IIRC, this reason for this forced transition was to get small rural communities to switch over to DTV. I live in rural New Mexico. All our signals arrive here via repeaters.
Only one out of five stations (ABC) made the transition. NBC simply went off the air (because making the transition to digital would be too expensive). PBS is also off the air but this may be becausetheir repeater got hammered in a storm.
So right now our local station, FOX, and CBS are still broadcasting in analog while ABC is only digital. The Zenith converter box I got (because it had analog pass-through) does not pass through analog signals without loss so I have to actually replug wires to switch stations.
For my little piece of rural America, this transition was about as smooth as sandpaper toilet tissue.
According to PJ over on Groklaw (in the news column on the right. Scroll down) the bankruptcy would allow a backer to remain hidden if they pulled out before the bankruptcy. In fact PJ goes on to say that Psystar was already ordered by the court to turn over their business records therefore (I conclude that) the bankruptcy was the only way to keep the backer(s) hidden. So GP was right on the money.
It would be quite a trick if they were. It would be like having a lens here on earth that could turn blue light into green or red light. All that is happening is that the paths of the photons are being bent ever so slightly.
It is true that the bending of the paths is due to the fact that the speed of light changes slightly due to changes in the density of ions but that is entirely different from robbing the photons of energy (which is what "slowing down" means since they are always traveling at the speed of light). If we ignore absorbtion, where photons are completely gobbled up, light passing through a lens conserves energy.
If you placed a perfect mirror in their path so the are reflected back at exactly 180 degrees then their speed at any point in the path would be the same as the speed they had going in.
The California electricity crisis (also known as the Western U.S. Energy Crisis) of 2000 and 2001 resulted from the gaming of a partially deregulated California energy system by energy companies such as Enron and Reliant Energy. Due to price controls, public utility companies were paying more for electricity than they were allowed to charge customers, forcing the bankruptcy of Pacific Gas and Electric and the public bailout of Southern California Edison. This led to a shortage in energy and therefore, blackouts. Rolling blackouts began in June 2000 and recurred several times in the following 12 months. Price instability and spikes lasted from May 2000 to September 2001.
Industries that can totally screw you over if they stop working (utilities such as power and water) are traditionally under government control because we know the free market ideas of supply and demand do not work for these situations.
Electronic communications infrastructures in the US are many years behind those in other industrialized areas precisely because those areas (Japan and the EU) treated e-communication as a utility and we left our communications infrastructure to the "wisdom" of the free market.
Just to be clear, I agree with P and disagree with GP. The California energy crisis was caused by the privitisation of part of the electric system. ENRON, et al., screwed over people and businesses in California in order to make a few more bucks for themselves. Unfettered Capitalism is just as bad as unfettered Communism. Put starkly: Communism assumes greed does not exist while Capitalism assumes greed is a virtue. What is needed is a system that allows for human greed but that does not elevate it to a virtue. Or as John Kenneth Galbraith once said:
Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite.
There has grown in the minds of certain groups in this country the idea that just because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with guaranteeing such a profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is supported by neither statute or common law. Neither corporations or individuals have the right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back.
[Companies] actually need need a return on the money spent, unlike government which can waste all the money it wants and never go out of business
It sounds like you are claiming that the money the US government spent on starting the Internet was a bad and unwise investment. But the reality is that it was a fantastically good investment.
The problem is that US companies need to make a profit in the very short-term. They are only allowed to look ahead at most a year or two on the outside. Often the are most concerned about quarterly results. IMO it is utter insanity for the US to be using a system that demands short-sightedness in its decision makers.
Your right that the government does not have to worry as much about short-term profit as companies do. But this is a good thing(TM), not a waste, unless you agree with Michael Lynton and think that nothing good came from the Internet in which case, your analysis would be spot on.
Obviously NOT by the web site owners who don't want their stuff archived.
We disagree. The problem is NOT that AP refuses to use or understand the robots.txt convention. The problem is that they obviously DO want Google to index their site. If the didn't, they could simply say:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /
But they don't say that. Adding that little file is a thousand times easier than configuring a web server so this notion that there is some sort of technical hurdle or opt-in versus opt-out philosophical disagreement here is absurd. If the AP forbids Google from indexing their site then the amount of traffic they get will plummet which would be financially ruinous.
The AP wants Google to index their site and they also want to get paid for Google providing this service to them. But Google doesn't want to pay for providing this service so the AP has a very simple choice:
Let Google continue providing the free service, or
why should a web site have to explicitly exclude content.
Maybe because that is the agreed upon standard that is already 15 years old.
Why shouldn't exclusion be the default, and there be a standard for including/permitting content to be cached/indexed/???
Some enterprising company did introduce an opt in protocol named
Sitemaps in 2005. The name of this company you ask? Why Google of course.
