Granted I didn't RTFA, the idea is not to rent the ILEC's wires, which they keep trying to make harder and harder, the idea is to buy the last mile (or however many miles you need to reach the backbone providers) outright. And given that much of the local communications infrastructure was laid using emminent domain of municipal grants of right-of-way, it probably would not be too much of a stretch to use local powers of emminent domain to seize the last mile connections, with just compensation, for transfer to a publicly owned and run co-operative. Electric co-ops have existed for years, and around my hometown in Oregon, provide better service at lower rates than the local commercial provider could if they had even been willing to run powerlines out into rural areas in the first place.
Unless they work in the aerospace industry, in which case every extra pound of airframe weight costs $500 to $1000 a year to lug around for the rest of the airplane's service life (up to 40 years), about the same cost increase for spacecraft expect with those you pay in one lump sum at launch time. Still, titanium use is limited by cost and supply, though by limited I mean about >10% by weight of the upcoming Boeing 787, slightly less (by percent weight) in an Airbus A380.
A titanium part that is built right weighs in at a fraction of a comparable steel part. The cost differences are reduced somewhat because aircraft tend to use stainless steel to get some corrision resistance whereas titanium is essentially corrision-proof in aircraft applications (stainless steel and aluminum are not) and must not be quite as sensitive as you make it seem (or is treatable with proper unlimited-life coatings, I honestly don't know, AE not MME), otherwise they could never let in out on the same ramp as the idiots who like to spear aircraft with the bagagge loaders.
Now what could make this a non-answer to a non-problem is that parts that migrated to titanium years ago for strength/weight purposes are not migrating to carbon fiber composites (>50% of a 787 by weight), though not into areas requiring high temperature operation.
Mr. Gonzales said that the administration promoted and respected the right of the press that is protected under the First Amendment.
"But it can't be the case that that right trumps over the right that Americans would like to see, the ability of the federal government to go after criminal activity," he said. "And so those two principles have to be accommodated."
I think is most certainly must be the case that 'that right' trumps over the 'right that Americans would like to see' because first, I doubt very many people would like the government to have Gonzales' particular intrepretation of that right, and second, unless it is written in the Constitution or follows clearly there-from, it is a law, not a right. And rights enumerated in the Constitution (Congress shall make no law...) explicitly trump any and all laws by design. There can be no accommodation of law (much less a stretched intrepretation of a law) by a right (much less a right listed first for a reason).
If Gonzales, Bush and Congress really think the American people want them to have the Constitutional right to muzzle journalists they should have no objection to proposing just such an amendment to the Constitution. RIGHT NOW. The resulting brouhaha might just make the last two years of BS worthwhile.
Blockbuster has nothing whatsoever to offer Apple if and when Apple decides to go into the full-length, hi-def movie business.
Other than perhaps saving Apple a large fortune in bandwidth costs and the bad karma associated with grinding the entire internet to a halt as millions of geeks cry 'Ohh! Movies on iTunes! Shiny!'
I, however, would suggest some place other than Blockbuster:
Blockbuster == evil
big chain grocery store == less evil
I always find it curious that some people insist that we have to understand the 'reasons' motivating any particular group of rioters. In any sort of vaguely democratic republic where the rule of law actually holds, the only reasons to throw a riot is to light things on fire, and to completely prevent any grievances you may have from being heard in a reasonable and open forum. Peaceful protests get their message heard in the court of public opinion, violent protests only get a hearing for their means.
Some individuals who wanted to change the world (MLK, Gandhi) understood this; they never threw rocks, torched buidlings or even hit back at the police and the murders. AND THEY WON. The British left India, Jim Crow left America.
Some people, however, have failed to learn from these examples (the IRA, anti-globalization protesters, and now disgruntled youths in Paris); they throw rocks, grab guns, build and use fire-bomb launchers (Argentia protesters note: bringing a welded steel device specifically designed to accurately launch a flaming projectile at police is a good indicator that you do NOT hold the moral high ground) and what not. And this has done a great job of uniting Ireland, preventing the spread of mega-corps and allieviating poverty among immigrants in France. A lot more could be accomplished by a few thousand people sitting down in the middle of the Champs Elyse'es than by torching a million cars (unless you're a car dealer).
Its how functional societies change, adapt or lose.
