well - you asked about the wars. You might want to read James Jones works. Do a google search. I read from here to eternity when I was in grade 8 and it had quite an impact on me. If you read the books (best - do this first) then read books like the 20th century march of the dead it might give you some idea of what the war was like and why young men would be willing to throw away their lives.
Now to the rail guns.
Please consider the last shuttle disaster. Note that it took place at high elevation.
Clearly, a projectile launched at the surface must have more kinetic energy than the same projectile at the shuttle's location. Clearly at low elevation the effect of the atmosphere is many many times worse (follows an exponential in fact)
If the shuttle has a tough time protecting itself against re-entry then imagine the order of magnitude worse problem of gaining orbit from stored kinetic energy.
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Any system that is going to work has to feed energy into the launch craft on a more or less linear schedual. Given the ability to get a craft airborne using external energy feeds - then clearly we should be able to sustain the energy flow into the craft and there is a continous energy draw function and a continous energy drain function and a continuous drag/heat function and similar lift functions.
As a mathematician who has not tried to caclulate a window through these functions... my gut feeling says there is one and it is rather large.
So you can go to hyper velocities but you must choose a high elevation where you do this - where the air is rather thin.
Brute force blasting from the surface will gain a melted bullet. But - you might hide a nice little spacecraft in the wake..... agree?
I do not agree with you. The best the x-prize achieves is tiny compared to orbit. Just calculate the kinetic energy at orbital speeds verses the potential gravitational energy.
When you do so I think you will find you are comparing GIANT PUMKINS to cherry tomatoes.
Have you compared the ratio of the density of helium at atmospheric pressure to that of air at the same pressure? You might note that hydrogen is about 2x as good as helium but has some undesirable qualities.
Having done that ratio please re-do the calculations using a perfect vaccuum in place of the light gas.
Next you might want to consider the mechnical strength of the container holding the vaccuum and consider what happens if the container developes a little leak.
Suppose we build a BIG BLACK BALLOON. We put ordinary air into this great balloon and then shine a whole shitload of mirrors on it. This is not a new idea because Archimedes designed same as a weapon deployed in the hills and had the army use their shields as mirrors to concentrate the sunlight on the Romans they attacked Syracuse. From a distance he lit the Roman ships ablase!
And so our balloon can rise above the planet bathed in the glory of the sunlight reflected from many mirrors... while below, tethered by a great cable is a glider and its passengers.
Upon achieving altitude the cable is cut and the glider then floats on currents of air for a great distance until finally it lands at the next airfeild where another great balloon awaits it.
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Actually balloons have lifted to over 100,000 feet but they didn't carry a large payload.
If you look at the website there are many other things to laugh about. One of them is the "drag" windmill.
Basically the same idea was put forth years ago and took the form of a merry-go-round construction that sat on the top of a large pole. Some of them fell off and sort of cart-wheeled down the terrain. But they were built and investors did invest their hard earned sheckles in them.
The problem with these ideas is that in order to extract some of the energy from the wind, you must slow down some of the wind. The most efficient design for this is an air foil and this is why airplane propellers and wings are designed as such.
It would be pretty funny looking at a helechopper with a big flapping contraption up top - but it was tried - sometime before the turn of the century I think.
hahaha
Now I will give you an idea that might actually work. Since I don't have the funds to patent it nor to actually build it I will contribute this to the well being of the human race. At least everyone can point to the "prior art".
We can place into orbit a series of mirrors which are dispersed over a fairly wide width of orbits and are each reasonable small collectors.
Next we can harness a large number of these collectors to focus their sunlight into a fairly small region in the atmosphere and arrange to have a plane with black wings there. Note that any sunlight not falling on the wings spreads out harmlessly since the incident angles of the beams are not in alignment.
This can pipe a considerable amount of energy into a small area which the airplane can then transport into a chamber designed to heat a compressed air mass.
The basic operation of a turbine is this: You cram a bunch of air into a small chamber and heat it up by burning fuel. You let it expand and differentially push on a larger area as it does so and since the air mass is now hotter you get a larger volume of air doing the pushing and the push more than cancels the drag of the intake side of the engine. Go look at a basic ramjet design.
Well - it is pretty easy to turn a mirror. They can track a solar powered aircraft like this quite accurately. Thus we can have many 100's of suns intensity falling on the upper surface of our solar airplane.
Of course - material science to collect and transport this energy into a chamber which is analagous to the combustion chamber of a jet engine (or a ram jet engine for that matter) is not going to be easy... but at least - we have some energy to play around with.
Using a system like this we might even be able to eventually get craft into orbit.
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well - so much for the pipe dreams. Something like this might take 100,000 mirrors in space. Imagine the tracking system. hahaha.
Shit like this has happened to me. I got a speeding ticket one time for sitting at a red light - behind another car.
The police car did follow me. I was going down the road under the speed limit and he turned in behind me from a side street and followed me. I was not speeding ever. I knew he was there because the light was red and he was sitting at it when I drove past - through a green light.
I'm clearly not going to speed when I see the cop pulling in behind me - right?
Well - the next light was red and I stopped behind another car which was also waiting for the light to turn green.
The light turned green - we started off - a few minutes later the cops lights are flashing and I'm pulled over. After another few minutes I was handed a ticket and the cop suggested I was speeding ont he bridge way back about 2 miles - 2 miles before the intersection he was at when I drove past him.
He could net even _SEE_ the bridge from where he was. Asshole!
When I complained he says "Tell it to the judge!". Ya right - you can sort of see the assholes and how the system works... your word against the cop and guess who wins eh?
Well - since that time I have fought every ticket I have recieved. Fuck them. I have won virtually every case too.
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Oh - here is another case. I was given a parking ticket. My van was legally parked, there was still time on the meter and I was at it - unlocking the drivers door as the cop comes walking around the back. He could not see me there because the van is a rather high vehicle.
As I opened the door I notice the ticket. So I ran around and grabbed at and then caught up with the guy because there was still time on the meter.
His explanation? Well - its expired by now! I think most people would have fed him a knuckle sandwitch!
I was on the phone to his superiors within the hour. I called the aldermen and the major's office and demanded an explanation. They cancelled the ticket.
The bottom line is that this shit goes on way too often. There are a lot of bad cops out there - just as there are good cops. But the botttom line is that traffic enforcment is more or less a money grab and it should be viewed as such and the public should fight it every way they can.
Any ticket fought in court costs THEM money, even if you lose. So fight every damn one folks. Its your civic duty.
it takes more energy to produce the ethanol than you get back in stored chemical energy. I am sure that no one disputes that.
I dispute this. Having grown up on a grain farm I have a very good handle on the fuel and fertilizer inputs. Being a hobbiest beer and winemaker I have a very good handle on the mashing and fermentation processes. Being very good friends with a fellow who runs a commercial water distillation plant I have a very good handle on the state of high efficieny distillation systems.
This idea stems from work by David Plimentel at Cornel. (see my other post) David analysed horribly ineffecient coal fired distillation systems. His assumptions are incorrect.
One example is as follows. corn can easily produce over 100 bushles per acre. Barley can easily produce over 40 bushels per acre in the dry land farming areas I grew up in. Since barley weighs in at 48 lbs/bushel - that is nominally a tonne of grain per acre.
A 40 acre feild can be plowed in about 6 hours using a tractor and plow that runs about 3 1/2 MPH and burns about 3-4 gallons of fuel per hour. This means that plowing the feild can be done with under about 20 gallons of fuel - or about 1/2 barrel. A tractor of this size is about 70 horsepower and that compares favorably to your SUV which burns 3 gallons of fuel per hour while running down the highway at 60 MPH while it gets 20 MPG fuel economy.
