Someone misled you. Shot (for shotguns) is made in freefall using a tower. And it basically does work the way you're thinking: it doesn't necessarily solidify all the way, but the outside does, and that's enough for it to retain its shape when it hits the water at the bottom of the tower.
Cannonballs were generally made out of cast iron. If you look at an authentic one that's in good shape, you can usually see the mold lines and sprue marks where it was poured. They were usually poured into sand molds that were then knocked away after they cooled.
Some very old cannon balls (prior to the 18th century at least) were cast bronze or cut stone rather than iron, but most people switched to iron as soon as they were able to because it's a harder, cheaper material than bronze, and easier to work with and more effective than stone. (Bronze remained as a material for the cannons themselves well into the 19th century, though, since it has greater tensile strength than cast iron and is less likely to shatter.)
Also, if you think about pouring large quantities of viscous liquid, you'd realize that "dropping" a cannonball wouldn't work; rather than forming a sphere, you'd probably form a teardrop or ellipsoidal shape* due to the air resistance. Forming spheres via freefall cooling is only practical (in normal Earth gravity) for rather small parts, where the surface area to mass ratio is low.
* I'm told that if you look at the shot produced in a shot tower closely enough, all of it is really ellipsoidal rather than truly spherical, but it's such a small difference that it's normally ignored.
Of course, you realize that this very case we're discussing is of TWO INDIVIDUALS who own a patent used by all hard drive manufacturers, so your argument is specious. What makes you think that they actually invented anything? All I've seen is that they filed a patent, and one that quite a few people have suggested is meritless and ignores a ton of prior art.
Filing a patent doesn't make you an inventor. It makes you a person skilled at manipulating the system for your own benefit; it doesn't say anything about actual technical prowess.
All I have to say is, if you think T-Mobile is bad, you should try dealing with Cingular/ATT.
T-Mobile has the best unlocking policy and the best customer service of any of the U.S. cellular companies, hands down. Granted, that's kind of like talking about which slave labor camp has the best dental policy, but it's the situation we're left with due to the technological, geographic, and regulatory climate in the U.S.
A few months ago I was trying to help out a friend who was the executor of a deceased friend's estate. The deceased guy had been with Cingular for years, and had a fully paid-off, very nice phone, which someone else in his family wanted (which strikes me as borderline creepy, but hey, nobody wants to let a good smartphone go to waste I guess). Cingular would not unlock it, period, even though the phone was paid off, the account had been closed, and the account holder was dead. (They even got faxed a copy of the death certificate and everything.) Every time somebody called, they just said 'sorry, we can't do that,' and then started in on their sales pitch to try and sign them onto a new plan. (Even when the person calling identified themselves as the executor of a dead customer's estate, which you'd think would be a signal to drop the sales crap.) Written communication went unanswered. Eventually I just helped the friend find a place locally that unlocked it for $15, because that was easier than dealing with the cellphone company's shit. But the absolute gall they displayed was disgusting.
T-Mobile fails mostly through incompetence and ignorance, but AT&T/Cingular fail through malice. At least T-Mobile has a fairly reasonable unlocking policy (I never had any problem getting phones unlocked through them, personally, even before I was out of contract).
And as for Verizon and the other CDMA networks, they're designed with screwing the consumer as a primary goal from the ground up.
Corporations pay for most of the research that generates patents (and products). The individual inventor, tinkering in his garage to produce a patent that he'll use to get rich, is mostly a myth and has been for years. For every one person like that, there are probably ten thousand patents ground out by IBM Research or Intel or Microsoft, purely as weapons in an ever-escalating war.
Virtually all keyboards in the world can also produce ASCII, in addition to the local script/character set. Someone in Japan, for instance, can type an ASCII domain, as can someone in China or Germany. But someone in Germany can't easily type Kanji characters or Simplified Chinese ones.
There's no other set of characters (and their binary representations) that can be typed in by virtually anyone, anywhere. If you use anything else, you start locking people out based on the equipment they have.
Telco and power deregulation are slightly different animals, though. Electric power in the deregulated market is treated basically as a fungible good; you buy watt-hours from one place, sell them to somebody else. It's basically a spot market. For the most part, you don't care where the 'power' that's running your lights came from (and there's really no way to tell, in any literal sense; we just play an accounting shell-game to determine who gets paid what).
You can't really deal with packets that way. One person's packets aren't worth anything to somebody else. It's not really a buy-and-sell market.
