on the whole issue... let's say they're a bit more eager to let you die when you're an organ donor. Is that really so bad? In a situation where you're at the edge of life/death, you may end up brain-damaged if you recover after they've been shocking you for a few minutes. You may end up retarded and drooling for the rest of your life. Is death so much worse?
One way or another, I'm an organ donor. I can't see a logical reason why anyone wouldn't be.
Fraunhoeffer has done the analysis in great detail, of that you can be certain.
They have almost certainly found a patent in their extensive portfolio that applies to vorbis. They're not going to waste time and money suing the developers - they can't really profit from that. Instead they'll sue a large company that uses vorbis in a successful commercial product.
They'll do this if or when vorbis gains significant market share. Sue one large company, win, and then you can demand license fees from that company's competitors.
Let everyone ignore the patent until the product gets popular, then sue for license fees retroactively. A tactic straight from the books of Rambus and Unisys.
Slashdot Mirror
The question isn't "who would want to nuke the US," but rather, "who would want to nuke the US using an ICBM?"
I'm not an expert on military hardware or capabilities, but it's practically certain that the US has the ability to detect a rocket launch from anywhere in the world. I say that it's a practical certainty because, without that capability, the principle of mutually assured destruction couldn't have been effectively implemented against the Soviets.
The bottom line is that, before an ICBM even hit American ground, the source would be known and a barrage of missiles would be headed there. A nuclear attack on an American city would be met with a counterattack of unimaginable lethality.
Given this, there is no conceivable scenario under which the US would be attacked by a ballistic missile. Supposing that Kim Jong-Il is completely insane, he's still a dictator, and dictators generally aren't interested in presiding over a scorched radioactive wasteland.
The US nuclear defense policy must be aimed at non-state actors, principally through the control and monitoring of nuclear material everywhere in the world.
To merely say that sitcoms show men as sex-crazed idiots is understating the severity of the problem. Far worse, sitcom men are ineffectual, incompetent, and willing to endlessly abase themselves in pursuit of sex.
It may have been funny at some point, but the prevalance of these roles has reshaped the definition of man from a competent and capable individual to a blithering buffoon who, despite his deficiencies, manages to fuck scores of vapid women. He has the intellectual and emotional maturity of a teenager. He is considered successful if, in addition to women, he has pointless material things of status.
Truly, this is what we should all strive to emulate.
Just a note: coal mining is a very safe profession in North America and Europe. It's only in places like China, where labour is considered expendable, and is sometimes actually prison labour, that death rates in coal mines are high.
Some stats: according to MSHA, the organization responsible for regulating all mining activity in the USA, there were 30 fatalities in coal mining throughout the entire nation in the year 2003. That number could be lower of course, but it's probably comparable to any inherently risky profession, such as construction contracting.
A nuclear reactor is just a big process control design problem: it's not very different from a large chemical plant. If you think that nuclear reactors have magic in them that no mortal should ever mess with, then you're blissfully unaware of what kind of energies the chemical industry keeps bottled up every day, all over the world. In and around every major city are chemical plants with tanks of high pressure sulfur dioxide, ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, sulfuric acid, benzene, and a million other deadly chemicals. Accidents are rare, and when they happen (Bhopal anyone?), they can be a LOT worse than the worst conceivable nuclear disaster. Yet, for some reason, no one seriously suggests that chemistry is too dangerous a beast for man to tame.
[A note on Bhopal: 2000 people dead immediately, 6000 dead later, estimates of 150 thousand injured. Chernobyl caused orders of magnitude less human damage.]
Curious: does the light turn green only when a gap opens up into which you can merge? Or is it simply on a timer? If it's the latter, why don't Californians start ignoring the lights and just treating them as standard onramps?
For the next few years, we've essentially run out of clock speed increases, so the general improvement in computer power will come from parallelization - dual core and potentially quad. This will be the case even for the consumer market. To have a strategy of charging more for dual core chips would thus be analogous to charging more for CPUs of higher clock rate. It would serve to slow down the growth of the entire computer industry, or drive the move to less restrictive platforms.
It seems that clock rates aren't really scaling any more... expect future CPUs to be offered in a narrow range of speed grades, with upgrades coming less frequently and being partial core redesigns rather than clock increases driven by improved yields. Case in point: Prescott.
