My name (not an uncommon one at all) got 1660 hits on Google. (And this is with quote marks "Mark Moss" so it will only find pages where both names are together - not studies of primitive plants by someone named Mark) My name plus the small village where I live got 9 hits - 8 of them aren't relevant, but the very first one appears to be a telephone book listing. Of course, your phone # and address never have been private unless you paid the little extra to keep it unlisted. Nowadays, I'm not sure even that is sufficient anymore, since one leak and one post to the web and the info is out there forever. I hope you can sue the phone company for $1M when they screwrf up. If you're really worried, you can buy a cell phone for cash, and then you buy codes that add minutes to the account as needed. But I don't know if you could get any sort of land line for your modem anonymously.
I also checked on my sister; name and city got 9 hits, 8 of them are either things she put on the web or articles she wrote in a brief newspaper job. One is a birth announcement for someone else with the same name - and in the same city. Apparently her phone company doesn't put it's directory on the web. So you can find out that she hates Bob Dylan and knows enough medieval history to very wittily pan the latest Joan of Arc movie, but not name, address, or phone number.
My two children (adults and living away from home): names plus towns give no hits. Names alone: 342 hits for my daughter's name; the first ten aren't her, and since she's never been active on the internet and doesn't currently have a phone in her name, it's likely that none are her. 3 hits for my son's name (the first name is not so common); two of them I'm sure are not him (a list of the colonial families of Philadelphia, a referee at a college game), one is someone I never heard of looking for a long list of people, so it's probably not a reference to him but I don't know for sure.
Have we become a society where a woman's marital status is something to be hidden?
No, but we have become a society where a woman is something more than either married (Mrs.) or searching for a husband (Miss). In most contexts marital status doesn't matter. Hence Ms.
By the way, Ms. (or something that sounds just like it) was in common use at my grade school as early as 1960 - long before you'd see it in print anywhere. We kids didn't _care_ whether the substitute teacher was Miss Paine (say) or Mrs. Paine, so we'd forget which it was, and cover by a slurred pronounciation - "mizz".
That's changed. Now snail mail to anyone important goes through anthrax decontamination, and whatever other "security" they can think of before the staffers get it -- if it's still legible after all that, chances are they kept waiting for decontamination so long the bill in question is already passed, voted down, or mutated so you wouldn't recognize it.
I don't know if they read their e-mail or not, but at least they're not afraid it will kill them...
There are people doing ten years in a federal penitentiary for merely taking a phone message for a drug dealer, so your scenario is not impossible... BTW, often the actual dealer is doing only five years - they give time off for "cooperating" by naming other dealers. The bigger the dealer, the more penny-ante dealers he knows (it ain't safe to turn in the big ones!) and the less time he actually serves. And as a bonus, maybe he'll get rid of some competition. Or maybe he'll just get those pesky neighbors that keep calling the cops on his crackhouse raided themselves...
It depends on how the class is defined. If it works out that the group prosecuted is highly correlated with one of the "suspect" categories (color, nationality, religion, etc.), then the courts are going to toss it out. If it's primarily "people so dumb they speed even when the cops are out there with the radar gun", then arguoing that 99.9% of the speeders don't get caught isn't going to get you anywhere. (Arguing that the radar is inaccurate or the cop doesn't know how to operate it might. But if you've got the combination of tech knowledge and courtroom smarts to carry that off, you could get paid $300/hour somewhere, so why are you spending days preparing to fight a $100 ticket?)
Or in this particular case, the non-prosecuted class might be "professors specializing in DRM technology, when discussing their findings with other specialists in the field". That might tend to tilt too much towards white males, but it's going to be awfully hard for a white male techie caught modifying DVD players for profit to claim that he is the victim of prosecutorial discrimination...
The point is not to be convicted -- it's to go to court and have the DMCA overturned as a violation of constitutional rights. But you can't do that unless you violate the law in the first place
And if he is actually arrested and locked up for a significant time (like Skylarov, who was shuttled around for 3 weeks before he got a _chance_ to post bail), also to have a $5M civil rights countersuit against the prosecutor, on the grounds that anyone who passed the bar exam ought to have known better...
RTFA. What Perens will be doing is NOT "ripping of music and movie companies." He will be discussing a technology, at a conference on that area of technology. That's a basic first amendment freedom. He will break the regional coding on DVD's - IMO, this is fair use, which is protected by the first amendment, and is also sort of allowed by the DMCA. And he will tell the audience how he does this - this is breaking the DMCA, but it's also quite clearly constitutionally protected speech.
By the way, breaking regional coding is not any sort of special accomplishment - I hear that in Australia, right next to the electronics store that sells region-coded DVD players, you'll often find a "repair" shop that will convert the player to multi-region in about five minutes. But according to the DMCA, telling americans how to do this is illegal. B.S. I hope Ashcroft is dumb enough to arrest him.
