In America we have Fox (right wing), CNN (left wing), and NBC (very left wing).... and CBS (left wing) and...
Note that the right-wing material on Fox News has been nearly exclusively the Neocon faction's. There are several other factions, which Fox News has been perfectly willing to stonewall - except when they get enough exposure that Fox News switches to ridiculing them. Some of these other factions still have no effective news outlet except the Internet. (Although with the drastic failure of the Neocons in the last election and the economic collapse, the financial side of Fox News is starting to carry some of the other factions' economic stuff.)
The TFA (one of them) says: Since the tax is small, less than half a percent of gross revenue, it does not violate the Commerce Clause of the Constitution, which regulates interstate trade.
Say WHAT?
The commerce clause says:
[The Congress shall have power] To regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes;
Not "except for state taxes under one percent". All commerce. Every last copper.
(And how is a tax totaling a billion dollars "small"?)
If nothing else in the article seems bogus that's an incandescant red flag.
Can you trust the bios... All the software on voting machines should be testably open and some effort made to keep them safe from virtual machines...
And similarly additional posters object to potentially hacked chips and extraneous RF interfaces...
I agree with you there. Replace or reflash the BIOS ROM. Inspect for extraneous interfaces. And of course be sure the CPU is not one that supports Intel AMT or similar schemes that can open sneak channels and get between the main CPU(s) and their peripherals.
However, except for the BIOS I'd expect such issues (wireless, hacked chips,...) to be mainly applicable to future hardware.
The Diebold machines are somewhat older technology and even if they were deliberately designed for election cheating I'd expect the focus to have been on the software. Providing such hardware backdoors that would work WITHOUT BIOS, OS, or application support would have made the project too big and leak-prone with the technology available at the time.
These days it's essentially off-the-shelf. So lots of care needs to be taken with the components and hardware design. (For starters: NO Intel AMT-capable parts, or others with "remote administration" backdoors.)
I've reverse-engineered a lot of code from stripped object back to source. It got more difficult to do manually with some of the odd flows that RISC processors do and progressively more optimizing compilers, but it's hardly impossible. And there are fine tools to support it now.
Once you get to uncommented source for something where you roughly understand the program's function it's usually pretty easy to figure out what the author intended. Then you can comment it.
The fun part is finding errors. (I recall one where I was reverse-engineering a Unix driver and identified a place where the programmer had written (approximately) "if (a=b)" when he meant "if (a==b)". It was doubly fun to feed this back to a guy in the OS group - especially when I walked him through the code to the statement and he asked about a nearby assertion which had been conditionally not-compiled into the object that I was working from. He hadn't really internalized that I'd decompiled to source until I pointed out that I couldn't see the assertion. B-) )
If so it could let a lot of counties currently stuck with that PoC switch to the open source code without buying extra hardware. Just load the free software in the existing hardware (and maybe add a printer).
The Diebold machines are essentially PCs with touchscreens so they shouldn't be a tough port for Linux and the apps.
The Drudge Report today has a picture of Julius Caeser with the headline "Julius at FCC wants to regulate Internet".
While I agree with much of what you are saying, some such reactions are to be expected.
Up to now the government has kept its hands almost entirely off the Internet (and virtually all moves to regulate it have been aborted). Now the FCC proposes to issue regulations on the details of packet forwarding. This is a major change.
There is considerable question as to whether "naive network neutrality" regulations might destroy the differentiated service features necessary for streaming media and large file transfers to "play well together" in a common forwarding architecture. The details of this has, so far, been driven by (sometimes monopolistic) market players innovating. Regulations will pour metaphorical concrete into the solution space, limiting the innovations to the set of solutions the regulators permit. We've seen how that stunted the telephone industry. The potential for damage to the Internet is far greater.
So of course there is opposition to solving problem that is basically cartel-forming and false-advertising with detailed regulation of the market. Followed, very likely, by stagnation of market growth and deployment of new services, degradation of price/performance ratio, ongoing increases in regulatory tweaks to try to fix the regulatory problem, and finally "regulatory capture" where the regulated take over the regulatory boards.
One of my favorite fake-Confuscisms applies here: "Virgin like bubble. One prick, all gone!"
[Argument that pushing FOSS mandates for government operations is an interference in the free market - consisting of government purchasing agents "expertly" and "freely" choosing proprietary software.]
I was under the impression that the pushing of FOSS in government was about several other things:
1) Keeping public documents and channels of required communications with government in freely readable formats, rather than locked up in proprietary formats that require those governed to purchase compatible software and/or agree to licensing terms in order to communicate.
2) Keeping the details of the operation of government open and auditable, rather than exposing it to malware inside of black-box software products.
3) Cost containment - imposed on the government by its citizens, who are the primary payers of the taxes that pay for the government's IT operation.
