alas, here in Canada (at least in this chunk of SW Ontario), we never get to see the superbowl ads in the first place, 'cause they're typically substituted for cheesy local advertising by the Canadian broadcasters showing the event.
Remember that if you can pyhsically pick up a signal from the US it's prefectly legal to watch it in Canada.
The thing is, the government doesn't have to answer about its spending, it just has to strain its citizens a little more. In this case, it is using the money of the people it is supposed to protect and using that money to tell us(if you're a US citizen) what you can and can't do. That million dollars could help save the lives of understaffed police officiers or firefighters without proper equipment,
Maybe because giving the illusion of "doing something" is easier than actually doing something useful. Governments are usually very reluctant to admit they did something wrong or omitted to do something they should have done... (The bigger the wrongdoing the harder they will try to draw attention away from it.)
In their words - "We haven't given up our copyright on this article, but we have agreed to waive many of the exclusive rights a copyright normally bestows."
Remember that the original idea was thought up by an American. Where "copyright" is intended as a means to an end, rather than an end in itself.
I personally think that copyleft is silly. It should be copyfree but I guess that isn't as catchy as copyleft.
Maybe it's an attempt to indicate that "copyright" dosn't do what it was ment to do as well as it could. Also "copyfree" isn't a good term. Because you restricted in what you can do with the code. Just that the restrictions are rather different from those associated with propriatary code.
The IMF and the World Bank, while supposedly independent entities, are seen to be as much an agent of the United States as their military forces are. The sanctioning and support of despots and dictators, who instead of using the money loaned by the IMF to better the lives of the general populace steal it leaving the impoverished nation to pay off the billion dollar loans,
Remember that quite a number of these "despots and dicators" (especially in central and south America) were put into place by the US in the first place.
But when the despot has been deposed, your children are dying because of a non-existent health system and you're under a constant threat of starving because taxes take most of what you earn to pay off the spiralling national debt (60% of GNP in the case of Pakistan I believe), who is your enemy? Who do you strike back at? Who do you hate? The most powerful and wealthiest nation on the planet.
The US being wealthy and powerful is less of an issue than the US government using that wealth and power to go toppling democratic governments and supporting (in many ways) "despots and dictators". It's a lot easier for the US government to deal with an opressive regime which owes it's very existance to the US government, rather that a democratic government which cares somewhat about its people and economy and (most important) isn't going to offer any special deals to US based megacorps. Indeed they might insist on such things as controlling their own industrial base, imposing duties on exports, regulating working practices, etc.
From what the article tells us, it seems that Wellington has a tram sytem with overhead power, which are easy to string lightweight fibre onto. In a city like London, there are no tram wires to exploit so you'd still have to dig the road - and that costs a fortune.
Alternativly you could lease some space from LRT. The oldest tube lines were constricted by "cut and cover" under roads.
Thanks for reminding me of CP/M -- a real OS that was the obvious choice for IBM to bundle with the PC. If IBM had come to terms with Digital Research, the implications are mind-boggling. It's a minor detail that Mister Bill wouldn't be rich. As you say, CP/M allows apps to be hardware independent.
However QDOS (which Microsoft bought) was a clone of CP/M. There are plenty of bits in MS DOS which are very CP/M like indeed.
However, one drawback is security. On a Cisco router, you only have to worry about someone breaking the IOS system; with Zebra, you have to worry about someone breaking the underlieing OS AND Zebra itself.
Is IOS entirely monolithic anyway.
Breaking either gives you access to the router itself.
Even if this is running a general purpose operating system does not mean that every single application that OS can run will be installed.
Further, IOS has been around for years and has been throughly debugged.
Wern't their problems with Cisco routers and Code Red HTTP probing. Dosn't sound that throughly debugged. Also you are comparing closed source with open source...
Zebra is not quite in a 1.0 release. Plus there are features; Zebra won't have support for multicast routing protocols until 2.0.
This is more a matter of being "feature complete" than "debugged". Do Cisco routers support IP v6 yet?
