I'm getting over a hundred kB/sec from ftp.ens.utulsa.edu, which beats the full redhat.com servers and the 10 kB/sec rpmfind.net servers. If you're on ftp.redhat.com, you might want to just grab the MD5SUMS to verify packages with, then move to a less crowded mirror.
And he shouldn't be repeated by Moofie, let alone random anonymous cowards.
The National Aerospace Plane (NASP) and X-33 are completely different programs; anyone willing to spend 5 minutes on the web could verify that. Another 10 minutes would be enough to discover that the parent post was talking about the NASP, not the X-33. A professor of aerospace engineering should definitely know better; I really hope that this error was introduced by misquoting...
The space shuttle and x-33 come back as gliders and so don't waste precious payload space carrying landing fuel.
No, they waste precious payload space carrying huge load-bearing wings or multilobed conformal fuel tanks. It's possible that these things could be made lighter than the fuel a VTOL would need to land... but they haven't been so far. In fact, in the redesign pictures I saw before someone gave a merciful bullet to X-33, it's "stabilizer" flaps were starting to look like outright wings themselves.
it is a provable theorem of computer science that all systems have at least one single point of failure.
Unfortunately, a google search for "all systems" and "single point of failure" did not lead me to such a theorem; simply to a bunch of marketing guys contradicting it.
And since I can think of dozens of mechanical and electrical systems without a single point of failure, I'd appreciate a link to more information about why this is impossible in computer science.
it takes many minutes (sometimes hours) for the typical VHDL or similar program to produce the code that you will want to download to those FPGAs
It takes many minutes (sometimes hours) for my compiler to build a medium or large project. But I don't store the source code on my computer to run, I store the object code, so I don't care how long the compiler takes to produce it.
I've never used an FPGA; would it not be possible to do the same thing for them? Compile a program once into "FPGA code" which then gets stored as the executable file to be sent to the chip when invoked?
I find it hard to argue any moral dillema against pirating a full version of software that is designed solely for the purpose of piracy.
Exactly; it's no worse than rear-ending a radar detector salesman's car, breaking into a locksmith's shop, or shooting a gun store clerk.
*g*
Seriously, though, I don't know if "solely for the purpose of piracy" is accurate. It occurs to me that if I wanted to publish just a few hundred copies of my own copy-protected CD-ROM, something like CloneCD would be the way to do it.
(1) Oh, give me a clone
Of my own flesh and bone,
With its Y chromosome changed to X.
And after it's grown,
Then my own little clone
Will be of the opposite sex.
(Chorus) Clone, clone of my own
With its Y chromosome changed to X
And when I'm alone,
With my own little clone,
We will both think of nothing but sex!
(2) Oh give me a clone
Is my sorrowful moan,
A clone that is wholly my own.
And if she's X-X
And the feminine sex
Oh, what fun we will have when we're prone!
(3) My heart's not of stone,
As I've frequently shown
When alone with my own little X.
And after we've dined,
I am sure we will find
Better incest than Oedipus Rex!
(4) Why should such sex vex
Or disturb or perplex
Or induce a disparaging tone?
After all, don't you see,
Since we're both of us me,
When we're having sex, I'm alone!
(5) And after I'm done
She will still have her fun
For I'll clone myself twice ere I die.
And this time without fail
They'll be both of them male
And they'll each ravage her by and by.
I think that AMDZone and www.amd.com might just be a little bit biased, and I noticed Ace's Hardware spending half their time gloating over the performance they got by overclocking one of the new Athlons to 1.5 Ghz, and neglecting the fact that they managed to render it unstable at 1.533 Ghz.
But what really gets me: you're claiming that Slashdot and Sharky Extreme are Intel biased sites? Are you daft? Did you actually read the linked review? From Sharky's conclusion:
With this, their most recent unveiling, AMD has again leapfrogged Intel in all but one of our performance matrices, making the Athlon 1.33GHz the fastest processor we have tested.
