Pure ammonia (as in these refrigerators) is extremely poisonous, when it's used as a household cleaner it's pretty dilute. It's more poisonous than the chlorine used as a war gas in WWI, except that ammonia (NH3) is lighter than air so it would rise away from the target, while Cl2 is heavy and went down into the trenches where the troops were.
But compared to lots of other things in our lives (automobiles for instance), ammonia isn't very dangerous. You get the plumbing joints tight, test them before filling the system, and run away fast if you smell it leaking -- and you _will_ run away if dangerous amounts leak, because it's one of the most godawful smells ever. If the smell is merely annoying, the dosage is not harmful, but you won't need to know it's poisonous to want to do something about the source. Since ammonia is a common naturally occurring poison, mammals (and possibly everything with a nervous system) avoid it by instinct.
If Ebola or any other horrific disease wipes out 90% of one village in a few days, most people from other villages will stay far away so they don't catch it... Not to mention that death rates of "up to 90%" seem to happen only when people are undernourished, overcrowded, and lack all modern medicine. "As low as" rates don't make headlines, but when WHO gets a medical team in soon enough death rates are down to 40% of those infected, and most don't get infected. In a more modern society, where it's harder to quarantine diseases, people are healthier to begin with, Ebola is somewhat treatable, and the death rate would be quite a lot lower.
When the media can't find enough real dangers, they go hysterical about Ebola. Michael Fumento
put it into perspective:
Talk about an outbreak! From the apparent inception date of the current epidemic in Uganda last October 14th to January 25th of this year, 427 Ebola cases have been reported with 173 deaths. During the same time there were over 1,900 media references to the disease on the Nexis database.
That's 11 media mentions per fatality.
...
"It's possible that someone with Ebola might leave a remote area where the disease is occurring and might even get sick here," Dr. C.J. Peters, chief of the Special Pathogens branch at the federal Centers for Disease Control told me. But, "Because our socioeconomic level allows high standards in hospitals . . . there would be a few cases but they would be controllable under our circumstances."
Ebola has as much chance of spreading in the North America as malaria does in the Arctic.
Finally, even in Africa, Ebola as an infectious disease killer is a pipsqueak.
The slow stealthy diseases can be more dangerous. Bubonic plague is exceptionally bad, because it spreads through rats without drawing much attention (most people think of piles of dead rats as a good thing), and then suddenly jumps to humans. But it's treatable with antibiotics; most Americans who catch it (a few every year, from wild rodents) survive. And at it's absolute worst, the plague didn't bring down western civilization, but probably contributed to bringing about the renaissance, the age of exploration (did the switch from galleys to sailing ships happen because of a shortage of galley slaves?), and the industrial revolution.
If viral plagues were capable of wiping out species or civilizations, it would be factored into L. However, diseases DO NOT kill off 100% of anything -- being too deadly is an evolutionary dead end. Smallpox and ebola are not new diseases; AIDS might be, be it's far more likely that various simian HIV viruses have been picked up by Africans who ate undercooked ape meat at various times for millenia. It was recognized as a disease in the US only when nutrition, medical care, and availability of antibiotics had eliminated so many other causes of death, and after certain sub-groups of Americans had completely abandoned traditional inhibitions about sex. There is no chance whatever of it actually bringing down our civilation. With sufficient promiscuity, AIDS or other STD's can easily wipe out a village -- but until recently most Africans didn't travel enough to make it likely to spread too far before people simply learned to stay away from those from the "sick" village, while cultures that did travel widely (Arabs, upper-class Europeans) tended to be obsessed with controlling sex...
Smallpox and the bubonic plague are real killers, but not civilation-killers. The Black Plague killed somewhere between 1/4 and 3/4 of Europeans in less than a century, but European civilation not only survived but thrived. The survivors were richer and more willing to look at new ways of doing things. Especially, the shrinking workforce forced craftsmen to look at labor-saving devices -- for instance, ironworks replaced much manpower on bellows and hammers with waterpower, and in a few decades were making more and better iron than ever before.
The early course of smallpox in Europe is not too clear, but it is clear that there were centuries when it was simply accepted that at least 50% of each generation would catch it, and over 25% would die. All it meant was that fewer peasants had to starve to death or be hanged for theft, and there were more chances for peasants to become middle class or middle class to become noble...
