A survey held at my university on the day after student government elections showed that 30% of those surveyed had voted. The actual turnout was only 10%. Without the slightest embarassment, the poll takers reported a "margin of error" of 2% on their numbers.
Perhaps people willing to respond to the survey were more likely to have voted. I see nothing necessarily inconsistent about 30% of SURVEY RESPONDENTS having voted, but only 10% of the student body as a whole (which would include everyone who didn't respond to the survey.)
Something good did happen from it however. The changes to the MacOS ROM to support 68060s worked its way into one of the last of the machines, Performa, LC or Quadra 630 to 640 machines are 68060 compatible.
Combined with an adaptor such as this one from Emulation Tech, you get a cooler running and MUCH MUCH faster mac.
I've upgraded six Performa 630s now, and MacOS 8.1 feels like it was made for the 060. It certainly runs far more responsively under the 68060 than any other mac less than a 200 MHz 604.
If you have done this successfully, you should document it. Everything I've ever read suggested that no version of the Mac OS supported the 060, which was not fully backwards compatible and required certain 040 instructions to be trapped and emulated in software.
I would love to see proof that this has been done, if only to satisfy some sentimental curiosity.
I wonder what protections this law has against genetic data being disclosed to private parties?
Lots of states sell personal data (driver's license info, etc.) to private parties. There's certainly no federal genetic privacy law, and I don't know if California has a state law limiting disclosure of genetic information. In the absence of such a law, what's to stop a state from selling potentially lucrative genetic information to well-heeled insurers and credit reporting agencies?
What about idiot colleges who require are not allowed (legally) to request your social security number, but anyone can ask for your "student ID" which is coincidently the same?
This sentence is garbled, but if you're implying that most colleges aren't legally permitted to require your SSN, and similarly free to use it as your student ID number, you're wrong.
A private school can require you to tattoo your ssn on your forehead as a condition of enrollment.
If you go to a *public* college or university that has been collecting SSNs since before 1975 (i.e. most of them), your university is free to make you hand it out like candy to any and every jerk remotely affiliated with the school. They are exempt from the terms of the Federal Privacy Act of 1974. See 5 USC Sec. 552a. I learned this first hand after fighting with Florida State University to get a non-SSN student ID number assigned to me. They won. They were allowed to tell me to pound sand if I didn't like it, and I didn't, but it was too late to change schools. Even if I paid my tuition in cash, they would simply not assign an ID that was different from the student's SSN, if the student had an SSN. (Of course they assigned IDs all the time to international students who had no SSN.)
The ISP essentially warns the user, "We know who you are, we know what you're doing, now stop it or we'll cut your access before we're held liable." [snip] Doesn't that seem to take the burden from the ISP for making sure that the offending material is removed from the subscriber's system?
Not necessarily. You're confusing 2 different issues - the ISP's "safe harbor" from liability for transmitting an infringing copy across its network at the direction of its users (17 USC 512(a)) and the validity of subpoenas issued administratively by the clerk of court (i.e. not by a judge as part of an actual case) pursuant to 17 USC 512(h).
The two issues are related - prompt compliance with subpoenas properly issued under 512(h) is required for exemption from liability for infringing copies on an ISP's servers. This case basically held that the subpoena provisions of section 512(h) do not apply to the 512(a) safe harbor. (i.e. immunity from liability for infringing copies transmitted across an ISP's network)
Actual knowledge of infringing activity MAY (though I'm not sure this has been tested) preclude an ISP from claiming safe harbor from liability for contributory or actual copyright infringement by transmission of infringing copies through its systems or networks. (This is set forth in 17 USC sec. 512(c)(1) - you can see where this is mentioned on pages 7-8 of the opinion.)
So, to take the example you raise, Comcast has potentially created its own liability by monitoring the activities of its users! This shouldn't be surprising; it's part of the basis of common-carrier immunity for other crimes. The phone company isn't liable for wire fraud committed across its wires because they don't monitor the content of conversations.
The computer tech at my high school was so incredibly incompetent. We eventually found out why - he had a degree in ART.
