If the computer will crash by accessing these records, then this implies the records are inaccessible. Not to mention that if the records magically 'disappear' all they have to say it "look we told you so"
Perhaps it's not as simple as that. From what the DOJ seems to be saying, extracting and compiling a report of this size using the existing interface could, quite understandably, render the system unstable. In theory, then, such a system may behave unpredictably and could potentially damage the database. That would, of course, imply that the DOJ database is built on unstable, outdated technology--but we already knew that. They're working to improve that, but it will take many years and millions of dollars.
The reporters aren't asking for (nor are they entitled to) a complete backup of the database. That would be comparatively easy to provide, but is obviously out of the question, as it would include much more than just the authorized content.
Perhaps they'd have better luck if they made a whole bunch of small queries: Instead of saying "send me everything you've got", they could say "Send me all relevant content for August 1947", then "Send me all relevant content for September 1947", and so on.
You could argue that the instead of forcing the reporters to take the time and money to make thousands of small, separate requests, they should be able to make a single blanket request and have the government office subdivide it internally. However, such an assumption would not take into consideration the fact that you're working with a government office that is only helping you because they're required to by law. Give them a single excuse to say no and they won't hesitate to give you nothing at all.
I think the purpose here is fighting a war without risking your own solders' lives. You could shell a bunker 250 miles inland at more than 6 rounds per minute, and the projectiles would impact at mach 4.
Furthermore, their main incentive is that it costs less than conventional weapons. (RTFA)
Ever wonder what type of aircraft SS1 is registered as in the FAA records?
If you look up its tail number ("N-number"), 328KF, in the FAA registry, you get the following:
Serial Number 001 Model 316 Type Aircraft Glider MFR Year 2003 Certificate Issue Date 03/20/2003 Type Engine None
So, apparently Space Ship One was registered back in March of last year as an unpowered glider. I think that's something of an understatement of the aircraft's potential.
The viewable angle on these computers in 3-D mode has got to be awful. 10 degrees off and you lose your picture entirely, since they use "an optical parallax barrier" to control which eye sees which pixel.
I think my neck would start to hurt after more than 10 minutes of game play from trying to hold still.
I'm sorry, my friend, but thirteen servers does not mean decentralized it means replicated. The fact that they are geographically dispersed doesn't matter.
I'm sorry, my friend, but it most certainly does mean decentralized. Here's why:
Decentralized means "having power or function dispersed from a central to local authorities". Each individual top-level nameserver operates entirely independantly of the others to the extent that it is capable of remaining completely operational in the absence of the others.
DNS is actually the epitome of a decentralized service--as perfect an example as there comes. Assuming it is implemented as perscribed in the RFCs, there is no single point of failure (an incorrectly implemented DNS system is not the result of a poor design, it's the result of poor implementation--you can't blame DNS).
There are 13 totally and completely independant top level servers. The only thing that ties them together (in a practical sense) is that they speak the same protocol and synchronize with eachother if possible. All top-level domains have at least two nameservers (generally much more), and all second level domains are required to have at least two authoratative nameservers as well. If any one of these servers in the whole chain fails at any time, the others will pick up the slack--it's part of the protocol.
Implementing this service correctly such that no failure will take down your own domain is left as an exercise for you. It's your domain and your nameserver. You're responsible for insuring that it works. The "system" correctly assures that each one of your own nameservers will be queried until one responds. If you take all of your own nameservers offline, there's obviously nothing that the DNS system can do to help you. That's what Akamai's problem was. Don't blame DNS.
...that the real problem never was coming up with hard-to-guess credentials. If a black-hat wants to steal from your bank acount, he won't try to brute-force your password. He'll social-engineer it out of you, or attack his target from another angle.
For example, a well-played phishing ("click here to protect your bank acount from hackers", says the email...) scam can circumvent just about any challenge-response based authentication scheme with a MITM attack.
Bank presents phisher with challenge
Phisher presents user with challenge (posing as bank)
User gives phisher correct response
phisher gives bank correct response
No matter how complicated the procedure (even the ones with transaction numbers), the bad guy's best bet is to get the unwary user to surrender the passcodes himself.
Furthermore, banks and other institutions are often much less secure internally than they seem from their interface. You'd be amazed at how insecure and unreliable on the inside some of the more well-known and trusted organizations are, even though the present a 128-bit RSA-encrypted facade to the customer.
Banks regularly write off millions in losses due to theft through some unknown or unsecured channel. In order for enhanced security to be an option, it has to cost less than the losses it eliminates. The observant cracker takes advantage of this fact and strikes carefully.
It says that these things are able to continue to learn and adapt. I am not an AI expert, but how many mistakes does it have to make before it figures everything out?
I don't think that's the kind of intelligence they were talking about. There's a sort of "collective intelligence" you see in communities of "unintelligent" creatures, like ants or bees. Each does a fairly simple task which may or may not help out, but together they get something accomplished. The community seems intelligent, but the individual doesn't.
