My wish list was not in any way intended to be a gripe about how he did the wonderful things he has been doing. It was intended as an appreciation of what his posting has illustrated so beautifully and a speculation on what else might be done in the future (perhaps by others or even an official project), inspired by what he did so far, to extend it and produce an even more useful teaching aid or perhaps some new science data.
I'm sorry my post was worded so that this wasn't clear to you and apologize to anyone else who might have misunderstood my intent.
But I'd love to see it without the vehicle obscuring it. It would help to get a better visual grasp of the structure of the aurora itself.
From this you can see that the green glow is low and the red glow above it and diffuse. Without the obscuration you could get a better idea of the pattern of the intersection of the magnetically guided particle stream(s) with the atmosphere.
I've never really followed the arguments behind why everyone hates software patents. I'm not trolling here, please help me understand.
Building and marketing a hardware product ("an arrangement of matter") requires a large investment and considerable time. Cost recovery takes a while once it comes to market and second-movers already making similar things have a major advantage: They can quickly clone the improvement represented by the invention, come to market, and suck out the profit needed by the inventor and his supporters. Good for the consumer - for THIS invention. Bad for the consumer because this means nobody does much inventing because there's no money in it. And inventions in matter arrangement tend to have a long time before obsolescence. So granting a limited-time monopoly to the inventor in return for general availability of the invention's technique once the patent expires is believed to do more general good by incentiveizing than it does harm by restricting and impeding other designers.
Software has a much faster timescale and much lower production and distribution costs. It's already (more than) adequately protected against straightforward cloning by copyright: A potential competitor must redesign or clean-room reverse engineer rather than copying the distribution medium. This typically takes months - enough time for a good software product to pay off the investment with a huge profit and establish a long-term market presence. This provides more than adequate incentive to build new and better software inventions without government invention.
By the time a patent on software expires the original products are mostly long obsolete. Meanwhile, many generations of software must be written avoiding this patented technique - and every OTHER patented technique. This quickly creates an impassible "MINE field" where anyone writing new software will unavoidably infringe a large number of patents and be chased by patent holders yelling "MINE!". Most software construction consists of combining existing techniques in useful new ways with perhaps a small amount of new ideas incorporated.
So not only are software patents unnecessary, they retard progress far more by blocking new uses of existing ideas than they encourage development and release of new ideas that wouldn't be pursued without them. They're an economic disaster for the people of any country that is suckered into granting them.
... the 19th century attempts of the Indiana legislature to pass a law that the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter is exactly 3, not approximately 3.1416.
While I have not researched this myself, I hear that the Pi=3 legislation was a rider which was attached to another bill in an attempt by some of the legislators to both ridicule and kill that bill.
Essentially it was a way to say that passing the original bill was equivalent to passing a law regulating the timing and height of tides or specifying that the sun not come up until noon on particular days. It also opened anyone who voted for the bill to ridicule come next campaign season. "This guy is so dumb he voted to make pi equal to 3."
Seriously, why do movies generate so much nerd rage?
Because they never get the tech straight and it blows the "willing suspension of disbelief" needed to enjoy the films - after you've paid all this money on the promise you will be entertained.
Examples from Independence Day:
- The mother ship is a quarter the mass of the moon and they put it in near Earth orbit without cracking the planet open with tides, making significant changes in the orbits of the Earth and Moon, or even causing noticeable tidal disruption of the Earth's shipping.
- They can cross interstellar space with a fleet but have to crack into our comsats to get a signal to the other side of the planet? They never heard of using one of their OWN ships for a relay, or directional antennas, or even moonbounce?
- Their entire network is susceptible to a Macintosh worm? If there's ONE THING that is technology specific and guaranteed not to operate on a separately-designed computer built by people from another planet with no previous contact with Earth. it's a worm. What did these guys do? Steal the plans from Woz and Jobs? GIVE the plans to Woz and Jobs?
Gimmie a break.
= = = =
I understand that one thing which surprised the filmmakers was the audience reaction when the aliens blasted the Whitehouse: A standing ovation! (During the Clinton years no less.)
