I'm proud to admit that I stand corrected. My parsing of the Fifth Amendment was incorrect and I'm embarrassed to have to blame sleep deprivation as the cause.
I do stand by my assertion that the first amendment is being violated when valedvictorians are told that they cannot offer prayers at graduations and such, as this is clearly infringing on their right to practice their religion freely.
It is my understanding that in many trial cases, much evidence is discovered that ultimately will never be used in a trial. Much of this is because the evidence is useless, but in quite a few cases, a judge will rule that the evidence is inadmissable for other reasons. Prior convictions and confessions under duress come to mind immediately.
I can see no reason for wiretapped conversations between counsel and a client to be admissable in any court for the currently accused or any of his accomplices. That is not to say that I see no value in having these conversations taped.
The crux of the problem that investigators are having now is the fact that none of the detainees with strong associations to the hijackers or other known terrorists, are saying anything. Anything that they may tell their attourneys would not be admissable in their trial, and their counsel cannot divulge much of this information anyway. Even though the eavesdropping tapes would be inadmissable in court, they could still provide leads for other investigative teams to persue on other linked individuals.
Note that these individuals have had warrants issued, based on credible evidence. Many are direct accomplices to the events of 9/11. Our Bill of Rights does not say "presumed innocent" it only guarantees a fair trial, so that they can be convicted of only the crimes that they did commit. Many of them are not completely innocent people, and most who are really innocent know information about the truly guilty. Silence and priveledge are preventing justice from being done.
I was one of the few in my high school class, many years ago, who didn't sleep through the "Rights vs. Priveledges" lecture. Were you?
A right is something that is believed (in most cultures) to be "inalienable" or inseperable from being. Personal rights are not granted but are guaranteed by our U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Freedom of speech, freedom from persecution and freedom to bear arms are the most well known of these. Most of the other items in the Bill of Rights pertain to rights of people held for trial, and protection of their property and reputation (until found guilty).
The tenth amendment stakes out the rights of states to override federal powers, when such powers are usurped outside of the constitution, hence some footing for the States vs. Microsoft case, but the seventh amendment should guarantee Microsoft a jury trial since the alleged offense is valued at greater than $20, and the eighth prohibits cruel punishment or excessive fines (a double edged sword for Microsoft).
A priveledge is something completely different. It is not enumerated in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. You can check, Lawyer-Client priveledge is not in their. Priveledges are manifestations of custom that are expected, but not guaranteed.
Separation of church and state is one of these priveledges. If you check, you will find the Bill of Rights expressly says "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;"
What this means is that a state religion cannot be established, but that no laws can prevent someone from praying in public. The removal of all things with religious connotations is a priveledge extended to the ACLU and litigious agnostics, and actually inpinges on a constitutional right.
Even some rights guaranteed by the Bill of Rights have loopholes that make them more priveledge than right. The third amendment, preventing the forced harboring of soldiers has exception provisions for times of war.
This brings me to the infamous Fifth amendment and it's counterpart the sixth. These are the two you site, the ones which have the strongest of weak ties to attourney-client priveledge. So that no-one can argue baselessly, I'll provide the text here:
Amendment 5
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
Amendment 6
In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.
There's a lot of verbage to parse there, but you can plainly see that the word lawyer, attourney, barrister, soliciter, ombudsman, or advocate are nowhere to be found! "Assistance of Counsel for his defense" is provide for, but no additional explicit rights are granted. Remember, presumption of innocence is not the right, a fair trial is. The presumption of the framers is that this would be used to protect the falsly accused, not the truly guilty.
Also, a clause is contained explicitly permitting the removal of this right for military persons and for everyone in time of war or "Public Danger".
In this sense, this eavesdropping is explicitly constitutional.
Everyone should take a deep breath and remember these points:
1. The fifth amendment will protect you if you committed a crime and told a lawyer about it while somebody was recording, as you cannot be "forced" to incriminate yourself.
2. Such "testimony" will greatly aid the search for accomplices when lawyers cannot divulge such information.
3. Priveleges are not rights. The ACLU is currently inventing the constitutional right of Lawyer-Client privelege when non-such right or privelege is given by the Constitution of the US.
4. Many of those detained in this current action, are not citizens of the US, and do not have the same rights.
5. In almost all true professions, Law and Clergy being the exceptions, practitioners are bound by codes of ethics that demand action when the safety or welfare of other human beings is at stake. Coincidently, this exception drives many lawyers and Priests to alcoholism, and other vices, but that's another post.
I stand corrected. The Alpha, Power, PowerPC and the RISC-ish P6 core (not the x86 interpreter) use out-of-order execution. I think that the MIPS IV and later also use this, but I'm not sure.
I just assumed that the Ultra SPARC would use it as well. Mea culpa.
I'm not lying and latency problems are not "totally program dependent."
RISC takes many more instructions to do the same thing as a CISC chip, so caching the instructions will improve the performance for repeated actions. The P4 is RISC like on the chip level, so it would probably benefit from a much larger cache. I believe that the size of it's cache has less to do with the fact that it's low latency than it does with chip yields for making memory that runs reliably at 2Ghz.
I will concede that some programs would definately show the large cache as superior to a small low latency cache. Witness the older SPEC benchmarks which became obsolete when they would fit entirely into the L1 and L2 caches of some processors. In this case, the large cache is superior to the small low latency cache.
Think about what these processors will be used for. Most likely, they will be used for large database servers, as that is what HU-UX is good for. While an entire database will not fit into 32 Meg, a lot of repetitive queries and essential system and program code can fit into this large cache. In this way, this processor would be superior to a raft of P4's which would be constantly fetching from main memory for this particular type of service. So the first search for "Pam Anderson" web sites would take the same amount of time on a P4 as it would on this PA-8800, but every successive search would have a much higher possibly of being a cache hit on the PA-RISC chip.
