The point of the justice system is to provide a public disincentive for future violations of a given law by the population of society at large.
It can't bring murder victims back from the dead, it's not there to extract vengence, it's not there to reform criminals into useful members of society, and it's not there to balance some imaginary cosmic scale (which, if it existed, would be enforced by the laws of physics without the need for human intervention).
In fact, it is possible for it to serve its purpose without an actual guilty party simply by demonstrating to potential future transgressors what will happen to a guilty party if they are caught.
Any argument claiming that the demonstration won't stop a crime is either a claim that the penalty is insufficient to provide disincentive, or they are arguing that no disincentive is sufficient for some people (which is true: we call those people "sociopaths", and we lock them away indefinitely in mental institutions when we identify them).
(1) Provide an accurate count of the number of NetBSD installations
(2) Disregard all server installations of NetBSD (subtract them out)
(3) Disregard all non-Intel installations of NetBSD (subtract them out)
(4) Disregard all versions of NetBSD that are not binary backward compatible with the most popular one because of changes to system libraries (subtract them out)
(5) For the remaining desktop machines, identify the percentages of each GUI toolkit; include binary incompatible library versions of the same GUI toolkit as separate toolkits
(6) Of those, pick the non-GPL'ed one with the highest market share
(7) Report that number...that is the potential market for a commercial GUI application running on NetBSD.
(8) Now multiply this by the percentage of those installations which would get the application....that is the actual market or a commercial GUI application running on NetBSD.
Obviously, you could increase the number from #7 drastically by standardizing on a particular version of a particular GUI toolkit and having a strategy for maintaining binary backward compatibility with future versions of system libraries. That would increase the overall value of the market
The Truth About Commercial vs. Open Source...is that in a commercial setting, there is dictatorial editorial control, and people are willing to work on things they wouldn't ordinarily work on for the joy of it, in trade for money.
Without that, there's no way to prioritize customer input ahead of developer desires, and there's no way to get a developer to work on something that they disagree with.
The closest the Open Source community has come to this are companies like Mozilla, RedHat, and Ubuntu, which are large participants in particular Open Source projects, but which internally exercise a single editorial philosophy over the product, and have paid engineers to work on the things that no one would work on at all, if it weren't for the money.
I have absolutely no idea (and I expect no one else does, either) how you would cause a bug report to be responded to in a timely fashion and get it resolved to the satisfaction of the person who filed it, in an Open Source project, unless the person who filed it wrote the fix, and the fix was acceptable to the some pigs who were more equal than others in the project. Most large changes to Open Source projects are arbitrated by a board of people who are self-selecting, who are there because of seniority, or nepotism, or as a result of a popularity contest. From such groups, you're going to get consensus. Anything that goes against that is going to get strong resistance, even if the consensus is basically what Frank Herbert called a "demopoll", which means you will always end up with the lowest common denominator.
Great products (and terrible ones) require an 800 pound gorilla to force its views on the participants, and for those participants to be willing to stick around despite the force.
bash is UNIX2003 standards compliant because of Apple contributions back to bash. vim is UNIX2003 standards compliant because of Apple contributions back to vim.
I could repeat sentences of this format for about 80 different Open Source versions of UNIX command line commands.
Apple just doesn't make a press release every time it contributes a patch back to an Open Source project.
"Today's research focuses - has to focus - on incremental improvements. Huge, mindblowing breakthroughs are becoming increasingly rare."
The way to guarantee that you get only incremental improvements rather than huge mind-blowing breakthroughs is to attempt only incremental improvements. Or to quote Robert Browning: "Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?". One of the worst things IBM, in the person of Louis Gerstner, ever did to itself is demand that their research facilities like Almaden must bring one product to market each year, rather than doing research. By yoking their research centers to a short term fiscal horizon, they've blindered themselves as to how far they can see. This is the same thing we did to academia when we allowed it to monetize even government funded research for private interests.
"essentially creating a steam explosion several miles underground in under conditions that probably have more unknowns than knowns, all in an area with known levels of significant instability seems like a prospect deserving of extreme scrutiny."
Let's try the experiment and scrutinize the results.
I think you aren't grasping the number of turbines that are being proposed. Assuming G.E. could even build them (so far, they've only built 12,000 units, world-wide).
