The threat of Israeli occupation and dominance may not justify Palestinian terror attacks, and the acts may be useless blood-letting in terms of their goals, but you must actually argue those points rather than simply assuming that such actions are universally unacceptable - history says such acts are par for the course in warfare. History may say it, but 61 countries negotiated some little things called the Geneva Conventions. Maybe you've heard of them.
Look, I know the US did bad things once upon a time, before I was born. Smallpox blankets, slavery, internment of Japanese-descended Americans, racial segregation all the way up until the 1960's, and more. I wasn't here for any of that, and it's not happening now. What Iran's doing now is happening now. They haven't changed since 1979 (for which I was born and old enough to remember) except to get bolder.
WW II was the defining point for modern warfare. Firebombing the industrial city centers of important war production cities was bound to cause civilian casualties. It's awful, but it was deemed necessary by both sides to use such large and inaccurate weapons in that war. The V2 wasn't exactly laser-guided. Nanking wasn't simply surrounded by barbed wire. The nuclear bombs dropped on Japan were awful, but they probably saved more lives in the long run than what they took. Noone in 1945 realized the generational effects of the radiation, either. At least the US wasn't gassing whole populations and performing medical experiments on them based on their ethnicity in the 1940s. That was out of the US system by the late 1800s.
No country on Earth is without its past atrocities. Let's worry about the current ones, and keep an eye on preventing them in the future.
Who or what is this "isreal" of which you speak. I know of a sovereign state acknowledged by the United Nations named "Israel" which defends its school children from being blown up by men in bomb vests using uniformed, professional soldiers. Are you trying to claim that is terrorism?
The 2% of the population that's non-Muslim is "plenty"? Jews and Christians, and in fact Zoroastrians are technically protected. Bahai are subject to execution, though.
As for the smart weapons barb, that's just silly. There's a huge difference between collateral damage and targeting children purposely. Our weapons are more discriminating than dumb bombs, but nobody promised they'd never produce a bit of overkill.
You claim I seem to be against it, yet in the post to which you responded, I said this very system isn't a nonstarter, but has serious obstacles to overcome. Would you not agree that it has serious obstacles to overcome?
A rapidly recharging electric car with a range of 120 miles is fine for the 200 mile one-way trip, if quick charging stations are available. One that has a 120 mile range at full charge, charges overnight, and only has half or 3/4 charge in the morning would not be. The speed at which the car can be charged and the availability, or lack thereof, of stations able to sell a metered charge to the driver are important factors.
When the gasoline engine was first introduced, we didn't have gasoline stations everywhere, either. Then people went for unleaded, even though leaded was the norm. It's not a stretch at all that some electric car solution could be made to work. To get wide adoption, though, it will have to be comparable in range to gasoline engines. That's my argument.
My argument has nothing to do with big city elitists bashing people who prefer to live elsewhere into submission over where to live. Actually, a huge SUV getting 10 MPG is hard to plan for decent range in a hurry, too. If you're short on cash and have your cards maxed, as many people do, then 20 gallons * $3 = $60 for a range of 200 miles. That's a drop in the bucket on most days for a day-long entertainment budget, but if it's an unplanned emergency or if you're doing it 20 days a month for work, it could really hit you. Twelve hundred a month is a house payment and utilities for a month in lots of places. The same range in a car getting 30 MPG is much more reasonable. It's too bad station wagons are "uncool" and overgrown station wagons on car frames with truck engines are "cool". I'd drive a station wagon before an SUV if I had to haul so many people around. SUVs should really be used for what the name implies -- off-road driving sports and utility vehicles. A Lincoln Navigator isn't exactly a Baja racer.
Another place people forget to look at for fuel consumption is their propensity to love overnight shipping from coast to coast, or three days around the world. Many products would be nearly as cheap manufactured closer to the point of sale, and would use much less fuel to transport. Longer delivery times and using trains more and trucks less would help, too. It's not just the private auto owners to blame, although that's certainly a big part of the problem. When your package could come in the mail truck that's coming by anyway, but you save $1 by having a 5 MPG semi haul it from San Diego to Buffalo, you're not doing the world any favors.
My point about it being hard to get manufactured has to do with the fact that not just a few but many people will not consider this particular system because of its limitations. It's a shame if it doesn't get manufactured, because it could do a lot of good.
The company is still a US company, and is required to obey US law regardless of whether the chip fab is in the US, Taiwan, Singapore, Indonesia, Germany, or Ireland. I've never seen an AMD chip fabbed in China.
The ban on business with Iran goes well beyond military exports. It's a ban on business, period. It's called an embargo. It's to economically punish Iran for being enemies to the US and its allies.
In case anyone hasn't noticed the course of the last 300 years of warfare, it's not the size of your population or the fealty of a few princes in neighboring cities that make a country powerful any longer. It's your economy. The size of your fleet of ships, tanks, planes, subs, helicopters, jeeps, and other vehicles is one key. The logistical support of modern electronics and a worldwide communications network is another these days. A distribution network for troops, equipment, and supplies is a third. The money to keep a standing army well trained is important. The more business you do with enemies or potential enemies, the stronger they can become militarily. All this has been the trend since at least the Industrial Revolution. It became a stark truth nobody could deny in the World Wars, especially WW II.
This is why so many military people are interested in the US's levels of trade with China. We're not in a very friendly state with them, although relations are fairly solid. We send them more money every year, though, and their year-over-year growth in military spending is starting to closely follow the growth in the US/China trade imbalance. American consumers are supporting the Chinese military, and if they ever decide to assert that power against the US, it'll be those DVD players, dolls, lead-painted trains, and TVs that funded it. Relations with China are good enough right now, though, that it's kind of a long view type of mild concern. The Taiwan issue might change that some day, but China hasn't called for the death of the US, the UK, and Israel just yet, nor has their president denied the Holocaust.
Iran, on the other hand, was ruled by a US ally. It was taken over by militant theocrats who held US citizens hostage for well over a year. Many of us still remember the yellow ribbons for those hostages. They have supported terrorists in Israel, and they are believed to be funding and supplying terrorists within Iraq. No, I don't mean insurgent freedom fighters. Insurgent freedom fighters don't blow up women and children at Mosques and in the marketplaces. Insurgent freedom fighters attack military personnel and military targets with minimal collateral damage to their own country's people and property. I believe there are some people in Iraq who really are trying to just fight against the US occupation, but there's something else going on there as well. Don't be fooled for a second into thinking that religiously ruled Shia Iran is keeping any money or weapons it supplies away from death squads killing Aramaic Christians, Sunni Arabs, and Kurds in the streets. If they are indeed placing weapons and supplies into Iraq as is claimed, it's surely to help the Shiite cause more than anything else.