And most of the collateral damage you point out is caused by the drugs being illegal. The price is artificailly high beause they are illegal making it difficult for people with few skills to support their habits without resorting to crime. Violence surrounds the drug trade beause it is illegal. Legal drugs will still cause problems, but the cost to society in general will be much, much, lower
All of these are little different from what happened when the US decided to make alchol illegal. Then realised sometime later that this caused more problems than it solved...
How come Bush hasn't turned himself in for doing coke in his youth? Shouldn't he be doing ten years in some nice Texas jail?
Same reason that the "war against terror" didn't start with the CIA. In which case shouldn't GW Bush be spending his 10 years at Camp X-ray...
We have been in a state of perpetual war for ages now. Can you think of a 5 year period in the US history where we were not killing some people some place on the planet? I can't. Wether covert or overt, hot or cold, we have been in a state of continual war since vietnam.
The US government has been interfering with other people's government for over a century. The significence of Vietnam is more that it was a failure and the US people voiced their opinion of what was going on. The US government fears the US people, since most of the US population has no quarral with the rest of the world (assuming they even know there is a rest of the world...) But does not want to change it's policy of trying to make the rest of the world "friendly" to US government (and often corporate interests, from the sugar companies in Hawaii to the oil companies of today) by any means available. Probably the most suprising thing is that it took so long for something to happen on the US mainland.
A war against an abstract concept is a war without end because you can just keep moving the goal posts as you see fit. Every time someone does something you don't like you just add them to the list.
Which is a game more than one person/state can play. e.g. with Robert Mugabe redefining his political opponents and independent journalists as "terrorists"
While a war against Al Qaeda is not only right but just,
Al Qaeda appear to have a more clearly defined idea of "enemy". Also the people who carried out the attacks in September would probably argue that these were "right", "just" even "striking back". In a conflict all sides bend the truth...
The war on terrorism is a completely different story. While the civil rights abuses of the USA government are alarming, the fact remains that unless stopped (killed) terrorists WILL KILL INNOCENT PEOPLE ON PURPOSE. Terrorists are evil, plain and simple. Terrorists should be hunted down and eradicated.
A "war against terrorism" is about a smeaningful as a "war against bombs". Terrorism is simply a method of persuing warfare.
And I am glad that the Americans have taken on the job of wiping out terrorists.
Except that it isn't wiping out terrorists it's a half hearted attempt to deal with terrorists the US dodn't like.
It would be nice if the american's would pause for a moment to consider why they are the most hated nation on the planet, but this is secondary compared to the importance of wiping out terrorist vermin.
One of the reasons for people not liking the US is the the US trains terrorists, supports states which user terrorism and has itself enguaged in a lot ot terrorism. Indeed the US has actually been found guilty. by the UN, of being a "terrorist state". If the US government was serious about wiping out terrorism they'd have started with the CIA, then moved on to Israel. (Only the US and Israel opposed a UN resolution against, state sponsored, terrorism.)
And in the ideal world the suggestion would be caried through to the only obvious conclusion: prohibition of illegal drugs should be ended, and funds wasted on fighting the "drug war" should be redirected towards [voluntary] treatment programs for addicts.
In an ideal world the lesson thet prohibition dosn't work would have been learned about 80 years ago. Not only does it not work, it can actually encourage more abusive drug use as users binge due to an unreliable supply of an unregulated product.
The "war on drugs" does not have a clearly defined enemy. It's been going on for what, 30 years? And there's no end in sight. The "war on terror" also does not have a clearly defined enemy.
Both of these actually need the word "some" inserting.
Are you ready for perpetual war?
No doubt politicans are fully ready. War is a good way to divert attention away from domestic issues. After all can't risk putting all those hard working people at Microsoft, Enron, Anderson, etc under the spotlight. Or even (more diectly related to terrorism) those people working for the INS, FBI, USAF, FAA or NORAD...
In this article, I've seen at least 150 people mention wood. The majority of methanol is not made from freakin' WOOD.
Some people have latched on to a common (at least in some parts of the world) name. In complete ignorance of the kind of chemistry involved.
