This is a misunderstanding, and has been debated elsewhere: NAT offers no security by itself, it's because normally NATs have a firewall effect at the same time that they create the illusion (and in some cases reality) of security.
There's no reason why using IPv6 with a firewall wouldn't be just as -- and probably more -- secure. Especially because you wouldn't have to spend time configuring the NAT functionality and could instead configure it as a single-purpose stateful firewall.
It is possible -- although you probably wouldn't want to -- to create a situation using static NAT without any firewalling effect that leaves your computer just as open to attack as it would sitting on the public net. Likewise it's possible to assign every computer on a LAN a globally routable IP address and secure them using a properly designed firewall (that's actually how my company is set up).
If your comment had just said you didn't want your fridge and toaster exposed to the internet without your trusty Linux firewall between it and the internet, I would heartily agree. Although I don't doubt some would argue for you about choosing Linux over BSD.:)
That's actually one of the best MS-related posts I've read in a while.
I think you're absolutely right -- Microsoft doesn't seem to actually do any market research, instead they just watch the Nasdaq listings to see what new companies are doing really well this year, and figure out what they're doing right, then either buy or copy it. This minimizes their risk and creates the perception that everything they make is gold.
Personally I'm not a fan of that business model, because I think it hurts the market in general by failing to adequately reward the people who actually innovate. But it's not illegal so I can't fault them too much, they just use what they've got, and it's partially the market's fault for letting them acquire that dominance.
You can use a 105mm howitzer against ground troops if you want (although I'm not sure the ammunition is manufactured or in service anymore, it was called the "Beehive round" and was a flechette device), it's just not really practical in a lot of instances.
The only reason I can think of to not use a.50 BMG against personnel is that 1) it's expensive, and just not necessary to use against another person, and 2) it has the potential to overpenetrate and cause unintentional civilian casualties.
There's no reason why you couldn't use it, I think it's more that soldiers are discouraged from swatting a fly with a sledgehammer, you might say.
Re:762 rounds (from an M-60, current issue MG)
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I'm pretty sure that this is the intent when soldiers end up shooting at cars driving towards road blocks. The driver just has a tendency to get shot also, since they're located behind the engine and as other people have pointed out, rounds which don't bury themselves in the block aren't going to be stopped by much else in the car.
Although I can't say for sure what the current Rules of Engagement are for situations like that, I bet that when they do get authorization to fire on the vehicle (after firing all their warning shots -- just in case you missed the road block ahead of you), it's the engine block that they're supposed to be aiming for.
I stand corrected, I was confusing the Geneva Convention with the Hague Convention of 1898, which we were not a signatory to (although we were signatories to later versions of it).
However I stand by my point about temporary versus permanent blindness, prohibiting the latter of which was obviously the intent of the rule.
Re:Can't blind on purpose
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That's fairly consistent with a civilian course I took on the use of lethal force in self-defense. In short, people who have actually analyzed self-defense shooting incidents have shown that you're better off killing the other person than wounding them, in terms of the legal aftermath.
It's not hard to believe though, since a dead criminal is just another statistic, while a live one is a "victim" that some scumbag lawyer can put up in front of a jury and use to wring a settlement out of you, especially if you hit them in the spine and caused any sort of permanent damage.
From a public relations standpoint, it's usually better to create bodies than it is to create cripples. The exception to this might be if creating a body also involves creating a marytr.
if say, China/Russia had invaded, we'd be seeing much more brutality and inhumane treatment stories.
No, you wouldn't, because they'd be controlling the press so tightly that nothing negative would really get out, at least officially. All you'd have would be a lot of really disturbing rumors, and later on, a lot of hollow-eyed people mumbling about how they'd never been mistreated and had nothing to say. And maybe twenty or thirty years from now, once the perpetrators were nicely retired, there'd be a few not-too-well selling books on the topic, and maybe a History Channel special. That'd be it.
Frankly I think they'd probably be much more effective occupiers (whether that's something a country should aspire to, I won't say) than the U.S. is, because our effectiveness is limited by our inability to accept that sometimes you have to be hypocritical if you want to be effective: sometimes you have to espouse an ideal, even if you can't live up to it because of circumstances (and because your enemies may not play by the same rules). Given that the alternative, and the route taken by some other countries, is to not espouse any ideals and thus avoid being charged with hypocrisy, excuse me if I decide to ignore their shallow criticism.