Why would a country so against what the US and our allies represent not be on a banned trading list? Hell, we still don't trade with Castro except for selling Cuba medicine and food. I still can't legally buy a Cuban cigar just because he nationalized a bunch of US-owned nightclubs and hotels and took the country socialist. Sure, Castro's a dictator, but when has that single fact ever stopped the US? I'd remove Cuba from the list long before Iran. Hell, we're even friendly with Libya now, and they blew up a Pam Am flight in the 80's. But Iran? No. Not under Khamenei and Ahmadinejad.
His last offense 20 years ago and he was in prison or the hospital for 20 years. So you're saying his last offense was the last time he had an opportunity as a free man?
Rapists and molesters shouldn't be hunted down and shot in the streets, I agree. Too many innocent bystanders and all, who might get caught in the crossfire. Plus, it's not for the individual to decide in an orderly society unless there is imminent danger.
I'll buy that sometimes people get accused and even convicted of things they didn't do. A serial rapist or serial molester probably didn't get railroaded every time. If you believe in the death penalty for anything, these offenders are serious candidates for having the state take care of things.
I'll admit I waver on the death penalty. On days that I support it, I'd support it for serial child molesters and serial rapists before bank robbers or drug gangsters who happened to kill someone in connection with their illegal trade, or just about anyone else other than serial murderers. See, in the current justice system, crimes done for money are considered "aggravated", meaning they're worse. They might be worse than crimes that are committed because of a deep, seething hatred or overwhelming fear because they're colder and more detached. They are not worse, though, than people like serial molesters and serial rapists who commit their offense for no slight, no gain, with no attachment to the person at all, and who destroy lives for a momentary release.
One thing that would open lots of prison space -- and yes, I'll say this about every time there's a mention of prison space or prisoner release in a thread -- would be to not jail nonviolent offenders. About half of prison inmates are there for nonviolent offenses. About one fifth of them are their for property crimes (theft, fraud, embezzlement...) and another fifth are there for drug crimes. With more parole officers and more ankle bands, we could cut nearly 40% of the prison population, making more room for violent offenders. I say "nearly" because some really unmanageable repeat offenders of certain non-violent crimes would still have to be locked up. Another 8-10% is there for "public order" violations, including weapons, commercialized vice, drunk driving, and more. Many of these could be handled by house arrest.
Drunk driving, for example, is considered non-violent unless someone gets hurt or dies. If you take away someone's license, put them under house arrest, and they still violate the house arrest and drive drunk again without a license, then sure, lock them up a while. If someone shoplifts, don't send them to prison though. Put an ankle bracelet on them. Hell, make it part of their sentence that the ankle bracelet not only tracks them for the government but that retail stores can be notified by it and they can single out the person for their loss prevention team. I know it sounds invasive, but that's for part of a sentence for doing a crime, and it would sure beat being in the state pen.
It beats having murderers, rapists, and child molesters getting out early, doesn't it?
Oh, and those people who kill somebody once in a bar fight on accident, or who kill over a love affair in a rage of passion... Don't lock them up either, or maybe for a short time. It's the people who premeditate murder or who've done it a few times that we really should be worried about. Just keep the bar fight guy out of bars and get him some counseling as part of his sentence. The recidivism rate for such things is low, and the offender is often his own worst critic over it. Putting him in prison for an extended length of time just makes him lose touch with society, come out colder and more hardened, and pissed off at the people who took so much out of his life for something he didn't mean to do.
The main argument against this position is that sometimes people like Al Capone, thought to have ordered lots of murders and all, get put away on charges easier to prove (his was tax evasion). Well, I don't think it takes a roc
Thanks for assuming I'm in the middle of nowhere. I live in a city of 50,000 people, thankyouverymuch. I'm not against an electric car at all, either, so please quit your flaming assumptions. I said it would work well as a second car for people who have something else. I said that. Read the damn post. I also said it would work for some people as a first car, but not for everyone.
Oh, and I consider your belittling of my major life events by placing the word in derogatory quotes a flame in itself.
You straight out say that it's practical "for others".
And fuck you for telling me what I do and don't need. I'll make the decision what I need, thankyouverymuchagain. Now go to hell.
I thought it was intentional humor. Trying to buy a vowel on Jeopardy would make as much sense as some of John C. Dvorak's PC Magazine columns.
BTW, I always refer to him as "John C. Dvorak" as h puts his name on the byline, because there's a John A. Dvorak out there who's a respectable journalist and he shouldn't have to pay for this guy's mess.
Also, I can't help but wonder if this will stick to the course of The Dvorak Effect. There's a strong history, supposedly (I've never checked the actual rates) that if John C. Dvorak praises something in a big way it nearly always fails and that if he pans something it nearly always succeeds. I wonder if it's been brought to his attention, and I sometimes wonder if he makes his column decisions consciously with that in mind.
Anyone can look at PC Magazine's back articles by JCD to see his rate of success and his cocky writing style. The archive only goes back to 2001, though, and your local library might have back into the 90's.
...or you're watching out for future stars of college women's basketball. Amber Dvorak's a 6'7" high school sophomore post, and reportedly is still growing. She already has a scholarship to Minnesota.
Have you ever had an out-of-state relative suddenly deathly ill? Have you ever had to drive two states away to work on a customer's problem or some remote hardware on a network unexpectedly? Have you ever had to evacuate a home and go live with family for a while? Maybe you've had a call for a big job interview a few hundred miles away in the morning, but they wanted to interview you that day? Sure, these are extreme examples, but people do on occasion experience these extremes.
Plus, it's very nice to just get up on a Saturday and decide to go visit someone, to go an amusement park, or go to a ballgame. For lots of people, that can mean hundreds of miles. I, for one, live 110 miles from the closest major league ball park and about 200 miles from the stadium for my favorite NFL team.