I (without RTFA) would suppose that the sensor would be in very nearly the same sun-orbiting track as the pinhole assembly to maintain the correct focal length. Thus, to turn the camera by 90 degrees in the plane of the orbit, you just have to wait for 1/4th or 3/4th (depending which way you wanted to turn) of the orbital period to transpire (3 or 9 months in an Earth-trailing orbit). If you want to turn it more than a few degrees (or even a few arc-minutess) out of plane, things would get complicated and expensive, but if you can get the orbital plane of the camera more-or-less aligned with the plane of the galaxy, it shouldn't be that great of a limitation.
Well if the launch customer for your aircraft is FedEx, they could start offering previous business day delivery for Toyko to New York shipments.
You make think this is said in jest, but they have seriously considered just such a scenario. Going in the opposite direction, same-business day deliveries (from New York's perspective, next-business day from Toyko's) become possible. And shippers of business documents are about the only people who would be willing to pay the fuel bill for a new supersonic transport.
So I take it the pictures of British streets strewn with shattered glass during the Concorde's high speed trials are just figments of the worlds collective imagination?
According to this source, the overpressure of the Concorde was about 16 pounds per sqare foot (PSF), or a little more that 0.1 psi. This level "will not cause material damage to any structure in a reasonable state of repair", subject to their definitions of material damage and reasonable state of repair. That level of overpressure, combined the short-duration square-wave nature of the pressure signal tend to make the impact somewhat more significant than the 30-mph (50 kph) wind they compare it to. It also doesn't account for the presence of other factors, ie: a window that is already stressed by a 30 mph wind will shatter more easily than a window that is not stressed.
Finally, there were designs on the drawing board for an American SST, but Congress pulled to funding. And the real money (particularly now) for airlines has been on international routes because various bi-lateral agreements limit capacity and city-pairs, driving up fares. Domestically, the mid-course speed benefits of an SST are mitigated by the more fixed-speed ground and departure/approach legs of the flight (fly United and listen in on the ATC comms, flying into San Francisco you might hear orders to reduce speed for 'traffic flow' somewhere over Utah).
Yes, they could, but only for Americans. And that is the key.
While such an action would affect immigrants from Venezuala or Americans who want to visit, it would not affect anyone in Venezuala itself. With a system like the one I proposed, any country could possibly prevent its residents from communicating with outside websites, or prevent outsiders from communicating with in-country websites (you can already do this with an army and any destructive implement you care to think of), but that is it. If every country maintained their own mirror of the root zone files and checked for hi-jackings each time before updating, then no one country can cut off communications between two other countries or inside another country; ie: the US could not sever the connections between the UK and France or keep Brazilians from connecting to Brazil's tax website.
I posted a comment or two the last time this came up, but now I will take a different tack: it is understandable that they want some way to maintain access to their country level domains even if the US goes utterly nuts. I suggested that is just what they should do.
Now they want to force the issue, I think we should help them along. Tell the EU and the UN to pick a date on which the US root zone file will no longer be responsible for containing the look-up information for non US country domains such as.br and.tv. Starting this day the US root zone file would point to the UN zone file for look-ups for the domains. The UN file would of course point to the US file for the.us domains and for the existing international TLDs such as.com and.org. The UN could also create their own new TLDs, maybe.comnet or something, but the old ones stay with the US.
Now if they actually did this, the US part of the internet would not be order the control of an organization that is not beholden in the slightest way to the American people, while the rest of the world gets to deal with something administered by the UN or the EU. Really, what is so hard about this?
Oh, as for the internet being essential to the infrastructure of some countries, might it be said that the internet pretty much IS the infrastructure of the US economy, government and whotnot? Turn off the internet everywhere, and the transistion in the US would be substantially more severe than the transistion in Brazil (I am sure they would still get their taxes somehow).
They are also joining forces with the organizers of the annual Reno Air Races that were held just a couple weeks ago. Similar to grand prix road races, there are several classes of air racers, the biggest and fastest being the piston-powered Unlimiteds (mostly stripped and re-engined WWII-era fighters). Courses are low to the ground and marked by giant pylons. From the article, it seems the rocket racers are planning more vertical courses so it will be intersting the see how those are plotted. Maybe GPS and a virtual track shown on a heads-up display?
For those pointing out that some people watch NASCAR mostly for the crashes, crashes at Reno usually involve a distant thud, a cloud of smoke and little good news. Everybody maintains a healthy distance between aircraft, crowd others out of the course and you get grounded, do it too often (as in more than once or twice), and you get banned.
