OK, so an evil webmister makes a pop-under containing this kind of code and puts it up when you visit his porn site (optionally by mistyping "google" in your address bar.)
Heck, (google|SlashDot|your legitimate business) just has a tiny inset on their page: "This box is using your spare CPU cycles to help us pay for this site or service. Subscribers do not see this box. Click here to subscribe."
It could work.
In the popunder case it is vile and abusive. In the legitimite and well advertised case it is totally fair.
Almost to the day that Carter (or was it Ragan?) signed the death-knell of the US Fission Power program a (french?) woman over at Fermi Labs figured a way to really make breeder reactors pay.
My (Lay) understanding was that the new process was sufficently good enough that it might have been worthwile to load up a good bit of the existing nuclear waste into fuel rods and put it back into reactors.
Whatever the process details (which I am inssficent to the task of detailing here to any credible degree) I have been led to beleive they were a cycle evolutionary improvement.
My source is my father (a navy nuke from all the way back on the Enterprise commissioning) and my roommates brother (classified work in NM, if you get me 8-) but I am just the parrot here... 8-)
Added bonuses:
-- It'll never get put in to practice now because it is euphimistically called "the French process" and our current crop of idiots don't like the word "French" for totally inapproprate reasons.
-- When the US Nuke program was stopped in this country it was already an "old man's field", most of our US expertise has died off (or at least irretreivably retired) so it is *almost* too late for us to start up again without having to export the job to a forign firm like any other third-world(*) country.
(*) IMHO the U.S. is doing a great job of positioning itself as the "third world country of the new millennium". We shut off our nuclear program, underfund all our non-petrochem energy research, ship our IT jobs overseas, ship our Factory Jobs overseas, contrive to make it cheaper to make movies in other countries, issue patents for things like "hyperlinks" and "shipping boxes (in certian orders)". Then we loan countries money and then try to force them into default using anti-competitive economic forces. We borrow money from other countries and then do our damndist to piss them off. Meanwhile our educational system is so bad that fully-grown senators (nearly) get elected on the "race war now" platform; and most of our highschool graduates can't tell you if the U.S. or Japan came out ahead in the last war we had with them...
Come to think of it, on that last one I am not so sure who really came out on top myself...
Seriously people. You actually *DONT* need to represent times (rememberdates are large times) before the epoch. At least not in the scope of the time_t data type.
The scope of the project and standard in quesiton is represent "now" (the current time) and to place, track, and manipulate time signatures for operating-sytem level events. You know, things like "date file created" and "date file last modified" and so forth.
The time_t type exists to let directory updates and newer-than/older-than comparasons happen in "very small, linear time" so that it is cost effective to, say, search a directory in chronological order or see if an object file needs to be recompiled.
Go see how porly these functions work using windows networking accross a slow link and you will get an inkling about why this speed vs limit tradeoff is important.
There is no rational need to represent a "now" of such historical scope WITH RESPECT TO AN OPERATING SYSTEM DATA.
Yes, some idiot programmers out there are using this time_t datum in "very bad" contexts. Databases of historical fact that are expected to contain items predating the epoc (birth registries, deed and title search databases, publishing databases, and so on) ARE *completely* unsuited for, and outside the intent of, the time_t "quanta past epoch" representation for dates and times.
Saying time_t is bad for historical dates is "exactly" as valid as mentionting that ASCII is not a good character set for representing hyroglyphs. The word "duh" comes to mind.
In "real data" (as opposed to OS event/contemporary transient data) there are actually two types of "time" the ordinal (spesific date and time) and the inerval (a measure of duration). An actual data storage system (database) needs to have an internal abstraction for storing and "doing math (uniformly) over" and "indexing across" those two abstractions.
(methinks) Someone has a little something stuck in his craw.
Could there possibly be a reason for an offtopic mod? Lets see:
-- Article/thread about an article about the linux scheduler.
-- Respondent asks a technical support question having nothing to do with the article referenced or the scheduler in general.
-- Respondent gets moded down for jumping off topic because this isn't a Linux support forum nor is it generally an audience who would want it to *become* a support forum.
-- Someone who doesn't like to see a lot of the linux-centricisim in the forum *complains* BECAUSE others who don't want to read a technical support thread mod the offtopic post... "offtopic."
===
As a side note, you rigorous thinker you, a question or comment in the range of "I don't know why" ("this pause here with that message there confuses me", et. al.) indicates that the user wants information about his system and is not prima facia evidence that there is something "making Linux look bad" in any meaningful sense.
Consider: Sort of like saying that a single customer asking "what are the ingreedents of the 'special sauce', cause it feels oily?" must automatically make McDonalds "look bad" for filling the oily sauce role with an oily sauce not understood by a single questioner.
If you took the time to gather one single iota of information you would know that the message he doesn't like is in the startup sequence and happens only once (per boot) and lasts a couple of seconds at most.
If, on the other hand, he even vaguely intimated that the message lasted X seconds and was repeated every N seconds, then there would be some "looking bad" to be had here. If he could *FURTHER* even remotely tie this to the scheduler then the post would suddnely not be "offtopic".
Shame none of that happened. Which kind of leaves you wearing the inflatable rubber ducky on the subway there dude. You probably shoud stop yelling about the rising watter too. (IF you can follow a cultural metaphore there dude. 8-)
====
Point of (bonus) fact, there wasn't enough information in the question to even address an answer. Even so, (and without even checking), if the initrd (etc) system is compiled in there but the user isn't using initrd then he should compile the kernel without this bit. If he *IS* using the initrd image then it is kind of normal that the unpacking and mounting of the initrd image would cause a pause at that point because the kernel is working on something that everything else has to wait for.
So, nothing to see here folks, conspiracy theorist presenting tinfoil-hat theory about an demonstrably offtopic post getting modded down for being demostrably off topic. These arn't the droids your looking for. Move along... 8-)
My father (now disceased) was a Nuclear and Electrical Engineer, a Lawyer, a pilot (and a bunch of other things) but he had allowed a single presentation by a single person convince him that "The depletion of the ozone layer was not a concern because there was 'good evidence' that the ozone layer 'might have been created by the industrial revolution.'"
Whaaa?
I know! It is incredible! It seems impossible. A rational and educated man latching onto an odd tidbit of spin and then using that to skew an entire world view. I spent several years carefully and gently trying to probe to the heart of this oddity and there were all sorts of things revealed. One of the interesting bits was that in his youth people actually beleived that when you dumped an industrial efluvent into a stream, and then didn't see it a mile downstream, that nature had taken care of the problem.
This concept of reality is so close to contemporary that it it is scary, and people tend to forget. Look up the invetion of the smoke stack sometime. Consider the first smokestack legislation came to this country in the late 1930's
So anyway, what is my point...?
See, lots of people believe that research and science is about piling up evidence and looking for answers. In tis lesser form this is empiricism, in the greater form (get answers from having "all truth") it is gestaltism. The problem is that when you start piling up facts and then pawing through them your own biasis become the prime consideration. You find and see those shapes that best match up with your existing brain. That, unfortunately, includes your biases.
The "scientific method" that they pushed on you in school was created, and it lauded, because it *DIRECTLY* OPPOSES the skew that empiricism naturally carries with it. See, science *starts* with a tiny bit of empiricisim because a scientist piles up his facts and his experiences and looks for a pattern, but that is the pre-science, having done his pre-science he then engages in the incredibly simple sequence we know of as "science".
1) Take your opinion and carve it down to the simplist and most direct statement you can. (The "hypothesis") These are simple things like "glass is unbreakable".
2) Figure out what it would take to make you a Liar. That is, think up ways that the statement of step one could be disproved. These ways can be little actions (experiments) like "throw rock at glass at least this-hard" "shoot glass with gun" etc. They can also be more collective "look for any record of persons having broken glass" and so forth. Some evidence *may* be discarded if you can show that it wasn't credible or wasn't well structured ("in the Bob's glass-works experiment the rock was thrown at random and never actually struck the glass, so its assertion that the 'glass never broke in a thousand throws' is bull, as there were zero hits").
3) If any avenue in step two shows your step one to be wrong, go back to step one and see if you can make a new statement that could survive step 2. e.g. "glass is unbreakable" becomes "*this* glass is unbreakable" becomes "this glass will not break for forces up to this range".
If you get through step 2, having done your best to disprove item 1, then you have a "good scientific idea" that your statement is true.
So... what is wrong with the book? How can it be chock full of facts and footnotes but still be condemned by as bad science?
Well the book is aparently full of all this empirical information, but there is no sign of the effort to complete step 2. A well written *SCIENTIFIC* book would have a short section at the front filled with "enough" empirical stuff to validate that the question was worth asking. Then it would proceed on with a section by section attempt to show what it would take to disprove the empirical idea, demonstrate that the data or experiments took place, and that all the credible results failed to disprove the idea.
We know that the wheel of time is not/will not be broken because the past-tense nature of the narrative. (Consider the opening of each book, and the expression that each cycle shifts the outcome of each cycle just nudges the next cycle a little more to one side or the other. [all of this is established cannon.]) The dark one needs to break the wheel of time to escape back to the realm of the creator (or some such), and tries every round. To some extent the entrity of the purpose of the wheel is to imprision the dark one.
Doesn't mean he actually can nor ever will. The *creator* couldn't kill the dark one, how could Rand.
===
As for the other, they shoudl be able to *make* or *steal* the angreal and sa'angreal. Nobody alive should be competent to stand against them. Hell, the Black Aja could, and rightfully should given their access in the tower and their apparent numbers, plunder the place dry overnight. Since the one power and the true power are (essentially) invisible to one another there is NO EXCUSE for the forsaken to not have all the tools and power they want.
That is why I feel these characters are so Sindely Wiplash. They don't just quash their enemies, they dont wield compulsion (except the one who makes sex-toys out of people) they don't really leverage traveling or gate-making even though they all clearly know how to do it.
They just tie the damsel to the raliroad tracks and then ride away before the train is even in the neighborhood.
It makes for intracately wroght but still incompetent villans. And badly executed villans just cannot maintian their apeal.
(IMHO of course) The wheel of time books are getting slower and more tedious because Jordan wrote himself into a corner...
Reconcile the following:
1) The dark-one's prison must not be patched, it must be made whole again to the degree that it was never breached.
