The House Rules committee will take all 4 or 5 versions of this bill to date, and hack them together into something similar to what Commerce, Judiciary, and International Relations approved, dropping most, if not all, of what Armed Services did.
The full house will debate. Some killer amendments will be proposed, and defeated. Some weakening -but not killer- amendments will be accepted.
The Senate will take the bill, and have the same type of wrangling that the House has had. In the end, they will come up with a bill which is more LEA friendly, but still a good bill. They will pass it
Conference committee will debate it, and hack up something with some key LEA-appeasing unenforceable provisions, and send it back to the House and Senate.
Both will pass it, and it will go to the President, who will veto it.
It was introduced to the House on 25 February 1999, and reported to a total of four committees: Commerce, Judiciary, International Relations, and Armed Services. Those four committees each considered the bill, held hearings, and listened to both Industry and Law Enforcement opinion of the bill.
Before -any- amendments, it garnered 257 cosponsors -- 257 Representatives who say it's a good bill they support. Remember: 218 have to vote Yea for it to pass, and it has 257 behind it.
On April 27th, the Judiciary committee reported it to the House, saying "Good bill, as is"
The Commerce committee also liked it, and suggested a couple of small amendments -- still a very pro-encryption bill
The International Relations committee added a couple of more things to it, but left it mostly intact.
Most interesting is reading the finding of the committees: None of them particularly agreed with Law Enforcement. International Relations even went as far as stating that the Administration policy that Law Enforcement supports doesn't meet Law Enforcement's stated goals -- and no attempt is being made by the Administration to tighten the restrictions currently in place.
The 106th Congress bill query page will allow you to search for h.r.850 and read the reports for yourself (I can't figure out how to link directly, sorry).
Now the fourth committee has marked up the bill -- but not reported it yet -- and has apparently supported Law Enforcement over Industry.
The House as a whole hasn't even officially seen the Armed Services Committee's amendments, although they've seen the other three committees. It's a little early to say the bill is deal.
I will note that the first committee to report (Judiciary) refused to consider one section of the bill because of jurisdictional grounds.
So at this point, assuming the Armed Services Committee reports it as reported, there will be four versions of the bill -- three very similar, and pro-Industry, and one very different, and pro-Law Enforcement. This is what the Rules Committee will have to sort out.
Then, it will go to the full House, then to the Senate, and finally to the President.
I wouldn't say it's dead yet. It might not be mortally wounded. But we should let our congresscritters know that we favor the original version.
Stevens "Unix Network Programming VOLUME 1"?!? My copy of Stevens doesn't have a volume number (checks... UNP has no volume number, TCP/IP Illustrated has Vols 1-3, but no IPv6, and Advanced Programming doesn't have a volume number nor covers IP).
Does this mean that I have to update my library again?
Let's see... There are 6.023x10^26 electrons/kg. Call it 10^27, for convenience. I'm on the heavy side, so I'll under-estimate my weight, to get a convenient figure of 100kg/human. That's 10^29 electrons. There are about 6 billion humans. Again, let's over-estimate to get 10 billion (10^7), for 10^36 electrons. I've deliberately over-estimated so far thrice, each by about 66% That works out roughly to a factor of 56 over-estimate, so we have 2x10^35 electrons. in the human population.
IPv6 addresses are 128 bits long. Assuming that there isn't any overhead in how those bits are assigned (i.e., all 2^128 address are available, not realistic due to net and broadcast addresses, multicast addresses, room for expansion, etc), there are approximately 3x10^38 IPv6 addresses.
Yep, that works out to about 1000/electron, within an order of magnitude.
Some were failures. NASP spent years in development, and was eventually given up as infeasable as designed. Perhaps the same should have happened with the shuttle. But the others...
DC-X (aka Delta Clipper) was not originally a government project, but rather a privately funded testbed. The DC-X was built as a proof-of-concept, to show that the idea had merit, then the companies involved went looking for money for step two (of three), the DC-Y. Neither the DC-X nor the DC-Y were designed or intended to be orbital -- that would have been the third step.
When no money was forthcoming, NASA bought it, and tested it to (unintentional) destruction -- a landing strut failed on the planned final landing, causing the vehicle to fall over and burn. It successfully served its function as a testbed and proof-of-concept vehicle.
The DC-Y was pitched as a potential candidate for the X-33 project, but was turned down in favor of the Lockheed project. X-33 is also supposed to be a testbed, instead of an orbital vehicle. It's goal is not to -be- the Shuttle replacement, but to be a prototype for the RLV.
Similarly, the X-34 appears to again be a testbed and demonstrator, not an cheap-to-orbit vehicle. The X-37 is also a testbed, not a cheap-to-orbit vehicle.
I expect that the various technologies pioneered and tested in these various projects will be used in future full-scale project. Those projects will likely have lower development and operating costs because when they are designed and built, we will -know- what will work already, rather than trying to forge lots of new ground.
In a way, I think that NASA learned from the Shuttle and NASP projects. Instead of one giant, expensive, project like the Shuttle or NASP, which are great if they work, and a big boondoggle if they don't, they are funding many less expensive, demonstration projects, each with modest goals. If they fail, it's less of a problem, and they've spend less money to find out what doesn't work.
