The V-173 had a top airspeed of 500 MPH and a landing speed of 10 MPH.
It wasn't quite *that* good, but it did have a remarkably low stall speed.
These were indeed weird beasts - I looked up the "flying flapjacks" in the archives when I worked for LTV in the 1980's, as well as the Cutlass, which was a conglomeration of German design features that was a decade or two ahead of its time, and arguably the most successful failure in naval aviation history - the list of firsts racked up by that plane are truly impressive, even though it failed operationally.
If you want a look at "future" aviation technology we *were* reverse engineering after WWII, forget UFOs and concentrate on the Germans: Luft46.com is a real eye-opener - had the war lasted another year, Germany would have filled the sky with jets that the Allies couldn't match until a decade later, not to mention the stealth fighter-bombers, guided air-to-air missiles, rocket planes, and the atmosphere-skipping Sanger "Amerika Bomber". Impressive. And scary. Thank God that Hitler was foolish enough to try to fight in the Russian winter, or we'd all be speaking German...
Just two guys doing this, with helpers, ranging from machinists on the engine, to crew at Kitty Hawk. Interesting to note that their parents encouraged them at an early age, and that they had a limited social life, directing their energy instead toward their scientific explorations.
Your 21st century bigotry is showing. The Wrights did not have a "limited social life". Theirs was probably better than yours. Their father was a travelling minister, and they often hosted all kinds of visitors when he was home. They were quite well educated, and like most successful home-schoolers today, they had a far better and more rounded education than products of government propaganda mills. They were encouraged to pursue all sorts of things (which they did), "science" being only one of those.
Like Nathaniel Bowditch before them (probably the greatest American mathemetician ever, also home and self educated), one of their chief contributions was realizing that the existing tables and calculations were wrong and that they would need to create their own if they were going to succeed.
I very much doubt that the modern US has gotten its hands on alien technology.
Explain Velcro, then.
Anyone who's ever tried to get "stick-tights" brushed out of a dog's coat has absolutely no trouble believing the story that it was that operation that was the inspiration for Velcro...;-)
I have been thinking about those rumors of a crashed UFO being studied at the Groom Lake facility, and it got me thinking about the possibilities. If the stories were true, I doubt they would gain much useful knowledge from it. Technology far in advance of your own, (or even moderately in advance of your own) would be unfathomable. Consider the following:
I cry "BS!" You're falling for the "modern man is superior" fallacy. The mechanical engineers of 1862 were better educated and had a better grasp of engineering fundamentals than MEs of today. (That's the opinion of my father, who was an ME professor at a prominent university. As an aside, the better engineers were more likely to be found in the South - the creativity lived there, it was production capapcity that the North had in spades...)
They would discover that the machine is made of wonderous materials - Aluminum was newly discovered and more expensive than Silver in that day. Titanium was unknown, as would be carbon fibre and other composites. They could discover some of its physical properties, but would have no idea how to manufacture it.
Somewhat true, but knowing what they were aiming for, they might figure it out before too long. Aluminum they'd get, it's really not that hard. Composites would be much tougher, since it's not at all clear from looking at a crosslinked thermoset that the resin was once a two-component goo, but most of the chemistry was known then. Interestingly, it would probably be welding that would throw them the most - not until WWII was welding steel possible on an industrial scale, and welded aluminum would appear even more exotic.
The principle of the turbine was known, but they would likely assume the aircraft was steam driven.
Oh, really, even with that quite simple oil burning combustion chamber, with all it's injector nozzles? I don't think so...
It is doubtful they could even refine the fuel that would enable the one aircraft they had to fly a single mission!
Oh, bunk! Jet fuel is only slightly modified kerosene, a fuel that was available in both high qualities and quantities in 1862, owing to the prevalence of the fuel for relatively smokeless lighting. Also, gas turbines will run on darn near anything that burns and can be pumped into the combustor, from near-tar to Chanel No. 5 (yes, that's actually been done - search the web...)
An examination of the overall aircraft would not give them any advantage in learning how to build a flying machine either - aircraft of the early 20th century bear no respemblence to a modern jet fighter. If the Wright brothers were given the opportunity to carefully examine one before they started building their flyer, it would have set them back many years.
Again your point boils down to a condescending, "Those poor dolts wouldn't know enough to figure out which parts they could build and which parts they couldn't." The actual ingenuity of the Wrights testifies to the opposite. Every critical aspect of the Wright Flyer except the propellor is present and recognizable in an F-16.
Don't assume people used to be stupid. They weren't. In fact, they were at least as bright and most likely better educated than people are today. By the way, that's as true of people 2000 years ago as it is of people 100 years ago. If you don't believe it, look up "Antikythera Mechanism" on the net to see how Rhodian scholars and engineers were building differential calculating gearsets in 80 BC. Not all progress and engineering prowess is recent, and it's a huge mistake to think that's the case...
You're missing the point if you think the FSF cares at all about promoting the GPL. You see, the GPL is evil in the eyes of the FSF here because it's working in favor of what is the greatest of all evils in the FSF's twisted worldview: if KDE were included, a COMPANY might actually MAKE MONEY on software.
In the FSF's eyes, this is intolerable - whether that position is logically consistent, or even consistent with their positions last week is irrelevant - the only thing that matters, indeed the only thing that drives the FSF mentality is a deep-seated hatred and bigoted intolerance of commerce in software.
This is a great idea. There are a huge number of technical advantages to building atop a BSD, rather than a Linux base for this sort of project, entirely aside from licensing issues. I've used both extensively, and even the best Linux distros are dramatically less stable and robust than the BSDs. (I've also found that those arguing otherwise have usually never really tried the BSDs - just managing to have installed them doesn't count - use in actual production does.)
But it's also quite clear, given Bruce's requirements for the UserLinux project, that BSD would be a better fit, since it is not a commercially hostile license. It's great that even a guy like Bruce now realizes that GPL-only licensing is the kiss of death for the kinds of large-scale commercial support such a venture needs.
