The FCC's concern is that many of the Telco's are routing existing PSTN calls over IP channels, or are planning to, and thereby avoiding paying regulatory fees and taxes (a savings they are not passing on to the customers). Much as I am against government intervention in tech issues, this is a case where it is called for.
Your statements that: "When you look back at the history of that explanation, it becomes pretty clear that nobody cared much, then someone noticed plant leaves and bark patterns in some lumps of coal and everyone said "Oh, that must have been it." (HINT: Petrified forests weren't grown by stone trees)" (care to explain this incomprehensible non-sequitur?)
Petrified forests (and other fossils) are formed by a steady substitution of silicates for the organics under the proper conditions (the organics must have been included intact in sediments fairly quickly, then immersed in a mineral-rick water flow, among other things).
A similar process could easily be at work with the coal that shows the forms and textures of organic forms. In fact, when you consider how much the original organic material would have to have been compacted to form coal, it beggars the imagination that a recognizeable, never mind nearly exact, copy of the original plant appears. In fact, you have to conclude that the percursor to the coal bed formed, was compacted, exposed, took on inclusions of organic material, and then covered *again*.
I repeat, when you look at the tortuous logic used to explain the traditional model, and the inconsistencies between various elements of the explanations, Gold's theory doesn't look so far out anymore. I didn't like the bit about the coal fossils and the clathrates *before* I ever heard of Gold.
I should have been more specific. Almost any fluid can contain gases, and in fact molten rock is known to contain many (including hydrogen sulfide, CO2, and methane, all of which are well-documented by vulcanologists). It is also known that this gas is not homogenized, but can vary from an extremely low level to very gas-rich (the lava that forms reticulite, for example, is so gas filled that after the gas expands the "rock" is 90%+ air pockets). Gas-rich magma would be less dense than gas-poor magma, and a large mass of it would tend to rise to the surface, becoming even less dense as it did so.
Gold's "Deep Hot Biosphere" (yes, I misremembered his name in my original post, as I said it's nowhere near my field and I only read it out of passing curiousity) lays the case out better than I can, but as a reasonably educated layman I found his logic much more compelling than the standard geological explanations for oil formation, the brief, intense volcanic "blowouts" associated with diamond finds, and the methane clathrates that can be found in oil-producing seas all over the planet from the poles to the equator.
Methane clathrates, for those who haven't heard of them, are basically a frozen methane slush on the sea bottom (where the temperature is around 36 fahrenheit, just barely cold enough for methane to be a solid under pressure). The original explanation for them was that methane was somehow being frozen out of the air and settling in these deposits on the bottom of the ocean, an iffy proposition at best even at the poles. But these clathrates are also found in large volumes in the Gulf of Mexico.
So we are expected to believe that these huge volumes of methane are somehow "freezing out" in the tropics in exactly the same way they do at the poles, even though we can't really explain how the gas comes to sink to the bottom and clump up even at the lower surface temperatures. Or, alternatively, that these extremely unstable formations somehow migrate thousands of miles down from the poles.
At some point, the contortions required to preserve traditional models become just too much to believe. From a layman's perspective, this is one of those occasions.
I think the non-fossil origins of oil and other subterranean hydrocarbons is just about a lock. Of course, I'm not any sort of chemist or geologist, but the idea that only biological processes can produce hydrocarbons has been in trouble ever since we found out Titan has a methane atmsophere (aka "Natural Gas").
When you consider how much biomatter would have to have been tied up in swamps and then covered in just the right ways and held at just the right pressures and temperatures to produce the amount of oil and coal we've already pulled out of the ground, and how inefficient that process would have to have been, the "fossil" explanation becomes pretty unlikely. When you look back at the history of that explanation, it becomes pretty clear that nobody cared much, then someone noticed plant leaves and bark patterns in some lumps of coal and everyone said "Oh, that must have been it." (HINT: Petrified forests weren't grown by stone trees)
Cook's theory isn't really "abiogenic", BTW. The only abiogenic "fossil fuel" under his theory would be plain methane. Rather, he believes that methane left over from planet formation is steadily separating out, and somewhere in the mantle (around 10-30 kilometers subsurface) a bacterial ecosystem based on sulfides and methane is forming it into complex hydrocarbons. Given that we already know of sulfide-based, high-temperature ecosystems in the deep ocean thermal vents, it's really not much a stretch anymore.
