If they collected it for all non US persons I wouldn't mind. Although don't they already collect all this info for non US persons. If not, maybe they should.
"When they came for the Jews, I did nothing, for I am not a Jew. When they came for the Socialists, I did nothing, for I am not a Socialist. When they came for the Labour Leaders, the Homosexuals, the Gypsies, I did nothing, for I am none of these, and when they came for me, I was alone, there was no one to stand up for me.
--
Pastor Martin Niemoller
The program, which has never been tested fully, was launched after the Sept. 11, 2001, hijacking attacks to refine electronic techniques for using personal information to identify and rate potential threats.
This sentence means that the program hijacked attacks [...]. I think they meant:
The program, which has never been tested fully, was launched after the Sept. 11, 2001 hijacking attacks to refine electronic techniques for using personal information to identify and rate potential threats.
Nope. The original form was correct. Grammar and spelling flames have a tendancy to reveal more about the flamer's dubious language skills than the text being criticised.
A comma is
required
after the year in dates in this format. The year itself is treated like a non-restrictive clause that must be set off by commas on both sides when it follows the month. Now, if the word "was" had been preceeded by "which", then the comma after "2001" could have ended "2001" and possibly the clause starting with the comma before "which" as well. This hypothetical case would illustrate an ambiguity in English grammar.
If the date had been properly specified in ISO-8601 format ("2001-09-11") then the ambiguity would have been avoided.
Another way of looking at it is that since the wedding party is providing both the subject matter and the market for photographs is that the photographer should pay the wedding party for the concession right to take and sell photos. Of course, unless there were an unusually larger number of guests or it was a celebrity wedding, the cost per photograph would need to be pretty high for the photographer to recoup their costs (so high it might kill the market).
The only grammatical superiority you can claim in that quote is putting a period at the end of the sentence. Other than that, the original
is superior to your own version. Meters are "peaked". People are "piqued". The original post, in sections not quoted, did omit some non-essential words as a form of shorthand. The use of "un-copyrightable" is a little suspicious, but use of "un-copyrightable" and "uncopyrightable" combined exceeds use of "not copyrightable", "non-copyrightable", and "noncopyrightable" in a google search.
(My punctuation is deliberately placed outside the quotation marks as I am using the alpha version of the English language, in which maintaining the integrity of quotations gets precedence over superficial typographic conventions).
The Department of Habitual Stupidity's (DHS's) recommendation of Security through Obscurity is absurd. It only serves to protect cellular providers from having their level of incompetence revealed to the customers, potential customers, and shareholders. This secrecy will compromise national security by allowing companies to continue to do sloppy engineering and maintenence
of important communications infrastructure.
Instead, all of the reports should be made VERY public, including searches on the FCC site listing the total minutes of downtime and number of affected customers by company within an area.
This will allow stockholders and customers to favor more robust systems. As for the vulnerable parts of the system that might be of interest to terrorists, they are rather hard to keep secret as they tower 200 feet above the landscape: the main towers that the smaller cells uplink to.
One nice thing about this approach, compared to many other systems, is that it could lend itself to distributed production which would spread wealth around to many companies and local economies rather than concentrating wealth in the hands of a few.
The design requires over 2000 laser/telescope modules each in an intermodal container. Instead of having one contractor build them all, imagine having a hundred contractors (average two per state), perhaps many in university towns, each building 20 units to a common design. Move the
factory to the workers instead of vice versa.
Each production facility would have a large flatbed CNC mill, mirror grinder, welding equipment, and a small electronics shop or
would be a consortium of local manufacturing
shops with excess capacity (i.e. a machine shop and a welding shop). Many more smaller companies would produce subassemblies.
Assuming that production was not continuous but came to an end, making them all in one factory
would require large numbers of people to move to one city which would then have a large layoff and unemployment that the local economy could not absorb at the end of production. By spreading it out, local economies would be better able to absorb the layoffs. And the number of layoffs would actually be reduced because the 100 different companies could each have different transition plans to developing other products
so you wouldn't need another project of the same magnitude to absorb the labor and manufacturing surplus at the conclusion of the project. The distributed surplus of manufacturing capability
would then spur innovation in other areas. I am thinking that each factory would have, rather than single purpose fixtures, a more general purpose programmable production ability (such as CNC tools) that would need little retooling to work on other projects. Also,
many of the manufacturers would be applying existing facility and labor surpluses to this
project. Manufacturing the individual lasers would still be handled by a small number of plants with a few more turning them into laser arrays. Specialized tasks like silvering the mirrors might be cheaper to do by shipping an intermodal container based factory with metalization equipment to the various factories or by shipping the mirrors in to a central site. Mass producable electronics like tracking systems could be manufactured at a smaller number of plants and shipped to the individual plants. The honeycomb mirror blanks could be manufactured by the University of Arizona Mirror lab, Corning, or similar glass manufacturer and possibly spin cast to approximate curvature.
When the booster modules are completed a tilt bed truck picks them up and transports them to the nearest railroad container facility to be put on a rail car for shipment to the final laser site.
The only huge scale production operation would be if you decided to build a nuclear power plant to power the system.
The individual launch craft would be small enough that their manufacture could be distributed as well.
The distributed nature would reduce cost overruns
which are routine for large contractors since how many systems were ordered from each manufacturer would depend on the quality and cost of the systems they produced. The first (prototypes) would necessarily be built in small shops; this could be extended to final production and still keep a reasonable economy of scale by using flexible tooling and centralized engineering costs and by eliminating beaurocracy and monopolistic thinking and by reusing idle factory spaces around the country. The quantity of units isn't really high enough, anyway, to fall into the economy of scale of a fixed purpose production line (like for an automobile).
I imagine the laser site looking like a freight yard with perhaps 20 widely spaced parallel sidings with 100 containers each. The added expense of leaving rail cars under each container is offset by the ease of replacing modules although you could use a crane to move the container onto smaller wheel
If you (or another slashdot reader) are in the area, maybe you should get a boat (or a long stick) and a cheap ohmeter and find out. That way you are actually measuring the conductivity and not the salinity. Radio waves don't care if the water is conductive because of salt or because someone dumped lead in the water, though salinity should be the dominant factor. Kluge a couple of
electrodes a fixed distance apart and record your readings at various points (GPS could improve the quality of position recordings). Keep the spacing of the electrodes and the height exposed to water constant (coat the portion near the water line with, preferably with the two distances the same to avoid the need to scale. If you want to the minimum amount of work, just take the probes from the ohm meter and rubber band them together and imerse them in the water. Just measure the length and width so you can scale the results to "ohms per square". Paint over the wider portion of the metal probes, which would otherwise create ambiguity with the width measurement, with nail polish. Ideally, you would float the electrodes horizontally instead of immerse them vertically.
As for salt water and radio signals, the conductivity of the water could lead to radio signals either being absorbed or reflected. In the case of reflections, destructive interference could be an issue.
The primary advantage PowerDVD seems to offer over open source players, in my opinion, is reverse play or review mode.
In the open source players, you can skip back to the begining of the scene or the previous scene but skipping back 10 seconds or so doesn't work. This is really the only difficult feature missing to make several open source players full featured players. One minor feature missing from open source players (don't recall PowerDVD. windvd, or media player having it either) is single frame forward and reverse (reverse depends on reverse play working). An assortment of fast and slow play speeds would also be nice (Power DVD offers many fast speeds but only a couple slow ones). An instant replay button (skip back 10 seconds or so and then play forward) would also be convenient.
Most of the free players seem to lack deinterlacing or the ability to switch deinterlacing mode on the fly (either manually or automatically) when the content changes. Deinterlacing is needed when they include content shot on a video camera or foolishly telecine (film to video conversion) the movie before encoding. A few DVDs actually mix modes within a single title.
Free players:
ogle (supports menus, no deinterlacing)
Xine (supports menus, has
deinterlacing)
VLC (supports menus, can't switch
deinterlacing on fly)
mplayer (no menus, can't switch deinterlacing on the fly)
The Bossa DSL is more constrained than C or C++ in that, for example, pointers (known for being the cause of many bugs) are absent and infinite loops can't be defined.
The omega incomplete domain-specific language (DSL) is not a feature, its a bug. Turing machines have more smarts.
The last thing I would want when writing a scheduler is some broken language that interferes with what I can do. If you can't be trusted with pointers and loops, you don't have any business writing a scheduler. Yes, you can lock up the machine easily with an infinite loop
in the scheduler (or almost anywhere else in the kernel). But you can also lock up the machine simply by excluding certain processes from the run queue. For example, lets suppose we
write a buggy scheduler that only lets a single process run. The system is dead.
Now, suppose that I want to incorporate a task in the scheduler that every 100 time slices takes a slice for itself to analyse each process to
determine what kind of scheduling coefficients
should be used for that process. Ooops,
Requires a loop. Can't get there from here.
At least in this particular example one could steal a few CPU cycles each timeslice to do the caclulations and it would probably scale better but there are probably algorithms that might
benifit from having them.
There could be a case made that avoiding loops in a scheduler is a good thing (since it is likely
to lead to implementations that don't scale well)
but prohibiting them is not a good thing.
Likewise, pointers are a very useful tool. If they have implemented a list manipulation toolkit that handles most of the pointers for you, that is a good thing but eliminating the ability to handle pointers is a bad thing. Sophisticated schedulers might want to do things like launch their own priviledged subprocesses which monitor performance.
Remember an obsolete language called Pascal?
Pascal tried to use an Orwellian Newspeak approach to making poor programmers into mediocre programmers by taking away the means to express
dangerous ideas. It also turned excellent programmers into mediocre programmers.
I remember when it seemed like the majority starting projects were using Pascal but I also noticed over the heydey of Pascall that the majority of projects that were succesfully completed were written in C. I also remember when a simple change (at least in C) to a Pascal program doubled the size of the program and had a substantial negative impact on its maintainability.
