Why Genesis? was my thoguht too but it looks like they were after a rosetta stone which allows one to decode one language in one that might have survived and the claptrap in the Bible has been translated into more languages than any other info and there is no denying that it still influences our modern world. For example Egypts history (the 20th centruy version). The country was named "Egypt" by the french less than 200 years ago. A Hewbew word meaning "accross the water" is something like Aegept and the place with the pyramids must have been the people involved with Mosses so their kings are called Pharos and the Egyptians get blamed for enslaving the Jews over 5000 years ago which resulted in a war in the 1960s where Isreal tooke over the Sini and conducted huge archology surveys and determined that the exodus didn't go through the sini desert. In the last 20 years its starting to look like the jews were in northern Iraq before they were in their current homeland.
Medical records are fair game in the data mining business. The only restrictions are that records only be given to others in the medical profession which basicly involves your doctor, the nurse, the insurance comapny, the insurance companies debt collector, the drug companies, the goverment and their dog. From what I can tell it only limits the data to about 1 in 6 people.
The laws cover giving the data out. They don't cover how the data came in. Insurance compaines will pay top dollar for info on pre-exisiting conditions and drug histories and anything they can use to drop people into a higher risk group.
Check out what the from says the next time you see the doctor. Its been scary stuff for almost two decades. My solution is to cross it out, pay cash and if I have to deal with the insurance company, I'll do that directly.
By the way, insurance compaines can share info freely between themselves. This is also allowed for drug research.
GSM only works in high density areas. This is why it is a total and complete flop in many parts of the world even though it is "the standard". It is a poor system to cover long distance roads in places like Kasnas or 95% of Australia or most of Africia. At least with the old alanlog system you could boost the power and talk to a cell site 20 miles away. Some of the experimental CDMA sites in Australia are covering 100 miles (160km)
What if he doesn't ask? If he launches from one of the many AF launch areas and has a mode-c transponder and opens a ballon flight plan at the area, the FAA won't even know about it except for TV.
Lets assume hes got 50/50 odds of getting out of this alive and knows it. Its a one shot deal. What are the fines for not playing along? The FAA is second in control of the airspace to NASA and NASA has a way around all FAA regs. In fact they have a program where you can report one offence to them and they will keep the FAA from busting you but its a one time thing and you have to make sure they know all the details so the can try to prevent thouse things in the future.
Since this is an experimental type that the FAA does not have a type class for, they may not have any control over it if he launches from military grounds (which it sounds like), the FAA may or may not have any real control over it. The military will know about it and simply block out the airspace nearby assuming its not already controlled and that will keep the 767s full of people out of harms way.
If this guy has fuel to go up 30 miles, he is not going more than 60 miles from the start if the stuff stays in a small number of pieces.
While there are emulators for the N64, they don't emulating the hardware, they emulate a MIPS cpu and watch for calls to known functions. Those functions are then written natively in things like open-gl. Since my PC is about 5x faster than my N64 running the same code, its in the realm of emulation but if anyone made use of the reality coprocessor (RCP) in the N64, there is no way a PC could emulate it at anywhere close to real time. It can peak out at something like.5 gigflops. Now it would be nice to get a datasheet on the RCP but its not going to happen unless it leaks out of SGI since Nintendo doens't even seem to use it in its own games.
This brings up why it won't matter if the lastest game platform has the latest and greatest unique hardware. There is no game company that is going to spend the R&D money developing a 1 platform game for a console. If they count on the hardware then they can't port it to other platforms.
One of the early books I read involved describing an ALU as a bunch of boxes that could add other boxes. It was written in the early 1960'sand had lots of drawings taht look like departmental mailboxes and how data access worked with index registers and the like. Today most people would consider it a waste of time but I'm not sure. I know how computers operate down to the gate level. I can optimize things well enough. Most of the books I read in my early programming days wouldn't even be considered programming books by todays standards but they worked well for me. I guess thats why I get to explain to the new CS grads why we don't do some things some ways since the computer doesn't like doing trillions of calculations when it has other thigns to do too.
