Monsanto is also suing farmers who have not signed their licensing agreement, but who were caught with the genetically engineered plants growing on their farm.
It is more than just a contract issue. Monsanto has actually patented the gene splice.
If I decide to manufacture, say, Viagra, the company that holds the patent for that drug can sue me and win. I never entered into any contractual agreement with Phiser, but infringing on a patent is patently illegal.
What makes this particular case so appalling, however, is the fact that the farmer didn't intend to steal the genetics. As a matter of fact, if any of that pollen managed to get to my heritage corn, I would consider suing for genetic contamination. Most people who buy organic or heritage produce do not want 'frankenfood'.
The corn that we feed to our chickens and burn in our pellet stove might very well be frankencorn. We don't know -- it isn't labeled. Can I be sued if some of the seed lands on the ground and sprouts? (Fat chance! Our chickens don't let much get by them.)
Thanks for the flame, but peruse here: http://www.arrl.org/FandES/field/regulation s/alloc ate.html#higher
I understated the 1500 watt limit, but what I said is correct: you can, in fact, run 1000 watts in that band.
On some bands, we have secondary privileges. That is, we may not interfere with the primary users, and we must accept any interference from the primary users. On other bands, we are primary users.
For the sake of completeness, I must mention that it is not legal to intentionally interfere.
"Who, me? I'm not *intentionally* interfering! Nope, I'm just experimenting with my shiny new moonbounce rig! Yah, that's it. That's the ticket!"
--Tacky was a strange bird, but a good bird to have around.
We don't need no steenkin' amplifier! Just modulate the magnatron from a microwave oven.
Seriously, though, there are perfectly good reasons to run a full gallon at 2.4 GHz. At that frequency, you can get quite a bit of gain from an old (large) satellite antenna dish, and bounce your signal off the moon.
But this guy living in an apartment isn't going to do that.
Don't forget to get a codeless ham license so you can legally transmit on the 2.4 GHz band with a full kilowatt of power. If they interfere with you, they have to stop.
Put an Aluminum Foil Protective Beanie around your apartment -- or, at least, the walls between you and the other wireless users. Seriously, a Faraday cage, even if it's imperfect and will only reduce the signal a few decebels, will help a lot.
I believe someone makes a conductive paint for just such an occasion.
Now's where I get to make a fool of myself -- especially since my old electromagnetic theory book is stashed away somewhere.
The two values of interest are dielectric constant and permeability.
The permeability of free space, by definition, is 1.0. Increasing that (as in using an iron core) increases the magnetic field. Actually, the ration of the B field to the H field (and I forgot the exact definition of those two quantities).
Since only a couple substances (iron, for instance) have a permeability of much more than 1.0, permeability is generally ignored.
The dielectric constant increases the amount of energy stored in an electric (E) field (measured in volts per meter). If you slip some glass or barium titanate or something like that between the two plates of a capacitor, it will increase the capacitance, and therefore the amount of energy stored for a given voltage.
The index of refraction is related to those two constants (no, I don't remember the formula). Generally, we take permeability to be 1.0, and let that part of the equation drop out.
Therefore, if you know the dielectric constant of glass, you know the index of refraction of glass.
(By the way, the index of refraction is the speed of light in free space divided by the speed of light in that medium. If something has an index of refraction of 2.0, light travels in that medium at 0.5c.)
Similarly, the velocity factor (velocity of the signal divided by the speed of light) of a transmission line is calculated based on the capacitance and inductance of the transmission line. The capacitance and inductance are determined by the dielectric constant and permeability of the surrounding medium.
So, it all comes down to permeability and dielectric constant.
Light speed is a big issue, but so is stray capacitence and inductance. A capacitor tends to short out a high frequency signal, and it takes very little capacitence to look like a dead short to a 10 GHz signal. Similarly, the stray inductance of a straight piece of wire has a high reactance at 10 GHz. That's why they run the processor at high speed internally, but have to slow down the signal before sending it out to the real world. If they sent it out over an optical fiber, things would work much better.
And I don't even know if electricity travels at true lightspeed or at something below that.
Under ideal conditions, electric signals can travel at light speed. In real circuits, it is more like.5c to.7c due to capacitive effects -- very much (exactly, actually) the same way a dielectric (like glass or water) slows down light.
If this sort of thing becomes respectable where does it end?