By that theory, the oil-richness of the Middle East becomes inter-related with the East African Rift (both being the consequence of a deep upwelling of methane-rich rock). But we're going to have to wait for those funerals before it will be acceptable for a petro-geologist to admit they have been back-asswards about it for the last century. The "Appropriate Technology" bunch is going to have a screaming fit, as well.
Not to pimp for my own site, but I wrote up a piece for the Terra Nova blog where I advanced a similar theory, but pointing towards the subscription services. Star Wars Galaxies launched in August, with the fastest growth of any MMO ever, which matches well with the timing of the decline.
Anyway, I think Michael Malone is correct that this is the leading edge of a cultural sea change, rather than a transient effect of a bad set of new shows.
Any plan to switch over to metered, "tagged" network transfer where you buy different grades of network performance on a connection by connection basis, requires that both the primary backbones and the routing control lie with entities who want to make the switch. The backbones alone can't do it, because they no longer transfer most of the traffic. But if you controlled the routing, you could make sure that only "content flagged" traffic had any real chance to arrive.
To control the routing, one of the pieces you need is control of DNS, *complete* control with no viable alternatives. Another piece is that you need to either be ICANN, or you have to break them.
That's the conspiracy-theory version, anyway. It's another episode of the same old fight, "The Internet won't be safe for business until business runs it." From that point of view, this is a fight between ICANN and Verisign over who gets to be masters of a "mature", commercial from the packet level up, internet.
Airlines fly planes with a safety record that exceeds that of automobiles. Hundreds of nuclear facilities have operated for decades with only 3 significant accidents, the only one of which that had an effect outside the facility (and that one would never have happened under the regulations the rest of the industry operated under). Thousands of chemical plants and refineries operate with an acceptable safety record.
Fine, there was no MMU. Why? Wrong question, there was no MMU because after studying it to death NASA decided there didn't need to be an MMU, and it wasn't safe to make the inspection by going out on a tether. NASA's current culture is that if you plan well enough, anticipate thouroughly enough, you can make space flight safe through sheer force of brainpower. Their reaction to *this* is going to be to study the problems more, implement more safety regulations, slow down the launch schedule more, increase the cost of each launch.
Here's a concept NASA doesn't culturally comprehend: Acceptable operating loss. At some point, the gains from additional safety measures exceed the value gained from taking those measures. Why does it cost a billion a shot to launch a vehicle that costs less than $100 million each to build? Because NASA studies every damned thing to death. Right now the failure rate of the shuttle is about 1 vehicle and crew every 50 launches. Let's say that throwing the regulations out the window and boosting them up as fast as we could would increase the failure rate to 1 in 25 missions, at a cost per launch of $100 million (including 4% amortization for the expected loss rate of the vehicles). We'd lose a couple of shuttles (and their crews) per year, get 10 times as many launches, and learn what we really need to know in order to build safer spacecraft. We'd also be able to constantly increment the quality of the designs and integrate new safety features, as we'd be building them all the freaking time.
In a few decades, we'd have systems that failed about as often as commercial aircraft, and the cost-per-pound to orbit would be a tiny fraction of what it is now. Pay astronauts high salaries to go with the high risk and you'll have no shortage of crew (like fishermen and deep coal miners, you think those guys do it for *fun*?).
But we don't have the balls, and NASA isn't going to get out of the way. The Chinese, or the Russians, or *somebody* who is willing to do what it takes is going to fulfill the dream. But it won't be us, not at this rate.
NASA hasn't been the leader in space technology for a long time. They spend too much, accomplish too little, and paradoxically they make it *too* safe. If we were throwing up a launch every other day, and losing a bird a year, we'd get used to it. Astronaut would be just another dangerous profession, like "test pilot", "commercial fisherman", or "underground coal miner".