Virtual Light type geohacking would need a device that was aware of it's physical orientation, not just it's location. You would, in effect, need a three dimensionally operational compass, not just an accelerometer. Given the vagries of GPS, you'd also need differential lock-in. I suppose you might be able to do that with bluetooth, if you had smarter hardware giving the differential back to you from you talking to it, to give the offset bias, rather than trying to do the processing on the phone itself, without the necessary timing hooks and resolution in the software stack there (remember, you are being isolated from the hardware by SDKs).
"Once our society begins selecting and/or rejecting offspring based on their genes [...] evolution stops."
You mean, for example, by establishing normative values of beauty so that people are more likely to want to have children with people who fit a particular morphology as a result of their genes, right?
Or is it only laboratory selection that has you up in arms, because of the destruction of the non-selected blastocysts?
Or is it that the selection is most likely to happen in affluent first-world countries, where there's enough disposable income to make the procedure routinely affordable there, but not elsewhere, potentially giving those countries significant genetic advantages over everyone else?
PS: I hate to break it to you, but we've already shot evolution in the foot by keeping people with congenital issues alive past the point in time where they are able to breed. Explicit selection is a matter of amount, not of kind. For every person with kids who wouldn't have them without shooting up humalin to replace their inability to produce insulin, or for every near-sighted person with kids because they didn't walk in front of that bus due to RK (or, more prosaically, corrective lenses), we've already interfered with the natural selective pressures (against) those people procreating.
"Sure is nice that you spent your money on SUVs for the last eight years, that they didn't have any short term financial incentive to do research like this."
Maybe if they thought a little longer term and remembered "the energy crisis" from 1973 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_oil_crisis as they were designing their vehicles, people would want to buy them now.
Or maybe if GM hadn't discontinued the EV1 in 199 and then taken all the EV1's and crushed them in 2003 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_EV1, they'd have something to sell that people want to buy.
Or maybe if instead of discontinuing them in 2001, they still sold Suzuki G10 XFi engine based Chevy Sprints / Geo Metros which got 51MPG highway, 43 MPg city, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suzuki_Cultus, they'd have non-hybrid cars that exceeded the new CAFE standards already.
GM had the products and manufacturing capability for success in the current economy, but they squandered it all on short term thinking, like investments in GMAC (which got about 7% of last Novembers TARP bailout money after declaring itself a bank, or $5 billion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GMAC).
Who else read this and thought... working in a satellite office for an aerospace company would involve a lot of cool travel perks?
-- Terry
You are using the wrong "echo".
on
Unix Turns 40
·
· Score: 1
You are using the wrong "echo".
If you use the shell built-in, and you call the shell as "sh" instead of as "bash", you will not be able to use -n; but if you use the echo in/bin/echo, or invoke the shell as "bash" instead of "sh", then you will get the historical behaviour (i.e. your "-n" will work how you want it to. You can also (if you want it to be a bash script instead of a Bourne shell script) issues the command "enable -n echo" to disable the shell built-in for echo.
You'd probably be better off doing the following, in any case, since otherwise your shell scripts aren't going to be portable between BSD and System V systems:
ECHON=`echo -n` if test "x${ECHON}" = "x-n" then
ECHO_OPT=""
ECHO_TAIL="\\c" else
ECHO_OPT="-n"
ECHO_TAIL="" fi # system independent echo-no-nl command echon() {
echo ${ECHO_OPT} $* "${ECHO_TAIL}" }
Interestingly, PCI-DSS does not itself appear to be sufficient to prevent a security breach in the first place; among other things, they mandate a set of principles which are pretty, but not a guarantee:
Yeah, if everything were to work out, and all virus threads were already covered by the antivirus software, and there were no such thing as a zero-day exploits, it might stop a penetration. But not otherwise.
"The Internet is something the people in the 50's didn't even dream of."
J.C.R. Licklider's memos were first published in August of 1962; while technically a little over 2 1/2 years after the 1950's, I think that's close enough to say that yeah, they did dream about such things.
No one has talked about the purpose of these interviews.
It's unlikely any of the disclosed information could be usable for blackmail in any way.
The purpose of a government agency obtaining all possible blackmail information about you is to prevent you from being blackmailed with the information under threat of disclosure of said information to your employer (the government agency). The safest answer (for the agency) to such an external threat is the target of the blackmail being able to say "they already know".
Most likely, the information disclosed will not in fact be usable for blackmail, as the article suggests, if the information was considered to have been mitigated sufficiently for the clearance to have been granted. If the information was not mitigated, then there would not have been a clearance issues; in that case, it might be a problem for the officer in question, but it won't impact their ability to do the job for which they were cleared to do.