Yea it's old, but I couldn't resist. And it does seem like two people with mod points found it funny. But one "Insightful" point, WTF??? And I don't even need the karma.
In the 1950's, semiconductors had that bathtub curve. The US military spent a lot of bucks researching the failure mechanisms and figuring out how to estimate the wearout point by inducing early failure by overheating, overloading, etc. The bad news is, the failure modes that the military researched so well back then are pretty much irrelevant now. We've improved the electronics until they just don't fail in those ways - they fail in other ways, and any claim that if a stress test shows them failing in x months, this scales to y years in recommended operating conditions is simply a wild-ass-guess that different failure modes will scale the same.
You might see the bathtub curve with circuits that push the technology to the limits (Pentium CPU's, miniaturized power supplies, etc.), but most components in most circuits are running nowhere near hard enough for for wearout under normal conditions to ever be observed on Earth. Of course, just one of about 300 parts on a motherboard has to die to turn it into scrap. Something gets static zapped, or the CPU or P/S dies when it's sufficiently old that they are not worth replacing, or it's completely obsolete but working perfectly fine until it's dropped into the trash compacter. Or, in the tropics fungus will eat the circuit board, near the sea salt spray will corrode the leads, etc. Military systems may run longer - but usually they keep the major structural parts and change out the electronics every ten years or so to stay current. (Not always true - the F-111D avionics were built in 1968. They were a bleeding edge design at that time - and very unreliable. The test equipment was replaced at about 20 years just after I got out of the service, but AFAIK most of the electronics on the plane was still built to the original design when they scrapped the planes in 1991. But note - it wasn't the original electronics, everything had been replaced many times, and at 23 years old the design apparently wasn't considered capable of facing even Iraqis. The "D" avionics package should have been scrapped a whole lot earlier...)
So space is going to be where you'll find out how long circuitry can _really_ last. GHz CPU's won't last - as you say, these things are made with wires so thin and current density so high that aluminum atoms get dragged along with the electrons, and this of course results in shorts and opens. Anything that runs very hot won't last (2nd strike against the P3 & P4). But stay behind the leading edge and design conservatively (e.g., use nothing beyond the 486-66MHz CPU's - in beowulf clusters if needed), and 20+ year average life ought to be quite possible now.
There is one more aspect to space missions that I don't know how to assess - the electronics get pelted by a _lot_ more radiation than the control systems at 3 Mile Island ever saw. This can cause both flipped bits (requiring reboot from a cosmic-ray proof memory) and cumulative damage leading to eventual total failure. I'm not sure about this, but I suspect your starship is going to have to carry along a small silicon foundry.
I thought it was a re-used software module, not hardware. But either way, the problem was the module was re-used without sufficient review, and assumed to not need much test because it worked flawlessly before. That's a human error unrelated to language or even to whether it's hardware or software.
What I really do not understand is why they did not run a full flight simulation that would have revealed a problem occurring at such and such a speed or whatever? This is more understandable if it was a hardware issue, since it might be pretty hard to persuade a hardware unit that it is flying through space at x kilometers per second - and if there was a simulator input to the hardware, it still might not react to a simulated out of range value input the same as it would to the sensors actually hitting their stops.
Strings should be conceived as a natural data type with their own natural set of operations, not as a funny kind of array.
I agree in general, but this adds considerable complexity to the language. Either you reserve the maximum possible size for every string (wasting maybe 90% of the space since most strings are short), or you make string variables a sort of pointer, with the actual strings allocated and freed as needed. In 1983 or so the Ada spec was released, the first choice was probably unacceptable because a lot of the military hardware Ada was targeted for was limited in memory. The second choice was unacceptable because it requires garbage collection and Ada was supposed to be suitable for embedded systems where you cannot have the system pause for garbage collection. IIRC, in 1983 on-the-fly garbage collection (that doesn't freeze the system until done) was a new and untested concept, far too risky to add on to a language that already severely challenged the compiler technology of that time. (IIRC, it took a few years after the first release of the spec before you could buy compilers for more than one or two CPU's, or count on the code beiing compiled 100% correctly.)
Yeah, now if you need to handle strings freely you've probably got a >100MHz CPU with >32M RAM, so you just choose whether bounded or unbounded strings will fit your programming style better. But it sure wasn't so when the spec was written.
I just want the ability to declare something as an int with value 3, divide it in half, and reassign the value back so it is now a float 1.5 (wince)
int n=3; float x; x = n/2/* A page of other code */ printf("%d",4*x)
Logically, (n/2) should be done in integer, since both the operands are integers. That is, 3/2 => 1, and then you convert that to float, so x = 1.0. But compilers _might_ do this differently, and it sure as hell is not obvious why somewhere on the next page x*4 came out as 4.0 instead of 6.0. If you expected x = 1.5, that's a bug you'll probably spend hours figuring out. What's worse, given a legal range for n of 0 through 4, the testers might just decide to try it at 0, 2, and 4, and the bug remain undetected until the airplane takes off and the ride gets bumpy...