Reporting to autorities on your own employer - even if there was a serious wrongdoing - is certain to end your industry career.
It may end your career, but even if there is merely minor wrongdoing a professional engineer, licensed or otherwise, is bound by ethics and professional responsibility to report said wrongdoing. And in the US (and likely the majority of Europe), the legal protections provided to people in cases like this are quite extensive for the specific reason that if nobody feels free to expose covered-over problems, innocent people will eventually die. Perhaps such standards are not as pervasive in big pharma companies, resulting in some recent drug safety issues that have been turned into very splashy headlines and very expensive lawsuits.
My understanding is that blowing the whistle on something like this in the US is only a crime if it can be shown the allegations were knowingly false. Perhaps Austria should implement a similar standard.
Several people have already pointed that software is different because you agree to abide by a license agreement that exempts the publisher from basically all liability if the software screws up. But notice how no other product, even products that have license agreements, contain clauses granting such blanket indemitity??? The reason is that an exception was made in law for software when the computing industry was bright and shiny and new and really didn't have much impact on everyday life, much less safety of life.
Fast forward to today, and there are well over a 100 computer systems within 100 feet of where I am sitting. Some are used for posting to Slashdot, some are used to acquire, process and store experimental data for multi-million dollar research contracts, and some control machines quite capable of killing an innocent grad student if the computer goes 'bing' at a bad time.
Commerical software should be held to standards more comparable to every other product out there. That does not require that it be absolutely perfect, but rather that it has been designed and reasonably tested to do what it promises in the enviroment it is designed for, subject to any minimum requirements imposed by law. In the case of aircraft, reasonably tested means thousands of heavily instrumented flight hours and, usually, a ground-level test to destruction of a complete airframe. For cars, tens of thousands of miles driven and multiple test vehicles flung into solid walls. For most software, a couple of underpaid and overworked people poke at it for a few days and are satisfied if nothing breaks too horribly. Software designed to run on systems connected to the world wide web, such as Windows, should be able to do so without the web being able to connect to everything on my system. Software designed to run a heart monitor should be built understanding that 99.999% uptime is the starting point for the early prototypes, not the goal for the final product. The ONLY exception should be software that is completely free (both speech and beer varities of freedom) because you don't have to pay for it and you can see everything that is under the hood. WYSIWYG is fine when you can see it, but when you pay for it, you had better get what you paid for.
Looking through all the comments here, the general trend seems to be Americas saying 'Its ours, we paid for it, why should we give it away?' and everyone else saying 'Why should we let you have the ability to re-map our country level domain into oblivion?'
Note: I just realized this is a very long comment so here is the summary: The US should maintain control of the root zones file and servers, but other countries should establish their own redundant copies of said file and servers to administer for their own use.
Disclaimer: I am an American.
Now I don't completely understand what the 'Root Zone File' is supposed to do, but the general idea seems to be that it lists the locations of the individual TLD name servers, i.e.: where to find the server that lists all domain names for.com or.br. This file is currently maintained by ICANN under the authority of the US Commerce Department. It would seem that every other country and ISP in the world refers to this one file out of a combination of a desire to maintain uniformity and momentum/laziness/cheapness.
I can't see why other countries could not choose to maintain their own root files for use by ISPs in their country (or multi-national trade alliance). This way, even if the US goes genuinely nuts and cuts off international access (don't worry, the megacorps won't let us), the various national TLDs would continue to work for the rest of the world.
On the other hand, suppose the US turns the one and only Root Zone File over to an agency of a quasi-governmental group that is not elected-by or held-accountable in any way, shape or form to any of the individual citizens of this planet, that gives equal voting power to representative democracies and authoritarian regimes of all sizes and that (perhaps understandably) and sometimes projects a general attitude towards the US of 'give us money and keep the NYPD from towing our illegally parked cars, but otherwise go bugger yourself.'
Given these two scenarios, I think it far more likely that a UN agency would decide to cut the US off from the internet than the US deciding to cut any other country off. And given that we did build it and pay for it in the first place and maintaining it functioning order is vital to the economic and security interests of the United States, I think it is the right, privilege and prerogative of the US to keep control of the root zone file and servers. Other countries can easily clone these files and servers in their own countries, controlled by their own agencies, for use by their own citizens and corporations, and until someone decides to very deliberately screw things up in one country, the change would be completely transparent to internet users worldwide.
