A spread of 200,000 votes is way more than enough to have tipped many elections in US history.
Mostly because our silly electoral college system serves as a statistical noise amplifier, often making the result swing on the closest contest out of 50 states. Thus, a nationwide election with tens of millions of voters can easily end up hinging on a few thousand votes (1960), or even a few hundred votes (2000). These tiny margins mean that the actual outcome in such years gets determined by mistakes and/or fraud, since there's no way to reduce these below such small values.
Of course Microsoft open source such a release, just as Oracle's version of Red Hat is open sourced. Novell's problem would be that they invested a lot of effort helping MS get up to speed, then MS turns around and releases the results of these efforts under their own dominant brand. Regardless of whether Novell has access to Microsoft's kernel code, they end up marginalized. They don't have access to Microsoft's proprietary userland or apps, and in the long run they may not have this patent license either. Novell also can't match Microsoft's sales force and marketing muscle.
Just staring at 10 million lines of code for a few months isn't going to give you much insight into how the entire system *actually* behaves. You need real-world experience that can only be gained by many years of actual coding, debugging and using the code.
It's far easier to get up to speed by learning from the people with that experience, and maybe hiring away a few of the best ones.
How is this going to hurt Novell in any way, shape or form.
Judging from 25 years of history, including personal experience, here's what's likely to happen in the long term:
Microsoft works with Novell for a few years on "interoperability". Microsoft's engineers absorb as much practical working knowledge as possible about Linux internals from Novell/SUSE people, without giving much back in the way of their Windows secrets.
Perhaps the OS market will remain in a static status quo for the next decade. In that unlikely event, Novell may not get hurt. However, if Microsoft ever feels that the OS kernel is starting to get commoditized, they can simply pull an Oracle, dump Novell, and put out their own branded Linux-based OS using the results of their joint labors.
Since their agreement with Novell has a time limit, they'll eventually be free to unlicense them and FUD them out of the way along with the rest of the commercial Linux vendors. In the long run, Microsoft may not care whether there's an NT or Linux kernel under their stack of wares, especially if.NET/Mono hides the difference. They can still make sure that their customers pay for per-seat licenses by using Apple's hybrid kernel/userland model, and they'll be able to claim that they're "playing nice" by using a freely distributable (but rather useless in isolation) kernel.
Microsoft has successfully used this general approach many times in the past, starting with their IBM DOS and OS/2 deals, up throught the most recent example of bamboozling digital device manufacturers with the Plays For Sure/Zune switcheroo. There's no reason to believe that it will be any different with Novell, especially with that company's long track record poor strategic decisions.
The point is to prevent illegal distribution of copyrighted material.
That's what the hardware manufacturers might tell you. However, the actual point of DRM hardware is to stake out a vertical region of the digital media and digital player market, wall it off with proprietary formats and patents, lock customers into the region, and lock competitors out. This way, the hardware manufacturers can now grab a piece of the lucrative media sales pie instead of being relegated to single-digit margins selling little made-in-China gadgets. Preventing interoperability is the key aspect of this strategy.
Hardware vendors don't give a rat's ass about illicit copying. If that were the only consideration, you wouldn't be able to find anyone who would manufacture DRM'd gear. Those who buy into into the "illegal copying" justification for DRM are simply being duped.
Given that the earth has had dramatic climate changes well before people could have possibly had anything to do with it...why is that anyone who believes this could be the case here must be some type of moronic fool?
Anyone who can't grasp the concept of rate of change is rather likely to be a moronic fool.
But you're actually about 100X more likely to die in a car accident than a terrorist attack. And you'll never be able to avoid the most random 1% of car accidents. For example, a few years ago someone who I had met was killed when the driver in front of them suddenly swerved head-on into the path of an 18-wheeler, which subsequently jacknifed and swept out the entire highway.
Sadly, his number was up, and there was exactly nothing that he could have been done to avoid it. However, I don't see the president up there on the news every night harping about how our civilization is doomed if we don't hunt down and exterminate everyone who can't stay alert while driving on 2-lane roads.
the eight million victims of the Holocaust might have the right to ask that question. perhaps also the 3000 who died at the WTC.
We shouldn't overlook the fact that many if not most of the millions who died in the Holocaust were killed by government security agencies whose jobs included preventing terrorist acts. The cure can be worse than the disease.
But in a ventilated space that had just had a huge hole blasted into it?
