Do you want to call modules you wrote from a python program? Or do you want to call python modules from perl. For the latter look no farther than cpan
For the former, first check out the python package index , which is the equivelent of CPAN to see if someone else has created a relevant package. If not, creating a python module from C code from python is easy . As far as calling perl modules from python, that is one of the things Parrot is intended to do, so your savior will come with the apoclypse.
It is one thing to design and build guns. It is quite another to knowingly sell them to the Mafia.
Sure if you create something with good intentions and it ends up being used for nefarious purpose, it is not your fault. But when you make a business out of dealing with scum, and doing thier dirty work, as this kid did, then you are as guilty as they are. It is his business dealing that should get him nailed, not the software he wrote.
Re:Let he who has not sinned, throw the first ston
on
Interview with a Spampire
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· Score: 4, Insightful
So, since we are not holding anyone accountable for their actions, you won't mind if I hire myself out to run a hit on this guy, right? I mean I have to making a living somehow.
Sure, selling spamware is unethical. But if it's that or starving to death...
On to the serious side, no one needs to starve to death in this country. Between food shelters, welfare, and temporary jobs, it is easy to get enough food to stay alive. Furthermore, I have never been in a situation where I could not find a job. It may be a shitty job that pays crap but you can almost always find a job if you want to.
The problem with poverty in this country is not unemployment, but underemployment, and the large number of people that have not been able to advance themselves out of the subsistance level of employment. I do think that we need to do something about this, but I don't buy for one second that this kid had no other choice.
If you RTFA, you will see that long before he started selling spamware, he was under investigation by the feds for DOS attacks and other blackhat crap that had nothing to do with making money - he was just being an asshole. He was intelligent, and could have found a decent job, if he had bothered investing the time to build up some good experience. If he really loved programming/security he could have eventually found a job in it. And if is only concern was money, then there are plenty of other way to do that. It's not like has years and years in college wasted by moving to another sector. He choose to be a scum and make his living by harming others.
Uhm, no. He has given an irrevocable, royalty-free licence for it's use in GPL'd software. Montavista RT Linux is GPL'd. Besides if you read the patent you will see that it is for something that has nothing to do with Montavista's code. Yodaiken's approach was to run the linux kernal as a process of a smaller realtime kernal, and it is that technique that he patented. Montavista is modifying the Linux kernal itself to be run-time, which is a much more difficult task, and would not infringe on this patent whatsoever.
As it said, Python, Perl, Ruby, Smalltalk, Lisp, and most of the languages targeted by Parrot are dynamically typed and have dynamic message passing (method calls). This means that typechecking is done by the run-time environment, not by the compiler. Likewise, it is not known untill runtime which if an object has a method. Therefore, the runtime has to do a fair amount of checking (mostly symbol table lookups). If you were to do this with a VM designed for static languages (JVM,.NET) that do not do this checking for you, then you would have to implement all of it as byte-code in the VM - in effect you would be writing a big chunk of a Perl interpretor in Java.
This approach would inevitably be slower than the existing Perl 5 interpretor, while the Parrot approach has managed to be significatly faster than the current Perl 5 interpretor. The reasons are that 1) all of the runtime checking is highly optimized native code 2) after the complex perl code is translated into a simpler form, the traditional compiler optimizations can be applied to the code.
Even if the worst FUD claims of the anti electronic voting crowd are true electronic voting is no more vulnerable to tampering than paper ballot voting.
That is simply not true. With paper ballot voting the only people who can tamper with the ballots are the election officials, and members of all interested parties, observe the voting and tallying process. With some of these poorly implemented systems, anyone with internet access or access to the voting machine (any voter) could potentially hack and tamper with the voting results. This is not a theoretical concern either - there are proven vulnerabilities with these systems.
The lesser reason why your statement is incorrect is that with paper ballots, if fraud is suspected, you can at least go back and do some post mortem analysis of the election - recount the existing ballots, make sure that the number of people who signed in at a voting location is consistent with the number of existing ballots. With most of these electronic voting systems this is currently not an option (although it could be).
