MSG is a neurotoxin. It excites brain cells to death. I, at least, am incredibly sensitive to it.
It wasn't always that way. For years and years I was able to eat it without problems. However, I started drinking a lot of diet pepsi, and after a couple of years of that, got very, very sick. Couldn't pin down what the problem was. My vision was damaged, my memory was shot, my ability to focus/concentrate was gone. I was having coordination problems. When they examined at me at one neurologist, I couldn't even walk heel and toe; I lost my balance. Every time. I was really a mess. At the time they thought I might have multiple sclerosis. They ruled that out with an MRI, but I still had many of the same symptoms. (it turns out aspartame poisoning is frequently mistaken for MS).
Things started improving after I stopped aspartame (which is a much stronger neurotoxin than is MSG), but it wasn't until I realized that MSG was also (now) causing me trouble that I started to get back to anything approaching normal. I don't think I'll ever be what I was, but I'd call myself 90% recovered at this point.
I don't know why I reacted so badly to aspartame/MSG and many people don't. However, they are both documented neurotoxins, and I tend to think that any group of people that relies primarily on their brains to function should avoid them.
MSG makes food taste good because it excites nerve cells; they are fooled into thinking that the food you are eating has more 'goodness' in it than it actually does. That tingly feeling you sometimes get after you've had a lot of MSG? (lips and fingertips are common). That's nerve cells being overstimulated, often to death.
This stuff sneaks up on you; I was having minor symptoms I didn't think were important for at least a year before I got really sick. You don't get really visible symptoms until you have lost about 75% of the brain cells in a given functional area; the brain is highly resilient to damage. But it doesn't last forever.
There used to be a really wonderful site with tons of information about MSG at www.123recipes.com. They had a great section on what it can do to you and the (MANY!) ways that manufacturers try to hide the fact that they have added it to food. (it's in probably 90% of the foods on the shelf-- you're probably getting a whopping great dose of MSG every day without even knowing it.) But 123recipes.com seems to have gone away.:-(
I would suggest reading up on MSG -- you should realize just how many things it's in. (basically almost everything on the shelf). Due to a curiosity of Federal regulation, only 100% pure MSG needs to be labeled as "monosodium glutamate". So manufacturers just put in 90% pure MSG instead and call it something else.
They hide it in all sorts of ways.... the most common label is "natural flavors". Another very common one is any type of "hydrolyzed" protein. Yeast extract and autolyzed yeast extract are two more. (I avoid anything with a -lyzed suffix now). "Caseinate" is another trigger word; I usually see it as "milk caseinate" but I've seen it used as a modifier on other source foods as well. "Modified starch" is the most recent trick I'm aware of.
For more on aspartame, www.aspartametruth.com has many links to studies, etc. Before getting sick, I probably wouldn't have paid that much attention to it, but I can tell you from personal experience that many of the described symptoms are absolutely real and valid -- I have had them myself. I presume, since I had so many of the listed problems, that most of the links are truthful. Read carefully, but I can assure you that there is definitely a real core here. It is not just hysterical armwaving.
One thing I sometimes think about... over the lsat 20 years, there has been an enormous rise in the use of neurotoxins in food. At the same time, there seems to be an overwhelming rise in stupidity. I don't know if these two are causally linked, but I do wonder.
I'm far from an expert, but I think all a terrorist would have to do is loosen one of the heat tiles enough so that it would come loose under stress. If just one gave out, I believe we'd see exactly what we just saw.
They have a full manual inspection program that runs during every launch preparation. I believe there'd be an opportunity to tamper with one of the tiles after the inspection is done. And I don't think it would take much time, no more than a minute or two.
As I understand it, "fair use" describes what someone may do with a copyrighted work, whether or not the copyright holder objects. You can, for instance, lend someone a book, even though the publisher would much prefer that your friend buy the book instead. But the concept of fair use isn't a Constitutional concept, it's a construct of law (or possibly of judicial decree, I'm still not sure about this.)
The Constitution says that Congress may protect works "for limited times", but it does NOT say how those works may be protected. It could range from "no protection whatsoever" up to "25 years in prison for reading this novel aloud" without affecting anyone's rights. This just isn't a "rights" issue. You don't have ANY rights with regard to a copyrighted work. You have only privileges, and Congress may grant or suspend those at its pleasure.
You could probably argue on the basis of "promote the Useful Arts and Sciences", but considering that Lessig wasn't able to even convince the Supremes that "limited times" means limited times, I don't think you'd get very far.
Fair use is a privilege, not a right. I'm not sure if it's a judicial decree or an actual law, but it's not enshrined in the Constitution.
Therefore, the Congresscritters can indeed take away your privilege to fair use if they choose. They have, to some degree, already done so with the DMCA.
I found Snow Crash to be quite good; I remember it quite clearly, and with the sheer number of books I read, that's saying something. Admittedly, there was an absolutely INTERMINABLE expository section about language and the Tower of Babel. You could take a pair of scissors to those (40??) pages and barely miss anything. A tremendous clunker in an otherwise very good book, IMO. He's certainly no Orson Scott card, but he's a good read, IMO.
one I absolutely can't stand is Gibson -- he has interesting ideas, but his writing is horrid. I'm still surprised he A) found a publisher, and B) found readers. I guess some folks are a lot more tolerant than I am.:-)
You mentioned Hogan....IMO, he's another one of those writers with good ideas and poor writing. He's more worth wading through than most, however. He has genuinely interesting and different ideas. I just wish his prose wasn't so clunky.
The problem with alternate history books like Turtledove's is that, to be accurate, he CAN'T end in any particular place. History is sorta continuous; it's unusual for it to have really discrete starting and stopping places. I thought he handled it about as well as he could have; the eventual outcome appears inevitable. Getting there would be interesting, but it's really not worth spending another book on. And no matter where he stopped, there would be unresolved issues; that's the nature of history.