There's an effect called draft. Look it up. In a cavity that size, it would be hugely more powerful than a shop vac. Anyway, as others have pointed out, no actual melting of the structure was required to make it fail.
The official explanation is that there was no molten steel by the way, despite the eye witness reports and photographs of - molten steel.
Or maybe, if these eyewitness reports were true, what they saw was about 100,000 pounds of burning molten aluminum.
Face it, the only unexpected thing from that event was that the buildings managed to not collapse immediately on impact... Oh I know, next you'll claim that there weren't any airplanes at all.
Seeing as how its impossible for jet fuel to melt steel (jet fuel burns from 800F to 1500F depending on conditions) and that steel melts at 2750F. I would certainly hope it would be famous for violating the laws of physics.
Now wait a minute... Back in my school days I melted steel myself with nothing more than some Kingsford charcoal, a ceramic crucible I appropriated from chem lab, and the output hose of a ShopVac.
Now since charcoal undoubtedly "burns" cooler than jet fuel, that must have been impossible... Unless of course the combustion temperature depends on the conditions in which it is occurring. Anyway, I suspect that you're confusing *ignition* temperature with that of sustained burning.
Here's another thing to ponder: if jet fuel can't melt ordinary steel, why do they bother using exotic high-temp alloys and active cooling systems in jet turbines?
Yeah, I'm sure that at the sales meetings, Diebold people make that exact point: "Look, this system is totally inappropriate for managing elections, but since it seems to be what you want, we'll reluctantly sell it to you. We really don't recommend you use it for official voting. If the election gets stolen, don't come back to us and say we didn't warn you!"
Diebold's hardware runs billions of dollars and transactions through it every day.
Financial transactions are non-anonymous and routinely audited by all parties. That makes it likely that any fraud is quickly detected by one of the parties, and not unlikely to be traced back to the perpetrators. This aspect provides most of the security for electronic financial systems, not the systems themselves.
Voting, which is a one-directional anonymous system where the voter by definition has no way to verify that what they entered is properly counted, is a security problem that's orders of magnitude harder. Diebold has obviously applied the much more lax standards appropriate for their financial systems to these election systems, with predictably dubious results.
The Gimp has no problem opening and saving JPEGs but every day I hear another excuse why Totem can't play WMV / Quicktime files.
That's because the JPEG patent was a submarine patent that nobody even knew about until just a couple of years ago, when it was almost expired. Moreover, many if not most analysts doubt that the patent was valid in the first place. This is definitely not the case for most video codecs, which have been widely known to be covered by probably valid patents since day 1.
I don't have any productive suggestions to fix the mistakes that were already made by these people, other than maybe hassling them for repairs or refunds so that they can share in the pain. I can only hope that at least one of them reads my post and realizes that they should not hardcode something as volatile as DST dates into equipment next time around, and they should not just continue to stamp out products hardcoded with the new dates.
All I can say is that the designers of those systems are incredibly stupid. The transition dates have been changed many times since DST was first introduced, and will undoubtedly be changed again. They also vary by state and region. Hard programming the dates is just silly.
If somebody's going to try and overthrow the government, they don't give a damn about legality.
That's my whole point. The 2nd amendment is irrelevant because people are going to ignore any laws and acquire effective hardware as soon as the conflict starts.
Imagine that multiplied by a few thousand who are specifically targeting military, police, and government officials.
Without independent media coverage, a few thousand snipers aren't going to put a dent in a national army. A totalitarian government will just absorb the losses and respond with mass reprisals against nearby civilians. If this weren't the case, we could have toppled Sadaam's regime by sending over some snipers.
Moreover, recent technology is making sniping less and less viable. In the near future, advances in sonar and radar monitoring, along with 24x7 unmanned drones in the sky, could make the life expectency of a sniper about 20 seconds past pulling the trigger. The feds were already thinking about deploying today's anti-sniper military technology against the Beltway sniper; that technology will continue to improve over time.
Apparently, you also didn't realize that the context of this thread is consumer-grade weapons vs. government forces. Fantasizing about snuffing burglars is a whole different topic.
If they keep getting "picked off", it's only because we're trying to look like "nice guys" and don't respond in a way that's a credible deterrent. A hypothetical US government that warrants a revolution would not be constrained by such niceties. Moreover, we have just about zero intelligence about what's really going on in Iraq; a tyrannical US government would already know all about you and your associations.
If each assassinated government agent were replied to by the authorities exterminating an entire neighborhood, your antics with little guns would come to an end real quick. That's how historic tyrants have successfully managed the situation.