Implicit type conversion seems to make programming easier, but it's a prolific bug generator. What I'd rather have is a compiler that would handle mismatched types by rewriting the source to insert casts as needed. That is, "x=n/2" comes back as "x=(float)(n/2), and you get to think about whether you meant that or "x=((float) n)/2.0.
the center of gravity is positioned to the rear of the center of pressure. Doesn't that mean that in a stall, the nose will tend to go up and the stall become worse?
As far as I can tell, Forgent is not a member of the JPEG organization
The last time Forgent's patent (actually Concurrent Labs) was discussed, one poster said that he had been involved with JPEG, and Concurrent Labs was a member in 1992-95 (IIRC). This patent was granted several years before CL joined JPEG. All the members, including CL, signed agreements to reveal all patents and applications related to the standards under discussion. CL never brought up this patent. This means one of three things:
1) CL was in breach of their contract with the JPEG organization.
2) CL reviewed this patent vs. JPEG's compression methods and decided it did not cover JPEG, so it didn't have to be brought up.
3) The left hand didn't know what the right hand was doing - that is, their still-picture people on the JPEG project didn't even know about the video compression patent.
When Forgent bought CL, they bought up their liabilities along with their assets. So they had better be arguing #3, because #2 is an admission that their suit is groundless as far as anything in the JPEG standard before 1995 goes, while with #1 JPEG can sue to be "made whole" by requiring Forgent to license it's patent(s) for free for JPEG applications. And I doubt that CL was ever big enough to make #3 very believable...
Who said anything about schoolbuses or automatic weapons?
50 or more passengers definitely _could_ have swarmed 4 men armed only with boxcutters. Some of them would have needed stitches - but that's a hell of a lot better than enabling 19 kooks with no real weapons to carry off the greatest act of terrorism ever. (A boxcutter or other 2 inch blade is hardly a weapon - there are a few spots on the body where that shallow a cut could be fatal or disabling, but you can't reach those spots on someone that is free to move and fighting back. Of course, many sheltered middle-class Americans are such wimps that they'll _think_ they're disabled by a tiny cut...)
That's just one incident. Maybe you think all those other incidents over the last 35 or so years where some kook has been able to terrorize a planeful of people for hours or days, and get a jumbo jet diverted to fly him wherever he wanted to go, can be counted as "successfully" handled because the kooks killed only a few people? I disagree. Each time the kook got a free flight to Cuba, Libya, or wherever, it encouraged the next kook. If (like the Israelis at Entebbe), we had made it clear at the start that hijackers were NEVER going to get away, it might have cost a dozen lives then, but deterring other hijackings would have saved more lives in the long run.
The fundamental problem is that patent examiners look primarily at the database of existing patents. There is no way that someone who is not actually working in an industry could be expected to keep up with all the relevant publications and products, so they have to depend on what has been indexed into a database - and for most technology, the patent database is fairly inclusive. This doesn't work for software; many basic algorithms were developed before software could be patented, also many programmers are rather anti-IP and would rather place their new algorithms in the public domain by simply making them public. (It is of course quite possible to get a patent and make it public domain - the USPTO even has a special patent form for this - but few people want to go throught the paperwork.)
This works legally, but not practically; because the patent office is unaware of what is not in their database, they are quite likely to grant a patent on ideas which an expert _working_ in the field would recognize as not new. Most notoriously, the Australian patent office granted a patent on the wheel; yep, there have been no prior patents on the wheel, even though there's 5,000 years of prior art. I am not sure if that patent examiner was remarkably stupid or went along with the joke, but fields where the existing technology is less well known (image compression software, for instance), it will certainly always be possible to slide public domain ideas by the examiners as long as they do not have a database of public ideas that is as well indexed as their patent database.
Of course, if there was prior art, you can always go to court and invalidate a patent. The problem is that once the PO signed off on it, the courts consider the patent valid until proved otherwise. If you have unquestionable evidence of prior art (e.g., the patent description is copied right out of Knuth), it's still very expensive and takes years to get to present it in court. If the equivalence between the prior art and the patent claims is murky - and it usually is, because people filing questionable patents never use the normal industry terms to describe their "invention" - it's going to be a long, expensive court case, with the outcome depending on whether the judge and jury manage to comprehend the issues. Or it might be quite difficult to prove that the shareware source code you are presenting as prior art actually dates from 1980. And after you go through all this and win, in the US usually you can't get your legal costs back from the company asserting the bogus patent.
