This is an excellent of example of why we need to be more vigilent and less complacent when it comes to government legislation. The fact that with no actual precedent for requiring stronger powers,
I wonder how often law enforcement "requiring more powers" are actually a sign of lack of basic competence
the FBI would lie to get them,
It's actually rather worst than that. To justify their lie required an investigation to be sabotaged. Then when they got these "stronger powers" the result appears to have been to make them less able to investigate anything. Quite likely what was actually needed here was more oversight and possibly even a weakening of existing powers and privileges.
is a testament to the fact that everyone is susceptible to feeling, and succombing to, a hunger for power, even at the expense of the people they are meant to be serving.
Without proper oversight the people involved are likely to act only in their own interests. e.g. the so called "rogue" office.
Once you know when and what direction, you know which hemisphere. Once you account for projection distortion, that puts the odds as pretty good it lands in an area well less than half of the Earth's surface. Something the size of, say, the Atlantic Ocean.
The direction it is comming from is going to give you lattitude, for longitude you need the time with accuracy. How do you know it won't have any further collisions or close encounters with anything of similar or greater mass in its 7 year orbit.
It would seem surprising if a collision with a satellite that's 0.00000005% of the asteroid's mass is going to change that enough for it to hit the earth.
On the next orbit... Mass may be less important than relative velocity, given (mv^2)/2. If it's possible for such a collision to deflect this object to be likely to hit the Earth then I'm sure it's perfectly possible to engineer a collision which will make sure it will come nowhere near.
But, hey - in the free market I can vote with my cash: let's see, which broadcaster is going to offer me the best deal for watching the latest episode of "Battlestar Galactica" or "Lost" tonight... Oh dear, it looks as if my only "choice" is to subscribe to a Murdochvision package or not watch the shows.
Or the best deal might be to get it as a torrent of bits within a few hours of it having been broadcast anywhere on the planet.
A large number of people in the UK have access to satellite and cable TV now and the most popular programmes on any TV channel are invariably American imports - Lost, 24, Prison Break, Heroes, The Simpsons etc. etc. In fact it was the BBC that showed 24 first and then sky took it to get more subscribers because it was that popular. Lost was first on Channel 4, now its on Sky too. Prison Break was on Channel 5 first, then sky took that too. The Simpsons were a staple of BBC 2 (after first being shown on Sky) for 10 years before it was taken by Channel 4 simply because it was that popular. Heroes is one of the most popular shows in the country - and what channel broadcasts it? Yup, BBC2. Smallville? Yeah - Channel 4. Dawson's Creek - Channel 4 again.
When it comes to foreign imports TV stations can "cherry pick". Also you don't get the same "experience" in terms of commercial interruptions. The BBC will show without commercials, quite often in a 45 minute slot for the 42-43 minutes of actual content. Note that this causes issues for US broadcasters wanting to show British TV. To the extent that if something is over 42 minutes of running time (which includes ITV material) it can wind up getting cut in order to fit enough adverts into the schedule.
"Getting there faster" should never be a goal in designing a commercial passenger jet. The vast majority of flights are so short that you spend more time on the ground, in the terminal, than you do in the air, so the overall improvement would be minuscule.
Maybe instead effort needs to be put into making the time on the ground shorter, rather than longer:)
The other way it could go is to use semiballistic transport. You would build something like a space shuttle. The engines would burn for a couple of minutes and accelerate you to 5 km/s. You would get about 30 minutes of free fall followed by aerobraking and landing at your destination. It is perfectly feasible, just horribly expensive.
Especially if you need an extra long runway (imagine what those protesting at Heathrow would have to say were they to be told that the new 09L/27R was going to be nearly 5km long) and the aircraft is going to require a D check after every flight.
Then - most countries do not allow supesonic overflights - I remember concorde had to fly subsonic while over land and could only go supersonic while over the ocean on the trans atlantic crossing.
The Concorde was noisy
Even flying subsonic, with reheat off, it was much louder than just about any other civil aircraft.
the engines needed to push a large plane to go that fast are very noisy, no leaky turbofans here
In terms of passengers and cargo capacity Concorde was not a large aircraft.
