Allowing for some form of FTL that has no impact as a strategic weapon is already a total fabrication, so we would have to look at systems where there are more than one habitable planet. Infowar can happen at lightspeed, but I feel that infowar is outside of the scope of 'space battle'.
To me 'space battle' implies the idea that there is territory worth fighting over, in space. As I see it, the only territory that is worth fighting over is something capable of yielding resources. So, the most precious resources are found on the inner planets. Rarer still are naturally occurring (cheap) habitable conditions - so space battles are more likely to happen on-planet rather than off-planet, as battles are expensive.
Planetary defence plays a part - so if high atmosphere defence against an invasion fleet counts as a 'space battle' - then you could probably see that. But the invasion fleet would not be 'manned' - it would contain lightweight payloads to incapacitate the population. So probably some form of biological warfare attack.
Likewise very low mass objects have an advantage in that they don't burn up in atmospheric entry. So some sort of very hardy vacuum-survivable biological agent being dispersed across a planetary atmosphere- or (if there is diplomatic interplanetary travel) a biological 'suitcase bomb'.
Well, so for me - and this is an SME - I employed people when I found myself stretched. "I can delegate", I said. I delegated. Now there are ten people doing what I used to do on my own. The company has grown, as it was the skills supply that was at shortage, not the demand.
Most of those who have been employed were graduates trained by me, or by others in the team. Not all - certain aspects of the job grew beyond my expertise. Those aspects, I would never consider myself to be better than the experts that are hired. I know my limits.
But maybe 80% of the workflow I can do better, faster, if I had the time. The point is that I value my team completely - they do their best, and they know that I know that. When one of them gets out of their depth in an area of my expertise (software development), I show them a few solutions. They go away - hopefully more skilled. Doing the work for them completely misses the point. They are hired in order to take the work from me. Sometimes they think that I am way too conservative. I am, sometimes, conservative.
It's not because I am the boss, or get more money. I hired people to take on the skills that I am good in, or who can extend those skills.
Well, if you are on an apple, then s/mime works very well for encryption, on the basis that both parties have each other's keys. As long as one signs one's emails with a pkcs7-signature the key is transferred. So a typical transaction goes (signed email: hi, do you really need my password) (signed return: yep, I do) (encrypted email: ok it's p455w0rd ) (encrypted return: I have reset your password to Gh0-dA6-Ly3-d3cu-dNl )
There is some reasonably plausible corroborating evidence for superluminal muon neutrinos from both SN1987a and MINOS which predates the OPERA experiments. There appears that there could be energy relation also - i.e. the more energetic the neutrino, the faster it goes, which explains why the MINOS results showed a potential deviation of 1.4 whereas OPERA is 6. There was a noticeable increase in neutrino activity roughly ten hours before the SN1987a light arrived.
Of course it all remains supposition until the work can be replicated. It's highly likely that any model will address this effect as being linked strongly with neutrinos alone, and possibly only muon neutrinos.
The reasons are a lot to do with combined internet/telephony packages, which are wrapped up with significant monthly savings, an inability to be flexible in what must be one of the most fast-changing industries in all history, and an inability to meet the specific needs of individuals.
I have been with BT since before it was privatised, but now I doubt I shall stay with them. The reason is because they cannot (will not?) offer a static IP as a part of their package. With IPv6 available, and with many years having past for them to enable it, there really isn't any excuse left for this, especially as I am happy to pay for such a service. My current DSL provider (TalkTalk, but under an old, permanent Nildram contract which they are desperate to get me off of - and I'm moving house, so they will get their wish granted) can reduce my telephony bill by about £50 pcm, and they've been more than happy to provide me with a static IP (v4!)
There's been a LOT of mergers in the UK - it's getting harder to find a good DSL provider that meets my needs. But combined accounts and flexible facilities are why the big companies are losing out.