You can recover your costs and more if you can prove it was truly fraudulently filed - but that's one reason the filers use odd jargon, so at worst they can claim they invented the algorithm independently and never saw the writeup of it in "Proceedings of the ACM".
The "odd jargon" issue will limit the usefulness of database searches, but still there is a much better chance of finding non-patented prior art if the examiner has a database of non-patented art to search than if he only searches the patents... If a patent has to be taken to court, a database of public domain source code and algorithms would make it easier to find the prior art, provide proof of the original date, and make it more difficult to file and assert bogus patents without being found liable for fraud.
Given the patent office's recent record of errors exceeding even the norm for government agencies, I would recommend a different approach. Reduce the role of the patent office from approving patents to merely recording patent forms in a public database; putting the forms in the database does not imply that it's a good patent. This database will include both patents and public-domain ideas. Patents require a filing fee sufficient to cover the PO's expenses, but there is no fee to post an idea to be free to the public (if it doesn't infringe on prior patents).
Along with the forms and filing fee, the inventor has to send a $20,000 bond to pay off anyone who successfully challenges the patent within the first three years. As soon as the forms are posted to the database, the inventor or agents can start asking anyone else using the idea to stop or pay royalties. But anyone can also challenge the patent, whether or not they are in infringement.
And we need a special, technologically sophisticated, court to rule on patent issues. That is, you need judges with degrees in engineering or science as well as in law. The initial challenge requires a brief summary hearing before a judge, with an informal presentation of evidence. (Brief and informal so that $20K bond will be sufficient.) If the patent is less than 3 years old and has not been previously upheld by a court, there is a presumption _against_ the patent - that is, the inventor must present a preponderance of evidence to uphold the patent. If the inventor withdraws the patent or the judge rules against the patent at this point, the challenger gets reasonable and necessary expenses plus a $5K profit, or $10K if the prior art was in the database before the patent was filed. The inventor does have a motive to withdraw if he's likely to lose, because the longer the proceedings go on, the more he'll pay. If the challenger loses, he does not have to pay the inventor's expenses; defending the patent once at a summary judgement is just a normal expense of getting the patent.
All prior art presented to the court goes into the patent and public ideas database. If the patent is invalidated, it stays in the database - marked as invalid, with the court ruling given, and so anything in it that wasn't in a prior patent becomes public-domain.
The loser in the summary judgement can request another hearing before a 3-judge panel, or request a full jury trial - but in either case he has to pay the court costs and the other side's expenses until the final judgement. In jury trials, the jury pool will be working scientists and engineers, and be paid appropriately, so this gets rather expensive... The court will have to power to assess costs and the winner's legal expenses against the loser, and to fine either party if egregious behavior such as knowingly filing falsely is revealed during the trial.
And of course, everyone has to wait in line outside the terminal to be stripped and shackled. The terrorists just drive-by those long lines and machine gun hundreds of people at a time (and can get away and repeat indefinitely, which hasn't been the case in the recent attacks), but hey, nobody's getting hurt _inside_ the terminal and they're not responsible for what happens outside.
Also don't allow belts, luggage straps, shoestrings, or anything else that could be used as a garrote. Laptops and hardsided briefcases must be banned, you could bash someone's head in. And take those crutches away from that cripple, he could do real damage swinging that around - or maybe even conceal a weapon inside. (The last time I flew, the stewardess actually did seat a guy on crutches, then took the crutches out of a passenger cabin - I'm not sure if that was security or just because that commuter plane was so small.)
Or maybe just handcuff everyone stronger than a 1 year old.
Or, really radical idea - encourage citizens to actually defend themselves, instead of acting like subjects like a dictatorship and doing whatever the thugs want until the gov't thugs show up...
My experience is, refrigerators DON'T leak. After about 20 years, everything else is AFU (seals gone, thermostat worn out, compressor either seized up or the motor won't start), but unless someone icepicked the system, the refrigerant is still there.
Of course, people don't carry them around like a laptop...
you might as well use some sort of coolant fluid with better heat transfer properties insted of plain water. AFAIK, Water IS the best heat transfer liquid at room temperature, if you want something that stays liquid. It has a very high heat capacity and low viscosity (flows easily).
A Freon-replacement might work better if you could be sure the system stayed right side up - it would boil at the CPU and condense in the tank behind the LCD, which - but tilt the computer too far and the system's cooked because no liquid is flowing back to the CPU. With water, you've got some cooling even upside down.
