Because if resource-poor 3rd world countries had a fucking big DAMN holding the water for the power plant, you can be sure they'd drink from it...
Besides which, you probably didn't RTFA, as the article at physics.about.com states that the channels need to be between nanometers and micrometers in thickness for the effect to work. Get too much particulate matter in the tubes and the whole thing shuts down.
You'd like to think that all those protesters wouldn't be going home to watch TV with a bunch of lights on in their houses while waiting for their microwave overs to heat up their frozen dinners...
Sadly, this isn't the case. The protesters don't generally suggest alternatives, they just want to bitch about something. I suspect they'd even be perfectly comfortable using wind turbine power if the turbines were located somewhere out of sight.
The few system i've seen for tidal generations were basicly underwater windmills, which do indeed get the job done. It seems to me that one could use a large holding tank which would fill at high tide, and flow out at low tide.
I think I saw something like that in a documentary some years back. The proposed (or actual) generator used regular tide power as the tide flowed in and out, but at low tide supplemented the outflow with water from a holding tank. During times of low electricity use, water was pumped uphill to the tank (reservoir), effectively storing the generated power until the peak electricity use times.
By your reasoning, no benchmarks should ever be done. Don't bother benchmarking Intel and AMD cpus, don't bother benchmarking different kinds of memory, different video cards, different printers. Don't bother comparing cars, TVs, washing machines, &c from different manufacturers, because they're so dissimilar.
Oh, wait, but we are comparing those dissimilar products when they're all attempting to do the same thing. Why else would car makers boast about engine horsepower, acceleration, traction and braking, for example?
I guess you didn't actually read the article, where the guy states that he's doing the same damn thing on each OS, using the same hardware, so the only variable is the OS/distro being used. His choice of OS/distro may be suspect, but the results still stand. He's comparing oranges to oranges and telling you which is sweeter, which is juicier, etc.
Didn't someone post a patch for bind that takes care of the Verisign problem? Dunno how it would have worked, but it would be really funny to watch Verisign slowly fall off the 'net as people apply the patch...
404 - Not Found is generated by the server, when you try to pick up a page it doesn't have. Completely different from not finding the server's address in the DNS.
When a telemarketer calls a cel phone or sends a text message, the phone's owner can point to a line on his bill and say "This unwanted call/message cost me $X."
Is that true? The originating number shows up on your bill? Is it the same on landlines? Kinda kicks caller-id-blocking into touch...
Ban telemartketing unless people explicitely opt-in
The problem with that is, the bottle is open and the genie is has stolen the stopper... Telemarketers aren't going to let go that easily. They've got cash and backing to lobby against any legislation that might limit them. Why else do you think the national Do Not Call list is being challenged in court?
Telemarketers believe they have a Constitutionally-granted right to call anybody, anytime, to sell stuff (freedom of speech), and that fact that you've gone to the trouble of acquiring a phone (cell or landline) means that you obviously want to be contacted. Never mind that they're dialling all the exchange numbers sequentially...
Theoretically, only one... Think about it - if you know the precise location of multiple cell towers around you, and if you can discriminate between their signals as reflected from the target, you should be able to triangulate and get the target's location fairly closely.
The boot manager should get a real command line interface to have the possibility to check the hardware before the boot process
Got that already... My Compaq Armada laptop has a diag partition that I can boot from Grub. I think it's basically a DOS partition with autoloading diag utilities.
On the other hand, if you're thinking of something like Sun's Openboot prom, with power-on-self-test routines and a command line interface that allows you to test individual bits of hardware, that's not a Linux or boot manager issue. That's down to the BIOS manufacturers. For the boot manager to start at all, you have to have a mostly functioning system (cpu, memory, hard/floppy disk, etc). Do it in the BIOS and you only need a functioning CPU (OK, and serial port and other infrastructure, to be able to see what's happening, but you need those for diags in the boot manager also).
Curvature wouldn't be too much of a problem if the laser (with big solar panels) was in orbit, pointing more or less straight down... OK, so punching a serious amount of power down through the atmosphere will cause all sorts of unwanted side effects, but no worse than point-to-point transmission across the surface.
Use the right frequency of laser or microwave, and clouds needn't be much of a problem. Come to think of it, if the thing (or part of it) were tunable, it could probably be used to make clouds disappear... And birds... And airplanes... And ICBMs...:)
Niven & Pournelle's Footfall is a closer match. Aliens invade Earth and during the occupation, use ground-to-orbit shuttles that are partially launched by ground-based lasers. The lasers push the shuttle to an altitude where it's "safe" to crank up the main engine. Some resistance fighters manage to damage one laser ground-station during a launch, causing the loss of the shuttle, but they're subsequently creamed by the mothership. I don't remember if the shuttles glide to land, or come down ass-first onto the laser...