I was also really surprised by this. He was right about all the earlier Windows versions, but he doesn't appear to understand that the whole POINT of NT was that "there is no DOS"; Windows XP is NT 6.0. (Win2k was 5.0).
He makes another error, talking about MS-DOS 2.0 and its Hierarchical Filing System. As far as I know, HFS was Mac-only, wasn't it? DOS 2.0 used just regular old FAT, as far as I know. I don't think that changed until Windows 98 and FAT32. OS/2 used HPFS, and NT used NTFS. (they could both use FAT, and NT also spoke HPFS, but those were their primary filesystems.)
He's way, way off base in this article. Usually Cringely is great. He sure blew it in this one.
If I understood the prior articles correctly, TCPA should provide a basic keystore, an authentication mechanism, and enough checking to insure that the boot sector is signed.
If I want to install a new boot sector, do I generate my own key, install that, and self-sign the boot code? Or do the LILO or GRUB teams have to get a key issued and then sign things themselves?
Who has ultimate control over the keys? CAN I install my own, or is it centralized somewhere? Who does TCPA *ultimately* trust? How can I be *certain* that it doesn't trust anyone I don't want it to? If I screw up and lose my key, how I recover access to the system?
I assume there must be some master, uneraseable keys in TCPA; I just can't imagine that you'd ship it without implicitly trusting Microsoft, and I distrust Microsoft very much. And if there are recovery keys in there, do I have to ship my machine away to some lab to replace a lost key, or can I do it myself? And if there IS a master, unerasable key available for recovery purposes, why can't virus writers just sign their code with that key instead?
Would I be willing to wait 6 hours on a 'cool breaking story'?
In a word: YES!
Most news on Slashdot is NOT BREAKING. If I didn't hear about barcode keys until tomorrow, or Wednesday, or next bloody MONTH for that matter, my life is not going to be significantly impacted.
When was the last time you saw a Slashdot story that you just absolutely had to read RIGHT THEN? There have been a few over the years (and I've been reading since close to the beginning; my number is so high because I didn't bother getting an account for six months or so after they started registrations.) There are occasional bits of 'breaking news' that make it here, but they're not nearly as common as the editors seem to think.
Slashdot, I think you are ignoring/abusing a responsbility here. You have the net equivalent of an Uzi; almost any small site you point to is going to die. Yes, the solution to the problem is tricky and would require some real thought and effort to implement. But you have had YEARS to think about this; I don't think 'it's hard!' is an adequate excuse anymore. Your other FAQ reasons are, in my opinion, fluff. The REAL reason is because it's hard, and I don't think that washes anymore.
If you actually DO have a breaking story, you always have the option of linking it directly. But if I have to wait an extra day before hearing about barcoded house keys, well.... I imagine I'll cope. Somehow.
Enough is enough. It's time to get started on some kind of caching system. If you're really lost, call Google. They're geeks. Many of them probably read this site, and I'll bet most would at least talk to you about the problem free of charge. If you want to start a discussion list on the project, I'll be happy to join and help as much as I can.
This is a problem that really needs to be solved, and I'm sure that many of us are ready and willing to help solve it.
To my understanding, he can choose to do custom work for a specific person for money, and put that code under the GPL. He then transfers it to that other person, along with the source code. He simply doesn't transfer that version to anyone else, thus keeping that code branch private.
That entity must provide all the code to anyone they sell the product to, but if they just USE the product, either internally or to provide a service to others, they are not obligated to distribute the custom source code to anyone.
Almost all current GPL licensing says "you may use GPL version 2 or, at your option, any later version", so anti-ASP clauses added to the GPL won't apply to the bulk of existing code.
Personally, I don't see what the ASP issue is... yes, people are using GPL code to roll out a custom solution to something, but they're selling the solution, not the source code. I regard this as a form of support, which is supposedly how one makes money with GPL software. The ASP is selling the expertise to roll everything together into one coherent system.
We can presently crack 40-bit DES keys without too much difficulty on a fast home computer. I know that RSA isn't as efficient, per bit, as DES is; but even worst case, we should need no more than another 2,008 generations of computer power increase to make a 2,048-bit key easily crackable.
That's still a really, really long time (3,000 years) but WAY less than sun-dies-out.:-)
This is a very good fundamental question, one I haven't resolved for myself yet. I'm leaning in the direction that the right to anonymity trumps the right to know who is talking about you, except in legal matters. (ie, if you're accused of a crime, you have the right to confront your accuser.)
I have trouble differentiating between the right to anonymity and the right to privacy, personally.
I'm arguing against the parent post, not the subpoena, wherein he said (approximately): "If you don't want people to know you're reading things, then don't read them" That's a classic example of 'chilling effect'; people avoiding ideas found obnoxious by the Government, because they fear reprisal.
This is roughly analogous to "if you have nothing to hide, you shouldn't be worried about the government being able to raid your house without a warrant."
Ultimately, the reason we have these rights is because We the People agree that we do. We got together, way back when, and created a new government with the Constitution. The government exists to implement the Constitution, and the Constitution exists to serve us. We are the masters, even though the government would like very, very much to convince us otherwise. In many cases, it has succeeded, as demonstrated by the parent post that started this whole thread.
You are right that the Constitution does document certain rights, but I disagree with you about the importance of Amendment 10, to wit:
"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people."
Basically, this is a catch-all, reminding us that the Framers didn't think they'd get it all right, and that unless it explicitly granted a right to the Federal government, or took it away from the states, then the states or the people retained the right. I read this as a very strong endorsement of state rights; to my reading, state governments would be able to do almost anything, limited in turn by their own Constitutions.
The government itself can't modify the Constitution. That has to be done by having a potential amendment passed by both houses and then ratified by 2/3rds of the States. Or, a Constitutional Convention can be called, at which point, apparently, anything goes.