Now, I know one response to this is that it's still great as a second car, and that's probably true. It has to be good as a primary car for many people, though, and for some people it won't be. I think the car companies are increasingly wiling to get into niche markets, but you'd have to convince a major manufacturer or two this will sell at least decent numbers before they'll even think about building them. I wouldn't call the idea a nonstarter, but it does have some serious obstacles to overcome to be successful.
It's not purely to make money on the individual work. It's also to encourage derivative works by the same author and to provide for a type of limited-length ownership for the expression itself.
I can tell you for certain that if a person writes one short story and publishes online, they probably don't want someone to come along and make a killing off of a compilation of short stories including their work without some compensation. $25 for something you're not planning to sell is kind of steep. What you're saying is essentially that if someone writes that to share with people for free, they have no right to keep someone else from plagiarizing it without paying the fee for registration.
I like the idea someone else in the thread stated, though. Make it a short protection for everything (maybe as short as one year), and require registration within a year including a full copy of the work for it to be extended. If you combine this with the ability to register compilations of your work (several short stories and poems together, or multiple short films/cartoons less than 5 minutes or so in length) up to the size of what a full-length normal work would be regardless of whether that's the way it was originally published, then I think that's an entirely reasonable burden. Make them fill out the form for each work, and make a batch submission with the copy of the works in whatever archival format is acceptable and all those forms for $25 plus an additional $2 for each additional form maybe.
As it is, with statutory damages being limited to registered content ant it being very difficult to prove actual damages for most works, there are only two things that are majorly functionally different now. One is the maximum limit is way too high. The other is that works under copyright with no holder aren't released sooner than the maximum. A company-held copyright held by a defunct company that hasn't been liquidated into other businesses and hasn't been registered with the government as an ongoing business concern for X years (where X is maybe 3 or 5) should cease. That would be great for all the abandon-ware gamers out there.
I'm not for banning after-death protection as long as it's within the shorter maximum length, BTW. If Stephen King's publisher releases a book of his one day and he has a heart attack and dies the next, his family has every claim to the royalties IMO. Perhaps it should be required that the remainign copyrights be explicitly transferred in a will or placed into a trust, but the possibility of inheriting the fruits of a family member's labor shouldn't be lost simply because it's writing, photography, film, music, or computer software. If it was owned by a corporation, the death of one person wouldn't end the protection. I'm of the firm belief that all property in a capitalist society should pass from spouse to spouse, parent to child, or as a will requests without taxes and penalties. If my parents spent all their money on me while they lived, I wouldn't have to declare that as income. Why should their death (when that happens, hopefully decades from now) be a taxable event? But I digress...
I agree except for the required explicit registration. Every time you make a new blog post, you have to register? Every time a live sports broadcast is on TV they have to register? Before the game happens, when there's no footage to copyright? Or do thy register after it's transmitted, and therefore can't protect it because ti wasn't under copyright when it was broadcast? Or maybe we just wouldn't get live games on TV any longer.
Besides, the US is a signatory country on the Berne Convention. That requires copyright upon entering into a fixed format.
I might also consider 30 or 40 years fair, but not 120. People do tend to live a bit longer these days, and there's a lot more media available so waiting 30 years instead of 20 won't hurt the commons that much. 120 is ridiculous, though.
I don't have the statistic, and I wish I did. I'm not sure anyone would have thought to compile it. I wonder, though, just what percentage of those auto accidents are officers, NCOs, and civilian personnel vs. junior enlisted.
It's also good to remember that bases could have an impact on traffic simply by being there. When you put 4,000 - 25,000 people in a smallish area which interconnects with public roads and most of the drivers are not locals you're bound to raise accident rates. Shopping malls, race tracks, ballparks, and university campuses probably have higher accident rates too.
I agree about the men in groups idea. Men tend to form a pack. Mild aggression within the group is even a sign of acceptance and sometimes affection. A bunch of arm-punching, wrestling, back-slapping guys in one place can be fun or it can become trouble. I think it's a wonder the military does such a good job, considering all that.
As long as you're bringing this to a psychological level as opposed to the neurochemical level, I have a few questions about the validity of some conclusions from that perspective. Isn't the id always a base sort of thing, and isn't it necessary to have an active id to get by? Aren't the ego and superego supposed to balance out the id and keep us from doing antisocial things under normal circumstances?
Having an impulse -- even a strengthened impulse -- and not being able to control that impulse are, after all, two very different things, aren't they? Or is this greater activity of baser impulses actually negating our ability to control ourselves, as the summary implies? We are, after all, not beings of pure id.
Considering we have an entirely self-selected military, you'd have to do some serious investigation into before and after to get more than correlation. Self-selection into the military could be based largely on the traits that the military trains people for. Careful, bicycle-riding, peaceful, pacifists don't generally volunteer to be taught how to shoot at gun-wielding teenagers from other countries.
Also, since our military is comprised mostly of people who have barely made the age of majority (and mostly men), you'd be comparing their auto collision, domestic violence, disorderly conduct, and aggressive tendencies to high school boys who are placed close together in large groups.
I think the actuaries at any auto insurance company could tell you that if you put 12,000 teenage boys on a campus and keep them almost constantly occupied you're going to have a huge number of auto incidents and accidents when they leave the campus. It doesn't necessarily make a lot of difference if it's a school or a military base. You'd have to control for things like that.
Specifically excluded from the transfer you quoted are: "Intellectual property: A. All copyrights and trademarks, except for the trademarks UNIX and UnixWare. B. All Patents" in Schedule 1.1(b).
I think one difference the XO can make is in the level of desire some kids will have for becoming literate. Sure, nothing will reach every kid. When kids have the chance to be included in Google, Yahoo, Disney, Nickelodeon, and more because they have the laptop, they'll be less likely, I think, to disdain reading as something just stuck-up rich people do.
It's terribly discouraging growing up sharing 40-year old History books and not being able to do participate in the activities the other kids can. If the kids see that they can get their fun information using this tool, that's not as boring as a textbook. When they see the information is more current, that will help. When they can have interactive instruction outside the classroom, that will help.
I remember some of the most popular games when I was in school were Darwin's Island, Sim Earth, Oregon Trail, and Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego. Those types of things kept kids enthralled for hours. They're fun and educational, and they require a computer. I used to live with a woman whose daughter loved to sit at the computer and play with those self-reading books. She'd set it to only pronounce words when she'd click on them, and it helped her reading and spelling.