Slashdot Mirror
My name (not an uncommon one at all) got 1660 hits on Google. (And this is with quote marks "Mark Moss" so it will only find pages where both names are together - not studies of primitive plants by someone named Mark) My name plus the small village where I live got 9 hits - 8 of them aren't relevant, but the very first one appears to be a telephone book listing. Of course, your phone # and address never have been private unless you paid the little extra to keep it unlisted. Nowadays, I'm not sure even that is sufficient anymore, since one leak and one post to the web and the info is out there forever. I hope you can sue the phone company for $1M when they screwrf up. If you're really worried, you can buy a cell phone for cash, and then you buy codes that add minutes to the account as needed. But I don't know if you could get any sort of land line for your modem anonymously.
I also checked on my sister; name and city got 9 hits, 8 of them are either things she put on the web or articles she wrote in a brief newspaper job. One is a birth announcement for someone else with the same name - and in the same city. Apparently her phone company doesn't put it's directory on the web. So you can find out that she hates Bob Dylan and knows enough medieval history to very wittily pan the latest Joan of Arc movie, but not name, address, or phone number.
My two children (adults and living away from home): names plus towns give no hits. Names alone: 342 hits for my daughter's name; the first ten aren't her, and since she's never been active on the internet and doesn't currently have a phone in her name, it's likely that none are her. 3 hits for my son's name (the first name is not so common); two of them I'm sure are not him (a list of the colonial families of Philadelphia, a referee at a college game), one is someone I never heard of looking for a long list of people, so it's probably not a reference to him but I don't know for sure.
Have we become a society where a woman's marital status is something to be hidden?
No, but we have become a society where a woman is something more than either married (Mrs.) or searching for a husband (Miss). In most contexts marital status doesn't matter. Hence Ms.
By the way, Ms. (or something that sounds just like it) was in common use at my grade school as early as 1960 - long before you'd see it in print anywhere. We kids didn't _care_ whether the substitute teacher was Miss Paine (say) or Mrs. Paine, so we'd forget which it was, and cover by a slurred pronounciation - "mizz".
That's changed. Now snail mail to anyone important goes through anthrax decontamination, and whatever other "security" they can think of before the staffers get it -- if it's still legible after all that, chances are they kept waiting for decontamination so long the bill in question is already passed, voted down, or mutated so you wouldn't recognize it.
I don't know if they read their e-mail or not, but at least they're not afraid it will kill them...
There are people doing ten years in a federal penitentiary for merely taking a phone message for a drug dealer, so your scenario is not impossible... BTW, often the actual dealer is doing only five years - they give time off for "cooperating" by naming other dealers. The bigger the dealer, the more penny-ante dealers he knows (it ain't safe to turn in the big ones!) and the less time he actually serves. And as a bonus, maybe he'll get rid of some competition. Or maybe he'll just get those pesky neighbors that keep calling the cops on his crackhouse raided themselves...
It depends on how the class is defined. If it works out that the group prosecuted is highly correlated with one of the "suspect" categories (color, nationality, religion, etc.), then the courts are going to toss it out. If it's primarily "people so dumb they speed even when the cops are out there with the radar gun", then arguoing that 99.9% of the speeders don't get caught isn't going to get you anywhere. (Arguing that the radar is inaccurate or the cop doesn't know how to operate it might. But if you've got the combination of tech knowledge and courtroom smarts to carry that off, you could get paid $300/hour somewhere, so why are you spending days preparing to fight a $100 ticket?)
Or in this particular case, the non-prosecuted class might be "professors specializing in DRM technology, when discussing their findings with other specialists in the field". That might tend to tilt too much towards white males, but it's going to be awfully hard for a white male techie caught modifying DVD players for profit to claim that he is the victim of prosecutorial discrimination...
I don't know a large number of geeks that are able to back up many physical threats.
;-)
True, but we can can post the REAL company books on the web, or hack into the sex offender registry and add your name.
The point is not to be convicted -- it's to go to court and have the DMCA overturned as a violation of constitutional rights. But you can't do that unless you violate the law in the first place
And if he is actually arrested and locked up for a significant time (like Skylarov, who was shuttled around for 3 weeks before he got a _chance_ to post bail), also to have a $5M civil rights countersuit against the prosecutor, on the grounds that anyone who passed the bar exam ought to have known better...
RTFA. What Perens will be doing is NOT "ripping of music and movie companies." He will be discussing a technology, at a conference on that area of technology. That's a basic first amendment freedom. He will break the regional coding on DVD's - IMO, this is fair use, which is protected by the first amendment, and is also sort of allowed by the DMCA. And he will tell the audience how he does this - this is breaking the DMCA, but it's also quite clearly constitutionally protected speech.
By the way, breaking regional coding is not any sort of special accomplishment - I hear that in Australia, right next to the electronics store that sells region-coded DVD players, you'll often find a "repair" shop that will convert the player to multi-region in about five minutes. But according to the DMCA, telling americans how to do this is illegal. B.S. I hope Ashcroft is dumb enough to arrest him.