So the government, in theory, cannot take away rights, except in those areas where it was explicitly granted powers by the Constitution. In actual practice, it often does anyway, because Constitutional challenges are exceedingly difficult and expensive battles to fight, and the Supreme Court has been very wary of "creating new rights"... even though they also subscribe to that hideous "living Constitution" crap. (quick aside: it means what it meant WHEN IT WAS WRITTEN, not what we'd like it to mean today or next week. It's not up to the Supreme Court to change the Constitution; they exist solely to enforce it. "Living Constitution" doctrine means they can change interpretations whenever they want, effectively changing the Constitution, which is not a power granted to the Supreme Court. They just took it. Very frustrating.)
I agree with you that the 'inalienable human rights' thing is probably a fiction. I'm mildly spiritual but I just don't see any sign that the Creator really did give us any particular rights; animals don't seem to be guaranteed anything, and I don't think we are either.
I think we gave ourselves those rights, and created a government to help insure that we would be able to keep them. For the most part, it has been quite successful.
But our cultural identity is not being transmitted correctly to the young. The arguments in the original parent post showed that. We are very rapidly chaining ourselves because we aren't teaching our children what freedom means.... or even how the government works!
That is just appalling: "If you are worried about your IP being logged when you get into a server or access online content, dont get online."
Have you ever heard of 'chilling effects'? Do you have any idea just how noxious this idea is to freedom? One of our fundamental principles has always been that you are free to think and read anything you wish; that information (with a very, very few exceptions) should not be suppressed in this country. No matter how noxious the current government may find the spread of some ideas, some of them are undoubtedly going to be right. There is little that makes authority figures more uncomfortable than the truth.
And finally.... freedoms ARE NOT GRANTED BY THE GOVERNMENT. I hope you're not a US citizen... if you are, you should just pack up and move to China. Government can only grant privileges. You have rights, many of which are enumerated in the Constitution (but it was never meant to be an exhaustive list) that cannot be taken away by the government. Instead, we grant the government certain limited powers which it uses on our behalf for the greater good.
They work for US, we don't work for THEM. The fact that you could be mixed up on this issue is scary. The fact that you could be modded up to +5 is even more frightening. What the hell is going on in this country??
A single-spaced sheet of 80x66 ASCII text, on average, uses about 2k. On a 1.44MB floppy you should be able to fit roughly 700 pages. If you tar/gzip your documents, you should be able to get about 10/1 compression, or 7,000 pages.
Just because Microsoft Word takes two hundred K to save a "hello, world!" document doesn't mean that floppies don't hold enough.:-)
You can, of course, skew your argument by positing very, VERY small typefaces, or some method of image encoding that fits 1.44mb on one piece of paper.... I'm just talking about straight old ASCII text at a normal typeface size.
And for the most part, a 250mhz processor is about 90% as good as a 2 gigahertz one. It takes more programming effort, because you have to work in a more efficient language, but China has lots and lots of manpower.
Most of the improvement after 1ghz or so is fluff.... at least at present, there just isn't much need for any more speed than that. I imagine China will be essentially self-sufficient in CPUs within three or four years. The marketroids will sneer (that's their job), but in real life, being a few years behind the curve won't matter much. For the few places where it DOES matter, like supercomputers, they can still buy Intel/AMD/Cyrix/VIA chips.
Sure, but for that kind of unlucky, you'd be more likely to be hit by a meteorite.
If a gun is properly cared for and all normal safety precautions are used, accidents are EXCEEDINGLY rare. There is the occasional manufacturing defect (most often in ammo, quite rare in the actual weapons), but beyond that, if someone is shot 'accidentally', it means the rules weren't being followed. Rule #1: all guns are loaded, even one you just unloaded yourself: Rule #2: never point a gun at anything unless you intend to kill it, and rule #3, always know where the gun is pointed. Just those rules alone will prevent 99% of accidents.
And I seriously question that a gun with this kind of added "safety feature" will actually be safer. The simpler a mechanism is, the less likely that it will malfunction. You DO NOT want a handgun to malfunction. If you need to use one, someone's life is on the line. If I'm killed because my gun doesn't fire when I need it, that sure didn't improve my safety any.
The overall, nebulous, "public safety" may be very slightly impacted by me owning a gun (which I actually don't, btw.) But my own personal safety is improved a great deal. Since I'm part of the public, my increase in safety is certainly a part of the overall 'public safety', and it's direct and quite measurable, whereas the nebulous 'public safety' is conveniently very hard to measure and quantify.
When you're talking about something as ill-defined and impossible to measure as 'public safety', pretty much any imaginary BS that makes any sort of sense at all can be thrown out there. It can't be proven, but it can't be DISproven, either.
Actually, those going out of business furniture sales are a huge scam. I don't know all the details, but apparently the store gets sold or something to a distributor, who then announces "we're going out of business"... and brings in a bunch of cheap shit with huge price tags but big markdowns. They keep advertising that they are 'going out of business' and keep trucking in more crap furniture until the local market is saturated. Then they really do close and look for another community to operate in. But it can take months and months before a given area is fished out.
"Valley Furniture is going out of business....forever!"
More precisely, VMWare virtualizes the hardware. Most of the time, the virtual machine programs are just X86 programs and just run on the native hardware at full speed.
However, PC I/O is (always??) memory-mapped. The processor writes commands to certain places in memory to cause things to happen. VMWare virtualizes this process; it uses the memory management unit to trap attempts to write to I/O devices on virtual machines. It then figures out what the virtualized program is trying to do, and does the actual correct thing with the real hardware. If the virtual machine is trying to write to disk, for instance, VMWare emulates the responses that the real hardware would make, but actually writes to or reads from a file on the host machine's filesystem.
Apparently this trickery runs at a lower level than the operating system, because you can run just about any OS that's out.