Still, I think this approach is ill-suited for space-station assembly. Take, for example, the following phrase from the article: "Once each robot in a pair has found itself a girder, they pick them up using mechanical docking units..." A community of ants finds food because food is abundant. A community of drifting robots will likely find some free-floating parts to the space station, but probably won't find all of them--just like a community of ants isn't going to find ALL of the food within a given area, especially when that food is constantly drifting away in a boundless universe. Sure, it works on an air hockey table, but those have bumbers. That makes a bit of difference.
If you want to develop a new tool and have have the bazaar dev model work like ESR told us all it should, then Fedora is a great place. I remember when Fedora was first getting started, I offered to start development on a much needed tool, and I got no less that 7 different offers for help from other non-RH participants in just a week. The prospect of having your tool built under the oversight of RedHat, and almost guarantee that it will be included in the distro is enough already to get all the outside support you need. Fedora was a brilliant idea. It was executed horribly, however.
Offical support and direction was difficult to come by. "Read the docs," they said, but there was precious little written about how we were to proceed. Common questions were: how should we communicate, where should we host the project, how do we best get our product to integrated into the RH environment. All the "offical" Fedora components were hosted on RedHat's own CVS server and had entries in RedHat's official Bugzilla site. What about our project? We're writing for Fedora, for RedHat. We were even given the go-ahead by RH staff. Now when do we get CVS and Bugzilla? We want to start building here.
RedHat staff has been "very busy" trying to answer our questions and satisfy our reasonable requests. Apparently there's red tape everywhere--legal and logistical issues enough to make a man cry. Stuff can be fixed, but it takes time.
We sit and twiddle our thumbs hoping for some answers. Status updates are few and generally cryptic. RedHat is still "very, very busy" and is apparently making progress.
In the mean time, other commitments have commanded my time and I've had to abandon my post as a Fedora developer--at least for now. Now I look back and wonder how much I actually got to contribute.
It was a wonderful environment. Your work was almost guaranteed to be included in the distro (assuming you were filling a posted need). And I, a nameless nobody in the Linux world, had on multiple occasions asked questions and gotten prompt, insightful answers from both Eric Raymond and Alan Cox. I really felt like I was doing something important.
But the delays and disorganization, good heavens. What frustration is was to try to get any offical assistance or direction from RedHat. Their developer support infrastructure was nonexistant at best. To borrow an old metaphor, they were building a passenger jet in the air with Fedora, and we the passengers expected to be joining something a little more..erm.. functional than we experinced.
Fedora's not a bad idea. It's a great idea. I was (and still am) fairly excided about the whole prospect. But it would have been nice if RedHat had prepared itself and built some sort of support system before bringing the rest of us on board.
Has everybody missed what this story is about? These people haven't destroyed file sharing, they've saved it. They didn't come up with a way of poisoning p2p networks, the've PATENTED the only effective method out there.
Patenting a method doesn't make it popular, it makes the method expensive (or even illegal). This means that now whenever the RIAA tries to destory p2p network with fake content (which they currently do), they'll have to pay this kid royalties--how ever much the kid wants--or they're not allowed to do it.
This opens up all sorts of new doors for us. Doesn't anybody see the implications here? We can actually use the patent system we've argued against so vehemently to our advantage. The ability to patent is the ability to write law. You can use patents to make almost any unwanted behavior illegal.
Take a page out of Microsoft's book--don't try to patent overly general techniques--pick very specific things you don't other people to do, and patent it:
Patent #3234732223134: "A method for preventing software piracy of office suite and operating system components by configuring the client to periodically report back to the authoring company"
Patent #3234732223135: "A method for preventing the unauthorized duplication of copyrighted material by only allowing such material to be played using pre-certified devices"
You can then use your shiny new patents to either (A) fund your organization's fight against patents, or (B) simply make the patented behavior illegal.
The key that we've learned from past patent suits is that if you make your patent specific enough to your targeted application, you won't have to worry about prior art. ("Sure, they may have done something like this before, but they didn't do it with web browsers"). You really can patent just about anything, we've seen more than enough absurd patents to know that. You just have to beat the bad guys to it: patent it before they get a chance to put their plans into effect.
And the end result? Perhaps the business disruption created by these crazy patents will spur a reformation of the patent system, or perhaps angry consumers will continue to be able to write their own laws to fight unwanted business practices. Who cares? Either way we win, as long as we're the ones getting the patents.
What the hell is that supposed to mean? Even on a commercial scheduled flight, any electronic device at all that the pilot and/or carrier deems safe is allowed--and that's under IFR. For GA craft under VFR, there's nothing even remotely illegal or even discouraged about it. There's obviously nothing dangerous about it. Steam gauges, visual navigation. You could lose your whole electrical system in those conditions and still continue the flight safely and legally as planned (albeit not in LAX's airspace) The 2.5 GHz transmitters aren't going to interfere with the com radios, though--you could test that on the ground. Hardly the stuff that would put lives in danger. Did you read your FAR/AIM manual before you took your written test? I did. Yep, the whole damn thing. And let me tell you, there's nothing illegal about what they did.