For example, if an officer engaged in an extramarital affair, but had disclosed that information to his wife, then the information could not be used as blackmail fodder in an attempt to coerce the officer to not perform their assigned duty. If the information was not disclosed to his wife, then the officer would probably have been denied a clearance, and could face restrictions on their military duty, up to and including discharge from the military, to prevent that information being used to cause the officer to act as the attacker/enemy wanted during a conflict situation.
It might be a problem unrelated to any national security concerns for the officer who disclosed unmitigated information, but it's actually unlikely that the information would not be disclosed unless it was apriori mitigated (unless the officer was "plain stupid").
The US criteria for denial and mitigation for reasons of denial is:
If you want VoIP from their service, you will need to use their routers and their software, which apparently makes a TCP connection to a back-end server, and then VoIPs from there (this also lets them comply with CALEA wire-tap orders from the authorities by making sure your connection is in the clear, the same way it is for AIM internally to the AOL servers).
For the people talking about 911, the 911 service in Mobile phones is on a different, higher-power, prioritized frequency supporting triangulation of the signal source, rather than trusting a GPS in the phone. Since Clearwire is talking to handset vendors about hand-off between WiMAX and the proprietary cell networks, it's pretty clear that they are not intending to position themselves as a cellular service competitor, which probably means both vendor agreements and that the VoIP-enabled handset, when used to dial 911, will go through the standard cellular network.
The most likely vendor agreement would be a "network sparing" agreement that kept you off VoIP if a cellular network was available to be used instead, which would be used to lock you into a cellular service contract, just like any other cell phone (why would they give up their business model if they didn't have to?).
If your Netbook runs Windows, then you might be lucky enough for it to run Clearwire's proprietary VoIP software; if you are on Linux, you are out of luck (the articles I read on this didn't mention Mac OS X, so using the "corporate rule of lazy", that's probably not supported either.
It does this to make up for a number of commercial operating systems that *don't* do random initial sequence numbers. Then it rewrites the packets as they go through the TCP stream, including the checksum, on both the way in and the way out.
This is a common method of mitigating "guessable" initial sequence numbers for older systems behind good firewalls.
Whoever your peers were, they weren't familiar with best common practices for asymmetric bandwidth border crossings.
We did this in 1996 for the Whistle InterJet, back when the idea was relatively new, but it's now common practice. The problem is that if you have a border router with a relatively fast network inside the border and a slow connection to the Internet, with a faster connection for the router on the other side of the slow connection (e.g. for a DSLAM, for example, then what you're going to end up with is any larger transmission starving interactive traffic (for example, an update download vs. transient mail traffic, or a large file download vs. an ssh session.
The only reasonable way t deal with this situation from a bandwidth management perspective is to manage how full the buffer is on the routers on the other side of the slow connection, and that means banging the window size larger or smaller than it actually is in order to allow bandwidth control. Otherwise, your fast connection packs the router buffers full of data packets for the large transfers, and there's no room for packets not specifically related to the large data transfers, unless your router decides to do RED queueing. And that has its own performance issues (specifically, it increases the effective bandwidth delay product until it's the same as if it had been multiplied by your actual queue size divided by your high watermark at which pint you RED 50% of your incoming packets).
PS: This is why I always laugh at things like AltQ, which try to flow rate limit in order to do traffic shaping, since you can do that, but unless you adjust the window size, you're still going to pack up your router buffers with data unrelated to the flows that you wanted to prefer.
Sorry, Peter; harsh reality time......but your book "Compression Algorithms for Real Programmers" is really a light survey work, something that someone would maybe read if they were a manager of a team that worked on compressions software and wanted to be able to know (generally) what their employees were talking about when they talked technical, and not what I would call a textbook.
A textbook is something you put on your shelf and use it as a reference work. It's something like "Technical Aspects of Data Communication" by McNamara, or "Advanced Engineering Mathematics" by Greenberg, or "Algorithms in C++" by Sedgewick -- where it's about the only place you can go for something that you'd use in a day to day setting.
I did technical editing/fact checking for Prentice Hall on "UNIX Internals: The New Frontiers" by Vahalia, and that is also a survey work, but it's also what I'd call a textbook. It's something a lot of the kernel engineers here at Apple own and put up on their shelves (and it wasn't evangelism by me that made them do it -- they did it on their own). It has chapter end information, it has technical footnotes that lead to useful papers, and it has student exercises. If you want, for example, to go look at algorithmic tradeoffs for kernel memory allocators as part of your job, you'd probably actually look at chapter 12 of this book; doing so will at least get the list of the seminal papers on the subject that you should be asking Citeseer to find for you.
