Who would've thought that??... besides Theodore Sturgeon and everybody who heard of his law.
(Reminds me of the classical music program host at UofMichigan's official radio station, decades ago, declaring the death of rock-n-roll because only something like 10% of all rock songs were new compositions that year - some decades into the rock music era. Was sorely tempted to call him up and demand he also declare the death of classical music, since 0% were new compositions. B-) )
Just as "weed" incluses any plant that's growing in a place where you don't want a plant of that type to grow, "malware" includes any software that is installed without your permission.
What is its nefarious and maligned function? Does it [a], [b], [c], [d]?
For starters it bloats your Firefox instalation. Beyone that, it's proprietary. That means WE DON'T KNOW what, if anything, it does.
But it does one or more of these:
- Nothing. (No bets on that.)
- Something we want done (in which case we'd have done it voluntarily - either with some other tool of our choice or by CHOSING to install this one).
- Something we DON'T want done. (Open security holes, collect data, etc.)
So it fits my definitions of malware and likely yours as well. But I doubt anyone will be able to convince you of that, short of a security expert spending a couple months taking it apart and demonstrating the problems. And probably not even then.
If some other operation installed malware on your machine then said it would uninstall cleanly if you just TURNED IT ON and ASKED IT, would YOU believe them? Would you enable it just to turn on the uninstall button?
I sure wouldn't. Whether it was (or claimed to be) from Sony, Microsoft, 3FN, or Linus himself. Why the HELL should I enable malware that actually IS from a company that considers Firefox to be a major competing product line and has repeatedly sabotaged it in the past?...
And you can bet that, even if Microsoft's malware uninstalls itself cleanly, the next generation of black-hat malware will include plugins that MASQUERADE as later versions of this thing...
Until the article takes you from slashdot.org to.slashdot.org and the subsidiary domain's servers don't honor your login and switch you back to the default settings.
(Or did they fix that? I've got enough manually-installed cookies for the baby domains that I don't see it much any more.)
That's apparently a good one: Pairs with up to 3 cellular phones (plus a landline if you buy the appropriate model). Searches for a free trunk or lets you select the outgoing phone. Lets you switch between calls on different cellphones ala call-waiting. Forwards caller ID info to the POTS phones on incoming calls. Supports pulse dial as well as tone so you can use antique phones.
A third one is Dock-n-Talk which can be connected either by wire or bluetooth (with an extra-cost adapter).
There are also both handset company and aftermarket docking cradles for some phones (example: Cell Socket). Unlike a bluetooth types (which pretends to be a headset as far as the phone is concerned) the direct-connect types are only for a particular cellphone model so you lose your investment when you switch handsets.
= = = = =
NO FAX / modems / satellite pay-per-view uplink:
Note that cellphones, with or without POTS adapters, will NOT carry high-speed modem signals. No FAX, 56K modems, satellite pay-per-view connections, etc. (Those require the full 64K-equivalent DS0 signal to carry their bandwidth, while the cellphones use a lower bit rate and run a voice-optimized CODEC.)
Same is true of VoIP adapters (i.e. Magic Jack), but for a different reason: While the software and POTS card/dongle could convert to/from DS0 byte streams with A-law or u-law CODEC, the high-speed modems also require a very accurate (Stratum-III) clock synchronized with the phone system's clocking. While your DSL or whatever may use this clocking for its hop to the net, it isn't forwarded to your computer. (Maybe once Synchronous Ethernet is deployed this will change.) Even IEEE-1588 isn't good enough for this timing.
Touching one of the wires shouldn't be a problem -- birds do it all the time. Touching two of the wires, or getting between one of the wires and a path to ground IS a big problem.
The line he was using to rappel probably wasn't sufficiently insulating to avoid being a conductor to ground. Especially after he handled it with his sweaty body.
Also, the field strength (volts/inch) is significantly higher near the tower than on the span (because the tower brings ground up near the wires, reducing their effective spacing.) The insulator stacks are designed to be close to breakover, both to save money and so they are self-cleaning. (Dust gets blasted off by a quick arc in damp weather). Bypass too much of that gap with a conductive body and the arc will jump the rest of the way, filling in the gaps both between the wire and you and between you and the tower.
Doing the "cherry-picker tied to the line" or "helicopter to the line and crawl along it" stunts for working bare-handed require care to avoid having the power "reach out and touch" you. Dropping onto a highline with rappel gear doesn't cut it.