GPS recivers figure out how much distance is between them and each of the GPS sats they can listen to. The cheap recivers figure that down to a wavelength (about 18cm) and then figure a position based on that.
The velocity limits have nothing to do with SA being on or off. They are limits in the firmware and software (and sometimes hardware). Old export laws required them to be about 18,000 m (60,000 ft) and 999 kts ( mach 1.55 according to units(1)
For thouse who want to try this at home, drop in the local toy store and look in the "science" area. You may find a $10 kit to do just this.
I've found most scientific supply places are a pain to deal with when you want something delivered to a home address. Sigma (out of St Louis) called me 3 times to find out why I was ordering $3 worth of tubing.
Most people have no idea how little electronics is used in modern aviation. The entire ATC system isn't anything like what is being proposed in those nice books on OOD. Autopilots are often analog computers. Its legal to fly most small planes in lots of places in the US with no radios at all. Basically anything involving modern aviation is 1/2 century old.
The transponders use tube based amps. When they get a signal they respond with the altitude and a 4 digit base 8 code. Its all very simple but old. Very very old.
VORs are the primary means of navigation these days. Its being phased out by inertial navigation and in a decade or four it might get replaced with GPS. The VORs involve a rotating antenna and a fixed one. You subtract the phase difference between the signals and you know which radial from the transmitter your on. If the VOR receivers (there might be as many as 4 on a modern passenger jet) get one of the two signals slightly out of phase you end up with a plane off course. The Instr landing system (ILS) is based on similar concepts but you don't want a 2 degree error on the ground. Cell phones can mess with VOR receivers. I've seen it my self.
The landing markers are AM radio transmitters. There is something called ADF which basically points a needle towards a tuned in AM radio station or the nearest thunderstorm.
The problem with cell phones in the air is that they will pickup up lots of cell sites is also true. Over rural Kansas at about 5000 ft, a phone that was "fixed" could pickup something like 500 different sites. If the phone transmitted, all of those sites would have picked up the signal just fine.
Los Alamos was where Richard Feynman had to get the main safe unlocked but no one knew the combination. The locksmith was called out and tried the factory default and it worked... after at least 20 years of "protecting" some of the most secrect info the US had.
I have been told that some of the US space suit technology is still top secret including bits involving pielter effect devices simply because the Russians haven't done the same things.
Re:All right, confess...who modded this crap up?
on
EU Web Tax Proposed
·
· Score: 1
Ok so the US VAT is about 6% (higher in CA, lower other places) but thats only on goods. Europe, NZ and as of next month Australia will have VAT on services too. That means things like consulting services are taxed at rates of 10 to 17% (the lowest VAT that I know of is the one in Oz at 10%)
If you look at the exchange rates of all the major currencys you see a trend, the higher the tax rate, the lower the relative growth. Since the US figured this out, why don't other countries?
>Frankly, I'm a little disturbed Napster didn't approach the Offspring initially before bringing in the sharks
Have you ever tried to approach an orginzation like Offspring? Its not like they have their phone number listed. Often the only way to get in touch with the people that make decissions is to get the sharks to deliver a letter that can not be ignored.
> ray-tracing is inherently and fundamentally object-oriented, and I really doubt it could be approached more beautifully or elegantly in any other paradigm.
Is there any ray tracer that is in common use (for a ray tracer) that uses OOD at the core level?
Due to the stupid requirement that you have to root to bind to a port <1024 is a major problem. Its nailed bind, sendmail, ncsa httpd, poper, ftp....
Its time this stupid stuff stoped.
The fix is very simple. In 2.2.15 about line 543 of net/ipv4/af_inet.c put make the following change and it will allow group 53 to open port 53. So you can put bind in group 53, run it as a user with no other access and then the exploits won't have root.
