Even then, you could only get it down to the temperature of the surrounding space.
Yes, but that's a somewhat tricky thing to quantify. The problem is that space is actually filled with a very tenuous high-temperature plasma (at a little shy of 70kK — yes, that's kilokelvin), and in between all those super-hot ions you've got the background radiation which is actually darn cold (about 2.7K). The average temperature might be a bit warmer than liquid nitrogen, but that hides a multitude of complex details; it's not a normal equilibrium system.
So what you actually do is you have a shield to keep the sun away from the rest of the satellite (you need that anyway) and with a little work you can also keep much of the solar wind away too. Then, you have two parts: one is a big-ass radiator that exploits the difference with the CMB, and the other is your instrument package which you need to cool, and where you need a heat pump to do it. Remember, you don't need every part to be that cold, and in fact you could never achieve that; all you need to keep really cold are the instruments themselves plus anything that the instruments are actually pointing at (e.g., waveguides). That should be doable.
"Dollars", "Bitcoins" and "jars of pickled hamster poop", united once more in the same sentence as they were truly meant to be! It all makes sense now!
Except in Denmark, you don't have San Diego, New England, and everything in between (not to mention the outlying territories...)
Why is that an "except"? It looks like a statement of the obvious.
Proportionately, the US doesn't have as many major bridges or ferries as Denmark, as there are a lot of islands in Denmark (and far fewer people than in the US). But so what? They're not identical. Why does this matter to the argument? Are you saying that people become happier to pay taxes when they live next to the sea?? That would at least be a more amusing argument than most I've heard (even if it is a total BS strawman argument that isn't to be taken seriously at all).
Come on! Give us a hint why you thought what you wrote was a worthwhile addition to this conversation.
Practically, it works by taxing on the whole amount that it is sold for, but allowing the reclaiming of the tax already collected on the input goods and services required to make the product or service. Since you have to be in the system to reclaim, there's a strong incentive for businesses to cooperate (and that keeps the total fraud level down).
Absolutely there are some who legitimately cannot take care of themselves. However, that does not mean that government needs to intervene. There used to be a time when families took care of the invalids.
So... do you have family to look after you if you have the bad fortune to require help? No? Or what happens if your family just decides that you're not someone they really want to talk to, and that they don't want you sponging off them? Or maybe you've just previously moved across country to a new job before the accident and you don't have any family nearby. Should we just leave you out naked in the middle of winter to die of exposure then so that you're not a burden on the rest of us? No? Then we're into arguing about the level of social support.
I'm not going to say that the current level is right or wrong, but to say that there should be no support at all is pretty abhorrent. Yes, you could say that the support should be done through various sorts of non-profits (religious or otherwise) but that's just moving the responsibility around. (You do want to pay your tithes, your 10%-of-income church "taxes", right?) It's also important to note that having government handle these things affects many things in subtle ways; for example, it makes it far easier to move to a new job in a different part of the country as you will be able to know that, should shit happen, you won't be destitute. Maybe you've never moved far from one place, but lots of people have and it is an important part of making the economy more efficient and people better able to have appropriate work.
The biggest problem I have with so many who style themselves conservatives is that they start from the position, no, from the axioms, that taxes are too high and that government is always 100% bad. Given that I reject those as axioms (without comment on whether they could be true in some situations) having a sane discussion is rather difficult. (I prefer to start my 'social calculus' from axioms like "Don't treat any person like shit unless they have personally proved that they deserve it." YMMV.)
IT titles are indeed screwed up and don't mean a whole lot. They may hint at the proportion one spends on a given type of task, but little more.
They hint at responsibilities and therefore salary level. Someone who describes himself as a programmer to his management is likely to be paid a lot less than someone who describes himself as a computer system architect. It's mostly BS, of course. But only mostly; the additional responsibilities (and hence additional opportunity to screw things up big-time) really are there. (Between themselves, those who program computers are much less hierarchic, at least in my experience: what is right is right, whoever says it.)
And again, oddly enough, some of the best indicators were clear, intelligent, structured English and an interest in music.
Those would be good correlates. The English skills are an indication that they can read very well (useful for background research) and communicate (also really useful), and music skills are often associated with ability in math and logic; they appear to use the same area of the brain.
The trick is that you want to get rid of the ones who want to coast, whether or not they've got degrees. A lazy ass is a lazy ass, whatever pieces of paper they've got. However, I'm not going to pretend that a lack of a degree automatically makes you better either. The advantage of a degree — apart from having a piece of paper that says you can actually work and think a bit, at least some of the time — is that you've probably got better contacts and have been exposed to more sophisticated ideas than someone without. For someone who is good and hard working in the first place, a degree is a good thing as it should expand the range of ideas in their mental toolbox.