2) The only thing that can undo things and unmake things is Balefire.
3) When you Balefire something the timeline is rewound and replayed with the event removed.
So... Rand has to balefire the forsaken "hard enough" to unmake them far enough that the dark-one's prison was never opened (or possibly even never found).
Unfortunately, that would then prevent the breaking of the world and the third age would never have taken place.
This is a very unhappy Star Trek version of time paradox that leads to the "story that never happened". The way things are laid out now the story can not conclude.
The story is fixable, of course, if several things happen:
1) "The bore" is altered so that it is no-longer a hole cut into the dark-one's prison, but instead a tunnel around the structure of reality (sort of voice-over-IP style magical conduit) so that the dark ones prison was never actually breached. All of the references to the breach are simply declared deleberately apocryphal "because the forsaken were not so stupid as to tell anybody how they *really* accessed the dark one and his power."
2) A blanket means of cleaning up old enchantments needs to be introduced. Sort of a Bale-washing-up-fluid that can snuff out anything from sa-angrel to that golem thingy that can only be harmed by anti-magic. The diswater-of-fate then needs to be sudzed up to a nice foam and pored on the bore, the forsaken, and every piece of culendar (sp?) after it is all piled up on the dragonmount.
3) The FORSAKEN have to loose their SNIDLEY WIPLASH and his doomed dasterdly deeds flavor.
I mean seriously, the thirteen greatest mages (give or take) of the second age are unleashed on the third age with all of their lost knowledge of the "one power" and their access to the "true power" and the best thing they can come up with is sleeping their way into the bed/court of a queen?
The more detail Jordan provides on the actions and schemes of his villians, the DUMBER they look when the punk kids stumble into their plots and wreck them by apparently random action.
This is plot suicide.
At some point he has to stop digging the hole deeper and start digging a ramp out, otherwise we might as well just stop reading and start watching DragonBall-Z. It's got the same pointless escalation of power etc and you don't have to memorize a list of names...
Please people, watch your words. "The Public Domain" is a spesific thing, and the GPL does not intersect the public domain at all.
The GPL provides a means for me to release, for general use and scruteny, a body of work. The terms are spesific and governed. My rights are preserved. Your rights are explicitly enumerated. Among those, your rights, enumerated is the right to use my work to create a deritive of my work under the provision that your diritive work, IF you release it, is also released under the GPL.
The public domain is a condition of release where the creator waives (or has lost) all rights to the work and can not then place, grant, or revoke enumerated rights and responsibilities on anybody.
Consider Mickey Mouse. (yes, the Disney property.) If Mickey Mouse were released under a "open source" license, that license *might* include a "no pornography" restriction (etc) whereby Mickey could be rendered as performing any non-lude act, or any act that was, at worst, "rated PG". You know, something like "we, Disney corp, release the image, likeness, and character of Mickey Mouse for any public use or performance, provided the portryal of same is in keeping with the wholesome nature and public image of the character..." In this public license scenerio, Disney would be saying "go ahead and use him but within limits."
Mickey Mouse (et. al.) in the public domain would mean that Disney could do nothing about persons who chose to depict the furry beast swearing like a salor while mounting goofy from behind whilst they both tumble freely about amidtst and feeding upon the bloody entrails of Minny and Donald.
See... "Licence", that last word/letter of the GP_L_ inferrs restrictions and aggrements.
"Public Domain" means all bets are off, come what may, hell or high water.
As a gay man I *INSIST* that everyone stop using any word ending with or containing the two letters "ag". Similarly, the word "got", clearly having no usage except as an slang argot (and that word has to go too) for the longer word faggot.
I am embarrassed and humiliated every time anybody uses the past perfect of "to receive" because it belittles my people and our struggle to escape being steriotyped (by Churchill) as somehow entangled with the British Navy!
etc...
Besides the country of Nigeria is just damned if they do and damned if they dont.
====
PARDON MY RANT BUT...
Crimeny people, there is only one person who can hurt you with a word, and that person is you yourself.
On the contrapositive a hatefilled butthead can turn even the most common and seemingly neutral words and phrases into vile invective.
The belief that the words are, in and of themselves, to blame for the attitudes is just humanist bull. People who cannot face the fact that humans can be vile and abbusive will blame anything that comes to hand to protect their world view. You can get rid of the words and new ones will crop up to replace them one-for-one. You can get rid of the guns and knives, and the bad people will pick up sticks and stones and just keep on going.
It's not the things and its not the words. It is the willful ignorance of the pointless people. If you fight the things instead of the ignorance, you become equally pointless and equally harmful.
Just think, if every black parent could teach their child that "nigger" meant "someone who others are rightfully jealous of for being strong and black" instead of "the terrible n-word"...
oh... what's the point... people have decided to be wounded by this stuff, and that it is better to hide from the ideas so thuroughly that "master hard drive" is "offensive."
At this point I suspect that there will be that "race war" and it will, sadly, be between the people who think race really matters and those who think it doesn't.
I envision a day where the Black Panther alikes (in whatever form they end up) and the KKK (in whatever form they end up) take up arms together to assault all the people who wish both sides would go the hell away. They will be cheered on from the sidelines by Gay people who want to get married but only if they can do so using a different word than "married" because they "don't want the negative associations from thousands of years of straight married people" and the More-Native-Than-Thou (Americans|Serbians|Corats|Albainians|Arabs|etc by geographical region.)
Take the following truths to heart people:
There is ONLY ONE INSULT in all of human experience. That is when I ascribe to you a trait you do not wish to have. No matter what word I use for stupid, if you don't want to be stupid that word will become an insult.
Actual quote from a radio show: "Moron is a medical term, the morons I know are hurt greatly when they hear that used as an isult." Replace "moron" with "blort" and the statement will remain a tautology. The moment "handycapt" was coined it was an insult. Same with "special" "differently abled" etc. The ENTIRITY of the MECHANISIM is that we as a species want to be hale, whole, and healthy. (Diety forfend! That should change! Fix the word again! 8-)
Repeat for old, young, black, white, jew, arab, "disenfranchised", poor, ignorant, stupid, geek, lawyer, and any other collective noun you care to think of.
These are all steriotypes, but so is "teacher" and "doctor" and "circus peanut vendor".
Short of replacing every word for every person, place, thing, or idea with the word "Marklar" there will always be words that someone will find just too terrible.
Well Marklar every Marklar damned Marklar of those Marklars and lets get back to feeding the hungry, opposing the corrupt, protecting the weak, and servicing the needs of ourselves and those who are less fortunate.
A recovering cancer patient sneezed on several people at Memorial General's admitting desk yesterday, prompting Monsanto to sue for breach of intellectual property rights. Monsanto claims that the patient, who's name is being witheld, deliberately attempted to provide their medical virus to several incomming cancer patients who had not yet paid the licence fee.
In accordance with a ninth circuit court injunction upholding the sneeze as a DMCA "circumvention technology", the man is being held in seclusion pending a cure for the common cold.
Actually, by definiton, doesn't that depend on how they were programmed?
Imperious Leader: Number 6 serial number xxxxxx2 you will go to the surface and make sure that the target (Y) is destroyed no matter what. When your body is destroyed its consciousness will, of course, transmit itself back and be recovered and reimplanted in a new frame.
Assistant to IL: (you think she will actually buy that?)
IL: (of course, serial number xxxxx2 is programmed to beleive it...)
The "Article of faith" only has to go as far as the infultration models actively persuing suicide missions. Perhaps all the cylons know that death is death (so they will fight to survive) and the suicide troops are programmed to have memories of this happening all the time. If this wern't the case then there would have been a lot less "dodging" on the parts of the Cylons. With the immortality transmission idea as a universal, the fighter-models would be little more than flying bombs with point-defense guns. (suicide smart bombs yeild peak guidance, peak damage, peak payload, and no flinching).
Perhaps they don't know the difference (experience no difference) between the accumulation of fact and the idea of self.
Number 6 was "quite religious", being transmitted back to awaken in a new body is a (very lazy on the author's part) reincarnation myth.
Perhpas *our* Number 6 is the first of the truly aware and doesn't quite understand the difference between "having a bunch of memories" and "being that same being."
Either way, her articles of faith were a big part of her, and that Baltar was the "best" of "god" in his role as most machine-like human was a significant insight to the Cylon concepts of self.
(Whatever the authors had in mind, it is fun to speculate. 8-)
Field and Frame as in "relativity". Simple physics? provide one means for the vipers manuverability and one way to store and accelerate enough mass to achieve that manuverability that wouldnt be ejecting the mass so fast that it would compromise the landing bays (etc.)
Explain the "slow moving" debris from the "Fast moving" explosions.
Sorry, there *has* to be a "magic field" or the whole thing falls apart. That *these* magic fields more closely aproximate physics than Star Trek is an obvious given. But without them, a purely physical model crashes and burns immediately.
and before you get too knotted up about it, they demonstrably had artificial gravity which is about as field theory as it gets.
As for those things being "bullets", by the simple definition they were just that, i.e. "some sort of projectile". What sort exactly is where the fun comes in.
With "acceleration shielding" (whatever keeps people != jell-o when changing directions at those rates) (and made debris less-than-instantly-fatal) comes the need for high-tech bulletts.
These just are the rules. If your definition of "good physics" stops sharply at "didn't swoop and make noise in vaccuum" then I am wrong. If, however, you take the scenes wholisticly (e.g. pay attention to all evidence presented) then there was something happening there, and there was also something to explain about the bulletts. These were not "tracers" nor "simple slugs." Sorry, that just wont fly as shown.
1) They only have twelve models (dumb, but who says they would have understood the need for diversification if they also didn't know a babies kneck is too weak to suppor its head. We don't know what they "kenw" when they left after the first war.)
2) They are smart enough that they know humans would get suspicous if they ran into more than two of any one model.
3) At least three models are useless for infultration. (The old centurion models ["they are still around, they have their uses"] would be instantly recognized. The new centurion models, and the star-fighter models, would be instantly recognizable as "a bad thing in general" and we don't know whether the old command-caste models are around, but lets persume not...) so they have at *MOST* nine humanoid infultration drones (if they have NO OTHER specialized models (Miners, Doctors, etc.)
3a) In fact, at the end, they two-male two-female human analog(s) we see in sets has some inferance.