Another analogy is Javascript. The core language (ECMAscript) is deliberately so weak that about the worst thing you can do is waste cpu cycles
with an infinte loop. It was deliberately weak because it was intended to run code provided by untrusted users. Then they incorporated access and control over the behavior of the browser giving the scripts the ability to take over the screen, steal private information, and perform cross domain hacks. There have been something like 500 security holes reported in Javascript.
Well, DML is kinda like that. The language is so weak that you can't hurt yourself until you actually give it control over process scheduling, its original intended purpose. At which point
it becomes trivially easy to crash the machine.
DSL is like an unloaded gun, it gives you a false
sense of security.
The Bossa DSL schedulers could be rewritten - almost line for line - in a subset of C with
the Bossa list handling tools.
If you wanted the illusion of safety that DSL provides, you could restrict yourself to that subset. If, on the other hand, you were an expert programmer, the full language is
availible. And you don't polute the kernel tree with the implementation of an entirely unnecessary language.
Now, they have done some good things here. Loadable scheduler modules. Separating queue linked list handling from the actual kernel code.
Defining an event based API. Allowing for more than one scheduler. And abstracting
the scheduling enough that you could write a
user space test pro
Maybe the average Joe won't care but I would rather have everything stored on my laptop that I physically carry with me. Why would I trust a random computer? Boo these men.
Yep, I have the same concerns. I haven't done anything of any consequence on machines I don't control for about a decade now.
Lets imagine a much safer system than they are describing: an iPod sized device that is a complete desktop computer sans keyboard/and display. You carry this on your person and
use public "terminals" consisting of nothing more than a usb keyboard, mouse, and VGA monitor. The risk of such a setup is MUCH lower than the system described and yet there is still an appreciable
degree of risk. The more popular the public terminal is, the closer it is to sensitive
organizations, or the more affluent the demographic, the more incentive there is to
install radio transmitters or recording devices
into the keyboard and monitor. The starbucks
across the street from the headquarters
of a multinational corporation has a high
likelyhood of being bugged.
Compared to this scenario, the system proposed in
the article would be much easier to compromise.
No special transmitter hardware needed. No receiver hidden in a closet or van. No need
to conspicuously disassemble or switch equipment in a public place. No need to "spill" beer in the vent holes on the monitor so they will call in a "repairperson" to fix it. Nope, just compromise the host OS and have it transmit the data over the net. So instead of being mostly limited to inside jobs, government spy agencies, and corporate espionage the compromise of this system is likely to be accomplished by mere script kiddies.
Similarly, VNC on public machines would be very vulnerable to intercepting the data while it
was still in plaintext.
One could try to argue that
trusted computing
systems with a Frist chip would make this
secure, yet these systems give control to
the government and multinationals corporation,
who have a bad track record where privacy is
concerned and are also want to erase data
they assume you have pirated or perhaps
is incriminating towards them.
Public terminals (used to?) work pretty well within the scientific community where people were trustworthy or in situations like the IBM internal voicemail/email system where the terminals
were carefully controlled by the organisation
whose secrets are at risk.
Dedicated Employee, Inc. regrets to inform our customers that, due to recent budget cutbacks and rising expenses, we are no longer able to provide free after hours technical support. After hours support will now be charged our standard consulting rates of $150/hr with a 1 hour minimum billing per call. A page or other form of contact to which an out of hours response is
requested or expected will count as a call.
Billing begins at the initiation of contact.
A 50% surcharge will be imposed for any calls which interupt sleep or sexual activity. In addition, for any interruptions impacting relations or a romantic or sexual character,
there will be a $100 surcharge to defray expenses incurred in restoring harmony. In the event that
the call disrupts any movie, play, dining out,
sporting event, or similar activity expenses incurred by Dedicated Employee and companions in attending said event shall become a reimbursable expense. In addition, there will be a $300 dollar infrastructure surcharge for each month in which out of hours services are rendered to help defray the cost of cellular phones, portable and handheld computing, internet connectivity, wireless connectivity, home office space, and other infrastructure expenses.
Any work related calls or other forms of work related contact initiated by customer or their employees, subcontractors, affiliates, agents, customers, or
any other party to whom customer provides our contact information shall constitute acceptance
of these terms on behalf of customer; we would like to underscore the importance of taking whatever steps are necessary to prevent unauthorized calls including, but not limited to, mantaining our out of hours contact information in strict confidence to avoid any liability
for calls.
A 33% discount will be extended for calls where the fee for the call can be entirely deducted from a prepaid deposit account. A late payment penalty of $50 per month plus interest at 5% per month shall apply to any amounts not reimbursed
within 30 days. Questions regarding these terms should be brought up during regular working hours to avoid being billed as an out of hours call.
We believe that these new terms will allow us to provide more efficient, professional, and courteous service by insuring that we have the resources necessary resources at our disposal and by minimizing disruptions. Further,
this new policy will better enable customer to properly account for the previously intangible costs of various possible courses of action.
To minimize the costs incurred under these terms, you may wish to consider instituting a policy of solving foreseeable problems before they they escalate into emergencies. Thank you for your patronage and we look forward to serving you in the future.
Make a fashion statement. Get a tinfoil bag to match your hat.
While tinfoil hats would appeal only to the mentally ill, knapsacks with metal mesh woven in might actually become trendy if companies and organizations don't respect reasonable privacy concerns. And if so, neither the libraries new RFID systems or its old passive systems will
be effective at stopping theft. So, by adopting
RFID, libraries could make their security problems worse. Same goes for stores.
I have no problems with RFID tags on airport luggage. I think it is a great idea, as long as they provide the wire cutters to remove the tags
as you leave the baggage area. But any tag that
becomes permanently attached to an article you
may carry around is potentially a problem.
Likewise, an RFID chip might be convenient in
an employee ID card but a tinfoil pocket protector might be appropriate (though a fatal fashion faux paus) when you leave the office. In the early
days of proximity badges, they weren't that
much of a privacy issue because you weren't
likely to encouter a reader.
So, all things considered, an iButton ring might be a more appropriate security device - contact required. Or a badge that had a built in slide,
just as a 3.5" floppy does. A promiscous ID badge (RFID) could also introduce some potential security holes; you just need two guys with
an RFID radio relay - to get intruder A into
the building we just need to get intruder B in close proximity to Employee C, at which point C's
ID badge will happily authenticate A into the building via the link.
RFIDs could also be handy on large organized events like bike rides (think MS 150) and marathons where tracking people is actually
a good thing (unless you plan to cheat),
because it helps you locate people who may
need assistance.
Somehow, I think I can do without a computer
greeting me as I walk into a Wal-mart:
"Good morning,
John Anderton
Would you like to try new extra strength Preparation H? It is 40% more effective than
the product you have been using."
RFID attached to the disposable cardbord box I buy a DVD player in at walmart doesn't raise a lot of red flags for me but when the damn chip is hidden inside the DVD case, that is a lot more problematic. But a single RFID in a pallet
full of DVDs to track it as it moves around
the warehouse is ok. RFIDs on intermodal containers is a good use - barcodes do not work
well in that environment. An RFID on my car
to go through tollbooths can be a problem but if you put a pushbutton on it so I can activate it,
then it is a good application.
On the otherhand, contact based systems (more
like an iButton than an RFID) for merchandise
pose a lot fewer problems. An an RFID chip
that is programmed to deactivate the RF portion
when you check out but will still respond to
a contact probe at the customer return desk
could be ok. And there could be some
advantages as far as manufacturer QA/QC
if they get the serial numbers of every
product returned as defective within
minutes of return, though this works a lot
better if it was manufactured two weeks ago here in the US and delivered just in time than if it was sent via container ship from the Pacific Rim
and the assembly line has been churning out high defect rate products without feedback for 3 months.
Encryption doesn't work for the manufacturing/retail environment, there are just two many people at too many stores who have
access to the key.
RFID that falls back to contact probe operation after checkout (or before shipment if mail order),
solves most of the privacy issues.
Allowed access for retail products:
Manufacturer
Distributer
Retail or online store. But only the store that
sold the product and only until it leaves
the store the first time at which point
it must be deactivated.
Better for whom? The hundred and fifty other passengers who are left cooling their heels, and were already going to have to rush to make a connection at O'Hare? The pilot who ends up in a later spot in the queue for takeoff? The airline, which needs that plane to be on the ground, cleaned, turned around, and ready to load a fresh batch of passengers half an hour after wheels-down at its destination? The airport, that is waiting for you to clear the gate for another bird?
Nope--it sucks for all those people. The airline is going to send your bag on the next flight (in one to twenty-four hours, depending on the destination) and have it couriered to your hotel or home.
I had aready considered all that, which is why I
imposed reasonable time limits to exclude the intractable cases where someones suitcase comes open on the conveyor or the bomb inspectors find a bomb (in that case, however, the flight will be delayed anyway while the swat team storms the plane). The inconvenience to passengers and the airlines of lost baggage
is much worse than you suggest. "locating and delivering misdirected luggage costs the airline about $100 million annually". And the opportunity cost and incidental expenses of that lost baggage to customers may be higher. Basically, your approach is the Microsoft software approach to
air travel. You effectively propose features, such as getting there 10 minutes faster, that look good on paper but don't actually work reliably. Yeah, sometimes you will get there 10 minutes faster. And other times you will have to wait more than half an hour while they unload the plane and reload it or get to the other end and have to
wait 24 hours for your luggage. These are the things that really inconvenience passengers and cause logistical problems for the airline, not
a 10 minute delay, that is explicitly incorporated in the schedule. In Switzerland, you can almost set your clock by the trains (95% are within 4 minutes of scheduled time) but in India the trains are notoriously late (one person I met was actually surprised to see a train arrive at its scheduled time - it was yesterdays train).
Good management dictates that you spend the extra 10 minutes to make sure that only the right luggage and all of the right luggage is on the plane and in doing so you actually improve the timeliness of your flights.