To me, this is really boils down to the same debate as control of the GPS system. The ONLY difference is that with GPS, the US was adamant from the get-go that it was ours to control as we pleased (we did pledge (not quite a sworn promise or treaty, but a pledge) to not use selective denial outside of war zones, but that's it). Realizing how important GPS had become, Europe decided to build Galileo (whether they actually produce the funding is another story for another day). Given how important the internet is, why there isn't already a European equivalent to ICANN for managing European TLDs (is there?) is really beyond me.
So the choice that Microsoft and Apple have is to either play HDCP'd content the way they are told to play it (which is downgraded on non-HDCP monitors) or to not play it at all.
Then I would prefer, and others would as well, that they don't play at all. Nothing like telling a content provider that the increasingly dominant system for viewing said providers content won't work with their super-duper new revenue generating restrictions-laden format.
I also think it fair to mention one of the better places to buy older Lego sets and parts, Bricklink.com, though I may be biased because I am one of many people who sell parts through the site.
"Let red denote the fabricated data..." It just sounds so natural.
In fluid dynamics we prefer to use "computational results", sounds classier that way. (Disclaimer: I work in a wind tunnel lab so I may be biased towards experimental work.)
Given the current problems the Joint Strike Fighter is having with weight and cost increases, buying a fleet of Jedi Starfighters might just be cheaper in the long run.
In addition to working on Spaceship Two (or whatever they are going to call it) for Virgin Galactic, Burt Rutan and Scaled Composities are working with these fellows(note: annoying flash menus) on a project that can more directly benefit from the Spaceship One experience.
Having lived near Eugene my entire life, I can confirm that they have exposed themselves to many interesting substances and other weird things, and thus should not be used as a baseline for studying the effects of ELF radio waves.
Actually, very old bombs (and other explosives) will tend to greatly exceed their original specifications after being left to sit for a very long time. This is because whatever was added to the explosives to make the mixture stable enough to be transported safely will tend to separate out. As a result, the bomb becomes very unstable, sometimes to the point where moving it to abuprtly will cause it to go off.
I am sure they have thought of this, physics being rather bright types, but as a veteran of 2 credits of astrodynamics: Could it be that during a solar eclipse, both the Moon and the Sun are aligned exactly with your local gravity vector, but pulling in the oppositie direction, thus causing a small reduction in net gravitational acceleration. If they were to make measurements while a solar eclipse was happening on the exact opposite side of the planet, a slight increase in the net acceleration would probably be noticed.
Slashdot Mirror
Granted I didn't RTFA, the idea is not to rent the ILEC's wires, which they keep trying to make harder and harder, the idea is to buy the last mile (or however many miles you need to reach the backbone providers) outright. And given that much of the local communications infrastructure was laid using emminent domain of municipal grants of right-of-way, it probably would not be too much of a stretch to use local powers of emminent domain to seize the last mile connections, with just compensation, for transfer to a publicly owned and run co-operative. Electric co-ops have existed for years, and around my hometown in Oregon, provide better service at lower rates than the local commercial provider could if they had even been willing to run powerlines out into rural areas in the first place.
Unless they work in the aerospace industry, in which case every extra pound of airframe weight costs $500 to $1000 a year to lug around for the rest of the airplane's service life (up to 40 years), about the same cost increase for spacecraft expect with those you pay in one lump sum at launch time. Still, titanium use is limited by cost and supply, though by limited I mean about >10% by weight of the upcoming Boeing 787, slightly less (by percent weight) in an Airbus A380.
A titanium part that is built right weighs in at a fraction of a comparable steel part. The cost differences are reduced somewhat because aircraft tend to use stainless steel to get some corrision resistance whereas titanium is essentially corrision-proof in aircraft applications (stainless steel and aluminum are not) and must not be quite as sensitive as you make it seem (or is treatable with proper unlimited-life coatings, I honestly don't know, AE not MME), otherwise they could never let in out on the same ramp as the idiots who like to spear aircraft with the bagagge loaders.
Now what could make this a non-answer to a non-problem is that parts that migrated to titanium years ago for strength/weight purposes are not migrating to carbon fiber composites (>50% of a 787 by weight), though not into areas requiring high temperature operation.
Mr. Gonzales said that the administration promoted and respected the right of the press that is protected under the First Amendment.
...) explicitly trump any and all laws by design. There can be no accommodation of law (much less a stretched intrepretation of a law) by a right (much less a right listed first for a reason).