* Unexperienced pilots flying formation
That would be dangerous if they were inexperienced. But how did you arrive at that conclusion? Certainly not by checking the FAA registry -- At least one of the two is an instructor.
* DOOR POPPING OPEN AT TAKEOFF
A bit out of the ordinary, sure, but certainly not the stuff of disaster. The Cessna is, after all, a 1973. Perhaps the door latch needs work. Still, an open door has never caused an accident on an unpressurized aircraft. Never? Never. Not even one. Sometimes the pilot forgets to fly the plane when he sees that the door is open. But that's just training.
No, I don't see anything inherently dangerous about the operations they were conducting. Actually, I think you just came up with a few objections to their procedures to find an excuse to let the slashdot world know that you're a pilot.
In fact, I was thinking it would be fun to do in my area, if I can get someone to man the laptop.:)
It's quite possible the reason that they keep their mouth shut about their capabilities is to avoid the NSA (or someone like them) to come calling.
Though, interestingly enough, if the NSA or FBI or CIA wanted to extract intelligence from the google database, all they'd have to do is fire up their browser and run a normal search. After all, that's exactly what Google is for. And I'll bet you a dime to a dollar that the federal agencies frequently do exactly that.
And not only that, there really is no motivation for a some agency to poke around the internals of Google's databases because their search interface is almost certainly the most efficient and complete way to extract data anyway.
I didn't see anything on their site about licensing cost, but it doesn't look like it's free.
Does anyone know about a free alternative to VMWare etc.? It sure would be nice to be able to run "the other OS" in a virtual machine while I'm on Linux or Windows... but not nice enought to warrant paying for it.
By and large, science is all about making conclusions about what something is by observing how it behaves.
Whether or not the universe actually is curved or flat or banana-shaped is really immaterial. All we really care about is what we can observe, and more importantly, what we can expect to observe in the future. If rules and laws and principles we come up with accurately predict how objects, forces, etc. will interact in the future, then those laws are "correct" as far as we know and as far as we care. Newton's laws of motion and Einstein's laws of relativity are both considered "correct" even though they contradict eachother. They're correct because they can be used to accurately predict the future.
After all, when you drawing out your calculations for how to send a monkey to Mars, it really doesn't matter what shape the universe is if you know for certain that it at least behaves as if its shaped like a donut. Your donut-based calculations will still get chimpy to Mars--and it's the results you're after.
As our perception increases, we notice that our existing models do not adequately describe the reality we observe. So we come up with another (probably much more odd) model that describes the results we see, but that still agrees with the results we've previously attributed to the old model. The new model is considered "correct" and the old model is still considered useful.
I was worried that the government would abuse such an all-inclusive database. Or that perhaps false information that found its way into the this storehouse could tarnish an innocent person's reputation and prevent him from getting the access to important resources (like a job or a house).
It's nice to know that much of the querying will be done by private organizations, and not just the government. Non-government organizations are so much more trustworthy and reliable. Phew. What a relief.
And if you didn't catch the sarcasm, think of the damage that people can currently cause with our existing system in the form of identity theft. Now immagine a parallel system being used to determine how much of a threat you pose to society. Now when you apply for housing in an appartment, they not only call your references, but check this database to see if they should worry about you bombing the place or something absurd like that. Great.
That's a lot of power, by the way. And claims that it will be accurate and reliable only worsen the situation. People wouldn't take such a database seriously if it contained a lot of mistakes. The only reason why you can correct your credit report at all is because there are so many publicised inaccuracies. But if such a database managed to be some 99.95% accurate, or something like that... boy does it suck to be one of the thousands of people who got got an undeserved "black mark" on your record. No one would ever believe you, it would be completely impossible for you to correct it--not because you can't prove you're innocent, but because there's no one you can go to to get it fixed. Everyone believes the database because it's always right. You get turned down for loans, housing, jobs, and can't even travel. Such a database may even wind up admissable in court.
Now immagine the position of those who can anonymously input information into that database (and there will be many). That's too much power, with no accountability. A recipe for a silent disaster. Of course, you'll never hear about it, that's the nature of the thing. The only ones who will know are the abusers and the victims. Wow.
Stephen J. Mraz, "Senior Editor," is in need of a severe beating. Since when is buoyancy "a form of gravity?"
Since buoyancy is caused by gravity pulling the fluid (air/water) around you toward the earth and you moving away from the earth to take its place. "Form of gravity" is probably a less accurate term than "effect of gravity." Still, Stephen J. Mraz was right, you're wrong. How about that severe beating?
Nothing bothers me more than shitty pseudoscience.
Be careful when you deride things you don't understand. This isn't new technology. It's been in use in autonomous submarines for years. Employing the same principles in the air hasn't been done yet because it's a bit more complicated: The speeds are a lot higher, the weather becomes a factor, and the margin for error is a lot smaller.
Call me crazy, but isn't that basically what the legal defense fund is?