But after a year or two of work, that degree doesn't matter a whole lot. At that point, it should be possible to see if they're a stupid lazy ass on the basis of their work (or lack of it). You don't want stupid lazy asses, at least not for programming jobs.
You're analogy fails in one critical aspect. You assume 20000 people going to one place to eat a hamburger is a bad thing. If people flock to the freeway then that means people are out of the side roads which free up to handle more traffic. There aren't magically any more people in the world, the traffic just redistributes to find a new equilibrium. The end result is the free way is still congested, but not as much, and neither are the other mainroads which people used to take instead.
Even that is over-simplistic. Having the additional road capacity there encourages people to make journeys they would otherwise not do, or to travel using very different routes than they otherwise would; in a sense, roads generate traffic.
Infrastructure planning is tricky. Its impact (both good and bad) can be felt very widely.
The article itself is concerned with the fact that serial ports offer little to no authentication on their lines.
But is the serial line routed off site? If you have to have physical access to the immediate locale or go through a properly-secured terminal server, the fact that the serial line itself doesn't do a lot of auth doesn't really matter.
The real problem comes when people connect these things to the internet (either directly or indirectly) without thinking about network security. (Security always makes things more difficult, but good security is that which makes things much more difficult for the unauthorized while having little impact on the authorized.)
Unfortunately ALL SCADA systems I've used which require authentication had a default username and password set.
Did I mention that SCADA vendors need introducing to a +3 Blessed Baseball Bat of Cluefulness?
HTML5 should include a robust media streaming framework
Actually, could we not have that? It's main use will be for obnoxious adverts (you know I'm right) and I'd love to be without those. I can live without Youtube (and don't use Netflix or its competitors).
Has anyone written a GPL HTML5 browser? Even one that only implements an early draft and completely omits video rendering? (I don't think HTML5 requires that browsers actually be able to render video, merely that they know what a piece of markup intended to render video looks like in the document and what they are going to do about it if they encounter it.) If there is no such browser, grumping about the problems with licensing isn't very helpful, since there's only a very abstract problem.
There's also no technical reason for a video renderer that supports DRM to not be licensed under at least some versions of the GPL, provided that the key cryptographic secret involved is not code but rather some sort of key; the GPL does not and never has required that one builder of a piece of software be able to impersonate another (and that would be fundamentally a dishonest thing to do). The problems you have persuading someone else to give you a crypto key for your build are not technical in nature. OTOH, DRM that is compliant with the spirit of what the GPL represents would be prohibitively expensive for service providers as they'd have to encrypt the content with a per-user key, which explains why GPL-licensed software isn't popular in that space. Nevertheless, it is necessary to distinguish between the letter of what is stated and the general intent.
But it's all theoretical. There's no GPL browser worth the name, and so there's neither a presence of nor a lack of a DRM video rendering component within such a browser.
Just your average clueless control-freak politician.
He's not just a politician, he's a world leader!
So, slightly more objectionable and clueless than average for a politician, but within normal variation. Of course, this is an uncosted kite that he's flying, so who knows whether it will manage to get implemented. (Mind you, it's a stupid policy that I'd bet is driven by the latest moral panic in the Daily Fail, so it's got far more legs than it actually merits. Oh well.)
The real lesson here is for British politicians and courts to tidy up our messy libel system (assuming she is telling the truth) so companies using these tactics are out of pocket so they think twice about filing these kind of law suits.
That's mostly how it works right now, you know. People shouldn't be encouraged to bring private cases at all, but rather should work out their differences between themselves and leave the courts for where agreement just can't be reached.
Those who turn to the courts to defend their reputation often do so because they have so little good reputation left to defend.
Why is the truth not considered a valid defense in British courts?
It is a defense, and it is in fact a really strong one. It's not an absolute defense though; it's possible for there to be true things that still shouldn't be said in public (e.g., where the defendant is maliciously saying true-but-very-embarrassing facts purely to hurt the plaintiff). It's a really rare variation though, and I'd be startled if that was applicable here.
Mind you, the court still has to decide whether the statements at question were actually true. If the statements are not true, they also have to decide whether level of damages asked for is reasonable; the plaintiff is not guaranteed to get what he wants even if he wins, as courts are typically constrained to keep damages awarded proportionate to the level of harm incurred, and it would be really surprising if a single tweet were to cause that much damage without containing something really horrible.