"But it can't be the case that that right trumps over the right that Americans would like to see, the ability of the federal government to go after criminal activity," he said. "And so those two principles have to be accommodated."
I think is most certainly must be the case that 'that right' trumps over the 'right that Americans would like to see' because first, I doubt very many people would like the government to have Gonzales' particular intrepretation of that right, and second, unless it is written in the Constitution or follows clearly there-from, it is a law, not a right. And rights enumerated in the Constitution (Congress shall make no law
If Gonzales, Bush and Congress really think the American people want them to have the Constitutional right to muzzle journalists they should have no objection to proposing just such an amendment to the Constitution. RIGHT NOW. The resulting brouhaha might just make the last two years of BS worthwhile.
Blockbuster has nothing whatsoever to offer Apple if and when Apple decides to go into the full-length, hi-def movie business.
Other than perhaps saving Apple a large fortune in bandwidth costs and the bad karma associated with grinding the entire internet to a halt as millions of geeks cry 'Ohh! Movies on iTunes! Shiny!'
I, however, would suggest some place other than Blockbuster:
Blockbuster == evil
big chain grocery store == less evil
But without the internet, how are we supposed to view the howto?
I always find it curious that some people insist that we have to understand the 'reasons' motivating any particular group of rioters. In any sort of vaguely democratic republic where the rule of law actually holds, the only reasons to throw a riot is to light things on fire, and to completely prevent any grievances you may have from being heard in a reasonable and open forum. Peaceful protests get their message heard in the court of public opinion, violent protests only get a hearing for their means.
Some individuals who wanted to change the world (MLK, Gandhi) understood this; they never threw rocks, torched buidlings or even hit back at the police and the murders. AND THEY WON. The British left India, Jim Crow left America.
Some people, however, have failed to learn from these examples (the IRA, anti-globalization protesters, and now disgruntled youths in Paris); they throw rocks, grab guns, build and use fire-bomb launchers (Argentia protesters note: bringing a welded steel device specifically designed to accurately launch a flaming projectile at police is a good indicator that you do NOT hold the moral high ground) and what not. And this has done a great job of uniting Ireland, preventing the spread of mega-corps and allieviating poverty among immigrants in France. A lot more could be accomplished by a few thousand people sitting down in the middle of the Champs Elyse'es than by torching a million cars (unless you're a car dealer).
Its how functional societies change, adapt or lose.
I (without RTFA) would suppose that the sensor would be in very nearly the same sun-orbiting track as the pinhole assembly to maintain the correct focal length. Thus, to turn the camera by 90 degrees in the plane of the orbit, you just have to wait for 1/4th or 3/4th (depending which way you wanted to turn) of the orbital period to transpire (3 or 9 months in an Earth-trailing orbit). If you want to turn it more than a few degrees (or even a few arc-minutess) out of plane, things would get complicated and expensive, but if you can get the orbital plane of the camera more-or-less aligned with the plane of the galaxy, it shouldn't be that great of a limitation.
Well if the launch customer for your aircraft is FedEx, they could start offering previous business day delivery for Toyko to New York shipments.
You make think this is said in jest, but they have seriously considered just such a scenario. Going in the opposite direction, same-business day deliveries (from New York's perspective, next-business day from Toyko's) become possible. And shippers of business documents are about the only people who would be willing to pay the fuel bill for a new supersonic transport.
So I take it the pictures of British streets strewn with shattered glass during the Concorde's high speed trials are just figments of the worlds collective imagination?
According to this source, the overpressure of the Concorde was about 16 pounds per sqare foot (PSF), or a little more that 0.1 psi. This level "will not cause material damage to any structure in a reasonable state of repair", subject to their definitions of material damage and reasonable state of repair. That level of overpressure, combined the short-duration square-wave nature of the pressure signal tend to make the impact somewhat more significant than the 30-mph (50 kph) wind they compare it to. It also doesn't account for the presence of other factors, ie: a window that is already stressed by a 30 mph wind will shatter more easily than a window that is not stressed.
Finally, there were designs on the drawing board for an American SST, but Congress pulled to funding. And the real money (particularly now) for airlines has been on international routes because various bi-lateral agreements limit capacity and city-pairs, driving up fares. Domestically, the mid-course speed benefits of an SST are mitigated by the more fixed-speed ground and departure/approach legs of the flight (fly United and listen in on the ATC comms, flying into San Francisco you might hear orders to reduce speed for 'traffic flow' somewhere over Utah).