For this kind of a tactic to work, the attacker needs to find a large group of people who are willing to work together to do the job. That will limit the available targets.
I can tell you from experience that our rural school is much better than the urban school our children used to attend. For instance, instead of doing everything they could do to avoid helping my son who has asparager's, the rural school (Pine River) is doing everything possible to help him -- and he's thriving. I just can't say enough good things about them. I wish I had gone there as a kid.
By the way, accusing the rural schools of having lower standards is silly. The gummint works hard to keep standards uniform -- for better of for worse.
In summary, the test sample I have seen supports the claim that rural schools are better. Your mileage may vary.
I am not a proponent of bigger government but I > think that this is something that should be made > illegal.
I'm not a proponent of bigger government, either.
If someone makes the spoofing illegal, it will still be done. If it is not made illegal, technological solutions will be developed. It would be a no-brainer for the phone company itself to to block the problem. In the case of a VOIP connection, adding a "VOIP" prefix to the caller ID data would help greatly.
In the long run, it doesn't matter much. The traditional phone is going to go the way of the hand cranked phone. Instead of a phone line, we will have a data line. Something like net phone will probably be used. At that point, IP address spoofing and anonymous servers will make any form of non-voluntary caller ID useless. If you want to identify yourself, you can use a PGP signature. If you want to avoid spam calls and the like, you can choose to only answer properly identified calls.
Back when I was a kid (late 60s/early 70s), someone sold eyeglasses with a built-in FM radio. For all you history buffs, that was before the Walkman (tm).
Re:Interesting technology
on
RFID Explained
·
· Score: 1
RFID tags have been available for a while. We almost used it for some clients a few times.
There are two major differences between RFID tags and bar codes. The most obvious difference is the fact that you don't have to open the package to scan the item. The less obvious difference is the fact that each item will have a unique code. If you pick up two identical Coke cans, each has the same bar code. With RFID tags, each will be serialized.
If you buy a stereo or computer with an RFID tag, what are you going to do? Are you going to disable it, or are you going to record the numbers and supply them to the police when you get robbed? If they don't cooperate, get a scanner and start visiting pawn shops.
If they start putting RFID tags into your money, what are you going to do? I, personally, will put a "tinfoil hat" on my wallet. Realistically, I'll sew aluminum screen into it to act as a Faraday cage. That way, nobody will be able to read my cash.
Or, maybe I'll make a million bucks selling RFID tag proof wallets.
Meanwhile, the banks and businesses can read the serial numbers of all the currency that comes in. If they get robbed, the list of stolen serial numbers can be sent to the appropriate authorities. Then, any business with a scanner will automatically look for the stolen currency. They may lead to a few false arrests, but someone who has only one stolen bill can easily be questioned (Who gave that money to you?) and released. They will hang on to the person who has a wallet full of the tagged bills. Meanwhile, it'll make it a whole lot more difficult for would-be thieves.
Are your car keys tagged? Get a reader so that you can find them the next time your toddler drops them in the grass or under the refrigerator.
Is your wallet tagged? Remove the old tag and install your own. Don't give anyone the code unless your wallet is stolen. Meanwhile, you can use your portable scanner to look for it next time your honey borrows it and drops it somewhere.
Baen is doing very well (and making money) with its ebook sales. Rather than forcing the user to choose one format, several are offered (html,.pdf, etc.) None have DRM, and all can be freely copied.
Buy Baen ebooks and prove to the industry that they don't have to be so agressive with their copy protection to make money.
Have you ever tried to read something from Project Gutenberg in text format? It's horrible! Try downloading something like the King James Bible and go mad as you slog through in 80 character monospaced print. Furthermore, say goodbye to an pictures or diagrams, e.g. illustrations in Alice in Wonderland.
The advantage of text format is that the user (you) can choose any font and text width desired. It is, truly, the universal standard.
The only disadvantage is that the author can't use things like italics and bold print for emphasis. For that, HTML works fine.
My one experience of this was quite nasty in that we had a legasy app using foxpro back and front ends that we needed to convert so the data would run inside sqlserver (to integrate it with the rest of the business) and leave the front end in vfp. In theory just a case or ripping out the direct data accesses and replace it by odbc calls.
heh. I'm not surprised.