I agree completely that waiting for main memory is a huge problem.
The latency issue just isn't an issue with the SPARC, or any other modern RISC-ish architectures. Out of order execution and branch prediction techniques can accomodate latencies. Cache size though, is much more important, as a larger cache can hold many queued instructions and data, which will be fed in a constant stream to the processor without having to revert to slower memory.
In the P4, 20 stage pipeline and it's prediction logic are much more succeptible to cache latency problems. Waiting two or three cycles for data on a P4 could cause major pipeline hiccups.
...My sister was telling me that she had to submit to a full body search when she went to a concert at Madison Square Garden earlier this week...
...She told me that she didn't, of course, enjoy submitting to a full body search, but that she would gladly give up some of her freedoms in these "terrifying times" if it would even potentially be a deterrent to terrorists...
It occurred to me that in these troubling times, it could be a golden business opportunity to provide the services of enjoyable body searches for patron conscious event holders! Kind of like a walk through spa service that would make people feel good about being searched.
Seriously, I doubt that whoever the guard was that did the search actually suspected your sister of harboring anything dangerous or of being a terrorist. Was she searched in the name of fairness to avoid the appearance of racial profiling (justified discriminitory searches), or was this a more typical search done for out of venue refreshments?
Earlier this year, the PNC Park baseball stadium opened in Pittsburgh. Many people went to the games carying coolers of drinks, only to have them stripped at the gates. The old venue, Three Rivers Stadium, allowed fans to bring their own refreshments. The new one resorted to body searches for food and drink that were being brought in to avoid the exorbitant prices charged by the stadium vendors. After public outcry and several changes to the stadium's policy, some beverages were allowed in.
I guess my point is that this search may not have anything to do with the recent events, but we may be more attentive to them because of the attack.
I don't know about anybody else, but it seems to me that this mostly a code cosmetic update. No security fixes or major problems addressed. Might this mean that 2.5 is coming very soon?
The only things that caught my eye were the emu10k1 (aka SB Live) update the USB updates and FireWire work. All three of these have been improved in recent kernels.
The emu10k1 driver update specifically interested me as I've had no luck with the version included in the kernel, and the Creative Labs CVS version has been a gamble as well.
What if someone were to setup a honeypot for finding Osama?
You could set-up several sites like binladenpornos.com and feature things like doctored pictures of him in compromising positions with livestock and such.
Anyway, by following the attempts to crack and rectify this site, you would flesh out the information on the technical side of his network. If you get sued, all the better to track funds and connections through the representing lawyers.
When I said that they wouldn't work, I meant to say that they wouldn't work well. My understanding is that USB 2.0 adds peer-to-peer connection ability that was not in 1.x. 1.x requires a master computer.
Additionally, 1.x has the embarrassing problem of the differing protocol implementations for the host controller, UHCI vs. OHCI. Embarrassing because the "founding members" of the USB consortium used differing (not 100% compatible) host controller interfaces, the real reason that USB was doomed from the start on the PC. USB 2.0 having peering ability would certainly conflict with both of these controllers.
Microsoft wrote their drivers to the OHCI standard, while Intel flooded the world with their UHCI based chipsets. Great cooperation.
Anyway, I stand by my previous statement, as most USB 2.0 marketers are going to want to trumpet their new features, which will be lacking when their devices are connected to USB 1.x buses. Peer-to-Peer was in FireWire from the beginning.
I don't quite believe this rumor, but let's just suppose its true.
Apple would be including USB 2.0 and faster firewire (800 Mbps, not 3.2 Gbps), for two reasons. First, it would be accomodating a standard that many peripheral manufacturers would be supporting for LOW speed hardware. Second, it would be including it to showcase Firewire's supremecy as a HIGH speed interface.
Remember, Intel has bee trying to market USB 2.0 as a FireWire killer. Everybody knows that the 480 Mbps spec. makes 1394's 400 Mbps look slower. Unfortunately for Intel, USB is a poorly hacked technology which is not capable of producing real-world results of this speed. Theoretically, it works this fast, until you add a slow device like a mouse or keyboard, peripherals which predominate the USB connected equipment today.
Actually, they might use USB 2.0 for some integrated telephony and modem type devices, as that is what USB was originally developed for.
Primarily, Apple would include the technology to maintain a pool of peripherals, since 2.0 devices will not work on 1.x buses. It will not be able to replace FireWire for high speed stuff, so they wouldn't be dropping 1394, even to save a few bucks on low-end models, since the "Digital Hub" requires high speed DV capabilities.
The 7300/180 had a 60 MHz. bus and a processor card that was locked to it. I bought one of these off of e-bay and it wouldn't work in my 7500. Then I got the dual 180 604e from a 8600/180MP, and it worked because it was clocked for a 45 MHz. bus.
I still use my 7500 with 9.1 a Jaz drive and 160 Meg of RAM, but it doesn't hold a candle to my lowly iMac. Now, I use it primarily for a client on my home LAN, when we have a few friends over for a networked game like Myth II.
It was definately from another generation, with 8 DIMM slots, a cache slot, dual SCSI buses and built-in everything. Makes me nostalgic to remember how much it cost to double the RAM to 32 Meg. (~$400 for 16 Meg, January 1996).
I agree in general, but the problem is that turning the other cheek will only enrage and encourage them, while enraging and discouraging the American public.
As you said, politicians don't persue long term solutions, as it won't get them re-elected. A long term solution of doing nothing will look just that way, like they are doing nothing. This does little to comfort the grieving who want justice or vengance. Also, when the next attack comes, those politicians will appear apathetic in hindsight, which we all know is much worse than ineffective. We favor those who try vs. those who don't.
