If you try to get some details of how the Apollo space suits work, you will find they can't be released under FoIA and they will claim all sorts of stupid things.
It turns out that the reason this is still secret is that the Russinas haven't built a space suit using thouse nice pielter effect devices and still used a compressor like system just like your car's air conditioner. Never mind that pielter devices are being put into coolers in China but since the silly Ruskies aren't smart enough to use these devices, its clearly in the National Interest to hide this fact from them.
Offical NASA statments still say that one of the space suits functions is to _heat_ the astronauts in space. Lets see here... heat source, perfect
thermal insulation and you need heating? right...
Dima's web site had details on some of the reasons that these detainees are being held. Many of them refuse to provide any ID and fit descriptions of people wanted in different parts of the world. Many of these people claim to be from one country but speak with an accent of another. Also consider that there are a few very violent people in thouse camps. What do you do with someone in the camps who can't go home because he took advantage of his position durring the civil wars and his home town people will lynch him if they get their hands on them. Do you give him a visa and say don't kill/rape/plunder anyone else? Australia already has a bit of a reputation of giving war criminals an easy life.
Austrlia is holding some people for more than 5 years but their visa's have been rejected and they would prefer to stay in jail here than got back to places like Iraq.
From what I can tell, the rule is "if you cause trouble, you go to the end of the queue". Many people in thouse camps are processed quickly so I'm sure you don't know the full story.
The total lack of sustainable business models was the major reason for the huge market crash in Russia. It was common to sell things to friends for less than it cost to make and then charge foreign compainies much more. That was fine until the foreign company canceled the deal because someone else was selling the same product for 1/2. The result was a large cascade of failures that affected most compaines in Russia. The same lession was learned in Hong Kong years ago and before that Japan. Now it appears that the US is getting to see it first hand.
Harley is very popular in Australia and its not the yuppies buying them. I see far more Harleys here that I ever did in the US. It may have something to do with the fact that a bike can be your only transport in most places in Australia unlike much of the US where snow can be a problem. The prices I've seen at one of the dealers didn't strike me as exceptionaly high either.
AOL is ignoring winAMP because if they push it, they may end up in court at the RIAA's request. At this point they have prevented MS from buying winAmp and thats enough.
They will not ignore Red Hat and just leave it as it isn.
Lucent used to have a router that sounds like this
on
Is Hyperchip Hype?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
But the never found any customers. It turns out that the few people that need very high speed routing don't buy anything but cisco and in that market it won't matter if you have a product thats much better, you'll have poor sales for years before the market will even consider your product.
As far as routing much faster, its not that hard to do. If you stop treating a router as a router and more like a switch, you can speed things up a grat deal with content addressable memory (the stuff used for cache tags). Its very expensive but 8 mb of CAM ram will let you decide which of 16 interfaces a packet goes to within 500 ps after the address bits hit the hardware. You can't do real time route update on this type of system like a cisco but you can still change routes within miliseconds.
The ideas behind the internet are dead when a small business can't dual home. Without routable class C address, that has already happened.
You could start with pre-loaded bit tables if your data is mostly static. You start out creating a subset of your data that includes the bits you know will be repeated and you feed that to gzip and let it build a table. You then build a custom version of gzip that starts with that table and not an empty one. The result is your compression will be better and it will be much faster. Years ago I looked at this for use in usenet news. if you compress headers and text seperately, you get better compression than just treating it as a stream.
What are the odds that these bugs were put there to be found. Now China will take the plane apart looking for bugs and when they are sure there are no more, there is a good chance that it will go back into service for its intend use. Is the CIA good enough that there will still be working bugs on the plane after its declared clean?
MS can "security upgrade" AOL out of business.
What would the average user do if they got an "urgent security upgrade" cd in the mail that had patches that broke AOL? The support costs and bad PR could kill AOL and if the patch also added a button that auotmaticly fixed things by hooking up to MSN, many people would swtich.
So far MS has had the good sense to not do that but what would happen if they did it today? If they destory AOL, then it wouldn't matter what the DOJ did, they would not be punished.