The passenger ratio of 150:1 you suggest is bad math. Other people
on your flight have also lost baggage. Even by the statistics in this article, it is 80:1 - numbers which my past air travel experience
would suggest are fictional.
In my own experience it was more like 20:1. And if anyone of a groups bags were lost, everyone in the group could be affected, too, further raising the odds.
They may only count "complaints" but if your bag doesn't arrive, they may tell you to come back in a couple hours and file a complaint if it hasn't shown up by then. But I haven't flown in a while so things may have improved considerably. If they have, it may be in large part because the airplanes are required to sit at the gate longer
anyway and check bags against passengers and because the passengers have to check in (and thus check their baggage) so long before a flight now
to allow time to get through airport security. In other words, the plan I was suggesting has effectively already been implemented, in part,
even if not intentionally.
One of the people I used to travel with had a rule: he would never leave for one trip until
his baggage got back from his last trip. And
he did have occasions to apply that rule.
Not everyones itenerary is a simple as taking a taxi or car to a hotel near the airport.
People get off one airline and get on a flight to another airline that doesn't cross-check baggage. People get off an airplane and take a 500 mile bus ride the next day. People get off of airplanes and take a shuttle bus to the next state over.
People get off the plane and have places to go
and people to see and not having your bag can
be a signifi
I work in a library, and RFID has been trying to make its way in for years.
[...]
RFID is not always the beast...
The library is one of the places where the intentions are likely to be good but they
side effects may be bad. Librarians have
traditionally been very privacy conscious
(though the government by laws and funding
can twist their arms).
I agree that RFID could be very useful in libraries (I have 4 librarians in the family,
not counting my own experience in the distant
past) since libraries already use security tags and bar codes. However, there are potential privacy issues in library use compared to the airport case because those RFID tags can not be
thrown away when you leave the library. The RFID tag, directly or indirectly, identifies the person carrying the books and the books themselves.
That book you are carrying will identify itself
to every RFID scanner you pass and these scanners
will become more common. And many of those scanners could record information about foreign
RFID tags as well as their own. So, you walk
out of the library and through the subway turnstiles. scan.
Homeland security now has a record of you location
at a particular point in time. You stop at a barnes and noble and buy a book. Of course, you walk through a scanner to get out of the store and because you are now carrying a book with one of their RFID tags, they know who you are. B&N has now added the list of books you are carrying to their marketing database. We will skip the
airport because you know you have a microscope
up your ass there. Now on your way to the job interview, you are of course scanned as you pass through the scanners in the lobby and it is correlated with the RFID from your visitors pass. Your interviewer checks the scanner logs. If you
were lucky and didn't have anything prejudicial on you, just think of having your briefcase or backpack scanned every day as you arrive at work.
Now you go to the video store and of course walk through a scanner. Next a stop off at wal-mart.
Your purchase of an item there with a credit card
identifies you and we all know you are going through scanners there. And the supermarket.
You get home to find that UPS (scan, scan) has
delivered some reading material from amazon
that is even more prejudicial than what you can get at the library or B&N so the scanners will have a bigger heyday.
Most of those scanners are capable of collecting marketing information on you and many owned by
companies that are very eager to do so (hence
all the savings cards programs at the bookstore,
supermarket, video store, etc). Some could
contribute to a movement tracking database.
One of them can cost you a job, without your knowing it. And others could lead to harassment
by security personel at subways, airports, post offices, and other government controlled locations.
Far too many people will know about your sexual (bondage, polyamoury, gay/lesbian/bisexual/transexual), technical (microbiology, nuclear physics, chemistry, electronics, explosives), religious (The Qur'an) political (Chomsky, anarchism, socialism, human rights) reading material. And this is the situation before the folks from the
Thought Police ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Homeland Security
go around attaching little black boxes to all
the RFID scanners (with the employees subject
to gag orders) so they can data mine everyones
data.
There are some possible ways to reduce the effect.
Encrypt the data on the RFID tag so only the library can read it (until the key is stolen).
Limit the range on the RFID tag to 2 inches and
put it in the dewey decimal or LC number tag on
the spine so you can still inventory the books on the shelf by running a scanner directly over the spines. But with more power and better antennas
the walk through scanners may still be able to pick up what a hand scanner could only detect 2 inches away. Or just use the old fashioned method of bar codes and passive security tags
and do inventory the old fashioned way of pulling
all the books on the shelf out far enough to expose the barcode label and push them back in as you scan each one.
They have the technology to prevent the plane from taking off until all the passengers who belong to the luggage are on board. It would be pretty trivial modification to keep the plane from taking off until all the luggage belonging to the passengers was on board, within reasonable time limits. Might be better to wait ten minutes on the runway than hours or days for your luggage.
The current method, of sending your suitcase on the next flight if it misses your flight (or just sending it on the wrong flight) is a bit of a security risk. All you need is a bomb that is capable of pinging your fake cell phone through aluminum (use magnetic fields) to determine if you are on board or not when it reaches altitute and a fistful of airline tickets. You just wait for baggage handlers to do their magic. Does increase the cost and chances that the security people might accidently do their jobs and detect a bomb, though, if you have to go on multiple flights. Checking in at the last possible minute can help. Maybe suicidal fanatics are cheaper, though.
So there are what, 4 people using linux at home that also have intimate enough relationships to actually produce offspring
At least some of us Linux users are capable of extremely intimate relationships.
If there is a small number of Linux users with kids, it may be because we are smart enough to read the
man page for condoms.
And of course, the little part in the birth control pill manual that says they aren't effective for 30 days after you start taking
them or after missing a dose.
Windows machines, and their owners, get knocked up all the time because they aren't smart enough to RTFM.
Often, even their operating system was loaded on the computer without their consent. It isn't that windows users have more sex, its just that they have more mishaps.
And Linux users are also capable of creating intellectual creations which reduces the psychological need to spawn biological
creations.
Mac users, on the other, hand may have trouble reproducing because they are always too busy using their
iBrators
:-).
An accuweather boycott has been created at
Boycott City
.
However, it may take 24 hours before the boycott
is officially added to the list and you can join.
If you want to join, send yourself a reminder message to visit the site tomorrow.
This is my first experiment with such a system.
The primary value of such an online boycott is that people can search to find out if people are boycotting a company - and why - before doing business with a company. As an added bonus,
when you join a boycott it shows up on the main
page thereby raising awareness.
The boycott city system itself is pretty crude and
doesn't yet have a large user base.
Half way up, at 32,000 miles, there is no appreciable drag. Also, I question your mass-density assumptions.
Once that portion enters the earths atmosphere, however, it
will begin decelerating and disintegrating and will have plenty of time to do so before it
can hit objects on the ground.
Upon what are you basing your assumptions of its width and overall mass per unit of width-length?
Well, according to the
documentation
the nanotubes have a density lower then kevlar, and the lower portion is 2CM wide by 5
microns thick. Now, if they goop the nanotubes
up with epoxy, that could affect the density by
a little bit (they don't plan to use much). With just the nanotubes, we are looking at a weight of 130grams per kilometer of cable
(0.02M * 0.000005M * 1000M *1300 Kg/M^3 = 0.130Kg). For comparison, I just measured
a piece of reynolds heavy duty aluminum foil
at around 0.5 mils (12.7 microns). So, one
food service roll (18"x500foot) could be cut
into 22 ribbons and welded end to end to make
3.3Km of cable (at 2-3 times the thickness)
and more than twice the density (2700 Kg/M^3).
So, your aluminum replica will be about 5 times
as heavy and (very roughly) 1000 times weaker
than 3.3Km of nanotube cable.
The tensile string of the nanotubes is
130GPa (19 million psi). The entire 91000KM
length of cable will weigh roughly 18000 Kg,
or about as much as 20 automobiles.
If 1 km of the ribbon hits you at the speed
of sound the force of impact (44.2 kg m/s)
would be the equivalent of a 98 pound weakling bumping into you at a slow walk (2.2mph).
But you might get one hell of a paper cut.
Their worst case estimate for how long a segment
of cable could fall to earth without disintegrating is about 4000km or 3000kg (about the weight of two SUVs). That density is different that what I discussed above because we are talking about a higher strength cable. It looks like the figures I was looking at were
for the cable before it has been beefed up
by the maintenence droids. Now, I don't want
a hummer landing on my head but it doesn't sound
any worse than a stray rocket.
I don't suppose anyone is going to come up with an argument saying that they are in the theaters with their camcorders excersizing their right to time shift...
You lose that bet.
A camcorder can be assistive technology. Keeping them out of the movie theater can be as unethical as turning away people with seeing eye dogs or wheelchairs.
There are quite valid reasons for having and/or using a camcorder or similar device in a theater.
Time shifting. Movie theaters
have limited hours that can make it very
difficult for people who because of work
or sleep disabilities do not run with
the herd, schedule wise. There actually
is a legitimate need to time shift movies
from theaters or even video rentals (the
weeks you can get to the video store are
not necessarily the same weeks you have
time to watch movies).
People with artificial eyes.
Narcoleptics who doze off intermittently
throught the middle of the movie.
People with parkinson's disease who fall
asleep around the same time that movies
are shown in theaters.
People who carry a camcorder or digital
camera with them at all times.
If you think time cannot be as big a barrier
as space, I propose you undertake the following
consciousness raising experiment. Divide into
three groups. One group has to ride around
in a wheel chair for a month. One group can
only go outside the house or watch live tv
or use the phone between the hours of 10PM and
6AM for the same month. The third group
has no constraints on temporal or spacial mobility. Keep track of what each group was
able to do and not do during the course of
the month. And each group should try to
excercise a broad range of activities.
Go to a movie,
rent a movie,
rent a car,
eat a decent meal out (late night bar food and
fast food does NOT count),
ride public transportation,
enter a tournament,
go to a hobby related club meeting,
go to a park (most close at dark),
go to the doctor,
go call a friend on the phone,
go to the library,
go to a book store,
go work out at the gym,
go to the local health food store,
go visit a juice bar,
go buy groceries,
go to a bar/nightclub,
rent a canoe or tube,
visit a saladbar,
go for a hike in the woods,
take a class,
go to a live game,
go see live theater,
go rent a motel room (hint: you will be charged for two days if you sleep past noon),
go talk to your bank manager,
and try holding a decent job.