3b) But EVEN IF she meant that there were twelved infultration models (human-analogs) how many could you put out there before people noticed doubles. ("Hey admiral Bob, your assistant looks just like my assistant...?")
So...
-- One sleeper (Boomer) who is programmed (with a bias) to end up mixed in with any survivors so that she can do mop-up. She is going to be biased to old-tech (uninfluencable) support craft with fairly independent mission parameters. Where is she? Assigned to the ass-end of the fleet in the oldest bucket they have in commission, driving a free-roving survey and scout ship. So she is in place for good reason. It totally works.
-- One intercessor. (the red-suit guy they marooned after his "test" showed him to be Cylon.) Dispatched to the (fully armed) future museum ship *because* it *still* hadn't been brought into the defense network dispite repeated dispatches to install those systems. He had been sent there by his people to find out why the Glactica was still independent. [Maybe even to get it into the net as soon as possible, after all, he was doing the musium retrofit work.] He couldn't leave until it was in the net or the attack went off and the bull-headed human (Adama) kept vexing his efforts. So he put up the Cylon Mistery Device but never left. This also works in plot.
-- The one guy at the weapons dump was also charged with infultration of stragglers. Notice how helpful he was being and how useful his arms-dealer back-story would have been for use against virtually any kind of humans likely to find the dump. He was supposed to infultrate and track military-grade armed survivors. It would have worked if it werent for the (unknown to the Cylons) effects of the storm. When his breakdown revealed him as an infiltration unit the plan went bad. Prior to that, all you would want is *one* on the dump. One person that "happens to know" everything about all the weapons there, who would, if the arriving craft were not fully military, be able to become indispensable to the humans and end up installing the sabatoge even as he helped the super-distrustful survivors to "arm up". (There was probably one of "him", or another human analog at each of the known weapons caches. Number 6 had the access to know them all too.)
Law of small numbers combines with likely outcomes and desireable positions to let us THE ENTIRE SURVIVING POPULATION OF MAN encounter !gasp! three whole models...
And Blathar was *way too smart* to lie to Colnel Tie in the brig. So when he claimed that even the autopsy couldn't tell (hence the traces in the cremation) he would have been *REAMED* if Tie later saw a report from the doctor (really a certanty as the XO) that mentioned all this silicon...
Sy yes, they mention the "silicon pathways" WRT the storm degradign the Cylons, but wherever this silicon is, it isn't even significant enough to show up when you do the post-mortem.
One would suspect a transmitter that could transmit an entire Cylon conciousness back to their [wherever] amid a nuclear holocost would take *AT LEAST* enough forign materials and structures (say silicon) to be *noticable* in an autopsy. *AND* require enough stored energy to beat the noise floor, and that such energy storage would be scanable.
No, it would be much better if the "transmitted back" element were an "article of faith" or "preprogrammed lie for the suicide troops", or at the least that "easy to miss" nanotech were involved and that same nanotech was used to explain the trace differences in cremation, and were it further used to turn "transmitted" to "collected up when my peers find my body."
It would fix several things that make the existing structure hard to maintian in episodic fassion.
Like, why "don't even know it themselves" sleepers at all? Why not ongoing transmissions of intel? IF the transmitter can't be spotted in an autopsy it must use technology that is untracable by the humans, so why not run it all the time? If it is biologically powered then slam back a Caprican-Dew energy drink and phone home.
The "Transmitted back to a new body" feature is good for a movie but it is far too DragonBall-Z to sustain in an ongoing series.
Actually, they give that and take it away several times. (In short, they did a song-and-dance glossy Fuax [sic 8-)] News treatment.)
But indeed, you need to watch it again.
Colnel Tie delivers the "at first glance" line, to Adama, who responds with "right down to the blood."
The "blood tests" were never done in the course of the movie(s), as there was no "blood test". Balthar might (may or may not) have faked doing such tests, but it doesn't matter where Boomer was at the time. Baltar aledged (in the brig) he had analyzed the subjects *hair* (not blood) but in the sequence later (just after leaving the brig) in the hall he tells the female Cylon projection/hallucination that he *WILL* figure out a way to test for Cylons.
The clear implication that he "will" and therefore "has not yet" figured out a way to perform the test indicates that the tests were never performed (at least meaningfully). Remember the aledged Cylon (guy in the brig) was aledged as such only because he was an Ideal Patsy(tm) picked out of the croud by Baltar as soon as he realized he needed to get rid of the Cylon Device without opening himself to any form of suspision.
That the man was actually a Cylon is just a "coincidence" and yet not. The very selection criteria that Baltar used to single him out (civilian, stranger, recient arrival, unlimited access to the ship) "just happened" to match the very circumstances of his presence. That is, he looked like a likely person to pin as the spy because he was, in fact, a spy.
But it was just a coincidence sort of.
The inferance we can take from Baltars "promise" that he "will" figure it out is that there is no "just scan them" or "simple blood test" or "existing adaptable technology" for them to do the test now.
Hence the whole ominous part about "there could be another Cylon" (and) "and it could be programmed not ot even know it is a spy." If they had a test (and it worked) they would have tested everyone on-board *AND* every arrival. It would be *FAR* *TOO* *STUPID* to *BEAR* if they tested everybody on board but then let everybody not on board at the time of the test come on and off with impunity. 8-)
You actually have to follow the story, not just the pretty effects, if you want to get the meat of the authors intent. Clearly you missed a fiew things like the fact that the guy was marooned completely without prof. We were supposed to think that that the humans were being unjust.
Oh, so the nukes were on missled that "had to hit" and the armor plating of the galactica was "effective" because, if you want to nuke a ship, and you can get the nuke *inside* the ship, then the ship's atmosphere and structure become the medium that chaies the shockwave.
So the ships are actually deliberately "kind of fragile" in spesific ways, so that if the nuke does puncture the hull and detonate, the energy will tend to want to "go back out the way it came" and the transferred energy in the atmosphere inside would tend to want to "vent" the shockwave in nicely "back out there" directions. So even with a nuke (and magic field thory 8-) you end up wanting the fields working more on bulkheads and structural integrety bits, while you want the hull to be more of a self-pivioting and massless louver arrangement. Oh look, a fountain of fast moving air and dead-people. Do that in about ten more places and we will be talking about meaningful losses!... 8-)
Given, oh, lets say, artificial gravity and such (which they *CLEARY* had) mass drivers and such woudld be kind of pointless. The same thing that would protect those ships from natural spaceborne particles would protect against artificall lumps of stuff.
And these are clearly *NOT* reaction-mass drives or the fighters couldn't ever accelerate and manuver at those speeds. Sure, the attitude thrusters were reaction-mass, but the main drives couldn't possibly have been. They'd run out of reaction mass far too soon.
Consider "the rain" ("Starbuck... what do you hear?"), what with being in space and having no atmospheric friction to slow THAT debris down, and what with the energy levels required to cut the various ships into fist-sized chunks, clearly the Vipers are protected against simple mass-velocity impacts.
That (then could) mean that the reason the "bulletts" glow would be related to whatever they are equipped with in order to let them puncture the afore-theroized protections possessed by both sides.
The "shots" would almost *have* to be tiny, slow moving (as such things are measured) torroidal envelopes of energy (around a meaty center 8-) that can penetrate the (sci-fi magic 8-) acceleration field that keeps the humans from being ground to pulp and lets the ships accelerate and change directions at those scales and rates.
The blue "exhaust" comming out of the back of the military craft are the "we don't have to clean our exhaust, we are the military damn it" venting of the reactor waste products that exist as the side-effect of needing "more responsive" fields than the civilian crafts. Its in the back because if you dump the high energy exhaust anywhere else, you will have to fly through it and that would degrade the field and raise the energy cost of the whole thing.
Uh, lets see... and the guns stick out to get them as far out of the fields as possible.
And the big guns on the Galicta have those "frames" around them to generate a counter field to let the projectiles out of the big field at the "most reasonable cost not encompassed by our military budget."
In short, physics were butchered everywhere, but if you demand *internal* consistency to that butchering, then kenitic weapons don't work in that universe.
PS and in space, with no medium to carry the "force" wouldn't a nuclear explosion just be a big EM flash and a lot of heat? Down here planetside, its the "shockwave" that does the most ripping up and knocking about. Using a nuclear bomb (lots of energy in a very mass-less package) to move an asteroid (etc) is stupid. (Just like if you just put a stick of dinamite on a stout table and set if off the table is likely to come out "just a bit scorched" and so on. 8-) That's why you need "nuclear pumped X-Ray lasers" to use Nukes against a ship in space. IF you wrapped a nuke in a lot of debris it could be effective too, but it would more likely atomize the wrapper because the energy vs momentum would make an easily defeated plasma ball. But a nice, heavy missle with lots of mass and a fairly mundane explosive is most likely to be useful in space combat. Use your drive (at tech level X) to get through their drive (also at tech level X) and then make a nice "boom" with enough "knock about" to do some harm once you are *inside* the opponents boundries.
Ok, so humanesque Cylons are "really hard to spot" and have been dealt the near-imortality card. That card itself produces the only really annoying error in the whole show.
If the humanesque Cylons can only be told from the humans by analizing the post-cremation remains, how can their bodies "upload their conciousness" when they die (from anywhwere except inside the storm)? The power requirements for that alone preclude the humanesque body thing.
How does that reconcile to the glowing spinal cord bit? (it doesn't)
It would have been better (and just as easy) to give them medical-scanner jammers. OR EVEN BETTER give them nonocites living in their spinal-cords.
"We can detect them, sure, all we have to do is saw the backbone out of the accused, section it, and look for bugs." "Uh, that wont fly after we test the first dozen or so... will it?"
Kind of the "cut the hand off to see if there is fur inside" way of checking for a werewolf.
The nanocites thing would let the conciousness be "collected" instead of "transmitted" as well. As it is, once the theoretical sleeper-Cylon wakes up, it (no spoilers 8-) would only need to kill itself and it would have "reported back" with the exact position and disposition of the fleet.
To keep the timeline interesting, the suicide == instant intellegence factor needs to be removed.
Of course, wouldn't it be lovely if the reincarnation thing weren't true at all. Sort of logan's run. Sure, we just get reloaded into a new body. I've never met anybody who it happened to, but I'm sure it happens all the time. How am I so sure? I'm programed to believe I have a soul, it keeps my survival instinct in check when I am sent out on a suicide mission.