This is a cultural problem, that we just aren't capable of wrestling with. The closest thing to this that we deal with is organized crime. Jailing a boss and all of his henchmen will not make the problem go away, it just changes the names associated with the problem. This is still different though as crime families fight with one another, and that infighting isn't apparent between anti-US terrorists.
I should've amend my usage of "irrational" with the qualifier "as viewed by western culture". Although I agree morally with your summary and solution of your last paragraph, I must correct either mis-understanding or blatant falsehoods in your post.
Starting with your chronographically earliest reference, WWI and adding our own US Civil War, I agree. Punishing the people afterwards does little good, it festers anger and distrust. I was refering to Neville Chamberlain's attempt to appease to Hitler in the mid 1930's with the invasion of Poland. Chamberlain hoped to achieve peace with Germany by having Hitler agree not to expand any further West. We all know how well that worked.
As to the "...all the thousands of civilians that have died in our bombings in Afghanistan and East Africa in our futile attempts to take out bin Laden," I believe that death toll stands in the tens at most. Actually, it is one unfortunate night watchman in Sudan and about twenty in one of Bin Laden's encampments in Afghanistan, not thousands.
I will not touch the topic of Israel, as I am conflicted, and do not approve of some of their actions.
It is not the fault of the U.S. that humanitarian aid and medical supplies are kept from the children of Iraq. Such things supplied by U.N. peace-keepers have been routinely confiscated by the Iraqi army.
This brings me to a topic that I am actually fearful of bringing up, as you will see why in a moment. The government of Iraq has defiantly progressed in its plans for biological weapons. It will never follow the Geneva convention of "Humane" warfare (if there is such a thing), which bans the use of both chemical and biological agents.
A company that I formerly worked for, a manufacturer of scientific and medical equipment, received a rather large order in 1998. It was from the government of Iraq, ordering 800-900 mid-sized and large sized incubators (refrigerator sized). To put this in perspective, this single order was close to a year's production for the entire world-wide market for these incubators. These devices are not for any human (post-natal) incubation, but for bacterial and viral culturing, and can be used for no other purpose.
Many people at my facility were conflicted. Locally, our economy was very poor, and passing on the order would mean layoffs. The higher-ups, looking for the quick money, were looking to sell them through Germany, if the commerce department didn't approve the sale. Clinton's dept. of Commerce wasn't known for their moral fortitude, and it did approve the sale. After the sale was completed and delivered, Iraq ordered enough spare parts to completely rebuild 1/3 of the incubators that they bought!
I haven't had many nights of restful sleep since learning of this event. I've only told a few close friends of my worries, as I needed my job. Even though I am still under NDA, I feel that the recent events warrant a break in my silence.
Seriously, Mac upgrades are very similar to upgrades in the PC world, except you won't be replacing your motherboard.
As you've been through the Slot1/Socket 370 Celeron to Slot A/Socket whatever change required by jumping from intel to AMD, you know about masive upgrade stress and non-compatible processors (pin-outs). You no doubt had to deal with different BIOSes, IRQ conflicts, ISA/PCI/Plug-n-Pray fiascos. We don't have that, but we do have similar restraints with regard to individual processors. A G3 or G4 upgrade will be made for specific machines, with specific sockets or slots.
For example, I have a PowerMac 7500 that I bought back in 1995. It shipped with a 100 MHz. PPC 601+ processor (think Pentium 100). A few years ago, I picked up a dual 180 MHz. PPC 604e (think dual PII 233) board on e-bay for ~$100. I just replaced my original processor board with the new one, and it just worked. I didn't have to change anything, although I did have a bit of difficulty with getting LinuxPPC SMP to work. I could upgrade this machine again to a G4, but it would still have a 50MHz bus speed to the rest of the components. Newer machines don't use this same processor card, but a ZIF socket.
I added a PC standard Voodoo 3 card to this machine, flashed the cards PROM, and it just worked. Now, I face the same driver problem that PC users have, since 3dfx is no more.
Likewise, I have a Rev B. iMac. I've put in a new Maxtor 45 Gig hard drive and lots of memory, and it is much faster now. About a year and a half ago, a company came out with a G4 upgrade for these machines. Unfortunately, they aren't around either, but their cards still work (if you can find them) with MacOSX.
The new Apple machines are very interchangeable (parts wise) with PCs. They use ATA/66 drives and PC133 memory. The processors, of course, aren't.
It disturbs me greatly to see so many apparently intelligent people here whining for peaceful solutions to the present problem. Wake up! It won't happen because it won't work.
At the core of these terror attacks were people, ideologically driven, irrational individuals who believe that America (and Israel) is the greatest evil on the planet. They are not with us anymore, but many of their compatriots are. Those in the attack spent YEARS preparing for their mission. Every day spent in preparation, firming their resolve. They could not be deterred from achieving their objective. They were not rational people.
Ask yourselves, what would appease the groups behind the terrorists? Elimination of Israel? Elimination of the United States perhaps? In short, only the genocide of hundreds of millions of people. Being one of those who would have to be eliminated, I don't think that I would advocate this solution.
The truth is, there is nothing that can be given to the terrorist, or the governments that sponsor them, which would appease them. Nothing!
Tony Blair has just reminded the main-stream media of how well appeasement worked in the 1930's against Hitler's Nazi machine. The same holds today, because we can't give the terrorists what they want.
Also, you non-American folk out there who are convinced that this is a US problem, how many of your countrymen were killed in Tuesday's attack? I would wager that nearly a quarter of those poor souls lost were not Americans, but foreign nationals doing business there. This may turn out to be the largest loss of life in terrorist attacks for six or seven different countries.
