A few relevant ballpark figures might help the discussion:
World electricity consumption circa 2001: under 14 trillion KWh (14 x 10^12)
Max solar energy typically falling on a square metre of land: 1 KWh
Minimum area of land needed to supply world demand at 100% conversion: 14 million Km^2, or 14 solar farms of 1,000 x 1,000 Km each.
Before anyone gets carried away, this doesn't lead directly to a plan for converting the world to solar by siting 14 farms in the world's deserts.:-) [For a start, 100% conversion efficiency isn't even theoretically possible.] However, on a smaller national scale, there's no doubt that there is a lot of energy available in sunlight.
It's worth examining this proposition at face value for pros and cons, rather than immediately discounting it.
The first question that comes to mind is, does plasma research benefit from being carried out in a natural vacuum environment rather than needing apparatus to create one artificially? How does the degree of evacuation inside a fusion containment vessel compare with that in LEO, far orbit, or on the Moon? Is there any benefit to be gained from ever-better vacuums, such as freedom from plasma contamination?
Questions like those are probably more likely to be of interest than any handwaving about danger from black holes.
put 100 simple things together and have them interact, and you end up with a system that is vastly more complex than just 100 unconnected simple things. We have no idea on how to learn the parameters of such a behemoth, let alone how to initialize it.
That's sad. It was true over a decade ago when I did my PhD in an AI-related field, but those were early days, with neural nets, expert systems and fuzzy logic still all the rage. Is there at least a recognized subfield of machine learning now that deals in the study of emergence?
Is the future of competitive sports an elite cadre of genetically engineered athletes?
Of course it is. There's no discrimination against those with hip replacements, heart bypasses, dental refurbishments nor plastic surgery in sport. Mankind will continue to replace its really crappy protein bits with more durable components, and the Olympic committee is not going to object, at the risk of becoming totally irrelevant.
Human responses to intrusion don't scale
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When she found out about attacks and attempted intrusions, she got on the phone with the netblock owner and gave them an earful and followed up until something happened, even if it was only a small improvement. If need be, she reported it to the police and was even able to convince them that crime was an area of their responsibility even if they did not currently have the expertise.
The problem with your suggestion is that human response doesn't scale. At her average low of 15 mins per day dealing with the problem manually or socially, the rate of intrusions only has to increase 32-fold before it takes up an entire 8-hour normal working day. How many thousands of network admins are you going to hire to handle a DDoS attack from 100K sources? There is no limit to the number of owned Windows boxes out there.
It doesn't scale and it doesn't help. It is far better to spend your network admin's time on making your systems ever more impervious to attack, and if she has any time left over, to teach others how to do likewise. Ultimately, if all sites are securely tied down then it doesn't matter what the cracker kiddies are doing.
Worrying about port scans is a blast from the past. Let's see now, 65536 ports, that's 16-bits of space from which to brute-force your secret. Do you see anyone advocating 16-bit encryption as secure? I don't think so. You are truly pwned.
If your security depends on people not knowing which ports you have open, then you have no security.
But, by "adding a level of indirection", as you might say, you're "gambling" on people's reaction to how the stock will perform.
Gambling on the random roll of a die or on the semi-predictable reaction of people is still gambling. As long as there is a random element, it's gambling. Take boxing, in which years of preparation of a very accessible human precede the fight, which is far less random than racing horses for example. Yet, nobody is likely to argue that betting on the outcome of a boxing match is not gambling.
In any event, it's all immaterial. The key observation here is that this gambling or non-gambling results in very large financial gains for people who are not contributing to the material wealth of the nation in any way whatsoever, except as consumers. The normal term for organisms that do that is "parasite", and that's what these gamblers or speculators are.
Admittedly, 5% or so of market trading actually loosens up capital which productive companies use to underpin their manufacturing and generate real wealth, and that's good. But the other 95% is purely parasitic.
It would be quite easy to justify even the role of pure unadulterated parasitism by requiring a percentage of trading profits to automatically enter the coffers of the company being traded. That would be anathema though to the traders. The idea that to make money you should actually create something lost its hold in America a long time ago.
It's not a victory for technology, nor for freedom.
What we have here is an network facility that was implemented badly (ie. without default access controls), and instead of the manufacturers getting their wrists slapped by the user community for inept design, the courts are brought in and it's turned into yet another thing for the state to regulate.