There's an important difference: SCO has been claiming for months that they're going to go after end-users of Linux software. They're dragging their feet, though, because it would do even more PR damage to an already sinking ship, they'd have to show some proof of wrongdoing (which they've been keeping strictly secret for some strange reason), and they'd most likely lose anyway.
What they'd rather do is sue a big company with deep pockets on behalf of all its indemnified customers and settle out of court for a small fraction of the amount asked for in the suit, but much more than they'd get from any individual user.
With the legal defense fund, SCO still has to sue the user. Only the user doesn't have to pay for a lawyer, while SCO still does. SCO's chances of coming out ahead in that case are even more slim than before.
SCO is not happy with this arrangement, and keeps pleading for the "legal indemnification" scenario.
IF a pilot had problems, called in said problems to the tower and acted according instructions or his own judgement, would he really get shot down?
Absolutely not. From the FAA Regulations part 91 ("General Operating and Flight Rules"):
(a) The pilot in command of an aircraft is directly responsible for, and is the final authority as to, the operation of that aircraft.
(b) In an in-flight emergency requiring immediate action, the pilot in command may deviate from any rule of this part to the extent required to meet that emergency.
--FAR 91.3
In an emergency, the pilot can legally ignore every rule in the book that prevents him from meeting that emergency, that includes breaking the rules set in FAR 91.133 "Restricted and Prohibited Areas". The pilot has the right-of-way, even if he's flying 10 feet over the white house, as long as he's declared an emergency. In such a case, ATC would have to communicate with any defense agencies and tell them to stand down.
Don't get the idea that any joe can just pony up the $400 grand and use the car to take off on I-25 on their way to grandma's house. You'd be breaking all sorts of laws. First of all, this car not a propeller driven junker, it's a jet. You're got to be licensed and qualified to fly the thing. That means you have to obtain (a) a medical certificate from an FAA licensed doctor, (b) a private pilots license, (c) IFR rating, (d) commercial rating, and (probably) (e) type-specific rating. The minimum you can expect is some 250-300 hours flight time under your belt before you're allowed to take this car into the air; probably much more.
Next, once you can fly the plane, you still have to follow all the same rules that normal planes have to follow. You can only take off and land on airport runways. You must maintain contact with ATC when you're within controlled airspace, and you have to file a flight plan and remain in constant contact with ATC if you intend to fly at or above 18000 feet, or in weather with low visibility.
What sets this craft apart is.. or rather, what Taero hopes will set this craft apart is:
(a) price. A light jet for under $1 million new? Still yet to be done. Granted, it is a kit plane--that brings the price down quite a bit. You sacrifice reliability to get an uncertified aircraft that you get to assemble yourself. No guarantees. Hope you didn't forget that last screw.
(b) freedom. Drive to the airport, fly your car to your destination, then drive you plane to the hotel.
(c) novelty. Let's face it, if you can afford to own (and pay insurance on) a jet, you can afford to rent a car when you get to grandma's house. It's really the novelty factor that would attract most customers. "Wow, a flying car!"
From the article: But the questions ethicists have raised about such work are numerous: Should we be playing God?
Man has been playing God for over 3000 years. We build our own fires and water our own crops. We've made lightning, hail, thunder and rain. We've built boats, airplanes, televisions, refrigerators, and all sorts of devices allowing us all to be gods in our own right.
Shold man be playing God? The very question itself is just a declaration of one's own ignorance and fear.
So what, then, if some evil terrorist uses our new technology to kill us all? It's possible, sure, but that's not our decision to make. The technology already exists for any one determined man to destroy the world. Perhaps tomorrows invention will do us all in, but then perhaps it will end up saving us from certain destruction.
In history, technology has saved us more often than it's killed us. We didn't lose one third of our population during the last viral outbreak like we did a few hundred years ago. Our own survival is due almost entirely to a few men "playing God" as blatantly as possible when they created various medicines and vaccines. Scientists could just as likely kill us all by avoiding an important discovery that would save us as they could by creating the device that would destroy us.
Nature has caused more death and destruction than man alone has ever done, or could ever do. Yet we rarely curse the volcano or say mother nature screwed it all up when she created the hurricane. The latest scientific progressions are just as much a part of nature as anything else out there, because we are just as much a part of nature as anything else.
We cannot destroy the ultimate course of nature because we are part of nature. We're an evolving species now, just as much as ever, just like any other on the planet. Our technology doesn't hinder or advance evolution: our technology is evolution.
A lot of people died at Heroshima, just like a lot of innocent people died at Pompei. Both events demonstrated the awsome and potentially destructive power of nature.
Our race is driven to progress and evolve by our own instinct--by nature itself. Even if we wanted to, we couldn't stop it from happening. We can control ourselves, but we cannot control our species. Perhaps mankind will progress indefinately, scattered across myriad worlds, as far as immagination can propel us. Or perhaps we'll all find an end in a blaze of glorious descruction. That's not our decision. We simply have to watch and let nature run its course.