These complaints are not FUD, by any stretch of the imagination.
Sorry for the unfinished post - darn enter key submits form badness.
I understand that it is easy to just write off these concerns as just more wacko technophobe hysteria, but look at how many problems we have created just by introducing non-native species into other habitats. These aren't genetically modified, or in many cases even bred by humans for specific traits. They are perfectly natural organisms that simply evolved in different places. And yet they have reeked havoc in their new habitat because the life forms in that habitat are not evolved to deal with them.
Nothing is evolved to deal with these new crops that we are introducing, and the primary motivation for the crops is that we want them make them more resilient against natural (and in some case human made - aka RoundUp) predators, so we can get better yields cheaper.
I am not opposed to GM in principle - I think it can and will have a wonderful positive impact on us and even the environment as a whole, as it will allow for more efficient and balanced use of the resources available to us. However, I think we need to be careful, and I think that it would be a good idea if the work was more driven by scientific curiosity then profit. In my opinion the best way to do achieve this is to declare GM work to be unpatentable. This will remove much of the profitability of GM research, while creating a more open scientific environment. Not to mention the philosophical questions of whether genes and biological processes should even be patentable. And if it also slows down progress some, that might even be a good thing in this case.
I disagree that these computer models are a good solution. I also disagree that they are fair. The purpose of an election is for the people to choose who best represents their opinions. The purpose of these models is to garrentee that a certain number of each major party is elected. These are not compatible goals.
The only real solution to gerrymandering is to stop using districts in elections where they have no meaning. Does the US House of Representitives really need a representive specifically from my district? I thought they were state representitives not district representitives. If you simply have elections accross the entire state and send the top X candidates to congress then you don't have to worry about gerrymandering at all.
Futhermore, districting assures that only majority views get represented in congress, while large minority views are ignored. For example, even if 30% of the people in a state support, the Green Party, unless these people are concentrated in a single district (unlikely), the Green candidates will not recieve > 50% vote in any of the districts, so none of the representives sent to congress will be Green. If you had a state-wide election, though, about 1/3 of the state representitives sent to congress would be Green, which is more representive of the actuall population of the state.
Same for city wide elections. Districts in those elections serve no functional purpose in the logistics of running the city, and exist soley for the purpose of gerrymadering. They should be abolished.
Right, no-one is going to redesign for the sake of redesign. But for new devices why would someone choose to go with an 8-bit when the 32-bit is just as cheap and is easier to design for since it does not have as many restrictions as 8bit? If there are legitimate reasons why 8-bit is still better than 32-bit, in some situations, then it will stick around and coexist. But if not then it will die out eventually, and it is not hyperbole to say so.
The problem with this and all other National ID card ideas that have been proposed is that they are inherently secure, because they result in people treating a single piece of information as both public information and as a secret. As an example, concider your Social Security Number. This number is used for two purposes 1) It is a unique identifier that the government (and others) use to differentiate you from others. 2) It used as a means of authenticating that you are who you say you are.
This creates a problem, because in order for the SSN to be usefull as an identifier it will be handled out in view of the public, but in order for it to be used as a means of authentication it must be kept secret - which it is not! It frightens me how many entities act as though anyone who can rattle off my SSN, must be me.
What you are doing is exactly the same. My drivers license number is not private information, and using it as a password is highly insecure!
I would really like to see a standardized authentication system worked out that used a public key / private key / password system, on a smart card. Technically it could work the same as PGP signatures. The public key is is associated with a unique ID, and available on public servers. The encrypted private key exists only on a smart card and cannot be read off the card, and therefore all computation must be done on the card.
The entity wishing to recieve authentication (say safeway) would read my unique ID off the card and send it to the authenticator (say VISA) who would send back a challenge. I would then enter a password (likely pin number) into the local machine. Then the challenge and password would be fed into the card which would use then use the password to decrypt the private key and then sign the challenge with it, and feed out the response. Then safeway would send the responce to VISA who would check it with the public key and securely return their decision.