It happens to be an MS problem in this case, but the issue is of much wider concern. You really don't want the state brought in when the problem is just a symptom arising from a technical fault. If you do, pretty soon the nanny state is tucking you up in bed every night... in a straightjacket.
Learning to do A,B or C if X,Y or Z happens is NOT computer science!
Really? Because I really don't understand finite state automata then. Crud.:-)
The poster to whom you replied was correct, and your retort was misplaced. "Doing A, B or C if X, Y or Z happens" is merely what FSAs do rather than FSA theory, and does not require any technical knowledge about FSAs at all. MS admins are often taught to perform reactive duties like that too, as if they were cogs in a machine, since the platform is largely a black box. Being able to do that yourself does not constitute understanding how it is done, nor does it provide you with any of the background or principles of FSAs.
That's the difference between vocational training and education. An MCSE suggests that the holder is competent in certain computing duties for a particular platform. It doesn't pretend to offer an education in computer science.
"There's no set architecture in Linux. All roads lead to madness" -Microsoft
The article is full of meaningless statements about Linux, words used for effect and without any attempt at reason or logic. The poetic "All roads lead to madness" really highlights how they've pretty much abandoned technical arguments and are now invoking defensive political rhetoric.
That statement is pretty funny though when you think about it. Linux and the BSDs all have the architecture of Unix, and that's by far the most elegant and powerful O/S architecture available outside of academia at the present time. The fact that they can say something as laughable as "no set architecture in Linux" just shows how divorced from reality they really are.
so you're saying if you are out of your depth, it's sad to even try?
That depends on the degree to which you're out of your depth, and the risks involved.
When you're so out of your depth that you're not even aware that you should have run complete stress and temperature simulations first, and that you should be measuring how your equipment performs and comparing it against your simulation results to be sure that you're in control, that's when it gets worrying.
Technology is hard enough to get to work reliably even when you take a strong scientific approach and do your utmost to apply quality engineering. When you don't have that mindset, then you've got to be pretty dumb to even contemplate putting a human life at risk.
Amateur enterprise is very good. Amateurism is not.
It seems as if there's a lot of cool stuff being developed by the impetus of the prize.
Looking at SpaceShipOne, I have to agree. But on the other hand, looking at Armadillo....
This had also happened on the previous 12" engine after a few runs (you could see a couple red hot catalyst rings fly out in one of the static test videos). It didn't seem to be progressive last time, so we went ahead and left it alone, expecting the test run to squash the rings down into an interference fit again.
Rings fly out of the engine and they aren't too worried? They think rings may be loose but they expect them to squash down to interference fit again? Words fail me.
There's good engineering and there's also appalling engineering covered in wishful thinking and viewed through rose-tinted spectacles. The X-Prize has very worthy goals, but it's sad that by setting a date and making it a race, it necessarily attracts also those who are totally out of their depth in the kind of engineering discipline required for such an endeavour.
FYI- All of the states Attorneys General have a "Consumer Protection Unit." They are charged with protecting consumers from fraudulent activity. That is why you as citizens are considered consumers in the letter.
It sounds like you know what you're talking about here, so could you please explain something that totally eludes me?
My understanding of "Attorney General" is something along the lines of the most eminent judicial office in each state. People with a clear and balanced view, and easily able to distinguish fact from bullshit. Although their position inevitably makes them political figures, nevertheless they are highly independent and probably contemptuous of commercial lobbies trying to push them in certain directions with a blatant profit motive. OK, so that's a highly rose-tinted view, but hopefully there's at least some foundation of truth to it.
Unfortunately, this view of AGs totally fails to correlate in the slightest with the completely opinionated and unadulterated rubbish contained in that joint letter. We're talking about a level of unreason and unsupported factual nonsense of which even Darl McBride would be proud. This is simply not the kind of thing that senior, clear-headed legal experts could ever possibly even think about, let alone write. I mean, the lowest judge in the land would trivially dismiss 98% of it as not substantive, factual, or germane to the topic.
And the fact that so many pretty unique "individuals" apparently were willing to act as a unanimous cabal and put their names to it is equally incredible. It's more common to get 3 different legal opinions when you put 2 such people together.
Something's wrong here. I'm not sure what, but the pieces of this puzzle just don't fit together. Do you have any insights on this aspect of the AG office as well?