It takes about 4 trips over the feild - one for 1st spring working, another for sowing the grain, another to take it off and another for working the field in the fall. Typically it will lay fallow for one year in 4 and during this year it will need to be worked 3-4 times. Since each trip requires in the ball park of a 1/2 barrel of fuel, the farmer will use about 1/2 x 4 x 1.5 = 3 barrels per crop for the 40 acre feild. To this we need to add fertilizers and these typically are applied when I was doing it at about 40 lbs/acre and each sack of fertilizer weighted 80 lbs so that 40 acre field needed 20 sacks of fertilizer or about 3/4 tonne. Present day fertilization levels are much higher mind you.
Nevertheless, chemically the fertilizer was something like 11-48-0 or 11-55-0 and this translates to 11% nitrogen by weight - typically in the form of ammonium phosphate. The chemical formula is NH4H2P2O5. If we look at jsut the nitrogen which is typically made by starting with Methane (CH4) and replacing the Carbon with a Nitrogen then we are looking at about 11% by weight Nitrogen (which is what the 1st number stands for) and that works out to adding about 11% of 3/4 of a tonne of Nitrogen to the feild. This works out to about 165 lbs of Nitrogen.
On a per pound basis the energy in Methane is not all that much different than liquid fuels... a few percent but within 15%. There is more energy in the carbon bonds than the hydrogen bonds so fuels like Diesel carry more BTU per pound than gasoline (predomenantly parafines: C(n)H(2n+2)) and similarly gasoline carries more BTU per pound than methane.
atomic weights: C=12, N=14, H=1 This implies that CH4=16 and NH4=18. They are within 12% of each other. Thus it is fair to say that 165 LBS of Nitrogen on the feild is about the same as 18/14x165=212lbs NH4.
Since the methane is lighter it is fair to say that we'll need in the ball park of 200 lbs CH4 as a chemical feedstock. At 8 lbs/gallon (Gasoline), 200 lbs represents about 25 gallons or just over 1/2 barrel of oil equivalent (BOE).
Well - we started with the farmer using 3 barrels of oil in the form of liquid fuel to plough the land. Next we calculated the energy input by way of Nitrogen in the form of NH4 and got about 1/2 barrel more - albeit at a low fertilization level so lets double it!!! Now our farmer is up to 4 barrels for his crop of 40 acres. That is 10 acres per barrel... but we do have other unaccounted for energy inputs like the coal used t
It was David Pimentel from Cornel who was perhaps most vocal on this idea. He's an entomologist, not a chemist and it does show because he is out to lunch on his energy calcualtions.
However, that being said, apparently the industrial processes he analysed involved using coal fired distillation plants which were horribly energy inefficient.
The bottom line is that such a system can be an energy collector - however there are serious problems when it comes to sustainability because the nutrient cycle and top soil maintenance must be factored in as well. In general, the farming community is minning the soils and they openly admit they are doing so - but they feel they are powerless to do anything about it because of the economic pressure.
As a friend of mine who farms several sections stated, without the fertilizers they are sunk! It may enlighten many that a couple years ago with the natural gas crisis the North American Nitrogen fertilizer industry more or less shut down. It is apparently back on its feet - but don't count on it staying there for long. Of course we'll see these changes in the rear view mirror.
One thing anyone reading this post should realise is that ethanol is a hydrocarbon, and the only source of that carbon is from atmospheric CO2. IE CO2 is a nuitrient.
The idea of CO2 being responsible for global warming is just preposterous and this can be confirmed with a little work. The most important green house gas on the planet is water vapour - and water vapour is about 100 times more prevalent in the atmosphere than CO2 is. The relative consentrations are from 2-4% verses 365 ppm = 0.0365% In fact, the uncertanty in the change in consentrations of the water vapour is about 2 orders of magnitute greater that the total amount of CO2.
The IPCC (intergovernmental panel on climate change) in chapter 7 talks about the H2O modeling in the current climatology models. Typically atmospheric H2O is ignored. This is something they admit they need to beef up.
Next it is argued that since water vapour is relatively short lived in the atmosphere - that it can safely be ignored. An argument like this is akin to saying that since my humidifer needs refilling that it doesn't work.
All over the planet aquifers are being drained for irrigation. All over the planet rivers are dammed for irrigation. Evaporation over the oceans hasn't changed much... but... evaporation on land has. Instead of a thin ribbon of water flowing down a river bed to the ocean, we now have huge expanses of lucious foliage which transpires water 24x7 all spring, summer and fall.
Put it this way - the humidifer called irrigation is working pretty well!!! Now, if you check precipitation records from the turn of the century , you will find that the incidence of days of rainfall with over 1" precipitation, with between 1-2", with between 2-3" and with between 3-4" as measured by events per decade is up about 20% since the turn of the century.
That is quite consistant with the idea of huge increases in irrigation.
So our most significant greenhouse gas - a stronger absorber in ALL wavelengths - is clearly increasing.
CO2, if it has any effect at all, is pale in comparision to the impact of water vapour.
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The issue of CO2's role as a greenhouse gas is important because this artical addresses the idea of somehow discarding the Carbon as if it is unwanted in the ethanol. Well - there is more energy in the carbon bonds than in the Hydrogen bonds so by doing this, in all liklihood most of the energy in the ethanol is wasted. In short - nothing makes much sense with this approach.
What do they do with the excess carbon? does it come out as coke? If so then what so they propose to do with it?
If we have the ethanol then about all that makes sense is to use it like we would use gasoline.
Some people have proposed that this is the beginning of the end of NASA. There is quite a lot of merit in this idea.
First you redirect the efforts into a direction that is going to be hideously expensive. In order to achieve this goal you abandon pretty much everything else. Then when the elusive goals of landing a man on Mars clearly are seen for what they are - an expensive boondoggle - you simply abandon that project and since there is nothing else left you can shut down all of NASA.
The problem with this future for mankind - one firmly planted on earth - like the proverbial ostrich is this:
There is a lot of energy in space and it can be harvested quite inexpensively. This has been known for decades, but with oil and gas cheap and plentiful on planet earth - space based energy systems really never were explored, much less exploited.
This is now changing. Is it really cheaper to fight wars in the middle east than to harvest energy from space? What of the lives lost? Is it really the case that anonymous teenage boys dying in a desert in Iraq is ok because:"----" You fill in the blanks. With enough creativity pretty much anything can be justified.
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The nuclear program was set back decades through carefully crafted fear mongering. The movie "China Syndrom" is an excellent example of this. I wonder how much influence wealthy Texas oil barons had in this. Their oil would not nearly have had the value it has were a strong nuclear energy industry around. So instead of cheap reliable energy, we end up with such a regulatory mess that even huge corporations are afraid to propose a reactor. The latest example of this is Exelon (EXC:NYSE) who invested with the South African firm, Escom, in the development of the pebble bed reactor. Clearly they felt that the manufactured opposition to nuclear power would be great enough that it is not feasible in the USA to consider building a plant, so they dropped the idea.
I personally think it is rather sad that the USA considers fighting a war so they can grab Arabian oil and gas is preferable to building safe nuclear power plants. But then what would a Canadian know of USA politics?
Thankfully the rest of the world doesn't seem inclined to play along with these mad ideas and France and South Africa as well as India, and several Asian countries have vibrant nuclear programs.
But even this is twisted in the USA disinformation machine. Under the guise of nuclear non-proliferation it is suggested that since a power plant can produce Plutonium, that nuclear energy is inherantly unsafe. Then the USA goes off and builds reactors specifically designed to produce the plutonium. While the rest of the world is told to not use nuclear as a source of energy the USA meanwhile builds and deploys an arsenal of weaponry that boggles the imagination.
Of course while all this is taking place, the peaceful use of nuclear power is discouraged because of the "long lived wastes which take centuries to decay". Of course, there is no real effort to develope scintillation technology that will burn the wastes and turn them into electricity, and in fact, the vast majority never even hear that such technology is possible!!!
How is this any different than the politics that took place when DuPont brought out synthetic fibers and meanwhile Congress passed legilation that outlawed Hemp? They were so crafty back then that they employed the spanish word Marijuana rather than the common English word - because they bloody well knew that if the average joe sixpack knew what they were up to that they would never get away with it!