Earlier this week, I had thought that an ironic twist of this situation would actually achieve peace in the mid-east. In building a coalition, Bush wanted Arafat on board with the PLO. To get this, Israel (which appeared to be pumped-up and a bit righteous after the attack) would be thumped (have aid decreased) by the US, for attacking Palestinians.
To get Israel and the PLO on the same team in a war against terrorism, you would need some severe concessions. Israel would have to agree to not attack any Palestinians, where the consequence would be elimination of all US aid (guaranteeing a short lifespan for the state). Also, the Palestinians would have to agree to not attack any Israelis, or be considered a terrorist state, and be wiped off the face of the planet. Unfortunately, as I said before, these are not rational people, and this peace agreement would probably stand for about an hour before one or both sides would falter.
Many of us started writing software that we wanted or needed to use individually, but soon found that it felt better to give it to friends who could use it and improve it as well. It's kind of like an ego trip without having people acknowledging your ego, hence not becoming known as arrogant or egocentric (not that that still doesn't happen). YOU know that other people depend on you, and YOUR work is appreciated.
If others improve on your work, you still made it possible for the improvement to happen. If you improved someone elses work, you still feel ownership of making it better. In short, it makes us feel good.
A few years ago, a professor of my mentioned in lecture that a standards body was attempting to define what a kilogram is by using light!
I guess now a meter is defined, not by a steel or platinum rod, but by a multiple of the wavelength of light emitted by Xenon plasma or some other gas. By using the logic that mass can be converted into energy, and light was a form of energy, you could somehow define a kilogram by a multiple of the energy in the form of light, released by an atom of some substance when excited to a certain state.
I think that they probably lost most non-geek people on this, not to mention the engineers that use mass kg all of the time. The extension of this theoretical definition of a kg would spawn a horrible sense of relationships for tomorrow's physics and engineering students. What is heavier, a kg of feathers or a kg of light? Huh?
The Plat-Irid rod is good enough for Gubmint work.
The article states that the slander (or libel) was published first in NJ (USA) and the in Victoria. If a cacheing web search like Google happened to reside in Austrailia, would the existance of a site in its cache constitute publishing? I mean it would be available for anyone to read, and the data would be hosted locally in Australia.
I admit that I haven't read the article yet, but would you have to be an Aussie to use this new law?
I see this as a horrible thing for free speech in general, but a profitable issue for Austrailian lawyers. Now, a site in the US, or a tabloid site in the U.K. could have a predatory lawsuite filed against it in Oz, with only the claim that it somehow defames somebody. Troubling.
-- Len
At first I thought it was lame...
on
The Joys Of Porting
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· Score: 4, Interesting
The WinCE apache thing, but then it hit me.
It isn't about the general type of web server that we know and love. It's about a portable transaction platform!
Imagine that you are a salesman, contractor or other individual who travels and does business with many different people in many different places. If you had a 802.11 (I don't think bluetooth will make it) enabled Jornada or iPaq, then you could cary a web-based transaction server with you, wherever you go. You wouldn't need a fixed IP, nor a constant broadband link to the internet.
You could hop on to your client's wireless LAN, or establish a peer-to-peer link to make your transaction server (e-business whatever) appear local to your clients. They could do business with you, and you take your web-site and data with you when you leave. In this way, you could use a near universal interface (web browser) to handle customer interactions, without having to scrawl all of the information in by a flaky pen-based interface.
This would be a very cheap way of doing business, with less threat of being cracked by some script kiddie.
Most slashdotters don't formalize their relationships with their computers this much, but some are truely touched.
Seriously, it depends. If you can recognize your wife and kids without 'accidentally' refering to them as the compiler and the daemons (or forks), you loose geek points. If your wife and kids can't recognize you by looking at the front of your head, then guru bonus.
The goal of this competition is to eventually develop robots and AI that would be capable of competing with a human soccer team. It's a bit scaled down and unrealistic for now, but the machines are getting better every year.
Our team here at Cornell has one the last two international competitions for the small (not AIBO) class robots, in fact, they haven't lost a game yet (although I'm not sure how they're doing right now). Thier team consists of five omnidirectional player robots and one unidirectional (like foozball) goalie robot, all less than one foot in diameter.
The playing field that they use is about one and a half times larger than a ping-pong table, and their class uses a fluorescent orange golf ball for a soccer ball. The players aren't allowed to touch the players on the other team, and none of the robots are permitted to grab the ball (it must remain un-restrained).
A camera is mounted midfield, to give both teams the same video feed. Our entire team is controlled remotely by two computers. One is dedicated to processing the video feed while the other computer does the AI and remote controll of the robots. Unfortunately, they use NT for both because the drivers for their video capture card don't exist yet under Linux.
SpaceBalls and Space Mouses still exist. I use a LogiCad 3D Magellan Plus Space mouse for high-end 3D CAD, and it's awesome. Another guy here used a SpaceBall 3000 FLX, and had no complaints.
There are some drawbacks to these devices though, they cost about $500 (US) and need application specific drivers, in addition to OS level drivers. Most of these devices hook up to standard serial ports and use a proprietary protocol to communicate to the workstation. The other drawback is that as complexity of your 3D scene increases, the lag between your control of the scene and the screen update also increases. Eventually, you may find yourself nudging the controller and then waiting to see that you overshot your desired position. Of course more RAM, faster processors, and most importantly better graphics cards will greatly reduce this problem.
Which OS and program are you looking at using? Most commercial 3D stuff has hooks into the OS level drivers for these devices. Also, most 3D input devices support a wide range of UNIX operating systems, as well as Windows. I'm using my Magellan on sgi IRIX right now.
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I'm proud to admit that I stand corrected. My parsing of the Fifth Amendment was incorrect and I'm embarrassed to have to blame sleep deprivation as the cause.