Yea it's old, but I couldn't resist. And it does seem like two people with mod points found it funny. But one "Insightful" point, WTF??? And I don't even need the karma.
Doh!!! Thanks for the correction.
In the 1950's, semiconductors had that bathtub curve. The US military spent a lot of bucks researching the failure mechanisms and figuring out how to estimate the wearout point by inducing early failure by overheating, overloading, etc. The bad news is, the failure modes that the military researched so well back then are pretty much irrelevant now. We've improved the electronics until they just don't fail in those ways - they fail in other ways, and any claim that if a stress test shows them failing in x months, this scales to y years in recommended operating conditions is simply a wild-ass-guess that different failure modes will scale the same.
You might see the bathtub curve with circuits that push the technology to the limits (Pentium CPU's, miniaturized power supplies, etc.), but most components in most circuits are running nowhere near hard enough for for wearout under normal conditions to ever be observed on Earth. Of course, just one of about 300 parts on a motherboard has to die to turn it into scrap. Something gets static zapped, or the CPU or P/S dies when it's sufficiently old that they are not worth replacing, or it's completely obsolete but working perfectly fine until it's dropped into the trash compacter. Or, in the tropics fungus will eat the circuit board, near the sea salt spray will corrode the leads, etc. Military systems may run longer - but usually they keep the major structural parts and change out the electronics every ten years or so to stay current. (Not always true - the F-111D avionics were built in 1968. They were a bleeding edge design at that time - and very unreliable. The test equipment was replaced at about 20 years just after I got out of the service, but AFAIK most of the electronics on the plane was still built to the original design when they scrapped the planes in 1991. But note - it wasn't the original electronics, everything had been replaced many times, and at 23 years old the design apparently wasn't considered capable of facing even Iraqis. The "D" avionics package should have been scrapped a whole lot earlier...)
So space is going to be where you'll find out how long circuitry can _really_ last. GHz CPU's won't last - as you say, these things are made with wires so thin and current density so high that aluminum atoms get dragged along with the electrons, and this of course results in shorts and opens. Anything that runs very hot won't last (2nd strike against the P3 & P4). But stay behind the leading edge and design conservatively (e.g., use nothing beyond the 486-66MHz CPU's - in beowulf clusters if needed), and 20+ year average life ought to be quite possible now.
There is one more aspect to space missions that I don't know how to assess - the electronics get pelted by a _lot_ more radiation than the control systems at 3 Mile Island ever saw. This can cause both flipped bits (requiring reboot from a cosmic-ray proof memory) and cumulative damage leading to eventual total failure. I'm not sure about this, but I suspect your starship is going to have to carry along a small silicon foundry.
No, the Martian milk cartons say "If you see an Earthian terrorist device like this, report it to the Home Planet Security Office right away."
I mean, if war breaks out between France and the US, and they don't allow Windows exports, that would be catastrophic!
Nah, the French would surrender before they even got Linux downloaded, let alone noticed how much better it is. 8-)
I thought it was a re-used software module, not hardware. But either way, the problem was the module was re-used without sufficient review, and assumed to not need much test because it worked flawlessly before. That's a human error unrelated to language or even to whether it's hardware or software.
What I really do not understand is why they did not run a full flight simulation that would have revealed a problem occurring at such and such a speed or whatever? This is more understandable if it was a hardware issue, since it might be pretty hard to persuade a hardware unit that it is flying through space at x kilometers per second - and if there was a simulator input to the hardware, it still might not react to a simulated out of range value input the same as it would to the sensors actually hitting their stops.
Strings should be conceived as a natural data type with their own natural set of operations, not as a funny kind of array.
I agree in general, but this adds considerable complexity to the language. Either you reserve the maximum possible size for every string (wasting maybe 90% of the space since most strings are short), or you make string variables a sort of pointer, with the actual strings allocated and freed as needed. In 1983 or so the Ada spec was released, the first choice was probably unacceptable because a lot of the military hardware Ada was targeted for was limited in memory. The second choice was unacceptable because it requires garbage collection and Ada was supposed to be suitable for embedded systems where you cannot have the system pause for garbage collection. IIRC, in 1983 on-the-fly garbage collection (that doesn't freeze the system until done) was a new and untested concept, far too risky to add on to a language that already severely challenged the compiler technology of that time. (IIRC, it took a few years after the first release of the spec before you could buy compilers for more than one or two CPU's, or count on the code beiing compiled 100% correctly.)
Yeah, now if you need to handle strings freely you've probably got a >100MHz CPU with >32M RAM, so you just choose whether bounded or unbounded strings will fit your programming style better. But it sure wasn't so when the spec was written.