When the robots.txt protocol was established in 1994, it made sense for it to be opt-out. The Internet has evolved mightily in the ensuing 15 years and now opt-in would probably make more sense, but we can't go back in time to change the protocol. But this really isn't about opt-in verus opt-out. The robots.txt file is rather trivial to implement. If the AP has the technical know-how to run a fairly sophisticated web site, they must have the technical know-how to write a robots.txt, even if it would be slightly more convenient for them to use a slightly different format.
If they don't want Google to index their site, the should provide the proper robots.txt file. It is really not that difficult. The difficulty occurs because the AP wants Google to index their site but they also want Google to pay for this priviledge.
I keep seeing people write that RMS was proven right. What was proven right?
When Stallman released the GPLv1 twenty some years ago, the naysayers and namecallers said:
It wouldn't work.
It wasn't needed.
Individuals would never use it.
Corporations would never use it.
Only a few "tree-hugging-nutjob-hippie" would ever use it.
Stallman was proved right and the naysayers were proved wrong on all these counts.
The GPL has withstood every legal challenge it has faced even though the vast majority of cases are settled before reaching a courtroom precisely because the GPL is so solid legally.
The all-out attack on the GPL (MS's
Halloween Documents for example) demonstrate that the GPL is so effective that some companies with closed-source business models see it as their number one threat.
By many measures the GPL is the most used FOSS licence.
Many major projects use the GPL including Linux, KDE, and MySQL. Many projects have switched to the GPL over the years such as Trolltech's QT framework.
But perhaps the best proof that Stallman was right is all the anti-GPL hate, lies and dirty tricks that flood the Internet crowned by the Microsoft funded SCO lawsuits against IBM and Novell and others. See especially the shameful coverage of these lawsuits by Maureen O'Gara Rob Enderle.
If Stallman was wrong, why on earth would anyone go to so much trouble trying to discredit the GPL? If Stallman had been wrong twenty years ago then his ideas would have died out by now and he would be totally ignored. People certainly wouldn't be saying that he's "wondering [sic] off to the tree-hugging-nutjob-hippie commune."
In fact, the acceptance and use of the GPL is still going strong and growing. The ideas behind the GPL have spread into other area such as Groklaw's uses them for legal research and the Creative Commons licences use them for books and other creative endeavours.
Your post demonstrates just how valuable Stallman has been to our community. If most people agreed with what he says then he wouldn't have to say it.
Twenty years ago, people used ad hominem attacks similar to yours to castigate Stallman for the idea of Free software and the original GPL. Now, twenty years later, Stallman has been proven to be right. David Wheeler
has made the case that a significant part of the success of Linux versus the BSDs was that the protections of the GPL attracted developers.
More recently he's been proven right about DRM; trusted/treacherous computing; and the need for the GPLv3. He was attacked for his stand on all of these issues and many of these attacks included name-calling similar to what you used above. Stallman was right and the name-callers were wrong.
My respect for Stallman has grown over the years (and decades) because it has taken longer time-scales for me to be able to observe how well Stallman has solved problems that most people refused to admit even existed. Attacks such as yours only increase my respect for him because he continues to speak his truth, the way he sees it, even if most people disagree with him, and even when some people attack him and call him names because they don't yet grasp the import of what he is saying.
I don't know anything about IntelliJ, but from your description of the performance issues you are up against with hundreds of thousands (1,000 x 12 x 12) of method checks per sanity check, I can't help but wonder if the performance could be drastically improved if the sanity checks were normally only performed on the code that has changed since the last sanity check.
ISTM that 99% of the checks being performed are redundant.
I love this book. It contains a wide variety of topics and although some of it is elementary, there is plenty of depth to challenge and enchant your students.
Albert Einstein praised it as:
A lucid representation of the fundamental concepts and methods of the whole field of mathematics. It is an easy to understand introduction for the layman and helps give the mathematical sudent a general view of the basic principles and methods.
If you want to teach your students to love math, try this book. Courant was a leading mathematician of his day. He co-authored the formidable Methods of Mathematical Physics with David Hilbert. Courant's love of mathematics shines throughout What is Mathematics.
... even though both TFA and PAR use Reed-Solomon.
The difference is that TFA interleaves the data so it is robust against sector errors. A bad sector contains bytes from many different data blocks so each data block only loses one byte which is easy to recover from. If you use PAR and encounter a bad sector, you're SOL.
PAR was designed to solve a different problem and it solves that different problem very well but it wasn't designed to solve the problem that is addressed by TFA. Use PAR to protect against "the occasional bit error" as you suggest, but use the scheme given in TFA to protect against bad sectors.
Since we're only dealing with three dimensions, why would any number of satellites > 3 be more precise for GPS?
If the errors are random and follow a normal distribution (two big ifs, I admit) then even in one dimension, the error is reduced by a factor of 1/sqrt(N) where N is the number of measurements.
The same general idea applies to higher dimensions. If you can avoid systematic errors then the more measurements you take, the more accurate your final result will be. If you are interested in the gory details of the higher dimensional case, you should take a look at
singular value decomposition.
Free means no restrictions, ironic the FSF's GPL forces restrictions, isn't it? What's your definition of free?
So according to you, any society that has laws (restrictions) is not a free society. This has been explained succinctly by saying the freedom for you to move your fist ends at my nose.
The restrictions imposed by the GPL are similar. You are free to do almost anything you want with the code as long as you don't restrict the freedom of others.
The US is ass-deep in a foolish, expensive, illegal, immoral war. Why would smart people want to use the most productive years of their lives supporting such idiocy?
Slashdot Mirror
... talk about getting screwed ...
IIRC, this reason for this forced transition was to get small rural communities to switch over to DTV. I live in rural New Mexico. All our signals arrive here via repeaters.
Only one out of five stations (ABC) made the transition. NBC simply went off the air (because making the transition to digital would be too expensive). PBS is also off the air but this may be becausetheir repeater got hammered in a storm.
So right now our local station, FOX, and CBS are still broadcasting in analog while ABC is only digital. The Zenith converter box I got (because it had analog pass-through) does not pass through analog signals without loss so I have to actually replug wires to switch stations.
For my little piece of rural America, this transition was about as smooth as sandpaper toilet tissue.
According to PJ over on Groklaw (in the news column on the right. Scroll down) the bankruptcy would allow a backer to remain hidden if they pulled out before the bankruptcy. In fact PJ goes on to say that Psystar was already ordered by the court to turn over their business records therefore (I conclude that) the bankruptcy was the only way to keep the backer(s) hidden. So GP was right on the money.
I was using regex's to normalize phone numbers in HTML pages back in 1999.
It would be quite a trick if they were. It would be like having a lens here on earth that could turn blue light into green or red light. All that is happening is that the paths of the photons are being bent ever so slightly.
It is true that the bending of the paths is due to the fact that the speed of light changes slightly due to changes in the density of ions but that is entirely different from robbing the photons of energy (which is what "slowing down" means since they are always traveling at the speed of light). If we ignore absorbtion, where photons are completely gobbled up, light passing through a lens conserves energy. If you placed a perfect mirror in their path so the are reflected back at exactly 180 degrees then their speed at any point in the path would be the same as the speed they had going in.
P = Parent = Abcd1234
GP = GrandParent = Anonymous Coward
You must not have lived in California back when the power was privitized:
Industries that can totally screw you over if they stop working (utilities such as power and water) are traditionally under government control because we know the free market ideas of supply and demand do not work for these situations.
Electronic communications infrastructures in the US are many years behind those in other industrialized areas precisely because those areas (Japan and the EU) treated e-communication as a utility and we left our communications infrastructure to the "wisdom" of the free market.
Just to be clear, I agree with P and disagree with GP. The California energy crisis was caused by the privitisation of part of the electric system. ENRON, et al., screwed over people and businesses in California in order to make a few more bucks for themselves. Unfettered Capitalism is just as bad as unfettered Communism. Put starkly: Communism assumes greed does not exist while Capitalism assumes greed is a virtue. What is needed is a system that allows for human greed but that does not elevate it to a virtue. Or as John Kenneth Galbraith once said:
It is the result of having a corporate-controlled government.
There has grown in the minds of certain groups in this country the idea that just because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with guaranteeing such a profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is supported by neither statute or common law. Neither corporations or individuals have the right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back.
It sounds like you are claiming that the money the US government spent on starting the Internet was a bad and unwise investment. But the reality is that it was a fantastically good investment.
The problem is that US companies need to make a profit in the very short-term. They are only allowed to look ahead at most a year or two on the outside. Often the are most concerned about quarterly results. IMO it is utter insanity for the US to be using a system that demands short-sightedness in its decision makers.
Your right that the government does not have to worry as much about short-term profit as companies do. But this is a good thing(TM), not a waste, unless you agree with Michael Lynton and think that nothing good came from the Internet in which case, your analysis would be spot on.
I don't know. How many lawyers does Scientology have in the Department of Justice? The RIAA five.
Come to think of it, this might explain why they think the can get away with the shenanigans that Ray just uncovered.
Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
The link I provided answered that question.
We disagree. The problem is NOT that AP refuses to use or understand the robots.txt convention. The problem is that they obviously DO want Google to index their site. If the didn't, they could simply say:
But they don't say that. Adding that little file is a thousand times easier than configuring a web server so this notion that there is some sort of technical hurdle or opt-in versus opt-out philosophical disagreement here is absurd. If the AP forbids Google from indexing their site then the amount of traffic they get will plummet which would be financially ruinous.
The AP wants Google to index their site and they also want to get paid for Google providing this service to them. But Google doesn't want to pay for providing this service so the AP has a very simple choice:
Maybe because that is the agreed upon standard that is already 15 years old.
Some enterprising company did introduce an opt in protocol named Sitemaps in 2005. The name of this company you ask? Why Google of course.
When the robots.txt protocol was established in 1994, it made sense for it to be opt-out. The Internet has evolved mightily in the ensuing 15 years and now opt-in would probably make more sense, but we can't go back in time to change the protocol. But this really isn't about opt-in verus opt-out. The robots.txt file is rather trivial to implement. If the AP has the technical know-how to run a fairly sophisticated web site, they must have the technical know-how to write a robots.txt, even if it would be slightly more convenient for them to use a slightly different format.
If they don't want Google to index their site, the should provide the proper robots.txt file. It is really not that difficult. The difficulty occurs because the AP wants Google to index their site but they also want Google to pay for this priviledge.
I keep seeing people write that RMS was proven right. What was proven right?
When Stallman released the GPLv1 twenty some years ago, the naysayers and namecallers said:
Stallman was proved right and the naysayers were proved wrong on all these counts.
But perhaps the best proof that Stallman was right is all the anti-GPL hate, lies and dirty tricks that flood the Internet crowned by the Microsoft funded SCO lawsuits against IBM and Novell and others. See especially the shameful coverage of these lawsuits by Maureen O'Gara Rob Enderle.
If Stallman was wrong, why on earth would anyone go to so much trouble trying to discredit the GPL? If Stallman had been wrong twenty years ago then his ideas would have died out by now and he would be totally ignored. People certainly wouldn't be saying that he's "wondering [sic] off to the tree-hugging-nutjob-hippie commune."
In fact, the acceptance and use of the GPL is still going strong and growing. The ideas behind the GPL have spread into other area such as Groklaw's uses them for legal research and the Creative Commons licences use them for books and other creative endeavours.
Your post demonstrates just how valuable Stallman has been to our community. If most people agreed with what he says then he wouldn't have to say it. Twenty years ago, people used ad hominem attacks similar to yours to castigate Stallman for the idea of Free software and the original GPL. Now, twenty years later, Stallman has been proven to be right. David Wheeler has made the case that a significant part of the success of Linux versus the BSDs was that the protections of the GPL attracted developers.
More recently he's been proven right about DRM; trusted/treacherous computing; and the need for the GPLv3. He was attacked for his stand on all of these issues and many of these attacks included name-calling similar to what you used above. Stallman was right and the name-callers were wrong.
My respect for Stallman has grown over the years (and decades) because it has taken longer time-scales for me to be able to observe how well Stallman has solved problems that most people refused to admit even existed. Attacks such as yours only increase my respect for him because he continues to speak his truth, the way he sees it, even if most people disagree with him, and even when some people attack him and call him names because they don't yet grasp the import of what he is saying.
I don't know anything about IntelliJ, but from your description of the performance issues you are up against with hundreds of thousands (1,000 x 12 x 12) of method checks per sanity check, I can't help but wonder if the performance could be drastically improved if the sanity checks were normally only performed on the code that has changed since the last sanity check.
ISTM that 99% of the checks being performed are redundant.
Albert Einstein praised it as:
If you want to teach your students to love math, try this book. Courant was a leading mathematician of his day. He co-authored the formidable Methods of Mathematical Physics with David Hilbert. Courant's love of mathematics shines throughout What is Mathematics.
The original poster did NOT say it was a "Republican bill". The original poster said "Republicans pushed for this" which you seem to agree with.
... that was part of the SCO scam?
Great.
The difference is that TFA interleaves the data so it is robust against sector errors. A bad sector contains bytes from many different data blocks so each data block only loses one byte which is easy to recover from. If you use PAR and encounter a bad sector, you're SOL.
PAR was designed to solve a different problem and it solves that different problem very well but it wasn't designed to solve the problem that is addressed by TFA. Use PAR to protect against "the occasional bit error" as you suggest, but use the scheme given in TFA to protect against bad sectors.
"... I see dead companies ..."
If the errors are random and follow a normal distribution (two big ifs, I admit) then even in one dimension, the error is reduced by a factor of 1/sqrt(N) where N is the number of measurements.
The same general idea applies to higher dimensions. If you can avoid systematic errors then the more measurements you take, the more accurate your final result will be. If you are interested in the gory details of the higher dimensional case, you should take a look at singular value decomposition.
The restrictions imposed by the GPL are similar. You are free to do almost anything you want with the code as long as you don't restrict the freedom of others.
The US is ass-deep in a foolish, expensive, illegal, immoral war. Why would smart people want to use the most productive years of their lives supporting such idiocy?