I don't know what rule book you play with the the US goverment considers financial communication and banks to be vaild military tragets. The money markets in Iraq were wiped out within days of the first attacks there. They also consider diplomatic centers of foreign countries targets if they are sharing intelligence (Chinese embassy). According to the actions of the US in the past 15 years, the WTC was a vaild military target. Wars are about extreme action to force your opponent to give up and taking any action that will expedite those goals.
The rules of not killing civilians are quite new and are within the limits of the weapons used. The war crimes trials in Nuremberg considered the ability of the control of a weapon vs the action. A tank commander who destroyed a house at close range and killed people got a harsher sentence than a bombardier that did the same thing.
If you read the terriorist handbook you will see where they are quite clear that if you get cuaght, you will name as your leader someone that has a reputation for doing these sorts of things. They even mention that someone that has been in jail is acceptable. If you take what happened and you look at the US populations reaction, I suspect the Sept 11 attack wasn't planed by Laden but someone else and that person may still be running around. bin Laden knows that things for him will not change if he provides evidence that he was in charge of the operation with the exception that who ever did plan it might be overlooked. Laden was too far away and too concerned with other things to not have delegated the planning operation to someone else. Remember that while he hates the US more than anything but Jews, he was given protection by the Talaban in order for him to train their people for an upcomming holy war between Pakistan and India. There are still the questions about the balance of power between the Talaban and al Qaeda.
In most very port countries (Afganastan?), their internet connections aren't through local backbones so if you use simple reverse lookups, you will find they are all located inside the US (or major countries in Europe) according to DNS.
If I remember correctly, the most common tool kit for open source crypto was mostly written in Australia.
It depends on the time it takes to do each round. If you had a crypto algorithm that took 2 days for one key then 32 bit crypo would be be harder to crack than most of the 64 bit stuff that is floating around today.
Lots of crypt starts getting easy to crack if you can unfold loops so that iteration #1 takes 100% of the normal time but iteration #2 takes 1% of the time. For things like DES and MD5, people have come up with ways of doing this. The other thing is lots of people like to encrypt known plaintext. For example credit card databases will usualy encrypt all the data. If you sell 2 items that are $10.00 and $19.95 then one field in that database will have one of two values most of the time. If those numbers are stored in 32 bits on a block boundry its child play to brute force the key for that block since you don't have to look at 99.9999% of the keys. Another common problem with crypto is putting hashes outside of the encrypted packets. If you can guess at enough of the other info (which tends to be nice formatted packets) then you can brute force the other bits till the hash matches. MD5 and SHA are a pain but there are short circuts you can take if you want to verify that something isn't correct.
TeX puts letters in boxes and is very good at it. It is not so good at doing things like drawing an image on the background of the page or even vector graphics.
Most DVI drivers will let you put Postscript into a TeX document that will come out nice on a postscript printer.
I've been attempting to convert some of our web page catalogn data into TeX so that it prints out better. The text is great but the tables just don't have a modern fluffy look that is so common in modern catalogs.
I've been using pdflatex which take LaTeX input and makes a pdf file directly.
I worked for a company that was formed by a group of contractors. They had taken their previous employers bid, slashed the prices by 1/2 and submited it. I was hired in after the jokers got the contract.
This was to a US AF base in wonderful part of date your sister Georgia. The contract was with DISA (used to be DARPA) but involved servics for the AF. Now let me count the bosses. 1 for the head hunting company, 2 on the Air force contract side (one was the contract manager, the other was on the technical side). On the DISA side there were two more. Due to goverment policies of who can be a boss, none of these people were qualified so all their supervisors also were my bosses. The company with the contract had a local supervisor, a local contract supervisor and a project supervisor and a project contract supervisor. With the overlap, I had 12 bosses. Only one of them was clueless and a problem. About onnce a week I would be called into Katy's bosses office (he was my boss two different ways and hers one) where he would simply say "Kathy wants to fire you again. Got any idea why this time?". In one of the weekly meetings, I proposed a new metic of "MIPS per square foot" and based on that she got one of those awards goverment empolyees love so much even though she wanted to fire me because I did something to raise her MIPS/sqft" with a new sun box. I suspect she still has no clue.
