That's Hawkings radiation, something which provides a mechanism for small black holes to "evaporate" over time. It's an exponential conversion of mass to energy, so you do *not* want to be near one at the final moments!
Hawkings radiation is interesting for a different reason. Some people had observed that black holes physics have a lot of similaries with thermodynamics. The mass of the black hole corresponds to entrophy, iirc. However there was some minor point where the behaviors differed, and Hawkings decided to explore the "impossible" case where black holes really did match thermodynamics. He eventually identified the quantum tunneling mechanism and all hell broke loose in the physics community. Hawkings radiation is now a classic example of a situation where important discovery was made by exploring something that first appears to be a mere coincidence.
As others have pointed out, the X-rays we're talking about here are due matter falling into the accretion disk.
It took thousands of years to fully exploit the power of the steam engine.
The steam engine is only a few hundred years old, and the development of the first practical steam engine (by James Watt) kicked off the Industrial Revolution. If you date computers to WW-II, the steam engine is only about three times older than computers.
If you date computers to Charles Babbage, which is not entirely unreasonable, then computers and steam engines are nearly the same age!
While it's true that a steam-driven novelty was known in classical times, it was not an engine capable of doing practical work. While a hollow sphere with directed vents will spin when heated by an external flame, it doesn't generate much usable power.
In contrast, a "steam engine" works by filling a sealed chamber with steam, then rapidly cooling it causing the steam to condense and the external air pressure to move a piston. This requires good metallurgy (so the chamber doesn't collapse) and tight manufacturing tolerances (so the piston will slide, but not let air leak around it), and a dozen other things to keep it from seizing up within hours. Calling the classical toy a "steam engine" is comparable to calling your walkman -- no, your cd-player -- a Cray supercomputer because both contain silicon-based circuitry.
This was *not* a troll, this was a deliberately provacative title to force people to stop and ask why they are so fast to rush to believe the content.
Think about it: why would an official announcement from a government agency use an IP address instead of a domain name? It's more secure, but only if the person knows the correct IP number. Unless you run nslookup it could have easily been posted from a cable modem.
Second, even if we accept that the web site is legitimate, why do we assume that the *content* is legitimate? The last I heard the announcement was expected a few days ago, and posting a bogus announcement a few days early would be a good way to cause confusion as the government attempts to invalidate the bogus report.
The obvious way to settle this is to call up the DoC and ask them if it's true -- but this report hit the net long after official Washington went home. More reason to be cautious.
Ironically, this is about the best proof possible for the need for relaxed export control. If the code hadn't been suppressed for so long, I would have known it was a valid DoC page because of the cryptographic signature on the content and the digital certificate of the server!
Why would a Department of Commerce web page resolve to a cable modem user?
Okay, it *really* resolves to DOCUSER.osec.doc.gov, so it probably is a legitimate message from the Office of the Secretary for the Department of Commerce. But why does the META TAG contain "FREE KEVIN!" references?
I really, really want this to be true. I do not like having to put access controls on my unoffical Debian Kerberos packages, but at this moment in time we have a single document saying exactly what we want to hear... and it wasn't put up on slashdot until LONG after the contacts listed would be asleep.
And never forget that the US Government has a very long history of "the large print giveth, the fine print taketh away" in crypto policy. It will probably take the lawyers some time to figure out exactly what the new policy really means.
So don't pop the champagne yet... but definitely put it on ice so you'll be ready!
Caffeine-free Mountain Dew as test marketed in the states; I picked up a six-pack in Colorado Springs many years ago (5?) and kept one can as proof that Coke doesn't have a monopoly on brain-dead ideas.
Drinking caffeine-free MD was a weird experience; I was reminded of the "Hi-C" fruit drink of my youth, since there was no caffeine kick. Of course, on the flip side that shows just how much of an impact the caffeine in the soda has!
Meanwhile, Canada should post warning signs on its borders, right below (or above!) the reminder that the speed limit in Canada is in kph, not mph. I've driven from Calgary to Vancouver a couple times, and each time I "crashed" a day or two after crossing the border. This Is Not Good since that's a mountainous trip. I had assumed it was because I was tricked by the longer days and not aware of how late it was (both trips were within a month of the summer solstice), but now I wonder if it was due to the sudden absense of caffeine in my system!
This was the case until a few years ago, but now the branded debit cards have changed their policy to match those of credit cards, at least in the US.
HOWEVER, if you use a debit card you should still maintain multiple accounts, since there is usually a significant delay before your funds are returned. The people who get bounced checks might be understanding when you contact them, but they are not legally required to be so. I've known more than a few landlords who would not hesitate to assess substantial penalties, even start the eviction process, if your check bounces for *any* reason.
I think you're both right, and are looking at the same thing from different angles.
Everyone has a "life" capacity, and that capacity varies from person to person. Call it intelligence, or charm, or something else for which there is no word yet - it's clear that some people can accomplish great things with seemingly less effort than their peers. It also seems to be something that is, at least partially, under our control through our choice of diet, exercise, etc. (e.g., if you're already physically active it is an energizer, but if you've fallen out of shape it is a huge drain/investment to get back into shape.)
Tom sounds like one of those lucky people who has a huge capacity, whether innate or developed. However, I also agree with the first poster that *most* people seem to fall into the "you can be pretty or you can be right" trap and there's an inverse relationship between technical skills and other skills. It's not absolute, but it's a direct enough correlation that I'm always suspicious of the tech expert wearing an expensive suit.
Hmm; this sounds like an "ask slashdot" topic. What do people which expands their capacity? E.g., I found a tremendous benefit in moving my lifecycle rides from the gym after work to my own house before taking my morning shower. It takes less time, but I'm energized during those unholy pre-noon hours.
long uptime = proof of few resource leaks etc.