//--thogard this will allow any user to open any port which cooresponds // to a group they belong in. apaches user should be in group 80 and 443 // this should be linked moreinto capabile(CAP_NET_BIND_???) if (snum && !in_group_p(snum) && snum < PROT_SOCK && !capable(CAP_NET_BIND_SERVICE)) return(-EACCES);
MP3's will kill Quality Music? How? There are millions of talented musicans all over the world and you get to hear about 200 groups of them on your local radio station. Why? Because they are the ones with connections. They are the ones with the record deals. Are they good? Some of them are. Some of them suck. Some of them suck real bad.
Mp3's allow you to hear hundreds of thousands of bands that you would never hear on your local radio station.
There are mp3's on my web site and every one of is there because the artist want the world to hear them.
The concept of breaking M$ into 2 or 3 parts is just plain stupid. It will not do anything to encourage competition since Office will still only work correctly with Windows (and Mac OS). The breakup isn't going to cause one side of M$ to decide that Linux is going to get a version of Office.
The only way to allow competition into the Office game is to break it up into components. Make Excel its own company. Make Word its own company. Give them both orders that they can not talk to each other other than by public info on a web server for 3 years. That would allow others to write add ons to both products. The current solution only allows the OS system to maintain its control and the application group to maintain its monopoly.
The judge claims M$ was as bad as Standard Oil. It was broken into 20 compaines. That was not a bad thing.
One theory stats that there was a much higher percentage of O2 in the air millions of years ago. Its one of the theorys about why the mammals won out over the reptiles was the (no disproved?) more efficent heart.
Actually, they have... All the big boys that use it are licensees, Microsoft, Adobe,...
How about IBM? How much did Microsoft pay? Anything? Adobe might have payed but I suspect that Xerox didn't. Just because they are licensees, that dosen't say any money change hands. The way the big patent players IBM, AT&T, Ford) play when they get letters is say "Prior Art! now give me a license and go away"
Re:What's Really Important Here
on
Virtual War
·
· Score: 1
Keep in mind that there seems to be a bit of evidence that Iraq calimed it would invade Kawaiti before it happened and was "politely ignored". Was it all a big game to show who has power in the region?
Remember when the Russians invaded the airport at Serbia? The US officaly claimed they had no idea about that. Except that the US provided fuel for the invasion force. To me that was just a ploy to allow Russia to face the US and not have to back down (which kept a certain Russian president in power till he retired) Had the Russians not taken that silly airport, things might have been much different in Russia now.
As for the concept of a "virtual war" where the warfighters on one side are immune to the weapons of the other side isn't a new concept. Roman armor, Da Vinci's Tank, The Mongols horses, the U boat, V2 and cruise missles all come to mind. As the US gets more an more involved with lame third world military strongmen (can you say Fiji?) the tech gap between the US and its new "enemys" is growing every day. I suspect that some big country will get involed with Fiji. Will it be the US? UK? Australia? NZ? Someone else? The current military defense level of Fiji is about the same as the as the the navy base in Hutchton Kansas was before world war II. I guess thats why the US should keep the USS Missouri. Sure it would suck in a real war but its a great thing to park in some thrid world dictators port and it does win the game of "who has bigger guns."
Depending on what he's asking for, most large companies will pay and not fight. Compaines like Ford would fork over $200k without too much of a hassle. IBM on the other hand would sit back and say "prior art - now go away" but may be willing to pay $5k just to make the problem go away. The trick to winning in the legal extortion racket it to threaten to sue for $1 less than what it would cost to fight.
Ever notice how Unisys isn't going after the big boys with their GIF nonsense? I wonder what whould happen if a bunch of companies got letters claiming infringement on the Unisys patent.