You notice this overhead the most on video and hard disk writes. Both video and disk I/O are *a lot* slower under VMWare. Network operations, however, aren't very affected; they run at nearly full speed. You can run most server-type applications very nicely under VMWare, unless they are extremely disk-intensive. You wouldn't want to run a database, but Apache runs great.
Games are pretty much a loss in VMWare; the video virtualization is simply too slow. Solitaire is fine. Quake would be a slideshow, if it ran at all.
To help avoid the disk I/O bottleneck, VMWare has the ability to assign a 'raw disk' to a virtual machine. This would probably be a lot faster, but I haven't worked with it. There are also versions of VMWare that are designed to entirely replace the host operating system. I imagine that they are much more efficient, but haven't worked with them either. (they cost thousands, not just hundreds.)
Bochs, on the other hand, emulates EVERYTHING, including the CPU. This full virtualization allows the emulation to run on any processor, but it's A LOT slower than a real CPU (which is essentially a highly-tuned hardware emulator of the X86 instruction set.) The X86 is devilishly hard to emulate properly, because of all the different instruction layers (8086, 80286, 80386, 80486, 80586, 80686). You have to spend a lot of CPU time figuring out what each instruction is: is it 8-bit, 16-bit, 32-bit, MMX, or SSE? You can't take the same kind of easy shortcuts you can with cleaner instruction sets. Decoding takes a long time and a lot of host processor cycles, so you take an enormous speed hit.
On top of that, you ALSO have to virtualize the video, I/O, and network, so you get all the overhead of VMWare, above and beyond the CPU emulation bottleneck. You probably couldn't run a realistic server of ANY sort under Bochs.
VMWare can be indispensable at times. I registered two copies (one for Linux and one for Windows) back when it was cheap, and keep them up to date. It's an incredible program.
Example: I wanted to update firmware on one of my cards. (running Win2K on this machine). I don't have a floppy drive on this computer anymore, so a normal bootdisk is difficult. I have a CD burner, but I couldn't find my copy of Easy CD Creator.
I fired up VMWare. Under Debian, running in a window, I built a bootable CD image using a downloaded floppy image and mkisofs. I then copied the image file back to the host machine's filesystem, and booted up another virtual machine *on that image file* to make sure it worked. (and discovered that the Techworm boot disk has problems with VMWare, but I proved it worked after some fiddling. QEMM doesn't seem to like VMWare's BIOS too well.) Then I switched back to the Debian window and actually burned it to a CDROM. Finally rebooted the REAL machine onto the CDROM I just made. Worked great. Got it right in exactly one real reboot.
VMWare is one of those programs that becomes so useful and convenient that it's hard to imagine not having it in the arsenal.
(And yes, I could have either A) installed a floppy, or B) dug up my copy of Easy CD Creator, but I'm a geek. Doing it the hard way is fun.:-) )
The recognition of this fact was one of the reasons why.Half-Life was such a compelling game.
Each level in Half-Life was done with some sort of artificial constraint, ie, "you can only have X polygons total". They talked, some years ago, about what the constraints were, but I have forgotten the details. I do remember that they were different for every level.... and they were hard constraints to deal with, not wimpy ones that didn't matter.
I do not think it is a coincidence that Half-Life is among the most innovative and successful games in history. It is STILL selling (though now, mostly due to mods like Counterstrike and Natural Selection.) Limitations do indeed encourage creativity.
Kinda makes you wonder if fledgling game-designers should work on emulators of the old 8-bit machines.
Of all the analogies to choose, this was one of the worst. Have you ever seen a cat play with a mouse? It is VERY cruel. If cats could understand formaldehyde, I have no doubt whatsoever that they'd gleefully inject a mouse with it... well, except for the fact that it would ruin lunch.
Cruelty is very much a part of nature. A fox will kill every hen in a henhouse just because it can. Wolverines fight just to fight; they are nasty, cruel animals.
We may be the only animal that can experiment on others... but we appear also to be the only animal that can feel guilty about it afterward.
By the logic of your argument, because animals don't feel guilty, we shouldn't either.
But from the sound of it, all your machines are probably running the same software. (compute farm). What HE is talking about is something like:
8 NT machines,
1 running SQL Server
3 running IIS in a failover cluster
1 running Exchange 2000
1 license server for all those weird license programs
1 development IIS box
1 running some home-brewed custom app
1 Solaris machines:
1 running Oracle;
1 running Apache for an intranet server; also deployment box for internal apps
1 running the Unix development environment
etc, etc, ad nauseum. I'm just pulling this stuff out of the air, it has only a vague resemblance to real networks I've used.
The fundamental problem is that networks are rarely initially deployed by experts. They are almost always understaffed and poorly-planned. Later sysadmins come in and have NO CLUE where things are. Even if the documentation was really well-done, when you have a farm of 50+ servers you don't know well, you're NOT going to be pushing out major patches to them quickly.
And then you have the really BIG environments, thousands of machines, which I haven't really worked on personally. I believe that they most likely resemble dozens or hundreds of the small networks I describe above, all lumped together over time. I don't know that this is true, I'm just guessing. I DO know that very large networks run into problems that we smaller-network admins never see.
I think that's one of the biggest areas that need to be addressed.... small company networks. It's the initial deployment/setup that determines how the network will run for years. More expertise brought down to that level would make the job A LOT easier. Scaleability costs money, and small companies don't usually have much, but there are certainly some fundamental things you can do to make your life easier later on. It'd be nice to get that knowledge pushed down to even the amateurs that do most initial setups.
Back to my original reply: you may be blessed with a simple, easy-to-administer environment, but don't slam other sysadmins for not being as lucky as you are.
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MSG is a neurotoxin. It excites brain cells to death. I, at least, am incredibly sensitive to it.