Sounds rather like the NetBSD (and others) way of building the kernel. You take the generic config file, which has all the really common/useful options already selected, then you pick the various bits you want and comment out the rest. Once you have your custom configuration, you run the config program against it. This creates a compile directory that contains symbolic links to the necessary source files, and probably fiddle with Makefiles, etc. You cd to the compile directory and run make. Some time later, you have a kernel.
Now, suppose the "symbolic link" stage was replaced by a wget-if-newer, pulling the source files from the official source tree...
Of course, this would only really work with the standard source tree. If you wanted to be able to add any random patch sets, the config program would have to be a lot smarter.
Isn't that what digitally signed email is for? An update would arrive via the distributed RBL, your email program would check the digital signature and only install the new list if it matched. Obviously there are some implementation details to work out, but that ought to cover the credibility issue.
If groups like Netscape/Mozilla, AOL and Microsoft were to package the digital signatures along with a block of patches, that would help to DDOS-proof the signature delivery.
All that leaves is to secure the OS against some bastard putting a spoof signature or RBL in a virus payload...
And how exactly do you validate that the code running in the voting machine is the same code that was reviewed? Who reviews it? Who coordnates patches and, most importantly, who guarantees that the updated reaches the machines intact, or at all?
I've got this nagging feeling that if that would work, someone would have tried it in Florida. And if it was tried, the court still ruled against it. I don't remember - I lost interest when it became obvious that Florida would go to whoever had the most stamina and the biggest stick, regardless of the actual counts.
To my mind, the only way to handle a Florida-style situation would be to discard all the disputed ballots and instigate an immediate paper ballot (of the check mark on paper kind). Sure, it would delay the final count by several days - that happened with all the legal wrangling anyway, so what's lost? If such a policy were published up front and "rubber-stamped" by, say, the Supreme Court (or whoever), it might just serve to cool things down.
Never mind the code review - how can you be sure that the code someone reviewed is what's actually running the voting machine when you vote? And how can you be sure there isn't a "black box" between the voting station and the central office that's been programmed to split the vote 60/40 (or whatever)?
I was wondering about that too, so one day I took my router/firewall out of the loop and conencted my Linux box directly to the cable modem. Ethereal showed almost all the traffic to be "arp: who has xx.xx.xx.xx", with a small sprinkling of other packets.
I think it's worse than that - the way I read the original article, the monitoring company crapped on the webhosting company, then tried to sell monitoring services to the webhosting company's customers.
Your customers should be able to go to a third party for monitoring, if they so choose. The contract they signed with you does cover bandwidth charges as well as hosting, right? So just make them aware of the amount of traffic being generated by the third party and make it clear that it's theirs to pay for.
How about itemizing their bandwidth bill (maybe something like Webalizer?) to show that 90% (or whatever) of their traffic comes from one particular IP block, and identify each block with 'whois' records...
If they're paying you by the Mb, and an enormous proportion of the bill is caused by the monitoring company, things should sort themselves out fairly quickly.
Also, do what others have suggested, and get lawyers involved, to make sure you're not risking breaching your side of the provider contract, and to C'n'D the monitoring company.
Sure, you're supposedly presumed innocent until proven guilty, but... Doen't the PATRIOT act trump that? It certainly seems to have done for a lot of people. My son, for one - he and a friend were stopped and interrogated twice while waiting to board a cruise ship. The ostensible reason given was that they were "filming in the port area". With a powered-down, lenscap-covered camera, no less... "We could throw you in jail right now" and, waving vaguely towards another group "we've got witnesses that say you were shoving the camera in their faces". The goons wouldn't listen to any kind of reasoning, including "here, run the tape back and see what's on it". Nope, those goons were out to piss some people off and make themselves feel like big, hard men. The irony is that the boys had just been interviewed outside the building by a camera crew and reporter regarding the cruise ship epidemics that were making hundreds of passenger ill. Personally, I think I'd have gone back outside and tried making a statement to the press about the Gestapo tactics being used by the poorly trained, wannabe soldiers in Homeland Security.
Sorry, that was a year ago and it still yanks my chain...
The point I was trying to make is that if you have a long-term, stated policy of destroying logs after collecting "aggregrate data" sufficient for billing but not for absolutely connecting a real person to a given IP, then you should be safe.