Plus the nanocite-plus-collection theory would allow for and explain Baltars hallucinations. When the Cylon protected him from the blast she transfered herself into his body and is waiting for pickup. That is why she helped him remove the Cylon device, how she can move and effect his body, and why she is protecting him but has to ask him things like "what are you working on?" Her nanocites can only properly control the genetically engineered bodies, not a/the real, imperfect (normally variable) body she is sharing with Baltar.
(God, these people should contact me about writing the sequel... I've already got several patch-files for The Matrix, you know "delete battery/power source; replace with "neuro-transmitter farm/factory" etc. 8-)
Without the spoiler, consider whom "Boxy" is connected up with (vis a vi the last few minutes of the second half.) They should have given him a real name though, you know "my name is X Y, but mom always called me Boxy..." "Ok... Boxy..."
Besides, think of every element of who Boomer is "children first" at the landing site, et al. There is no way that she wouldn't attach to one of them, at least for now.
Boxy as a simple DNPC ("Dependent Non-Player Character" for you non role-playing people) for *Boomer* is just potentially *OUTSTANDING* especially later.
On a side note, remember that Baltar picked the guy to blame for the Cylon Device because of his otustanding "blamability" in the circumstances. That that character ended up being who he was is significant to the character development. Baltar sure can pick them dificult situations out of a crowd.
Fun for the whole family, have little billy click it twice for twice the fun!
Seriously, I was eating in "Dennies" (rellay, my fault, I know) and the eight of us each had the all-you-can-eat breakfast bar. When the bill arrived we had been charged for ten. When we said, "hey, there are eight of us, but you charged us for ten" the servers response was, "oh, so do you want to go back and eat some more?"
If you don't understand what is so wrong with the server in this example, then "automatically" and "changed at any time" are happy fun words for you and yours.
Someone please save us all from the popular culture that would make people think anything like this CRF could be given a "popular and positive" spin...
Oh and P.S. I am a born and raised citizen of the United States of America. That doesn't stop me from understanding why a Brazillain (etc) hates it when we call U.S. people like ourselves (just) "Americans". It also lets me appreciate in fullness just how lazy my average countryman is when expounding his mentally lax "wisdom" on the rest of the world (typically at gun point.)
I benefited fully from my understanding (at the time) of how deficient my public education was going to trun out to be.
So I may not have been popular during that public education, but at least I am, on the average, now not as dumb as my general population. 8-)
As the decenting intelligencia it is our job to try to make Microsoft look bad. Without a "well-heeled" and "porperly managed" niche opposition, real opposition might foment and cause our corporate masters some discomfort.
Also, as a well-heeled opposition, we have our body-politic well and properly stocked with internal detractors whos job it is to make it look like we are the shills we are supposed to be, by pointing out at every turn how knee-jerk our reactions are.
It's like an ongoing episode of Hannity and Colms (however you spell the names) on Fox Propiganda Network but not so rightest-anti-mock-liberal.
I for one publicly descent from the opinions of our just and mighty corporate overlords who know best how I might serve them with my descent.
NEWS FLASH:
The artist was deprived of the money Bob would have otherwise spent. It does matter how you look at it.
is a specious and demonstrably false statement.
In point of fact, lots of people download(ed) lots of stuff they would never buy. Their "never buy" status is not dependent on the presence or absence of the download.
The straw-man arugment that each download represents a lost sale is unsupportable. There are several classes of adopters. The largest cross section of downloaders would not be "promoted" from "downloader" to "purchaser", they would de DEMOTED from "downloader" to "might own if it were cheap of free" and some more would DEMOTE all the way to "wouldn't keep this if it were forced on me at gun point." Further, there are people who download(ed) things at random, liked what they hear, and promoted themselves to "purchaser" because of the available downloads. Finally there is NO WAY to tell whether downloading availability was a positive or negative sum transaction.
The only known facts:
[Group A] (1) downloading peaked, (2) album sales peaked at the same time as downloading peaked, (3) the econmy peaked with items 1 and 2.
[Group B] (1) downloading got attacked and fell off, (2) album sales fell off at the same time as downloading, (3) the economy generally fell off at the same times as items 1 and 2.
The facts actually support EXACTLY TWO conclusions. (1) the economy has affected album sales and (2) downloading may have helped album sales, but at a minimum did no demonstrable harm to album sales.
The follow on fact that lazy thinkers who cannot correlate "economy" and "sales" tend to be the same people who can neither correlated nor reconcile "no IP style entanglements" and "the renesance".
[ASIDE: Just for the record, I write software and fiction and get paid for one and want to get paid for the other. But I also pay enough attention to the world to know that overly simple models of interraction based on deleberate ignorance will fail to reach accurate conclusions. "The money the artist would have got" is just such a conclusion.]
Consider BitOBear's three question "cultural reletivity" test...
1) "Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo..." What is Juliet asking? [HINT: she isn't trying to find out if he is at the bottom of the wall...]
2) "Let them eat cake." What is Marie Antoniette suggesting? [HINT: it is not the common "birthday food"...]
3) Where did the "Confederacy" get its name? [HINT: the civil war was about slavery in the same way that not-driving-drunk is about avoiding points on your driver's license...]
These are three culturally accessible examples of how modern people (Americans spesifically?) walk around with their heads full of garbage about what is going on in life. If you bother to look up and understand the above tidbits (in anything at least as authoratative as a middle-school textbook), and look at how how that understanding is different from "what everybody knows", you will be sadly surprised at just how stupid people are about the simple events that surround them.
The current "music theft" debate is just as wrong headed and "unresearched" on all sides as, say, the average American's understanding of "manifest destiny" as an extension of "might makes right".
If you don't pay attention to the details, you have no right to cry foul when people think you are not worth listening to...
The thing is, it really *isn't* a "tangle" of anything but the outgoing PR. While nobody can tell what SCO is going to CLAIM they own, there is a good record of what they CANNOT POSSIBLY own. Once you subtract what they CANNOT POSSIBLY OWN, the remainder is the sum total of what they COULD POSSIBLY own.
THEN they would have to prove that ownership.
The thing is, Linus (And hence the Linux kernel effort) has detailed records of what came from whom (and therefore from where). SCO has no such records except the vague statement that "whatever we (sco) have we own."
If there is common code, and Linus can prove who provided it to him (e.g. who wrote it), and SCO cannot prove even the first records of who provided the code to *them*, then guess who legally possessess "proof of ownership."
See the word Provenance (which usually applies to "fine art"). Lets say I walked up to you with a genuine Picasso, proveably genuine, if I can't provide the chain of ownership that demonstrates that it is mine to sell to you, you would be a fool to buy it.
The same basic features apply to the (mis-named) intellectual property issues. If SCO demonstrates that there is code in common between something they claim to own and the Linux kernel, they will need to be able to make a stronger claim of ownership than that made by the OS community.
This is the basis of the ATT vs BSD settlement. In that case BSD was more pursuasive in their ownership of the disputed text because they had the original copyright notices that included the names of the authors, and they had the authors right there saying "yep" I wrote that under X cirsumstances. ATT was in the SCO position of just having some program text in a bunch of files, no attributable authors and no copyright notices.
The point is, SCO has produced no proof because they have none. They are (probably) hoping to release whatever confluence of code they may have as close to closing arguments as possible, on the grounds that such material would apear to stand on merrit. They *cannot* release that data because the very presence of submission and aproval-for-inclusion records kept in the linux project system (BitKeeper et al) is, by definition, "more pursuasive" than any straight claim.
We saw how fast the one example that got out was debunked. By this time SCO is hoping to do a drive-by submission-of-evidence. That never works. 8-)
Guessing that they have some kind of case is very bad. The simple fact that they havn't produced a single spesific instance of (provenanced) code in the process of pursuing thier case, is rather indicitive.
Remember that in civil cases there is no "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard. It is purely "proponderance of evidence." In a civl matter it is *ONLY* a question of who has "more and more credible" evidence.
"incredible" evidence and clames are, by definition, useless.
The probem is that the word "software" is essentially meaningless in exatcly the way the word "religion" is essentially meaningless. I use the phrase (if I may be allowed to coin a phrase in public) "nomnitave adjective", or just plain "ad-noun" to refer to this problem.
Consider the adjective "good", we all know how to use this word and we all know when we think something does or doesn't deserve the label. Fair enough.
Now move on to the word "religion" there are all sorts of things that can be religion to all sorts of people. But as soon as you try to codify the difference between religion and not-religion you get into trouble. Like pronography, you know it when you see it, but to others, the evil alien Xenu and his penchant for filmmaking are a religion, a position with witch I would tend to disagree.
"Software" is likewise sufficently vague in construction and scope. In its meaty center you are on firm ground, but as you aproach the edges things get abstruse and indeterminant.
Consider that there has been, to date, no instance of someone implementing in software, something that was not (or at least could not be) implemented on paper in the real world. Start with easy analogous items like solitare. The game exists in both forms, but there are versions of the game on the computer that would be impractical with actual cards. You could *play* them with real cards, but the experience would be unweildy. The thing is, by extension, the most obscure exercise in pointer indirection is essentially analogous to using a card catalog in a library. Cross referencing and doing lookups. Chain of evidence, data integrety. eBay... All of it exists out here first.
So, is there one methodology for validating all software persuits? Should their be?
No and No.
That method would first have to exist as a means to validate all human endevour, and then it would have to validate that the software properly performed the analog of that endeavour.
It's impractical.
When the word "software" is applied to a "real" noun, e.g. "Accounting software" "database software" and so forth, you get your first (only) glimpse at a rational subset of operations that can then be considered and validated.
"Management Software" is a double ad-noun, it must be combined with something else, "database management software" "finincial management software."
The unending chain of ad-nouns is where people get lost in the great fire swamps... "business management software"... ouch. A tripple ad-noun. how do we tell "good business management software" (a quadruple ad-noun 8-) from "bad business management software"? At these points we are speaking with aparent spesificity, but still managing to say absolutely nothing spesific or concrete.
So...
There should be, and are, ways to tell if the particular thing you are codifying into software is being codified correctly. Unfortunately (for some) that requires knowledge of "software techniques" and the spesifics of the thing being codified.
