Are all men at a higher level of technical proficiency?
No, but most women tend to hold back more than men do when asked if they know something. A man will say "yes" with a weaker hand.
Now, imagine what this leads to when someone who doesn't know about this "feature" of interaction between the sexes are told by a woman that she doesn't know something - when she may know her stuff better than the person asking.
Remember what happened to non-alpha females who spoke up in the herd when you were at school? I have never seen people treating each other as harshly as adolescent girls do without even thinking about it. Young girls tend to teach themselves that it doesn't pay to speak up. Yes, males help out, but young males usually mostly dream of interaction with young girls - males are not the ones who teach young girls to interact in groups.
If a male tries to point something like this out - even to adult women - chances are that he will be stamped as a sexist bastard.
If you have a bachelor's degree, then you should start out as an officer.
Not if the US system is anything like the norwegian. To become an officer in Norway, you must take something that is best translated as "the school of war" - a three-year school. Don't ask me what they teach, I am not an officer.
Norway has a drafted army. When I was drafted as a M.Sc. in electronics/computer science, I spent most of my time logging incoming mail. The next rank in the pecking order would be civilian employees, then the military ranks came on top of this. The amount of techological savvy went down as you progressed up the hierarchy.
In a civilian company, this state of affairs would lead to bankruptcy. The military doesn't have any self-regulating controls of this kind to ensure that resources are utilized effectively - or utilized at all.
I just can't see this happening. The military is based on a hierarchy, and it needs to be organized just this way to be effective during a war - you can't sit and hold hands and talk things out when someone are shooting at you. The only way to make a proper hierarchical model work is to have the most experienced people on top. I think it is impossible to have a marriage between a hierarchical system where it takes 15+ years to reach the top and disciplines where your skills are outdated in five years.
I don't have a solution to this draft-related problem. I don't think a solution exists.
How the hell do they get lawyers to work at government rates?
By paying whatever rate a lawyer would make anyway.
Also, since there is no "free market" for public case lawyers, any lawyer who wants to do that kind of case has to be able to cope with this. If not, he can do divorce settlements. His choice, and the pay is about the same, as I said.
Personally, I think any US lawyer would be thrilled to bits at the thought of being able to send his bill to someone who has no way of keeping track of how many hours he has spent on the case.
It reminds me of the medical system in England where you get to wait with a bum knee for 2 years
Last time I needed orthopaedic surgery (removal of some metal hardware in my ankle) I waited a whole week. The ironmongery was removed at one of the largest orthopaedic wards in Oslo, which I happened to live next door to, luckily. When I had to have the bits put into the ankle I had to wait all of nine hours (including a two hour drive) before I was in an operating theatre. In other words, things can happen quite fast.
Since these systems are run by the government, you can also get lost in the paperwork and never get anything done. One of the top hospital bosses in the south of norway has just been in the papers because he had a pension agreement giving him something like a $100.000 pension from the year he turned 62. So there are problems, but I don't have anything to complain about.
I also pay 35% tax, and there is a VAT of 23% on everything I buy except food, which is 12%, and books, which are exempt. This, and the oil Norway sells, is what keeps these systems ticking over.
Second and more interesting there is actually a tort in the UK that covers this exact type of case.
Interesting--can you give a bit of background on this?
We also have similar laws in Norway.
You can't demand payment without having entered into a sales agreement. You can't distribute goods and then ask payment for them. If you do, the recipient is allowed to keep the goods free of charge.
You are not allowed to market goods in a way that doesn't look like marketing. "Pay or we sue" is clearly not marketing, IMHO. But IANAL.
There is also a paragraph in the same law stating that exploiting a lack of knowledge on the consumers part is illegal. Not telling what you want to sell them under threat of litigation would probably be relevant for this as well.
I really can't see how linus can claim copyright to the distribution of any source which happens to run with the linux kernel - but does not contain any part of it.
He doesn't. He is claiming copyright for the interfaces you have to use to make a kernel module. You are free to do whatever you wish to the bits you have written yourself - you have the copyright on that.
However, including the *.h files needed to make your code a derived module makes use of something someone else have written. You are not allowed to make copies of that code without the consent of the copyright holder.