The reaction to an ongoing investigation based upon some suppositions made by those who don't understand the code, I can understand. But CEDET does distribute the grammar files (yes, the human-written sources) that have been mentioned. They are also all under GPL. Maybe Emacs didn't release the entire CEDET source tree when it should, but it's not as if the CEDET source doesn't indicate where the grammars are to be found.
Wow. Why does knee-jerk reaction come to mind?? Oh it must be a Friday.
I'm an apple 'fanboy'. But when Vista came out, I thought - maybe I should give MSFT another chance - after all, AAPL was getting big.
That lasted a very short time, and one totally useless and expensive Sony Vaio with built-in Vista later, I went back to AAPL. Lots of other people went back to XP, I hear.
Since then, AAPL have become richer than MSFT. I'm not surprised. Vista was an unmitigated commercial disaster. I wonder if MSFT will ever recover. Unfortunately for me, and probably many others, Windows 7 was way too late.
You gave me a very thorough response and you treated my 'gripe' seriously. I thank you for that. Regardless, I have found plenty of closed doors when attempting to make contributions to the Internet community.
I (with help from the team) have been working (very hard!) on an opensource xml syntax programming language (called Obyx) over the last nine years (since 2003), which is used as a cgi to serve thousands of public pages. Uptake has been nearly zero. Interest has been nearly zero. W3C are stuck with their own (very similar - but IMO poorly designed) XProc; the project leaders of XProc are not only uninterested in my experience or expertise, they are disinterested in it.
I believe that the work done on Obyx is remarkable and useful, most especially the -gap() extensions to XPath (see eg http://www.obyx.org/media/images/gaps_227.gif , part of a tutorial on iterations (http://www.obyx.org/tutiteration.html) ) which (more or less) make FLWOR expressions redundant. (Choosing to extend XPath in Obyx was not a decision taken lightly. The only standards-based alternative would be to use FLWOR or XSLT syntaxes, but both of these don't have access to memory stored variables, environment, system parameters, http parameters, cookies, sql fields, functional parameters etc. (just 'file' and 'url') used in Obyx. Likewise, the concept of insertion-points or 'holes' is not new to tree-based data structures, and it allows for us to easily insert elements repeatedly into an object without needing placeholders). Moreover, the design principles behind Obyx (separation of concerns, simplicity, and parsimony) have made it a language that is easy to learn and to use. W3C hasn't been interested in discussing any of this.
This has been my experience with W3C. (I am not alone; just now I see a comment on Jira from one of the guys who author xercesc:- "Good luck in trying to convince W3C.")
The company that funds the Obyx work is small - I am it's technical director, and have a team of 10 or so under me, but our annual revenue is less than $1M, though we have been around as a web agency since 1996. Every technical individual at the company uses Obyx and loves it once they get used to it, but it takes time to understand the benefits. We cannot afford the entry-price onto W3C, and in the eyes of W3C I am not expert enough to have an opinion.
I have no relevant academic path; I've been coding for 30 years or so, and come from a generation where computing was done in the field, not at the campus. I am familiar with about 30 RFCs (mainly covering 1945/2616, 822, 959, 854, 707 and all of their affiliated RFCs, as well as many encoder documents eg 2045 etc., and of course I am familiar with 2119 etc., As stated, I've been the technical director of an internet agency for fifteen years, Obyx is the fifth or sixth language that I've written, though it's the only one that I have been proud enough to bring to the public eye, albeit quietly.
So, I haven't had your experience with 'the community'. Instead I've found it pretty self-obsessed and at least some of it is run by power-players (individuals, organisations) who often have their own agendas, which probably accounts for some of my bitterness in my original comment at/.
Manu Sporny, [...] (said), "The entire Web community should decide which features should be supported – not just Microsoft or Google or Yahoo."
So just who is the entire Web community? It certainly isn't W3C, who effectively bar individuals and SME's with their $8000 annual membership fees. The corporations are only interested in establishing or brokering leverage. The IETF isn't the easiest means of establishing support for a feature, and not many of us have read all 6000 odd RFCs anyhow.