All else, that is all "official procedure" that isn't talored to the particular project, is just ISO9000 documentary masturbation.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, so an evil webmister makes a pop-under containing this kind of code and puts it up when you visit his porn site (optionally by mistyping "google" in your address bar.)
Heck, (google|SlashDot|your legitimate business) just has a tiny inset on their page: "This box is using your spare CPU cycles to help us pay for this site or service. Subscribers do not see this box. Click here to subscribe."
It could work.
In the popunder case it is vile and abusive. In the legitimite and well advertised case it is totally fair.
Almost to the day that Carter (or was it Ragan?) signed the death-knell of the US Fission Power program a (french?) woman over at Fermi Labs figured a way to really make breeder reactors pay.
My (Lay) understanding was that the new process was sufficently good enough that it might have been worthwile to load up a good bit of the existing nuclear waste into fuel rods and put it back into reactors.
Whatever the process details (which I am inssficent to the task of detailing here to any credible degree) I have been led to beleive they were a cycle evolutionary improvement.
My source is my father (a navy nuke from all the way back on the Enterprise commissioning) and my roommates brother (classified work in NM, if you get me 8-) but I am just the parrot here... 8-)
Added bonuses:
-- It'll never get put in to practice now because it is euphimistically called "the French process" and our current crop of idiots don't like the word "French" for totally inapproprate reasons.
-- When the US Nuke program was stopped in this country it was already an "old man's field", most of our US expertise has died off (or at least irretreivably retired) so it is *almost* too late for us to start up again without having to export the job to a forign firm like any other third-world(*) country.
(*) IMHO the U.S. is doing a great job of positioning itself as the "third world country of the new millennium". We shut off our nuclear program, underfund all our non-petrochem energy research, ship our IT jobs overseas, ship our Factory Jobs overseas, contrive to make it cheaper to make movies in other countries, issue patents for things like "hyperlinks" and "shipping boxes (in certian orders)". Then we loan countries money and then try to force them into default using anti-competitive economic forces. We borrow money from other countries and then do our damndist to piss them off. Meanwhile our educational system is so bad that fully-grown senators (nearly) get elected on the "race war now" platform; and most of our highschool graduates can't tell you if the U.S. or Japan came out ahead in the last war we had with them...
Come to think of it, on that last one I am not so sure who really came out on top myself...
Seriously people. You actually *DONT* need to represent times (rememberdates are large times) before the epoch. At least not in the scope of the time_t data type.
The scope of the project and standard in quesiton is represent "now" (the current time) and to place, track, and manipulate time signatures for operating-sytem level events. You know, things like "date file created" and "date file last modified" and so forth.
The time_t type exists to let directory updates and newer-than/older-than comparasons happen in "very small, linear time" so that it is cost effective to, say, search a directory in chronological order or see if an object file needs to be recompiled.
Go see how porly these functions work using windows networking accross a slow link and you will get an inkling about why this speed vs limit tradeoff is important.
There is no rational need to represent a "now" of such historical scope WITH RESPECT TO AN OPERATING SYSTEM DATA.
Yes, some idiot programmers out there are using this time_t datum in "very bad" contexts. Databases of historical fact that are expected to contain items predating the epoc (birth registries, deed and title search databases, publishing databases, and so on) ARE *completely* unsuited for, and outside the intent of, the time_t "quanta past epoch" representation for dates and times.
Saying time_t is bad for historical dates is "exactly" as valid as mentionting that ASCII is not a good character set for representing hyroglyphs. The word "duh" comes to mind.
In "real data" (as opposed to OS event/contemporary transient data) there are actually two types of "time" the ordinal (spesific date and time) and the inerval (a measure of duration). An actual data storage system (database) needs to have an internal abstraction for storing and "doing math (uniformly) over" and "indexing across" those two abstractions.
So for real data you need explicit structures.
(methinks) Someone has a little something stuck in his craw.
Could there possibly be a reason for an offtopic mod? Lets see:
-- Article/thread about an article about the linux scheduler.
-- Respondent asks a technical support question having nothing to do with the article referenced or the scheduler in general.
-- Respondent gets moded down for jumping off topic because this isn't a Linux support forum nor is it generally an audience who would want it to *become* a support forum.
-- Someone who doesn't like to see a lot of the linux-centricisim in the forum *complains* BECAUSE others who don't want to read a technical support thread mod the offtopic post... "offtopic."
===
As a side note, you rigorous thinker you, a question or comment in the range of "I don't know why" ("this pause here with that message there confuses me", et. al.) indicates that the user wants information about his system and is not prima facia evidence that there is something "making Linux look bad" in any meaningful sense.
Consider: Sort of like saying that a single customer asking "what are the ingreedents of the 'special sauce', cause it feels oily?" must automatically make McDonalds "look bad" for filling the oily sauce role with an oily sauce not understood by a single questioner.
If you took the time to gather one single iota of information you would know that the message he doesn't like is in the startup sequence and happens only once (per boot) and lasts a couple of seconds at most.
If, on the other hand, he even vaguely intimated that the message lasted X seconds and was repeated every N seconds, then there would be some "looking bad" to be had here. If he could *FURTHER* even remotely tie this to the scheduler then the post would suddnely not be "offtopic".
Shame none of that happened. Which kind of leaves you wearing the inflatable rubber ducky on the subway there dude. You probably shoud stop yelling about the rising watter too. (IF you can follow a cultural metaphore there dude. 8-)
====
Point of (bonus) fact, there wasn't enough information in the question to even address an answer. Even so, (and without even checking), if the initrd (etc) system is compiled in there but the user isn't using initrd then he should compile the kernel without this bit. If he *IS* using the initrd image then it is kind of normal that the unpacking and mounting of the initrd image would cause a pause at that point because the kernel is working on something that everything else has to wait for.
So, nothing to see here folks, conspiracy theorist presenting tinfoil-hat theory about an demonstrably offtopic post getting modded down for being demostrably off topic. These arn't the droids your looking for. Move along... 8-)
====
Not hard to see why you posted AC...
The problem with empiricism is demonstrated thus:
My father (now disceased) was a Nuclear and Electrical Engineer, a Lawyer, a pilot (and a bunch of other things) but he had allowed a single presentation by a single person convince him that "The depletion of the ozone layer was not a concern because there was 'good evidence' that the ozone layer 'might have been created by the industrial revolution.'"
Whaaa?
I know! It is incredible! It seems impossible. A rational and educated man latching onto an odd tidbit of spin and then using that to skew an entire world view. I spent several years carefully and gently trying to probe to the heart of this oddity and there were all sorts of things revealed. One of the interesting bits was that in his youth people actually beleived that when you dumped an industrial efluvent into a stream, and then didn't see it a mile downstream, that nature had taken care of the problem.
This concept of reality is so close to contemporary that it it is scary, and people tend to forget. Look up the invetion of the smoke stack sometime. Consider the first smokestack legislation came to this country in the late 1930's
So anyway, what is my point...?
See, lots of people believe that research and science is about piling up evidence and looking for answers. In tis lesser form this is empiricism, in the greater form (get answers from having "all truth") it is gestaltism. The problem is that when you start piling up facts and then pawing through them your own biasis become the prime consideration. You find and see those shapes that best match up with your existing brain. That, unfortunately, includes your biases.
The "scientific method" that they pushed on you in school was created, and it lauded, because it *DIRECTLY* OPPOSES the skew that empiricism naturally carries with it. See, science *starts* with a tiny bit of empiricisim because a scientist piles up his facts and his experiences and looks for a pattern, but that is the pre-science, having done his pre-science he then engages in the incredibly simple sequence we know of as "science".
1) Take your opinion and carve it down to the simplist and most direct statement you can. (The "hypothesis") These are simple things like "glass is unbreakable".
2) Figure out what it would take to make you a Liar. That is, think up ways that the statement of step one could be disproved. These ways can be little actions (experiments) like "throw rock at glass at least this-hard" "shoot glass with gun" etc. They can also be more collective "look for any record of persons having broken glass" and so forth. Some evidence *may* be discarded if you can show that it wasn't credible or wasn't well structured ("in the Bob's glass-works experiment the rock was thrown at random and never actually struck the glass, so its assertion that the 'glass never broke in a thousand throws' is bull, as there were zero hits").
3) If any avenue in step two shows your step one to be wrong, go back to step one and see if you can make a new statement that could survive step 2. e.g. "glass is unbreakable" becomes "*this* glass is unbreakable" becomes "this glass will not break for forces up to this range".
If you get through step 2, having done your best to disprove item 1, then you have a "good scientific idea" that your statement is true.
So... what is wrong with the book? How can it be chock full of facts and footnotes but still be condemned by as bad science?
Well the book is aparently full of all this empirical information, but there is no sign of the effort to complete step 2. A well written *SCIENTIFIC* book would have a short section at the front filled with "enough" empirical stuff to validate that the question was worth asking. Then it would proceed on with a section by section attempt to show what it would take to disprove the empirical idea, demonstrate that the data or experiments took place, and that all the credible results failed to disprove the idea.
We know that the wheel of time is not/will not be broken because the past-tense nature of the narrative. (Consider the opening of each book, and the expression that each cycle shifts the outcome of each cycle just nudges the next cycle a little more to one side or the other. [all of this is established cannon.]) The dark one needs to break the wheel of time to escape back to the realm of the creator (or some such), and tries every round. To some extent the entrity of the purpose of the wheel is to imprision the dark one.
Doesn't mean he actually can nor ever will. The *creator* couldn't kill the dark one, how could Rand.
===
As for the other, they shoudl be able to *make* or *steal* the angreal and sa'angreal. Nobody alive should be competent to stand against them. Hell, the Black Aja could, and rightfully should given their access in the tower and their apparent numbers, plunder the place dry overnight. Since the one power and the true power are (essentially) invisible to one another there is NO EXCUSE for the forsaken to not have all the tools and power they want.
That is why I feel these characters are so Sindely Wiplash. They don't just quash their enemies, they dont wield compulsion (except the one who makes sex-toys out of people) they don't really leverage traveling or gate-making even though they all clearly know how to do it.
They just tie the damsel to the raliroad tracks and then ride away before the train is even in the neighborhood.
It makes for intracately wroght but still incompetent villans. And badly executed villans just cannot maintian their apeal.