Wait, things have to actually conserve energy in order to get people to feel good about saving energy with them? When did this happen?
When some nerds accepted the global warming and/or other green rhetoric - but still were nerds enough to demand more than just claims for the remediation schemes.
They could store some power while it's charging things and use that to turn it off. Say a big capacitor - which is holding the output at +5, with the +5 shutting things down by biasing the gate of a FET or IGBT. Nothing but leakage currents (which can be too small to measure) until the charge finally leaks away and it turns on long enough to reestablish it.
Or it can charge its own internal battery when it's charging something else and shut down its draw for months at a time. (Of course this takes the "vampire current" it would have drawn over months and concentrates it during the period the device is charging the external load...).
Combine the ideas: A battery to hold the output at +5ish for years without drawing line power. A sensitive relay with its coil in series with the output (or controlled by a low-leakage transistor ditto), drawing no power when it - and the line - are off. Relay turns on the charging circuit which refreshes the battery while charging the load.
Or put a mechanical switch in the socket where you plug in the charging cord of the device. B-)
IMHO "vampire currents" are blown far out of proportion. We're talking pennies a year of electricity even with most of the existing devices. While making them a true zero (without a mechanical switch) is nice, something that makes their load very small is just about as nice. But if the premium price for the device is more than the cost of the power the cheaper device would burn in a decade it's a financial loss. Also it's likely an energy loss, once you count the energy to make the extra components to cut out the vampire draw. So you don't even get feel-good-I'm-so-green benefits.
Pitch black night vision goggles ? Wow... is that like the photoshop filter that can take photos taken with the lense cap on and convert them to full colour pictures ?
I think "pitch black night vision goggles" is a term-of-art for night vision goggles that can produce usable images at light levels that would APPEAR pitch black to an unaided eye - though there are enough photons available that with sufficient amplification you don't need added illumination.
- It replaces the in-chip photodetector with an on-top-of-chip detector, allowing all the real estate on the chip be used for the REST of the system rather than reserving most of it for light sensors. That means you can use bigger features (and cheaper processes) - and/or get more pixels by shrinking the features back down a bit.
- It gives about a 4x sensitivity improvement. (2x because the quantum dots are more sensitive, another 2x because they get to be on top (so the light isn't attenuated by chip structures) and cover the whole pixel rather than part of it.) You can use that to make 4x more sensitive pixels of the same size, 4 times more pixels of the same sensitivity, or some other tradeoff.
The CCP are hostile and dishonest towards foreigners not because it's in their interests, but because it's in their nature.
It's also in the (perceived and possibly actual) best interests of the tyrants in power (even if not in the best interests of China as a whole).
They're keeping a quarter of the world's population under control by force and by suppression of information. A free flow of information is likely to collapse their power structure - and circulate the news of their past crimes so they end up under the rubble or dancing at the ends of ropes.
From the standpoint of China, several billion growing pies is better than several billion very small pies. From the standpoint of the leaders a big piece of several billion small pies is better than being dead while there are several billion growing pies being consumed by happy Chinese.
The trick is for a new generation of leaders to make a big point of opening things up before they accumulate an unforgivable backlog of "bad karma". Then, though the empire might partially collapse, the governmental hunk of the pie end up smaller, and the people who opened things might be viewed as having fumbled the ball politically, they also get to be heroes and live through the shakeup.
The Chinese rulers have the (ongoing) example of the Former Soviet Union to show they what can happen if they open the information floodgates. They can try that. Or they can try to hold on to power and see if they can patch the leaks in the dam fast enough to avoid a flood.
The choclea evolved from the lateral line of the fishes, coiling up to fit inside the head and modifying the wave path so what used to map into direction now maps into pitch.
Perhaps that might be reverse engineered so we can generate a sound that produces the original "fish acoustic vision" sensation of directionality and intensity for impulse noise ("something is twitching THERE").
(And perhaps that's what the "sounds like modem tones, maps into vision" thing mentioned earlier is up to?)