So we have the scheme that was developed in the 1980s and 90s for telcos. By and large, it worked really well. Long distance rates went down dramatically with deregulation, and high-speed internet was going down as well with LLU. Rather than working on a spot-market, like power, the telco regulation required the infrastructure owners (who were using the public rights-of-way) to lease circuits out, thus allowing smaller providers (e.g. Speakeasy) to compete by providing their own customer service and value-added services.
It was a good balance between free markets and regulation. It didn't create a regulated, government-run monopoly (which is one way of dealing with natural monopoly situations; you just nationalize it and turn it into one big, Stalinist enterprise), but it provided some measure of control against the infrastructure owners simply running their fees up to whatever the market would bear. (Which is bad for the consumer -- ideally you want the cost of service to sink to the marginal cost of production / maintenance.) But for that reason, the telcos hated it.
In eliminating the unbundling rules, I suspect that the Bush administration set telecommunications and domestic broadband access in the U.S. back five or ten years, and swindled consumers out of billions of dollars, most of which will never be used for infrastructure improvements.
Spag's was, from 1934 to 2004, a discount department store on Route 9 in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts. It was founded by Anthony Borgatti, nicknamed "Spag" (short for spaghetti, his favorite dish). Until 1996, customers had to bring their own bags, hence the slogan, "No bags at Spag's." When Spag died in 1996, his daughters took over until 2002, when they sold it to Building 19. The location became Spag's 19, and in September 2004 Building 19 owner Jerry Ellis said the store was not profitable in its current format. Spag's merchandise and operations were converted to Building 19's format. October 3, 2004 was the last day of business for Spag's. For much of its lifecycle, the roof of the main building had the name "SPAGS" written across the east roof, but this was painted over in 2005. Other businesses surrounding Spags, including The Ground Round family-style restaurant, have since closed due to lack of business. In June 2007 tentative plans were announced to close Spags 19 and demolish the building to make way for an affordable housing project.
Kinda sad, actually. I remember going there, back in the day.
languages intrigue me and it sounds silly to me to peg some dialects/accents as inferior to others. Well, the languages or dialects themselves aren't "inferior," they take on identities based on the people who predominantly speak them. E.g., if you have a certain accent or dialect that's mostly spoken by immigrants or laborers without higher education, chances are over time it will develop a reputation as being a low-status marker. Conversely, the pronunciation, dialect, and accent used by cultural elites tends to be regarded as high-status.
Generally, the language is used as an earmark of education, class, and background; it has very little meaning in the abstract sense. (Actually, I'd argue it has none at all; all languages are inherently arbitrary and none are really superior to any other, except perhaps in terms of technical vocabularies.)
The difference between non-rhotic accents and the more common 'American English' pronunciations are not wholly dissimilar to the difference between Cockney and Received Pronunciation in the U.K. I suspect there are similar situations in other languages. (In many places there are 'rural accents' that have a definite cultural stigma associated with them, either currently or in the past. I've heard German definitely does.)
Wikipedia has an interest article on Prestige dialects (which is different from prestige accents) with worldwide examples.
Please, for the love of all that is good and holy in this world, switch off the shitty ajax crap that lets me see 25 comments before requiring another click.
Bloody hell, it is annoying! Get an account, log in, go to Preferences:Comments, and click on "Normal" under "Discussion Style."
You would have a point if this was an industry where the barriers to entry weren't so astronomically, prohibitively high.
Telecommunications requires so much capital investment that it tends towards a natural monopoly, at least within regions, dominated by whoever can get there first and run the wires around. Once that first person is there, much of the impetus to repeat the investment is gone.
Due more to some interesting historical/technological developments than any real forethought, some people happen to actually have two sources of telecommunications, one run by the phone company any one run by the cable TV company. This sort of parallel infrastructure buildout is unlikely to happen again; in fact I think it may actually decrease: one company or the other will decide to expend its resources in areas where the other company isn't, meaning that if you want really good, high speed service, there will be a clear choice even if you have two wires running into your house.
And really, it doesn't benefit most consumers to have two halfassed networks coming into their house. You're probably only going to be able to easily use one of them (at least one of them, per service, but those services -- TV, phone, data -- are quickly becoming one "packet data" service anyway). Two companies forced to lay parallel infrastructure are always going to have higher costs and worse service than a single company, because of the extra overhead they carry, if (and this is a non-trivial 'if', granted) the single company is forced to offer service at cost, rather than being allowed to increase it.