The xBase languages predate SQL. Most vintage xBase software is going to be a real nightmare to convert to a database where you are so insulated from the tables -- for the reason that you described.
FoxPro 2.0 was the first version that would do SQL queries and inserts. Even so, it was nowhere near a complete implimentation. For instance, it wouldn't do outer joins.
The ability to do ODBC on VFP is great for connecting to external databases, and for those who want to use something other than the native tables and database container.
The long and the short of it is that there are xBase techniques that have no counterpart in the SQL world. When I write programs, I try to use SQL commands to retrieve the data because it's generally faster to do it that way. There are times, however, when nothing works like a good 'ol scan loop, BROWSE KEY, BROWSE FOR, or an index with a FOR clause tacked on.
There are actually some good reasons for going with an external backend database, but speed isn't one of them. I recall showing a query to another (non-FoxPro) programmer. He told me that the outer join would "drive the server to its knees". It was lightning fast on FoxPro, however. That makes me wonder if there is any style of query that would be fast in something like MySQL, but would bog VFP down.
So what is it about VFP that inspires so much devotion among its users?
Someone already mentioned the tons of applications that use VFP. I have a couple clients that are still running applications under FoxPro 2.6 for DOS. It isn't pretty, but it is robust and fast. (Actually, to be honest, the original application was written for dBase III, and we modified it to run quickly under Foxpro.)
FoxPro isn't just a database. It's a data-centric language. Instead of choosing something like VB or C for the front end, choosing MySQL or MS SQL for the backend, and maybe something like R&R for reports, it's handy to have everything wrapped up in one neat little package.
Getting back to the old code - who wants to port it to something else? It's easy to take code written in something really old like the original dBase, FoxBase, Quicksilver, or Clipper, feed it into the latest version of VFP, and watch it run. There might be a little tweaking to do, but it'll run without a problem.
Look at it this way. When do you expect ForTran or Cobol to die? FoxPro is to the 80s business software what Cobol is to the '60s and '70s software.
A bit of esprit de corps comes into play, too. When FoxPro 2.0 came out, it was the fastest thing around (advertised as beating a Vax). Truly, I have written programs on a 286 or 386 that are faster than some of the newer stuff that runs on the modern gigahertz chips. If you know what you're doing (Rushmore Optomization), you can get a whole lot of speed from slower machines, and handle complex queries in huge databases with faster machines. That data essentially comes up instantly. I don't know if anything else out there has match the speed of FoxPro yet, but I find things like MS SQL to be rather sluggish -- even with small databases.
Of course, admitedly, a whole lot of us know the product inside and out, and don't want to have to fumble around with something else. I ended up spending a whole lot of time writing applications in JavaScript that I would have written practically without thinking in FoxPro.
Finally, VFP has managed to keep up with technology. While it will run ancient code, it is also web-enabled, is a true OOP language, can use other applications via ActiveX, and can talk to all those other databases via ODBC.
In short, it's not just a language or database. It's an entire environment that needs little else for most applications.
The carbonation in soda is pretty bad for you. It will react and strip calcium off of pretty much anything in you, teeth, bones etc, this is why sports coaches tell their players not to drink soda, it can weaken your bones.
Actually, it's the phosphoric acid that messes with your calcium metabolism. It takes a few soft drinks a day to cause much trouble, though.
Since the design of TMI required human operators, the possiblity of operator incompetence was a built in part of the design of TMI. However, the designers failed to implement a system that made it impossible for operator incompetence to cause a catastrophic failure. That's bad engineering. There were insufficient fail-safe mechanisms, which guaranteed that, given sufficient time, there would eventually be a catastophic failure.
Despite all of this, nobody got hurt and no measurable radioactivity was released. It was an expensive incident, but there were enough safeguards to prevent real trouble.
It was a good learning experience, and I'm sure that current designs are much better.
I'm sure they can -- with the appropriate software. It doesn't take much computing power to encrypt data.
Just encrypting the data isn't enough. If the enemy can point an antenna at you and read some of the signals that are running around inside the computer (such as the signal going to the display, or the signal coming from the keyboard), encryption is moot.
Military equipment is often shielded to prevent tempest (data leakage due to electromagnetic radiation).
Re:Spread the Cost (was: Moore's Law)
on
The Space Elevator
·
· Score: 1
What would be the killer business/consumer application for carbon nanotubes?