In north america, a whole cluster of European diseases swept through a native population with no immunities. (There may have been some deliberate attempts at germ warfare like giving away smallpox-infested blankets, but the diseases were spreading so fast on their own that it hardly mattered.) Sometimes these diseases wiped out an entire tribe in one year, when the tribe was camped in one village (and probably not eating very well either), but other (maybe better fed, or more dispersed) tribes were only lightly hit. Possibly smallpox killed up to 75% and measles, etc., brought it up to 90% on the average. That didn't end most of their cultures -- it just made it a lot easier for white men to shoot and drive off the survivors.
It is highly unlikely that any one disease will ever kill more than 75%. And a real civilization can survive that quite well. There's considerable disruption in deciding how to scale back businesses to the smaller work force and customer base, but the problems are buffered by all that inherited wealth...
TV sets are pretty good at displaying moving, colored graphics, but lousy at displaying a text file; the maximum readable line length is about 40 characters. Sony assumes (correctly, I think) that anyone who needs Linux on their PS/2 is going to need better text display capabilities. That is, they are doing their best to make this a platform for writing games, not pirating them -- and if you are coding, you need a decent monitor. You also need a better monitor than a TV for web-surfing...
So they do make it possible to set the video to the TV output (you'll need this when you want to run that game you wrote), but set the system so the first boot will be to a monitor. This seems to forget two groups of people:
1) SSH: Real hackers already have a computer, and they'd probably much rather type on that than on the PS2 anyhow, so they'll probably prefer the PS2 Linux set up for remote control, and going to the TV when they want to try running a game. So borrow an SVGA monitor to boot it the first time and change the settings. You've already got at least one.
2) Non-hackers that just want to play the games hackers are giving away. Some of these people just might have a little trouble finding a monitor they can borrow for the first set-up. Sony has also made distributing the games a little difficult, with the CD/DVD player apparently not being good reading non-factory disks; they're probably not too enthused about turning customers into competitors with their own games division. However, it doesn't sound like they blocked downloading games from the internet.
Interesting to note that there is no mention of the 'we didn't violate Russian law' argument."
"Burton also filed motions to dismiss based on arguments that the law doesn't apply to a foreign company doing business solely on the internet..." (news.com)
This is perhaps a more important point than even the flaws in the DCMA.
Having one person own the entire "tree" of code slows the development process to a crawl. Linux will never be able to bring functionality to the table as fast as Windows if everything has to go through one man. Do you think Bill Gates is sitting at his desk and reviewing Windows XP code? No. He has better things to do.
I think you've just identified the basic difference between lean, fast, reliable programs and function-rich but bloated and unreliable programs like Windows. Linux is built to one man's plan, and code doesn't get in until he has read it and decided that it fits the plan. This obviously sets a maximum limit on how fast code can be added, and probably limits how big the program can ever become -- but it keeps the design clean, which limits the scope of bugs that can occur.
By contrast, Windows is far beyond any one person's comprehension. Stuff is added so fast no one knows what's going on. You've got features galore, but sometimes the system keeps crashing and no one can figure out why...
Linus obviously prefers the lean & fast model, at the cost of features. In addition, his kernel design isn't modularized, which makes it even leaner and faster, but prevents subdividing the final code review function. However, he could use a group of reviewers to do the first pass, and an assistant or top-notch secretary to keep track of submitted patches, send them out to the appropriate reviewer, and feed the survivors of the first pass to Linus in order. It won't change the fact that Linus _wants_ to maintain a system that limits program size and growth, but it will make the limitations a little less onerous.
I'm no expert on the Linux kernel, but just lurking on various discussions like this, it seems to keep coming down to a lack of modularization. Apparently Linus didn't want to modularize the kernel because intermodule communications are slower than within one module. However, this also means that someone working in one area can inadvertently foul up an apparently unrelated area. So Linus can't divide up the job effectively among subordinates, because a sub-Linus focused on one area isn't going to know when he's making a mess elsewhere. (In military terms, span of control becomes impossible if just anyone on your side can march his troops through your sector.) It all has to go to the top (Linus), and obviously his "army" of coders has got too big for any man to keep track of.
Other people have quoted Weird Al as saying that he thinks he could win on the law, but thinks its polite to ask permission, as well as avoiding a lawsuit. I'm not so sure about him winning on the law, because of a factor that doesn't necessarily come into the movie title cases. His parodies generally use the original tune with a parody of the lyrics. If the tune was original, it is copyrighted by itself -- you can't even print the tune on sheet music without getting permission from the copyright owner. Al's lyrics by themselves don't violate the copyright, but playing the tune along with them might.