So, basically, who cares what schema org says, or Manu Sporny for that matter? Since when has anyone been able to make a change to the status quo?
We use a dating system due to the large number of minor revisions, but keep the major revision number - so for instance,
1.2011.03.23.1:= The first minor revision of version 1 of the software that took place on 23rd March 2011. It gives us the best of both worlds. We spent way too long coming to that solution, but it suits us a lot.
Maybe for Linux it may make sense to move the first minor revision to the left of the revision date. Outside of that, subdivisions become pretty meaningless anyhow.
If I were Linus, I would start the next revision as 3.2011.mm.dd, using version 3 just to indicate the change in the versioning system is maybe a bit too much of a leap, but it makes a clear break - and also provides an easy enough transition for implementations.
Firstly, Cookies are generally tied to User-Agents, not to people. UK websites are not required to get consent from spiders, crawlers, or other bots. What I invite the ICO to do is to demonstrate a technical, non-invasive, means of being able to identify an individual from the information made available over a HTTP1.1 request.
Secondly, regarding Session Cookies, it is trivial to replace a session cookie with a QueryString token - so what is the differentiating feature of these two that requires consent for the former and nothing for the latter.
Thirdly, hasn't anyone yet learned that the Internet doesn't follow state boundaries?
The families of Indian call centre employees will be happier - it means that their sons and daughters will be one hour less from the rest of India. If the UK were to be so generous to go +5.30 onto Indian time, even better
[...] The client is always the one who pays the bills.
Well, picking up on the term 'client' misses my point. However, with respect, I ask you to choose a dictionary of your choice and look up the word 'client'. The term 'client' is used by government agencies to indicate those people who are receiving the benefits, services, etc. of the agency, or in general, it is the person or group who use the services of an agency, not necessarily those who pay for it. Contextually, it can be seen that the term 'client' clearly refers to the children/prisoners/patients.
Exactly. Meeting the needs of your client (in this case, the child) is something that seems to be missed out here. But then, the US seems to be caught in a web of antiquated behavioural psychology ideas. The idea of actually caring about how your client feels is missed. Not just schools, but prisons and other institutions also. It seems to be driven by "conform with authority, or be penalized" - a weird message from the Land of the Free.
IANAL, (and IANAUSC) but the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 may offer some sort of legal redress, if the mother (or son) are convinced that it is his disability which is affecting his game play.
I agree. However, it's a good idea - as long as the end-users are trained enough so that their machines don't get more or less instantly added to existing botnets.
So -
(1) yes, Scandinavia leads on this in Europe,
(2) But it's a good idea, and if the UK gov. needs to say that sort of thing to it's populace, then so be it. It's marketing.
(3) But if it's not done well, it's just a total waste of money, or worse.
I recall when I went through a rather lengthy discussion with the UK government about software patents, and the state of the law. It became very clear that regarding patent law, the UK government and the UK patent office is very heavily influenced by advisors who are, almost to a man, commercial patent lawyers. The remaining industry spokesmen are from big business.
It doesn't take a huge amount of understanding or research to see that SME innovation has more or less been destroyed by the existing patent processes. Entry into big success is done through innovation still - but not so much via the patent route. I would contend that companies like Facebook was successful, NOT because of whatever patents they may have held, (or bought), but because they were able to identify a market demand and react to it faster or more successfully than existing big industry was able.
Slashdot Mirror
Allowing for some form of FTL that has no impact as a strategic weapon is already a total fabrication, so we would have to look at systems where there are more than one habitable planet. Infowar can happen at lightspeed, but I feel that infowar is outside of the scope of 'space battle'.
To me 'space battle' implies the idea that there is territory worth fighting over, in space.
As I see it, the only territory that is worth fighting over is something capable of yielding resources.
So, the most precious resources are found on the inner planets. Rarer still are naturally occurring (cheap) habitable conditions - so space battles are more likely to happen on-planet rather than off-planet, as battles are expensive.
