you still need to remember to wrap *all* of your allocations with auto_ptr
Huh? Since when?
MyObj::MyObjPtr foo = new MyObj;
... I define MyObj::MyObjPtr to be an autoptr, and I overload the new operator for MyObj to return an autoptr. This isn't rocket science, nor does it require a tremendous amount of discipline. All you have to do is have enough experience with C++ to know that (a) C-style pointers are Dangerous Beasts and should be avoided whenever possible, (b) the autoptr exists, (c) how to use a typedef, and (d) how to overload the new operator.
C++ does not have memory management because it lacks garbage collection of some sort.
C++ lacks built-in GC. It doesn't lack GC. If you want GC, it exists for C++. There are lots of providers of C++ GC. The reason why GC didn't make it into the C++ standard is twofold.
There is no optimal GC algorithm. Java is a garbage-collected language, but the specification doesn't say how the GC must be implemented. The ISO committee didn't have the Sun cop-out of saying "well, it must be done, but we don't care how it's done or how efficiently it's done". The C++ committee simply felt there was no single GC approach which would result in an engineering win for the vast majority of code. I think the committee was probably right.
It violates the C++ Maxim. The fundamental maxim of C++ is, ``you don't pay for what you don't use.'' Every C-superset feature of C++ is optional. If you restrict yourself to the C90 subset of the C++ spec, your code will have the performance of C. Adding GC to C would violate this maxim. Hence, no GC in C++.
... Bjarne Stroustrup has publically said that when the C++ standard is revised, beginning in 2003, he thoroughly expects GC to become part of the standard... but even when GC is included in the C++ standard, GC will be optional, due to the above two reasons.
C++ has a rudimentary but surprisingly effective memory management tool called the autoptr (or auto_ptr, depending on who's talking). It's essentially a thin class wrapped around a pointer. When the class goes out of scope, the autoptr destructor is called. It deletes the pointer contained within the class, thus returning whatever was pointed at to the memory pool. It ensures proper object destruction, etc., etc.
If you don't know about the autoptr, then maybe you'd better not make statements about C++'s lack of memory management assistance.
I've used the autoptr a fair bit, and it's a surprisingly handy and low-overhead way of solving a lot of dangling-pointer errors.
One time, I was attempting to install OpenSSH on a RH box I was adminning. to put on OpenSSH, I needed OpenSSL.
Funny, "./configure && make && make install" works fine for me on a RH box. Go figure.
To install RPM V.5, I needed to replace half my packages.
See above. If upgrading via RPM is too dependency-ridden, compile from source. You're an admin. Be an admin, not somebody who insists on having everything prepackaged in a format a deaf-blind rhesus monkey with a drinking problem could use.
To install OpenSSL, I needed to get RPM v.5 (4 was installed)
You know, I'd take this anecdote of yours more seriously if RPM 5.x even existed (which it doesn't).
[rjhansen@numbers rjhansen]$ rpm --version
RPM version 4.0.3
That's on a RH 7.2 box. If you've got RPM 5.x, I'd love to know where you picked it up.
You've been a UNIX admin for twelve years and it still takes you time to get Linux up and running?
Buddy, ever since Red Hat 6.0, I have yet to see any piece of reasonable hardware (i.e., hardware you might reasonably see in a consumer box) fail to be autodetected. X could still be a pain in the 6.x series, but in 7.2 configuring it was sweet and simple.
If you've been a UNIX admin for twelve years, and it takes you a week to get your network card, sound and video configured properly, you're either using an Yggdrasil CDROM from '95 or else your sound card consists of a telephone transceiver soldered into LPT1 and controlled via smoke signals.
energy as afaik from what I understand even has gravitational effects
It does. Spacetime is warped by energy just as much as by mass. That doesn't mean the two are the same thing; they're not. To put it in a C idiom, there's an equivalence which can be drawn between a char* and a char[], but pop onto comp.lang.c and try and say "arrays and pointers are the same". You'll get mocked.:)
Theres still E as you say but its just how its applied that differs
No. Read a college physics textbook. It's not "how it's applied that differs". The math must always, always, always be consistent; if the math's not consistent, it's not science. Saying that "well, it's not really negative" makes the numbers inconsistent. That negative sign in front doesn't mean "in a different direction". It means "-1 times the quantity".
If something goes three feet forwards and then three feet back, it's fair to say "it goes three feet forwards and then three feet backwards". It goes the quantity of three, the measurement unit of feet, and a direction. But it is equally fair to say "it goes positive three feet and then another negative three feet".
What's the difference? In the first, you're assigning real absolute distances along different vectors. In the second, you're assigning real nonabsolute values along a single vector. Minimizing coordinate system abuse is something physicists really like to do, because it makes their lives easier. So it's not a matter of "negative distances, negative energies, etc., are just a notational convenience". It's all about coordinate systems, and within that coordinate system, those are real negative values. They aren't pretenders. They aren't poseurs.
It is fascinating all this stuff. I wish I had kept it up, but I'm crap at maths:(
I mean no offense here, but I can tell.:)
Pretty much without exception, every time we've correctly assessed what the rules of the cosmos are, we've found that everything permitted by mathematics within those rules happens. When Einstein was formulating relativity, he dismissed black holes as an illusion of the mathematics. Well, turns out those illusions are likely pretty darn real. The same happened in the birth of quantum mechanics--things that were believed to be nonsensical artifacts of the mathematical process turned out to be astonishingly real.
It is a critical mistake to dismiss negative quantities as "artifacts" (which is what you're doing) because it contradicts our intuition about the cosmos. All of us have an intuition about the cosmos, and this intuition is usually plumb wrong.
For thousands of years, we had only rational numbers. Everyone knew that all numbers were defined as integers or integer fractions of other integers. Anything else was inconceivable.
For thousands of years, we had no transcendental numbers. Numbers which aren't merely irrational, but add all sorts of weirdness on top of it? Don't be absurd.
For thousands of years we had no number zero. After all, how could you have a number to denote something that wasn't there?
We had no negative numbers. You could conceive of ten apples, five apples--heck, you could even conceive of no apples. But negative numbers were nonsensical, right?
We had no imaginary numbers. The square root of a negative number? Don't be absurd. Of course, you're using imaginary numbers right now--they're used in AC circuits, like the wall outlet powering your PC.
We had no complex numbers. How could you add an imaginary to a real?
We had no Hamiltonians (quaternions). Oh, man, don't even get me started on quaternion theory; it's beautiful and deranged all at once.
... Do you see what I'm getting at here? You're saying that "well, the negative value is just an illusion we can handwave away--all distances, all energies, all masses, etc., are absolute values, and the plus or minus sign is just an indicator of direction." It doesn't work that way. When people insist that it must work that way, it usually shows someone who's not very comfortable with mathematics or the notion that the universe might be a lot stranger than they give it credit for.
My apologies; I thought you were arguing that negative energy cannot exist, which is what I was taking exception with.:)
So therefore it is always some positive value somewhere in the system right?