However, the Austin Powers 3 case is about trademark, not copyright, the claim apparently being that both the title and the character Goldmember infringe on the Bond title and character Goldfinger. Since it's pretty hard to parody something without putting enough resemblance in the names so people can tell what you are parodying, I would not expect this to hold up in a US court. I don't know about British law (where MGM and the Bond franchise reside), or whether Myers (who sure sounds British) and his production company are in British jurisdiction. If British courts rule one way and US the other, MGM would become the "bad guy" who kept the film out of British territory only -- or the "good guy" to Brits of taste. 8-)
One thing: how close was Myers planning to come to the original on the title song? (I cringe to think about the possible lyrics...) There might be a copyright violation on the tune.
Thanks for the link. As for the abstract, I wouldn't call leaving you logged in while saying you were logged out "minor", but MS could fix that bug in a few hours if they actually cared about Netscape users maybe having their accounts hijacked...
A fast skim through the article indicates that there are fundamental problems with the basic idea, aside from the MS implementation errors. The web itself is too insecure to allow running a really secure application on un-modified browsers. Passport collects the authorizations to many accounts in one place, so it ought to be more secure than is theoretically possible with the protocols used.
A butane cigarette lighter is potentially more explosive, because butane is a gas at room temperature and pressure. Crush the plastic pressure tank and all the butane will evaporate at once, so if ignited it could either give a very hot, fast-burning fire, or an explosion. Methanol is a liquid which will burn only as fast as it evaporates.
Anyone know the composition of the lighter fluid used in the old cigarette lighters with wicks? Was that methanol, some other alcohol, or hydrocarbon?
OTOH, I think 120ml = 4 ounce, which is enough fuel to make a fairly impressive fire in a small closed space like an airliner. And don't believe that 10 hours on one cartridge claim -- you aren't doing much with your laptop if it's running at 15W.
The methanol cartridges are simply little tanks, I'm sure there won't be anything toxic in them. Probably it will be a flexible plastic bottle, which isn't that great a thing in land-fills either. And since they were going to be selling these little bottles with a few cents worth of methanol for about $3, I expect you'll see refill kits on the market real fast -- that is, a big plastic bottle of methanol, plus a syringe or whatever to get it into the cartridge and something to seal the cartridge up again.
By the way, weren't the old wick-type cigarette lighters fueled with something like methanol?
Maybe some of the waste heat from the fuel cell will be used to evaporate the water. Maybe the water will be drained to the CPU heatsink, which will evaporate it. I doubt that you'll be left with a wet spot in your lap...
I believe this is something we can blame on the Romans -- somehow or other they created two very similar prefixes, one meaning "not" and the other meaning "very". So as they carried over into English, they are quite confusing:
Inflammable = capable of burning very much
Inadmissible = not admissible
"Flammable" wasn't originally a word in English, but in the era of lawsuits and warning signs about obvious dangers, marking a gasoline tank as "inflammable" left the possibility of being misunderstood as "not flame-able". Or that the lawyers representing the estate of some idiot that lit a cigarette while standing next to the gas tank would claim in court that he read it that way... So the word "flammable" was coined. No english-speaker is likely to misunderstand that -- and now (in the US at least), they mark the things in Spanish too. (This just makes me wonder about the French-Canadians, Swedes, and Finns up here, or the Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, etc. in California -- is there room enough for warning messages in every language?)
>most of the letter refers to what Microsoft could possibly do in the future. I could possibly go out and rob a bank in the next week but does this mean the police should arrest me? If you have previously robbed banks you certainly can be arrested for acquiring guns, masks, and safecracking tools.
Or what may be more to the point where MS is concerned: their servers have already been cracked to the point where unknown third parties could have read out just about any data they wanted from MS's network. Therefore, whether or not MS promises to keep your data private is pretty much meaningless, because that's a promise they do not know how to keep.
I recently went to a seminar with MS's senior systems architect (UK) talking about Passport (mainly.net though). He first said that the Passport protocol should be implementable by any provider who wants to provide this service, so it need not be Microsoft authenticating details.
I'm sure MS would like that -- if the other servers paid MS big $$$ for the software. But the fundamental security problem isn't that MS is running the servers, but that the servers are running fundamentally insecure MS software.
From the letter: "Microsoft's failure to make public known security risks in Windows XP and Passport and provide a reasonable degree of control of personal information violates state law that prohibits unfair deceptive trade practices. In light of the FTC's reluctance to address this clear violation of Section 5 of the FTC Act even after the widely disclosed security flaws, we urge you to investigate the privacy and security risks of Microsoft Passport."
If that's deceptive, how about those ads claiming that Windows servers run unattended?