Planetary defence plays a part - so if high atmosphere defence against an invasion fleet counts as a 'space battle' - then you could probably see that.
But the invasion fleet would not be 'manned' - it would contain lightweight payloads to incapacitate the population. So probably some form of biological warfare attack.
Likewise very low mass objects have an advantage in that they don't burn up in atmospheric entry. So some sort of very hardy vacuum-survivable biological agent being dispersed across a planetary atmosphere- or (if there is diplomatic interplanetary travel) a biological 'suitcase bomb'.
Well, so for me - and this is an SME - I employed people when I found myself stretched. "I can delegate", I said. I delegated. Now there are ten people doing what I used to do on my own. The company has grown, as it was the skills supply that was at shortage, not the demand.
Most of those who have been employed were graduates trained by me, or by others in the team. Not all - certain aspects of the job grew beyond my expertise. Those aspects, I would never consider myself to be better than the experts that are hired. I know my limits.
But maybe 80% of the workflow I can do better, faster, if I had the time. The point is that I value my team completely - they do their best, and they know that I know that. When one of them gets out of their depth in an area of my expertise (software development), I show them a few solutions. They go away - hopefully more skilled. Doing the work for them completely misses the point. They are hired in order to take the work from me. Sometimes they think that I am way too conservative. I am, sometimes, conservative.
It's not because I am the boss, or get more money. I hired people to take on the skills that I am good in, or who can extend those skills.
I thought that US programmers (regardless of the coastline) were all being laid off thanks to outsourcing to India, or is that last year's IT gripe?
Well, if you are on an apple, then s/mime works very well for encryption, on the basis that both parties have each other's keys. As long as one signs one's emails with a pkcs7-signature the key is transferred. So a typical transaction goes (signed email: hi, do you really need my password) (signed return: yep, I do) (encrypted email: ok it's p455w0rd ) (encrypted return: I have reset your password to Gh0-dA6-Ly3-d3cu-dNl )
There is some reasonably plausible corroborating evidence for superluminal muon neutrinos from both SN1987a and MINOS which predates the OPERA experiments. There appears that there could be energy relation also - i.e. the more energetic the neutrino, the faster it goes, which explains why the MINOS results showed a potential deviation of 1.4 whereas OPERA is 6. There was a noticeable increase in neutrino activity roughly ten hours before the SN1987a light arrived.
Of course it all remains supposition until the work can be replicated. It's highly likely that any model will address this effect as being linked strongly with neutrinos alone, and possibly only muon neutrinos.
The reasons are a lot to do with combined internet/telephony packages, which are wrapped up with significant monthly savings, an inability to be flexible in what must be one of the most fast-changing industries in all history, and an inability to meet the specific needs of individuals.
I have been with BT since before it was privatised, but now I doubt I shall stay with them. The reason is because they cannot (will not?) offer a static IP as a part of their package. With IPv6 available, and with many years having past for them to enable it, there really isn't any excuse left for this, especially as I am happy to pay for such a service. My current DSL provider (TalkTalk, but under an old, permanent Nildram contract which they are desperate to get me off of - and I'm moving house, so they will get their wish granted) can reduce my telephony bill by about £50 pcm, and they've been more than happy to provide me with a static IP (v4!)
There's been a LOT of mergers in the UK - it's getting harder to find a good DSL provider that meets my needs. But combined accounts and flexible facilities are why the big companies are losing out.
The reaction to an ongoing investigation based upon some suppositions made by those who don't understand the code, I can understand. But CEDET does distribute the grammar files (yes, the human-written sources) that have been mentioned. They are also all under GPL. Maybe Emacs didn't release the entire CEDET source tree when it should, but it's not as if the CEDET source doesn't indicate where the grammars are to be found.
Wow. Why does knee-jerk reaction come to mind?? Oh it must be a Friday.
It's Patent Number: US007251778
Erm. IANAL, but isn't liberty an important part of the American cultural and political identity?
Do AAPL have a leg to stand on here?