I personally would be in favor of a modified BSD license that would add only one stipulation: that the code can never be placed under another more restrictive license, preventing the modified-BSD-licensed code from being relicensed (and thus effectively "stolen" from the community) under the GPL or similar viral licenses. In this way, it can be assured that truly free software remains that way and cannot be co-opted and limited to Stallman's twisted idea of "free".
They are not 100% sure of why the foam came off, the area it broke away from was laid up by hand not machine and has a complex geometry, both of which were contributing factors.
This was only the effect, not the cause. The foam on the tank was a hard-surfaced foam material *until* a few years ago. Then the type of foam used was changed for "environmental" reasons to eliminate a small amount of chloroflourocarbons in the original foam. The new foam is far more susceptible to damage than the old, at least partly because in order to get a properly shaped surface with the new foam, they now have to grind off the harder "rind" of the foam. This leaves the soft and frangible interior exposed and just asking to be ripped off in huge hunks by the adjacent supersonic airflows.
It's really not a stretch at all to say that it was radical environmentalism that brought down Columbia and is the ultimate root cause for the loss of an expensive ship and seven precious lives.
It's time to eliminate NASA entirely. If we're going to have a space program, it's time to start with a clean slate. I don't know what more evidence of NASA's total incompetence we could possibly need than losing the seven Columbia astronauts through exactly the same sort of boneheaded ignorance that caused the loss of the seven Challenger astronauts...
Zope is awesome in its potential, Hellish in its reality. All geeks are impressed with Zope's abilities. But very few even of that group are capable or willing to put up with its inane complexities. I've wasted *way* too much time trying to get Zope to do anything useful, and have nothing to show for it.
Blosxom, on the other hand is dead easy to install "a working blog in fifteen minutes or your money back..." and has plug-ins to handle things like the image management side of things.
On an open source software pain-in-the-butt scale of 1 to 10, Zope is a 9, Blosxom is a 2.
Blosxom is no panacea, but if you just want a blog, it's orders of magnitude easier than Movable Type, Zope, and their ilk, and with plug-ins, it offers similar functionality. My problem with both MT and Zope is that they require a very seriously high-maintenance commitment. Try Blosxom first - if it turns out you don't like it, at least you won't have wasted any effort at all compared to the others....
The only states' right the South cared enough about to actually tear apart the Union for was the "right" to hold human property in the form of slaves. That's what I meant by "sole cause." IOW, IMO, slavery and the threat of abolition alone would have caused them to secede, without any of the other issues being present; without that issue, none of the other issues would have been sufficient to bring about the war.
Sorry, but this is the typical misunderstanding of one whose opinion on this period in history has been shaped by historians view rather than by reading the copious original source material availalbe. If you bother to do that, you'll see that slavery was only a very minor political issue. It wasn't even held up as a "cause" of the war in the North for the first 50 years or so after the war, because everyone, NOrth and South, knew that was wrong. It's really a very interesting study in the mechaincs of historical revisionism...
Go back and read original sources, not historians' retelling of them, and you'll be able to see the real truth for yourself - and you'll be quite surprised that you could have got it so wrong...
The American Revolution began in 1776, and seemed to have been won in 1865...
You couldn't be more wrong in your grasp of history. There never was an "American Revolution", but rather a "War for Independence". France had a revolution - there's a BIG difference. Try reading some actual history (preferably based on original sources) to learn more.
Secondly, from the point of view of freedom, the War Between the States (that war's official designation even by the US Congress, and not a "Civil War" under any circumstances) destroyed the last vestiges of freedom held by the people and thier states. I don't say that just because I'm a Southerner, but because it's true - self determination was terminated at the point of a bayonet during that war, and we've been suffering under the illusion that we're actually free since then. Look into Lincoln's blatantly illegal actions in stacking the Supreme Court, creating a new state (WV) by fiat to realign the balance of power in Congress in his favor, and more. And don't even get me started on the illegality of the 14th amendment and the way it's been used to justify the federal government's involvement in every minute aspect of our lives...
Black or white, we all lost our freedom in 1865, and the country can never again be what the founders intended, and what it once was. In reality, slavery was not ended, but expanded to cover the entire citizenry.
It wasn't so much that it was a woman, but rather the epic conflict between the fuzzies and the techies. Those striving for their B.S. or B.E. degrees in University typically have certain disdain for their classmates who take nothing but fluffy liberal arts classes and then brag about their 4.0 GPA...
It also has quite a bit to do with the fact that colleges have completely forgotten that a liberal arts education should be the *foundation* of a technical one - in the medieval and renaaissance universities that ours *should* be based upon, one was required to master the tivium (grammar (facts of things), logic, and rhetoric) before being allowed to advance to study the quadrivium (arithmetic/mathematics, music, geometry, and astronomy).
Real liberal arts is NOT fuzzy or wimpy, it's just that there are only a veryfew places one can get a REAL liberal arts education anymore...
On another note, I'd like to propose "Judge/Citizen" as an approriate and entirely politically correct alternative euphemism for the terribly insensitive "Master/Slave" nomenclature. I can think of no case in recent history where the two are not synonymous - to be honest, we have lived under a judicial hegemony since the 14th amendment abolished both state and individual rights in 1865...
A moral discussion about this is a whole topic in itself, but most of these people don't see what they are doing as really "wrong", or else they probably wouldn't do it, because they are basically good people.
It's worth noting that many people who fall into this category are not "pirates" at all, but simply those that find it easier to download a bunch of MP3's of CDs they already own than to spend a couple of weeks ripping them. Sure, many of us here like to know our music was ripped and encoded "correctly", but most people don't care enough to deal with the hassles - they just find it easier to download than rip.
I've ripped some, and downloaded some, and almost all of what I've downloaded are MP3's of things I have the CDs for, simply for convenience. The rest are things that are very hard or impossible to buy CDs of anyway - old stuff, obscure stuff (The Judy's), no longer available, or, in one case, a CD I own that doesn't play correctly anymore. Is that one legit? Maybe...
Actually... mouse gestures are better implemented as Pie Menus.
Depends on what you want. I'd agree that for the sorts of things done in the demo, pie menus are better, but strokes/gestures can be incredibly beneficial in other environments.