The article says the 120ml cartridge is "enough to power a 15W notebook computer for 10 hours". I seriously wonder whether that 15W is realistic, considering most modern CPU's draw several times that at rated speed -- and you've also got disk drives and display. I suspect 150 Watt-hour is pretty similar to the capacity of the larger laptop batteries. Of course, you could carry a dozen refills in less space and weight than one spare battery...
The other question is how the paranoiac, irrational, and just plain stupid airport security people are going to react to that cache of flammable material. Methanol is pretty similar to cigarette lighter fluid (for the old-style lighters with wicks), and should be safer than butane. But IIRC there are about 28ml in an ounce, so 120 ml = 4 ounces, which could make a bigger fire than you'd want to deal with in close quarters. I think the Russians in Stalingrad would tackle a German tank with an 8 ounce soda bottle filled with gasoline -- three methanol cartridges would be about equivalent in energy.
Of course, another idea would be to trim back the bloatware so you didn't need such a powerful CPU or a continuously spinning HD...
an addiction is something that you choose to do in order to relieve a physical or psychological pressure that doesn't solve the problem -- it masks it. Yes, that's the critical part that was left out of the definition. In regards to TV watching, the research showed various chemical and brainwave changes roughly corresponding to relaxation -- but when the subjects turned the tube off after two hours or more, they soon became _less_ relaxed than before they started. That is, TV's immediate effect seems to solve stress, but if you lose control of the habit it leaves you more stressed out than before. Sounds a lot like heroin to me -- except there are a lot more people who can control their TV urges.
As for who is in control: Do you turn the TV on for one hour of Buffy and then turn it off, or do you turn the tube on and go looking for something fit to watch, then settle for the barely endurable?
One final note about starving Joe -- I very much doubt that he finds himself eating more than he intended...
The idea of patents is good, the present implementation is lousy.
1) Too many patents are granted without any "thorough description of how it works." If this is an attempt to gain the protection of the patent without giving up the trade secrets, it's breaking the basic bargain involved in patents. And if it's a case of trying to patent an undeveloped idea so as to be able to sue whoever later actually delivers a working invention, then granting such vague patents does indeed choke off innovation.
What is needed is a requirement that either the description be clear enough that engineers can construct a working device, or a working device be delivered to and stored at the expense of the patent requestor. If you can't prove that you knew how to build the device at the time of the patent application, the patent is void.
2) Too many patents are granted covering ideas which are NOT new. The Australian patent office granted a patent for the wheel, and the US granted a patent for "training using a manual." The wheel patent application was a prank. The training manual application appears to be serious -- but are they going to sue the US Army for training methods that were old in 1940, or are they going to try to bully some small company into coughing up the dough rather than facing an expensive trial?
More typically (and the training manual patent may be one of these), the patent will mix one small new idea in with lots of old ideas, then claim it all. The PO should sort out the prior art in these, but obviously the US, Aussie, and presumably most other PO's have been overwhelmed until this is no longer possible. This puts the onus on companies trying to produce other products incorporating those old ideas to sort out what was really patentable, and possibly defend their interpretation in court.
There is no penalty for over-reaching like this. So I have suggested before: If two or more claims in a patent application are proven bogus, it is entirely disallowed, published, and any actual innovations contained therein become public domain.
3. It costs too much to challenge a bogus patent in court, or even to do the research to determine that it is provably bogus. The first fix for this is a "loser pays" system for legal costs. Second, I suggest that when a patent is granted the patent-holder be required to post a bond of, say, $10,000. If someone challenges the patent and the patent-holder chooses not to answer the challenge ("Gee, I didn't know the US Army used training manuals in 1940"), this bond pays (some of) the challenger's expenses. If the patent-holder takes it to trial and loses, the bond is just a tiny down-payment on what he'll owe...
Not to mention that reproducibility is the only defense against scientists who lie, exaggerate their results, or are self-deluded. And ethics in science (as in other parts of society) is definitely in decline -- cases of fraud used to be rare enough that each one was remembered for a century (e.g., Piltdown Man), now there are several fraudulent scientists caught each year.
Previous posts noted that -- but also that the scientists responding to the poll about why they don't share data may be lying. I find it rather suspicious that this lack of sharing became much more of a problem just as valuable patents became possible. If it wasn't too much work to share the data when it was in hand-written notebooks or typed (on a typewriter, not a computer) reports, why is it too hard now that the data is almost always computerized?
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Pure ammonia (as in these refrigerators) is extremely poisonous, when it's used as a household cleaner it's pretty dilute. It's more poisonous than the chlorine used as a war gas in WWI, except that ammonia (NH3) is lighter than air so it would rise away from the target, while Cl2 is heavy and went down into the trenches where the troops were.