The biggest reason they can give *not* to buy this processor is that they're expecting faster (Palomino-based, possibly smaller process) chips from AMD shortly!
There are some people (um, 98% of desktop users?) that just want a fast (*fast*!) gui
Bullshit. The explosion of pixmap based themes (on modern GUIs which can handle them, I mean) should be proof enough that nobody cares whether their graphics update in one microsecond or ten.
which can do all the neato stuff like opengl, directx, etc. as close to the hardware as possible
Does the acronym "DRI" ring a bell? "Xv"?
while having at least some basic GUI semantics built-in, so every application doesn't look and behave differently
There is a basic GUI included with X. Start any Athena widget based program, then be thankful that X doesn't enforce policy. If you still believe that it's never too late to make the "let's force everybody into using our widget set" mistake, your solution is clear: pick one. You can get a pretty complete desktop based entirely on Qt or Gtk.
Oh yeah, it needs to be easy to configure (X is a bitch...I never ever want to deal with scanlines and refresh rates!!)
No, XFree86 is a bitch; try MetroX for an example of why we don't have to throw away an entire windowing system just to get a better config program. Even XFree86 is only a bitch depending on which config program you use.
but these are desktop users, who would never run a display over a network in their lifetime.
This gets said a lot, usually by the same people who said "normal people would never use a computer" 20 years ago or "normal people would never use a network" 10 years ago. Is it so incredible to imagine that someone might be at work and want to run a program on their home computer, or vice versa?
Explain to Joe Sixpack Gamer why his GUI has been built on a framework for network-based display.
Sure, after you explain to him why his game doesn't run in ring 0, or why it can be preempted by the operating system kernel. As long as he gets the frame rates he expects, Joe Sixpack Gamer doesn't care.
I meant to say canyons and such, but my grasp of the English language seemed to escape me at that moment.
That's OK; it's an honest mistake. An ironic one, too. Giovanni Schiaparelli (I would have never remembered his name; yay Google!) saw the optical illusion of lines criss-crossing Mars and called them "canali": a word that means "channels", but was mistranslated "canals". In English, "channels" generally means any fluid passage, but "canals" implies a water passage of artificial origin. So all the 19th century wonder about intelligent life on Mars was first sparked by an English mistranslation of someone else's language.
And doubly ironic, there are channels on Mars. They might be from lava flows instead of water, and they're much smaller than the optical illusions some squinting pre-Space Age astronomers saw, but they are there.
preferably one which doesn't require winelib dll hacks, since dad doesn't want to know about that sort of thing.
Yeah, it sucks when my dad has to hex edit a binary dll. The DivX player should also not be written in C/C++ either, since my mom doesn't know how to use a compiler.
Don't know if you are aware or not... But DivX has now been open sourced which makes this point of yours totally irrelevant.
I'm aware of a bunch of projects which have promised to release an open source DivX codec Real Soon Now, but don't currently have line 1 of code in public CVS. I'm aware of things like avifile which make DivX usable in Linux through an open source wrapper... but an open source DivX implementation? Where?
A Turing machine can require an arbitrary amount of data to encode. If you encode them as integers, then the numbers W_1000 (probability that a random Turing machine from 1 to 1000 will halt), W_10000, W_100000, etc. are well-defined for that encoding. But how do you know that these probabilities converge?
The fact of the matter is that every piece of digital information is nothing but a sting of digits.
Right.
This one is interesting in that the number happens to be prime.
The number happens to compress down to a number that can be turned into a prime by adding some trailing digits. This is probably (but not proven AFAIK) possible for any number; what's interesting is that someone tried to do so and was successful.
My question for a lawyer is this; does Microsoft have legal copyright on some numbers?
I'm not a lawyer, but the answer is obviously yes: every piece of Microsoft software can be encoded as a (usually multimillion digit) number. Sending that number to someone else would violate copyright law.
If so, do they also own every number that can be derived mathematically from them?