But it is extremely interesting that the lawyers get 20% of an acquisition cost. That speaks a lot towards motives in bringing the lawsuit.
That's the crux of it right there. The lawyer's job is usually to win the court case, and payment is contingent upon that happening. However, in this case SCO doesn't really have a legal prayer. Apparently that fact was discussed right up front--If we're only getting paid if we win, then we're not taking the case, says Boies, because we won't win.
On the other hand, there seemed a strong enough possibility that if they make enough noise and get big blue mad enough, maybe they'll get bought out just to settle things down.
So instead of fighting the court hopeless battle, Boies's primary objective is to inflate the company's stock price. That means getting a lot of attention (hence the invoices to the fortune 1000 companies--that gets them noticed (more so than just the law suit) in places like Fortune and the WSJ. Then, they use their extensive media attention to spread a hell of a lot of FUD. Waves of it, loads of it. They don't hve to prove anything--that a losing battle anyway. They just have to look all important.
And suddenly their stock goes from just pennies to $18/share. As stated by another poster here, Boies has already reaped part of his reward by getting $10M from SCOs recent stock offering.
This is the biggest Wall Street con job since Enron, if not bigger.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps it's not as simple as that. From what the DOJ seems to be saying, extracting and compiling a report of this size using the existing interface could, quite understandably, render the system unstable. In theory, then, such a system may behave unpredictably and could potentially damage the database. That would, of course, imply that the DOJ database is built on unstable, outdated technology--but we already knew that. They're working to improve that, but it will take many years and millions of dollars.
The reporters aren't asking for (nor are they entitled to) a complete backup of the database. That would be comparatively easy to provide, but is obviously out of the question, as it would include much more than just the authorized content.
Perhaps they'd have better luck if they made a whole bunch of small queries: Instead of saying "send me everything you've got", they could say "Send me all relevant content for August 1947", then "Send me all relevant content for September 1947", and so on.
You could argue that the instead of forcing the reporters to take the time and money to make thousands of small, separate requests, they should be able to make a single blanket request and have the government office subdivide it internally. However, such an assumption would not take into consideration the fact that you're working with a government office that is only helping you because they're required to by law. Give them a single excuse to say no and they won't hesitate to give you nothing at all.
I think the purpose here is fighting a war without risking your own solders' lives. You could shell a bunker 250 miles inland at more than 6 rounds per minute, and the projectiles would impact at mach 4.
Furthermore, their main incentive is that it costs less than conventional weapons. (RTFA)
If you look up its tail number ("N-number"), 328KF, in the FAA registry, you get the following:
So, apparently Space Ship One was registered back in March of last year as an unpowered glider. I think that's something of an understatement of the aircraft's potential.
Here is a nice orbital velocity calculator.
Using that calculator: Enter the altitude above the earth in kilometers: 100 (how high SS1 flew today)
- - - - - - - - - -
Calculation Complete
An orbit less than about 185 kilometers is not stable.
- - - - - - - - - -
Then, apparently it is a matter of height... at least to a degree.
Boy, I sure was scared about nano-robots taking over the world, but being overrun by self-replecating cars wouldn't be so bad... 'cause hey, free car!
I think my neck would start to hurt after more than 10 minutes of game play from trying to hold still.
I'm sorry, my friend, but it most certainly does mean decentralized. Here's why:
Decentralized means "having power or function dispersed from a central to local authorities". Each individual top-level nameserver operates entirely independantly of the others to the extent that it is capable of remaining completely operational in the absence of the others.
DNS is actually the epitome of a decentralized service--as perfect an example as there comes. Assuming it is implemented as perscribed in the RFCs, there is no single point of failure (an incorrectly implemented DNS system is not the result of a poor design, it's the result of poor implementation--you can't blame DNS).
There are 13 totally and completely independant top level servers. The only thing that ties them together (in a practical sense) is that they speak the same protocol and synchronize with eachother if possible. All top-level domains have at least two nameservers (generally much more), and all second level domains are required to have at least two authoratative nameservers as well. If any one of these servers in the whole chain fails at any time, the others will pick up the slack--it's part of the protocol.
Implementing this service correctly such that no failure will take down your own domain is left as an exercise for you. It's your domain and your nameserver. You're responsible for insuring that it works. The "system" correctly assures that each one of your own nameservers will be queried until one responds. If you take all of your own nameservers offline, there's obviously nothing that the DNS system can do to help you. That's what Akamai's problem was. Don't blame DNS.
For example, a well-played phishing ("click here to protect your bank acount from hackers", says the email...) scam can circumvent just about any challenge-response based authentication scheme with a MITM attack.
No matter how complicated the procedure (even the ones with transaction numbers), the bad guy's best bet is to get the unwary user to surrender the passcodes himself.
Furthermore, banks and other institutions are often much less secure internally than they seem from their interface. You'd be amazed at how insecure and unreliable on the inside some of the more well-known and trusted organizations are, even though the present a 128-bit RSA-encrypted facade to the customer.