So? My college degree is a BFA in Film Production. OK, knowing how to load a mag, hold a boom, color-correct light sources, or drive an Avid isn't part of my job anymore. The real education I got with my degree was in planning and implementing a project from initial concept to finished product (with documentation) on a tight budget and schedule with logistical and personnel challenges. That's my bread and butter as a sysadmin.
Maybe someone with a studio art degree never learned these skills, but one shouldn't assume that computer science is the most necessary or even most germane education to the realities of systems administration. Most good sysadmins I've worked with (and I've worked with dozens) have diverse educational backgrounds - only a small minority came out of computer science programs, and those that did to the last person said that what they studied in school bears little relevance to the realities of the role.
so what you're saying is that there is no such thing as an inalienable right, since there clearly is no 'right' that has has never been nor could be taken away.
No. An example of an inalienable right is freedom from bondage. You can't (legally) be enslaved, nor voluntarily submit to slavery, nor sell yourself into chattel slavery.
An example of an alienable right is your right to free speech. You can enter a contract where you agree to be restricted as to what you may speak about - e.g. a nondisclosure agreement.
What are your ideas on how to print this thing. No, i dont think a plotter would do it.
Durst Lambda printing, obviously. 400ppi continuous-tone laser imaging on photographic stock. Unfortunately, this image is just a bit too tall for pixel-perfect reproduction - it would need 67" wide stock and the max width for Lambda is 50". (50" is the max width of commercially-available photo stock anyhow.)
However, thanks to the nature of the camera's CCD sensor, the effective resolution of the image is somewhat lower, so the image won't really lose detail by being resampled to only 20000 pixels tall instead of 26800.
Wouldn't it be easier for the spacecraft to dock with the ISS, and return the samples to earth via. the next Soyuez capsule? It seems silly to need to build a craft capable of re-entry when it doesn't need to...
I'm certain it's considerably easier to build a capsule with an ablative heat shield capable of reentry than to build a craft with enough maneuvering fuel to match the orbit of ISS for a complicated recovery of the sort you propose.
With this design, the craft doesn't have to match orbits with a very small and very fast target - it just has to hit Utah. The latter is considerably easier, especially as there aren't any squishy humans inside who can't tolerate deceleration forces greater than a few dozen G.
So, IBM is taking away the ability to hot swap individual chips in exchange for... what? That's the big question. If there's some major improvement in the design, say so! Inquiring minds want to know!:-)
Damn, dude, RTFA if you're that curious!
What is gained is full-speed interconnect between processors within the same module. No "multipliers" - the bus between the cores within the module run at chip speeds. The timings are so tight at 2+ GHz that this is simply impossible to do with individual chips.
I live in the UK, and until I started watching The Simpsons, I had never even heard of Fox. Advertisers would pay good money for this sort of publicity.
You only think you've never heard of Fox. It's just the American face of News Corporation, which owns BSkyB (and Sky-everything-else) and a hefty chunk of your newspapers.
Over here they own a few papers, a few dozen cable/satellite channels with Fox branding, the Fox broadcast TV network (whither the Simpsons), and DirecTV, the leading satellite broadcaster.
Same scenario, same right-wing bias, different names.
How about the unemployment line? There's lots of "web developers" there. You can do all the networking and shop talk you want. And as for award presentation... everybody wins! The prize is a check, though the presenters don't stand on ceremony, and a lengthy acceptance speech will probably earn you a shove in the back from the next "award winning web developer."
Punch in Ronald Harris and slot machine as search terms into google. Do a little bit of reading. Then realize that elections supervisors are often elected politicians or political appointees themselves.
If someone is going to rig an election by tampering with electronic voting machines, they're also more than capable of forging the paper trail.
I'm sorry, that's not insightful - it's total bollocks. Of course it's possible to tamper with paper ballots, but to do so on a large scale (e.g. large enough to affect statewide or national elections) would inevitably attract attention because one would need to gain access to, and modify or destroy, literally tons of paper.
Electronic voting systems may be tampered with without any heavy lifting, by few people, and the only access problem is electronic, not physical - do you trust that the home or office PC of the supervisor of elections in your county is secure? Having done computer work for municipal governments in the past, I certainly do not.
