Yes, MLK's campaign was non-violent, but the opposition (led by government)
Led by government? I didn't know that the Kennedy's, Johnson, Eisenhower, and so many other members of goverment orchestrated such a violent opposition to the civil rights movement.
The word "government" is not equivalent to the phrase "federal government". "Government" also includes state and local government, such as, for example, the government of the city of Birmingham, Alabama.
I am guessing you have never had to follow freedom of speech issues in germany. They are a lot more restrictive then the US and you don't have that 1st ammendment to fall back on.
Article 5
[Freedom of expression, arts and sciences]
(1) Every person shall have the right freely to express and disseminate his opinions in speech, writing and pictures, and to inform himself without hindrance from generally accessible sources. Freedom of the press and freedom of reporting by means of broadcasts and films shall be guaranteed. There shall be no censorship.
(2) These rights shall find their limits in the provisions of general laws, in provisions for the protection of young persons, and in the right to personal honour.
(3) Arts and sciences, research and teaching shall be free. The freedom of teaching shall not release any person from allegiance to the constitution.
Is the problem the "These rights shall find their limits in the provisions of general laws..." part? (My guess is that the part about "the right to personal honor" is intended to say, for example, "this doesn't say you can't get your ass sued for libel if you publicly accuse somebody of fucking goats".)
More like, we will find that quantum physics and standard model don't actually differ, but only in observation.
They differ by virtue of belonging to different categories of things.
Quantum physics is a general framework that encapsulates a number of particular physical theories, including quantum electrodynamics (interaction between charged particles and photons), quantum electroweakdynamics or whatever it's called (throw in the W and Z bosons and neutrinos on top of quantum electrodynamics), quantum chromodynamics (interaction between quarks, bearing a charge called "color", and gluons, the force quanta for the field generated by that charge), and the standard model (quantum electroweakandchromodynamics). So the standard model is a quantum theory, and thus falls under the general heading of "quantum physics" (as do atomic physics, nuclear physics, most if not all of what's called "condensed matter physics", and so on).
Exactly how is that different from Jesus Christ saying "Make God your Father, look at him as a parent rather than as a vengeful, arbitrary judge, and see what happens"?
If Jesus had said "Gee, in some hypothetical world we invent, not the same as this world, what would happen if you made God your Father and looked at him as a parent rather than as a vengeful, arbitrary judge? And then let's see what would happen in a world where God was your Father and your Father were a vengeful, arbitrary judge? And then what if there's a triumvirate of Gods? And then....", that might be the same.
However, I was under the impression that Christians treated the existence of God as a statement, taken on faith, about our world, rather than as an arbitrary hypothesis they're imposing on an abstract world they're constructing for the lulz. Perhaps I'm mistaken there....
And the difference between irrational and rational religion is asking the question "What does the universe look like if God Doesn't Exist and everything is Random?" as well as "What does the universe look like if God is an irrational idiot who doesn't follow his own rules?"
What does the universe look like if God doesn't exist but, for some unknown reason, everything isn't completely random? (At least as we understand quantum mechanics now, there is a fair bit of randomness in the universe, but you can at least make statistical predictions.)
Science itself would not be able to exist in those other two universes- because there would be no rational laws at all- you can't have physics without laws, and you can't have laws without a lawgiver.
By "laws" do you mean "laws" as in the prescriptive laws of human society, where one or more people write laws requiring or banning certain behaviors, or do you mean "laws" as in the descriptive "laws" of science, where people observe some regularities in the real world, formulate those regularities, and test whether they work in situations other than the ones from which they're derived? The latter doesn't necessarily imply a "lawgiver" in the sense of prescriptive laws; it could stem from something no more "interesting" than the weak anthropic principle.
Riddle me this - photons and the supposed gravitons have infinite range due to zero (rest) mass. Strong and weak forces, heavy bosons, short range, right?
I'll accept a counter-example that shows how I can manipulate the strong or weak forces from a distance larger than a nucleus or thereabouts. Not just fire some other non-boson particle into there (which then is that close or closer).