(IMHO of course) The wheel of time books are getting slower and more tedious because Jordan wrote himself into a corner...
Reconcile the following:
1) The dark-one's prison must not be patched, it must be made whole again to the degree that it was never breached.
2) The only thing that can undo things and unmake things is Balefire.
3) When you Balefire something the timeline is rewound and replayed with the event removed.
So... Rand has to balefire the forsaken "hard enough" to unmake them far enough that the dark-one's prison was never opened (or possibly even never found).
Unfortunately, that would then prevent the breaking of the world and the third age would never have taken place.
This is a very unhappy Star Trek version of time paradox that leads to the "story that never happened". The way things are laid out now the story can not conclude.
The story is fixable, of course, if several things happen:
1) "The bore" is altered so that it is no-longer a hole cut into the dark-one's prison, but instead a tunnel around the structure of reality (sort of voice-over-IP style magical conduit) so that the dark ones prison was never actually breached. All of the references to the breach are simply declared deleberately apocryphal "because the forsaken were not so stupid as to tell anybody how they *really* accessed the dark one and his power."
2) A blanket means of cleaning up old enchantments needs to be introduced. Sort of a Bale-washing-up-fluid that can snuff out anything from sa-angrel to that golem thingy that can only be harmed by anti-magic. The diswater-of-fate then needs to be sudzed up to a nice foam and pored on the bore, the forsaken, and every piece of culendar (sp?) after it is all piled up on the dragonmount.
3) The FORSAKEN have to loose their SNIDLEY WIPLASH and his doomed dasterdly deeds flavor.
I mean seriously, the thirteen greatest mages (give or take) of the second age are unleashed on the third age with all of their lost knowledge of the "one power" and their access to the "true power" and the best thing they can come up with is sleeping their way into the bed/court of a queen?
The more detail Jordan provides on the actions and schemes of his villians, the DUMBER they look when the punk kids stumble into their plots and wreck them by apparently random action.
This is plot suicide.
At some point he has to stop digging the hole deeper and start digging a ramp out, otherwise we might as well just stop reading and start watching DragonBall-Z. It's got the same pointless escalation of power etc and you don't have to memorize a list of names...
Please people, watch your words. "The Public Domain" is a spesific thing, and the GPL does not intersect the public domain at all.
The GPL provides a means for me to release, for general use and scruteny, a body of work. The terms are spesific and governed. My rights are preserved. Your rights are explicitly enumerated. Among those, your rights, enumerated is the right to use my work to create a deritive of my work under the provision that your diritive work, IF you release it, is also released under the GPL.
The public domain is a condition of release where the creator waives (or has lost) all rights to the work and can not then place, grant, or revoke enumerated rights and responsibilities on anybody.
Consider Mickey Mouse. (yes, the Disney property.) If Mickey Mouse were released under a "open source" license, that license *might* include a "no pornography" restriction (etc) whereby Mickey could be rendered as performing any non-lude act, or any act that was, at worst, "rated PG". You know, something like "we, Disney corp, release the image, likeness, and character of Mickey Mouse for any public use or performance, provided the portryal of same is in keeping with the wholesome nature and public image of the character..." In this public license scenerio, Disney would be saying "go ahead and use him but within limits."
Mickey Mouse (et. al.) in the public domain would mean that Disney could do nothing about persons who chose to depict the furry beast swearing like a salor while mounting goofy from behind whilst they both tumble freely about amidtst and feeding upon the bloody entrails of Minny and Donald.
See... "Licence", that last word/letter of the GP_L_ inferrs restrictions and aggrements.
"Public Domain" means all bets are off, come what may, hell or high water.
Get it straight please.
As a gay man I *INSIST* that everyone stop using any word ending with or containing the two letters "ag". Similarly, the word "got", clearly having no usage except as an slang argot (and that word has to go too) for the longer word faggot.
...
I am embarrassed and humiliated every time anybody uses the past perfect of "to receive" because it belittles my people and our struggle to escape being steriotyped (by Churchill) as somehow entangled with the British Navy!
etc...
Besides the country of Nigeria is just damned if they do and damned if they dont.
====
PARDON MY RANT BUT...
Crimeny people, there is only one person who can hurt you with a word, and that person is you yourself.
On the contrapositive a hatefilled butthead can turn even the most common and seemingly neutral words and phrases into vile invective.
The belief that the words are, in and of themselves, to blame for the attitudes is just humanist bull. People who cannot face the fact that humans can be vile and abbusive will blame anything that comes to hand to protect their world view. You can get rid of the words and new ones will crop up to replace them one-for-one. You can get rid of the guns and knives, and the bad people will pick up sticks and stones and just keep on going.
It's not the things and its not the words. It is the willful ignorance of the pointless people. If you fight the things instead of the ignorance, you become equally pointless and equally harmful.
Just think, if every black parent could teach their child that "nigger" meant "someone who others are rightfully jealous of for being strong and black" instead of "the terrible n-word"
oh... what's the point... people have decided to be wounded by this stuff, and that it is better to hide from the ideas so thuroughly that "master hard drive" is "offensive."
At this point I suspect that there will be that "race war" and it will, sadly, be between the people who think race really matters and those who think it doesn't.
I envision a day where the Black Panther alikes (in whatever form they end up) and the KKK (in whatever form they end up) take up arms together to assault all the people who wish both sides would go the hell away. They will be cheered on from the sidelines by Gay people who want to get married but only if they can do so using a different word than "married" because they "don't want the negative associations from thousands of years of straight married people" and the More-Native-Than-Thou (Americans|Serbians|Corats|Albainians|Arabs|etc by geographical region.)
Take the following truths to heart people:
There is ONLY ONE INSULT in all of human experience. That is when I ascribe to you a trait you do not wish to have. No matter what word I use for stupid, if you don't want to be stupid that word will become an insult.
Actual quote from a radio show: "Moron is a medical term, the morons I know are hurt greatly when they hear that used as an isult." Replace "moron" with "blort" and the statement will remain a tautology. The moment "handycapt" was coined it was an insult. Same with "special" "differently abled" etc. The ENTIRITY of the MECHANISIM is that we as a species want to be hale, whole, and healthy. (Diety forfend! That should change! Fix the word again! 8-)
Repeat for old, young, black, white, jew, arab, "disenfranchised", poor, ignorant, stupid, geek, lawyer, and any other collective noun you care to think of.
These are all steriotypes, but so is "teacher" and "doctor" and "circus peanut vendor".
Short of replacing every word for every person, place, thing, or idea with the word "Marklar" there will always be words that someone will find just too terrible.
Well Marklar every Marklar damned Marklar of those Marklars and lets get back to feeding the hungry, opposing the corrupt, protecting the weak, and servicing the needs of ourselves and those who are less fortunate.
A recovering cancer patient sneezed on several people at Memorial General's admitting desk yesterday, prompting Monsanto to sue for breach of intellectual property rights. Monsanto claims that the patient, who's name is being witheld, deliberately attempted to provide their medical virus to several incomming cancer patients who had not yet paid the licence fee.
In accordance with a ninth circuit court injunction upholding the sneeze as a DMCA "circumvention technology", the man is being held in seclusion pending a cure for the common cold.
Actually, by definiton, doesn't that depend on how they were programmed?
Imperious Leader: Number 6 serial number xxxxxx2 you will go to the surface and make sure that the target (Y) is destroyed no matter what. When your body is destroyed its consciousness will, of course, transmit itself back and be recovered and reimplanted in a new frame.
Assistant to IL: (you think she will actually buy that?)
IL: (of course, serial number xxxxx2 is programmed to beleive it...)
The "Article of faith" only has to go as far as the infultration models actively persuing suicide missions. Perhaps all the cylons know that death is death (so they will fight to survive) and the suicide troops are programmed to have memories of this happening all the time. If this wern't the case then there would have been a lot less "dodging" on the parts of the Cylons. With the immortality transmission idea as a universal, the fighter-models would be little more than flying bombs with point-defense guns. (suicide smart bombs yeild peak guidance, peak damage, peak payload, and no flinching).
Perhaps they don't know the difference (experience no difference) between the accumulation of fact and the idea of self.
Number 6 was "quite religious", being transmitted back to awaken in a new body is a (very lazy on the author's part) reincarnation myth.
Perhpas *our* Number 6 is the first of the truly aware and doesn't quite understand the difference between "having a bunch of memories" and "being that same being."
Either way, her articles of faith were a big part of her, and that Baltar was the "best" of "god" in his role as most machine-like human was a significant insight to the Cylon concepts of self.
(Whatever the authors had in mind, it is fun to speculate. 8-)
Field and Frame as in "relativity". Simple physics? provide one means for the vipers manuverability and one way to store and accelerate enough mass to achieve that manuverability that wouldnt be ejecting the mass so fast that it would compromise the landing bays (etc.)
Explain the "slow moving" debris from the "Fast moving" explosions.
Sorry, there *has* to be a "magic field" or the whole thing falls apart. That *these* magic fields more closely aproximate physics than Star Trek is an obvious given. But without them, a purely physical model crashes and burns immediately.
and before you get too knotted up about it, they demonstrably had artificial gravity which is about as field theory as it gets.
As for those things being "bullets", by the simple definition they were just that, i.e. "some sort of projectile". What sort exactly is where the fun comes in.
With "acceleration shielding" (whatever keeps people != jell-o when changing directions at those rates) (and made debris less-than-instantly-fatal) comes the need for high-tech bulletts.
These just are the rules. If your definition of "good physics" stops sharply at "didn't swoop and make noise in vaccuum" then I am wrong. If, however, you take the scenes wholisticly (e.g. pay attention to all evidence presented) then there was something happening there, and there was also something to explain about the bulletts. These were not "tracers" nor "simple slugs." Sorry, that just wont fly as shown.
1) They only have twelve models (dumb, but who says they would have understood the need for diversification if they also didn't know a babies kneck is too weak to suppor its head. We don't know what they "kenw" when they left after the first war.)
2) They are smart enough that they know humans would get suspicous if they ran into more than two of any one model.
3) At least three models are useless for infultration. (The old centurion models ["they are still around, they have their uses"] would be instantly recognized. The new centurion models, and the star-fighter models, would be instantly recognizable as "a bad thing in general" and we don't know whether the old command-caste models are around, but lets persume not...) so they have at *MOST* nine humanoid infultration drones (if they have NO OTHER specialized models (Miners, Doctors, etc.)