Unless you live in the city that
never sleeps, you are likely to find that
those with the temporal constraints are as
restricted as those with spacial constraints
and face MUCH greater discrimation from
businesses and government agencies.
On the list above only two: bar/nightclub
and non-healthfood grocery shopping are
really workable. The person in the wheelchair
won't be able to go on a hike but they can
go to the park or canoeing/tubing.
I am
certainly not trying to downplay the hardships
faced by the physical handicaps, but our
society has come a long way in accomodating
their needs compared to time related needs.
And, to add insult to injury, try consulting
with medical people about a sleep disability:
"Thank you for calling the Sleep Center at
the University of Virginia. Our office
hours are from 9AM to 5PM, monday through
friday."
Should handicapped people be forced to wait
until a movie comes out on DVD and not be even
further cut off socially from other people
because they can't discuss movies while
they are still a hot topic? And speaking
of which, why the hell don't they project
subtitles underneath the movies or transmit
them via 802.11 to portable receivers (which
you could borrow if you weren't one of the
borg.)
"Wanna watch a movie together?"
"Yes, but, honey, we live 500 miles apart?" "True, but we have
high speed net access". People today form
or maintain social and even romantic relation
There are two theories: one that terminal velocity would limit the speed and the other that it would come down like a whip. I think both are true to an extent.
In the short term, terminal velocity would not apply since terminal velocity assumes that the only accellerating force is gravity. The tension of the cable would, however, be expected to accelerate the cable to supersonic speeds.
In the long term, drag would eventually slow the cable down to terminal velocity and/or cause it to burn up. A big advantage of the nanotubes is that they keep the weight to surface area ratio low, as does giving the cable a flat rather than round profile. Also, I assume they have very low stretch which would minimize the duration of
accelleration.
The lower portion will not come down like a fluttering newspaper. It will have the tremendous tension accellerating it and it would have weight of its long length encouraging it to fall down lengthwise for minimum drag. Compare the drag if you were to hold a newspaper out the sunroof of a car perpendicular to the line of travel (holding all 4 corners) vs if you were just to hold two corners.
When you double the height of the break (assuming
we are dealing with a section of uniform thickness), you double the mass, double the
acceleration time, halve the acceleration (because the tension has twice as much mass to accelerate), and double the drag. These factors have a tendancy to cancel out. Also, portions high above the tower will take long enough to come down
that they will tend to burn through. The most
dangerous place to break the cable may actually
be pretty close to the ground so that the time
it takes the free end to hit the ground is not
substantially longer than the duration of tension
induced accelleation. The most
dangerous portion of the cable may well be the length just slightly longer than the tower which the tower itself will cause to snap like a whip.
In one sense, the tower makes it more dangerous that way. However, the reasoning behind the
tower may be that the time it would take for the
first part of the cable to hit the ground would be much longer than the duration of tension driven acceleration.
The cable may have low mass per unit length (like a piece of string) but a piece of string accelerated to supersonic speeds will cut. A ribbon will have more drag but could hit you edge on making it sharper than a string. In this case, we appear to be talking about a glorified piece of tinsel. Without the stored energy due to tension and stretch, it will be harmless kinetically; if the stretch energy is low enough it will still be harmless.
I would think that before deploying such a system
you would want to do a pull test (even horizontally) to destruction of a mile long section of cable. You could test smaller sections but they
Any destruction, therefore, should be concentrated at the base station. It is possible that the stretch of the cable is so low that the stored energy in the system due to tension is not significant compared to the effect of drag that there isn't even much risk to the base station.
It looks like the space elevator will not have the amplifying effect in terms of destruction that would make it so appealing to terrorists. The
best way to take out the cable would probably be two rockets with a cable stretched in (a modern day version of the chain shot used to take out the mast of a ship) because it is too narrow a target to take out with a conventional missle. However,
it may well turn out that the two missles are a greater destructive force than the elevators cable they unleash. No, what makes it appealing to terrorists is its economic amplification and symbolic status. Anytime you can take out a multibillion dollar target with a thousands of
dollars worth of missles, it is a good strategic
investment to do so. That being the case,
one of the costs of the elevator is going to be the cost of having the navy patrol the area and the opportunity cost of making a large chunk of ocean off limits.
If you give the police a name other than your own,
that can give them cause to prosecute you. If you still want to do that, don't
use "John Smith" (or worse, a more plausable name).
Tell them "You can call me Ernesto Miranda". That way, you are making
a reference to "Miranda v. Arizona" and the fifth
ammendment. And, they would have a very hard time making a case that you lied
about your identity vs. withheld it (though they may be
able to get you for witholding it). And it would be seriously embarasing to an
officer to tell
a judge, "I didn't realize, your honor, that
Ernesto Miranda was the name of the Plaintiff
in a landmark supreme court decision that
pertained to the rights of people when dealing with police investigations." It might even
jepardize the officers testimony in other cases.
And they probably will indeed be refereing to you
as "Mr. Miranda" when talking about you even after they learn your real name. Technically, I believe Miranda applies after you have been arrested, which could
happen in short order. But if you are going to fight, you might as well do it with some style.
Incidently, based on census statistics regrding the distribtion of first and last names, one would expect there to be about 4000 people in the US who actually are named "John Smith". Actually "James Smith" would the most common male name and "Mary Smith" the most common female name.
The Terry decision that gave police the right
to ask for identification prohibited them from arresting someone for failure/refual to provide ID papers. However, the police in this case did not ask for Hiibel's name, they asked for ID documents and arrested Hiibel for refusing to produce ID documents he already said he did not possess.
Hiibel made a jerk of himself as did the officers
who arrested him.
While the disenting opinions were logical, the majority opinion was falacious.
Block quotes
are from the majority opinion:
Hiibel s contention that his conviction violates the Fifth Amendment s prohibition on self-incrimination fails because disclosure of his name and identity presented no reasonable danger of incrimination.
But if he had any outstanding warrants it would have been incriminating. So, if he told them his name he could have been arrested and if he didn't
tell his name he also could be arrested under this
decision, thus nullifying a persons right.
While police in this case did have reasonable suspicion and thus were within the rights to question Hiibel, they did not provide information
to him, under demand, that would substantiate that fact, therefore one can argue that he was also within his rights to refuse questions about his
identity. Actually, they did mention the heard
about the fight earlier
but when he specifically asked about the matter
under investigation, they evaded the question.
But his daughter said she had hit him, not the other way around. If that is true, then Hiibel
was the victim not the assailent. Therefore,
the police (though they didn't realize it) were demanding that the victim of an
assault, who had not indicated a desire to press charges, identify himself.
As a result, the Fourth Amendment itself cannot require a suspect to answer questions. This case concerns a different issue, however. Here, the source of the legal obligation arises from Nevada state law, not the Fourth Amendment.
This is falacious. It basically says that since the fourth ammendment does not require him to identify himself, it does not apply. But the fourth ammendment
does apply, not because it
requires him to identify himself but because
it restricts the rights of police regarding
seach and seizure. In order for it not to
apply, the supreme court was obligated to
explain why a request for identification did not constitute unlawful search and
seizure.
Answering a request to disclose a name is likely to be so insignificant in the scheme of things as to b
Parent poster goes on at great, ungramatical, length expounding on the supposed erroneous
grammer of the list in the following sentence:
He makes a great case for why DRM is bad for society, business, and artists, why it simply don't work, and why Microsoft... should not invest in it
Here are parenthesis that show that there
are actually two nested lists:
He makes a great case for (WHY DRM is bad for (society, business, AND artists)), WHY it simply don't work), AND WHY Microsoft... should not invest in it)
Nested lists like this are one reason why English grammer was revised to requre a "," before the word "and" in a list as both a visual and
verbal (pause) marker. The other reason being to
bind the word "artists" into "(society, business
and artists)" rather than "society, (business and artists)". [<-- intentional] The word "and" itself is there to convey grouping. Also notice that each item in the outer list starts with the same word ("why") to provide further verbal clues.
Once you parse the lists properly, you will find
that parallelism was maintained.
Yes nested lists have the potential to be confusing but they are useful sometimes.
And if you can't come up with uses for them,
it probably means that your thought patterns are way too simplistic to accurately represent reality.
The subject line of this posting contains a gramatical error in using the word "don't"
instead of "doesn't". Did you honestly think,
even for a second, that I didn't intend it to?
Writers deliberately break the rules of grammer
when it serves a purpose. In this case, the
purpose was to sound derisive towards a certain
grammer troll. Just as the original posting may or may not have made that mistake on purpose in order to deride those who advocate DRM. Given
competent handling of nested lists (a concept
beyond the meger understanding of a self proclaimed grammer cop), I will give the
original author the benefit of the doubt.
In any event, it using the wrong form of the
word did not detract from anyone's ability
to comprehend the sentence. And sometimes
people just like to abuse the English language;
it has certainly abused us enough.
I am not a grammer wiz. I can't, for example, remember what a subjunctive gerund is. Spelling and gramatical errors included at no extra charge.
Someone who sends a lot of mail can still do so, through the ISPs outgoing mail filters. They
should be blocking all outbound SMTP except to
the ISP outbound SMTP relays unless the
user has specifically requested direct outbound SMTP (which should be free, easy to do online,
and quick but you will be required to 1)read some stuff, 2) provide a justification (which will be accepted by default)).
Doing half ass like this is just a ploy to cut
down on tech support calls from people who didn't
configure their email client. The relays
can then monitor for evidence of spam/virus
activity. Unfortunately, blocking these ports
does deviate from the principles of TCP/IP but
in the case of email there is a compelling public
interest to make the default state be blocked.