Even in minimalist conceptions of government (which I am generally a fan of), there is a legitimate function for the state when it comes to the regulation of natural monopolies. Although I'm not advocating for state-run telcos -- although they may look good on paper, history has shown that state-run industries generally suck terribly -- the way things worked in the U.S. from deregulation to a few years ago (thanks, George!) was that the first carrier to build-out in an area, in return for using the public rights-of-way, had to share the infrastructure with other firms basically at cost, or at low negotiated rates (e.g., "Local Loop Unbundling"). Since this system has been undercut by the telco drones at the FCC, connectivity costs have gone up far in excess of service offered, and competition has diminished.
It's held back by useless metaphors.
on
Has Wikipedia Peaked?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I agree.
Personally, I think Wikipedia suffers from being too limited in scope. Yeah, creating a free encyclopedia is great and all, but I'm not entirely convinced that's what the world really needs. It's good in that it provided some competition to Britannica, and forced them to open up some of their content, but where Wikipedia is most useful is where it goes well beyond any traditional "encyclopedia." Sadly, these tend to be the areas where Wikipedia bureaucrats and administrators are most likely to delete content.
Wikipedia has the potential to blow away the entire concept of an 'encyclopedia,' but it's held back by narrow-minded ideas of what 'encyclopedic' content is.
You see this "emulation complex" in a lot of projects. Bottom line: you can never be better than a thing you are trying to imitate. If you want to be better than it, you have to stop trying to be it. This goes for some parts of Linux desktops trying to emulate Windows, it goes for OpenOffice trying to be Microsoft Office, and it goes for Wikipedia trying to be a traditional encyclopedia.
I think the examples on that page illustrate well why the serial comma can be both good and bad, depending on the situation.
Personally, I hate linguistic prescriptivists. I'll use whichever format is less ambiguous; it's stupid to create a rule just for the sake of having a rule, if it produces a stupid result some the time.
The only good "rule" is to try to be unambiguous wherever possible, unless ambiguity is the desired effect. Simply picking one or the other and then dogmatically sticking to it, even when the result is inferior, is the mark of a small mind.
I feel the same way about punctuation and quotation marks. I'll include punctuation within quotation marks when the punctuation is part of the quote (when, for example, I'm quoting a statement that really is the end of a sentence), but I think it borders on intellectual dishonesty to insert anything into the quotation marks that wasn't actually in the quoted text, and that includes terminal punctuation. The placement of a full stop can drastically change the tone or meaning of a statement; it's trivial to use American-style quotation rules to perform what's technically not a misquotation but is certainly out of context or misleading.
Also, when doing technical writing (e.g. documentation), where you are using quotes to distinguish something in an interface from the rest of the body text, including punctuation in the quotes can be confusing. What should be in the quotes is literally what's on the screen, nothing else.
The American-style quotation rules are a leftover from old typesetting methods that are no longer in use or relevant; it's time that we retired them in favor of greater precision and flexibility for the writer.
one, according to legend, was drywalled into a building by a work-crew that didn't know it was there Oh, come on -- now you're stealing IBM mainframe lore? I think I first heard that story about the System/360 or something. The key point in the story was that nobody knew where the machine was until an IBM tech showed up to swap out a part that had failed (IBM big iron had ways of phoning home when something went bad and it switched to a spare; then the technician just came out to swap the FRU).
How about a series of mirrors to reflect in an orbit that keeps the side of the earth away from the sun lit up? then you could use standard solar panels. That would not be a good idea. Lots of biological organisms -- including humans, but a lot more critical ones -- really don't like having direct sunlight 24/7. Lots of plants will just refuse to go into seed, for instance.
How is this different from the concept of SOA? "...software that is traditionally installed on personal computers is shifted or extended to be accessible via the internet". I was under the impression the idea of Grid processing was more about sharing computing tasks... I don't think there's really a difference. "Cloud computing" strikes me as basically a sexed-up name for SOA, directed towards end-users rather than corporate implementors.
That and SOA is pretty vague. I don't know where you're getting your particular definition from, but there are lots of competing ones; you can include a lot under the umbrella of "service" within "service-oriented architecture." It doesn't refer just to web services or even just to software and IT.
Well Boo fuck'n Hoo then. I guess it just sucks to be you. Yeah, it just runs on LInux and Windows which means it runs on 95% of the computers out there. It don't run on your machine, well fucking though. The source is available, port it your own damn self or shut the hell up.
God damn I'm in a foul mood today. My porn database blew up lastnight now I have to spend the next 3 days re-indexing it.