(I had finally unscrewed their previous AJAX-or-whatever abortion sufficiently to be able to watch their live feed channels - with manual poking EVERY TIME. But I'd given up on figuring out their interface to their earlier, partial, library offerings.)
Just tried this stupid thing: With only c-spanvideo.org enabled it showed me a static image with no controls. Adding netsuite.com made it hang my browser at 98% CPU. Had to kill it and restart.
Don't they have any competent web designers that actually TEST their product with non-IE browsers?
Yet another example of the adaptability of the human brain.
More than some might realize.
Some decades ago (when a camera was not practically portable) a similar device was built with an array of vibrators on the back for the interface. This worked as well (though the resolution was necessarily low both because of the size of the vibrators and because the back has a low density of touch sensors).
But one event was telling:
At one point the camera tipped over into the scene it was viewing. The subject reflexively threw his hands up to "protect his eyes". (Later the blind-from-birth subject said he now had a referent for the word "looming".)
This event implies that the subject's brain had routed the input from the touch sensors on his back into his visual processing at a stage before the "dangerously close incoming object" detection. So he was "really seeing" without eyes.
Any voting system is subject to fraud. It's only the way of committing the fraud that changes.
It is also the scale. Electronic voting makes nation-wide fraud possible. Electronic voting gives a single point of failure for fraud : the machine manufacturer.
Bingo!
But it introduces not one but several single points of failure, of which the manufacturer is just the most obvious. In addition there are, at least:
- The distribution channel for software updates (OS, voting app, ballot configuration entry,...)
- The hardware itself. (For instance, NO voting machine should EVER use a chipset that supports Intel AMT, which is a hardware back door that is invisible to the software running on the machine and can completely take it over.)
- Anyone who can crack into them - opening the covers, injecting information through ports, wireless, or interface bugs, hacking their communications if they're network enabled, etc. (The people who handle and transport them, the people who update their software or load the ballot, the poll workers who operate them, the voters who have their hands on them in shrouded conditions, anybody nearby with some electronics if they're radio-crackable,...)
- Bugs in all that software and hardware.
and ditto for the central servers that collect and summarize the results.
Someone sees headline They assume they know what is in the article, and in a panic frenzy to get slashdot cock waving rights, they just submit the story...probably by justs clicking on a button on the webpage.
How about:
Someone see headline, reads the article, decides this is important "news for nerds", and composes a Slashdot submission.
The submission works its way through the queue and eventually gets accepted and posted.
Before (or very shortly after) the Slashdot posting makes it through the queue, the original article draws comments and feedback and the author posts a correction at the top. Though the posting might have been dead-on on the basis of the uncorrected article, the correction aborts the original point of the submission and would make the submitter look foolish, IF he had seen it before submitting.
Why would you want IBM, the largest patent troll in history, to buy them?
Because IBM has built a large business supporting open source solutions in large corporate customers. They're smart enough to feed the goose that lays their golden eggs - and have a track record of doing so.
IBM was ONCE a problem. But they've been through a mid-life crisis since then, and came out as one of the best "corporate citizens" the Open Source community could have for a neighbor. Past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior, but recent past behavior is a better predictor than distant past behavior.
Why would any other Linux distributer want to purchase Novell after the deal they made with microsoft? That would make them part of that agreement as well.
You mean the deal that, if IBM bought Novell and ran it as a wholly-owned subsidiary, would give IBM access to all Microsoft's patents while Microsoft had access only to Novell's?
Naw. NO open-source company would want to be thrown into THAT brier patch, would they?
I hope you're right, Bruce. (Did the terms of the BSD deal ever come out publicly? If so I missed it.)
My concern is that SCO only had a license, while Novell has the actual copyrights, for whatever they're worth. IMHO that could make just enough of a difference that we could be in for another ride on the legal mill-of-the-gods merry-go-round - with Microsoft funding it openly and directly from their Marianas-Trench-deep pockets.