Re:Can't blind on purpose
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Call me cynical, but I think the prohibitions on chemical weapons have a lot more to do with countries that think themselves pretty good at 'conventional war' not wanting to allow anything in that changes the rules and might put them at a disadvantage. Consider the parties that came up with the Geneva Convention and what it prohibits: all of them are what could potentially be disruptive technologies. Chemical (and later, biological) weapons are not only ugly in an aesthetic/"honorable war" sense, but they could allow a country which lacks conventional military capabilities to compete with a major power. Thus the major powers have a vested interest in keeping them from being developed, especially if there is domestic pressure for them not to use them themselves.
It's clearer when you consider how biological and nerve weapons are treated versus nuclear ones. Both have the capability of being WMDs, but nuclear ones were more or less tolerated for a long time because they were perceived as difficult for less industrialized countries to build. As it's become less of a technical challenge to construct them, we've seen the major powers start beating the nonproliferation/disarmament drum -- and there was a period in the 80s with "Star Wars," when it looked like nuclear missles were going to be supplanted by an even newer and harder to build type of weapons system.
IMO, the prohibitions against chemical weapons were partly the last gasp of a 19th century idea of war as an honorable and manly activity, to which the concept of invisible, impersonal death by airborne chemicals was abhorrent; but mainly it was the superpowers who had the most to lose from a new and disruptive form of warfare trying to nip a new technology in the bud, and keep war focused on what they were proven to be good at.
Yup. But that sort of defeats the purpose of trying to shoot the tires as an alternative to something that's going to harm the driver. Even.30-cal rounds will go probably go through the firewall and into the passenger compartment if they don't hit the engine block. They'd have no problem going through a sheet-metal fender. The fender just conceals the target you're shooting for and makes it harder to just shoot the tire, I didn't mean to suggest that it doesn't offer any protection.
I guess my basic point was that you don't start putting lead at high velocity towards anything or anyone that you haven't already written off; shooting out the tires of a moving vehicle is right up there with "shoot the gun out of his hand" as a non-lethal takedown procedure.
WP is generally used as an anti-armor round, although it's markedly less effective than it was in the past. It's not anti-personnel, although there are situations where it could be used against mixed forces and seem as though it was being used that way.
Before tanks were hermetically sealed like they are today, you could pretty reliably disable one by dumping some burning stuff on it (napalm, white phosphorous, burning gasoline) if you could get it to fall down into the gap between the turret and the chassis. The turret essentially sits in a hole in the top of the chassis...get something through that gap and it's in the crew compartment. This is why if you're in a tank, you don't want to let yourself get swarmed by rioters with Molotov cocktails; even though it might not seem like they'd be much of a risk to a tank, a few well placed ones can really make life uncomfortable for the crew inside.
As a result, you don't send out armor units without infantry support, because they'll get overrun by foot soldiers and destroyed (a la 'Saving Private Ryan'). An advancing armor unit will almost always be mixed in with regular leg infantry, as force protection.
As a counter to this, if you're an artilleryman and trying to stop an advancing column of tanks with infantry support, you'd use a combination of both air-bursting high explosive (to disable the soldiers) and white phosphorous (to disable the tanks). The command for this is "HE and WP, timed and quick" -- high explosive air bursting (timed fuse) and white phosphorous with a contact-detonating fuse (quick fuse).
Nowadays, I'm not sure that white phosphorous is really used as a weapon per se, I think it's mostly used for the psychological effect, and for illumination. Plus obviously the tactics of huge land armies maneuvering around each other is relatively outdated today.
I think they mean permanent blindness, this was obviously referring to temporary blindness.
CN/CS tear gas "blinds" you for a certain amount of time, by making your eyes sting and water, but isn't prohibited for riot control. I think it's one of those "lesser evil" things, especially when you consider that the alternative (being shot) does carry a risk of permanent blindness, secondary to death.
Also, at least last time I checked, the U.S. wasn't a signatory to the Geneva Convention, it just voluntarily follows it. If there was a big enough difference of opinion as to whether a certain weapon was allowed, and the U.S. military thought it would be useful to its troops and save friendly lives, there's not much to hold them to it. It's not like the U.S.'s current enemies are going to abide by it anyway, so it's more a feel-good, moral-high-ground policy than anything.
Go stand in front of a car sometime and try and figure out how you'd like to shoot the tires, especially if it was driving towards you at high speed. They're not exactly a huge target to begin with, plus they'd be turned end-on, and all but the very bottom is covered by the front fender in most vehicles. Now imagine trying to shoot them and only them, using a machine gun, probably mounted on another vehicle (putting it ~6' up in the air) so there's a downward angle, and you'll realize it's highly impractical. Furthermore, it would really suck to waste your last chance at stopping a car by shooting at its tires, only to realize the instant before whatever large amount of explosive that it's carrying detonates, that it had run-flats.