The majority of methanol used today comes from reforming natural gas (methane).
Methane can be derived from either fossil fuels or from renewable sources. Though currently the major source appears to be from the oil industry. Also the same chemical process can be used for industrial production of other alchols. Simply by using a different hydrocarbon...
If a peice of this sat actually causes damage say to a house, can NASA be held responsible? Can they be sued or have any official preceedings brought against them?
How do you prove it was space junk. There are considerably more natural than man made meteorites... Even if you can convince the judge that it was man made how do you prove it came from a NASA craft?
I'm sure they probably count on the odds that they crash over water, or some unpopulated area, and not notify anyone beforehand. Or if it does get hit something, they'll attribute it to some plane part falling off...:)
The difference is that a bit of a plane would be a recognisable man made object, most likely people would have a tough time telling the difference between a bit of space junk and a natural meteorite.
Did you know that just about all countries send
up thousands and thousands of weatherbaloons
in the sky, every day. And you dont hear them
killing people left and right?
It's not unknown for bits and pieces to fall of aircraft. Sometimes without even being noticed until a maintenance worker takes a look at the plane.
Can you tell me where a piece of paper dropped off a skyscraper will land?
Apparently you can do this with a magic passport though.
The weather in low earth orbit is just as unpredictable as the weather at the ground, and just as variable.
If something is comming down from orbit the weather at all levels of the atmosphere
It may not even have just drag acting on it; even in orbit an angled surface can produce just as much lift as drag, and when the satellite hits the atmosphere its shape could produce more lift than drag.
Solar arrays are obvious type of object for generating lift. As a satellite is heated it may well be subject to forces from "outgassing".
If you get hit in the head by a piece of titanium travelling approximately 1300 feet per second, you probably won't have to worry about medical bills, or much of anything else for that matter.
If you get hit by something travelling at that speed, it dosn't matter what element it is made of. But unless it is either very large or aerodynamically shaped there is no way you are going to get anything from space travelling at anything like that kind of speed from space. Anything dropped into Earth's atmosphere is subject to a "terminal velocity", where drag from the air equates to 1G. Since the Earth's atmosphere is of varying density the force due to drag can quite easily excede 1G.
Actually, debris entering the atmosphere (man-made and not) is a common occurrence. Happens everyday on some scale. It isn't just everyday a 3.5 ton one comes down:)
Though this is a fairly fragile 3 and a half ton object. It's not ias if it is a 3.5 ton lump of iron and nickel or solid rock.
Each piece that does not hit the atmosphere enters its own orbit - risking collision with some other satellite.
Even something hitting the atmosphere does not mean it will simply burn up or hit the Earth. The alternative possibility is that it can bounce off, into a different orbit.
Could you design a sattelite in such a way that it could be destroyed remotely, ie. blown into small chunks that pose no danger to other spacecraft (are "blasted" towards Earth and therefore certain disintegration)
To do this you'd need a fancy system of shaped charges. You'd also need to have a functional attitude control system when you set them off. Also the chance of something reaching the ground intact is not simply a function of its size. Shape and composition also play a part.
I always found it funny seeing insurance contracts that covered impact by 'air and land vehicles, and spacecraft'. I guess the insurance companies aren't too worried about a satellite hit - the damage could be great, but the odds are rather slim.
Anything which survives from a satellite doing an uncontrolled reentry isn't going to be much different from a regular meteorite. Also a sizable object hitting the ground is more likely to have fallen off an aircraft than be space junk anyway.
Then again, they *do* exclude nuclear attack, so who knows:)
Insurance companies also tend to exclude being bombed, whatever the type of munitions. They also tend to consider "terrorism" as being exempt unless specifically covered.
Slashdot Mirror
alas, here in Canada (at least in this chunk of SW Ontario), we never get to see the superbowl ads in the first place, 'cause they're typically substituted for cheesy local advertising by the Canadian broadcasters showing the event.
Remember that if you can pyhsically pick up a signal from the US it's prefectly legal to watch it in Canada.