My first Unix exposure was on a Version 7 CAD system from a company called Cimcad/Cimlinc. Their system had what to this day is still the BEST interface for geometry creation I've ever seen in ANY CAD product. It used gestures (they called them "strokes" extensively to speed common operations - for instance, to zoom in on an area (one of the most common CAD operations) you simply drew a circle CW around the area you wanted to see. The process was reversed by drawing the circle the other way. Geometry was selected by simply defining a box around it NW to SE. Unselecting parts of that could be accomplished by the reverse stroke. Construction lines were instantly created by horizontal or vertical strokes, and a circle could be created from points on the stack with another stroke. These are the easy ones, but there were several dozen, each of which was an order of magnitude faster and more productive than any other method I've ever seen.
The only app I've seen that is even sort-of as well thought out from a UI point of view is Ashlar's Vellum (now Graphite), which is hardly surprising, since it was started by remnants of Cimlinc's West Coast development center. Sadly, as good as it is, it's only a pale shadow of what CimCAD once was, and the drafting assistant is all that remains of the innovative UI that once existed.
Gestures are fantastic, if they're well thought out. Interestingly, given the resources of that system, you could get better performance today running such a CAD system as a JavaScript app in a browser. Moore's law really is cool...
As a web developer myself, I feel that javascript's time has come (one third of mozilla is written in Javascript), but users like you who view the world in only black and white are going to slow down its adoption and dampen the usefulness of javascript webpages. Certainly 1/3rd of Mozilla isn't gimmicky cruft...
Six months ago, I thought JavaScript was a joke, a toy scripting language that just pretended to have real capbilities. I am now FIRMLY convinced that JavaScript may well be the MOST important asset that we have in opposing anyone's efforts to take over, control, or "proprietize" the web, as Microsoft and Macromedia are rolling ahead to do, with.NET and the new Flash.
Several reasons why I think JavaScript is the best choice for much app development today:
Ubiquitous environment: It's the closest thing we have to a universal platform. There is nothing else that even approaches its ubiquity and reach. Mac, Windows, Unix/Linux, whatever, it's there and it just works. No other environment is so pervasive. Like the Bourne Shell in the Unix world, you can count on its presence and rely on it to get the job done, regardless of the platform. No other environment can credibly make that claim today, and I see no other real challengers on the horizon from a cross-platform point-of-view.
Capability: There is very little you can't do with it (except the few things network-delivered code has no right doing in the first place, and that's a good thing!) In general, it's safer than Java because it's "sandbox" restricts it to the browser, limiting damage even if something does go wrong. In the better implementations (like Mozilla's) it is capable of absolutely staggering things - but doing so requires a good understanding not only of JavaScript, but also the DOM, CSS, and possibly XML. In reality, you need to know these things anyway, as they ensure your app is platform agnostic.
Compatibility: There are far fewer problematic incompatibilities across all the varying JavaScript/JScript/ECMAscript implementations than there are across different versions of the JRE, for instance. If Microsoft would pay some attention to web standards in IE, much of what's pain now would go away. I'm convinced this is why they refuse to fix many obvious bugs - it would weaken their efforts to force.NET on their customers.
Object Orientation: While not as snazzy as some other environments, JavaScript does have real objects, and you can do real oo work with it. I suspect the reason we haven't seen more acknowledgement of this is that the elite types turn up their nose at it before they even bother to find out what it can do... As Mozilla has clearly shown, JavaScript is up to doing the heavy lifting, and it's time for the effete snobs that claim otherwise to reassess their own bigotries.
Ease of use: JavaScript is not a hard language to get started in. It's easy to do many useful and interesting things with little effort. There is even a huge and rapidly growing base of JavaScripts to be leveraged out there - nothing as comprehensive as CPAN, but several that, taken together, are close.
Momentum: JavaScript is finally being recognized for its real abilities, rather than it's image as somethign best suited for only toys. Combined with the factors above, I think JavaScript is the most important development environment in the world today, and the only one that has a real chance of helping make sure that the web stays based on open standards and protocols.
If you still think JavaScript is a steaming pile, commit to spending a few dozen hours cheking out what it can *really* do before giving up on what may well be the best hope for the open, interoperable future that is of the greatest benefit to us all.
The USPTO is working as designed. They are supposed to accept as many patents as possible to generate revenue. The USPTO stopped actually checking if patents are "obvious" or "inventions" a long time ago.
You've quite obviously never tried to get a patent yourself, have you? I'm going through the process now, and I can assure you, you're dead wrong - the PTO does not simply accept applications in return for money, and the nonobviousness and utility provisions are as strong as they ever were.
Don't let one or two bad patents getting through fool you - the system works, and works fairly well. More importantly, its patent system is a fundamental reason why the US has been the leading industrial power for the last century. We should not change that lightly, if at all.
For the average mechanic, knowing about carburetors or points is a complete waste of time. No car has rolled off a high-volume assembly line with either in years, and even the distributor is going the way of the dodo.
Sadly, this is true, even for classics and exotics. Just last year, I had to wait *weeks* to get all the proper parts for a complete rebuild on the four Weber two-barrels that sit atop my Ferrari Dino 308gt4 - these parts simply did not exist in North America, and had to be shipped from Italy (presumably by oxen-powered paddle-wheel boat by way of Venezuela and Fiji...)
(The Dino gt4 was the first V8 Ferrari - the entire 308/328/348/355/360 family developed from this car. Like the orginal small-block Chevy, it was the beginning of a dynasty, and although not a favorite of collectors, it's an absolute hoot to drive, and way cheaper than a new BMW if you can find a good guy to wrench on the classics - and that's generally NOT the dealer...)
Anyway, it's getting harder to find people that know how to work on carbs, but worth the effort. (Some people are converting old Ferraris to FI, but the Webers are quite reliable, once they're properly set up, and were generally regarded as superior to Fuel injection until the late 1980s, anyway, they make those wonderful howling, shrieking, slurping noises that FI cars lack - or mayybe that's why mine needed work...:-))
The nice thing about that car is that it's one of the last honest exotics - there's not a thing there that can't be worked on by a competent mechanic with a good set of metric tools. I did give in and convert it to electronic ignition,. but other than that, it's all mechanical. (I don't mind distributors, but *two* of them, with two sets of points each, made tune-ups and spark plug cleaning a way-too-frequent chore.)