Yes, they could, but only for Americans. And that is the key.
While such an action would affect immigrants from Venezuala or Americans who want to visit, it would not affect anyone in Venezuala itself. With a system like the one I proposed, any country could possibly prevent its residents from communicating with outside websites, or prevent outsiders from communicating with in-country websites (you can already do this with an army and any destructive implement you care to think of), but that is it. If every country maintained their own mirror of the root zone files and checked for hi-jackings each time before updating, then no one country can cut off communications between two other countries or inside another country; ie: the US could not sever the connections between the UK and France or keep Brazilians from connecting to Brazil's tax website.
I posted a comment or two the last time this came up, but now I will take a different tack: it is understandable that they want some way to maintain access to their country level domains even if the US goes utterly nuts. I suggested that is just what they should do.
.br and .tv. Starting this day the US root zone file would point to the UN zone file for look-ups for the domains. The UN file would of course point to the US file for the .us domains and for the existing international TLDs such as .com and .org. The UN could also create their own new TLDs, maybe .comnet or something, but the old ones stay with the US.
Now they want to force the issue, I think we should help them along. Tell the EU and the UN to pick a date on which the US root zone file will no longer be responsible for containing the look-up information for non US country domains such as
Now if they actually did this, the US part of the internet would not be order the control of an organization that is not beholden in the slightest way to the American people, while the rest of the world gets to deal with something administered by the UN or the EU. Really, what is so hard about this?
Oh, as for the internet being essential to the infrastructure of some countries, might it be said that the internet pretty much IS the infrastructure of the US economy, government and whotnot? Turn off the internet everywhere, and the transistion in the US would be substantially more severe than the transistion in Brazil (I am sure they would still get their taxes somehow).
They are also joining forces with the organizers of the annual Reno Air Races that were held just a couple weeks ago. Similar to grand prix road races, there are several classes of air racers, the biggest and fastest being the piston-powered Unlimiteds (mostly stripped and re-engined WWII-era fighters). Courses are low to the ground and marked by giant pylons. From the article, it seems the rocket racers are planning more vertical courses so it will be intersting the see how those are plotted. Maybe GPS and a virtual track shown on a heads-up display?
For those pointing out that some people watch NASCAR mostly for the crashes, crashes at Reno usually involve a distant thud, a cloud of smoke and little good news. Everybody maintains a healthy distance between aircraft, crowd others out of the course and you get grounded, do it too often (as in more than once or twice), and you get banned.
My understanding is that blowing the whistle on something like this in the US is only a crime if it can be shown the allegations were knowingly false. Perhaps Austria should implement a similar standard.
Several people have already pointed that software is different because you agree to abide by a license agreement that exempts the publisher from basically all liability if the software screws up. But notice how no other product, even products that have license agreements, contain clauses granting such blanket indemitity??? The reason is that an exception was made in law for software when the computing industry was bright and shiny and new and really didn't have much impact on everyday life, much less safety of life.
Fast forward to today, and there are well over a 100 computer systems within 100 feet of where I am sitting. Some are used for posting to Slashdot, some are used to acquire, process and store experimental data for multi-million dollar research contracts, and some control machines quite capable of killing an innocent grad student if the computer goes 'bing' at a bad time.
Commerical software should be held to standards more comparable to every other product out there. That does not require that it be absolutely perfect, but rather that it has been designed and reasonably tested to do what it promises in the enviroment it is designed for, subject to any minimum requirements imposed by law. In the case of aircraft, reasonably tested means thousands of heavily instrumented flight hours and, usually, a ground-level test to destruction of a complete airframe. For cars, tens of thousands of miles driven and multiple test vehicles flung into solid walls. For most software, a couple of underpaid and overworked people poke at it for a few days and are satisfied if nothing breaks too horribly. Software designed to run on systems connected to the world wide web, such as Windows, should be able to do so without the web being able to connect to everything on my system. Software designed to run a heart monitor should be built understanding that 99.999% uptime is the starting point for the early prototypes, not the goal for the final product. The ONLY exception should be software that is completely free (both speech and beer varities of freedom) because you don't have to pay for it and you can see everything that is under the hood. WYSIWYG is fine when you can see it, but when you pay for it, you had better get what you paid for.
Looking through all the comments here, the general trend seems to be Americas saying 'Its ours, we paid for it, why should we give it away?' and everyone else saying 'Why should we let you have the ability to re-map our country level domain into oblivion?'