I heard a rumor that someone is making cell phone shells out of nanotubes.
Aside from that, there are several obvious answers. Where did graphite fibers first hit the mass marked? Who, besides us geeks, will pay the extra buck for a new high-tech gizmo that will give them some (perhaps imagined) advantage? The sports people, of course!
I predict that golf club shafts and tennis rackets will be among the first mass-market uses of nanotubes. At about the same time, the military, police, and others who often face bullets will buy body armor that uses nanotubes instead of kevlar.
After they become cheaper, the sky's the limit. OK... so it isn't a limit;-)
Car bodies will become more crash-proof. Toys will actually be able to resist the kids' best attempts to destroy them. Fishing line will be very thin and strong. Fishing poles will be incredibly light. Burt Rutan and his cohorts will make home-built airplane kits that use nanotubes. Somewhat later, commercial aircraft builders will do the same. Military tanks will get lighter and stronger. Military aircraft will be able to carry more effective armor. Guns will be lighter. Computer cases and circuit boards will be lighter. Four-wheelers will be able to bolt on some really effective skid plates. Drive trains will genuinely become bulletproof. In fact, vehicles of all types will become lighter and stronger. Clothing will become tear-proof and last a long time. This may not help the fashion-conscious, but will be great for those of us who wear clothing for practical reasons. Backpackers will routinely carry less than ten pounds of gear -- most of their weight will be water and food. A canoe that can carry a thousand pounds or more of passengers and gear will weigh less than ten pounds. If it's designed right, it can be folded up and put into the backpack. Ultralight aircraft will become even lighter.
Maybe we'll finally be able to get a flying car that folds up into a briefcase. OK, so maybe that one is pushing it a bit.
Slashdot Mirror
Monsanto is also suing farmers who have not signed their licensing agreement, but who were caught with the genetically engineered plants growing on their farm.
It is more than just a contract issue. Monsanto has actually patented the gene splice.
If I decide to manufacture, say, Viagra, the company that holds the patent for that drug can sue me and win. I never entered into any contractual agreement with Phiser, but infringing on a patent is patently illegal.
What makes this particular case so appalling, however, is the fact that the farmer didn't intend to steal the genetics. As a matter of fact, if any of that pollen managed to get to my heritage corn, I would consider suing for genetic contamination. Most people who buy organic or heritage produce do not want 'frankenfood'.
The corn that we feed to our chickens and burn in our pellet stove might very well be frankencorn. We don't know -- it isn't labeled. Can I be sued if some of the seed lands on the ground and sprouts? (Fat chance! Our chickens don't let much get by them.)
Thanks for the flame, but peruse here:n s/alloc ate.html#higher
http://www.arrl.org/FandES/field/regulatio
I understated the 1500 watt limit, but what I said is correct: you can, in fact, run 1000 watts in that band.
On some bands, we have secondary privileges. That is, we may not interfere with the primary users, and we must accept any interference from the primary users. On other bands, we are primary users.
For the sake of completeness, I must mention that it is not legal to intentionally interfere.
"Who, me? I'm not *intentionally* interfering! Nope, I'm just experimenting with my shiny new moonbounce rig! Yah, that's it. That's the ticket!"
--Tacky was a strange bird, but a good bird to have around.
We don't need no steenkin' amplifier! Just modulate the magnatron from a microwave oven.
Seriously, though, there are perfectly good reasons to run a full gallon at 2.4 GHz. At that frequency, you can get quite a bit of gain from an old (large) satellite antenna dish, and bounce your signal off the moon.
But this guy living in an apartment isn't going to do that.
Don't forget to get a codeless ham license so you can legally transmit on the 2.4 GHz band with a full kilowatt of power. If they interfere with you, they have to stop.
Put an Aluminum Foil Protective Beanie around your apartment -- or, at least, the walls between you and the other wireless users. Seriously, a Faraday cage, even if it's imperfect and will only reduce the signal a few decebels, will help a lot.
I believe someone makes a conductive paint for just such an occasion.
Now's where I get to make a fool of myself -- especially since my old electromagnetic theory book is stashed away somewhere.
The two values of interest are dielectric constant and permeability.
The permeability of free space, by definition, is 1.0. Increasing that (as in using an iron core) increases the magnetic field. Actually, the ration of the B field to the H field (and I forgot the exact definition of those two quantities).