(As the article notes) it's probably a lot harder to have the blood pressure to pump blood all the way up that column to the head. Blood pressure is one of the things they can't explain about their model. The article says, "Estimates of blood pressure also suggested that it would have been very difficult for sauropods to pump their blood up to such a height."
Presuming you do it all with the heart.
But it's similarly hard for a human to pump the blood back up from his/her feet. And if we stand still the blood WILL pool down there, the veins expand, and damage take place over a while. And if we don't flex our legs but stand still for a long time, enough blood will pool down there that we'll pass out. (This happens to people in the military when standing at attention for a long time when they're new to it and don't know the trick of flexing the legs occasionally.)
The way it works is similar to how some trees use wind power to pump sap up to the upper branches: With valves and swaying. We have valves in the leg veins. The intermittent squeezing of the muscles around the veins which go through them and/or stretching of the veins as the leg bends makes the vein/valve system act like a distributed heart, pumping the blood up past the next valve, then the one after that, etc.
Why shouldn't the long-necked dinosaurs have a similar mechanism for neck arteries? (If not actual additional heart-like devices partway up the neck - perhaps as an additional function of a gizzard?) These would be made of soft tissue and typically wouldn't make it into the fossil record.
Another tweak that works is to make the bulb spherical and give it a coating that reflects infrared while passing visible light. The reflected infrared photons are reabsorbed by the filament and the energy gets another chance to be emitted as a visible photon. This also makes a big improvement.
If the figures in TFA are correct, these slightly more efficient incandescents are about half as efficient as a CFL.
The operative word in that sentence is "these".
- I've seen reports that incandescent filaments with other nanostructures on their surfaces can beat or tie with CFLs.
- These are only about half the improvement needed to match CFLs. But the modification can be easily applied by zapping an ALREADY CONSTRUCTED bulb, creating a very randomized nanostructure.
And this group is still experimenting - getting more structure to the tweak, adjusting color balance, polarization...
Any bets on whether they (or another group) gets near to or beats CFL efficiency within the next year or so?
No. It means it will continue to go up (on a basis of watts per cubic foot).
For the next couple years it will go up as this high-leakage stuff is deployed (although there are already some low-power chips in the works that will drop in and be deployed with them, which will mitigate it.) Then newer stuff will start coming out.
But the newer stuff won't necessarily replace the older stuff, which will stay in service for years. And the newer stuff will trade the lower power for more packet processing - both more "services" (such as packet filtering) and more bandwidth per box.
The boxes will always be designed to put as much as possible into the space - and the big limit is getting rid of heat. It's possible that the result will be lower volume - fewer "rack-inches" - dedicated to networking boxes in later data centers (or upgrades to current ones). But I'm betting that, until there's a fundamental breakthrough or a fundamental saturation of demand, the explosion of bandwidth and functionality will continue to absorb the technological improvements on the networking side.
Sounds fishy to me. Power demands of rack servers have been falling dramatically for years...
Read the post more closely. It's the networking equipment that is chewing up more power. You have to make up for it by using lower-power(-input) servers.
As someone involved in designing the servers I can attest that they ARE taking more power. (Part of that is that they're doing more stuff than just hot-potatoing packets. Part is that they're putting more bandwidth into each RU (Rack Unit {of height in a rack}). And part is that the currently-deploying generation of networking equipment uses custom chips built in the stage of silicon feature shrinkage where the leakage got so big that it is consuming as much power as the computation - the generation before the foundaries figured out a way around that and started cutting the leakage fraction back down.
What's going on with slashdot? If I click on a story link, like http://hardware.slashdot.org/... I get a "connection reset by peer" error message.... But if I change the url to http://slashdot.org/... then everything works fine.
Maybe Slashdot ran out of data center space and had to throw out the hardware.slashdot.org servers.
What happens if you don't like your little tech company? uh, you're screwed. In Silicon Valley you always had a network three deep that could get you a fun, interesting job in a little bit.... In smaller towns you're running without a safety net. If you leave the relocated tech-company, you've got the small-town mindset and businesses.
To create a hi-tech center you need to create the whole structure. You can't just attract a single hi-tech company for the cheap labor, for the reasons given above. You need job mobility - which means both a LOT of companies (along with other infrastructure such as universities) and (most importantly) the ability for the workers to move out and start their own new operation. That last is the key to CREATING, EXPANDING, and MAINTAINING the rich mix of companies and further opportunities.