.com or .br. This file is currently maintained by ICANN under the authority of the US Commerce Department. It would seem that every other country and ISP in the world refers to this one file out of a combination of a desire to maintain uniformity and momentum/laziness/cheapness.
Note: I just realized this is a very long comment so here is the summary: The US should maintain control of the root zones file and servers, but other countries should establish their own redundant copies of said file and servers to administer for their own use.
Disclaimer: I am an American.
Now I don't completely understand what the 'Root Zone File' is supposed to do, but the general idea seems to be that it lists the locations of the individual TLD name servers, i.e.: where to find the server that lists all domain names for
I can't see why other countries could not choose to maintain their own root files for use by ISPs in their country (or multi-national trade alliance). This way, even if the US goes genuinely nuts and cuts off international access (don't worry, the megacorps won't let us), the various national TLDs would continue to work for the rest of the world.
On the other hand, suppose the US turns the one and only Root Zone File over to an agency of a quasi-governmental group that is not elected-by or held-accountable in any way, shape or form to any of the individual citizens of this planet, that gives equal voting power to representative democracies and authoritarian regimes of all sizes and that (perhaps understandably) and sometimes projects a general attitude towards the US of 'give us money and keep the NYPD from towing our illegally parked cars, but otherwise go bugger yourself.'
Given these two scenarios, I think it far more likely that a UN agency would decide to cut the US off from the internet than the US deciding to cut any other country off. And given that we did build it and pay for it in the first place and maintaining it functioning order is vital to the economic and security interests of the United States, I think it is the right, privilege and prerogative of the US to keep control of the root zone file and servers. Other countries can easily clone these files and servers in their own countries, controlled by their own agencies, for use by their own citizens and corporations, and until someone decides to very deliberately screw things up in one country, the change would be completely transparent to internet users worldwide.
To me, this is really boils down to the same debate as control of the GPS system. The ONLY difference is that with GPS, the US was adamant from the get-go that it was ours to control as we pleased (we did pledge (not quite a sworn promise or treaty, but a pledge) to not use selective denial outside of war zones, but that's it). Realizing how important GPS had become, Europe decided to build Galileo (whether they actually produce the funding is another story for another day). Given how important the internet is, why there isn't already a European equivalent to ICANN for managing European TLDs (is there?) is really beyond me.
So the choice that Microsoft and Apple have is to either play HDCP'd content the way they are told to play it (which is downgraded on non-HDCP monitors) or to not play it at all.
Then I would prefer, and others would as well, that they don't play at all. Nothing like telling a content provider that the increasingly dominant system for viewing said providers content won't work with their super-duper new revenue generating restrictions-laden format.
I assume you mean something like this: NWBrickCon
Already way ahead of you.
I also think it fair to mention one of the better places to buy older Lego sets and parts, Bricklink.com, though I may be biased because I am one of many people who sell parts through the site.
"Let red denote the fabricated data..." It just sounds so natural.
In fluid dynamics we prefer to use "computational results", sounds classier that way. (Disclaimer: I work in a wind tunnel lab so I may be biased towards experimental work.)
Given the current problems the Joint Strike Fighter is having with weight and cost increases, buying a fleet of Jedi Starfighters might just be cheaper in the long run.
In addition to working on Spaceship Two (or whatever they are going to call it) for Virgin Galactic, Burt Rutan and Scaled Composities are working with these fellows(note: annoying flash menus) on a project that can more directly benefit from the Spaceship One experience.
That they pay to send someone to Mars to put up the little signs along the interpretative trails.
Having lived near Eugene my entire life, I can confirm that they have exposed themselves to many interesting substances and other weird things, and thus should not be used as a baseline for studying the effects of ELF radio waves.
Actually, very old bombs (and other explosives) will tend to greatly exceed their original specifications after being left to sit for a very long time. This is because whatever was added to the explosives to make the mixture stable enough to be transported safely will tend to separate out. As a result, the bomb becomes very unstable, sometimes to the point where moving it to abuprtly will cause it to go off.
I am sure they have thought of this, physics being rather bright types, but as a veteran of 2 credits of astrodynamics: Could it be that during a solar eclipse, both the Moon and the Sun are aligned exactly with your local gravity vector, but pulling in the oppositie direction, thus causing a small reduction in net gravitational acceleration. If they were to make measurements while a solar eclipse was happening on the exact opposite side of the planet, a slight increase in the net acceleration would probably be noticed.