Actually there was a Mac developer who posts on Schneier's blog occasionally who was interested in writing a Mac port -- actually a really nice one, some sort of module that would have allowed Apple's existing Disk Image framework to deal with Truecrypt ".tc" files just like it now handles ".dmg"'s. Apparently the guy talked to the TrueCrypt devs and they were totally hostile to any outside development. They wouldn't do a damn thing, wouldn't include anything in the mainstream tree, etc. The best the guy was ever going to be able to do wasn't a Mac port, it was going to be a Mac fork. Since the Mac platform already has its own encrypted disc image format, and keeping two forked codebases compatible with each other (particularly if one group was hostile to the other) would be a huge undertaking, the idea was dropped.
If this is true (and to be fair, I've never heard TrueCrypt's side of the story), it's disappointing. But it wouldn't totally surprise me; free software projects can develop just as much 'not invented here' syndrome as some commercial projects, and be almost as exclusive.
Plus, it's also been pointed out to me that TrueCrypt isn't GPL. So not only are you forking a program, you're forking a non-GPL program, which is a bit of a legal risk. Not necessarily because the TrueCrypt license is bad per se, but just because it's a unique license, and unlike forking a GPL project, which is a more or less routine occurrence, but you'd be using a license that's never been tested, and the original authors of which might decide to use against you.
Recall that thesis which layed out (using public sources) all the fiber optic cables in the US? The Government wanted to classify his paper and they went ahead and started scrubbing all those public sources of non-classified information. I think it's worth pointing out in the case of the Sean Gorman paper that the author (Gorman) and his institution (George Mason Univ.) didn't protest too hard. They pretty much fell over themselves to voluntarily take all sorts of draconian "security" procedures, because they wanted to get into the good graces of the national security establishment. In fact, Gorman has gone on to become an adviser to various government agencies (through his private firm), and it wouldn't surprise me if the company is supported in large part by the government.
I have a strong suspicion that some of the controversy there was manufactured; both Gorman and GMU got exactly what they wanted out of that whole affair. Gorman launched his career, and GMU is considered a premiere program if you want to get involved with national security: they have a multidisciplinary "Critical Infrastructure Protection" program, a graduate degree in Biodefense, and a long list of former Beltway insiders on faculty. Their institutional culture is worlds apart from what people who are familiar with the big IT campuses might expect. While I'm not saying that the entire thing was scripted ahead of time, they rolled over so fast that it's blindingly obvious where their interests lay.
PiD was the first really 'dark' thematic shooter I played; I scared the bejeezus out of myself for about a week playing that thing. Compared to Doom, which I think came out around the same time and was all the rage with my PC-using friends, PiD was way ahead on things like actually having a coherent plot, and requiring a little thought to get past some parts.
I'm not sure whether it's ever been officially resolved as to whether Pathways is part of the Marathon/Halo canon, but it could certainly be integrated as a far-off prequel. It's certainly ripe for a remake that would firm up its relationship to the other games. (As are the Marathon games, really; spruced up onto a modern engine they'd probably work well.)
They do this at a lot of schools. At Penn State I believe it's called "Nittany Notes." It's quite an operation; to get hired as a note-taker by them, you need to show your transcript (so that your GPA can be verified -- they don't want D students taking notes), and they have fairly strict requirements on not missing any classes, and the deadlines by which you have to have your notes transcribed and submitted.
And I don't think they ask the professors' permission; in class you never have any idea who's just taking notes for themselves and who's taking for Nittany Notes. (They often have multiple note-takers in the same class to make sure there's good coverage, particularly on popular courses. When you buy the note pack you get all of them.)
Not sure how long they've been around for but I think it's a while. I suspect there are probably similar operations at most larger university campuses.
The GPG program that you download doesn't do full-disk encryption; it's pretty purely a file/stream encryption program. I suppose you could use it for disk encryption, by streaming data through it on its way to and from a device, but that's not how it's normally used.
There is/was a program around that used GPG to do FDE, called GPGDisk. I'm not sure whether it used your installed copy of GPG to do the heavy lifting, or if it just included the same code, or worked using the same algorithms but had its own totally separate crypto engine. It was reasonably popular for a while, but I think a lot of people who were using it have now switched to TrueCrypt.