No; just because they have a copyright on n doesn't mean they own n - n = 0 or n / n = 1, Onion article to the contrary.
You might say they own every number that has to be derived mathematically from them; i.e. gzipping the file, turning it into a prime number, etc. doesn't remove the copyright protection. On the other hand, you could distribute a file containing the first 10^1500 integers, and as long as you didn't also distribute a way of discerning which integers were copyrighted your act should be useless but legal.
Of course, I'm one of those folks who thinks that the War on Drugs and DMCA are unconstitutional, so if you're actually considering brushing up against the law you should ignore everything I say.
Really, Lucas is missing the opportunity of a lifetime here. How exactly is he planning to show Anakin irrevocably turn to the dark side? A lover's quarrel with Amidala? A brainwashing session with Palpatine? What gimmick could possibly be used to turn a cutsy kid into the embodiment of Star Wars Evil, and still remain believable?
Simple. The way to turn Anakin to the dark side is to make him finally get fed up with Jar Jar, and kill him. Maybe the murder would be premeditated, maybe it would seem accidental, but it would alienate all Anakin's goody-goody friends and force Anakin out into the bosom of evil while still leaving him a sympathetic character to the audience. "How could something so morally ambiguous be the crucial step on the road to the dark side?" we will wonder. "Why are the other Jedi all being so hard on Anakin, when we've been imagining gutting Jar-Jar like a trout since Episode I?" Mark my words, this is the only way that Lucas can turn Vader into an evil character that the audience will still identify with, and if he uses it he'll be retroactively vindicating the most annoying parts of Episode I as well. Everyone, keep your fingers crossed.
But if so, nobody has proved it for Pi or e, at least. I don't know if it's been proven for "starting sequences" of prime numbers.
Beware of two things you're doing here: you're imagining that primes, Pi, and e are all sequences of "random" digits. They certainly look that way, but it isn't true, and some of that non-randomness may, for example, prevent a particular number from ever appearing in the digit sequence. Secondly, you're trying to make a mathematical argument from "common sense" rather than from axioms and logic. That doesn't work as often as you'd wish it would; common sense sucks.
Ignore all replies that don't mention the bitrate of the MP3s.
Take all replies that don't mention the encoder, or who didn't try a "blind taste test", with a grain of salt.
Keep in mind that listening to any MP3 though most computer speakers is not going to sound as good as listening to CD audio through most stereo systems, and that 99% of the MP3s on Napster were apparantly ripped and encoded by poorly trained monkeys.
Check out this site for the best discussion of MP3 quality I've ever seen, including the link to a German computer magazine's test of 300 audiophiles. 90% of the 128kbps MP3s were rated as worse than CD Audio; the 256kbps (constant bitrate) MP3s were not.
I personally can hear the difference between (constant bitrate) 128 and 192 kbps, but not between 192 kbps and CD Audio. My roommate is happy with 160. My one audiophile friend reencoded all his music at 384kbps after discovering how lousy 128 sounded through $2000 speakers.
But this is not about forbidding anyone to "create and share software". It's about forbidding people from sharing software that someone else created.
We're not talking about people war3zing Photoshop. Does the context "vicarious infringement against AOL for the development of the Gnutella file transfer protocol by its Nullsoft division" make the discussion any clearer? You may have been a little hasty in snipping it.
2^40 is what, one trillion? But there's a couple hundred DVD player keys, so only a few billion files need be generated before a legally useful one is found. So a 1 kilobyte copyrightable file would require just a few terabytes of storage for this workaround... that's not cheap, and I think you'd have a really hard time convincing His Honor that there was any purpose to all this other than pissing off the court.
He couldn't sue himself under the DMCA any more than he could sue himself under copyright law for copying his own works.
He could try suing DVD makers, but he'd have a hell of a time getting it through court. You see, if he encrypted his DVD with CSS and his own key, then commercial DVD players wouldn't decrypt it. If he encrypted his DVD with CSS and at least one of *their keys*, then he'd have a hard time convincing a judge that the key choice wasn't implicit consent for them to perform decryption.