If, on the other hand, your logs (and system backups that might contain logs) magically disappear when the subpoena is served, you could well find yourself looking at "destruction of evidence". Getting out of that would probably require convincing the mythical "reasonable man" that you have sufficient records to bill your customers. Oh, and also that if they let your servers continue working without interference, then they still wouldn't collect the logs. IANAL, so I don't know how much of that would be viewed as a "fishing expedition" that a judge would prevent.
BTW, does the DMCA actually specify what information an ISP must record and provide on demand, or does it just say "thou shalt fork it over when told to"?? As the other responder to my post said, "what about flat rate ISPs?" They only need to record that you paid your $10 (or whatever) on time. It wouldn't be necessary, in a business sense, to track the IPs the DHCP server hands out, It wouldn't even be necessary to track that any given person ever logged in, just that he paid money...
That sounds about right - if someone has already filed a subpoena for your logs, you'd better be able to produce them, or produce compelling evidence to show that logs older than, say, 5 minutes are deleted. Anyone in that situation ought also to be prepared to defend that policy in front of a judge, and back it up with an open invitation to the court to have your systems and backups examined by a trusted third-party (ie, someone not being paid by your accuser).
The EFF can push all they want but I seriously doubt filesharing will ever become legal, even under a compulsory licence.
I think you're wrong about filesharing being illegal. What's illegal is sharing copyrighted works. If filesharing per se is illegal, then everyone using NFS-mounted filesystems is breaking the law, everyone using Windows filesharing is breaking the law, etc.
Sounds like you're a pilot, or instructor of some kind. So, maybe you could answer this: do airplanes get routed around satellite uplinks? You know, those big, fixed dishes used to push TV and other broadcasts up to geostationary satellites for rebroadcast back all over the country?
Or perhaps someone could give an opinion on how much power the uplinks broadcast? Would it be enough to cause some of the weird effects that pilots are currently attributing to passenger electronics?
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Besides which, you probably didn't RTFA, as the article at physics.about.com states that the channels need to be between nanometers and micrometers in thickness for the effect to work. Get too much particulate matter in the tubes and the whole thing shuts down.
Sadly, this isn't the case. The protesters don't generally suggest alternatives, they just want to bitch about something. I suspect they'd even be perfectly comfortable using wind turbine power if the turbines were located somewhere out of sight.
Oh, wait, but we are comparing those dissimilar products when they're all attempting to do the same thing. Why else would car makers boast about engine horsepower, acceleration, traction and braking, for example?
I guess you didn't actually read the article, where the guy states that he's doing the same damn thing on each OS, using the same hardware, so the only variable is the OS/distro being used. His choice of OS/distro may be suspect, but the results still stand. He's comparing oranges to oranges and telling you which is sweeter, which is juicier, etc.
Didn't someone post a patch for bind that takes care of the Verisign problem? Dunno how it would have worked, but it would be really funny to watch Verisign slowly fall off the 'net as people apply the patch...
404 - Not Found is generated by the server, when you try to pick up a page it doesn't have. Completely different from not finding the server's address in the DNS.
Great. You just had to tell them, didn't you?
Is that true? The originating number shows up on your bill? Is it the same on landlines? Kinda kicks caller-id-blocking into touch...
The problem with that is, the bottle is open and the genie is has stolen the stopper... Telemarketers aren't going to let go that easily. They've got cash and backing to lobby against any legislation that might limit them. Why else do you think the national Do Not Call list is being challenged in court?
Telemarketers believe they have a Constitutionally-granted right to call anybody, anytime, to sell stuff (freedom of speech), and that fact that you've gone to the trouble of acquiring a phone (cell or landline) means that you obviously want to be contacted. Never mind that they're dialling all the exchange numbers sequentially...
Theoretically, only one... Think about it - if you know the precise location of multiple cell towers around you, and if you can discriminate between their signals as reflected from the target, you should be able to triangulate and get the target's location fairly closely.
Got that already... My Compaq Armada laptop has a diag partition that I can boot from Grub. I think it's basically a DOS partition with autoloading diag utilities.
On the other hand, if you're thinking of something like Sun's Openboot prom, with power-on-self-test routines and a command line interface that allows you to test individual bits of hardware, that's not a Linux or boot manager issue. That's down to the BIOS manufacturers. For the boot manager to start at all, you have to have a mostly functioning system (cpu, memory, hard/floppy disk, etc). Do it in the BIOS and you only need a functioning CPU (OK, and serial port and other infrastructure, to be able to see what's happening, but you need those for diags in the boot manager also).