However, GPGDisk did offer some unique features, like the ability to encrypt a disk using a GPG key, and some fairly fine-grained access controls that you could set up for multiple users (IIRC). Every once in a while someone will mention it on the comments on Bruce Schneier's blog, so apparently it's still getting some use. But it doesn't offer some of the neater features that TrueCrypt does, like plausible deniability or containers-in-containers, I don't believe.
Secularism is a better philosophy than Islam in the same way that rationality is superior to delusion. I'm not sure what you think that has to do with The United States though. I'm not disagreeing with you. In fact that's exactly how I feel. However, the argument for that isn't "secularism is better because secularists have more bombs." The fact that one society is, at some point in time, more successful than another, doesn't mean it has a superior belief system, since there are other reasons why societies can be successful.
There is an attitude that sometimes percolates up that seems to posit that the 'best' belief system is whatever the most people believe, or that the overall success of a society which generally has a certain belief system, is an objective measure of the superiority of that belief system. I'm simply saying that there are too many confounding factors to make that a valid real-world metric.
I think the secularist philosophies are objectively better than mystical ones because they don't require arationality or faith; this is totally independent of the success or failure of societies embracing them, on anything less than an infinite timescale.
I was talking more about everything south of the US. Because there's more of it. And the Catholic church did it, not the people who got kicked out of England for being weirdos.
Nothing wrong with being a weirdo, of course. The big civilizations of South/Central (and the southern part of North) America were almost nearly wiped out by disease. The conquistadors get more credit than they really deserve for their downfall, there. Had it not been for smallpox, Cortez would have been impaled on the end of a spear, and that would have been the end of that. It's not as though the civilizations there were "inferior" in some social/racial sense that caused them to lose.
Where the Catholic Church should be everlastingly damned for is the cultural genocide that came afterwards. It wasn't enough just to topple their society, but the conquistadors had to finish the job by burning everything they could get their hands on. That's the true ugliness of what happened in the Americas; the actual downfall of the civilizations there was mostly unavoidable from the moment the Europeans stepped ashore.
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Someone misled you. Shot (for shotguns) is made in freefall using a tower. And it basically does work the way you're thinking: it doesn't necessarily solidify all the way, but the outside does, and that's enough for it to retain its shape when it hits the water at the bottom of the tower.
Cannonballs were generally made out of cast iron. If you look at an authentic one that's in good shape, you can usually see the mold lines and sprue marks where it was poured. They were usually poured into sand molds that were then knocked away after they cooled.
Some very old cannon balls (prior to the 18th century at least) were cast bronze or cut stone rather than iron, but most people switched to iron as soon as they were able to because it's a harder, cheaper material than bronze, and easier to work with and more effective than stone. (Bronze remained as a material for the cannons themselves well into the 19th century, though, since it has greater tensile strength than cast iron and is less likely to shatter.)
Also, if you think about pouring large quantities of viscous liquid, you'd realize that "dropping" a cannonball wouldn't work; rather than forming a sphere, you'd probably form a teardrop or ellipsoidal shape* due to the air resistance. Forming spheres via freefall cooling is only practical (in normal Earth gravity) for rather small parts, where the surface area to mass ratio is low.
* I'm told that if you look at the shot produced in a shot tower closely enough, all of it is really ellipsoidal rather than truly spherical, but it's such a small difference that it's normally ignored.
Filing a patent doesn't make you an inventor. It makes you a person skilled at manipulating the system for your own benefit; it doesn't say anything about actual technical prowess.
All I have to say is, if you think T-Mobile is bad, you should try dealing with Cingular/ATT.
T-Mobile has the best unlocking policy and the best customer service of any of the U.S. cellular companies, hands down. Granted, that's kind of like talking about which slave labor camp has the best dental policy, but it's the situation we're left with due to the technological, geographic, and regulatory climate in the U.S.
A few months ago I was trying to help out a friend who was the executor of a deceased friend's estate. The deceased guy had been with Cingular for years, and had a fully paid-off, very nice phone, which someone else in his family wanted (which strikes me as borderline creepy, but hey, nobody wants to let a good smartphone go to waste I guess). Cingular would not unlock it, period, even though the phone was paid off, the account had been closed, and the account holder was dead. (They even got faxed a copy of the death certificate and everything.) Every time somebody called, they just said 'sorry, we can't do that,' and then started in on their sales pitch to try and sign them onto a new plan. (Even when the person calling identified themselves as the executor of a dead customer's estate, which you'd think would be a signal to drop the sales crap.) Written communication went unanswered. Eventually I just helped the friend find a place locally that unlocked it for $15, because that was easier than dealing with the cellphone company's shit. But the absolute gall they displayed was disgusting.