How something is USED, and what something IS, are two completely different things.
You're using logic.:-) You should know that logic is irrelevant here when it comes to politicians trying to justify something. They use rhetoric for effect, not to conveny logical reasoning. (And AG's are politicians, possibly the most dangerous kind owing to their long-term power and elevated status.)
When you're a politician, you're in the power game, the power to regulate and to dictate what others do. You're a coercer, in every bone in your body.
Now consider P2P networks. They bypass every possible point of control, totally undermining the ability of coercers to impose their will. The idea that P2P can be allowed to exist is utter anathema to them. And they can see that it could get much worse, with P2P traffic becoming practically invisible in addition to being effectively anonymous. This is beyond the pale. They have not worked their way up the tree of political power for 30-40 years only to be undermined like this.
If you can imagine a bunch of people totally freaking out, you've got the right picture. Don't expect logic.
If the current corporate adoption of OSS is what constitutes critical mass (ie a few marginal projects here and there), then continue to welcome our current microsoft overlords.
Critical mass and market share are two entirely different things. The fact that open source has only a small marketshare, as measured by the number of commercial applications, does not invalidate the idea that open source has "gone critical", ie. that its mindshare is now so big that it is "exploding" on the software scene.
The metaphor from atomics isn't all that bad. Free and open source software (minus the labels) have now been around for decades, yet it is only in the last several years that they have appeared on the commercial radar, first as inconsequential, and now as a dire threat. In the world inhabited by Microsoft and friends, this is a real explosion in the software world.
The decision to freeze the project is more of a political statement to force the federal government to take a clear stand on the EU patent directive.
While some are saying that this is indeed a political strategy that could backfire, it's worth noting that even if it achieved the exact opposite of its intended purpose, this could be beneficial.
First of all, it raises the profile of the patent disaster greatly, and if software patents go ahead and block the takeup of open software then everyone will be pointing huge fingers at the pro-patent supporting politicians and blaming them for increased taxation and wasting public money as a result of not being able to use our lower-cost systems in government. It'll provide a very useful mallet for knocking sense into politicians (pure reason doesn't work too well).
Secondly, if government isn't able to use open software then it will necessarily have to use inferior proprietary systems and hence it will be less effective. A weaker government is a very good thing, at least from the point of view of the libertarian community. Opinions differ on this a lot of course, and certainly the fervent socialists would not see a less effective goverment as a good thing. However, even they would probably agree that a 1984-style scenario would be slightly less bad if a totally intrusive government chose to use inferior tools.
So, not all is lost, even if the greens have misjudged the outcome of this completely.
That's actually quite a good question, given the huge amount of power available from sunlight in the inner solar system. A continuous-burn trajectory to Mercury would probably be very much shorter than the current one; the thrust may be small, but craft speed builds up rapidly under such continuous acceleration. You'd only need to carry enough conventional chemical propellant for the final orbital insertion.
NASA has been very active on the ion-engine front -- last year it successfully completed a pretty advanced test: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/11/03112 1072826.htm. (And enter "ion engine" at NASA's main site for a huge number of links.) So, it's not only ESA that have their fingers in this pie.
Maybe the answer is that ion engines still need a few more years of development? Certainly not long though, since small ion thrusters are already in use, as you point out.
This tech is only being billed for a national security use because that's where the government wasteful spending is these days. If everybody was concerned about hurricanes for some strange reason, then this tech would be sold for its weather uses.
Indeed, but once you understand that, you might as well buy into the system. Politicians aren't sentient as such, they just twitch occasionally under particular triggers, and National Security is of course a key positive trigger.
While one's at it, one might as well label one's competition as encouraging terrorism and creating a danger to our children. That's bound to trigger a helpful negative response. Logic doesn't come into the process at all.
This is where geeks go wrong, in expecting that the rest of society uses the same rational mechanism of thought as they. If one starts with that misconception, it's no wonder that the world appears incomprehensible.
Anything that makes politicians sit up and think about the horrors of patents in today's world is good.
The danger of course is that they'll think for 3 seconds only, and conclude that they need proprietary software instead of free, since its manufacturer then picks up any liability for royalties.
In contrast, if they could be made to think for just a little bit longer, they might realize that patents would only a problem in this case if they remained hidden underwater and surfaced later when profits were smelled. That would be easy for a government agency to counteract in advance, since politicians are singularly well placed to force patent holders to register claims by a specific date to assist in government planning. This would flush submarines up very nicely.
