That's the whole point of the separation of powers! That the FCC is directly answerable to the president, and can't be trivially overridden by Congress, just because Congress is "more important" than some federal regulatoru commission.
No. The FCC is not part of the executive branch, it is part of the legislative branch and was created by the congress.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is an independent United States government agency, directly responsible to Congress. The FCC was established by the Communications Act of 1934 and is charged with regulating interstate and international communications by radio, television, wire, satellite and cable. The FCC's jurisdiction covers the 50 states, the District of Columbia, and U.S. possessions.
FCC rules have the full force of law because congress has delegated its power to the FCC. But the congress could disband the FCC tomorrow if they so chose.
When the jury returns a verdict of "not guilty." That is the end of that particular case. That particular case cannot be tried again with the same defendant.
The jury may declare "not guilty" for any reason, and the jurors cannot be punished for using a rationale which the judge finds objectionable.
Originally, the intent was to ensure that justice was compatible with community norms, but nowadays, the jury has been reduced to a sort of human lie detector.
Typically, the judge will give the jury instructions that they must consider only whether the defendant comitted the crime, and not whether the defendant deserves to be punished. Also, by and large, the judge will not allow the jury to hear extenuating circumstances, unless they are strictly relevant to the defense. For example, the jury won't know that a particular defendant is on trial for the third of three strikes. As far as they know, it is a petty theft case, but the defendant will be going to prison on a third strike for a long time.
I have heard that sometimes judges will even remove a juror for refusing to only consider the facts. (After another juror told the judge what was going on.) But the juror cannot be punished.
My advice is that if you are a juror, and you smell a rat, insist on a not-guilty verdict. But keep in mind that most defendants actually are guilty.
"And because the attacker only needs to burst periodically, the attacker will not be distinguishable from normal hosts."
Except for the bursts of traffic from the same host at a certain frequency.
Actually, according to the paper, the attack works in such a way that all traffic synchronizes with the attacker's bursts. This is a consequence of the timeout mechanism employed by TCP.
So after the initial getting started period, it would be hard to tell the attacker from the legitimate traffic.
To my thinking this would affect throughput for only the attacker's TCP flow, but the authors say that ALL TCP flows can be affected. I'm just not smart enough to understand why all TCP flows can be induced into the same exponential backoff phase.
According to my (possibly flawed) understanding of the paper, it works like this:
For a very brief time (in milliseconds), you do a high volume DOS attack. This will cause packet loss, and *everybody* who is waiting for an ack will retransmit about 1 second later. Exactly at that point, you send another burst, causing packet loss again and everyone to time out again.
In effect, the attack mechanism forces all the normal traffic to synch up with the attack frequency. That is why it is so hard to detect who the bad guy is and start blocking him/her.
so by your logic the stupider a thing someone does the more we should reward them?
because she is willing to destabilise a flimsy cup of near boiling liquid IN BETWEEN HER FUCKING LEGS while DRIVING!!! McD's is that much more at fault in your mind?
I challenge you to find support for your conception of "my logic" in what I actually posted.
As I clearly said, I'm not defending the lawsuit. I was just pointing out that the plaintiff had, according to the article, 3'd degree burns over 6% of her body, not 2nd degree burns, as suggested by the parent of my original post.
Also, she was a passenger in the car, not the driver.
If you had read the article linked to by the OP, you would see that the plaitiff suffered third degree burns over about 6% of her body. She had to have skin grafts.
I'm not defending the lawsuit or anything, just pointing out that you seem to be understating the damage experienced by the plaintiff.
"Hundreds of customers like and use SCO's Unix products."
I think that is a pretty good example of [how] "relevant" SCO is... This is like the director (?producer, someone else) of Gigli getting quoted as saying "I've seen worse movies [than Gigli]"
Heh. There's a phrase to describe this phenomenon. It's called "damning [whatever] with faint praise," or "damning [whatever] with too little praise."