Not necessarily. The system is allowed to be at a zero-energy state. A lot of people believe that, from whatever point within the cosmos that you observe the cosmos, the net energy of the cosmos is zero. I'm not certain I buy this, but not because the idea is bad--just because I haven't seen evidence to directly suggest this.
My arguement is that "negative" energy, as you put it, would have the same effect within the universe as positive "energy"... because although its observable behaviour would be opposite, the effects on spacetime curvature would be exactly the same as positive mass
You seem to be conflating mass and energy here. An equivalency exists between the two, but they're not strictly speaking identical to each other. A photon, for instance, has no mass--but due to its energy level, it can be treated as if it possessed mass. Discussing this more would quickly get extremely arcane, but a good astrophysics text should explain it much better than I can.:)
First, in many instances you're right. Whenever you see an energy-squared term, the cosmos doesn't care whether the sign is negative or positive--the squaring means the result is always positive.
But that doesn't mean in all instances you're right. As a very quick and primitive example, look at E = mc**2. Let's say you're watching a spacecraft zoom by at relativistic speeds. Its energy content is equal to its mass times the square of c.
Now let's say you slow down that spacecraft somehow. You reduce its kinetic energy content by applying an acceleration opposite to its direction. You're diminishing the energy--or, not to be too mathematical about it, applying negative energy to the system. You apply so much energy that you bring the spacecraft to a crashing halt. Before, it had E energy, and now you've applied -E energy.
Well, how do you get -E energy? -m times c**2, of course. So as you apply negative energy, you also confer a negative mass... so as the spacecraft slows down, its relativistic mass vanishes (negative mass applied) and it returns to its conventional rest mass.
Professional physicists will undoubtedly want to crucify me for this example.:) Keep in mind that it's a first approximation meant to illustrate the point, nothing more.
Short version: negative energy levels are known to exist. Negative masses are necessary in order to make some of the equasions work out properly, but we don't know whether (a) negative masses can exist on their own, or (b) whether it's just an illusion created by the mathematics we use to describe the system.
As an illustration of (b), imagine a square-shaped yard that's a hundred square meters. How long is each side? Well, ten meters, of course. But the square root also means negative ten meters would give us the same answer. In this instance, the negative result is discarded as an illusion of the mathematics. The same basic principle might apply to negative mass--necessary to make equasions work, but doesn't really exist.
I suspect the answer is (b), but I'm not willing to make any wagers on it. The cosmos can be a really weird place.
-60v is not a measurement of the energy in the system, its a measure of the direction of the flow of energy in the system.
Well, actually, it's an assessment of electromotive force, not energy. The salient fact is that it is a relative measurement, not an absolute measurement. Energy is a relative state, not an absolute one, and as such, negative energies make every bit as much sense as positive ones. Tell me, if someone throws a baseball while traveling on a spacecraft moving at a relativistic speed, how much energy is involved? Answer: it depends on your frame of reference.
In one frame of reference, you can very easily have negative energies. In another frame of reference, that same negative may be a positive. Negative energy is not a problem except if your mind is too brittle to accept different frames of reference, some of them leading to things you may find paradoxical.
Insofar as mass being determined by momentum, you set up a really nasty circular argument. What's mass? Something with momentum. What's momentum? Mass times velocity. You can't have it both ways--you can't define something with a trait derived from your definition.
You can have negative energy. It's just numbers. For instance, it takes energy to split water apart into hydrogen and oxygen, and energy is liberated when hydrogen and oxygen combine to form water. In one direction, say it takes ten joules of energy to do something... reversed, it takes negative ten joules of energy to do something. I.e., you get energy back.
This is real Physics I stuff here. It's not rocket science.
And yes, it does have bearing on QMech. Frankly, we don't know what causes mass at all. We think it has something to do with an exotic energy field. That field has solutions for negative mass, just like positive mass.
That doesn't mean negative masses exist.
That does mean that our current understanding of QMech explicitly permits it.
Sure it can. What, can an electromotive force of -60V not exist? Sure it can. It's at -60 relative to ground. Exact same thing with energy. Energy measurements are not absolute; they always measure in comparison to something. It's a coordinate system like any other.
Yes, it does help to understand what you're measuring before you do your calculations. It also helps to take quantum mechanics in college, where you have a very stark choice: you can totally disregard everything your intuition tells you about the cosmos and start over from scratch, with a clean slate and willing to believe things which are totally impossible except for the fact that the numbers work... or else you can fail the class.
If the numbers work, it's permitted. If the numbers don't work, it's verboten. Not everything that's permitted will turn out to be true, of course.
But everything that's permitted is certainly worth thinking about.
And why can't negative energy exist? Remember, these are all numerical values. That's all they are. Look at the rest mass of some of the subatomic particles, which have imaginary rest mass (their measured mass-squared is a negative number). If we've already measured imaginary mass, who are you to say negative mass is impossible, or even implausible?:)
Sure, negative mass implies negative energy. This is well-known. That's why, theoretically speaking, negative mass could be generated at arbitrarily close to zero cost--just generate conventional mass along with it, you offset the energy investment required, your only loss being to thermodynamic inefficiency in your equipment. (Note that we have no idea how to do this, not even a theoretical basis for how to do it. That doesn't mean it's silly to think about the possibilities.)
Insofar as what negative mass would mean in terms of spacetime curvature, that's another very interesting question which has very interesting, but nonintuitive, answers. Self-consistent with the rest of the cosmos, mind you.
I'm not saying that negative mass exists. I'm not saying we'll ever find it. I'm saying that the cosmos is absolutely not required to be in accordance with your, mine, or anyone else's, suspicions about how it ought to operate, and that it pays to keep an open mind to the possibilities.
If we've already measured imaginary mass, then I think trying to say "no, no, negative mass is impossible" is being a little presumptuous, since I'd imagine the square root of negative mass is even more counterintuitive than negative mass itself.
No, but if you plug in a negative value for M, the cosmos doesn't turn into a pumpkin. Yes, you can get negative results in any of dozens of ways--but one of the ways the cosmos seems prepared to accept is to put in a negative mass.
I'm unaware of any principle of physics which says that mass must always be positive. Look at either Newton's or Einstein's laws of motion, for instance--in F=ma, you can plug in negative numbers for mass just as easily as positive numbers. You get answers which are self-consistent (if sometimes counterintuitive) and which maintain the beauty of the mathematical system. These are tantalizing hints--and that's all they are, hints--that negative mass is permitted by the universe.
We have no idea how to make it, but we know what it would look like, how it would interact with positive mass, and how forces would act upon it.:)
The Constitution protects citizens against unreasonable and unwarranted search and seizure by the government. In other words, if the government wants to conduct a reasonable search of your person, papers and effects (for instance, the cop's arrested you with good cause and is frisking you), that's okay. If the government wants to come by your house and take off all the exterior siding while looking for drugs, they're going to need a warrant.
And if you sign a contract with Borland and give them permission to search your house anytime you like, nothing in the Constitution will protect you from your own stupidity.