The other copyright holder is willing to give you the right to make copies of his code and distribute the result. The terms may, however, be dictated by him. He owns the copyright to the code you need, after all. The terms you are being offered are based on the concept that if you want to link to the linux kernel and distribute the result, you have to let everyone else do what you just did to the code you wrote.
You are, of course, free to try to negotiate a better deal. Be my guest.
Network connections at university do not come from a horn of plenty. They cost money. A lot of money. The internet connections are there to help the students learn. All rhetoric aside - Kazaa doesn't teach anyone anything you need to know at a university. Being able to see the cost of using things like Kazaa is, however, a sought-after skill. We need more people like that where I work, at least.
I don't think the other students should have to foot the bill for those who want to use huge amounts of bandwidth. Those who want to swap can get their own, private internet connection.
I ponder if we made a list of oh say 'n' of these if the typical/.er would read them. (...) But I don't think there's much hope the typical/.er will take the time and effort to read them better yet think about them.
I assume you would tell someone who asks for directions to somewhere that they would just get lost again, and then walk on?
You must be a very poor teacher. "I could tell you lots of stuff, but I won't bother, since most of you probably won't bother to learn this stuff."
To the point: I agree with other posters. It is probably not a very efficient way of going about it to read papers, especially ones that are more than two years old. Go buy some textbooks instead. Have you got a total and complete control of what happens in your "own" field? Then switch to another field. There are vastly different ways of going about things out there. I for one would love to work with more people that actually make an effort to update themselves, and that don't dig themselves into a very narrow trench called "java" or "web applications". I spend about $4000 a year on new books - very few of my coworkers seem to do the same, which is a pity.
"The helicopter is unique. No other company in the world has succeeded in operating such a flying machine, capable of independent flying without remote control. Many companies have tried, but none of their tests worked."
This is wrong. A friend of mine made a model airplane that flew about 1hr, then turned around and came back to within radio range in the early 1980s. No GPS, just inertial (gyro) control.
From what I've heard, Atkins is extremely harsh on your kidneys, with some seriously bad side-effects when you use it for prolonged periods. Surely getting thin is not worth dying or having permanent renal damage for...
You are correct. Atkins-like diets put a huge strain on all waste disposal systems in the body. Forcing the body to live off proteins is not healthy in the long run - the body tends to reduce nonessential tissue like muscle that is not in use. This is a bad thing since having a decent amount of muscle will actually increase your metabolism. This is all a downwards spiral - you go on a diet, lose muscle, need to eat even less, then diet even harder, lose more muscle...
I realize that this is politically incorrect, but the only "overclockers" out there with a long-term track record are (dope-free) bodybuilders. They eat healthy food and exercise regularly, and keep on doing this year after year. The key to that is variation. Half the year, these people lift weights and eat lots of (healthy) food. The body builds muscle, and the waste disposal systems are forced to grow (slowly) along with the muscles. The other half (leading up to the beach season, yuh?) they lift less weights and do more cardicascular stuff, and eat less. The kidneys and liver now live a harder life, but will get a break in a couple of months.
No, I am not a bodybuilder, but I am willing to learn from people who actually accomplish their goals instead of just writing about it. Atkins has described a fifteen year old bodybuilding diet. Go buy a modern book on bodybuilding diets. And yes, I have lost about 30 pounds since I started exercising. I now have a basic metabolism that seems to burn off about 500kcal more each day than it did before. I can now more or less eat moderate amounts of whatever I want without gaining weight. When I have time to really put in some exercise (which means doing something physical for an hour each day or so), it is more or less impossible to gain weight. Good job too, since I like to spend time in my kitchen.
Why would you think that anyone would need to protect themselves from the gov't?
Norway. 1940. The germans invade. Society is split in half. Most of the parliament and the king is opposed to the invation. Power is seized by the local nazis. All of a sudden, things turn round. The country is no longer being led by elected officials. A foreign power has meddled in local affairs to give "their boys" power.
The invading germans were held back for a while mostly because of the number of privately owned guns. This time proved sufficient for the king and parliament to escape to England. The owners of the guns were hunters, and knew how to use the guns. The germans knew that if someone fired on them, they wouldn't see that person until it was too late. Wonderful for morale.