Slashdot Mirror
Why Genesis? was my thoguht too but it looks like they were after a rosetta stone which allows one to decode one language in one that might have survived and the claptrap in the Bible has been translated into more languages than any other info and there is no denying that it still influences our modern world. For example Egypts history (the 20th centruy version). The country was named "Egypt" by the french less than 200 years ago. A Hewbew word meaning "accross the water" is something like Aegept and the place with the pyramids must have been the people involved with Mosses so their kings are called Pharos and the Egyptians get blamed for enslaving the Jews over 5000 years ago which resulted in a war in the 1960s where Isreal tooke over the Sini and conducted huge archology surveys and determined that the exodus didn't go through the sini desert. In the last 20 years its starting to look like the jews were in northern Iraq before they were in their current homeland.
Medical records are fair game in the data mining business. The only restrictions are that records only be given to others in the medical profession which basicly involves your doctor, the nurse, the insurance comapny, the insurance companies debt collector, the drug companies, the goverment and their dog. From what I can tell it only limits the data to about 1 in 6 people.
The laws cover giving the data out. They don't cover how the data came in. Insurance compaines will pay top dollar for info on pre-exisiting conditions and drug histories and anything they can use to drop people into a higher risk group.
Check out what the from says the next time you see the doctor. Its been scary stuff for almost two decades. My solution is to cross it out, pay cash and if I have to deal with the insurance company, I'll do that directly.
By the way, insurance compaines can share info freely between themselves. This is also allowed for drug research.
GSM only works in high density areas. This is why it is a total and complete flop in many parts of the world even though it is "the standard". It is a poor system to cover long distance roads in places like Kasnas or 95% of Australia or most of Africia. At least with the old alanlog system you could boost the power and talk to a cell site 20 miles away. Some of the experimental CDMA sites in Australia are covering 100 miles (160km)
What if he doesn't ask? If he launches from one of the many AF launch areas and has a mode-c transponder and opens a ballon flight plan at the area, the FAA won't even know about it except for TV.
Lets assume hes got 50/50 odds of getting out of this alive and knows it. Its a one shot deal. What are the fines for not playing along? The FAA is second in control of the airspace to NASA and NASA has a way around all FAA regs. In fact they have a program where you can report one offence to them and they will keep the FAA from busting you but its a one time thing and you have to make sure they know all the details so the can try to prevent thouse things in the future.
Since this is an experimental type that the FAA does not have a type class for, they may not have any control over it if he launches from military grounds (which it sounds like), the FAA may or may not have any real control over it. The military will know about it and simply block out the airspace nearby assuming its not already controlled and that will keep the 767s full of people out of harms way.
If this guy has fuel to go up 30 miles, he is not going more than 60 miles from the start if the stuff stays in a small number of pieces.
The last time this happened in Australia, /.ers donated quite a bit to help out the effort here.
.za the hard way, but you want to help the little birds, you can send it to the Penguin Hospital in .au at http://www.penguins.org.au/media/helpinghand.html
And if your too lazy to send money to
Aren't there a few people who can do this already?
They are commonly called Idiot Savants but the more PC name is Autistic Savant.
I just see it as paving the way to ".net (TM)*"
.net is a Trademark of Microsoft
*
While there are emulators for the N64, they don't emulating the hardware, they emulate a MIPS cpu and watch for calls to known functions. Those functions are then written natively in things like open-gl. Since my PC is about 5x faster than my N64 running the same code, its in the realm of emulation but if anyone made use of the reality coprocessor (RCP) in the N64, there is no way a PC could emulate it at anywhere close to real time. It can peak out at something like .5 gigflops. Now it would be nice to get a datasheet on the RCP but its not going to happen unless it leaks out of SGI since Nintendo doens't even seem to use it in its own games.
This brings up why it won't matter if the lastest game platform has the latest and greatest unique hardware. There is no game company that is going to spend the R&D money developing a 1 platform game for a console. If they count on the hardware then they can't port it to other platforms.
You can pick up RPMs for GCC at
http://n64dev.50megs.com/
Then all you need is a transfer device to copy your code to the N64 but Nintendo has sued Bung so they have stopped selling them.