And this usually had something to do with the fact that human population is always growing.
Except it's not. Population growth in many industrialized countries is negative (Italy, Japan), or would be without immigration (USA, among many others). That's because in industrialized societies, having more children is a liability, not an asset - they cost more to raise than they bring in income to the family. The only groups having a lot of kids in the industrialized world are:
people who have large families for religious reasons (i.e. birth control is not permitted or large families are explicitly encouraged by doctrine). This is why Mormonism is the fastest growing religion in the US, by the way.
recent immigrants from places where large families are commonplace.
I'm not saying that population growth isn't a problem, just that population growth is not much of a problem in the industrialized world. The problems come when countries with population problems industrialize - see China.
At our shop, we have dozens of E4000, E4500 Sun servers running with 400mhz processors. From what I'm told, (its sounds stupid as hell but true) some of the 400 mhz processors were not shielded correctly, so on occasions such as this (CME's) we actually had machines panic on us...
Sounds like Sun (the company, not the bright thing that lights up the Big Room) blowing smoke up your ass. There's a cache coherency bug on some 400 MHz UltraSPARC II processors with 8 meg ecache that causes panics. *Maybe* this bug has a slightly higher chance of manifesting itself during a CME, but I doubt it (anything is possible). They denied this problem for a long time until some high-profile clients threw a fit and Sun offered to replace the affected processors. That free replacement program is almost certainly over now; we replaced dozens of these cpus at a previous employer.
The sunspot cycle (which takes 11 years) peaked in 2000, yet there's an unusually large amount of activity of late. There was a somewhat intense solar flare a few days ago, and now this one, which is believed to be the third-largest one on record. Are there any explanations for this large amount of activity at what should be a non-peak time?
Let's see:
The roughly-11-year solar cycle is just based on observation and correlation. It lets one make certain predictions about the likelihood of solar events, but that's all.
Recorded history isn't very long compared to the sun's age, to say nothing of the still-shorter track record of scientific solar observation. The sun may (and probably does) exhibit other epicyclic phenomena on timescales too long for us to have directly measured.
That's a start. Just because we're past the predicted peak of current cycle doesn't mean there won't be solar activity.
I keep waiting for a device that has the functionality of my T-Mobile Sidekick
And what, pray tell, will you do when you find such a device? There's no way to get your data out of your sidekick should you decide to switch. You're locked in, dude.
I heard someone suggest that most of the "OS"es in movies are simply flash programs that are full screen, and will do the correct sequence of events, regardless of the input. Can anyone verify this?
Macromedia Director, actually. I guess they might have moved to Flash these days, but yeah, computers in big-budget movies are just playing these scripts.
The computer in this movie was probably running windows and displaying a director or flash movie of GNOME.
Nearlyfreespeech.net, just to pick an example, charges $1 per gigabyte transferred plus $0.02/day for DNS service that includes email forwarding.
You cannot host a site off your own internet connection as cheaply or robustly as a dedicated provider. I don't recommend hosting your own site unless you already need "fancy" service (multiple static IPs, fast upstream) for other reasons.
The problem I have with X is that it's overkill for most client desktops. It's nice that X allows remote windowing. But how many users actually need that? (I'm ignoring the security implications this has as well.) The reality is that 99.9% of X applications have both the client application and X server on the same machine.
That's not the reality at all. Real environments where X is widely deployed (i.e. not a few boxen on a geek's home lan) frequently use the remote display capabilities of X. Indeed, those capabilities are the among the main reasons X gets deployed in the first place. Only niche markets use X clients and servers exclusively on the same machine (notably the visual effects industry where SGI once ruled and Linux has taken over.) Even in these environments, the overhead of a networking layer is minimal. (And these are among the most graphics-performance-sensitive environments that exist.)
So we don't have to worry about this leasing/licensing everything, over the next 600 years it will probably drift back to actual ownership by people. As the feudal lords lose their grip.
That's reassuring.