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Linux Kernel 2.2.14
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I agree that you should never perform a necessary upgrade just to preserve an uptime value, but I strongly disagree with your claim that a long uptime is meaningless.
A long uptime on an active system is proof that the system doesn't have significant resource leaks. The same logic applies to systems that don't require frequent disk "defragmentation", etc.
Resource leaks, by themselves, aren't dangerous other than the fact that they force you to reboot the system to recover the lost resources... but they are excellent indicators of the overall quality of the software. In my experience, all program with significant resource leaks have *always* had an unusually large number of other bugs... and the times that someone has tried to eliminate the leaks just to shut up their noisy boss they ended up fixing a large number of unrelated bugs.
Note I did not say that they "found" those bugs - many of the bugs were due to wild pointers that simply disappeared once the programmer took care to properly manage their resources. IMHO, the second most powerful bug-finding strategy, after fixing all warnings issued by the compiler, is elimination of resource leaks.
Old kernels are still important, for several reasons:
1) they are well tested 2) the C library for that kernel is well tested 3) the programs for that library are well tested
the importance of this can't be overemphasized. There are a lot of situations where it's much more important to work with a known quantity than to get the ultimate bit of performance or flexibility.
It's worth noting that one of the most damning complaints against Microsoft as an "enterprise class" OS & application suite is the fact that they have repeatedly demonstrated a cavalier attitude towards making big changes in a way that forces users to upgrade everything to fix a single bug in the kernel (e.g., Win95->Win98) or application (e.g., Office file formats).
That's why Linux, and all real enterprise-ready OSes, allow fairly independent maintenance paths for all major versions of the kernels/libraries/applications. It's a bit more work for the developer, but it's criticial when you're talking about systems which *must* remain up. (E.g., if a hospital's systems go down due to an unexpected bug in an upgraded OS, patients may die. If an airline's systems go down due to an unexpected bug, they can lose millions of dollars in lost bookings and contractual penalties for delays.)
In my opinion, the funniest thing on the Darwin site is the date shown on the "pending" items. The web site correctly shows "01/01/00", but subsequent dates are set 1900 years earlier: "01/02/100" and "01/03/100".
The flip side is that my blizzard kit meant that all I had to do was get some extra water. I couldn't count on getting water by melting snow!
Seriously, I agreed with the Red Cross entirely on preparations - we didn't need more than prudent for usual local conditions, yet few people in California have earthquake kits, few people in metro Colorado have blizzard kits, few people on the eastern and gulf seaboard have hurricane kits, etc.
Re:Conspiracy theorists want no need to believe.
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There are actually several Y2K leap year issues. The first, as everyone knows by now, is the surprisingly persistent myth that 2000 is not a leap year. (Or "century year", according to the most pedantic.)
The second is that there are some pretty strange variants out there. I haven't followed the Y2K mailing list for years, but I recall people mentioning finding live code with both double leap years (February had 30 days) and a negative leap year (February had 27 days).
Finally, many calendar calculations actually involve a year starting on March 1st; this forces the oddball month of February to the end of the year. One of the most widely used one is Euler's equation for the day of the week given the month, day (2-digit) year and century. Unfortunately, several popular programming magazines published a simplified version which is valid from March 1, 1600 through February 28th, 2000, but it will be off by a day from March 1st, 2000 on. *This* bug will be a real pain because it will be hidden in speedsheets and database functions and it will require a software patch to fix -- easy if you're running the latest version of the software, but not so easy if you've frozen your software at an earlier release for some reason.
There's absolutely no excuse for that nonsense, and you are doing your students a gross disservice.
"kilo-" means "multiply by 1000" *only*. This isn't just a convention, IIRC it's the legal definition in essentially all nations under their respective "standards and measures" law. (This is how the US gets NIST and ANSI, Germany gets DIN, etc., and they all get together for ISO)
The use of "kilo-" to indicate multiplication by 1024 is a corruption of the term. It is currently tolerated in areas which are unambiguously computer related (e.g., before "byte" or "baud"), but it is legally risky and is most emphatically *not* correct before existing units such as "year". Or did you think that hard disks are sold in units of million-fold "mega-" and billion-fold "giga-" simply for the slightly inflated values?
To avoid the confusion caused by your former students attempting to refine legally defined terms there's been some discussion of introducing several new prefixes to indicate powers of two, but there's some resistance. IIRC, the abbreviations will be similar to the existing abbreviations but include a "b", e.g.,
I thought that this proposal was an overreaction, but after seeing several people insisting that "kilo-" always refers to 1024-fold multiplication I have changed my mind.
(rant off)
That said, I agree that interpreting "Y2K" as 2048 AD is good for a quick laugh, but *only* for a laugh. It has absolutely no place on a "computer architecture final" other than a forepage intended to break the tension.
Obviously the correct answer is local time. That's when all of the techie wannabes will be sitting at home watching their home system (Windows, natch) tick over to 00:00 01-01-;0 panting to see the first Y2K bug. (Of course, since they're wannabes they won't know that only problem they're likely to see at exactly midnight is in the RTC - both Windows and Linux only use the RTC to initialize a software clock during boot-up.)
Few people will notice that the power, TV, etc., fails to go off at midnight UTC. Even if there is a big "oomph," recent newspaper and TV reports make me doubt that the reporters will understand the situation well enough to explain it everyone else. The recent snafu with British credit card processing is a prime example. (CNN, I think, described the problem as being due to the clock being set ahead to 2000 for no discernable reason.)
IIRC, December 25th was the start of the Roman Saturnalia, a holiday that was deliberately set a few days after the solstice and notorious for its "debauchery" since it was a brief period when certain laws were not enforced. So, it acted as a pressure release valve by allowing the controlled violation of certain morality laws.