This whole "shoot the tires" idea is pure Hollywood. If you're putting bullets into a car, chances are the situation has already degraded past the point where non-lethal force is appropriate anyway. Most of the time if you're trying to stop a car, you don't even aim for the driver, you'd be aiming for the engine block, which is unfortunately mounted in front of the driver. Cracking the block pretty much guarantees a quick disable of the vehicle, and is conveniently located "center mass" so it's not difficult to hit.
Think about the real world practicality of your suggestions in the future. There's a reason soldiers aren't trained to aim for the tires when somebody is trying to ram a roadblock, and it's not because they get a sick thrill out of shooting people.
Re:Would gaming companies target this platform?
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Actually that might be a pretty reasonable request, given that software testing is usually (at least in my experience) handled at a different part of the development cycle and often by different people than the ones responsible for directing initial development. Also, it's asking a lot less: "Could you test this and fix the things that break compatibility with WINE," versus "Could you make a completely separate version that runs on our niche OS." The first one might be justified by the few sales you'd get from a Linux+Cedega version, currently I don't think that the second one would be. At least not yet.
I understand your point, but I think that asking for a Linux version of a game, given the small current market, might be asking for a bit much while asking for testing to ensure compatibility with Cedega -- especially if Cedega was willing to work from the other direction and help to make things easier -- would be more successful.
I'm not exactly sure, but I think part of the problem might be that a lot of software programmers are hired not as employees but as independent contractors, and that might affect the copyright status of their work.
I think that the lawyer's real point in that article is 'get the agreement up front to avoid problems later,' and probably shouldn't be taken as specific advice as to who owns the code in particular instances, as I'd imagine it could vary considerably. It might even be something that is different in different states, or from one Circuit Court district to another (because of conflicting precedent). I work with a retired IP attorney fairly regularly, maybe I'll pick his brain sometime off the record over lunch.
After all there's nothing preventing people from suing each other and generally making a legal mess of things, especially if the relationship between the company and the contractor/employee wasn't originally clear, and has just gotten more murky with time. From a company's perspective, it's worth getting the contract pounded out in the beginning just to remove the potential for problems later -- especially since they're the "deep pocket" that someone might seek to go after in a suit after the fact.
Personally I know that my current company makes it quite crystal clear that they automatically own everything you do while in their employ that relates to the project you're on, and unless you have specific permission anything related to their entire scope of business as well ("permission" is defined rather loosely as basically a statement by your manager that 'John Doe's hobby project doesn't have anything to do with what he's doing on the job'). I'm not sure how enforceable this second part would be, but I'm not going to go out of my way to find out.
Anyway, I smell a little bit of FUD in that article, but he's a lawyer and I'm not, so take it how you will. His overarching point though ('get it on paper') is probably well heeded by everyone, though.
Thanks for the info. I had never heard of Savonius windmills before -- or at least not heard the name. I've actually seen one before though, but not for any practical purpose: one of those annoying moving-lawn-ornament type things.
In case anyone else is interested in what a Savonius windmill is, there's a page with a little simulation of one here. I think they're selling something (model turbines maybe?) although I didn't really check it out.
I have to wonder though whether one of these is really as efficent as a propeller-type windmill, given that a propeller type one can alter its blade pitch and keep the rotational speed relatively constant in different wind speeds. Is there a way to do that with a Savonius design? It doesn't seem like the airfoils are really anything that you could easily change in flight.
I'm not sure if it's true, but I once heard an interesting factoid about Dutch-style propeller windmills, and how they were among the first mechanical devices to implement a "feedback loop"; you have a tail rotor mounted perpendicular to the main rotor, which drives the mechanism that orients the windmill. If the wind isn't blowing at the mill directly from the front, it causes the small rotor to turn, turning the mill into the wind. When the mill is pointing in the right direction, there's no wind on the small rotor, so it stops. Pretty brilliant, for the 17th or 18th century.
I'll be honest, I really have to wonder about the whole windmills-killing-birds business. It always gets dragged up, but does anyone really know how many birds those propellers actually kill? I'm willing to bet it's very low; I also suspect way more birds are killed by flying into vehicles on the highway, or into the sides of highrise buildings (I had one kamikaze into my house last week, and that's not even a high rise).