Let's say that the US government has indeed overstepped its bounds to a ridiculous degree. Fair enough - public healthcare can just as easily be implemented at the state level. In fact, Canadian public healthcare is provincially run, with partial federal funding. We also have premiums - in BC they're $54/month per person, with discounts for families. That's the provincial contribution, and indeed, the rest comes from taxes. In America, you have many states with populations comparable to our entire nation, so a state-run public healthcare system is certainly feasible. For that matter, it may be preferable - we both acknowledge that there are inefficiencies in government, and administrative overhead is probably less when you have, say, 15 million people rather than 300M.
You cite the crossing of the American border by Canadians for healthcare as the ultimate failure of our system. Your system has its failures too... For one, people who don't get treatment for serious conditions because they can't afford it. Actually, I can think of no failure more dramatic than that. Then you have your discriminatory insurance policies that put high burdens, or even refuse to cover, those that need it most (the unprofitable). This is actually a symptom of the fact that you allow the young and healthy to be uninsured - they're the ones who are supposed to subsidize the old and sick. Insurance companies refuse to cover the old and sick so that consumers have some incentive to buy insurance when they're still healthy.
If you're a free market capitalist, the very idea of subsidies is an offense to you, but then, that's almost the definition of insurance. If subsidizing the poor is wasteful, why bother with anyone? We might as well just make it the responsibility of each person to save enough money for their potential healthcare needs.
The free market is indeed the best way to provide a nation with food, boots, and televisions. Maybe it's not the best way to deal with electricity, roads, or healthcare though. There may be room for private hospitals and clinics - actually, hospitals competing on cost, efficiency, patient survival rates, and advances in the medical sciences can and do benefit America. (You do need regulatory safeguards in place to make sure that competing on cost doesn't compromise the quality of care.) Really, it's the insurance system that needs to be made public.
This is a case where the profit taken by the insurance companies themselves should be seen as an inefficiency, because the pool of dollars provided by the people for their mutual benefit is having a percentage taken away, above and beyond what it costs to maintain the system. Government can do better simply by not taking a profit.
- I'm a Canadian, and therefore not an expert on American law, but I'm pretty sure the constitution doesn't explicitly give the federal government the power to build highways or run a space program, but you still have the interstate highway system and NASA. By precedent, it would seem that the constitution doesn't have to explicitly state every power of the federal government.
- Paying for a smoker's lung removal or a drunk driver's broken back may be an offense to your sense of justice or something, but the fact is that people make mistakes. So you think drunk drivers and smokers shouldn't be covered... what about morbidly obese people? America is certainly full of those... what about people who hurt themselves mountain biking, or playing tennis? They knew the risks, why should we pay for their self-inflicted injuries? For that matter, old people knew they were going to get old, so why the hell didn't they save for their medical expenses? This line of thinking is really quite absurd. We all have frail human bodies, and either we do stupid things to screw them up, or they just fail on their own. We all need fixing, eventually.
- Health insurance companies employ thousands... of beaurocrats. Yes, they're generally good people, and they need to eat too. But it's been shown time and again that a poorly designed government program can't really be justified based on job creation; similarly, neither can the horrendous American health insurance industry.
- Drug companies should be able to recover development costs and make a healthy profit, you'll get no argument from me on that. In the Canadian system, they can do that. Drugs are cheaper here, but that's because America has rolled over and allowed drug companies to do as they please - they get away with truly absurd profit margins.
- America has completely forgotten what insurance is supposed to be about. Everyone pays into a pool, and takes from that pool what is needed. We all pay to support our fellow citizens, and to insure that, should something happen to us, we're covered too. Allowing the young and healthy to be uninsured completely screws this up. So does charging more for smokers, the disabled, those with chronic conditions, old people, etc. That's not insurance anymore. It's especially not insurance when a percentage of the pool goes to profit. Everyone gives, and the guy we trust to hold on to the money takes a cut? I'm not talking about administrative overhead, but rather about pure profit. Again, it's not really insurance if you're paying, but you're not covered in case of X, Y, or Z.
