I am a true conservative. I am such an old-school Republican that I cannot in good conscience vote for Bush this year. (I can't vote for Kerry, either: voting for the lesser evil is still evil.) I think John Ashcroft is the most dangerous attorney general we've had since Bobby Kennedy (the man who plotted the murder of foreign leaders, e.g., Castro).
So, since I pass your political litmus test, let me inform you of some things you apparently missed in elementary school:
Beating people up is wrong.
Mrs. Lawton made sure my kindergarten class knew that. Mrs. Boettcher made sure the next year that the slow learners got it repeated, and Mrs. Hesse the year after that, Miss Cleveringa the year after that, and on and on and on. It was repeated so often because it is important.
Say it with me now: beating people up is wrong.
It doesn't matter if you think the person is as innocent as the driven snow or if you think they're a loathsome human being. It doesn't matter if it's John Kerry or John Ashcroft. Beating people up--and that includes snide, offhand, inaccurate and ad-hominem remarks--is wrong.
Period.
So no, I don't agree with you. I'll continue to defend John Ashcroft against unfair, unwarranted and asinine "criticisms". I'll do this because I hope you'd do the same for me. I'll do this because I hope John Ashcroft would do the same for me. I'll do this because there are people out there who don't know that beating people up is wrong; and by making a stand for what is right, maybe they'll learn.
I don't know how you got modded +2 Insightful. I really don't. I'd like to think that all of us here have at least the basic moral development of a kindergartener.
I seriously doubt you're a lawyer, because no lawyer I know would be so reckless as to make this statement. It's just plain wrong, and I hope anyone reading this thread will remember how dangerous it is to get a legal education on Slashdot.
This judge's ruling is binding within his jurisdiction. That means it's a settled issue within that district. This will undoubtedly be appealed to an appellate court, and once it hits the appellate level, the appeals court will re-examine the conclusions of law. The conclusions of fact, though, are supreme and cannot be re-examined by any court unless they are "as offensive to the senses as a three day old mackerel". (For non-lawyers, yes, that is the legal standard used. The precedent in question is a funny read.)
Once the appellate court rules on it, the judgement is binding within the appellate court's entire jurisdiction. At this point, the law is effectively dead. Other appellate courts will refer to this first appellate court in their own decisions, and it's overwhelmingly likely all Federal circuits will come to the exact same decision.
The Supreme Court accepts less than one percent of the cases appealed to it from the appellate court level. The cases it accepts tends, overwhelmingly, to be cases which have been handled in different ways by different appellate courts (a rare occurrence), or cases which it feels to possess unusual relevance to Constitutional law.
Fine; assume two orders of magnitude more. (That's a huge, huge amount, by the by.) You're still talking about only a gram of matter in a cylinder from here to Alpha Centauri.
Think about this one for a moment: these nebulae are light-years across, and yet, despite there being light-years of matter there, we can still see stars on the other side.
Outer space is a vacuum. It's very, very close to a perfect vacuum. Even the places which are relatively jam-packed with stuff are very close to a perfect vacuum.
The fact you got modded up to +3 goes to show just how few Slashdotters know much about astrophysics. This proposal is completely infeasible.
Take a cylinder a meter wide, from here to Alpha Centauri. Tally up how much matter is there inside of it. I would tell you just how little there is, but you wouldn't believe me, so let's go through the math so you know I'm not yanking your chain. On average, there's about one atom per cubic centimeter of space. Thus, in one cubic meter there's about 10^6 atoms.
One mole of hydrogen, with a mass of one gram, is 6.023 * 10^23 atoms.
One cubic meter of interstellar space has a mass of 1.6 * 10^-18 grams, or 1.6 * 10^-21 kilograms.
It's about four lightyears to Alpha Centauri, or 4 * 10^16 meters, approximately. So a cylinder a meter across would have a cross-section of quarter-pi square meters, or about.785m^2. Multiply that by 4 * 10^16 meters and you get a total volume of roughly 3 * 10^16 cubic meters.
Multiply 3 * 10^16 cubic meters by 1.6 * 10^-21 kilograms per cubic meter and what do you get?
You get the total mass of all the matter in a cylinder from here to Alpha Centauri. Something on the order of a fraction of a gram. You leave orders of magnitude more matter in a Kleenex when you sneeze.
You may want to radically rethink your proposal for farming interstellar gas. There just ain't much of it out there.
Assuming you're not deliberately trying to break MD5, it requires 2**64 files to have 50/50 odds of creating one or more MD5 collisions. Check Google for the Birthday Paradox if you want a full explanation.
You're far too reasonable, far too intelligent, in your posting to be the real Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf! Your lies have been exposed, you dirty fiend! Your only hope is to drink poison and commit suicide beneath the firewalls of Slashdot! Your stomach will be grilled in the flames of/dev/null!
I've known the submitter for about ten years now, a little less, so maybe I can answer your question for you.
The reason is simple. He's a hacker. He sees something that works but is inelegant; and he'd like to be able to make it a little more elegant. It's that simple.
So the answer to "why risk introducing a bunch of bugs just to make the software 'more modern'" is not a facetious "job security".
The answer is elegance.
If you can't appreciate that answer, that's a strong sign you're not qualified to have an opinion.
Please note, by the by, that I almost agreed with you. I recommended that he be very careful in what he fixes and how. That's worlds apart from saying "leave it alone, you don't know what you're doing". Any answer of "leave it alone" is fundamentally anti-hacker.
