Frankly, I think your estimates are fairly optimistic. Are they based on the total amount of nuclear material you could fit in a suticase? Remember, there's a lot more to a bomb than the plutonium. What's more, I suspect your statistics are based on open air tests. Built up areas complicate things. I doubt the explosion would affect more than five city blocks, although the resulting carnage would spread further, of course.
My point, however, since you seem to have missed it, is even a 4-10km area of damage would not justify the expense and risk of building and smuggling the bomb. If you are going to risk the ire of the US, you want to see a whole city bite it, not a couple of neighbourhoods.
You are making a false assumption that it is easier to bring a small scale nuclear weapon into the US through canada than it is to bring it by sea into a North Western state. The sad fact is, our Northern friends have a much better record of policing their borders than we have of policing ours, having an estimated ten times the amount of successful interceptions to quantity of illegal contraband ratio as we do.
Furthermore, the concept of a "suitcase nuke" is absurd. Such a weapon would have a relatively insignificant explosive yield. For a nuclear device to be worth the effort of transporting it to the US, it would have to be about the size of a smallish crate.
Finally, if I were Osama Bin Laden, and I wanted to seriously upset the US people, I know exactly where I'd detonate a bomb. I'd place a large one in a cargo ship, and send it to Pearl Harbor. He wouldn't even have to wait for customs to check the ship out before he detonated it.
"I'm having far too much fun to stop panicking and shouting just yet. This is the greatest injustice in the history of Australia! Fight the Power!"
Dude, take some valium and pull your head out of your ass. Looking back over the history of slashdot, every legal story they've posted has turned out to have zero effect on the lives of their readership, with about 4 exceptions, all of which were widely reported before they were posted here. Leave the law to the lawyers, because if you, timothy and taco got together and worked real hard on it, you'd be able to understand enough of it to get yourselves laughed out of court.
Don't be such a geek. How's rackmounting going to improve your life? It's not like you have fifty seperate systems to house and maintain. Take the money you'd waste on pointless rackmounting, which serves no purpose to you other than nerd-masturbation fodder, and spend it on something that will provide more of a return on investment. Take up photography or something. Go mountain biking. Go skydiving. Rack mounting? Jesus...
Do they release the enhanced portions of their code? They claim that they will, but they haven't yet. So my uninformed opinions are still the correct ones.
While it's it may seem like a win for Linux, this is definitely a loss for free software. This will encourage people to use proprietary browser plugins for windows, rather than developing native ones for Linux. This sort of thing will end up restricting Linux to a secondary, niche market, which is just where MS wants it.
I glanced around their homepage, and codeweavers don't even seem to be open source, as far as I can tell. Their mission statement is a perfect piece of corporate doublethink, which might be more plainly interpreted as: "To free Macromedia and Real Networks from the hassle of ever having to support anything except windows ever again."
You have restored my faith. My comments about compiler based performance increases are drawn from benchmakring done prior to the P4 release. I've utterly forgotten the details, except that P4 was slammed utterly in the initial benchmark, but after severe hand made adjustments from the intel techs, it blew the competition away. Evidently the compiler wasn't quite up to scratch at that point.
Obviously designing a compiler like gcc requires making some trade-offs, given the way it is used. Redhat can't afford to compile rpms exclusively for x86, and they can't start seperate distros for AMD and intel, realistically. As a result, compiler optimisations are a compromise.
I can tell you why the windows compiler doesn't optimise well: Apparently they haven't written code to optimise for P2 yet. Hopefully, they'll skip a generation or two and jump straight to P4.
Drag about alpha. I'd still recommend sparc for high-end over most other things, due to excellent bus speeds and huge MP support. Bus speeds count for a hell of a let in some fields.
Finally, it wasn't meant to be a troll. Seriously. I don't know what happened there.
That said, it seems to me that this case hinges on CDDB proving that freedb have simply copied their database. This would only be possible if it is demonstrated that a substantial number of errors have been duplicated (ie. spelling errors). If they cannot prove this, how can they substantiate the claim that freedb is an unauthoized derivative?