Since only a couple substances (iron, for instance) have a permeability of much more than 1.0, permeability is generally ignored.
The dielectric constant increases the amount of energy stored in an electric (E) field (measured in volts per meter). If you slip some glass or barium titanate or something like that between the two plates of a capacitor, it will increase the capacitance, and therefore the amount of energy stored for a given voltage.
The index of refraction is related to those two constants (no, I don't remember the formula). Generally, we take permeability to be 1.0, and let that part of the equation drop out.
Therefore, if you know the dielectric constant of glass, you know the index of refraction of glass.
(By the way, the index of refraction is the speed of light in free space divided by the speed of light in that medium. If something has an index of refraction of 2.0, light travels in that medium at 0.5c.)
Similarly, the velocity factor (velocity of the signal divided by the speed of light) of a transmission line is calculated based on the capacitance and inductance of the transmission line. The capacitance and inductance are determined by the dielectric constant and permeability of the surrounding medium.
So, it all comes down to permeability and dielectric constant.
The problem with that is light speed.
.5c to .7c due to capacitive effects -- very much (exactly, actually) the same way a dielectric (like glass or water) slows down light.
Light speed is a big issue, but so is stray capacitence and inductance. A capacitor tends to short out a high frequency signal, and it takes very little capacitence to look like a dead short to a 10 GHz signal. Similarly, the stray inductance of a straight piece of wire has a high reactance at 10 GHz. That's why they run the processor at high speed internally, but have to slow down the signal before sending it out to the real world. If they sent it out over an optical fiber, things would work much better.
And I don't even know if electricity travels at true lightspeed or at something below that.
Under ideal conditions, electric signals can travel at light speed. In real circuits, it is more like
--Tacky the BSEE
I use Spamvampire almost constantly. It works great. It sucks up their bandwidth
So, if I want to DDOS someone, I send out a bunch of spam that has their IP address as the 'buy' link. Then, all the vigilantes do the work for me.
If this sort of thing becomes respectable where does it end?
For this kind of a tactic to work, the attacker needs to find a large group of people who are willing to work together to do the job. That will limit the available targets.
Is it mob rule, or unofficial democracy?
I can tell you from experience that our rural school is much better than the urban school our children used to attend. For instance, instead of doing everything they could do to avoid helping my son who has asparager's, the rural school (Pine River) is doing everything possible to help him -- and he's thriving. I just can't say enough good things about them. I wish I had gone there as a kid.
By the way, accusing the rural schools of having lower standards is silly. The gummint works hard to keep standards uniform -- for better of for worse.
In summary, the test sample I have seen supports the claim that rural schools are better. Your mileage may vary.
I am not a proponent of bigger government but I
> think that this is something that should be made
> illegal.
I'm not a proponent of bigger government, either.
If someone makes the spoofing illegal, it will still be done. If it is not made illegal, technological solutions will be developed. It would be a no-brainer for the phone company itself to to block the problem. In the case of a VOIP connection, adding a "VOIP" prefix to the caller ID data would help greatly.
In the long run, it doesn't matter much. The traditional phone is going to go the way of the hand cranked phone. Instead of a phone line, we will have a data line. Something like net phone will probably be used. At that point, IP address spoofing and anonymous servers will make any form of non-voluntary caller ID useless. If you want to identify yourself, you can use a PGP signature. If you want to avoid spam calls and the like, you can choose to only answer properly identified calls.
Back when I was a kid (late 60s/early 70s), someone sold eyeglasses with a built-in FM radio. For all you history buffs, that was before the Walkman (tm).
RFID tags have been available for a while. We almost used it for some clients a few times.
There are two major differences between RFID tags and bar codes. The most obvious difference is the fact that you don't have to open the package to scan the item. The less obvious difference is the fact that each item will have a unique code. If you pick up two identical Coke cans, each has the same bar code. With RFID tags, each will be serialized.
If you buy a stereo or computer with an RFID tag, what are you going to do? Are you going to disable it, or are you going to record the numbers and supply them to the police when you get robbed? If they don't cooperate, get a scanner and start visiting pawn shops.
If they start putting RFID tags into your money, what are you going to do? I, personally, will put a "tinfoil hat" on my wallet. Realistically, I'll sew aluminum screen into it to act as a Faraday cage. That way, nobody will be able to read my cash.