Blackbirds with Aerospikes
on
NASA's X-37
·
· Score: 1
The test that put an aerospike on a blackbird was part ofthe X-33 program, designed to test the airworthiness and performance of the aerospike at multiple-Mach speeds.
The Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird was not ramjet powered. It had relatively conventional jet engines, albeit specially designed to operate at the altitudes and speeds the SR-71 was designed for. There was a ramjet powered drone designed to be launched from a Blackbird, but that was a different beast anyway.
I've seen films of Blackbirds in flight, as well as taking off and landing. All was under power from its two engines -- the Blackbird was NOT designed for a dead-stick landing, as would be necessary if it was ramjet powered.
Previous brain fluid pressure relief apparatus lacked critical features of this current invention.
Prior art for relieving brain fluid through similar apparatus included devices utilizing a hammer combined with a chisle, or a rotary device for boring through the skull. In these devices, part of the skull is physically removed. This process tends to generate large amounts of dust or bone chips which provides opportunistic locations for infection. In addition, they also tend to be reusable and reused, and careless application of sterile technique could lead to transmission of viral, bacterial, and prion diseases from patient to patient. Also, the area behind the piece of skull removed is exposed to the outside environment, again exposing the patient to risk of infection.
This invention instead utilizes a tap which is designed to pierce, rather than remove, the skull, much like a tap for maple syrup production pierces the tree without removing any of it. This prevents the production of bone chips, thus reducing the risk of infection. In addition, once the tap is in place, it need not be removed, thus preventing the subcranial tissues from outside exposure.
(Note: I don't know how to explain the use of a temporary tattoo).
Actually, the book will work fine for you. It's more about weight maintenance and control than weight loss.
The basic idea of the book is that improper weight (too much, usually) is caused by malfunctioning feedback mechanisms. The part of the body that says "eat" or "stop eating" doesn't register when it should.
So substitute an external feedback mechanism: carefully monitor your weight (using statistically sound smoothing methods), and adjust your eating to match the weight loss/gain/maintenance you want. Smoothing the weight measurements is necessary because the natural swings caused by daily activity is much greater than the baseline changes. There is a low signal/noise ratio, so it's necessary to filter out the noise.
The basic technique should work fine for weight gain as well as weight loss.
It was water vapor. Think of it this way: Big tank of liquid hydrogen. Big tank of liquid oxygen. Both tanks the proper size to hold exactly the right ratio of H2 to O2 to burn cleanly. Now ram them together in the presence of a lot of heat. What do you get? A big fireball, and a lot of water vapor.
The orbiter itself wasn't destroyed by the explosion, but it didn't survive long.
With Challenger, it's also important to note that we honestly didn't -know- if anyone could have, or did, survive the initial explosion. The research needed to find out took a long time, and by that time, the only people who cared were the families, the researchers, and other die-hard space freaks.
Remember, all radio communications ended at the time of the accident. Mission Control didn't even -know- there was an explosion for some time (they announced, to the crowds watching the fireball "There appears to be a major malfunction").
At the time of the explosion, the few people who were saying that the cabin portion of the orbiter flew out of the fireball intact were drowned out in the media by everyone who was screaming "OH MY GHOD!!! DID YOU SEE THAT???? NO ONE COULD HAVE SURVIVED!!!"
As it was, the orbiter DID survive the fireball -- the SRB which malfunctioned ended up attached to the shuttle, but rotated so it was pointing forward, causing the airframe to snap sideways into a several mach speed airstream, which tore it to pieces. You couldn't see any of this because the fireball hid everything.
Finding out if anyone survived the explosion, and for how long, was complicated by the fact that if they -did- survive, they didn't survive impact with the water -- and all the evidence was either floating on, or deep beneath, the sea. But they were able to get some info.
The NASA reports (which are available online, in case anyone really cares) say that they don't know if the cabin maintained pressure integrity after the airframe self-destructed. The damage from water impact was too great. If it didn't, then they would have had no air to breathe, and would have passed out in 15 secs, if they weren't already unconsious or dead from the accident.
There are signs that at least two survived, and tried to do something before they fell unconsious or were killed.
But the official NASA reports are usually pretty good. If they -knew- that Christa McAuliff spent her last minute alive and conscious, it would be in the report. The PR flacks probably wouldn't point it out, however.
On the way to the moon, a catastrophic failure occurs, threatening the lives of the crew and the mission. Yet everyone involved works overtime to try to figure out a way to save the lives of the three astronauts, and succeeds. It happened; it was Apollo 13.
The contingency plan to cut off the radios wasn't intended for that type of scenario, but rather if they were stranded on the moon...
...if Armstrong hadn't been able to set down when he did, and used up too much fuel, so they wouldn't have had enough to get back to the CM.
...if the LEM had been damaged in the landing, so it was unable to lift again.
...if a malfunction occured on the way back to the CM, and the LEM was unable to make it.
This is the type of situation where you -know- they are going to die, and there is -nothing- that can be done about it. As it stands, they were less than 1 minute away from that happening anyway (Armstrong was dangerously low on fuel when he landed; Another minute more, and he would have had to abort the landing).