In Christianity, it goes without saying that God never blinks and a Saturnalia isn't permitted. Like all zero-tolerance laws, you can make a strong argument that it's been a disaster. (E.g., is it better to suffer adultery one week per year, but otherwise have a solid marriage, or have a sham marriage because the straying spouse figures that Hell won't get any hotter if the marriage vows are broken 1000 times instead of just once?) But our "secular" society is still so chi-centric that most people look at you like you have truly lost your mind if you suggest that there's historical precedence for a one-week "get drunk, get stoned, get laid, gamble, lie and cheat!" break from the normal rules of society.
Finally, your "Jesus was born on the sixth of January" sounds like a very odd distortion of the Orthodox Church's calendar. The Catholic and Protestant churches follow the Gregorian calendar, but the Orthodox and Coptic(?) churches still follow the Julian calendar. The difference is almost 2 weeks, so 25 December (Julian) = 6 January (Gregorian). That's also why the Russian "October Revolution" occured in early November - Czarist Russia was Orthodox, but atheist communists ultimately switched to the Gregorian calendar.
Much of the "double standard" you refer to are due to the profound differences in the way each group operates.
All proprietary software vendors operate with the implicit (or not so implicit) assumption that They Know Best. They may give lip service to serving the customer's needs, but when push comes to shove they (or in a few cases, a client with a very thick wallet) decide what is done, how it is done, how long it is supported, etc. Because the customer can't look after his own interests, the company is required to assume some measure of responsibility for doing it on the customer's behalf.
In contrast, all open source projects operate on the assumption that the Customer Knows Best. We hope that our code solves the problem as-is, but we embrace customers who are willing and able to modify the source to fit their needs exactly. In general, all we ask in return is feedback (in the form of modified source code) so that we can drift the main source tree towards the customer's requirements, if there's general consensus that the changes are improvements. Not every customer is competent to judge whether the open source project poses an acceptable risk, of course, but they *can* take a hint from the fact that other customers can and do provide updates to the source code.
Besides the staggering difference between these two ideals (and what it appears to do to the psychological profile of each camp), there's a fundamental difference in terms of the law. A proprietary software vendor can, and is expected to, maintain exclusive access to the software. This incurs a significant legal obligation since they, alone, can modify it. In contrast, an open software vendor not only does not maintain exclusive access to the software, he can't force the people downstream to use the latest version of the software or to retain changes made for the purpose of minimizing risk. Meta-legally, you can only be held responsible for acts you control. (That's why many people are *deeply* troubled by the laws that criminally punish parents for the acts of their minor children.)
Finally, it is worth noting that the courts can (and IIRC occasionally *do*) negate the "disclaimer of liability" statements found in shrinkwrap and open licenses.
It's much *scarier* if it was quickly written by a MS drone instead of a marketing spinmeister because it would then reflect the unspoken biases of the company.
E.g., if you think that Linux and Windows partitions are "incompatible" to the extent that they can't coexist (and not thinking through the consequences of the fact that Linux can mount Windows partitions, but not vice versa), then there's no need for you to waste your time considering the impact of your actions on others. Why not, if you honestly believe that a disk can contain one, and only one, operating system?
From there, why not write programs that overwrite the MBR on reboot, or as part of a virus checker, without regard to the possibility that you'll overwrite a foreign MBR since other OSes can't be present! On a similar note, since there can only be one OS per disk it's easy to overlook the possibility that you might not want all disk partitions mounted, you might want to have a dual-boot Win9x/WinNT system, etc.
If marketing wrote this paper, but the techies understood how dual-booting works, I wouldn't be too worried. It would mess up some PHBs, but few PHBs are installing dual-boot systems. On the other hand, if the techies don't understand how dual-booting works they might always tell callers with dual-boot systems that YY2K requires that the dual-boot partitions be removed... and that could harm us.
Why should old programs care that they're running on an NTFS partition instead of a FAT partition? Isn't that what an operating system is for - to provide an abstraction layer so that the application can ignore piddling details about how the data is actually stored on disk, where the disk is actually located (local vs. network), etc.?
Oh yeah, I forgot that Redmond (alone) defines internet browsers a critical function of the operating system, but disk transparency is apparently something only long-haired hippies who refuse to buy into the must-always-use-lastest-software-regardless-of-cos t mentality care about.
Upon reflection, I realize that I probably took too many shortcuts with the graduate-level mechanics.
If you work through the Hamiltonian, tidal forces cause orbiting bodies to become tidally locked. Luna is tidally locked 1:1 with the earth, but long before the earth would be tidally locked with the moon (with month-long days) luna will cease orbiting the earth - it will be too far away. If you want the hairy details it's a fairly straightforward Hamiltonian calculation... if you consider PDEs "straightforward."
On our timescale and orbital altitudes, we're mostly concerned with non-conservative losses (e.g., friction with the upper atmosphere) that eventually causes orbiting bodies to crash.
As to my comments about PE and KE, forget them. Orbital mechanics are notoriously counterintuitive, so it's extremely difficult to forget the errors in your first textbook.:-( Unfortunately it's easier to remember HS textbooks than PDEs off the top of your head. (Yum. Humble pie.)
The earth-luna system is *not* a tidy little two-body problem where every player always follows the same orbit. It's not even a pure three-body problem since any real solution must account for the earth's equatorial and tidal bulges (although they are often time-averaged into a single bulge).
On earth, we get our angle of inclination bobbing around between 22-24 degrees (approx) *and* slowly drifting around the entire sky over tens of thousands of years. We also get slow changes of the earth's orbit due to the other planets; many people believe these changes are directly related to the ice ages.