Blocking malicious traffic close to the source
has significant societal benefits.
Note that forcing email through your ISP actually helps you if someone files a false complaint
against you.
Because the ISP can calculate a hash on all
messages you send and therefore distinguish
forged abuse complaints from real ones.
One thought as far as selectively blocking
port 25, is that SPF could be used as a sanity
check. If the IP address used (static ip) matches
the SPF (sender policy framework) for the envelope from address, that is a good sign that the traffic
should not be blocked. If you are sending a lot
of email, you should have set up SPF anyway.
How about a Wiki-type thing that lists some previous art for patents that a watchdog group lists out? Get some serious evidence and archive it in one place so the masses can check and see what patents they don't really have to pay attention to.
Good idea. Unfortunately, EFF has totally
bungled the web side of this project.
They need a wiki, outline, or threaded message
system (with threads structured) to list each patent that has been challenged, followed by an overview of what the patent covers, followed by a section of
prior art, followed by a section on negative
impacts, followed by a section on litigation and threats. And it should collect information
on the people submitting the comments (unless
they want to remain anonymous) so they can
be asked to file affidavits later.
All patents challenged should
be listed, not just those selected for the
top 10 and the wiki should remain open after
the "contest" closes. A wiki like this
would provide useful information for other poeple
opposing bogus patent holders through the patent office, the courts, or through congress.
Slashdot Mirror
If they collected it for all non US persons I wouldn't mind. Although don't they already collect all this info for non US persons. If not, maybe they should.
If that trips your Godwin's Law Filter, try one of the modern variations .The program, which has never been tested fully, was launched after the Sept. 11, 2001, hijacking attacks to refine electronic techniques for using personal information to identify and rate potential threats.
This sentence means that the program hijacked attacks [...]. I think they meant:
The program, which has never been tested fully, was launched after the Sept. 11, 2001 hijacking attacks to refine electronic techniques for using personal information to identify and rate potential threats.
Nope. The original form was correct. Grammar and spelling flames have a tendancy to reveal more about the flamer's dubious language skills than the text being criticised. A comma is required after the year in dates in this format. The year itself is treated like a non-restrictive clause that must be set off by commas on both sides when it follows the month. Now, if the word "was" had been preceeded by "which", then the comma after "2001" could have ended "2001" and possibly the clause starting with the comma before "which" as well. This hypothetical case would illustrate an ambiguity in English grammar. If the date had been properly specified in ISO-8601 format ("2001-09-11") then the ambiguity would have been avoided.
Another way of looking at it is that since the wedding party is providing both the subject matter and the market for photographs is that the photographer should pay the wedding party for the concession right to take and sell photos. Of course, unless there were an unusually larger number of guests or it was a celebrity wedding, the cost per photograph would need to be pretty high for the photographer to recoup their costs (so high it might kill the market).
>> What you say peaks my BS-O-Meter
> What you say piques my Grammar-O-Meter.
The only grammatical superiority you can claim in that quote is putting a period at the end of the sentence. Other than that, the original is superior to your own version. Meters are "peaked". People are "piqued". The original post, in sections not quoted, did omit some non-essential words as a form of shorthand. The use of "un-copyrightable" is a little suspicious, but use of "un-copyrightable" and "uncopyrightable" combined exceeds use of "not copyrightable", "non-copyrightable", and "noncopyrightable" in a google search. (My punctuation is deliberately placed outside the quotation marks as I am using the alpha version of the English language, in which maintaining the integrity of quotations gets precedence over superficial typographic conventions).
The Department of Habitual Stupidity's (DHS's) recommendation of Security through Obscurity is absurd. It only serves to protect cellular providers from having their level of incompetence revealed to the customers, potential customers, and shareholders. This secrecy will compromise national security by allowing companies to continue to do sloppy engineering and maintenence of important communications infrastructure. Instead, all of the reports should be made VERY public, including searches on the FCC site listing the total minutes of downtime and number of affected customers by company within an area. This will allow stockholders and customers to favor more robust systems. As for the vulnerable parts of the system that might be of interest to terrorists, they are rather hard to keep secret as they tower 200 feet above the landscape: the main towers that the smaller cells uplink to.
One nice thing about this approach, compared to many other systems, is that it could lend itself to distributed production which would spread wealth around to many companies and local economies rather than concentrating wealth in the hands of a few. The design requires over 2000 laser/telescope modules each in an intermodal container. Instead of having one contractor build them all, imagine having a hundred contractors (average two per state), perhaps many in university towns, each building 20 units to a common design. Move the factory to the workers instead of vice versa. Each production facility would have a large flatbed CNC mill, mirror grinder, welding equipment, and a small electronics shop or would be a consortium of local manufacturing shops with excess capacity (i.e. a machine shop and a welding shop). Many more smaller companies would produce subassemblies. Assuming that production was not continuous but came to an end, making them all in one factory would require large numbers of people to move to one city which would then have a large layoff and unemployment that the local economy could not absorb at the end of production. By spreading it out, local economies would be better able to absorb the layoffs. And the number of layoffs would actually be reduced because the 100 different companies could each have different transition plans to developing other products so you wouldn't need another project of the same magnitude to absorb the labor and manufacturing surplus at the conclusion of the project. The distributed surplus of manufacturing capability would then spur innovation in other areas. I am thinking that each factory would have, rather than single purpose fixtures, a more general purpose programmable production ability (such as CNC tools) that would need little retooling to work on other projects. Also, many of the manufacturers would be applying existing facility and labor surpluses to this project. Manufacturing the individual lasers would still be handled by a small number of plants with a few more turning them into laser arrays. Specialized tasks like silvering the mirrors might be cheaper to do by shipping an intermodal container based factory with metalization equipment to the various factories or by shipping the mirrors in to a central site. Mass producable electronics like tracking systems could be manufactured at a smaller number of plants and shipped to the individual plants. The honeycomb mirror blanks could be manufactured by the University of Arizona Mirror lab, Corning, or similar glass manufacturer and possibly spin cast to approximate curvature. When the booster modules are completed a tilt bed truck picks them up and transports them to the nearest railroad container facility to be put on a rail car for shipment to the final laser site.
The only huge scale production operation would be if you decided to build a nuclear power plant to power the system.
The individual launch craft would be small enough that their manufacture could be distributed as well.
The distributed nature would reduce cost overruns which are routine for large contractors since how many systems were ordered from each manufacturer would depend on the quality and cost of the systems they produced. The first (prototypes) would necessarily be built in small shops; this could be extended to final production and still keep a reasonable economy of scale by using flexible tooling and centralized engineering costs and by eliminating beaurocracy and monopolistic thinking and by reusing idle factory spaces around the country. The quantity of units isn't really high enough, anyway, to fall into the economy of scale of a fixed purpose production line (like for an automobile).
I imagine the laser site looking like a freight yard with perhaps 20 widely spaced parallel sidings with 100 containers each. The added expense of leaving rail cars under each container is offset by the ease of replacing modules although you could use a crane to move the container onto smaller wheel
If you (or another slashdot reader) are in the area, maybe you should get a boat (or a long stick) and a cheap ohmeter and find out. That way you are actually measuring the conductivity and not the salinity. Radio waves don't care if the water is conductive because of salt or because someone dumped lead in the water, though salinity should be the dominant factor. Kluge a couple of electrodes a fixed distance apart and record your readings at various points (GPS could improve the quality of position recordings). Keep the spacing of the electrodes and the height exposed to water constant (coat the portion near the water line with, preferably with the two distances the same to avoid the need to scale. If you want to the minimum amount of work, just take the probes from the ohm meter and rubber band them together and imerse them in the water. Just measure the length and width so you can scale the results to "ohms per square". Paint over the wider portion of the metal probes, which would otherwise create ambiguity with the width measurement, with nail polish. Ideally, you would float the electrodes horizontally instead of immerse them vertically.
As for salt water and radio signals, the conductivity of the water could lead to radio signals either being absorbed or reflected. In the case of reflections, destructive interference could be an issue.
The primary advantage PowerDVD seems to offer over open source players, in my opinion, is reverse play or review mode. In the open source players, you can skip back to the begining of the scene or the previous scene but skipping back 10 seconds or so doesn't work. This is really the only difficult feature missing to make several open source players full featured players. One minor feature missing from open source players (don't recall PowerDVD. windvd, or media player having it either) is single frame forward and reverse (reverse depends on reverse play working). An assortment of fast and slow play speeds would also be nice (Power DVD offers many fast speeds but only a couple slow ones). An instant replay button (skip back 10 seconds or so and then play forward) would also be convenient.
Most of the free players seem to lack deinterlacing or the ability to switch deinterlacing mode on the fly (either manually or automatically) when the content changes. Deinterlacing is needed when they include content shot on a video camera or foolishly telecine (film to video conversion) the movie before encoding. A few DVDs actually mix modes within a single title.
Free players:
The Bossa DSL is more constrained than C or C++ in that, for example, pointers (known for being the cause of many bugs) are absent and infinite loops can't be defined.
The omega incomplete domain-specific language (DSL) is not a feature, its a bug. Turing machines have more smarts. The last thing I would want when writing a scheduler is some broken language that interferes with what I can do. If you can't be trusted with pointers and loops, you don't have any business writing a scheduler. Yes, you can lock up the machine easily with an infinite loop in the scheduler (or almost anywhere else in the kernel). But you can also lock up the machine simply by excluding certain processes from the run queue. For example, lets suppose we write a buggy scheduler that only lets a single process run. The system is dead. Now, suppose that I want to incorporate a task in the scheduler that every 100 time slices takes a slice for itself to analyse each process to determine what kind of scheduling coefficients should be used for that process. Ooops, Requires a loop. Can't get there from here. At least in this particular example one could steal a few CPU cycles each timeslice to do the caclulations and it would probably scale better but there are probably algorithms that might benifit from having them. There could be a case made that avoiding loops in a scheduler is a good thing (since it is likely to lead to implementations that don't scale well) but prohibiting them is not a good thing. Likewise, pointers are a very useful tool. If they have implemented a list manipulation toolkit that handles most of the pointers for you, that is a good thing but eliminating the ability to handle pointers is a bad thing. Sophisticated schedulers might want to do things like launch their own priviledged subprocesses which monitor performance.