So how does the Higgs work over all of space, guys?
It's not a force-carrying boson, as the photon, W bosons, Z boson, and various mesons are, so the "zero mass, goes as 1/r^2, non-zero mass, drops off faster than that" doesn't apply.
This is ridiculous as the SM being right to N decimals, and relativity also being right to N (N being however many we can measure).
Presumably by "relativity" you mean "general relativity", given that the standard model is a relativistic model.
Yet, the huge gaping, embarrassing, festering (yet almost always not spoken of) wound in all physics is that - they can't both be right, yet in their own domains, they are.
Actually, I have the impression that most physicists realize that gravity and the SM aren't some Neat Unified Theory, and some of them are trying to unify them.
Yes. Any Axiomatic Definition is equivalent to what Religions are talking about when they say "faith". If you use the word "faith" when talking about the Axiomatic Definitions of religions, then it is equally correct to use the word "faith" when talking about the Axiomatic Definitions of Mathematics,
The effects of a handheld Higgs Generator are to reduce or increase or decrease the mass of subatomic particles.
Or, more accuratly, the effects of a handheld Higgs generator, were it possible to construct such a device, would be to....
Done precisely enough, you could change not only the neutron mass of a given element but *also* it's number of electrons-
Err, what? To change the number of electrons in an atom you also have to change the number of protons in the atom, and changing the masses of the quarks in the nucleus would, as I indicated, only change the number of protons in the atom if it changed the dynamics of the nucleus so that the "extra" protons would be kicked out - it's not as if making the components of the nucleons in a nucleus lighter ipso facto means the nucleus will have fewer protons just because protons have mass.
"Well, create something. Whether it's new arable land, or, for example, a bunch of stuff that's not land, arable or otherwise, is another matter."
That's an engineering problem, not a physics problem precisely.
Well, physics imposes constraints on engineering problems; it's not as if building a perpetual motion machine is a "simple matter of engineering", for example - and it's not as if "we found something that might be a Higgs boson" automatically leads to "and someday we'll be able to 'control' the Higgs field in some fashion"; we've known about gravity for centuries but nobody's built an anti-gravity machine yet.
Well, given the fact that eventually, a handheld Higgs generator
So what does a "Higgs generator" do? (Note: "generate a Higgs field" is a non-answer; it's like saying a hammer "hammers things". What are the precise physical effects of a "Higgs generator"?)
could allow you to take a patch of rocky desert, disintegrate the rocks
How so?
and transmute some of the larger atomic numbers into carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen (which are pretty light elements by comparison and certainly by reducing the mass of the higher elements you can make the lower ones)
Erm, no, it's not as if the only difference between elements with lighter nuclei and elements with heavier nuclei is the mass; they differ in mass (primarily) because they have different numbers of nucleons, not because the masses of the nucleons are different. Changing the masses of the nucleons in, say, lead might have all sorts of interesting effects, but I rather doubt that "poof, it's now carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen" will be one of them. (You might get transmutation if, say, the change in the nucleon masses make the some or all lead isotope nuclei unstable, but you might not get transmutation into what you want, especially if that renders the desired products' nuclei unstable. I'll leave it to actual nuclear physicists to indicate what might happen here.)
(And, in any case, most of the mass of nucleons isn't due to the quark rest masses.)
and create *new arable land*
Well, create something. Whether it's new arable land, or, for example, a bunch of stuff that's not land, arable or otherwise, is another matter.
turning the same generator on your fellow human being to make him not only disappear, but all of the atoms in his body whiz off in different directions at the speed of light;
And perhaps the atoms in a bunch of other things in the vicinity, including your body. I'll leave it to actual particle physicists to indicate whether you could zero out the vacuum expectation value of the Higgs field in a limited region of space, and, if so, what would happen if you did.
I see, this is about providing an embedded platform for things that want to get on some local Internet drop. It isn't really about creating an Internet from things.