The result was that cities like Narvik were bombed to bits - more force was used to meet the resistance. An uncle of mine told me about how he went around with a bucket after the airraid, picking up bits of friends. The king escaped, though. The price was a number of lives. This is what happens when people use force. We are seeing similar things in Iraq.
These people did not own guns out of some need of a feeling of security. These were people who used the guns to make a living.
The guns the military were supposed to have were, by the way, crippled. The firing pins had been removed and stored separately for security reasons. The keys to the two locations were held by different people. Mostly, the military had problems getting hold of their tools in time to do any good in the south of Norway.
The rest is history. I am sure you can find similar examples if you try.
The interesting thing about this, according to the article, is the IL-4 gene gives the virus its potency, but at the same time keeps it from being contagious. Apparently, they are not sure why. Sounds like the real scary part will be once they figure that out and someone figures out a work around.
This is so very true. Just imagine a world where we had figured out how to stop people from catching a virus-based disease. Pfizer would go broke! No more would we buy C vitamins by the bucketful to avoid catching the flu.
What sort of qualifications does Diebold have to be making voting systems? If I as a customer saw these messages, bug rapports and horror stories, I wouldn't trust them to design a cup holder for my car, let alone for something as critical as a voting system.
So what you are saying is that any and all horror stories make you distrust a company? Everything in the media is correct?
I would like to point you in the direction of http://zetatalk.com/ . The information on this site is about as trustworthy as any and all leaked memos out there, regardless of their source.
Of course, Diebold has gone out and pulled a rabbit out of their hat by going out and trying to use the DMCA. Still, it could be caused by them not knowing what the DMCA really is, or a result of the DMCA being a convenient piece of legislation in this case.
In the future, should the US head toward the use of GSM or the next latest-and-greatest communications system, the older equipment, lines and all, will have to be removed. These companies will have to foot the bill to pay for that removal.
This is just plain wrong. Wireless service isn't replacing the existing network. It complements it.
A typical GSM base station has a range of up to 50 kms (maximum line-of-sight range). You still need the old copper or fibres to carry the signals between the base stations - there is no need to rip them out. You have a small amount of copper left over the last few kilometers to the customers, but it is usual for the customer to own that in modern buildings anyway - it makes it possible to switch telcos without having a number of redundant wiring systems installed.
It may seem feasible, for someone living in a country with a lessor-established technological-infrastructure that never had a system in place such as the existing telephone system in the US, that the US is behind but the US already had a *huge* system established for over 130 years. An entire industry was created because of it and when you have a beast (or a burden) of such a large scale as the US does one does not just throw it out in favor of some other kind of system - such as the cell phone.
Who says Norway has a worse POTS service than the US?
The US has had 130 plus years to amortize its network, Norway has had about 30-50. We still have a 100% POTS coverage and a hellish country to build a POTS network in (mountains and fjords all over the place) to boot.
Lo and behold, we also have two distinct GSM networks with more or less the same coverage. Two older, analogue networks have been made redundant already. It all depends. If you think communications infrastructure is important, you invest, regardless of what kind of old infrastructure is in place. Especially if it is 130+ years old.
I am a Norwegian. We mostly use hydroelectric power. Usually, we have more than enough, but there has been very little rain in the west of Norway the last year. As a result, prices have gone up in the west of Norway. We can't bring cheap power in from Sweden to cover the deficit in the power budget because of transmission losses.
Now someone has suggested we export power to Laos. Methinks someone should read up on basic physics.
They will blame everyone and everything, except the two causes:
1) the people who teased them to death for years.
2) the boys themselves for choosing to plan the crime and carry it out.
Or even
3) The parents
According to a local newspaper, the father said (translated, YMMV): "Matt is a wonderful child, and has always been protective of his brother (...)". If I had done something like this, my father would not have excused my actions. I would not have been called a "wonderful child".
I am a voluntary amateur motorcycle instructor for the local AA. I have no official training or certification. I have taken a number of private driving courses. My opinions are probably coloured by this. Caveat emptor.