3a) In fact, at the end, they two-male two-female human analog(s) we see in sets has some inferance.
3b) But EVEN IF she meant that there were twelved infultration models (human-analogs) how many could you put out there before people noticed doubles. ("Hey admiral Bob, your assistant looks just like my assistant...?")
So...
-- One sleeper (Boomer) who is programmed (with a bias) to end up mixed in with any survivors so that she can do mop-up. She is going to be biased to old-tech (uninfluencable) support craft with fairly independent mission parameters. Where is she? Assigned to the ass-end of the fleet in the oldest bucket they have in commission, driving a free-roving survey and scout ship. So she is in place for good reason. It totally works.
-- One intercessor. (the red-suit guy they marooned after his "test" showed him to be Cylon.) Dispatched to the (fully armed) future museum ship *because* it *still* hadn't been brought into the defense network dispite repeated dispatches to install those systems. He had been sent there by his people to find out why the Glactica was still independent. [Maybe even to get it into the net as soon as possible, after all, he was doing the musium retrofit work.] He couldn't leave until it was in the net or the attack went off and the bull-headed human (Adama) kept vexing his efforts. So he put up the Cylon Mistery Device but never left. This also works in plot.
-- The one guy at the weapons dump was also charged with infultration of stragglers. Notice how helpful he was being and how useful his arms-dealer back-story would have been for use against virtually any kind of humans likely to find the dump. He was supposed to infultrate and track military-grade armed survivors. It would have worked if it werent for the (unknown to the Cylons) effects of the storm. When his breakdown revealed him as an infiltration unit the plan went bad. Prior to that, all you would want is *one* on the dump. One person that "happens to know" everything about all the weapons there, who would, if the arriving craft were not fully military, be able to become indispensable to the humans and end up installing the sabatoge even as he helped the super-distrustful survivors to "arm up". (There was probably one of "him", or another human analog at each of the known weapons caches. Number 6 had the access to know them all too.)
Law of small numbers combines with likely outcomes and desireable positions to let us THE ENTIRE SURVIVING POPULATION OF MAN encounter !gasp! three whole models...
It's all actually rather a given, really...
And Blathar was *way too smart* to lie to Colnel Tie in the brig. So when he claimed that even the autopsy couldn't tell (hence the traces in the cremation) he would have been *REAMED* if Tie later saw a report from the doctor (really a certanty as the XO) that mentioned all this silicon...
Sy yes, they mention the "silicon pathways" WRT the storm degradign the Cylons, but wherever this silicon is, it isn't even significant enough to show up when you do the post-mortem.
One would suspect a transmitter that could transmit an entire Cylon conciousness back to their [wherever] amid a nuclear holocost would take *AT LEAST* enough forign materials and structures (say silicon) to be *noticable* in an autopsy. *AND* require enough stored energy to beat the noise floor, and that such energy storage would be scanable.
No, it would be much better if the "transmitted back" element were an "article of faith" or "preprogrammed lie for the suicide troops", or at the least that "easy to miss" nanotech were involved and that same nanotech was used to explain the trace differences in cremation, and were it further used to turn "transmitted" to "collected up when my peers find my body."
It would fix several things that make the existing structure hard to maintian in episodic fassion.
Like, why "don't even know it themselves" sleepers at all? Why not ongoing transmissions of intel? IF the transmitter can't be spotted in an autopsy it must use technology that is untracable by the humans, so why not run it all the time? If it is biologically powered then slam back a Caprican-Dew energy drink and phone home.
The "Transmitted back to a new body" feature is good for a movie but it is far too DragonBall-Z to sustain in an ongoing series.
Actually, they give that and take it away several times. (In short, they did a song-and-dance glossy Fuax [sic 8-)] News treatment.)
But indeed, you need to watch it again.
Colnel Tie delivers the "at first glance" line, to Adama, who responds with "right down to the blood."
The "blood tests" were never done in the course of the movie(s), as there was no "blood test". Balthar might (may or may not) have faked doing such tests, but it doesn't matter where Boomer was at the time. Baltar aledged (in the brig) he had analyzed the subjects *hair* (not blood) but in the sequence later (just after leaving the brig) in the hall he tells the female Cylon projection/hallucination that he *WILL* figure out a way to test for Cylons.
The clear implication that he "will" and therefore "has not yet" figured out a way to perform the test indicates that the tests were never performed (at least meaningfully). Remember the aledged Cylon (guy in the brig) was aledged as such only because he was an Ideal Patsy(tm) picked out of the croud by Baltar as soon as he realized he needed to get rid of the Cylon Device without opening himself to any form of suspision.
That the man was actually a Cylon is just a "coincidence" and yet not. The very selection criteria that Baltar used to single him out (civilian, stranger, recient arrival, unlimited access to the ship) "just happened" to match the very circumstances of his presence. That is, he looked like a likely person to pin as the spy because he was, in fact, a spy.
But it was just a coincidence sort of.
The inferance we can take from Baltars "promise" that he "will" figure it out is that there is no "just scan them" or "simple blood test" or "existing adaptable technology" for them to do the test now.
Hence the whole ominous part about "there could be another Cylon" (and) "and it could be programmed not ot even know it is a spy." If they had a test (and it worked) they would have tested everyone on-board *AND* every arrival. It would be *FAR* *TOO* *STUPID* to *BEAR* if they tested everybody on board but then let everybody not on board at the time of the test come on and off with impunity. 8-)
You actually have to follow the story, not just the pretty effects, if you want to get the meat of the authors intent. Clearly you missed a fiew things like the fact that the guy was marooned completely without prof. We were supposed to think that that the humans were being unjust.
Oh, so the nukes were on missled that "had to hit" and the armor plating of the galactica was "effective" because, if you want to nuke a ship, and you can get the nuke *inside* the ship, then the ship's atmosphere and structure become the medium that chaies the shockwave.
... 8-)
So the ships are actually deliberately "kind of fragile" in spesific ways, so that if the nuke does puncture the hull and detonate, the energy will tend to want to "go back out the way it came" and the transferred energy in the atmosphere inside would tend to want to "vent" the shockwave in nicely "back out there" directions. So even with a nuke (and magic field thory 8-) you end up wanting the fields working more on bulkheads and structural integrety bits, while you want the hull to be more of a self-pivioting and massless louver arrangement. Oh look, a fountain of fast moving air and dead-people. Do that in about ten more places and we will be talking about meaningful losses!
Given, oh, lets say, artificial gravity and such (which they *CLEARY* had) mass drivers and such woudld be kind of pointless. The same thing that would protect those ships from natural spaceborne particles would protect against artificall lumps of stuff.
And these are clearly *NOT* reaction-mass drives or the fighters couldn't ever accelerate and manuver at those speeds. Sure, the attitude thrusters were reaction-mass, but the main drives couldn't possibly have been. They'd run out of reaction mass far too soon.
Consider "the rain" ("Starbuck... what do you hear?"), what with being in space and having no atmospheric friction to slow THAT debris down, and what with the energy levels required to cut the various ships into fist-sized chunks, clearly the Vipers are protected against simple mass-velocity impacts.
That (then could) mean that the reason the "bulletts" glow would be related to whatever they are equipped with in order to let them puncture the afore-theroized protections possessed by both sides.
The "shots" would almost *have* to be tiny, slow moving (as such things are measured) torroidal envelopes of energy (around a meaty center 8-) that can penetrate the (sci-fi magic 8-) acceleration field that keeps the humans from being ground to pulp and lets the ships accelerate and change directions at those scales and rates.
The blue "exhaust" comming out of the back of the military craft are the "we don't have to clean our exhaust, we are the military damn it" venting of the reactor waste products that exist as the side-effect of needing "more responsive" fields than the civilian crafts. Its in the back because if you dump the high energy exhaust anywhere else, you will have to fly through it and that would degrade the field and raise the energy cost of the whole thing.
Uh, lets see... and the guns stick out to get them as far out of the fields as possible.
And the big guns on the Galicta have those "frames" around them to generate a counter field to let the projectiles out of the big field at the "most reasonable cost not encompassed by our military budget."
In short, physics were butchered everywhere, but if you demand *internal* consistency to that butchering, then kenitic weapons don't work in that universe.
PS and in space, with no medium to carry the "force" wouldn't a nuclear explosion just be a big EM flash and a lot of heat? Down here planetside, its the "shockwave" that does the most ripping up and knocking about. Using a nuclear bomb (lots of energy in a very mass-less package) to move an asteroid (etc) is stupid. (Just like if you just put a stick of dinamite on a stout table and set if off the table is likely to come out "just a bit scorched" and so on. 8-) That's why you need "nuclear pumped X-Ray lasers" to use Nukes against a ship in space. IF you wrapped a nuke in a lot of debris it could be effective too, but it would more likely atomize the wrapper because the energy vs momentum would make an easily defeated plasma ball. But a nice, heavy missle with lots of mass and a fairly mundane explosive is most likely to be useful in space combat. Use your drive (at tech level X) to get through their drive (also at tech level X) and then make a nice "boom" with enough "knock about" to do some harm once you are *inside* the opponents boundries.
Ok, so humanesque Cylons are "really hard to spot" and have been dealt the near-imortality card. That card itself produces the only really annoying error in the whole show.
If the humanesque Cylons can only be told from the humans by analizing the post-cremation remains, how can their bodies "upload their conciousness" when they die (from anywhwere except inside the storm)? The power requirements for that alone preclude the humanesque body thing.
How does that reconcile to the glowing spinal cord bit? (it doesn't)
It would have been better (and just as easy) to give them medical-scanner jammers. OR EVEN BETTER give them nonocites living in their spinal-cords.
"We can detect them, sure, all we have to do is saw the backbone out of the accused, section it, and look for bugs." "Uh, that wont fly after we test the first dozen or so... will it?"
Kind of the "cut the hand off to see if there is fur inside" way of checking for a werewolf.
The nanocites thing would let the conciousness be "collected" instead of "transmitted" as well. As it is, once the theoretical sleeper-Cylon wakes up, it (no spoilers 8-) would only need to kill itself and it would have "reported back" with the exact position and disposition of the fleet.