On luna, it gets an orbit which oscillates between nearly circular and slightly elliptical, all while slowly moving away from the earth as energy is lost raising the earth's tidal bulges. (Remember: less total energy = a *higher* orbit due to the tradeoff of kinetic energy for gravitational potential energy. It's only hard for us because we're coming up from the planetary surface and have no KE.)
All of this means that lunar perigees are not created equal and the perigee tonight is *not* the same as the perigee last month or a perigee a month from now.
More generally, the perigee is solely a function of the earth-luna system and a full moon is solely a function of the sun-earth system -- there is absolutely no connection between perigees and full moons. This means that perigees and full moons occuring at the same time are a statistical fluke - you're just as likely to have a new moon and perigee at the same time.
Finally, the local newspaper reported that the full moon will be unusually high in the sky (in the NH) because of the solstice, but I'm not sure about their logic. If true, this full moon could very well light the ground better than average for the same reason our seasons are tied to the position of the sun in the sky instead of our orbital position.
P.S., as other posters have commented the actual difference in the brightness of the moon is modest enough that few people will legitimately notice a difference. I don't know what the urban legend claims, so I can't answer it's claims, but the astronomy is solid and usually covered in any introductory astronomy class. If you've been "debunking" it, expect to eat plenty of pie, humble pie, over the next few weeks.
The law the first poster cited limit the enforceability of certain types of contracts *only*. IIRC, these laws were prompted, in large part, by banks sending unsolicited *credit cards* back when credit cards were rare and many people didn't realize the consequences of using that little piece of plastic. (At least when debit cards were introduced people knew that they had to pay the bill *sometime*, although many people didn't realize just how quickly that bill came due.)
To say there were a lot of problems is putting it mildly. It got so bad that the government eventually had to go in and wipe the slate clean by declaring all such contracts unenforceable. A secondary effect was wiping out responsibility for unsolicited merchandise, but few people would equate a $5 tie and a $1000 VISA bill.
As to your points, the law (and our society) recognizes that mistakes happen *and it's incumbent upon each of us to minimize the damages*. This obligation isn't unlimited, but it is proportional to both the value and your ability to undo the damage. You might have a hard time finding a law that states this explicitly, but you'll have a much harder time finding a prosecutor, judge and jury that have even a sliver of compassion for your argument.
IANAL, but read the law you cite. That law does *not* say you can keep everything you receive in the mail (or via some other delivery service); it simply says that implied contracts where you "indicate consent" by accepting your mail are unenforceable and you are under no obligation to either pay the invoice or return the merchandise at your own expense. It's the same logic used to overturn the other notorious unilateral implied contracts - "shrinkwrap" software license.
You *can* be required to return the merchandise at the shipper's expense.
You *can* be required to return misdelivered merchandise to the delivery agent, so they can complete delivery.
But most importantly, this law doesn't apply because it wasn't invoiced merchandise and this individual was not the intended recepient.
As for the presence of the cops, that's probably just standard procedure when valuable deliveries go astray. It's wildly inappropriate here, but think about what's usually involved in megadollar value shipments. It's not unreasonable for the cops to wonder if there's a connection between the carrier, the recepient, and the missing diamonds.
That is utter bullshit. After ten years all references to this event must be wiped from her credit report. If some credit bureau refuses to remove the negative information, they could find themselves at the end of a very nasty lawsuit for violation of the FCRA and possibly even defamation.
That means that, at worst, her slate will be wiped clean in 10 years.
However, even in the interrim this is hardly a "kiss of death." Her problems might have been due to transient financial problems which no longer apply. (The classic examples are major illness, divorce, job loss.) She might have been a struggling college student and now settled into a new career and fairly affluent. She might have one the lottery, or come into an inheritence. Most creditors will take all of this into consideration.
Finally, while you have been busy on your soapbox some companies have made a bundle on "marginal credit" for people such as this. She would have no problem getting a secured credit card, for instance, since refusal to pay would simply result in her account being closed and a check for the remainder of her deposit being sent. House and car loans are also possible, albeit at a higher interest rate (by several points, typically), plus extra points and a larger down payment.
... there was an outcry of moral superiority from west of the Atlantic....
Complete that thought. One of the most notable such outcries, a signed ad in major newspapers, was subsequently denounced by some of the signers. They claimed that they were deliberately misled about the situation and did *not* agree with the CoS after learning the full story. (Unfortunately, since I saw this on a news broadcast I can't recall the name of the people interviewed.)
Many of the other signers were obviously no different than many of the KKK members of the 1920's-era USA. (Some states had *huge* KKK membership roles - including many minorities - because a few prominent business owners announced that they would only do business with other businesses owned by members of the KKK. As long as they keep their gloves on, and hoods off, they had a lot of "support," but it all evaporated the instant someone called them on their true colors. No pun intended) If you're a movie producer and the agents for Tom Cruise and John Travolta call you and, ahem, suggest that you add your name to what seems to be an innoculous ad, you do so. The alternative is to find the stars are oddly unavailable for your next project.
Many Americans *do* have mixed feelings about the German actions vis-a-vis the CoS, but we also rank most of the published outcry as being nothing more than a feeble attempt at Hollywood-ized politics. Besides, we need our guns in case the CoS actually does somehow get control of a state.:-)
No, but MPs might not get free service lest it be viewed as a bribe.
And even if every MP and mid-level bureaucrat got free service, you could pick the victims out of the phone book. How many people would keep DSL service, no matter how convenient, if it exposed them to large phone bills because the rate structure is totally insane? IIRC, Robert Murdock is Australian so I'm sure there's at least one national media outlet which could take a semi-credible threat of this type of action and run with it.