Of course the unfree tenures were only officially abolished in Britain in 1922 and their attendant feudal duties (admittedly pro forma by then) in 1935. How many generations lived and died as serfs under unfree tenure? Taking the long view is small comfort to those of us who see in these trends the seeds of a new dark age.
What if Ford Motor company suddenly decided to include a clause in the contract that stipulates, something like: "if you purchase a Ford vehicle, you agree to purchase all accessory and or replacement parts from Ford Directly" ? I think you would see allot more Chevy's running arround town.
Actually, this is more like Ford and Chevy getting together to lobby the NTSB and Congress to forbid third-party aftermarket accessories or replacement parts. Your choice isn't Ford or Chevy, your choice is a used car, or the new car with its restrictions.
This has already come to pass with things like printers - I still use old Canon-engine laser printers because the cartridges are ubiquitous and made by many companies (and are, consequently, cheap). Newer printers have chips that disallow third-party refills or cartridges, and so far Lexmark has been able to successfully prevent circumvention of these chips under the DMCA.
Individuals who think like this obviously have a complete lack of understanding of how insurance works, as well as a complete lack of understanding of economics and praxeology. All that these laws are going to do is force people who are perfectly healthy and likely to be so all their lives to pay higher premiums, to cover for freeloaders much more susceptible to various risks.
Sorry, but private socialization of risk is the point of insurance. Insurance is pointless if only the people who don't need it are able to buy it. Who's going to tend to the "freeloaders" who got dealt a lousy genetic hand through no fault of their own? If they're not insurable and not employable due to genetic discrimination, what then? Send them to die in the streets like Reagan emptying the asylums?
Talk about a recipe for social unrest.
Because business is inherently risk-averse, it's not always desirable for businesses to know everything about everyone - the creation of a permanently unemployable, uninsurable, unhouseable underclass. Then these people really will be freeloaders - the opportunity for them to be productive members of society will have been pulled out from under them due to discriminaton based on factors beyond their control.
You didn't write the word eugenics, but I can read it strongly between the lines.
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Perhaps people willing to respond to the survey were more likely to have voted. I see nothing necessarily inconsistent about 30% of SURVEY RESPONDENTS having voted, but only 10% of the student body as a whole (which would include everyone who didn't respond to the survey.)
-Isaac
If you have done this successfully, you should document it. Everything I've ever read suggested that no version of the Mac OS supported the 060, which was not fully backwards compatible and required certain 040 instructions to be trapped and emulated in software.
I would love to see proof that this has been done, if only to satisfy some sentimental curiosity.
-Isaac
Lots of states sell personal data (driver's license info, etc.) to private parties. There's certainly no federal genetic privacy law, and I don't know if California has a state law limiting disclosure of genetic information. In the absence of such a law, what's to stop a state from selling potentially lucrative genetic information to well-heeled insurers and credit reporting agencies?
-Isaac
This sentence is garbled, but if you're implying that most colleges aren't legally permitted to require your SSN, and similarly free to use it as your student ID number, you're wrong.
A private school can require you to tattoo your ssn on your forehead as a condition of enrollment.
If you go to a *public* college or university that has been collecting SSNs since before 1975 (i.e. most of them), your university is free to make you hand it out like candy to any and every jerk remotely affiliated with the school. They are exempt from the terms of the Federal Privacy Act of 1974. See 5 USC Sec. 552a. I learned this first hand after fighting with Florida State University to get a non-SSN student ID number assigned to me. They won. They were allowed to tell me to pound sand if I didn't like it, and I didn't, but it was too late to change schools. Even if I paid my tuition in cash, they would simply not assign an ID that was different from the student's SSN, if the student had an SSN. (Of course they assigned IDs all the time to international students who had no SSN.)
Nice, huh?
-Isaac
Not necessarily. You're confusing 2 different issues - the ISP's "safe harbor" from liability for transmitting an infringing copy across its network at the direction of its users (17 USC 512(a)) and the validity of subpoenas issued administratively by the clerk of court (i.e. not by a judge as part of an actual case) pursuant to 17 USC 512(h).