But because we've lost only 3 crews, and spend over a billion on every launch trying to bring it to zero (and therefore don't get a lot of launches), people are able to delude themselves into thinking that space travel should be safe. So when we do have a problem, everyone looks for someone to blame, NASA writes a few more books of safety procedures, launches get more expensive and less frequent.
You know why we lost the Columbia? Because NASA regulations didn't allow anyone to go out and look at the damned wing in orbit without specific orders. If the astronauts weren't treated as remote voice-controlled drones by the ground crews, and the shuttle commander had the responsibility and authority that goes with that title in any other field, somebody would have put on a suit and taken a look. But an EVA requires the input of hundreds of desk jockeys, and an "emergency" EVA requires authorization from the agency director. What kind of bullshit way to run a railroad is that?
Disband NASA, turn over civilian spaceflight regulation to the FAA (after first burning every regulation NASA ever wrote), turn the shuttle over to the Air Force and unmanned launches over to the civilian companies that really run them already. Otherwise, get used to the idea that the good old USA is no longer a space-faring nation, and other countries with the stomach for it are going to take the lead.
A record is kept of the destination of every piece of mail, but not of the particular piece or of the sender. So the USPS could know that around the same time that an anthrax letter went through a machine, letter went to particular other places. Theoretically you could track backwards as far as knowing what Post Office's you were receiving mail from, but with very few exceptions this wouldn't tell you anything about the sender or the contents. And if two letters for the same destination went into the same mailbag at some point, you couldn't separate out which came from where if they diverged later.
The regulations cited are basically a bunch of qualification hoops that have to be jumped through before software is considered "Mil-Spec". The first outfit inside DoD to qualify a OSS package is going to have to *really* want it to fill out all that paperwork, but once it is done it should get a lot easier.
Keep in mind, that doesn't mean it will get used for Top Secret or above work right away, some of those hoops are *not* pro forma. But once DoD starts using it, even for trivial things, there will be outfits that just need to satisfy *one* more requirement than has already been filled, and will find it worthwhile to take it the next step.
Best first bet would be it will slip in from DARPA. They've probably *already* been using it in places they're technically supposed to be using a commercial UNIX.
Judge Lewis' order would be more disturbing if it wasn't totally self defeating. How many hundreds of thousands of people have checked out that Google cache by now? An ad in the New York Times couldn't have done a better job.
He's a jerk, and she's a flake. She's obviously in desperate need of a personality transplant, and had the misfortune of having her first intense relationship with a complete asshole. I've met the type, the very pretty girl that has always been made so aware of it she doesn't know who she is beyond her looks. At this rate, she's not going to find out.
1) Most "Uberguilds" have a "raid points" system, the more raids you go on, the more points you get, and the more chances you have of getting some of the better items.
2) In at least one guild, the officers were smuggling the proceeds of raids off of the server (through character transfers that SOE will perform for a fee) and selling them on eBay, the cash getting split among those in on the scam. Interestingly, even after finding out they were being used, most of the members chose to stay with the guild.
This is a squeeze on the hardware manufacturer's more than anything else. One, you have to pay MS for the certification tests (I forget how much it is, but it's a sizable chunk), and they probably want to turn this into a profit center. No matter what they do, the OS and Office market is not going to give them significant revenue growth, so they're going to extract a tax from the peripheral hardware side.
Two, if you can't get your stuff on the shelves without MS certifying your drivers, and MS is a bit...slow about certifying devices with vendor-supplied Linux drivers.... Guess how many companies will look at the 98% of the peripheral/card market that is Windows and the 2% that is not, and decide they don't need to distribute their own Linux drivers, after all? We'd be back to 1995 for Linux drivers, rolling our own from reverse engineering.
Three, to really implement DRM for video and audio, you need to build it into the video and audio cards, and MS is still pushing their own DRM standards. If they can turn XP certification into a club to beat the card-builders over the head with, how long before you can't buy a SoundBlaster that isn't hard-wired for MicroSoft DRM?