No, the XO's not a magic bullet. No, there's not a real effective way to isolate a population of real people in a laboratory environment, either. One can compare similar situations in different areas with and without the laptops. One can also compare an area before and after their introduction. Neither is tightly controlled, but when discussing the differences the other environmental factors can be considered. Any social science is not perfectly controlled, but statistically important trends do sometimes be found. The best way to do that is to have as many experimental groups as possible so that independent factors can be found to overlap here and not there.
It's my humble and relatively safe prediction that the laptops will help, but not as much as their proponents hope. My biggest fear about them is that the adults might focus too heavily on the technology and not on how to apply it.
That's always my biggest fear when I hear abut technology in schools. I think the folks at OLPC are actually running an end around on that issue with the XO in many ways though. Much of the right type of software has been worked out in advance and preloaded. They're laptops and they're promoted as individual laptops, so just sticking a few at the back of a room and never using them isn't much of an option. Early trials with the machines shows the kids will self-direct activities with the machines when at home, and that they tend to share their newfound skills with older family members.
Take a look at the 60 Minutes piece with Negroponte to see more about that. School attendance in a village in Cambodia increased by 50% after the introduction of more conventional laptops, because the kids thought so much of being able to use the computers. Now, I'd say in Birmingham, where electricity and running water are common and school attendance is mandatory, it's not going to make as notable a difference. It could still help keep kids interested in learning, though, even if not in traditional school.
My cars are stocked in case of getting stuck, too. If I hit a deer, cow, or another car and I'm bleeding from the head, having a car stocked for two days in the cold doesn't do me much good. A cell phone might. I'm not saying it's a necessity, but it sure does give me some extra peace of mind.
There was a time when you could borrow a stranger's house phone, too, which probably won't happen these days. Again, that doesn't make a cell phone a necessity, but it's a better investment in convenience than most.
IANAEE (electrical engineer) and I've never built my own CPU, even from TTLs or in a simulator. It makes sense to me, though, that while chips having the error in them may not be tied to specific clock frequencies that the chances of encountering the bug still could be.
If it's a race condition in hardware, there's a good chance it's clock-sensitive. The bug probably exists in the whole line, sure. It'll manifest more as the clock ticks are closer together, because the margin for error without triggering the reversal of steps is smaller. If it's a matter of the wrong signal being sometimes being asserted because the edge of a clock line transition was missed, it's logically going to happen more when the clock cycles are shorter.
A bug being in the whole line regardless of clock frequency and that bug becoming more of an issue at higher clock frequencies are not at all mutually exclusive conditions. The higher frequencies and higher rates of the error may not coincide, but there's nothing in the article to logically say they don't.
The erratum probably does apply to the whole line equally but probably manifests as a percentage of the time in use as some function of the frequency.
For any geek wanting a basic understanding of issues like latching times, gate propagation delays, and other analog electrical signaling issues inside a digital CPU, I recommend the first few chapters of Structured Computer Organization. The book builds upon basic designs of computers from using TTLs to designing a CPU, then up by layers through microcode, designing an assembly language, and more. I have an older edition at home which covers up through the 68030 and the 80386 as examples. The newer one covers up through the Pentium II, the UltraSparc, and the Java chips. The book won't make you an electrical engineer by any means, but the discussions of the tricky timing issues within even simple CPUs might be useful here.
As for the clock speed not effecting the percentage loss in efficiency due to the microcode fix... well, yeah. The microcode is the same across the line regardless of the clock speed. If you insert two identical strings of instructions A1 and A2 into an identical pair of microcode stores B1 and B2, the resulting patched microcodes C1 and C2 will likewise be identical. The faster processor will decode and execute the microcode at the same clock speed as before, and so will the slower one. They'll each have the same percentage slowdown relative to their own clock speeds, because they're running the same microcode. We're not talking about two different generations of processors or even two different revisions. It's the same processor design at two clock speeds. One is going to get the same nerfs and buffs for any microcode change proportional to their clock speeds as the other.
The easy way would be to route traffic for each residence hall and campus lab using a PC with Linux or a BSD back to the NOC and to monitor at each of those points. It'd scale much better than putting this between the switch and the site's public-facing routers. It also gives the admins a chance to easily partition the campus network with multiple firewalls, set up multiple DHCP servers (each with their own pool per building), and possibly even NAT each building individually using cheap, off-the-shelf hardware.
I don't particularly agree with the MPAA's tactics, but there's no reason a campus network couldn't easily accommodate both filtering and monitoring every packet passing through. I'd be tempted in the position of a university campus lead network administrator to set up such a system and monitor traffic for signs of worms, backdoor trojans, spambots and other similar high-traffic malware.
When I was in the ISP field we'd send "your system appears to be infected" notices to customers. If I was running the network for a university I'd probably proactively monitor for such things in the traffic and advise students and faculty whose systems generated harmful traffic that they need take action. I just wouldn't do such a thing at the beck and call of the movie industry to chase down their supposed gremlins.
Every live CD I've seen distributed tells you where to get the sources for the live CD from the distributor's servers. Please let us know which ones don't so we can inform the appropriate copyright holders.
You make a good point. That's how it is with today's browsers, though, no matter the OS or the browser. They do much more than the browser was originally intended to do. OS X should at least, like any modern Unix, keep any damage within the account of the browser's current user and not allow it to damage the system as a whole. Of course, that's little comfort to someone who got their identity stolen due to some malicious web site owning the running copy of the browser.
IE's one of the last things I'd expect to see supported by something like this, though. With Safari, Firefox, and all the other browsers for Mac I don't see IE as particularly needed anyway. I know I barely use it on Windows, and then only to test sites I've done to make sure they look sane on it. All my browsing of unknown sites is on Firefox or Opera.
It sounds to me they just decided to let someone else field the equipment. There's a lot of exaggeration around this story, but the facts are all over the web. Death of the payphone, indeed. This reaction is kind of like saying IBM getting out of the consumer laptop and desktop PC market was the end of the Windows computer.
Gee, maybe you can find a call box along every highway where you live. Around here, people have either cell phones, CB radios they can turn to channel 9, or light up the road flares and wait.
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Look, I know the US did bad things once upon a time, before I was born. Smallpox blankets, slavery, internment of Japanese-descended Americans, racial segregation all the way up until the 1960's, and more. I wasn't here for any of that, and it's not happening now. What Iran's doing now is happening now. They haven't changed since 1979 (for which I was born and old enough to remember) except to get bolder.