If computers came with a slot for the card, standard, it would provide for an easy-to-use secure method of authentication for anything that needs it. I could have a card the proves that I am Citizen #123-45-6789 and another that proves I am allowed use VISA card 1234-5678-9012-3456, and other that proves that I am gate_keeper2345@example.com. And having a standard secure method of authentication, could even increase privacy because then entities could choose to athenticate you on criteria other than knowing who you are so they can sue you if things go wrong.
Thanks for bringing up the difference between power density and energy density. I had been overlooking that when thinking about alternative fuels. It also put a question in my head that perhaps you could answer. Currently, with hybrid cars, the electric motor has a good deal of torque at low speeds, but not at high, compared to combustion engines which can be made to have decent torque at all desired speed ranges.
Is this a property of the motor or the energy source? Ie, if we could increase the discarge rate of the source, would an electric motor have comprable power to a gasoline engine at high speeds? Are fuel cell cars doomed to having pathetic accelleration at prolonged high speeds because of their low power density? Do you know of a good site to read about this aspect of alternative fuel / fuel system vehicles?
Yes, I find it really interesting, and perhaps ironic that the fuels we are using now - hydrocarbons - have a higher hydrogen density than any of the mechanical (temperature, pressure) or chemical (metal hydrides) methods proposed for hydrogen cars. Not to mention the additional energy stored in the form of chemical bonds. It makes you think that perhaps nature was onto something when (nearly?) every life form on this planet uses hydrocarbons as their primary source of energy.
Also, if you think about it, hydrocarbon fuel cells are a step towards a fuel "metabolism" that closer mimics biology than current combustion engines. Maybe our next improvements in fuel efficency won't come from pure chemistry but learning from and modififying existing biological systems. Genetically modified biocrops, which power biological inspired fuel cells, both tuned specifically for each other.
The most foolproof method of keeping track of where screws go is to use masking tape to label them. Put each groups of screws on a piece of tape and fold it over, then put a piece of tape next to where the screws came from, and label both peices of tape with the same number or letter.
While it may be a little bit more work then neccisarry, it is worthwhile, because it prevents you from getting in over your head. I'm sure everyone has had a time when they started taking out screws thinking they could remember where they go, only to find far more screws than they were expecting. This is especially true when you are taking apart a device for the first time, and are likely to take out more screws than you really needed to in hind-sight.
Or the project may end up spanning over several days because you find you need to get another part and end up forgeting where the screws go in that time. I have a laptop which I took apart months ago, and was able to successfully put it together again just the other day, because all the screws were labeled.
This also prevents the screws from getting lost or mixed should they spill out of the bowl or tray you are keeping them in - essential if you share residence with pets, children, college students or careless adults.
I can't fucking believe you people. Free speech is DEAD now that Indymedia has been raided and you guys want to talk about the Fantastic Four? For God's sake, people, GET SOME PRIORITIES!!
No you have it all wrong. It's times like this when the Fantastic Four are needed more than ever to protect our liberty! At last a returning glimmer of hope on the horizon! Onward our brave superheros - Onward to freedom!
I was at the XPrize launch, and they made some comments about this. I was only half listening, but the impression I got was that they (Scaled, Xprize, etc) were in favor of this.
There are legitimate concerns surrounding space travel, and some regulation is needed to address those. Given this, potential investors are reluctant to invest their money when they know that some sort of regulations will exist, but do not know what they will be or how they will effect the ventures they are funding. Burt Rutan has been working with the FAA and OSC from day one and they have been very supportive of his effort. He is wants to get get these regulations out on the table and nailed down as soon as possible, so that the transition from experimental space flight to commercial space flight can begin.
The telephone network and internet have very different makeups, and what makes sense for one does not necisarrily make sense for another.
With the telephone system, you only have a handfull of companies which have control of and legal access to the communication lines. They are tightly regulated by the government, and thus laws are fairly effective at protecting your privacy. With the telephone system, up until the 1950's, there was no method of encrypting conversations, and it was much later until these technologies were developed enough to be available to the public. Laws and physical security were the only means available to protect your privacy, and thus they were employed to do so.