Maybe that's all so much conspiracy-spinning, but the implications and conclusions look pretty obvious to me.
I can see it. Okay, you know how OOP lets you over-ride ancestor behaviour in descendants? But if you want to combine the behaviour of two different objects you have to either encapsulate one in the other, or go all the way back to their common ancestor and create a new descendent line because if you change the root line then *all* descendants are changed?
AOP would seem to let you over-ride methods or invoke special handling *without* touching the object directly. You simply tell the compiler "When this method is called, do this first (or afterwards)."
On the one hand, this could lead to spagetti code nightmares, since execution paths could become effectively untraceable. On the other, it's in many ways cleaner than putting your special-case or over-ride code directly into the methods and objects directly.
It makes my head hurt, but I sort of understand it. Quantum computing ties into the theory (now seeming pretty well proven) that at a sub-atomic level, all of the things that *can* happen, do happen, until someone actually observes them and forces the system to assume a fixed state. Electrons have "spin", and one of the properties of that spin is that it *must* be either up or down (don't worry what "up" or "down" means, think of it like flipping a coin). A "quantumly entangled" electron may have either up or down spin, and as long as you don't look at it directly it will behave like it has both (you flip the coin and catch in in your fist, you don't know whether it is heads or tails, even though it must be one or the other).
In QC, you set things up so that the "quantum entanglement" is going to do a calculation for you, in effect you're not only using the computer you built, but all of the computers it might have become. Then you observe the results in such a way that only the "potential" computer that achieves the right result is remaining.
If you really want to give yourself a headache, think of it this way: To find out if the cat in the box is alive or dead, you ask the cat.
The message is that if you don't show any loyalty to your employees (if, for example, you employ them "at whim" through a temp agency, without benefits or job security) you shouldn't expect them to show any loyalty in return.
Way back once upon a time, I worked a fab line as a "contractor", it royally sucked. "Night and fog" atmosphere, people you work with would just stop showing up, and getting curious about why was a good way to follow them out the door.
As I understand it, around half of it is in the same conduit with lit fiber. The other half should be fairly durable, although it will probably get a few breaks as time goes on.
That "Billions of dollars" estimate to light the dark fiber was just a straight projection of the 275 million the existing fiber required. The stuff that is running alongside lit fiber has already had a lot of that money spent (enclosures, power supply, etc.). The price of the amplifiers and repeaters will almost certainly drop in time, as well.
It's not a short-term investment, but the kinds of investors that will make it can do far better risk assessments than I can.
Did we really need 3 trans-continental railways? Nope, not when they were built, and as a result the companies that built them went broke. There simply wasn't enough freight transportation capacity needed at the time.
Fast-forward 30 years, and they were all running at capacity. The fiber is there, it's not going to go away. 5, 10, maybe 15 years down the road, someone who picks it up cheap now will make a fortune off of it.
Actually, it was him remembering history. Those stupid laws about having a man on horseback ride through town carrying a red lantern to warn everyone an automobile was about to come through? Buggy whip sharpeners, blacksmiths, livery stable operators, and coachmakers got those passed in an attempt to prevent the adoption of the automobile, because that would destroy their industry (which at the time employed a significant percentage of the population and provided service to nearly everyone).
Any parellels between that and the DMCA/Hollings bill are surely a coincidence, right?
In most of Europe, broadband is the only flat-rated residential Internet access you can get, the other alternatives involve by the minute charges for both the access and the phone line. People have no idea what to do with high bandwidth connections or always-on connections, but they can get the idea that they can surf as much as they like without having to log out between large pages (no, I'm not exaggerating). Almost all of our European customers (for an MMOG) are broadband users.
We've got nothin'. The "security, anti-virus, and authentication" loophole is wide enough to hide the entire OS in all by itself, and the DOJ can add anything to that list they are told to. You don't need to be a lawyer to see that this is so weak a set of restrictions as to amount to a liscense for continued abuse.
What it comes down to is this:
Is Microsoft a monopoly? Yes.
Did they abuse their powers as a monopoly? Yes.