But since then, how many kids have been jailed and have criminal records because of these insane laws? How many kids have now lost their parents and are growing up in foster care and orphanages because of the antics of the DEA?
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Well - this story is about NASA and decommisioning the Hubble. I personally think we need to be very vocal about
I have no intention of drooling in this glass of wine I am enjoying... but...
This is a good idea. It is a very good idea. Every real profession needs to have both roots and wings. The idea has merit from many points of view. And the more I think about it the more merit I think the idea has.
Having more than 25 years experiance and more than 20 years as a consultant, developer and so forth... I can say that from my perspective there are patterns I have witnessed which I find very disturbing.
I will summarize. I personally consider many (and perhaps the majority) in this profession to be totally incompetant. Having said this - I'll contrast to the feild of Geology and Geophysics (both feilds of which I have strong ties). In my years of working with the Geologists, Geophysists, Reservoir Engineers in every major corporation and instution which has paid me A LOT OF MONEY - I have NEVER run into a single instance where the cheif geologist, or cheif engineer or cheif geophysist was not very well respected by their collegues for their experiance, their judgement and so forth.
Yet - in my proffession. The horror stories I can tell and the incompetance.... whoa boy! Abject stupidity abounds.
Let me ask. If you look at a gneiss rock - most professional geologists can tell you the minerals and related rocks. So can I actually. To be promoted to cheif whatever - you gotta know your stuff.
What of the IT people?
Do you want to know of the manager of a computer department who didn't know the numeric data types the computer supported? what of the programming languages and what they supported? Would you like to know of the suggestion to try to develope a Production Acccounting package using a programming language where you could not write a callable function/subroutine? Where the variables were restricted to A1, A2, B1, B2 and Same with $?
This was a major oil company of Royal Dutch decent that tried this trick.
This is just the tip of the 'berg. How about the consulting firm out of Winnipeg,CA that recommended after intensive study the purchase of a computer which you could not install enough disk drives to carry the data... and at the same time recomended the development of the applications software in a language that did not support a data type that could even count the number of oil/gas wells drilled - much less the technical data collected.
Oh - and after 3 years not a single line of code was written.
They were doing _HIGH LEVEL_ work!
In my entire life I have experianced such a deplorable level of BULLSHIT as seems to course normally through the feilds of comp science and IT. Yet when I look at related fields - I am totally impressed with the caliber of the work that is done.
A simple example in the feild of Physics for instance can be found by reading the Feynman books.
If anyone who chooses to read this post cares to call up the local public library and ask what they have on Feynman.... perhaps ask for the Feynman Lectures on Physics ON TAPE - ALL OF THEM - then this would be a good start.
Feynman knew his stuff. So should IT people. I for instance should not have to walk into a room full of IT people and find that not one knows what COMP-3 is and why it needs to be there and why C++ really doesn't do the same job.
To draw this post to a close. A geologist is expected to know his mineralogy.
In the IT world - even the analagous basic level of knowledge of the data types the computer or language supports is often mixed in with the vapid ideas of abstration that float through the ether of higher intellectual thought.
If you get slapped with a libel suit I think it will be too good for you. The BBC, an organizaiton with a history of fair and honest news coverage, has with this story stooped to the slimey bottom of the lowest gutter of bad journalizm.
I am refering of course to the libelous story written by Stephen Evans Titled: Linux cyber-battle turns nasty.
With this story your organization stoops to lows I personally never would have thought possible. I have lost the respect I once had. If your people cannot do even the most basic research before running off and spewing such filth, then how can I trust that in other areas somehow a much higher standard applies and what the BBC reports actually has merit?
In the OpenSource development movement, there has been a considerable amount of work directed at detrmining the origin and motivation behind this (and other) viruses. It appears that this particular virus originated in Russia and has ties with spammers.
So rather than report news, your Mr.Stephen Evans instead finds himself a big wide libelous paintbrush which he then uses to smear millions of Linux users. But this is not good enough! He also accuses: "the run-of-the-mill geeks who wreak damage on the unsuspecting computer user".
I am a run-of-the-mill-geek. I make my living honerably as a programmer and have for over 25 years. I use Linux. My doughter now uses Linux and my son will be switching to Linux after giving up on his 21st install of Windows 2000. So is my son (who is a student in 3rd year business managment) to be condemed as a "zealot" because Windows 2000 self distructs and needs to be re-installed over and over and over.
Why am I being smeared as a "zealot"? I have developed software on over 13 other operating systems including most of the windows products. I can say without a doubt that IMHO linux is a breath of fresh air. Kudos to the OpenSource movement and the millions of "run-of-the-mill-geeks" who donate their time and skills to the betterment of this world.
Our Mr. Stephen Evans has shown himself to be an intellectual light weight player, a cyber ludite if you will. What is unacceptable is that his editor and the BBC actually published this spew.
Look - I live in an area where we don't need much security. I have no bars on my windows. I have no deadbolts on my doors. I have locks that can be picked rather easily. When my kids were young they used to leave the windows open so that if they lost their keys they could crawl in.
Lax security is not necessarily an invitation for theift.
HOWEVER...
If security starts to became an issue in this area and B&E started to become a serious consern, then someone criticising my lax security as a possible reason my property walks out the front door would be quite justified.
Suppose I am the first person in the area to experiance a theift. Suppose my car drives down the street one day. Someone who points out that the fact that I left it unlocked, running with the keys in the ignition, parked on the street, while I causally ate my eggs for breaky might have a point that I maybe deserve what came my way! eh?
Well - the above example may sound ludicrous - but the average joe sixpack and unfortunately many corporate managers are simply so naive about securing their computer networks that the analogy of leaving the keys in the ignition is more apt than many people care to admit.
Most people are basically quite honest. But if you leave your wallet in the middle of a parking lot do you really expect to get it back with the money intact?
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BTW - I actually did find a wallet in the parking lot one day and it was returned with the money intact... so there! I do not condone theift and dishonesty and I am not trying to justify it. I'm trying to be a realist ok?
I've posted this unpopular sentiment before and I guess I am still on the pedestal.
Those machines, and many others are just as open to our enemies the likes of which include Osama Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein (before he was captured) and many others. Had they cracked in (which they may well have done and may well be doing), the machines will probably not be used as a receptical for kiddie porn.
Were it not for kids that are just mucking about poking their collective digits where the authorities would rather not be poked - our authorities would remain FAT DUMB and HAPPY dreaming their collective bliss.
We live in the real world where we have many real enemies. We need secure systems that we can count on. Each time some kid pokes his finger into a vulnerable spot it helps to educate the masses that they really do need to pay attention.
Perhaps the judge in this case realises this. 200 hours is a suitable punishment, even if it is perhaps a little severe.
One thing that I think needs to be recognised is that there are many would be very competant systems admins who frequent slash dot. Many of these people would relish a well paying job and could be gainfully employed closing these security holes. Perhaps our authorities and joe sixpack in general should open their eyes and smell the coffee here.
There is no reason on earth that I can think of for an email system to run code received arbitraily from the web.
personally I shut down these really bad ideas in 1997. Personally I received more than 100 copies of mydoom in the last few days.
So it does appear many people who have legitimate reasons to put my email address in their contact lists have no idea how to be prudent about safe sex in cyberspace. This being said - I am optimistic they are learning.
Well - I have outsourced... not for programming but it is possible we will do that to. We needed some commercial artistic work done - illustrations.
After posting a notice in the nearby college of art and trying to work with some local talent - out of the blue we were contacted by some people from Pondicherry.
They offered to give the work a whirl and they did an absolutely excellent job. None of the local workers did. In fact - the local artists (three so far) have not produced a single thing of any use to us. This does nto mean the present one will not come through - just that to date this has not happened but at least this time I know we have found considerable talent.
The bottom line is pretty simple. If Local talent isn't up to the job then we will outsource.
What most people to not realise is that in court most people are being paid. You only need to look about the room and surmise who is not being paid to know how unjust the system is.