PGP on Windows XP. PGPtray works, PGP for Outlook XP is dodgy, PGPdisk is broken and PGPnet will hork your system. At least, those are the reports on alt.security.pgp.
NAI is walking away from PGP. This is a Good Thing, believe it or not. Or, at the very least, not a Bad Thing. PGP has always existed in two different components with totally different agendas:
The community's agenda is to enhance individual liberties and ensure electronic privacy.
The corporation's agenda is to turn a profit.
... It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that those two agendas are not exactly in sync with each other.
The community is alive and well. There are a lot of individuals who are interested (and some who are genuinely obsessed!) with the notion of personal privacy and personal liberties. The GNU Privacy Guard crowd is part of this community--so what if their initials are GPG instead of PGP? So are the remailers, mixmasters and everyone else.
NAI is dying. Due to the fact that I'm a former NAI employee, I'm not going to say more than that--except to recognize that Network Associates has a long history of buying great software companies and failing to capitalize on them. (Check out the San Jose Mercury-News from February 2001 for some brilliant examples.)
Summary: the community is alive and kicking. GPG keeps getting better and better--at 500k, it's slim enough to fit on a floppy, it supports RFC2440 and RFC2440bis, and has good integration with almost all UNIX mailers. The WinPT and GPGshell programs give friendly Win32 front-ends (but both still need a lot of work).
... Don't panic. Unlike the Monty Python parrot sketch, PGP really is just resting.;)
Two psychologists independently discovered autism in the 1940s; Kanner and Asperger. Kanner wrote in English, Asperger wrote in German. That's why American psychologists always use autism to mean Kanner's Autism; it's marked by extreme social withdrawal, usually occurs with mental retardation, etc.
The other side of the autistic spectrum is Asperger's Autism, aka Asperger's Syndrome, aka Very High Functioning Autism, aka Pervasive Developmental Disorder--Not Otherwise Specified, etc.
Asperger's research into autism was well-known in continental Europe, but unknown in English-speaking places, until Lorna Wing translated Asperger's original works and brought him to the attention of the English-speaking psychological community. In America, there's a lot of debate as to whether or not Asperger's is a form of autism--the current belief is yes, but it's still being worked out. In the UK and Europe, there's very little debate about it; most psychologists believe that yes, it is.
I have Asperger's, incidentally, so I try to keep abreast of the latest developments in the field.:)
Check out OASIS, at University of Delaware, for more information regarding Asperger's Syndrome.
The weakness does allow (relatively) cheap generation of data which creates duplicate MD5sums.
Yep--and cryptanalytic attacks only get better over time. While Dobbertin's attack does not directly lend itself towards generating arbitrary messages which hash out to a specific result, I'd expect that to be the next bastion to fall. Once the compression function goes, everything else soon follows.
You'd be much better off by simply writing functionally-equivalent viruses (obviously, this could be automated) and then MD5summing them.
That's simple brute force, and is usually the absolute worst way to attack a system. The best way, IMO, would be to refine Dobbertin's attack, find a general break of MD5, and go from there. I may be off my rocker here, but I feel pretty safe in saying that would be several orders of magnitude faster than brute force.
Dobbertin created collisions in the compression function.
The security of an iterative hash algorithm can be no greater than the security of its compression function.
This means that if you can create collisions in the compression function, then you can create collisions in the hash.
Dobbertin did not extend his attack to the full MD5 algorithm, and nobody knows quite why--maybe RSADSI asked him not to, or maybe Dobbertin wanted to give people a few years to migrate from MD5 to SHA-1 before he applied his attack to the full MD5 algorithm.
RSADSI is correct to say that Dobbertin did not break the full MD5 algorithm. But don't think that doesn't mean Dobbertin didn't break MD5 in half. By analogy, imagine a locked door. Someone comes along, picks the lock, and demonstrates that yes, the doorknob turns freely and the bolt turns. The lock manufacturer (RSADSI) says, "well, yes, Dobbertin did expose some weaknesses in the lock, but he didn't open the door."
RSADSI, by the way, nowadays recommends the use of SHA-1 as a hash algorithm instead of MD5. Given that MD5 is the brainchild of one of RSADSI's founders, I think that says worlds.
The security of an iterative hash algorithm cannot be any better than that of its compression function. (Source: Menezes, Van Oorschot and Vanstone, Handbook of Applied Cryptography)
MD5 is an iterative hash function. (Source: Schneier, Applied Cryptography Second Edition; also, Menezes)
Collisions can be generated in MD5's hash algorithm (Dobbertin, 1996).
Dobbertin's compression-function collision algorithm executes in just a few hours on a 586 (Dobbertin, 1996).
Therefore, collisions in the full MD5 algorithm can be generated in the same time or less. (This is known to be true as a logical consequence of what's already been proven; if anyone has actually used Dobbertin's attack on the full algorithm, they've kept quiet about it.)
... Next time, before you quote Applied Cryptography, you might want to ask a cryptographer what the latest research in the field is.
I'm writing this post using a Toshiba Satellite 1715XCDS laptop, with a built-in Lucent Winmodem. Yes, the modem works under Linux. The only mod to the laptop is an extra 64M of RAM (thanks, Dave), bringing it up to 128M. The CPU is a Celeron-600, if I recall correctly, so if the Winmodem takes up "around 40 MHz of a Pentium-class CPU", we'd expect to see about a 0.8% performance hit.
The Linux install is RH 7.2; I'm in X right now, running Sawfish, GNOME 1.4 and Nautilus. On top of that, I just closed out some KDE apps (I prefer KMail over Balsa), so there are probably still some KDE things running--the DCOP server, etc. Galeon, Pan, gnome-terminal and a Python program (a small MUD client I hacked together with PyGNOME) are all running.
Any trinary machine can mimic a binary machine simply by getting rid of one of its states. So if we switch to ternary, the first ports of crypto libraries will just be binary libraries running on ternary machines.
Second, separate theory from implementation, please. Very few areas of information theory and cryptography are dependent on base-2. That'd be counter to the entire point of math, which is to think abstractly enough that the principles apply to any base. Your statement is sort of like saying "moving from base 10 to base 16 is hard, since we learn arithmetic in base 10 and we'd have to relearn all our arithmetic". It's just not the case. A + B = B + A, no matter what base you use. And likewise, the integer factorization problem and the discrete logarithm problem are damn hard no matter what base you use.
Implementations are highly dependent on binary systems, yeah--but that's only because we only have binary computers right now. As soon as someone comes up with a ternary computer, rest assured, Blowfish and 3DES and RSA and El Gamal and AES and all sorts of crypto goodness will be running on it in no time flat.
Think about this one for a moment. Computers are Turing machines. We write in Turing-complete languages.
But there's nothing in the definition of a Turing machine which requires that it be binary, trinary, or base radical two. The Turing machine doesn't care.
In a uniprocessor system the lack of reentrant kernel threads allows applications to control processor time. This cooperative multitasking is ineffecient, and systems intensive.