The plus side was that I got to play with some cool equipment and I meet people that played with even cooler equipment -- a F-15E beats a sparc station any day. I learned about security from people who knew what they were doing. It was worth while and let me pay of student loans.
I also got to work on the Gossip email spec and made a change to allow SMTP as a "transition" email system which effectively killed X.400.
I live in Melbourne Australia and it has one of the largest tram systems in the world. Depending on where your going it can be very good or very bad.
Melbourne is the 4th largest city in the world area wise and its population of 3.2 million put is larger than all but 4 US cities (and 14 metro areas). The trams and train lines here assume that people want to move from the suburbs to the city center. While its only one tram away to get to the beach, its two to get to most of the places in the city I want to get to. I work in a light industrial park and the trams don't go that far out.
Melbourne has a number of problems with the trams. The first is they used to have conductors and now have automated machines that won't sell the tickets that most people want and only take coins. The result is 50% or more of the people on the trams don't have tickets.
The other problem is the trams vs cars. Many of Melbourne's streets are quit wide with a median in the middle and the tram tracks run there but in areas where many of the small shopping streets are, there are two lanes. The outsides ones are used for parking and there are tram lines in the middle.
The trams can move quite qucikly but they tend to back up car traffic. if you get stuck behind a tram along one of the older roads, you will be there for quite some time. They should have ares set aside for cars to pass trams.
The energy use for the trams is quite high. They weigh much more than they need to and the engery load for them being full is the same as being empty. The new trams take even more power. There is also the problem that the trams take 7500V DC and the local trans take 1500V AC so there are complicated switching systems when a tram crosses a train line.
Melbourne still doesn't have a train or tram to the new airport and isn't likly to get one. They seem to be stuck with the train mentality and haven't given serious consideration to things like monorails.
If your in a small car and your going to hit the side of a sports utility car (SUC), aim for the wheels since thats the only impatct area where the a smaller car's crush zones work. It will also transfer more energy into the larger vehicle with a result of turning 30:1 car/truck death rate around. Your very likly to flip the truck which will likly kill its occupents but had they chosen a car closer to the average mass on the road, everyone would have walked away.
G3 is about getting mythical over priced data to the phones. DoCoMo (by NTT in Japan) is about geting pr0n to the phones in color. DoCoMo has dumped G3 and are rolling out something close that works. The largest DoCoMo phone I've seen is still smaller than the smallest GSM phone. The features that are packed into the phones are much better as well.
Some how I expect that most of the worlds phones in 20 years will be based on DoCoMo.
We were considering building some special hand sping modules as well. Now that isn't going to happen.
What Visor did was killed off their vertical market edge. There are many compaines tdeveloping software for specifc industries because you can put things like bar code readers on these low cost handheld devices.
As far as the Trio, what can it do that my Nokia 8310 can't other than run plam software? Its smaller and has a very good radio so it makes a good phone.
libertynews is correct about handspring not surviving the move. They only have $115 mil in the bank if once a few springboard "partners" sue them for wasted R&D costs, they will cease to exist.
The US patent office can only search things in the library of congress or their library (i.e. stuff that is patent pending or has been patented (they discard the stuff they reject)). They can't do a google search for prior art since that would leak info to google.
Because most of the inventors of the cool computer stuff didn't think their work was patentable, they didn't submit it and now if you can find something that hasn't been sbumitted, you too can get a patent on something you didn't invent.
The same is true for business practices which can now be patented. With no "prior art", anything can get a patent.
One easy fix to this would be to do something as patent a method to something uesless (but patentable) and submit all of google's database. the problem with this approach is that it requires the entire database.
years ago I had a chat with some nice people in blue suits who wanted to know what I knew about an airline system in Kasnas City and what I knew about programming. Turns out that a friend of mine told the nice men in blue suits that I had taught him how to program. He was part of a group of "evil hacker" types and one of them had been running a multi channel BBS. The BBS had two lines and was running on a vic 20. Now the odd thing about this BBS is you could upload as much stuff as your 110 baud modem could choke on and weeks later it was still there. This was odd considering the best you could on a vic 20 was maybe 8 single sided floppys. It turns out that someone from this evil computer club had found out how to transfer stuff off to one of the backup mainframes and he was using that for storage and all the vic 20 was doing was multiplexing data streams and sending out ansi graphics. I still consider that one of the best all time hacks I've heard of.