Fun fact about the DC-X: NASA didn't build or fly it. All NASA did was get handed a successful program and crash the damn thing!
The DC-X was a program started by the BMDO: Ballistic Missile Defense Organization. I don't want to start an argument about whether it's a good idea for Bush to spend $60 billion on anti-missile systems... but if they do get handed $60 billion, wouldn't it be nice if they spent $1 or 2 billion on finishing the Delta Clipper research to put some of those defense systems in orbit?
The DC-X got off the ground and flew around. They demonstrated vertical powered landing and crossrange maneuvering with it, and they managed to fly it twice in 24 hours; killing two of the "but that's impossible" objections to VTOL RLV designs.
However, I don't think it even broke the sound barrier; the DC-X was a tiny rocket compared to the Delta Clipper design. The DC-Y was the proposed suborbital follow on, which got beaten by Lockheed Martin's "gee whiz" design for the X-33 contract (you'll notice I'm not arguing with your "NASA == ignorant slut" assertion), and the Delta Clipper was the orbital rocket that would have been built with the lessons learned from DC-Y. The Delta Clipper never got past the initial design proposal phase. In fact, the company proposing Delta Clipper got merged into Boeing shortly thereafter; don't expect to hear anything about it again.
"The person who has, through no knowledge of his own, left file sharing 'on' with no protection, that is the electronic equivalent of leaving your door unlocked," says Rasch. "You can't with any degree of certainly say it is an invitation to enter... Therefore when you enter through an open file share, that's likely an unauthorized access."
So does the same reasoning apply to read-only passwordless access? When I pull up a random web page, it's rarely because I've received a written invitation from their webmaster to do so; it's because there is no password restricting my access to the page!
Slashdot Mirror
I'm getting over a hundred kB/sec from ftp.ens.utulsa.edu, which beats the full redhat.com servers and the 10 kB/sec rpmfind.net servers. If you're on ftp.redhat.com, you might want to just grab the MD5SUMS to verify packages with, then move to a less crowded mirror.
And he shouldn't be repeated by Moofie, let alone random anonymous cowards.
The National Aerospace Plane (NASP) and X-33 are completely different programs; anyone willing to spend 5 minutes on the web could verify that. Another 10 minutes would be enough to discover that the parent post was talking about the NASP, not the X-33. A professor of aerospace engineering should definitely know better; I really hope that this error was introduced by misquoting...
The space shuttle and x-33 come back as gliders and so don't waste precious payload space carrying landing fuel.
No, they waste precious payload space carrying huge load-bearing wings or multilobed conformal fuel tanks. It's possible that these things could be made lighter than the fuel a VTOL would need to land... but they haven't been so far. In fact, in the redesign pictures I saw before someone gave a merciful bullet to X-33, it's "stabilizer" flaps were starting to look like outright wings themselves.
it is a provable theorem of computer science that all systems have at least one single point of failure.
Unfortunately, a google search for "all systems" and "single point of failure" did not lead me to such a theorem; simply to a bunch of marketing guys contradicting it.
And since I can think of dozens of mechanical and electrical systems without a single point of failure, I'd appreciate a link to more information about why this is impossible in computer science.
it takes many minutes (sometimes hours) for the typical VHDL or similar program to produce the code that you will want to download to those FPGAs
It takes many minutes (sometimes hours) for my compiler to build a medium or large project. But I don't store the source code on my computer to run, I store the object code, so I don't care how long the compiler takes to produce it.
I've never used an FPGA; would it not be possible to do the same thing for them? Compile a program once into "FPGA code" which then gets stored as the executable file to be sent to the chip when invoked?
I find it hard to argue any moral dillema against pirating a full version of software that is designed solely for the purpose of piracy.
Exactly; it's no worse than rear-ending a radar detector salesman's car, breaking into a locksmith's shop, or shooting a gun store clerk.
