"...corporations don't have souls and cannot be sinned against".
A corporation is collectively owned by a group of people. Ultimately, the myriad lines of ownership through mutual funds and holding corporations and retirement funds and all the other instruments of ownership all end up in the hands of individual people.
The owners may fill a dozen stadiums and they each may only hold a small portion of the total, but that doesn't matter. Just because your sin is thinly distributed doesn't make it any less a sin.
Google has a serious publicity problem. This whole episode has sullied the name of Google and should bring doubt into anyone's mind that Google is not censoring their results, no matter where they live.
I mean, think about it -- Google has shown themselves to be quite willing to censor results to accommodate the aims of a repressive dictatorship. How much easier would it be for Google to censor results in the U.S.? Wouldn't it be quite a bit less "evil" to censor results at the prompting of the Dept of Homeland Security for the noble purpose of "fighting terrorism'? (And if you think they're not already, how would you know? The PATRIOT Act prohibits Google from saying anything!)
To my mind, a cornerstone of Google's "don't be evil" motto has to be "unfettered access to the internet". That's the only way it can work, otherwise Google can't be fully trusted. I think in cases where Google has to compromise their values just to do business, they should rebadge themselves as something else and reserve the name Google for unfettered access to the internet, when they are truly able to "not be evil".
Rebadging can be done in such a way that it still serves the purpose of letting repressed people know they're not getting the original, but in a subtle way. For example, Chinese users keying in google.com could be redirected to giggle.com where they would see
GIGGLE
Powered by Google
And that's all Google has to do. Move censorship one step away from the name Google and send a subtle but clear message: "The real deal is Google and we aren't allowed to take you there. Here's a substitute approved by your government". Refuse to associate the name Google with censorship.
As a user and an investor, I hope Google is listening. This is not just important for the Chinese, this is important for anyone who needs trustworthy search results.
Well, for blind people you could have a separate machine read the printed ballot aloud. The precinct has to have machines that read them anyway. Have headphones available if they want to verify the ballot in privacy.
Myself, I'm voting absentee just to get a paper ballot (Georgia).
...what legal difference does it make if Microsoft did finance the whole SCO v Linux deal?
Well for one, IBM has a countersuit against SCO. If IBM can show that SCO is acting as a legal agent of Microsoft, that may open up Microsoft to liability under the countersuit. IBM knows they're not going to get any money out of SCO, but Microsoft has a coin or two and would make a very fat target.
This is probably a long shot for IBM, but I can't see them passing up a chance, no matter how remote, of a multi-billion dollar payday 4 or 5 years from now.
Under U.S. copyright law, all works are automatically copyrighted. For a government agency releasing works that would otherwise be copyrighted, this has the perverse effect that a copyright statement is needed to remove the copyright.
Copyleft(c) 2004 Speederaser. All Other Rights Reserved.
The problem with a chemical factory turning sunlight and atmospheric CO2 into hydrocarbons is the sunlight-to-electricity conversion. Current solar panels are around 10% to 15% efficient, and then you still have to convert the electricity to hydrocarbons.
Plants, on the other hand, are 85% to 90% efficient at turning sunlight directly into hydrocarbons. Compared to a factory, plants are more than an order of magnitude more efficient. Human engineering has a long way to go to catch up with hundreds of millions of years of evolution.
For more information on flying wing stability, here is a talk by Jack Northrop to the the Royal Aeronautical Society.
Jack provides a very thorough discussion of lateral stability (your "hunting" problem) in the latter parts of his talk, where he describes a simple method to solve this, without computers:
For special occasions, when particular airplane steadiness is required (such as a bombing run), it is probable that the equivalence of such damping in yaw may be supplied by an automatic pilot, or by temporarily increasing the drag at the wing tips. This latter effect can be accomplished on the XB-35 by simultaneously opening both rudders and gives deadbeat damping in yaw.
For you non-aeronautical engineers, "deadbeat damping" means "rock-solid stable". The "rudders" he talks about are split flaps at the wing-tips, same as those used on the B-2.