Well, it depends what you mean about going to war with the entire planet. Of course the US could destroy every nation with nuclear weapons. But that serves no purpose.
In conventional war, the US could never take over the world. Can you imagine trying to occupy China? How about India?
And of course there are countries such as Switzerland which A) really value their sovereignty, and B) are armed to the teeth.
Right. As long as the utilities have to petition the PUC to raise rates, I don't see how you can cal it deregulated.
In fact, it sort of seems as though what happened here in CA is that they deregulated the bulk suppliers, but didn't deregulate the prices consumers pay. But I don't really know if that's right.
So, what is your basis for saying that occasional memory errors are acceptable?
Sir, do you disagree with Anadtech's lowest error rate of 1 bit-flip in an 8 hour run as documented here. Anandtech seems to imply that one bit-flip in an 8 hour period is an excellent result. Please comment. [Href omitted]
I am not accusing anandtech of fraud. I am saying that the prevailing attitude in the industry, at least for high-end Compact PCI boards, is not one of acceptance toward memory errors.
I submit to you that it is possible that the board or the memory that Anandtech used for their test is of inferior design. They quite rightly used the same board and memory for all their tests, and it may just be a junker. On the other hand, it may be hard to get a quality board to fail, so maybe using a junker is the way to go.
It should be noted that what Anandtech did is check the long-term persistence of memory. This is not a test that I performed on my boards, and I can't say whether they would pass Anandtech's test or not. But any board that can't hold its memory for six hours is defective, in my opinion, unless the voltage passes outside specified margins.
I cut mine into strips with scissors. I throw away only every other strip, and hold onto the others for a couple of weeks before throwing them away in a totally different load of trash. Also, I always throw them away in the kitchen trash, which is more, well, disgusting
[memory errors] happen very frequenty, hence why you have ECC and parity in many levels. We're not talking about situations where one bad bit causes a blue screen or kernel panic here.
I used to design Intel-based Compact PCI computers for a big company. We would definitely not consider memory errors to be normal or acceptable. Also, by default the BIOS would configure the chipset so that if the ECC circuitry detected an error, it would assert the system error signal, which, in Windows 2000 does blue-screen.
If a board couldn't run through memory tests reliably, or if it generated memory parity errors during Windows Hardware Compatibility (HCT) testing, it was considered to be a broken design. We ran the HCT for 8 hours at a time while cycling the ambient temperature between zero and 50 C. We also varied clock speed and power supply voltages. None of these things caused memory errors.
So, what is your basis for saying that occasional memory errors are acceptable?
This seems to be a sad state of affairs. But as soon as someone asks for and receives the source code, that person is allowed (per the GPL) to redistribute it freely, and could, e.g., put it on Sourceforge.
I wasn't really going to buy one anyway, so I don't really care.
Write-protecting the floppy will not necessarily prevent it from being overwritten. The write-protect tab simply tells the hardware that it shouldn't write to the disk, and generally operating systems (as they should) honor this. However, an attacker could potentially get around this.
Can you cite an actual example? I have never heard this claim before and I am not willing to believe it without a detailed explanation or concrete example. I have always thought that the write-protect tab causes the floppy drive to disable writing at the hardware level.
Well, one of the things that confuses matters is that we live in a one-G world.
That is, sitting at a stop light, a car is already doing one G. If it accelerates at an additional one G in the forward direction, the riders will experience the vectorial sum of gravity's one G plus the car's forward acceleration. So, if the car accelerates at about 22MPH per second, the total acceleration is 1.4 (sqrt(2)) G's.
But the real issue is that with roller-coasters (and aerobatic planes, for that matter) the highest G's are experienced during changes in direction. That is, when a coaster (or plane) makes a dramatic turn, or when it pulls out of a dive, it can easily experience very high G's. MUCH higher than what it experiences during start up. An inexperienced pilot can easily wreck the wings or airframe on a normal airplane if he/she inadvertently dives and then pulls up too hard on the stick.