I.e., "the Internet of things" is the same damn Internet as "the Internet of people posting captioned cat pictures to icanhascheezburger.com" - it's not a special Internet for "things", it's just putting a lot more things on the plain old Internet, such as thermostats and smart cards and refrigerators and washing machines and strain gauges and....
Compilers compile to "object code" or "machine code", not "assembler language". It may be that some simple compilers produce output in assembler language that has to be separately "assembled".
I.e., many UN*X C compilers, including but hardly limited to gcc, are simple? Or does hiding the "run the assembler" stage behind the compiler driver (cc, gcc, etc.) mean that the compiler "compiles to "machine code"" rather than to "compiling to "assembler language""?
From: Linus Torvalds
Subject: Re: [RFC] Convert builin-mailinfo.c to use The Better String Library.
Newsgroups: gmane.comp.version-control.git
Date: 2007-09-06 17:50:28 GMT (2 years, 14 weeks, 16 hours and 36 minutes ago)...
In other words, the only way to do good, efficient, and system-level and portable C++ ends up to limit yourself to all the things that are basically available in C. And limiting your project to C means that people don't screw that up, and also means that you get a lot of programmers that do actually understand low-level issues and don't screw things up with any idiotic "object model" crap.
And, for a view somewhat less harsh about C++, but still not a case of "C++ roolz, C droolz!", see The Old Man and the C, the abstract of which says
"You can't teach an old dog new tricks" goes the old proverb. This is a story about a pack of old dogs (C programmers) and their odyssey of trying to learn new tricks (C++ programming).
C++ is a large, complex language which can easily be abused, but also includes many features to help programmers more quickly write higher quality code. The TeamWare group consciously decided which C++ features to use and, just as importantly, which features not to use. We also incrementally adopted those features we chose to use. This resulted in a successful C++ experience.
You're complaining that my washing machine only allows me to execute the programs that its maker decided were "good" for me?
No, he's stating (without any indication that he thinks this is a Bad Thing, i.e. no "complaint") that the washing machine comes only with specialized software to control it, without any mechanism to support third-party software.
How's that different from the iToys?
Because the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch do have a mechanism to support third-party software. Unlike some other smartphones/tablets, the only such mechanism available without jailbreaking the machine uses the vendor's store, and the vendor controls what software is allowed in the store, but that's hugely different from most if not all washing machines - our washing machine doesn't have a Whirlpool App Store from which we can get third-party aps.
This seems like the kind of problem made by one of those "super-bright" children that got hired for way too much money in the late 90's and were given offices with dog beds and room for their skateboards while they ignored all the great original standards that made the internet possible, and built insanely over-engineered new ones in the hope of making a fortune.
I'm not sure what "this" refers to there, but, as per RFC 958, the "leap indicator" dates back at least to 1985, and, at least if I remember correctly, the "seconds since the Epoch" doesn't mean "seconds that have elapsed since the Epoch" dates back to the original 1988 POSIX.
As far as I knew, NTP just says "Hey, server, what time is it" and gets back "It's f*****ing 3 o'clock, exactly 1 hour since the last time you asked. Now go away and quit bothering me!" (only it says it really fast using a single big number) At which point the software makes sure my server knows it's 3 o'clock.
No, as others have noted, NTP does a lot more - including saying "hey, a {positive or negative} leap second is coming up!" (look for "leap indicator" in RFC 5905). What the NTP client does with that is up to the client; I guess Linux is trying to do what POSIX specifies, i.e. having "seconds since the Epoch" be something other than a count of the seconds that have elapsed since the Epoch.
When NTP knows that a leap second is to be added, it (on Linux at least) sets a flag in the kernel to say that at 23:59:59, please continue to 23:59:60 before going to 00:00:00.
Where does the Linux kernel know about "23:59:59" and "23:59:60" rather than "N seconds since the Epoch", other than when dealing with real time clock hardware that maintains year/month/day/hour/minute/second rather than a count of ticks?
It looks as if the stuff in kernel/time/ntp.c adjusts the "N seconds and M whatevers since the Epoch" counter so that it reflects "seconds since the Epoch" rather than the number of seconds that have elapsed since the Epoch.