1) and 2) are clearly "open information" issues, where it's obvious which choice is "open". Only 3) even touches on either "free market" or "choice in software" ideals that you claim are being violated. And given that governments (in republics at least) are supposed to be agencies of their citizens, this decision is properly the right of those citizens if they chose to issue such policy directives to their hired agents rather than relying solely on the agents' judgement.
The GPL requires copyright to be enforced. You can't place terms (such as releasing the source code) on distribution if distribution is already completely legal.
The GPL exists to fix a problem with Copyright law: If you release a work in the public domain, somebody can make a modified version, copyright THAT, and enforce it against YOU. They can also create a compilation of a number of public domain works and copyright the compilation.
This means, for instance, that some commercial entity could fix a bug in or add a feature to your public-domain software product and you couldn't make the equivalent fix or add the equivalent feature. Or they could construct a distribution (ala Red Had or Debian) and copyright it, and no equivalent could be made - first Linux distribution gets a monopoly on Linux distributions.
GPL and most other FOSS licenses head this off by maintaining the copyright and using the licensing terms on the underlying work to deny adding such restrictions to derived works and compilations.
But without copyright the restrictions couldn't be added. Sure, something like the GPL would be unenforceable. But if someone were to release a bug fix or upgrade, anyone could reverse-engineer it and include the fix/upgrade in another version of the public-domain work. If someone made a compilation, anyone else could make a similar or identical compilation. Or they could just copy the fixed/upgraded version or compilation. So the GPL's purpose - allowing software set free to STAY free - would be realized and the GPL would be unnecessary.
... anyone who didn't ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO have a iPhone would be with [Verizon] due to network strength.
I'd have been with them since 2000 or so, when I first needed a cellphone, if they'd just put in ONE MORE TOWER. My Nevada place is on AT&T's LAST tower in the outskirts of the Reno-Taho/Carson City/Minden-Gardnerville/southbound-US395 coverage area and Verizon's last TWO towers are behind TWO hills and don't cover the valley. B-b
Sprint/Clearwire could have a bunch of customers, too, if they'd just put in a couple hotspots to relay from their Gardnerville tower to this dead spot. Right now all it's got is slow dialup (28k) and a mom-and-pop WiFi WISP(at $85ish/month to share a pair of T1s with several towns).
- PUBLIC facing web configuration? I have never, ever, ever, seen a router that did that. Not even cheesy home routers.
For a topper, try Intel's AMT.
Remote administration by a little board with its own computer.
- Always-on. (Goodbye battery life in powerdown mode on laptops.)
- Sits between the REAL computer and its network interfaces - "under", invisible to, inaccessable to and overriding the OS.
- Lets a remote administrator establish a tunnel to it (or reaches out to establish its own).
- Able to otherwise act as a man-in-the-middle for network traffic.
- Able to sniff and twiddle the rest of the system.
- Even able to turn it off.
Intended for remote administration of the machine and shutting it down to defend the LAN and VLAN from the machine if it becomes infected and/or any of its services stop mumbling occasional prayers to tell its watchdog function that they're sane.
My immediate reaction was "Remote administration? Yeah - by the NSA, DHS, Chinese spys, Russian malware gangs, and any tech-savvy terrorist group."
How do you know it's turned off? The BIOS says so. Yeah, right!
And most probably a policy of defending against legitimate IP suits as well, don't you think?
If the suit is legitimate the best strategy is to settle quickly for a reasonable royalty or an IP swap and small lump sum (for a little guy or a competing big guy respectively) rather than risk a large judgment and an injunction against shipping more product and supporting their user base.
I don't know that IBM follows this strategy. But I haven't seen any stories (or heard any rumors) in the last couple decades about IBM grinding a little guy down with big lawyers - or losing to one, either.
If the suit is legit and the potential damages are not chump change the little guys can get some big guns in court on a contingency basis. The law firm gets a sizable piece if they win it but the little guy gets even more. Or some up-and-coming lawyer gets maybe a third AND makes his rep as a giant-killer. No guarantee the court will render a correct judgement when the big guns are firing. But they try hard to get it right. The little guys certainly win enough that trying to crush them all is 'way risky.
Other companies HAVE such a public history. Recall Robert_Kearns, the guy who invented the intermittent windshield wiper, had it usurped by the auto companies, sued, and won big time. Or Sears, which was accused of stealing the design for a nifty folding carpentry workbench from its inventor but defended and won.
This might have earned them a few karma points if they had done this half a decade ago, it's a little too late now.
The company was in receivership - at least partly to get Darryl's hands off the controls before he crashed it into IBM's brick wall yet again. With him no longer making decisions the receivers didn't need his decision making any more - and continuing to pay his salary would be a violation of their fiduciary duty.
why doesn't IBM buy them up (or at least a controlling interest) and finally drop the curtain on SCO's last act?
Because IBM is a big pockets corp. They have a policy of defending against bogus IP suits rather than buying them off - because if they ever bought one off they'd be inundated with more.