Slashdot Mirror
That's Hawkings radiation, something which provides a mechanism for small black holes to "evaporate" over time. It's an exponential conversion of mass to energy, so you do *not* want to be near one at the final moments!
Hawkings radiation is interesting for a different reason. Some people had observed that black holes physics have a lot of similaries with thermodynamics. The mass of the black hole corresponds to entrophy, iirc. However there was some minor point where the behaviors differed, and Hawkings decided to explore the "impossible" case where black holes really did match thermodynamics. He eventually identified the quantum tunneling mechanism and all hell broke loose in the physics community. Hawkings radiation is now a classic example of a situation where important discovery was made by exploring something that first appears to be a mere coincidence.
As others have pointed out, the X-rays we're talking about here are due matter falling into the accretion disk.
It took thousands of years to fully exploit the power of the steam engine.
The steam engine is only a few hundred years old, and the development of the first practical steam engine (by James Watt) kicked off the Industrial Revolution. If you date computers to WW-II, the steam engine is only about three times older than computers.
If you date computers to Charles Babbage, which is not entirely unreasonable, then computers and steam engines are nearly the same age!
While it's true that a steam-driven novelty was known in classical times, it was not an engine capable of doing practical work. While a hollow sphere with directed vents will spin when heated by an external flame, it doesn't generate much usable power.
In contrast, a "steam engine" works by filling a sealed chamber with steam, then rapidly cooling it causing the steam to condense and the external air pressure to move a piston. This requires good metallurgy (so the chamber doesn't collapse) and tight manufacturing tolerances (so the piston will slide, but not let air leak around it), and a dozen other things to keep it from seizing up within hours. Calling the classical toy a "steam engine" is comparable to calling your walkman -- no, your cd-player -- a Cray supercomputer because both contain silicon-based circuitry.
This was *not* a troll, this was a deliberately provacative title to force people to stop and ask why they are so fast to rush to believe the content.
Think about it: why would an official announcement from a government agency use an IP address instead of a domain name? It's more secure, but only if the person knows the correct IP number. Unless you run nslookup it could have easily been posted from a cable modem.
Second, even if we accept that the web site is legitimate, why do we assume that the *content* is legitimate? The last I heard the announcement was expected a few days ago, and posting a bogus announcement a few days early would be a good way to cause confusion as the government attempts to invalidate the bogus report.
The obvious way to settle this is to call up the DoC and ask them if it's true -- but this report hit the net long after official Washington went home. More reason to be cautious.
Ironically, this is about the best proof possible for the need for relaxed export control. If the code hadn't been suppressed for so long, I would have known it was a valid DoC page because of the cryptographic signature on the content and the digital certificate of the server!
Why would a Department of Commerce web page resolve to a cable modem user?
Okay, it *really* resolves to DOCUSER.osec.doc.gov, so it probably is a legitimate message from the Office of the Secretary for the Department of Commerce. But why does the META TAG contain "FREE KEVIN!" references?
I really, really want this to be true. I do not like having to put access controls on my unoffical Debian Kerberos packages, but at this moment in time we have a single document saying exactly what we want to hear... and it wasn't put up on slashdot until LONG after the contacts listed would be asleep.
And never forget that the US Government has a very long history of "the large print giveth, the fine print taketh away" in crypto policy. It will probably take the lawyers some time to figure out exactly what the new policy really means.
So don't pop the champagne yet... but definitely put it on ice so you'll be ready!
Caffeine-free Mountain Dew as test marketed in the states; I picked up a six-pack in Colorado Springs many years ago (5?) and kept one can as proof that Coke doesn't have a monopoly on brain-dead ideas.
Drinking caffeine-free MD was a weird experience; I was reminded of the "Hi-C" fruit drink of my youth, since there was no caffeine kick. Of course, on the flip side that shows just how much of an impact the caffeine in the soda has!
Meanwhile, Canada should post warning signs on its borders, right below (or above!) the reminder that the speed limit in Canada is in kph, not mph. I've driven from Calgary to Vancouver a couple times, and each time I "crashed" a day or two after crossing the border. This Is Not Good since that's a mountainous trip. I had assumed it was because I was tricked by the longer days and not aware of how late it was (both trips were within a month of the summer solstice), but now I wonder if it was due to the sudden absense of caffeine in my system!
This was the case until a few years ago, but now the branded debit cards have changed their policy to match those of credit cards, at least in the US.
HOWEVER, if you use a debit card you should still maintain multiple accounts, since there is usually a significant delay before your funds are returned. The people who get bounced checks might be understanding when you contact them, but they are not legally required to be so. I've known more than a few landlords who would not hesitate to assess substantial penalties, even start the eviction process, if your check bounces for *any* reason.
I think you're both right, and are looking at the same thing from different angles.
Everyone has a "life" capacity, and that capacity varies from person to person. Call it intelligence, or charm, or something else for which there is no word yet - it's clear that some people can accomplish great things with seemingly less effort than their peers. It also seems to be something that is, at least partially, under our control through our choice of diet, exercise, etc. (e.g., if you're already physically active it is an energizer, but if you've fallen out of shape it is a huge drain/investment to get back into shape.)
Tom sounds like one of those lucky people who has a huge capacity, whether innate or developed. However, I also agree with the first poster that *most* people seem to fall into the "you can be pretty or you can be right" trap and there's an inverse relationship between technical skills and other skills. It's not absolute, but it's a direct enough correlation that I'm always suspicious of the tech expert wearing an expensive suit.
Hmm; this sounds like an "ask slashdot" topic. What do people which expands their capacity? E.g., I found a tremendous benefit in moving my lifecycle rides from the gym after work to my own house before taking my morning shower. It takes less time, but I'm energized during those unholy pre-noon hours.