One of the early books I read involved describing an ALU as a bunch of boxes that could add other boxes. It was written in the early 1960'sand had lots of drawings taht look like departmental mailboxes and how data access worked with index registers and the like. Today most people would consider it a waste of time but I'm not sure. I know how computers operate down to the gate level. I can optimize things well enough. Most of the books I read in my early programming days wouldn't even be considered programming books by todays standards but they worked well for me. I guess thats why I get to explain to the new CS grads why we don't do some things some ways since the computer doesn't like doing trillions of calculations when it has other thigns to do too.
GPS recivers figure out how much distance is between them and each of the GPS sats they can listen to. The cheap recivers figure that down to a wavelength (about 18cm) and then figure a position based on that.
The velocity limits have nothing to do with SA being on or off. They are limits in the firmware and software (and sometimes hardware). Old export laws required them to be about 18,000 m (60,000 ft) and 999 kts ( mach 1.55 according to units(1)
For thouse who want to try this at home, drop in the local toy store and look in the "science" area. You may find a $10 kit to do just this.
I've found most scientific supply places are a pain to deal with when you want something delivered to a home address. Sigma (out of St Louis) called me 3 times to find out why I was ordering $3 worth of tubing.
Most people have no idea how little electronics is used in modern
aviation. The entire ATC system isn't anything like what is being
proposed in those nice books on OOD. Autopilots are often analog
computers. Its legal to fly most small planes in lots of places in the
US with no radios at all. Basically anything involving modern aviation
is 1/2 century old.
The transponders use tube based amps. When they get a signal they respond
with the altitude and a 4 digit base 8 code. Its all very simple but old.
Very very old.
VORs are the primary means of navigation these days. Its being
phased out by inertial navigation and in a decade or four it might get
replaced with GPS. The VORs involve a rotating antenna and a fixed one.
You subtract the phase difference between the signals and you know which
radial from the transmitter your on. If the VOR receivers (there might
be as many as 4 on a modern passenger jet) get one of the two signals
slightly out of phase you end up with a plane off course. The Instr
landing system (ILS) is based on similar concepts but you don't want a
2 degree error on the ground. Cell phones can mess with VOR receivers.
I've seen it my self.
The landing markers are AM radio transmitters. There is something called
ADF which basically points a needle towards a tuned in AM radio station
or the nearest thunderstorm.
The problem with cell phones in the air is that they will pickup up
lots of cell sites is also true. Over rural Kansas at about 5000 ft, a
phone that was "fixed" could pickup something like 500 different sites.
If the phone transmitted, all of those sites would have picked up the
signal just fine.
Los Alamos was where Richard Feynman had to get the main safe unlocked but no one knew the combination. The locksmith was called out and tried the factory default and it worked ... after at least 20 years of "protecting" some of the most secrect info the US had.
I have been told that some of the US space suit technology is still top secret including bits involving pielter effect devices simply because the Russians haven't done the same things.
Ok so the US VAT is about 6% (higher in CA, lower other places) but thats only on goods. Europe, NZ and as of next month Australia will have VAT on services too. That means things like consulting services are taxed at rates of 10 to 17% (the lowest VAT that I know of is the one in Oz at 10%)
If you look at the exchange rates of all the major currencys you see a trend, the higher the tax rate, the lower the relative growth. Since the US figured this out, why don't other countries?
>Frankly, I'm a little disturbed Napster didn't approach the Offspring initially before bringing in the sharks
Have you ever tried to approach an orginzation like Offspring? Its not like they have their phone number listed. Often the only way to get in touch with the people that make decissions is to get the sharks to deliver a letter that can not be ignored.
> ray-tracing is inherently and fundamentally object-oriented, and I really doubt it could be approached more beautifully or elegantly in any other paradigm.
Is there any ray tracer that is in common use (for a ray tracer) that uses OOD at the core level?
the fireworks with this one won't be as nearly as impressive as Iridium.
Programs running as root are the problem.
//--thogard this will allow any user to open any port which cooresponds
// to a group they belong in. apaches user should be in group 80 and 443
// this should be linked moreinto capabile(CAP_NET_BIND_???)