The whole bird thing sounds like a convenient excuse invented by people who really oppose windmills because of noise or land use issues, but want a fuzzier, more PR-friendly excuse. The kill zone on a windmill is basically going to be the circle described by the rotor tips as they go through the air, so it's not a huge zone (as you get towards the center they're not moving as fast, tangentially) and at any given time it's not as if just flying into that ring would result in death, you'd have to be at a point at the particular moment in time when the blade moved through it. Last time I checked, birds don't hover, so you have two moving objects that would have to compete against some long odds to end up in the same place at the same time. Also, the turbines are noisy as hell -- something which is a legitimate criticism -- and I find it hard to imagine that birds wouldn't be scared off by the sound, air currents, and motion. (Actually they wouldn't make a bad large-scale scarecrow over farmland...)
Call me overly cynical but I find that particular objection dubious.
Does anyone know what the story is with the Debian package of this?
I just spent more than two hours trying to get the "official" version of this running on my headless Debian sarge box, over an SSH session, and I eventually threw in the towel when I couldn't find a script for running it as a daemon that seemed generally accepted to work and be stable. It's too bad, since I have the perfect system for it: my backup server, which sits connected to a cable modem in a friend's basement, on a UPS and 99.9% idle, since all it ever gets used for is the few seconds every day when my other systems rsync to it.
I had high hopes when I found out that there's a packaged version over at https://alioth.debian.org/projects/pkg-boinc/ however that server seems to be dead as an oak door right now.
It's too bad they didn't do a better job documenting this for anything other than a "desktop linux" install with a non-remote user, because I think a lot of the potential users of this software are going to want to do it using a daemon, and install it remotely over SSH -- so it can use the idle cycles on a server or other headless box. Right now it's a real exercise in frustration, sadly, and I think I'll wait until somebody comes up with some good step-by-step instructions on how do it, using precompiled Debian packages.
I'd love to help, but I'm not going to risk possibly screwing up something on my home server for it. There's a reason I swore off installing anything that didn't come from Debian Stable, and maybe I'm just being reminded of why.
Well, guess I got ahead of myself there. Just for the record, although World Community Grid (which is clearly the IBM-sponsored project) does use the BOINC client, it only uses the Windows and Linux "official" versions. The OS X and I assume probably also any other roll-your-own-from-source versions don't work. As an example on my Mac I just get this message:
"Mon Nov 7 20:03:27 2005|World Community Grid|Message from server: platform 'powerpc-apple-darwin' not found"
Their loss, I'll find another project to attach to I guess. Too bad, because it's always on and idle most of the day and night, since it basically just acts as my firewall and wireless router.
Maybe I'm missing something, since I haven't actually installed it yet (downloading now) but can't you use BOINC? It's open source and multiplatform, runs on Linux x86, PPC, probably other architectures as well, and Mac OS X. Probably there's a windows version...but who cares.;)
Would that satisfy your requirements?
OT: I wish there was a summary of the various distributed projects along with a rundown of what they do, who's sponsoring them, and what clients you need to help out. I keep hearing about a big IBM-sponsored one that uses a Windows screensaver (it's popular at work) but I can't figure out which project it is.
What I want to know is what ever happened to Andy Inkhnato's column? He was the "back page guy" for MacWorld, and I think MacUser before that (and his website still claims that he is), but I haven't seen him anywhere in MacWorld in a long, long time.
Maybe if the mac gets back to 20% market share he'll end whatever hunger strike he's been on and the MW editors will hire him back... probably not, but I can hope. He did invent Web That Smut back in 1996, that ought to be worth something on a guy's resume.
That would be useful, wouldn't it? No, once you post it's added to the static page, and sticks around forever, or until CmdrTaco needs more space for porn, whichever comes first. (Say it together now: "It's a feature, not a limitation...")
And I wouldn't worry about the spelling, nobody else seems to.
There are a lot of scientists out there who are theists, and still effective at their fields, because theism doesn't contradict any known scientific theories. You can still accept evolution, even the "primordial soup" theories of where life self-replicating life began, and have a place for God at the Very Beginning.
Although I'm all about suing Sony, you should probably refrain from double-posting; you're going to get downmoderated hard, and I'd hate for both your posts to end up so far below the 'noise floor' that people don't see it.
Note: This rootkit was designed to hide a legitimate application, but it can be used to hide other objects, including malicious software.
What sort of "legitimate application" needs to be hidden using a rootkit? What sort of definition of legitimate are they using, anyway?