Or (worse!) that the perceived potential for such an action could be used to put the fear of litigation into potential open-source adopters once again. THAT could last as long as the copyrights - which means effectively forever - while Microsoft doesn't have to do ANYTHING but whisper a little untraceable FUD while publicly claiming (in a non-binding way) they don't intend to ever actually sue. B-(
One thing seems clear to me: Microsoft isn't about to run out of money if they decided to hit the courts one more time. (Fortunately they ARE perceived as a monopolist.)
If Microsoft were to buy them we could see a re-run of IBM vs. SCO, with Microsoft playing SCO but, having learned from SCO where the land mines are and having the REAL copyright ownership, going after any places where they might win and winning. They might be able to collect a "Microsoft Tax" on any remaining Unix vendors that are still running under ongoing licenses. They might find places where other vendors weren't covered by previous licenses. They might find some code leakage from Unix to open source projects and go after them, beating them into submission or bankruptcy, maybe winning on the merits, maybe winning by just having big pockets while open-sourcerers live on a shoestring. This could be a disaster for IBM, open source, any remaining proprietary Unix vendors, etc.
If IBM buys Novell they are protected from this sort of attack on their current business model from now on. They have the option of releasing the Unix code base under open-source licenses. I could go on.
IBM has the bux, the incentive, and the smarts. So I'm not just hoping, but betting, on them.
Fortunately, wind and solar match certain loads.
on
Gas Wants To Kill the Wind
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Wind and solar power have radically different properties with respect to the national grid, and you can't just plunk them in and go on.
Actually their properties are a good enough match for certain loads that, within appropriate fraction-of-total-grid-capacity limits, you CAN just plunk them in and go on. (Part of the concern is over the push to exceed those fractions.)
Solar and wind both vary wildly at a single-mill or roof-full-of-panels level. But spread them out over a few square miles (do individual clouds, gusts, and storm cells aren't the issue) and multiple sites separated by tens and hundreds of miles (so local weather timing also gets many distinct samples) and the rapid variations average out. They become at least as predictable as the weather - which is very predictable at a 3-day level.
Solar matches the air conditioning load pretty closely - though it leads it a tad. Wind does the same with a slight lag. complimenting solar. It also peaks in the afternoon (due to "lake effect" and tracks the general load peak very well.
Wind also has a component that tracks HVAC load well: Temperature differences drive both wind speeds and need to heat/cool to keep things comfy, while wind speeds drive heat loss-gain through insulation by air infiltration and conduction between surfaces and the air. So higher winds drive both higher geneeation and higher heating/cooling loads to consume the generated power.
So up to a point adding solar and especially wind to the grid - if it's spread out a bit - IMPROVES the grid's ability to handle the cyclic nature of the load and REDUCES the variability that you need to cover with "peaking plants". You still need to keep some other capacity on line to cover the variations. But you needed that anyhow: The load is almost totally UNcontrolled and can vary even more rapidly than the output of a wind farm as a storm cell passes through it. The name of the game is to match the two sides of this equation.
The problem is the high voltage transmission infrastructure that no one wants to build.
So let the price of power where the wind is (and when it's blowing) be low. Wire 'em up within the state under state law.
If a power company wants to run lines to sell this cheap power elsewhere, it can spring the bucks to do so - and tack on the cost pf the new lines when it sells the power. And maybe get some more bucks by running more expensive power back across the same lines to the consumers inside the state when the wind isn't blowing.
Then the east coast companies can take their choice:
- Run the wires and sell the wind power on the east coast - with a premium to cover the wires, but still cheaper than power generated locally using fuel.
- Don't run the wires, sell the fuel-generated power, and risk being out-competed by a company that DOES string cables (if the cost differential is enough that wiring up some big industrial consumers will pay for the infrastructure).
The market handles this JUST FINE - if you don't try to "fix" it with regulation (or let the existing large players use regulations to cheat and support their now-broken business model).
Slashdot Mirror
I thank him too. In spades.