One nice thing - this car is so old now that it requires no pollution controls, and runs so efficiently it outperforms any modern car with a bad O2 sensor. It only gets 15 miles per gallon, but what the heck did you expect? That's better than a Hummer or Land Cruiser by several MPG...
By day, I build new software and hardware for measurement and control systems, but it's really nice to spend time with an old machine that doesn't have any of that crap on it, and doesn't need any in order to function really, really well.
We only own one "new" car, and I doubt seriously that we'll ever buy another one, partly because the modern electronics systems are an incredibly expensive nightmare that is essentially impossible to fix. I costs me far less to keep my Ferrari running well than many of my friends spend just keeping their new Porsche and BMWs on the road, and parts for the Japanese cars are even worse - go price a set of valves for a Lexus if you *really* want sticker shock!
Only if no-one has modified it while it was a GPL beastie. If they have, you have to track them all down, one by one, and get a release. Unless of course they've assigned their copyrights to the FSF, in which case you are screwed, cos there's no way RMS is gonna re-BSD stuff that was entrusted to him on the expectation that it would be exclusively available under the terms of the GPL.
Your assertion rests on the assumption that the GPL is valid. I pointed out that this has not yet been determined by the courts. Despite the FSF's bluster, there are several very good legal reasons why the GPL might be found invalid if it were ever really tried. (The entire preamble is legally worthless (by definition - that's what preamble means), it fails for consideration, it attempts to bind third parties, etc., etc. - there are literally dozens of legal points on which it is quite vulnerable.)
In general, though, there's no benefit in fighting it in court - so it will probably remain untested for decades or more... (Why would anyone spend a fortune in court to try to keep from paying a little bit for software? It would be cheaper to just re-implement anything you find under a Gnu license that happens to be useful to you, but which cannot reamin under the GPL in order to meet your needs.
If the GPL *is* ever upheld, BTW, that would very likely mean that GPL'ed software could also be re-licensed under BSD or some other license - the sword must cut both ways - always - there's no way to allow only Gnu to leverage such restrictions.
Personally, I'm in favor of abolishing all copyright for software... That'd fix 'em!:-)
And what if we just haven't discovered the code that got through yet...
We have had no, I repeat, NO, undetected break-ins to our computer systems.
- An IT manager responsible (at least only partly, thank goodness) for security at a Fortune 20 company I used to work for. Apparently she wasn't clear on the meaning of "undetected"...
Actually, you can take all that wonderful BSD licensed code, strap the GPL on it, and redistribute.
The FSF calls the BSD license "GPL compatible" in that regard.
And because that code was originally under a BSD license, it is quite probably legal and completely legitimate to strip off the GPL from that code and once again distribute it as truly free software. (Note this is only possible with GPL'ed software, where the source is still available - commercial binary-only distributions are still protected by the fact that their source is not available!)
Unfortunately, we won't know for sure until the courts rule on the issue, so until then it doesn't even matter if IANAL...
>Um, I use Darwin on an x86 as my primary firewall and work machine. You might be surprised to learn that unix does not necessarily require a goofy gnome foot dropping cores on your desktop every few seconds.
Um, folks use GNOME on Darwin on x86.
And while I don't use GNOME, it's matured a *lot* since the 1.0 days, and is pretty stable, so your jibes aren't exactly accurate.
Gnome has improved, but it's still one of the most unstable user environments I've ever encountered, and not intending to start a flamefest here, easily less than half as stable and reliable as KDE... If only Sun had chosen *anything* else to build their standard desktop upon...
...it's possible to create an SSH tunnel for port 21, FTP's control port. The data is actually transmitted in the clear over other ports, but the protocol-related transmissions take place over the encrypted port.
This approach will crash and burn if attempting to traverse a stateful firewall, of course, since such a beast needs the info in the control conection in order to allow the data connection back through.
Re:Looking at his Speak Freely website...
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I took a gander at his Speak Freely website to check out the reason behind his dropping maintenance to Speak Freely.
It mostly revolves around his contention that NAT'd LANs block peer to peer traffic. However, while he does concede that you can do port mapping to overcome this issue, he doesn't give people credence to make it work.
Well that sort of thing certainly is NOT plug and play. It's quite reasonable to say that it's *well* beyond the capabilities of more than 90% of the people on the net.
But you miss something else important here: in our rush to embrace NAT as a solution to all ills (especially the IPv4 address "crisis"), we let a big, ugly smelly camel's nose in the tent, and now the whole flea-ridden beast can't be chased out.
NAT was never a very good idea, and it has its down side (especially the brain-dead IP masq-ing flavor of NAT popularized by Linux, which causes far more problems than true NAT.) One of the saddest developments inthe short history of the net has been the weed-like propagation of IP masq-ing instead of real NAT as originally implemented by a company called Network Translation in their PIX product. (...before they were bought by Cisco and their decent, fast, NAT code was replaced by the execrable IOS.)
How can they compete with mp3's that can be acquired for free, have no restriction AND can play on any platform (Windows, Mac, Unix) or portable device?
Don't you get it? That's the point - The music industry is forcing everything to WMA format (and possibly other heavily DRM-ed formats in the future. I'll call them all WMA for brevity here.)
They know it will take a few years, but that they will eventually win. Here's the scenario:
1) Make all current and classic songs only available "legally" in WMA formats. Already happening through most "legal" online music services, and the customers are biting. Augment this by encouraging the creation of more and more embedded car/portable players that support WMA only, or support mp3 as a second-class citizen. This is also already beginning to happen.
2) Eliminate CDs or cripple them with technology to prevent ripping. The latter is beginning - they can't reliably stop ripping now, but they'll keep at it, but it won't matter because we can expect some new releases in WMA formats only in the near future.