:-(
It wasn't always that way. For years and years I was able to eat it without problems. However, I started drinking a lot of diet pepsi, and after a couple of years of that, got very, very sick. Couldn't pin down what the problem was. My vision was damaged, my memory was shot, my ability to focus/concentrate was gone. I was having coordination problems. When they examined at me at one neurologist, I couldn't even walk heel and toe; I lost my balance. Every time. I was really a mess. At the time they thought I might have multiple sclerosis. They ruled that out with an MRI, but I still had many of the same symptoms. (it turns out aspartame poisoning is frequently mistaken for MS).
Things started improving after I stopped aspartame (which is a much stronger neurotoxin than is MSG), but it wasn't until I realized that MSG was also (now) causing me trouble that I started to get back to anything approaching normal. I don't think I'll ever be what I was, but I'd call myself 90% recovered at this point.
I don't know why I reacted so badly to aspartame/MSG and many people don't. However, they are both documented neurotoxins, and I tend to think that any group of people that relies primarily on their brains to function should avoid them.
MSG makes food taste good because it excites nerve cells; they are fooled into thinking that the food you are eating has more 'goodness' in it than it actually does. That tingly feeling you sometimes get after you've had a lot of MSG? (lips and fingertips are common). That's nerve cells being overstimulated, often to death.
This stuff sneaks up on you; I was having minor symptoms I didn't think were important for at least a year before I got really sick. You don't get really visible symptoms until you have lost about 75% of the brain cells in a given functional area; the brain is highly resilient to damage. But it doesn't last forever.
There used to be a really wonderful site with tons of information about MSG at www.123recipes.com. They had a great section on what it can do to you and the (MANY!) ways that manufacturers try to hide the fact that they have added it to food. (it's in probably 90% of the foods on the shelf-- you're probably getting a whopping great dose of MSG every day without even knowing it.) But 123recipes.com seems to have gone away.
I would suggest reading up on MSG -- you should realize just how many things it's in. (basically almost everything on the shelf). Due to a curiosity of Federal regulation, only 100% pure MSG needs to be labeled as "monosodium glutamate". So manufacturers just put in 90% pure MSG instead and call it something else.
They hide it in all sorts of ways.... the most common label is "natural flavors". Another very common one is any type of "hydrolyzed" protein. Yeast extract and autolyzed yeast extract are two more. (I avoid anything with a -lyzed suffix now). "Caseinate" is another trigger word; I usually see it as "milk caseinate" but I've seen it used as a modifier on other source foods as well. "Modified starch" is the most recent trick I'm aware of.
For more on aspartame, www.aspartametruth.com has many links to studies, etc. Before getting sick, I probably wouldn't have paid that much attention to it, but I can tell you from personal experience that many of the described symptoms are absolutely real and valid -- I have had them myself. I presume, since I had so many of the listed problems, that most of the links are truthful. Read carefully, but I can assure you that there is definitely a real core here. It is not just hysterical armwaving.
One thing I sometimes think about... over the lsat 20 years, there has been an enormous rise in the use of neurotoxins in food. At the same time, there seems to be an overwhelming rise in stupidity. I don't know if these two are causally linked, but I do wonder.
I'm far from an expert, but I think all a terrorist would have to do is loosen one of the heat tiles enough so that it would come loose under stress. If just one gave out, I believe we'd see exactly what we just saw.
They have a full manual inspection program that runs during every launch preparation. I believe there'd be an opportunity to tamper with one of the tiles after the inspection is done. And I don't think it would take much time, no more than a minute or two.
Just a thought.
As I understand it, "fair use" describes what someone may do with a copyrighted work, whether or not the copyright holder objects. You can, for instance, lend someone a book, even though the publisher would much prefer that your friend buy the book instead. But the concept of fair use isn't a Constitutional concept, it's a construct of law (or possibly of judicial decree, I'm still not sure about this.)
The Constitution says that Congress may protect works "for limited times", but it does NOT say how those works may be protected. It could range from "no protection whatsoever" up to "25 years in prison for reading this novel aloud" without affecting anyone's rights. This just isn't a "rights" issue. You don't have ANY rights with regard to a copyrighted work. You have only privileges, and Congress may grant or suspend those at its pleasure.
You could probably argue on the basis of "promote the Useful Arts and Sciences", but considering that Lessig wasn't able to even convince the Supremes that "limited times" means limited times, I don't think you'd get very far.
Fair use is a privilege, not a right. I'm not sure if it's a judicial decree or an actual law, but it's not enshrined in the Constitution.
Therefore, the Congresscritters can indeed take away your privilege to fair use if they choose. They have, to some degree, already done so with the DMCA.
I found Snow Crash to be quite good; I remember it quite clearly, and with the sheer number of books I read, that's saying something. Admittedly, there was an absolutely INTERMINABLE expository section about language and the Tower of Babel. You could take a pair of scissors to those (40??) pages and barely miss anything. A tremendous clunker in an otherwise very good book, IMO. He's certainly no Orson Scott card, but he's a good read, IMO.
:-)
one I absolutely can't stand is Gibson -- he has interesting ideas, but his writing is horrid. I'm still surprised he A) found a publisher, and B) found readers. I guess some folks are a lot more tolerant than I am.
You mentioned Hogan....IMO, he's another one of those writers with good ideas and poor writing. He's more worth wading through than most, however. He has genuinely interesting and different ideas. I just wish his prose wasn't so clunky.
The problem with alternate history books like Turtledove's is that, to be accurate, he CAN'T end in any particular place. History is sorta continuous; it's unusual for it to have really discrete starting and stopping places. I thought he handled it about as well as he could have; the eventual outcome appears inevitable. Getting there would be interesting, but it's really not worth spending another book on. And no matter where he stopped, there would be unresolved issues; that's the nature of history.