I'm at the maximum safe driver discounts. I haven't even been close to being in an accident in some fifteen years (arsehole ran a red light!). I maintain an attitude of defensive driving.
It is a fact of life that a very significant percentage of the people driving motorized vehicles out there think they are a better than average driver. Most of them can't be, by definition.
You are stating something to the effect that a defensive driver is a safe driver. I don't agree with this view. You can be as defensive as you want. All you accomplish is lowering your own skill level. You won't become a better driver by going back and forth to the shops doing 30 km/h seven times a week, even if you need to spend most of the day driving (the old "I drive many miles a year" argument)
I am also worried that you are afraid of what other people might do to you. It doesn't seem like you really have that much confidence in your defensice driving.
What makes a better driver is actually learning to do something you couldn't do before - in a controlled environment, of course. When did you last try an evasive maneuver without having to? Do you know how your car behaves when you have to not hit something on ice? On a wet road? Do you buy cheap plastic tires? Can you really stop instantaneously when you travel where children might be playing? Most people haven't even tried. They regularily have opinions on speed limits and other peoples driving habits, but many have absolutely no idea how much time and road surface they need to stop their own car.
In Norway, we have a goverment that has tried to lower speed limits and promote "defensive driving" in order to reduce the accident rate. It works for a time, then people adjust, lose some driving skills, and the accidents go up again.
Go and learn something new. Then realize that everyone else probably haven't done the same thing. This is where you don't increase your own speed, but continue driving as before, but with your additional skills in store for when you need them. Driving defensively is only one part of being a safe driver. Telling everyone else how dangerous they are is not part of being one.
You have just told me you haven't had to use any driving skills for 15 years, and that you crashed the last time you needed better than average driving skills because someone ran a red light. I suggest you ponder how safe this really is, and if it really is the message you wanted to give.
, but there isn't anything fundamentally different between a biological solution and a technological one.
There is.
We understand the way the technological solution works. At least, someone does.
Nobody has come forward to claim an insight into how even moderately complex neural nets actually work. We are baffled by a mere evolved XOR in a known technology. The solution isn't comparable to anything within the world of CS. The best explanation anyone has is "it works for me" and a small shrug of the shoulders. That is not a description of any fundamental insight, it is a description of the learning algorithm that produced the result.
While what looks like the assembled ranks of CS experts are telling the world about their collective ignorance, you assert that there "isn't anything fundamentally different between a biological solution and a technological one".
It's easy to see why DNA is digital; it means that copies can be made with 100% fidelity. You don't want random mutations every time a cell divides.
This forces some processes to be essentially digital,(...)
It certainly forces humans to think of them as essentially digital, thus the digital model of the output of couple of million years of iterating one or more biological learning algorithms.
We didn't understand the evolved FPGA pattern implementing an XOR either, although we think of it as a bit pattern.
By the way, DNA isn't recombined with 100% fidelity. Mostly, things work ok, but things do mutate once in a while, just as they do when you make analogue recordings. This leads me to think your "digital tape recorder" analogy isn't a very good model - "DNA bits" can and do flip.
In a theater and time of war, all bets are off. You use any frequency you damned well want to if you have the ability to do so and believe it is tactically sound to do so. I also refuse to believe any heavily-armoured equipment in the US military is not frequency agile from DC to daylight.
In that case, there is no reason in my sitting here and telling you otherwise.
You sound like electronics designers of the sixties who scoffed at the USSR still using electron valve technology in their planes. They stopped when they got all the information available: valve technology didn't stop working when someone let off a tactical nuke. Silicon transistors without protection will be fried to a crisp. Russia has still got the most agile fighter planes, by the way.
Also, even at 60 or 70 MHz, if the Good Guys are using frequency-hopping and DSS, you have to *detect* it's in use in the first place (NOT easy to do in the slightest), and THEN find a way to jam it. Again, not easy. Jamming conventional is easy. Jamming FH/DSS is something I'd have to wonder if any of our enemies are even capable of doing. Considering the recent "jamming of GPS signals" incident in Gulf War II, and how laughably easily it was handled, I tend to think our comms don't have much chance of being interfered with to any significant degree.