It was not a "we are having a major problem here" type contingincy, it was a "You know, you are dead." "Yeah, we know... Say goodbye to my kids for me" type contingency.
No American astronaut has died in space. Several Soviet cosmonauts have died in space, but I don't know how many, or on what missions.
Three astronauts died in a fire in the Apollo 1 capsule, during an unfueled test on the launch pad. Their deaths were not a secret, and was much publicised at the time.
Seven more astronauts died during launch of the SST Challenger, and that was also highly publicised.
At the time of the Apollo program, the US space program was popular, often televised or covered in the news, and not secretive about what was going on at all. Of course, having every launch visible from several nearby cities (like Orlando, only 50 miles away) makes it hard to have a launch no one knows about. The US could not have had unpublicised manned moon landings before Apollo 11.
I think it tries to patent a system that automatically wraps the content of a window around other windows placed on top of it.
I don't think it covers redrawing obscured content once the obscuring window is (re)moved, but rather redrawing obscured content in an unobscured location.
There are already two: The American Society of Composer, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP); and the Broadcast Music Inc (BMI). Both of these companies act as licensing middlemen between public performers of music (TV, radio, Muzak and Muzak-like services, bars, clubs, DJ's, etc) and the writers and publishers of music.
Both ASCAP and BMI have web-based license agreements already. It looks like they have taken the route of treating the web like other venues that they license, rather than trying to keep music off the web.
I wonder... If I signed license agreements with ASCAP and BMI, and paid them my licensing fees (for BMI, a minimum of $500 annually, or 1.75% of my gross revenues), could I run a legal, free, MP3 site?
"they" has been used as a neuter personal pronoun in English for centuries. There are recorded case of Will Shakespeare doing so in his plays, for instance. I don't have a problem with it.
As for split infinitives... It has never been non-grammatical to do so in English. The reason it was ever considered bad grammar was when some educators mistakenly thought that English grammar should be based on Latin grammar. Since Latin doesn't use split infinitives (actualy, an infinitive in Latin is a single word, which is kind of hard to split), the "logical" assumption was that it was improper in English.
The problem with that logic is twofold: a) English speakers have been boldly splitting infinitives for as long as they have been uttering them, and b) English is not derived from Latin, but is instead Germanic, a different language branch.
Besides, some grammarians now view "to boldly go" not as a split infinitive, but consider "go" to be the infinitive, and "to" to simply be a marker that an infinitive will be used. "Boldly" serves as an adverb modifying the infinitive.
[Also... How do you quote referred text in the/. posting interface?
Taking Yahoo at their word, I'd say their intent is not to deprive authors of their rights, but rather secure for Yahoo rights they feel they need...
Geocities is in the business of hosting web sites. This involves taking material written and copyrighted by J. Random Author and copying and distributing it all over the world. By copyright law, without a license to do so, Geocities would be breaking the law.
So they need a license to copy and distribute J. Random Author's pages.
Geocities also habitually modifies web pages to display advertising. Again, without a license, this violates the law if they distribute the result.
So that license also has to include the ability to modify the pages by J. Random Author that Geocities copies and distributes.
Furthermore, Geocities was just bought by Yahoo. If Yahoo bought Geocities lock, stock, and barrel, then the licenses they previously had presumably go with it. But now Yahoo owns those licenses. If Yahoo got tired of Geocities, it would want to sell Geocities, and the licenses with them. Suddenly, Yahoo wants "transferrable" licenses, so it can transfer them if need be.
Likewise, Yahoo might want to contract out the serving of Geocities pages, which means it would needs to sublicense the content.
So this means that Yahoo needs, to do the basic type of thing it has been doing, a transferrable, sublicensable license to copy, distribute, and modify the content posted on Geocities. It doesn't need an exclusive license, so it specifies that it wants a "non-exclusive" license.
Likewise, since they are just putting the pages up without prior review of the contents, they don't want to be held responsible for any content that is of questionable legality.
I'm sure that the remaining clauses can be justified as easily (I don't have them in front of me, so I can't come up with the justifications).
The problem is... While it allows Yahoo to do what they are currently doing, it also allows them to do a whole bunch more, stuff that J. Random Author might find objectionable.
I think what they wanted to do was something like:
"We respect that you, the author, have a valid copyright on the content of this page. As such, we need, from you, the legal right to provide that content on the WWW, with ads inserted by us, as we have always done, as well as the legal right to readjust how we serve those pages to best serve our business interests. At the same time, we also trust you to be in a position to give us those rights, and do not want to be involved in lawsuits concerning -your- right to say what you say on this page."
Would that intent be justifiable? I think that that intent is compatable with the contract and their statements concerning their intent.
If the Wired article is accurate, then something -very- strange is going on. I read the opinions of the panel, and most of the stuff described by Wired as being in the Government's case would have little effect on the decision.