Second favorite part:
WARNING: Removing this security risk manually may damage the compromised computer's operating system and may violate the manufacturer's end-user license agreement.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a misunderstanding, and has been debated elsewhere: NAT offers no security by itself, it's because normally NATs have a firewall effect at the same time that they create the illusion (and in some cases reality) of security.
:)
There's no reason why using IPv6 with a firewall wouldn't be just as -- and probably more -- secure. Especially because you wouldn't have to spend time configuring the NAT functionality and could instead configure it as a single-purpose stateful firewall.
It is possible -- although you probably wouldn't want to -- to create a situation using static NAT without any firewalling effect that leaves your computer just as open to attack as it would sitting on the public net. Likewise it's possible to assign every computer on a LAN a globally routable IP address and secure them using a properly designed firewall (that's actually how my company is set up).
If your comment had just said you didn't want your fridge and toaster exposed to the internet without your trusty Linux firewall between it and the internet, I would heartily agree. Although I don't doubt some would argue for you about choosing Linux over BSD.
That's actually one of the best MS-related posts I've read in a while.
I think you're absolutely right -- Microsoft doesn't seem to actually do any market research, instead they just watch the Nasdaq listings to see what new companies are doing really well this year, and figure out what they're doing right, then either buy or copy it. This minimizes their risk and creates the perception that everything they make is gold.
Personally I'm not a fan of that business model, because I think it hurts the market in general by failing to adequately reward the people who actually innovate. But it's not illegal so I can't fault them too much, they just use what they've got, and it's partially the market's fault for letting them acquire that dominance.
Yeah, that's clearly not true.
.50 BMG against personnel is that 1) it's expensive, and just not necessary to use against another person, and 2) it has the potential to overpenetrate and cause unintentional civilian casualties.
You can use a 105mm howitzer against ground troops if you want (although I'm not sure the ammunition is manufactured or in service anymore, it was called the "Beehive round" and was a flechette device), it's just not really practical in a lot of instances.
The only reason I can think of to not use a
There's no reason why you couldn't use it, I think it's more that soldiers are discouraged from swatting a fly with a sledgehammer, you might say.
I'm pretty sure that this is the intent when soldiers end up shooting at cars driving towards road blocks. The driver just has a tendency to get shot also, since they're located behind the engine and as other people have pointed out, rounds which don't bury themselves in the block aren't going to be stopped by much else in the car.
Although I can't say for sure what the current Rules of Engagement are for situations like that, I bet that when they do get authorization to fire on the vehicle (after firing all their warning shots -- just in case you missed the road block ahead of you), it's the engine block that they're supposed to be aiming for.
I stand corrected, I was confusing the Geneva Convention with the Hague Convention of 1898, which we were not a signatory to (although we were signatories to later versions of it).
However I stand by my point about temporary versus permanent blindness, prohibiting the latter of which was obviously the intent of the rule.
That's fairly consistent with a civilian course I took on the use of lethal force in self-defense. In short, people who have actually analyzed self-defense shooting incidents have shown that you're better off killing the other person than wounding them, in terms of the legal aftermath.
It's not hard to believe though, since a dead criminal is just another statistic, while a live one is a "victim" that some scumbag lawyer can put up in front of a jury and use to wring a settlement out of you, especially if you hit them in the spine and caused any sort of permanent damage.
From a public relations standpoint, it's usually better to create bodies than it is to create cripples. The exception to this might be if creating a body also involves creating a marytr.
if say, China/Russia had invaded, we'd be seeing much more brutality and inhumane treatment stories.
No, you wouldn't, because they'd be controlling the press so tightly that nothing negative would really get out, at least officially. All you'd have would be a lot of really disturbing rumors, and later on, a lot of hollow-eyed people mumbling about how they'd never been mistreated and had nothing to say. And maybe twenty or thirty years from now, once the perpetrators were nicely retired, there'd be a few not-too-well selling books on the topic, and maybe a History Channel special. That'd be it.
Frankly I think they'd probably be much more effective occupiers (whether that's something a country should aspire to, I won't say) than the U.S. is, because our effectiveness is limited by our inability to accept that sometimes you have to be hypocritical if you want to be effective: sometimes you have to espouse an ideal, even if you can't live up to it because of circumstances (and because your enemies may not play by the same rules). Given that the alternative, and the route taken by some other countries, is to not espouse any ideals and thus avoid being charged with hypocrisy, excuse me if I decide to ignore their shallow criticism.