WW II was the defining point for modern warfare. Firebombing the industrial city centers of important war production cities was bound to cause civilian casualties. It's awful, but it was deemed necessary by both sides to use such large and inaccurate weapons in that war. The V2 wasn't exactly laser-guided. Nanking wasn't simply surrounded by barbed wire. The nuclear bombs dropped on Japan were awful, but they probably saved more lives in the long run than what they took. Noone in 1945 realized the generational effects of the radiation, either. At least the US wasn't gassing whole populations and performing medical experiments on them based on their ethnicity in the 1940s. That was out of the US system by the late 1800s.
No country on Earth is without its past atrocities. Let's worry about the current ones, and keep an eye on preventing them in the future.
Who or what is this "isreal" of which you speak. I know of a sovereign state acknowledged by the United Nations named "Israel" which defends its school children from being blown up by men in bomb vests using uniformed, professional soldiers. Are you trying to claim that is terrorism?
The 2% of the population that's non-Muslim is "plenty"? Jews and Christians, and in fact Zoroastrians are technically protected. Bahai are subject to execution, though.
He does recommend moving all the Jews and Christians to Alaska or Canada instead of the area he thinks should all be Palestine. Or is the Iranian News Agency too much of an American slant for you?
As for the smart weapons barb, that's just silly. There's a huge difference between collateral damage and targeting children purposely. Our weapons are more discriminating than dumb bombs, but nobody promised they'd never produce a bit of overkill.
You claim I seem to be against it, yet in the post to which you responded, I said this very system isn't a nonstarter, but has serious obstacles to overcome. Would you not agree that it has serious obstacles to overcome?
A rapidly recharging electric car with a range of 120 miles is fine for the 200 mile one-way trip, if quick charging stations are available. One that has a 120 mile range at full charge, charges overnight, and only has half or 3/4 charge in the morning would not be. The speed at which the car can be charged and the availability, or lack thereof, of stations able to sell a metered charge to the driver are important factors.
When the gasoline engine was first introduced, we didn't have gasoline stations everywhere, either. Then people went for unleaded, even though leaded was the norm. It's not a stretch at all that some electric car solution could be made to work. To get wide adoption, though, it will have to be comparable in range to gasoline engines. That's my argument.
My argument has nothing to do with big city elitists bashing people who prefer to live elsewhere into submission over where to live. Actually, a huge SUV getting 10 MPG is hard to plan for decent range in a hurry, too. If you're short on cash and have your cards maxed, as many people do, then 20 gallons * $3 = $60 for a range of 200 miles. That's a drop in the bucket on most days for a day-long entertainment budget, but if it's an unplanned emergency or if you're doing it 20 days a month for work, it could really hit you. Twelve hundred a month is a house payment and utilities for a month in lots of places. The same range in a car getting 30 MPG is much more reasonable. It's too bad station wagons are "uncool" and overgrown station wagons on car frames with truck engines are "cool". I'd drive a station wagon before an SUV if I had to haul so many people around. SUVs should really be used for what the name implies -- off-road driving sports and utility vehicles. A Lincoln Navigator isn't exactly a Baja racer.
Another place people forget to look at for fuel consumption is their propensity to love overnight shipping from coast to coast, or three days around the world. Many products would be nearly as cheap manufactured closer to the point of sale, and would use much less fuel to transport. Longer delivery times and using trains more and trucks less would help, too. It's not just the private auto owners to blame, although that's certainly a big part of the problem. When your package could come in the mail truck that's coming by anyway, but you save $1 by having a 5 MPG semi haul it from San Diego to Buffalo, you're not doing the world any favors.
My point about it being hard to get manufactured has to do with the fact that not just a few but many people will not consider this particular system because of its limitations. It's a shame if it doesn't get manufactured, because it could do a lot of good.
The company is still a US company, and is required to obey US law regardless of whether the chip fab is in the US, Taiwan, Singapore, Indonesia, Germany, or Ireland. I've never seen an AMD chip fabbed in China.
The ban on business with Iran goes well beyond military exports. It's a ban on business, period. It's called an embargo. It's to economically punish Iran for being enemies to the US and its allies.
In case anyone hasn't noticed the course of the last 300 years of warfare, it's not the size of your population or the fealty of a few princes in neighboring cities that make a country powerful any longer. It's your economy. The size of your fleet of ships, tanks, planes, subs, helicopters, jeeps, and other vehicles is one key. The logistical support of modern electronics and a worldwide communications network is another these days. A distribution network for troops, equipment, and supplies is a third. The money to keep a standing army well trained is important. The more business you do with enemies or potential enemies, the stronger they can become militarily. All this has been the trend since at least the Industrial Revolution. It became a stark truth nobody could deny in the World Wars, especially WW II.
This is why so many military people are interested in the US's levels of trade with China. We're not in a very friendly state with them, although relations are fairly solid. We send them more money every year, though, and their year-over-year growth in military spending is starting to closely follow the growth in the US/China trade imbalance. American consumers are supporting the Chinese military, and if they ever decide to assert that power against the US, it'll be those DVD players, dolls, lead-painted trains, and TVs that funded it. Relations with China are good enough right now, though, that it's kind of a long view type of mild concern. The Taiwan issue might change that some day, but China hasn't called for the death of the US, the UK, and Israel just yet, nor has their president denied the Holocaust.
Iran, on the other hand, was ruled by a US ally. It was taken over by militant theocrats who held US citizens hostage for well over a year. Many of us still remember the yellow ribbons for those hostages. They have supported terrorists in Israel, and they are believed to be funding and supplying terrorists within Iraq. No, I don't mean insurgent freedom fighters. Insurgent freedom fighters don't blow up women and children at Mosques and in the marketplaces. Insurgent freedom fighters attack military personnel and military targets with minimal collateral damage to their own country's people and property. I believe there are some people in Iraq who really are trying to just fight against the US occupation, but there's something else going on there as well. Don't be fooled for a second into thinking that religiously ruled Shia Iran is keeping any money or weapons it supplies away from death squads killing Aramaic Christians, Sunni Arabs, and Kurds in the streets. If they are indeed placing weapons and supplies into Iraq as is claimed, it's surely to help the Shiite cause more than anything else.