If this case turns to be another round of "rich asshole turns to courts too easily" then the main loss to the defendant, whether or not of the case, will be the time spent actually doing the defense.
Actually, you're 100% right. I think I was trying to decide between the phrase "content cartel" and "copyright maximalists", so my aging brain settled on "content maximalists". Would you change that to "copyright maximalists" for me, please:)
It's a pity you didn't mix it the other way. "Copyright cartel" would have worked just fine.
Well apparently the law in Germany says you can't provide a service without having a method for customers to contact the provider directly.
But does the law require the use of any specific technological method? (It would seem pretty dumb if that was the case, as technologies do change.) Would a variation on an online forum where users can elect to not have their questions be public and where there is someone (or several people) dedicated to answering the questions be an acceptable solution? After all, for virtually anything where you are dealing with Google at all, you'd be online and so able to use a web forum.
Those reference works translate quite well to this technology called HTML that's been around a few years now. I hear that there are even handheld devices which can navigate those sorts of documents efficiently...
The vancouver Aquarium had a movie on penguins last spring (2012) featuring typical effects as well as in theatre snow, rain, fog, tentacle slaps behind the ankles and jiggling seats. We did miss the smells however.
Miss the smell of millions of seabirds? No, you didn't. That might be an experience, but it isn't one worth experiencing...
You're doing it wrong. They have this technology called Swype now.
How does that work when writing Perl? Heck, how does it work even with something as verbose as Java? (No, having to go back to using COBOL would not be a step forward!)
The rules are exceptionally complex, even by the standards of US tax law, but in general a US person cannot control a foreign investment corporation (such as your Cayman shell corp) and not pay tax on its income, because its income is US income (income from licensing the IP in the US). Loans from a controlled company back into the US to the controller can be considered distributions of income in some circumstances, such as these.
That's why there are certain people in these tax havens who specialize in controlling shell companies for tax purposes. Remember, the people who do this sort of thing consider it to be immoral to pay a fair level of tax on their earnings.
Slashdot Mirror
Even then, you could only get it down to the temperature of the surrounding space.
Yes, but that's a somewhat tricky thing to quantify. The problem is that space is actually filled with a very tenuous high-temperature plasma (at a little shy of 70kK — yes, that's kilokelvin), and in between all those super-hot ions you've got the background radiation which is actually darn cold (about 2.7K). The average temperature might be a bit warmer than liquid nitrogen, but that hides a multitude of complex details; it's not a normal equilibrium system.
So what you actually do is you have a shield to keep the sun away from the rest of the satellite (you need that anyway) and with a little work you can also keep much of the solar wind away too. Then, you have two parts: one is a big-ass radiator that exploits the difference with the CMB, and the other is your instrument package which you need to cool, and where you need a heat pump to do it. Remember, you don't need every part to be that cold, and in fact you could never achieve that; all you need to keep really cold are the instruments themselves plus anything that the instruments are actually pointing at (e.g., waveguides). That should be doable.
"Dollars", "Bitcoins" and "jars of pickled hamster poop", united once more in the same sentence as they were truly meant to be! It all makes sense now!
Except in Denmark, you don't have San Diego, New England, and everything in between (not to mention the outlying territories...)
Why is that an "except"? It looks like a statement of the obvious.
Proportionately, the US doesn't have as many major bridges or ferries as Denmark, as there are a lot of islands in Denmark (and far fewer people than in the US). But so what? They're not identical. Why does this matter to the argument? Are you saying that people become happier to pay taxes when they live next to the sea?? That would at least be a more amusing argument than most I've heard (even if it is a total BS strawman argument that isn't to be taken seriously at all).
Come on! Give us a hint why you thought what you wrote was a worthwhile addition to this conversation.
Practically, it works by taxing on the whole amount that it is sold for, but allowing the reclaiming of the tax already collected on the input goods and services required to make the product or service. Since you have to be in the system to reclaim, there's a strong incentive for businesses to cooperate (and that keeps the total fraud level down).
Absolutely there are some who legitimately cannot take care of themselves. However, that does not mean that government needs to intervene. There used to be a time when families took care of the invalids.
So... do you have family to look after you if you have the bad fortune to require help? No? Or what happens if your family just decides that you're not someone they really want to talk to, and that they don't want you sponging off them? Or maybe you've just previously moved across country to a new job before the accident and you don't have any family nearby. Should we just leave you out naked in the middle of winter to die of exposure then so that you're not a burden on the rest of us? No? Then we're into arguing about the level of social support.