Swap space is an archaic idea. The system should reserve an amount of RAM for the OS in low memory conditions and tell other programs they can't have any more. I haven't had a server run out of memory in a long time and I'm tired of X and netscrape swaping to the "never used unless theres a bug" swap space. Nothinkg like watching a program swap out a gig or so.
Mandrake wipes out most of my system configuration every time it upgrades and I'm currently on Mandrake 8.0. FreeBSD hasn't rewritten any of my modified config files yet on an upgrade.
The last Mandrake upgrade broke my kdm startup. I used to run two different kdm's on different virtual termals (vt7/8) so I use vt8 and other people in my house use vt7 and a guest account. I don't know if this is a kdm problem, an x problem or something else but it was working and now I can't get it to work. Mandrake also wants to overwrite my resolution defintions for X. I use a start up of 800x600 (because I've got and LCD that only does that resolution) and then I can switch to 1024x768 if I want to and the other users don't have to knwo about the ctrl-atl-+ if I swap monitors.
I've been using BSD unix in some flavor since 87 or so and I've never had the problems I get with some of the newer "user friendly" Linux distros durring upgrades.
Oh, Mandrake update has never found any packages that needed upgradeing the last year or so.
The reason is simple, there are several compaines that make a lot of money selling the city M$ junk. They will object if they get wind of your open source attitude. They will point out that your open source attitude will cost them jobs which the other tax payers will not like. They will spin you out of the picture and you could find ads for your oponents paid for by M$ who has more money than you do. Thouse voters that do care won't make a difference compared to the large number of voters that don't but are cuaght up by the spin doctors.
My advice, go on other issues. If asked about your software views say your "_open_ about them" and if you win, chase the M$ money through the goverment and take a axe with you.
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If you try to get some details of how the Apollo space suits work, you will find they can't be released under FoIA and they will claim all sorts of stupid things.
It turns out that the reason this is still secret is that the Russinas haven't built a space suit using thouse nice pielter effect devices and still used a compressor like system just like your car's air conditioner. Never mind that pielter devices are being put into coolers in China but since the silly Ruskies aren't smart enough to use these devices, its clearly in the National Interest to hide this fact from them.
Offical NASA statments still say that one of the space suits functions is to _heat_ the astronauts in space. Lets see here... heat source, perfect
thermal insulation and you need heating? right...
Dima's web site had details on some of the reasons that these detainees are being held. Many of them refuse to provide any ID and fit descriptions of people wanted in different parts of the world. Many of these people claim to be from one country but speak with an accent of another. Also consider that there are a few very violent people in thouse camps. What do you do with someone in the camps who can't go home because he took advantage of his position durring the civil wars and his home town people will lynch him if they get their hands on them. Do you give him a visa and say don't kill/rape/plunder anyone else? Australia already has a bit of a reputation of giving war criminals an easy life.
Austrlia is holding some people for more than 5 years but their visa's have been rejected and they would prefer to stay in jail here than got back to places like Iraq.
From what I can tell, the rule is "if you cause trouble, you go to the end of the queue". Many people in thouse camps are processed quickly so I'm sure you don't know the full story.
The total lack of sustainable business models was the major reason for the huge market crash in Russia. It was common to sell things to friends for less than it cost to make and then charge foreign compainies much more. That was fine until the foreign company canceled the deal because someone else was selling the same product for 1/2. The result was a large cascade of failures that affected most compaines in Russia. The same lession was learned in Hong Kong years ago and before that Japan. Now it appears that the US is getting to see it first hand.
Harley is very popular in Australia and its not the yuppies buying them. I see far more Harleys here that I ever did in the US. It may have something to do with the fact that a bike can be your only transport in most places in Australia unlike much of the US where snow can be a problem. The prices I've seen at one of the dealers didn't strike me as exceptionaly high either.
I expect better from the National Academy of Science.
About these:
1) Why do pendulums swing funny durring an eclipse?