I really doubt that people aren't buying it because they are pirating it, but if they are pirating it, it's definitely not for use as a reference work, and probably not for use as a textbook, unless you've managed to convince some "Informations Systems" or some "Introduction to Computer Science" professors somewhere to require it for the class, instead of writing their own textbook and requiring that instead (which is usually how introductory college textbooks roll).
It's anecdotal, but I have to say that absolutely none of the QuickTime engineers, and none of the people I know who are working on codecs for the iPhone, etc., have your book on their shelves for reference (or, after a brief verbal survey, anywhere in electronic form, such as for their Kindles, either).
It's far more likely the the blame for your lack of sales is a result of the general economic downturn, rather than electronic piracy.
I'm sorry you aren't making the money you think you should be making off the book, but not sorry enough to go out and buy a copy of it when I can't use it as a reference or pass the bill for it back to the company as a work-related expense.
Unlike the conspiracy theory that "they want you to pay for Airphone services", electronics are banned for two reasons:
(1) For cell phones, a cell phone in a plane is "seen" by far too many cells and generally confuses the cell network. This is the same reason that they were relatively useless for locating the missing hikers, in recent history, on Mount Hood, which has the same altitude-based issue.
(2) For all electronics, the (now very old, but not yet replaced in all US airports/aircraft) ILS/LOC systems are oversensitive to electronic interference, which is why you are required to shut portable electronics off on takeoff and landing, when an emergency might require their use(*).
[*] ILS/LOC was supposed to be replaced by MLS, but with the advent of GPS and the hopes that it could be used instead, few MLS systems were deployed in the US, and most that were have been shut down. Instead, the GPS-based WAAS is being deployed instead, which broadcasts differential corrections for the intentional GPS "wobble" that was intended to prevent GPS being used by an adversary for targeting purposes (meaning it's still usable for that, if you include WAAS). Fears about the ability of the US to "turn off" GPS signals on a theatre-basis have led to continued deployment of MLS in Europe.
Pu-238 is used because it is relatively short-lived and is not easily fissile (low multiplication factor), and instead experiences relatively rapid Alpha decay.
Like most alpha decay, it generates heat as a decay byproduct. Unlike Pu-239, which has a half life of a little over 24,000 years, the Pu-238 half-life is a little under 90 years, which makes it a better thermal source for use in power generation (Pu-239 decays way to slowly to be used as an Alpha decay based heat source).
Trying to convert to something like Pu-239 from decommissioned nuclear weapons (for example) would require converting to using fission by-products instead, which would require shielding against the Beta decay and fast neutrons (Alpha particles can be shielded with nothing more than paraffin). This would add a lot of mass to the probe itself - both for shielding the sensitive components, and for carrying a large enough sub-critical mass of Pu-239 to induce spontaneous subcritical fission.
In fact, all in all, Pu-238 is one of only a few materials that could be used for this application.
Slashdot Mirror
The point of the justice system is to provide a public disincentive for future violations of a given law by the population of society at large.
It can't bring murder victims back from the dead, it's not there to extract vengence, it's not there to reform criminals into useful members of society, and it's not there to balance some imaginary cosmic scale (which, if it existed, would be enforced by the laws of physics without the need for human intervention).
In fact, it is possible for it to serve its purpose without an actual guilty party simply by demonstrating to potential future transgressors what will happen to a guilty party if they are caught.
Any argument claiming that the demonstration won't stop a crime is either a claim that the penalty is insufficient to provide disincentive, or they are arguing that no disincentive is sufficient for some people (which is true: we call those people "sociopaths", and we lock them away indefinitely in mental institutions when we identify them).
-- Terry
Homework assignment for commercial apps on NetBSD
(1) Provide an accurate count of the number of NetBSD installations
(2) Disregard all server installations of NetBSD (subtract them out)
(3) Disregard all non-Intel installations of NetBSD (subtract them out)
(4) Disregard all versions of NetBSD that are not binary backward compatible with the most popular one because of changes to system libraries (subtract them out)
(5) For the remaining desktop machines, identify the percentages of each GUI toolkit; include binary incompatible library versions of the same GUI toolkit as separate toolkits
(6) Of those, pick the non-GPL'ed one with the highest market share
(7) Report that number ...that is the potential market for a commercial GUI application running on NetBSD.