Delta Wings (Like the Concorde) - great for high speed flight, the Valkyrie bomber used a nice Delta wing design that "rode" the shock wave of supersonic flight at high speed to conserve fuel.
The Valkyrie never made it out of the prototype stage. IIRC the wingtips would fold downwards in supersonic cruise.
It is not an optimum load carrying wing, and is not good for low-speed flight. Delta wings have a poor take-off and landing performance, i.e. it means that it lands and takes off at a high speed, and the landing profile is very "low" meaning it flies low over urban areas when taking off and landing.
With the TU144 retractable canards were needed to ensure stability at low speeds.
Whereas a wing for the A380 could be optimised for better performance in this flight envelope and not lose a lot of performance when it is actually airborne,
A conventional swept wing comes with flaps, slats and slots which are used to vary the shape of the wing (and make it considerably larger) for takeoff and landing. This creates more lift, at the expense of increased drag, which enables the aicraft to take off and land at much lower speeds.
I don't understand this hatred of 'leeching' amongst file sharers. You know that you are ALL leeching right? You are leeching off the honest people who actually BUY the music, BUY the movies and BUY the software.
Quite a lot of the content here is likely to originate from people who bought the whatever and uploaded it. Another major source is where the content was broadcast to a significent chunk of the planet.
without them, the stuff would not get made,
This is the "every pirated copy is a lost sale" theory. Which has been completly debunked. Quite simply the vast majority of the people involved are not "potential customers" in the first place.It's also very possible that the "pirate" version, which tends to be "Available worldwide and DRM free", will be the only version available to people. Possibly for months/years even forever.
You need to look back to CPM and thus MS-DOS. There was one user on an isolated machine, therefore you didn't need separation.
You also had MP/M a multi user version of CP/M; Concurrent CP/M a multitasking CP/M; CP/NET a networked version of CP/M. This was 25 years ago. Using such harware as a Z80 CPU with bank switched memory.
* How many stupid little applications required an NT user to run as administrator. NT 4 came out in 1996 and vendors still had problems a decade later.
These are not always "little" applications, nor are they always even 12 months (let alone 12 years) old.
(Some of it could be fixed with ACL changes, but some of it was just stupid and mean.)
Assuming you could get the relevent information out tf the clueless vendor.
The point I was making is that multi-user, remote-computing is experiencing a resurgence of popularity; and that UNIX has its roots in that way of doing things, whereas Windows does not. I never said Windows lacked the capability.
Windows has had the capability since NT 3. The problem appears to be that application developers often don't understand the basic concepts.
You are correct in saying that you have to defend a trademark but do NOT have to defend a copyright, so I'll add on to that. IANAL, but unless there was a copyright assignment with a 'written memorandum of transfer' (I learned that one from SCO v. Novell; copyright law being federal, it applies to the whole USA), THE COSTUME MAKERS own whatever copyright there could be on the costume. Though I assume that Lucas owns the trademark. True, it could be a 'work for hire', but I think that only applies to individuals working for some company (and it would probably have to be spelled out), so I don't know.
There is a complication here. US copyright law underwent a major revision in 1976. The costume design could easily predate this law change.
Schools are going to teach all kinds of BS that parents won't approve, that kids shouldn't bother learning.
They should probably aim to minimise the BS. There is also plenty of non BS that schools probably could be teaching which parents (and others) might not approve of. If might even be (a vocal minority of) parents who want schools to be teaching, various sorts of, BS, even if they don't actually believe it themselves.
Sex ed. used to be something of an anatomy/biology lesson. Explaining exactly how the entire reproductive system worked, which isn't something the average person would know without being taught.
Which is actually fairly limited, given that humans frequently have sex without any intention of reproducing. Though a really comprehensive sex education would offend a lot of people (including parents) by mentioning lots of things plenty of people do which are social taboos. Including that exclusive heterosexuality is not for everyone, nor is monogamy.
However, sex. ed. has become something worthless consisting of "Don't have sex until you're married or you will die from having a million STDs".
Which is actually propaganda rather than education. Since it is likely to lead to people to behave in ways against their nature it can easily be socially harmful propaganda.