I do stand by my assertion that the first amendment is being violated when valedvictorians are told that they cannot offer prayers at graduations and such, as this is clearly infringing on their right to practice their religion freely.
It is my understanding that in many trial cases, much evidence is discovered that ultimately will never be used in a trial. Much of this is because the evidence is useless, but in quite a few cases, a judge will rule that the evidence is inadmissable for other reasons. Prior convictions and confessions under duress come to mind immediately.
I can see no reason for wiretapped conversations between counsel and a client to be admissable in any court for the currently accused or any of his accomplices. That is not to say that I see no value in having these conversations taped.
The crux of the problem that investigators are having now is the fact that none of the detainees with strong associations to the hijackers or other known terrorists, are saying anything. Anything that they may tell their attourneys would not be admissable in their trial, and their counsel cannot divulge much of this information anyway. Even though the eavesdropping tapes would be inadmissable in court, they could still provide leads for other investigative teams to persue on other linked individuals.
Note that these individuals have had warrants issued, based on credible evidence. Many are direct accomplices to the events of 9/11. Our Bill of Rights does not say "presumed innocent" it only guarantees a fair trial, so that they can be convicted of only the crimes that they did commit. Many of them are not completely innocent people, and most who are really innocent know information about the truly guilty. Silence and priveledge are preventing justice from being done.
-- Len
I shouldn't respond to AC's but...
I was one of the few in my high school class, many years ago, who didn't sleep through the "Rights vs. Priveledges" lecture. Were you?
A right is something that is believed (in most cultures) to be "inalienable" or inseperable from being. Personal rights are not granted but are guaranteed by our U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Freedom of speech, freedom from persecution and freedom to bear arms are the most well known of these. Most of the other items in the Bill of Rights pertain to rights of people held for trial, and protection of their property and reputation (until found guilty).
The tenth amendment stakes out the rights of states to override federal powers, when such powers are usurped outside of the constitution, hence some footing for the States vs. Microsoft case, but the seventh amendment should guarantee Microsoft a jury trial since the alleged offense is valued at greater than $20, and the eighth prohibits cruel punishment or excessive fines (a double edged sword for Microsoft).
A priveledge is something completely different. It is not enumerated in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. You can check, Lawyer-Client priveledge is not in their. Priveledges are manifestations of custom that are expected, but not guaranteed.
Separation of church and state is one of these priveledges. If you check, you will find the Bill of Rights expressly says "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;"
What this means is that a state religion cannot be established, but that no laws can prevent someone from praying in public. The removal of all things with religious connotations is a priveledge extended to the ACLU and litigious agnostics, and actually inpinges on a constitutional right. Even some rights guaranteed by the Bill of Rights have loopholes that make them more priveledge than right. The third amendment, preventing the forced harboring of soldiers has exception provisions for times of war.
This brings me to the infamous Fifth amendment and it's counterpart the sixth. These are the two you site, the ones which have the strongest of weak ties to attourney-client priveledge. So that no-one can argue baselessly, I'll provide the text here:
Amendment 5
Amendment 6
There's a lot of verbage to parse there, but you can plainly see that the word lawyer, attourney, barrister, soliciter, ombudsman, or advocate are nowhere to be found! "Assistance of Counsel for his defense" is provide for, but no additional explicit rights are granted. Remember, presumption of innocence is not the right, a fair trial is. The presumption of the framers is that this would be used to protect the falsly accused, not the truly guilty. Also, a clause is contained explicitly permitting the removal of this right for military persons and for everyone in time of war or "Public Danger".
In this sense, this eavesdropping is explicitly constitutional.
-- Len
Everyone should take a deep breath and remember these points:
1. The fifth amendment will protect you if you committed a crime and told a lawyer about it while somebody was recording, as you cannot be "forced" to incriminate yourself.
2. Such "testimony" will greatly aid the search for accomplices when lawyers cannot divulge such information.
3. Priveleges are not rights. The ACLU is currently inventing the constitutional right of Lawyer-Client privelege when non-such right or privelege is given by the Constitution of the US.
4. Many of those detained in this current action, are not citizens of the US, and do not have the same rights.
5. In almost all true professions, Law and Clergy being the exceptions, practitioners are bound by codes of ethics that demand action when the safety or welfare of other human beings is at stake. Coincidently, this exception drives many lawyers and Priests to alcoholism, and other vices, but that's another post.
-- Len
I stand corrected. The Alpha, Power, PowerPC and the RISC-ish P6 core (not the x86 interpreter) use out-of-order execution. I think that the MIPS IV and later also use this, but I'm not sure.
I just assumed that the Ultra SPARC would use it as well. Mea culpa.
-- Len
I'm not lying and latency problems are not "totally program dependent."
RISC takes many more instructions to do the same thing as a CISC chip, so caching the instructions will improve the performance for repeated actions. The P4 is RISC like on the chip level, so it would probably benefit from a much larger cache. I believe that the size of it's cache has less to do with the fact that it's low latency than it does with chip yields for making memory that runs reliably at 2Ghz.
I will concede that some programs would definately show the large cache as superior to a small low latency cache. Witness the older SPEC benchmarks which became obsolete when they would fit entirely into the L1 and L2 caches of some processors. In this case, the large cache is superior to the small low latency cache.
Think about what these processors will be used for. Most likely, they will be used for large database servers, as that is what HU-UX is good for. While an entire database will not fit into 32 Meg, a lot of repetitive queries and essential system and program code can fit into this large cache. In this way, this processor would be superior to a raft of P4's which would be constantly fetching from main memory for this particular type of service. So the first search for "Pam Anderson" web sites would take the same amount of time on a P4 as it would on this PA-8800, but every successive search would have a much higher possibly of being a cache hit on the PA-RISC chip.