Call me cynical, but I think the prohibitions on chemical weapons have a lot more to do with countries that think themselves pretty good at 'conventional war' not wanting to allow anything in that changes the rules and might put them at a disadvantage. Consider the parties that came up with the Geneva Convention and what it prohibits: all of them are what could potentially be disruptive technologies. Chemical (and later, biological) weapons are not only ugly in an aesthetic/"honorable war" sense, but they could allow a country which lacks conventional military capabilities to compete with a major power. Thus the major powers have a vested interest in keeping them from being developed, especially if there is domestic pressure for them not to use them themselves.
It's clearer when you consider how biological and nerve weapons are treated versus nuclear ones. Both have the capability of being WMDs, but nuclear ones were more or less tolerated for a long time because they were perceived as difficult for less industrialized countries to build. As it's become less of a technical challenge to construct them, we've seen the major powers start beating the nonproliferation/disarmament drum -- and there was a period in the 80s with "Star Wars," when it looked like nuclear missles were going to be supplanted by an even newer and harder to build type of weapons system.
IMO, the prohibitions against chemical weapons were partly the last gasp of a 19th century idea of war as an honorable and manly activity, to which the concept of invisible, impersonal death by airborne chemicals was abhorrent; but mainly it was the superpowers who had the most to lose from a new and disruptive form of warfare trying to nip a new technology in the bud, and keep war focused on what they were proven to be good at.
Yup. But that sort of defeats the purpose of trying to shoot the tires as an alternative to something that's going to harm the driver. Even .30-cal rounds will go probably go through the firewall and into the passenger compartment if they don't hit the engine block. They'd have no problem going through a sheet-metal fender. The fender just conceals the target you're shooting for and makes it harder to just shoot the tire, I didn't mean to suggest that it doesn't offer any protection.
I guess my basic point was that you don't start putting lead at high velocity towards anything or anyone that you haven't already written off; shooting out the tires of a moving vehicle is right up there with "shoot the gun out of his hand" as a non-lethal takedown procedure.
WP is generally used as an anti-armor round, although it's markedly less effective than it was in the past. It's not anti-personnel, although there are situations where it could be used against mixed forces and seem as though it was being used that way.
Before tanks were hermetically sealed like they are today, you could pretty reliably disable one by dumping some burning stuff on it (napalm, white phosphorous, burning gasoline) if you could get it to fall down into the gap between the turret and the chassis. The turret essentially sits in a hole in the top of the chassis...get something through that gap and it's in the crew compartment. This is why if you're in a tank, you don't want to let yourself get swarmed by rioters with Molotov cocktails; even though it might not seem like they'd be much of a risk to a tank, a few well placed ones can really make life uncomfortable for the crew inside.
As a result, you don't send out armor units without infantry support, because they'll get overrun by foot soldiers and destroyed (a la 'Saving Private Ryan'). An advancing armor unit will almost always be mixed in with regular leg infantry, as force protection.
As a counter to this, if you're an artilleryman and trying to stop an advancing column of tanks with infantry support, you'd use a combination of both air-bursting high explosive (to disable the soldiers) and white phosphorous (to disable the tanks). The command for this is "HE and WP, timed and quick" -- high explosive air bursting (timed fuse) and white phosphorous with a contact-detonating fuse (quick fuse).
Nowadays, I'm not sure that white phosphorous is really used as a weapon per se, I think it's mostly used for the psychological effect, and for illumination. Plus obviously the tactics of huge land armies maneuvering around each other is relatively outdated today.
I think they mean permanent blindness, this was obviously referring to temporary blindness.
CN/CS tear gas "blinds" you for a certain amount of time, by making your eyes sting and water, but isn't prohibited for riot control. I think it's one of those "lesser evil" things, especially when you consider that the alternative (being shot) does carry a risk of permanent blindness, secondary to death.
Also, at least last time I checked, the U.S. wasn't a signatory to the Geneva Convention, it just voluntarily follows it. If there was a big enough difference of opinion as to whether a certain weapon was allowed, and the U.S. military thought it would be useful to its troops and save friendly lives, there's not much to hold them to it. It's not like the U.S.'s current enemies are going to abide by it anyway, so it's more a feel-good, moral-high-ground policy than anything.
That's idiotic.
Go stand in front of a car sometime and try and figure out how you'd like to shoot the tires, especially if it was driving towards you at high speed. They're not exactly a huge target to begin with, plus they'd be turned end-on, and all but the very bottom is covered by the front fender in most vehicles. Now imagine trying to shoot them and only them, using a machine gun, probably mounted on another vehicle (putting it ~6' up in the air) so there's a downward angle, and you'll realize it's highly impractical. Furthermore, it would really suck to waste your last chance at stopping a car by shooting at its tires, only to realize the instant before whatever large amount of explosive that it's carrying detonates, that it had run-flats.