Remember an obsolete language called Pascal? Pascal tried to use an Orwellian Newspeak approach to making poor programmers into mediocre programmers by taking away the means to express dangerous ideas. It also turned excellent programmers into mediocre programmers. I remember when it seemed like the majority starting projects were using Pascal but I also noticed over the heydey of Pascall that the majority of projects that were succesfully completed were written in C. I also remember when a simple change (at least in C) to a Pascal program doubled the size of the program and had a substantial negative impact on its maintainability.
Another analogy is Javascript. The core language (ECMAscript) is deliberately so weak that about the worst thing you can do is waste cpu cycles with an infinte loop. It was deliberately weak because it was intended to run code provided by untrusted users. Then they incorporated access and control over the behavior of the browser giving the scripts the ability to take over the screen, steal private information, and perform cross domain hacks. There have been something like 500 security holes reported in Javascript. Well, DML is kinda like that. The language is so weak that you can't hurt yourself until you actually give it control over process scheduling, its original intended purpose. At which point it becomes trivially easy to crash the machine. DSL is like an unloaded gun, it gives you a false sense of security.
The Bossa DSL schedulers could be rewritten - almost line for line - in a subset of C with the Bossa list handling tools. If you wanted the illusion of safety that DSL provides, you could restrict yourself to that subset. If, on the other hand, you were an expert programmer, the full language is availible. And you don't polute the kernel tree with the implementation of an entirely unnecessary language.
Now, they have done some good things here. Loadable scheduler modules. Separating queue linked list handling from the actual kernel code. Defining an event based API. Allowing for more than one scheduler. And abstracting the scheduling enough that you could write a user space test pro
Maybe the average Joe won't care but I would rather have everything stored on my laptop that I physically carry with me. Why would I trust a random computer? Boo these men.
Yep, I have the same concerns. I haven't done anything of any consequence on machines I don't control for about a decade now.
Lets imagine a much safer system than they are describing: an iPod sized device that is a complete desktop computer sans keyboard/and display. You carry this on your person and use public "terminals" consisting of nothing more than a usb keyboard, mouse, and VGA monitor. The risk of such a setup is MUCH lower than the system described and yet there is still an appreciable degree of risk. The more popular the public terminal is, the closer it is to sensitive organizations, or the more affluent the demographic, the more incentive there is to install radio transmitters or recording devices into the keyboard and monitor. The starbucks across the street from the headquarters of a multinational corporation has a high likelyhood of being bugged.
Compared to this scenario, the system proposed in the article would be much easier to compromise. No special transmitter hardware needed. No receiver hidden in a closet or van. No need to conspicuously disassemble or switch equipment in a public place. No need to "spill" beer in the vent holes on the monitor so they will call in a "repairperson" to fix it. Nope, just compromise the host OS and have it transmit the data over the net. So instead of being mostly limited to inside jobs, government spy agencies, and corporate espionage the compromise of this system is likely to be accomplished by mere script kiddies.
Similarly, VNC on public machines would be very vulnerable to intercepting the data while it was still in plaintext.
One could try to argue that trusted computing systems with a Frist chip would make this secure, yet these systems give control to the government and multinationals corporation, who have a bad track record where privacy is concerned and are also want to erase data they assume you have pirated or perhaps is incriminating towards them.
Public terminals (used to?) work pretty well within the scientific community where people were trustworthy or in situations like the IBM internal voicemail/email system where the terminals were carefully controlled by the organisation whose secrets are at risk.
Dedicated Employee, Inc. regrets to inform our customers that, due to recent budget cutbacks and rising expenses, we are no longer able to provide free after hours technical support. After hours support will now be charged our standard consulting rates of $150/hr with a 1 hour minimum billing per call. A page or other form of contact to which an out of hours response is requested or expected will count as a call. Billing begins at the initiation of contact. A 50% surcharge will be imposed for any calls which interupt sleep or sexual activity. In addition, for any interruptions impacting relations or a romantic or sexual character, there will be a $100 surcharge to defray expenses incurred in restoring harmony. In the event that the call disrupts any movie, play, dining out, sporting event, or similar activity expenses incurred by Dedicated Employee and companions in attending said event shall become a reimbursable expense. In addition, there will be a $300 dollar infrastructure surcharge for each month in which out of hours services are rendered to help defray the cost of cellular phones, portable and handheld computing, internet connectivity, wireless connectivity, home office space, and other infrastructure expenses. Any work related calls or other forms of work related contact initiated by customer or their employees, subcontractors, affiliates, agents, customers, or any other party to whom customer provides our contact information shall constitute acceptance of these terms on behalf of customer; we would like to underscore the importance of taking whatever steps are necessary to prevent unauthorized calls including, but not limited to, mantaining our out of hours contact information in strict confidence to avoid any liability for calls. A 33% discount will be extended for calls where the fee for the call can be entirely deducted from a prepaid deposit account. A late payment penalty of $50 per month plus interest at 5% per month shall apply to any amounts not reimbursed within 30 days. Questions regarding these terms should be brought up during regular working hours to avoid being billed as an out of hours call.
We believe that these new terms will allow us to provide more efficient, professional, and courteous service by insuring that we have the resources necessary resources at our disposal and by minimizing disruptions. Further, this new policy will better enable customer to properly account for the previously intangible costs of various possible courses of action. To minimize the costs incurred under these terms, you may wish to consider instituting a policy of solving foreseeable problems before they they escalate into emergencies. Thank you for your patronage and we look forward to serving you in the future.
Make a fashion statement. Get a tinfoil bag to match your hat.
While tinfoil hats would appeal only to the mentally ill, knapsacks with metal mesh woven in might actually become trendy if companies and organizations don't respect reasonable privacy concerns. And if so, neither the libraries new RFID systems or its old passive systems will be effective at stopping theft. So, by adopting RFID, libraries could make their security problems worse. Same goes for stores.
I have no problems with RFID tags on airport luggage. I think it is a great idea, as long as they provide the wire cutters to remove the tags as you leave the baggage area. But any tag that becomes permanently attached to an article you may carry around is potentially a problem.
Likewise, an RFID chip might be convenient in an employee ID card but a tinfoil pocket protector might be appropriate (though a fatal fashion faux paus) when you leave the office. In the early days of proximity badges, they weren't that much of a privacy issue because you weren't likely to encouter a reader. So, all things considered, an iButton ring might be a more appropriate security device - contact required. Or a badge that had a built in slide, just as a 3.5" floppy does. A promiscous ID badge (RFID) could also introduce some potential security holes; you just need two guys with an RFID radio relay - to get intruder A into the building we just need to get intruder B in close proximity to Employee C, at which point C's ID badge will happily authenticate A into the building via the link.
RFIDs could also be handy on large organized events like bike rides (think MS 150) and marathons where tracking people is actually a good thing (unless you plan to cheat), because it helps you locate people who may need assistance.
Somehow, I think I can do without a computer greeting me as I walk into a Wal-mart: "Good morning, John Anderton Would you like to try new extra strength Preparation H? It is 40% more effective than the product you have been using."
RFID attached to the disposable cardbord box I buy a DVD player in at walmart doesn't raise a lot of red flags for me but when the damn chip is hidden inside the DVD case, that is a lot more problematic. But a single RFID in a pallet full of DVDs to track it as it moves around the warehouse is ok. RFIDs on intermodal containers is a good use - barcodes do not work well in that environment. An RFID on my car to go through tollbooths can be a problem but if you put a pushbutton on it so I can activate it, then it is a good application.
On the otherhand, contact based systems (more like an iButton than an RFID) for merchandise pose a lot fewer problems. An an RFID chip that is programmed to deactivate the RF portion when you check out but will still respond to a contact probe at the customer return desk could be ok. And there could be some advantages as far as manufacturer QA/QC if they get the serial numbers of every product returned as defective within minutes of return, though this works a lot better if it was manufactured two weeks ago here in the US and delivered just in time than if it was sent via container ship from the Pacific Rim and the assembly line has been churning out high defect rate products without feedback for 3 months.
Encryption doesn't work for the manufacturing/retail environment, there are just two many people at too many stores who have access to the key. RFID that falls back to contact probe operation after checkout (or before shipment if mail order), solves most of the privacy issues.
Allowed access for retail products:
Better for whom? The hundred and fifty other passengers who are left cooling their heels, and were already going to have to rush to make a connection at O'Hare? The pilot who ends up in a later spot in the queue for takeoff? The airline, which needs that plane to be on the ground, cleaned, turned around, and ready to load a fresh batch of passengers half an hour after wheels-down at its destination? The airport, that is waiting for you to clear the gate for another bird?
Nope--it sucks for all those people. The airline is going to send your bag on the next flight (in one to twenty-four hours, depending on the destination) and have it couriered to your hotel or home.
I had aready considered all that, which is why I imposed reasonable time limits to exclude the intractable cases where someones suitcase comes open on the conveyor or the bomb inspectors find a bomb (in that case, however, the flight will be delayed anyway while the swat team storms the plane). The inconvenience to passengers and the airlines of lost baggage is much worse than you suggest. "locating and delivering misdirected luggage costs the airline about $100 million annually". And the opportunity cost and incidental expenses of that lost baggage to customers may be higher. Basically, your approach is the Microsoft software approach to air travel. You effectively propose features, such as getting there 10 minutes faster, that look good on paper but don't actually work reliably. Yeah, sometimes you will get there 10 minutes faster. And other times you will have to wait more than half an hour while they unload the plane and reload it or get to the other end and have to wait 24 hours for your luggage. These are the things that really inconvenience passengers and cause logistical problems for the airline, not a 10 minute delay, that is explicitly incorporated in the schedule. In Switzerland, you can almost set your clock by the trains (95% are within 4 minutes of scheduled time) but in India the trains are notoriously late (one person I met was actually surprised to see a train arrive at its scheduled time - it was yesterdays train). Good management dictates that you spend the extra 10 minutes to make sure that only the right luggage and all of the right luggage is on the plane and in doing so you actually improve the timeliness of your flights.