Linux has never had cooperative multitasking. Never. Ever. It has always been preemptively multitasking. This one sentence alone shows that either you're wording things in a manner so tragically incorrect it's comedic, or else you simply don't know beans.
Another serious setback for Linux is the lack of a journalling file system. This makes data storage unreliable, and backup and recovery a dicey proposition. SGI said they would port the IRIX file system to Linux, but I haven't heard anything about this yet.
ReiserFS. Ext3. IBM's JFS. SGI's XFS, as found on Irix. Do I need to go on?
I would refute your post in depth and at length, but at this point I'm certain you're either totally uninformed or else trolling. Have a nice day.:)
Nearly all of the examples, I believe, involve insurgent forces supplied by an outside power during the conflict. I'm tired of hearing how wonderful, for example, the Mujahedeen were at resisting the Soviets without anyone commenting how they got their behinds kicked for the first few years, until the US supplied them with Stinger missiles.
No, most of those examples are insurgent forces fighting as insurgents. What the Soviets feared weren't Stinger missiles--it was fanatical mujahedeen with AK-47s who could fit in effortlessly into the background. Mujahedeen who, on more than one occasion, skinned Soviet troops alive, within earshot of Soviet camps, just to demoralize the defenders within.
The Viet Cong were, in fact, supplied by an outside agency... namely, the US Army. That one actually works against you.
FARC are supplied by an internal agency... namely, the Colombian Army (from whom they steal equipment) and the narcosyndicates (likewise).
The Zulus overwhelmed the British with spears. Think about that one for a moment.
It was not rifle fire that brought down the Soviets. It was the ability of the Stingers to deprive them of air transport... a capability the Afghans would not have had on their own.
Oh, please. Read up on Afghanistan. Why do you think nobody in their right mind wants to fight there? It's not because of air resupply difficulties. It has to do with Afghani insurgents who think it's fun to skin invaders alive, just so their screams can demoralize their friends who are safe inside their perimeter. The last time the British tried to invade Afghanistan, the Afghanis were stuck in a medieval level of technology and they still annihilated all but one single soldier.
It's quite clear the Viet Cong didn't beat "the US Army". They beat the fraction of the Army that was deployed to fight them, most of the military being constrained politically and physically by the rest of the world situation
<yawn> Let me get this straight. We beat "the fraction of the Japanese Imperial Army that was deployed to fight us in the Pacific, most of the military being constrained politically and physically by the rest of the world situation to keep already-won territories in China, Korea and Southeast Asia"? Armies are always limited by political and military reality. You're arguing the trivial here, and nothing nontrivial follows from a triviality.
In the fevered apocalyptic world in which the evil US Army is resisted by a band of freedom-loving ordinary citzens, we're no longer talking about a politically constrained Army.
Never read up on the Civil War, did you? When the "evil Union army [was] resisted by a band of freedom-loving ordinary citizens" (as the Confederate armies overwhelmingly were), the Union army still had enormous political constraints--and a lot of the soldiers didn't like the idea of fighting their own countrymen very much, either.
The ordinary citizens would be facing the full might of the Army.
Two point five million soldiers versus a nation with over one hundred fifty million armed citizens. Hmmm... my magic eight-ball says, Outlook Not Good.
Ask the militiamen from a few years back how successful their plan of armed resistance was.
It failed because, for all its warts and foibles, the United States Government is still in power at the sufferance of the people. One or two half-baked cranks with guns is a hell of a lot different from a popular uprising encompassing millions of people with guns.
I would be willing to bet that, when passing a tax package, not a single Representative says, "Oh, wait. What if my constituents take to the hills as partisans?"
Ask Teddy Kennedy if he thinks there are people out there who are willing to kill him if he passes a law which they disagree with. I seem to recall a couple of his brothers winding up on the losing side of extremely one-sided arguments.
I'm not condoning political assassination, by the by. It's deplorable. But you live in an astonishingly naieve dream world. If a politician does something unpopular enough, that politician stands a pretty good chance of not living long enough to see a re-election bid. That is why, by and large, politicians go to such extreme lengths to make sure people like them.
I fail to see how any collection of ordinary citizens is going to be ``better armed'' than the United States Army.
... Apparently, someone forgot to tell the Viet Cong that they didn't stand a chance, because the US Army had much better weapons and they could just steamroll over the VC effortlessly.
Let's look at history here, shall we?
Great Britain versus the Zulus at Isandhlwana. Score: Zulus 1, GB 0
The Soviet Union versus the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan. Score: Mujahedeen 1, Soviet Union 0.
Colombia versus FARC in the Andes. Score: FARC 1, Colombia 1, at Halftime.
The French Foreign Legion versus Ho Chi Minh at Dienbienphu. Score: Uncle Ho 1, Legion Etranger 0
(Doubleheader) The US Army versus Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, immediately after FFL/Ho Chi Minh. Score: Uncle Ho 1, Uncle Sam 0
... do I really need to go on about how historically shortsighted your post is?
Anarchy does mean ``you can do whatever you want''. Look it up in the dictionary; anarchy means the utter absence of law and government. Without any sort of law or government, each individual gets to do whatever the hell they want, limited only by the activities of those stronger than them to do whatever the hell they want.
If anarchy merely meant ``acceptable behavior is determined by those around you'', then democratic governments would be anarchy, since the people around you are the ones who determine the laws, which are the people's method of establishing the boundaries of acceptable and unacceptable behavior.
Anarchy means there is no law. There is no government. Anarchy means rule by the mob, and if you happen to get steamrollered by the mob, too bad--you have no recourse and the mob has no repercussions.
If you want to see what your anarchic government looks like in practice, I would suggest looking at Somalia--Mogadishu in particular.
If software were truely free, you'd be able to do what you wanted and not have to do a damn thing in return. This SHOULD include being able to do what ever you want with the source, including selling a hacked up commercial version without opening your source if you don't want to.
Hmm. Let's try rewriting that as,
If America was truely free, you'd be able to do what you wanted and not have to do a damn thing in return. This SHOULD include being able to do what ever you want with your life, including selling children into preschool prostitution rings if you want to.
Freedom does not mean ``you can do whatever the hell you want''. That's called anarchy, and while some people would call anarchy perfect freedom, I don't--I call it a damn dangerous place to live. Freedom carries with it responsibilities, the foremost of which is not to infringe upon other people's equal freedoms. My freedom of speech carries with it the responsibility not to use my speech to limit your freedom of speech.
Free Software, in the FSF's view, needs to carry with it the responsibility that it not be used to deny other people software freedoms.
Don't like it? Hey, that's fine--not as if you needed anyone's permission to not like it. But please don't call it unreasonable simply because inherent in the GPL is the notion that you must not deny these freedoms to anybody else.
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Huh? Since when?
MyObj::MyObjPtr foo = new MyObj;
... I define MyObj::MyObjPtr to be an autoptr, and I overload the new operator for MyObj to return an autoptr. This isn't rocket science, nor does it require a tremendous amount of discipline. All you have to do is have enough experience with C++ to know that (a) C-style pointers are Dangerous Beasts and should be avoided whenever possible, (b) the autoptr exists, (c) how to use a typedef, and (d) how to overload the new operator.