"Analog: (n & adj) variant of analogue" (American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Ed)
Yes, we tend to use the variant spelling when talking about circuits, but that doesn't change the fact that it is, indeed, a variant and not the preferred spelling.
If it's working, be real careful in how you decide to 'fix' it. The old "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" adage is really true when it comes to old software.
Check the original assumptions. Which platforms did it have to run on originally? How many of those vendors are still around? What platforms does it have to run on now? You may discover that the only platforms you need to support all have good POSIX facilities.
If you've really got a wild hair to improve things, consider creating a port to $foo (Perl, Python, Java,.NET, etc.). One way to get around the lots of different incompatabilities problem is to use a language which already abstracts these things away, after all.
If you absolutely must have platform-specific behavior in C, then GNU Autoconf is probably your best bet. Be warned that GNU Autoconf is arguably a cure that's worse than the disease. I've yet to meet one single programmer who's thought Autoconf was a good idea--only that Autoconf was a marginally less bad idea than all the other alternatives.
Ah, cheap and puerile cynicism which gets modded up as 'insightful'. God, I love Slashdot.
Recently, a friend of mine who works in the Federal public defender's office was brutally attacked when she was jogging. The litany of injuries is almost too shocking to be believed. It's definitely the worst beating I've ever heard of. In the interests of Jane's medical privacy, I'm not going to go into details. It's enough to say the injuries were horrific and turned my stomach, and I've been through EMT school and emergency-room rotations.
The FBI was on the case within hours of Jane's body being discovered. Before she was even out of surgery the FBI was on the streets asking questions. There was absolutely no evidence that Jane was targeted for her work as a Federal employee, but y'know what? The FBI agents didn't seem to care all that much. What they cared about was that an innocent woman was beaten so badly she wasn't recognizable anymore, strangled, left for dead and still alive only by a miracle and a Lifeline helicopter flight. That was what they cared about. The fact she was a Federal employee was just what gave the FBI freedom to get involved.
Now, the brutal mugging of a pretty woman doesn't threaten anyone's bottom line. It costs a lot of money to do the full-court press. It takes a lot of overtime and a lot of dedication. And the FBI did so because she was an American citizen and someone put an Old Testament hurt on her and that pissed the FBI off.
The local police now have a suspect in the case. A local whacko who targeted Jane because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Nothing Federal about it. The FBI didn't hog the spotlight, they didn't grandstand for the cameras. It was enough that the guy was caught, and they genuinely didn't give a damn if they got props for it or not.
That's the FBI.
Do they screw up? Sure. Of course. There's no organization on earth that doesn't.
But you're screwing up, too, by believing the most puerile, most cynical things about the FBI, without ever bothering to consider the good, responsible law-enforcement work they do that never makes the papers.
Of all philosophies, cynicism unalloyed by idealism is the most bankrupt, most hollow.
(If you want more information to make sure I'm not making this up, check the Iowa City or Cedar Rapids newspapers for information on Jane Kelly of the public defender's office.)
I know for a fact that at least one Federal appellate judge has received one of these. (How do I know? I was fixing his Net connection and saw it in the Inbox.)
Don't expect the government to do anything. First, it's not a threat directed at the officeholder; this is a To Whom It May Concern. Which means that while it's still an offense the Feds can get involved over, the Feds would (a) say "we've got bigger fish to fry" and (b) there'd be a bureaucratic fight over who had authority--would it be US Marshals Service, the by-law protectors of the Judiciary? Would it be the FBI, since this is international extortion and wire fraud? Would it be the Secret Service, since this is financial crime using our nation's banking system? Would it be the Federal Trade Commission, since this is spam?
So the long and short of it is (a) the Feds don't care, since they've got bigger fish to fry, and (b) even if they did care, they'd spend a year locked in committee meetings just figuring out who had lead on this one.
Re:Galileo? Probably not.
on
Game with God
·
· Score: 1
When it comes down to it, that is typically all you have to go on when comparing scientific theories, and is precisely what makes one theory inferior to another. All theories explain everything equally if you allow their authors to add complex clauses to them to explain away the problems.
Wow. If that's your view of the scientific method, then there's nothing I can say to convince you otherwise.
But that's an appalling misunderstanding of the scientific method.
Keats is the one who said truth was beauty and beauty truth, and that was all we needed to know. Scientists like Keats; we think he was a Pollyanna idealist, but it's a beautiful ideal.
The true test of theory is, has been, and always will be, trifold:
Does it explain past observations?
Does it correctly predict future observations?
Can it be proven false?
Copernican theory fails on point one and point two. It passes point three; you can, in fact, show Copernican theory to be wrong.
Keplerian theory gets a qualified pass on all three. It explains past observations; it correctly predicted all observations of the day (later observations, like the precession of Mercury, it couldn't); and it could be proven false, as the precession of Mercury did.
Ptolemaic-Tychoian theory gets a qualified pass on all three. It explains past observations; it correctly predicted all observations of the day; and it could be proven false, as the precession of Mercury did.
The only reason to choose the Kepler model over the Ptolemaic-Tychoian model is the Keplerian model is simpler; and Occam's Razor tells us that, when faced with two equally satisfying explanations, we should choose the simpler.
Occam's Razor has never, ever said "choose the simpler explanation, even if it's barkingly wrong".
Then, when Einstein came along, he re-established the Ptolemaic-Tychoian model. What Einstein discovered, in a nutshell, is "you pay your money, you get your frame of reference, no deposit, no return." From the reference frame of the Earth, the heavens are Ptolemaic-Tychoian. From the reference frame of the Sun, the heavens are Keplerian.