The decision (summarized, and clouded by weeks since I read it) was based on these ideas:
1. The Government can't exercise prior restraint on protected speech. Period. 2. While the Government -can- exercise prior restraint on non-protected speech, it can only do so with severe restrictions -- guaranteed time-frame for review, strict guidelines for review, etc. "In the best judgement of..." or "against the policies of..." type guidelines don't do it. It has to be non-discressionary. 3. The existing export regulations, which allow a 90-day review period, after which the item reviewed can be sent to the President for review, don't meet the guarantee requirement. 4. The existing export regulations, which use "national security" as the guideline for review, don't meet the non-discressionary requirement. 5. As such, the existing export regulations, if applied to first-amendment protected speech, would be well outside the guidelines established by the courts of allowable prior restraint, and would thus be unconstitutional. 6. So the remaining question is: Is cryptographic source code, and specifically the source code at issue here, protected speech, or not? ["Speech", here, is a bit broader than just textual writings or actual spoken word. Other "expressions", such as burning a draft card or a flag, have been held to be protected speech.] 7. To distinguish between protected speech and non-protected speech, it is necessary to look at the intent of the "speech". Is it intended to communicate an idea to another person (i.e., is "expressive", and therefor protected) or is it intended to control a device (i.e., is purely "functional", and therefore not protected). 8. While source code tends to be functional in nature (it is, after all, designed to control the operation of a computer), it is also commonly used to clearly communicate details of algorithms, etc, in an expressive way, to other humans. So it also -can be- expressive. 9. In particular, the source code involved in this case a) was written to demonstrate a technique, and b) is not complete in itself (it won't compile, but requires other parts to be written by the prospective user), it was not intended to be functional but rather expressive. Therefore, it is protected speech. 10. Since it is possible for source code which could fall under the jurisdiction of the export regulations in question to be expressive, the law is unconstitutional, at least as far as it applies to expressive source code. 11. Since the regulation is not written in a "separable" way, it is impossible to make it constitutional without an extensive line-by-line rewrite (which is beyond the purview of the court), so the -entire- regulation is ruled unconstitutional.
The dissenting judge disagreed with point 8, and refused to consider that source code could have an expressive nature. Being purely functional, it was not entitled to first-amendment protection, so the regulation is constitutional. Other than that, he basically agreed with the reasoning.
I fail to see how any of the claims that Wired was saying the DoJ was using (the vacuum-cleaner approach to surveillance, etc) would relate to the logic used in the opinions. It strikes me as absurd that they would use such an argument at odds with the case in question.
Does anyone have a URL to the petition actually filed by the DoJ? Is it online anywhere?
Replacements? Sure.... There's X2, X3, X4, X5, etc. Right now, we are up to the eleventh major version of X, and the sixth major release of that version.
True, in 1984, the author of X knew that it was a start, but in 1991, Linus knew that the small kernel he had was a start, as well. We aren't using the same Linux as we were in 1991, and we aren't using the same X as we were in 1984.
I thought that UTC got UTC because of the various time scales involved...
TAI (International Atomic Time) -- bears no direct relation with the rotation of the Earth.
UT (Universal Time), consisting of: UT0 -- Rotational time of a given point on the earth, as measured by the stars. UT1 -- UT0 corrected for changes in the Earth's orbit. UTC -- Coordinated Universal Timescale defined to be an integral number of seconds off from TAI, but less than 0.9 seconds from UT1.
Of course, when you talk about UTC, you should talk about who is doing the measuring. There is a difference between UTC(USNO) (as measured by the US) and UTC(BIPM) (as measured by the French). BIPM doesn't actually -have- any clocks, they just tell people how off their clocks are. Trust the French to develop a system that once a month tells you what time it was two weeks ago...
This article reads like it was longer, more in depth, and then seriously hacked to pieces by an editor concerned with reaching his target audience. It ended up seeming very content-free, and very simplistic. As someone else said, I could feel my IQ falling as I read it.
Given the length and content of the interview, I don't really think that ESR were really who they wanted to interview, but that they didn't know it at the time. So it was chopped into something they could use, but wasn't good.
I think that they would probably have been better off just dropping the article entirely. ESR didn't seem like a good fit for them, period.
I mean, imagine what they would have done with an interview with RMS!
Mistake #1: You should have realised that 25 Gbits/in^2 * 1byte/8bits = 3.125 Gbytes/in^2, and saved your conversion from Gbits/in^2 to bits/in^2 to bytes/in^2 to Gbytes/in^2.
Mistake #2: 1 Gbit = 1024^3, not 1024^2. So your calculations were off by a factor of 1024.
Mistake #3: You didn't account for the spindle on the platter...
My calculations...
They said 105,000 tracks/inch, and 25Gbits/in^2, so that means we have 0.25Mbit/in linear density. If we assume a 3-inch platter has a half-inch spindle and a 1/4-in outside border, that gives us a 1-inch wide recording surface, with track radiuses ranging from 0.25-in (410Kbits) to 1.25 in (1.96Mbit), with an average radius of 0.75in (1.18Mbit), and 105,000 tracks, or 123700Mbits/side, or 15.1 GBytes/side. Close enough for me.....
(going the other way, from 18Gbytes/side and 3.125Gbytes/in^2, simple division will give you 18/3.125 in^2/side, or 5.76in^2/side. My geometry assumptions give me 4.71in^2/side, so my answer being low is reasonable -- my geometry is also low...)
Slashdot Mirror
You are full of FUD...