First of all, direct sequence spreading is just one of the modulation techniques that get lumped into CDMA modulation techniques. CDMA is the more relevant concept for this discussion.
It would be more sensible for you to look at places that haven't been denied commercial interaction with the outside world for the past decade.
You are also wrong in assuming that CDMA signals are hard to find in all circumstances. All CDMA helps you do is detect signals that may be below the noise threshold. The sad bit is that a radio signal will deteriorate as a function of r^3 or r^4. In order to keep the same range as non-DSS equipment, you can only lower the output frequency by the "processing gain" DSS gives you. 30dB is what you can realistically expect to gain in a real-world system. If you move the detection equipment closer to the transmitter, you are not below the noise threshold any more, and a simple frequency analyzer will show the signal. If you don't believe me, go to the lab and try it for yourself.
The alternative to buying a radio/jammer is making one. Building the expertise and designing it will take a significant amount of time and resources, and you need access to a semiconductor plant. The iraqis had neither.
By the way: Equipment such as one of the frequency analyzers marketed by HP around 1998-1999 was pulled from the market because it was able to detect FH signals before the next hop started. I feel bad putting a dent in your belief that the US military has equipment that is not possible to make by civilians with enough resources, but that is just not true any more. The frequency jammer I mentioned above worked in the VHF frequency range, by the way.
I suggest you go and find someone who has actually made such radio systems and find out what the requirements are. I can't help you.
Back "in the day" when encrytion was relatively primitive the need for so many frequencies was greater so users could "hide through obscurity" This is no longer needed, and a significantly smaller mil-air band would more than suffice given current DES-encrypted digital-spread-spectrum transmissions that are ultra-efficient in bandwidth requirements.
This is a simplistic view of the problems military communications have to cope with. Strategic communication tends to be point-to-point, so I will leave strategic communications out of this.
Often, tactical (minute-to-minute communications, often in the battlefield) communications has a low risk if being overheard, as long as the information actually gets through. This is the typical "fire" command kind of information - the enemy can do very little once the information has reached the recipient. If he can stop the information, everything grinds to a halt unless people are within shouting distance of each other.
Yes, spread spectrum gives you what in practice amounts to a "better antenna". This means the signal can be harder to find because it is harder to pick out from the background noise. Frequency hopping helps a bit more - once the enemy has found your signal, you move it. All of a sudden, the enemy has to jam large bits of the available spectrum.
This is why restricting the "unpolluted" frequency band usable for military communications might not be a good idea. The smaller the total frequency band, the easier it is to jam communications. Truly wideband high-power amplifiers are extraordinarily expensive and hard to make.
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No, but most women tend to hold back more than men do when asked if they know something. A man will say "yes" with a weaker hand.
Now, imagine what this leads to when someone who doesn't know about this "feature" of interaction between the sexes are told by a woman that she doesn't know something - when she may know her stuff better than the person asking.
Remember what happened to non-alpha females who spoke up in the herd when you were at school? I have never seen people treating each other as harshly as adolescent girls do without even thinking about it. Young girls tend to teach themselves that it doesn't pay to speak up. Yes, males help out, but young males usually mostly dream of interaction with young girls - males are not the ones who teach young girls to interact in groups.
If a male tries to point something like this out - even to adult women - chances are that he will be stamped as a sexist bastard.
It is a funny old world.
Not if the US system is anything like the norwegian. To become an officer in Norway, you must take something that is best translated as "the school of war" - a three-year school. Don't ask me what they teach, I am not an officer.
Norway has a drafted army. When I was drafted as a M.Sc. in electronics/computer science, I spent most of my time logging incoming mail. The next rank in the pecking order would be civilian employees, then the military ranks came on top of this. The amount of techological savvy went down as you progressed up the hierarchy.
In a civilian company, this state of affairs would lead to bankruptcy. The military doesn't have any self-regulating controls of this kind to ensure that resources are utilized effectively - or utilized at all.
I just can't see this happening. The military is based on a hierarchy, and it needs to be organized just this way to be effective during a war - you can't sit and hold hands and talk things out when someone are shooting at you. The only way to make a proper hierarchical model work is to have the most experienced people on top. I think it is impossible to have a marriage between a hierarchical system where it takes 15+ years to reach the top and disciplines where your skills are outdated in five years.