The internet is designed to be distributed in nature, and thus far more people have legal access and control over the lines and servers through which you information passes. With the internet it has been anticipated from the beginning that encryption would be used for any sensitive communication. Furthermore, what entails a wiretap? Parsing mail to improve a spam filter? Caching user data to improve performance? The internet was designed to not be secure without encryption, and unenforcable laws are worthless. Why do you want the government to give you a false sense of privacy and security when you could have real privacy and security right now on your own?
There are probably two ways of judging how bad an invasive species is: the negative effects on other "native" species and ecology, and how hard it is to eradicate. As an example lets look at the salt cedar , which is bad on both of these counts.
This plant is a huge success of natural selection. It can survive in all sorts of environments, and scales wonderfully eeking a survival in the middle of the desert as a shrub or thrive in wet forest as a tree, but always leeching every and all the resources available to it. It has an extensive root system which soaks up all the water available, which not only chokes off local trees, but prevents ground water from replenishing streams and aquifers, hurting the ecology of the entire region. It is near worthless as a source of food for animals, unlike the plants which it displaces.
Getting rid of it is not quite as easy as using a chainsaw. As I mentioned, it has an extensive root system which survives and resprouts after the above-ground portion of the plant has been cut down. The salt ceder also salinates the soil, making harder for other plants to regrow if the infestation has been there a long time before removal. Most places resort to pesticide to get rid of it, either by spraying areas that are completely infested, or by poisoning the trunks of individual trees that have been cut down. Also, "just chainsawing it", is not as easy as it sounds. It is an extremely time consuming task. Likewise, pesticides are not something that you want to go overboard with. In general these trees have been spreading over decades and we are just now getting around to dealing with them, so you don't want to just rip out all the salt cedars as fast as possible without a plan for reintroducing native plants.
Here in New Mexico, the salt cedar is concidered to be one of the greatest threats to our water supply, and a great deal of effort is being made to eradicate it, and progress is being made, but it is necisarrily slow.
Hehe, you and the moderators just unwittingly made your parent's point. All of the things listed - alchohol, nicotine, caffine, sex - can be vices to people, or they can be positive depending on circumstance. But here on slashdot people are so reactionary against the idea of sex being a bad thing, that people immediately defended sex as not being a vice, but not the others.
Actually, cell phones do not use satellites. They use towers, and a system which allows the communication to be passed off from one tower to another as the user changes between the area (cell) that the tower services. Real sattelite phones are large and cumbersome, and are only used in locations that have no other form of outside communication. But your point is valid, just substitute cellphone with GPS.
Depending on where you read, it is released under either the IBM Public License or the Common Public License, which superceded the IPL and which is simular to the LGPL. It is approved by the OSI as an open source license and the FSF as a free software license. However, it is incompatible with the GPL because of some clauses about patent restriction. The FSF is not opposed to these clauses in principle - in fact they are concidering putting something simular in the next version of the GPL. But as things stand now, any IPL or CPL code cannot be combines with GPL code (unless of course, the author dual licenses the code under both).
Personally, I tend to side with the FSF when some software developer invents his own open source license which has not had the same legal scrutany of existing licenses, is incompatible with existing licnenses, causes fragmentation in potential codebases, and then accuses the FSF of being inflexible when they try to help the developer resolve these problems. I mean what is the the FSF foundation expected to do - change thier license according to the whims of every new license that comes around? It is the newcomers that are causeing incompatibility not the FSF.
But the CPL is becoming very popular among business, is a very fair Free Software license, has had the scrutiny of IBM lawyers, and does include some good ideas that are not in the GPL. So I really hope that the FSF makes it a top priority to work on the new version of the GPL which solves the patent-based conflicts with the CPL and other licenses.
You can no longer buy tickets online for their X-Prize launch. It did not say if they are available through other means - you should probably call the number listed on my link to check if you really want to go.
Which is why I am glad I got my tickets the day it was announced:P
Slashdot Mirror
Neither Coral nor Mirrordot managed to grab this one before it went down.
DRMBOT0110 !!!!