Re:Personally, I would go one step further.
on
Game with God
·
· Score: 1
Our government comes from Greek and Roman traditions that predate Christianity
Ah, this must be why there's so many chapters in the Federalist Papers explaining why Greek-style democracy has always failed, and why the new American democracy must not be patterned on it. I was such a fool; and here I was thinking Hamilton was saying we shouldn't be like the Greeks.
In reality, our system of government is an amalgamation of the best traits of the best governments of the day: the Iroquois Federation, the Dutch United Provinces, and England. Our idea of a strong federal government came, at least partially, from the Iroquois Federation; our idea of independent states with their own rights came from the Dutch United Provinces; and our idea of a bicameralist legislature came from Parliament (House of Representatives == House of Commons, Senate == House of Lords).
And the Treaty of Tripoli, SIGNED by all the congressmen at the time (who were around for the formation fo the constitution), explicitly states that the government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.
And they're right. The United States Constitution makes it quite clear that there is to be no test of religious affiliation required for service in any branch of government. However, this is not to say that in the minds of the Framers, God had no role to play.
Again, read the Federalist Papers. Or some Locke or some Hobbes. The Framers were, as a general rule, all quite committed Christians of one stripe or another (from Deism all the way to ordained clergy). The surviving papers of the Framers make it clear that the overwhelming majority of them considered liberty to be a gift from the Almighty, and it was the purpose of government to safeguard the Almighty's blessing. But in order to best safeguard the Almighty's blessing, the Framers had to establish a government which neither acknowledged nor denied the Almighty.
You keep on falling into the trap of false dichotomy. Just because the government isn't founded on any particular faith doesn't mean none of the Framers were motivated and inspired by their faith when they were establishing the government.
This was there even before the debate on the first amendment.
This is true, but meaningless. Remember that the Federal government is one of enumerated powers; if the Constitution doesn't specifically allow the government to do something, the government's forbidden from doing it.
There was debate as to whether establishment of religion ought to be one of government's enumerated powers. It was shot down.
From a strictly legal perspective, almost all of the Bill of Rights is redundant. Congress shall pass no law establishing a religion, abridging the right to speak freely, to print material, to assemble, to petition the government for the redress of grievances? From a strictly Federalist view, the attitude was "of course the government can't! That's not one of its enumerated powers!"
However, the Constitutional Convention was eventually convinced that the American people wanted to see those guarantees made explicitly instead of implicitly... and as a result, the Bill of Rights came into being.
Re:Galileo? Probably not.
on
Game with God
·
· Score: 1
The fact that Galelio *was* is, all by itself, plenty of reason to dislike the religious establishment of the time, and it was plenty of reason, all by itself, to side with Galelio on this.
Not especially. Galileo didn't frame it as a free-speech issue, after all. Viewing Galileo's defense in the light most favorable to him, I find his defense wanting.
You're subscribing to a false dichotomy, where you have to believe that either Galileo was a hero and Pope Urban was evil, or that Galileo was an idiot and Pope Urban was right. The reality is they were, both of them, idiots who didn't tolerate dissent. The only difference between Galileo and Urban was that Urban had a hell of a lot more political clout to bring to bear--and Galileo was such a loudmouth that he guaranteed that clout would be brought to bear.
The prevailing theory at the time was *also* mistaken because it did not use the sun as the center.
On the contrary. The particular flavor of Ptolemaic model used by Scheiner and others was the Tychoian-Ptolemaic model, wherein the Earth was the center of the cosmos, the Sun revolved around the Earth in an ellipse, and the planets revolved around the Sun in ellipses.
If you actually sit down and crunch the math, the Tychoian-Ptolemaic model gives completely equivalent results to the Keplerian model. The only way the Tychoian-Ptolemaic model is inferior is that it's more complex; but it yields the exact same results.
Galileo? Probably not.
on
Game with God
·
· Score: 1
I won't contest Augustine; Augustine, to put it simply, was a dude. But Galileo... Let's just say I have some serious objections to how Galileo is usually represented.
Galileo, contrary to the myths that have sprung up surrounding him, wasn't put on ecclesiastical trial just for saying the Earth moved 'round the sun. After all, that theory had already been established years earlier... by a Catholic priest.
(Funny, isn't it, how Copernicus always gets remembered as an astronomer and never as a priest?)
Galileo was put on ecclesiastical trial for two things: (a) being wrong and (b) politics. Galileo bought the Copernican line hook, line and sinker, and didn't care about the fact the Copernican view was demonstrably wrong. Here's a little experiment you can do, if you have enough math: compute the motions of the planets according to Copernican theory, and then compute the motions according to epicyclic (Ptolemaic) theory.
Ptolemaic theory gives far, far more accurate results.
Why? Because Copernicus thought the planets moved in perfect circles. They don't. Once Kepler came onto the scene and modified Copernican theory to be based on ellipses instead of circles, then Keplerian theory took off and displaced Ptolemaic theory. But Galileo wasn't arguing Kepler's perspective; he was arguing Copernicus'.
So, in the first place, Galileo was wrong. In the second place, Galileo had an annoying habit of mocking the Pope in print. If memory serves, Galileo took Pope Urban's well-considered objections to Copernican theory and put them in the mouth of a fictional character, "Simplicio", then spent an entire book refuting "Simplicio's" beliefs.
What does "Simplicio" mean in Italian?
Moron.
So right there were Galileo's two major goofs. One, he was wrong, and two, he called the Pope a moron in print.
Very few of Galileo's astronomical "discoveries" have stood the test of time. As it turns out, the prosecutor in Galileo's trial--a Jesuit named Scheiner, if I recall correctly--has had a much better track record.