T-Mobile fails mostly through incompetence and ignorance, but AT&T/Cingular fail through malice. At least T-Mobile has a fairly reasonable unlocking policy (I never had any problem getting phones unlocked through them, personally, even before I was out of contract).
And as for Verizon and the other CDMA networks, they're designed with screwing the consumer as a primary goal from the ground up.
Corporations pay for most of the research that generates patents (and products). The individual inventor, tinkering in his garage to produce a patent that he'll use to get rich, is mostly a myth and has been for years. For every one person like that, there are probably ten thousand patents ground out by IBM Research or Intel or Microsoft, purely as weapons in an ever-escalating war.
Virtually all keyboards in the world can also produce ASCII, in addition to the local script/character set. Someone in Japan, for instance, can type an ASCII domain, as can someone in China or Germany. But someone in Germany can't easily type Kanji characters or Simplified Chinese ones.
There's no other set of characters (and their binary representations) that can be typed in by virtually anyone, anywhere. If you use anything else, you start locking people out based on the equipment they have.
Telco and power deregulation are slightly different animals, though. Electric power in the deregulated market is treated basically as a fungible good; you buy watt-hours from one place, sell them to somebody else. It's basically a spot market. For the most part, you don't care where the 'power' that's running your lights came from (and there's really no way to tell, in any literal sense; we just play an accounting shell-game to determine who gets paid what).
You can't really deal with packets that way. One person's packets aren't worth anything to somebody else. It's not really a buy-and-sell market.
So we have the scheme that was developed in the 1980s and 90s for telcos. By and large, it worked really well. Long distance rates went down dramatically with deregulation, and high-speed internet was going down as well with LLU. Rather than working on a spot-market, like power, the telco regulation required the infrastructure owners (who were using the public rights-of-way) to lease circuits out, thus allowing smaller providers (e.g. Speakeasy) to compete by providing their own customer service and value-added services.
It was a good balance between free markets and regulation. It didn't create a regulated, government-run monopoly (which is one way of dealing with natural monopoly situations; you just nationalize it and turn it into one big, Stalinist enterprise), but it provided some measure of control against the infrastructure owners simply running their fees up to whatever the market would bear. (Which is bad for the consumer -- ideally you want the cost of service to sink to the marginal cost of production / maintenance.) But for that reason, the telcos hated it.
In eliminating the unbundling rules, I suspect that the Bush administration set telecommunications and domestic broadband access in the U.S. back five or ten years, and swindled consumers out of billions of dollars, most of which will never be used for infrastructure improvements.
Generally, the language is used as an earmark of education, class, and background; it has very little meaning in the abstract sense. (Actually, I'd argue it has none at all; all languages are inherently arbitrary and none are really superior to any other, except perhaps in terms of technical vocabularies.)
The difference between non-rhotic accents and the more common 'American English' pronunciations are not wholly dissimilar to the difference between Cockney and Received Pronunciation in the U.K. I suspect there are similar situations in other languages. (In many places there are 'rural accents' that have a definite cultural stigma associated with them, either currently or in the past. I've heard German definitely does.)
Wikipedia has an interest article on Prestige dialects (which is different from prestige accents) with worldwide examples.
Bloody hell, it is annoying! Get an account, log in, go to Preferences:Comments, and click on "Normal" under "Discussion Style."
You would have a point if this was an industry where the barriers to entry weren't so astronomically, prohibitively high.
Telecommunications requires so much capital investment that it tends towards a natural monopoly, at least within regions, dominated by whoever can get there first and run the wires around. Once that first person is there, much of the impetus to repeat the investment is gone.
Due more to some interesting historical/technological developments than any real forethought, some people happen to actually have two sources of telecommunications, one run by the phone company any one run by the cable TV company. This sort of parallel infrastructure buildout is unlikely to happen again; in fact I think it may actually decrease: one company or the other will decide to expend its resources in areas where the other company isn't, meaning that if you want really good, high speed service, there will be a clear choice even if you have two wires running into your house.
And really, it doesn't benefit most consumers to have two halfassed networks coming into their house. You're probably only going to be able to easily use one of them (at least one of them, per service, but those services -- TV, phone, data -- are quickly becoming one "packet data" service anyway). Two companies forced to lay parallel infrastructure are always going to have higher costs and worse service than a single company, because of the extra overhead they carry, if (and this is a non-trivial 'if', granted) the single company is forced to offer service at cost, rather than being allowed to increase it.