But compared to lots of other things in our lives (automobiles for instance), ammonia isn't very dangerous. You get the plumbing joints tight, test them before filling the system, and run away fast if you smell it leaking -- and you _will_ run away if dangerous amounts leak, because it's one of the most godawful smells ever. If the smell is merely annoying, the dosage is not harmful, but you won't need to know it's poisonous to want to do something about the source. Since ammonia is a common naturally occurring poison, mammals (and possibly everything with a nervous system) avoid it by instinct.
If Ebola or any other horrific disease wipes out 90% of one village in a few days, most people from other villages will stay far away so they don't catch it... Not to mention that death rates of "up to 90%" seem to happen only when people are undernourished, overcrowded, and lack all modern medicine. "As low as" rates don't make headlines, but when WHO gets a medical team in soon enough death rates are down to 40% of those infected, and most don't get infected. In a more modern society, where it's harder to quarantine diseases, people are healthier to begin with, Ebola is somewhat treatable, and the death rate would be quite a lot lower.
When the media can't find enough real dangers, they go hysterical about Ebola. Michael Fumento
put it into perspective:
Talk about an outbreak! From the apparent inception date of the current epidemic in Uganda last October 14th to January 25th of this year, 427 Ebola cases have been reported with 173 deaths. During the same time there were over 1,900 media references to the disease on the Nexis database.
That's 11 media mentions per fatality.
...
"It's possible that someone with Ebola might leave a remote area where the disease is occurring and might even get sick here," Dr. C.J. Peters, chief of the Special Pathogens branch at the federal Centers for Disease Control told me. But, "Because our socioeconomic level allows high standards in hospitals . . . there would be a few cases but they would be controllable under our circumstances."
Ebola has as much chance of spreading in the North America as malaria does in the Arctic.
Finally, even in Africa, Ebola as an infectious disease killer is a pipsqueak.
The slow stealthy diseases can be more dangerous. Bubonic plague is exceptionally bad, because it spreads through rats without drawing much attention (most people think of piles of dead rats as a good thing), and then suddenly jumps to humans. But it's treatable with antibiotics; most Americans who catch it (a few every year, from wild rodents) survive. And at it's absolute worst, the plague didn't bring down western civilization, but probably contributed to bringing about the renaissance, the age of exploration (did the switch from galleys to sailing ships happen because of a shortage of galley slaves?), and the industrial revolution.
If viral plagues were capable of wiping out species or civilizations, it would be factored into L. However, diseases DO NOT kill off 100% of anything -- being too deadly is an evolutionary dead end. Smallpox and ebola are not new diseases; AIDS might be, be it's far more likely that various simian HIV viruses have been picked up by Africans who ate undercooked ape meat at various times for millenia. It was recognized as a disease in the US only when nutrition, medical care, and availability of antibiotics had eliminated so many other causes of death, and after certain sub-groups of Americans had completely abandoned traditional inhibitions about sex. There is no chance whatever of it actually bringing down our civilation. With sufficient promiscuity, AIDS or other STD's can easily wipe out a village -- but until recently most Africans didn't travel enough to make it likely to spread too far before people simply learned to stay away from those from the "sick" village, while cultures that did travel widely (Arabs, upper-class Europeans) tended to be obsessed with controlling sex...
Smallpox and the bubonic plague are real killers, but not civilation-killers. The Black Plague killed somewhere between 1/4 and 3/4 of Europeans in less than a century, but European civilation not only survived but thrived. The survivors were richer and more willing to look at new ways of doing things. Especially, the shrinking workforce forced craftsmen to look at labor-saving devices -- for instance, ironworks replaced much manpower on bellows and hammers with waterpower, and in a few decades were making more and better iron than ever before.
The early course of smallpox in Europe is not too clear, but it is clear that there were centuries when it was simply accepted that at least 50% of each generation would catch it, and over 25% would die. All it meant was that fewer peasants had to starve to death or be hanged for theft, and there were more chances for peasants to become middle class or middle class to become noble...
In north america, a whole cluster of European diseases swept through a native population with no immunities. (There may have been some deliberate attempts at germ warfare like giving away smallpox-infested blankets, but the diseases were spreading so fast on their own that it hardly mattered.) Sometimes these diseases wiped out an entire tribe in one year, when the tribe was camped in one village (and probably not eating very well either), but other (maybe better fed, or more dispersed) tribes were only lightly hit. Possibly smallpox killed up to 75% and measles, etc., brought it up to 90% on the average. That didn't end most of their cultures -- it just made it a lot easier for white men to shoot and drive off the survivors.