The thing is, the government doesn't have to answer about its spending, it just has to strain its citizens a little more. In this case, it is using the money of the people it is supposed to protect and using that money to tell us(if you're a US citizen) what you can and can't do. That million dollars could help save the lives of understaffed police officiers or firefighters without proper equipment,
Maybe because giving the illusion of "doing something" is easier than actually doing something useful. Governments are usually very reluctant to admit they did something wrong or omitted to do something they should have done... (The bigger the wrongdoing the harder they will try to draw attention away from it.)
Cool - while ESPN, CNN/SI and Fox are breaking down the game, PBS will be breaking down who spent their 2.5 Million per 30 seconds the best.
Or maybe even breaking down and commenting upon a different "game".
In their words - "We haven't given up our copyright on this article, but we have agreed to waive many of the exclusive rights a copyright normally bestows."
Remember that the original idea was thought up by an American. Where "copyright" is intended as a means to an end, rather than an end in itself.
I personally think that copyleft is silly. It should be copyfree but I guess that isn't as catchy as copyleft.
Maybe it's an attempt to indicate that "copyright" dosn't do what it was ment to do as well as it could. Also "copyfree" isn't a good term. Because you restricted in what you can do with the code. Just that the restrictions are rather different from those associated with propriatary code.
The IMF and the World Bank, while supposedly independent entities, are seen to be as much an agent of the United States as their military forces are. The sanctioning and support of despots and dictators, who instead of using the money loaned by the IMF to better the lives of the general populace steal it leaving the impoverished nation to pay off the billion dollar loans,
Remember that quite a number of these "despots and dicators" (especially in central and south America) were put into place by the US in the first place.
But when the despot has been deposed, your children are dying because of a non-existent health system and you're under a constant threat of starving because taxes take most of what you earn to pay off the spiralling national debt (60% of GNP in the case of Pakistan I believe), who is your enemy? Who do you strike back at? Who do you hate? The most powerful and wealthiest nation on the planet.
The US being wealthy and powerful is less of an issue than the US government using that wealth and power to go toppling democratic governments and supporting (in many ways) "despots and dictators".
It's a lot easier for the US government to deal with an opressive regime which owes it's very existance to the US government, rather that a democratic government which cares somewhat about its people and economy and (most important) isn't going to offer any special deals to US based megacorps. Indeed they might insist on such things as controlling their own industrial base, imposing duties on exports, regulating working practices, etc.
From what the article tells us, it seems that Wellington has a tram sytem with overhead power, which are easy to string lightweight fibre onto. In a city like London, there are no tram wires to exploit so you'd still have to dig the road - and that costs a fortune.
Alternativly you could lease some space from LRT. The oldest tube lines were constricted by "cut and cover" under roads.
Thanks for reminding me of CP/M -- a real OS that was the obvious choice for IBM to bundle with the PC. If IBM had come to terms with Digital Research, the implications are mind-boggling. It's a minor detail that Mister Bill wouldn't be rich. As you say, CP/M allows apps to be hardware independent.
However QDOS (which Microsoft bought) was a clone of CP/M. There are plenty of bits in MS DOS which are very CP/M like indeed.
However, one drawback is security. On a Cisco router, you only have to worry about someone breaking the IOS system; with Zebra, you have to worry about someone breaking the underlieing OS AND Zebra itself.
Is IOS entirely monolithic anyway.
Breaking either gives you access to the router itself.
Even if this is running a general purpose operating system does not mean that every single application that OS can run will be installed.
Further, IOS has been around for years and has been throughly debugged.
Wern't their problems with Cisco routers and Code Red HTTP probing. Dosn't sound that throughly debugged. Also you are comparing closed source with open source...
Zebra is not quite in a 1.0 release. Plus there are features; Zebra won't have support for multicast routing protocols until 2.0.
This is more a matter of being "feature complete" than "debugged". Do Cisco routers support IP v6 yet?