My wish list was not in any way intended to be a gripe about how he did the wonderful things he has been doing. It was intended as an appreciation of what his posting has illustrated so beautifully and a speculation on what else might be done in the future (perhaps by others or even an official project), inspired by what he did so far, to extend it and produce an even more useful teaching aid or perhaps some new science data.
I'm sorry my post was worded so that this wasn't clear to you and apologize to anyone else who might have misunderstood my intent.
But I'd love to see it without the vehicle obscuring it. It would help to get a better visual grasp of the structure of the aurora itself.
From this you can see that the green glow is low and the red glow above it and diffuse. Without the obscuration you could get a better idea of the pattern of the intersection of the magnetically guided particle stream(s) with the atmosphere.
I've never really followed the arguments behind why everyone hates software patents. I'm not trolling here, please help me understand.
Building and marketing a hardware product ("an arrangement of matter") requires a large investment and considerable time. Cost recovery takes a while once it comes to market and second-movers already making similar things have a major advantage: They can quickly clone the improvement represented by the invention, come to market, and suck out the profit needed by the inventor and his supporters. Good for the consumer - for THIS invention. Bad for the consumer because this means nobody does much inventing because there's no money in it. And inventions in matter arrangement tend to have a long time before obsolescence. So granting a limited-time monopoly to the inventor in return for general availability of the invention's technique once the patent expires is believed to do more general good by incentiveizing than it does harm by restricting and impeding other designers.
Software has a much faster timescale and much lower production and distribution costs. It's already (more than) adequately protected against straightforward cloning by copyright: A potential competitor must redesign or clean-room reverse engineer rather than copying the distribution medium. This typically takes months - enough time for a good software product to pay off the investment with a huge profit and establish a long-term market presence. This provides more than adequate incentive to build new and better software inventions without government invention.
By the time a patent on software expires the original products are mostly long obsolete. Meanwhile, many generations of software must be written avoiding this patented technique - and every OTHER patented technique. This quickly creates an impassible "MINE field" where anyone writing new software will unavoidably infringe a large number of patents and be chased by patent holders yelling "MINE!". Most software construction consists of combining existing techniques in useful new ways with perhaps a small amount of new ideas incorporated.
So not only are software patents unnecessary, they retard progress far more by blocking new uses of existing ideas than they encourage development and release of new ideas that wouldn't be pursued without them. They're an economic disaster for the people of any country that is suckered into granting them.
... the 19th century attempts of the Indiana legislature to pass a law that the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter is exactly 3, not approximately 3.1416.
While I have not researched this myself, I hear that the Pi=3 legislation was a rider which was attached to another bill in an attempt by some of the legislators to both ridicule and kill that bill.
Essentially it was a way to say that passing the original bill was equivalent to passing a law regulating the timing and height of tides or specifying that the sun not come up until noon on particular days. It also opened anyone who voted for the bill to ridicule come next campaign season. "This guy is so dumb he voted to make pi equal to 3."
Seriously, why do movies generate so much nerd rage?
Because they never get the tech straight and it blows the "willing suspension of disbelief" needed to enjoy the films - after you've paid all this money on the promise you will be entertained.
Examples from Independence Day:
- The mother ship is a quarter the mass of the moon and they put it in near Earth orbit without cracking the planet open with tides, making significant changes in the orbits of the Earth and Moon, or even causing noticeable tidal disruption of the Earth's shipping.
- They can cross interstellar space with a fleet but have to crack into our comsats to get a signal to the other side of the planet? They never heard of using one of their OWN ships for a relay, or directional antennas, or even moonbounce?
- Their entire network is susceptible to a Macintosh worm? If there's ONE THING that is technology specific and guaranteed not to operate on a separately-designed computer built by people from another planet with no previous contact with Earth. it's a worm. What did these guys do? Steal the plans from Woz and Jobs? GIVE the plans to Woz and Jobs?
Gimmie a break.
= = = =
I understand that one thing which surprised the filmmakers was the audience reaction when the aliens blasted the Whitehouse: A standing ovation! (During the Clinton years no less.)
anti-anti pirate-pirate-pirates?