The passenger ratio of 150:1 you suggest is bad math. Other people on your flight have also lost baggage. Even by the statistics in this article, it is 80:1 - numbers which my past air travel experience would suggest are fictional. In my own experience it was more like 20:1. And if anyone of a groups bags were lost, everyone in the group could be affected, too, further raising the odds. They may only count "complaints" but if your bag doesn't arrive, they may tell you to come back in a couple hours and file a complaint if it hasn't shown up by then. But I haven't flown in a while so things may have improved considerably. If they have, it may be in large part because the airplanes are required to sit at the gate longer anyway and check bags against passengers and because the passengers have to check in (and thus check their baggage) so long before a flight now to allow time to get through airport security. In other words, the plan I was suggesting has effectively already been implemented, in part, even if not intentionally.
One of the people I used to travel with had a rule: he would never leave for one trip until his baggage got back from his last trip. And he did have occasions to apply that rule.
Not everyones itenerary is a simple as taking a taxi or car to a hotel near the airport. People get off one airline and get on a flight to another airline that doesn't cross-check baggage. People get off an airplane and take a 500 mile bus ride the next day. People get off of airplanes and take a shuttle bus to the next state over. People get off the plane and have places to go and people to see and not having your bag can be a signifi
I work in a library, and RFID has been trying to make its way in for years. [...] RFID is not always the beast...
The library is one of the places where the intentions are likely to be good but they side effects may be bad. Librarians have traditionally been very privacy conscious (though the government by laws and funding can twist their arms). I agree that RFID could be very useful in libraries (I have 4 librarians in the family, not counting my own experience in the distant past) since libraries already use security tags and bar codes. However, there are potential privacy issues in library use compared to the airport case because those RFID tags can not be thrown away when you leave the library. The RFID tag, directly or indirectly, identifies the person carrying the books and the books themselves.
That book you are carrying will identify itself to every RFID scanner you pass and these scanners will become more common. And many of those scanners could record information about foreign RFID tags as well as their own. So, you walk out of the library and through the subway turnstiles. scan. Homeland security now has a record of you location at a particular point in time. You stop at a barnes and noble and buy a book. Of course, you walk through a scanner to get out of the store and because you are now carrying a book with one of their RFID tags, they know who you are. B&N has now added the list of books you are carrying to their marketing database. We will skip the airport because you know you have a microscope up your ass there. Now on your way to the job interview, you are of course scanned as you pass through the scanners in the lobby and it is correlated with the RFID from your visitors pass. Your interviewer checks the scanner logs. If you were lucky and didn't have anything prejudicial on you, just think of having your briefcase or backpack scanned every day as you arrive at work. Now you go to the video store and of course walk through a scanner. Next a stop off at wal-mart. Your purchase of an item there with a credit card identifies you and we all know you are going through scanners there. And the supermarket. You get home to find that UPS (scan, scan) has delivered some reading material from amazon that is even more prejudicial than what you can get at the library or B&N so the scanners will have a bigger heyday.
Most of those scanners are capable of collecting marketing information on you and many owned by companies that are very eager to do so (hence all the savings cards programs at the bookstore, supermarket, video store, etc). Some could contribute to a movement tracking database. One of them can cost you a job, without your knowing it. And others could lead to harassment by security personel at subways, airports, post offices, and other government controlled locations. Far too many people will know about your sexual (bondage, polyamoury, gay/lesbian/bisexual/transexual), technical (microbiology, nuclear physics, chemistry, electronics, explosives), religious (The Qur'an) political (Chomsky, anarchism, socialism, human rights) reading material. And this is the situation before the folks from the Thought Police ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Homeland Security go around attaching little black boxes to all the RFID scanners (with the employees subject to gag orders) so they can data mine everyones data.
There are some possible ways to reduce the effect. Encrypt the data on the RFID tag so only the library can read it (until the key is stolen). Limit the range on the RFID tag to 2 inches and put it in the dewey decimal or LC number tag on the spine so you can still inventory the books on the shelf by running a scanner directly over the spines. But with more power and better antennas the walk through scanners may still be able to pick up what a hand scanner could only detect 2 inches away. Or just use the old fashioned method of bar codes and passive security tags and do inventory the old fashioned way of pulling all the books on the shelf out far enough to expose the barcode label and push them back in as you scan each one.
They have the technology to prevent the plane from taking off until all the passengers who belong to the luggage are on board. It would be pretty trivial modification to keep the plane from taking off until all the luggage belonging to the passengers was on board, within reasonable time limits. Might be better to wait ten minutes on the runway than hours or days for your luggage.
The current method, of sending your suitcase on the next flight if it misses your flight (or just sending it on the wrong flight) is a bit of a security risk. All you need is a bomb that is capable of pinging your fake cell phone through aluminum (use magnetic fields) to determine if you are on board or not when it reaches altitute and a fistful of airline tickets. You just wait for baggage handlers to do their magic. Does increase the cost and chances that the security people might accidently do their jobs and detect a bomb, though, if you have to go on multiple flights. Checking in at the last possible minute can help. Maybe suicidal fanatics are cheaper, though.
So there are what, 4 people using linux at home that also have intimate enough relationships to actually produce offspring
At least some of us Linux users are capable of extremely intimate relationships. If there is a small number of Linux users with kids, it may be because we are smart enough to read the man page for condoms. And of course, the little part in the birth control pill manual that says they aren't effective for 30 days after you start taking them or after missing a dose. Windows machines, and their owners, get knocked up all the time because they aren't smart enough to RTFM. Often, even their operating system was loaded on the computer without their consent. It isn't that windows users have more sex, its just that they have more mishaps.
And Linux users are also capable of creating intellectual creations which reduces the psychological need to spawn biological creations.
Mac users, on the other, hand may have trouble reproducing because they are always too busy using their iBrators :-).
Error: Adult Content Blocked!
Site: http://www.whitehouse.gov/president/gwbbio.html
Reason: George W Bush is a boob!
An accuweather boycott has been created at Boycott City . However, it may take 24 hours before the boycott is officially added to the list and you can join. If you want to join, send yourself a reminder message to visit the site tomorrow.
This is my first experiment with such a system. The primary value of such an online boycott is that people can search to find out if people are boycotting a company - and why - before doing business with a company. As an added bonus, when you join a boycott it shows up on the main page thereby raising awareness.
The boycott city system itself is pretty crude and doesn't yet have a large user base.
Half way up, at 32,000 miles, there is no appreciable drag. Also, I question your mass-density assumptions.
Once that portion enters the earths atmosphere, however, it will begin decelerating and disintegrating and will have plenty of time to do so before it can hit objects on the ground.
Upon what are you basing your assumptions of its width and overall mass per unit of width-length?
Well, according to the documentation the nanotubes have a density lower then kevlar, and the lower portion is 2CM wide by 5 microns thick. Now, if they goop the nanotubes up with epoxy, that could affect the density by a little bit (they don't plan to use much). With just the nanotubes, we are looking at a weight of 130grams per kilometer of cable (0.02M * 0.000005M * 1000M *1300 Kg/M^3 = 0.130Kg). For comparison, I just measured a piece of reynolds heavy duty aluminum foil at around 0.5 mils (12.7 microns). So, one food service roll (18"x500foot) could be cut into 22 ribbons and welded end to end to make 3.3Km of cable (at 2-3 times the thickness) and more than twice the density (2700 Kg/M^3). So, your aluminum replica will be about 5 times as heavy and (very roughly) 1000 times weaker than 3.3Km of nanotube cable. The tensile string of the nanotubes is 130GPa (19 million psi). The entire 91000KM length of cable will weigh roughly 18000 Kg, or about as much as 20 automobiles. If 1 km of the ribbon hits you at the speed of sound the force of impact (44.2 kg m/s) would be the equivalent of a 98 pound weakling bumping into you at a slow walk (2.2mph). But you might get one hell of a paper cut.
Their worst case estimate for how long a segment of cable could fall to earth without disintegrating is about 4000km or 3000kg (about the weight of two SUVs). That density is different that what I discussed above because we are talking about a higher strength cable. It looks like the figures I was looking at were for the cable before it has been beefed up by the maintenence droids. Now, I don't want a hummer landing on my head but it doesn't sound any worse than a stray rocket.
I don't suppose anyone is going to come up with an argument saying that they are in the theaters with their camcorders excersizing their right to time shift...
You lose that bet.
A camcorder can be assistive technology. Keeping them out of the movie theater can be as unethical as turning away people with seeing eye dogs or wheelchairs.
There are quite valid reasons for having and/or using a camcorder or similar device in a theater.
If you think time cannot be as big a barrier as space, I propose you undertake the following consciousness raising experiment. Divide into three groups. One group has to ride around in a wheel chair for a month. One group can only go outside the house or watch live tv or use the phone between the hours of 10PM and 6AM for the same month. The third group has no constraints on temporal or spacial mobility. Keep track of what each group was able to do and not do during the course of the month. And each group should try to excercise a broad range of activities. Go to a movie, rent a movie, rent a car, eat a decent meal out (late night bar food and fast food does NOT count), ride public transportation, enter a tournament, go to a hobby related club meeting, go to a park (most close at dark), go to the doctor, go call a friend on the phone, go to the library, go to a book store, go work out at the gym, go to the local health food store, go visit a juice bar, go buy groceries, go to a bar/nightclub, rent a canoe or tube, visit a saladbar, go for a hike in the woods, take a class, go to a live game, go see live theater, go rent a motel room (hint: you will be charged for two days if you sleep past noon), go talk to your bank manager, and try holding a decent job. Unless you live in the city that never sleeps, you are likely to find that those with the temporal constraints are as restricted as those with spacial constraints and face MUCH greater discrimation from businesses and government agencies. On the list above only two: bar/nightclub and non-healthfood grocery shopping are really workable. The person in the wheelchair won't be able to go on a hike but they can go to the park or canoeing/tubing. I am certainly not trying to downplay the hardships faced by the physical handicaps, but our society has come a long way in accomodating their needs compared to time related needs. And, to add insult to injury, try consulting with medical people about a sleep disability: "Thank you for calling the Sleep Center at the University of Virginia. Our office hours are from 9AM to 5PM, monday through friday."