Even in minimalist conceptions of government (which I am generally a fan of), there is a legitimate function for the state when it comes to the regulation of natural monopolies. Although I'm not advocating for state-run telcos -- although they may look good on paper, history has shown that state-run industries generally suck terribly -- the way things worked in the U.S. from deregulation to a few years ago (thanks, George!) was that the first carrier to build-out in an area, in return for using the public rights-of-way, had to share the infrastructure with other firms basically at cost, or at low negotiated rates (e.g., "Local Loop Unbundling"). Since this system has been undercut by the telco drones at the FCC, connectivity costs have gone up far in excess of service offered, and competition has diminished.
I agree.
Personally, I think Wikipedia suffers from being too limited in scope. Yeah, creating a free encyclopedia is great and all, but I'm not entirely convinced that's what the world really needs. It's good in that it provided some competition to Britannica, and forced them to open up some of their content, but where Wikipedia is most useful is where it goes well beyond any traditional "encyclopedia." Sadly, these tend to be the areas where Wikipedia bureaucrats and administrators are most likely to delete content.
Wikipedia has the potential to blow away the entire concept of an 'encyclopedia,' but it's held back by narrow-minded ideas of what 'encyclopedic' content is.
You see this "emulation complex" in a lot of projects. Bottom line: you can never be better than a thing you are trying to imitate. If you want to be better than it, you have to stop trying to be it. This goes for some parts of Linux desktops trying to emulate Windows, it goes for OpenOffice trying to be Microsoft Office, and it goes for Wikipedia trying to be a traditional encyclopedia.
I think the examples on that page illustrate well why the serial comma can be both good and bad, depending on the situation.
Personally, I hate linguistic prescriptivists. I'll use whichever format is less ambiguous; it's stupid to create a rule just for the sake of having a rule, if it produces a stupid result some the time.
The only good "rule" is to try to be unambiguous wherever possible, unless ambiguity is the desired effect. Simply picking one or the other and then dogmatically sticking to it, even when the result is inferior, is the mark of a small mind.
I feel the same way about punctuation and quotation marks. I'll include punctuation within quotation marks when the punctuation is part of the quote (when, for example, I'm quoting a statement that really is the end of a sentence), but I think it borders on intellectual dishonesty to insert anything into the quotation marks that wasn't actually in the quoted text, and that includes terminal punctuation. The placement of a full stop can drastically change the tone or meaning of a statement; it's trivial to use American-style quotation rules to perform what's technically not a misquotation but is certainly out of context or misleading.
Also, when doing technical writing (e.g. documentation), where you are using quotes to distinguish something in an interface from the rest of the body text, including punctuation in the quotes can be confusing. What should be in the quotes is literally what's on the screen, nothing else.
The American-style quotation rules are a leftover from old typesetting methods that are no longer in use or relevant; it's time that we retired them in favor of greater precision and flexibility for the writer.
That and SOA is pretty vague. I don't know where you're getting your particular definition from, but there are lots of competing ones; you can include a lot under the umbrella of "service" within "service-oriented architecture." It doesn't refer just to web services or even just to software and IT.
Well Boo fuck'n Hoo then. I guess it just sucks to be you. Yeah, it just runs on LInux and Windows which means it runs on 95% of the computers out there. It don't run on your machine, well fucking though. The source is available, port it your own damn self or shut the hell up.
Actually there was a Mac developer who posts on Schneier's blog occasionally who was interested in writing a Mac port -- actually a really nice one, some sort of module that would have allowed Apple's existing Disk Image framework to deal with Truecrypt ".tc" files just like it now handles ".dmg"'s. Apparently the guy talked to the TrueCrypt devs and they were totally hostile to any outside development. They wouldn't do a damn thing, wouldn't include anything in the mainstream tree, etc. The best the guy was ever going to be able to do wasn't a Mac port, it was going to be a Mac fork. Since the Mac platform already has its own encrypted disc image format, and keeping two forked codebases compatible with each other (particularly if one group was hostile to the other) would be a huge undertaking, the idea was dropped.God damn I'm in a foul mood today. My porn database blew up lastnight now I have to spend the next 3 days re-indexing it.
If this is true (and to be fair, I've never heard TrueCrypt's side of the story), it's disappointing. But it wouldn't totally surprise me; free software projects can develop just as much 'not invented here' syndrome as some commercial projects, and be almost as exclusive.