Submarining is truly the main evil with patents, since it prevents people from planning ahead to avoid liabilities, as well as feeding the parasitic squatter instead of the inventors. If patent holders lost the ability to claim royalties when they remained hidden, much of the problem could be averted.
In the end, the programmer has to get paid or they can't make a living off it. What we're seeing is the destruction of huge profit margins and the market force establishing the 'true' value of a programmer.
What you say is true, but the key aspect of OSS that has this undesireable effect is rarely identified. The problem isn't really that an independent open-source developer isn't paid... it's that he's made entirely irrelevant when his project is forked. He may have spent years or decades developing the background for a system, and then some kiddie with zero background investment decides that he prefers things done slightly differently and forks and takes the concept away from its originator.
That's hardly fair to the original developer, yet all open-source licenses have that same feature. Not a single one dissuades against forking. Even the open-source Artistic License which allegedly tries to ensure that the author can retain some artistic control over a project fails in this. It's pretty sad.
Frankly, it drives me nuts at times, the way that, say, Windows 95 did.
I know what you mean, but I don't think that it's just a problem with Gnome. Linux is now overrun with pretty-looking facilities that only help marginally with our ability to do useful work, and in some cases they actually decrease our overall ability by making the system more obscure.
Linux and the BSDs are primarily tools for power users, because that's what their remote ancestor and inspiration was, namely Unix. Anything that dumbs down these extremely powerful tools just so that they can appeal to Windows users or to granny is completely wrong. Any dumbing-down interface needs to be entirely additive and optional, and not given pride of place as if it were a leading-edge goal.
Re:Supported by IBM who supports Sen Hatch ...
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Cite please. "Sponsor" how?
I'm glad you asked that, 3.2.3, as you made me go back and check my sources. IBM ***does not*** appear in the Hatch contributor's list at http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/contrib.asp ?CID=N00009869&cycle=2002 and I would tend to believe the info on that page, so I think that I made a mistake in repeating hearsay about IBM without checking. Maybe one of those companies has IBM connections and that's what people were pointing to, but I want facts not speculation. Darn.
I apologize and withdraw my point entirely.
Novell and Oracle are promonent software companies in the list who should know better, but not IBM.
This sounds very like the phased array speaker technology that 1 Limited have been using...
Possibly, although the Fraunhofer Institute seems to be doing it in a massively less efficient way.
The key issue seems to be that as you progress from just a few point sources to hundreds, you're no longer just approximating a fully distributed source but you're actually starting to implement one physically. Once you accept that that's what you're doing, then you should stop thinking about "number of speakers" and focus on area coverage with flat panels.
Nobody is nuts enough to consider wiring up hundreds of speakers as a viable home market option, but replacing wallpaper with a few large robust decorative sound panels would easily be acceptable in many an ordinary home.
Unfortunately, Gabriel has missed a key point. Everything he mentions would be true and would provide a great way forward for musicians in the digital era, if only it weren't for one collosal problem.
Musicians live within an extremely complex community embracing music production, fandom, distribution, a major hype machine, journalism, radio and television, thousands of associated forms of business, professional institutions of various kinds, and a strong legal environment, all parts of which sustain each other and exclude anyone who does not play by their rules.
The vast vast vast majority of musicians *want* to play within this cozy hyped up environment, they want to get signed to major labels (it's a right of passage), they want to get interviewed by the label-owned magazines, they want to be on first-name terms with the best producers. With extremely few exceptions, they will NOT even consider going it alone, because that is tantamount to self-exile from their own community.
This is why we almost never hear any dissenting voices when the RIAA decides to shaft another few thousand fans. Musicians don't care, because all they see is their mother defending them, and nobody else complains apart from a few loons, so it must be OK.
Gabriel will get nowhere because he is being very careful not to rock the boat in which musicians lie peacefully asleep. The fans are not asleep, and that is why he has had some business success getting music to them. In contrast, the future about which he is now talking requires the musicians to awaken first from their slumbers (or maybe it's a total coma) and recognize that the values of everyone in their community are badly distorted and somewhat evil, and hence to want out. That however is not happening.