I really don't think this is going to go very far - primarily because it seems to me that a spammer from say bigisp.com can say he is ANY OTHER CUSTOMER from bigisp.com.
Suppose we have joesixpack as an example - and he has a laptop. At home he connects via his ISP and sends an email to his mom. The letter is received because the from address is valid in his ISP's SPF list. Then he goes to work and tries to send her another email. This time the email will get rejected. So he tries to send it through his ISP's mail server. Since he is not connected to his ISP's system, the email is rejected.
This means that joesixpack has to somehow LOG IN to a server and go through an authentication.
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This sort of comes to the nub of the problem. Authentication. If Joesixpack is a good guy - he should be able to send email to anyone - and if he is not a good guy we will find out fairly quicky and we can fine him or pull his priviliges.
The issue is not much different than driving a car actually. It needs to be dealt with in the same way as traffic infractions... perhaps through the police.
One way to implement something that will work is via issuing a certifiation. At the time joesixpack signs up with his ISP - the ISP could act as a CA and certify him as a good guy. They can record his identiy just as they recorded that he paid his bill. At this time they could install a cert for JoeSixpack into his email client - AND - bond it to his machine. There are many ways to bond it - including using a dongle or smartcard. But a practical way would simply bond it to the hard drive. I'm sure ways can be invented so that certs cannot be simply pulled from one machine and stuck into another.
If Joe later abuses his cert - then his ISP can blacklist it and refuse to issue another. Also - the ISP's can trade blacklist information just as banks and businesses trade credit information.
The mail clients can be modified to send the cert and the MTA's could check for and eventually reject any unsigned mail.
As for the ISP's being a trusted CA? Well - we have to trust some people somewhere. The question would really boil down to which ISP's trust which other ISP's and they could cooperatively run their own blacklist.
With a system like this - I would think that an ISP that is shady would find their email services would be in jeopardy of being refused and that should serve to keep the ISP's in line to.
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I also think the spamd solution in OpenBSD has a lot of merit. Spamd does not block email. Instead - if the sender is blacklisted - spamd accepts it very very slowly. This creates an incentive for the owner of the mail server sending out the spam to deal with it. With spamd in wide spread usage the problem comes under control in a number of ways.
(1) suzy spammer will find if she runs a spam server that it can't spew very fast - because her IP address and/or domain will end up in the RBL rather quickly and the moment this happens. Receiving MTA's slow to a crawl.
(2) If Suzy spammer tries to send through her ISP's account - the same thing happens but now the ISP has to deal with the problem. No ISP's will want to have a significant number of their IP addresses in an RBL. Since this will pose a significant admin problem - the ISP has a huge incentive to give Suzy spammer the boot.
(3) We have some bad ISP's and these people will find their errant ways are causing themselves grief.
(4) It might encourage ISP's to actually issue static IP's which many of us want anyways. Note we would NOT have nearly the spam problem if static IP addresses were issued.
What will work is a certification that is revolkable. The concept is embodied in public key encryption and certification.
Basically - all we need to do is this. We have a trusted institution like a bank or your local government office issue a digital ID to everyone who wishes to participate... purely voluntary.
Next - those who wish to participate use an email client that refuses to accept anything from anyone who does not have a valid certificate.
Next - we set up a black hole list and the email clients refuse emails from anyone in the blackhole list.
Next - we make this list available to the issuing authorities and if they re-issue we blackhole that authority.
By doing this we create a beuracratic nightmare for our wanna be spammers and everyone else is pretty much free to go on as they have.
I for one will NOT join an opt in list because there are far to many people who have legitimate reasons to contact me. Yet the spammers? well - there are not that many of them... they are really a fringe group actually.
This is like saying that women should not be able to give sex out for free because it competes with the rights of hookers to rent what they got at exhorbitant prices.
The Model M is still being made and there are PS/2 to USB adapters.
The new ones are pretty expensive though. As of a couple months ago I could have picked up over 100 Model "M"'s in varying states of health for under $20 bux each. I suppose to cover my time and energy I could perhaps sell them for say $40 bux plus shipping. Still - that is a good price.
If you start out with a nice keyboard you can stay with it. I had my heart set on an IBM Model "M" when they first came out in the 1986 - but they came attacked to an IBM 286 boat anchore back then - so I had to wait until they found their way into the recyclers.
Now they are available in quantity for under $20 bux and they are the best bargain in the world!!!
Check them out folks. None of the new junk even compairs.
Well - I expected this. You see - if SCO does not hold the copyrights then their case is substantially weaker.
The first thing the court will do is to determine what the contracts between Novel and SCO are really all about. Money changed hands. SCO must have recieved something for the money they paid - but what? The court may deem SCO bought the copyrights even though Novel clearly had no intentions of giving them up.
This brings up the issue of Novel down the track fallowing in SCO's footsteps. Corporations have interests, not friends. We all need to realise this.
I think PC's should be designed to be about the size and configuration of a carton of cigarettes... and they should clip together like lego bricks.
The configuration would be really easy to build and upgrade.
1) we would need a standardized card to card communications connector. This is already designed for the PC104 standard.
2) each card gets mounted in an extruded standardized aluminum carrier shell, and this forms a module. The card edge connecotrs would probably be mechanically fastened to the shell. These shells might have a varying thickness of anywhere from say 1/2 to 2" with AIR HOLES designed to cool the enclosed device. Power is external and in its own module.
By doing this, we end up with no heat problems and we have the mechanical protection for the device/card built in at the factory. There could be a top and bottom plate if desired adding extra security.
3) Disk drives, CD drives, video subsystems can all be mounted in such a system. I would suggest that a 3 1/2" form factor would be ideal - but I suppose we'd have to go with 5 1/4 in order to accomodate CD and DVD. Alternativly we introduce a 3.5" CD and DVD format which is quite doable... we can already buy 3.5" CD's that run in the 5 1/4" drives.
4) Power should be preferably a nominal 12 volt. By doing this we can put a big hogging 12 volt battery between the inverter and the computer so we have automatically designed in UPS capability.
The present design of UPS systems is pure insanity. First we take the power in at 120/240 and step it down to 12 volts. When the line power drops we have to pull the 12 back up to 120/240 and feed it into the internal power supply which steps it back down to 5 and 12 volts.
If we just run 12 volts into the system then we eliminate a major source of heat and simplify the UPS to boot - and create the opportuinty to use even a cheap car battery for UPS backups. Note: I don't recomend car batteries - but I did put a big hogging 60 amp hour SBS from Hawker on my UPS's. Of course - they work fine - all lead acid batteries produce the same voltage per cell and your typical UPS systems are either 12 volt or 24 volt inside.
5) All connections should be on the front. Power should be from the side and be channeled module to modual through a main power bus that connects via an appropriate plug. Note that IBM developed ideas like this with their 80 pin SCA hard drives where one connector does it all. Raid systems have done this for years with hot swap modules.
6) A slight variation would use a raid idea with hot swappable modules. One should just be able to zip out to the store and buy say a new hard drive and plug it in. What we have to do now is nutz. Pull the case out from under the desk - pull out 50 odd cables, 1/2 dismanatle the thing then put it all back together again.
Hell - manufactures would sell more equipment if we could upgrade easily.
The 286 I bought the day the Challenger blew up is still running. What do you mean "So old". Electronics has at least a 15 year life expectancy.
I told you how you can turn those machines into fully modren machines that can serve the needs of your people for years to come - and what do you respond with?
You want to turn gut them!!!
Well - if your desktop that you are running on these "DUMB TERMINALS" is reasonable then you need the RAM and CPU in them or you will simply not get decent performance.
Frankly - I think you are pointed in the wrong direction. When I say this I am being generous. You are lucky I am not your boss.
Slashdot Mirror
well - you asked about the wars. You might want to read James Jones works. Do a google search. I read from here to eternity when I was in grade 8 and it had quite an impact on me. If you read the books (best - do this first) then read books like the 20th century march of the dead it might give you some idea of what the war was like and why young men would be willing to throw away their lives.