I just want the ability to declare something as an int with value 3, divide it in half, and reassign the value back so it is now a float 1.5
/* A page of other code */
(wince)
int n=3;
float x;
x = n/2
printf("%d",4*x)
Logically, (n/2) should be done in integer, since both the operands are integers. That is, 3/2 => 1, and then you convert that to float, so x = 1.0. But compilers _might_ do this differently, and it sure as hell is not obvious why somewhere on the next page x*4 came out as 4.0 instead of 6.0. If you expected x = 1.5, that's a bug you'll probably spend hours figuring out. What's worse, given a legal range for n of 0 through 4, the testers might just decide to try it at 0, 2, and 4, and the bug remain undetected until the airplane takes off and the ride gets bumpy...
Implicit type conversion seems to make programming easier, but it's a prolific bug generator. What I'd rather have is a compiler that would handle mismatched types by rewriting the source to insert casts as needed. That is, "x=n/2" comes back as "x=(float)(n/2), and you get to think about whether you meant that or "x=((float) n)/2.0.
the center of gravity is positioned to the rear of the center of pressure. Doesn't that mean that in a stall, the nose will tend to go up and the stall become worse?
As far as I can tell, Forgent is not a member of the JPEG organization
The last time Forgent's patent (actually Concurrent Labs) was discussed, one poster said that he had been involved with JPEG, and Concurrent Labs was a member in 1992-95 (IIRC). This patent was granted several years before CL joined JPEG. All the members, including CL, signed agreements to reveal all patents and applications related to the standards under discussion. CL never brought up this patent. This means one of three things:
1) CL was in breach of their contract with the JPEG organization.
2) CL reviewed this patent vs. JPEG's compression methods and decided it did not cover JPEG, so it didn't have to be brought up.
3) The left hand didn't know what the right hand was doing - that is, their still-picture people on the JPEG project didn't even know about the video compression patent.
When Forgent bought CL, they bought up their liabilities along with their assets. So they had better be arguing #3, because #2 is an admission that their suit is groundless as far as anything in the JPEG standard before 1995 goes, while with #1 JPEG can sue to be "made whole" by requiring Forgent to license it's patent(s) for free for JPEG applications. And I doubt that CL was ever big enough to make #3 very believable...
Who said anything about schoolbuses or automatic weapons?
50 or more passengers definitely _could_ have swarmed 4 men armed only with boxcutters. Some of them would have needed stitches - but that's a hell of a lot better than enabling 19 kooks with no real weapons to carry off the greatest act of terrorism ever. (A boxcutter or other 2 inch blade is hardly a weapon - there are a few spots on the body where that shallow a cut could be fatal or disabling, but you can't reach those spots on someone that is free to move and fighting back. Of course, many sheltered middle-class Americans are such wimps that they'll _think_ they're disabled by a tiny cut...)
That's just one incident. Maybe you think all those other incidents over the last 35 or so years where some kook has been able to terrorize a planeful of people for hours or days, and get a jumbo jet diverted to fly him wherever he wanted to go, can be counted as "successfully" handled because the kooks killed only a few people? I disagree. Each time the kook got a free flight to Cuba, Libya, or wherever, it encouraged the next kook. If (like the Israelis at Entebbe), we had made it clear at the start that hijackers were NEVER going to get away, it might have cost a dozen lives then, but deterring other hijackings would have saved more lives in the long run.
The fundamental problem is that patent examiners look primarily at the database of existing patents. There is no way that someone who is not actually working in an industry could be expected to keep up with all the relevant publications and products, so they have to depend on what has been indexed into a database - and for most technology, the patent database is fairly inclusive. This doesn't work for software; many basic algorithms were developed before software could be patented, also many programmers are rather anti-IP and would rather place their new algorithms in the public domain by simply making them public. (It is of course quite possible to get a patent and make it public domain - the USPTO even has a special patent form for this - but few people want to go throught the paperwork.)
This works legally, but not practically; because the patent office is unaware of what is not in their database, they are quite likely to grant a patent on ideas which an expert _working_ in the field would recognize as not new. Most notoriously, the Australian patent office granted a patent on the wheel; yep, there have been no prior patents on the wheel, even though there's 5,000 years of prior art. I am not sure if that patent examiner was remarkably stupid or went along with the joke, but fields where the existing technology is less well known (image compression software, for instance), it will certainly always be possible to slide public domain ideas by the examiners as long as they do not have a database of public ideas that is as well indexed as their patent database.
Of course, if there was prior art, you can always go to court and invalidate a patent. The problem is that once the PO signed off on it, the courts consider the patent valid until proved otherwise. If you have unquestionable evidence of prior art (e.g., the patent description is copied right out of Knuth), it's still very expensive and takes years to get to present it in court. If the equivalence between the prior art and the patent claims is murky - and it usually is, because people filing questionable patents never use the normal industry terms to describe their "invention" - it's going to be a long, expensive court case, with the outcome depending on whether the judge and jury manage to comprehend the issues. Or it might be quite difficult to prove that the shareware source code you are presenting as prior art actually dates from 1980. And after you go through all this and win, in the US usually you can't get your legal costs back from the company asserting the bogus patent.