Slashdot Mirror
A few relevant ballpark figures might help the discussion:
:-) [For a start, 100% conversion efficiency isn't even theoretically possible.] However, on a smaller national scale, there's no doubt that there is a lot of energy available in sunlight.
World electricity consumption circa 2001: under 14 trillion KWh (14 x 10^12)
Max solar energy typically falling on a square metre of land: 1 KWh
Minimum area of land needed to supply world demand at 100% conversion: 14 million Km^2, or 14 solar farms of 1,000 x 1,000 Km each.
Before anyone gets carried away, this doesn't lead directly to a plan for converting the world to solar by siting 14 farms in the world's deserts.
Put it on the Moon.
It's worth examining this proposition at face value for pros and cons, rather than immediately discounting it.
The first question that comes to mind is, does plasma research benefit from being carried out in a natural vacuum environment rather than needing apparatus to create one artificially? How does the degree of evacuation inside a fusion containment vessel compare with that in LEO, far orbit, or on the Moon? Is there any benefit to be gained from ever-better vacuums, such as freedom from plasma contamination?
Questions like those are probably more likely to be of interest than any handwaving about danger from black holes.
put 100 simple things together and have them interact, and you end up with a system that is vastly more complex than just 100 unconnected simple things. We have no idea on how to learn the parameters of such a behemoth, let alone how to initialize it.
That's sad. It was true over a decade ago when I did my PhD in an AI-related field, but those were early days, with neural nets, expert systems and fuzzy logic still all the rage. Is there at least a recognized subfield of machine learning now that deals in the study of emergence?
Is the future of competitive sports an elite cadre of genetically engineered athletes?
Of course it is. There's no discrimination against those with hip replacements, heart bypasses, dental refurbishments nor plastic surgery in sport. Mankind will continue to replace its really crappy protein bits with more durable components, and the Olympic committee is not going to object, at the risk of becoming totally irrelevant.
When she found out about attacks and attempted intrusions, she got on the phone with the netblock owner and gave them an earful and followed up until something happened, even if it was only a small improvement. If need be, she reported it to the police and was even able to convince them that crime was an area of their responsibility even if they did not currently have the expertise.
The problem with your suggestion is that human response doesn't scale. At her average low of 15 mins per day dealing with the problem manually or socially, the rate of intrusions only has to increase 32-fold before it takes up an entire 8-hour normal working day. How many thousands of network admins are you going to hire to handle a DDoS attack from 100K sources? There is no limit to the number of owned Windows boxes out there.
It doesn't scale and it doesn't help. It is far better to spend your network admin's time on making your systems ever more impervious to attack, and if she has any time left over, to teach others how to do likewise. Ultimately, if all sites are securely tied down then it doesn't matter what the cracker kiddies are doing.
Don't scan my ports!
Worrying about port scans is a blast from the past. Let's see now, 65536 ports, that's 16-bits of space from which to brute-force your secret. Do you see anyone advocating 16-bit encryption as secure? I don't think so. You are truly pwned.
If your security depends on people not knowing which ports you have open, then you have no security.
But, by "adding a level of indirection", as you might say, you're "gambling" on people's reaction to how the stock will perform.
Gambling on the random roll of a die or on the semi-predictable reaction of people is still gambling. As long as there is a random element, it's gambling. Take boxing, in which years of preparation of a very accessible human precede the fight, which is far less random than racing horses for example. Yet, nobody is likely to argue that betting on the outcome of a boxing match is not gambling.
In any event, it's all immaterial. The key observation here is that this gambling or non-gambling results in very large financial gains for people who are not contributing to the material wealth of the nation in any way whatsoever, except as consumers. The normal term for organisms that do that is "parasite", and that's what these gamblers or speculators are.
Admittedly, 5% or so of market trading actually loosens up capital which productive companies use to underpin their manufacturing and generate real wealth, and that's good. But the other 95% is purely parasitic.
It would be quite easy to justify even the role of pure unadulterated parasitism by requiring a percentage of trading profits to automatically enter the coffers of the company being traded. That would be anathema though to the traders. The idea that to make money you should actually create something lost its hold in America a long time ago.
This would be a victory if ...
... in a straightjacket.
It's not a victory for technology, nor for freedom.
What we have here is an network facility that was implemented badly (ie. without default access controls), and instead of the manufacturers getting their wrists slapped by the user community for inept design, the courts are brought in and it's turned into yet another thing for the state to regulate.