Know your clocks. Check the clock_getclock() and other clock_* functions, and all clock types in POSIX.
You mean the clock types such as:
CLOCK_REALTIME, which "[represents] the amount of time (in seconds and nanoseconds) since the Epoch", where at least in the Rationale, they say it's "a higher resolution version of the clock that maintains POSIX.1 system time", so that it's "seconds and nanoseconds since the Epoch" rather than a count of the number of seconds-and-nanoseconds that have elapsed since the Epoch (i.e., it has the same problem as time()), and
CLOCK_MONOTONIC, which "represents the amount of time (in seconds and nanoseconds) since an unspecified point in the past", rendering it useless as a time-of-day clock (and they don't even appear to guarantee that the clock won't freeze during a positive leap second - they just say it won't move backwards - and they explicitly indicate that it can jump forward and thus could jump forward during a negative leap second)?
Frankly, I'm confused by the POSIX API design; it uses the system clock (CLOCK_REALTIME instead of CLOCK_MONOTONIC) for all waits which is just downright stupid. If I set a wait period of 100 seconds on Windows then change the system clock forward an hour, nothing happens. Do that on Linux and the wait will fire immediately. Why? That's useless, fragile and undesirable; you're almost always waiting for some other part of the system to do something, not just because you arbitrarily felt like waiting 10 wall clock seconds.
Yes. At, for example, 07:00 on June 30, 2012, "I want this to happen 24 hours from now" and "I want this to happen at 07:00 on July 1, 2012" should be treated as different requests. The former should happen after 86400 seconds have elapsed, regardless of whether any of those seconds were leap seconds or not. The latter should happen at 07:00 on July 1, 2012, even if that happens to mean it happens 86401 seconds later courtesy of a leap seconds inserted at the end of June 30, 2012.
The bug is related to kernel version, IIRC (introduced somewhere in the 2.6 series, resolved in 3.2 or somesuch). So it depends what kernel the distros ran.
More like resolved yesterday (today being July 2, 2012 where I'm typing this).
Slashdot Mirror
An EM field interacts with itself, too.
So there's a Feynman diagram that's all photons all the time? How does a neutral particle such as the photon interact with an EM field?
non-violent campaigns
Yes, MLK's campaign was non-violent, but the opposition (led by government)
Led by government? I didn't know that the Kennedy's, Johnson, Eisenhower, and so many other members of goverment orchestrated such a violent opposition to the civil rights movement.
The word "government" is not equivalent to the phrase "federal government". "Government" also includes state and local government, such as, for example, the government of the city of Birmingham, Alabama.
I am guessing you have never had to follow freedom of speech issues in germany. They are a lot more restrictive then the US and you don't have that 1st ammendment to fall back on.
You can't fall back on, instead, Article 5 of the Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany:
Is the problem the "These rights shall find their limits in the provisions of general laws..." part? (My guess is that the part about "the right to personal honor" is intended to say, for example, "this doesn't say you can't get your ass sued for libel if you publicly accuse somebody of fucking goats".)
More like, we will find that quantum physics and standard model don't actually differ, but only in observation.
They differ by virtue of belonging to different categories of things.
Quantum physics is a general framework that encapsulates a number of particular physical theories, including quantum electrodynamics (interaction between charged particles and photons), quantum electroweakdynamics or whatever it's called (throw in the W and Z bosons and neutrinos on top of quantum electrodynamics), quantum chromodynamics (interaction between quarks, bearing a charge called "color", and gluons, the force quanta for the field generated by that charge), and the standard model (quantum electroweakandchromodynamics). So the standard model is a quantum theory, and thus falls under the general heading of "quantum physics" (as do atomic physics, nuclear physics, most if not all of what's called "condensed matter physics", and so on).
Exactly how is that different from Jesus Christ saying "Make God your Father, look at him as a parent rather than as a vengeful, arbitrary judge, and see what happens"?