(Look, Natasha! Is moose and squirrel!)
Wait, things have to actually conserve energy in order to get people to feel good about saving energy with them? When did this happen?
When some nerds accepted the global warming and/or other green rhetoric - but still were nerds enough to demand more than just claims for the remediation schemes.
They could store some power while it's charging things and use that to turn it off. Say a big capacitor - which is holding the output at +5, with the +5 shutting things down by biasing the gate of a FET or IGBT. Nothing but leakage currents (which can be too small to measure) until the charge finally leaks away and it turns on long enough to reestablish it.
Or it can charge its own internal battery when it's charging something else and shut down its draw for months at a time. (Of course this takes the "vampire current" it would have drawn over months and concentrates it during the period the device is charging the external load...).
Combine the ideas: A battery to hold the output at +5ish for years without drawing line power. A sensitive relay with its coil in series with the output (or controlled by a low-leakage transistor ditto), drawing no power when it - and the line - are off. Relay turns on the charging circuit which refreshes the battery while charging the load.
Or put a mechanical switch in the socket where you plug in the charging cord of the device. B-)
IMHO "vampire currents" are blown far out of proportion. We're talking pennies a year of electricity even with most of the existing devices. While making them a true zero (without a mechanical switch) is nice, something that makes their load very small is just about as nice. But if the premium price for the device is more than the cost of the power the cheaper device would burn in a decade it's a financial loss. Also it's likely an energy loss, once you count the energy to make the extra components to cut out the vampire draw. So you don't even get feel-good-I'm-so-green benefits.
Pitch black night vision goggles ? ... is that like the photoshop filter that can take photos
Wow
taken with the lense cap on and convert them to full colour pictures ?
I think "pitch black night vision goggles" is a term-of-art for night vision goggles that can produce usable images at light levels that would APPEAR pitch black to an unaided eye - though there are enough photons available that with sufficient amplification you don't need added illumination.
According to the articles, both.
In particular:
- It replaces the in-chip photodetector with an on-top-of-chip detector, allowing all the real estate on the chip be used for the REST of the system rather than reserving most of it for light sensors. That means you can use bigger features (and cheaper processes) - and/or get more pixels by shrinking the features back down a bit.
- It gives about a 4x sensitivity improvement. (2x because the quantum dots are more sensitive, another 2x because they get to be on top (so the light isn't attenuated by chip structures) and cover the whole pixel rather than part of it.) You can use that to make 4x more sensitive pixels of the same size, 4 times more pixels of the same sensitivity, or some other tradeoff.
(This comment intentionally left blank.)
yes, there's internet cafe. but there's highly efficient people's police, and net cafe owners who won't think twice to report to the authority.
I seem to recall a previous /. article about the Chinese requiring the internet cafes to record I.D. on the users and log their activity...
The CCP are hostile and dishonest towards foreigners not because it's in their interests, but because it's in their nature.
It's also in the (perceived and possibly actual) best interests of the tyrants in power (even if not in the best interests of China as a whole).
They're keeping a quarter of the world's population under control by force and by suppression of information. A free flow of information is likely to collapse their power structure - and circulate the news of their past crimes so they end up under the rubble or dancing at the ends of ropes.
From the standpoint of China, several billion growing pies is better than several billion very small pies. From the standpoint of the leaders a big piece of several billion small pies is better than being dead while there are several billion growing pies being consumed by happy Chinese.
The trick is for a new generation of leaders to make a big point of opening things up before they accumulate an unforgivable backlog of "bad karma". Then, though the empire might partially collapse, the governmental hunk of the pie end up smaller, and the people who opened things might be viewed as having fumbled the ball politically, they also get to be heroes and live through the shakeup.
The Chinese rulers have the (ongoing) example of the Former Soviet Union to show they what can happen if they open the information floodgates. They can try that. Or they can try to hold on to power and see if they can patch the leaks in the dam fast enough to avoid a flood.
Yo, Dude!
I TURNED IT BACK ON.
It STILL didn't work.