Do you want to call modules you wrote from a python program? Or do you want to call python modules from perl. For the latter look no farther than cpan
For the former, first check out the python package index , which is the equivelent of CPAN to see if someone else has created a relevant package. If not, creating a python module from C code from python is easy . As far as calling perl modules from python, that is one of the things Parrot is intended to do, so your savior will come with the apoclypse.
title sufficent
yet lameness filter attacks
my haiku deflects
filter returns blow
poem redoubles it's effort
will it be enough?
enemy unslain
patience wearing so thin
anticipation
revelation comes
slashcode prohibits colon
title corrected
It is one thing to design and build guns. It is quite another to knowingly sell them to the Mafia.
Sure if you create something with good intentions and it ends up being used for nefarious purpose, it is not your fault. But when you make a business out of dealing with scum, and doing thier dirty work, as this kid did, then you are as guilty as they are. It is his business dealing that should get him nailed, not the software he wrote.
So, since we are not holding anyone accountable for their actions, you won't mind if I hire myself out to run a hit on this guy, right? I mean I have to making a living somehow.
Sure, selling spamware is unethical. But if it's that or starving to death...
On to the serious side, no one needs to starve to death in this country. Between food shelters, welfare, and temporary jobs, it is easy to get enough food to stay alive. Furthermore, I have never been in a situation where I could not find a job. It may be a shitty job that pays crap but you can almost always find a job if you want to.
The problem with poverty in this country is not unemployment, but underemployment, and the large number of people that have not been able to advance themselves out of the subsistance level of employment. I do think that we need to do something about this, but I don't buy for one second that this kid had no other choice.
If you RTFA, you will see that long before he started selling spamware, he was under investigation by the feds for DOS attacks and other blackhat crap that had nothing to do with making money - he was just being an asshole. He was intelligent, and could have found a decent job, if he had bothered investing the time to build up some good experience. If he really loved programming/security he could have eventually found a job in it. And if is only concern was money, then there are plenty of other way to do that. It's not like has years and years in college wasted by moving to another sector. He choose to be a scum and make his living by harming others.
Uhm, no. He has given an irrevocable, royalty-free licence for it's use in GPL'd software. Montavista RT Linux is GPL'd. Besides if you read the patent you will see that it is for something that has nothing to do with Montavista's code. Yodaiken's approach was to run the linux kernal as a process of a smaller realtime kernal, and it is that technique that he patented. Montavista is modifying the Linux kernal itself to be run-time, which is a much more difficult task, and would not infringe on this patent whatsoever.
As it said, Python, Perl, Ruby, Smalltalk, Lisp, and most of the languages targeted by Parrot are dynamically typed and have dynamic message passing (method calls). This means that typechecking is done by the run-time environment, not by the compiler. Likewise, it is not known untill runtime which if an object has a method. Therefore, the runtime has to do a fair amount of checking (mostly symbol table lookups). If you were to do this with a VM designed for static languages (JVM, .NET) that do not do this checking for you, then you would have to implement all of it as byte-code in the VM - in effect you would be writing a big chunk of a Perl interpretor in Java.
This approach would inevitably be slower than the existing Perl 5 interpretor, while the Parrot approach has managed to be significatly faster than the current Perl 5 interpretor. The reasons are that 1) all of the runtime checking is highly optimized native code 2) after the complex perl code is translated into a simpler form, the traditional compiler optimizations can be applied to the code.
Even if the worst FUD claims of the anti electronic voting crowd are true electronic voting is no more vulnerable to tampering than paper ballot voting.
That is simply not true. With paper ballot voting the only people who can tamper with the ballots are the election officials, and members of all interested parties, observe the voting and tallying process. With some of these poorly implemented systems, anyone with internet access or access to the voting machine (any voter) could potentially hack and tamper with the voting results. This is not a theoretical concern either - there are proven vulnerabilities with these systems.
The lesser reason why your statement is incorrect is that with paper ballots, if fraud is suspected, you can at least go back and do some post mortem analysis of the election - recount the existing ballots, make sure that the number of people who signed in at a voting location is consistent with the number of existing ballots. With most of these electronic voting systems this is currently not an option (although it could be).