*g*
Seriously, though, I don't know if "solely for the purpose of piracy" is accurate. It occurs to me that if I wanted to publish just a few hundred copies of my own copy-protected CD-ROM, something like CloneCD would be the way to do it.
(1) Oh, give me a clone
Of my own flesh and bone,
With its Y chromosome changed to X.
And after it's grown,
Then my own little clone
Will be of the opposite sex.
(Chorus) Clone, clone of my own
With its Y chromosome changed to X
And when I'm alone,
With my own little clone,
We will both think of nothing but sex!
(2) Oh give me a clone
Is my sorrowful moan,
A clone that is wholly my own.
And if she's X-X
And the feminine sex
Oh, what fun we will have when we're prone!
(3) My heart's not of stone,
As I've frequently shown
When alone with my own little X.
And after we've dined,
I am sure we will find
Better incest than Oedipus Rex!
(4) Why should such sex vex
Or disturb or perplex
Or induce a disparaging tone?
After all, don't you see,
Since we're both of us me,
When we're having sex, I'm alone!
(5) And after I'm done
She will still have her fun
For I'll clone myself twice ere I die.
And this time without fail
They'll be both of them male
And they'll each ravage her by and by.
I think that AMDZone and www.amd.com might just be a little bit biased, and I noticed Ace's Hardware spending half their time gloating over the performance they got by overclocking one of the new Athlons to 1.5 Ghz, and neglecting the fact that they managed to render it unstable at 1.533 Ghz.
But what really gets me: you're claiming that Slashdot and Sharky Extreme are Intel biased sites? Are you daft? Did you actually read the linked review? From Sharky's conclusion:
With this, their most recent unveiling, AMD has again leapfrogged Intel in all but one of our performance matrices, making the Athlon 1.33GHz the fastest processor we have tested.
The biggest reason they can give *not* to buy this processor is that they're expecting faster (Palomino-based, possibly smaller process) chips from AMD shortly!
...I suggest that everyone sell off their tech stocks...
Why don't you type that suggestion up and mail it to last year, when it might have been helpful!
Look at the chip market; how funny would it be if AMD were called BetterIntel, or Intellium, or ByeByeIntel?
How funny would it be if AMD were called "FastX86"? How funny would it still be if Intel sued them for it?
There are some people (um, 98% of desktop users?) that just want a fast (*fast*!) gui
Bullshit. The explosion of pixmap based themes (on modern GUIs which can handle them, I mean) should be proof enough that nobody cares whether their graphics update in one microsecond or ten.
which can do all the neato stuff like opengl, directx, etc. as close to the hardware as possible
Does the acronym "DRI" ring a bell? "Xv"?
while having at least some basic GUI semantics built-in, so every application doesn't look and behave differently
There is a basic GUI included with X. Start any Athena widget based program, then be thankful that X doesn't enforce policy. If you still believe that it's never too late to make the "let's force everybody into using our widget set" mistake, your solution is clear: pick one. You can get a pretty complete desktop based entirely on Qt or Gtk.
Oh yeah, it needs to be easy to configure (X is a bitch...I never ever want to deal with scanlines and refresh rates!!)
No, XFree86 is a bitch; try MetroX for an example of why we don't have to throw away an entire windowing system just to get a better config program. Even XFree86 is only a bitch depending on which config program you use.
but these are desktop users, who would never run a display over a network in their lifetime.
This gets said a lot, usually by the same people who said "normal people would never use a computer" 20 years ago or "normal people would never use a network" 10 years ago. Is it so incredible to imagine that someone might be at work and want to run a program on their home computer, or vice versa?
Explain to Joe Sixpack Gamer why his GUI has been built on a framework for network-based display.
Sure, after you explain to him why his game doesn't run in ring 0, or why it can be preempted by the operating system kernel. As long as he gets the frame rates he expects, Joe Sixpack Gamer doesn't care.
I meant to say canyons and such, but my grasp of the English language seemed to escape me at that moment.