2) Why are space probes slowing down?
Answer those two and you'll find out how to answer the others.
The more I talk to particle physicists, the more I'm convinced they know as much about reality as an alchemists.
AOL is ignoring winAMP because if they push it, they may end up in court at the RIAA's request. At this point they have prevented MS from buying winAmp and thats enough.
They will not ignore Red Hat and just leave it as it isn.
But the never found any customers. It turns out that the few people that need very high speed routing don't buy anything but cisco and in that market it won't matter if you have a product thats much better, you'll have poor sales for years before the market will even consider your product.
As far as routing much faster, its not that hard to do. If you stop treating a router as a router and more like a switch, you can speed things up a grat deal with content addressable memory (the stuff used for cache tags). Its very expensive but 8 mb of CAM ram will let you decide which of 16 interfaces a packet goes to within 500 ps after the address bits hit the hardware. You can't do real time route update on this type of system like a cisco but you can still change routes within miliseconds.
The ideas behind the internet are dead when a small business can't dual home. Without routable class C address, that has already happened.
You could start with pre-loaded bit tables if your data is mostly static. You start out creating a subset of your data that includes the bits you know will be repeated and you feed that to gzip and let it build a table. You then build a custom version of gzip that starts with that table and not an empty one. The result is your compression will be better and it will be much faster. Years ago I looked at this for use in usenet news. if you compress headers and text seperately, you get better compression than just treating it as a stream.
What are the odds that these bugs were put there to be found. Now China will take the plane apart looking for bugs and when they are sure there are no more, there is a good chance that it will go back into service for its intend use. Is the CIA good enough that there will still be working bugs on the plane after its declared clean?
MS can "security upgrade" AOL out of business.
What would the average user do if they got an "urgent security upgrade" cd in the mail that had patches that broke AOL? The support costs and bad PR could kill AOL and if the patch also added a button that auotmaticly fixed things by hooking up to MSN, many people would swtich.
So far MS has had the good sense to not do that but what would happen if they did it today? If they destory AOL, then it wouldn't matter what the DOJ did, they would not be punished.
I don't know what rule book you play with the the US goverment considers financial communication and banks to be vaild military tragets. The money markets in Iraq were wiped out within days of the first attacks there. They also consider diplomatic centers of foreign countries targets if they are sharing intelligence (Chinese embassy). According to the actions of the US in the past 15 years, the WTC was a vaild military target. Wars are about extreme action to force your opponent to give up and taking any action that will expedite those goals.
The rules of not killing civilians are quite new and are within the limits of the weapons used. The war crimes trials in Nuremberg considered the ability of the control of a weapon vs the action. A tank commander who destroyed a house at close range and killed people got a harsher sentence than a bombardier that did the same thing.
If you read the terriorist handbook you will see where they are quite clear that if you get cuaght, you will name as your leader someone that has a reputation for doing these sorts of things. They even mention that someone that has been in jail is acceptable. If you take what happened and you look at the US populations reaction, I suspect the Sept 11 attack wasn't planed by Laden but someone else and that person may still be running around. bin Laden knows that things for him will not change if he provides evidence that he was in charge of the operation with the exception that who ever did plan it might be overlooked. Laden was too far away and too concerned with other things to not have delegated the planning operation to someone else. Remember that while he hates the US more than anything but Jews, he was given protection by the Talaban in order for him to train their people for an upcomming holy war between Pakistan and India. There are still the questions about the balance of power between the Talaban and al Qaeda.
In most very port countries (Afganastan?), their internet connections aren't through local backbones so if you use simple reverse lookups, you will find they are all located inside the US (or major countries in Europe) according to DNS.
If I remember correctly, the most common tool kit for open source crypto was mostly written in Australia.
It depends on the time it takes to do each round. If you had a crypto algorithm that took 2 days for one key then 32 bit crypo would be be harder to crack than most of the 64 bit stuff that is floating around today.