At that point, they've won the war, although battles will continue to be fought for some time. The trendy crowd will swallow WMA hook line and sinker to get the latest rapcrap music, so they'll get away with not having CDs available.
Once this has happened, mp3, Ogg, and the rest will irrelevant, since you can't transcode across psychoacoustic models without the result sounding horrible, even for bad music. That means WMA will be the only way to get high fidelity rapcrap (an oxymoron if ever there was one) but it *will* sell.
Your whole argument assumes the record companies will make music available in some non-DRM'ed form for ripping. They won't - they intend to squash that within a year or two, and with WMA'ed audio as the only option, they'll swing the consumer electronics (CE) industry behind them, barring some extraordinary set of circumstances. I really don't see that the customers have enough power to be very effective at doing anything about this. If they can continue to arm-twist the CE vendors, they will win by default for all except a few rebel geeks. (If Ogg players were readily available, I might change my tune, but we don't have those, do we? And very few CE vendors are willing to endure draw the withering fire from Microsoft and the RIAA that such a product would surely bring, especially since they are incresingly owned by or otherwise entangles with the record companies themselves.)
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The V-173 had a top airspeed of 500 MPH and a landing speed of 10 MPH.
It wasn't quite *that* good, but it did have a remarkably low stall speed.
These were indeed weird beasts - I looked up the "flying flapjacks" in the archives when I worked for LTV in the 1980's, as well as the Cutlass, which was a conglomeration of German design features that was a decade or two ahead of its time, and arguably the most successful failure in naval aviation history - the list of firsts racked up by that plane are truly impressive, even though it failed operationally.
If you want a look at "future" aviation technology we *were* reverse engineering after WWII, forget UFOs and concentrate on the Germans: Luft46.com is a real eye-opener - had the war lasted another year, Germany would have filled the sky with jets that the Allies couldn't match until a decade later, not to mention the stealth fighter-bombers, guided air-to-air missiles, rocket planes, and the atmosphere-skipping Sanger "Amerika Bomber". Impressive. And scary. Thank God that Hitler was foolish enough to try to fight in the Russian winter, or we'd all be speaking German...
Just two guys doing this, with helpers, ranging from machinists on the engine, to crew at Kitty Hawk. Interesting to note that their parents encouraged them at an early age, and that they had a limited social life, directing their energy instead toward their scientific explorations.
Your 21st century bigotry is showing. The Wrights did not have a "limited social life". Theirs was probably better than yours. Their father was a travelling minister, and they often hosted all kinds of visitors when he was home. They were quite well educated, and like most successful home-schoolers today, they had a far better and more rounded education than products of government propaganda mills. They were encouraged to pursue all sorts of things (which they did), "science" being only one of those.
Like Nathaniel Bowditch before them (probably the greatest American mathemetician ever, also home and self educated), one of their chief contributions was realizing that the existing tables and calculations were wrong and that they would need to create their own if they were going to succeed.
I very much doubt that the modern US has gotten its hands on alien technology.
;-)
Explain Velcro, then.
Anyone who's ever tried to get "stick-tights" brushed out of a dog's coat has absolutely no trouble believing the story that it was that operation that was the inspiration for Velcro...
I have been thinking about those rumors of a crashed UFO being studied at the Groom Lake facility, and it got me thinking about the possibilities. If the stories were true, I doubt they would gain much useful knowledge from it. Technology far in advance of your own, (or even moderately in advance of your own) would be unfathomable. Consider the following:
I cry "BS!" You're falling for the "modern man is superior" fallacy. The mechanical engineers of 1862 were better educated and had a better grasp of engineering fundamentals than MEs of today. (That's the opinion of my father, who was an ME professor at a prominent university. As an aside, the better engineers were more likely to be found in the South - the creativity lived there, it was production capapcity that the North had in spades...)
They would discover that the machine is made of wonderous materials - Aluminum was newly discovered and more expensive than Silver in that day. Titanium was unknown, as would be carbon fibre and other composites. They could discover some of its physical properties, but would have no idea how to manufacture it.
Somewhat true, but knowing what they were aiming for, they might figure it out before too long. Aluminum they'd get, it's really not that hard. Composites would be much tougher, since it's not at all clear from looking at a crosslinked thermoset that the resin was once a two-component goo, but most of the chemistry was known then. Interestingly, it would probably be welding that would throw them the most - not until WWII was welding steel possible on an industrial scale, and welded aluminum would appear even more exotic.
The principle of the turbine was known, but they would likely assume the aircraft was steam driven.
Oh, really, even with that quite simple oil burning combustion chamber, with all it's injector nozzles? I don't think so...
It is doubtful they could even refine the fuel that would enable the one aircraft they had to fly a single mission!
Oh, bunk! Jet fuel is only slightly modified kerosene, a fuel that was available in both high qualities and quantities in 1862, owing to the prevalence of the fuel for relatively smokeless lighting. Also, gas turbines will run on darn near anything that burns and can be pumped into the combustor, from near-tar to Chanel No. 5 (yes, that's actually been done - search the web...)
An examination of the overall aircraft would not give them any advantage in learning how to build a flying machine either - aircraft of the early 20th century bear no respemblence to a modern jet fighter. If the Wright brothers were given the opportunity to carefully examine one before they started building their flyer, it would have set them back many years.
Again your point boils down to a condescending, "Those poor dolts wouldn't know enough to figure out which parts they could build and which parts they couldn't." The actual ingenuity of the Wrights testifies to the opposite. Every critical aspect of the Wright Flyer except the propellor is present and recognizable in an F-16.
Don't assume people used to be stupid. They weren't. In fact, they were at least as bright and most likely better educated than people are today. By the way, that's as true of people 2000 years ago as it is of people 100 years ago. If you don't believe it, look up "Antikythera Mechanism" on the net to see how Rhodian scholars and engineers were building differential calculating gearsets in 80 BC. Not all progress and engineering prowess is recent, and it's a huge mistake to think that's the case...
You're missing the point if you think the FSF cares at all about promoting the GPL. You see, the GPL is evil in the eyes of the FSF here because it's working in favor of what is the greatest of all evils in the FSF's twisted worldview: if KDE were included, a COMPANY might actually MAKE MONEY on software.