- The Canadian system is not perfect - and that's a symptom of our reluctance to put enough money into it. Canadians want American-level taxes and European-level government services, so it's always tricky balancing these things. The system has its ups and downs... right now, non-critical care is suffering, and that's why you have Canadians showing up in America. It's just an issue of money. The bottom line is that a government healthcare system is non-profit. Private health care isn't. It's well established that government tends to be inefficient, but in this case, your tangled mess of private health insurers, private hospitals, and rediculous litigiousness is far worse. Bottom line: you're getting less healthcare for your money.
I don't have any specific data on the Koenigstein mine, but in general, uranium ore grades are roughly comparable to finely disseminated gold deposits. The bottom line is that you have to mine many tonnes to get even a few grams of uranium metal. Digging in the hills is not going to do it.
There are a few high-grade deposits (~20% Uranium - an absolutely remarkable ore grade) in northern Saskatchewan. As far as I know, those are the only ones.
Whatever you mine will be largely U238 of course - enriching it presents major technical challenges. I lack any expertise in this area, but I can say with a reasonable degree of confidence that milk processing equipment won't quite do it.
The reason you can't do that is the same as the reason you can't make a 1.5V rechargable cell - there is no anode/cathode combination that makes 0.75 volts and can be recharged many times while providing high current when needed, reasonable self discharge rates, and a manageable memory effect. It's a matter of electrochemical effects, not a vast conspiracy or the widespread incompetence of battery companies.
Curious: how does a dog go about commiting suicide?
Opera's user-agent string, when emulating IE, is "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.0) Opera 7.01 [en]"
The user-agent string seems to be a very bad hack. IE calls itself mozilla because it was forced to do so years ago, largely to keep stupidly-designed websites from automatically rejecting its connection attempts. But it still wanted to make itself known as IE, so it appended things in brackets that most stupidly-designed web sites didn't bother looking at.
Jump ahead a few years, and we have the same thing happening with Opera. It pretends to be IE (pretending to be mozilla), but adds its own signature after the end of the brackets, where modern stupidly-designed websites don't bother to look. My guess is that most scripts just stop parsing the user agent string once they hit the last bracket. The website referred to here looks at the whole thing because it's outright malicious and wants to "punish" opera users.
Wow, you can write in the needlessly complex and formal manner of a statistics textbook, you're my hero.
Your entire argument can be summed up as follows:
"Don't ascribe to an entire group a property that applies to only a subset of it."
Don't try to be clever. You're not.
According to the article, this technology has been developed for creating master discs for the upcoming blue laser optical standards. Currently, this is being done with UV lasers.
This will probably never be used as the basis of a consumer recordable format - we don't even have consumer-level blue laser drives yet. Furthermore, we could realize a significant increase in capacity over blue laser by using UV lasers, which will probably be the trend after blue proves to be too limiting.
This article has practically no applicability to the average slashdot reader - it's not an "electron beam dvd" as the title of the article suggets. Editors should really read the articles they post...
Another good whitepaper is available here.
This one goes into more detail about the changes from the user perspective rather than the developer one - it's a much better read, and considerably more concise.
Now that this issue is in the public consciousness, TurnItIn will probably add the equivalent of a click-through license agreement to their system, wherein the user specifically grants permission for long term archival and royalty-free use. This assumes that this isn't already the case.
The notice on your paper won't do much good in the face of a contract to which you agreed (after all, you clicked "I Agree"). Your notice is passive, while you have to actively click on something to agree to the hypothetical TurnItIn license agreement. It could be argued that you made a conscious decision in managing your intellectual property, and thus, the license agreement supercedes the disclaimer on your paper.
More importantly, you can't just make laws. To use an analogy (I know, just bear with me)... If you make a product, you can't say "This product is not to be used outside your bathroom. Kitchen use is explicitly forbidden." Well, you can say it, you can stamp it on the product, but it won't have any legal meaning.
Likewise, the notice that you suggest putting on the paper would hold no legal weight. You can state that it's your copyright, but it's yours even if you don't. You can state that all rights are reserved, but those rights remain yours even if you omit that standard line. There is no magic phrase that makes copyright valid - if you made it, you own it.
If you decide to enter a legally binding contract with TurnItIn, one that gives them unrestricted use of your copyrighted work, then the law will see that as your mistake. Don't agree to something unless you're prepared to accept the consequences.