Were competitors harmed by this abuse? Yes.
Were consumers harmed by this abuse? Yes.
Is this abuse part of Microsoft's continuing strategy? Yes.
Is the federal government going to do a damned thing about it? No.
This isn't even a slap on the wrist, it's a wink and a nod.
For this purpose, there is a significant difference between the BSD and GPL, but not much of one between BSD and Public Domain.
If you release it under the GPL, all derived code must itself be released under the GPL. Like it or not, this *does* interfere with commercialization of the software, nobody is going to spend millions of dollars writing code they'll have to give away, under most circumstances.
On the other hand, BSD or Public domain carries no such strings. Someone can pick up the BSD or PD code, alter and adapt it, and make the result proprietary, *and* someone else can take the same original PD/BSD code, alter and adapt it, and release it under the GPL or a similar required open-source liscense. The best of all possible worlds, if making something government-generated generally useful requires a lot of up-front investment, in ways that don't appeal to OSS communities, someone can take that opportunity and make an investment with reasonable hope of return. And if something of benefit can be derived in ways that "scratch an itch", the result can be released or recreated under the GPL and kept available.
The problem is that some systems should never be made public. I don't want the command computer source code for the ICBM system running around loose, "many eyes" security methods are a bad thing when intrusion impacts are measured in megatons. So, like it or not, some code will have to remain forever closed.
Sociology spent too long with nothing really new happening, 99% of the really important insights for the field were made 75 or more years ago. Since then it's been mostly mental masturbation and ancestor worship. This is just starting to change, as the internet has made the creation and dynamics of communities a way of doing experimental sociology (in the sense of developing disprovable theories).
Unfortunately, most sociologists are not prepared to take advantage of the opportunity. It's become such a "soft" science, so channelled into the idea that nothing can really be proven, and dependant on the advocacy model of academic discussion, that it's institutionally unprepared to switch gears and behave like a hard science.
There are exceptions, but they tend to be outsiders and young students. There's been some really interesting ideas coming from synthesis with network theory, and Nick Yee has done some really good work treating the populations of online games as subjects and doing comparative studies. But it's not yet being taken seriously by the greater community of sociology, which seems focused on finding ways to make the new tools give the old results.
As probably the only one in the thread who has designed a virtual economy from scratch and had a few hundred thousand people beat on it, I found the paper very interesting. I also work for the first company to get sued because we stopped someone from converting virtual money to the real thing. This stuff isn't hypothetical to *me*.
What is real, when we're talking about economics and communities? Is the community of baseball card collectors real? Are the economics of fine art auctions based on rational decisions?
People "live" in these worlds. They have friends, lovers, rivalries, and the *emotions* are certainly indistinguishable from "real". You may smugly sneer at the inconsequentialness of it all, but what would your ancestors of a few hundred years ago think of you? How many of you make a living directly producing something you can hold in your hands? How many of you have jobs you can't quite get your grandparents to understand?
How many people who read/. routinely hunt and kill their own food, or till the soil to grow the wheat for their daily bread? How few people actually make things *essential* to daily life in this modern age?
The worlds I build are virtual. The communities that appear in them are real.
Slashdot Mirror
--Dave
Petrified forests (and other fossils) are formed by a steady substitution of silicates for the organics under the proper conditions (the organics must have been included intact in sediments fairly quickly, then immersed in a mineral-rick water flow, among other things).
A similar process could easily be at work with the coal that shows the forms and textures of organic forms. In fact, when you consider how much the original organic material would have to have been compacted to form coal, it beggars the imagination that a recognizeable, never mind nearly exact, copy of the original plant appears. In fact, you have to conclude that the percursor to the coal bed formed, was compacted, exposed, took on inclusions of organic material, and then covered *again*.
I repeat, when you look at the tortuous logic used to explain the traditional model, and the inconsistencies between various elements of the explanations, Gold's theory doesn't look so far out anymore. I didn't like the bit about the coal fossils and the clathrates *before* I ever heard of Gold.