Now to the rail guns.
Please consider the last shuttle disaster. Note that it took place at high elevation.
Clearly, a projectile launched at the surface must have more kinetic energy than the same projectile at the shuttle's location. Clearly at low elevation the effect of the atmosphere is many many times worse (follows an exponential in fact)
If the shuttle has a tough time protecting itself against re-entry then imagine the order of magnitude worse problem of gaining orbit from stored kinetic energy.
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Any system that is going to work has to feed energy into the launch craft on a more or less linear schedual. Given the ability to get a craft airborne using external energy feeds - then clearly we should be able to sustain the energy flow into the craft and there is a continous energy draw function and a continous energy drain function and a continuous drag/heat function and similar lift functions.
As a mathematician who has not tried to caclulate a window through these functions... my gut feeling says there is one and it is rather large.
So you can go to hyper velocities but you must choose a high elevation where you do this - where the air is rather thin.
Brute force blasting from the surface will gain a melted bullet. But - you might hide a nice little spacecraft in the wake..... agree?
I do not agree with you. The best the x-prize achieves is tiny compared to orbit. Just calculate the kinetic energy at orbital speeds verses the potential gravitational energy.
When you do so I think you will find you are comparing GIANT PUMKINS to cherry tomatoes.
Of course - the cherries are always fun!
Have you compared the ratio of the density of helium at atmospheric pressure to that of air at the same pressure? You might note that hydrogen is about 2x as good as helium but has some undesirable qualities.
Having done that ratio please re-do the calculations using a perfect vaccuum in place of the light gas.
Next you might want to consider the mechnical strength of the container holding the vaccuum and consider what happens if the container developes a little leak.
Finally - apply the 80:20 rule.
Oh - it can work alright.
Suppose we build a BIG BLACK BALLOON. We put ordinary air into this great balloon and then shine a whole shitload of mirrors on it. This is not a new idea because Archimedes designed same as a weapon deployed in the hills and had the army use their shields as mirrors to concentrate the sunlight on the Romans they attacked Syracuse. From a distance he lit the Roman ships ablase!
And so our balloon can rise above the planet bathed in the glory of the sunlight reflected from many mirrors... while below, tethered by a great cable is a glider and its passengers.
Upon achieving altitude the cable is cut and the glider then floats on currents of air for a great distance until finally it lands at the next airfeild where another great balloon awaits it.
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Actually balloons have lifted to over 100,000 feet but they didn't carry a large payload.
If you look at the website there are many other things to laugh about. One of them is the "drag" windmill.
Basically the same idea was put forth years ago and took the form of a merry-go-round construction that sat on the top of a large pole. Some of them fell off and sort of cart-wheeled down the terrain. But they were built and investors did invest their hard earned sheckles in them.
The problem with these ideas is that in order to extract some of the energy from the wind, you must slow down some of the wind. The most efficient design for this is an air foil and this is why airplane propellers and wings are designed as such.
It would be pretty funny looking at a helechopper with a big flapping contraption up top - but it was tried - sometime before the turn of the century I think.
hahaha
Now I will give you an idea that might actually work. Since I don't have the funds to patent it nor to actually build it I will contribute this to the well being of the human race. At least everyone can point to the "prior art".
We can place into orbit a series of mirrors which are dispersed over a fairly wide width of orbits and are each reasonable small collectors.
Next we can harness a large number of these collectors to focus their sunlight into a fairly small region in the atmosphere and arrange to have a plane with black wings there. Note that any sunlight not falling on the wings spreads out harmlessly since the incident angles of the beams are not in alignment.
This can pipe a considerable amount of energy into a small area which the airplane can then transport into a chamber designed to heat a compressed air mass.
The basic operation of a turbine is this: You cram a bunch of air into a small chamber and heat it up by burning fuel. You let it expand and differentially push on a larger area as it does so and since the air mass is now hotter you get a larger volume of air doing the pushing and the push more than cancels the drag of the intake side of the engine. Go look at a basic ramjet design.
Well - it is pretty easy to turn a mirror. They can track a solar powered aircraft like this quite accurately. Thus we can have many 100's of suns intensity falling on the upper surface of our solar airplane.
Of course - material science to collect and transport this energy into a chamber which is analagous to the combustion chamber of a jet engine (or a ram jet engine for that matter) is not going to be easy... but at least - we have some energy to play around with.
Using a system like this we might even be able to eventually get craft into orbit.
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well - so much for the pipe dreams. Something like this might take 100,000 mirrors in space. Imagine the tracking system. hahaha.
Shit like this has happened to me. I got a speeding ticket one time for sitting at a red light - behind another car.
The police car did follow me. I was going down the road under the speed limit and he turned in behind me from a side street and followed me. I was not speeding ever. I knew he was there because the light was red and he was sitting at it when I drove past - through a green light.
I'm clearly not going to speed when I see the cop pulling in behind me - right?
Well - the next light was red and I stopped behind another car which was also waiting for the light to turn green.
The light turned green - we started off - a few minutes later the cops lights are flashing and I'm pulled over. After another few minutes I was handed a ticket and the cop suggested I was speeding ont he bridge way back about 2 miles - 2 miles before the intersection he was at when I drove past him.
He could net even _SEE_ the bridge from where he was. Asshole!
When I complained he says "Tell it to the judge!". Ya right - you can sort of see the assholes and how the system works... your word against the cop and guess who wins eh?
Well - since that time I have fought every ticket I have recieved. Fuck them. I have won virtually every case too.
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Oh - here is another case. I was given a parking ticket. My van was legally parked, there was still time on the meter and I was at it - unlocking the drivers door as the cop comes walking around the back. He could not see me there because the van is a rather high vehicle.
As I opened the door I notice the ticket. So I ran around and grabbed at and then caught up with the guy because there was still time on the meter.
His explanation? Well - its expired by now! I think most people would have fed him a knuckle sandwitch!
I was on the phone to his superiors within the hour. I called the aldermen and the major's office and demanded an explanation. They cancelled the ticket.
The bottom line is that this shit goes on way too often. There are a lot of bad cops out there - just as there are good cops. But the botttom line is that traffic enforcment is more or less a money grab and it should be viewed as such and the public should fight it every way they can.
Any ticket fought in court costs THEM money, even if you lose. So fight every damn one folks. Its your civic duty.
it takes more energy to produce the ethanol than you get back in stored chemical energy. I am sure that no one disputes that.
I dispute this. Having grown up on a grain farm I have a very good handle on the fuel and fertilizer inputs. Being a hobbiest beer and winemaker I have a very good handle on the mashing and fermentation processes. Being very good friends with a fellow who runs a commercial water distillation plant I have a very good handle on the state of high efficieny distillation systems.
This idea stems from work by David Plimentel at Cornel. (see my other post) David analysed horribly ineffecient coal fired distillation systems. His assumptions are incorrect.
One example is as follows. corn can easily produce over 100 bushles per acre. Barley can easily produce over 40 bushels per acre in the dry land farming areas I grew up in. Since barley weighs in at 48 lbs/bushel - that is nominally a tonne of grain per acre.
A 40 acre feild can be plowed in about 6 hours using a tractor and plow that runs about 3 1/2 MPH and burns about 3-4 gallons of fuel per hour. This means that plowing the feild can be done with under about 20 gallons of fuel - or about 1/2 barrel. A tractor of this size is about 70 horsepower and that compares favorably to your SUV which burns 3 gallons of fuel per hour while running down the highway at 60 MPH while it gets 20 MPG fuel economy.
It takes about 4 trips over the feild - one for 1st spring working, another for sowing the grain, another to take it off and another for working the field in the fall. Typically it will lay fallow for one year in 4 and during this year it will need to be worked 3-4 times. Since each trip requires in the ball park of a 1/2 barrel of fuel, the farmer will use about 1/2 x 4 x 1.5 = 3 barrels per crop for the 40 acre feild. To this we need to add fertilizers and these typically are applied when I was doing it at about 40 lbs/acre and each sack of fertilizer weighted 80 lbs so that 40 acre field needed 20 sacks of fertilizer or about 3/4 tonne. Present day fertilization levels are much higher mind you.