[At this point it should probably be said that I'm not a lawyer; far from it, I'm applying what I think to be common sense to the situation.]
[Of course, a reality check is in order: the balance of power between the individual and a larger corporate entity like a university is so skewed that the idea of you signing a mutually negotiated contract is a joke. The act of "agreeing" to a license in a situation like this is like agreeing to something with a gun to your head. One could argue that this makes such a contract unenforcable, but the reality is that the law doesn't see it that way. You went through the motions of agreement, so the contract is valid. To rule otherwise would invalidate the system of EULAs that the entire tech industry is based on.]
Here is a list of all the class A IP allocations.
I find it amusing to read about an IP address shortage. Here are some highlights from that list:
ICANN should develop a spine and forcefully divest these companies of their class A ranges unless they can display a reasonable near-term allocation need. They can be given a dozen class B ranges each as a consolation prize.
To talk of an IP address shortage, and put half the computers in the world behind the broken hack that is NAT, while these agencies sit on hundreds of millions of addresses, is nothing short of a joke.
I believe that there is a realistic solution to waste disposal. The solution hasn't been implemented, but it's there, it's workable, and all it takes is some initiative.
Basically, you create underground storage chambers, up to 1km below the surface of the earth, in a geological formation known as a batholith.
A batholith is essentially a solid igneous rock formation, ranging from a few to hundreds of square kilometers. Such a chunk of rock is completely impermeable to water, making groundwater contamination an impossibility. Some batholiths are billions of years old, having survived eons without metamorphosis or faulting; as such, these geological formations can be assumed to be stable for as long as humanity will exist.
So, you'd use standard hard-rock mining methods to sink a shaft and create underground workings. A nuclear waste storage facility that would suit our needs for hundreds of years would be small in comparison to underground base metal mines that are operating today.
When we're done with the whole thing, all we do is backfill it with clay and rock. We then backfill the access shaft, replace the overburden, revegetate the area, and forget about it.
It is in fact that simple - we can forget about it completely. Drilling through the cemented backfill would be as difficult as drilling through the rock itself. Security is thus a nonissue.
We can also be assured that it's safe for all generations to come. Even in a worst case scenario, where humanity reverts to pre-industrial levels of knowledge, it is idiot-proof.
Hard-rock mining methods, especially ones capable of creating a shaft 1km in depth, are inaccessible to a culture unless it has developed both explosives and engineered materials (carbides). Thus, accessing the disposal site requires technologies that only a nuclear-capable society (or one that is on the verge of nuclear capability) would have.
Furthermore, the dump site is essentially hidden. It could be detected by advanced geomagnetic or gravitational sensors, but any culture advanced enough to have those, as we do today, would understand nuclear radiation.
If we leave no indication of what lies underground, the waste disposal site can only be detected by pure accident (unlikely in, for example, the barren wilderness of northern Canada).
This is a far better arrangement than making your dump site obvious and trying to warn future generations of the hazards of radiation, for the simple reason that it is completely impossible to satiate human curiousity. The more you warn people, the more curious they will be. Designing an effective warning is a complete and total impossibility.
I am of the opinion that this is the solution to the nuclear waste issue, and that it is safe, effective, and idiot-proof.
What those of you who do not live in Vancouver don't know is that our driver's licenses contain magstripes and PDF417 barcodes (two dimensional; they store as much as a magstripe in a slightly smaller area).
I've scanned both the PDF417 and the magstripe, the former using a digital camera and some freely available software, and the latter with a magstripe reader.
Both the magstripe and the barcode contain the same data: your driver's license number, full address, name, height, weight, sex, eye and hair color, date of birth, and probably a few other pieces of information that I can't recall.
Swiping your magstripe or having the barcode read gives away many of the critical pieces of information required to steal your identity.
If you're thinking of going to a place that does this, just don't. Do you really trust your critical information to the brutish sub-morons that are known as bouncers?
The photo in the Vancouver Sun article shows the card readers they're using: these are devices you can buy for $90 or less if you look around a little. There's basically nothing to stop a crooked bouncer from buying his own and swiping everyone's ID through it for a whole night.