Lots of crypt starts getting easy to crack if you can unfold loops so that iteration #1 takes 100% of the normal time but iteration #2 takes 1% of the time. For things like DES and MD5, people have come up with ways of doing this. The other thing is lots of people like to encrypt known plaintext. For example credit card databases will usualy encrypt all the data. If you sell 2 items that are $10.00 and $19.95 then one field in that database will have one of two values most of the time. If those numbers are stored in 32 bits on a block boundry its child play to brute force the key for that block since you don't have to look at 99.9999% of the keys. Another common problem with crypto is putting hashes outside of the encrypted packets. If you can guess at enough of the other info (which tends to be nice formatted packets) then you can brute force the other bits till the hash matches. MD5 and SHA are a pain but there are short circuts you can take if you want to verify that something isn't correct.
TeX puts letters in boxes and is very good at it. It is not so good at doing things like drawing an image on the background of the page or even vector graphics.
Most DVI drivers will let you put Postscript into a TeX document that will come out nice on a postscript printer.
I've been attempting to convert some of our web page catalogn data into TeX so that it prints out better. The text is great but the tables just don't have a modern fluffy look that is so common in modern catalogs.
I've been using pdflatex which take LaTeX input and makes a pdf file directly.
Oh joy.
I worked for a company that was formed by a group of contractors. They had taken their previous employers bid, slashed the prices by 1/2 and submited it. I was hired in after the jokers got the contract.
This was to a US AF base in wonderful part of date your sister Georgia. The contract was with DISA (used to be DARPA) but involved servics for the AF. Now let me count the bosses. 1 for the head hunting company, 2 on the Air force contract side (one was the contract manager, the other was on the technical side). On the DISA side there were two more. Due to goverment policies of who can be a boss, none of these people were qualified so all their supervisors also were my bosses. The company with the contract had a local supervisor, a local contract supervisor and a project supervisor and a project contract supervisor. With the overlap, I had 12 bosses. Only one of them was clueless and a problem. About onnce a week I would be called into Katy's bosses office (he was my boss two different ways and hers one) where he would simply say "Kathy wants to fire you again. Got any idea why this time?". In one of the weekly meetings, I proposed a new metic of "MIPS per square foot" and based on that she got one of those awards goverment empolyees love so much even though she wanted to fire me because I did something to raise her MIPS/sqft" with a new sun box. I suspect she still has no clue.
The plus side was that I got to play with some cool equipment and I meet people that played with even cooler equipment -- a F-15E beats a sparc station any day. I learned about security from people who knew what they were doing. It was worth while and let me pay of student loans.
I also got to work on the Gossip email spec and made a change to allow SMTP as a "transition" email system which effectively killed X.400.
I live in Melbourne Australia and it has one of the largest tram systems in the world. Depending on where your going it can be very good or very bad.
Melbourne is the 4th largest city in the world area wise and its population of 3.2 million put is larger than all but 4 US cities (and 14 metro areas). The trams and train lines here assume that people want to move from the suburbs to the city center. While its only one tram away to get to the beach, its two to get to most of the places in the city I want to get to. I work in a light industrial park and the trams don't go that far out.
Melbourne has a number of problems with the trams. The first is they used to have conductors and now have automated machines that won't sell the tickets that most people want and only take coins. The result is 50% or more of the people on the trams don't have tickets.
The other problem is the trams vs cars. Many of Melbourne's streets are quit wide with a median in the middle and the tram tracks run there but in areas where many of the small shopping streets are, there are two lanes. The outsides ones are used for parking and there are tram lines in the middle.
The trams can move quite qucikly but they tend to back up car traffic. if you get stuck behind a tram along one of the older roads, you will be there for quite some time. They should have ares set aside for cars to pass trams.
The energy use for the trams is quite high. They weigh much more than they need to and the engery load for them being full is the same as being empty. The new trams take even more power. There is also the problem that the trams take 7500V DC and the local trans take 1500V AC so there are complicated switching systems when a tram crosses a train line.
Melbourne still doesn't have a train or tram to the new airport and isn't likly to get one. They seem to be stuck with the train mentality and haven't given serious consideration to things like monorails.
If your in a small car and your going to hit the side of a sports utility car (SUC), aim for the wheels since thats the only impatct area where the a smaller car's crush zones work. It will also transfer more energy into the larger vehicle with a result of turning 30:1 car/truck death rate around. Your very likly to flip the truck which will likly kill its occupents but had they chosen a car closer to the average mass on the road, everyone would have walked away.