What -will- happen:
The House Rules committee will take all 4 or 5 versions of this bill to date, and hack them together into something similar to what Commerce, Judiciary, and International Relations approved, dropping most, if not all, of what Armed Services did.
The full house will debate. Some killer amendments will be proposed, and defeated. Some weakening -but not killer- amendments will be accepted.
The Senate will take the bill, and have the same type of wrangling that the House has had. In the end, they will come up with a bill which is more LEA friendly, but still a good bill. They will pass it
Conference committee will debate it, and hack up something with some key LEA-appeasing unenforceable provisions, and send it back to the House and Senate.
Both will pass it, and it will go to the President, who will veto it.
It did follow normal procedure:
It was introduced to the House on 25 February 1999, and reported to a total of four committees: Commerce, Judiciary, International Relations, and Armed Services. Those four committees each considered the bill, held hearings, and listened to both Industry and Law Enforcement opinion of the bill.
Before -any- amendments, it garnered 257 cosponsors -- 257 Representatives who say it's a good bill they support. Remember: 218 have to vote Yea for it to pass, and it has 257 behind it.
On April 27th, the Judiciary committee reported it to the House, saying "Good bill, as is"
The Commerce committee also liked it, and suggested a couple of small amendments -- still a very pro-encryption bill
The International Relations committee added a couple of more things to it, but left it mostly intact.
Most interesting is reading the finding of the committees: None of them particularly agreed with Law Enforcement. International Relations even went as far as stating that the Administration policy that Law Enforcement supports doesn't meet Law Enforcement's stated goals -- and no attempt is being made by the Administration to tighten the restrictions currently in place.
The 106th Congress bill query page will allow you to search for h.r.850 and read the reports for yourself (I can't figure out how to link directly, sorry).
Now the fourth committee has marked up the bill -- but not reported it yet -- and has apparently supported Law Enforcement over Industry.
The House as a whole hasn't even officially seen the Armed Services Committee's amendments, although they've seen the other three committees. It's a little early to say the bill is deal.
I will note that the first committee to report (Judiciary) refused to consider one section of the bill because of jurisdictional grounds.
So at this point, assuming the Armed Services Committee reports it as reported, there will be four versions of the bill -- three very similar, and pro-Industry, and one very different, and pro-Law Enforcement. This is what the Rules Committee will have to sort out.
Then, it will go to the full House, then to the Senate, and finally to the President.
I wouldn't say it's dead yet. It might not be mortally wounded. But we should let our congresscritters know that we favor the original version.
Stevens "Unix Network Programming VOLUME 1"?!? My copy of Stevens doesn't have a volume number (checks... UNP has no volume number, TCP/IP Illustrated has Vols 1-3, but no IPv6, and Advanced Programming doesn't have a volume number nor covers IP).
Does this mean that I have to update my library again?
Let's see... There are 6.023x10^26 electrons/kg. Call it 10^27, for convenience. I'm on the heavy side, so I'll under-estimate my weight, to get a convenient figure of 100kg/human. That's 10^29 electrons. There are about 6 billion humans. Again, let's over-estimate to get 10 billion (10^7), for 10^36 electrons. I've deliberately over-estimated so far thrice, each by about 66% That works out roughly to a factor of 56 over-estimate, so we have 2x10^35 electrons. in the human population.
IPv6 addresses are 128 bits long. Assuming that there isn't any overhead in how those bits are assigned (i.e., all 2^128 address are available, not realistic due to net and broadcast addresses, multicast addresses, room for expansion, etc), there are approximately 3x10^38 IPv6 addresses.
Yep, that works out to about 1000/electron, within an order of magnitude.
Of the projects you mentioned...
Some were failures. NASP spent years in development, and was eventually given up as infeasable as designed. Perhaps the same should have happened with the shuttle. But the others...
DC-X (aka Delta Clipper) was not originally a government project, but rather a privately funded testbed. The DC-X was built as a proof-of-concept, to show that the idea had merit, then the companies involved went looking for money for step two (of three), the DC-Y. Neither the DC-X nor the DC-Y were designed or intended to be orbital -- that would have been the third step.
When no money was forthcoming, NASA bought it, and tested it to (unintentional) destruction -- a landing strut failed on the planned final landing, causing the vehicle to fall over and burn. It successfully served its function as a testbed and proof-of-concept vehicle.
The DC-Y was pitched as a potential candidate for the X-33 project, but was turned down in favor of the Lockheed project. X-33 is also supposed to be a testbed, instead of an orbital vehicle. It's goal is not to -be- the Shuttle replacement, but to be a prototype for the RLV.
Similarly, the X-34 appears to again be a testbed and demonstrator, not an cheap-to-orbit vehicle. The X-37 is also a testbed, not a cheap-to-orbit vehicle.
I expect that the various technologies pioneered and tested in these various projects will be used in future full-scale project. Those projects will likely have lower development and operating costs because when they are designed and built, we will -know- what will work already, rather than trying to forge lots of new ground.
In a way, I think that NASA learned from the Shuttle and NASP projects. Instead of one giant, expensive, project like the Shuttle or NASP, which are great if they work, and a big boondoggle if they don't, they are funding many less expensive, demonstration projects, each with modest goals. If they fail, it's less of a problem, and they've spend less money to find out what doesn't work.