To keep the timeline interesting, the suicide == instant intellegence factor needs to be removed.
Of course, wouldn't it be lovely if the reincarnation thing weren't true at all. Sort of logan's run. Sure, we just get reloaded into a new body. I've never met anybody who it happened to, but I'm sure it happens all the time. How am I so sure? I'm programed to believe I have a soul, it keeps my survival instinct in check when I am sent out on a suicide mission.
Plus the nanocite-plus-collection theory would allow for and explain Baltars hallucinations. When the Cylon protected him from the blast she transfered herself into his body and is waiting for pickup. That is why she helped him remove the Cylon device, how she can move and effect his body, and why she is protecting him but has to ask him things like "what are you working on?" Her nanocites can only properly control the genetically engineered bodies, not a/the real, imperfect (normally variable) body she is sharing with Baltar.
(God, these people should contact me about writing the sequel... I've already got several patch-files for The Matrix, you know "delete battery/power source; replace with "neuro-transmitter farm/factory" etc. 8-)
Without the spoiler, consider whom "Boxy" is connected up with (vis a vi the last few minutes of the second half.) They should have given him a real name though, you know "my name is X Y, but mom always called me Boxy..." "Ok... Boxy..."
Besides, think of every element of who Boomer is "children first" at the landing site, et al. There is no way that she wouldn't attach to one of them, at least for now.
Boxy as a simple DNPC ("Dependent Non-Player Character" for you non role-playing people) for *Boomer* is just potentially *OUTSTANDING* especially later.
On a side note, remember that Baltar picked the guy to blame for the Cylon Device because of his otustanding "blamability" in the circumstances. That that character ended up being who he was is significant to the character development. Baltar sure can pick them dificult situations out of a crowd.
Many possibilities... 8-)
Fun for the whole family, have little billy click it twice for twice the fun!
Seriously, I was eating in "Dennies" (rellay, my fault, I know) and the eight of us each had the all-you-can-eat breakfast bar. When the bill arrived we had been charged for ten. When we said, "hey, there are eight of us, but you charged us for ten" the servers response was, "oh, so do you want to go back and eat some more?"
If you don't understand what is so wrong with the server in this example, then "automatically" and "changed at any time" are happy fun words for you and yours.
Someone please save us all from the popular culture that would make people think anything like this CRF could be given a "popular and positive" spin...
Oh and P.S. I am a born and raised citizen of the United States of America. That doesn't stop me from understanding why a Brazillain (etc) hates it when we call U.S. people like ourselves (just) "Americans". It also lets me appreciate in fullness just how lazy my average countryman is when expounding his mentally lax "wisdom" on the rest of the world (typically at gun point.)
I benefited fully from my understanding (at the time) of how deficient my public education was going to trun out to be.
So I may not have been popular during that public education, but at least I am, on the average, now not as dumb as my general population. 8-)
As the decenting intelligencia it is our job to try to make Microsoft look bad. Without a "well-heeled" and "porperly managed" niche opposition, real opposition might foment and cause our corporate masters some discomfort.
Also, as a well-heeled opposition, we have our body-politic well and properly stocked with internal detractors whos job it is to make it look like we are the shills we are supposed to be, by pointing out at every turn how knee-jerk our reactions are.
It's like an ongoing episode of Hannity and Colms (however you spell the names) on Fox Propiganda Network but not so rightest-anti-mock-liberal.
I for one publicly descent from the opinions of our just and mighty corporate overlords who know best how I might serve them with my descent.
In point of fact, lots of people download(ed) lots of stuff they would never buy. Their "never buy" status is not dependent on the presence or absence of the download.
The straw-man arugment that each download represents a lost sale is unsupportable. There are several classes of adopters. The largest cross section of downloaders would not be "promoted" from "downloader" to "purchaser", they would de DEMOTED from "downloader" to "might own if it were cheap of free" and some more would DEMOTE all the way to "wouldn't keep this if it were forced on me at gun point." Further, there are people who download(ed) things at random, liked what they hear, and promoted themselves to "purchaser" because of the available downloads. Finally there is NO WAY to tell whether downloading availability was a positive or negative sum transaction.
The only known facts:
[Group A] (1) downloading peaked, (2) album sales peaked at the same time as downloading peaked, (3) the econmy peaked with items 1 and 2.
[Group B] (1) downloading got attacked and fell off, (2) album sales fell off at the same time as downloading, (3) the economy generally fell off at the same times as items 1 and 2.
The facts actually support EXACTLY TWO conclusions. (1) the economy has affected album sales and (2) downloading may have helped album sales, but at a minimum did no demonstrable harm to album sales.
The follow on fact that lazy thinkers who cannot correlate "economy" and "sales" tend to be the same people who can neither correlated nor reconcile "no IP style entanglements" and "the renesance".
[ASIDE: Just for the record, I write software and fiction and get paid for one and want to get paid for the other. But I also pay enough attention to the world to know that overly simple models of interraction based on deleberate ignorance will fail to reach accurate conclusions. "The money the artist would have got" is just such a conclusion.]
Consider BitOBear's three question "cultural reletivity" test...
1) "Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo..." What is Juliet asking? [HINT: she isn't trying to find out if he is at the bottom of the wall...]
2) "Let them eat cake." What is Marie Antoniette suggesting? [HINT: it is not the common "birthday food"...]
3) Where did the "Confederacy" get its name? [HINT: the civil war was about slavery in the same way that not-driving-drunk is about avoiding points on your driver's license...]
These are three culturally accessible examples of how modern people (Americans spesifically?) walk around with their heads full of garbage about what is going on in life. If you bother to look up and understand the above tidbits (in anything at least as authoratative as a middle-school textbook), and look at how how that understanding is different from "what everybody knows", you will be sadly surprised at just how stupid people are about the simple events that surround them.
The current "music theft" debate is just as wrong headed and "unresearched" on all sides as, say, the average American's understanding of "manifest destiny" as an extension of "might makes right".
If you don't pay attention to the details, you have no right to cry foul when people think you are not worth listening to...
THEN they would have to prove that ownership.
The thing is, Linus (And hence the Linux kernel effort) has detailed records of what came from whom (and therefore from where). SCO has no such records except the vague statement that "whatever we (sco) have we own."
If there is common code, and Linus can prove who provided it to him (e.g. who wrote it), and SCO cannot prove even the first records of who provided the code to *them*, then guess who legally possessess "proof of ownership."
See the word Provenance (which usually applies to "fine art"). Lets say I walked up to you with a genuine Picasso, proveably genuine, if I can't provide the chain of ownership that demonstrates that it is mine to sell to you, you would be a fool to buy it.
The same basic features apply to the (mis-named) intellectual property issues. If SCO demonstrates that there is code in common between something they claim to own and the Linux kernel, they will need to be able to make a stronger claim of ownership than that made by the OS community.
This is the basis of the ATT vs BSD settlement. In that case BSD was more pursuasive in their ownership of the disputed text because they had the original copyright notices that included the names of the authors, and they had the authors right there saying "yep" I wrote that under X cirsumstances. ATT was in the SCO position of just having some program text in a bunch of files, no attributable authors and no copyright notices.
The point is, SCO has produced no proof because they have none. They are (probably) hoping to release whatever confluence of code they may have as close to closing arguments as possible, on the grounds that such material would apear to stand on merrit. They *cannot* release that data because the very presence of submission and aproval-for-inclusion records kept in the linux project system (BitKeeper et al) is, by definition, "more pursuasive" than any straight claim.
We saw how fast the one example that got out was debunked. By this time SCO is hoping to do a drive-by submission-of-evidence. That never works. 8-)
Guessing that they have some kind of case is very bad. The simple fact that they havn't produced a single spesific instance of (provenanced) code in the process of pursuing thier case, is rather indicitive.
Remember that in civil cases there is no "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard. It is purely "proponderance of evidence." In a civl matter it is *ONLY* a question of who has "more and more credible" evidence.
"incredible" evidence and clames are, by definition, useless.
The probem is that the word "software" is essentially meaningless in exatcly the way the word "religion" is essentially meaningless. I use the phrase (if I may be allowed to coin a phrase in public) "nomnitave adjective", or just plain "ad-noun" to refer to this problem.
Consider the adjective "good", we all know how to use this word and we all know when we think something does or doesn't deserve the label. Fair enough.
Now move on to the word "religion" there are all sorts of things that can be religion to all sorts of people. But as soon as you try to codify the difference between religion and not-religion you get into trouble. Like pronography, you know it when you see it, but to others, the evil alien Xenu and his penchant for filmmaking are a religion, a position with witch I would tend to disagree.
"Software" is likewise sufficently vague in construction and scope. In its meaty center you are on firm ground, but as you aproach the edges things get abstruse and indeterminant.
Consider that there has been, to date, no instance of someone implementing in software, something that was not (or at least could not be) implemented on paper in the real world. Start with easy analogous items like solitare. The game exists in both forms, but there are versions of the game on the computer that would be impractical with actual cards. You could *play* them with real cards, but the experience would be unweildy. The thing is, by extension, the most obscure exercise in pointer indirection is essentially analogous to using a card catalog in a library. Cross referencing and doing lookups. Chain of evidence, data integrety. eBay... All of it exists out here first.
So, is there one methodology for validating all software persuits? Should their be?
No and No.
That method would first have to exist as a means to validate all human endevour, and then it would have to validate that the software properly performed the analog of that endeavour.
It's impractical.
When the word "software" is applied to a "real" noun, e.g. "Accounting software" "database software" and so forth, you get your first (only) glimpse at a rational subset of operations that can then be considered and validated.
"Management Software" is a double ad-noun, it must be combined with something else, "database management software" "finincial management software."
The unending chain of ad-nouns is where people get lost in the great fire swamps... "business management software"... ouch. A tripple ad-noun. how do we tell "good business management software" (a quadruple ad-noun 8-) from "bad business management software"? At these points we are speaking with aparent spesificity, but still managing to say absolutely nothing spesific or concrete.
So...
There should be, and are, ways to tell if the particular thing you are codifying into software is being codified correctly. Unfortunately (for some) that requires knowledge of "software techniques" and the spesifics of the thing being codified.
All else, that is all "official procedure" that isn't talored to the particular project, is just ISO9000 documentary masturbation.