G3 is about getting mythical over priced data to the phones. DoCoMo (by NTT in Japan) is about geting pr0n to the phones in color. DoCoMo has dumped G3 and are rolling out something close that works. The largest DoCoMo phone I've seen is still smaller than the smallest GSM phone. The features that are packed into the phones are much better as well.
Some how I expect that most of the worlds phones in 20 years will be based on DoCoMo.
We were considering building some special hand sping modules as well. Now that isn't going to happen.
What Visor did was killed off their vertical market edge. There are many compaines tdeveloping software for specifc industries because you can put things like bar code readers on these low cost handheld devices.
As far as the Trio, what can it do that my Nokia 8310 can't other than run plam software? Its smaller and has a very good radio so it makes a good phone.
libertynews is correct about handspring not surviving the move. They only have $115 mil in the bank if once a few springboard "partners" sue them for wasted R&D costs, they will cease to exist.
The US patent office can only search things in the library of congress or their library (i.e. stuff that is patent pending or has been patented (they discard the stuff they reject)). They can't do a google search for prior art since that would leak info to google.
Because most of the inventors of the cool computer stuff didn't think their work was patentable, they didn't submit it and now if you can find something that hasn't been sbumitted, you too can get a patent on something you didn't invent.
The same is true for business practices which can now be patented. With no "prior art", anything can get a patent.
One easy fix to this would be to do something as patent a method to something uesless (but patentable) and submit all of google's database. the problem with this approach is that it requires the entire database.
years ago I had a chat with some nice people in blue suits who wanted to know what I knew about an airline system in Kasnas City and what I knew about programming. Turns out that a friend of mine told the nice men in blue suits that I had taught him how to program. He was part of a group of "evil hacker" types and one of them had been running a multi channel BBS. The BBS had two lines and was running on a vic 20. Now the odd thing about this BBS is you could upload as much stuff as your 110 baud modem could choke on and weeks later it was still there. This was odd considering the best you could on a vic 20 was maybe 8 single sided floppys. It turns out that someone from this evil computer club had found out how to transfer stuff off to one of the backup mainframes and he was using that for storage and all the vic 20 was doing was multiplexing data streams and sending out ansi graphics. I still consider that one of the best all time hacks I've heard of.
Swap space is an archaic idea. The system should reserve an amount of RAM for the OS in low memory conditions and tell other programs they can't have any more. I haven't had a server run out of memory in a long time and I'm tired of X and netscrape swaping to the "never used unless theres a bug" swap space. Nothinkg like watching a program swap out a gig or so.
Mandrake wipes out most of my system configuration every time it upgrades and I'm currently on Mandrake 8.0. FreeBSD hasn't rewritten any of my modified config files yet on an upgrade.
The last Mandrake upgrade broke my kdm startup. I used to run two different kdm's on different virtual termals (vt7/8) so I use vt8 and other people in my house use vt7 and a guest account. I don't know if this is a kdm problem, an x problem or something else but it was working and now I can't get it to work. Mandrake also wants to overwrite my resolution defintions for X. I use a start up of 800x600 (because I've got and LCD that only does that resolution) and then I can switch to 1024x768 if I want to and the other users don't have to knwo about the ctrl-atl-+ if I swap monitors.
I've been using BSD unix in some flavor since 87 or so and I've never had the problems I get with some of the newer "user friendly" Linux distros durring upgrades.
Oh, Mandrake update has never found any packages that needed upgradeing the last year or so.
The reason is simple, there are several compaines that make a lot of money selling the city M$ junk. They will object if they get wind of your open source attitude. They will point out that your open source attitude will cost them jobs which the other tax payers will not like. They will spin you out of the picture and you could find ads for your oponents paid for by M$ who has more money than you do. Thouse voters that do care won't make a difference compared to the large number of voters that don't but are cuaght up by the spin doctors.
My advice, go on other issues. If asked about your software views say your "_open_ about them" and if you win, chase the M$ money through the goverment and take a axe with you.