In the FSF's eyes, this is intolerable - whether that position is logically consistent, or even consistent with their positions last week is irrelevant - the only thing that matters, indeed the only thing that drives the FSF mentality is a deep-seated hatred and bigoted intolerance of commerce in software.
This is a great idea. There are a huge number of technical advantages to building atop a BSD, rather than a Linux base for this sort of project, entirely aside from licensing issues. I've used both extensively, and even the best Linux distros are dramatically less stable and robust than the BSDs. (I've also found that those arguing otherwise have usually never really tried the BSDs - just managing to have installed them doesn't count - use in actual production does.)
But it's also quite clear, given Bruce's requirements for the UserLinux project, that BSD would be a better fit, since it is not a commercially hostile license. It's great that even a guy like Bruce now realizes that GPL-only licensing is the kiss of death for the kinds of large-scale commercial support such a venture needs.
I personally would be in favor of a modified BSD license that would add only one stipulation: that the code can never be placed under another more restrictive license, preventing the modified-BSD-licensed code from being relicensed (and thus effectively "stolen" from the community) under the GPL or similar viral licenses. In this way, it can be assured that truly free software remains that way and cannot be co-opted and limited to Stallman's twisted idea of "free".
They are not 100% sure of why the foam came off, the area it broke away from was laid up by hand not machine and has a complex geometry, both of which were contributing factors.
This was only the effect, not the cause. The foam on the tank was a hard-surfaced foam material *until* a few years ago. Then the type of foam used was changed for "environmental" reasons to eliminate a small amount of chloroflourocarbons in the original foam. The new foam is far more susceptible to damage than the old, at least partly because in order to get a properly shaped surface with the new foam, they now have to grind off the harder "rind" of the foam. This leaves the soft and frangible interior exposed and just asking to be ripped off in huge hunks by the adjacent supersonic airflows.
It's really not a stretch at all to say that it was radical environmentalism that brought down Columbia and is the ultimate root cause for the loss of an expensive ship and seven precious lives.
It's time to eliminate NASA entirely. If we're going to have a space program, it's time to start with a clean slate. I don't know what more evidence of NASA's total incompetence we could possibly need than losing the seven Columbia astronauts through exactly the same sort of boneheaded ignorance that caused the loss of the seven Challenger astronauts...
Zope is awesome in its potential, Hellish in its reality. All geeks are impressed with Zope's abilities. But very few even of that group are capable or willing to put up with its inane complexities. I've wasted *way* too much time trying to get Zope to do anything useful, and have nothing to show for it.
Blosxom, on the other hand is dead easy to install "a working blog in fifteen minutes or your money back..." and has plug-ins to handle things like the image management side of things.
On an open source software pain-in-the-butt scale of 1 to 10, Zope is a 9, Blosxom is a 2.
Blosxom is no panacea, but if you just want a blog, it's orders of magnitude easier than Movable Type, Zope, and their ilk, and with plug-ins, it offers similar functionality. My problem with both MT and Zope is that they require a very seriously high-maintenance commitment. Try Blosxom first - if it turns out you don't like it, at least you won't have wasted any effort at all compared to the others....
The only states' right the South cared enough about to actually tear apart the Union for was the "right" to hold human property in the form of slaves. That's what I meant by "sole cause." IOW, IMO, slavery and the threat of abolition alone would have caused them to secede, without any of the other issues being present; without that issue, none of the other issues would have been sufficient to bring about the war.
Sorry, but this is the typical misunderstanding of one whose opinion on this period in history has been shaped by historians view rather than by reading the copious original source material availalbe. If you bother to do that, you'll see that slavery was only a very minor political issue. It wasn't even held up as a "cause" of the war in the North for the first 50 years or so after the war, because everyone, NOrth and South, knew that was wrong. It's really a very interesting study in the mechaincs of historical revisionism...
Go back and read original sources, not historians' retelling of them, and you'll be able to see the real truth for yourself - and you'll be quite surprised that you could have got it so wrong...
The American Revolution began in 1776, and seemed to have been won in 1865 ...
You couldn't be more wrong in your grasp of history. There never was an "American Revolution", but rather a "War for Independence". France had a revolution - there's a BIG difference. Try reading some actual history (preferably based on original sources) to learn more.
Secondly, from the point of view of freedom, the War Between the States (that war's official designation even by the US Congress, and not a "Civil War" under any circumstances) destroyed the last vestiges of freedom held by the people and thier states. I don't say that just because I'm a Southerner, but because it's true - self determination was terminated at the point of a bayonet during that war, and we've been suffering under the illusion that we're actually free since then. Look into Lincoln's blatantly illegal actions in stacking the Supreme Court, creating a new state (WV) by fiat to realign the balance of power in Congress in his favor, and more. And don't even get me started on the illegality of the 14th amendment and the way it's been used to justify the federal government's involvement in every minute aspect of our lives...
Black or white, we all lost our freedom in 1865, and the country can never again be what the founders intended, and what it once was. In reality, slavery was not ended, but expanded to cover the entire citizenry.
There is nothing so intolerant as "tolerance"...
It wasn't so much that it was a woman, but rather the epic conflict between the fuzzies and the techies. Those striving for their B.S. or B.E. degrees in University typically have certain disdain for their classmates who take nothing but fluffy liberal arts classes and then brag about their 4.0 GPA...
It also has quite a bit to do with the fact that colleges have completely forgotten that a liberal arts education should be the *foundation* of a technical one - in the medieval and renaaissance universities that ours *should* be based upon, one was required to master the tivium (grammar (facts of things), logic, and rhetoric) before being allowed to advance to study the quadrivium (arithmetic/mathematics, music, geometry, and astronomy).
Real liberal arts is NOT fuzzy or wimpy, it's just that there are only a very few places one can get a REAL liberal arts education anymore...
On another note, I'd like to propose "Judge/Citizen" as an approriate and entirely politically correct alternative euphemism for the terribly insensitive "Master/Slave" nomenclature. I can think of no case in recent history where the two are not synonymous - to be honest, we have lived under a judicial hegemony since the 14th amendment abolished both state and individual rights in 1865...