--Dave
Gold's "Deep Hot Biosphere" (yes, I misremembered his name in my original post, as I said it's nowhere near my field and I only read it out of passing curiousity) lays the case out better than I can, but as a reasonably educated layman I found his logic much more compelling than the standard geological explanations for oil formation, the brief, intense volcanic "blowouts" associated with diamond finds, and the methane clathrates that can be found in oil-producing seas all over the planet from the poles to the equator.
Methane clathrates, for those who haven't heard of them, are basically a frozen methane slush on the sea bottom (where the temperature is around 36 fahrenheit, just barely cold enough for methane to be a solid under pressure). The original explanation for them was that methane was somehow being frozen out of the air and settling in these deposits on the bottom of the ocean, an iffy proposition at best even at the poles. But these clathrates are also found in large volumes in the Gulf of Mexico.
So we are expected to believe that these huge volumes of methane are somehow "freezing out" in the tropics in exactly the same way they do at the poles, even though we can't really explain how the gas comes to sink to the bottom and clump up even at the lower surface temperatures. Or, alternatively, that these extremely unstable formations somehow migrate thousands of miles down from the poles.
At some point, the contortions required to preserve traditional models become just too much to believe. From a layman's perspective, this is one of those occasions.
--Dave
I think the non-fossil origins of oil and other subterranean hydrocarbons is just about a lock. Of course, I'm not any sort of chemist or geologist, but the idea that only biological processes can produce hydrocarbons has been in trouble ever since we found out Titan has a methane atmsophere (aka "Natural Gas").
When you consider how much biomatter would have to have been tied up in swamps and then covered in just the right ways and held at just the right pressures and temperatures to produce the amount of oil and coal we've already pulled out of the ground, and how inefficient that process would have to have been, the "fossil" explanation becomes pretty unlikely. When you look back at the history of that explanation, it becomes pretty clear that nobody cared much, then someone noticed plant leaves and bark patterns in some lumps of coal and everyone said "Oh, that must have been it." (HINT: Petrified forests weren't grown by stone trees)
Cook's theory isn't really "abiogenic", BTW. The only abiogenic "fossil fuel" under his theory would be plain methane. Rather, he believes that methane left over from planet formation is steadily separating out, and somewhere in the mantle (around 10-30 kilometers subsurface) a bacterial ecosystem based on sulfides and methane is forming it into complex hydrocarbons. Given that we already know of sulfide-based, high-temperature ecosystems in the deep ocean thermal vents, it's really not much a stretch anymore.
By that theory, the oil-richness of the Middle East becomes inter-related with the East African Rift (both being the consequence of a deep upwelling of methane-rich rock). But we're going to have to wait for those funerals before it will be acceptable for a petro-geologist to admit they have been back-asswards about it for the last century. The "Appropriate Technology" bunch is going to have a screaming fit, as well.
--Dave
Anyway, I think Michael Malone is correct that this is the leading edge of a cultural sea change, rather than a transient effect of a bad set of new shows.
--Dave
To control the routing, one of the pieces you need is control of DNS, *complete* control with no viable alternatives. Another piece is that you need to either be ICANN, or you have to break them.
That's the conspiracy-theory version, anyway. It's another episode of the same old fight, "The Internet won't be safe for business until business runs it." From that point of view, this is a fight between ICANN and Verisign over who gets to be masters of a "mature", commercial from the packet level up, internet.
--Dave
Fine, there was no MMU. Why? Wrong question, there was no MMU because after studying it to death NASA decided there didn't need to be an MMU, and it wasn't safe to make the inspection by going out on a tether. NASA's current culture is that if you plan well enough, anticipate thouroughly enough, you can make space flight safe through sheer force of brainpower. Their reaction to *this* is going to be to study the problems more, implement more safety regulations, slow down the launch schedule more, increase the cost of each launch.