The choclea evolved from the lateral line of the fishes, coiling up to fit inside the head and modifying the wave path so what used to map into direction now maps into pitch.
Perhaps that might be reverse engineered so we can generate a sound that produces the original "fish acoustic vision" sensation of directionality and intensity for impulse noise ("something is twitching THERE").
(And perhaps that's what the "sounds like modem tones, maps into vision" thing mentioned earlier is up to?)
... so it works with Firefox and Noscript...
(I had finally unscrewed their previous AJAX-or-whatever abortion sufficiently to be able to watch their live feed channels - with manual poking EVERY TIME. But I'd given up on figuring out their interface to their earlier, partial, library offerings.)
Just tried this stupid thing: With only c-spanvideo.org enabled it showed me a static image with no controls. Adding netsuite.com made it hang my browser at 98% CPU. Had to kill it and restart.
Don't they have any competent web designers that actually TEST their product with non-IE browsers?
Yet another example of the adaptability of the human brain.
More than some might realize.
Some decades ago (when a camera was not practically portable) a similar device was built with an array of vibrators on the back for the interface. This worked as well (though the resolution was necessarily low both because of the size of the vibrators and because the back has a low density of touch sensors).
But one event was telling:
At one point the camera tipped over into the scene it was viewing. The subject reflexively threw his hands up to "protect his eyes". (Later the blind-from-birth subject said he now had a referent for the word "looming".)
This event implies that the subject's brain had routed the input from the touch sensors on his back into his visual processing at a stage before the "dangerously close incoming object" detection. So he was "really seeing" without eyes.
Bingo!
But it introduces not one but several single points of failure, of which the manufacturer is just the most obvious. In addition there are, at least:
- The distribution channel for software updates (OS, voting app, ballot configuration entry, ...)
- The hardware itself. (For instance, NO voting machine should EVER use a chipset that supports Intel AMT, which is a hardware back door that is invisible to the software running on the machine and can completely take it over.)
- Anyone who can crack into them - opening the covers, injecting information through ports, wireless, or interface bugs, hacking their communications if they're network enabled, etc. (The people who handle and transport them, the people who update their software or load the ballot, the poll workers who operate them, the voters who have their hands on them in shrouded conditions, anybody nearby with some electronics if they're radio-crackable, ...)
- Bugs in all that software and hardware.
and ditto for the central servers that collect and summarize the results.
Someone sees headline
They assume they know what is in the article, and in a panic frenzy to get slashdot cock waving rights, they just submit the story...probably by justs clicking on a button on the webpage.
How about:
Someone see headline, reads the article, decides this is important "news for nerds", and composes a Slashdot submission.
The submission works its way through the queue and eventually gets accepted and posted.
Before (or very shortly after) the Slashdot posting makes it through the queue, the original article draws comments and feedback and the author posts a correction at the top. Though the posting might have been dead-on on the basis of the uncorrected article, the correction aborts the original point of the submission and would make the submitter look foolish, IF he had seen it before submitting.
Why would you want IBM, the largest patent troll in history, to buy them?
Because IBM has built a large business supporting open source solutions in large corporate customers. They're smart enough to feed the goose that lays their golden eggs - and have a track record of doing so.
IBM was ONCE a problem. But they've been through a mid-life crisis since then, and came out as one of the best "corporate citizens" the Open Source community could have for a neighbor. Past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior, but recent past behavior is a better predictor than distant past behavior.
Why would any other Linux distributer want to purchase Novell after the deal they made with microsoft? That would make them part of that agreement as well.
You mean the deal that, if IBM bought Novell and ran it as a wholly-owned subsidiary, would give IBM access to all Microsoft's patents while Microsoft had access only to Novell's?
Naw. NO open-source company would want to be thrown into THAT brier patch, would they?
I hope you're right, Bruce. (Did the terms of the BSD deal ever come out publicly? If so I missed it.)