Use the right frequency of laser or microwave, and clouds needn't be much of a problem. Come to think of it, if the thing (or part of it) were tunable, it could probably be used to make clouds disappear... And birds... And airplanes... And ICBMs... :)
Niven & Pournelle's Footfall is a closer match. Aliens invade Earth and during the occupation, use ground-to-orbit shuttles that are partially launched by ground-based lasers. The lasers push the shuttle to an altitude where it's "safe" to crank up the main engine. Some resistance fighters manage to damage one laser ground-station during a launch, causing the loss of the shuttle, but they're subsequently creamed by the mothership. I don't remember if the shuttles glide to land, or come down ass-first onto the laser...
Now, suppose the "symbolic link" stage was replaced by a wget-if-newer, pulling the source files from the official source tree...
Of course, this would only really work with the standard source tree. If you wanted to be able to add any random patch sets, the config program would have to be a lot smarter.
If groups like Netscape/Mozilla, AOL and Microsoft were to package the digital signatures along with a block of patches, that would help to DDOS-proof the signature delivery.
All that leaves is to secure the OS against some bastard putting a spoof signature or RBL in a virus payload...
And how exactly do you validate that the code running in the voting machine is the same code that was reviewed? Who reviews it? Who coordnates patches and, most importantly, who guarantees that the updated reaches the machines intact, or at all?
To my mind, the only way to handle a Florida-style situation would be to discard all the disputed ballots and instigate an immediate paper ballot (of the check mark on paper kind). Sure, it would delay the final count by several days - that happened with all the legal wrangling anyway, so what's lost? If such a policy were published up front and "rubber-stamped" by, say, the Supreme Court (or whoever), it might just serve to cool things down.
Never mind the code review - how can you be sure that the code someone reviewed is what's actually running the voting machine when you vote? And how can you be sure there isn't a "black box" between the voting station and the central office that's been programmed to split the vote 60/40 (or whatever)?
I was wondering about that too, so one day I took my router/firewall out of the loop and conencted my Linux box directly to the cable modem. Ethereal showed almost all the traffic to be "arp: who has xx.xx.xx.xx", with a small sprinkling of other packets.
I think it's worse than that - the way I read the original article, the monitoring company crapped on the webhosting company, then tried to sell monitoring services to the webhosting company's customers.
How about itemizing their bandwidth bill (maybe something like Webalizer?) to show that 90% (or whatever) of their traffic comes from one particular IP block, and identify each block with 'whois' records...
If they're paying you by the Mb, and an enormous proportion of the bill is caused by the monitoring company, things should sort themselves out fairly quickly.
Also, do what others have suggested, and get lawyers involved, to make sure you're not risking breaching your side of the provider contract, and to C'n'D the monitoring company.
Sorry, that was a year ago and it still yanks my chain...
The point I was trying to make is that if you have a long-term, stated policy of destroying logs after collecting "aggregrate data" sufficient for billing but not for absolutely connecting a real person to a given IP, then you should be safe.
If, on the other hand, your logs (and system backups that might contain logs) magically disappear when the subpoena is served, you could well find yourself looking at "destruction of evidence". Getting out of that would probably require convincing the mythical "reasonable man" that you have sufficient records to bill your customers. Oh, and also that if they let your servers continue working without interference, then they still wouldn't collect the logs. IANAL, so I don't know how much of that would be viewed as a "fishing expedition" that a judge would prevent.
BTW, does the DMCA actually specify what information an ISP must record and provide on demand, or does it just say "thou shalt fork it over when told to"?? As the other responder to my post said, "what about flat rate ISPs?" They only need to record that you paid your $10 (or whatever) on time. It wouldn't be necessary, in a business sense, to track the IPs the DHCP server hands out, It wouldn't even be necessary to track that any given person ever logged in, just that he paid money...
That sounds about right - if someone has already filed a subpoena for your logs, you'd better be able to produce them, or produce compelling evidence to show that logs older than, say, 5 minutes are deleted. Anyone in that situation ought also to be prepared to defend that policy in front of a judge, and back it up with an open invitation to the court to have your systems and backups examined by a trusted third-party (ie, someone not being paid by your accuser).
I think you're wrong about filesharing being illegal. What's illegal is sharing copyrighted works. If filesharing per se is illegal, then everyone using NFS-mounted filesystems is breaking the law, everyone using Windows filesharing is breaking the law, etc.
Or perhaps someone could give an opinion on how much power the uplinks broadcast? Would it be enough to cause some of the weird effects that pilots are currently attributing to passenger electronics?