It is highly unlikely that any one disease will ever kill more than 75%. And a real civilization can survive that quite well. There's considerable disruption in deciding how to scale back businesses to the smaller work force and customer base, but the problems are buffered by all that inherited wealth...
TV sets are pretty good at displaying moving, colored graphics, but lousy at displaying a text file; the maximum readable line length is about 40 characters. Sony assumes (correctly, I think) that anyone who needs Linux on their PS/2 is going to need better text display capabilities. That is, they are doing their best to make this a platform for writing games, not pirating them -- and if you are coding, you need a decent monitor. You also need a better monitor than a TV for web-surfing...
So they do make it possible to set the video to the TV output (you'll need this when you want to run that game you wrote), but set the system so the first boot will be to a monitor. This seems to forget two groups of people:
1) SSH: Real hackers already have a computer, and they'd probably much rather type on that than on the PS2 anyhow, so they'll probably prefer the PS2 Linux set up for remote control, and going to the TV when they want to try running a game. So borrow an SVGA monitor to boot it the first time and change the settings. You've already got at least one.
2) Non-hackers that just want to play the games hackers are giving away. Some of these people just might have a little trouble finding a monitor they can borrow for the first set-up. Sony has also made distributing the games a little difficult, with the CD/DVD player apparently not being good reading non-factory disks; they're probably not too enthused about turning customers into competitors with their own games division. However, it doesn't sound like they blocked downloading games from the internet.
Interesting to note that there is no mention of the 'we didn't violate Russian law' argument."
"Burton also filed motions to dismiss based on arguments that the law doesn't apply to a foreign company doing business solely on the internet..." (news.com)
This is perhaps a more important point than even the flaws in the DCMA.
The only way I ever know what those pictograms mean is if I there is accompanying text I can read.
Solighter fluid is more flammable than methanol, and they let you take about an ounce on an airplane.
Having one person own the entire "tree" of code slows the development process to a crawl. Linux will never be able to bring functionality to the table as fast as Windows if everything has to go through one man. Do you think Bill Gates is sitting at his desk and reviewing Windows XP code? No. He has better things to do.
I think you've just identified the basic difference between lean, fast, reliable programs and function-rich but bloated and unreliable programs like Windows. Linux is built to one man's plan, and code doesn't get in until he has read it and decided that it fits the plan. This obviously sets a maximum limit on how fast code can be added, and probably limits how big the program can ever become -- but it keeps the design clean, which limits the scope of bugs that can occur.
By contrast, Windows is far beyond any one person's comprehension. Stuff is added so fast no one knows what's going on. You've got features galore, but sometimes the system keeps crashing and no one can figure out why...
Linus obviously prefers the lean & fast model, at the cost of features. In addition, his kernel design isn't modularized, which makes it even leaner and faster, but prevents subdividing the final code review function. However, he could use a group of reviewers to do the first pass, and an assistant or top-notch secretary to keep track of submitted patches, send them out to the appropriate reviewer, and feed the survivors of the first pass to Linus in order. It won't change the fact that Linus _wants_ to maintain a system that limits program size and growth, but it will make the limitations a little less onerous.
I'm no expert on the Linux kernel, but just lurking on various discussions like this, it seems to keep coming down to a lack of modularization. Apparently Linus didn't want to modularize the kernel because intermodule communications are slower than within one module. However, this also means that someone working in one area can inadvertently foul up an apparently unrelated area. So Linus can't divide up the job effectively among subordinates, because a sub-Linus focused on one area isn't going to know when he's making a mess elsewhere. (In military terms, span of control becomes impossible if just anyone on your side can march his troops through your sector.) It all has to go to the top (Linus), and obviously his "army" of coders has got too big for any man to keep track of.
Other people have quoted Weird Al as saying that he thinks he could win on the law, but thinks its polite to ask permission, as well as avoiding a lawsuit. I'm not so sure about him winning on the law, because of a factor that doesn't necessarily come into the movie title cases. His parodies generally use the original tune with a parody of the lyrics. If the tune was original, it is copyrighted by itself -- you can't even print the tune on sheet music without getting permission from the copyright owner. Al's lyrics by themselves don't violate the copyright, but playing the tune along with them might.