A moral discussion about this is a whole topic in itself, but most of these people don't see what they are doing as really "wrong", or else they probably wouldn't do it, because they are basically good people.
It's worth noting that many people who fall into this category are not "pirates" at all, but simply those that find it easier to download a bunch of MP3's of CDs they already own than to spend a couple of weeks ripping them. Sure, many of us here like to know our music was ripped and encoded "correctly", but most people don't care enough to deal with the hassles - they just find it easier to download than rip.
I've ripped some, and downloaded some, and almost all of what I've downloaded are MP3's of things I have the CDs for, simply for convenience. The rest are things that are very hard or impossible to buy CDs of anyway - old stuff, obscure stuff (The Judy's), no longer available, or, in one case, a CD I own that doesn't play correctly anymore. Is that one legit? Maybe...
Actually ... mouse gestures are better implemented as Pie Menus.
Depends on what you want. I'd agree that for the sorts of things done in the demo, pie menus are better, but strokes/gestures can be incredibly beneficial in other environments.
My first Unix exposure was on a Version 7 CAD system from a company called Cimcad/Cimlinc. Their system had what to this day is still the BEST interface for geometry creation I've ever seen in ANY CAD product. It used gestures (they called them "strokes" extensively to speed common operations - for instance, to zoom in on an area (one of the most common CAD operations) you simply drew a circle CW around the area you wanted to see. The process was reversed by drawing the circle the other way. Geometry was selected by simply defining a box around it NW to SE. Unselecting parts of that could be accomplished by the reverse stroke. Construction lines were instantly created by horizontal or vertical strokes, and a circle could be created from points on the stack with another stroke. These are the easy ones, but there were several dozen, each of which was an order of magnitude faster and more productive than any other method I've ever seen.
The only app I've seen that is even sort-of as well thought out from a UI point of view is Ashlar's Vellum (now Graphite), which is hardly surprising, since it was started by remnants of Cimlinc's West Coast development center. Sadly, as good as it is, it's only a pale shadow of what CimCAD once was, and the drafting assistant is all that remains of the innovative UI that once existed.
Gestures are fantastic, if they're well thought out. Interestingly, given the resources of that system, you could get better performance today running such a CAD system as a JavaScript app in a browser. Moore's law really is cool...
Six months ago, I thought JavaScript was a joke, a toy scripting language that just pretended to have real capbilities. I am now FIRMLY convinced that JavaScript may well be the MOST important asset that we have in opposing anyone's efforts to take over, control, or "proprietize" the web, as Microsoft and Macromedia are rolling ahead to do, with
Several reasons why I think JavaScript is the best choice for much app development today:
If you still think JavaScript is a steaming pile, commit to spending a few dozen hours cheking out what it can *really* do before giving up on what may well be the best hope for the open, interoperable future that is of the greatest benefit to us all.
The USPTO is working as designed. They are supposed to accept as many patents as possible to generate revenue. The USPTO stopped actually checking if patents are "obvious" or "inventions" a long time ago.
You've quite obviously never tried to get a patent yourself, have you? I'm going through the process now, and I can assure you, you're dead wrong - the PTO does not simply accept applications in return for money, and the nonobviousness and utility provisions are as strong as they ever were.
Don't let one or two bad patents getting through fool you - the system works, and works fairly well. More importantly, its patent system is a fundamental reason why the US has been the leading industrial power for the last century. We should not change that lightly, if at all.
For the average mechanic, knowing about carburetors or points is a complete waste of time. No car has rolled off a high-volume assembly line with either in years, and even the distributor is going the way of the dodo.
:-))
Sadly, this is true, even for classics and exotics. Just last year, I had to wait *weeks* to get all the proper parts for a complete rebuild on the four Weber two-barrels that sit atop my Ferrari Dino 308gt4 - these parts simply did not exist in North America, and had to be shipped from Italy (presumably by oxen-powered paddle-wheel boat by way of Venezuela and Fiji...)
(The Dino gt4 was the first V8 Ferrari - the entire 308/328/348/355/360 family developed from this car. Like the orginal small-block Chevy, it was the beginning of a dynasty, and although not a favorite of collectors, it's an absolute hoot to drive, and way cheaper than a new BMW if you can find a good guy to wrench on the classics - and that's generally NOT the dealer...)
Anyway, it's getting harder to find people that know how to work on carbs, but worth the effort. (Some people are converting old Ferraris to FI, but the Webers are quite reliable, once they're properly set up, and were generally regarded as superior to Fuel injection until the late 1980s, anyway, they make those wonderful howling, shrieking, slurping noises that FI cars lack - or mayybe that's why mine needed work...
The nice thing about that car is that it's one of the last honest exotics - there's not a thing there that can't be worked on by a competent mechanic with a good set of metric tools. I did give in and convert it to electronic ignition,. but other than that, it's all mechanical. (I don't mind distributors, but *two* of them, with two sets of points each, made tune-ups and spark plug cleaning a way-too-frequent chore.)
One nice thing - this car is so old now that it requires no pollution controls, and runs so efficiently it outperforms any modern car with a bad O2 sensor. It only gets 15 miles per gallon, but what the heck did you expect? That's better than a Hummer or Land Cruiser by several MPG...
By day, I build new software and hardware for measurement and control systems, but it's really nice to spend time with an old machine that doesn't have any of that crap on it, and doesn't need any in order to function really, really well.
We only own one "new" car, and I doubt seriously that we'll ever buy another one, partly because the modern electronics systems are an incredibly expensive nightmare that is essentially impossible to fix. I costs me far less to keep my Ferrari running well than many of my friends spend just keeping their new Porsche and BMWs on the road, and parts for the Japanese cars are even worse - go price a set of valves for a Lexus if you *really* want sticker shock!
Only if no-one has modified it while it was
:-)
a GPL beastie. If they have, you have to
track them all down, one by one, and get a
release. Unless of course they've assigned
their copyrights to the FSF, in which case
you are screwed, cos there's no way RMS is
gonna re-BSD stuff that was entrusted to him
on the expectation that it would be exclusively
available under the terms of the GPL.