That's OK; it's an honest mistake. An ironic one, too. Giovanni Schiaparelli (I would have never remembered his name; yay Google!) saw the optical illusion of lines criss-crossing Mars and called them "canali": a word that means "channels", but was mistranslated "canals". In English, "channels" generally means any fluid passage, but "canals" implies a water passage of artificial origin. So all the 19th century wonder about intelligent life on Mars was first sparked by an English mistranslation of someone else's language.
And doubly ironic, there are channels on Mars. They might be from lava flows instead of water, and they're much smaller than the optical illusions some squinting pre-Space Age astronomers saw, but they are there.
preferably one which doesn't require winelib dll hacks, since dad doesn't want to know about that sort of thing.
Yeah, it sucks when my dad has to hex edit a binary dll. The DivX player should also not be written in C/C++ either, since my mom doesn't know how to use a compiler.
Don't know if you are aware or not... But DivX has now been open sourced which makes this point of yours totally irrelevant.
I'm aware of a bunch of projects which have promised to release an open source DivX codec Real Soon Now, but don't currently have line 1 of code in public CVS. I'm aware of things like avifile which make DivX usable in Linux through an open source wrapper... but an open source DivX implementation? Where?
A Turing machine can require an arbitrary amount of data to encode. If you encode them as integers, then the numbers W_1000 (probability that a random Turing machine from 1 to 1000 will halt), W_10000, W_100000, etc. are well-defined for that encoding. But how do you know that these probabilities converge?
The fact of the matter is that every piece of digital information is nothing but a sting of digits.
Right.
This one is interesting in that the number happens to be prime.
The number happens to compress down to a number that can be turned into a prime by adding some trailing digits. This is probably (but not proven AFAIK) possible for any number; what's interesting is that someone tried to do so and was successful.
My question for a lawyer is this; does Microsoft have legal copyright on some numbers?
I'm not a lawyer, but the answer is obviously yes: every piece of Microsoft software can be encoded as a (usually multimillion digit) number. Sending that number to someone else would violate copyright law.
If so, do they also own every number that can be derived mathematically from them?
No; just because they have a copyright on n doesn't mean they own n - n = 0 or n / n = 1, Onion article to the contrary.
You might say they own every number that has to be derived mathematically from them; i.e. gzipping the file, turning it into a prime number, etc. doesn't remove the copyright protection. On the other hand, you could distribute a file containing the first 10^1500 integers, and as long as you didn't also distribute a way of discerning which integers were copyrighted your act should be useless but legal.
Of course, I'm one of those folks who thinks that the War on Drugs and DMCA are unconstitutional, so if you're actually considering brushing up against the law you should ignore everything I say.
Really, Lucas is missing the opportunity of a lifetime here. How exactly is he planning to show Anakin irrevocably turn to the dark side? A lover's quarrel with Amidala? A brainwashing session with Palpatine? What gimmick could possibly be used to turn a cutsy kid into the embodiment of Star Wars Evil, and still remain believable?
Simple. The way to turn Anakin to the dark side is to make him finally get fed up with Jar Jar, and kill him. Maybe the murder would be premeditated, maybe it would seem accidental, but it would alienate all Anakin's goody-goody friends and force Anakin out into the bosom of evil while still leaving him a sympathetic character to the audience. "How could something so morally ambiguous be the crucial step on the road to the dark side?" we will wonder. "Why are the other Jedi all being so hard on Anakin, when we've been imagining gutting Jar-Jar like a trout since Episode I?" Mark my words, this is the only way that Lucas can turn Vader into an evil character that the audience will still identify with, and if he uses it he'll be retroactively vindicating the most annoying parts of Episode I as well. Everyone, keep your fingers crossed.
But if so, nobody has proved it for Pi or e, at least. I don't know if it's been proven for "starting sequences" of prime numbers.