In one of life's little ironies, everyone today knows Galileo as a brilliant astronomer, when he really wasn't. And to the extent anyone remembers Scheiner, it's always as "the guy who persecuted Galileo", not "the finest astronomer of the seventeenth century" or "the guy who established the Vatican's astronomical observatory, the world's oldest and longest-running".
Technically, the B-2 Spirit flies with only one wing; it's a uniwing design. But that's not what you're talking about.
The A-10 Thunderbolt II has been known to fly with only one wing. To the best of my knowledge it's the only modern aircraft to have been specifically designed to be pilotable even with loss-of-wing.
You have a source for tubes that can handle 20 amps of current? If so, show me the money.
Prof. Doug Jones at the University of Iowa has a 100kW vacuum tube in his office. Yes, that's right, one hundred kilowatts. If I recall his story correctly, it was originally used to impart one hell of a surface tempering to cylinders of steel. At 100kW, you can heat up something really damn fast.
So yes, there are tubes which can handle extremely large (nigh-insane) loads. The tubes might be big, bulky, and made of ceramic, but they exist.
Tritium is bought and sold on the open market like any other commodity. One major use is for night sights for weapons. Tritium runs for around $1000 per gram, if memory serves--at that rate, it's nowhere near impossible to accumulate a few kilos of it for a wealthy entrepreneur.
I'm far more irritated at the form the tritium took. Tritium isn't a solid (at least, not under any terrestrial environment). Tritium is a gas.
Also keep in mind the reason why the cell companies don't want you to be able to call from a plane: cellphones are line-of-sight transmitters.
From 35,000 feet, line of sight covers most of an entire state. That means the cell network on the ground is going to have a heart attack when it discovers "gaah! I'm getting an identical cell signal in 917 different cell zones! What do I do?!"
Basically, the cell network wasn't designed for airborne transmitters. When the cell network was being designed, it was just beyond anybody's imagination that cell phones would someday be so prevalent and pervasive that you'd have hundreds of them on each and every 747 flight.
Yes, I used to work in telecom. Yes, we actually had to deal with this sort of thing on occasion.
Electrically conductive glass and wire screen goes an awful long way. What you don't cover by those means can be handled by building a small foyer around each door, such that either the inner or outer door is closed at all times (like an airlock).
Turning a building into a Faraday cage isn't that difficult of a proposition. It requires some money and a little construction, but beyond that it's straightforward.
And if it had been built with a containment dome, the leak would've been contained. Simulations done in the US after the fact (both computer and with scale models) showed that a containment dome built to US standards could contain three times the explosive force of Chernobyl without a rupture.
Luckily, a meltdown didn't occur, but we may not be so fortunate in the future.
U.S. reactors literally cannot go Chernobyl in the event of failure. Once the temperature rises to the point where the moderating system is destroyed, the reaction shuts down since it can't take place without the moderating system. This is called a "negative void coefficient", and is an essential part of every Western design.
The RBMK reactor used in Chernobyl had a positive void coefficient. When they lost moderation, the reactor went runaway.
Next time you say "luckily, a meltdown didn't occur", please learn enough about the reactors in use in the West to be able to tell us what sort of failure could cause a meltdown to occur.
Your point is a good one; but the "luckily, a meltdown didn't occur" just sets off my nuclear-power-paranoia sensor.
If this were the case, you could sue $developer for $foss_project.
Why is this so misunderstood? Why is legal "analysis" like the preceding accepted as unquestioned fact?
Here's the thing. Well, here are the things--there are two of them.
$developer can be sued for $foss_project today. You can be sued for eating a ham sandwich. You can be sued for putting a detailed account of felonies on your webpage. The only way to be lawsuit-proof is to die, and even then, your estate can be sued.
So this entire "software needs to be without liability, because otherwise we could be sued!" is nonsense. We can already be sued. What can't happen, at least assuming EULAs are valid and we're all using a EULA that disclaims liability, is we can't be sued successfully. And even if EULAs are held invalid and software liability becomes the rule, we're still not likely to be sued. Read on.
If I tell you "hey, I wrote this, and I'm giving it to you for free without any reciprocation from you, but I'm not making any guarantees it'll work," that's a boatload different in the eyes of the law from me telling you "hey, I wrote this, and for $10,000 and the souls of your children I'll let you use it, but I'm not making any guarantees it'll work".
Have you ever heard of Good Samaritan laws? Some state legislatures got tired of hearing of frivolous lawsuits filed against people who came onto the scene of an accident, gave emergency care in good faith and for no cost at all, only to have the person whose life they saved turn around and slap them with a malpractice suit. This was considered to be so beyond the pale that both the courts, via common law, and the legislatures, via statute law, moved to smack it down.
If software finally becomes subject to the same requirements of any other manufactured good, we're going to see commercial software companies (like Microsoft, Oracle, Red Hat, Novell, etc.) spending a lot of money doing bughunting, bugfixing, and documenting failures; and we're going to see both common and statute law exempting no- or low-cost free software from software liability.