Here's a concept NASA doesn't culturally comprehend: Acceptable operating loss. At some point, the gains from additional safety measures exceed the value gained from taking those measures. Why does it cost a billion a shot to launch a vehicle that costs less than $100 million each to build? Because NASA studies every damned thing to death. Right now the failure rate of the shuttle is about 1 vehicle and crew every 50 launches. Let's say that throwing the regulations out the window and boosting them up as fast as we could would increase the failure rate to 1 in 25 missions, at a cost per launch of $100 million (including 4% amortization for the expected loss rate of the vehicles). We'd lose a couple of shuttles (and their crews) per year, get 10 times as many launches, and learn what we really need to know in order to build safer spacecraft. We'd also be able to constantly increment the quality of the designs and integrate new safety features, as we'd be building them all the freaking time.
In a few decades, we'd have systems that failed about as often as commercial aircraft, and the cost-per-pound to orbit would be a tiny fraction of what it is now. Pay astronauts high salaries to go with the high risk and you'll have no shortage of crew (like fishermen and deep coal miners, you think those guys do it for *fun*?).
But we don't have the balls, and NASA isn't going to get out of the way. The Chinese, or the Russians, or *somebody* who is willing to do what it takes is going to fulfill the dream. But it won't be us, not at this rate.
--Dave
But because we've lost only 3 crews, and spend over a billion on every launch trying to bring it to zero (and therefore don't get a lot of launches), people are able to delude themselves into thinking that space travel should be safe. So when we do have a problem, everyone looks for someone to blame, NASA writes a few more books of safety procedures, launches get more expensive and less frequent.
You know why we lost the Columbia? Because NASA regulations didn't allow anyone to go out and look at the damned wing in orbit without specific orders. If the astronauts weren't treated as remote voice-controlled drones by the ground crews, and the shuttle commander had the responsibility and authority that goes with that title in any other field, somebody would have put on a suit and taken a look. But an EVA requires the input of hundreds of desk jockeys, and an "emergency" EVA requires authorization from the agency director. What kind of bullshit way to run a railroad is that?
Disband NASA, turn over civilian spaceflight regulation to the FAA (after first burning every regulation NASA ever wrote), turn the shuttle over to the Air Force and unmanned launches over to the civilian companies that really run them already. Otherwise, get used to the idea that the good old USA is no longer a space-faring nation, and other countries with the stomach for it are going to take the lead.
--Dave
--Dave
Best first bet would be it will slip in from DARPA. They've probably *already* been using it in places they're technically supposed to be using a commercial UNIX.
--Dave
He's a jerk, and she's a flake. She's obviously in desperate need of a personality transplant, and had the misfortune of having her first intense relationship with a complete asshole. I've met the type, the very pretty girl that has always been made so aware of it she doesn't know who she is beyond her looks. At this rate, she's not going to find out.
--Dave
1) Most "Uberguilds" have a "raid points" system, the more raids you go on, the more points you get, and the more chances you have of getting some of the better items.
2) In at least one guild, the officers were smuggling the proceeds of raids off of the server (through character transfers that SOE will perform for a fee) and selling them on eBay, the cash getting split among those in on the scam. Interestingly, even after finding out they were being used, most of the members chose to stay with the guild.
--Dave
Two, if you can't get your stuff on the shelves without MS certifying your drivers, and MS is a bit...slow about certifying devices with vendor-supplied Linux drivers.... Guess how many companies will look at the 98% of the peripheral/card market that is Windows and the 2% that is not, and decide they don't need to distribute their own Linux drivers, after all? We'd be back to 1995 for Linux drivers, rolling our own from reverse engineering.
Three, to really implement DRM for video and audio, you need to build it into the video and audio cards, and MS is still pushing their own DRM standards. If they can turn XP certification into a club to beat the card-builders over the head with, how long before you can't buy a SoundBlaster that isn't hard-wired for MicroSoft DRM?
Maybe that's all so much conspiracy-spinning, but the implications and conclusions look pretty obvious to me.
--Dave
AOP would seem to let you over-ride methods or invoke special handling *without* touching the object directly. You simply tell the compiler "When this method is called, do this first (or afterwards)."
On the one hand, this could lead to spagetti code nightmares, since execution paths could become effectively untraceable. On the other, it's in many ways cleaner than putting your special-case or over-ride code directly into the methods and objects directly.