This lesson on "Internet safety" sounds like a load of shit now,
Probably because it looks to be starting from a point not unlike propaganda.
but I think it's similar to the sex ed. situation. It serves a useful purpose, should be part of the existing "health" class, but needs to be made better.
How is it "health?" Remember that one thing the average politican does not want people educated in is "how to spot a lier and conman". Because they might then have to find a real job:)
Actually, the opposite. The chances of a kid being kidnapped/sexually assaulted in real life by a stranger are so small as to be practically nonexistent.
The majority of these being perpetrated by people already known to the child.
On the Internet it's still very unlikely but somewhat less so.
Also the vast majority of nasty things which happen to people just can't happen "on The Internet". Any risk only occurs in "meatspace". Also other telecommunications systems such as (snail)mail and telephones tend to lack the ability to filter senders which are present in many Internet communication systems.
People in authority shouldn't get a second chance. I know I wouldn't if I committed extortion. She's a common criminal who should suffer the same fate as any other common criminal.
Or she could be a "high criminal" who should face a much greater sentence than a "common criminal".
I don't think they had semi-automatic and automatic weapons back then either, but you have NRA gun nuts saying citizens must be allowed to carry them.
The idea of an automatic weapon goes back a long way. The Romans had the polybolos long before anyone have even though of gunpowder, let alone using it for propelling projectiles.
In the one single paragraph, they have explicitly shown the world the main difference between Linux and Windows - Linux Admins know what the fuck they're doing - Windows Admins don't need to.
The bluring of "user" and "admin" roles has always been part of Windows. In some ways it appears that with Vista Microsoft have actually started to realise that this isn't such a good idea. If anything you need a more skilled admin for Windows than you do with Linux. Someone able to cope with the complex permissions system and software which expects to be run as a privileged user.
Actually, Microsoft's shoddy software has made a whole cottage industry of software developers, consultants, IT managers, and service providers very, very wealthy. Those people are Microsoft's marketing secret, and they will fight open source tooth and nail: they don't like that open source works better, and they don't want to have to learn anything new anyway.
Probably especially the software suppliers who's business is selling the types of programs, including simple utilities, which come as "standard" with Linux distributions.
On a side note, the nice thing about searching for "open source" applications as opposed to "freeware" applications, is that open source applications do not have trial periods. Try searching for "freeware tone generator" on Google and see how many trialwares there are. Now try searching sourcefoge for the same thing.
You tend to find the same thing on sites specifcially carrying Windows "free" software. There can be all types of shareware, nagware, crippleware, trialware, free only to certain types of users, etc. With what could be genuinely described as "freeware (including OSS) being in a hard to find minority. A possible reason for people being uncertain about "free software" is that if they are familiar with software for proprietary systems "free" is a very much abused term.
While "free equally worthless" is a common fallacy, there are other reasons to want proprietary code. I, for one, want a company to be held responsible for bugs in the code I use.
Good luck trying that with a typical piece of proprietary software. In order to stand any chance of doing this you'd need to take the company to court and win.
If there's a bug I want to be able to outsource the patch in the form of paying for it.
Which is something you can easily do with open source. With proprietary software you face both technical and legal issues even trying.
I record all the lectures that I go to because I have Asperger Syndrome, and got the permission of all my professors in advance.
They'd probably notice a video camera if you didn't ask first.
Similarly, for one class, I posted my lecture notes and lab results in a blog for a friend that had to quit the class because she was pregnant - again, no problem,but I checked with the relevant professor first, and got his permission.
Your notes are something other than your (unedited) footage of a lecture.
For example, when the article discussed the pet scam thing, it described how an over-paying check would be mailed to a pet owner, with a request that the owner wire the difference to someone else who would be caring for the pet... only (elaborated the article) for the owner to eventually discover that the check was bad, and that they were out the wired money.
This kind of "overpayment fraud" can be much more general. It dosn't even need to involve The Internet either. Typically the fraudster is using the banking system in such a way that payments to them clear considerably more quickly than payments they make.