But you are certainly right that the car pulling 1.4 G's is accelerating pretty well, for a car.
All ethics are related to value judgements. Different people have different values and these values change. Therefore it is very difficult to say what is, and what is not, ethical.
Example: 50 years ago, most people considered it OK to kill whales. Now less people do.
Example 2: Traditionally, Eskimo people left their old folk out to die in the snow. Then came the white folk and charged them with murder. Who is ethically right here?
There is no right or wrong, there is only opinion formed from one's value set.
While it is true that some things vary from culture to culture, the idea that all ethics are relative is total garbage, and adherrence to that credo is likely to destroy society utterly.
Certain things are wrong in every culture, or very nearly every culture.
For example, it is wrong to deliberately lie to assist in the persecution of another. Come to think of it, most types of sinister duplicity are considered wrong. I guess you could say that lying, cheating and stealing to benefit yourself are pretty much always wrong. AFAIK, the only cultures which don't recognize theft as wrong are very primitive ones with a weak notion of personal property.
Also, killing a person to steal his or her belongings is wrong. Show me a culture that condones it and I will show you an immoral culture.
Incest is tabu in EVERY CULTURE, and can be considered universally wrong.
Yes, I think we largely agree. In fact, after re-reading my post and yours, I realized that I didn't add much new material to the discussion.;-)
However, I will say this: If Reed was saying that interference doesn't exist, or that it is a limitation of the receiving device, he is clearly using it in sense 5a, from above.
Because in sense 2, which I called the "technical" sense, the interference exists regardless of whether a receiver is even present. In this sense, it is strictly a narrow band phenomonon, of course.
And I'll also just add that when noise enters a signal, the signal is harder to correctly decode no matter what type of receiver you have. This is information theory stuff. So, interference (sense 5a) from the atmosphere and so on can eventually overcome any practical receiver.
I guess you could just say that the probability of correctly decoding a signal depends on the signal to noise ratio. What, exactly, constitutes noise depends on the system.
Think about it: How else do you get a zeppelin to go up in a brilliant fireball when hydrogen burns clear?
I believe you about the Hindenberg, BUT any impurities in the hydrogen, or the bag, for that matter, could easily impart color to the flame.
A small amount of sodium will turn any flame yellow/orange. If you have gas burners at home, you can verify this by putting small quantities of salty water in contact with the flame. Don't burn yourself in the process!
What a communications engineer calls "radio interferance", a physicist would call electromagnetic superposition.
Electromagnetic superposition is, by definition, interferrence.
All EM radiation is capable of interferrence in this technical sense. This is well documented, well-understood and not controversial. Only when the radiation is coherrent (laser, FM or AM radio, radar, etc.) is the interferrence easily observable.
But Reed isn't using "interferrence" in this technical sense. He just means that one signal is screwing up someone's efforts to detect some other signal which most likely occupies the same bandwidth.
But Reed does gloss over some fairly real problems. The way FM radio works, for example, makes it extremely difficult for a receiver to discriminate between two different signals transmitting at the same frequency. In principal, if the receiver had an array of antennas, an analog to digital converter, and a DSP, it could decode two signals on the same frequency, provided that the two transmitters don't line up with the receiver. Such a receiver would be more costly than the type in use today.
Furthermore, Reed ignores the installed base issue. There is a lot of expensive equipment out there set up to transmit and receive radio signals, and we can't just start sending out additional signals that would degrade the performance of systems already in use. If I'm trying to tune in 104.5, and I hear all kinds of pops and whistles and chirps that aren't supposed to be part of the broadcast, I'm going to be ticked off. It will be small consolation to me that a theoretical receiver could do away with the unwanted noise. And of course, the "owner" of the spectrum really did pay real money for an exclusive license, so he or she will be even more pissed-off than I!