Furthermore, I wonder what grounds they have for making this a copyright case, since their entire business centres around redistributing the titles of the copyrighted work of other artists, making their entire database a derivative of other people's work. Does anybody know if they have deals with record companies that enable them to operate this service? The article makes no mention of this.
And someone else didn't get it, and titled their story in nature after it. These quantum computers are off in the same sense that a modern "AND" gate is off if all its inputs are set to zero, which is to say, not off at all.
I mean, these could be as operating a circumvention device without your even knowing it. This, as the article implies, would be the result of people in parallel universes operating circumvention software, although I feel that this is something of an oversimplification of the way quantum mechanics work.
Due to various changes to the super-scalar and caching features of pentium in the P4, AMD processors are a dangerous risk if you plan to use your machine for a particularly long time. As compilers are reworked to take advantage of the changes, AMD processors will perform considerably worse in comparison.
In short, if you want intel, buy intel. If you want performance, buy a different architecture, like alpha or sparc. Don't waste your time on the low end if you are doing high end stuff, and don't blow your cash on dual proc boards that you aren't going to be able to take advantage of. Hell, there aren't any really good SMP OSs for intel anyway, except BeOS, and that suffers from other problems that keep it from achieving much popularity.
A corporation is a corporation is a corporation. HP is not substantially different from MS, or IBM. The fact that they are hiring as many debian developers as they can merely indicates a plan at HP to coopt debian for their own commercial purposes. I think this is a genuine concern for all debian users.
On the plus side, maybe increased business interest will provide the backing needed to finally fix debian's installer, so that oridinary people can use it with out going through two days of insanity.
This case has been dragging on since before the LNUX IPO. MPAA must have lost it five times already. Why can't they just tell when their beaten and give up?
I figure their plan must be to make 2600 got hrough all their cash reserves, so they can't continue with the defense, and MPAA wins by default. If the government would get off their asses and institute some reforms that prevent this sort of lawsuit-by-attrition, maybe honest americans like Emmanuel Goldstein would be able to go about their perfectly legal business without being dumped on by mega-corporate cartels.
Hey, weren't there some sort of antitrust laws passed to prevent companies from joining together to control markets like this? Calling it an association doesn't make it any less a horizontal trust, now does it?
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My point, however, since you seem to have missed it, is even a 4-10km area of damage would not justify the expense and risk of building and smuggling the bomb. If you are going to risk the ire of the US, you want to see a whole city bite it, not a couple of neighbourhoods.
You are making a false assumption that it is easier to bring a small scale nuclear weapon into the US through canada than it is to bring it by sea into a North Western state. The sad fact is, our Northern friends have a much better record of policing their borders than we have of policing ours, having an estimated ten times the amount of successful interceptions to quantity of illegal contraband ratio as we do. Furthermore, the concept of a "suitcase nuke" is absurd. Such a weapon would have a relatively insignificant explosive yield. For a nuclear device to be worth the effort of transporting it to the US, it would have to be about the size of a smallish crate. Finally, if I were Osama Bin Laden, and I wanted to seriously upset the US people, I know exactly where I'd detonate a bomb. I'd place a large one in a cargo ship, and send it to Pearl Harbor. He wouldn't even have to wait for customs to check the ship out before he detonated it.
"I'm having far too much fun to stop panicking and shouting just yet. This is the greatest injustice in the history of Australia! Fight the Power!"
Dude, take some valium and pull your head out of your ass. Looking back over the history of slashdot, every legal story they've posted has turned out to have zero effect on the lives of their readership, with about 4 exceptions, all of which were widely reported before they were posted here. Leave the law to the lawyers, because if you, timothy and taco got together and worked real hard on it, you'd be able to understand enough of it to get yourselves laughed out of court.
Don't be such a geek. How's rackmounting going to improve your life? It's not like you have fifty seperate systems to house and maintain. Take the money you'd waste on pointless rackmounting, which serves no purpose to you other than nerd-masturbation fodder, and spend it on something that will provide more of a return on investment. Take up photography or something. Go mountain biking. Go skydiving. Rack mounting? Jesus...