I don't have a solution to this draft-related problem. I don't think a solution exists.
By paying whatever rate a lawyer would make anyway.
Also, since there is no "free market" for public case lawyers, any lawyer who wants to do that kind of case has to be able to cope with this. If not, he can do divorce settlements. His choice, and the pay is about the same, as I said.
Personally, I think any US lawyer would be thrilled to bits at the thought of being able to send his bill to someone who has no way of keeping track of how many hours he has spent on the case.
It reminds me of the medical system in England where you get to wait with a bum knee for 2 years
Last time I needed orthopaedic surgery (removal of some metal hardware in my ankle) I waited a whole week. The ironmongery was removed at one of the largest orthopaedic wards in Oslo, which I happened to live next door to, luckily. When I had to have the bits put into the ankle I had to wait all of nine hours (including a two hour drive) before I was in an operating theatre. In other words, things can happen quite fast.
Since these systems are run by the government, you can also get lost in the paperwork and never get anything done. One of the top hospital bosses in the south of norway has just been in the papers because he had a pension agreement giving him something like a $100.000 pension from the year he turned 62. So there are problems, but I don't have anything to complain about.
I also pay 35% tax, and there is a VAT of 23% on everything I buy except food, which is 12%, and books, which are exempt. This, and the oil Norway sells, is what keeps these systems ticking over.
Interesting--can you give a bit of background on this?
We also have similar laws in Norway.
You can't demand payment without having entered into a sales agreement. You can't distribute goods and then ask payment for them. If you do, the recipient is allowed to keep the goods free of charge.
You are not allowed to market goods in a way that doesn't look like marketing. "Pay or we sue" is clearly not marketing, IMHO. But IANAL.
There is also a paragraph in the same law stating that exploiting a lack of knowledge on the consumers part is illegal. Not telling what you want to sell them under threat of litigation would probably be relevant for this as well.
Sometimes, I like our laws.
Or above. Any problems with that?
Yes.
Inflation.
He doesn't. He is claiming copyright for the interfaces you have to use to make a kernel module. You are free to do whatever you wish to the bits you have written yourself - you have the copyright on that.
However, including the *.h files needed to make your code a derived module makes use of something someone else have written. You are not allowed to make copies of that code without the consent of the copyright holder.
The other copyright holder is willing to give you the right to make copies of his code and distribute the result. The terms may, however, be dictated by him. He owns the copyright to the code you need, after all. The terms you are being offered are based on the concept that if you want to link to the linux kernel and distribute the result, you have to let everyone else do what you just did to the code you wrote.
You are, of course, free to try to negotiate a better deal. Be my guest.
I don't think the other students should have to foot the bill for those who want to use huge amounts of bandwidth. Those who want to swap can get their own, private internet connection.
When a private ISP does this, I will care.
I assume you would tell someone who asks for directions to somewhere that they would just get lost again, and then walk on?
You must be a very poor teacher. "I could tell you lots of stuff, but I won't bother, since most of you probably won't bother to learn this stuff."
To the point: I agree with other posters. It is probably not a very efficient way of going about it to read papers, especially ones that are more than two years old. Go buy some textbooks instead. Have you got a total and complete control of what happens in your "own" field? Then switch to another field. There are vastly different ways of going about things out there. I for one would love to work with more people that actually make an effort to update themselves, and that don't dig themselves into a very narrow trench called "java" or "web applications". I spend about $4000 a year on new books - very few of my coworkers seem to do the same, which is a pity.
You are correct. Atkins-like diets put a huge strain on all waste disposal systems in the body. Forcing the body to live off proteins is not healthy in the long run - the body tends to reduce nonessential tissue like muscle that is not in use. This is a bad thing since having a decent amount of muscle will actually increase your metabolism. This is all a downwards spiral - you go on a diet, lose muscle, need to eat even less, then diet even harder, lose more muscle...