Slashdot Mirror
This is an excellent of example of why we need to be more vigilent and less complacent when it comes to government legislation. The fact that with no actual precedent for requiring stronger powers,
I wonder how often law enforcement "requiring more powers" are actually a sign of lack of basic competence
the FBI would lie to get them,
It's actually rather worst than that. To justify their lie required an investigation to be sabotaged.
Then when they got these "stronger powers" the result appears to have been to make them less able to investigate anything.
Quite likely what was actually needed here was more oversight and possibly even a weakening of existing powers and privileges.
is a testament to the fact that everyone is susceptible to feeling, and succombing to, a hunger for power, even at the expense of the people they are meant to be serving.
Without proper oversight the people involved are likely to act only in their own interests. e.g. the so called "rogue" office.
Once you know when and what direction, you know which hemisphere. Once you account for projection distortion, that puts the odds as pretty good it lands in an area well less than half of the Earth's surface. Something the size of, say, the Atlantic Ocean.
The direction it is comming from is going to give you lattitude, for longitude you need the time with accuracy. How do you know it won't have any further collisions or close encounters with anything of similar or greater mass in its 7 year orbit.
It would seem surprising if a collision with a satellite that's 0.00000005% of the asteroid's mass is going to change that enough for it to hit the earth.
On the next orbit... Mass may be less important than relative velocity, given (mv^2)/2. If it's possible for such a collision to deflect this object to be likely to hit the Earth then I'm sure it's perfectly possible to engineer a collision which will make sure it will come nowhere near.
But, hey - in the free market I can vote with my cash: let's see, which broadcaster is going to offer me the best deal for watching the latest episode of "Battlestar Galactica" or "Lost" tonight... Oh dear, it looks as if my only "choice" is to subscribe to a Murdochvision package or not watch the shows.
Or the best deal might be to get it as a torrent of bits within a few hours of it having been broadcast anywhere on the planet.
My god, you are delirious. The BBC is the most anti-American station, yes.
Why they did they have so much coverage of US Primaries? More so than they'd generally have towards proper foreign elections...
A large number of people in the UK have access to satellite and cable TV now and the most popular programmes on any TV channel are invariably American imports - Lost, 24, Prison Break, Heroes, The Simpsons etc. etc. In fact it was the BBC that showed 24 first and then sky took it to get more subscribers because it was that popular. Lost was first on Channel 4, now its on Sky too. Prison Break was on Channel 5 first, then sky took that too. The Simpsons were a staple of BBC 2 (after first being shown on Sky) for 10 years before it was taken by Channel 4 simply because it was that popular. Heroes is one of the most popular shows in the country - and what channel broadcasts it? Yup, BBC2. Smallville? Yeah - Channel 4. Dawson's Creek - Channel 4 again.
When it comes to foreign imports TV stations can "cherry pick". Also you don't get the same "experience" in terms of commercial interruptions. The BBC will show without commercials, quite often in a 45 minute slot for the 42-43 minutes of actual content. Note that this causes issues for US broadcasters wanting to show British TV. To the extent that if something is over 42 minutes of running time (which includes ITV material) it can wind up getting cut in order to fit enough adverts into the schedule.
"Getting there faster" should never be a goal in designing a commercial passenger jet. The vast majority of flights are so short that you spend more time on the ground, in the terminal, than you do in the air, so the overall improvement would be minuscule.
:)
Maybe instead effort needs to be put into making the time on the ground shorter, rather than longer
The other way it could go is to use semiballistic transport. You would build something like a space shuttle. The engines would burn for a couple of minutes and accelerate you to 5 km/s. You would get about 30 minutes of free fall followed by aerobraking and landing at your destination. It is perfectly feasible, just horribly expensive.
Especially if you need an extra long runway (imagine what those protesting at Heathrow would have to say were they to be told that the new 09L/27R was going to be nearly 5km long) and the aircraft is going to require a D check after every flight.
Then - most countries do not allow supesonic overflights - I remember concorde had to fly subsonic while over land and could only go supersonic while over the ocean on the trans atlantic crossing.
The Concorde was noisy
Even flying subsonic, with reheat off, it was much louder than just about any other civil aircraft.
the engines needed to push a large plane to go that fast are very noisy, no leaky turbofans here
In terms of passengers and cargo capacity Concorde was not a large aircraft.