You can recover your costs and more if you can prove it was truly fraudulently filed - but that's one reason the filers use odd jargon, so at worst they can claim they invented the algorithm independently and never saw the writeup of it in "Proceedings of the ACM".
The "odd jargon" issue will limit the usefulness of database searches, but still there is a much better chance of finding non-patented prior art if the examiner has a database of non-patented art to search than if he only searches the patents... If a patent has to be taken to court, a database of public domain source code and algorithms would make it easier to find the prior art, provide proof of the original date, and make it more difficult to file and assert bogus patents without being found liable for fraud.
Given the patent office's recent record of errors exceeding even the norm for government agencies, I would recommend a different approach. Reduce the role of the patent office from approving patents to merely recording patent forms in a public database; putting the forms in the database does not imply that it's a good patent. This database will include both patents and public-domain ideas. Patents require a filing fee sufficient to cover the PO's expenses, but there is no fee to post an idea to be free to the public (if it doesn't infringe on prior patents).
Along with the forms and filing fee, the inventor has to send a $20,000 bond to pay off anyone who successfully challenges the patent within the first three years. As soon as the forms are posted to the database, the inventor or agents can start asking anyone else using the idea to stop or pay royalties. But anyone can also challenge the patent, whether or not they are in infringement.
And we need a special, technologically sophisticated, court to rule on patent issues. That is, you need judges with degrees in engineering or science as well as in law. The initial challenge requires a brief summary hearing before a judge, with an informal presentation of evidence. (Brief and informal so that $20K bond will be sufficient.) If the patent is less than 3 years old and has not been previously upheld by a court, there is a presumption _against_ the patent - that is, the inventor must present a preponderance of evidence to uphold the patent. If the inventor withdraws the patent or the judge rules against the patent at this point, the challenger gets reasonable and necessary expenses plus a $5K profit, or $10K if the prior art was in the database before the patent was filed. The inventor does have a motive to withdraw if he's likely to lose, because the longer the proceedings go on, the more he'll pay. If the challenger loses, he does not have to pay the inventor's expenses; defending the patent once at a summary judgement is just a normal expense of getting the patent.
All prior art presented to the court goes into the patent and public ideas database. If the patent is invalidated, it stays in the database - marked as invalid, with the court ruling given, and so anything in it that wasn't in a prior patent becomes public-domain.
The loser in the summary judgement can request another hearing before a 3-judge panel, or request a full jury trial - but in either case he has to pay the court costs and the other side's expenses until the final judgement. In jury trials, the jury pool will be working scientists and engineers, and be paid appropriately, so this gets rather expensive... The court will have to power to assess costs and the winner's legal expenses against the loser, and to fine either party if egregious behavior such as knowingly filing falsely is revealed during the trial.
And of course, everyone has to wait in line outside the terminal to be stripped and shackled. The terrorists just drive-by those long lines and machine gun hundreds of people at a time (and can get away and repeat indefinitely, which hasn't been the case in the recent attacks), but hey, nobody's getting hurt _inside_ the terminal and they're not responsible for what happens outside.
Also don't allow belts, luggage straps, shoestrings, or anything else that could be used as a garrote. Laptops and hardsided briefcases must be banned, you could bash someone's head in. And take those crutches away from that cripple, he could do real damage swinging that around - or maybe even conceal a weapon inside. (The last time I flew, the stewardess actually did seat a guy on crutches, then took the crutches out of a passenger cabin - I'm not sure if that was security or just because that commuter plane was so small.)
Or maybe just handcuff everyone stronger than a 1 year old.
Or, really radical idea - encourage citizens to actually defend themselves, instead of acting like subjects like a dictatorship and doing whatever the thugs want until the gov't thugs show up...
My experience is, refrigerators DON'T leak. After about 20 years, everything else is AFU (seals gone, thermostat worn out, compressor either seized up or the motor won't start), but unless someone icepicked the system, the refrigerant is still there.
Of course, people don't carry them around like a laptop...
Unless you actually meant "mulled ale" when you said beer. ;-)
you might as well use some sort of coolant fluid with better heat transfer properties insted of plain water. AFAIK, Water IS the best heat transfer liquid at room temperature, if you want something that stays liquid. It has a very high heat capacity and low viscosity (flows easily).
A Freon-replacement might work better if you could be sure the system stayed right side up - it would boil at the CPU and condense in the tank behind the LCD, which - but tilt the computer too far and the system's cooked because no liquid is flowing back to the CPU. With water, you've got some cooling even upside down.