(8) Now multiply this by the percentage of those installations which would get the application. ...that is the actual market or a commercial GUI application running on NetBSD.
Obviously, you could increase the number from #7 drastically by standardizing on a particular version of a particular GUI toolkit and having a strategy for maintaining binary backward compatibility with future versions of system libraries. That would increase the overall value of the market
-- Terry
The Truth About Commercial vs. Open Source ...is that in a commercial setting, there is dictatorial editorial control, and people are willing to work on things they wouldn't ordinarily work on for the joy of it, in trade for money.
Without that, there's no way to prioritize customer input ahead of developer desires, and there's no way to get a developer to work on something that they disagree with.
The closest the Open Source community has come to this are companies like Mozilla, RedHat, and Ubuntu, which are large participants in particular Open Source projects, but which internally exercise a single editorial philosophy over the product, and have paid engineers to work on the things that no one would work on at all, if it weren't for the money.
I have absolutely no idea (and I expect no one else does, either) how you would cause a bug report to be responded to in a timely fashion and get it resolved to the satisfaction of the person who filed it, in an Open Source project, unless the person who filed it wrote the fix, and the fix was acceptable to the some pigs who were more equal than others in the project. Most large changes to Open Source projects are arbitrated by a board of people who are self-selecting, who are there because of seniority, or nepotism, or as a result of a popularity contest. From such groups, you're going to get consensus. Anything that goes against that is going to get strong resistance, even if the consensus is basically what Frank Herbert called a "demopoll", which means you will always end up with the lowest common denominator.
Great products (and terrible ones) require an 800 pound gorilla to force its views on the participants, and for those participants to be willing to stick around despite the force.
-- Terry
I call BS.
bash is UNIX2003 standards compliant because of Apple contributions back to bash.
vim is UNIX2003 standards compliant because of Apple contributions back to vim.
I could repeat sentences of this format for about 80 different Open Source versions of UNIX command line commands.
Apple just doesn't make a press release every time it contributes a patch back to an Open Source project.
-- Terry
Focus is no substitute for vision.
"Today's research focuses - has to focus - on incremental improvements. Huge, mindblowing breakthroughs are becoming increasingly rare."
The way to guarantee that you get only incremental improvements rather than huge mind-blowing breakthroughs is to attempt only incremental improvements. Or to quote Robert Browning: "Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?". One of the worst things IBM, in the person of Louis Gerstner, ever did to itself is demand that their research facilities like Almaden must bring one product to market each year, rather than doing research. By yoking their research centers to a short term fiscal horizon, they've blindered themselves as to how far they can see. This is the same thing we did to academia when we allowed it to monetize even government funded research for private interests.
-- Terry
Why you have to type our WiFi password twice:
The first time sends the password to my botnet.
The second time actually logs you in.
-- Terry
That's a good point...
"essentially creating a steam explosion several miles underground in under conditions that probably have more unknowns than knowns, all in an area with known levels of significant instability seems like a prospect deserving of extreme scrutiny."
Let's try the experiment and scrutinize the results.
-- Terry
"Ugly? Ugly? As opposed to what?"
I think you aren't grasping the number of turbines that are being proposed. Assuming G.E. could even build them (so far, they've only built 12,000 units, world-wide).
Here's the actual link to the paper:
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2009/06/19/0904101106.full.pdf+html
Using their numbers for the US, 3,815.9TWh / 2.5Mwh turbines / 20% utility = 7.63 million turbines required.
Or about one turbine for every 40 people.
Even more amusing is that the G.E. turbines being discussed, the 2.5xl, http://www.gepower.com/prod_serv/products/wind_turbines/en/2xmw/index.htm, they cost about 3.5M U.S. each, according to this article: http://www.goodenergies.com/news/-pdfs/Good-Energies-GE-turbine-deal-release-final.pdf, and only have an operational lifetime of 20 years.
So that works out to about $26,705,000,000,000 US (yes, that's ~26.705 trillion dollars). Or slightly less than twice the U.S. GDP of $14,264,600,000,000 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal).
You could buy a lot of nuclear power plants for that kind of money. Heck, you could buy 13,352 Ohio-class submarines http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohio_class_submarine with 1 Gigawatt pressurized water reactors, and float them to where you wanted to hook them to the grid. But of course, you'd actually only need 400 of them to produce all the power the U.S. uses: http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/nuclear/page/nuc_reactors/reactsum.html.