The test that put an aerospike on a blackbird was part ofthe X-33 program, designed to test the airworthiness and performance of the aerospike at multiple-Mach speeds.
The Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird was not ramjet powered. It had relatively conventional jet engines, albeit specially designed to operate at the altitudes and speeds the SR-71 was designed for. There was a ramjet powered drone designed to be launched from a Blackbird, but that was a different beast anyway.
I've seen films of Blackbirds in flight, as well as taking off and landing. All was under power from its two engines -- the Blackbird was NOT designed for a dead-stick landing, as would be necessary if it was ramjet powered.
That's easy...
Previous brain fluid pressure relief apparatus lacked critical features of this current invention.
Prior art for relieving brain fluid through similar apparatus included devices utilizing a hammer combined with a chisle, or a rotary device for boring through the skull. In these devices, part of the skull is physically removed. This process tends to generate large amounts of dust or bone chips which provides opportunistic locations for infection. In addition, they also tend to be reusable and reused, and careless application of sterile technique could lead to transmission of viral, bacterial, and prion diseases from patient to patient. Also, the area behind the piece of skull removed is exposed to the outside environment, again exposing the patient to risk of infection.
This invention instead utilizes a tap which is designed to pierce, rather than remove, the skull, much like a tap for maple syrup production pierces the tree without removing any of it. This prevents the production of bone chips, thus reducing the risk of infection. In addition, once the tap is in place, it need not be removed, thus preventing the subcranial tissues from outside exposure.
(Note: I don't know how to explain the use of a temporary tattoo).
Actually, the book will work fine for you. It's more about weight maintenance and control than weight loss.
The basic idea of the book is that improper weight (too much, usually) is caused by malfunctioning feedback mechanisms. The part of the body that says "eat" or "stop eating" doesn't register when it should.
So substitute an external feedback mechanism: carefully monitor your weight (using statistically sound smoothing methods), and adjust your eating to match the weight loss/gain/maintenance you want. Smoothing the weight measurements is necessary because the natural swings caused by daily activity is much greater than the baseline changes. There is a low signal/noise ratio, so it's necessary to filter out the noise.
The basic technique should work fine for weight gain as well as weight loss.
It was water vapor. Think of it this way: Big tank of liquid hydrogen. Big tank of liquid oxygen. Both tanks the proper size to hold exactly the right ratio of H2 to O2 to burn cleanly. Now ram them together in the presence of a lot of heat. What do you get? A big fireball, and a lot of water vapor.
The orbiter itself wasn't destroyed by the explosion, but it didn't survive long.
With Challenger, it's also important to note that we honestly didn't -know- if anyone could have, or did, survive the initial explosion. The research needed to find out took a long time, and by that time, the only people who cared were the families, the researchers, and other die-hard space freaks.
Remember, all radio communications ended at the time of the accident. Mission Control didn't even -know- there was an explosion for some time (they announced, to the crowds watching the fireball "There appears to be a major malfunction").
At the time of the explosion, the few people who were saying that the cabin portion of the orbiter flew out of the fireball intact were drowned out in the media by everyone who was screaming "OH MY GHOD!!! DID YOU SEE THAT???? NO ONE COULD HAVE SURVIVED!!!"
As it was, the orbiter DID survive the fireball -- the SRB which malfunctioned ended up attached to the shuttle, but rotated so it was pointing forward, causing the airframe to snap sideways into a several mach speed airstream, which tore it to pieces. You couldn't see any of this because the fireball hid everything.
Finding out if anyone survived the explosion, and for how long, was complicated by the fact that if they -did- survive, they didn't survive impact with the water -- and all the evidence was either floating on, or deep beneath, the sea. But they were able to get some info.
The NASA reports (which are available online, in case anyone really cares) say that they don't know if the cabin maintained pressure integrity after the airframe self-destructed. The damage from water impact was too great. If it didn't, then they would have had no air to breathe, and would have passed out in 15 secs, if they weren't already unconsious or dead from the accident.
There are signs that at least two survived, and tried to do something before they fell unconsious or were killed.
But the official NASA reports are usually pretty good. If they -knew- that Christa McAuliff spent her last minute alive and conscious, it would be in the report. The PR flacks probably wouldn't point it out, however.
Consider this...
On the way to the moon, a catastrophic failure occurs, threatening the lives of the crew and the mission. Yet everyone involved works overtime to try to figure out a way to save the lives of the three astronauts, and succeeds. It happened; it was Apollo 13.
The contingency plan to cut off the radios wasn't intended for that type of scenario, but rather if they were stranded on the moon...
...if Armstrong hadn't been able to set down when he did, and used up too much fuel, so they wouldn't have had enough to get back to the CM.
...if the LEM had been damaged in the landing, so it was unable to lift again.
...if a malfunction occured on the way back to the CM, and the LEM was unable to make it.
This is the type of situation where you -know- they are going to die, and there is -nothing- that can be done about it. As it stands, they were less than 1 minute away from that happening anyway (Armstrong was dangerously low on fuel when he landed; Another minute more, and he would have had to abort the landing).