The real promise, though, is of starting off with devices which do not, in practice, "interfere" with the vast majority of existing radio systems. The FCC has already taken the first steps down this road, and it is very exciting stuff. We'll see what happens.;-)
Uh, it's HARD to get above 20 or 30 thousand feet with a missile. That's why the US was able to fly U2's over the USSR with impunity for many years. Above 80,000 feet, attack is out of the question. So, you have a vertical ribbon with, say, 10 miles of attackable extent. That is defensible, I think, and it wouldn't be an outrageous expense.
Right. Tropical hurricanes (a.k.a. cyclones, a.k.a. tropical revolving storms) never actually cross the equator. There are few other things that can be said with certainty when it comes to hurricanes, however.
For example, no ship and no harbor is assured of surviving a category 5 hurricane. In the most extreme hurricanes, wind speeds are not even known with certainty, because instruments either break, or the buildings they are attached to are destroyed. 200 MPH is not out of the question. What windspeeds like this would do to the sea surface, I cannot even imagine.
Even enormous aircraft carriers have been damaged in hurricanes.
The main reason there are not more horror stories is that nowadays most ships simply route around them.
This is feasible because we have good weather reporting and most ships are fast enough to stay away.
The ability to run one or more concurrent instances of Linux (or whatever, quite frankly) internally to one of the Xilinx Virtex II parts is seriously amazing.
There is a Virtex II and a Virtex II Pro, which are not the same.
The article is about a demo board with the PRO version on it. The plain Virtex II doesn't have a PPC processor built-in to it.
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No. The FCC is not part of the executive branch, it is part of the legislative branch and was created by the congress.
Check here if you don't believe me:
http://www.fcc.gov/aboutus.html
A choice quote:
FCC rules have the full force of law because congress has delegated its power to the FCC. But the congress could disband the FCC tomorrow if they so chose.MM
--
When the jury returns a verdict of "not guilty." That is the end of that particular case. That particular case cannot be tried again with the same defendant.
The jury may declare "not guilty" for any reason, and the jurors cannot be punished for using a rationale which the judge finds objectionable.
Originally, the intent was to ensure that justice was compatible with community norms, but nowadays, the jury has been reduced to a sort of human lie detector.
Typically, the judge will give the jury instructions that they must consider only whether the defendant comitted the crime, and not whether the defendant deserves to be punished. Also, by and large, the judge will not allow the jury to hear extenuating circumstances, unless they are strictly relevant to the defense. For example, the jury won't know that a particular defendant is on trial for the third of three strikes. As far as they know, it is a petty theft case, but the defendant will be going to prison on a third strike for a long time.
I have heard that sometimes judges will even remove a juror for refusing to only consider the facts. (After another juror told the judge what was going on.) But the juror cannot be punished.
My advice is that if you are a juror, and you smell a rat, insist on a not-guilty verdict. But keep in mind that most defendants actually are guilty.
MM
--
Actually, according to the paper, the attack works in such a way that all traffic synchronizes with the attacker's bursts. This is a consequence of the timeout mechanism employed by TCP.
So after the initial getting started period, it would be hard to tell the attacker from the legitimate traffic.
MM
--
According to my (possibly flawed) understanding of the paper, it works like this:
For a very brief time (in milliseconds), you do a high volume DOS attack. This will cause packet loss, and *everybody* who is waiting for an ack will retransmit about 1 second later. Exactly at that point, you send another burst, causing packet loss again and everyone to time out again.
In effect, the attack mechanism forces all the normal traffic to synch up with the attack frequency. That is why it is so hard to detect who the bad guy is and start blocking him/her.
MM
--
I challenge you to find support for your conception of "my logic" in what I actually posted.
As I clearly said, I'm not defending the lawsuit. I was just pointing out that the plaintiff had, according to the article, 3'd degree burns over 6% of her body, not 2nd degree burns, as suggested by the parent of my original post.
Also, she was a passenger in the car, not the driver.