-- Terry
Virtual Light type geohacking would need a device that was aware of it's physical orientation, not just it's location. You would, in effect, need a three dimensionally operational compass, not just an accelerometer. Given the vagries of GPS, you'd also need differential lock-in. I suppose you might be able to do that with bluetooth, if you had smarter hardware giving the differential back to you from you talking to it, to give the offset bias, rather than trying to do the processing on the phone itself, without the necessary timing hooks and resolution in the software stack there (remember, you are being isolated from the hardware by SDKs).
I'm not sure you'll be seeing something like Tonchidot's demo http://www.intomobile.com/2008/09/17/tonchidots-sekai-camera-iphone-application-augmented-reality-coming-to-iphone.html in real life any time soon.
-- Terry
"Once our society begins selecting and/or rejecting offspring based on their genes [...] evolution stops."
You mean, for example, by establishing normative values of beauty so that people are more likely to want to have children with people who fit a particular morphology as a result of their genes, right?
Or is it only laboratory selection that has you up in arms, because of the destruction of the non-selected blastocysts?
Or is it that the selection is most likely to happen in affluent first-world countries, where there's enough disposable income to make the procedure routinely affordable there, but not elsewhere, potentially giving those countries significant genetic advantages over everyone else?
PS: I hate to break it to you, but we've already shot evolution in the foot by keeping people with congenital issues alive past the point in time where they are able to breed. Explicit selection is a matter of amount, not of kind. For every person with kids who wouldn't have them without shooting up humalin to replace their inability to produce insulin, or for every near-sighted person with kids because they didn't walk in front of that bus due to RK (or, more prosaically, corrective lenses), we've already interfered with the natural selective pressures (against) those people procreating.
-- Terry
Fixed that for you...
"Sure is nice that you spent your money on SUVs for the last eight years, that they didn't have any short term financial incentive to do research like this."
Maybe if they thought a little longer term and remembered "the energy crisis" from 1973 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_oil_crisis as they were designing their vehicles, people would want to buy them now.
Or maybe if GM hadn't discontinued the EV1 in 199 and then taken all the EV1's and crushed them in 2003 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_EV1, they'd have something to sell that people want to buy.
Or maybe if instead of discontinuing them in 2001, they still sold Suzuki G10 XFi engine based Chevy Sprints / Geo Metros which got 51MPG highway, 43 MPg city, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suzuki_Cultus, they'd have non-hybrid cars that exceeded the new CAFE standards already.
GM had the products and manufacturing capability for success in the current economy, but they squandered it all on short term thinking, like investments in GMAC (which got about 7% of last Novembers TARP bailout money after declaring itself a bank, or $5 billion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GMAC).
-- Terry
Who else read this and thought... working in a satellite office for an aerospace company would involve a lot of cool travel perks?
-- Terry
You are using the wrong "echo".
If you use the shell built-in, and you call the shell as "sh" instead of as "bash", you will not be able to use -n; but if you use the echo in /bin/echo, or invoke the shell as "bash" instead of "sh", then you will get the historical behaviour (i.e. your "-n" will work how you want it to. You can also (if you want it to be a bash script instead of a Bourne shell script) issues the command "enable -n echo" to disable the shell built-in for echo.
You'd probably be better off doing the following, in any case, since otherwise your shell scripts aren't going to be portable between BSD and System V systems:
-- Terry
Interestingly, PCI-DSS does not itself appear to be sufficient to prevent a security breach in the first place; among other things, they mandate a set of principles which are pretty, but not a guarantee:
https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/security_standards/pci_dss.shtml
Yeah, if everything were to work out, and all virus threads were already covered by the antivirus software, and there were no such thing as a zero-day exploits, it might stop a penetration. But not otherwise.
-- Terry
"The Internet is something the people in the 50's didn't even dream of."
J.C.R. Licklider's memos were first published in August of 1962; while technically a little over 2 1/2 years after the 1950's, I think that's close enough to say that yeah, they did dream about such things.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET
-- Terry
"The only way to overcome this rejection is to grow the organs from the adult stem cells taken from the recipient herself."
Or to modify the histamine complex on chromosome 6.
-- Terry
"It does if you use NTFS file encryption in Win2k, XP, Vista, 7."
Is that on by default? Or does turning it on require competence?
-- Terry
No one has talked about the purpose of these interviews.
It's unlikely any of the disclosed information could be usable for blackmail in any way.