I'm not going to say that the current level is right or wrong, but to say that there should be no support at all is pretty abhorrent. Yes, you could say that the support should be done through various sorts of non-profits (religious or otherwise) but that's just moving the responsibility around. (You do want to pay your tithes, your 10%-of-income church "taxes", right?) It's also important to note that having government handle these things affects many things in subtle ways; for example, it makes it far easier to move to a new job in a different part of the country as you will be able to know that, should shit happen, you won't be destitute. Maybe you've never moved far from one place, but lots of people have and it is an important part of making the economy more efficient and people better able to have appropriate work.
The biggest problem I have with so many who style themselves conservatives is that they start from the position, no, from the axioms, that taxes are too high and that government is always 100% bad. Given that I reject those as axioms (without comment on whether they could be true in some situations) having a sane discussion is rather difficult. (I prefer to start my 'social calculus' from axioms like "Don't treat any person like shit unless they have personally proved that they deserve it." YMMV.)
IT titles are indeed screwed up and don't mean a whole lot. They may hint at the proportion one spends on a given type of task, but little more.
They hint at responsibilities and therefore salary level. Someone who describes himself as a programmer to his management is likely to be paid a lot less than someone who describes himself as a computer system architect. It's mostly BS, of course. But only mostly; the additional responsibilities (and hence additional opportunity to screw things up big-time) really are there. (Between themselves, those who program computers are much less hierarchic, at least in my experience: what is right is right, whoever says it.)
And again, oddly enough, some of the best indicators were clear, intelligent, structured English and an interest in music.
Those would be good correlates. The English skills are an indication that they can read very well (useful for background research) and communicate (also really useful), and music skills are often associated with ability in math and logic; they appear to use the same area of the brain.
The trick is that you want to get rid of the ones who want to coast, whether or not they've got degrees. A lazy ass is a lazy ass, whatever pieces of paper they've got. However, I'm not going to pretend that a lack of a degree automatically makes you better either. The advantage of a degree — apart from having a piece of paper that says you can actually work and think a bit, at least some of the time — is that you've probably got better contacts and have been exposed to more sophisticated ideas than someone without. For someone who is good and hard working in the first place, a degree is a good thing as it should expand the range of ideas in their mental toolbox.
But after a year or two of work, that degree doesn't matter a whole lot. At that point, it should be possible to see if they're a stupid lazy ass on the basis of their work (or lack of it). You don't want stupid lazy asses, at least not for programming jobs.
You're analogy fails in one critical aspect. You assume 20000 people going to one place to eat a hamburger is a bad thing. If people flock to the freeway then that means people are out of the side roads which free up to handle more traffic. There aren't magically any more people in the world, the traffic just redistributes to find a new equilibrium. The end result is the free way is still congested, but not as much, and neither are the other mainroads which people used to take instead.
Even that is over-simplistic. Having the additional road capacity there encourages people to make journeys they would otherwise not do, or to travel using very different routes than they otherwise would; in a sense, roads generate traffic.
Infrastructure planning is tricky. Its impact (both good and bad) can be felt very widely.
The article itself is concerned with the fact that serial ports offer little to no authentication on their lines.
But is the serial line routed off site? If you have to have physical access to the immediate locale or go through a properly-secured terminal server, the fact that the serial line itself doesn't do a lot of auth doesn't really matter.
The real problem comes when people connect these things to the internet (either directly or indirectly) without thinking about network security. (Security always makes things more difficult, but good security is that which makes things much more difficult for the unauthorized while having little impact on the authorized.)
Unfortunately ALL SCADA systems I've used which require authentication had a default username and password set.
Did I mention that SCADA vendors need introducing to a +3 Blessed Baseball Bat of Cluefulness?
HTML5 should include a robust media streaming framework
Actually, could we not have that? It's main use will be for obnoxious adverts (you know I'm right) and I'd love to be without those. I can live without Youtube (and don't use Netflix or its competitors).
DRM by definition is not GPL compliant
Has anyone written a GPL HTML5 browser? Even one that only implements an early draft and completely omits video rendering? (I don't think HTML5 requires that browsers actually be able to render video, merely that they know what a piece of markup intended to render video looks like in the document and what they are going to do about it if they encounter it.) If there is no such browser, grumping about the problems with licensing isn't very helpful, since there's only a very abstract problem.
There's also no technical reason for a video renderer that supports DRM to not be licensed under at least some versions of the GPL, provided that the key cryptographic secret involved is not code but rather some sort of key; the GPL does not and never has required that one builder of a piece of software be able to impersonate another (and that would be fundamentally a dishonest thing to do). The problems you have persuading someone else to give you a crypto key for your build are not technical in nature. OTOH, DRM that is compliant with the spirit of what the GPL represents would be prohibitively expensive for service providers as they'd have to encrypt the content with a per-user key, which explains why GPL-licensed software isn't popular in that space. Nevertheless, it is necessary to distinguish between the letter of what is stated and the general intent.