This whole "shoot the tires" idea is pure Hollywood. If you're putting bullets into a car, chances are the situation has already degraded past the point where non-lethal force is appropriate anyway. Most of the time if you're trying to stop a car, you don't even aim for the driver, you'd be aiming for the engine block, which is unfortunately mounted in front of the driver. Cracking the block pretty much guarantees a quick disable of the vehicle, and is conveniently located "center mass" so it's not difficult to hit.
Think about the real world practicality of your suggestions in the future. There's a reason soldiers aren't trained to aim for the tires when somebody is trying to ram a roadblock, and it's not because they get a sick thrill out of shooting people.
Actually that might be a pretty reasonable request, given that software testing is usually (at least in my experience) handled at a different part of the development cycle and often by different people than the ones responsible for directing initial development. Also, it's asking a lot less: "Could you test this and fix the things that break compatibility with WINE," versus "Could you make a completely separate version that runs on our niche OS." The first one might be justified by the few sales you'd get from a Linux+Cedega version, currently I don't think that the second one would be. At least not yet.
I understand your point, but I think that asking for a Linux version of a game, given the small current market, might be asking for a bit much while asking for testing to ensure compatibility with Cedega -- especially if Cedega was willing to work from the other direction and help to make things easier -- would be more successful.
When I was reading the article on the front page I wondered to myself, "how long will it take for someone to make a 'shady pixel' joke?"
I really need to get out more.
I'm not exactly sure, but I think part of the problem might be that a lot of software programmers are hired not as employees but as independent contractors, and that might affect the copyright status of their work.
I think that the lawyer's real point in that article is 'get the agreement up front to avoid problems later,' and probably shouldn't be taken as specific advice as to who owns the code in particular instances, as I'd imagine it could vary considerably. It might even be something that is different in different states, or from one Circuit Court district to another (because of conflicting precedent). I work with a retired IP attorney fairly regularly, maybe I'll pick his brain sometime off the record over lunch.
After all there's nothing preventing people from suing each other and generally making a legal mess of things, especially if the relationship between the company and the contractor/employee wasn't originally clear, and has just gotten more murky with time. From a company's perspective, it's worth getting the contract pounded out in the beginning just to remove the potential for problems later -- especially since they're the "deep pocket" that someone might seek to go after in a suit after the fact.
Personally I know that my current company makes it quite crystal clear that they automatically own everything you do while in their employ that relates to the project you're on, and unless you have specific permission anything related to their entire scope of business as well ("permission" is defined rather loosely as basically a statement by your manager that 'John Doe's hobby project doesn't have anything to do with what he's doing on the job'). I'm not sure how enforceable this second part would be, but I'm not going to go out of my way to find out.
Anyway, I smell a little bit of FUD in that article, but he's a lawyer and I'm not, so take it how you will. His overarching point though ('get it on paper') is probably well heeded by everyone, though.
Thanks for the info. I had never heard of Savonius windmills before -- or at least not heard the name. I've actually seen one before though, but not for any practical purpose: one of those annoying moving-lawn-ornament type things.
In case anyone else is interested in what a Savonius windmill is, there's a page with a little simulation of one here. I think they're selling something (model turbines maybe?) although I didn't really check it out.
I have to wonder though whether one of these is really as efficent as a propeller-type windmill, given that a propeller type one can alter its blade pitch and keep the rotational speed relatively constant in different wind speeds. Is there a way to do that with a Savonius design? It doesn't seem like the airfoils are really anything that you could easily change in flight.
I'm not sure if it's true, but I once heard an interesting factoid about Dutch-style propeller windmills, and how they were among the first mechanical devices to implement a "feedback loop"; you have a tail rotor mounted perpendicular to the main rotor, which drives the mechanism that orients the windmill. If the wind isn't blowing at the mill directly from the front, it causes the small rotor to turn, turning the mill into the wind. When the mill is pointing in the right direction, there's no wind on the small rotor, so it stops. Pretty brilliant, for the 17th or 18th century.
I'll be honest, I really have to wonder about the whole windmills-killing-birds business. It always gets dragged up, but does anyone really know how many birds those propellers actually kill? I'm willing to bet it's very low; I also suspect way more birds are killed by flying into vehicles on the highway, or into the sides of highrise buildings (I had one kamikaze into my house last week, and that's not even a high rise).