But even in the least free states, fertilizer and fuel is perfectly legal and go boom very nicely.
They're not legal to mix. Nor are they as compact and effective as actual military weapons. The Iraqis aren't wasting their time making home-brewed concoctions like that; they've got real explosives.
Anyway, who the hell cares about what ineffective popguns joe sixpack might have? Even in the most poverty-stricken 3rd world countries, rebel forces have no problems getting their hands on real military weapons. Why do so many people here fantasize that they could try using their Wal-Mart ordnance in a real war and have any chance to survive? If it ever comes to pass, every American rebel would acquire serious weapons that definitely aren't legal in any state.
Yes, they might "make examples" on occasion, but on the whole the populace must be not be annihilated, otherwise who will they rule?
The population doesn't have to be totally annihilated to be pacified. Killing or imprisoning just 20% of them (using collective punishment reprisals for each incident involving those pathetic private firearms) would effectively wipe out all resistance, while still leaving most of the people available for work. This approach worked great for Joseph Stalin.
Slashdot Mirror
Nevertheless, it's currently linked from their front page under the "technology" section.
They'll go along with a minimum wage increase, but the president will add a signing statement:
"Within the context of this statute, the term 'Dollar' shall defined to be equal to 68 cents."
It's more like: Lobbyists write new laws; congress votes for them in exchange for campaign donations.
Mostly because our silly electoral college system serves as a statistical noise amplifier, often making the result swing on the closest contest out of 50 states. Thus, a nationwide election with tens of millions of voters can easily end up hinging on a few thousand votes (1960), or even a few hundred votes (2000). These tiny margins mean that the actual outcome in such years gets determined by mistakes and/or fraud, since there's no way to reduce these below such small values.
Of course Microsoft open source such a release, just as Oracle's version of Red Hat is open sourced. Novell's problem would be that they invested a lot of effort helping MS get up to speed, then MS turns around and releases the results of these efforts under their own dominant brand. Regardless of whether Novell has access to Microsoft's kernel code, they end up marginalized. They don't have access to Microsoft's proprietary userland or apps, and in the long run they may not have this patent license either. Novell also can't match Microsoft's sales force and marketing muscle.
It's far easier to get up to speed by learning from the people with that experience, and maybe hiring away a few of the best ones.
Judging from 25 years of history, including personal experience, here's what's likely to happen in the long term:
Microsoft works with Novell for a few years on "interoperability". Microsoft's engineers absorb as much practical working knowledge as possible about Linux internals from Novell/SUSE people, without giving much back in the way of their Windows secrets.
Perhaps the OS market will remain in a static status quo for the next decade. In that unlikely event, Novell may not get hurt. However, if Microsoft ever feels that the OS kernel is starting to get commoditized, they can simply pull an Oracle, dump Novell, and put out their own branded Linux-based OS using the results of their joint labors.
Since their agreement with Novell has a time limit, they'll eventually be free to unlicense them and FUD them out of the way along with the rest of the commercial Linux vendors. In the long run, Microsoft may not care whether there's an NT or Linux kernel under their stack of wares, especially if .NET/Mono hides the difference. They can still make sure that their customers pay for per-seat licenses by using Apple's hybrid kernel/userland model, and they'll be able to claim that they're "playing nice" by using a freely distributable (but rather useless in isolation) kernel.
Microsoft has successfully used this general approach many times in the past, starting with their IBM DOS and OS/2 deals, up throught the most recent example of bamboozling digital device manufacturers with the Plays For Sure/Zune switcheroo. There's no reason to believe that it will be any different with Novell, especially with that company's long track record poor strategic decisions.
That's what the hardware manufacturers might tell you. However, the actual point of DRM hardware is to stake out a vertical region of the digital media and digital player market, wall it off with proprietary formats and patents, lock customers into the region, and lock competitors out. This way, the hardware manufacturers can now grab a piece of the lucrative media sales pie instead of being relegated to single-digit margins selling little made-in-China gadgets. Preventing interoperability is the key aspect of this strategy.
Hardware vendors don't give a rat's ass about illicit copying. If that were the only consideration, you wouldn't be able to find anyone who would manufacture DRM'd gear. Those who buy into into the "illegal copying" justification for DRM are simply being duped.
Anyone who can't grasp the concept of rate of change is rather likely to be a moronic fool.