I agree completely that waiting for main memory is a huge problem.
-- Len
The latency issue just isn't an issue with the SPARC, or any other modern RISC-ish architectures. Out of order execution and branch prediction techniques can accomodate latencies. Cache size though, is much more important, as a larger cache can hold many queued instructions and data, which will be fed in a constant stream to the processor without having to revert to slower memory.
In the P4, 20 stage pipeline and it's prediction logic are much more succeptible to cache latency problems. Waiting two or three cycles for data on a P4 could cause major pipeline hiccups.
-- Len
Here goes my karma to hell.
It occurred to me that in these troubling times, it could be a golden business opportunity to provide the services of enjoyable body searches for patron conscious event holders! Kind of like a walk through spa service that would make people feel good about being searched.
Seriously, I doubt that whoever the guard was that did the search actually suspected your sister of harboring anything dangerous or of being a terrorist. Was she searched in the name of fairness to avoid the appearance of racial profiling (justified discriminitory searches), or was this a more typical search done for out of venue refreshments?
Earlier this year, the PNC Park baseball stadium opened in Pittsburgh. Many people went to the games carying coolers of drinks, only to have them stripped at the gates. The old venue, Three Rivers Stadium, allowed fans to bring their own refreshments. The new one resorted to body searches for food and drink that were being brought in to avoid the exorbitant prices charged by the stadium vendors. After public outcry and several changes to the stadium's policy, some beverages were allowed in.
I guess my point is that this search may not have anything to do with the recent events, but we may be more attentive to them because of the attack.
-- LenI don't know about anybody else, but it seems to me that this mostly a code cosmetic update. No security fixes or major problems addressed. Might this mean that 2.5 is coming very soon?
The only things that caught my eye were the emu10k1 (aka SB Live) update the USB updates and FireWire work. All three of these have been improved in recent kernels.
The emu10k1 driver update specifically interested me as I've had no luck with the version included in the kernel, and the Creative Labs CVS version has been a gamble as well.
-- Len
What if someone were to setup a honeypot for finding Osama?
You could set-up several sites like binladenpornos.com and feature things like doctored pictures of him in compromising positions with livestock and such.
Anyway, by following the attempts to crack and rectify this site, you would flesh out the information on the technical side of his network. If you get sued, all the better to track funds and connections through the representing lawyers.
-- Len
When I said that they wouldn't work, I meant to say that they wouldn't work well. My understanding is that USB 2.0 adds peer-to-peer connection ability that was not in 1.x. 1.x requires a master computer.
Additionally, 1.x has the embarrassing problem of the differing protocol implementations for the host controller, UHCI vs. OHCI. Embarrassing because the "founding members" of the USB consortium used differing (not 100% compatible) host controller interfaces, the real reason that USB was doomed from the start on the PC. USB 2.0 having peering ability would certainly conflict with both of these controllers.
Microsoft wrote their drivers to the OHCI standard, while Intel flooded the world with their UHCI based chipsets. Great cooperation.
Anyway, I stand by my previous statement, as most USB 2.0 marketers are going to want to trumpet their new features, which will be lacking when their devices are connected to USB 1.x buses. Peer-to-Peer was in FireWire from the beginning.
-- Len
I don't quite believe this rumor, but let's just suppose its true.
Apple would be including USB 2.0 and faster firewire (800 Mbps, not 3.2 Gbps), for two reasons. First, it would be accomodating a standard that many peripheral manufacturers would be supporting for LOW speed hardware. Second, it would be including it to showcase Firewire's supremecy as a HIGH speed interface.
Remember, Intel has bee trying to market USB 2.0 as a FireWire killer. Everybody knows that the 480 Mbps spec. makes 1394's 400 Mbps look slower. Unfortunately for Intel, USB is a poorly hacked technology which is not capable of producing real-world results of this speed. Theoretically, it works this fast, until you add a slow device like a mouse or keyboard, peripherals which predominate the USB connected equipment today.
Actually, they might use USB 2.0 for some integrated telephony and modem type devices, as that is what USB was originally developed for.
Primarily, Apple would include the technology to maintain a pool of peripherals, since 2.0 devices will not work on 1.x buses. It will not be able to replace FireWire for high speed stuff, so they wouldn't be dropping 1394, even to save a few bucks on low-end models, since the "Digital Hub" requires high speed DV capabilities.
-- Len
The 7300/180 had a 60 MHz. bus and a processor card that was locked to it. I bought one of these off of e-bay and it wouldn't work in my 7500. Then I got the dual 180 604e from a 8600/180MP, and it worked because it was clocked for a 45 MHz. bus.
I still use my 7500 with 9.1 a Jaz drive and 160 Meg of RAM, but it doesn't hold a candle to my lowly iMac. Now, I use it primarily for a client on my home LAN, when we have a few friends over for a networked game like Myth II.
It was definately from another generation, with 8 DIMM slots, a cache slot, dual SCSI buses and built-in everything. Makes me nostalgic to remember how much it cost to double the RAM to 32 Meg. (~$400 for 16 Meg, January 1996).
-- Len
I agree in general, but the problem is that turning the other cheek will only enrage and encourage them, while enraging and discouraging the American public.
As you said, politicians don't persue long term solutions, as it won't get them re-elected. A long term solution of doing nothing will look just that way, like they are doing nothing. This does little to comfort the grieving who want justice or vengance. Also, when the next attack comes, those politicians will appear apathetic in hindsight, which we all know is much worse than ineffective. We favor those who try vs. those who don't.