Lots of states have excellent universities, trained personnel, low taxes, fine social and recreational opportunities, etc. But they're missing a key element that led to the creation of Silicon Valley in Califonia: A little piece of Intellectual Property law.
In California there is a state law that overrides employment law for a "pressing state interest". You'll find it quoted on one of the appendix pages of any California knowledge-worker employment contract: If the employee makes an invention that is not in the company's current or expected immediate future business line, and does so without using company facilities and materials, it belongs to the EMPLOYEE. He can move across the street, rent a garage, bing in a few of his buddies, and found a new startup to develop it.
This "budding off" mechanism, like yeast, is what created Silicon Valley's rich culture of diverse companies and employment opportunities.
If any other state wants to replicate the success of Silicon Valley, rather than providing a site for a US-internal equivalent of third-world offshoreing for a hi-tech firm, the FIRST thing they need to do is clone this bit of employment law.
A quote from the report in TFA refers to "ilicit downloads" in the billions, at 65 times the "legal download" rate.
As I recall, Canada charges a tax on recording media to pay the content producers for copies of copyright works made on them. Seems to me that, if the downloades burn the downloaded content onto such taxed media (or have purchased enough taxed media to hold it - and left it empty or used it for other purposes) they've already paid for the content and the download should be licit.
Note that this is NOT legal advice. (And I suspect the MAFIAA have gotten the Canadian legal system set up so they can double-dip already, so attempting this will still get you hosed.) But it seems like an interesting question to bring up whenever they cry about the amount of "illicit" downloading and ask for still MORE dips into your pocketbook.
Hiroshima sized yield doesn't mean Hiroshima sized device or Hiroshima technology device. (Note that the Little Boy bomb is reported to be about 13-18 Kiloton while the Nagasaki bomb - a plutonium pinch device - only 21.)
The Hiroshima bomb was dropped without testing because it was such a near-sure-thing. The Nagasaki bomb had a prototype tested at Trinity because it was it was more iffy: Any screwup in the explosive focus, the calculations, the isotope mix, the timing of the neutron strobelamp, or more stray neutrons than expected would cause it to perform badly or just spray its material around in a conventional explosion. (They even constructed a bottle to hold the debris in case it failed, to catch the material for another try, though they changed their minds and left the bottle lying near ground zero.)
North Korea's first test apparently didn't work anywhere near as well as intended. They have a parallel missile program for a delivery system - developed on a very limted budget compared to that of WW II USA. And in sixty years a lot of stuff about what works has leaked out, while the Manhattan project had to roll their own from scratch.
So I'd bet that the bomb they tested is a prototype of one that would work as a payload on the missiles they're testing, not a new "Little Boy" - or even "Fat Man".
They have long forgotten (systemically not always individually there are plenty of good cops out there) their job is to serve and protect the people.
Their job is not, and never was, to "serve and protect the people". It is to "maintain public order" - with the bulk of the decisions about what that consists of left to the police (though there's lots of law about what they aren't supposed to do).
There are plenty of court decisions on this. It usually comes up when somebody is threatened by crookies and demands protection, or when the cops take a long time to arrive. The cops have no obligation to protect any particular person (except in very limited circumstances where the cops' actions put the person in exceptional jepoardy.)
(It also comes up in debates over whether private citizens should be able to arm themselves to protect themselves. Those saying "no" often claim that the cops will take care of it. Those saying "yes" point out that there's no mandate for them to do so.)
They now mostly exist to serve government and its all controlling pervasive aims.
Which is what government power always gravitates toward, and why fighting for your rights is an ongoing matter, rather than something a bunch of revolutionaries do and make it stick for centuries or all time.
Neither you nor the power company, for instance, are required to give free power to oldsters who will freeze to death in the winter or die of heatstroke in the summer absent heating and air conditioning. You and they aren't even required to give free power to somebody in an iron lung. As a public utility the power company IS required to give them power, even reduced rate power, WHEN arrangements are made to pay appropriately for it. This stuff has come up over and over again.
Similarly with the phone company.
Cops said: "Turn the phone on so we can find him."
Phone company said "Sure. We'll do it for $20 - much less than his outstanding balance - as soon as you tell where to send the bill."
Cops said: "We won't pay."
Family said: "We won't pay."
Phone company said: "Call us when you figure out where to send the bill. We're all set to push the button."
Fifth amendment: "... nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation."
The cops were trying to steal service. The phone company knew damn well that if they turned on the phone without the necessary promise to pay they'd never see the money.