I agree that you should never perform a necessary upgrade just to preserve an uptime value, but I strongly disagree with your claim that a long uptime is meaningless.
A long uptime on an active system is proof that the system doesn't have significant resource leaks. The same logic applies to systems that don't require frequent disk "defragmentation", etc.
Resource leaks, by themselves, aren't dangerous other than the fact that they force you to reboot the system to recover the lost resources... but they are excellent indicators of the overall quality of the software. In my experience, all program with significant resource leaks have *always* had an unusually large number of other bugs... and the times that someone has tried to eliminate the leaks just to shut up their noisy boss they ended up fixing a large number of unrelated bugs.
Note I did not say that they "found" those bugs - many of the bugs were due to wild pointers that simply disappeared once the programmer took care to properly manage their resources. IMHO, the second most powerful bug-finding strategy, after fixing all warnings issued by the compiler, is elimination of resource leaks.
Old kernels are still important, for several reasons:
1) they are well tested
2) the C library for that kernel is well tested
3) the programs for that library are well tested
the importance of this can't be overemphasized. There are a lot of situations where it's much more important to work with a known quantity than to get the ultimate bit of performance or flexibility.
It's worth noting that one of the most damning complaints against Microsoft as an "enterprise class" OS & application suite is the fact that they have repeatedly demonstrated a cavalier attitude towards making big changes in a way that forces users to upgrade everything to fix a single bug in the kernel (e.g., Win95->Win98) or application (e.g., Office file formats).
That's why Linux, and all real enterprise-ready OSes, allow fairly independent maintenance paths for all major versions of the kernels/libraries/applications. It's a bit more work for the developer, but it's criticial when you're talking about systems which *must* remain up. (E.g., if a hospital's systems go down due to an unexpected bug in an upgraded OS, patients may die. If an airline's systems go down due to an unexpected bug, they can lose millions of dollars in lost bookings and contractual penalties for delays.)
In my opinion, the funniest thing on the Darwin site is the date shown on the "pending" items. The web site correctly shows "01/01/00", but subsequent dates are set 1900 years earlier: "01/02/100" and "01/03/100".
ROTFL
The flip side is that my blizzard kit meant that all I had to do was get some extra water. I couldn't count on getting water by melting snow!
Seriously, I agreed with the Red Cross entirely on preparations - we didn't need more than prudent for usual local conditions, yet few people in California have earthquake kits, few people in metro Colorado have blizzard kits, few people on the eastern and gulf seaboard have hurricane kits, etc.
There are actually several Y2K leap year issues. The first, as everyone knows by now, is the surprisingly persistent myth that 2000 is not a leap year. (Or "century year", according to the most pedantic.)
The second is that there are some pretty strange variants out there. I haven't followed the Y2K mailing list for years, but I recall people mentioning finding live code with both double leap years (February had 30 days) and a negative leap year (February had 27 days).
Finally, many calendar calculations actually involve a year starting on March 1st; this forces the oddball month of February to the end of the year. One of the most widely used one is Euler's equation for the day of the week given the month, day (2-digit) year and century. Unfortunately, several popular programming magazines published a simplified version which is valid from March 1, 1600 through February 28th, 2000, but it will be off by a day from March 1st, 2000 on. *This* bug will be a real pain because it will be hidden in speedsheets and database functions and it will require a software patch to fix -- easy if you're running the latest version of the software, but not so easy if you've frozen your software at an earlier release for some reason.
There's absolutely no excuse for that nonsense, and you are doing your students a gross disservice.
"kilo-" means "multiply by 1000" *only*. This isn't just a convention, IIRC it's the legal definition in essentially all nations under their respective "standards and measures" law. (This is how the US gets NIST and ANSI, Germany gets DIN, etc., and they all get together for ISO)
The use of "kilo-" to indicate multiplication by 1024 is a corruption of the term. It is currently tolerated in areas which are unambiguously computer related (e.g., before "byte" or "baud"), but it is legally risky and is most emphatically *not* correct before existing units such as "year". Or did you think that hard disks are sold in units of million-fold "mega-" and billion-fold "giga-" simply for the slightly inflated values?
To avoid the confusion caused by your former students attempting to refine legally defined terms there's been some discussion of introducing several new prefixes to indicate powers of two, but there's some resistance. IIRC, the abbreviations will be similar to the existing abbreviations but include a "b", e.g.,
kbb - kibobits - 1024 bits
kbB - kibobytes
Mbb - (meba?)bits - 2^20 bits
MbB
GbB - (giba?)
TbB - (teba?)
and so forth.
I thought that this proposal was an overreaction, but after seeing several people insisting that "kilo-" always refers to 1024-fold multiplication I have changed my mind.
(rant off)
That said, I agree that interpreting "Y2K" as 2048 AD is good for a quick laugh, but *only* for a laugh. It has absolutely no place on a "computer architecture final" other than a forepage intended to break the tension.
Obviously the correct answer is local time. That's when all of the techie wannabes will be sitting at home watching their home system (Windows, natch) tick over to 00:00 01-01-;0 panting to see the first Y2K bug. (Of course, since they're wannabes they won't know that only problem they're likely to see at exactly midnight is in the RTC - both Windows and Linux only use the RTC to initialize a software clock during boot-up.)
Few people will notice that the power, TV, etc., fails to go off at midnight UTC. Even if there is a big "oomph," recent newspaper and TV reports make me doubt that the reporters will understand the situation well enough to explain it everyone else. The recent snafu with British credit card processing is a prime example. (CNN, I think, described the problem as being due to the clock being set ahead to 2000 for no discernable reason.)
IIRC, December 25th was the start of the Roman Saturnalia, a holiday that was deliberately set a few days after the solstice and notorious for its "debauchery" since it was a brief period when certain laws were not enforced. So, it acted as a pressure release valve by allowing the controlled violation of certain morality laws.