Banks regularly write off millions in losses due to theft through some unknown or unsecured channel. In order for enhanced security to be an option, it has to cost less than the losses it eliminates. The observant cracker takes advantage of this fact and strikes carefully.
I don't think that's the kind of intelligence they were talking about. There's a sort of "collective intelligence" you see in communities of "unintelligent" creatures, like ants or bees. Each does a fairly simple task which may or may not help out, but together they get something accomplished. The community seems intelligent, but the individual doesn't.
Still, I think this approach is ill-suited for space-station assembly. Take, for example, the following phrase from the article: "Once each robot in a pair has found itself a girder, they pick them up using mechanical docking units..." A community of ants finds food because food is abundant. A community of drifting robots will likely find some free-floating parts to the space station, but probably won't find all of them--just like a community of ants isn't going to find ALL of the food within a given area, especially when that food is constantly drifting away in a boundless universe. Sure, it works on an air hockey table, but those have bumbers. That makes a bit of difference.
Offical support and direction was difficult to come by. "Read the docs," they said, but there was precious little written about how we were to proceed. Common questions were: how should we communicate, where should we host the project, how do we best get our product to integrated into the RH environment. All the "offical" Fedora components were hosted on RedHat's own CVS server and had entries in RedHat's official Bugzilla site. What about our project? We're writing for Fedora, for RedHat. We were even given the go-ahead by RH staff. Now when do we get CVS and Bugzilla? We want to start building here.
RedHat staff has been "very busy" trying to answer our questions and satisfy our reasonable requests. Apparently there's red tape everywhere--legal and logistical issues enough to make a man cry. Stuff can be fixed, but it takes time.
We sit and twiddle our thumbs hoping for some answers. Status updates are few and generally cryptic. RedHat is still "very, very busy" and is apparently making progress.
In the mean time, other commitments have commanded my time and I've had to abandon my post as a Fedora developer--at least for now. Now I look back and wonder how much I actually got to contribute.
It was a wonderful environment. Your work was almost guaranteed to be included in the distro (assuming you were filling a posted need). And I, a nameless nobody in the Linux world, had on multiple occasions asked questions and gotten prompt, insightful answers from both Eric Raymond and Alan Cox. I really felt like I was doing something important.
But the delays and disorganization, good heavens. What frustration is was to try to get any offical assistance or direction from RedHat. Their developer support infrastructure was nonexistant at best. To borrow an old metaphor, they were building a passenger jet in the air with Fedora, and we the passengers expected to be joining something a little more ..erm.. functional than we experinced.
Fedora's not a bad idea. It's a great idea. I was (and still am) fairly excided about the whole prospect. But it would have been nice if RedHat had prepared itself and built some sort of support system before bringing the rest of us on board.
Patenting a method doesn't make it popular, it makes the method expensive (or even illegal). This means that now whenever the RIAA tries to destory p2p network with fake content (which they currently do), they'll have to pay this kid royalties--how ever much the kid wants--or they're not allowed to do it.
This opens up all sorts of new doors for us. Doesn't anybody see the implications here? We can actually use the patent system we've argued against so vehemently to our advantage. The ability to patent is the ability to write law. You can use patents to make almost any unwanted behavior illegal.
Take a page out of Microsoft's book--don't try to patent overly general techniques--pick very specific things you don't other people to do, and patent it:
You can then use your shiny new patents to either (A) fund your organization's fight against patents, or (B) simply make the patented behavior illegal.
The key that we've learned from past patent suits is that if you make your patent specific enough to your targeted application, you won't have to worry about prior art. ("Sure, they may have done something like this before, but they didn't do it with web browsers"). You really can patent just about anything, we've seen more than enough absurd patents to know that. You just have to beat the bad guys to it: patent it before they get a chance to put their plans into effect.
And the end result? Perhaps the business disruption created by these crazy patents will spur a reformation of the patent system, or perhaps angry consumers will continue to be able to write their own laws to fight unwanted business practices. Who cares? Either way we win, as long as we're the ones getting the patents.
Now, go to, and make it happen!
The key to the statement is that the remote services are disabled by default. So, though the software might be vulnerable, the box isn't.
Sure, its a bunch of vacuous marketing, but it's technically accurate.
What the hell is that supposed to mean? Even on a commercial scheduled flight, any electronic device at all that the pilot and/or carrier deems safe is allowed--and that's under IFR. For GA craft under VFR, there's nothing even remotely illegal or even discouraged about it. There's obviously nothing dangerous about it. Steam gauges, visual navigation. You could lose your whole electrical system in those conditions and still continue the flight safely and legally as planned (albeit not in LAX's airspace) The 2.5 GHz transmitters aren't going to interfere with the com radios, though--you could test that on the ground. Hardly the stuff that would put lives in danger. Did you read your FAR/AIM manual before you took your written test? I did. Yep, the whole damn thing. And let me tell you, there's nothing illegal about what they did.