The following's just a small sampling of some of the musical horror you can inflict on those hapless souls you've got strung on hold. None of these are gratuitously bad tunes; many of them are, IMO, quite excellent. But they're all... ahh. Shall we just say that they're very appropriate for the work experience? They all talk to the poor schmuck on the other end of the line and tell him/her how pathetic their situation is and how much you don't want to hear from them.:)
Leonard Cohen, Waiting for the Miracle
Nothing left to do when you know that you've been taken Nothing left to do when you're begging for a crumb Nothing left to do but you've got to go on waiting Waiting for the miracle to come
Leonard Cohen, Everybody Knows
Everybody knows that the dice are loaded Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed Everybody knows the war is over Everybody knows the good guys lost Everybody knows the fight is fixed The poor stay poor, the rich get rich That's how it goes Everybody knows
Bob Seger, Hands in the Air
I've seen bad news messengers avoiding kings...
The Cardigans, Erase and Rewind
Erase and rewind I've been wasting my time Erase and rewind...
Dire Straits, Brothers in Arms
Now the sun's gone to hell And the moon's riding high Let me bid you farewell Every man has to die
Jim's Big Ego, I'm Addicted to Stress
I'm addicted to stress, it's the way that I get things done If I'm not under pressure then I sleep too long And hang around like a bum And I think I'm going nowhere and that makes me nervous
Kathy Mar, Merlin
It's late at night and the stars are deep It's okay--I don't need sleep I've been sleeping for quite some time.
Kim Wilde, You Keep Me Hanging On
Come on. Do I really need to quote this one to you?
Leonard Cohen, Closing Time
Ah, we're drinking and we're dancing But there's nothing really happening The place is dead as Heaven on a Saturday night
Meat Loaf, Life is a Lemon and I Want My Money Back!
And all the morons! All the stooges with their coin! They're the ones who make the rules It's not a game--it's just a rout.
Pandora's Box, Original Sin
I've been looking for the Ultimate Crime Infinite victims, infinitesimal time!
(This song also has the benefit of a percussion line so ass-kicking you'll make your customers' eardrums meet in the middle of their heads. Heh. Bonus.)
Peter Gabriel, Come Talk to Me
Come on. Come talk to me.
Rob Dougan, Left Me for Dead
You kept on taking your time Until it was certain I couldn't survive...
Rob Dougan, Furious Angels
And if you go, furious angels will bring you back to me
Slashdot Mirror
I am a true conservative. I am such an old-school Republican that I cannot in good conscience vote for Bush this year. (I can't vote for Kerry, either: voting for the lesser evil is still evil.) I think John Ashcroft is the most dangerous attorney general we've had since Bobby Kennedy (the man who plotted the murder of foreign leaders, e.g., Castro).
So, since I pass your political litmus test, let me inform you of some things you apparently missed in elementary school:
Beating people up is wrong.
Mrs. Lawton made sure my kindergarten class knew that. Mrs. Boettcher made sure the next year that the slow learners got it repeated, and Mrs. Hesse the year after that, Miss Cleveringa the year after that, and on and on and on. It was repeated so often because it is important.
Say it with me now: beating people up is wrong.
It doesn't matter if you think the person is as innocent as the driven snow or if you think they're a loathsome human being. It doesn't matter if it's John Kerry or John Ashcroft. Beating people up--and that includes snide, offhand, inaccurate and ad-hominem remarks--is wrong.
Period.
So no, I don't agree with you. I'll continue to defend John Ashcroft against unfair, unwarranted and asinine "criticisms". I'll do this because I hope you'd do the same for me. I'll do this because I hope John Ashcroft would do the same for me. I'll do this because there are people out there who don't know that beating people up is wrong; and by making a stand for what is right, maybe they'll learn.
I don't know how you got modded +2 Insightful. I really don't. I'd like to think that all of us here have at least the basic moral development of a kindergartener.
I seriously doubt you're a lawyer, because no lawyer I know would be so reckless as to make this statement. It's just plain wrong, and I hope anyone reading this thread will remember how dangerous it is to get a legal education on Slashdot.
This judge's ruling is binding within his jurisdiction. That means it's a settled issue within that district. This will undoubtedly be appealed to an appellate court, and once it hits the appellate level, the appeals court will re-examine the conclusions of law. The conclusions of fact, though, are supreme and cannot be re-examined by any court unless they are "as offensive to the senses as a three day old mackerel". (For non-lawyers, yes, that is the legal standard used. The precedent in question is a funny read.)
Once the appellate court rules on it, the judgement is binding within the appellate court's entire jurisdiction. At this point, the law is effectively dead. Other appellate courts will refer to this first appellate court in their own decisions, and it's overwhelmingly likely all Federal circuits will come to the exact same decision.
The Supreme Court accepts less than one percent of the cases appealed to it from the appellate court level. The cases it accepts tends, overwhelmingly, to be cases which have been handled in different ways by different appellate courts (a rare occurrence), or cases which it feels to possess unusual relevance to Constitutional law.
Fine; assume two orders of magnitude more. (That's a huge, huge amount, by the by.) You're still talking about only a gram of matter in a cylinder from here to Alpha Centauri.
Think about this one for a moment: these nebulae are light-years across, and yet, despite there being light-years of matter there, we can still see stars on the other side.
Outer space is a vacuum. It's very, very close to a perfect vacuum. Even the places which are relatively jam-packed with stuff are very close to a perfect vacuum.
The fact you got modded up to +3 goes to show just how few Slashdotters know much about astrophysics. This proposal is completely infeasible.
.785m^2. Multiply that by 4 * 10^16 meters and you get a total volume of roughly 3 * 10^16 cubic meters.
Take a cylinder a meter wide, from here to Alpha Centauri. Tally up how much matter is there inside of it. I would tell you just how little there is, but you wouldn't believe me, so let's go through the math so you know I'm not yanking your chain. On average, there's about one atom per cubic centimeter of space. Thus, in one cubic meter there's about 10^6 atoms.