MM
--
If you had read the article linked to by the OP, you would see that the plaitiff suffered third degree burns over about 6% of her body. She had to have skin grafts.
I'm not defending the lawsuit or anything, just pointing out that you seem to be understating the damage experienced by the plaintiff.
MM
--
I think that is a pretty good example of [how] "relevant" SCO is... This is like the director (?producer, someone else) of Gigli getting quoted as saying "I've seen worse movies [than Gigli]"
Heh. There's a phrase to describe this phenomenon. It's called "damning [whatever] with faint praise," or "damning [whatever] with too little praise."
MM
--
ITYM noble gas. That's noble as in aloof and unreactive, not nobel as in the prize.
MM
--
Well, it depends what you mean about going to war with the entire planet. Of course the US could destroy every nation with nuclear weapons. But that serves no purpose.
In conventional war, the US could never take over the world. Can you imagine trying to occupy China? How about India?
And of course there are countries such as Switzerland which A) really value their sovereignty, and B) are armed to the teeth.
Right. As long as the utilities have to petition the PUC to raise rates, I don't see how you can cal it deregulated.
In fact, it sort of seems as though what happened here in CA is that they deregulated the bulk suppliers, but didn't deregulate the prices consumers pay. But I don't really know if that's right.
MM
--
I submit to you that it is possible that the board or the memory that Anandtech used for their test is of inferior design. They quite rightly used the same board and memory for all their tests, and it may just be a junker. On the other hand, it may be hard to get a quality board to fail, so maybe using a junker is the way to go.
It should be noted that what Anandtech did is check the long-term persistence of memory. This is not a test that I performed on my boards, and I can't say whether they would pass Anandtech's test or not. But any board that can't hold its memory for six hours is defective, in my opinion, unless the voltage passes outside specified margins.
MM
--
I cut mine into strips with scissors. I throw away only every other strip, and hold onto the others for a couple of weeks before throwing them away in a totally different load of trash. Also, I always throw them away in the kitchen trash, which is more, well, disgusting
--MM
If a board couldn't run through memory tests reliably, or if it generated memory parity errors during Windows Hardware Compatibility (HCT) testing, it was considered to be a broken design. We ran the HCT for 8 hours at a time while cycling the ambient temperature between zero and 50 C. We also varied clock speed and power supply voltages. None of these things caused memory errors.
So, what is your basis for saying that occasional memory errors are acceptable?
MM
--
This seems to be a sad state of affairs. But as soon as someone asks for and receives the source code, that person is allowed (per the GPL) to redistribute it freely, and could, e.g., put it on Sourceforge.
I wasn't really going to buy one anyway, so I don't really care.
Besides, where would linux be without gcc?
MM
--
MM
--
Well, one of the things that confuses matters is that we live in a one-G world.
That is, sitting at a stop light, a car is already doing one G. If it accelerates at an additional one G in the forward direction, the riders will experience the vectorial sum of gravity's one G plus the car's forward acceleration. So, if the car accelerates at about 22MPH per second, the total acceleration is 1.4 (sqrt(2)) G's.
But the real issue is that with roller-coasters (and aerobatic planes, for that matter) the highest G's are experienced during changes in direction. That is, when a coaster (or plane) makes a dramatic turn, or when it pulls out of a dive, it can easily experience very high G's. MUCH higher than what it experiences during start up. An inexperienced pilot can easily wreck the wings or airframe on a normal airplane if he/she inadvertently dives and then pulls up too hard on the stick.
But you are certainly right that the car pulling 1.4 G's is accelerating pretty well, for a car.
MM
--
Certain things are wrong in every culture, or very nearly every culture.
For example, it is wrong to deliberately lie to assist in the persecution of another. Come to think of it, most types of sinister duplicity are considered wrong. I guess you could say that lying, cheating and stealing to benefit yourself are pretty much always wrong. AFAIK, the only cultures which don't recognize theft as wrong are very primitive ones with a weak notion of personal property.