* Unexperienced pilots flying formation
That would be dangerous if they were inexperienced. But how did you arrive at that conclusion? Certainly not by checking the FAA registry -- At least one of the two is an instructor.
* DOOR POPPING OPEN AT TAKEOFF
A bit out of the ordinary, sure, but certainly not the stuff of disaster. The Cessna is, after all, a 1973. Perhaps the door latch needs work. Still, an open door has never caused an accident on an unpressurized aircraft. Never? Never. Not even one. Sometimes the pilot forgets to fly the plane when he sees that the door is open. But that's just training.
No, I don't see anything inherently dangerous about the operations they were conducting. Actually, I think you just came up with a few objections to their procedures to find an excuse to let the slashdot world know that you're a pilot.
In fact, I was thinking it would be fun to do in my area, if I can get someone to man the laptop. :)
Though, interestingly enough, if the NSA or FBI or CIA wanted to extract intelligence from the google database, all they'd have to do is fire up their browser and run a normal search. After all, that's exactly what Google is for. And I'll bet you a dime to a dollar that the federal agencies frequently do exactly that.
And not only that, there really is no motivation for a some agency to poke around the internals of Google's databases because their search interface is almost certainly the most efficient and complete way to extract data anyway.
Does anyone know about a free alternative to VMWare etc.? It sure would be nice to be able to run "the other OS" in a virtual machine while I'm on Linux or Windows... but not nice enought to warrant paying for it.
Whether or not the universe actually is curved or flat or banana-shaped is really immaterial. All we really care about is what we can observe, and more importantly, what we can expect to observe in the future. If rules and laws and principles we come up with accurately predict how objects, forces, etc. will interact in the future, then those laws are "correct" as far as we know and as far as we care. Newton's laws of motion and Einstein's laws of relativity are both considered "correct" even though they contradict eachother. They're correct because they can be used to accurately predict the future.
After all, when you drawing out your calculations for how to send a monkey to Mars, it really doesn't matter what shape the universe is if you know for certain that it at least behaves as if its shaped like a donut. Your donut-based calculations will still get chimpy to Mars--and it's the results you're after.
As our perception increases, we notice that our existing models do not adequately describe the reality we observe. So we come up with another (probably much more odd) model that describes the results we see, but that still agrees with the results we've previously attributed to the old model. The new model is considered "correct" and the old model is still considered useful.
And then it just got worse.
It's nice to know that much of the querying will be done by private organizations, and not just the government. Non-government organizations are so much more trustworthy and reliable. Phew. What a relief.
And if you didn't catch the sarcasm, think of the damage that people can currently cause with our existing system in the form of identity theft. Now immagine a parallel system being used to determine how much of a threat you pose to society. Now when you apply for housing in an appartment, they not only call your references, but check this database to see if they should worry about you bombing the place or something absurd like that. Great.
That's a lot of power, by the way. And claims that it will be accurate and reliable only worsen the situation. People wouldn't take such a database seriously if it contained a lot of mistakes. The only reason why you can correct your credit report at all is because there are so many publicised inaccuracies. But if such a database managed to be some 99.95% accurate, or something like that... boy does it suck to be one of the thousands of people who got got an undeserved "black mark" on your record. No one would ever believe you, it would be completely impossible for you to correct it--not because you can't prove you're innocent, but because there's no one you can go to to get it fixed. Everyone believes the database because it's always right. You get turned down for loans, housing, jobs, and can't even travel. Such a database may even wind up admissable in court.
Now immagine the position of those who can anonymously input information into that database (and there will be many). That's too much power, with no accountability. A recipe for a silent disaster. Of course, you'll never hear about it, that's the nature of the thing. The only ones who will know are the abusers and the victims. Wow.
Since buoyancy is caused by gravity pulling the fluid (air/water) around you toward the earth and you moving away from the earth to take its place. "Form of gravity" is probably a less accurate term than "effect of gravity." Still, Stephen J. Mraz was right, you're wrong. How about that severe beating?
Nothing bothers me more than shitty pseudoscience.
Be careful when you deride things you don't understand. This isn't new technology. It's been in use in autonomous submarines for years. Employing the same principles in the air hasn't been done yet because it's a bit more complicated: The speeds are a lot higher, the weather becomes a factor, and the margin for error is a lot smaller.
There's an important difference: SCO has been claiming for months that they're going to go after end-users of Linux software. They're dragging their feet, though, because it would do even more PR damage to an already sinking ship, they'd have to show some proof of wrongdoing (which they've been keeping strictly secret for some strange reason), and they'd most likely lose anyway.
What they'd rather do is sue a big company with deep pockets on behalf of all its indemnified customers and settle out of court for a small fraction of the amount asked for in the suit, but much more than they'd get from any individual user.
With the legal defense fund, SCO still has to sue the user. Only the user doesn't have to pay for a lawyer, while SCO still does. SCO's chances of coming out ahead in that case are even more slim than before.
SCO is not happy with this arrangement, and keeps pleading for the "legal indemnification" scenario.