Should handicapped people be forced to wait until a movie comes out on DVD and not be even further cut off socially from other people because they can't discuss movies while they are still a hot topic? And speaking of which, why the hell don't they project subtitles underneath the movies or transmit them via 802.11 to portable receivers (which you could borrow if you weren't one of the borg.)
"Wanna watch a movie together?" "Yes, but, honey, we live 500 miles apart?" "True, but we have high speed net access". People today form or maintain social and even romantic relation
There are two theories: one that terminal velocity would limit the speed and the other that it would come down like a whip. I think both are true to an extent.
In the short term, terminal velocity would not apply since terminal velocity assumes that the only accellerating force is gravity. The tension of the cable would, however, be expected to accelerate the cable to supersonic speeds.
In the long term, drag would eventually slow the cable down to terminal velocity and/or cause it to burn up. A big advantage of the nanotubes is that they keep the weight to surface area ratio low, as does giving the cable a flat rather than round profile. Also, I assume they have very low stretch which would minimize the duration of accelleration.
The lower portion will not come down like a fluttering newspaper. It will have the tremendous tension accellerating it and it would have weight of its long length encouraging it to fall down lengthwise for minimum drag. Compare the drag if you were to hold a newspaper out the sunroof of a car perpendicular to the line of travel (holding all 4 corners) vs if you were just to hold two corners.
When you double the height of the break (assuming we are dealing with a section of uniform thickness), you double the mass, double the acceleration time, halve the acceleration (because the tension has twice as much mass to accelerate), and double the drag. These factors have a tendancy to cancel out. Also, portions high above the tower will take long enough to come down that they will tend to burn through. The most dangerous place to break the cable may actually be pretty close to the ground so that the time it takes the free end to hit the ground is not substantially longer than the duration of tension induced accelleation. The most dangerous portion of the cable may well be the length just slightly longer than the tower which the tower itself will cause to snap like a whip. In one sense, the tower makes it more dangerous that way. However, the reasoning behind the tower may be that the time it would take for the first part of the cable to hit the ground would be much longer than the duration of tension driven acceleration.
The cable may have low mass per unit length (like a piece of string) but a piece of string accelerated to supersonic speeds will cut. A ribbon will have more drag but could hit you edge on making it sharper than a string. In this case, we appear to be talking about a glorified piece of tinsel. Without the stored energy due to tension and stretch, it will be harmless kinetically; if the stretch energy is low enough it will still be harmless.
I would think that before deploying such a system you would want to do a pull test (even horizontally) to destruction of a mile long section of cable. You could test smaller sections but they
Any destruction, therefore, should be concentrated at the base station. It is possible that the stretch of the cable is so low that the stored energy in the system due to tension is not significant compared to the effect of drag that there isn't even much risk to the base station.
It looks like the space elevator will not have the amplifying effect in terms of destruction that would make it so appealing to terrorists. The best way to take out the cable would probably be two rockets with a cable stretched in (a modern day version of the chain shot used to take out the mast of a ship) because it is too narrow a target to take out with a conventional missle. However, it may well turn out that the two missles are a greater destructive force than the elevators cable they unleash. No, what makes it appealing to terrorists is its economic amplification and symbolic status. Anytime you can take out a multibillion dollar target with a thousands of dollars worth of missles, it is a good strategic investment to do so. That being the case, one of the costs of the elevator is going to be the cost of having the navy patrol the area and the opportunity cost of making a large chunk of ocean off limits.
IANAL
If you give the police a name other than your own, that can give them cause to prosecute you. If you still want to do that, don't use "John Smith" (or worse, a more plausable name). Tell them "You can call me Ernesto Miranda". That way, you are making a reference to "Miranda v. Arizona" and the fifth ammendment. And, they would have a very hard time making a case that you lied about your identity vs. withheld it (though they may be able to get you for witholding it). And it would be seriously embarasing to an officer to tell a judge, "I didn't realize, your honor, that Ernesto Miranda was the name of the Plaintiff in a landmark supreme court decision that pertained to the rights of people when dealing with police investigations." It might even jepardize the officers testimony in other cases. And they probably will indeed be refereing to you as "Mr. Miranda" when talking about you even after they learn your real name. Technically, I believe Miranda applies after you have been arrested, which could happen in short order. But if you are going to fight, you might as well do it with some style.
Incidently, based on census statistics regrding the distribtion of first and last names, one would expect there to be about 4000 people in the US who actually are named "John Smith". Actually "James Smith" would the most common male name and "Mary Smith" the most common female name.
The Terry decision that gave police the right to ask for identification prohibited them from arresting someone for failure/refual to provide ID papers. However, the police in this case did not ask for Hiibel's name, they asked for ID documents and arrested Hiibel for refusing to produce ID documents he already said he did not possess.
Hiibel made a jerk of himself as did the officers who arrested him.
While the disenting opinions were logical, the majority opinion was falacious. Block quotes are from the majority opinion:
But if he had any outstanding warrants it would have been incriminating. So, if he told them his name he could have been arrested and if he didn't tell his name he also could be arrested under this decision, thus nullifying a persons right.
While police in this case did have reasonable suspicion and thus were within the rights to question Hiibel, they did not provide information to him, under demand, that would substantiate that fact, therefore one can argue that he was also within his rights to refuse questions about his identity. Actually, they did mention the heard about the fight earlier but when he specifically asked about the matter under investigation, they evaded the question. But his daughter said she had hit him, not the other way around. If that is true, then Hiibel was the victim not the assailent. Therefore, the police (though they didn't realize it) were demanding that the victim of an assault, who had not indicated a desire to press charges, identify himself.
This is falacious. It basically says that since the fourth ammendment does not require him to identify himself, it does not apply. But the fourth ammendment does apply, not because it requires him to identify himself but because it restricts the rights of police regarding seach and seizure. In order for it not to apply, the supreme court was obligated to explain why a request for identification did not constitute unlawful search and seizure.
Parent poster goes on at great, ungramatical, length expounding on the supposed erroneous grammer of the list in the following sentence:
Here are parenthesis that show that there are actually two nested lists:
Nested lists like this are one reason why English grammer was revised to requre a "," before the word "and" in a list as both a visual and verbal (pause) marker. The other reason being to bind the word "artists" into "(society, business and artists)" rather than "society, (business and artists)". [<-- intentional] The word "and" itself is there to convey grouping. Also notice that each item in the outer list starts with the same word ("why") to provide further verbal clues. Once you parse the lists properly, you will find that parallelism was maintained.
Yes nested lists have the potential to be confusing but they are useful sometimes. And if you can't come up with uses for them, it probably means that your thought patterns are way too simplistic to accurately represent reality.
The subject line of this posting contains a gramatical error in using the word "don't" instead of "doesn't". Did you honestly think, even for a second, that I didn't intend it to? Writers deliberately break the rules of grammer when it serves a purpose. In this case, the purpose was to sound derisive towards a certain grammer troll. Just as the original posting may or may not have made that mistake on purpose in order to deride those who advocate DRM. Given competent handling of nested lists (a concept beyond the meger understanding of a self proclaimed grammer cop), I will give the original author the benefit of the doubt. In any event, it using the wrong form of the word did not detract from anyone's ability to comprehend the sentence. And sometimes people just like to abuse the English language; it has certainly abused us enough.
I am not a grammer wiz. I can't, for example, remember what a subjunctive gerund is. Spelling and gramatical errors included at no extra charge.
Someone who sends a lot of mail can still do so, through the ISPs outgoing mail filters. They should be blocking all outbound SMTP except to the ISP outbound SMTP relays unless the user has specifically requested direct outbound SMTP (which should be free, easy to do online, and quick but you will be required to 1)read some stuff, 2) provide a justification (which will be accepted by default)). Doing half ass like this is just a ploy to cut down on tech support calls from people who didn't configure their email client. The relays can then monitor for evidence of spam/virus activity. Unfortunately, blocking these ports does deviate from the principles of TCP/IP but in the case of email there is a compelling public interest to make the default state be blocked. Blocking malicious traffic close to the source has significant societal benefits.
Note that forcing email through your ISP actually helps you if someone files a false complaint against you. Because the ISP can calculate a hash on all messages you send and therefore distinguish forged abuse complaints from real ones.
One thought as far as selectively blocking port 25, is that SPF could be used as a sanity check. If the IP address used (static ip) matches the SPF (sender policy framework) for the envelope from address, that is a good sign that the traffic should not be blocked. If you are sending a lot of email, you should have set up SPF anyway.
How about a Wiki-type thing that lists some previous art for patents that a watchdog group lists out? Get some serious evidence and archive it in one place so the masses can check and see what patents they don't really have to pay attention to.
Good idea. Unfortunately, EFF has totally bungled the web side of this project. They need a wiki, outline, or threaded message system (with threads structured) to list each patent that has been challenged, followed by an overview of what the patent covers, followed by a section of prior art, followed by a section on negative impacts, followed by a section on litigation and threats. And it should collect information on the people submitting the comments (unless they want to remain anonymous) so they can be asked to file affidavits later. All patents challenged should be listed, not just those selected for the top 10 and the wiki should remain open after the "contest" closes. A wiki like this would provide useful information for other poeple opposing bogus patent holders through the patent office, the courts, or through congress.