These complaints are not FUD, by any stretch of the imagination.
Sorry for the unfinished post - darn enter key submits form badness.
I understand that it is easy to just write off these concerns as just more wacko technophobe hysteria, but look at how many problems we have created just by introducing non-native species into other habitats. These aren't genetically modified, or in many cases even bred by humans for specific traits. They are perfectly natural organisms that simply evolved in different places. And yet they have reeked havoc in their new habitat because the life forms in that habitat are not evolved to deal with them.
Nothing is evolved to deal with these new crops that we are introducing, and the primary motivation for the crops is that we want them make them more resilient against natural (and in some case human made - aka RoundUp) predators, so we can get better yields cheaper.
I am not opposed to GM in principle - I think it can and will have a wonderful positive impact on us and even the environment as a whole, as it will allow for more efficient and balanced use of the resources available to us. However, I think we need to be careful, and I think that it would be a good idea if the work was more driven by scientific curiosity then profit. In my opinion the best way to do achieve this is to declare GM work to be unpatentable. This will remove much of the profitability of GM research, while creating a more open scientific environment. Not to mention the philosophical questions of whether genes and biological processes should even be patentable. And if it also slows down progress some, that might even be a good thing in this case.
I understand those that are quick to write off
I disagree that these computer models are a good solution. I also disagree that they are fair. The purpose of an election is for the people to choose who best represents their opinions. The purpose of these models is to garrentee that a certain number of each major party is elected. These are not compatible goals.
The only real solution to gerrymandering is to stop using districts in elections where they have no meaning. Does the US House of Representitives really need a representive specifically from my district? I thought they were state representitives not district representitives. If you simply have elections accross the entire state and send the top X candidates to congress then you don't have to worry about gerrymandering at all.
Futhermore, districting assures that only majority views get represented in congress, while large minority views are ignored. For example, even if 30% of the people in a state support, the Green Party, unless these people are concentrated in a single district (unlikely), the Green candidates will not recieve > 50% vote in any of the districts, so none of the representives sent to congress will be Green. If you had a state-wide election, though, about 1/3 of the state representitives sent to congress would be Green, which is more representive of the actuall population of the state.
Same for city wide elections. Districts in those elections serve no functional purpose in the logistics of running the city, and exist soley for the purpose of gerrymadering. They should be abolished.
Right, no-one is going to redesign for the sake of redesign. But for new devices why would someone choose to go with an 8-bit when the 32-bit is just as cheap and is easier to design for since it does not have as many restrictions as 8bit? If there are legitimate reasons why 8-bit is still better than 32-bit, in some situations, then it will stick around and coexist. But if not then it will die out eventually, and it is not hyperbole to say so.
The problem with this and all other National ID card ideas that have been proposed is that they are inherently secure, because they result in people treating a single piece of information as both public information and as a secret. As an example, concider your Social Security Number. This number is used for two purposes
1) It is a unique identifier that the government (and others) use to differentiate you from others.
2) It used as a means of authenticating that you are who you say you are.
This creates a problem, because in order for the SSN to be usefull as an identifier it will be handled out in view of the public, but in order for it to be used as a means of authentication it must be kept secret - which it is not! It frightens me how many entities act as though anyone who can rattle off my SSN, must be me.
What you are doing is exactly the same. My drivers license number is not private information, and using it as a password is highly insecure!
I would really like to see a standardized authentication system worked out that used a public key / private key / password system, on a smart card. Technically it could work the same as PGP signatures. The public key is is associated with a unique ID, and available on public servers. The encrypted private key exists only on a smart card and cannot be read off the card, and therefore all computation must be done on the card.
The entity wishing to recieve authentication (say safeway) would read my unique ID off the card and send it to the authenticator (say VISA) who would send back a challenge. I would then enter a password (likely pin number) into the local machine. Then the challenge and password would be fed into the card which would use then use the password to decrypt the private key and then sign the challenge with it, and feed out the response. Then safeway would send the responce to VISA who would check it with the public key and securely return their decision.