C++ does not have memory management because it lacks garbage collection of some sort.
C++ lacks built-in GC. It doesn't lack GC. If you want GC, it exists for C++. There are lots of providers of C++ GC. The reason why GC didn't make it into the C++ standard is twofold.
- There is no optimal GC algorithm. Java is a garbage-collected language, but the specification doesn't say how the GC must be implemented. The ISO committee didn't have the Sun cop-out of saying "well, it must be done, but we don't care how it's done or how efficiently it's done". The C++ committee simply felt there was no single GC approach which would result in an engineering win for the vast majority of code. I think the committee was probably right.
- It violates the C++ Maxim. The fundamental maxim of C++ is, ``you don't pay for what you don't use.'' Every C-superset feature of C++ is optional. If you restrict yourself to the C90 subset of the C++ spec, your code will have the performance of C. Adding GC to C would violate this maxim. Hence, no GC in C++.
... Bjarne Stroustrup has publically said that when the C++ standard is revised, beginning in 2003, he thoroughly expects GC to become part of the standard... but even when GC is included in the C++ standard, GC will be optional, due to the above two reasons.C++ has a rudimentary but surprisingly effective memory management tool called the autoptr (or auto_ptr, depending on who's talking). It's essentially a thin class wrapped around a pointer. When the class goes out of scope, the autoptr destructor is called. It deletes the pointer contained within the class, thus returning whatever was pointed at to the memory pool. It ensures proper object destruction, etc., etc.
If you don't know about the autoptr, then maybe you'd better not make statements about C++'s lack of memory management assistance.
I've used the autoptr a fair bit, and it's a surprisingly handy and low-overhead way of solving a lot of dangling-pointer errors.
One time, I was attempting to install OpenSSH on a RH box I was adminning. to put on OpenSSH, I needed OpenSSL.
Funny, "./configure && make && make install" works fine for me on a RH box. Go figure.
To install RPM V.5, I needed to replace half my packages.
See above. If upgrading via RPM is too dependency-ridden, compile from source. You're an admin. Be an admin, not somebody who insists on having everything prepackaged in a format a deaf-blind rhesus monkey with a drinking problem could use.
To install OpenSSL, I needed to get RPM v.5 (4 was installed)
You know, I'd take this anecdote of yours more seriously if RPM 5.x even existed (which it doesn't).
[rjhansen@numbers rjhansen]$ rpm --version
RPM version 4.0.3
That's on a RH 7.2 box. If you've got RPM 5.x, I'd love to know where you picked it up.
You've been a UNIX admin for twelve years and it still takes you time to get Linux up and running?
Buddy, ever since Red Hat 6.0, I have yet to see any piece of reasonable hardware (i.e., hardware you might reasonably see in a consumer box) fail to be autodetected. X could still be a pain in the 6.x series, but in 7.2 configuring it was sweet and simple.
If you've been a UNIX admin for twelve years, and it takes you a week to get your network card, sound and video configured properly, you're either using an Yggdrasil CDROM from '95 or else your sound card consists of a telephone transceiver soldered into LPT1 and controlled via smoke signals.
energy as afaik from what I understand even has gravitational effects
:)
:(
:)
It does. Spacetime is warped by energy just as much as by mass. That doesn't mean the two are the same thing; they're not. To put it in a C idiom, there's an equivalence which can be drawn between a char* and a char[] , but pop onto comp.lang.c and try and say "arrays and pointers are the same". You'll get mocked.
Theres still E as you say but its just how its applied that differs
No. Read a college physics textbook. It's not "how it's applied that differs". The math must always, always, always be consistent; if the math's not consistent, it's not science. Saying that "well, it's not really negative" makes the numbers inconsistent. That negative sign in front doesn't mean "in a different direction". It means "-1 times the quantity".
If something goes three feet forwards and then three feet back, it's fair to say "it goes three feet forwards and then three feet backwards". It goes the quantity of three, the measurement unit of feet, and a direction. But it is equally fair to say "it goes positive three feet and then another negative three feet".
What's the difference? In the first, you're assigning real absolute distances along different vectors. In the second, you're assigning real nonabsolute values along a single vector. Minimizing coordinate system abuse is something physicists really like to do, because it makes their lives easier. So it's not a matter of "negative distances, negative energies, etc., are just a notational convenience". It's all about coordinate systems, and within that coordinate system, those are real negative values. They aren't pretenders. They aren't poseurs.
It is fascinating all this stuff. I wish I had kept it up, but I'm crap at maths
I mean no offense here, but I can tell.
Pretty much without exception, every time we've correctly assessed what the rules of the cosmos are, we've found that everything permitted by mathematics within those rules happens. When Einstein was formulating relativity, he dismissed black holes as an illusion of the mathematics. Well, turns out those illusions are likely pretty darn real. The same happened in the birth of quantum mechanics--things that were believed to be nonsensical artifacts of the mathematical process turned out to be astonishingly real.
It is a critical mistake to dismiss negative quantities as "artifacts" (which is what you're doing) because it contradicts our intuition about the cosmos. All of us have an intuition about the cosmos, and this intuition is usually plumb wrong.
For thousands of years, we had only rational numbers. Everyone knew that all numbers were defined as integers or integer fractions of other integers. Anything else was inconceivable.
For thousands of years, we had no transcendental numbers. Numbers which aren't merely irrational, but add all sorts of weirdness on top of it? Don't be absurd.
For thousands of years we had no number zero. After all, how could you have a number to denote something that wasn't there?
We had no negative numbers. You could conceive of ten apples, five apples--heck, you could even conceive of no apples. But negative numbers were nonsensical, right?
We had no imaginary numbers. The square root of a negative number? Don't be absurd. Of course, you're using imaginary numbers right now--they're used in AC circuits, like the wall outlet powering your PC.
We had no complex numbers. How could you add an imaginary to a real?
We had no Hamiltonians (quaternions). Oh, man, don't even get me started on quaternion theory; it's beautiful and deranged all at once.
... Do you see what I'm getting at here? You're saying that "well, the negative value is just an illusion we can handwave away--all distances, all energies, all masses, etc., are absolute values, and the plus or minus sign is just an indicator of direction." It doesn't work that way. When people insist that it must work that way, it usually shows someone who's not very comfortable with mathematics or the notion that the universe might be a lot stranger than they give it credit for.
My apologies; I thought you were arguing that negative energy cannot exist, which is what I was taking exception with. :)
... because although its observable behaviour would be opposite, the effects on spacetime curvature would be exactly the same as positive mass
:)
:) Keep in mind that it's a first approximation meant to illustrate the point, nothing more.
So therefore it is always some positive value somewhere in the system right?
Not necessarily. The system is allowed to be at a zero-energy state. A lot of people believe that, from whatever point within the cosmos that you observe the cosmos, the net energy of the cosmos is zero. I'm not certain I buy this, but not because the idea is bad--just because I haven't seen evidence to directly suggest this.