It was not a "we are having a major problem here" type contingincy, it was a "You know, you are dead." "Yeah, we know... Say goodbye to my kids for me" type contingency.
No American astronaut has died in space. Several Soviet cosmonauts have died in space, but I don't know how many, or on what missions.
Three astronauts died in a fire in the Apollo 1 capsule, during an unfueled test on the launch pad. Their deaths were not a secret, and was much publicised at the time.
Seven more astronauts died during launch of the SST Challenger, and that was also highly publicised.
At the time of the Apollo program, the US space program was popular, often televised or covered in the news, and not secretive about what was going on at all. Of course, having every launch visible from several nearby cities (like Orlando, only 50 miles away) makes it hard to have a launch no one knows about. The US could not have had unpublicised manned moon landings before Apollo 11.
I think it tries to patent a system that automatically wraps the content of a window around other windows placed on top of it.
I don't think it covers redrawing obscured content once the obscuring window is (re)moved, but rather redrawing obscured content in an unobscured location.
There are already two: The American Society of Composer, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP); and the Broadcast Music Inc (BMI). Both of these companies act as licensing middlemen between public performers of music (TV, radio, Muzak and Muzak-like services, bars, clubs, DJ's, etc) and the writers and publishers of music.
Both ASCAP and BMI have web-based license agreements already. It looks like they have taken the route of treating the web like other venues that they license, rather than trying to keep music off the web.
I wonder... If I signed license agreements with ASCAP and BMI, and paid them my licensing fees (for BMI, a minimum of $500 annually, or 1.75% of my gross revenues), could I run a legal, free, MP3 site?
"they" has been used as a neuter personal pronoun in English for centuries. There are recorded case of Will Shakespeare doing so in his plays, for instance. I don't have a problem with it.
/. posting interface?
As for split infinitives... It has never been non-grammatical to do so in English. The reason it was ever considered bad grammar was when some educators mistakenly thought that English grammar should be based on Latin grammar. Since Latin doesn't use split infinitives (actualy, an infinitive in Latin is a single word, which is kind of hard to split), the "logical" assumption was that it was improper in English.
The problem with that logic is twofold: a) English speakers have been boldly splitting infinitives for as long as they have been uttering them, and b) English is not derived from Latin, but is instead Germanic, a different language branch.
Besides, some grammarians now view "to boldly go" not as a split infinitive, but consider "go" to be the infinitive, and "to" to simply be a marker that an infinitive will be used. "Boldly" serves as an adverb modifying the infinitive.
[Also... How do you quote referred text in the
Taking Yahoo at their word, I'd say their intent is not to deprive authors of their rights, but rather secure for Yahoo rights they feel they need...
Geocities is in the business of hosting web sites. This involves taking material written and copyrighted by J. Random Author and copying and distributing it all over the world. By copyright law, without a license to do so, Geocities would be breaking the law.
So they need a license to copy and distribute J. Random Author's pages.
Geocities also habitually modifies web pages to display advertising. Again, without a license, this violates the law if they distribute the result.
So that license also has to include the ability to modify the pages by J. Random Author that Geocities copies and distributes.
Furthermore, Geocities was just bought by Yahoo. If Yahoo bought Geocities lock, stock, and barrel, then the licenses they previously had presumably go with it. But now Yahoo owns those licenses. If Yahoo got tired of Geocities, it would want to sell Geocities, and the licenses with them. Suddenly, Yahoo wants "transferrable" licenses, so it can transfer them if need be.
Likewise, Yahoo might want to contract out the serving of Geocities pages, which means it would needs to sublicense the content.
So this means that Yahoo needs, to do the basic type of thing it has been doing, a transferrable, sublicensable license to copy, distribute, and modify the content posted on Geocities. It doesn't need an exclusive license, so it specifies that it wants a "non-exclusive" license.
Likewise, since they are just putting the pages up without prior review of the contents, they don't want to be held responsible for any content that is of questionable legality.
I'm sure that the remaining clauses can be justified as easily (I don't have them in front of me, so I can't come up with the justifications).
The problem is... While it allows Yahoo to do what they are currently doing, it also allows them to do a whole bunch more, stuff that J. Random Author might find objectionable.
I think what they wanted to do was something like:
"We respect that you, the author, have a valid copyright on the content of this page. As such, we need, from you, the legal right to provide that content on the WWW, with ads inserted by us, as we have always done, as well as the legal right to readjust how we serve those pages to best serve our business interests. At the same time, we also trust you to be in a position to give us those rights, and do not want to be involved in lawsuits concerning -your- right to say what you say on this page."
Would that intent be justifiable? I think that that intent is compatable with the contract and their statements concerning their intent.
I agree this is ordinary stuff, but...
If the Wired article is accurate, then something -very- strange is going on. I read the opinions of the panel, and most of the stuff described by Wired as being in the Government's case would have little effect on the decision.
The decision (summarized, and clouded by weeks since I read it) was based on these ideas:
1. The Government can't exercise prior restraint on protected speech. Period.
2. While the Government -can- exercise prior restraint on non-protected speech, it can only do so with severe restrictions -- guaranteed time-frame for review, strict guidelines for review, etc. "In the best judgement of..." or "against the policies of..." type guidelines don't do it. It has to be non-discressionary.