The real problem with a BWB as I see it is the wingspan and the position of the passenger doors -- how the heck is that thing going to fit into most terminals? The link shows a planform comparison of the BWB with a 747-400; the 747-400 wingspan is much smaller, 212 feet compared to the BWB at 289 feet. Regular 747 wingspan is 195 feet.
This is a fundemental problem -- if an airline can't fit the thing into its hub-airport terminals, they're just not going to buy it, no matter what its other benefits.
...the majority of the rope would simply pile itself (relatively) peacefully at it's base
Sorry, no. The collapse of one of these things will be anything but peaceful.
Here's why. The radial velocity at all points of the elevator is the same, but the distance from the center of rotation (center of the earth) varies quite a bit. Assuming the bottom is at the equator, it will have a lateral velocity the same as the earth's surface, about 1040mph towards the east. The center of gravity of the elevator is positioned 22,241 miles up in geosynchronous orbit, where its lateral velocity is around 6860mph towards the east.
That means every part below a break has a higher lateral velocity than the part below it. There is nothing in space to slow the eastward velocity as the piece accelerates toward the earth, so it wraps around the earth towards the east.
Here's another way to think of it - the c.g. of the elevator is orbiting the earth at the exact speed necessary to maintain altitude. If there is a break the part below the break suddenly has a new c.g. closer to the earth, where the speed required to stay in orbit is higher than before and the speed of the part is lower than even what's required to stay in geosynchronous orbit. So the piece de-orbits like Skylab or Mir or any other space vehicle, to the east.
... all of the great thigns that this can lead to.
...Like the perfect terrorist weapon! Nanobots that eat away the nerves to your heart, lungs, and eyes, destroy your immune system, inject poison in just the right spot! And there's a bonus (for the terrorist) - when the host dies they don't die. They just jump into the air currents and float to the next victim. Once turned loose they are unstoppable... except by other nanobots.
In the nanobot future, newborns must be immediately injected with protector nanobots, or they suffer a slow agonizing death. Nanobots are everywhere. Good 'bots and bad 'bots. No one on earth is alive that doesn't have a nanobot war raging inside. Self-replicating, stealing minerals and metals from the bloodstream to reproduce and fight. Everyone gobbles vitamins like candy, hoping that some of the precious minerals will get past the bots to feed their ravaged, anemic bodies.
How will it start? By some terrorist walking to the beach in his home country and dumping a bucket of nanobots into the ocean. Swimming nanobots pre-programmed to navigate by GPS to the target country. Once there they will reproduce quietly for years, staying within the bounds of the country using GPS, carefully doing no damage, staying out of sight, until... H-hour arrives and the attack begins!
How does even a fly-every-minute detect object under clouds and fogs? In those conditions such a ship could be useful even against the US.
Radar bounced off the sea from space can detect a ship's wake, which happens to point right at the ship. The process used is similar to decryption, where the natural ocean waves are the random noise and the wake is the message. Navigation radar and radio transmissions can be detected and triangulated. Infrared detectors in space can not only see plume from the smokestack, they can also see the wake from a large ship from space when cooler water is churned up to the surface.
Below the water, the US has very sensitive listening stations scattered about to detect submarines. US submarines can track a ship from quite a distance due to noise alone. Even when not underway, waves slapping up against the side of a ship make a distinctive noise (a problem submarines don't have). I suspect those "secret" ships have been followed by US submarines wherever they went for quite some time.
He is not within the jurisdiction of the DMCA, since he did not develop the software on American soil and he did not distribute the software in America.
Actually, ElcomSoft DID distribute the software in America. For profit. According to the complaint, an Adobe employee ordered the software over the internet as an FBI agent watched. It was paid for with American dollars through Paypal.
When Adobe received the package at their American address, it was opened in front of the FBI. The Adobe employee then demonstrated to the FBI that the software could, indeed, decrypt their books. The rest is history.