Thus they and the legal system have played "mill of the gods" to SCO's grain and ground them slowly but exceedingly fine.
Now that SCO is in receivership and their antagonist-in-chief is in the unemployment line, they MAY consider their point proven. Or they may continue to grind until every i is dotted and t is crossed in the legal record - and any remaining stockholders (who should have known better and restrained Darryl, rather than cheering him on and hoping for a piece of IBM) are perhaps left with zero.
Wouldn't it make more sense... to park such a device at L4 or L5, where you wouldn't require *ANY* fuel to keep it in position?
I'll second that.
Jupiter might perturb the Mars L4 & L5 points too much. But the Earth's points should do just fine. They'd also have somewhat more solar power available and would be closer, fuel-wise, for installation, which should help as well.
George O. Smith proposed essentially this solution in the _Venus Equilateral_ series, between 1942 and 1945. He sited his relay at Venus L4 to relay among Earth/Moon and hypothetical settlements on Venus and Mars.
It's a scream to read these days, with a giant manned communications/research station in Venus orbit, using advanced vacuum tube technology and machinery scheduling messages by automatically splicing hyper-fast-moving punched paper tape. But the basic problem (sun gets in the way sometimes) / solution (relay at an L4/5 point to bounce messages around it) is still sound and the engineering thinking and team organization was well portrayed.
And finally: What's with the (extremely annoying) capitalisation of each word in a headline on Slashdot and many other places? That's bad practice and makes sentences (headlines too) less readable.
It's (American) English grammar for titles. Get used to it.
Why are you talking about Microsoft like it's alive?
Corporations (like governments, organized religions, and a number of other kinds of human organizations) meet essentially all the (non biochemical-chauvinistic) definitions of lifeforms. The legal definition of "person" was also expanded to include corporations.
So why shouldn't he talk about Micro$oft that way? B-)
...that it will be TCP/IP with a pinch of pixie dust. Probably just changing a few extensions and reusing old code.
I'd expect that (re)defining some of the values in the type-of-service / differentiated-service field and the router behavior for them, and coming up with tests to insure that routers are enforcing this behavior (or some equivalent to this), would be at least half the job.
The field was originally there for precisely that purpose. If you look at rfc 1791 you'll see that, for instance, the six lowest priority subfield values in the priority subfield (below two for local net and internet control messages) clone the GETS and AUTOVON telephone-call priority levels.
Combine that with some network topology and backup power upgrades, along with more disaster-robust alternatives for the current routing protocols and name service, and you should have it.
The original design was intended to survive nuclear attacks, find a route if one exists. and give different packets different handling so high priority messages beat lower priority and packets that can wait waited behind those that couldn't - while packets that couldn't wait would be dropped if they were delayed. Initial deployment with priority features underutilized (and protocols that "cheated") led to quality-of-service differentiation being unsupported. Meanwhile the massive expansion lead to several changes that made robustness fall back from the "survive nukes" ideal:
- ISPs and their customers changed the bulk of the transport from a net to a tree.
- routing table explosions lead to the replacement of the "every router knows everything necessary" protocol(s) with "ask the locals for directions" alternatives
- symbolic name -> IP address translation moved from a local file to a giant distibuted database.
- The underlying long-haul network transport evolved from a web of shortest-path point-to-point cables and beams to a few sparse loops of very high capacity optic fibers, concentrating large amounts of traffic in a small number of boxes and wires and limiting routing redundancy.
Defining a fix for these problems as an add-on or upgrade shouldn't be all that much work. The bulk of the cost would be DEPLOYING the changes, which would require massive buildouts.
... I'll not be buying machines with Intel processors.
Last thing in the world I need in my machine is a built-in hunk of big-brother remote-sniff-and-poke hardware between my processor and its network port and other I/O. Peek and poke UNDER the operating system and out of its control or view. "The Matrix Has My Laptop." Worse than the Blue Pill virtualization hack.
Look up "Intel AMT" and its subset "CIRA". (My tinfoil hat spun clear around when reading THOSE documents.)
And how do I know it's disabled? The proprietary BIOS TELLS me so? Yeah, right!
Bluetooth doesn't just ship data. It also forwards the network's 8 kHz clock, which is used for digitizing audio and keeping it synchronized with the (pre-IP) telephone network's digital transport and the far-end D-to-A converters which turn the samples back into audio. This simplifies handsets and avoids "frame-slip" clicking and other audio artifacts from timing irregularities.
Does this new WiFi-variant include a network clock distribution? Or does it fall back on some of the other, more crunch-intensive and less robust solutions to the problem (which are part of the source of VoIP artifacts)? If the latter it may have a harder row to hoe than one might expect. (Though, like VHS vs. Betamax, other things than signal quality may prove to be the important drivers of adoption.)