And most of the collateral damage you point out is caused by the drugs being illegal. The price is artificailly high beause they are illegal making it difficult for people with few skills to support their habits without resorting to crime. Violence surrounds the drug trade beause it is illegal. Legal drugs will still cause problems, but the cost to society in general will be much, much, lower
All of these are little different from what happened when the US decided to make alchol illegal. Then realised sometime later that this caused more problems than it solved...
How come Bush hasn't turned himself in for doing coke in his youth? Shouldn't he be doing ten years in some nice Texas jail?
Same reason that the "war against terror" didn't start with the CIA. In which case shouldn't GW Bush be spending his 10 years at Camp X-ray...
We have been in a state of perpetual war for ages now. Can you think of a 5 year period in the US history where we were not killing some people some place on the planet? I can't. Wether covert or overt, hot or cold, we have been in a state of continual war since vietnam.
The US government has been interfering with other people's government for over a century. The significence of Vietnam is more that it was a failure and the US people voiced their opinion of what was going on.
The US government fears the US people, since most of the US population has no quarral with the rest of the world (assuming they even know there is a rest of the world...) But does not want to change it's policy of trying to make the rest of the world "friendly" to US government (and often corporate interests, from the sugar companies in Hawaii to the oil companies of today) by any means available.
Probably the most suprising thing is that it took so long for something to happen on the US mainland.
A war against an abstract concept is a war without end because you can just keep moving the goal posts as you see fit. Every time someone does something you don't like you just add them to the list.
Which is a game more than one person/state can play. e.g. with Robert Mugabe redefining his political opponents and independent journalists as "terrorists"
While a war against Al Qaeda is not only right but just,
Al Qaeda appear to have a more clearly defined idea of "enemy". Also the people who carried out the attacks in September would probably argue that these were "right", "just" even "striking back".
In a conflict all sides bend the truth...
The war on terrorism is a completely different story. While the civil rights abuses of the USA government are alarming, the fact remains that unless stopped (killed) terrorists WILL KILL INNOCENT PEOPLE ON PURPOSE. Terrorists are evil, plain and simple. Terrorists should be hunted down and eradicated.
A "war against terrorism" is about a smeaningful as a "war against bombs". Terrorism is simply a method of persuing warfare.
And I am glad that the Americans have taken on the job of wiping out terrorists.
Except that it isn't wiping out terrorists it's a half hearted attempt to deal with terrorists the US dodn't like.
It would be nice if the american's would pause for a moment to consider why they are the most hated nation on the planet, but this is secondary compared to the importance of wiping out terrorist vermin.
One of the reasons for people not liking the US is the the US trains terrorists, supports states which user terrorism and has itself enguaged in a lot ot terrorism. Indeed the US has actually been found guilty. by the UN, of being a "terrorist state".
If the US government was serious about wiping out terrorism they'd have started with the CIA, then moved on to Israel. (Only the US and Israel opposed a UN resolution against, state sponsored, terrorism.)
And in the ideal world the suggestion would be caried through to the only obvious conclusion: prohibition of illegal drugs should be ended, and funds wasted on fighting the "drug war" should be redirected towards [voluntary] treatment programs for addicts.
In an ideal world the lesson thet prohibition dosn't work would have been learned about 80 years ago. Not only does it not work, it can actually encourage more abusive drug use as users binge due to an unreliable supply of an unregulated product.
The "war on drugs" does not have a clearly defined enemy. It's been going on for what, 30 years? And there's no end in sight. The "war on terror" also does not have a clearly defined enemy.
Both of these actually need the word "some" inserting.
Are you ready for perpetual war?
No doubt politicans are fully ready. War is a good way to divert attention away from domestic issues. After all can't risk putting all those hard working people at Microsoft, Enron, Anderson, etc under the spotlight. Or even (more diectly related to terrorism) those people working for the INS, FBI, USAF, FAA or NORAD...
In this article, I've seen at least 150 people mention wood. The majority of methanol is not made from freakin' WOOD.
Some people have latched on to a common (at least in some parts of the world) name. In complete ignorance of the kind of chemistry involved.
The majority of methanol used today comes from reforming natural gas (methane).