Why would a country so against what the US and our allies represent not be on a banned trading list? Hell, we still don't trade with Castro except for selling Cuba medicine and food. I still can't legally buy a Cuban cigar just because he nationalized a bunch of US-owned nightclubs and hotels and took the country socialist. Sure, Castro's a dictator, but when has that single fact ever stopped the US? I'd remove Cuba from the list long before Iran. Hell, we're even friendly with Libya now, and they blew up a Pam Am flight in the 80's. But Iran? No. Not under Khamenei and Ahmadinejad.
His last offense 20 years ago and he was in prison or the hospital for 20 years. So you're saying his last offense was the last time he had an opportunity as a free man?
Rapists and molesters shouldn't be hunted down and shot in the streets, I agree. Too many innocent bystanders and all, who might get caught in the crossfire. Plus, it's not for the individual to decide in an orderly society unless there is imminent danger.
I'll buy that sometimes people get accused and even convicted of things they didn't do. A serial rapist or serial molester probably didn't get railroaded every time. If you believe in the death penalty for anything, these offenders are serious candidates for having the state take care of things.
I'll admit I waver on the death penalty. On days that I support it, I'd support it for serial child molesters and serial rapists before bank robbers or drug gangsters who happened to kill someone in connection with their illegal trade, or just about anyone else other than serial murderers. See, in the current justice system, crimes done for money are considered "aggravated", meaning they're worse. They might be worse than crimes that are committed because of a deep, seething hatred or overwhelming fear because they're colder and more detached. They are not worse, though, than people like serial molesters and serial rapists who commit their offense for no slight, no gain, with no attachment to the person at all, and who destroy lives for a momentary release.
One thing that would open lots of prison space -- and yes, I'll say this about every time there's a mention of prison space or prisoner release in a thread -- would be to not jail nonviolent offenders. About half of prison inmates are there for nonviolent offenses. About one fifth of them are their for property crimes (theft, fraud, embezzlement...) and another fifth are there for drug crimes. With more parole officers and more ankle bands, we could cut nearly 40% of the prison population, making more room for violent offenders. I say "nearly" because some really unmanageable repeat offenders of certain non-violent crimes would still have to be locked up. Another 8-10% is there for "public order" violations, including weapons, commercialized vice, drunk driving, and more. Many of these could be handled by house arrest.
Drunk driving, for example, is considered non-violent unless someone gets hurt or dies. If you take away someone's license, put them under house arrest, and they still violate the house arrest and drive drunk again without a license, then sure, lock them up a while. If someone shoplifts, don't send them to prison though. Put an ankle bracelet on them. Hell, make it part of their sentence that the ankle bracelet not only tracks them for the government but that retail stores can be notified by it and they can single out the person for their loss prevention team. I know it sounds invasive, but that's for part of a sentence for doing a crime, and it would sure beat being in the state pen.
It beats having murderers, rapists, and child molesters getting out early, doesn't it?
Oh, and those people who kill somebody once in a bar fight on accident, or who kill over a love affair in a rage of passion... Don't lock them up either, or maybe for a short time. It's the people who premeditate murder or who've done it a few times that we really should be worried about. Just keep the bar fight guy out of bars and get him some counseling as part of his sentence. The recidivism rate for such things is low, and the offender is often his own worst critic over it. Putting him in prison for an extended length of time just makes him lose touch with society, come out colder and more hardened, and pissed off at the people who took so much out of his life for something he didn't mean to do.
The main argument against this position is that sometimes people like Al Capone, thought to have ordered lots of murders and all, get put away on charges easier to prove (his was tax evasion). Well, I don't think it takes a roc
Thanks for assuming I'm in the middle of nowhere. I live in a city of 50,000 people, thankyouverymuch. I'm not against an electric car at all, either, so please quit your flaming assumptions. I said it would work well as a second car for people who have something else. I said that. Read the damn post. I also said it would work for some people as a first car, but not for everyone.
Oh, and I consider your belittling of my major life events by placing the word in derogatory quotes a flame in itself.
You straight out say that it's practical "for others".
And fuck you for telling me what I do and don't need. I'll make the decision what I need, thankyouverymuchagain. Now go to hell.
I thought it was intentional humor. Trying to buy a vowel on Jeopardy would make as much sense as some of John C. Dvorak's PC Magazine columns.
BTW, I always refer to him as "John C. Dvorak" as h puts his name on the byline, because there's a John A. Dvorak out there who's a respectable journalist and he shouldn't have to pay for this guy's mess.
Also, I can't help but wonder if this will stick to the course of The Dvorak Effect. There's a strong history, supposedly (I've never checked the actual rates) that if John C. Dvorak praises something in a big way it nearly always fails and that if he pans something it nearly always succeeds. I wonder if it's been brought to his attention, and I sometimes wonder if he makes his column decisions consciously with that in mind.
Anyone can look at PC Magazine's back articles by JCD to see his rate of success and his cocky writing style. The archive only goes back to 2001, though, and your local library might have back into the 90's.
...or you're watching out for future stars of college women's basketball. Amber Dvorak's a 6'7" high school sophomore post, and reportedly is still growing. She already has a scholarship to Minnesota.
What about unplanned trips?
Have you ever had an out-of-state relative suddenly deathly ill? Have you ever had to drive two states away to work on a customer's problem or some remote hardware on a network unexpectedly? Have you ever had to evacuate a home and go live with family for a while? Maybe you've had a call for a big job interview a few hundred miles away in the morning, but they wanted to interview you that day? Sure, these are extreme examples, but people do on occasion experience these extremes.
Plus, it's very nice to just get up on a Saturday and decide to go visit someone, to go an amusement park, or go to a ballgame. For lots of people, that can mean hundreds of miles. I, for one, live 110 miles from the closest major league ball park and about 200 miles from the stadium for my favorite NFL team.
Now, I know one response to this is that it's still great as a second car, and that's probably true. It has to be good as a primary car for many people, though, and for some people it won't be. I think the car companies are increasingly wiling to get into niche markets, but you'd have to convince a major manufacturer or two this will sell at least decent numbers before they'll even think about building them. I wouldn't call the idea a nonstarter, but it does have some serious obstacles to overcome to be successful.
It's not purely to make money on the individual work. It's also to encourage derivative works by the same author and to provide for a type of limited-length ownership for the expression itself.