... I've heard of objectivism as a civil remediation technique. Yet the value system can be defined in a slippery, even non-linear way that portends uncivil behavior. It's my belief that there's a need to evolve the speciation to deal with what's otherwise an enormous divide in humanity, more palpable and difficult than perhaps any other division we have.
"An thee harm none, do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law."
As far as I'm concerned, if it gets them to abide by the non-aggression principle, making their own choices within that bound is their right. If their interpretations slip around and vary from individual to individual, that's just fine. There are LOTS of successful and helpful-to-others strategies available, while such diversity leads to social robustness against changing circumstances and should be encouraged.
Meanwhile, trying to fine-tune the working philosophic structure risks breaking it.
So let's leave it like it is and stop trying to social-engineer it.
There was a short story on this subject that I read just a while ago, but I can't remember who wrote it or its name.
Perhaps Larry Niven's _Rotating Cylinders and the Possibility of Global Causality Violation_, as another poster mentioned?
Another one is Asimov's _The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline_, which is a scream.
He'd been working on some chemicals in his graduate work which dissolved VERY fast, So he wrote a takeoff on research papers in which the researchers were working with something that dissolved several seconds BEFORE water is added. After some hilarity early in the paper they make a cell that, driven by an electric signal, drops water on the substance and emits an electrical signal when the material dissolves, three seconds earlier. They build a device consisting of a string of such cells (with a funnel on the first one), wait until the output signal comes out of the last one, weld it shut in a steel cube, and wait. Shortly before water would have to be added to the first one a BIG tornado approaches the school. They frantically cut the cube open and add a drop of water. B-)
He sent this to Analog, expecting it to require revision. But Campbell liked it as is and published it - and it came out a week or so before Asimov had to defend his dissertation. (As it was lampooning research papers he was worried his committee members might be offended.) After a long session defending his dissertation one of the profs asks him to "please describe the Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline". At this point he cracks up in near-hysterics, realizing that the prof in question wasn't enough of a sadist to pull this on him if he'd failed so he'd passed and would get his doctorate. B-)
Sociopathy may look like a 'disease' but it's really a condition, and it's not 'curable'. Only the behavior can be modified, often with conditional behavioral therapy/CBT. But the sociopath usually doesn't see the errors and is unmotivated to want to modify their behavior.
Sociopaths can become "compensated" in several ways, replacing the missing conscience with something else in order to behave in ways that don't get them ostracized, imprisoned, murdered, or executed. Focusing on limited targets, for instance, could lead to a successful career in sales.
One common compensation is to become "rule-bound": Internalizing a moral or legal code and following it closely. This can lead to acceptable behavior. (But interacting with a rule-bound sociopath can be hazardous because if you don't follow HIS particular rule set he may identify you as a villain and causing you harm may become permitted - or even required - by his rules.)
One of the most effective compensations is to learn Objectivism. (Teaching it is just about the ONLY prison-based reform program that leads to a dramatic reduction in recidivism.) It is an internally consistent argument deriving the non-aggression principle from pure self interest (and explicitly rejecting altruism). Sociopathy/Psychopathy is not particularly correlated with intelligence, which means there are a lot of smart ones. So they need something they can believe in to show them what's in it for them to treat others fairly and forgo the pleasure of a successful attack or looting.
(It's interesting to watch the interaction of Objectivists (many of whom are compensated psychopaths) with other libertarian sorts. The Objectivists believe they have the one true way to be free and are constantly offended by the decisions made by the others - but required by their own rules to let the others behave in these "wrong-but-non-aggressive" behaviors. B-) )
The universe is not deterministic. If you got stuck in a loop like that, eventually you'd break out due to some crazy quantum coincidence.
Yep.
In fact I'd expect that the quantum randomness would all come out uncorrelated with the "previous fork" and macroscopic things would quickly diverge as a result. And if I were (re)writing it these days that's what I'd use to avoid infinite loops.
But back then I was a high school kid with very little understanding of quantum mechanics. So I used "psy" instead. (Campbell was still running Analog and was a big fan of Rhine - at least when it came to story premises.)
(Well, actually I had a LITTLE bit of quantum mechanics: I knew that things were lumpy at about the atomic level, important parameters of matter had discrete integer and half-integer values instead of continuous values, and you couldn't measure some stuff below this uncertainty-principle level, with some scientific philosophers speculating that this was because there WASN'T anything below that value. From this much I'd coined the phrase "The universe is a computer simulation and quantum numbers are as far as the computer takes the arithmetic.". I had another story outline based on the premise that the computer gets replaced with a new model that carries the arithmetic out farther, breaking semiconductors, bugs in the simulation were what {had} made ritual magic work before the previous upgrade, and while trying to figure out what happened to tunnel diodes the physicists find some NEW bugs...)
Slashdot Mirror
In America we have Fox (right wing), CNN (left wing), and NBC (very left wing). ... and CBS (left wing) and ...