I was also really surprised by this. He was right about all the earlier Windows versions, but he doesn't appear to understand that the whole POINT of NT was that "there is no DOS"; Windows XP is NT 6.0. (Win2k was 5.0).
He makes another error, talking about MS-DOS 2.0 and its Hierarchical Filing System. As far as I know, HFS was Mac-only, wasn't it? DOS 2.0 used just regular old FAT, as far as I know. I don't think that changed until Windows 98 and FAT32. OS/2 used HPFS, and NT used NTFS. (they could both use FAT, and NT also spoke HPFS, but those were their primary filesystems.)
He's way, way off base in this article. Usually Cringely is great. He sure blew it in this one.
I've heard it put this way: "You are now a salesman. Your job is to put yourself out of business by depleting your inventory to zero."
If I understood the prior articles correctly, TCPA should provide a basic keystore, an authentication mechanism, and enough checking to insure that the boot sector is signed.
If I want to install a new boot sector, do I generate my own key, install that, and self-sign the boot code? Or do the LILO or GRUB teams have to get a key issued and then sign things themselves?
Who has ultimate control over the keys? CAN I install my own, or is it centralized somewhere? Who does TCPA *ultimately* trust? How can I be *certain* that it doesn't trust anyone I don't want it to? If I screw up and lose my key, how I recover access to the system?
I assume there must be some master, uneraseable keys in TCPA; I just can't imagine that you'd ship it without implicitly trusting Microsoft, and I distrust Microsoft very much. And if there are recovery keys in there, do I have to ship my machine away to some lab to replace a lost key, or can I do it myself? And if there IS a master, unerasable key available for recovery purposes, why can't virus writers just sign their code with that key instead?
Would I be willing to wait 6 hours on a 'cool breaking story'?
In a word: YES!
Most news on Slashdot is NOT BREAKING. If I didn't hear about barcode keys until tomorrow, or Wednesday, or next bloody MONTH for that matter, my life is not going to be significantly impacted.
When was the last time you saw a Slashdot story that you just absolutely had to read RIGHT THEN? There have been a few over the years (and I've been reading since close to the beginning; my number is so high because I didn't bother getting an account for six months or so after they started registrations.) There are occasional bits of 'breaking news' that make it here, but they're not nearly as common as the editors seem to think.
Slashdot, I think you are ignoring/abusing a responsbility here. You have the net equivalent of an Uzi; almost any small site you point to is going to die. Yes, the solution to the problem is tricky and would require some real thought and effort to implement. But you have had YEARS to think about this; I don't think 'it's hard!' is an adequate excuse anymore. Your other FAQ reasons are, in my opinion, fluff. The REAL reason is because it's hard, and I don't think that washes anymore.
If you actually DO have a breaking story, you always have the option of linking it directly. But if I have to wait an extra day before hearing about barcoded house keys, well.... I imagine I'll cope. Somehow.
Enough is enough. It's time to get started on some kind of caching system. If you're really lost, call Google. They're geeks. Many of them probably read this site, and I'll bet most would at least talk to you about the problem free of charge. If you want to start a discussion list on the project, I'll be happy to join and help as much as I can.
This is a problem that really needs to be solved, and I'm sure that many of us are ready and willing to help solve it.
To my understanding, he can choose to do custom work for a specific person for money, and put that code under the GPL. He then transfers it to that other person, along with the source code. He simply doesn't transfer that version to anyone else, thus keeping that code branch private.
That entity must provide all the code to anyone they sell the product to, but if they just USE the product, either internally or to provide a service to others, they are not obligated to distribute the custom source code to anyone.
Almost all current GPL licensing says "you may use GPL version 2 or, at your option, any later version", so anti-ASP clauses added to the GPL won't apply to the bulk of existing code.
Personally, I don't see what the ASP issue is... yes, people are using GPL code to roll out a custom solution to something, but they're selling the solution, not the source code. I regard this as a form of support, which is supposedly how one makes money with GPL software. The ASP is selling the expertise to roll everything together into one coherent system.
Every generation of Moore's law is one bit.
:-)
We can presently crack 40-bit DES keys without too much difficulty on a fast home computer. I know that RSA isn't as efficient, per bit, as DES is; but even worst case, we should need no more than another 2,008 generations of computer power increase to make a 2,048-bit key easily crackable.
That's still a really, really long time (3,000 years) but WAY less than sun-dies-out.
This is a very good fundamental question, one I haven't resolved for myself yet. I'm leaning in the direction that the right to anonymity trumps the right to know who is talking about you, except in legal matters. (ie, if you're accused of a crime, you have the right to confront your accuser.)
I have trouble differentiating between the right to anonymity and the right to privacy, personally.
I'm arguing against the parent post, not the subpoena, wherein he said (approximately): "If you don't want people to know you're reading things, then don't read them" That's a classic example of 'chilling effect'; people avoiding ideas found obnoxious by the Government, because they fear reprisal.
This is roughly analogous to "if you have nothing to hide, you shouldn't be worried about the government being able to raid your house without a warrant."
Actually, freedoms are granted by ourselves.
Ultimately, the reason we have these rights is because We the People agree that we do. We got together, way back when, and created a new government with the Constitution. The government exists to implement the Constitution, and the Constitution exists to serve us. We are the masters, even though the government would like very, very much to convince us otherwise. In many cases, it has succeeded, as demonstrated by the parent post that started this whole thread.
You are right that the Constitution does document certain rights, but I disagree with you about the importance of Amendment 10, to wit:
"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people."
Basically, this is a catch-all, reminding us that the Framers didn't think they'd get it all right, and that unless it explicitly granted a right to the Federal government, or took it away from the states, then the states or the people retained the right. I read this as a very strong endorsement of state rights; to my reading, state governments would be able to do almost anything, limited in turn by their own Constitutions.
The government itself can't modify the Constitution. That has to be done by having a potential amendment passed by both houses and then ratified by 2/3rds of the States. Or, a Constitutional Convention can be called, at which point, apparently, anything goes.