Do they release the enhanced portions of their code? They claim that they will, but they haven't yet. So my uninformed opinions are still the correct ones.
While it's it may seem like a win for Linux, this is definitely a loss for free software. This will encourage people to use proprietary browser plugins for windows, rather than developing native ones for Linux. This sort of thing will end up restricting Linux to a secondary, niche market, which is just where MS wants it.
I glanced around their homepage, and codeweavers don't even seem to be open source, as far as I can tell. Their mission statement is a perfect piece of corporate doublethink, which might be more plainly interpreted as: "To free Macromedia and Real Networks from the hassle of ever having to support anything except windows ever again."
You have restored my faith. My comments about compiler based performance increases are drawn from benchmakring done prior to the P4 release. I've utterly forgotten the details, except that P4 was slammed utterly in the initial benchmark, but after severe hand made adjustments from the intel techs, it blew the competition away. Evidently the compiler wasn't quite up to scratch at that point.
Obviously designing a compiler like gcc requires making some trade-offs, given the way it is used. Redhat can't afford to compile rpms exclusively for x86, and they can't start seperate distros for AMD and intel, realistically. As a result, compiler optimisations are a compromise.
I can tell you why the windows compiler doesn't optimise well: Apparently they haven't written code to optimise for P2 yet. Hopefully, they'll skip a generation or two and jump straight to P4.
Drag about alpha. I'd still recommend sparc for high-end over most other things, due to excellent bus speeds and huge MP support. Bus speeds count for a hell of a let in some fields.
Finally, it wasn't meant to be a troll. Seriously. I don't know what happened there.
That said, it seems to me that this case hinges on CDDB proving that freedb have simply copied their database. This would only be possible if it is demonstrated that a substantial number of errors have been duplicated (ie. spelling errors). If they cannot prove this, how can they substantiate the claim that freedb is an unauthoized derivative?
Furthermore, I wonder what grounds they have for making this a copyright case, since their entire business centres around redistributing the titles of the copyrighted work of other artists, making their entire database a derivative of other people's work. Does anybody know if they have deals with record companies that enable them to operate this service? The article makes no mention of this.
And someone else didn't get it, and titled their story in nature after it. These quantum computers are off in the same sense that a modern "AND" gate is off if all its inputs are set to zero, which is to say, not off at all.
I mean, these could be as operating a circumvention device without your even knowing it. This, as the article implies, would be the result of people in parallel universes operating circumvention software, although I feel that this is something of an oversimplification of the way quantum mechanics work.
Due to various changes to the super-scalar and caching features of pentium in the P4, AMD processors are a dangerous risk if you plan to use your machine for a particularly long time. As compilers are reworked to take advantage of the changes, AMD processors will perform considerably worse in comparison.
In short, if you want intel, buy intel. If you want performance, buy a different architecture, like alpha or sparc. Don't waste your time on the low end if you are doing high end stuff, and don't blow your cash on dual proc boards that you aren't going to be able to take advantage of. Hell, there aren't any really good SMP OSs for intel anyway, except BeOS, and that suffers from other problems that keep it from achieving much popularity.
A corporation is a corporation is a corporation. HP is not substantially different from MS, or IBM. The fact that they are hiring as many debian developers as they can merely indicates a plan at HP to coopt debian for their own commercial purposes. I think this is a genuine concern for all debian users.
On the plus side, maybe increased business interest will provide the backing needed to finally fix debian's installer, so that oridinary people can use it with out going through two days of insanity.
I request to have the defense's remarks stricken from the record! duh.
This case has been dragging on since before the LNUX IPO. MPAA must have lost it five times already. Why can't they just tell when their beaten and give up?
I figure their plan must be to make 2600 got hrough all their cash reserves, so they can't continue with the defense, and MPAA wins by default. If the government would get off their asses and institute some reforms that prevent this sort of lawsuit-by-attrition, maybe honest americans like Emmanuel Goldstein would be able to go about their perfectly legal business without being dumped on by mega-corporate cartels.
Hey, weren't there some sort of antitrust laws passed to prevent companies from joining together to control markets like this? Calling it an association doesn't make it any less a horizontal trust, now does it?