3. The existing export regulations, which allow a 90-day review period, after which the item reviewed can be sent to the President for review, don't meet the guarantee requirement.
4. The existing export regulations, which use "national security" as the guideline for review, don't meet the non-discressionary requirement.
5. As such, the existing export regulations, if applied to first-amendment protected speech, would be well outside the guidelines established by the courts of allowable prior restraint, and would thus be unconstitutional.
6. So the remaining question is: Is cryptographic source code, and specifically the source code at issue here, protected speech, or not? ["Speech", here, is a bit broader than just textual writings or actual spoken word. Other "expressions", such as burning a draft card or a flag, have been held to be protected speech.]
7. To distinguish between protected speech and non-protected speech, it is necessary to look at the intent of the "speech". Is it intended to communicate an idea to another person (i.e., is "expressive", and therefor protected) or is it intended to control a device (i.e., is purely "functional", and therefore not protected).
8. While source code tends to be functional in nature (it is, after all, designed to control the operation of a computer), it is also commonly used to clearly communicate details of algorithms, etc, in an expressive way, to other humans. So it also -can be- expressive.
9. In particular, the source code involved in this case a) was written to demonstrate a technique, and b) is not complete in itself (it won't compile, but requires other parts to be written by the prospective user), it was not intended to be functional but rather expressive. Therefore, it is protected speech.
10. Since it is possible for source code which could fall under the jurisdiction of the export regulations in question to be expressive, the law is unconstitutional, at least as far as it applies to expressive source code.
11. Since the regulation is not written in a "separable" way, it is impossible to make it constitutional without an extensive line-by-line rewrite (which is beyond the purview of the court), so the -entire- regulation is ruled unconstitutional.
The dissenting judge disagreed with point 8, and refused to consider that source code could have an expressive nature. Being purely functional, it was not entitled to first-amendment protection, so the regulation is constitutional. Other than that, he basically agreed with the reasoning.
I fail to see how any of the claims that Wired was saying the DoJ was using (the vacuum-cleaner approach to surveillance, etc) would relate to the logic used in the opinions. It strikes me as absurd that they would use such an argument at odds with the case in question.
Does anyone have a URL to the petition actually filed by the DoJ? Is it online anywhere?
Replacements? Sure.... There's X2, X3, X4, X5, etc. Right now, we are up to the eleventh major version of X, and the sixth major release of that version.
True, in 1984, the author of X knew that it was a start, but in 1991, Linus knew that the small kernel he had was a start, as well. We aren't using the same Linux as we were in 1991, and we aren't using the same X as we were in 1984.
This is getting more off topic, but...
I thought that UTC got UTC because of the various time scales involved...
TAI (International Atomic Time) -- bears no direct relation with the rotation of the Earth.
UT (Universal Time), consisting of:
UT0 -- Rotational time of a given point on the earth, as measured by the stars.
UT1 -- UT0 corrected for changes in the Earth's orbit.
UTC -- Coordinated Universal Timescale defined to be an integral number of seconds off from TAI, but less than 0.9 seconds from UT1.
Of course, when you talk about UTC, you should talk about who is doing the measuring. There is a difference between UTC(USNO) (as measured by the US) and UTC(BIPM) (as measured by the French). BIPM doesn't actually -have- any clocks, they just tell people how off their clocks are. Trust the French to develop a system that once a month tells you what time it was two weeks ago...
This article reads like it was longer, more in depth, and then seriously hacked to pieces by an editor concerned with reaching his target audience. It ended up seeming very content-free, and very simplistic. As someone else said, I could feel my IQ falling as I read it.
Given the length and content of the interview, I don't really think that ESR were really who they wanted to interview, but that they didn't know it at the time. So it was chopped into something they could use, but wasn't good.
I think that they would probably have been better off just dropping the article entirely. ESR didn't seem like a good fit for them, period.
I mean, imagine what they would have done with an interview with RMS!
Let's see...
Mistake #1: You should have realised that 25 Gbits/in^2 * 1byte/8bits = 3.125 Gbytes/in^2, and saved your conversion from Gbits/in^2 to bits/in^2 to bytes/in^2 to Gbytes/in^2.
Mistake #2: 1 Gbit = 1024^3, not 1024^2. So your calculations were off by a factor of 1024.
Mistake #3: You didn't account for the spindle on the platter...
My calculations...
They said 105,000 tracks/inch, and 25Gbits/in^2, so that means we have 0.25Mbit/in linear density. If we assume a 3-inch platter has a half-inch spindle and a 1/4-in outside border, that gives us a 1-inch wide recording surface, with track radiuses ranging from 0.25-in (410Kbits) to 1.25 in (1.96Mbit), with an average radius of 0.75in (1.18Mbit), and 105,000 tracks, or 123700Mbits/side, or 15.1 GBytes/side. Close enough for me.....
(going the other way, from 18Gbytes/side and 3.125Gbytes/in^2, simple division will give you 18/3.125 in^2/side, or 5.76in^2/side. My geometry assumptions give me 4.71in^2/side, so my answer being low is reasonable -- my geometry is also low...)