So the government, in theory, cannot take away rights, except in those areas where it was explicitly granted powers by the Constitution. In actual practice, it often does anyway, because Constitutional challenges are exceedingly difficult and expensive battles to fight, and the Supreme Court has been very wary of "creating new rights"... even though they also subscribe to that hideous "living Constitution" crap. (quick aside: it means what it meant WHEN IT WAS WRITTEN, not what we'd like it to mean today or next week. It's not up to the Supreme Court to change the Constitution; they exist solely to enforce it. "Living Constitution" doctrine means they can change interpretations whenever they want, effectively changing the Constitution, which is not a power granted to the Supreme Court. They just took it. Very frustrating.)
I agree with you that the 'inalienable human rights' thing is probably a fiction. I'm mildly spiritual but I just don't see any sign that the Creator really did give us any particular rights; animals don't seem to be guaranteed anything, and I don't think we are either.
I think we gave ourselves those rights, and created a government to help insure that we would be able to keep them. For the most part, it has been quite successful.
But our cultural identity is not being transmitted correctly to the young. The arguments in the original parent post showed that. We are very rapidly chaining ourselves because we aren't teaching our children what freedom means.... or even how the government works!
That is just appalling: "If you are worried about your IP being logged when you get into a server or access online content, dont get online."
Have you ever heard of 'chilling effects'? Do you have any idea just how noxious this idea is to freedom? One of our fundamental principles has always been that you are free to think and read anything you wish; that information (with a very, very few exceptions) should not be suppressed in this country. No matter how noxious the current government may find the spread of some ideas, some of them are undoubtedly going to be right. There is little that makes authority figures more uncomfortable than the truth.
And finally.... freedoms ARE NOT GRANTED BY THE GOVERNMENT. I hope you're not a US citizen... if you are, you should just pack up and move to China. Government can only grant privileges. You have rights, many of which are enumerated in the Constitution (but it was never meant to be an exhaustive list) that cannot be taken away by the government. Instead, we grant the government certain limited powers which it uses on our behalf for the greater good.
They work for US, we don't work for THEM. The fact that you could be mixed up on this issue is scary. The fact that you could be modded up to +5 is even more frightening. What the hell is going on in this country??
A single-spaced sheet of 80x66 ASCII text, on average, uses about 2k. On a 1.44MB floppy you should be able to fit roughly 700 pages. If you tar/gzip your documents, you should be able to get about 10/1 compression, or 7,000 pages.
:-)
Just because Microsoft Word takes two hundred K to save a "hello, world!" document doesn't mean that floppies don't hold enough.
You can, of course, skew your argument by positing very, VERY small typefaces, or some method of image encoding that fits 1.44mb on one piece of paper.... I'm just talking about straight old ASCII text at a normal typeface size.
And for the most part, a 250mhz processor is about 90% as good as a 2 gigahertz one. It takes more programming effort, because you have to work in a more efficient language, but China has lots and lots of manpower.
Most of the improvement after 1ghz or so is fluff.... at least at present, there just isn't much need for any more speed than that. I imagine China will be essentially self-sufficient in CPUs within three or four years. The marketroids will sneer (that's their job), but in real life, being a few years behind the curve won't matter much. For the few places where it DOES matter, like supercomputers, they can still buy Intel/AMD/Cyrix/VIA chips.
Sure, but for that kind of unlucky, you'd be more likely to be hit by a meteorite.
If a gun is properly cared for and all normal safety precautions are used, accidents are EXCEEDINGLY rare. There is the occasional manufacturing defect (most often in ammo, quite rare in the actual weapons), but beyond that, if someone is shot 'accidentally', it means the rules weren't being followed. Rule #1: all guns are loaded, even one you just unloaded yourself: Rule #2: never point a gun at anything unless you intend to kill it, and rule #3, always know where the gun is pointed. Just those rules alone will prevent 99% of accidents.
And I seriously question that a gun with this kind of added "safety feature" will actually be safer. The simpler a mechanism is, the less likely that it will malfunction. You DO NOT want a handgun to malfunction. If you need to use one, someone's life is on the line. If I'm killed because my gun doesn't fire when I need it, that sure didn't improve my safety any.
The overall, nebulous, "public safety" may be very slightly impacted by me owning a gun (which I actually don't, btw.) But my own personal safety is improved a great deal. Since I'm part of the public, my increase in safety is certainly a part of the overall 'public safety', and it's direct and quite measurable, whereas the nebulous 'public safety' is conveniently very hard to measure and quantify.
When you're talking about something as ill-defined and impossible to measure as 'public safety', pretty much any imaginary BS that makes any sort of sense at all can be thrown out there. It can't be proven, but it can't be DISproven, either.
Actually, those going out of business furniture sales are a huge scam. I don't know all the details, but apparently the store gets sold or something to a distributor, who then announces "we're going out of business"... and brings in a bunch of cheap shit with huge price tags but big markdowns. They keep advertising that they are 'going out of business' and keep trucking in more crap furniture until the local market is saturated. Then they really do close and look for another community to operate in. But it can take months and months before a given area is fished out.
"Valley Furniture is going out of business....forever!"
More precisely, VMWare virtualizes the hardware. Most of the time, the virtual machine programs are just X86 programs and just run on the native hardware at full speed.
However, PC I/O is (always??) memory-mapped. The processor writes commands to certain places in memory to cause things to happen. VMWare virtualizes this process; it uses the memory management unit to trap attempts to write to I/O devices on virtual machines. It then figures out what the virtualized program is trying to do, and does the actual correct thing with the real hardware. If the virtual machine is trying to write to disk, for instance, VMWare emulates the responses that the real hardware would make, but actually writes to or reads from a file on the host machine's filesystem.