I realize that this is politically incorrect, but the only "overclockers" out there with a long-term track record are (dope-free) bodybuilders. They eat healthy food and exercise regularly, and keep on doing this year after year. The key to that is variation. Half the year, these people lift weights and eat lots of (healthy) food. The body builds muscle, and the waste disposal systems are forced to grow (slowly) along with the muscles. The other half (leading up to the beach season, yuh?) they lift less weights and do more cardicascular stuff, and eat less. The kidneys and liver now live a harder life, but will get a break in a couple of months.
No, I am not a bodybuilder, but I am willing to learn from people who actually accomplish their goals instead of just writing about it. Atkins has described a fifteen year old bodybuilding diet. Go buy a modern book on bodybuilding diets. And yes, I have lost about 30 pounds since I started exercising. I now have a basic metabolism that seems to burn off about 500kcal more each day than it did before. I can now more or less eat moderate amounts of whatever I want without gaining weight. When I have time to really put in some exercise (which means doing something physical for an hour each day or so), it is more or less impossible to gain weight. Good job too, since I like to spend time in my kitchen.
The invading germans were held back for a while mostly because of the number of privately owned guns. This time proved sufficient for the king and parliament to escape to England. The owners of the guns were hunters, and knew how to use the guns. The germans knew that if someone fired on them, they wouldn't see that person until it was too late. Wonderful for morale.
The result was that cities like Narvik were bombed to bits - more force was used to meet the resistance. An uncle of mine told me about how he went around with a bucket after the airraid, picking up bits of friends. The king escaped, though. The price was a number of lives. This is what happens when people use force. We are seeing similar things in Iraq.
These people did not own guns out of some need of a feeling of security. These were people who used the guns to make a living.
The guns the military were supposed to have were, by the way, crippled. The firing pins had been removed and stored separately for security reasons. The keys to the two locations were held by different people. Mostly, the military had problems getting hold of their tools in time to do any good in the south of Norway.
The rest is history. I am sure you can find similar examples if you try.
I would like to point you in the direction of http://zetatalk.com/ . The information on this site is about as trustworthy as any and all leaked memos out there, regardless of their source.
Of course, Diebold has gone out and pulled a rabbit out of their hat by going out and trying to use the DMCA. Still, it could be caused by them not knowing what the DMCA really is, or a result of the DMCA being a convenient piece of legislation in this case.
A typical GSM base station has a range of up to 50 kms (maximum line-of-sight range). You still need the old copper or fibres to carry the signals between the base stations - there is no need to rip them out. You have a small amount of copper left over the last few kilometers to the customers, but it is usual for the customer to own that in modern buildings anyway - it makes it possible to switch telcos without having a number of redundant wiring systems installed.
The US has had 130 plus years to amortize its network, Norway has had about 30-50. We still have a 100% POTS coverage and a hellish country to build a POTS network in (mountains and fjords all over the place) to boot.
Lo and behold, we also have two distinct GSM networks with more or less the same coverage. Two older, analogue networks have been made redundant already. It all depends. If you think communications infrastructure is important, you invest, regardless of what kind of old infrastructure is in place. Especially if it is 130+ years old.
Now someone has suggested we export power to Laos. Methinks someone should read up on basic physics.
Companies can't do a thing, at least here in Norway.
3) The parents
According to a local newspaper, the father said (translated, YMMV): "Matt is a wonderful child, and has always been protective of his brother (...)". If I had done something like this, my father would not have excused my actions. I would not have been called a "wonderful child".
You are stating something to the effect that a defensive driver is a safe driver. I don't agree with this view. You can be as defensive as you want. All you accomplish is lowering your own skill level. You won't become a better driver by going back and forth to the shops doing 30 km/h seven times a week, even if you need to spend most of the day driving (the old "I drive many miles a year" argument)
I am also worried that you are afraid of what other people might do to you. It doesn't seem like you really have that much confidence in your defensice driving.
What makes a better driver is actually learning to do something you couldn't do before - in a controlled environment, of course. When did you last try an evasive maneuver without having to? Do you know how your car behaves when you have to not hit something on ice? On a wet road? Do you buy cheap plastic tires? Can you really stop instantaneously when you travel where children might be playing? Most people haven't even tried. They regularily have opinions on speed limits and other peoples driving habits, but many have absolutely no idea how much time and road surface they need to stop their own car.