However, the Austin Powers 3 case is about trademark, not copyright, the claim apparently being that both the title and the character Goldmember infringe on the Bond title and character Goldfinger. Since it's pretty hard to parody something without putting enough resemblance in the names so people can tell what you are parodying, I would not expect this to hold up in a US court. I don't know about British law (where MGM and the Bond franchise reside), or whether Myers (who sure sounds British) and his production company are in British jurisdiction. If British courts rule one way and US the other, MGM would become the "bad guy" who kept the film out of British territory only -- or the "good guy" to Brits of taste. 8-)
One thing: how close was Myers planning to come to the original on the title song? (I cringe to think about the possible lyrics...) There might be a copyright violation on the tune.
Thanks for the link. As for the abstract, I wouldn't call leaving you logged in while saying you were logged out "minor", but MS could fix that bug in a few hours if they actually cared about Netscape users maybe having their accounts hijacked...
A fast skim through the article indicates that there are fundamental problems with the basic idea, aside from the MS implementation errors. The web itself is too insecure to allow running a really secure application on un-modified browsers. Passport collects the authorizations to many accounts in one place, so it ought to be more secure than is theoretically possible with the protocols used.
A butane cigarette lighter is potentially more explosive, because butane is a gas at room temperature and pressure. Crush the plastic pressure tank and all the butane will evaporate at once, so if ignited it could either give a very hot, fast-burning fire, or an explosion. Methanol is a liquid which will burn only as fast as it evaporates.
Anyone know the composition of the lighter fluid used in the old cigarette lighters with wicks? Was that methanol, some other alcohol, or hydrocarbon?
OTOH, I think 120ml = 4 ounce, which is enough fuel to make a fairly impressive fire in a small closed space like an airliner. And don't believe that 10 hours on one cartridge claim -- you aren't doing much with your laptop if it's running at 15W.
The methanol cartridges are simply little tanks, I'm sure there won't be anything toxic in them. Probably it will be a flexible plastic bottle, which isn't that great a thing in land-fills either. And since they were going to be selling these little bottles with a few cents worth of methanol for about $3, I expect you'll see refill kits on the market real fast -- that is, a big plastic bottle of methanol, plus a syringe or whatever to get it into the cartridge and something to seal the cartridge up again.
By the way, weren't the old wick-type cigarette lighters fueled with something like methanol?
Maybe some of the waste heat from the fuel cell will be used to evaporate the water. Maybe the water will be drained to the CPU heatsink, which will evaporate it. I doubt that you'll be left with a wet spot in your lap...
I believe this is something we can blame on the Romans -- somehow or other they created two very similar prefixes, one meaning "not" and the other meaning "very". So as they carried over into English, they are quite confusing:
Inflammable = capable of burning very much
Inadmissible = not admissible
"Flammable" wasn't originally a word in English, but in the era of lawsuits and warning signs about obvious dangers, marking a gasoline tank as "inflammable" left the possibility of being misunderstood as "not flame-able". Or that the lawyers representing the estate of some idiot that lit a cigarette while standing next to the gas tank would claim in court that he read it that way... So the word "flammable" was coined. No english-speaker is likely to misunderstand that -- and now (in the US at least), they mark the things in Spanish too. (This just makes me wonder about the French-Canadians, Swedes, and Finns up here, or the Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, etc. in California -- is there room enough for warning messages in every language?)
>most of the letter refers to what Microsoft could possibly do in the future. I could possibly go out and rob a bank in the next week but does this mean the police should arrest me? If you have previously robbed banks you certainly can be arrested for acquiring guns, masks, and safecracking tools.
Or what may be more to the point where MS is concerned: their servers have already been cracked to the point where unknown third parties could have read out just about any data they wanted from MS's network. Therefore, whether or not MS promises to keep your data private is pretty much meaningless, because that's a promise they do not know how to keep.
I recently went to a seminar with MS's senior systems architect (UK) talking about Passport (mainly .net though). He first said that the Passport protocol should be implementable by any provider who wants to provide this service, so it need not be Microsoft authenticating details.
I'm sure MS would like that -- if the other servers paid MS big $$$ for the software. But the fundamental security problem isn't that MS is running the servers, but that the servers are running fundamentally insecure MS software.
From the letter: "Microsoft's failure to make public known security risks in Windows XP and Passport and provide a reasonable degree of control of personal information violates state law that prohibits unfair deceptive trade practices. In light of the FTC's reluctance to address this clear violation of Section 5 of the FTC Act even after the widely disclosed security flaws, we urge you to investigate the privacy and security risks of Microsoft Passport."
If that's deceptive, how about those ads claiming that Windows servers run unattended?