Or, maybe I'll make a million bucks selling RFID tag proof wallets.
Meanwhile, the banks and businesses can read the serial numbers of all the currency that comes in. If they get robbed, the list of stolen serial numbers can be sent to the appropriate authorities. Then, any business with a scanner will automatically look for the stolen currency. They may lead to a few false arrests, but someone who has only one stolen bill can easily be questioned (Who gave that money to you?) and released. They will hang on to the person who has a wallet full of the tagged bills. Meanwhile, it'll make it a whole lot more difficult for would-be thieves.
Are your car keys tagged? Get a reader so that you can find them the next time your toddler drops them in the grass or under the refrigerator.
Is your wallet tagged? Remove the old tag and install your own. Don't give anyone the code unless your wallet is stolen. Meanwhile, you can use your portable scanner to look for it next time your honey borrows it and drops it somewhere.
Rough guess
CRTs: 10 x $250 = 2500
TFTs: 3 x $650 = 1950
Vid cards: 13 x $250 = 3250
PCs: 9 x $500 = 4500
So about $15K altogether, give or take a couple K.
For that, you might as well throw in a few more bucks and buy the damn plane.
Baen books is offering ebooks without DRM, and is doing very well.
In theory, offering copyable ebooks should lose them money. In practice, they are making money. Someone needs to update their theory.
Baen is doing very well (and making money) with its ebook sales. Rather than forcing the user to choose one format, several are offered (html, .pdf, etc.) None have DRM, and all can be freely copied.
Buy Baen ebooks and prove to the industry that they don't have to be so agressive with their copy protection to make money.
Have you ever tried to read something from Project Gutenberg in text format? It's horrible! Try downloading something like the King James Bible and go mad as you slog through in 80 character monospaced print. Furthermore, say goodbye to an pictures or diagrams, e.g. illustrations in Alice in Wonderland.
The advantage of text format is that the user (you) can choose any font and text width desired. It is, truly, the universal standard.
The only disadvantage is that the author can't use things like italics and bold print for emphasis. For that, HTML works fine.
Yah! That's the ticket! Create a new tax!
This guy must be a Democrat.
On a serious note, what are all of the free email list providers going to do?
-Tacky was an odd bird, but a good bird to have around.
My one experience of this was quite nasty in that we had a legasy app using foxpro back and front ends that we needed to convert so the data would run inside sqlserver (to integrate it with the rest of the business) and leave the front end in vfp. In theory just a case or ripping out the direct data accesses and replace it by odbc calls.
heh. I'm not surprised.
The xBase languages predate SQL. Most vintage xBase software is going to be a real nightmare to convert to a database where you are so insulated from the tables -- for the reason that you described.
FoxPro 2.0 was the first version that would do SQL queries and inserts. Even so, it was nowhere near a complete implimentation. For instance, it wouldn't do outer joins.
The ability to do ODBC on VFP is great for connecting to external databases, and for those who want to use something other than the native tables and database container.
The long and the short of it is that there are xBase techniques that have no counterpart in the SQL world. When I write programs, I try to use SQL commands to retrieve the data because it's generally faster to do it that way. There are times, however, when nothing works like a good 'ol scan loop, BROWSE KEY, BROWSE FOR, or an index with a FOR clause tacked on.
There are actually some good reasons for going with an external backend database, but speed isn't one of them. I recall showing a query to another (non-FoxPro) programmer. He told me that the outer join would "drive the server to its knees". It was lightning fast on FoxPro, however. That makes me wonder if there is any style of query that would be fast in something like MySQL, but would bog VFP down.
So what is it about VFP that inspires so much devotion among its users?
Someone already mentioned the tons of applications that use VFP. I have a couple clients that are still running applications under FoxPro 2.6 for DOS. It isn't pretty, but it is robust and fast. (Actually, to be honest, the original application was written for dBase III, and we modified it to run quickly under Foxpro.)
FoxPro isn't just a database. It's a data-centric language. Instead of choosing something like VB or C for the front end, choosing MySQL or MS SQL for the backend, and maybe something like R&R for reports, it's handy to have everything wrapped up in one neat little package.
Getting back to the old code - who wants to port it to something else? It's easy to take code written in something really old like the original dBase, FoxBase, Quicksilver, or Clipper, feed it into the latest version of VFP, and watch it run. There might be a little tweaking to do, but it'll run without a problem.