Note that the right-wing material on Fox News has been nearly exclusively the Neocon faction's. There are several other factions, which Fox News has been perfectly willing to stonewall - except when they get enough exposure that Fox News switches to ridiculing them. Some of these other factions still have no effective news outlet except the Internet. (Although with the drastic failure of the Neocons in the last election and the economic collapse, the financial side of Fox News is starting to carry some of the other factions' economic stuff.)
The TFA (one of them) says: Since the tax is small, less than half a percent of gross revenue, it does not violate the Commerce Clause of the Constitution, which regulates interstate trade.
Say WHAT?
The commerce clause says:
[The Congress shall have power] To regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes;
Not "except for state taxes under one percent". All commerce. Every last copper.
(And how is a tax totaling a billion dollars "small"?)
If nothing else in the article seems bogus that's an incandescant red flag.
Can you trust the bios ... All the software on voting machines should be testably open and some effort made to keep them safe from virtual machines ...
And similarly additional posters object to potentially hacked chips and extraneous RF interfaces ...
I agree with you there. Replace or reflash the BIOS ROM. Inspect for extraneous interfaces. And of course be sure the CPU is not one that supports Intel AMT or similar schemes that can open sneak channels and get between the main CPU(s) and their peripherals.
However, except for the BIOS I'd expect such issues (wireless, hacked chips, ...) to be mainly applicable to future hardware.
The Diebold machines are somewhat older technology and even if they were deliberately designed for election cheating I'd expect the focus to have been on the software. Providing such hardware backdoors that would work WITHOUT BIOS, OS, or application support would have made the project too big and leak-prone with the technology available at the time.
These days it's essentially off-the-shelf. So lots of care needs to be taken with the components and hardware design. (For starters: NO Intel AMT-capable parts, or others with "remote administration" backdoors.)
I've reverse-engineered a lot of code from stripped object back to source. It got more difficult to do manually with some of the odd flows that RISC processors do and progressively more optimizing compilers, but it's hardly impossible. And there are fine tools to support it now.
Once you get to uncommented source for something where you roughly understand the program's function it's usually pretty easy to figure out what the author intended. Then you can comment it.
The fun part is finding errors. (I recall one where I was reverse-engineering a Unix driver and identified a place where the programmer had written (approximately) "if (a=b)" when he meant "if (a==b)". It was doubly fun to feed this back to a guy in the OS group - especially when I walked him through the code to the statement and he asked about a nearby assertion which had been conditionally not-compiled into the object that I was working from. He hadn't really internalized that I'd decompiled to source until I pointed out that I couldn't see the assertion. B-) )
If so it could let a lot of counties currently stuck with that PoC switch to the open source code without buying extra hardware. Just load the free software in the existing hardware (and maybe add a printer).
The Diebold machines are essentially PCs with touchscreens so they shouldn't be a tough port for Linux and the apps.
Using the existing hardware could save a bundle.
Good work, guys.
Downloading....
(long string of dots aborted due to lameness filter...)
The Drudge Report today has a picture of Julius Caeser with the headline "Julius at FCC wants to regulate Internet".
While I agree with much of what you are saying, some such reactions are to be expected.
Up to now the government has kept its hands almost entirely off the Internet (and virtually all moves to regulate it have been aborted). Now the FCC proposes to issue regulations on the details of packet forwarding. This is a major change.
There is considerable question as to whether "naive network neutrality" regulations might destroy the differentiated service features necessary for streaming media and large file transfers to "play well together" in a common forwarding architecture. The details of this has, so far, been driven by (sometimes monopolistic) market players innovating. Regulations will pour metaphorical concrete into the solution space, limiting the innovations to the set of solutions the regulators permit. We've seen how that stunted the telephone industry. The potential for damage to the Internet is far greater.
So of course there is opposition to solving problem that is basically cartel-forming and false-advertising with detailed regulation of the market. Followed, very likely, by stagnation of market growth and deployment of new services, degradation of price/performance ratio, ongoing increases in regulatory tweaks to try to fix the regulatory problem, and finally "regulatory capture" where the regulated take over the regulatory boards.
One of my favorite fake-Confuscisms applies here: "Virgin like bubble. One prick, all gone!"
[Argument that pushing FOSS mandates for government operations is an interference in the free market - consisting of government purchasing agents "expertly" and "freely" choosing proprietary software.]
I was under the impression that the pushing of FOSS in government was about several other things:
1) Keeping public documents and channels of required communications with government in freely readable formats, rather than locked up in proprietary formats that require those governed to purchase compatible software and/or agree to licensing terms in order to communicate.
2) Keeping the details of the operation of government open and auditable, rather than exposing it to malware inside of black-box software products.
3) Cost containment - imposed on the government by its citizens, who are the primary payers of the taxes that pay for the government's IT operation.