This is a cultural problem, that we just aren't capable of wrestling with. The closest thing to this that we deal with is organized crime. Jailing a boss and all of his henchmen will not make the problem go away, it just changes the names associated with the problem. This is still different though as crime families fight with one another, and that infighting isn't apparent between anti-US terrorists.
-- Len
It weakens your arguments when you are found out!
I should've amend my usage of "irrational" with the qualifier "as viewed by western culture". Although I agree morally with your summary and solution of your last paragraph, I must correct either mis-understanding or blatant falsehoods in your post.
Starting with your chronographically earliest reference, WWI and adding our own US Civil War, I agree. Punishing the people afterwards does little good, it festers anger and distrust. I was refering to Neville Chamberlain's attempt to appease to Hitler in the mid 1930's with the invasion of Poland. Chamberlain hoped to achieve peace with Germany by having Hitler agree not to expand any further West. We all know how well that worked.
As to the "...all the thousands of civilians that have died in our bombings in Afghanistan and East Africa in our futile attempts to take out bin Laden," I believe that death toll stands in the tens at most. Actually, it is one unfortunate night watchman in Sudan and about twenty in one of Bin Laden's encampments in Afghanistan, not thousands.
I will not touch the topic of Israel, as I am conflicted, and do not approve of some of their actions.
It is not the fault of the U.S. that humanitarian aid and medical supplies are kept from the children of Iraq. Such things supplied by U.N. peace-keepers have been routinely confiscated by the Iraqi army.
This brings me to a topic that I am actually fearful of bringing up, as you will see why in a moment. The government of Iraq has defiantly progressed in its plans for biological weapons. It will never follow the Geneva convention of "Humane" warfare (if there is such a thing), which bans the use of both chemical and biological agents.
A company that I formerly worked for, a manufacturer of scientific and medical equipment, received a rather large order in 1998. It was from the government of Iraq, ordering 800-900 mid-sized and large sized incubators (refrigerator sized). To put this in perspective, this single order was close to a year's production for the entire world-wide market for these incubators. These devices are not for any human (post-natal) incubation, but for bacterial and viral culturing, and can be used for no other purpose.
Many people at my facility were conflicted. Locally, our economy was very poor, and passing on the order would mean layoffs. The higher-ups, looking for the quick money, were looking to sell them through Germany, if the commerce department didn't approve the sale. Clinton's dept. of Commerce wasn't known for their moral fortitude, and it did approve the sale. After the sale was completed and delivered, Iraq ordered enough spare parts to completely rebuild 1/3 of the incubators that they bought!
I haven't had many nights of restful sleep since learning of this event. I've only told a few close friends of my worries, as I needed my job. Even though I am still under NDA, I feel that the recent events warrant a break in my silence.
-- Len
It works the same, but different.
Seriously, Mac upgrades are very similar to upgrades in the PC world, except you won't be replacing your motherboard.
As you've been through the Slot1/Socket 370 Celeron to Slot A/Socket whatever change required by jumping from intel to AMD, you know about masive upgrade stress and non-compatible processors (pin-outs). You no doubt had to deal with different BIOSes, IRQ conflicts, ISA/PCI/Plug-n-Pray fiascos. We don't have that, but we do have similar restraints with regard to individual processors. A G3 or G4 upgrade will be made for specific machines, with specific sockets or slots.
For example, I have a PowerMac 7500 that I bought back in 1995. It shipped with a 100 MHz. PPC 601+ processor (think Pentium 100). A few years ago, I picked up a dual 180 MHz. PPC 604e (think dual PII 233) board on e-bay for ~$100. I just replaced my original processor board with the new one, and it just worked. I didn't have to change anything, although I did have a bit of difficulty with getting LinuxPPC SMP to work. I could upgrade this machine again to a G4, but it would still have a 50MHz bus speed to the rest of the components. Newer machines don't use this same processor card, but a ZIF socket.
I added a PC standard Voodoo 3 card to this machine, flashed the cards PROM, and it just worked. Now, I face the same driver problem that PC users have, since 3dfx is no more.
Likewise, I have a Rev B. iMac. I've put in a new Maxtor 45 Gig hard drive and lots of memory, and it is much faster now. About a year and a half ago, a company came out with a G4 upgrade for these machines. Unfortunately, they aren't around either, but their cards still work (if you can find them) with MacOSX.
The new Apple machines are very interchangeable (parts wise) with PCs. They use ATA/66 drives and PC133 memory. The processors, of course, aren't.
-- Len
It disturbs me greatly to see so many apparently intelligent people here whining for peaceful solutions to the present problem. Wake up! It won't happen because it won't work.
At the core of these terror attacks were people, ideologically driven, irrational individuals who believe that America (and Israel) is the greatest evil on the planet. They are not with us anymore, but many of their compatriots are. Those in the attack spent YEARS preparing for their mission. Every day spent in preparation, firming their resolve. They could not be deterred from achieving their objective. They were not rational people.
Ask yourselves, what would appease the groups behind the terrorists? Elimination of Israel? Elimination of the United States perhaps? In short, only the genocide of hundreds of millions of people. Being one of those who would have to be eliminated, I don't think that I would advocate this solution.
The truth is, there is nothing that can be given to the terrorist, or the governments that sponsor them, which would appease them. Nothing!
Tony Blair has just reminded the main-stream media of how well appeasement worked in the 1930's against Hitler's Nazi machine. The same holds today, because we can't give the terrorists what they want.
Also, you non-American folk out there who are convinced that this is a US problem, how many of your countrymen were killed in Tuesday's attack? I would wager that nearly a quarter of those poor souls lost were not Americans, but foreign nationals doing business there. This may turn out to be the largest loss of life in terrorist attacks for six or seven different countries.