It happens to be an MS problem in this case, but the issue is of much wider concern. You really don't want the state brought in when the problem is just a symptom arising from a technical fault. If you do, pretty soon the nanny state is tucking you up in bed every night
Learning to do A,B or C if X,Y or Z happens is NOT computer science!
:-)
Really? Because I really don't understand finite state automata then. Crud.
The poster to whom you replied was correct, and your retort was misplaced. "Doing A, B or C if X, Y or Z happens" is merely what FSAs do rather than FSA theory, and does not require any technical knowledge about FSAs at all. MS admins are often taught to perform reactive duties like that too, as if they were cogs in a machine, since the platform is largely a black box. Being able to do that yourself does not constitute understanding how it is done, nor does it provide you with any of the background or principles of FSAs.
That's the difference between vocational training and education. An MCSE suggests that the holder is competent in certain computing duties for a particular platform. It doesn't pretend to offer an education in computer science.
"There's no set architecture in Linux. All roads lead to madness" -Microsoft
The article is full of meaningless statements about Linux, words used for effect and without any attempt at reason or logic. The poetic "All roads lead to madness" really highlights how they've pretty much abandoned technical arguments and are now invoking defensive political rhetoric.
That statement is pretty funny though when you think about it. Linux and the BSDs all have the architecture of Unix, and that's by far the most elegant and powerful O/S architecture available outside of academia at the present time. The fact that they can say something as laughable as "no set architecture in Linux" just shows how divorced from reality they really are.
so you're saying if you are out of your depth, it's sad to even try?
That depends on the degree to which you're out of your depth, and the risks involved.
When you're so out of your depth that you're not even aware that you should have run complete stress and temperature simulations first, and that you should be measuring how your equipment performs and comparing it against your simulation results to be sure that you're in control, that's when it gets worrying.
Technology is hard enough to get to work reliably even when you take a strong scientific approach and do your utmost to apply quality engineering. When you don't have that mindset, then you've got to be pretty dumb to even contemplate putting a human life at risk.
Amateur enterprise is very good. Amateurism is not.
It seems as if there's a lot of cool stuff being developed by the impetus of the prize.
....
Looking at SpaceShipOne, I have to agree. But on the other hand, looking at Armadillo
This had also happened on the previous 12" engine after a few runs (you could see a couple red hot catalyst rings fly out in one of the static test videos). It didn't seem to be progressive last time, so we went ahead and left it alone, expecting the test run to squash the rings down into an interference fit again.
Rings fly out of the engine and they aren't too worried? They think rings may be loose but they expect them to squash down to interference fit again? Words fail me.
There's good engineering and there's also appalling engineering covered in wishful thinking and viewed through rose-tinted spectacles. The X-Prize has very worthy goals, but it's sad that by setting a date and making it a race, it necessarily attracts also those who are totally out of their depth in the kind of engineering discipline required for such an endeavour.
FYI- All of the states Attorneys General have a "Consumer Protection Unit." They are charged with protecting consumers from fraudulent activity. That is why you as citizens are considered consumers in the letter.
It sounds like you know what you're talking about here, so could you please explain something that totally eludes me?
My understanding of "Attorney General" is something along the lines of the most eminent judicial office in each state. People with a clear and balanced view, and easily able to distinguish fact from bullshit. Although their position inevitably makes them political figures, nevertheless they are highly independent and probably contemptuous of commercial lobbies trying to push them in certain directions with a blatant profit motive. OK, so that's a highly rose-tinted view, but hopefully there's at least some foundation of truth to it.
Unfortunately, this view of AGs totally fails to correlate in the slightest with the completely opinionated and unadulterated rubbish contained in that joint letter. We're talking about a level of unreason and unsupported factual nonsense of which even Darl McBride would be proud. This is simply not the kind of thing that senior, clear-headed legal experts could ever possibly even think about, let alone write. I mean, the lowest judge in the land would trivially dismiss 98% of it as not substantive, factual, or germane to the topic.
And the fact that so many pretty unique "individuals" apparently were willing to act as a unanimous cabal and put their names to it is equally incredible. It's more common to get 3 different legal opinions when you put 2 such people together.
Something's wrong here. I'm not sure what, but the pieces of this puzzle just don't fit together. Do you have any insights on this aspect of the AG office as well?