Absolutely not. From the FAA Regulations part 91 ("General Operating and Flight Rules"):
In an emergency, the pilot can legally ignore every rule in the book that prevents him from meeting that emergency, that includes breaking the rules set in FAR 91.133 "Restricted and Prohibited Areas". The pilot has the right-of-way, even if he's flying 10 feet over the white house, as long as he's declared an emergency. In such a case, ATC would have to communicate with any defense agencies and tell them to stand down.
One of the things I like the most about GTK is that it doesn't look like QT. Is change always progress?
Don't get the idea that any joe can just pony up the $400 grand and use the car to take off on I-25 on their way to grandma's house. You'd be breaking all sorts of laws. First of all, this car not a propeller driven junker, it's a jet. You're got to be licensed and qualified to fly the thing. That means you have to obtain (a) a medical certificate from an FAA licensed doctor, (b) a private pilots license, (c) IFR rating, (d) commercial rating, and (probably) (e) type-specific rating. The minimum you can expect is some 250-300 hours flight time under your belt before you're allowed to take this car into the air; probably much more.
Next, once you can fly the plane, you still have to follow all the same rules that normal planes have to follow. You can only take off and land on airport runways. You must maintain contact with ATC when you're within controlled airspace, and you have to file a flight plan and remain in constant contact with ATC if you intend to fly at or above 18000 feet, or in weather with low visibility.
What sets this craft apart is.. or rather, what Taero hopes will set this craft apart is:
(a) price. A light jet for under $1 million new? Still yet to be done. Granted, it is a kit plane--that brings the price down quite a bit. You sacrifice reliability to get an uncertified aircraft that you get to assemble yourself. No guarantees. Hope you didn't forget that last screw.
(b) freedom. Drive to the airport, fly your car to your destination, then drive you plane to the hotel.
(c) novelty. Let's face it, if you can afford to own (and pay insurance on) a jet, you can afford to rent a car when you get to grandma's house. It's really the novelty factor that would attract most customers. "Wow, a flying car!"
But the questions ethicists have raised about such work are numerous: Should we be playing God?
Man has been playing God for over 3000 years. We build our own fires and water our own crops. We've made lightning, hail, thunder and rain. We've built boats, airplanes, televisions, refrigerators, and all sorts of devices allowing us all to be gods in our own right.
Shold man be playing God? The very question itself is just a declaration of one's own ignorance and fear.
So what, then, if some evil terrorist uses our new technology to kill us all? It's possible, sure, but that's not our decision to make. The technology already exists for any one determined man to destroy the world. Perhaps tomorrows invention will do us all in, but then perhaps it will end up saving us from certain destruction.
In history, technology has saved us more often than it's killed us. We didn't lose one third of our population during the last viral outbreak like we did a few hundred years ago. Our own survival is due almost entirely to a few men "playing God" as blatantly as possible when they created various medicines and vaccines. Scientists could just as likely kill us all by avoiding an important discovery that would save us as they could by creating the device that would destroy us.
Nature has caused more death and destruction than man alone has ever done, or could ever do. Yet we rarely curse the volcano or say mother nature screwed it all up when she created the hurricane. The latest scientific progressions are just as much a part of nature as anything else out there, because we are just as much a part of nature as anything else.
We cannot destroy the ultimate course of nature because we are part of nature. We're an evolving species now, just as much as ever, just like any other on the planet. Our technology doesn't hinder or advance evolution: our technology is evolution.
A lot of people died at Heroshima, just like a lot of innocent people died at Pompei. Both events demonstrated the awsome and potentially destructive power of nature.
Our race is driven to progress and evolve by our own instinct--by nature itself. Even if we wanted to, we couldn't stop it from happening. We can control ourselves, but we cannot control our species. Perhaps mankind will progress indefinately, scattered across myriad worlds, as far as immagination can propel us. Or perhaps we'll all find an end in a blaze of glorious descruction. That's not our decision. We simply have to watch and let nature run its course.
That's the crux of it right there. The lawyer's job is usually to win the court case, and payment is contingent upon that happening. However, in this case SCO doesn't really have a legal prayer. Apparently that fact was discussed right up front--If we're only getting paid if we win, then we're not taking the case, says Boies, because we won't win.
On the other hand, there seemed a strong enough possibility that if they make enough noise and get big blue mad enough, maybe they'll get bought out just to settle things down.
So instead of fighting the court hopeless battle, Boies's primary objective is to inflate the company's stock price. That means getting a lot of attention (hence the invoices to the fortune 1000 companies--that gets them noticed (more so than just the law suit) in places like Fortune and the WSJ. Then, they use their extensive media attention to spread a hell of a lot of FUD. Waves of it, loads of it. They don't hve to prove anything--that a losing battle anyway. They just have to look all important.
And suddenly their stock goes from just pennies to $18/share. As stated by another poster here, Boies has already reaped part of his reward by getting $10M from SCOs recent stock offering.
This is the biggest Wall Street con job since Enron, if not bigger.