One mole of hydrogen, with a mass of one gram, is 6.023 * 10^23 atoms.
One cubic meter of interstellar space has a mass of 1.6 * 10^-18 grams, or 1.6 * 10^-21 kilograms.
It's about four lightyears to Alpha Centauri, or 4 * 10^16 meters, approximately. So a cylinder a meter across would have a cross-section of quarter-pi square meters, or about
Multiply 3 * 10^16 cubic meters by 1.6 * 10^-21 kilograms per cubic meter and what do you get?
You get the total mass of all the matter in a cylinder from here to Alpha Centauri. Something on the order of a fraction of a gram. You leave orders of magnitude more matter in a Kleenex when you sneeze.
You may want to radically rethink your proposal for farming interstellar gas. There just ain't much of it out there.
Assuming you're not deliberately trying to break MD5, it requires 2**64 files to have 50/50 odds of creating one or more MD5 collisions. Check Google for the Birthday Paradox if you want a full explanation.
Confession is still in the Book of Common Prayer. It's rarely used by most Episcopalians, but it's still an accepted part of the Episcopalian service.
You're far too reasonable, far too intelligent, in your posting to be the real Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf! Your lies have been exposed, you dirty fiend! Your only hope is to drink poison and commit suicide beneath the firewalls of Slashdot! Your stomach will be grilled in the flames of /dev/null!
I've known the submitter for about ten years now, a little less, so maybe I can answer your question for you.
The reason is simple. He's a hacker. He sees something that works but is inelegant; and he'd like to be able to make it a little more elegant. It's that simple.
So the answer to "why risk introducing a bunch of bugs just to make the software 'more modern'" is not a facetious "job security".
The answer is elegance.
If you can't appreciate that answer, that's a strong sign you're not qualified to have an opinion.
Please note, by the by, that I almost agreed with you. I recommended that he be very careful in what he fixes and how. That's worlds apart from saying "leave it alone, you don't know what you're doing". Any answer of "leave it alone" is fundamentally anti-hacker.
"Analog: (n & adj) variant of analogue" (American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Ed)
Yes, we tend to use the variant spelling when talking about circuits, but that doesn't change the fact that it is, indeed, a variant and not the preferred spelling.
- If it's working, be real careful in how you decide to 'fix' it. The old "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" adage is really true when it comes to old software.
- Check the original assumptions. Which platforms did it have to run on originally? How many of those vendors are still around? What platforms does it have to run on now? You may discover that the only platforms you need to support all have good POSIX facilities.
- If you've really got a wild hair to improve things, consider creating a port to $foo (Perl, Python, Java,
.NET, etc.). One way to get around the lots of different incompatabilities problem is to use a language which already abstracts these things away, after all. - If you absolutely must have platform-specific behavior in C, then GNU Autoconf is probably your best bet. Be warned that GNU Autoconf is arguably a cure that's worse than the disease. I've yet to meet one single programmer who's thought Autoconf was a good idea--only that Autoconf was a marginally less bad idea than all the other alternatives.
Good luck!Ah, cheap and puerile cynicism which gets modded up as 'insightful'. God, I love Slashdot.
Recently, a friend of mine who works in the Federal public defender's office was brutally attacked when she was jogging. The litany of injuries is almost too shocking to be believed. It's definitely the worst beating I've ever heard of. In the interests of Jane's medical privacy, I'm not going to go into details. It's enough to say the injuries were horrific and turned my stomach, and I've been through EMT school and emergency-room rotations.
The FBI was on the case within hours of Jane's body being discovered. Before she was even out of surgery the FBI was on the streets asking questions. There was absolutely no evidence that Jane was targeted for her work as a Federal employee, but y'know what? The FBI agents didn't seem to care all that much. What they cared about was that an innocent woman was beaten so badly she wasn't recognizable anymore, strangled, left for dead and still alive only by a miracle and a Lifeline helicopter flight. That was what they cared about. The fact she was a Federal employee was just what gave the FBI freedom to get involved.
Now, the brutal mugging of a pretty woman doesn't threaten anyone's bottom line. It costs a lot of money to do the full-court press. It takes a lot of overtime and a lot of dedication. And the FBI did so because she was an American citizen and someone put an Old Testament hurt on her and that pissed the FBI off.
The local police now have a suspect in the case. A local whacko who targeted Jane because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Nothing Federal about it. The FBI didn't hog the spotlight, they didn't grandstand for the cameras. It was enough that the guy was caught, and they genuinely didn't give a damn if they got props for it or not.
That's the FBI.
Do they screw up? Sure. Of course. There's no organization on earth that doesn't.
But you're screwing up, too, by believing the most puerile, most cynical things about the FBI, without ever bothering to consider the good, responsible law-enforcement work they do that never makes the papers.
Of all philosophies, cynicism unalloyed by idealism is the most bankrupt, most hollow.
(If you want more information to make sure I'm not making this up, check the Iowa City or Cedar Rapids newspapers for information on Jane Kelly of the public defender's office.)
I know for a fact that at least one Federal appellate judge has received one of these. (How do I know? I was fixing his Net connection and saw it in the Inbox.)
Don't expect the government to do anything. First, it's not a threat directed at the officeholder; this is a To Whom It May Concern. Which means that while it's still an offense the Feds can get involved over, the Feds would (a) say "we've got bigger fish to fry" and (b) there'd be a bureaucratic fight over who had authority--would it be US Marshals Service, the by-law protectors of the Judiciary? Would it be the FBI, since this is international extortion and wire fraud? Would it be the Secret Service, since this is financial crime using our nation's banking system? Would it be the Federal Trade Commission, since this is spam?