Beware of two things you're doing here: you're imagining that primes, Pi, and e are all sequences of "random" digits. They certainly look that way, but it isn't true, and some of that non-randomness may, for example, prevent a particular number from ever appearing in the digit sequence. Secondly, you're trying to make a mathematical argument from "common sense" rather than from axioms and logic. That doesn't work as often as you'd wish it would; common sense sucks.
Ignore all replies that don't mention the bitrate of the MP3s.
Take all replies that don't mention the encoder, or who didn't try a "blind taste test", with a grain of salt.
Keep in mind that listening to any MP3 though most computer speakers is not going to sound as good as listening to CD audio through most stereo systems, and that 99% of the MP3s on Napster were apparantly ripped and encoded by poorly trained monkeys.
Check out this site for the best discussion of MP3 quality I've ever seen, including the link to a German computer magazine's test of 300 audiophiles. 90% of the 128kbps MP3s were rated as worse than CD Audio; the 256kbps (constant bitrate) MP3s were not.
I personally can hear the difference between (constant bitrate) 128 and 192 kbps, but not between 192 kbps and CD Audio. My roommate is happy with 160. My one audiophile friend reencoded all his music at 384kbps after discovering how lousy 128 sounded through $2000 speakers.
But this is not about forbidding anyone to "create and share software". It's about forbidding people from sharing software that someone else created.
We're not talking about people war3zing Photoshop. Does the context "vicarious infringement against AOL for the development of the Gnutella file transfer protocol by its Nullsoft division" make the discussion any clearer? You may have been a little hasty in snipping it.
2^40 is what, one trillion? But there's a couple hundred DVD player keys, so only a few billion files need be generated before a legally useful one is found. So a 1 kilobyte copyrightable file would require just a few terabytes of storage for this workaround... that's not cheap, and I think you'd have a really hard time convincing His Honor that there was any purpose to all this other than pissing off the court.
He couldn't sue himself under the DMCA any more than he could sue himself under copyright law for copying his own works.
He could try suing DVD makers, but he'd have a hell of a time getting it through court. You see, if he encrypted his DVD with CSS and his own key, then commercial DVD players wouldn't decrypt it. If he encrypted his DVD with CSS and at least one of *their keys*, then he'd have a hard time convincing a judge that the key choice wasn't implicit consent for them to perform decryption.
Fun fact about the DC-X: NASA didn't build or fly it. All NASA did was get handed a successful program and crash the damn thing!
The DC-X was a program started by the BMDO: Ballistic Missile Defense Organization. I don't want to start an argument about whether it's a good idea for Bush to spend $60 billion on anti-missile systems... but if they do get handed $60 billion, wouldn't it be nice if they spent $1 or 2 billion on finishing the Delta Clipper research to put some of those defense systems in orbit?
The DC-X got off the ground and flew around. They demonstrated vertical powered landing and crossrange maneuvering with it, and they managed to fly it twice in 24 hours; killing two of the "but that's impossible" objections to VTOL RLV designs.
However, I don't think it even broke the sound barrier; the DC-X was a tiny rocket compared to the Delta Clipper design. The DC-Y was the proposed suborbital follow on, which got beaten by Lockheed Martin's "gee whiz" design for the X-33 contract (you'll notice I'm not arguing with your "NASA == ignorant slut" assertion), and the Delta Clipper was the orbital rocket that would have been built with the lessons learned from DC-Y. The Delta Clipper never got past the initial design proposal phase. In fact, the company proposing Delta Clipper got merged into Boeing shortly thereafter; don't expect to hear anything about it again.
"The person who has, through no knowledge of his own, left file sharing 'on' with no protection, that is the electronic equivalent of leaving your door unlocked," says Rasch. "You can't with any degree of certainly say it is an invitation to enter... Therefore when you enter through an open file share, that's likely an unauthorized access."
So does the same reasoning apply to read-only passwordless access? When I pull up a random web page, it's rarely because I've received a written invitation from their webmaster to do so; it's because there is no password restricting my access to the page!