The two issues are related - prompt compliance with subpoenas properly issued under 512(h) is required for exemption from liability for infringing copies on an ISP's servers. This case basically held that the subpoena provisions of section 512(h) do not apply to the 512(a) safe harbor. (i.e. immunity from liability for infringing copies transmitted across an ISP's network)
Actual knowledge of infringing activity MAY (though I'm not sure this has been tested) preclude an ISP from claiming safe harbor from liability for contributory or actual copyright infringement by transmission of infringing copies through its systems or networks. (This is set forth in 17 USC sec. 512(c)(1) - you can see where this is mentioned on pages 7-8 of the opinion.)
So, to take the example you raise, Comcast has potentially created its own liability by monitoring the activities of its users! This shouldn't be surprising; it's part of the basis of common-carrier immunity for other crimes. The phone company isn't liable for wire fraud committed across its wires because they don't monitor the content of conversations.
-Isaac
So? My college degree is a BFA in Film Production. OK, knowing how to load a mag, hold a boom, color-correct light sources, or drive an Avid isn't part of my job anymore. The real education I got with my degree was in planning and implementing a project from initial concept to finished product (with documentation) on a tight budget and schedule with logistical and personnel challenges. That's my bread and butter as a sysadmin.
Maybe someone with a studio art degree never learned these skills, but one shouldn't assume that computer science is the most necessary or even most germane education to the realities of systems administration. Most good sysadmins I've worked with (and I've worked with dozens) have diverse educational backgrounds - only a small minority came out of computer science programs, and those that did to the last person said that what they studied in school bears little relevance to the realities of the role.
-Isaac
No. An example of an inalienable right is freedom from bondage. You can't (legally) be enslaved, nor voluntarily submit to slavery, nor sell yourself into chattel slavery.
An example of an alienable right is your right to free speech. You can enter a contract where you agree to be restricted as to what you may speak about - e.g. a nondisclosure agreement.
-Isaac
I'll take vaccination, indoor plumbing, and affordable commercial air travel over MAME, personally. But MAME is still damned cool.
-Isaac
Durst Lambda printing, obviously. 400ppi continuous-tone laser imaging on photographic stock. Unfortunately, this image is just a bit too tall for pixel-perfect reproduction - it would need 67" wide stock and the max width for Lambda is 50". (50" is the max width of commercially-available photo stock anyhow.)
However, thanks to the nature of the camera's CCD sensor, the effective resolution of the image is somewhat lower, so the image won't really lose detail by being resampled to only 20000 pixels tall instead of 26800.
-Isaac
I'm certain it's considerably easier to build a capsule with an ablative heat shield capable of reentry than to build a craft with enough maneuvering fuel to match the orbit of ISS for a complicated recovery of the sort you propose.
With this design, the craft doesn't have to match orbits with a very small and very fast target - it just has to hit Utah. The latter is considerably easier, especially as there aren't any squishy humans inside who can't tolerate deceleration forces greater than a few dozen G.
-Isaac
What is gained is full-speed interconnect between processors within the same module. No "multipliers" - the bus between the cores within the module run at chip speeds. The timings are so tight at 2+ GHz that this is simply impossible to do with individual chips.
-Isaac
You only think you've never heard of Fox. It's just the American face of News Corporation, which owns BSkyB (and Sky-everything-else) and a hefty chunk of your newspapers.
Over here they own a few papers, a few dozen cable/satellite channels with Fox branding, the Fox broadcast TV network (whither the Simpsons), and DirecTV, the leading satellite broadcaster.
Same scenario, same right-wing bias, different names.
-Isaac
How about the unemployment line? There's lots of "web developers" there. You can do all the networking and shop talk you want. And as for award presentation... everybody wins! The prize is a check, though the presenters don't stand on ceremony, and a lengthy acceptance speech will probably earn you a shove in the back from the next "award winning web developer."
-Isaac
Punch in Ronald Harris and slot machine as search terms into google. Do a little bit of reading. Then realize that elections supervisors are often elected politicians or political appointees themselves.