Dmitry was also caught distributing the software at DefCon, but I think he was giving it away, not selling it.
ElcomSoft would have been fine if they didn't sell the software to anyone in the U.S. That's pretty simple, really - just don't ship anything to a U.S. address. If you're going to sell a product in a foreign country, you should at least make yourself aware of how the laws in that country pertain to your product.
There's a reason Budweiser doesn't ship to Saudi Arabia - alcohol is illegal there. (Which is a bit ironic because it was Arabs who invented beer in the first place). I put that law on the same level as the DMCA in backwardness, but hey, it's their country and they can have whatever laws they want.
The difference between Budweiser and ElcomSoft is that Budweiser respects the laws of other countries, no matter how backward they may seem.
Re:Throw ball bearings very, very fast
on
Battlefield Lasers
·
· Score: 1
A "couple railguns"? Don't bet the farm on it. All the railguns I've read about were single-use. One shot per gun, one projectile per shot. Also, the projectile comes out the muzzle with a somewhat unpredictable shape due to the enormous forces involved, making long distance accuracy problematic (in air).
If you want cheap, the article mentioned a follow-on electric laser costing 25 cents per shot that did the same thing. Hell, any handgun larger than a.22 is more expensive than that!
We would be better at recording history because...?
Because all OUR records are COMPUTERIZED! If WE got hit by a asteroid, literally billions and BILLIONS (think Carl Sagan here) of plastic CDs and magnetic backup tapes full of grit and, and fragile hard drives would... um, survive the millennia to be discovered by, umm, to be discovered by...
Same thing here. I have emacs emulating EDT (heavily customized) and my time on that 27-page replace is about 5 seconds + execution time of 3 seconds. The key sequence: GOLD, KP-Enter, |, ENTER, e, ENTER, a.
replaced 7861 occurrences
That's 8 keystrokes, including the shift to type |.
Reading between the lines, I don't think Tog was allowing his test subjects any time to learn the keyboard or the mouse commands he was trying to test. As a result, he is really only comparing learning curves between the two methods.
The only valid result that can be drawn from that is the unsurprising conclusion that a beginner gets up to speed quicker on a GUI. As an inveterate power user, this is completely useless information to me. What I want to know is what method is faster when I'm finished learning it.
Yep. Time to wipe that drool off your chins, folks. Did a search on the MIT website for "cesium". No hits. Even though the article claimed updates and more info could be found there. No links anywhere to a Cesium project.
And "finger dunkirk@mit.edu" got me "No matches to your query." also.
Code will always need to be written. Companies will always pay to have it written. Some of it will always be proprietary. Under the Open Source monopoly, the only difference is more of the code being written will be open source.
When IBM says they're investing $1 billion in Linux, where do you think that money is going? A BIG chunk of it is going to programmers to write open source software!
That same calculus is going on in every company threatened by Microsoft. Open source is the only weapon they have to fight Microsoft's anti-competitive behavior. Some have jumped on board in time (IBM, HP), some were too late (Corel). Eventually everyone but Microsoft will be on board, and in the battle of Microsoft vs. the world Microsoft will lose.
In the Open Source monopoly, you'll be writing code for someone. It just won't be Microsoft.
Re:Put the frickin' Home button back on the ...
on
Mozilla Bug Week
·
· Score: 1
That said, you can enable the "Home" button in the Preferences dialog.
That only enables the Home button on the Personal Toolbar. The Home button mrfiddlehead is talking about would be (missing) on the main Navigation Toolbar.
I'm with mrfiddlehead on this, there should be a Home button on the main Navigation Toolbar. I really detest that Personal Toolbar and want to turn it off, but I can't because the dang Home button is there.
I also can't seem to find a way to display the navigation icons without the words as in Netscape 4.x. I've been using Netscape forever and I don't need reminding what the buttons do. I would rather reclaim that real estate for viewing content.
Slashdot Mirror
"...corporations don't have souls and cannot be sinned against".