Nevertheless, chemically the fertilizer was something like 11-48-0 or 11-55-0 and this translates to 11% nitrogen by weight - typically in the form of ammonium phosphate. The chemical formula is NH4H2P2O5. If we look at jsut the nitrogen which is typically made by starting with Methane (CH4) and replacing the Carbon with a Nitrogen then we are looking at about 11% by weight Nitrogen (which is what the 1st number stands for) and that works out to adding about 11% of 3/4 of a tonne of Nitrogen to the feild. This works out to about 165 lbs of Nitrogen.
On a per pound basis the energy in Methane is not all that much different than liquid fuels... a few percent but within 15%. There is more energy in the carbon bonds than the hydrogen bonds so fuels like Diesel carry more BTU per pound than gasoline (predomenantly parafines: C(n)H(2n+2)) and similarly gasoline carries more BTU per pound than methane.
atomic weights: C=12, N=14, H=1 This implies that CH4=16 and NH4=18. They are within 12% of each other. Thus it is fair to say that 165 LBS of Nitrogen on the feild is about the same as 18/14x165=212lbs NH4.
Since the methane is lighter it is fair to say that we'll need in the ball park of 200 lbs CH4 as a chemical feedstock. At 8 lbs/gallon (Gasoline), 200 lbs represents about 25 gallons or just over 1/2 barrel of oil equivalent (BOE).
Well - we started with the farmer using 3 barrels of oil in the form of liquid fuel to plough the land. Next we calculated the energy input by way of Nitrogen in the form of NH4 and got about 1/2 barrel more - albeit at a low fertilization level so lets double it!!! Now our farmer is up to 4 barrels for his crop of 40 acres. That is 10 acres per barrel... but we do have other unaccounted for energy inputs like the coal used t
It was David Pimentel from Cornel who was perhaps most vocal on this idea. He's an entomologist, not a chemist and it does show because he is out to lunch on his energy calcualtions.
However, that being said, apparently the industrial processes he analysed involved using coal fired distillation plants which were horribly energy inefficient.
The bottom line is that such a system can be an energy collector - however there are serious problems when it comes to sustainability because the nutrient cycle and top soil maintenance must be factored in as well. In general, the farming community is minning the soils and they openly admit they are doing so - but they feel they are powerless to do anything about it because of the economic pressure.
As a friend of mine who farms several sections stated, without the fertilizers they are sunk! It may enlighten many that a couple years ago with the natural gas crisis the North American Nitrogen fertilizer industry more or less shut down. It is apparently back on its feet - but don't count on it staying there for long. Of course we'll see these changes in the rear view mirror.
One thing anyone reading this post should realise is that ethanol is a hydrocarbon, and the only source of that carbon is from atmospheric CO2. IE CO2 is a nuitrient.
The idea of CO2 being responsible for global warming is just preposterous and this can be confirmed with a little work. The most important green house gas on the planet is water vapour - and water vapour is about 100 times more prevalent in the atmosphere than CO2 is. The relative consentrations are from 2-4% verses 365 ppm = 0.0365% In fact, the uncertanty in the change in consentrations of the water vapour is about 2 orders of magnitute greater that the total amount of CO2.
The IPCC (intergovernmental panel on climate change) in chapter 7 talks about the H2O modeling in the current climatology models. Typically atmospheric H2O is ignored. This is something they admit they need to beef up.
Next it is argued that since water vapour is relatively short lived in the atmosphere - that it can safely be ignored. An argument like this is akin to saying that since my humidifer needs refilling that it doesn't work.
All over the planet aquifers are being drained for irrigation. All over the planet rivers are dammed for irrigation. Evaporation over the oceans hasn't changed much... but... evaporation on land has. Instead of a thin ribbon of water flowing down a river bed to the ocean, we now have huge expanses of lucious foliage which transpires water 24x7 all spring, summer and fall.
Put it this way - the humidifer called irrigation is working pretty well!!! Now, if you check precipitation records from the turn of the century , you will find that the incidence of days of rainfall with over 1" precipitation, with between 1-2", with between 2-3" and with between 3-4" as measured by events per decade is up about 20% since the turn of the century.
That is quite consistant with the idea of huge increases in irrigation.
So our most significant greenhouse gas - a stronger absorber in ALL wavelengths - is clearly increasing.
CO2, if it has any effect at all, is pale in comparision to the impact of water vapour.
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The issue of CO2's role as a greenhouse gas is important because this artical addresses the idea of somehow discarding the Carbon as if it is unwanted in the ethanol. Well - there is more energy in the carbon bonds than in the Hydrogen bonds so by doing this, in all liklihood most of the energy in the ethanol is wasted. In short - nothing makes much sense with this approach.
What do they do with the excess carbon? does it come out as coke? If so then what so they propose to do with it?
If we have the ethanol then about all that makes sense is to use it like we would use gasoline.
Some people have proposed that this is the beginning of the end of NASA. There is quite a lot of merit in this idea.
First you redirect the efforts into a direction that is going to be hideously expensive. In order to achieve this goal you abandon pretty much everything else. Then when the elusive goals of landing a man on Mars clearly are seen for what they are - an expensive boondoggle - you simply abandon that project and since there is nothing else left you can shut down all of NASA.
The problem with this future for mankind - one firmly planted on earth - like the proverbial ostrich is this:
There is a lot of energy in space and it can be harvested quite inexpensively. This has been known for decades, but with oil and gas cheap and plentiful on planet earth - space based energy systems really never were explored, much less exploited.
This is now changing. Is it really cheaper to fight wars in the middle east than to harvest energy from space? What of the lives lost? Is it really the case that anonymous teenage boys dying in a desert in Iraq is ok because:"----" You fill in the blanks. With enough creativity pretty much anything can be justified.
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The nuclear program was set back decades through carefully crafted fear mongering. The movie "China Syndrom" is an excellent example of this. I wonder how much influence wealthy Texas oil barons had in this. Their oil would not nearly have had the value it has were a strong nuclear energy industry around. So instead of cheap reliable energy, we end up with such a regulatory mess that even huge corporations are afraid to propose a reactor. The latest example of this is Exelon (EXC:NYSE) who invested with the South African firm, Escom, in the development of the pebble bed reactor. Clearly they felt that the manufactured opposition to nuclear power would be great enough that it is not feasible in the USA to consider building a plant, so they dropped the idea.
I personally think it is rather sad that the USA considers fighting a war so they can grab Arabian oil and gas is preferable to building safe nuclear power plants. But then what would a Canadian know of USA politics?
Thankfully the rest of the world doesn't seem inclined to play along with these mad ideas and France and South Africa as well as India, and several Asian countries have vibrant nuclear programs.
But even this is twisted in the USA disinformation machine. Under the guise of nuclear non-proliferation it is suggested that since a power plant can produce Plutonium, that nuclear energy is inherantly unsafe. Then the USA goes off and builds reactors specifically designed to produce the plutonium. While the rest of the world is told to not use nuclear as a source of energy the USA meanwhile builds and deploys an arsenal of weaponry that boggles the imagination.
Of course while all this is taking place, the peaceful use of nuclear power is discouraged because of the "long lived wastes which take centuries to decay". Of course, there is no real effort to develope scintillation technology that will burn the wastes and turn them into electricity, and in fact, the vast majority never even hear that such technology is possible!!!
How is this any different than the politics that took place when DuPont brought out synthetic fibers and meanwhile Congress passed legilation that outlawed Hemp? They were so crafty back then that they employed the spanish word Marijuana rather than the common English word - because they bloody well knew that if the average joe sixpack knew what they were up to that they would never get away with it!