1) and 2) are clearly "open information" issues, where it's obvious which choice is "open". Only 3) even touches on either "free market" or "choice in software" ideals that you claim are being violated. And given that governments (in republics at least) are supposed to be agencies of their citizens, this decision is properly the right of those citizens if they chose to issue such policy directives to their hired agents rather than relying solely on the agents' judgement.
The GPL requires copyright to be enforced. You can't place terms (such as releasing the source code) on distribution if distribution is already completely legal.
The GPL exists to fix a problem with Copyright law: If you release a work in the public domain, somebody can make a modified version, copyright THAT, and enforce it against YOU. They can also create a compilation of a number of public domain works and copyright the compilation.
This means, for instance, that some commercial entity could fix a bug in or add a feature to your public-domain software product and you couldn't make the equivalent fix or add the equivalent feature. Or they could construct a distribution (ala Red Had or Debian) and copyright it, and no equivalent could be made - first Linux distribution gets a monopoly on Linux distributions.
GPL and most other FOSS licenses head this off by maintaining the copyright and using the licensing terms on the underlying work to deny adding such restrictions to derived works and compilations.
But without copyright the restrictions couldn't be added. Sure, something like the GPL would be unenforceable. But if someone were to release a bug fix or upgrade, anyone could reverse-engineer it and include the fix/upgrade in another version of the public-domain work. If someone made a compilation, anyone else could make a similar or identical compilation. Or they could just copy the fixed/upgraded version or compilation. So the GPL's purpose - allowing software set free to STAY free - would be realized and the GPL would be unnecessary.
... anyone who didn't ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO have a iPhone would be with [Verizon] due to network strength.
I'd have been with them since 2000 or so, when I first needed a cellphone, if they'd just put in ONE MORE TOWER. My Nevada place is on AT&T's LAST tower in the outskirts of the Reno-Taho/Carson City/Minden-Gardnerville/southbound-US395 coverage area and Verizon's last TWO towers are behind TWO hills and don't cover the valley. B-b
Sprint/Clearwire could have a bunch of customers, too, if they'd just put in a couple hotspots to relay from their Gardnerville tower to this dead spot. Right now all it's got is slow dialup (28k) and a mom-and-pop WiFi WISP(at $85ish/month to share a pair of T1s with several towns).
- PUBLIC facing web configuration? I have never, ever, ever, seen a router that did that. Not even cheesy home routers.
For a topper, try Intel's AMT.
Remote administration by a little board with its own computer.
- Always-on. (Goodbye battery life in powerdown mode on laptops.)
- Sits between the REAL computer and its network interfaces - "under", invisible to, inaccessable to and overriding the OS.
- Lets a remote administrator establish a tunnel to it (or reaches out to establish its own).
- Able to otherwise act as a man-in-the-middle for network traffic.
- Able to sniff and twiddle the rest of the system.
- Even able to turn it off.
Intended for remote administration of the machine and shutting it down to defend the LAN and VLAN from the machine if it becomes infected and/or any of its services stop mumbling occasional prayers to tell its watchdog function that they're sane.
My immediate reaction was "Remote administration? Yeah - by the NSA, DHS, Chinese spys, Russian malware gangs, and any tech-savvy terrorist group."
How do you know it's turned off? The BIOS says so. Yeah, right!
That's why no more Intel PCs for me.
And most probably a policy of defending against legitimate IP suits as well, don't you think?
If the suit is legitimate the best strategy is to settle quickly for a reasonable royalty or an IP swap and small lump sum (for a little guy or a competing big guy respectively) rather than risk a large judgment and an injunction against shipping more product and supporting their user base.
I don't know that IBM follows this strategy. But I haven't seen any stories (or heard any rumors) in the last couple decades about IBM grinding a little guy down with big lawyers - or losing to one, either.
If the suit is legit and the potential damages are not chump change the little guys can get some big guns in court on a contingency basis. The law firm gets a sizable piece if they win it but the little guy gets even more. Or some up-and-coming lawyer gets maybe a third AND makes his rep as a giant-killer. No guarantee the court will render a correct judgement when the big guns are firing. But they try hard to get it right. The little guys certainly win enough that trying to crush them all is 'way risky.
Other companies HAVE such a public history. Recall Robert_Kearns, the guy who invented the intermittent windshield wiper, had it usurped by the auto companies, sued, and won big time. Or Sears, which was accused of stealing the design for a nifty folding carpentry workbench from its inventor but defended and won.
This might have earned them a few karma points if they had done this half a decade ago, it's a little too late now.
The company was in receivership - at least partly to get Darryl's hands off the controls before he crashed it into IBM's brick wall yet again. With him no longer making decisions the receivers didn't need his decision making any more - and continuing to pay his salary would be a violation of their fiduciary duty.
why doesn't IBM buy them up (or at least a controlling interest) and finally drop the curtain on SCO's last act?