A corporation is collectively owned by a group of people. Ultimately, the myriad lines of ownership through mutual funds and holding corporations and retirement funds and all the other instruments of ownership all end up in the hands of individual people.
The owners may fill a dozen stadiums and they each may only hold a small portion of the total, but that doesn't matter. Just because your sin is thinly distributed doesn't make it any less a sin.
It's not a mutation, it's intelligent design.
I've got Firefox on FC3 and it works for me. Make sure you LEFT click on the "test now" link. A middle click isn't vulnerable.
Google has a serious publicity problem. This whole episode has sullied the name of Google and should bring doubt into anyone's mind that Google is not censoring their results, no matter where they live.
I mean, think about it -- Google has shown themselves to be quite willing to censor results to accommodate the aims of a repressive dictatorship. How much easier would it be for Google to censor results in the U.S.? Wouldn't it be quite a bit less "evil" to censor results at the prompting of the Dept of Homeland Security for the noble purpose of "fighting terrorism'? (And if you think they're not already, how would you know? The PATRIOT Act prohibits Google from saying anything!)
To my mind, a cornerstone of Google's "don't be evil" motto has to be "unfettered access to the internet". That's the only way it can work, otherwise Google can't be fully trusted. I think in cases where Google has to compromise their values just to do business, they should rebadge themselves as something else and reserve the name Google for unfettered access to the internet, when they are truly able to "not be evil".
Rebadging can be done in such a way that it still serves the purpose of letting repressed people know they're not getting the original, but in a subtle way. For example, Chinese users keying in google.com could be redirected to giggle.com where they would see
GIGGLE
Powered by Google
And that's all Google has to do. Move censorship one step away from the name Google and send a subtle but clear message: "The real deal is Google and we aren't allowed to take you there. Here's a substitute approved by your government". Refuse to associate the name Google with censorship.
As a user and an investor, I hope Google is listening. This is not just important for the Chinese, this is important for anyone who needs trustworthy search results.
Speederaser
Well, for blind people you could have a separate machine read the printed ballot aloud. The precinct has to have machines that read them anyway. Have headphones available if they want to verify the ballot in privacy.
Myself, I'm voting absentee just to get a paper ballot (Georgia).
Well for one, IBM has a countersuit against SCO. If IBM can show that SCO is acting as a legal agent of Microsoft, that may open up Microsoft to liability under the countersuit. IBM knows they're not going to get any money out of SCO, but Microsoft has a coin or two and would make a very fat target.
This is probably a long shot for IBM, but I can't see them passing up a chance, no matter how remote, of a multi-billion dollar payday 4 or 5 years from now.
Under U.S. copyright law, all works are automatically copyrighted. For a government agency releasing works that would otherwise be copyrighted, this has the perverse effect that a copyright statement is needed to remove the copyright.
Copyleft(c) 2004 Speederaser. All Other Rights Reserved.
If you are in Michigan and need a corporate litigation lawyer, please contact Robert Harrison at his office:
Robert Harrison
2550 S Telegraph Rd
Bloomfield Hills, MI 48302
(248) 253 - 1800
In nearly 20 years of driving... I have been pulled over zero times.
You're white, aren't you?
The problem with a chemical factory turning sunlight and atmospheric CO2 into hydrocarbons is the sunlight-to-electricity conversion. Current solar panels are around 10% to 15% efficient, and then you still have to convert the electricity to hydrocarbons.
Plants, on the other hand, are 85% to 90% efficient at turning sunlight directly into hydrocarbons. Compared to a factory, plants are more than an order of magnitude more efficient. Human engineering has a long way to go to catch up with hundreds of millions of years of evolution.
For more information on flying wing stability, here is a talk by Jack Northrop to the the Royal Aeronautical Society.
Jack provides a very thorough discussion of lateral stability (your "hunting" problem) in the latter parts of his talk, where he describes a simple method to solve this, without computers:
For you non-aeronautical engineers, "deadbeat damping" means "rock-solid stable". The "rudders" he talks about are split flaps at the wing-tips, same as those used on the B-2.