My arguement is that "negative" energy, as you put it, would have the same effect within the universe as positive "energy"
You seem to be conflating mass and energy here. An equivalency exists between the two, but they're not strictly speaking identical to each other. A photon, for instance, has no mass--but due to its energy level, it can be treated as if it possessed mass. Discussing this more would quickly get extremely arcane, but a good astrophysics text should explain it much better than I can.
First, in many instances you're right. Whenever you see an energy-squared term, the cosmos doesn't care whether the sign is negative or positive--the squaring means the result is always positive.
But that doesn't mean in all instances you're right. As a very quick and primitive example, look at E = mc**2. Let's say you're watching a spacecraft zoom by at relativistic speeds. Its energy content is equal to its mass times the square of c.
Now let's say you slow down that spacecraft somehow. You reduce its kinetic energy content by applying an acceleration opposite to its direction. You're diminishing the energy--or, not to be too mathematical about it, applying negative energy to the system. You apply so much energy that you bring the spacecraft to a crashing halt. Before, it had E energy, and now you've applied -E energy.
Well, how do you get -E energy? -m times c**2, of course. So as you apply negative energy, you also confer a negative mass... so as the spacecraft slows down, its relativistic mass vanishes (negative mass applied) and it returns to its conventional rest mass.
Professional physicists will undoubtedly want to crucify me for this example.
Short version: negative energy levels are known to exist. Negative masses are necessary in order to make some of the equasions work out properly, but we don't know whether (a) negative masses can exist on their own, or (b) whether it's just an illusion created by the mathematics we use to describe the system.
As an illustration of (b), imagine a square-shaped yard that's a hundred square meters. How long is each side? Well, ten meters, of course. But the square root also means negative ten meters would give us the same answer. In this instance, the negative result is discarded as an illusion of the mathematics. The same basic principle might apply to negative mass--necessary to make equasions work, but doesn't really exist.
I suspect the answer is (b), but I'm not willing to make any wagers on it. The cosmos can be a really weird place.
-60v is not a measurement of the energy in the system, its a measure of the direction of the flow of energy in the system.
Well, actually, it's an assessment of electromotive force, not energy. The salient fact is that it is a relative measurement, not an absolute measurement. Energy is a relative state, not an absolute one, and as such, negative energies make every bit as much sense as positive ones. Tell me, if someone throws a baseball while traveling on a spacecraft moving at a relativistic speed, how much energy is involved? Answer: it depends on your frame of reference.
In one frame of reference, you can very easily have negative energies. In another frame of reference, that same negative may be a positive. Negative energy is not a problem except if your mind is too brittle to accept different frames of reference, some of them leading to things you may find paradoxical.
Insofar as mass being determined by momentum, you set up a really nasty circular argument. What's mass? Something with momentum. What's momentum? Mass times velocity. You can't have it both ways--you can't define something with a trait derived from your definition.
You can have negative energy. It's just numbers. For instance, it takes energy to split water apart into hydrogen and oxygen, and energy is liberated when hydrogen and oxygen combine to form water. In one direction, say it takes ten joules of energy to do something... reversed, it takes negative ten joules of energy to do something. I.e., you get energy back.
This is real Physics I stuff here. It's not rocket science.
And yes, it does have bearing on QMech. Frankly, we don't know what causes mass at all. We think it has something to do with an exotic energy field. That field has solutions for negative mass, just like positive mass.
That doesn't mean negative masses exist.
That does mean that our current understanding of QMech explicitly permits it.
Sure it can. What, can an electromotive force of -60V not exist? Sure it can. It's at -60 relative to ground. Exact same thing with energy. Energy measurements are not absolute; they always measure in comparison to something. It's a coordinate system like any other.
Yes, it does help to understand what you're measuring before you do your calculations. It also helps to take quantum mechanics in college, where you have a very stark choice: you can totally disregard everything your intuition tells you about the cosmos and start over from scratch, with a clean slate and willing to believe things which are totally impossible except for the fact that the numbers work... or else you can fail the class.
If the numbers work, it's permitted. If the numbers don't work, it's verboten. Not everything that's permitted will turn out to be true, of course.
But everything that's permitted is certainly worth thinking about.
And why can't negative energy exist? Remember, these are all numerical values. That's all they are. Look at the rest mass of some of the subatomic particles, which have imaginary rest mass (their measured mass-squared is a negative number). If we've already measured imaginary mass, who are you to say negative mass is impossible, or even implausible? :)
Sure, negative mass implies negative energy. This is well-known. That's why, theoretically speaking, negative mass could be generated at arbitrarily close to zero cost--just generate conventional mass along with it, you offset the energy investment required, your only loss being to thermodynamic inefficiency in your equipment. (Note that we have no idea how to do this, not even a theoretical basis for how to do it. That doesn't mean it's silly to think about the possibilities.)
Insofar as what negative mass would mean in terms of spacetime curvature, that's another very interesting question which has very interesting, but nonintuitive, answers. Self-consistent with the rest of the cosmos, mind you.
I'm not saying that negative mass exists. I'm not saying we'll ever find it. I'm saying that the cosmos is absolutely not required to be in accordance with your, mine, or anyone else's, suspicions about how it ought to operate, and that it pays to keep an open mind to the possibilities.
If we've already measured imaginary mass, then I think trying to say "no, no, negative mass is impossible" is being a little presumptuous, since I'd imagine the square root of negative mass is even more counterintuitive than negative mass itself.
No, but if you plug in a negative value for M, the cosmos doesn't turn into a pumpkin. Yes, you can get negative results in any of dozens of ways--but one of the ways the cosmos seems prepared to accept is to put in a negative mass.
I'm unaware of any principle of physics which says that mass must always be positive. Look at either Newton's or Einstein's laws of motion, for instance--in F=ma, you can plug in negative numbers for mass just as easily as positive numbers. You get answers which are self-consistent (if sometimes counterintuitive) and which maintain the beauty of the mathematical system. These are tantalizing hints--and that's all they are, hints--that negative mass is permitted by the universe.
:)
We have no idea how to make it, but we know what it would look like, how it would interact with positive mass, and how forces would act upon it.
The Constitution protects citizens against unreasonable and unwarranted search and seizure by the government. In other words, if the government wants to conduct a reasonable search of your person, papers and effects (for instance, the cop's arrested you with good cause and is frisking you), that's okay. If the government wants to come by your house and take off all the exterior siding while looking for drugs, they're going to need a warrant.
And if you sign a contract with Borland and give them permission to search your house anytime you like, nothing in the Constitution will protect you from your own stupidity.
- PGP on Windows XP. PGPtray works, PGP for Outlook XP is dodgy, PGPdisk is broken and PGPnet will hork your system. At least, those are the reports on alt.security.pgp.
- NAI is walking away from PGP. This is a Good Thing, believe it or not. Or, at the very least, not a Bad Thing. PGP has always existed in two different components with totally different agendas:
- The community's agenda is to enhance individual liberties and ensure electronic privacy.