If Jesus had said "Gee, in some hypothetical world we invent, not the same as this world, what would happen if you made God your Father and looked at him as a parent rather than as a vengeful, arbitrary judge? And then let's see what would happen in a world where God was your Father and your Father were a vengeful, arbitrary judge? And then what if there's a triumvirate of Gods? And then....", that might be the same.
However, I was under the impression that Christians treated the existence of God as a statement, taken on faith, about our world, rather than as an arbitrary hypothesis they're imposing on an abstract world they're constructing for the lulz. Perhaps I'm mistaken there....
And the difference between irrational and rational religion is asking the question "What does the universe look like if God Doesn't Exist and everything is Random?" as well as "What does the universe look like if God is an irrational idiot who doesn't follow his own rules?"
What does the universe look like if God doesn't exist but, for some unknown reason, everything isn't completely random? (At least as we understand quantum mechanics now, there is a fair bit of randomness in the universe, but you can at least make statistical predictions.)
Science itself would not be able to exist in those other two universes- because there would be no rational laws at all- you can't have physics without laws, and you can't have laws without a lawgiver.
By "laws" do you mean "laws" as in the prescriptive laws of human society, where one or more people write laws requiring or banning certain behaviors, or do you mean "laws" as in the descriptive "laws" of science, where people observe some regularities in the real world, formulate those regularities, and test whether they work in situations other than the ones from which they're derived? The latter doesn't necessarily imply a "lawgiver" in the sense of prescriptive laws; it could stem from something no more "interesting" than the weak anthropic principle.
Riddle me this - photons and the supposed gravitons have infinite range due to zero (rest) mass. Strong and weak forces, heavy bosons, short range, right? I'll accept a counter-example that shows how I can manipulate the strong or weak forces from a distance larger than a nucleus or thereabouts. Not just fire some other non-boson particle into there (which then is that close or closer). So how does the Higgs work over all of space, guys?
It's not a force-carrying boson, as the photon, W bosons, Z boson, and various mesons are, so the "zero mass, goes as 1/r^2, non-zero mass, drops off faster than that" doesn't apply.
This is ridiculous as the SM being right to N decimals, and relativity also being right to N (N being however many we can measure).
Presumably by "relativity" you mean "general relativity", given that the standard model is a relativistic model.
Yet, the huge gaping, embarrassing, festering (yet almost always not spoken of) wound in all physics is that - they can't both be right, yet in their own domains, they are.
Actually, I have the impression that most physicists realize that gravity and the SM aren't some Neat Unified Theory, and some of them are trying to unify them.
My name is David Leon Emery. I've always wondered how things like the pyramids were build
Ramps? Ropes and sledges?
Yes. Any Axiomatic Definition is equivalent to what Religions are talking about when they say "faith". If you use the word "faith" when talking about the Axiomatic Definitions of religions, then it is equally correct to use the word "faith" when talking about the Axiomatic Definitions of Mathematics,
No. When pure mathematicians say "there exists an empty set", they mean "let us postulate that there exists an empty set, and see what follows from that assumption". And when they say "If a line segment intersects two straight lines forming two interior angles on the same side that sum to less than two right angles, then the two lines, if extended indefinitely, meet on that side on which the angles sum to less than two right angles.", these days they're not taking it "on faith" that this is True, they're just saying "OK, what does geometry look like if that's true?", and they also say "OK, what does geometry look like if that's not true?".
The effects of a handheld Higgs Generator are to reduce or increase or decrease the mass of subatomic particles.
Or, more accuratly, the effects of a handheld Higgs generator, were it possible to construct such a device, would be to....
Done precisely enough, you could change not only the neutron mass of a given element but *also* it's number of electrons-
Err, what? To change the number of electrons in an atom you also have to change the number of protons in the atom, and changing the masses of the quarks in the nucleus would, as I indicated, only change the number of protons in the atom if it changed the dynamics of the nucleus so that the "extra" protons would be kicked out - it's not as if making the components of the nucleons in a nucleus lighter ipso facto means the nucleus will have fewer protons just because protons have mass.
"Well, create something. Whether it's new arable land, or, for example, a bunch of stuff that's not land, arable or otherwise, is another matter."