Also, killing a person to steal his or her belongings is wrong. Show me a culture that condones it and I will show you an immoral culture.
Incest is tabu in EVERY CULTURE, and can be considered universally wrong.
MM
--
MM
--
Yes, I think we largely agree. In fact, after re-reading my post and yours, I realized that I didn't add much new material to the discussion. ;-)
However, I will say this: If Reed was saying that interference doesn't exist, or that it is a limitation of the receiving device, he is clearly using it in sense 5a, from above.
Because in sense 2, which I called the "technical" sense, the interference exists regardless of whether a receiver is even present. In this sense, it is strictly a narrow band phenomonon, of course.
And I'll also just add that when noise enters a signal, the signal is harder to correctly decode no matter what type of receiver you have. This is information theory stuff. So, interference (sense 5a) from the atmosphere and so on can eventually overcome any practical receiver.
I guess you could just say that the probability of correctly decoding a signal depends on the signal to noise ratio. What, exactly, constitutes noise depends on the system.
MM
--
A small amount of sodium will turn any flame yellow/orange. If you have gas burners at home, you can verify this by putting small quantities of salty water in contact with the flame. Don't burn yourself in the process!
MM
--
All EM radiation is capable of interferrence in this technical sense. This is well documented, well-understood and not controversial. Only when the radiation is coherrent (laser, FM or AM radio, radar, etc.) is the interferrence easily observable.
But Reed isn't using "interferrence" in this technical sense. He just means that one signal is screwing up someone's efforts to detect some other signal which most likely occupies the same bandwidth.
But Reed does gloss over some fairly real problems. The way FM radio works, for example, makes it extremely difficult for a receiver to discriminate between two different signals transmitting at the same frequency. In principal, if the receiver had an array of antennas, an analog to digital converter, and a DSP, it could decode two signals on the same frequency, provided that the two transmitters don't line up with the receiver. Such a receiver would be more costly than the type in use today.
Furthermore, Reed ignores the installed base issue. There is a lot of expensive equipment out there set up to transmit and receive radio signals, and we can't just start sending out additional signals that would degrade the performance of systems already in use. If I'm trying to tune in 104.5, and I hear all kinds of pops and whistles and chirps that aren't supposed to be part of the broadcast, I'm going to be ticked off. It will be small consolation to me that a theoretical receiver could do away with the unwanted noise. And of course, the "owner" of the spectrum really did pay real money for an exclusive license, so he or she will be even more pissed-off than I!
The real promise, though, is of starting off with devices which do not, in practice, "interfere" with the vast majority of existing radio systems. The FCC has already taken the first steps down this road, and it is very exciting stuff. We'll see what happens. ;-)
MM
--
Uh, it's HARD to get above 20 or 30 thousand feet with a missile. That's why the US was able to fly U2's over the USSR with impunity for many years. Above 80,000 feet, attack is out of the question. So, you have a vertical ribbon with, say, 10 miles of attackable extent. That is defensible, I think, and it wouldn't be an outrageous expense.
MM
--
Right. Tropical hurricanes (a.k.a. cyclones, a.k.a. tropical revolving storms) never actually cross the equator. There are few other things that can be said with certainty when it comes to hurricanes, however.
For example, no ship and no harbor is assured of surviving a category 5 hurricane. In the most extreme hurricanes, wind speeds are not even known with certainty, because instruments either break, or the buildings they are attached to are destroyed. 200 MPH is not out of the question. What windspeeds like this would do to the sea surface, I cannot even imagine.
Even enormous aircraft carriers have been damaged in hurricanes.
The main reason there are not more horror stories is that nowadays most ships simply route around them.
This is feasible because we have good weather reporting and most ships are fast enough to stay away.
MM
--
There is a Virtex II and a Virtex II Pro, which are not the same.
The article is about a demo board with the PRO version on it. The plain Virtex II doesn't have a PPC processor built-in to it.
Just wanted to clear that up.
MM
--