Because IBM is a big pockets corp. They have a policy of defending against bogus IP suits rather than buying them off - because if they ever bought one off they'd be inundated with more.
Thus they and the legal system have played "mill of the gods" to SCO's grain and ground them slowly but exceedingly fine.
Now that SCO is in receivership and their antagonist-in-chief is in the unemployment line, they MAY consider their point proven. Or they may continue to grind until every i is dotted and t is crossed in the legal record - and any remaining stockholders (who should have known better and restrained Darryl, rather than cheering him on and hoping for a piece of IBM) are perhaps left with zero.
Their call.
Wouldn't it make more sense ... to park such a device at L4 or L5, where you wouldn't require *ANY* fuel to keep it in position?
I'll second that.
Jupiter might perturb the Mars L4 & L5 points too much. But the Earth's points should do just fine. They'd also have somewhat more solar power available and would be closer, fuel-wise, for installation, which should help as well.
George O. Smith proposed essentially this solution in the _Venus Equilateral_ series, between 1942 and 1945. He sited his relay at Venus L4 to relay among Earth/Moon and hypothetical settlements on Venus and Mars.
It's a scream to read these days, with a giant manned communications/research station in Venus orbit, using advanced vacuum tube technology and machinery scheduling messages by automatically splicing hyper-fast-moving punched paper tape. But the basic problem (sun gets in the way sometimes) / solution (relay at an L4/5 point to bounce messages around it) is still sound and the engineering thinking and team organization was well portrayed.
And finally: What's with the (extremely annoying) capitalisation of each word in a headline on Slashdot and many other places? That's bad practice and makes sentences (headlines too) less readable.
It's (American) English grammar for titles. Get used to it.
Why are you talking about Microsoft like it's alive?
Corporations (like governments, organized religions, and a number of other kinds of human organizations) meet essentially all the (non biochemical-chauvinistic) definitions of lifeforms. The legal definition of "person" was also expanded to include corporations.
So why shouldn't he talk about Micro$oft that way? B-)
...that it will be TCP/IP with a pinch of pixie dust. Probably just changing a few extensions and reusing old code.
I'd expect that (re)defining some of the values in the type-of-service / differentiated-service field and the router behavior for them, and coming up with tests to insure that routers are enforcing this behavior (or some equivalent to this), would be at least half the job.
The field was originally there for precisely that purpose. If you look at rfc 1791 you'll see that, for instance, the six lowest priority subfield values in the priority subfield (below two for local net and internet control messages) clone the GETS and AUTOVON telephone-call priority levels.
Combine that with some network topology and backup power upgrades, along with more disaster-robust alternatives for the current routing protocols and name service, and you should have it.
The original design was intended to survive nuclear attacks, find a route if one exists. and give different packets different handling so high priority messages beat lower priority and packets that can wait waited behind those that couldn't - while packets that couldn't wait would be dropped if they were delayed. Initial deployment with priority features underutilized (and protocols that "cheated") led to quality-of-service differentiation being unsupported. Meanwhile the massive expansion lead to several changes that made robustness fall back from the "survive nukes" ideal:
- ISPs and their customers changed the bulk of the transport from a net to a tree.
- routing table explosions lead to the replacement of the "every router knows everything necessary" protocol(s) with "ask the locals for directions" alternatives
- symbolic name -> IP address translation moved from a local file to a giant distibuted database.
- The underlying long-haul network transport evolved from a web of shortest-path point-to-point cables and beams to a few sparse loops of very high capacity optic fibers, concentrating large amounts of traffic in a small number of boxes and wires and limiting routing redundancy.
Defining a fix for these problems as an add-on or upgrade shouldn't be all that much work. The bulk of the cost would be DEPLOYING the changes, which would require massive buildouts.
(And it's always-on, too, even if the machine is "turned off". Great for battery life in a laptop.)
... I'll not be buying machines with Intel processors.
Last thing in the world I need in my machine is a built-in hunk of big-brother remote-sniff-and-poke hardware between my processor and its network port and other I/O. Peek and poke UNDER the operating system and out of its control or view. "The Matrix Has My Laptop." Worse than the Blue Pill virtualization hack.
Look up "Intel AMT" and its subset "CIRA". (My tinfoil hat spun clear around when reading THOSE documents.)
And how do I know it's disabled? The proprietary BIOS TELLS me so? Yeah, right!
Bluetooth doesn't just ship data. It also forwards the network's 8 kHz clock, which is used for digitizing audio and keeping it synchronized with the (pre-IP) telephone network's digital transport and the far-end D-to-A converters which turn the samples back into audio. This simplifies handsets and avoids "frame-slip" clicking and other audio artifacts from timing irregularities.
Does this new WiFi-variant include a network clock distribution? Or does it fall back on some of the other, more crunch-intensive and less robust solutions to the problem (which are part of the source of VoIP artifacts)? If the latter it may have a harder row to hoe than one might expect. (Though, like VHS vs. Betamax, other things than signal quality may prove to be the important drivers of adoption.)