But it's all theoretical. There's no GPL browser worth the name, and so there's neither a presence of nor a lack of a DRM video rendering component within such a browser.
Just your average clueless control-freak politician.
He's not just a politician, he's a world leader!
So, slightly more objectionable and clueless than average for a politician, but within normal variation. Of course, this is an uncosted kite that he's flying, so who knows whether it will manage to get implemented. (Mind you, it's a stupid policy that I'd bet is driven by the latest moral panic in the Daily Fail, so it's got far more legs than it actually merits. Oh well.)
But how would one have implemented new HTML5 features, such as the 2D Canvas,
Simple. Each pixel is a separate div.
I've seen that sort of monstrosity done for real. Apparently, it was the only way to make the code work reliably with IE6...
3. Realize if there was some way to retaliate or gain an advantage, they wouldn't be doing this for a living.
I'm waiting for SIFPTP (Simple Internet Face-Punch Transfer Protocol) to be implemented.
The real lesson here is for British politicians and courts to tidy up our messy libel system (assuming she is telling the truth) so companies using these tactics are out of pocket so they think twice about filing these kind of law suits.
That's mostly how it works right now, you know. People shouldn't be encouraged to bring private cases at all, but rather should work out their differences between themselves and leave the courts for where agreement just can't be reached.
Those who turn to the courts to defend their reputation often do so because they have so little good reputation left to defend.
Why is the truth not considered a valid defense in British courts?
It is a defense, and it is in fact a really strong one. It's not an absolute defense though; it's possible for there to be true things that still shouldn't be said in public (e.g., where the defendant is maliciously saying true-but-very-embarrassing facts purely to hurt the plaintiff). It's a really rare variation though, and I'd be startled if that was applicable here.
Mind you, the court still has to decide whether the statements at question were actually true. If the statements are not true, they also have to decide whether level of damages asked for is reasonable; the plaintiff is not guaranteed to get what he wants even if he wins, as courts are typically constrained to keep damages awarded proportionate to the level of harm incurred, and it would be really surprising if a single tweet were to cause that much damage without containing something really horrible.
If this case turns to be another round of "rich asshole turns to courts too easily" then the main loss to the defendant, whether or not of the case, will be the time spent actually doing the defense.
Actually, you're 100% right. I think I was trying to decide between the phrase "content cartel" and "copyright maximalists", so my aging brain settled on "content maximalists". Would you change that to "copyright maximalists" for me, please :)
It's a pity you didn't mix it the other way. "Copyright cartel" would have worked just fine.
Well apparently the law in Germany says you can't provide a service without having a method for customers to contact the provider directly.
But does the law require the use of any specific technological method? (It would seem pretty dumb if that was the case, as technologies do change.) Would a variation on an online forum where users can elect to not have their questions be public and where there is someone (or several people) dedicated to answering the questions be an acceptable solution? After all, for virtually anything where you are dealing with Google at all, you'd be online and so able to use a web forum.
Those reference works translate quite well to this technology called HTML that's been around a few years now. I hear that there are even handheld devices which can navigate those sorts of documents efficiently...
The vancouver Aquarium had a movie on penguins last spring (2012) featuring typical effects as well as in theatre snow, rain, fog, tentacle slaps behind the ankles and jiggling seats. We did miss the smells however.
Miss the smell of millions of seabirds? No, you didn't. That might be an experience, but it isn't one worth experiencing...
It's not rocket surgery, getting people to go to theaters. But Smell-a-Vision is not the solution.
But doing it right requires real money to be invested! Can't do that!
Just be glad it isn't Spiderman 2!
You're doing it wrong. They have this technology called Swype now.
How does that work when writing Perl? Heck, how does it work even with something as verbose as Java? (No, having to go back to using COBOL would not be a step forward!)
The rules are exceptionally complex, even by the standards of US tax law, but in general a US person cannot control a foreign investment corporation (such as your Cayman shell corp) and not pay tax on its income, because its income is US income (income from licensing the IP in the US). Loans from a controlled company back into the US to the controller can be considered distributions of income in some circumstances, such as these.
That's why there are certain people in these tax havens who specialize in controlling shell companies for tax purposes. Remember, the people who do this sort of thing consider it to be immoral to pay a fair level of tax on their earnings.