I'm an apple 'fanboy'. But when Vista came out, I thought - maybe I should give MSFT another chance - after all, AAPL was getting big.
That lasted a very short time, and one totally useless and expensive Sony Vaio with built-in Vista later, I went back to AAPL.
Lots of other people went back to XP, I hear.
Since then, AAPL have become richer than MSFT. I'm not surprised. Vista was an unmitigated commercial disaster. I wonder if MSFT will ever recover. Unfortunately for me, and probably many others, Windows 7 was way too late.
Hi there Manu Sporny,
You gave me a very thorough response and you treated my 'gripe' seriously. I thank you for that. Regardless, I have found plenty of closed doors when attempting to make contributions to the Internet community.
I (with help from the team) have been working (very hard!) on an opensource xml syntax programming language (called Obyx) over the last nine years (since 2003), which is used as a cgi to serve thousands of public pages. Uptake has been nearly zero. Interest has been nearly zero. W3C are stuck with their own (very similar - but IMO poorly designed) XProc; the project leaders of XProc are not only uninterested in my experience or expertise, they are disinterested in it.
I believe that the work done on Obyx is remarkable and useful, most especially the -gap() extensions to XPath (see eg http://www.obyx.org/media/images/gaps_227.gif , part of a tutorial on iterations (http://www.obyx.org/tutiteration.html) ) which (more or less) make FLWOR expressions redundant. (Choosing to extend XPath in Obyx was not a decision taken lightly. The only standards-based alternative would be to use FLWOR or XSLT syntaxes, but both of these don't have access to memory stored variables, environment, system parameters, http parameters, cookies, sql fields, functional parameters etc. (just 'file' and 'url') used in Obyx. Likewise, the concept of insertion-points or 'holes' is not new to tree-based data structures, and it allows for us to easily insert elements repeatedly into an object without needing placeholders). Moreover, the design principles behind Obyx (separation of concerns, simplicity, and parsimony) have made it a language that is easy to learn and to use. W3C hasn't been interested in discussing any of this.
This has been my experience with W3C.
(I am not alone; just now I see a comment on Jira from one of the guys who author xercesc:- "Good luck in trying to convince W3C.")
The company that funds the Obyx work is small - I am it's technical director, and have a team of 10 or so under me, but our annual revenue is less than $1M, though we have been around as a web agency since 1996. Every technical individual at the company uses Obyx and loves it once they get used to it, but it takes time to understand the benefits. We cannot afford the entry-price onto W3C, and in the eyes of W3C I am not expert enough to have an opinion.
I have no relevant academic path; I've been coding for 30 years or so, and come from a generation where computing was done in the field, not at the campus. I am familiar with about 30 RFCs (mainly covering 1945/2616, 822, 959, 854, 707 and all of their affiliated RFCs, as well as many encoder documents eg 2045 etc., and of course I am familiar with 2119 etc., As stated, I've been the technical director of an internet agency for fifteen years, Obyx is the fifth or sixth language that I've written, though it's the only one that I have been proud enough to bring to the public eye, albeit quietly.
So, I haven't had your experience with 'the community'. Instead I've found it pretty self-obsessed and at least some of it is run by power-players (individuals, organisations) who often have their own agendas, which probably accounts for some of my bitterness in my original comment at /.
Manu Sporny, [...] (said), "The entire Web community should decide which features should be supported – not just Microsoft or Google or Yahoo."
So just who is the entire Web community? It certainly isn't W3C, who effectively bar individuals and SME's with their $8000 annual membership fees.
The corporations are only interested in establishing or brokering leverage.
The IETF isn't the easiest means of establishing support for a feature, and not many of us have read all 6000 odd RFCs anyhow.
So, basically, who cares what schema org says, or Manu Sporny for that matter?
Since when has anyone been able to make a change to the status quo?
Well, actually we drop the 2000 part, and we only include the remainder as necessary, so e.g.
1.11 - The first 2011 release.