If computers came with a slot for the card, standard, it would provide for an easy-to-use secure method of authentication for anything that needs it. I could have a card the proves that I am Citizen #123-45-6789 and another that proves I am allowed use VISA card 1234-5678-9012-3456, and other that proves that I am gate_keeper2345@example.com. And having a standard secure method of authentication, could even increase privacy because then entities could choose to athenticate you on criteria other than knowing who you are so they can sue you if things go wrong.
Thanks for bringing up the difference between power density and energy density. I had been overlooking that when thinking about alternative fuels. It also put a question in my head that perhaps you could answer. Currently, with hybrid cars, the electric motor has a good deal of torque at low speeds, but not at high, compared to combustion engines which can be made to have decent torque at all desired speed ranges.
Is this a property of the motor or the energy source? Ie, if we could increase the discarge rate of the source, would an electric motor have comprable power to a gasoline engine at high speeds? Are fuel cell cars doomed to having pathetic accelleration at prolonged high speeds because of their low power density? Do you know of a good site to read about this aspect of alternative fuel / fuel system vehicles?
thanks!
Yes, I find it really interesting, and perhaps ironic that the fuels we are using now - hydrocarbons - have a higher hydrogen density than any of the mechanical (temperature, pressure) or chemical (metal hydrides) methods proposed for hydrogen cars. Not to mention the additional energy stored in the form of chemical bonds. It makes you think that perhaps nature was onto something when (nearly?) every life form on this planet uses hydrocarbons as their primary source of energy.
Also, if you think about it, hydrocarbon fuel cells are a step towards a fuel "metabolism" that closer mimics biology than current combustion engines. Maybe our next improvements in fuel efficency won't come from pure chemistry but learning from and modififying existing biological systems. Genetically modified biocrops, which power biological inspired fuel cells, both tuned specifically for each other.
The most foolproof method of keeping track of where screws go is to use masking tape to label them. Put each groups of screws on a piece of tape and fold it over, then put a piece of tape next to where the screws came from, and label both peices of tape with the same number or letter.
While it may be a little bit more work then neccisarry, it is worthwhile, because it prevents you from getting in over your head. I'm sure everyone has had a time when they started taking out screws thinking they could remember where they go, only to find far more screws than they were expecting. This is especially true when you are taking apart a device for the first time, and are likely to take out more screws than you really needed to in hind-sight.
Or the project may end up spanning over several days because you find you need to get another part and end up forgeting where the screws go in that time. I have a laptop which I took apart months ago, and was able to successfully put it together again just the other day, because all the screws were labeled.
This also prevents the screws from getting lost or mixed should they spill out of the bowl or tray you are keeping them in - essential if you share residence with pets, children, college students or careless adults.
I can't fucking believe you people. Free speech is DEAD now that Indymedia has been raided and you guys want to talk about the Fantastic Four? For God's sake, people, GET SOME PRIORITIES!!
No you have it all wrong. It's times like this when the Fantastic Four are needed more than ever to protect our liberty! At last a returning glimmer of hope on the horizon! Onward our brave superheros - Onward to freedom!
I was at the XPrize launch, and they made some comments about this. I was only half listening, but the impression I got was that they (Scaled, Xprize, etc) were in favor of this.
There are legitimate concerns surrounding space travel, and some regulation is needed to address those. Given this, potential investors are reluctant to invest their money when they know that some sort of regulations will exist, but do not know what they will be or how they will effect the ventures they are funding. Burt Rutan has been working with the FAA and OSC from day one and they have been very supportive of his effort. He is wants to get get these regulations out on the table and nailed down as soon as possible, so that the transition from experimental space flight to commercial space flight can begin.
The telephone network and internet have very different makeups, and what makes sense for one does not necisarrily make sense for another.
With the telephone system, you only have a handfull of companies which have control of and legal access to the communication lines. They are tightly regulated by the government, and thus laws are fairly effective at protecting your privacy. With the telephone system, up until the 1950's, there was no method of encrypting conversations, and it was much later until these technologies were developed enough to be available to the public. Laws and physical security were the only means available to protect your privacy, and thus they were employed to do so.