The article says the 120ml cartridge is "enough to power a 15W notebook computer for 10 hours". I seriously wonder whether that 15W is realistic, considering most modern CPU's draw several times that at rated speed -- and you've also got disk drives and display. I suspect 150 Watt-hour is pretty similar to the capacity of the larger laptop batteries. Of course, you could carry a dozen refills in less space and weight than one spare battery...
The other question is how the paranoiac, irrational, and just plain stupid airport security people are going to react to that cache of flammable material. Methanol is pretty similar to cigarette lighter fluid (for the old-style lighters with wicks), and should be safer than butane. But IIRC there are about 28ml in an ounce, so 120 ml = 4 ounces, which could make a bigger fire than you'd want to deal with in close quarters. I think the Russians in Stalingrad would tackle a German tank with an 8 ounce soda bottle filled with gasoline -- three methanol cartridges would be about equivalent in energy.
Of course, another idea would be to trim back the bloatware so you didn't need such a powerful CPU or a continuously spinning HD...
So, can you get Windows XP's remote product activation to work on that isolated network?
Need I mention the incongruity of isolating the network for security and then installing highly insecure software?
an addiction is something that you choose to do in order to relieve a physical or psychological pressure that doesn't solve the problem -- it masks it. Yes, that's the critical part that was left out of the definition. In regards to TV watching, the research showed various chemical and brainwave changes roughly corresponding to relaxation -- but when the subjects turned the tube off after two hours or more, they soon became _less_ relaxed than before they started. That is, TV's immediate effect seems to solve stress, but if you lose control of the habit it leaves you more stressed out than before. Sounds a lot like heroin to me -- except there are a lot more people who can control their TV urges.
As for who is in control: Do you turn the TV on for one hour of Buffy and then turn it off, or do you turn the tube on and go looking for something fit to watch, then settle for the barely endurable?
One final note about starving Joe -- I very much doubt that he finds himself eating more than he intended...
The idea of patents is good, the present implementation is lousy.
1) Too many patents are granted without any "thorough description of how it works." If this is an attempt to gain the protection of the patent without giving up the trade secrets, it's breaking the basic bargain involved in patents. And if it's a case of trying to patent an undeveloped idea so as to be able to sue whoever later actually delivers a working invention, then granting such vague patents does indeed choke off innovation.
What is needed is a requirement that either the description be clear enough that engineers can construct a working device, or a working device be delivered to and stored at the expense of the patent requestor. If you can't prove that you knew how to build the device at the time of the patent application, the patent is void.
2) Too many patents are granted covering ideas which are NOT new. The Australian patent office granted a patent for the wheel, and the US granted a patent for "training using a manual." The wheel patent application was a prank. The training manual application appears to be serious -- but are they going to sue the US Army for training methods that were old in 1940, or are they going to try to bully some small company into coughing up the dough rather than facing an expensive trial?
More typically (and the training manual patent may be one of these), the patent will mix one small new idea in with lots of old ideas, then claim it all. The PO should sort out the prior art in these, but obviously the US, Aussie, and presumably most other PO's have been overwhelmed until this is no longer possible. This puts the onus on companies trying to produce other products incorporating those old ideas to sort out what was really patentable, and possibly defend their interpretation in court.
There is no penalty for over-reaching like this. So I have suggested before: If two or more claims in a patent application are proven bogus, it is entirely disallowed, published, and any actual innovations contained therein become public domain.
3. It costs too much to challenge a bogus patent in court, or even to do the research to determine that it is provably bogus. The first fix for this is a "loser pays" system for legal costs. Second, I suggest that when a patent is granted the patent-holder be required to post a bond of, say, $10,000. If someone challenges the patent and the patent-holder chooses not to answer the challenge ("Gee, I didn't know the US Army used training manuals in 1940"), this bond pays (some of) the challenger's expenses. If the patent-holder takes it to trial and loses, the bond is just a tiny down-payment on what he'll owe...
Not to mention that reproducibility is the only defense against scientists who lie, exaggerate their results, or are self-deluded. And ethics in science (as in other parts of society) is definitely in decline -- cases of fraud used to be rare enough that each one was remembered for a century (e.g., Piltdown Man), now there are several fraudulent scientists caught each year.
Previous posts noted that -- but also that the scientists responding to the poll about why they don't share data may be lying. I find it rather suspicious that this lack of sharing became much more of a problem just as valuable patents became possible. If it wasn't too much work to share the data when it was in hand-written notebooks or typed (on a typewriter, not a computer) reports, why is it too hard now that the data is almost always computerized?
No, but if you look like my wife the neighbors will all demand an ordinance requiring you to remain fully clothed at all times...