Plus, it's also been pointed out to me that TrueCrypt isn't GPL. So not only are you forking a program, you're forking a non-GPL program, which is a bit of a legal risk. Not necessarily because the TrueCrypt license is bad per se, but just because it's a unique license, and unlike forking a GPL project, which is a more or less routine occurrence, but you'd be using a license that's never been tested, and the original authors of which might decide to use against you.
Not hard to see why nobody's gone down that path.
I have a strong suspicion that some of the controversy there was manufactured; both Gorman and GMU got exactly what they wanted out of that whole affair. Gorman launched his career, and GMU is considered a premiere program if you want to get involved with national security: they have a multidisciplinary "Critical Infrastructure Protection" program, a graduate degree in Biodefense, and a long list of former Beltway insiders on faculty. Their institutional culture is worlds apart from what people who are familiar with the big IT campuses might expect. While I'm not saying that the entire thing was scripted ahead of time, they rolled over so fast that it's blindingly obvious where their interests lay.
PiD was the first really 'dark' thematic shooter I played; I scared the bejeezus out of myself for about a week playing that thing. Compared to Doom, which I think came out around the same time and was all the rage with my PC-using friends, PiD was way ahead on things like actually having a coherent plot, and requiring a little thought to get past some parts.
I'm not sure whether it's ever been officially resolved as to whether Pathways is part of the Marathon/Halo canon, but it could certainly be integrated as a far-off prequel. It's certainly ripe for a remake that would firm up its relationship to the other games. (As are the Marathon games, really; spruced up onto a modern engine they'd probably work well.)
And porn is a bad thing because...?
They do this at a lot of schools. At Penn State I believe it's called "Nittany Notes." It's quite an operation; to get hired as a note-taker by them, you need to show your transcript (so that your GPA can be verified -- they don't want D students taking notes), and they have fairly strict requirements on not missing any classes, and the deadlines by which you have to have your notes transcribed and submitted.
And I don't think they ask the professors' permission; in class you never have any idea who's just taking notes for themselves and who's taking for Nittany Notes. (They often have multiple note-takers in the same class to make sure there's good coverage, particularly on popular courses. When you buy the note pack you get all of them.)
Not sure how long they've been around for but I think it's a while. I suspect there are probably similar operations at most larger university campuses.
The GPG program that you download doesn't do full-disk encryption; it's pretty purely a file/stream encryption program. I suppose you could use it for disk encryption, by streaming data through it on its way to and from a device, but that's not how it's normally used.
There is/was a program around that used GPG to do FDE, called GPGDisk. I'm not sure whether it used your installed copy of GPG to do the heavy lifting, or if it just included the same code, or worked using the same algorithms but had its own totally separate crypto engine. It was reasonably popular for a while, but I think a lot of people who were using it have now switched to TrueCrypt.
However, GPGDisk did offer some unique features, like the ability to encrypt a disk using a GPG key, and some fairly fine-grained access controls that you could set up for multiple users (IIRC). Every once in a while someone will mention it on the comments on Bruce Schneier's blog, so apparently it's still getting some use. But it doesn't offer some of the neater features that TrueCrypt does, like plausible deniability or containers-in-containers, I don't believe.
There is an attitude that sometimes percolates up that seems to posit that the 'best' belief system is whatever the most people believe, or that the overall success of a society which generally has a certain belief system, is an objective measure of the superiority of that belief system. I'm simply saying that there are too many confounding factors to make that a valid real-world metric.
I think the secularist philosophies are objectively better than mystical ones because they don't require arationality or faith; this is totally independent of the success or failure of societies embracing them, on anything less than an infinite timescale.
So clearly, we need more special features in compilers!
How about we give away 650MB of code comments -- we'll call it, uh, "programmer's commentary" -- with each copy? And an interactive "Hello, world"?
Nothing wrong with being a weirdo, of course. The big civilizations of South/Central (and the southern part of North) America were almost nearly wiped out by disease. The conquistadors get more credit than they really deserve for their downfall, there. Had it not been for smallpox, Cortez would have been impaled on the end of a spear, and that would have been the end of that. It's not as though the civilizations there were "inferior" in some social/racial sense that caused them to lose.
Where the Catholic Church should be everlastingly damned for is the cultural genocide that came afterwards. It wasn't enough just to topple their society, but the conquistadors had to finish the job by burning everything they could get their hands on. That's the true ugliness of what happened in the Americas; the actual downfall of the civilizations there was mostly unavoidable from the moment the Europeans stepped ashore.