I can tell you for certain that if a person writes one short story and publishes online, they probably don't want someone to come along and make a killing off of a compilation of short stories including their work without some compensation. $25 for something you're not planning to sell is kind of steep. What you're saying is essentially that if someone writes that to share with people for free, they have no right to keep someone else from plagiarizing it without paying the fee for registration.
I like the idea someone else in the thread stated, though. Make it a short protection for everything (maybe as short as one year), and require registration within a year including a full copy of the work for it to be extended. If you combine this with the ability to register compilations of your work (several short stories and poems together, or multiple short films/cartoons less than 5 minutes or so in length) up to the size of what a full-length normal work would be regardless of whether that's the way it was originally published, then I think that's an entirely reasonable burden. Make them fill out the form for each work, and make a batch submission with the copy of the works in whatever archival format is acceptable and all those forms for $25 plus an additional $2 for each additional form maybe.
As it is, with statutory damages being limited to registered content ant it being very difficult to prove actual damages for most works, there are only two things that are majorly functionally different now. One is the maximum limit is way too high. The other is that works under copyright with no holder aren't released sooner than the maximum. A company-held copyright held by a defunct company that hasn't been liquidated into other businesses and hasn't been registered with the government as an ongoing business concern for X years (where X is maybe 3 or 5) should cease. That would be great for all the abandon-ware gamers out there.
I'm not for banning after-death protection as long as it's within the shorter maximum length, BTW. If Stephen King's publisher releases a book of his one day and he has a heart attack and dies the next, his family has every claim to the royalties IMO. Perhaps it should be required that the remainign copyrights be explicitly transferred in a will or placed into a trust, but the possibility of inheriting the fruits of a family member's labor shouldn't be lost simply because it's writing, photography, film, music, or computer software. If it was owned by a corporation, the death of one person wouldn't end the protection. I'm of the firm belief that all property in a capitalist society should pass from spouse to spouse, parent to child, or as a will requests without taxes and penalties. If my parents spent all their money on me while they lived, I wouldn't have to declare that as income. Why should their death (when that happens, hopefully decades from now) be a taxable event? But I digress...
I agree except for the required explicit registration. Every time you make a new blog post, you have to register? Every time a live sports broadcast is on TV they have to register? Before the game happens, when there's no footage to copyright? Or do thy register after it's transmitted, and therefore can't protect it because ti wasn't under copyright when it was broadcast? Or maybe we just wouldn't get live games on TV any longer.
Besides, the US is a signatory country on the Berne Convention. That requires copyright upon entering into a fixed format.
I might also consider 30 or 40 years fair, but not 120. People do tend to live a bit longer these days, and there's a lot more media available so waiting 30 years instead of 20 won't hurt the commons that much. 120 is ridiculous, though.
I don't have the statistic, and I wish I did. I'm not sure anyone would have thought to compile it. I wonder, though, just what percentage of those auto accidents are officers, NCOs, and civilian personnel vs. junior enlisted.
It's also good to remember that bases could have an impact on traffic simply by being there. When you put 4,000 - 25,000 people in a smallish area which interconnects with public roads and most of the drivers are not locals you're bound to raise accident rates. Shopping malls, race tracks, ballparks, and university campuses probably have higher accident rates too.
I agree about the men in groups idea. Men tend to form a pack. Mild aggression within the group is even a sign of acceptance and sometimes affection. A bunch of arm-punching, wrestling, back-slapping guys in one place can be fun or it can become trouble. I think it's a wonder the military does such a good job, considering all that.
As long as you're bringing this to a psychological level as opposed to the neurochemical level, I have a few questions about the validity of some conclusions from that perspective. Isn't the id always a base sort of thing, and isn't it necessary to have an active id to get by? Aren't the ego and superego supposed to balance out the id and keep us from doing antisocial things under normal circumstances?
Having an impulse -- even a strengthened impulse -- and not being able to control that impulse are, after all, two very different things, aren't they? Or is this greater activity of baser impulses actually negating our ability to control ourselves, as the summary implies? We are, after all, not beings of pure id.
Considering we have an entirely self-selected military, you'd have to do some serious investigation into before and after to get more than correlation. Self-selection into the military could be based largely on the traits that the military trains people for. Careful, bicycle-riding, peaceful, pacifists don't generally volunteer to be taught how to shoot at gun-wielding teenagers from other countries.
Also, since our military is comprised mostly of people who have barely made the age of majority (and mostly men), you'd be comparing their auto collision, domestic violence, disorderly conduct, and aggressive tendencies to high school boys who are placed close together in large groups.
I think the actuaries at any auto insurance company could tell you that if you put 12,000 teenage boys on a campus and keep them almost constantly occupied you're going to have a huge number of auto incidents and accidents when they leave the campus. It doesn't necessarily make a lot of difference if it's a school or a military base. You'd have to control for things like that.
Sure, except, well... not so much.
Specifically excluded from the transfer you quoted are: "Intellectual property:
A. All copyrights and trademarks, except for the trademarks UNIX and UnixWare. B. All Patents" in Schedule 1.1(b).
I think one difference the XO can make is in the level of desire some kids will have for becoming literate. Sure, nothing will reach every kid. When kids have the chance to be included in Google, Yahoo, Disney, Nickelodeon, and more because they have the laptop, they'll be less likely, I think, to disdain reading as something just stuck-up rich people do.
It's terribly discouraging growing up sharing 40-year old History books and not being able to do participate in the activities the other kids can. If the kids see that they can get their fun information using this tool, that's not as boring as a textbook. When they see the information is more current, that will help. When they can have interactive instruction outside the classroom, that will help.
I remember some of the most popular games when I was in school were Darwin's Island, Sim Earth, Oregon Trail, and Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego. Those types of things kept kids enthralled for hours. They're fun and educational, and they require a computer. I used to live with a woman whose daughter loved to sit at the computer and play with those self-reading books. She'd set it to only pronounce words when she'd click on them, and it helped her reading and spelling.
No, the XO's not a magic bullet. No, there's not a real effective way to isolate a population of real people in a laboratory environment, either. One can compare similar situations in different areas with and without the laptops. One can also compare an area before and after their introduction. Neither is tightly controlled, but when discussing the differences the other environmental factors can be considered. Any social science is not perfectly controlled, but statistically important trends do sometimes be found. The best way to do that is to have as many experimental groups as possible so that independent factors can be found to overlap here and not there.