Sadly, his number was up, and there was exactly nothing that he could have been done to avoid it. However, I don't see the president up there on the news every night harping about how our civilization is doomed if we don't hunt down and exterminate everyone who can't stay alert while driving on 2-lane roads.
We shouldn't overlook the fact that many if not most of the millions who died in the Holocaust were killed by government security agencies whose jobs included preventing terrorist acts. The cure can be worse than the disease.
Face it, the only unexpected thing from that event was that the buildings managed to not collapse immediately on impact... Oh I know, next you'll claim that there weren't any airplanes at all.
Now since charcoal undoubtedly "burns" cooler than jet fuel, that must have been impossible... Unless of course the combustion temperature depends on the conditions in which it is occurring. Anyway, I suspect that you're confusing *ignition* temperature with that of sustained burning.
Here's another thing to ponder: if jet fuel can't melt ordinary steel, why do they bother using exotic high-temp alloys and active cooling systems in jet turbines?
Yeah, I'm sure that at the sales meetings, Diebold people make that exact point: "Look, this system is totally inappropriate for managing elections, but since it seems to be what you want, we'll reluctantly sell it to you. We really don't recommend you use it for official voting. If the election gets stolen, don't come back to us and say we didn't warn you!"
Financial transactions are non-anonymous and routinely audited by all parties. That makes it likely that any fraud is quickly detected by one of the parties, and not unlikely to be traced back to the perpetrators. This aspect provides most of the security for electronic financial systems, not the systems themselves.
Voting, which is a one-directional anonymous system where the voter by definition has no way to verify that what they entered is properly counted, is a security problem that's orders of magnitude harder. Diebold has obviously applied the much more lax standards appropriate for their financial systems to these election systems, with predictably dubious results.
That's because the JPEG patent was a submarine patent that nobody even knew about until just a couple of years ago, when it was almost expired. Moreover, many if not most analysts doubt that the patent was valid in the first place. This is definitely not the case for most video codecs, which have been widely known to be covered by probably valid patents since day 1.
I don't have any productive suggestions to fix the mistakes that were already made by these people, other than maybe hassling them for repairs or refunds so that they can share in the pain. I can only hope that at least one of them reads my post and realizes that they should not hardcode something as volatile as DST dates into equipment next time around, and they should not just continue to stamp out products hardcoded with the new dates.
All I can say is that the designers of those systems are incredibly stupid. The transition dates have been changed many times since DST was first introduced, and will undoubtedly be changed again. They also vary by state and region. Hard programming the dates is just silly.
That's my whole point. The 2nd amendment is irrelevant because people are going to ignore any laws and acquire effective hardware as soon as the conflict starts.
Without independent media coverage, a few thousand snipers aren't going to put a dent in a national army. A totalitarian government will just absorb the losses and respond with mass reprisals against nearby civilians. If this weren't the case, we could have toppled Sadaam's regime by sending over some snipers.
Moreover, recent technology is making sniping less and less viable. In the near future, advances in sonar and radar monitoring, along with 24x7 unmanned drones in the sky, could make the life expectency of a sniper about 20 seconds past pulling the trigger. The feds were already thinking about deploying today's anti-sniper military technology against the Beltway sniper; that technology will continue to improve over time.
Apparently, you also didn't realize that the context of this thread is consumer-grade weapons vs. government forces. Fantasizing about snuffing burglars is a whole different topic.
If each assassinated government agent were replied to by the authorities exterminating an entire neighborhood, your antics with little guns would come to an end real quick. That's how historic tyrants have successfully managed the situation.
Do you honestly think that an army comprised only of snipers could win any war? Because that's what the 2nd amendment gives you.
If all they had was AK-47s, we wouldn't be having any troubles at all right now.
They're not legal to mix. Nor are they as compact and effective as actual military weapons. The Iraqis aren't wasting their time making home-brewed concoctions like that; they've got real explosives.
Anyway, who the hell cares about what ineffective popguns joe sixpack might have? Even in the most poverty-stricken 3rd world countries, rebel forces have no problems getting their hands on real military weapons. Why do so many people here fantasize that they could try using their Wal-Mart ordnance in a real war and have any chance to survive? If it ever comes to pass, every American rebel would acquire serious weapons that definitely aren't legal in any state.
The population doesn't have to be totally annihilated to be pacified. Killing or imprisoning just 20% of them (using collective punishment reprisals for each incident involving those pathetic private firearms) would effectively wipe out all resistance, while still leaving most of the people available for work. This approach worked great for Joseph Stalin.