In Christianity, it goes without saying that God never blinks and a Saturnalia isn't permitted. Like all zero-tolerance laws, you can make a strong argument that it's been a disaster. (E.g., is it better to suffer adultery one week per year, but otherwise have a solid marriage, or have a sham marriage because the straying spouse figures that Hell won't get any hotter if the marriage vows are broken 1000 times instead of just once?) But our "secular" society is still so chi-centric that most people look at you like you have truly lost your mind if you suggest that there's historical precedence for a one-week "get drunk, get stoned, get laid, gamble, lie and cheat!" break from the normal rules of society.
Finally, your "Jesus was born on the sixth of January" sounds like a very odd distortion of the Orthodox Church's calendar. The Catholic and Protestant churches follow the Gregorian calendar, but the Orthodox and Coptic(?) churches still follow the Julian calendar. The difference is almost 2 weeks, so 25 December (Julian) = 6 January (Gregorian). That's also why the Russian "October Revolution" occured in early November - Czarist Russia was Orthodox, but atheist communists ultimately switched to the Gregorian calendar.
Much of the "double standard" you refer to are due to the profound differences in the way each group operates.
All proprietary software vendors operate with the implicit (or not so implicit) assumption that They Know Best. They may give lip service to serving the customer's needs, but when push comes to shove they (or in a few cases, a client with a very thick wallet) decide what is done, how it is done, how long it is supported, etc. Because the customer can't look after his own interests, the company is required to assume some measure of responsibility for doing it on the customer's behalf.
In contrast, all open source projects operate on the assumption that the Customer Knows Best. We hope that our code solves the problem as-is, but we embrace customers who are willing and able to modify the source to fit their needs exactly. In general, all we ask in return is feedback (in the form of modified source code) so that we can drift the main source tree towards the customer's requirements, if there's general consensus that the changes are improvements. Not every customer is competent to judge whether the open source project poses an acceptable risk, of course, but they *can* take a hint from the fact that other customers can and do provide updates to the source code.
Besides the staggering difference between these two ideals (and what it appears to do to the psychological profile of each camp), there's a fundamental difference in terms of the law. A proprietary software vendor can, and is expected to, maintain exclusive access to the software. This incurs a significant legal obligation since they, alone, can modify it. In contrast, an open software vendor not only does not maintain exclusive access to the software, he can't force the people downstream to use the latest version of the software or to retain changes made for the purpose of minimizing risk. Meta-legally, you can only be held responsible for acts you control. (That's why many people are *deeply* troubled by the laws that criminally punish parents for the acts of their minor children.)
Finally, it is worth noting that the courts can (and IIRC occasionally *do*) negate the "disclaimer of liability" statements found in shrinkwrap and open licenses.
It's much *scarier* if it was quickly written by a MS drone instead of a marketing spinmeister because it would then reflect the unspoken biases of the company.
E.g., if you think that Linux and Windows partitions are "incompatible" to the extent that they can't coexist (and not thinking through the consequences of the fact that Linux can mount Windows partitions, but not vice versa), then there's no need for you to waste your time considering the impact of your actions on others. Why not, if you honestly believe that a disk can contain one, and only one, operating system?
From there, why not write programs that overwrite the MBR on reboot, or as part of a virus checker, without regard to the possibility that you'll overwrite a foreign MBR since other OSes can't be present! On a similar note, since there can only be one OS per disk it's easy to overlook the possibility that you might not want all disk partitions mounted, you might want to have a dual-boot Win9x/WinNT system, etc.
If marketing wrote this paper, but the techies understood how dual-booting works, I wouldn't be too worried. It would mess up some PHBs, but few PHBs are installing dual-boot systems. On the other hand, if the techies don't understand how dual-booting works they might always tell callers with dual-boot systems that YY2K requires that the dual-boot partitions be removed... and that could harm us.
Why should old programs care that they're running on an NTFS partition instead of a FAT partition? Isn't that what an operating system is for - to provide an abstraction layer so that the application can ignore piddling details about how the data is actually stored on disk, where the disk is actually located (local vs. network), etc.?
s t mentality care about.
Oh yeah, I forgot that Redmond (alone) defines internet browsers a critical function of the operating system, but disk transparency is apparently something only long-haired hippies who refuse to buy into the must-always-use-lastest-software-regardless-of-co
Upon reflection, I realize that I probably took too many shortcuts with the graduate-level mechanics.
:-( Unfortunately it's easier to remember HS textbooks than PDEs off the top of your head. (Yum. Humble pie.)
If you work through the Hamiltonian, tidal forces cause orbiting bodies to become tidally locked. Luna is tidally locked 1:1 with the earth, but long before the earth would be tidally locked with the moon (with month-long days) luna will cease orbiting the earth - it will be too far away. If you want the hairy details it's a fairly straightforward Hamiltonian calculation... if you consider PDEs "straightforward."
On our timescale and orbital altitudes, we're mostly concerned with non-conservative losses (e.g., friction with the upper atmosphere) that eventually causes orbiting bodies to crash.
As to my comments about PE and KE, forget them. Orbital mechanics are notoriously counterintuitive, so it's extremely difficult to forget the errors in your first textbook.
The earth-luna system is *not* a tidy little two-body problem where every player always follows the same orbit. It's not even a pure three-body problem since any real solution must account for the earth's equatorial and tidal bulges (although they are often time-averaged into a single bulge).
On earth, we get our angle of inclination bobbing around between 22-24 degrees (approx) *and* slowly drifting around the entire sky over tens of thousands of years. We also get slow changes of the earth's orbit due to the other planets; many people believe these changes are directly related to the ice ages.