Delta Wings (Like the Concorde) - great for high speed flight, the Valkyrie bomber used a nice Delta wing design that "rode" the shock wave of supersonic flight at high speed to conserve fuel.
The Valkyrie never made it out of the prototype stage. IIRC the wingtips would fold downwards in supersonic cruise.
It is not an optimum load carrying wing, and is not good for low-speed flight. Delta wings have a poor take-off and landing performance, i.e. it means that it lands and takes off at a high speed, and the landing profile is very "low" meaning it flies low over urban areas when taking off and landing.
With the TU144 retractable canards were needed to ensure stability at low speeds.
Whereas a wing for the A380 could be optimised for better performance in this flight envelope and not lose a lot of performance when it is actually airborne,
A conventional swept wing comes with flaps, slats and slots which are used to vary the shape of the wing (and make it considerably larger) for takeoff and landing. This creates more lift, at the expense of increased drag, which enables the aicraft to take off and land at much lower speeds.
What do the Rutans have to do with the B787?
They are probably still trying to work out how many Sontarans fit in an A380.
I don't understand this hatred of 'leeching' amongst file sharers. You know that you are ALL leeching right? You are leeching off the honest people who actually BUY the music, BUY the movies and BUY the software.
Quite a lot of the content here is likely to originate from people who bought the whatever and uploaded it. Another major source is where the content was broadcast to a significent chunk of the planet.
without them, the stuff would not get made,
This is the "every pirated copy is a lost sale" theory. Which has been completly debunked. Quite simply the vast majority of the people involved are not "potential customers" in the first place.It's also very possible that the "pirate" version, which tends to be "Available worldwide and DRM free", will be the only version available to people. Possibly for months/years even forever.
You need to look back to CPM and thus MS-DOS. There was one user on an isolated machine, therefore you didn't need separation.
You also had MP/M a multi user version of CP/M; Concurrent CP/M a multitasking CP/M; CP/NET a networked version of CP/M. This was 25 years ago. Using such harware as a Z80 CPU with bank switched memory.
* How many stupid little applications required an NT user to run as administrator. NT 4 came out in 1996 and vendors still had problems a decade later.
These are not always "little" applications, nor are they always even 12 months (let alone 12 years) old.
(Some of it could be fixed with ACL changes, but some of it was just stupid and mean.)
Assuming you could get the relevent information out tf the clueless vendor.
The point I was making is that multi-user, remote-computing is experiencing a resurgence of popularity; and that UNIX has its roots in that way of doing things, whereas Windows does not. I never said Windows lacked the capability.
Windows has had the capability since NT 3. The problem appears to be that application developers often don't understand the basic concepts.
You are correct in saying that you have to defend a trademark but do NOT have to defend a copyright, so I'll add on to that. IANAL, but unless there was a copyright assignment with a 'written memorandum of transfer' (I learned that one from SCO v. Novell; copyright law being federal, it applies to the whole USA), THE COSTUME MAKERS own whatever copyright there could be on the costume. Though I assume that Lucas owns the trademark. True, it could be a 'work for hire', but I think that only applies to individuals working for some company (and it would probably have to be spelled out), so I don't know.
There is a complication here. US copyright law underwent a major revision in 1976. The costume design could easily predate this law change.
Schools are going to teach all kinds of BS that parents won't approve, that kids shouldn't bother learning.
They should probably aim to minimise the BS. There is also plenty of non BS that schools probably could be teaching which parents (and others) might not approve of. If might even be (a vocal minority of) parents who want schools to be teaching, various sorts of, BS, even if they don't actually believe it themselves.
Sex ed. used to be something of an anatomy/biology lesson. Explaining exactly how the entire reproductive system worked, which isn't something the average person would know without being taught.
:)
Which is actually fairly limited, given that humans frequently have sex without any intention of reproducing. Though a really comprehensive sex education would offend a lot of people (including parents) by mentioning lots of things plenty of people do which are social taboos. Including that exclusive heterosexuality is not for everyone, nor is monogamy.
However, sex. ed. has become something worthless consisting of "Don't have sex until you're married or you will die from having a million STDs".