Go somewhere else. Just something to consider: bars and clubs are there to make money. They're usually not owned by huge corporations. They don't have infinitely deep pockets, and if the atmosphere they set isn't right, people will go elsewhere. More than in most industries, capitalism works here: consumer choice wins. Boycotting establishments that do this can actually be highly effective.
Finally, if the potential for fraud doesn't bother you enough, just oppose this on general priciple.
What if i take a mechanical black box like a boat engine throttle control, see that it has two levers at the top and four cables at its base, and I make a device that actuates the cables in response to the levers in the exact same way as a competitor's product? This is perfectly legal, it's competition, and it's done all the time.
Now, changing the example above: what if I take a semiconductor device, and through comprehensive analysis of its inputs and resulting outputs, I create a functionally equivalent device and try to sell it? The DMCA says this is illegal. Same situation as above (known inputs and outputs, recreating the insides of the black box in my own way), but totally different laws govern it.
Now what if I take the plot of a best-selling book and rewrite it in my own words, keeping the story, characters, and scenes the same but telling it in my own voice? If we consider story, characters, and scenes to be the interface specification, and the words I use to tell the story to be the workings inside the black box, then this situation is comparable to those above. Is this illegal? Can I sell Henry Patter and the Wizard's Rock and profit from it? Probably not.
So where does software fall?
Is code speech - like a guy ranting on a soapbox - as the DeCSS people will try to claim? But you can copyright speech. Is it pure math - an algorithm - and can you copyright or patent that? Should you be able to? Is the LZW patent legit? Does that question matter, considering that it's been awarded and successfully enforced? Could I have patented bubblesort if I got there soon enough and no one could dig up prior art?
If someone puts out an amazing boat control that works in a totally innovative way, I'm actually free to rip it open and make an exact copy, unless it's been patented. But why am I not free to make an exact copy of large parts of unpatented software? If code is speech and it's copyrightable, but it's also an algorithm, and an algorithm is patentable, can I patent other types of speech? And why not?
Now, this entire post has been full of rhetorical questions, some rather absurd, and none of them really need to be answered. My point is only that making comparisons between software and some other case for which laws have been firmly established is not going to lead to any definitive answers. There's an enormous and contradictory mess of ideas surrounding the legal status of software, and I think this is a situation where trying to set guidelines based on precedent fails miserably.
I realize that's not a useful or constructive statement, but I have no brilliant insights in to the matter so I'll simply leave it at that.
What's the time frame in which the $10000 has to be withdrawn in order for the CTR to be necessary? If I withdraw $5000 on January 1, and another $5000 on January 15, do alarm bells still go off?
If you're breaking into my house and fall down the stairs, I'm not liable. Likewise if you're breaking into my backyard and using my rollercoaster.
GASP!! NO, not the mountain! That big, cold, unfeeling rock? Oh, the humanity.
I can't be sure how it works in your area of the world, but here (BC, Canada) the doctors don't actually know you're an organ donor when you're dragged into an emergency room. There is no driver's license decal or any other sort of identification you carry with you as an organ donor. Rather, if you're ever in a situation where you're braindead but stable on life support, they'll check the registry and see if you're on it. Then, they'll verify that you're actually braindead, and take your organs.
In theory, that's how it works. You can, of course, claim that that's a lie. In that case, I can't prove you wrong, but I can only say that your opinion of the medical profession rather low.
Well, that's just speculation, and once again, it only reflects a strong bias against the medical profession on your part.
But to put a lighter spin on the whole issue... let's say they're a bit more eager to let you die when you're an organ donor. Is that really so bad? In a situation where you're at the edge of life/death, you may end up brain-damaged if you recover after they've been shocking you for a few minutes. You may end up retarded and drooling for the rest of your life. Is death so much worse?
One way or another, I'm an organ donor. I can't see a logical reason why anyone wouldn't be.
Fraunhoeffer has done the analysis in great detail, of that you can be certain.
They have almost certainly found a patent in their extensive portfolio that applies to vorbis. They're not going to waste time and money suing the developers - they can't really profit from that. Instead they'll sue a large company that uses vorbis in a successful commercial product.
They'll do this if or when vorbis gains significant market share. Sue one large company, win, and then you can demand license fees from that company's competitors.
Let everyone ignore the patent until the product gets popular, then sue for license fees retroactively. A tactic straight from the books of Rambus and Unisys.