- The corporation's agenda is to turn a profit.
- The community is alive and well. There are a lot of individuals who are interested (and some who are genuinely obsessed!) with the notion of personal privacy and personal liberties. The GNU Privacy Guard crowd is part of this community--so what if their initials are GPG instead of PGP? So are the remailers, mixmasters and everyone else.
- NAI is dying. Due to the fact that I'm a former NAI employee, I'm not going to say more than that--except to recognize that Network Associates has a long history of buying great software companies and failing to capitalize on them. (Check out the San Jose Mercury-News from February 2001 for some brilliant examples.)
- Summary: the community is alive and kicking. GPG keeps getting better and better--at 500k, it's slim enough to fit on a floppy, it supports RFC2440 and RFC2440bis, and has good integration with almost all UNIX mailers. The WinPT and GPGshell programs give friendly Win32 front-ends (but both still need a lot of work).
... Don't panic. Unlike the Monty Python parrot sketch, PGP really is just resting.... It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that those two agendas are not exactly in sync with each other.
Two psychologists independently discovered autism in the 1940s; Kanner and Asperger. Kanner wrote in English, Asperger wrote in German. That's why American psychologists always use autism to mean Kanner's Autism; it's marked by extreme social withdrawal, usually occurs with mental retardation, etc.
:)
The other side of the autistic spectrum is Asperger's Autism, aka Asperger's Syndrome, aka Very High Functioning Autism, aka Pervasive Developmental Disorder--Not Otherwise Specified, etc.
Asperger's research into autism was well-known in continental Europe, but unknown in English-speaking places, until Lorna Wing translated Asperger's original works and brought him to the attention of the English-speaking psychological community. In America, there's a lot of debate as to whether or not Asperger's is a form of autism--the current belief is yes, but it's still being worked out. In the UK and Europe, there's very little debate about it; most psychologists believe that yes, it is.
I have Asperger's, incidentally, so I try to keep abreast of the latest developments in the field.
Check out OASIS, at University of Delaware, for more information regarding Asperger's Syndrome.
The weakness does allow (relatively) cheap generation of data which creates duplicate MD5sums.
Yep--and cryptanalytic attacks only get better over time. While Dobbertin's attack does not directly lend itself towards generating arbitrary messages which hash out to a specific result, I'd expect that to be the next bastion to fall. Once the compression function goes, everything else soon follows.
You'd be much better off by simply writing functionally-equivalent viruses (obviously, this could be automated) and then MD5summing them.
That's simple brute force, and is usually the absolute worst way to attack a system. The best way, IMO, would be to refine Dobbertin's attack, find a general break of MD5, and go from there. I may be off my rocker here, but I feel pretty safe in saying that would be several orders of magnitude faster than brute force.
Dobbertin created collisions in the compression function.
The security of an iterative hash algorithm can be no greater than the security of its compression function.
This means that if you can create collisions in the compression function, then you can create collisions in the hash.
Dobbertin did not extend his attack to the full MD5 algorithm, and nobody knows quite why--maybe RSADSI asked him not to, or maybe Dobbertin wanted to give people a few years to migrate from MD5 to SHA-1 before he applied his attack to the full MD5 algorithm.
RSADSI is correct to say that Dobbertin did not break the full MD5 algorithm. But don't think that doesn't mean Dobbertin didn't break MD5 in half. By analogy, imagine a locked door. Someone comes along, picks the lock, and demonstrates that yes, the doorknob turns freely and the bolt turns. The lock manufacturer (RSADSI) says, "well, yes, Dobbertin did expose some weaknesses in the lock, but he didn't open the door."
RSADSI, by the way, nowadays recommends the use of SHA-1 as a hash algorithm instead of MD5. Given that MD5 is the brainchild of one of RSADSI's founders, I think that says worlds.
- The security of an iterative hash algorithm cannot be any better than that of its compression function. (Source: Menezes, Van Oorschot and Vanstone, Handbook of Applied Cryptography)
- MD5 is an iterative hash function. (Source: Schneier, Applied Cryptography Second Edition; also, Menezes)
- Collisions can be generated in MD5's hash algorithm (Dobbertin, 1996).
- Dobbertin's compression-function collision algorithm executes in just a few hours on a 586 (Dobbertin, 1996).
- Therefore, collisions in the full MD5 algorithm can be generated in the same time or less. (This is known to be true as a logical consequence of what's already been proven; if anyone has actually used Dobbertin's attack on the full algorithm, they've kept quiet about it.)
... Next time, before you quote Applied Cryptography, you might want to ask a cryptographer what the latest research in the field is.I'm posting this from a laptop right now that's running Sawfish, GNOME, Nautilus, Galeon, etc. And is also using a Winmodem.
`top' tells me my system is 97.2% idle.
The "CPU suck factor" of Winmodems has been grossly exaggerated.
I'm writing this post using a Toshiba Satellite 1715XCDS laptop, with a built-in Lucent Winmodem. Yes, the modem works under Linux. The only mod to the laptop is an extra 64M of RAM (thanks, Dave), bringing it up to 128M. The CPU is a Celeron-600, if I recall correctly, so if the Winmodem takes up "around 40 MHz of a Pentium-class CPU", we'd expect to see about a 0.8% performance hit.
The Linux install is RH 7.2; I'm in X right now, running Sawfish, GNOME 1.4 and Nautilus. On top of that, I just closed out some KDE apps (I prefer KMail over Balsa), so there are probably still some KDE things running--the DCOP server, etc. Galeon, Pan, gnome-terminal and a Python program (a small MUD client I hacked together with PyGNOME) are all running.
11:39pm up 3:26, 1 user, load average: 0.12, 0.08, 0.07
71 processes: 69 sleeping, 2 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU states: 1.5% user, 1.1% system, 0.0% nice, 97.2% idle
Mem: 126644K av, 123836K used, 2808K free, 1828K shrd, 3692K buff
Swap: 136512K av, 41484K used, 95028K free 29188K cached
... I don't see the performance hit, myself. If the Winmodem was just "sucking up" CPU cycles, I wouldn't expect to see my PC 97% idle.
Any trinary machine can mimic a binary machine simply by getting rid of one of its states. So if we switch to ternary, the first ports of crypto libraries will just be binary libraries running on ternary machines.
Second, separate theory from implementation, please. Very few areas of information theory and cryptography are dependent on base-2. That'd be counter to the entire point of math, which is to think abstractly enough that the principles apply to any base. Your statement is sort of like saying "moving from base 10 to base 16 is hard, since we learn arithmetic in base 10 and we'd have to relearn all our arithmetic". It's just not the case. A + B = B + A, no matter what base you use. And likewise, the integer factorization problem and the discrete logarithm problem are damn hard no matter what base you use.
Implementations are highly dependent on binary systems, yeah--but that's only because we only have binary computers right now. As soon as someone comes up with a ternary computer, rest assured, Blowfish and 3DES and RSA and El Gamal and AES and all sorts of crypto goodness will be running on it in no time flat.