Apparently this trickery runs at a lower level than the operating system, because you can run just about any OS that's out.
You notice this overhead the most on video and hard disk writes. Both video and disk I/O are *a lot* slower under VMWare. Network operations, however, aren't very affected; they run at nearly full speed. You can run most server-type applications very nicely under VMWare, unless they are extremely disk-intensive. You wouldn't want to run a database, but Apache runs great.
Games are pretty much a loss in VMWare; the video virtualization is simply too slow. Solitaire is fine. Quake would be a slideshow, if it ran at all.
To help avoid the disk I/O bottleneck, VMWare has the ability to assign a 'raw disk' to a virtual machine. This would probably be a lot faster, but I haven't worked with it. There are also versions of VMWare that are designed to entirely replace the host operating system. I imagine that they are much more efficient, but haven't worked with them either. (they cost thousands, not just hundreds.)
Bochs, on the other hand, emulates EVERYTHING, including the CPU. This full virtualization allows the emulation to run on any processor, but it's A LOT slower than a real CPU (which is essentially a highly-tuned hardware emulator of the X86 instruction set.) The X86 is devilishly hard to emulate properly, because of all the different instruction layers (8086, 80286, 80386, 80486, 80586, 80686). You have to spend a lot of CPU time figuring out what each instruction is: is it 8-bit, 16-bit, 32-bit, MMX, or SSE? You can't take the same kind of easy shortcuts you can with cleaner instruction sets. Decoding takes a long time and a lot of host processor cycles, so you take an enormous speed hit.
On top of that, you ALSO have to virtualize the video, I/O, and network, so you get all the overhead of VMWare, above and beyond the CPU emulation bottleneck. You probably couldn't run a realistic server of ANY sort under Bochs.
Example: I wanted to update firmware on one of my cards. (running Win2K on this machine). I don't have a floppy drive on this computer anymore, so a normal bootdisk is difficult. I have a CD burner, but I couldn't find my copy of Easy CD Creator.
I fired up VMWare. Under Debian, running in a window, I built a bootable CD image using a downloaded floppy image and mkisofs. I then copied the image file back to the host machine's filesystem, and booted up another virtual machine *on that image file* to make sure it worked. (and discovered that the Techworm boot disk has problems with VMWare, but I proved it worked after some fiddling. QEMM doesn't seem to like VMWare's BIOS too well.) Then I switched back to the Debian window and actually burned it to a CDROM. Finally rebooted the REAL machine onto the CDROM I just made. Worked great. Got it right in exactly one real reboot.
VMWare is one of those programs that becomes so useful and convenient that it's hard to imagine not having it in the arsenal.
(And yes, I could have either A) installed a floppy, or B) dug up my copy of Easy CD Creator, but I'm a geek. Doing it the hard way is fun. :-) )
$ whois ps3.com
:-)
[major snippage]
Registrant:
Sony Computer Entertainment Inc (PS283-DOM)
1-1 Akasaka 7-chome, Minato-ku
Tokyo,107-0052
JAPAN
I'd say you had a good chance of being right.
The recognition of this fact was one of the reasons why.Half-Life was such a compelling game.
Each level in Half-Life was done with some sort of artificial constraint, ie, "you can only have X polygons total". They talked, some years ago, about what the constraints were, but I have forgotten the details. I do remember that they were different for every level.... and they were hard constraints to deal with, not wimpy ones that didn't matter.
I do not think it is a coincidence that Half-Life is among the most innovative and successful games in history. It is STILL selling (though now, mostly due to mods like Counterstrike and Natural Selection.) Limitations do indeed encourage creativity.
Kinda makes you wonder if fledgling game-designers should work on emulators of the old 8-bit machines.
Of all the analogies to choose, this was one of the worst. Have you ever seen a cat play with a mouse? It is VERY cruel. If cats could understand formaldehyde, I have no doubt whatsoever that they'd gleefully inject a mouse with it... well, except for the fact that it would ruin lunch.
Cruelty is very much a part of nature. A fox will kill every hen in a henhouse just because it can. Wolverines fight just to fight; they are nasty, cruel animals.
We may be the only animal that can experiment on others... but we appear also to be the only animal that can feel guilty about it afterward.
By the logic of your argument, because animals don't feel guilty, we shouldn't either.
But from the sound of it, all your machines are probably running the same software. (compute farm). What HE is talking about is something like:
8 NT machines,
1 running SQL Server
3 running IIS in a failover cluster
1 running Exchange 2000
1 license server for all those weird license programs
1 development IIS box
1 running some home-brewed custom app
1 Solaris machines:
1 running Oracle;
1 running Apache for an intranet server; also deployment box for internal apps
1 running the Unix development environment
etc, etc, ad nauseum. I'm just pulling this stuff out of the air, it has only a vague resemblance to real networks I've used.
The fundamental problem is that networks are rarely initially deployed by experts. They are almost always understaffed and poorly-planned. Later sysadmins come in and have NO CLUE where things are. Even if the documentation was really well-done, when you have a farm of 50+ servers you don't know well, you're NOT going to be pushing out major patches to them quickly.
And then you have the really BIG environments, thousands of machines, which I haven't really worked on personally. I believe that they most likely resemble dozens or hundreds of the small networks I describe above, all lumped together over time. I don't know that this is true, I'm just guessing. I DO know that very large networks run into problems that we smaller-network admins never see.
I think that's one of the biggest areas that need to be addressed.... small company networks. It's the initial deployment/setup that determines how the network will run for years. More expertise brought down to that level would make the job A LOT easier. Scaleability costs money, and small companies don't usually have much, but there are certainly some fundamental things you can do to make your life easier later on. It'd be nice to get that knowledge pushed down to even the amateurs that do most initial setups.
Back to my original reply: you may be blessed with a simple, easy-to-administer environment, but don't slam other sysadmins for not being as lucky as you are.