The purpose of a government agency obtaining all possible blackmail information about you is to prevent you from being blackmailed with the information under threat of disclosure of said information to your employer (the government agency). The safest answer (for the agency) to such an external threat is the target of the blackmail being able to say "they already know".
Most likely, the information disclosed will not in fact be usable for blackmail, as the article suggests, if the information was considered to have been mitigated sufficiently for the clearance to have been granted. If the information was not mitigated, then there would not have been a clearance issues; in that case, it might be a problem for the officer in question, but it won't impact their ability to do the job for which they were cleared to do.
For example, if an officer engaged in an extramarital affair, but had disclosed that information to his wife, then the information could not be used as blackmail fodder in an attempt to coerce the officer to not perform their assigned duty. If the information was not disclosed to his wife, then the officer would probably have been denied a clearance, and could face restrictions on their military duty, up to and including discharge from the military, to prevent that information being used to cause the officer to act as the attacker/enemy wanted during a conflict situation.
It might be a problem unrelated to any national security concerns for the officer who disclosed unmitigated information, but it's actually unlikely that the information would not be disclosed unless it was apriori mitigated (unless the officer was "plain stupid").
The US criteria for denial and mitigation for reasons of denial is:
http://www.smdc.army.mil/adr/adjguid/adjguidF.htm
and I can't believe that the RAF criteria would be very different.
-- Terry
Your Atlanta WiMAX is from Clearwire:
They charge an extra $25/month to unblock VoIP, and they are currently only trialing in Portland, Oregon right now:
http://www.fiercevoip.com/story/clearwire-tests-wimax-mobile-voip-phones/2009-03-20
If you want VoIP from their service, you will need to use their routers and their software, which apparently makes a TCP connection to a back-end server, and then VoIPs from there (this also lets them comply with CALEA wire-tap orders from the authorities by making sure your connection is in the clear, the same way it is for AIM internally to the AOL servers).
For the people talking about 911, the 911 service in Mobile phones is on a different, higher-power, prioritized frequency supporting triangulation of the signal source, rather than trusting a GPS in the phone. Since Clearwire is talking to handset vendors about hand-off between WiMAX and the proprietary cell networks, it's pretty clear that they are not intending to position themselves as a cellular service competitor, which probably means both vendor agreements and that the VoIP-enabled handset, when used to dial 911, will go through the standard cellular network.
The most likely vendor agreement would be a "network sparing" agreement that kept you off VoIP if a cellular network was available to be used instead, which would be used to lock you into a cellular service contract, just like any other cell phone (why would they give up their business model if they didn't have to?).
If your Netbook runs Windows, then you might be lucky enough for it to run Clearwire's proprietary VoIP software; if you are on Linux, you are out of luck (the articles I read on this didn't mention Mac OS X, so using the "corporate rule of lazy", that's probably not supported either.
-- Terry
My firewall does random sequence numbers.
It does this to make up for a number of commercial operating systems that *don't* do random initial sequence numbers. Then it rewrites the packets as they go through the TCP stream, including the checksum, on both the way in and the way out.
This is a common method of mitigating "guessable" initial sequence numbers for older systems behind good firewalls.
-- Terry
Whoever your peers were, they weren't familiar with best common practices for asymmetric bandwidth border crossings.
We did this in 1996 for the Whistle InterJet, back when the idea was relatively new, but it's now common practice. The problem is that if you have a border router with a relatively fast network inside the border and a slow connection to the Internet, with a faster connection for the router on the other side of the slow connection (e.g. for a DSLAM, for example, then what you're going to end up with is any larger transmission starving interactive traffic (for example, an update download vs. transient mail traffic, or a large file download vs. an ssh session.
The only reasonable way t deal with this situation from a bandwidth management perspective is to manage how full the buffer is on the routers on the other side of the slow connection, and that means banging the window size larger or smaller than it actually is in order to allow bandwidth control. Otherwise, your fast connection packs the router buffers full of data packets for the large transfers, and there's no room for packets not specifically related to the large data transfers, unless your router decides to do RED queueing. And that has its own performance issues (specifically, it increases the effective bandwidth delay product until it's the same as if it had been multiplied by your actual queue size divided by your high watermark at which pint you RED 50% of your incoming packets).
PS: This is why I always laugh at things like AltQ, which try to flow rate limit in order to do traffic shaping, since you can do that, but unless you adjust the window size, you're still going to pack up your router buffers with data unrelated to the flows that you wanted to prefer.
-- Terry
Very easy...
You and 4 or 5 of your friends all get accounts, and then follow him around in the game ganking all his treasure.