Think about this one for a moment. Computers are Turing machines. We write in Turing-complete languages.
But there's nothing in the definition of a Turing machine which requires that it be binary, trinary, or base radical two. The Turing machine doesn't care.
In a uniprocessor system the lack of reentrant kernel threads allows applications to control processor time. This cooperative multitasking is ineffecient, and systems intensive.
:)
Linux has never had cooperative multitasking. Never. Ever. It has always been preemptively multitasking. This one sentence alone shows that either you're wording things in a manner so tragically incorrect it's comedic, or else you simply don't know beans.
Another serious setback for Linux is the lack of a journalling file system. This makes data storage unreliable, and backup and recovery a dicey proposition. SGI said they would port the IRIX file system to Linux, but I haven't heard anything about this yet.
ReiserFS. Ext3. IBM's JFS. SGI's XFS, as found on Irix. Do I need to go on?
I would refute your post in depth and at length, but at this point I'm certain you're either totally uninformed or else trolling. Have a nice day.
Nearly all of the examples, I believe, involve insurgent forces supplied by an outside power during the conflict. I'm tired of hearing how wonderful, for example, the Mujahedeen were at resisting the Soviets without anyone commenting how they got their behinds kicked for the first few years, until the US supplied them with Stinger missiles.
... a capability the Afghans would not have had on their own.
No, most of those examples are insurgent forces fighting as insurgents. What the Soviets feared weren't Stinger missiles--it was fanatical mujahedeen with AK-47s who could fit in effortlessly into the background. Mujahedeen who, on more than one occasion, skinned Soviet troops alive, within earshot of Soviet camps, just to demoralize the defenders within.
The Viet Cong were, in fact, supplied by an outside agency... namely, the US Army. That one actually works against you.
FARC are supplied by an internal agency... namely, the Colombian Army (from whom they steal equipment) and the narcosyndicates (likewise).
The Zulus overwhelmed the British with spears. Think about that one for a moment.
It was not rifle fire that brought down the Soviets. It was the ability of the Stingers to deprive them of air transport
Oh, please. Read up on Afghanistan. Why do you think nobody in their right mind wants to fight there? It's not because of air resupply difficulties. It has to do with Afghani insurgents who think it's fun to skin invaders alive, just so their screams can demoralize their friends who are safe inside their perimeter. The last time the British tried to invade Afghanistan, the Afghanis were stuck in a medieval level of technology and they still annihilated all but one single soldier.
It's quite clear the Viet Cong didn't beat "the US Army". They beat the fraction of the Army that was deployed to fight them, most of the military being constrained politically and physically by the rest of the world situation
<yawn> Let me get this straight. We beat "the fraction of the Japanese Imperial Army that was deployed to fight us in the Pacific, most of the military being constrained politically and physically by the rest of the world situation to keep already-won territories in China, Korea and Southeast Asia"? Armies are always limited by political and military reality. You're arguing the trivial here, and nothing nontrivial follows from a triviality.
In the fevered apocalyptic world in which the evil US Army is resisted by a band of freedom-loving ordinary citzens, we're no longer talking about a politically constrained Army.
Never read up on the Civil War, did you? When the "evil Union army [was] resisted by a band of freedom-loving ordinary citizens" (as the Confederate armies overwhelmingly were), the Union army still had enormous political constraints--and a lot of the soldiers didn't like the idea of fighting their own countrymen very much, either.
The ordinary citizens would be facing the full might of the Army.
Two point five million soldiers versus a nation with over one hundred fifty million armed citizens. Hmmm... my magic eight-ball says, Outlook Not Good.
Ask the militiamen from a few years back how successful their plan of armed resistance was.
It failed because, for all its warts and foibles, the United States Government is still in power at the sufferance of the people. One or two half-baked cranks with guns is a hell of a lot different from a popular uprising encompassing millions of people with guns.
I would be willing to bet that, when passing a tax package, not a single Representative says, "Oh, wait. What if my constituents take to the hills as partisans?"
Ask Teddy Kennedy if he thinks there are people out there who are willing to kill him if he passes a law which they disagree with. I seem to recall a couple of his brothers winding up on the losing side of extremely one-sided arguments.
I'm not condoning political assassination, by the by. It's deplorable. But you live in an astonishingly naieve dream world. If a politician does something unpopular enough, that politician stands a pretty good chance of not living long enough to see a re-election bid. That is why, by and large, politicians go to such extreme lengths to make sure people like them.
... Apparently, someone forgot to tell the Viet Cong that they didn't stand a chance, because the US Army had much better weapons and they could just steamroll over the VC effortlessly.
Let's look at history here, shall we?
- Great Britain versus the Zulus at Isandhlwana. Score: Zulus 1, GB 0
- The Soviet Union versus the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan. Score: Mujahedeen 1, Soviet Union 0.
- Colombia versus FARC in the Andes. Score: FARC 1, Colombia 1, at Halftime.
- The French Foreign Legion versus Ho Chi Minh at Dienbienphu. Score: Uncle Ho 1, Legion Etranger 0
- (Doubleheader) The US Army versus Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, immediately after FFL/Ho Chi Minh. Score: Uncle Ho 1, Uncle Sam 0
... do I really need to go on about how historically shortsighted your post is?Anarchy does mean ``you can do whatever you want''. Look it up in the dictionary; anarchy means the utter absence of law and government. Without any sort of law or government, each individual gets to do whatever the hell they want, limited only by the activities of those stronger than them to do whatever the hell they want.
If anarchy merely meant ``acceptable behavior is determined by those around you'', then democratic governments would be anarchy, since the people around you are the ones who determine the laws, which are the people's method of establishing the boundaries of acceptable and unacceptable behavior.
Anarchy means there is no law. There is no government. Anarchy means rule by the mob, and if you happen to get steamrollered by the mob, too bad--you have no recourse and the mob has no repercussions.
If you want to see what your anarchic government looks like in practice, I would suggest looking at Somalia--Mogadishu in particular.
If software were truely free, you'd be able to do what you wanted and not have to do a damn thing in return. This SHOULD include being able to do what ever you want with the source, including selling a hacked up commercial version without opening your source if you don't want to.
Hmm. Let's try rewriting that as,
If America was truely free, you'd be able to do what you wanted and not have to do a damn thing in return. This SHOULD include being able to do what ever you want with your life, including selling children into preschool prostitution rings if you want to.
Freedom does not mean ``you can do whatever the hell you want''. That's called anarchy, and while some people would call anarchy perfect freedom, I don't--I call it a damn dangerous place to live. Freedom carries with it responsibilities, the foremost of which is not to infringe upon other people's equal freedoms. My freedom of speech carries with it the responsibility not to use my speech to limit your freedom of speech.
Free Software, in the FSF's view, needs to carry with it the responsibility that it not be used to deny other people software freedoms.
Don't like it? Hey, that's fine--not as if you needed anyone's permission to not like it. But please don't call it unreasonable simply because inherent in the GPL is the notion that you must not deny these freedoms to anybody else.