In Norway, we have a goverment that has tried to lower speed limits and promote "defensive driving" in order to reduce the accident rate. It works for a time, then people adjust, lose some driving skills, and the accidents go up again.
Go and learn something new. Then realize that everyone else probably haven't done the same thing. This is where you don't increase your own speed, but continue driving as before, but with your additional skills in store for when you need them. Driving defensively is only one part of being a safe driver. Telling everyone else how dangerous they are is not part of being one.
You have just told me you haven't had to use any driving skills for 15 years, and that you crashed the last time you needed better than average driving skills because someone ran a red light. I suggest you ponder how safe this really is, and if it really is the message you wanted to give.
It only matters because it would be a good thing to understand how to use biological "designs". We might learn something.
We understand the way the technological solution works. At least, someone does.
Nobody has come forward to claim an insight into how even moderately complex neural nets actually work. We are baffled by a mere evolved XOR in a known technology. The solution isn't comparable to anything within the world of CS. The best explanation anyone has is "it works for me" and a small shrug of the shoulders. That is not a description of any fundamental insight, it is a description of the learning algorithm that produced the result.
While what looks like the assembled ranks of CS experts are telling the world about their collective ignorance, you assert that there "isn't anything fundamentally different between a biological solution and a technological one".
How do you know?
We didn't understand the evolved FPGA pattern implementing an XOR either, although we think of it as a bit pattern.
By the way, DNA isn't recombined with 100% fidelity. Mostly, things work ok, but things do mutate once in a while, just as they do when you make analogue recordings. This leads me to think your "digital tape recorder" analogy isn't a very good model - "DNA bits" can and do flip.
You sound like electronics designers of the sixties who scoffed at the USSR still using electron valve technology in their planes. They stopped when they got all the information available: valve technology didn't stop working when someone let off a tactical nuke. Silicon transistors without protection will be fried to a crisp. Russia has still got the most agile fighter planes, by the way.
First of all, direct sequence spreading is just one of the modulation techniques that get lumped into CDMA modulation techniques. CDMA is the more relevant concept for this discussion.It would be more sensible for you to look at places that haven't been denied commercial interaction with the outside world for the past decade.
You are also wrong in assuming that CDMA signals are hard to find in all circumstances. All CDMA helps you do is detect signals that may be below the noise threshold. The sad bit is that a radio signal will deteriorate as a function of r^3 or r^4. In order to keep the same range as non-DSS equipment, you can only lower the output frequency by the "processing gain" DSS gives you. 30dB is what you can realistically expect to gain in a real-world system. If you move the detection equipment closer to the transmitter, you are not below the noise threshold any more, and a simple frequency analyzer will show the signal. If you don't believe me, go to the lab and try it for yourself.
The alternative to buying a radio/jammer is making one. Building the expertise and designing it will take a significant amount of time and resources, and you need access to a semiconductor plant. The iraqis had neither.
By the way: Equipment such as one of the frequency analyzers marketed by HP around 1998-1999 was pulled from the market because it was able to detect FH signals before the next hop started. I feel bad putting a dent in your belief that the US military has equipment that is not possible to make by civilians with enough resources, but that is just not true any more. The frequency jammer I mentioned above worked in the VHF frequency range, by the way.
I suggest you go and find someone who has actually made such radio systems and find out what the requirements are. I can't help you.
Often, tactical (minute-to-minute communications, often in the battlefield) communications has a low risk if being overheard, as long as the information actually gets through. This is the typical "fire" command kind of information - the enemy can do very little once the information has reached the recipient. If he can stop the information, everything grinds to a halt unless people are within shouting distance of each other.
Yes, spread spectrum gives you what in practice amounts to a "better antenna". This means the signal can be harder to find because it is harder to pick out from the background noise. Frequency hopping helps a bit more - once the enemy has found your signal, you move it. All of a sudden, the enemy has to jam large bits of the available spectrum.
This is why restricting the "unpolluted" frequency band usable for military communications might not be a good idea. The smaller the total frequency band, the easier it is to jam communications. Truly wideband high-power amplifiers are extraordinarily expensive and hard to make.