Methane can be derived from either fossil fuels or from renewable sources. Though currently the major source appears to be from the oil industry. Also the same chemical process can be used for industrial production of other alchols. Simply by using a different hydrocarbon...
If a peice of this sat actually causes damage say to a house, can NASA be held responsible? Can they be sued or have any official preceedings brought against them?
How do you prove it was space junk. There are considerably more natural than man made meteorites... Even if you can convince the judge that it was man made how do you prove it came from a NASA craft?
I'm sure they probably count on the odds that they crash over water, or some unpopulated area, and not notify anyone beforehand. Or if it does get hit something, they'll attribute it to some plane part falling off... :)
The difference is that a bit of a plane would be a recognisable man made object, most likely people would have a tough time telling the difference between a bit of space junk and a natural meteorite.
Did you know that just about all countries send up thousands and thousands of weatherbaloons in the sky, every day. And you dont hear them killing people left and right?
It's not unknown for bits and pieces to fall of aircraft. Sometimes without even being noticed until a maintenance worker takes a look at the plane.
Can you tell me where a piece of paper dropped off a skyscraper will land?
Apparently you can do this with a magic passport though.
The weather in low earth orbit is just as unpredictable as the weather at the ground, and just as variable.
If something is comming down from orbit the weather at all levels of the atmosphere
It may not even have just drag acting on it; even in orbit an angled surface can produce just as much lift as drag, and when the satellite hits the atmosphere its shape could produce more lift than drag.
Solar arrays are obvious type of object for generating lift. As a satellite is heated it may well be subject to forces from "outgassing".
Maybe it'll hit my car. Hang on, I gotta go buy some insurance from Lloyds real quick :)
Don't bother, if your car were to be hit by a piece of space junk its value as a "collectable" would be far greater than its insurance valuation.
If you get hit in the head by a piece of titanium travelling approximately 1300 feet per second, you probably won't have to worry about medical bills, or much of anything else for that matter.
If you get hit by something travelling at that speed, it dosn't matter what element it is made of. But unless it is either very large or aerodynamically shaped there is no way you are going to get anything from space travelling at anything like that kind of speed from space. Anything dropped into Earth's atmosphere is subject to a "terminal velocity", where drag from the air equates to 1G. Since the Earth's atmosphere is of varying density the force due to drag can quite easily excede 1G.
It just doesn't get the same publicity, some of the junk includes upper stage boosters including tons of fuel and a payload.
IIRC this sort of thing happened with the "Sea Lanuch" system. All the innovative bits worked fine, but the final stage of the rocket was a dud.
Actually, debris entering the atmosphere (man-made and not) is a common occurrence. Happens everyday on some scale. It isn't just everyday a 3.5 ton one comes down :)
Though this is a fairly fragile 3 and a half ton object. It's not ias if it is a 3.5 ton lump of iron and nickel or solid rock.
Each piece that does not hit the atmosphere enters its own orbit - risking collision with some other satellite.
Even something hitting the atmosphere does not mean it will simply burn up or hit the Earth. The alternative possibility is that it can bounce off, into a different orbit.
Could you design a sattelite in such a way that it could be destroyed remotely, ie. blown into small chunks that pose no danger to other spacecraft (are "blasted" towards Earth and therefore certain disintegration)
To do this you'd need a fancy system of shaped charges. You'd also need to have a functional attitude control system when you set them off. Also the chance of something reaching the ground intact is not simply a function of its size. Shape and composition also play a part.
I always found it funny seeing insurance contracts that covered impact by 'air and land vehicles, and spacecraft'. I guess the insurance companies aren't too worried about a satellite hit - the damage could be great, but the odds are rather slim.
:)
Anything which survives from a satellite doing an uncontrolled reentry isn't going to be much different from a regular meteorite. Also a sizable object hitting the ground is more likely to have fallen off an aircraft than be space junk anyway.
Then again, they *do* exclude nuclear attack, so who knows
Insurance companies also tend to exclude being bombed, whatever the type of munitions. They also tend to consider "terrorism" as being exempt unless specifically covered.