But since then, how many kids have been jailed and have criminal records because of these insane laws? How many kids have now lost their parents and are growing up in foster care and orphanages because of the antics of the DEA?
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Well - this story is about NASA and decommisioning the Hubble. I personally think we need to be very vocal about
Well - I could be moderating!!!
I have no intention of drooling in this glass of wine I am enjoying... but...
This is a good idea. It is a very good idea. Every real profession needs to have both roots and wings. The idea has merit from many points of view. And the more I think about it the more merit I think the idea has.
Having more than 25 years experiance and more than 20 years as a consultant, developer and so forth... I can say that from my perspective there are patterns I have witnessed which I find very disturbing.
I will summarize. I personally consider many (and perhaps the majority) in this profession to be totally incompetant. Having said this - I'll contrast to the feild of Geology and Geophysics (both feilds of which I have strong ties). In my years of working with the Geologists, Geophysists, Reservoir Engineers in every major corporation and instution which has paid me A LOT OF MONEY - I have NEVER run into a single instance where the cheif geologist, or cheif engineer or cheif geophysist was not very well respected by their collegues for their experiance, their judgement and so forth.
Yet - in my proffession. The horror stories I can tell and the incompetance.... whoa boy! Abject stupidity abounds.
Let me ask. If you look at a gneiss rock - most professional geologists can tell you the minerals and related rocks. So can I actually. To be promoted to cheif whatever - you gotta know your stuff.
What of the IT people?
Do you want to know of the manager of a computer department who didn't know the numeric data types the computer supported? what of the programming languages and what they supported? Would you like to know of the suggestion to try to develope a Production Acccounting package using a programming language where you could not write a callable function/subroutine? Where the variables were restricted to A1, A2, B1, B2 and Same with $?
This was a major oil company of Royal Dutch decent that tried this trick.
This is just the tip of the 'berg. How about the consulting firm out of Winnipeg,CA that recommended after intensive study the purchase of a computer which you could not install enough disk drives to carry the data... and at the same time recomended the development of the applications software in a language that did not support a data type that could even count the number of oil/gas wells drilled - much less the technical data collected.
Oh - and after 3 years not a single line of code was written.
They were doing _HIGH LEVEL_ work!
In my entire life I have experianced such a deplorable level of BULLSHIT as seems to course normally through the feilds of comp science and IT. Yet when I look at related fields - I am totally impressed with the caliber of the work that is done.
A simple example in the feild of Physics for instance can be found by reading the Feynman books.
If anyone who chooses to read this post cares to call up the local public library and ask what they have on Feynman.... perhaps ask for the Feynman Lectures on Physics ON TAPE - ALL OF THEM - then this would be a good start.
Feynman knew his stuff. So should IT people. I for instance should not have to walk into a room full of IT people and find that not one knows what COMP-3 is and why it needs to be there and why C++ really doesn't do the same job.
To draw this post to a close. A geologist is expected to know his mineralogy.
In the IT world - even the analagous basic level of knowledge of the data types the computer or language supports is often mixed in with the vapid ideas of abstration that float through the ether of higher intellectual thought.
If you get slapped with a libel suit I think it will be too good for you. The BBC, an organizaiton with a history of fair and honest news coverage, has with this story stooped to the slimey bottom of the lowest gutter of bad journalizm.
I am refering of course to the libelous story written by Stephen Evans Titled: Linux cyber-battle turns nasty.
With this story your organization stoops to lows I personally never would have thought possible. I have lost the respect I once had. If your people cannot do even the most basic research before running off and spewing such filth, then how can I trust that in other areas somehow a much higher standard applies and what the BBC reports actually has merit?
In the OpenSource development movement, there has been a considerable amount of work directed at detrmining the origin and motivation behind this (and other) viruses. It appears that this particular virus originated in Russia and has ties with spammers.
So rather than report news, your Mr.Stephen Evans instead finds himself a big wide libelous paintbrush which he then uses to smear millions of Linux users. But this is not good enough! He also accuses: "the run-of-the-mill geeks who wreak damage on the unsuspecting computer user".
I am a run-of-the-mill-geek. I make my living honerably as a programmer and have for over 25 years. I use Linux. My doughter now uses Linux and my son will be switching to Linux after giving up on his 21st install of Windows 2000. So is my son (who is a student in 3rd year business managment) to be condemed as a "zealot" because Windows 2000 self distructs and needs to be re-installed over and over and over.
Why am I being smeared as a "zealot"? I have developed software on over 13 other operating systems including most of the windows products. I can say without a doubt that IMHO linux is a breath of fresh air. Kudos to the OpenSource movement and the millions of "run-of-the-mill-geeks" who donate their time and skills to the betterment of this world.
Our Mr. Stephen Evans has shown himself to be an intellectual light weight player, a cyber ludite if you will. What is unacceptable is that his editor and the BBC actually published this spew.
I shall now post THIS letter on www.slashdot.org.
Your comments are Naive!
Look - I live in an area where we don't need much security. I have no bars on my windows. I have no deadbolts on my doors. I have locks that can be picked rather easily. When my kids were young they used to leave the windows open so that if they lost their keys they could crawl in.
Lax security is not necessarily an invitation for theift.
HOWEVER...
If security starts to became an issue in this area and B&E started to become a serious consern, then someone criticising my lax security as a possible reason my property walks out the front door would be quite justified.
Suppose I am the first person in the area to experiance a theift. Suppose my car drives down the street one day. Someone who points out that the fact that I left it unlocked, running with the keys in the ignition, parked on the street, while I causally ate my eggs for breaky might have a point that I maybe deserve what came my way! eh?
Well - the above example may sound ludicrous - but the average joe sixpack and unfortunately many corporate managers are simply so naive about securing their computer networks that the analogy of leaving the keys in the ignition is more apt than many people care to admit.
Most people are basically quite honest. But if you leave your wallet in the middle of a parking lot do you really expect to get it back with the money intact?
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BTW - I actually did find a wallet in the parking lot one day and it was returned with the money intact... so there! I do not condone theift and dishonesty and I am not trying to justify it. I'm trying to be a realist ok?
I've posted this unpopular sentiment before and I guess I am still on the pedestal.
Those machines, and many others are just as open to our enemies the likes of which include Osama Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein (before he was captured) and many others. Had they cracked in (which they may well have done and may well be doing), the machines will probably not be used as a receptical for kiddie porn.
Were it not for kids that are just mucking about poking their collective digits where the authorities would rather not be poked - our authorities would remain FAT DUMB and HAPPY dreaming their collective bliss.
We live in the real world where we have many real enemies. We need secure systems that we can count on. Each time some kid pokes his finger into a vulnerable spot it helps to educate the masses that they really do need to pay attention.
Perhaps the judge in this case realises this. 200 hours is a suitable punishment, even if it is perhaps a little severe.
One thing that I think needs to be recognised is that there are many would be very competant systems admins who frequent slash dot. Many of these people would relish a well paying job and could be gainfully employed closing these security holes. Perhaps our authorities and joe sixpack in general should open their eyes and smell the coffee here.
There is no reason on earth that I can think of for an email system to run code received arbitraily from the web.
personally I shut down these really bad ideas in 1997. Personally I received more than 100 copies of mydoom in the last few days.
So it does appear many people who have legitimate reasons to put my email address in their contact lists have no idea how to be prudent about safe sex in cyberspace. This being said - I am optimistic they are learning.
Well - I have outsourced... not for programming but it is possible we will do that to. We needed some commercial artistic work done - illustrations.
After posting a notice in the nearby college of art and trying to work with some local talent - out of the blue we were contacted by some people from Pondicherry.
They offered to give the work a whirl and they did an absolutely excellent job. None of the local workers did. In fact - the local artists (three so far) have not produced a single thing of any use to us. This does nto mean the present one will not come through - just that to date this has not happened but at least this time I know we have found considerable talent.
The bottom line is pretty simple. If Local talent isn't up to the job then we will outsource.
But he is asking to little.