-- Terry
Sorry, Peter; harsh reality time... ...but your book "Compression Algorithms for Real Programmers" is really a light survey work, something that someone would maybe read if they were a manager of a team that worked on compressions software and wanted to be able to know (generally) what their employees were talking about when they talked technical, and not what I would call a textbook.
A textbook is something you put on your shelf and use it as a reference work. It's something like "Technical Aspects of Data Communication" by McNamara, or "Advanced Engineering Mathematics" by Greenberg, or "Algorithms in C++" by Sedgewick -- where it's about the only place you can go for something that you'd use in a day to day setting.
I did technical editing/fact checking for Prentice Hall on "UNIX Internals: The New Frontiers" by Vahalia, and that is also a survey work, but it's also what I'd call a textbook. It's something a lot of the kernel engineers here at Apple own and put up on their shelves (and it wasn't evangelism by me that made them do it -- they did it on their own). It has chapter end information, it has technical footnotes that lead to useful papers, and it has student exercises. If you want, for example, to go look at algorithmic tradeoffs for kernel memory allocators as part of your job, you'd probably actually look at chapter 12 of this book; doing so will at least get the list of the seminal papers on the subject that you should be asking Citeseer to find for you.
I really doubt that people aren't buying it because they are pirating it, but if they are pirating it, it's definitely not for use as a reference work, and probably not for use as a textbook, unless you've managed to convince some "Informations Systems" or some "Introduction to Computer Science" professors somewhere to require it for the class, instead of writing their own textbook and requiring that instead (which is usually how introductory college textbooks roll).
It's anecdotal, but I have to say that absolutely none of the QuickTime engineers, and none of the people I know who are working on codecs for the iPhone, etc., have your book on their shelves for reference (or, after a brief verbal survey, anywhere in electronic form, such as for their Kindles, either).
It's far more likely the the blame for your lack of sales is a result of the general economic downturn, rather than electronic piracy.
I'm sorry you aren't making the money you think you should be making off the book, but not sorry enough to go out and buy a copy of it when I can't use it as a reference or pass the bill for it back to the company as a work-related expense.
-- Terry
Why electronics are banned on planes:
Unlike the conspiracy theory that "they want you to pay for Airphone services", electronics are banned for two reasons:
(1) For cell phones, a cell phone in a plane is "seen" by far too many cells and generally confuses the cell network. This is the same reason that they were relatively useless for locating the missing hikers, in recent history, on Mount Hood, which has the same altitude-based issue.
(2) For all electronics, the (now very old, but not yet replaced in all US airports/aircraft) ILS/LOC systems are oversensitive to electronic interference, which is why you are required to shut portable electronics off on takeoff and landing, when an emergency might require their use(*).
[*] ILS/LOC was supposed to be replaced by MLS, but with the advent of GPS and the hopes that it could be used instead, few MLS systems were deployed in the US, and most that were have been shut down. Instead, the GPS-based WAAS is being deployed instead, which broadcasts differential corrections for the intentional GPS "wobble" that was intended to prevent GPS being used by an adversary for targeting purposes (meaning it's still usable for that, if you include WAAS). Fears about the ability of the US to "turn off" GPS signals on a theatre-basis have led to continued deployment of MLS in Europe.
See also:
http://www.fcc.gov/cgb/consumerfacts/cellonplanes.html
http://www.faa.gov/news/fact_sheets/news_story.cfm?newsId=6275
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_Landing_System
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_Area_Augmentation_System
-- Terry
Pu-238 is hard to beat for this application
Pu-238 is used because it is relatively short-lived and is not easily fissile (low multiplication factor), and instead experiences relatively rapid Alpha decay.
Like most alpha decay, it generates heat as a decay byproduct. Unlike Pu-239, which has a half life of a little over 24,000 years, the Pu-238 half-life is a little under 90 years, which makes it a better thermal source for use in power generation (Pu-239 decays way to slowly to be used as an Alpha decay based heat source).
Trying to convert to something like Pu-239 from decommissioned nuclear weapons (for example) would require converting to using fission by-products instead, which would require shielding against the Beta decay and fast neutrons (Alpha particles can be shielded with nothing more than paraffin). This would add a lot of mass to the probe itself - both for shielding the sensitive components, and for carrying a large enough sub-critical mass of Pu-239 to induce spontaneous subcritical fission.
In fact, all in all, Pu-238 is one of only a few materials that could be used for this application.
-- Terry