That's an engineering problem, not a physics problem precisely.
Well, physics imposes constraints on engineering problems; it's not as if building a perpetual motion machine is a "simple matter of engineering", for example - and it's not as if "we found something that might be a Higgs boson" automatically leads to "and someday we'll be able to 'control' the Higgs field in some fashion"; we've known about gravity for centuries but nobody's built an anti-gravity machine yet.
So what the Higgs Boson is confirmed? Is it going to lead to a better life for millions of suffering humans?
In the short to medium term, probably not. In the long term, Reply Hazy, Ask Again Later.
Or is it going to make corporate and government psychopaths more powerful?
In the short to medium term, probably not. In the long term, Reply Hazy, Ask Again Later.
Well, given the fact that eventually, a handheld Higgs generator
So what does a "Higgs generator" do? (Note: "generate a Higgs field" is a non-answer; it's like saying a hammer "hammers things". What are the precise physical effects of a "Higgs generator"?)
could allow you to take a patch of rocky desert, disintegrate the rocks
How so?
and transmute some of the larger atomic numbers into carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen (which are pretty light elements by comparison and certainly by reducing the mass of the higher elements you can make the lower ones)
Erm, no, it's not as if the only difference between elements with lighter nuclei and elements with heavier nuclei is the mass; they differ in mass (primarily) because they have different numbers of nucleons, not because the masses of the nucleons are different. Changing the masses of the nucleons in, say, lead might have all sorts of interesting effects, but I rather doubt that "poof, it's now carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen" will be one of them. (You might get transmutation if, say, the change in the nucleon masses make the some or all lead isotope nuclei unstable, but you might not get transmutation into what you want, especially if that renders the desired products' nuclei unstable. I'll leave it to actual nuclear physicists to indicate what might happen here.)
(And, in any case, most of the mass of nucleons isn't due to the quark rest masses.)
and create *new arable land*
Well, create something. Whether it's new arable land, or, for example, a bunch of stuff that's not land, arable or otherwise, is another matter.
turning the same generator on your fellow human being to make him not only disappear, but all of the atoms in his body whiz off in different directions at the speed of light;
And perhaps the atoms in a bunch of other things in the vicinity, including your body. I'll leave it to actual particle physicists to indicate whether you could zero out the vacuum expectation value of the Higgs field in a limited region of space, and, if so, what would happen if you did.
I see, this is about providing an embedded platform for things that want to get on some local Internet drop. It isn't really about creating an Internet from things.
I.e., "the Internet of things" is the same damn Internet as "the Internet of people posting captioned cat pictures to icanhascheezburger.com" - it's not a special Internet for "things", it's just putting a lot more things on the plain old Internet, such as thermostats and smart cards and refrigerators and washing machines and strain gauges and....
Billed as the world's first Christian tablet
But does it run Linux?
("Steve Jobs"? Pudge, is that you?)
Compilers compile to "object code" or "machine code", not "assembler language". It may be that some simple compilers produce output in assembler language that has to be separately "assembled".
I.e., many UN*X C compilers, including but hardly limited to gcc, are simple? Or does hiding the "run the assembler" stage behind the compiler driver (cc, gcc, etc.) mean that the compiler "compiles to "machine code"" rather than to "compiling to "assembler language""?
From: Linus Torvalds Subject: Re: [RFC] Convert builin-mailinfo.c to use The Better String Library. Newsgroups: gmane.comp.version-control.git Date: 2007-09-06 17:50:28 GMT (2 years, 14 weeks, 16 hours and 36 minutes ago) ...
In other words, the only way to do good, efficient, and system-level and portable C++ ends up to limit yourself to all the things that are basically available in C. And limiting your project to C means that people don't screw that up, and also means that you get a lot of programmers that do actually understand low-level issues and don't screw things up with any idiotic "object model" crap.
And, for a view somewhat less harsh about C++, but still not a case of "C++ roolz, C droolz!", see The Old Man and the C, the abstract of which says
So, I guess what we can take away from this is: "We have to get a Linux distro for washing machines"
Electrolix?