So the long and short of it is (a) the Feds don't care, since they've got bigger fish to fry, and (b) even if they did care, they'd spend a year locked in committee meetings just figuring out who had lead on this one.
But that's an appalling misunderstanding of the scientific method.
Keats is the one who said truth was beauty and beauty truth, and that was all we needed to know. Scientists like Keats; we think he was a Pollyanna idealist, but it's a beautiful ideal.
The true test of theory is, has been, and always will be, trifold:
- Does it explain past observations?
- Does it correctly predict future observations?
- Can it be proven false?
Copernican theory fails on point one and point two. It passes point three; you can, in fact, show Copernican theory to be wrong.Keplerian theory gets a qualified pass on all three. It explains past observations; it correctly predicted all observations of the day (later observations, like the precession of Mercury, it couldn't); and it could be proven false, as the precession of Mercury did.
Ptolemaic-Tychoian theory gets a qualified pass on all three. It explains past observations; it correctly predicted all observations of the day; and it could be proven false, as the precession of Mercury did.
The only reason to choose the Kepler model over the Ptolemaic-Tychoian model is the Keplerian model is simpler; and Occam's Razor tells us that, when faced with two equally satisfying explanations, we should choose the simpler.
Occam's Razor has never, ever said "choose the simpler explanation, even if it's barkingly wrong".
Then, when Einstein came along, he re-established the Ptolemaic-Tychoian model. What Einstein discovered, in a nutshell, is "you pay your money, you get your frame of reference, no deposit, no return." From the reference frame of the Earth, the heavens are Ptolemaic-Tychoian. From the reference frame of the Sun, the heavens are Keplerian.
In reality, our system of government is an amalgamation of the best traits of the best governments of the day: the Iroquois Federation, the Dutch United Provinces, and England. Our idea of a strong federal government came, at least partially, from the Iroquois Federation; our idea of independent states with their own rights came from the Dutch United Provinces; and our idea of a bicameralist legislature came from Parliament (House of Representatives == House of Commons, Senate == House of Lords).And they're right. The United States Constitution makes it quite clear that there is to be no test of religious affiliation required for service in any branch of government. However, this is not to say that in the minds of the Framers, God had no role to play.
Again, read the Federalist Papers. Or some Locke or some Hobbes. The Framers were, as a general rule, all quite committed Christians of one stripe or another (from Deism all the way to ordained clergy). The surviving papers of the Framers make it clear that the overwhelming majority of them considered liberty to be a gift from the Almighty, and it was the purpose of government to safeguard the Almighty's blessing. But in order to best safeguard the Almighty's blessing, the Framers had to establish a government which neither acknowledged nor denied the Almighty.
You keep on falling into the trap of false dichotomy. Just because the government isn't founded on any particular faith doesn't mean none of the Framers were motivated and inspired by their faith when they were establishing the government.This is true, but meaningless. Remember that the Federal government is one of enumerated powers; if the Constitution doesn't specifically allow the government to do something, the government's forbidden from doing it.
There was debate as to whether establishment of religion ought to be one of government's enumerated powers. It was shot down.
From a strictly legal perspective, almost all of the Bill of Rights is redundant. Congress shall pass no law establishing a religion, abridging the right to speak freely, to print material, to assemble, to petition the government for the redress of grievances? From a strictly Federalist view, the attitude was "of course the government can't! That's not one of its enumerated powers!"
However, the Constitutional Convention was eventually convinced that the American people wanted to see those guarantees made explicitly instead of implicitly... and as a result, the Bill of Rights came into being.
You're subscribing to a false dichotomy, where you have to believe that either Galileo was a hero and Pope Urban was evil, or that Galileo was an idiot and Pope Urban was right. The reality is they were, both of them, idiots who didn't tolerate dissent. The only difference between Galileo and Urban was that Urban had a hell of a lot more political clout to bring to bear--and Galileo was such a loudmouth that he guaranteed that clout would be brought to bear.On the contrary. The particular flavor of Ptolemaic model used by Scheiner and others was the Tychoian-Ptolemaic model, wherein the Earth was the center of the cosmos, the Sun revolved around the Earth in an ellipse, and the planets revolved around the Sun in ellipses.
If you actually sit down and crunch the math, the Tychoian-Ptolemaic model gives completely equivalent results to the Keplerian model. The only way the Tychoian-Ptolemaic model is inferior is that it's more complex; but it yields the exact same results.
I won't contest Augustine; Augustine, to put it simply, was a dude. But Galileo... Let's just say I have some serious objections to how Galileo is usually represented.
Galileo, contrary to the myths that have sprung up surrounding him, wasn't put on ecclesiastical trial just for saying the Earth moved 'round the sun. After all, that theory had already been established years earlier... by a Catholic priest.
(Funny, isn't it, how Copernicus always gets remembered as an astronomer and never as a priest?)
Galileo was put on ecclesiastical trial for two things: (a) being wrong and (b) politics. Galileo bought the Copernican line hook, line and sinker, and didn't care about the fact the Copernican view was demonstrably wrong. Here's a little experiment you can do, if you have enough math: compute the motions of the planets according to Copernican theory, and then compute the motions according to epicyclic (Ptolemaic) theory.
Ptolemaic theory gives far, far more accurate results.
Why? Because Copernicus thought the planets moved in perfect circles. They don't. Once Kepler came onto the scene and modified Copernican theory to be based on ellipses instead of circles, then Keplerian theory took off and displaced Ptolemaic theory. But Galileo wasn't arguing Kepler's perspective; he was arguing Copernicus'.