-Isaac
I'm sorry, that's not insightful - it's total bollocks. Of course it's possible to tamper with paper ballots, but to do so on a large scale (e.g. large enough to affect statewide or national elections) would inevitably attract attention because one would need to gain access to, and modify or destroy, literally tons of paper.
Electronic voting systems may be tampered with without any heavy lifting, by few people, and the only access problem is electronic, not physical - do you trust that the home or office PC of the supervisor of elections in your county is secure? Having done computer work for municipal governments in the past, I certainly do not.
-Isaac
Except it's not. Population growth in many industrialized countries is negative (Italy, Japan), or would be without immigration (USA, among many others). That's because in industrialized societies, having more children is a liability, not an asset - they cost more to raise than they bring in income to the family. The only groups having a lot of kids in the industrialized world are:
I'm not saying that population growth isn't a problem, just that population growth is not much of a problem in the industrialized world. The problems come when countries with population problems industrialize - see China.
-Isaac
Sounds like Sun (the company, not the bright thing that lights up the Big Room) blowing smoke up your ass. There's a cache coherency bug on some 400 MHz UltraSPARC II processors with 8 meg ecache that causes panics. *Maybe* this bug has a slightly higher chance of manifesting itself during a CME, but I doubt it (anything is possible). They denied this problem for a long time until some high-profile clients threw a fit and Sun offered to replace the affected processors. That free replacement program is almost certainly over now; we replaced dozens of these cpus at a previous employer.
It's Sun's fault, not the sun's fault.
-Isaac
Let's see:
That's a start. Just because we're past the predicted peak of current cycle doesn't mean there won't be solar activity.
-Isaac
And what, pray tell, will you do when you find such a device? There's no way to get your data out of your sidekick should you decide to switch. You're locked in, dude.
Next time, try a syncable device.
-Isaac
Macromedia Director, actually. I guess they might have moved to Flash these days, but yeah, computers in big-budget movies are just playing these scripts.
The computer in this movie was probably running windows and displaying a director or flash movie of GNOME.
-Isaac
Nearlyfreespeech.net, just to pick an example, charges $1 per gigabyte transferred plus $0.02/day for DNS service that includes email forwarding.
You cannot host a site off your own internet connection as cheaply or robustly as a dedicated provider. I don't recommend hosting your own site unless you already need "fancy" service (multiple static IPs, fast upstream) for other reasons.
-Isaac
That's not the reality at all. Real environments where X is widely deployed (i.e. not a few boxen on a geek's home lan) frequently use the remote display capabilities of X. Indeed, those capabilities are the among the main reasons X gets deployed in the first place. Only niche markets use X clients and servers exclusively on the same machine (notably the visual effects industry where SGI once ruled and Linux has taken over.) Even in these environments, the overhead of a networking layer is minimal. (And these are among the most graphics-performance-sensitive environments that exist.)
-Isaac
That's reassuring.
Of course the unfree tenures were only officially abolished in Britain in 1922 and their attendant feudal duties (admittedly pro forma by then) in 1935. How many generations lived and died as serfs under unfree tenure? Taking the long view is small comfort to those of us who see in these trends the seeds of a new dark age.
-Isaac
Actually, this is more like Ford and Chevy getting together to lobby the NTSB and Congress to forbid third-party aftermarket accessories or replacement parts. Your choice isn't Ford or Chevy, your choice is a used car, or the new car with its restrictions.
This has already come to pass with things like printers - I still use old Canon-engine laser printers because the cartridges are ubiquitous and made by many companies (and are, consequently, cheap). Newer printers have chips that disallow third-party refills or cartridges, and so far Lexmark has been able to successfully prevent circumvention of these chips under the DMCA.
How's that for "innovation?"
-Isaac
Talk about a recipe for social unrest.
Because business is inherently risk-averse, it's not always desirable for businesses to know everything about everyone - the creation of a permanently unemployable, uninsurable, unhouseable underclass. Then these people really will be freeloaders - the opportunity for them to be productive members of society will have been pulled out from under them due to discriminaton based on factors beyond their control.
You didn't write the word eugenics, but I can read it strongly between the lines.
-Isaac