You're complaining that my washing machine only allows me to execute the programs that its maker decided were "good" for me?
No, he's stating (without any indication that he thinks this is a Bad Thing, i.e. no "complaint") that the washing machine comes only with specialized software to control it, without any mechanism to support third-party software.
How's that different from the iToys?
Because the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch do have a mechanism to support third-party software. Unlike some other smartphones/tablets, the only such mechanism available without jailbreaking the machine uses the vendor's store, and the vendor controls what software is allowed in the store, but that's hugely different from most if not all washing machines - our washing machine doesn't have a Whirlpool App Store from which we can get third-party aps.
Maybe we'll discover a way of creating three-dimensional objects that have zero mass.
...and that are zooming away from you at the speed of light.
This seems like the kind of problem made by one of those "super-bright" children that got hired for way too much money in the late 90's and were given offices with dog beds and room for their skateboards while they ignored all the great original standards that made the internet possible, and built insanely over-engineered new ones in the hope of making a fortune.
I'm not sure what "this" refers to there, but, as per RFC 958, the "leap indicator" dates back at least to 1985, and, at least if I remember correctly, the "seconds since the Epoch" doesn't mean "seconds that have elapsed since the Epoch" dates back to the original 1988 POSIX.
In my case, crashed meant that a bunch of processes got stuck in an I/O wait ("ps" reported state "D")
Sounds like some other bug, then - the bug discussed in the LKML thread seems to produce CPU spins.
As far as I knew, NTP just says "Hey, server, what time is it" and gets back "It's f*****ing 3 o'clock, exactly 1 hour since the last time you asked. Now go away and quit bothering me!" (only it says it really fast using a single big number) At which point the software makes sure my server knows it's 3 o'clock.
No, as others have noted, NTP does a lot more - including saying "hey, a {positive or negative} leap second is coming up!" (look for "leap indicator" in RFC 5905). What the NTP client does with that is up to the client; I guess Linux is trying to do what POSIX specifies, i.e. having "seconds since the Epoch" be something other than a count of the seconds that have elapsed since the Epoch.
When NTP knows that a leap second is to be added, it (on Linux at least) sets a flag in the kernel to say that at 23:59:59, please continue to 23:59:60 before going to 00:00:00.
Where does the Linux kernel know about "23:59:59" and "23:59:60" rather than "N seconds since the Epoch", other than when dealing with real time clock hardware that maintains year/month/day/hour/minute/second rather than a count of ticks?
It looks as if the stuff in kernel/time/ntp.c adjusts the "N seconds and M whatevers since the Epoch" counter so that it reflects "seconds since the Epoch" rather than the number of seconds that have elapsed since the Epoch.
Know your clocks. Check the clock_getclock() and other clock_* functions, and all clock types in POSIX.
You mean the clock types such as:
Frankly, I'm confused by the POSIX API design; it uses the system clock (CLOCK_REALTIME instead of CLOCK_MONOTONIC) for all waits which is just downright stupid. If I set a wait period of 100 seconds on Windows then change the system clock forward an hour, nothing happens. Do that on Linux and the wait will fire immediately. Why? That's useless, fragile and undesirable; you're almost always waiting for some other part of the system to do something, not just because you arbitrarily felt like waiting 10 wall clock seconds.
Yes. At, for example, 07:00 on June 30, 2012, "I want this to happen 24 hours from now" and "I want this to happen at 07:00 on July 1, 2012" should be treated as different requests. The former should happen after 86400 seconds have elapsed, regardless of whether any of those seconds were leap seconds or not. The latter should happen at 07:00 on July 1, 2012, even if that happens to mean it happens 86401 seconds later courtesy of a leap seconds inserted at the end of June 30, 2012.
The bug is related to kernel version, IIRC (introduced somewhere in the 2.6 series, resolved in 3.2 or somesuch). So it depends what kernel the distros ran.
More like resolved yesterday (today being July 2, 2012 where I'm typing this).