What most people to not realise is that in court most people are being paid. You only need to look about the room and surmise who is not being paid to know how unjust the system is.
I really don't think this is going to go very far - primarily because it seems to me that a spammer from say bigisp.com can say he is ANY OTHER CUSTOMER from bigisp.com.
Suppose we have joesixpack as an example - and he has a laptop. At home he connects via his ISP and sends an email to his mom. The letter is received because the from address is valid in his ISP's SPF list. Then he goes to work and tries to send her another email. This time the email will get rejected. So he tries to send it through his ISP's mail server. Since he is not connected to his ISP's system, the email is rejected.
This means that joesixpack has to somehow LOG IN to a server and go through an authentication.
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This sort of comes to the nub of the problem. Authentication. If Joesixpack is a good guy - he should be able to send email to anyone - and if he is not a good guy we will find out fairly quicky and we can fine him or pull his priviliges.
The issue is not much different than driving a car actually. It needs to be dealt with in the same way as traffic infractions... perhaps through the police.
One way to implement something that will work is via issuing a certifiation. At the time joesixpack signs up with his ISP - the ISP could act as a CA and certify him as a good guy. They can record his identiy just as they recorded that he paid his bill. At this time they could install a cert for JoeSixpack into his email client - AND - bond it to his machine. There are many ways to bond it - including using a dongle or smartcard. But a practical way would simply bond it to the hard drive. I'm sure ways can be invented so that certs cannot be simply pulled from one machine and stuck into another.
If Joe later abuses his cert - then his ISP can blacklist it and refuse to issue another. Also - the ISP's can trade blacklist information just as banks and businesses trade credit information.
The mail clients can be modified to send the cert and the MTA's could check for and eventually reject any unsigned mail.
As for the ISP's being a trusted CA? Well - we have to trust some people somewhere. The question would really boil down to which ISP's trust which other ISP's and they could cooperatively run their own blacklist.
With a system like this - I would think that an ISP that is shady would find their email services would be in jeopardy of being refused and that should serve to keep the ISP's in line to.
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I also think the spamd solution in OpenBSD has a lot of merit. Spamd does not block email. Instead - if the sender is blacklisted - spamd accepts it very very slowly. This creates an incentive for the owner of the mail server sending out the spam to deal with it. With spamd in wide spread usage the problem comes under control in a number of ways.
(1) suzy spammer will find if she runs a spam server that it can't spew very fast - because her IP address and/or domain will end up in the RBL rather quickly and the moment this happens. Receiving MTA's slow to a crawl.
(2) If Suzy spammer tries to send through her ISP's account - the same thing happens but now the ISP has to deal with the problem. No ISP's will want to have a significant number of their IP addresses in an RBL. Since this will pose a significant admin problem - the ISP has a huge incentive to give Suzy spammer the boot.
(3) We have some bad ISP's and these people will find their errant ways are causing themselves grief.
(4) It might encourage ISP's to actually issue static IP's which many of us want anyways. Note we would NOT have nearly the spam problem if static IP addresses were issued.
What will work is a certification that is revolkable. The concept is embodied in public key encryption and certification.
Basically - all we need to do is this. We have a trusted institution like a bank or your local government office issue a digital ID to everyone who wishes to participate... purely voluntary.
Next - those who wish to participate use an email client that refuses to accept anything from anyone who does not have a valid certificate.
Next - we set up a black hole list and the email clients refuse emails from anyone in the blackhole list.
Next - we make this list available to the issuing authorities and if they re-issue we blackhole that authority.
By doing this we create a beuracratic nightmare for our wanna be spammers and everyone else is pretty much free to go on as they have.
I for one will NOT join an opt in list because there are far to many people who have legitimate reasons to contact me. Yet the spammers? well - there are not that many of them... they are really a fringe group actually.
This is like saying that women should not be able to give sex out for free because it competes with the rights of hookers to rent what they got at exhorbitant prices.
Way to go SCO!!!!
The Model M is still being made and there are PS/2 to USB adapters.
The new ones are pretty expensive though. As of a couple months ago I could have picked up over 100 Model "M"'s in varying states of health for under $20 bux each. I suppose to cover my time and energy I could perhaps sell them for say $40 bux plus shipping. Still - that is a good price.
If you start out with a nice keyboard you can stay with it. I had my heart set on an IBM Model "M" when they first came out in the 1986 - but they came attacked to an IBM 286 boat anchore back then - so I had to wait until they found their way into the recyclers.
Now they are available in quantity for under $20 bux and they are the best bargain in the world!!!
Check them out folks. None of the new junk even compairs.
yup - dynamic addresses - ya gotta love them.
Oh - and NAT behind that. I'll suggest that the RIAA has its head up its butt end.
Well - I expected this. You see - if SCO does not hold the copyrights then their case is substantially weaker.
The first thing the court will do is to determine what the contracts between Novel and SCO are really all about. Money changed hands. SCO must have recieved something for the money they paid - but what? The court may deem SCO bought the copyrights even though Novel clearly had no intentions of giving them up.
This brings up the issue of Novel down the track fallowing in SCO's footsteps. Corporations have interests, not friends. We all need to realise this.
I think PC's should be designed to be about the size and configuration of a carton of cigarettes... and they should clip together like lego bricks.
The configuration would be really easy to build and upgrade.
1) we would need a standardized card to card communications connector. This is already designed for the PC104 standard.
2) each card gets mounted in an extruded standardized aluminum carrier shell, and this forms a module. The card edge connecotrs would probably be mechanically fastened to the shell. These shells might have a varying thickness of anywhere from say 1/2 to 2" with AIR HOLES designed to cool the enclosed device. Power is external and in its own module.
By doing this, we end up with no heat problems and we have the mechanical protection for the device/card built in at the factory. There could be a top and bottom plate if desired adding extra security.
3) Disk drives, CD drives, video subsystems can all be mounted in such a system. I would suggest that a 3 1/2" form factor would be ideal - but I suppose we'd have to go with 5 1/4 in order to accomodate CD and DVD. Alternativly we introduce a 3.5" CD and DVD format which is quite doable... we can already buy 3.5" CD's that run in the 5 1/4" drives.
4) Power should be preferably a nominal 12 volt. By doing this we can put a big hogging 12 volt battery between the inverter and the computer so we have automatically designed in UPS capability.
The present design of UPS systems is pure insanity. First we take the power in at 120/240 and step it down to 12 volts. When the line power drops we have to pull the 12 back up to 120/240 and feed it into the internal power supply which steps it back down to 5 and 12 volts.
If we just run 12 volts into the system then we eliminate a major source of heat and simplify the UPS to boot - and create the opportuinty to use even a cheap car battery for UPS backups. Note: I don't recomend car batteries - but I did put a big hogging 60 amp hour SBS from Hawker on my UPS's. Of course - they work fine - all lead acid batteries produce the same voltage per cell and your typical UPS systems are either 12 volt or 24 volt inside.
5) All connections should be on the front. Power should be from the side and be channeled module to modual through a main power bus that connects via an appropriate plug. Note that IBM developed ideas like this with their 80 pin SCA hard drives where one connector does it all. Raid systems have done this for years with hot swap modules.
6) A slight variation would use a raid idea with hot swappable modules. One should just be able to zip out to the store and buy say a new hard drive and plug it in. What we have to do now is nutz. Pull the case out from under the desk - pull out 50 odd cables, 1/2 dismanatle the thing then put it all back together again.
Hell - manufactures would sell more equipment if we could upgrade easily.
The 286 I bought the day the Challenger blew up is still running. What do you mean "So old". Electronics has at least a 15 year life expectancy.
I told you how you can turn those machines into fully modren machines that can serve the needs of your people for years to come - and what do you respond with?
You want to turn gut them!!!
Well - if your desktop that you are running on these "DUMB TERMINALS" is reasonable then you need the RAM and CPU in them or you will simply not get decent performance.
Frankly - I think you are pointed in the wrong direction. When I say this I am being generous. You are lucky I am not your boss.