1.11.3 - the first March 2011 release
1.11.3.21 - the first March 21 2011 release, etc.
We use a dating system due to the large number of minor revisions, but keep the major revision number - so for instance,
1.2011.03.23.1 := The first minor revision of version 1 of the software that took place on 23rd March 2011.
It gives us the best of both worlds. We spent way too long coming to that solution, but it suits us a lot.
Maybe for Linux it may make sense to move the first minor revision to the left of the revision date.
Outside of that, subdivisions become pretty meaningless anyhow.
If I were Linus, I would start the next revision as 3.2011.mm.dd, using version 3 just to indicate the change in the versioning system is maybe a bit too much of a leap, but it makes a clear break - and also provides an easy enough transition for implementations.
char*f="char*f=%c%s%c;main(){printf(f,34,f,34);}";main(){printf(f,34,f,34);}
Okay, so a source-self-replicator is nice - it got me thinking - how about a self-replicator with an awareness of it's generation-count?
long x=0; char*f="long x=%u; char*f=%c%s%c;main(){printf(f,x+1,34,f,34);}";main(){printf(f,x+1,34,f,34);}
Each successive generation is identified by x
Firstly, Cookies are generally tied to User-Agents, not to people. UK websites are not required to get consent from spiders, crawlers, or other bots.
What I invite the ICO to do is to demonstrate a technical, non-invasive, means of being able to identify an individual from the information made available over a HTTP1.1 request.
Secondly, regarding Session Cookies, it is trivial to replace a session cookie with a QueryString token - so what is the differentiating feature of these two that requires consent for the former and nothing for the latter.
Thirdly, hasn't anyone yet learned that the Internet doesn't follow state boundaries?
For me, this is the first sensible thing said by anyone who has played a role in politics / warfare.
I, for one, welcome our new technology overlords
The families of Indian call centre employees will be happier - it means that their sons and daughters will be one hour less from the rest of India. If the UK were to be so generous to go +5.30 onto Indian time, even better
[...] The client is always the one who pays the bills.
Well, picking up on the term 'client' misses my point. However, with respect, I ask you to choose a dictionary of your choice and look up the word 'client'. The term 'client' is used by government agencies to indicate those people who are receiving the benefits, services, etc. of the agency, or in general, it is the person or group who use the services of an agency, not necessarily those who pay for it. Contextually, it can be seen that the term 'client' clearly refers to the children/prisoners/patients.
Exactly. Meeting the needs of your client (in this case, the child) is something that seems to be missed out here.
But then, the US seems to be caught in a web of antiquated behavioural psychology ideas.
The idea of actually caring about how your client feels is missed. Not just schools, but prisons and other institutions also.
It seems to be driven by "conform with authority, or be penalized" - a weird message from the Land of the Free.
What stops a truant from giving it to the class geek for a dollar?
IANAL, (and IANAUSC) but the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 may offer some sort of legal redress, if the mother (or son) are convinced that it is his disability which is affecting his game play.
I agree. However, it's a good idea - as long as the end-users are trained enough so that their machines don't get more or less instantly added to existing botnets.
So -
(1) yes, Scandinavia leads on this in Europe,
(2) But it's a good idea, and if the UK gov. needs to say that sort of thing to it's populace, then so be it. It's marketing.
(3) But if it's not done well, it's just a total waste of money, or worse.
Very good. Never saw that one before. Got any more?
I recall when I went through a rather lengthy discussion with the UK government about software patents, and the state of the law. It became very clear that regarding patent law, the UK government and the UK patent office is very heavily influenced by advisors who are, almost to a man, commercial patent lawyers. The remaining industry spokesmen are from big business.
It doesn't take a huge amount of understanding or research to see that SME innovation has more or less been destroyed by the existing patent processes. Entry into big success is done through innovation still - but not so much via the patent route. I would contend that companies like Facebook was successful, NOT because of whatever patents they may have held, (or bought), but because they were able to identify a market demand and react to it faster or more successfully than existing big industry was able.