So, in the first place, Galileo was wrong. In the second place, Galileo had an annoying habit of mocking the Pope in print. If memory serves, Galileo took Pope Urban's well-considered objections to Copernican theory and put them in the mouth of a fictional character, "Simplicio", then spent an entire book refuting "Simplicio's" beliefs.
What does "Simplicio" mean in Italian?
Moron.
So right there were Galileo's two major goofs. One, he was wrong, and two, he called the Pope a moron in print.
Very few of Galileo's astronomical "discoveries" have stood the test of time. As it turns out, the prosecutor in Galileo's trial--a Jesuit named Scheiner, if I recall correctly--has had a much better track record.
In one of life's little ironies, everyone today knows Galileo as a brilliant astronomer, when he really wasn't. And to the extent anyone remembers Scheiner, it's always as "the guy who persecuted Galileo", not "the finest astronomer of the seventeenth century" or "the guy who established the Vatican's astronomical observatory, the world's oldest and longest-running".
Technically, the B-2 Spirit flies with only one wing; it's a uniwing design. But that's not what you're talking about.
The A-10 Thunderbolt II has been known to fly with only one wing. To the best of my knowledge it's the only modern aircraft to have been specifically designed to be pilotable even with loss-of-wing.
So yes, there are tubes which can handle extremely large (nigh-insane) loads. The tubes might be big, bulky, and made of ceramic, but they exist.
Tritium is bought and sold on the open market like any other commodity. One major use is for night sights for weapons. Tritium runs for around $1000 per gram, if memory serves--at that rate, it's nowhere near impossible to accumulate a few kilos of it for a wealthy entrepreneur.
I'm far more irritated at the form the tritium took. Tritium isn't a solid (at least, not under any terrestrial environment). Tritium is a gas.
Also keep in mind the reason why the cell companies don't want you to be able to call from a plane: cellphones are line-of-sight transmitters.
From 35,000 feet, line of sight covers most of an entire state. That means the cell network on the ground is going to have a heart attack when it discovers "gaah! I'm getting an identical cell signal in 917 different cell zones! What do I do?!"
Basically, the cell network wasn't designed for airborne transmitters. When the cell network was being designed, it was just beyond anybody's imagination that cell phones would someday be so prevalent and pervasive that you'd have hundreds of them on each and every 747 flight.
Yes, I used to work in telecom. Yes, we actually had to deal with this sort of thing on occasion.
Electrically conductive glass and wire screen goes an awful long way. What you don't cover by those means can be handled by building a small foyer around each door, such that either the inner or outer door is closed at all times (like an airlock).
Turning a building into a Faraday cage isn't that difficult of a proposition. It requires some money and a little construction, but beyond that it's straightforward.
And if it had been built with a containment dome, the leak would've been contained. Simulations done in the US after the fact (both computer and with scale models) showed that a containment dome built to US standards could contain three times the explosive force of Chernobyl without a rupture.
The RBMK reactor used in Chernobyl had a positive void coefficient. When they lost moderation, the reactor went runaway.
Next time you say "luckily, a meltdown didn't occur", please learn enough about the reactors in use in the West to be able to tell us what sort of failure could cause a meltdown to occur.
Your point is a good one; but the "luckily, a meltdown didn't occur" just sets off my nuclear-power-paranoia sensor.
Here's the thing. Well, here are the things--there are two of them.
- $developer can be sued for $foss_project today. You can be sued for eating a ham sandwich. You can be sued for putting a detailed account of felonies on your webpage. The only way to be lawsuit-proof is to die, and even then, your estate can be sued.
- If I tell you "hey, I wrote this, and I'm giving it to you for free without any reciprocation from you, but I'm not making any guarantees it'll work," that's a boatload different in the eyes of the law from me telling you "hey, I wrote this, and for $10,000 and the souls of your children I'll let you use it, but I'm not making any guarantees it'll work".
Have you ever heard of Good Samaritan laws? Some state legislatures got tired of hearing of frivolous lawsuits filed against people who came onto the scene of an accident, gave emergency care in good faith and for no cost at all, only to have the person whose life they saved turn around and slap them with a malpractice suit. This was considered to be so beyond the pale that both the courts, via common law, and the legislatures, via statute law, moved to smack it down.So this entire "software needs to be without liability, because otherwise we could be sued!" is nonsense. We can already be sued. What can't happen, at least assuming EULAs are valid and we're all using a EULA that disclaims liability, is we can't be sued successfully. And even if EULAs are held invalid and software liability becomes the rule, we're still not likely to be sued. Read on.
If software finally becomes subject to the same requirements of any other manufactured good, we're going to see commercial software companies (like Microsoft, Oracle, Red Hat, Novell, etc.) spending a lot of money doing bughunting, bugfixing, and documenting failures; and we're going to see both common and statute law exempting no- or low-cost free software from software liability.
Leonard Cohen, Waiting for the Miracle Leonard Cohen, Everybody Knows Bob Seger, Hands in the Air
The Cardigans, Erase and Rewind Dire Straits, Brothers in Arms Jim's Big Ego, I'm Addicted to Stress Kathy Mar, Merlin Kim Wilde, You Keep Me Hanging On Leonard Cohen, Closing Time Meat Loaf, Life is a Lemon and I Want My Money Back! Pandora's Box, Original Sin Peter Gabriel, Come Talk to Me Rob Dougan, Left Me for Dead Rob Dougan, Furious Angels