The real problem with a BWB as I see it is the wingspan and the position of the passenger doors -- how the heck is that thing going to fit into most terminals? The link shows a planform comparison of the BWB with a 747-400; the 747-400 wingspan is much smaller, 212 feet compared to the BWB at 289 feet. Regular 747 wingspan is 195 feet.
This is a fundemental problem -- if an airline can't fit the thing into its hub-airport terminals, they're just not going to buy it, no matter what its other benefits.
Of course they care. There are probably hundreds of /.ers waiting to lock in the url all.your.base.are.belong.to.us
The 1337 kiddies out there will want
411.y0ur.b453.4r3.b3|0ng.70.us
And what about toys.r.us?
Sorry, no. The collapse of one of these things will be anything but peaceful.
Here's why. The radial velocity at all points of the elevator is the same, but the distance from the center of rotation (center of the earth) varies quite a bit. Assuming the bottom is at the equator, it will have a lateral velocity the same as the earth's surface, about 1040mph towards the east. The center of gravity of the elevator is positioned 22,241 miles up in geosynchronous orbit, where its lateral velocity is around 6860mph towards the east.
That means every part below a break has a higher lateral velocity than the part below it. There is nothing in space to slow the eastward velocity as the piece accelerates toward the earth, so it wraps around the earth towards the east.
Here's another way to think of it - the c.g. of the elevator is orbiting the earth at the exact speed necessary to maintain altitude. If there is a break the part below the break suddenly has a new c.g. closer to the earth, where the speed required to stay in orbit is higher than before and the speed of the part is lower than even what's required to stay in geosynchronous orbit. So the piece de-orbits like Skylab or Mir or any other space vehicle, to the east.
...Like the perfect terrorist weapon! Nanobots that eat away the nerves to your heart, lungs, and eyes, destroy your immune system, inject poison in just the right spot! And there's a bonus (for the terrorist) - when the host dies they don't die. They just jump into the air currents and float to the next victim. Once turned loose they are unstoppable ... except by other nanobots.
In the nanobot future, newborns must be immediately injected with protector nanobots, or they suffer a slow agonizing death. Nanobots are everywhere. Good 'bots and bad 'bots. No one on earth is alive that doesn't have a nanobot war raging inside. Self-replicating, stealing minerals and metals from the bloodstream to reproduce and fight. Everyone gobbles vitamins like candy, hoping that some of the precious minerals will get past the bots to feed their ravaged, anemic bodies.
How will it start? By some terrorist walking to the beach in his home country and dumping a bucket of nanobots into the ocean. Swimming nanobots pre-programmed to navigate by GPS to the target country. Once there they will reproduce quietly for years, staying within the bounds of the country using GPS, carefully doing no damage, staying out of sight, until... H-hour arrives and the attack begins!
Will we survive that first attack?
Do we really understand what we're doing here?
He might want all the noisy boxes in one room so the other rooms can be quiet(er). It is a house, after all.
Radar bounced off the sea from space can detect a ship's wake, which happens to point right at the ship. The process used is similar to decryption, where the natural ocean waves are the random noise and the wake is the message. Navigation radar and radio transmissions can be detected and triangulated. Infrared detectors in space can not only see plume from the smokestack, they can also see the wake from a large ship from space when cooler water is churned up to the surface.
Below the water, the US has very sensitive listening stations scattered about to detect submarines. US submarines can track a ship from quite a distance due to noise alone. Even when not underway, waves slapping up against the side of a ship make a distinctive noise (a problem submarines don't have). I suspect those "secret" ships have been followed by US submarines wherever they went for quite some time.
Actually, ElcomSoft DID distribute the software in America. For profit. According to the complaint, an Adobe employee ordered the software over the internet as an FBI agent watched. It was paid for with American dollars through Paypal.