... I've heard of objectivism as a civil remediation technique. Yet the value system can be defined in a slippery, even non-linear way that portends uncivil behavior. It's my belief that there's a need to evolve the speciation to deal with what's otherwise an enormous divide in humanity, more palpable and difficult than perhaps any other division we have.
"An thee harm none, do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law."
As far as I'm concerned, if it gets them to abide by the non-aggression principle, making their own choices within that bound is their right. If their interpretations slip around and vary from individual to individual, that's just fine. There are LOTS of successful and helpful-to-others strategies available, while such diversity leads to social robustness against changing circumstances and should be encouraged.
Meanwhile, trying to fine-tune the working philosophic structure risks breaking it.
So let's leave it like it is and stop trying to social-engineer it.
There was a short story on this subject that I read just a while ago, but I can't remember who wrote it or its name.
Perhaps Larry Niven's _Rotating Cylinders and the Possibility of Global Causality Violation_, as another poster mentioned?
Another one is Asimov's _The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline_, which is a scream.
He'd been working on some chemicals in his graduate work which dissolved VERY fast, So he wrote a takeoff on research papers in which the researchers were working with something that dissolved several seconds BEFORE water is added. After some hilarity early in the paper they make a cell that, driven by an electric signal, drops water on the substance and emits an electrical signal when the material dissolves, three seconds earlier. They build a device consisting of a string of such cells (with a funnel on the first one), wait until the output signal comes out of the last one, weld it shut in a steel cube, and wait. Shortly before water would have to be added to the first one a BIG tornado approaches the school. They frantically cut the cube open and add a drop of water. B-)
He sent this to Analog, expecting it to require revision. But Campbell liked it as is and published it - and it came out a week or so before Asimov had to defend his dissertation. (As it was lampooning research papers he was worried his committee members might be offended.) After a long session defending his dissertation one of the profs asks him to "please describe the Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline". At this point he cracks up in near-hysterics, realizing that the prof in question wasn't enough of a sadist to pull this on him if he'd failed so he'd passed and would get his doctorate. B-)
Sociopathy may look like a 'disease' but it's really a condition, and it's not 'curable'. Only the behavior can be modified, often with conditional behavioral therapy/CBT. But the sociopath usually doesn't see the errors and is unmotivated to want to modify their behavior.
Sociopaths can become "compensated" in several ways, replacing the missing conscience with something else in order to behave in ways that don't get them ostracized, imprisoned, murdered, or executed. Focusing on limited targets, for instance, could lead to a successful career in sales.
One common compensation is to become "rule-bound": Internalizing a moral or legal code and following it closely. This can lead to acceptable behavior. (But interacting with a rule-bound sociopath can be hazardous because if you don't follow HIS particular rule set he may identify you as a villain and causing you harm may become permitted - or even required - by his rules.)
One of the most effective compensations is to learn Objectivism. (Teaching it is just about the ONLY prison-based reform program that leads to a dramatic reduction in recidivism.) It is an internally consistent argument deriving the non-aggression principle from pure self interest (and explicitly rejecting altruism). Sociopathy/Psychopathy is not particularly correlated with intelligence, which means there are a lot of smart ones. So they need something they can believe in to show them what's in it for them to treat others fairly and forgo the pleasure of a successful attack or looting.
(It's interesting to watch the interaction of Objectivists (many of whom are compensated psychopaths) with other libertarian sorts. The Objectivists believe they have the one true way to be free and are constantly offended by the decisions made by the others - but required by their own rules to let the others behave in these "wrong-but-non-aggressive" behaviors. B-) )
The universe is not deterministic. If you got stuck in a loop like that, eventually you'd break out due to some crazy quantum coincidence.
Yep.
In fact I'd expect that the quantum randomness would all come out uncorrelated with the "previous fork" and macroscopic things would quickly diverge as a result. And if I were (re)writing it these days that's what I'd use to avoid infinite loops.
But back then I was a high school kid with very little understanding of quantum mechanics. So I used "psy" instead. (Campbell was still running Analog and was a big fan of Rhine - at least when it came to story premises.)
(Well, actually I had a LITTLE bit of quantum mechanics: I knew that things were lumpy at about the atomic level, important parameters of matter had discrete integer and half-integer values instead of continuous values, and you couldn't measure some stuff below this uncertainty-principle level, with some scientific philosophers speculating that this was because there WASN'T anything below that value. From this much I'd coined the phrase "The universe is a computer simulation and quantum numbers are as far as the computer takes the arithmetic.". I had another story outline based on the premise that the computer gets replaced with a new model that carries the arithmetic out farther, breaking semiconductors, bugs in the simulation were what {had} made ritual magic work before the previous upgrade, and while trying to figure out what happened to tunnel diodes the physicists find some NEW bugs...)