Due to the stupid requirement that you have to root to bind to a port <1024 is a major problem. Its nailed bind, sendmail, ncsa httpd, poper, ftp....
Its time this stupid stuff stoped.
The fix is very simple. In 2.2.15 about line 543 of net/ipv4/af_inet.c put make the following change and it will allow group 53 to open port 53. So you can put bind in group 53, run it as a user with no other access and then the exploits won't have root.
if (snum && !in_group_p(snum) && snum < PROT_SOCK && !capable(CAP_NET_BIND_SERVICE))
return(-EACCES);
MP3's will kill Quality Music? How?
There are millions of talented musicans all over the world and you get to hear about 200 groups of them on your local radio station. Why? Because they are the ones with connections. They are the ones with the record deals. Are they good? Some of them are. Some of them suck. Some of them suck real bad.
Mp3's allow you to hear hundreds of thousands of bands that you would never hear on your local radio station.
There are mp3's on my web site and every one of is there because the artist want the world to hear them.
The concept of breaking M$ into 2 or 3 parts is just plain stupid. It will not do anything to encourage competition since Office will still only work correctly with Windows (and Mac OS). The breakup isn't going to cause one side of M$ to decide that Linux is going to get a version of Office.
The only way to allow competition into the Office game is to break it up into components. Make Excel its own company. Make Word its own company. Give them both orders that they can not talk to each other other than by public info on a web server for 3 years. That would allow others to write add ons to both products. The current solution only allows the OS system to maintain its control and the application group to maintain its monopoly.
The judge claims M$ was as bad as Standard Oil. It was broken into 20 compaines. That was not a bad thing.
One theory stats that there was a much higher percentage of O2 in the air millions of years ago. Its one of the theorys about why the mammals won out over the reptiles was the (no disproved?) more efficent heart.
Actually, they have... All the big boys that use it are licensees, Microsoft, Adobe, ...
How about IBM? How much did Microsoft pay? Anything? Adobe might have payed but I suspect that Xerox didn't. Just because they are licensees, that dosen't say any money change hands. The way the big patent players IBM, AT&T, Ford) play when they get letters is say "Prior Art! now give me a license and go away"
Keep in mind that there seems to be a bit of evidence that Iraq calimed it would invade Kawaiti before it happened and was "politely ignored". Was it all a big game to show who has power in the region?
Remember when the Russians invaded the airport at Serbia? The US officaly claimed they had no idea about that. Except that the US provided fuel for the invasion force. To me that was just a ploy to allow Russia to face the US and not have to back down (which kept a certain Russian president in power till he retired) Had the Russians not taken that silly airport, things might have been much different in Russia now.
As for the concept of a "virtual war" where the warfighters on one side are immune to the weapons of the other side isn't a new concept. Roman armor, Da Vinci's Tank, The Mongols horses, the U boat, V2 and cruise missles all come to mind. As the US gets more an more involved with lame third world military strongmen (can you say Fiji?) the tech gap between the US and its new "enemys" is growing every day. I suspect that some big country will get involed with Fiji. Will it be the US? UK? Australia? NZ? Someone else? The current military defense level of Fiji is about the same as the as the the navy base in Hutchton Kansas was before world war II. I guess thats why the US should keep the USS Missouri. Sure it would suck in a real war but its a great thing to park in some thrid world dictators port and it does win the game of "who has bigger guns."
Depending on what he's asking for, most large companies will pay and not fight. Compaines like Ford would fork over $200k without too much of a hassle. IBM on the other hand would sit back and say "prior art - now go away" but may be willing to pay $5k just to make the problem go away. The trick to winning in the legal extortion racket it to threaten to sue for $1 less than what it would cost to fight.
Ever notice how Unisys isn't going after the big boys with their GIF nonsense? I wonder what whould happen if a bunch of companies got letters claiming infringement on the Unisys patent.