When Adobe received the package at their American address, it was opened in front of the FBI. The Adobe employee then demonstrated to the FBI that the software could, indeed, decrypt their books. The rest is history.
Dmitry was also caught distributing the software at DefCon, but I think he was giving it away, not selling it.
ElcomSoft would have been fine if they didn't sell the software to anyone in the U.S. That's pretty simple, really - just don't ship anything to a U.S. address. If you're going to sell a product in a foreign country, you should at least make yourself aware of how the laws in that country pertain to your product.
There's a reason Budweiser doesn't ship to Saudi Arabia - alcohol is illegal there. (Which is a bit ironic because it was Arabs who invented beer in the first place). I put that law on the same level as the DMCA in backwardness, but hey, it's their country and they can have whatever laws they want.
The difference between Budweiser and ElcomSoft is that Budweiser respects the laws of other countries, no matter how backward they may seem.
A "couple railguns"? Don't bet the farm on it. All the railguns I've read about were single-use. One shot per gun, one projectile per shot. Also, the projectile comes out the muzzle with a somewhat unpredictable shape due to the enormous forces involved, making long distance accuracy problematic (in air).
.22 is more expensive than that!
If you want cheap, the article mentioned a follow-on electric laser costing 25 cents per shot that did the same thing. Hell, any handgun larger than a
Because all OUR records are COMPUTERIZED! If WE got hit by a asteroid, literally billions and BILLIONS (think Carl Sagan here) of plastic CDs and magnetic backup tapes full of grit and, and fragile hard drives would... um, survive the millennia to be discovered by, umm, to be discovered by...
Oh.
Nevermind.
Same thing here. I have emacs emulating EDT (heavily customized) and my time on that 27-page replace is about 5 seconds + execution time of 3 seconds. The key sequence: GOLD, KP-Enter, |, ENTER, e, ENTER, a.
replaced 7861 occurrences
That's 8 keystrokes, including the shift to type |.
Reading between the lines, I don't think Tog was allowing his test subjects any time to learn the keyboard or the mouse commands he was trying to test. As a result, he is really only comparing learning curves between the two methods.
The only valid result that can be drawn from that is the unsurprising conclusion that a beginner gets up to speed quicker on a GUI. As an inveterate power user, this is completely useless information to me. What I want to know is what method is faster when I'm finished learning it.
Perhaps you would like to hear another opinion?
Yep. Time to wipe that drool off your chins, folks. Did a search on the MIT website for "cesium". No hits. Even though the article claimed updates and more info could be found there. No links anywhere to a Cesium project.
And "finger dunkirk@mit.edu" got me "No matches to your query." also.
This is smelling like a hoax.
Code will always need to be written. Companies will always pay to have it written. Some of it will always be proprietary. Under the Open Source monopoly, the only difference is more of the code being written will be open source.
When IBM says they're investing $1 billion in Linux, where do you think that money is going? A BIG chunk of it is going to programmers to write open source software!
That same calculus is going on in every company threatened by Microsoft. Open source is the only weapon they have to fight Microsoft's anti-competitive behavior. Some have jumped on board in time (IBM, HP), some were too late (Corel). Eventually everyone but Microsoft will be on board, and in the battle of Microsoft vs. the world Microsoft will lose.
In the Open Source monopoly, you'll be writing code for someone. It just won't be Microsoft.
That only enables the Home button on the Personal Toolbar. The Home button mrfiddlehead is talking about would be (missing) on the main Navigation Toolbar.
I'm with mrfiddlehead on this, there should be a Home button on the main Navigation Toolbar. I really detest that Personal Toolbar and want to turn it off, but I can't because the dang Home button is there.
I also can't seem to find a way to display the navigation icons without the words as in Netscape 4.x. I've been using Netscape forever and I don't need reminding what the buttons do. I would rather reclaim that real estate for viewing content.
(/rant)
By chance, does anyone have a mirror of this site? It's completely slammed. I got less than 10 bytes before it timed out.