The whole bird thing sounds like a convenient excuse invented by people who really oppose windmills because of noise or land use issues, but want a fuzzier, more PR-friendly excuse. The kill zone on a windmill is basically going to be the circle described by the rotor tips as they go through the air, so it's not a huge zone (as you get towards the center they're not moving as fast, tangentially) and at any given time it's not as if just flying into that ring would result in death, you'd have to be at a point at the particular moment in time when the blade moved through it. Last time I checked, birds don't hover, so you have two moving objects that would have to compete against some long odds to end up in the same place at the same time. Also, the turbines are noisy as hell -- something which is a legitimate criticism -- and I find it hard to imagine that birds wouldn't be scared off by the sound, air currents, and motion. (Actually they wouldn't make a bad large-scale scarecrow over farmland...)
Call me overly cynical but I find that particular objection dubious.
Does anyone know what the story is with the Debian package of this?
I just spent more than two hours trying to get the "official" version of this running on my headless Debian sarge box, over an SSH session, and I eventually threw in the towel when I couldn't find a script for running it as a daemon that seemed generally accepted to work and be stable. It's too bad, since I have the perfect system for it: my backup server, which sits connected to a cable modem in a friend's basement, on a UPS and 99.9% idle, since all it ever gets used for is the few seconds every day when my other systems rsync to it.
I had high hopes when I found out that there's a packaged version over at https://alioth.debian.org/projects/pkg-boinc/ however that server seems to be dead as an oak door right now.
It's too bad they didn't do a better job documenting this for anything other than a "desktop linux" install with a non-remote user, because I think a lot of the potential users of this software are going to want to do it using a daemon, and install it remotely over SSH -- so it can use the idle cycles on a server or other headless box. Right now it's a real exercise in frustration, sadly, and I think I'll wait until somebody comes up with some good step-by-step instructions on how do it, using precompiled Debian packages.
I'd love to help, but I'm not going to risk possibly screwing up something on my home server for it. There's a reason I swore off installing anything that didn't come from Debian Stable, and maybe I'm just being reminded of why.
Well, guess I got ahead of myself there. Just for the record, although World Community Grid (which is clearly the IBM-sponsored project) does use the BOINC client, it only uses the Windows and Linux "official" versions. The OS X and I assume probably also any other roll-your-own-from-source versions don't work. As an example on my Mac I just get this message:
"Mon Nov 7 20:03:27 2005|World Community Grid|Message from server: platform 'powerpc-apple-darwin' not found"
Their loss, I'll find another project to attach to I guess. Too bad, because it's always on and idle most of the day and night, since it basically just acts as my firewall and wireless router.
Maybe I'm missing something, since I haven't actually installed it yet (downloading now) but can't you use BOINC? It's open source and multiplatform, runs on Linux x86, PPC, probably other architectures as well, and Mac OS X. Probably there's a windows version...but who cares. ;)
Would that satisfy your requirements?
OT: I wish there was a summary of the various distributed projects along with a rundown of what they do, who's sponsoring them, and what clients you need to help out. I keep hearing about a big IBM-sponsored one that uses a Windows screensaver (it's popular at work) but I can't figure out which project it is.
What I want to know is what ever happened to Andy Inkhnato's column? He was the "back page guy" for MacWorld, and I think MacUser before that (and his website still claims that he is), but I haven't seen him anywhere in MacWorld in a long, long time.
Maybe if the mac gets back to 20% market share he'll end whatever hunger strike he's been on and the MW editors will hire him back... probably not, but I can hope. He did invent Web That Smut back in 1996, that ought to be worth something on a guy's resume.
That would be useful, wouldn't it? No, once you post it's added to the static page, and sticks around forever, or until CmdrTaco needs more space for porn, whichever comes first. (Say it together now: "It's a feature, not a limitation...")
And I wouldn't worry about the spelling, nobody else seems to.
This should really be modded up.
There are a lot of scientists out there who are theists, and still effective at their fields, because theism doesn't contradict any known scientific theories. You can still accept evolution, even the "primordial soup" theories of where life self-replicating life began, and have a place for God at the Very Beginning.
This is not true with Intelligent Design.
Although I'm all about suing Sony, you should probably refrain from double-posting; you're going to get downmoderated hard, and I'd hate for both your posts to end up so far below the 'noise floor' that people don't see it.
What sort of "legitimate application" needs to be hidden using a rootkit? What sort of definition of legitimate are they using, anyway?
Second favorite part: