TPCA becomes standard in new products from Intel and AMD. No one really notices.
NGSCB(Paladium) becomes standard in new OS releases from Microsoft.
Content providers may start using NGSCB/TPCA to
sell/lease content over web.
The installed base of NGSCB/TPCA increases, and
users are encouraged to upgrade in order to have
access to web content.
Microsoft cuts support for all non-NGSCB versions of Windows to encourage upgrading.
NGSCB/TPCA starts to become pervasive. Many websites now require a NGSCB enabled browser to access them.
Some large companies produce TPCA supporting
"free" OS's (Redhat/IBM?).
The option to disable NGSCB in Windows quietly
disappears.
All new motherboards will only boot "secure" OS's.
Once most major Windows apps and games support
NSCB it suddenly becomes impossible to run non-NGSCB on Windows.
Since ordinary Windows users can no longer run
apps they write themselves, Windows compilers become extremely expensive and are only available
to the corporations that have the keys to sign the
binaries to make them work.
Proprietary software development is slowly concentrated into a few large corporations.
NGSCB enabled browsers, and there are no longer any other kind, will now only load signed pages.
Personal webpages, blogs, and other non-corporate sites are slowly frozen out and their traffic falls off to nothing.
Linux slowly splits in two: A corporate in house "secure" version that runs on new hardware
and a hackers version that will only run on legacy
hardware.
Linux usage plummets except in servers were
IBM makes a killing with its "secure" Linux and
slowly buys up all the other Linux companies as
they get into difficulty.
Once the majority of the population has been
forced into the mold, by the actions of Microsoft,
Intel etc., various laws are passed to force the
stragglers to follow.
All non-secure software and hardware is made
illegal.
Free software continues underground for a while but as old hardware breaks and the penalties
for getting caught slowly increase it slowly dies
out.
The brief flowering of the Internet is over.
Free software, personal computing, independent
publishing etc. are a thing of the past. The Internet is reduced to little more than interactive TV and other "content" distribution
controlled by major corporations.
Some people may think that the above is overly
pessimistic but you have to consider who will gain
from the above scenario. The answer is almost everyone. The content industry, including the media with their huge influence over the general
population is obvious, but they are not alone.
The big tech companies will gain from the barriers
to entry that it will erect to new competition and
the increased control will allow the creation of
new businesses selling things which were once free. Government will be a major supporter of this
scenario (especially in the present climate) as it will enable much great monitoring
of their citizens and control of information distribution.
The only people who will lose are ordinary people
and even then most of them will never know it. I
can't see mass demonstrations against any of these
measures. Most people will not know or care what
they are losing and the few (like us) who do are
too small in number to have any effect. At each
stage of the above scenario very reasonable sounding arguments about security can used to
obfuscate the real reasons for the changes. The scenario above can be implemented, it will result
in great benefits to those in power, in both corporations and government, and there is little
that can be done to stop it. It would be foolish
to believe that presented with the great opportunity
our masters will not seize it will both hands.
Re:source to the key in the kernel?
on
Linus on DRM
·
· Score: 1
Remember, DRM is not just "digital copyright protection"
Yes, DRM is just digital copyright protection. It you wanted to just automatically protect your machine from trojans etc. then the correct place to do it would be in your package
management system or in extreme cases in the kernel. There is however no need whatsoever for
any hardware or firmware changes to do this. Taking things to the level of hardware and firmware is only necessary in the case where you
are trying to restrict what the owner of a computer can do (people don't plant trojans by
breaking into your house and installing a new
kernel on your machine). There is no need to involve the BIOS in such matters unless the owner
of the machine is untrusted and in that case the
people not trusting the owner are external forces
and we are back to the issue of copy protection.
Sadly lacking are the ships from Iain M. Banks'
Culture universe. These not only have great
names
but are much more realistic than in most scifi.
Even a small General Systems Vehicle (GSV) would
be up there with a Super Star Destroyer sizewise
(and has millions of inhabitants)
and a Torturer Class Rapid Offensive Unit (ROU)
would kick the shit out of any other scifi warship (couple of hundred metres long, over 90% engine,
the rest weapons, controled by an AI, 0 crew).
It is actually fairly easy to estimate what
what warships in space would be like, from a little physics and common sense. Most scifi fails
miserably in this regard. The most obvious fact
that has a bearing on space warships is that space
is empty or nearly so. There is no where to hide
and therefore it is very easy to guess what colour
a warship would be, black. For the same reason it can also be guessed that the temperature of a warships hull will be 2.73 K (2.73 degrees above absolute zero), to match the temperature of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). Any hotter and its thermal emission will give away its presense, any cooler and it will stand out as a shadow against the CMB.
Of course there is still many effects (such as
passing in front of a star) that could give you
away. A critical parameter which determines how
battles would play out is at what distance, on average warships could detect each other. Since
the speed of light is around 300,000 km/s, if ships can only be detected at less than a million
kilometers battles are likely to very short, few
second affairs, where the first ship to detect
the other and fire a laser (or similar) wins. In
this case the sophistication of sensors and
camoflage technology will be the deciding factor.
However if the average detection distance is much
greater than a million kilometers then the travel
time of the fastest weapon will many seconds or
even minutes. Even ships moving at only a few
kilometers per second could move a considerable
distance in such time. Using laser like weapons
would have much of the quality of contempory battleships shelling each other. With significant
light travel times you would need to accurately
predict the motion of the target to stand any chance of hitting it and evasive action by the
target would be possible (although they would
not be able to see a laser pulse coming).
At short ranges lasers or the like would be the
weapon of choice but if you are engaging ships
at distances of a hundred million kilometres
guided missiles, if they could move at a significant fraction of the speed of light, might
be of use as well, since at such a distance the
light travel time would be many minutes and you are unlikely to hit something at that range with
a laser if it is doing any manouvring.
It should be noted that engagements at very small
distances such as those portrayed in Star Wars, B5
etc. would be rather unlikely. Not only is it
unlikely that ships would be undetectable down
to distances of a few kilometres but if this was
the case ship combat would be virtually impossible. Considering just the inner solar system and confining oneself to the within a million kilometres of the plane you are faced with
a volume of the order of 10^22 cubic kilometres.
Thousands of ships could wander around in such a
volume for ever without meeting if they needed to
pass within a few kilometres in order to see each
other.
When you consider the whole galaxy it quickly becomes clear that conventional war loses all
meaning. I think it is unlikely that ships would
detectable at even lightdays if they were trying
to be inconspicuous, given the huge amount of
gas, ice, dust and rocks that is floating around
and reflecting starlight. But even if you could
seeing where a ship was days ago is not a great
step forward in fighting it (a lightday is very
roughly the size of the solar system). The volume of the galaxy
Natural Uranium is mainly Uranium 238 (99.28%)
plus a small fraction of Uranium 235 (0.71%). Depleted Uranium (DU) has had the majority of the Uranium 235 removed. It is therefore true that if
DU was made exclusively from natural Uranium it
would be less radioactive (although just as chemically toxic) since Uranium 238 is less radioactive than Uranium 235. However Uranium
extracted from spent nuclear fuel has also been
used to make DU. This has traces of Plutonium
and Neptunium produced in the reactor in it and hence DU is often more radioactive than natural
Uranium.
Actually Werner Heisenberg got the calculation of the critical mass of Uranium 235
needed for a bomb wrong, which was the main reason
that the Germans never commited any serious resources to a nuclear weapons project. Heisenberg
calculated the critical mass to be of the order of
several tons and it was therefore concluded that
a bomb was not feasible. See this description
of Heisenberg's reaction to news of the dropping
Hiroshima bomb to see that he really believe that
many tons of Uranium 235 was needed.
The first reasonably accurate calculation of the critical mass
of Uranium 235 was made by Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls at the University of Birmingham, England
in 1940. They found that only about a kilogram or so would be needed for a bomb and a memorandum submitted by them to British science advisor Henry Tizard on March 19th can be seen as the main trigger for the Manhatten project. Frisch and Peierls calculation turned out to be
slightly
low
and in fact a few kilograms rather than one was
needed but it was still three orders of magnitude
less that the few tons the Germans thought was
necessary.
And this is different from other established news sources how?
Well I was under the impression Google News wasn't
supposed to be a news source itself, anymore than
the Google search engine is a source of web content. It is just an index of news sources. So the question is whether corporate press releases are, in themselves, news. You are of course right that "established news sources" will often pick up press releases as the basis of a story, but they don't repeat them all.
I would question whether the existance of a press release shows any evidense that a single person in the whole world thinks that the content of it is actually "news". After all the people who wrote and issued the press release did it because it was
their job to do so, and do not necessarily agree with what it says, or believe it is news. While
journalists in the corporate media are also doing
a job, they are in general writing the stories that they want to and believe are news. The main source of bias comes in what is omitted as a result of the editorial process rather than the introduction of spurious "news".
That being said the main thing I was complaining about was the fact that they are including corporate press releases (which are questionably
news) while excluding sites like indymedia.org because they are not owned by a corporation. I don't think that they should remove the press releases, a small fraction of them might be interesting, but they should mark them as press
releases which is not done at the moment. Press
releases are not journalism and in most cases
don't even pretent to be.
Ideally each of the sites they index (about 4,500 at the moment I believe) would be classified by a few parameters such as whether it is press releases or real news and whether the site is independent or corporate media. You should also
be able to include or exclude sites from your
search results based on these parameters. This would allow people who only trust news if it has
the stamp of approval of of a multimillion dollar
corporation, to exclude independent media, while at the same time allowing people who believe the
corporate media is highly biased to preferentially
select independent sources.
As an aside, I do believe that both government and
corporate press releases are a big problem for journalism in general. There is a worrying laziness in modern journalism, with many journalist just attending press conferences and
cut-and-pasting their stories out of press releases. Obviously both governments and corporations attempt to play on this by producing
press releases and quotes in a form that is as easy as possible to fold into a story. Journalists
presented with a ready made story and with a deadline to keep are increasingly uncritcally
parroting what they a given with little analysis
or research.
Google, while technically advanced and lacking in intrusive ads, appears to have slowly drifted away from what most people would consider fair and impartial behaviour as it has grown in size. To take a recent example they have been refusing to index many non-corporate news sites in Google News, while at the same time deciding to start indexing press releases on the websites of major corporations.
While the crack down on
independent news sites may have been unrelated to the invasion of Iraq it has certainly led some to speculate that they are under pressure not to index those who are not cheerleading the war. This is all before you get to the privacy
issue and of course the allegations that one of their employees used to work for the NSA.
PageRank can also be extremely annoying if you are
looking for information on an unpopular subject
that is similar to a much more popular one. The ability to disable PageRank of even to invert it,
to show the results with the least links to them first, would improve things greatly. It may be that the lowest common denominator effects of
PageRank are all too welcome for some people.
Search engines are a critical part of the present
web infrastructure and a website is of little value if no one can find it. In the long term it
would be of great benefit to all if Google could
be replaced by with some sort of distributed search facility with no centralised control, where the individual user would have full control of the
process.
In the US, it is ILLEGAL to put the military on the boarders, or to act as police except in emergencies
The Posse Commitatus Act is effectively dead and has been for years before 11th Sept 2001. The US border is highly militarised and the US military regularly kills US citizens while "helping" with
law enforcement. For a particularly egregous case
take that of Esequiel Hernandez an "18 year old high school sophomore" who was "shot and killed while tending goats on his own family's land" by US marines. Long before the "war on terror", the "war on drugs" destroyed all but the pretense of separation between the military and police in the US. In fact the given the presence of members of
the British Special Air Service (SAS) Regiment at
the seige of the Branch Dividian compound in Waco,
Texas, even foreign military forces are now appear welcome in US law enforcement.
Politics is replete with examples of words being hijacked and used to mean the total opposite
of their real meaning: the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is a dictatorship and the National Socialist German Workers Party (Nazis) weren't socialists. This is undoubtedly what Orwell drew on for the idea of Newspeak in 1984. This also extends to much more subtle redefinitions of words over time for political reasons.
For instance democracy orignally meant
rule by the people (Greek city states) and a republic was rule by an elite, with the people getting a vote on which section of the elite would rule them (Rome). When these ideas resurfaced a
few hundred years ago republics were instituted
but they were called democracies, to give people
the feeling that they were getting more than they
were (classic bait and switch). So democracy has effectively taken the meaning of republic and republic has been relegated to meaning "government without a monarch".
However, some of the examples that you use, are in fact entirely the opposite way round. Libertarian is a term that had been associated with anarchism
for over a hundred years before if was appropriated by some american capitalists in recent years. Likewise anarchism has meant opposition to all hierarchy, including capitalism,
for most of the last two centuries, although you
are right that many people in power have done their best to make it a synonm for chaos in everyday speech.
Your reference to "classical anarchy" shows you
are as much as fault as the people you are critising. Calling real anarchy, "classical anarchy", and then using the word to the mean the opposite of its true meaning, is as duplicitous as any other sneaky political redefinition. "Anarcho-Capitalism" is a contradiction in terms, since anarchy means without hierarchy but capitalism is a hierarchical economic system.
I also disagree that socialists are the main offenders since it is those in power that have
the most oppitunity to alter the meaning of words,
through their control of the media. Hence while
Marxists were probably the main culprits in altering the meaning of words behind the iron curtain, at most other times and places where right wing ideologies have held power, they are likely to be the main offenders.
Well, first off, I disagree with your categorizing (modern) libertarianism
as "right wing".
Obviously, there are economic and social issues and so at a minimum you need
two coordinates rather than one to measure someones political viewpoint
(another more complex test that might interest some people is the Political Compass). However the
right-left catagorisation really applies to economic issues and on that axis
american "libertarians" are very "right-wing". They may differ significantly
from Republicans and Democrats on social issues but to a much lesser extent on economic
ones.
"Anarchism is diametrically opposed to capitalism first and foremost."
CLASSICAL anarchism is, definitely.
Precisely, you admit that anarchism is opposed to capitalism but
you want to redefine it (by you I mean american "libertarians").
Anarchism is opposition to all hierarchy, including capitalism.
Anarcho-capitalism is a contradiction
in terms.
Downgrading Pluto to the largest known Kuiper belt
object would seem to be the best course of action.
The reason Ceres wasn't given the status of a planet when it was found was that it was just the largest of a number of similar object, the asteroid belt. When Pluto was discovered in the 1930's the Kuiper belt was unknown and so it got planet status.
However in recent years it has become clear that there are many similar objects to Pluto forming a belt outside the orbit of Neptune. In fact the
the Kuiper belt is thought to be over 100 times
larger, in terms of total mass and number of objects, than the asteroid belt between Mars and
Jupiter. Given that they are much further away
and only a very small fraction of them have been
found it is possible that Pluto is not even the
largest member of the Kuiper belt.
The definition of a planet should probably include
the proviso that the object not be part of a collection of objects in similar orbits. This would rule of all asteroids and Kuiper belt objects (KBOs) which includes Pluto. A part of
the traditional understanding of what a planet is,
is that it is, with the possible exception of its
moons, a solitary body.
University officials sent out letters to researchers -- including those who, for example, move around large amounts of sky-telescope data -- to warn them of the billing changes.
The university offered "to round off the sharp edges" for researchers who will be adversely affected.
They better had! The assumption that high bandwidth use is all
down to music filesharing and other "non-work related" activities is not necessarily well
founded. I work for a different large US university and regularly need to transfer
data from the other US universities or europe
to analyse. I can get transfer rate of 250-750k
per second depending on the time of day. This
translates to very roughly 1-2 Gb per hour and
I might spend all data selecting datasets and leave the transfers going all night and maybe the next day too, to get what I need. A transfer of upto 100 Gb over a couple of days followed by a month or more to analyse the data (before I need more) is not unheard
of. A 2 Gb per month limit would stop my research
in its tracks and there must be people at Cornell
that need similar bandwidth to me, for their work.
This sounds more like a money making scheme than
a real problem. Universities usually get charged
a fixed amount for their external connections, whether they use them or not. If they have maxed
out their connection and everyones transfer rates
are sufferring then slapping quotas on the undergrads, who don't do any work and so shouldn't
need large amounts of bandwidth, is the answer.
Charging users is just money grabbing since the money isn't going to go to add more bandwidth, since the demand for bandwidth will have fallen
when the charges are intoduced.
How long, exactly, has the US government had access to everyone's bank records without a
warrent? I guess it was probably the USA PATRIOT act but they may well be simply "asking" the banks for the imformation and they are handing it over even though the government may not be able to compel them to, because they are spineless. The sections in the USA PATRIOT act regarding banking relate largely to moneylaundering, but maybe the US government is taking the position that everyone is a moneylaunderer until it is proved otherwise by examining their bank records.
According to the author of the article (who is a lawyer, in Australia) a software license is only a contract if "consideration" is involved on both sides (i.e. each side has to receive something).
From my an admittedly small amount of searching on
the web this appears to be true. Now since the copyright holder does receive anything in the case of a free software license, it doesn't seem possible for it to be a contract.
The author then states that a pure license, one that involves no contractual obligation, can be
revoked by the copyright holder at any time. Searches on the web produce a lot of people saying
this is not the case but none of them are lawyers.
The author only states that it is true for Australia so it may vary depending what juristiction you are in. However in the case of
Australia the author cites a case involving the
shareware program Trumpet Winsock which appears
to back up his arguement.
The FSF site says that the GPL cannot be revoked but it presents no legal argument
why this is the case. Such a legal arguement would
certainly be comforting.
It would be interesting to know Prof. Moglen's
views on the main point in this article
in the unlikely event that he is reading this. Namely that while the GPL and most other Free/Open
software licenses are perfectly enforcable, there
exists a weak point with the copyright holder themselves. If the copyright holder of a peice of
free software decided to they could change, or totally revoke the license of the software, and
that change would apply to all copies of the software not just future versions. If this is indeed true it is certainly not the way most users
of free software believe things work.
I don't think most users believe that Linus could
wake up one morning and decide he is going to
revoke the license to all the code he has contributed to the Linux kernel and bring linux
development to a crashing halt until all that code
could be reimplemented by other people. While this
is an unlikely senario there are plenty of companies that contribute to free software which
might be bought out, go bankrupt or simply have a
change of heart.
What about the case of an individual free software developer going bankrupt? Couldn't the copyright
of some free software be considered an asset that
could be seized to pay their debts? Would the FSF
even be a safe copyright holder? Wouldn't it be
possible for the FSF to be forced into bankruptcy? Would it be any different from a company or an
individual going bankrupt?
My limited usderstanding of this is that the GPL
only really applies at the point where a copy is
made of the work, although our friends at the RIAA/MPAA are doing their best to make copyright
property, rather than a limited monoply on copying. If this is the case then revoking a free
software license would seem to only directly affect the distribution and development of the
software and current users would be free to continue using it. Although I know there have been
attempts to argue that using software involves copying it into memory and so is covered by copyright. What is the status of that?
Of course provided most copyright holders don't do
this, free software as a whole can advance but it
would be preferable if you could rely on a piece
of software staying free after it has been released under the GPL. But in the end I think
free software licenses are just a necessarily imperfect attempt to mitigate some of
the evils of copyright and that it is suprising
that it does as well as it does.
While the use of proprietry software and the lack of
a paper trail can't help, the problem appears more fundamental. It you turn elections over to private
companies to run, which is really what you are doing
if you use these voting machines, there are huge conflicts of interest. Take Senator Chuck Hagel who won the last two elections, against
expectations,
where 80 percent of the votes were counted using
machines supplied and run by a company he indirectly owned.
Even if there is no impropriety going on in this
particular case, their is certainly the appearance
of impropriety. The question of who makes, owns and runs the voting machines appears even more important than the software and proceedures used
by them. Rather worryingly the use of exit polls
in the 2002 election was almost non-existent,
so there was no indepedent check on the results.
Potentially the people who control the voting
machines control the result of an election.
Since there is no information on exactly how the
study was carried out the results are meaningless.
Assuming 100k for a sysadmin and 3.5k for a server
you get a ratio of 10 servers per admin using
the survey results of 62.2% of TCO for staff and
4.4% for hardware. Now while that seems about right for windows in my experience one good linux sysadmin can handle up to 100 machines, depending on the quality of the hardware. Certainly for linux servers once you have them setup well (with something like debian stable on them) they will run until the hardware breaks with little intervention.
The curve of load on the sysadmin as
the number of machines managed increases is likely
to be very different for windows and linux and while this IDC study is short on details it sounds
like they are probably fixing everything, except the operating system, including the servers per admin and comparing the costs. This is likely to
come out bad for linux as the a well qualified linux sysadmin will probably cost more but this
ignores the fact that the linux sysadmin could
potential manage a much large number of servers
reducing the cost per server well below that of
windows. Perhaps this is not the way the study was
done but it is certainly a way someone could get
the result they wanted with such a study.
This story seems somewhat confused and contradicts
other things I have read on the subject. I am not convinced the actual interpretation of this find
is very reliable.
The most modern theories about the origns of humans
in north america, prior to this find, as far as I
understand them are as follows. The first humans
came across the land bridge between alaska and asia
during the last ice age, about 17,000 years ago. They were caucasians, closely related to the Jomon,
the prehistoric inhabitants of Japan, whose modern
couterparts are the Ainu of Hokkaido. They penetrated throughout north and south america in
a 1,000 years or so. Later, about 3,000-4,000 years ago, another group crossed the bering strait
in boats. These people were closely related to the
modern Chinese and Mongolian people and only penetrated north america. Their descendents are
principly the Eskimo and Aleut, but some penetrated futher south such as the Navajo. See here
for details.
This find seems to just seems to add extra conformation to the above hypothesis. Finding
a 13,000 year old skull does not mean that there
had to be human in the americas 25,000 years ago.
Nor does the skull contradict the theory that the
first humans used the land bridge to cross to alaska during the last ice age. The evidence of camps -- man-made tools, a human footprint and huts dating back 25,000 years are totally
separate from this and obivously need explaining,
but this find has no real bearing on that debate.
In reality it is even worse than this, since the
raw result of interferometry is not a nice sharp
image but a fringe pattern which is cause by the
light from the individual telescopes being combined. It then takes a lot of processing to reconstruct an image and even then the image usually contains many artifacts that are not real and so an image must be carefully interpreted by someone who understands the whole process and can tell the difference between real features and artifacts. So I don't see much likelihood that it
would convince anyone who is unconvinced by the
presents evidense.
Of course in reality all this supply and demand crap is just is about as realistic the rest of
marginalist economic theory. Demand is determined by the price not the other way around and supply is determined by the supplier, who adjusts it to get the profits they desire.
To a first approximation the price of a product is
just the production cost plus the average profit
rate. The profit rate the supplier can squeeze out
of a product varies somewhat depending on the
amount of competition but competition is a transitory thing.
The paradox with competition is that it results in less competition, as weaker players are pushed out of the market. Competition can never last and it's
end result is always a monopoly. In the long run there will only be a small number of transnational corperations running everything.
If Linux had an exploit that allowed someone to ssh into your box, su to root, then fsck your harddrive, and a patch wasn't released yet, would you be pissed off that bugtraq posted the code to exploit the bug?
No, I would imediately disable sshd (or if necessary disable networking entirely) and wait the short time necessary for a fix to become available.
I would rather know that there is a exploitable bug in my system so I could immediately plug the hole (even if that ment losing some functionality)
than not know and risk my system being cracked in
the interim. This isn't about keeping infomation
from the "crackers" (who if they really care will
know already), it is about keeping information from the users, which is wrong. This is mainly
motivated by proprietary software vendors who want
maintain as much secrecy about their fuck-ups as
possible, for obvious reasons.
Slashdot Mirror
Some people may think that the above is overly pessimistic but you have to consider who will gain from the above scenario. The answer is almost everyone. The content industry, including the media with their huge influence over the general population is obvious, but they are not alone. The big tech companies will gain from the barriers to entry that it will erect to new competition and the increased control will allow the creation of new businesses selling things which were once free. Government will be a major supporter of this scenario (especially in the present climate) as it will enable much great monitoring of their citizens and control of information distribution.
The only people who will lose are ordinary people and even then most of them will never know it. I can't see mass demonstrations against any of these measures. Most people will not know or care what they are losing and the few (like us) who do are too small in number to have any effect. At each stage of the above scenario very reasonable sounding arguments about security can used to obfuscate the real reasons for the changes. The scenario above can be implemented, it will result in great benefits to those in power, in both corporations and government, and there is little that can be done to stop it. It would be foolish to believe that presented with the great opportunity our masters will not seize it will both hands.
Remember, DRM is not just "digital copyright protection"
Yes, DRM is just digital copyright protection. It you wanted to just automatically protect your machine from trojans etc. then the correct place to do it would be in your package management system or in extreme cases in the kernel. There is however no need whatsoever for any hardware or firmware changes to do this. Taking things to the level of hardware and firmware is only necessary in the case where you are trying to restrict what the owner of a computer can do (people don't plant trojans by breaking into your house and installing a new kernel on your machine). There is no need to involve the BIOS in such matters unless the owner of the machine is untrusted and in that case the people not trusting the owner are external forces and we are back to the issue of copy protection.
Sadly lacking are the ships from Iain M. Banks' Culture universe. These not only have great names but are much more realistic than in most scifi. Even a small General Systems Vehicle (GSV) would be up there with a Super Star Destroyer sizewise (and has millions of inhabitants) and a Torturer Class Rapid Offensive Unit (ROU) would kick the shit out of any other scifi warship (couple of hundred metres long, over 90% engine, the rest weapons, controled by an AI, 0 crew).
It is actually fairly easy to estimate what what warships in space would be like, from a little physics and common sense. Most scifi fails miserably in this regard. The most obvious fact that has a bearing on space warships is that space is empty or nearly so. There is no where to hide and therefore it is very easy to guess what colour a warship would be, black. For the same reason it can also be guessed that the temperature of a warships hull will be 2.73 K (2.73 degrees above absolute zero), to match the temperature of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). Any hotter and its thermal emission will give away its presense, any cooler and it will stand out as a shadow against the CMB.
Of course there is still many effects (such as passing in front of a star) that could give you away. A critical parameter which determines how battles would play out is at what distance, on average warships could detect each other. Since the speed of light is around 300,000 km/s, if ships can only be detected at less than a million kilometers battles are likely to very short, few second affairs, where the first ship to detect the other and fire a laser (or similar) wins. In this case the sophistication of sensors and camoflage technology will be the deciding factor.
However if the average detection distance is much greater than a million kilometers then the travel time of the fastest weapon will many seconds or even minutes. Even ships moving at only a few kilometers per second could move a considerable distance in such time. Using laser like weapons would have much of the quality of contempory battleships shelling each other. With significant light travel times you would need to accurately predict the motion of the target to stand any chance of hitting it and evasive action by the target would be possible (although they would not be able to see a laser pulse coming).
At short ranges lasers or the like would be the weapon of choice but if you are engaging ships at distances of a hundred million kilometres guided missiles, if they could move at a significant fraction of the speed of light, might be of use as well, since at such a distance the light travel time would be many minutes and you are unlikely to hit something at that range with a laser if it is doing any manouvring.
It should be noted that engagements at very small distances such as those portrayed in Star Wars, B5 etc. would be rather unlikely. Not only is it unlikely that ships would be undetectable down to distances of a few kilometres but if this was the case ship combat would be virtually impossible. Considering just the inner solar system and confining oneself to the within a million kilometres of the plane you are faced with a volume of the order of 10^22 cubic kilometres. Thousands of ships could wander around in such a volume for ever without meeting if they needed to pass within a few kilometres in order to see each other.
When you consider the whole galaxy it quickly becomes clear that conventional war loses all meaning. I think it is unlikely that ships would detectable at even lightdays if they were trying to be inconspicuous, given the huge amount of gas, ice, dust and rocks that is floating around and reflecting starlight. But even if you could seeing where a ship was days ago is not a great step forward in fighting it (a lightday is very roughly the size of the solar system). The volume of the galaxy
Natural Uranium is mainly Uranium 238 (99.28%) plus a small fraction of Uranium 235 (0.71%). Depleted Uranium (DU) has had the majority of the Uranium 235 removed. It is therefore true that if DU was made exclusively from natural Uranium it would be less radioactive (although just as chemically toxic) since Uranium 238 is less radioactive than Uranium 235. However Uranium extracted from spent nuclear fuel has also been used to make DU. This has traces of Plutonium and Neptunium produced in the reactor in it and hence DU is often more radioactive than natural Uranium.
Actually Werner Heisenberg got the calculation of the critical mass of Uranium 235 needed for a bomb wrong, which was the main reason that the Germans never commited any serious resources to a nuclear weapons project. Heisenberg calculated the critical mass to be of the order of several tons and it was therefore concluded that a bomb was not feasible. See this description of Heisenberg's reaction to news of the dropping Hiroshima bomb to see that he really believe that many tons of Uranium 235 was needed.
The first reasonably accurate calculation of the critical mass of Uranium 235 was made by Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls at the University of Birmingham, England in 1940. They found that only about a kilogram or so would be needed for a bomb and a memorandum submitted by them to British science advisor Henry Tizard on March 19th can be seen as the main trigger for the Manhatten project. Frisch and Peierls calculation turned out to be slightly low and in fact a few kilograms rather than one was needed but it was still three orders of magnitude less that the few tons the Germans thought was necessary.
And this is different from other established news sources how?
Well I was under the impression Google News wasn't supposed to be a news source itself, anymore than the Google search engine is a source of web content. It is just an index of news sources. So the question is whether corporate press releases are, in themselves, news. You are of course right that "established news sources" will often pick up press releases as the basis of a story, but they don't repeat them all.
I would question whether the existance of a press release shows any evidense that a single person in the whole world thinks that the content of it is actually "news". After all the people who wrote and issued the press release did it because it was their job to do so, and do not necessarily agree with what it says, or believe it is news. While journalists in the corporate media are also doing a job, they are in general writing the stories that they want to and believe are news. The main source of bias comes in what is omitted as a result of the editorial process rather than the introduction of spurious "news".
That being said the main thing I was complaining about was the fact that they are including corporate press releases (which are questionably news) while excluding sites like indymedia.org because they are not owned by a corporation. I don't think that they should remove the press releases, a small fraction of them might be interesting, but they should mark them as press releases which is not done at the moment. Press releases are not journalism and in most cases don't even pretent to be.
Ideally each of the sites they index (about 4,500 at the moment I believe) would be classified by a few parameters such as whether it is press releases or real news and whether the site is independent or corporate media. You should also be able to include or exclude sites from your search results based on these parameters. This would allow people who only trust news if it has the stamp of approval of of a multimillion dollar corporation, to exclude independent media, while at the same time allowing people who believe the corporate media is highly biased to preferentially select independent sources.
As an aside, I do believe that both government and corporate press releases are a big problem for journalism in general. There is a worrying laziness in modern journalism, with many journalist just attending press conferences and cut-and-pasting their stories out of press releases. Obviously both governments and corporations attempt to play on this by producing press releases and quotes in a form that is as easy as possible to fold into a story. Journalists presented with a ready made story and with a deadline to keep are increasingly uncritcally parroting what they a given with little analysis or research.
Google, while technically advanced and lacking in intrusive ads, appears to have slowly drifted away from what most people would consider fair and impartial behaviour as it has grown in size. To take a recent example they have been refusing to index many non-corporate news sites in Google News, while at the same time deciding to start indexing press releases on the websites of major corporations.
While the crack down on independent news sites may have been unrelated to the invasion of Iraq it has certainly led some to speculate that they are under pressure not to index those who are not cheerleading the war. This is all before you get to the privacy issue and of course the allegations that one of their employees used to work for the NSA.
PageRank can also be extremely annoying if you are looking for information on an unpopular subject that is similar to a much more popular one. The ability to disable PageRank of even to invert it, to show the results with the least links to them first, would improve things greatly. It may be that the lowest common denominator effects of PageRank are all too welcome for some people.
Search engines are a critical part of the present web infrastructure and a website is of little value if no one can find it. In the long term it would be of great benefit to all if Google could be replaced by with some sort of distributed search facility with no centralised control, where the individual user would have full control of the process.
In the US, it is ILLEGAL to put the military on the boarders, or to act as police except in emergencies
The Posse Commitatus Act is effectively dead and has been for years before 11th Sept 2001. The US border is highly militarised and the US military regularly kills US citizens while "helping" with law enforcement. For a particularly egregous case take that of Esequiel Hernandez an "18 year old high school sophomore" who was "shot and killed while tending goats on his own family's land" by US marines. Long before the "war on terror", the "war on drugs" destroyed all but the pretense of separation between the military and police in the US. In fact the given the presence of members of the British Special Air Service (SAS) Regiment at the seige of the Branch Dividian compound in Waco, Texas, even foreign military forces are now appear welcome in US law enforcement.
Politics is replete with examples of words being hijacked and used to mean the total opposite of their real meaning: the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is a dictatorship and the National Socialist German Workers Party (Nazis) weren't socialists. This is undoubtedly what Orwell drew on for the idea of Newspeak in 1984. This also extends to much more subtle redefinitions of words over time for political reasons.
For instance democracy orignally meant rule by the people (Greek city states) and a republic was rule by an elite, with the people getting a vote on which section of the elite would rule them (Rome). When these ideas resurfaced a few hundred years ago republics were instituted but they were called democracies, to give people the feeling that they were getting more than they were (classic bait and switch). So democracy has effectively taken the meaning of republic and republic has been relegated to meaning "government without a monarch".
However, some of the examples that you use, are in fact entirely the opposite way round. Libertarian is a term that had been associated with anarchism for over a hundred years before if was appropriated by some american capitalists in recent years. Likewise anarchism has meant opposition to all hierarchy, including capitalism, for most of the last two centuries, although you are right that many people in power have done their best to make it a synonm for chaos in everyday speech.
Your reference to "classical anarchy" shows you are as much as fault as the people you are critising. Calling real anarchy, "classical anarchy", and then using the word to the mean the opposite of its true meaning, is as duplicitous as any other sneaky political redefinition. "Anarcho-Capitalism" is a contradiction in terms, since anarchy means without hierarchy but capitalism is a hierarchical economic system.
I also disagree that socialists are the main offenders since it is those in power that have the most oppitunity to alter the meaning of words, through their control of the media. Hence while Marxists were probably the main culprits in altering the meaning of words behind the iron curtain, at most other times and places where right wing ideologies have held power, they are likely to be the main offenders.
Well, first off, I disagree with your categorizing (modern) libertarianism as "right wing".
Obviously, there are economic and social issues and so at a minimum you need two coordinates rather than one to measure someones political viewpoint (another more complex test that might interest some people is the Political Compass). However the right-left catagorisation really applies to economic issues and on that axis american "libertarians" are very "right-wing". They may differ significantly from Republicans and Democrats on social issues but to a much lesser extent on economic ones.
"Anarchism is diametrically opposed to capitalism first and foremost." CLASSICAL anarchism is, definitely.
Precisely, you admit that anarchism is opposed to capitalism but you want to redefine it (by you I mean american "libertarians"). Anarchism is opposition to all hierarchy, including capitalism. Anarcho-capitalism is a contradiction in terms.
Downgrading Pluto to the largest known Kuiper belt object would seem to be the best course of action. The reason Ceres wasn't given the status of a planet when it was found was that it was just the largest of a number of similar object, the asteroid belt. When Pluto was discovered in the 1930's the Kuiper belt was unknown and so it got planet status.
However in recent years it has become clear that there are many similar objects to Pluto forming a belt outside the orbit of Neptune. In fact the the Kuiper belt is thought to be over 100 times larger, in terms of total mass and number of objects, than the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Given that they are much further away and only a very small fraction of them have been found it is possible that Pluto is not even the largest member of the Kuiper belt.
The definition of a planet should probably include the proviso that the object not be part of a collection of objects in similar orbits. This would rule of all asteroids and Kuiper belt objects (KBOs) which includes Pluto. A part of the traditional understanding of what a planet is, is that it is, with the possible exception of its moons, a solitary body.
University officials sent out letters to researchers -- including those who, for example, move around large amounts of sky-telescope data -- to warn them of the billing changes. The university offered "to round off the sharp edges" for researchers who will be adversely affected.
They better had! The assumption that high bandwidth use is all down to music filesharing and other "non-work related" activities is not necessarily well founded. I work for a different large US university and regularly need to transfer data from the other US universities or europe to analyse. I can get transfer rate of 250-750k per second depending on the time of day. This translates to very roughly 1-2 Gb per hour and I might spend all data selecting datasets and leave the transfers going all night and maybe the next day too, to get what I need. A transfer of upto 100 Gb over a couple of days followed by a month or more to analyse the data (before I need more) is not unheard of. A 2 Gb per month limit would stop my research in its tracks and there must be people at Cornell that need similar bandwidth to me, for their work.
This sounds more like a money making scheme than a real problem. Universities usually get charged a fixed amount for their external connections, whether they use them or not. If they have maxed out their connection and everyones transfer rates are sufferring then slapping quotas on the undergrads, who don't do any work and so shouldn't need large amounts of bandwidth, is the answer. Charging users is just money grabbing since the money isn't going to go to add more bandwidth, since the demand for bandwidth will have fallen when the charges are intoduced.
How long, exactly, has the US government had access to everyone's bank records without a warrent? I guess it was probably the USA PATRIOT act but they may well be simply "asking" the banks for the imformation and they are handing it over even though the government may not be able to compel them to, because they are spineless. The sections in the USA PATRIOT act regarding banking relate largely to moneylaundering, but maybe the US government is taking the position that everyone is a moneylaunderer until it is proved otherwise by examining their bank records.
According to the author of the article (who is a lawyer, in Australia) a software license is only a contract if "consideration" is involved on both sides (i.e. each side has to receive something). From my an admittedly small amount of searching on the web this appears to be true. Now since the copyright holder does receive anything in the case of a free software license, it doesn't seem possible for it to be a contract.
The author then states that a pure license, one that involves no contractual obligation, can be revoked by the copyright holder at any time. Searches on the web produce a lot of people saying this is not the case but none of them are lawyers. The author only states that it is true for Australia so it may vary depending what juristiction you are in. However in the case of Australia the author cites a case involving the shareware program Trumpet Winsock which appears to back up his arguement.
The FSF site says that the GPL cannot be revoked but it presents no legal argument why this is the case. Such a legal arguement would certainly be comforting.
It would be interesting to know Prof. Moglen's views on the main point in this article in the unlikely event that he is reading this. Namely that while the GPL and most other Free/Open software licenses are perfectly enforcable, there exists a weak point with the copyright holder themselves. If the copyright holder of a peice of free software decided to they could change, or totally revoke the license of the software, and that change would apply to all copies of the software not just future versions. If this is indeed true it is certainly not the way most users of free software believe things work.
I don't think most users believe that Linus could wake up one morning and decide he is going to revoke the license to all the code he has contributed to the Linux kernel and bring linux development to a crashing halt until all that code could be reimplemented by other people. While this is an unlikely senario there are plenty of companies that contribute to free software which might be bought out, go bankrupt or simply have a change of heart.
What about the case of an individual free software developer going bankrupt? Couldn't the copyright of some free software be considered an asset that could be seized to pay their debts? Would the FSF even be a safe copyright holder? Wouldn't it be possible for the FSF to be forced into bankruptcy? Would it be any different from a company or an individual going bankrupt?
My limited usderstanding of this is that the GPL only really applies at the point where a copy is made of the work, although our friends at the RIAA/MPAA are doing their best to make copyright property, rather than a limited monoply on copying. If this is the case then revoking a free software license would seem to only directly affect the distribution and development of the software and current users would be free to continue using it. Although I know there have been attempts to argue that using software involves copying it into memory and so is covered by copyright. What is the status of that?
Of course provided most copyright holders don't do this, free software as a whole can advance but it would be preferable if you could rely on a piece of software staying free after it has been released under the GPL. But in the end I think free software licenses are just a necessarily imperfect attempt to mitigate some of the evils of copyright and that it is suprising that it does as well as it does.
While the use of proprietry software and the lack of a paper trail can't help, the problem appears more fundamental. It you turn elections over to private companies to run, which is really what you are doing if you use these voting machines, there are huge conflicts of interest. Take Senator Chuck Hagel who won the last two elections, against expectations, where 80 percent of the votes were counted using machines supplied and run by a company he indirectly owned.
Even if there is no impropriety going on in this particular case, their is certainly the appearance of impropriety. The question of who makes, owns and runs the voting machines appears even more important than the software and proceedures used by them. Rather worryingly the use of exit polls in the 2002 election was almost non-existent, so there was no indepedent check on the results. Potentially the people who control the voting machines control the result of an election.
Mpc = Mega parsecs, i.e. millions of parsecs, where parsec stands for parallax arcsecond and equals about 3.26 light years.
It is just rounding. They are quoting to two significant figures. It is actually 73.x and 22.y which adds up to 100% in total.
Mass media coverage can be found at CNN and the BBC. A list of all the MAP papers can be found here.
Since there is no information on exactly how the study was carried out the results are meaningless. Assuming 100k for a sysadmin and 3.5k for a server you get a ratio of 10 servers per admin using the survey results of 62.2% of TCO for staff and 4.4% for hardware. Now while that seems about right for windows in my experience one good linux sysadmin can handle up to 100 machines, depending on the quality of the hardware. Certainly for linux servers once you have them setup well (with something like debian stable on them) they will run until the hardware breaks with little intervention.
The curve of load on the sysadmin as the number of machines managed increases is likely to be very different for windows and linux and while this IDC study is short on details it sounds like they are probably fixing everything, except the operating system, including the servers per admin and comparing the costs. This is likely to come out bad for linux as the a well qualified linux sysadmin will probably cost more but this ignores the fact that the linux sysadmin could potential manage a much large number of servers reducing the cost per server well below that of windows. Perhaps this is not the way the study was done but it is certainly a way someone could get the result they wanted with such a study.
The BBC version of this story is more detailed and has somewhat less wild speculation.
This story seems somewhat confused and contradicts other things I have read on the subject. I am not convinced the actual interpretation of this find is very reliable.
The most modern theories about the origns of humans in north america, prior to this find, as far as I understand them are as follows. The first humans came across the land bridge between alaska and asia during the last ice age, about 17,000 years ago. They were caucasians, closely related to the Jomon, the prehistoric inhabitants of Japan, whose modern couterparts are the Ainu of Hokkaido. They penetrated throughout north and south america in a 1,000 years or so. Later, about 3,000-4,000 years ago, another group crossed the bering strait in boats. These people were closely related to the modern Chinese and Mongolian people and only penetrated north america. Their descendents are principly the Eskimo and Aleut, but some penetrated futher south such as the Navajo. See here for details.
This find seems to just seems to add extra conformation to the above hypothesis. Finding a 13,000 year old skull does not mean that there had to be human in the americas 25,000 years ago. Nor does the skull contradict the theory that the first humans used the land bridge to cross to alaska during the last ice age. The evidence of camps -- man-made tools, a human footprint and huts dating back 25,000 years are totally separate from this and obivously need explaining, but this find has no real bearing on that debate.
In reality it is even worse than this, since the raw result of interferometry is not a nice sharp image but a fringe pattern which is cause by the light from the individual telescopes being combined. It then takes a lot of processing to reconstruct an image and even then the image usually contains many artifacts that are not real and so an image must be carefully interpreted by someone who understands the whole process and can tell the difference between real features and artifacts. So I don't see much likelihood that it would convince anyone who is unconvinced by the presents evidense.
Of course in reality all this supply and demand crap is just is about as realistic the rest of marginalist economic theory. Demand is determined by the price not the other way around and supply is determined by the supplier, who adjusts it to get the profits they desire.
To a first approximation the price of a product is just the production cost plus the average profit rate. The profit rate the supplier can squeeze out of a product varies somewhat depending on the amount of competition but competition is a transitory thing.
The paradox with competition is that it results in less competition, as weaker players are pushed out of the market. Competition can never last and it's end result is always a monopoly. In the long run there will only be a small number of transnational corperations running everything.
If Linux had an exploit that allowed someone to ssh into your box, su to root, then fsck your harddrive, and a patch wasn't released yet, would you be pissed off that bugtraq posted the code to exploit the bug?
No, I would imediately disable sshd (or if necessary disable networking entirely) and wait the short time necessary for a fix to become available. I would rather know that there is a exploitable bug in my system so I could immediately plug the hole (even if that ment losing some functionality) than not know and risk my system being cracked in the interim. This isn't about keeping infomation from the "crackers" (who if they really care will know already), it is about keeping information from the users, which is wrong. This is mainly motivated by proprietary software vendors who want maintain as much secrecy about their fuck-ups as possible, for obvious reasons.