How something is USED, and what something IS, are two completely different things.
:-) You should know that logic is irrelevant here when it comes to politicians trying to justify something. They use rhetoric for effect, not to conveny logical reasoning. (And AG's are politicians, possibly the most dangerous kind owing to their long-term power and elevated status.)
You're using logic.
When you're a politician, you're in the power game, the power to regulate and to dictate what others do. You're a coercer, in every bone in your body.
Now consider P2P networks. They bypass every possible point of control, totally undermining the ability of coercers to impose their will. The idea that P2P can be allowed to exist is utter anathema to them. And they can see that it could get much worse, with P2P traffic becoming practically invisible in addition to being effectively anonymous. This is beyond the pale. They have not worked their way up the tree of political power for 30-40 years only to be undermined like this.
If you can imagine a bunch of people totally freaking out, you've got the right picture. Don't expect logic.
If the current corporate adoption of OSS is what constitutes critical mass (ie a few marginal projects here and there), then continue to welcome our current microsoft overlords.
Critical mass and market share are two entirely different things. The fact that open source has only a small marketshare, as measured by the number of commercial applications, does not invalidate the idea that open source has "gone critical", ie. that its mindshare is now so big that it is "exploding" on the software scene.
The metaphor from atomics isn't all that bad. Free and open source software (minus the labels) have now been around for decades, yet it is only in the last several years that they have appeared on the commercial radar, first as inconsequential, and now as a dire threat. In the world inhabited by Microsoft and friends, this is a real explosion in the software world.
What language is it written in?
C
Where is the source kept?
http://www.elections.act.gov.au/evacs.tar.gz
The decision to freeze the project is more of a political statement to force the federal government to take a clear stand on the EU patent directive.
While some are saying that this is indeed a political strategy that could backfire, it's worth noting that even if it achieved the exact opposite of its intended purpose, this could be beneficial.
First of all, it raises the profile of the patent disaster greatly, and if software patents go ahead and block the takeup of open software then everyone will be pointing huge fingers at the pro-patent supporting politicians and blaming them for increased taxation and wasting public money as a result of not being able to use our lower-cost systems in government. It'll provide a very useful mallet for knocking sense into politicians (pure reason doesn't work too well).
Secondly, if government isn't able to use open software then it will necessarily have to use inferior proprietary systems and hence it will be less effective. A weaker government is a very good thing, at least from the point of view of the libertarian community. Opinions differ on this a lot of course, and certainly the fervent socialists would not see a less effective goverment as a good thing. However, even they would probably agree that a 1984-style scenario would be slightly less bad if a totally intrusive government chose to use inferior tools.
So, not all is lost, even if the greens have misjudged the outcome of this completely.
Why aren't ion drives used more?
2 1072826.htm. (And enter "ion engine" at NASA's main site for a huge number of links.) So, it's not only ESA that have their fingers in this pie.
That's actually quite a good question, given the huge amount of power available from sunlight in the inner solar system. A continuous-burn trajectory to Mercury would probably be very much shorter than the current one; the thrust may be small, but craft speed builds up rapidly under such continuous acceleration. You'd only need to carry enough conventional chemical propellant for the final orbital insertion.
NASA has been very active on the ion-engine front -- last year it successfully completed a pretty advanced test: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/11/0311
Maybe the answer is that ion engines still need a few more years of development? Certainly not long though, since small ion thrusters are already in use, as you point out.
This tech is only being billed for a national security use because that's where the government wasteful spending is these days. If everybody was concerned about hurricanes for some strange reason, then this tech would be sold for its weather uses.
Indeed, but once you understand that, you might as well buy into the system. Politicians aren't sentient as such, they just twitch occasionally under particular triggers, and National Security is of course a key positive trigger.
While one's at it, one might as well label one's competition as encouraging terrorism and creating a danger to our children. That's bound to trigger a helpful negative response. Logic doesn't come into the process at all.
This is where geeks go wrong, in expecting that the rest of society uses the same rational mechanism of thought as they. If one starts with that misconception, it's no wonder that the world appears incomprehensible.
Anything that makes politicians sit up and think about the horrors of patents in today's world is good.
The danger of course is that they'll think for 3 seconds only, and conclude that they need proprietary software instead of free, since its manufacturer then picks up any liability for royalties.