Your assertion rests on the assumption that the GPL is valid. I pointed out that this has not yet been determined by the courts. Despite the FSF's bluster, there are several very good legal reasons why the GPL might be found invalid if it were ever really tried. (The entire preamble is legally worthless (by definition - that's what preamble means), it fails for consideration, it attempts to bind third parties, etc., etc. - there are literally dozens of legal points on which it is quite vulnerable.)
In general, though, there's no benefit in fighting it in court - so it will probably remain untested for decades or more... (Why would anyone spend a fortune in court to try to keep from paying a little bit for software? It would be cheaper to just re-implement anything you find under a Gnu license that happens to be useful to you, but which cannot reamin under the GPL in order to meet your needs.
If the GPL *is* ever upheld, BTW, that would very likely mean that GPL'ed software could also be re-licensed under BSD or some other license - the sword must cut both ways - always - there's no way to allow only Gnu to leverage such restrictions.
Personally, I'm in favor of abolishing all copyright for software... That'd fix 'em!
I love this. I state an OPINION based on my own person al EXPERIENCE, caveat it that it is not a flam, and STIL get modded "Flamebait".
It seems that absolutely no comments will be tolerated that don't enshrine Gnu software as the greatest creation in human history.
Where is the old Slashdot, where actual discussions could take place, and opponents could be wrong, but tolerated? This place is *way* too PC now...
- An IT manager responsible (at least only partly, thank goodness) for security at a Fortune 20 company I used to work for. Apparently she wasn't clear on the meaning of "undetected"...
Actually, you can take all that wonderful BSD licensed code, strap the GPL on it, and redistribute.
The FSF calls the BSD license "GPL compatible" in that regard.
And because that code was originally under a BSD license, it is quite probably legal and completely legitimate to strip off the GPL from that code and once again distribute it as truly free software. (Note this is only possible with GPL'ed software, where the source is still available - commercial binary-only distributions are still protected by the fact that their source is not available!)
Unfortunately, we won't know for sure until the courts rule on the issue, so until then it doesn't even matter if IANAL...
>Um, I use Darwin on an x86 as my primary firewall and work machine. You might be surprised to learn that unix does not necessarily require a goofy gnome foot dropping cores on your desktop every few seconds.
Um, folks use GNOME on Darwin on x86.
And while I don't use GNOME, it's matured a *lot* since the 1.0 days, and is pretty stable, so your jibes aren't exactly accurate.
Gnome has improved, but it's still one of the most unstable user environments I've ever encountered, and not intending to start a flamefest here, easily less than half as stable and reliable as KDE... If only Sun had chosen *anything* else to build their standard desktop upon...
...it's possible to create an SSH tunnel for port 21, FTP's control port. The data is actually transmitted in the clear over other ports, but the protocol-related transmissions take place over the encrypted port.
This approach will crash and burn if attempting to traverse a stateful firewall, of course, since such a beast needs the info in the control conection in order to allow the data connection back through.
I took a gander at his Speak Freely website to check out the reason behind his dropping maintenance to Speak Freely.
It mostly revolves around his contention that NAT'd LANs block peer to peer traffic. However, while he does concede that you can do port mapping to overcome this issue, he doesn't give people credence to make it work.
Well that sort of thing certainly is NOT plug and play. It's quite reasonable to say that it's *well* beyond the capabilities of more than 90% of the people on the net.
But you miss something else important here: in our rush to embrace NAT as a solution to all ills (especially the IPv4 address "crisis"), we let a big, ugly smelly camel's nose in the tent, and now the whole flea-ridden beast can't be chased out.
NAT was never a very good idea, and it has its down side (especially the brain-dead IP masq-ing flavor of NAT popularized by Linux, which causes far more problems than true NAT.) One of the saddest developments inthe short history of the net has been the weed-like propagation of IP masq-ing instead of real NAT as originally implemented by a company called Network Translation in their PIX product. (...before they were bought by Cisco and their decent, fast, NAT code was replaced by the execrable IOS.)
How can they compete with mp3's that can be acquired for free, have no restriction AND can play on any platform (Windows, Mac, Unix) or portable device?
Don't you get it? That's the point - The music industry is forcing everything to WMA format (and possibly other heavily DRM-ed formats in the future. I'll call them all WMA for brevity here.)
They know it will take a few years, but that they will eventually win. Here's the scenario:
1) Make all current and classic songs only available "legally" in WMA formats. Already happening through most "legal" online music services, and the customers are biting. Augment this by encouraging the creation of more and more embedded car/portable players that support WMA only, or support mp3 as a second-class citizen. This is also already beginning to happen.
2) Eliminate CDs or cripple them with technology to prevent ripping. The latter is beginning - they can't reliably stop ripping now, but they'll keep at it, but it won't matter because we can expect some new releases in WMA formats only in the near future.
At that point, they've won the war, although battles will continue to be fought for some time. The trendy crowd will swallow WMA hook line and sinker to get the latest rapcrap music, so they'll get away with not having CDs available.
Once this has happened, mp3, Ogg, and the rest will irrelevant, since you can't transcode across psychoacoustic models without the result sounding horrible, even for bad music. That means WMA will be the only way to get high fidelity rapcrap (an oxymoron if ever there was one) but it *will* sell.
Your whole argument assumes the record companies will make music available in some non-DRM'ed form for ripping. They won't - they intend to squash that within a year or two, and with WMA'ed audio as the only option, they'll swing the consumer electronics (CE) industry behind them, barring some extraordinary set of circumstances. I really don't see that the customers have enough power to be very effective at doing anything about this. If they can continue to arm-twist the CE vendors, they will win by default for all except a few rebel geeks. (If Ogg players were readily available, I might change my tune, but we don't have those, do we? And very few CE vendors are willing to endure draw the withering fire from Microsoft and the RIAA that such a product would surely bring, especially since they are incresingly owned by or otherwise entangles with the record companies themselves.)