Which is actually propaganda rather than education. Since it is likely to lead to people to behave in ways against their nature it can easily be socially harmful propaganda.
This lesson on "Internet safety" sounds like a load of shit now,
Probably because it looks to be starting from a point not unlike propaganda.
but I think it's similar to the sex ed. situation. It serves a useful purpose, should be part of the existing "health" class, but needs to be made better.
How is it "health?" Remember that one thing the average politican does not want people educated in is "how to spot a lier and conman". Because they might then have to find a real job
Actually, the opposite. The chances of a kid being kidnapped/sexually assaulted in real life by a stranger are so small as to be practically nonexistent.
The majority of these being perpetrated by people already known to the child.
On the Internet it's still very unlikely but somewhat less so.
Also the vast majority of nasty things which happen to people just can't happen "on The Internet". Any risk only occurs in "meatspace". Also other telecommunications systems such as (snail)mail and telephones tend to lack the ability to filter senders which are present in many Internet communication systems.
People in authority shouldn't get a second chance. I know I wouldn't if I committed extortion. She's a common criminal who should suffer the same fate as any other common criminal.
Or she could be a "high criminal" who should face a much greater sentence than a "common criminal".
I don't think they had semi-automatic and automatic weapons back then either, but you have NRA gun nuts saying citizens must be allowed to carry them.
The idea of an automatic weapon goes back a long way. The Romans had the polybolos long before anyone have even though of gunpowder, let alone using it for propelling projectiles.
In the one single paragraph, they have explicitly shown the world the main difference between Linux and Windows - Linux Admins know what the fuck they're doing - Windows Admins don't need to.
The bluring of "user" and "admin" roles has always been part of Windows. In some ways it appears that with Vista Microsoft have actually started to realise that this isn't such a good idea.
If anything you need a more skilled admin for Windows than you do with Linux. Someone able to cope with the complex permissions system and software which expects to be run as a privileged user.
Actually, Microsoft's shoddy software has made a whole cottage industry of software developers, consultants, IT managers, and service providers very, very wealthy. Those people are Microsoft's marketing secret, and they will fight open source tooth and nail: they don't like that open source works better, and they don't want to have to learn anything new anyway.
Probably especially the software suppliers who's business is selling the types of programs, including simple utilities, which come as "standard" with Linux distributions.
On a side note, the nice thing about searching for "open source" applications as opposed to "freeware" applications, is that open source applications do not have trial periods. Try searching for "freeware tone generator" on Google and see how many trialwares there are. Now try searching sourcefoge for the same thing.
You tend to find the same thing on sites specifcially carrying Windows "free" software. There can be all types of shareware, nagware, crippleware, trialware, free only to certain types of users, etc. With what could be genuinely described as "freeware (including OSS) being in a hard to find minority.
A possible reason for people being uncertain about "free software" is that if they are familiar with software for proprietary systems "free" is a very much abused term.
While "free equally worthless" is a common fallacy, there are other reasons to want proprietary code. I, for one, want a company to be held responsible for bugs in the code I use.
Good luck trying that with a typical piece of proprietary software. In order to stand any chance of doing this you'd need to take the company to court and win.
If there's a bug I want to be able to outsource the patch in the form of paying for it.
Which is something you can easily do with open source. With proprietary software you face both technical and legal issues even trying.
I record all the lectures that I go to because I have Asperger Syndrome, and got the permission of all my professors in advance.
They'd probably notice a video camera if you didn't ask first.
Similarly, for one class, I posted my lecture notes and lab results in a blog for a friend that had to quit the class because she was pregnant - again, no problem,but I checked with the relevant professor first, and got his permission.
Your notes are something other than your (unedited) footage of a lecture.
For example, when the article discussed the pet scam thing, it described how an over-paying check would be mailed to a pet owner, with a request that the owner wire the difference to someone else who would be caring for the pet... only (elaborated the article) for the owner to eventually discover that the check was bad, and that they were out the wired money.
This kind of "overpayment fraud" can be much more general. It dosn't even need to involve The Internet either. Typically the fraudster is using the banking system in such a way that payments to them clear considerably more quickly than payments they make.