In contrast, if they could be made to think for just a little bit longer, they might realize that patents would only a problem in this case if they remained hidden underwater and surfaced later when profits were smelled. That would be easy for a government agency to counteract in advance, since politicians are singularly well placed to force patent holders to register claims by a specific date to assist in government planning. This would flush submarines up very nicely.
Submarining is truly the main evil with patents, since it prevents people from planning ahead to avoid liabilities, as well as feeding the parasitic squatter instead of the inventors. If patent holders lost the ability to claim royalties when they remained hidden, much of the problem could be averted.
In the end, the programmer has to get paid or they can't make a living off it. What we're seeing is the destruction of huge profit margins and the market force establishing the 'true' value of a programmer.
... it's that he's made entirely irrelevant when his project is forked. He may have spent years or decades developing the background for a system, and then some kiddie with zero background investment decides that he prefers things done slightly differently and forks and takes the concept away from its originator.
What you say is true, but the key aspect of OSS that has this undesireable effect is rarely identified. The problem isn't really that an independent open-source developer isn't paid
That's hardly fair to the original developer, yet all open-source licenses have that same feature. Not a single one dissuades against forking. Even the open-source Artistic License which allegedly tries to ensure that the author can retain some artistic control over a project fails in this. It's pretty sad.
Frankly, it drives me nuts at times, the way that, say, Windows 95 did.
I know what you mean, but I don't think that it's just a problem with Gnome. Linux is now overrun with pretty-looking facilities that only help marginally with our ability to do useful work, and in some cases they actually decrease our overall ability by making the system more obscure.
Linux and the BSDs are primarily tools for power users, because that's what their remote ancestor and inspiration was, namely Unix. Anything that dumbs down these extremely powerful tools just so that they can appeal to Windows users or to granny is completely wrong. Any dumbing-down interface needs to be entirely additive and optional, and not given pride of place as if it were a leading-edge goal.
Cite please. "Sponsor" how?
p ?CID=N00009869&cycle=2002 and I would tend to believe the info on that page, so I think that I made a mistake in repeating hearsay about IBM without checking. Maybe one of those companies has IBM connections and that's what people were pointing to, but I want facts not speculation. Darn.
I'm glad you asked that, 3.2.3, as you made me go back and check my sources. IBM ***does not*** appear in the Hatch contributor's list at http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/contrib.as
I apologize and withdraw my point entirely.
Novell and Oracle are promonent software companies in the list who should know better, but not IBM.
Thanks for the heads'up.
This sounds very like the phased array speaker technology that 1 Limited have been using ...
Possibly, although the Fraunhofer Institute seems to be doing it in a massively less efficient way.
The key issue seems to be that as you progress from just a few point sources to hundreds, you're no longer just approximating a fully distributed source but you're actually starting to implement one physically. Once you accept that that's what you're doing, then you should stop thinking about "number of speakers" and focus on area coverage with flat panels.
Nobody is nuts enough to consider wiring up hundreds of speakers as a viable home market option, but replacing wallpaper with a few large robust decorative sound panels would easily be acceptable in many an ordinary home.
Unfortunately, Gabriel has missed a key point. Everything he mentions would be true and would provide a great way forward for musicians in the digital era, if only it weren't for one collosal problem.
Musicians live within an extremely complex community embracing music production, fandom, distribution, a major hype machine, journalism, radio and television, thousands of associated forms of business, professional institutions of various kinds, and a strong legal environment, all parts of which sustain each other and exclude anyone who does not play by their rules.
The vast vast vast majority of musicians *want* to play within this cozy hyped up environment, they want to get signed to major labels (it's a right of passage), they want to get interviewed by the label-owned magazines, they want to be on first-name terms with the best producers. With extremely few exceptions, they will NOT even consider going it alone, because that is tantamount to self-exile from their own community.
This is why we almost never hear any dissenting voices when the RIAA decides to shaft another few thousand fans. Musicians don't care, because all they see is their mother defending them, and nobody else complains apart from a few loons, so it must be OK.
Gabriel will get nowhere because he is being very careful not to rock the boat in which musicians lie peacefully asleep. The fans are not asleep, and that is why he has had some business success getting music to them. In contrast, the future about which he is now talking requires the musicians to awaken first from their slumbers (or maybe it's a total coma) and recognize that the values of everyone in their community are badly distorted and somewhat evil, and hence to want out. That however is not happening.