It's my humble and relatively safe prediction that the laptops will help, but not as much as their proponents hope. My biggest fear about them is that the adults might focus too heavily on the technology and not on how to apply it.
That's always my biggest fear when I hear abut technology in schools. I think the folks at OLPC are actually running an end around on that issue with the XO in many ways though. Much of the right type of software has been worked out in advance and preloaded. They're laptops and they're promoted as individual laptops, so just sticking a few at the back of a room and never using them isn't much of an option. Early trials with the machines shows the kids will self-direct activities with the machines when at home, and that they tend to share their newfound skills with older family members.
Take a look at the 60 Minutes piece with Negroponte to see more about that. School attendance in a village in Cambodia increased by 50% after the introduction of more conventional laptops, because the kids thought so much of being able to use the computers. Now, I'd say in Birmingham, where electricity and running water are common and school attendance is mandatory, it's not going to make as notable a difference. It could still help keep kids interested in learning, though, even if not in traditional school.
My cars are stocked in case of getting stuck, too. If I hit a deer, cow, or another car and I'm bleeding from the head, having a car stocked for two days in the cold doesn't do me much good. A cell phone might. I'm not saying it's a necessity, but it sure does give me some extra peace of mind.
There was a time when you could borrow a stranger's house phone, too, which probably won't happen these days. Again, that doesn't make a cell phone a necessity, but it's a better investment in convenience than most.
IANAEE (electrical engineer) and I've never built my own CPU, even from TTLs or in a simulator. It makes sense to me, though, that while chips having the error in them may not be tied to specific clock frequencies that the chances of encountering the bug still could be.
If it's a race condition in hardware, there's a good chance it's clock-sensitive. The bug probably exists in the whole line, sure. It'll manifest more as the clock ticks are closer together, because the margin for error without triggering the reversal of steps is smaller. If it's a matter of the wrong signal being sometimes being asserted because the edge of a clock line transition was missed, it's logically going to happen more when the clock cycles are shorter.
A bug being in the whole line regardless of clock frequency and that bug becoming more of an issue at higher clock frequencies are not at all mutually exclusive conditions. The higher frequencies and higher rates of the error may not coincide, but there's nothing in the article to logically say they don't.
The erratum probably does apply to the whole line equally but probably manifests as a percentage of the time in use as some function of the frequency.
For any geek wanting a basic understanding of issues like latching times, gate propagation delays, and other analog electrical signaling issues inside a digital CPU, I recommend the first few chapters of Structured Computer Organization. The book builds upon basic designs of computers from using TTLs to designing a CPU, then up by layers through microcode, designing an assembly language, and more. I have an older edition at home which covers up through the 68030 and the 80386 as examples. The newer one covers up through the Pentium II, the UltraSparc, and the Java chips. The book won't make you an electrical engineer by any means, but the discussions of the tricky timing issues within even simple CPUs might be useful here.
As for the clock speed not effecting the percentage loss in efficiency due to the microcode fix... well, yeah. The microcode is the same across the line regardless of the clock speed. If you insert two identical strings of instructions A1 and A2 into an identical pair of microcode stores B1 and B2, the resulting patched microcodes C1 and C2 will likewise be identical. The faster processor will decode and execute the microcode at the same clock speed as before, and so will the slower one. They'll each have the same percentage slowdown relative to their own clock speeds, because they're running the same microcode. We're not talking about two different generations of processors or even two different revisions. It's the same processor design at two clock speeds. One is going to get the same nerfs and buffs for any microcode change proportional to their clock speeds as the other.
The easy way would be to route traffic for each residence hall and campus lab using a PC with Linux or a BSD back to the NOC and to monitor at each of those points. It'd scale much better than putting this between the switch and the site's public-facing routers. It also gives the admins a chance to easily partition the campus network with multiple firewalls, set up multiple DHCP servers (each with their own pool per building), and possibly even NAT each building individually using cheap, off-the-shelf hardware.
I don't particularly agree with the MPAA's tactics, but there's no reason a campus network couldn't easily accommodate both filtering and monitoring every packet passing through. I'd be tempted in the position of a university campus lead network administrator to set up such a system and monitor traffic for signs of worms, backdoor trojans, spambots and other similar high-traffic malware.
When I was in the ISP field we'd send "your system appears to be infected" notices to customers. If I was running the network for a university I'd probably proactively monitor for such things in the traffic and advise students and faculty whose systems generated harmful traffic that they need take action. I just wouldn't do such a thing at the beck and call of the movie industry to chase down their supposed gremlins.
Ubuntu makes an offer to provide the sources, then provides them. They are within the rights granted by the license.
Every live CD I've seen distributed tells you where to get the sources for the live CD from the distributor's servers. Please let us know which ones don't so we can inform the appropriate copyright holders.
You make a good point. That's how it is with today's browsers, though, no matter the OS or the browser. They do much more than the browser was originally intended to do. OS X should at least, like any modern Unix, keep any damage within the account of the browser's current user and not allow it to damage the system as a whole. Of course, that's little comfort to someone who got their identity stolen due to some malicious web site owning the running copy of the browser.
IE's one of the last things I'd expect to see supported by something like this, though. With Safari, Firefox, and all the other browsers for Mac I don't see IE as particularly needed anyway. I know I barely use it on Windows, and then only to test sites I've done to make sure they look sane on it. All my browsing of unknown sites is on Firefox or Opera.
AT&T plans to help find alternative payphone operators for people who need them. The AT&T decision only applies to 13 states serviced by AT&T (SBC) payphones. AT&T only operates about 65,000 of the 1 million payphones in the US, while Verizon operates about 225,000. AT&T plans to sell as many of the phones and lines to independent operators as they can. They expect the majority of the phones to be bought by someone. They even expect to continue selling wholesale payphone service to payphone owners.
It sounds to me they just decided to let someone else field the equipment. There's a lot of exaggeration around this story, but the facts are all over the web. Death of the payphone, indeed. This reaction is kind of like saying IBM getting out of the consumer laptop and desktop PC market was the end of the Windows computer.
Gee, maybe you can find a call box along every highway where you live. Around here, people have either cell phones, CB radios they can turn to channel 9, or light up the road flares and wait.