--Dave
In QC, you set things up so that the "quantum entanglement" is going to do a calculation for you, in effect you're not only using the computer you built, but all of the computers it might have become. Then you observe the results in such a way that only the "potential" computer that achieves the right result is remaining.
If you really want to give yourself a headache, think of it this way: To find out if the cat in the box is alive or dead, you ask the cat.
--Dave
Way back once upon a time, I worked a fab line as a "contractor", it royally sucked. "Night and fog" atmosphere, people you work with would just stop showing up, and getting curious about why was a good way to follow them out the door.
--Dave
That "Billions of dollars" estimate to light the dark fiber was just a straight projection of the 275 million the existing fiber required. The stuff that is running alongside lit fiber has already had a lot of that money spent (enclosures, power supply, etc.). The price of the amplifiers and repeaters will almost certainly drop in time, as well.
It's not a short-term investment, but the kinds of investors that will make it can do far better risk assessments than I can.
--Dave
Fast-forward 30 years, and they were all running at capacity. The fiber is there, it's not going to go away. 5, 10, maybe 15 years down the road, someone who picks it up cheap now will make a fortune off of it.
--Dave
Any parellels between that and the DMCA/Hollings bill are surely a coincidence, right?
--Dave
--Dave
--Dave
What it comes down to is this:
Is Microsoft a monopoly? Yes.
Did they abuse their powers as a monopoly? Yes.
Were competitors harmed by this abuse? Yes.
Were consumers harmed by this abuse? Yes.
Is this abuse part of Microsoft's continuing strategy? Yes.
Is the federal government going to do a damned thing about it? No.
This isn't even a slap on the wrist, it's a wink and a nod.
--Dave
If you release it under the GPL, all derived code must itself be released under the GPL. Like it or not, this *does* interfere with commercialization of the software, nobody is going to spend millions of dollars writing code they'll have to give away, under most circumstances.
On the other hand, BSD or Public domain carries no such strings. Someone can pick up the BSD or PD code, alter and adapt it, and make the result proprietary, *and* someone else can take the same original PD/BSD code, alter and adapt it, and release it under the GPL or a similar required open-source liscense. The best of all possible worlds, if making something government-generated generally useful requires a lot of up-front investment, in ways that don't appeal to OSS communities, someone can take that opportunity and make an investment with reasonable hope of return. And if something of benefit can be derived in ways that "scratch an itch", the result can be released or recreated under the GPL and kept available.
The problem is that some systems should never be made public. I don't want the command computer source code for the ICBM system running around loose, "many eyes" security methods are a bad thing when intrusion impacts are measured in megatons. So, like it or not, some code will have to remain forever closed.
--Dave
Unfortunately, most sociologists are not prepared to take advantage of the opportunity. It's become such a "soft" science, so channelled into the idea that nothing can really be proven, and dependant on the advocacy model of academic discussion, that it's institutionally unprepared to switch gears and behave like a hard science.
There are exceptions, but they tend to be outsiders and young students. There's been some really interesting ideas coming from synthesis with network theory, and Nick Yee has done some really good work treating the populations of online games as subjects and doing comparative studies. But it's not yet being taken seriously by the greater community of sociology, which seems focused on finding ways to make the new tools give the old results.
--Dave
What is real, when we're talking about economics and communities? Is the community of baseball card collectors real? Are the economics of fine art auctions based on rational decisions?
People "live" in these worlds. They have friends, lovers, rivalries, and the *emotions* are certainly indistinguishable from "real". You may smugly sneer at the inconsequentialness of it all, but what would your ancestors of a few hundred years ago think of you? How many of you make a living directly producing something you can hold in your hands? How many of you have jobs you can't quite get your grandparents to understand?
How many people who read /. routinely hunt and kill their own food, or till the soil to grow the wheat for their daily bread? How few people actually make things *essential* to daily life in this modern age?
The worlds I build are virtual. The communities that appear in them are real.
--Dave Rickey