On luna, it gets an orbit which oscillates between nearly circular and slightly elliptical, all while slowly moving away from the earth as energy is lost raising the earth's tidal bulges. (Remember: less total energy = a *higher* orbit due to the tradeoff of kinetic energy for gravitational potential energy. It's only hard for us because we're coming up from the planetary surface and have no KE.)
All of this means that lunar perigees are not created equal and the perigee tonight is *not* the same as the perigee last month or a perigee a month from now.
More generally, the perigee is solely a function of the earth-luna system and a full moon is solely a function of the sun-earth system -- there is absolutely no connection between perigees and full moons. This means that perigees and full moons occuring at the same time are a statistical fluke - you're just as likely to have a new moon and perigee at the same time.
Finally, the local newspaper reported that the full moon will be unusually high in the sky (in the NH) because of the solstice, but I'm not sure about their logic. If true, this full moon could very well light the ground better than average for the same reason our seasons are tied to the position of the sun in the sky instead of our orbital position.
P.S., as other posters have commented the actual difference in the brightness of the moon is modest enough that few people will legitimately notice a difference. I don't know what the urban legend claims, so I can't answer it's claims, but the astronomy is solid and usually covered in any introductory astronomy class. If you've been "debunking" it, expect to eat plenty of pie, humble pie, over the next few weeks.
*sigh*
The law the first poster cited limit the enforceability of certain types of contracts *only*. IIRC, these laws were prompted, in large part, by banks sending unsolicited *credit cards* back when credit cards were rare and many people didn't realize the consequences of using that little piece of plastic. (At least when debit cards were introduced people knew that they had to pay the bill *sometime*, although many people didn't realize just how quickly that bill came due.)
To say there were a lot of problems is putting it mildly. It got so bad that the government eventually had to go in and wipe the slate clean by declaring all such contracts unenforceable. A secondary effect was wiping out responsibility for unsolicited merchandise, but few people would equate a $5 tie and a $1000 VISA bill.
As to your points, the law (and our society) recognizes that mistakes happen *and it's incumbent upon each of us to minimize the damages*. This obligation isn't unlimited, but it is proportional to both the value and your ability to undo the damage. You might have a hard time finding a law that states this explicitly, but you'll have a much harder time finding a prosecutor, judge and jury that have even a sliver of compassion for your argument.
IANAL, but read the law you cite. That law does *not* say you can keep everything you receive in the mail (or via some other delivery service); it simply says that implied contracts where you "indicate consent" by accepting your mail are unenforceable and you are under no obligation to either pay the invoice or return the merchandise at your own expense. It's the same logic used to overturn the other notorious unilateral implied contracts - "shrinkwrap" software license.
You *can* be required to return the merchandise at the shipper's expense.
You *can* be required to return misdelivered merchandise to the delivery agent, so they can complete delivery.
But most importantly, this law doesn't apply because it wasn't invoiced merchandise and this individual was not the intended recepient.
As for the presence of the cops, that's probably just standard procedure when valuable deliveries go astray. It's wildly inappropriate here, but think about what's usually involved in megadollar value shipments. It's not unreasonable for the cops to wonder if there's a connection between the carrier, the recepient, and the missing diamonds.
she'll never be able to...
(Assuming everyone is in the US...)
That is utter bullshit. After ten years all references to this event must be wiped from her credit report. If some credit bureau refuses to remove the negative information, they could find themselves at the end of a very nasty lawsuit for violation of the FCRA and possibly even defamation.
That means that, at worst, her slate will be wiped clean in 10 years.
However, even in the interrim this is hardly a "kiss of death." Her problems might have been due to transient financial problems which no longer apply. (The classic examples are major illness, divorce, job loss.) She might have been a struggling college student and now settled into a new career and fairly affluent. She might have one the lottery, or come into an inheritence. Most creditors will take all of this into consideration.
Finally, while you have been busy on your soapbox some companies have made a bundle on "marginal credit" for people such as this. She would have no problem getting a secured credit card, for instance, since refusal to pay would simply result in her account being closed and a check for the remainder of her deposit being sent. House and car loans are also possible, albeit at a higher interest rate (by several points, typically), plus extra points and a larger down payment.
... there was an outcry of moral superiority from west of the Atlantic....
:-)
Complete that thought. One of the most notable such outcries, a signed ad in major newspapers, was subsequently denounced by some of the signers. They claimed that they were deliberately misled about the situation and did *not* agree with the CoS after learning the full story. (Unfortunately, since I saw this on a news broadcast I can't recall the name of the people interviewed.)
Many of the other signers were obviously no different than many of the KKK members of the 1920's-era USA. (Some states had *huge* KKK membership roles - including many minorities - because a few prominent business owners announced that they would only do business with other businesses owned by members of the KKK. As long as they keep their gloves on, and hoods off, they had a lot of "support," but it all evaporated the instant someone called them on their true colors. No pun intended) If you're a movie producer and the agents for Tom Cruise and John Travolta call you and, ahem, suggest that you add your name to what seems to be an innoculous ad, you do so. The alternative is to find the stars are oddly unavailable for your next project.
Many Americans *do* have mixed feelings about the German actions vis-a-vis the CoS, but we also rank most of the published outcry as being nothing more than a feeble attempt at Hollywood-ized politics.
Besides, we need our guns in case the CoS actually does somehow get control of a state.
No, but MPs might not get free service lest it be viewed as a bribe.
And even if every MP and mid-level bureaucrat got free service, you could pick the victims out of the phone book. How many people would keep DSL service, no matter how convenient, if it exposed them to large phone bills because the rate structure is totally insane? IIRC, Robert Murdock is Australian so I'm sure there's at least one national media outlet which could take a semi-credible threat of this type of action and run with it.