Earlier this week, I had thought that an ironic twist of this situation would actually achieve peace in the mid-east. In building a coalition, Bush wanted Arafat on board with the PLO. To get this, Israel (which appeared to be pumped-up and a bit righteous after the attack) would be thumped (have aid decreased) by the US, for attacking Palestinians.
To get Israel and the PLO on the same team in a war against terrorism, you would need some severe concessions. Israel would have to agree to not attack any Palestinians, where the consequence would be elimination of all US aid (guaranteeing a short lifespan for the state). Also, the Palestinians would have to agree to not attack any Israelis, or be considered a terrorist state, and be wiped off the face of the planet. Unfortunately, as I said before, these are not rational people, and this peace agreement would probably stand for about an hour before one or both sides would falter.
-- Len
Many of us started writing software that we wanted or needed to use individually, but soon found that it felt better to give it to friends who could use it and improve it as well. It's kind of like an ego trip without having people acknowledging your ego, hence not becoming known as arrogant or egocentric (not that that still doesn't happen). YOU know that other people depend on you, and YOUR work is appreciated.
If others improve on your work, you still made it possible for the improvement to happen. If you improved someone elses work, you still feel ownership of making it better. In short, it makes us feel good.
-- Len
A few years ago, a professor of my mentioned in lecture that a standards body was attempting to define what a kilogram is by using light!
I guess now a meter is defined, not by a steel or platinum rod, but by a multiple of the wavelength of light emitted by Xenon plasma or some other gas. By using the logic that mass can be converted into energy, and light was a form of energy, you could somehow define a kilogram by a multiple of the energy in the form of light, released by an atom of some substance when excited to a certain state.
I think that they probably lost most non-geek people on this, not to mention the engineers that use mass kg all of the time. The extension of this theoretical definition of a kg would spawn a horrible sense of relationships for tomorrow's physics and engineering students. What is heavier, a kg of feathers or a kg of light? Huh?
The Plat-Irid rod is good enough for Gubmint work.
-- Len
The article states that the slander (or libel) was published first in NJ (USA) and the in Victoria. If a cacheing web search like Google happened to reside in Austrailia, would the existance of a site in its cache constitute publishing? I mean it would be available for anyone to read, and the data would be hosted locally in Australia.
Food for thought.
-- Len
I admit that I haven't read the article yet, but would you have to be an Aussie to use this new law?
I see this as a horrible thing for free speech in general, but a profitable issue for Austrailian lawyers. Now, a site in the US, or a tabloid site in the U.K. could have a predatory lawsuite filed against it in Oz, with only the claim that it somehow defames somebody. Troubling.
-- Len
The WinCE apache thing, but then it hit me.
It isn't about the general type of web server that we know and love. It's about a portable transaction platform!
Imagine that you are a salesman, contractor or other individual who travels and does business with many different people in many different places. If you had a 802.11 (I don't think bluetooth will make it) enabled Jornada or iPaq, then you could cary a web-based transaction server with you, wherever you go. You wouldn't need a fixed IP, nor a constant broadband link to the internet.
You could hop on to your client's wireless LAN, or establish a peer-to-peer link to make your transaction server (e-business whatever) appear local to your clients. They could do business with you, and you take your web-site and data with you when you leave. In this way, you could use a near universal interface (web browser) to handle customer interactions, without having to scrawl all of the information in by a flaky pen-based interface.
This would be a very cheap way of doing business, with less threat of being cracked by some script kiddie.
-- Len
Most slashdotters don't formalize their relationships with their computers this much, but some are truely touched.
Seriously, it depends. If you can recognize your wife and kids without 'accidentally' refering to them as the compiler and the daemons (or forks), you loose geek points. If your wife and kids can't recognize you by looking at the front of your head, then guru bonus.
-- Len
The goal of this competition is to eventually develop robots and AI that would be capable of competing with a human soccer team. It's a bit scaled down and unrealistic for now, but the machines are getting better every year.
Our team here at Cornell has one the last two international competitions for the small (not AIBO) class robots, in fact, they haven't lost a game yet (although I'm not sure how they're doing right now). Thier team consists of five omnidirectional player robots and one unidirectional (like foozball) goalie robot, all less than one foot in diameter.
The playing field that they use is about one and a half times larger than a ping-pong table, and their class uses a fluorescent orange golf ball for a soccer ball. The players aren't allowed to touch the players on the other team, and none of the robots are permitted to grab the ball (it must remain un-restrained).
A camera is mounted midfield, to give both teams the same video feed. Our entire team is controlled remotely by two computers. One is dedicated to processing the video feed while the other computer does the AI and remote controll of the robots. Unfortunately, they use NT for both because the drivers for their video capture card don't exist yet under Linux.
-- Len
Also, the 13th occurrance of 222222 is at 13371013!
Too spooky for me, as I was born on 2/22, and 13 used to be my lucky number.
-- Len
SpaceBalls and Space Mouses still exist. I use a LogiCad 3D Magellan Plus Space mouse for high-end 3D CAD, and it's awesome. Another guy here used a SpaceBall 3000 FLX, and had no complaints.
There are some drawbacks to these devices though, they cost about $500 (US) and need application specific drivers, in addition to OS level drivers. Most of these devices hook up to standard serial ports and use a proprietary protocol to communicate to the workstation. The other drawback is that as complexity of your 3D scene increases, the lag between your control of the scene and the screen update also increases. Eventually, you may find yourself nudging the controller and then waiting to see that you overshot your desired position. Of course more RAM, faster processors, and most importantly better graphics cards will greatly reduce this problem.
Which OS and program are you looking at using? Most commercial 3D stuff has hooks into the OS level drivers for these devices. Also, most 3D input devices support a wide range of UNIX operating systems, as well as Windows. I'm using my Magellan on sgi IRIX right now.
-- Len