My concern is that SCO only had a license, while Novell has the actual copyrights, for whatever they're worth. IMHO that could make just enough of a difference that we could be in for another ride on the legal mill-of-the-gods merry-go-round - with Microsoft funding it openly and directly from their Marianas-Trench-deep pockets.
Or (worse!) that the perceived potential for such an action could be used to put the fear of litigation into potential open-source adopters once again. THAT could last as long as the copyrights - which means effectively forever - while Microsoft doesn't have to do ANYTHING but whisper a little untraceable FUD while publicly claiming (in a non-binding way) they don't intend to ever actually sue. B-(
One thing seems clear to me: Microsoft isn't about to run out of money if they decided to hit the courts one more time. (Fortunately they ARE perceived as a monopolist.)
Novell still has the copyrights to Unix.
If Microsoft were to buy them we could see a re-run of IBM vs. SCO, with Microsoft playing SCO but, having learned from SCO where the land mines are and having the REAL copyright ownership, going after any places where they might win and winning. They might be able to collect a "Microsoft Tax" on any remaining Unix vendors that are still running under ongoing licenses. They might find places where other vendors weren't covered by previous licenses. They might find some code leakage from Unix to open source projects and go after them, beating them into submission or bankruptcy, maybe winning on the merits, maybe winning by just having big pockets while open-sourcerers live on a shoestring. This could be a disaster for IBM, open source, any remaining proprietary Unix vendors, etc.
If IBM buys Novell they are protected from this sort of attack on their current business model from now on. They have the option of releasing the Unix code base under open-source licenses. I could go on.
IBM has the bux, the incentive, and the smarts. So I'm not just hoping, but betting, on them.
Wind and solar power have radically different properties with respect to the national grid, and you can't just plunk them in and go on.
Actually their properties are a good enough match for certain loads that, within appropriate fraction-of-total-grid-capacity limits, you CAN just plunk them in and go on. (Part of the concern is over the push to exceed those fractions.)
Solar and wind both vary wildly at a single-mill or roof-full-of-panels level. But spread them out over a few square miles (do individual clouds, gusts, and storm cells aren't the issue) and multiple sites separated by tens and hundreds of miles (so local weather timing also gets many distinct samples) and the rapid variations average out. They become at least as predictable as the weather - which is very predictable at a 3-day level.
Solar matches the air conditioning load pretty closely - though it leads it a tad. Wind does the same with a slight lag. complimenting solar. It also peaks in the afternoon (due to "lake effect" and tracks the general load peak very well.
Wind also has a component that tracks HVAC load well: Temperature differences drive both wind speeds and need to heat/cool to keep things comfy, while wind speeds drive heat loss-gain through insulation by air infiltration and conduction between surfaces and the air. So higher winds drive both higher geneeation and higher heating/cooling loads to consume the generated power.
So up to a point adding solar and especially wind to the grid - if it's spread out a bit - IMPROVES the grid's ability to handle the cyclic nature of the load and REDUCES the variability that you need to cover with "peaking plants". You still need to keep some other capacity on line to cover the variations. But you needed that anyhow: The load is almost totally UNcontrolled and can vary even more rapidly than the output of a wind farm as a storm cell passes through it. The name of the game is to match the two sides of this equation.
The problem is the high voltage transmission infrastructure that no one wants to build.
So let the price of power where the wind is (and when it's blowing) be low. Wire 'em up within the state under state law.
If a power company wants to run lines to sell this cheap power elsewhere, it can spring the bucks to do so - and tack on the cost pf the new lines when it sells the power. And maybe get some more bucks by running more expensive power back across the same lines to the consumers inside the state when the wind isn't blowing.
Then the east coast companies can take their choice:
- Run the wires and sell the wind power on the east coast - with a premium to cover the wires, but still cheaper than power generated locally using fuel.
- Don't run the wires, sell the fuel-generated power, and risk being out-competed by a company that DOES string cables (if the cost differential is enough that wiring up some big industrial consumers will pay for the infrastructure).
The market handles this JUST FINE - if you don't try to "fix" it with regulation (or let the existing large players use regulations to cheat and support their now-broken business model).