Look at it this way. When do you expect ForTran or Cobol to die? FoxPro is to the 80s business software what Cobol is to the '60s and '70s software.
A bit of esprit de corps comes into play, too. When FoxPro 2.0 came out, it was the fastest thing around (advertised as beating a Vax). Truly, I have written programs on a 286 or 386 that are faster than some of the newer stuff that runs on the modern gigahertz chips. If you know what you're doing (Rushmore Optomization), you can get a whole lot of speed from slower machines, and handle complex queries in huge databases with faster machines. That data essentially comes up instantly. I don't know if anything else out there has match the speed of FoxPro yet, but I find things like MS SQL to be rather sluggish -- even with small databases.
Of course, admitedly, a whole lot of us know the product inside and out, and don't want to have to fumble around with something else. I ended up spending a whole lot of time writing applications in JavaScript that I would have written practically without thinking in FoxPro.
Finally, VFP has managed to keep up with technology. While it will run ancient code, it is also web-enabled, is a true OOP language, can use other applications via ActiveX, and can talk to all those other databases via ODBC.
In short, it's not just a language or database. It's an entire environment that needs little else for most applications.
The carbonation in soda is pretty bad for you. It will react and strip calcium off of pretty much anything in you, teeth, bones etc, this is why sports coaches tell their players not to drink soda, it can weaken your bones.
Actually, it's the phosphoric acid that messes with your calcium metabolism. It takes a few soft drinks a day to cause much trouble, though.
Since the design of TMI required human operators, the possiblity of operator incompetence was a built in part of the design of TMI. However, the designers failed to implement a system that made it impossible for operator incompetence to cause a catastrophic failure. That's bad engineering. There were insufficient fail-safe mechanisms, which guaranteed that, given sufficient time, there would eventually be a catastophic failure.
Despite all of this, nobody got hurt and no measurable radioactivity was released. It was an expensive incident, but there were enough safeguards to prevent real trouble.
It was a good learning experience, and I'm sure that current designs are much better.
Can they perform "military grade" encryption?
I'm sure they can -- with the appropriate software. It doesn't take much computing power to encrypt data.
Just encrypting the data isn't enough. If the enemy can point an antenna at you and read some of the signals that are running around inside the computer (such as the signal going to the display, or the signal coming from the keyboard), encryption is moot.
Military equipment is often shielded to prevent tempest (data leakage due to electromagnetic radiation).
What would be the killer business/consumer application for carbon nanotubes?
;-)
I heard a rumor that someone is making cell phone shells out of nanotubes.
Aside from that, there are several obvious answers. Where did graphite fibers first hit the mass marked? Who, besides us geeks, will pay the extra buck for a new high-tech gizmo that will give them some (perhaps imagined) advantage? The sports people, of course!
I predict that golf club shafts and tennis rackets will be among the first mass-market uses of nanotubes. At about the same time, the military, police, and others who often face bullets will buy body armor that uses nanotubes instead of kevlar.
After they become cheaper, the sky's the limit. OK... so it isn't a limit
Car bodies will become more crash-proof. Toys will actually be able to resist the kids' best attempts to destroy them. Fishing line will be very thin and strong. Fishing poles will be incredibly light. Burt Rutan and his cohorts will make home-built airplane kits that use nanotubes. Somewhat later, commercial aircraft builders will do the same. Military tanks will get lighter and stronger. Military aircraft will be able to carry more effective armor. Guns will be lighter. Computer cases and circuit boards will be lighter. Four-wheelers will be able to bolt on some really effective skid plates. Drive trains will genuinely become bulletproof. In fact, vehicles of all types will become lighter and stronger. Clothing will become tear-proof and last a long time. This may not help the fashion-conscious, but will be great for those of us who wear clothing for practical reasons. Backpackers will routinely carry less than ten pounds of gear -- most of their weight will be water and food. A canoe that can carry a thousand pounds or more of passengers and gear will weigh less than ten pounds. If it's designed right, it can be folded up and put into the backpack. Ultralight aircraft will become even lighter.
Maybe we'll finally be able to get a flying car that folds up into a briefcase. OK, so maybe that one is pushing it a bit.
Now, all we need is a computer that boots straight into a programming language.
Uh, wait a minute.......