The internet is designed to be distributed in nature, and thus far more people have legal access and control over the lines and servers through which you information passes. With the internet it has been anticipated from the beginning that encryption would be used for any sensitive communication. Furthermore, what entails a wiretap? Parsing mail to improve a spam filter? Caching user data to improve performance? The internet was designed to not be secure without encryption, and unenforcable laws are worthless. Why do you want the government to give you a false sense of privacy and security when you could have real privacy and security right now on your own?
There are probably two ways of judging how bad an invasive species is: the negative effects on other "native" species and ecology, and how hard it is to eradicate. As an example lets look at the salt cedar , which is bad on both of these counts.
This plant is a huge success of natural selection. It can survive in all sorts of environments, and scales wonderfully eeking a survival in the middle of the desert as a shrub or thrive in wet forest as a tree, but always leeching every and all the resources available to it. It has an extensive root system which soaks up all the water available, which not only chokes off local trees, but prevents ground water from replenishing streams and aquifers, hurting the ecology of the entire region. It is near worthless as a source of food for animals, unlike the plants which it displaces.
Getting rid of it is not quite as easy as using a chainsaw. As I mentioned, it has an extensive root system which survives and resprouts after the above-ground portion of the plant has been cut down. The salt ceder also salinates the soil, making harder for other plants to regrow if the infestation has been there a long time before removal. Most places resort to pesticide to get rid of it, either by spraying areas that are completely infested, or by poisoning the trunks of individual trees that have been cut down. Also, "just chainsawing it", is not as easy as it sounds. It is an extremely time consuming task. Likewise, pesticides are not something that you want to go overboard with. In general these trees have been spreading over decades and we are just now getting around to dealing with them, so you don't want to just rip out all the salt cedars as fast as possible without a plan for reintroducing native plants.
Here in New Mexico, the salt cedar is concidered to be one of the greatest threats to our water supply, and a great deal of effort is being made to eradicate it, and progress is being made, but it is necisarrily slow.
Hehe, you and the moderators just unwittingly made your parent's point. All of the things listed - alchohol, nicotine, caffine, sex - can be vices to people, or they can be positive depending on circumstance. But here on slashdot people are so reactionary against the idea of sex being a bad thing, that people immediately defended sex as not being a vice, but not the others.
Actually, cell phones do not use satellites. They use towers, and a system which allows the communication to be passed off from one tower to another as the user changes between the area (cell) that the tower services. Real sattelite phones are large and cumbersome, and are only used in locations that have no other form of outside communication. But your point is valid, just substitute cellphone with GPS.
Depending on where you read, it is released under either the IBM Public License or the Common Public License, which superceded the IPL and which is simular to the LGPL. It is approved by the OSI as an open source license and the FSF as a free software license. However, it is incompatible with the GPL because of some clauses about patent restriction. The FSF is not opposed to these clauses in principle - in fact they are concidering putting something simular in the next version of the GPL. But as things stand now, any IPL or CPL code cannot be combines with GPL code (unless of course, the author dual licenses the code under both).
Personally, I tend to side with the FSF when some software developer invents his own open source license which has not had the same legal scrutany of existing licenses, is incompatible with existing licnenses, causes fragmentation in potential codebases, and then accuses the FSF of being inflexible when they try to help the developer resolve these problems. I mean what is the the FSF foundation expected to do - change thier license according to the whims of every new license that comes around? It is the newcomers that are causeing incompatibility not the FSF.
But the CPL is becoming very popular among business, is a very fair Free Software license, has had the scrutiny of IBM lawyers, and does include some good ideas that are not in the GPL. So I really hope that the FSF makes it a top priority to work on the new version of the GPL which solves the patent-based conflicts with the CPL and other licenses.
You can no longer buy tickets online for their X-Prize launch. It did not say if they are available through other means - you should probably call the number listed on my link to check if you really want to go.
:P
Which is why I am glad I got my tickets the day it was announced