Now the media are dumping on the phone company - in an obvious attempt to let such attempts to steal service succeed in the future. IMHO the blame should be placed where it belongs: On the police department and/or the family (to the extent that they should have paid up as part of THEIR obligations). Not on the phone company (which would then be drafted into funding a never-ending set of demands for free service whenever someone decided the situation was some sort of emergency).
Linux is more than ready for the Desktop. Hardware manufacturers are getting on board far more rapidly than you might believe,...
And with the depression upon us a lot of people - both individual an business users, are looking at cutting their costs. Manufacturers of equipment are aware of this and are starting to support Linux in order to avoid loss of market share. And with big players like IBM in the support business it's no longer a major risk for corporate IT.
When the high costs of the old proprietary solutions start to make the difference, not between having more or less money left over, but between having a working modern system and not having one, people are far more willing to put up with some learning curve.
Slashdot Mirror
Who would've thought that?? ... besides Theodore Sturgeon and everybody who heard of his law.
(Reminds me of the classical music program host at UofMichigan's official radio station, decades ago, declaring the death of rock-n-roll because only something like 10% of all rock songs were new compositions that year - some decades into the rock music era. Was sorely tempted to call him up and demand he also declare the death of classical music, since 0% were new compositions. B-) )
Is it malware?
Just as "weed" incluses any plant that's growing in a place where you don't want a plant of that type to grow, "malware" includes any software that is installed without your permission.
What is its nefarious and maligned function? Does it [a], [b], [c], [d]?
For starters it bloats your Firefox instalation. Beyone that, it's proprietary. That means WE DON'T KNOW what, if anything, it does.
But it does one or more of these:
- Nothing. (No bets on that.)
- Something we want done (in which case we'd have done it voluntarily - either with some other tool of our choice or by CHOSING to install this one).
- Something we DON'T want done. (Open security holes, collect data, etc.)
So it fits my definitions of malware and likely yours as well. But I doubt anyone will be able to convince you of that, short of a security expert spending a couple months taking it apart and demonstrating the problems. And probably not even then.
And you must enable it in order to uninstall it.
That's what bugs me the most.
If some other operation installed malware on your machine then said it would uninstall cleanly if you just TURNED IT ON and ASKED IT, would YOU believe them? Would you enable it just to turn on the uninstall button?
I sure wouldn't. Whether it was (or claimed to be) from Sony, Microsoft, 3FN, or Linus himself. Why the HELL should I enable malware that actually IS from a company that considers Firefox to be a major competing product line and has repeatedly sabotaged it in the past? ...
And you can bet that, even if Microsoft's malware uninstalls itself cleanly, the next generation of black-hat malware will include plugins that MASQUERADE as later versions of this thing...
The fact that there is so little prosecution and so many accusations in this case makes me think there is little substance to the allegations.
Give it time. The government JUST went public that they're going after 'em.
Looks like the Slashdot clowns are "targeting" all browsers. Everything sucks.
Naw. Part of the content was hosted on 3FN and the FTC just took it down.
(It's a joke. Mod it "funny".)
Classic Index + Classic Discussion = works great
Until the article takes you from slashdot.org to .slashdot.org and the subsidiary domain's servers don't honor your login and switch you back to the default settings.
(Or did they fix that? I've got enough manually-installed cookies for the baby domains that I don't see it much any more.)
Just leave it alone.
In particular: Removing it may lower your house resale value. Keep it in place.
(See other posts below about things like cellphone adapters to make it live so ordinary phone instruments or antique phones will work in the house.)
The simulation sounded somewhat muffled, like the high frequency components weren't right or weren't of sufficient amplitude.
Can some of the rest of you listen and tell me if it sounds muffled to you too? (I want to be sure it's not my machine or earphones.)
Might be the CODEC used with flash rather than the original simulation itself...
That's apparently a good one: Pairs with up to 3 cellular phones (plus a landline if you buy the appropriate model). Searches for a free trunk or lets you select the outgoing phone. Lets you switch between calls on different cellphones ala call-waiting. Forwards caller ID info to the POTS phones on incoming calls. Supports pulse dial as well as tone so you can use antique phones.
Here's another one (only two lines): Cell2Tel
A third one is Dock-n-Talk which can be connected either by wire or bluetooth (with an extra-cost adapter).
There are also both handset company and aftermarket docking cradles for some phones (example: Cell Socket). Unlike a bluetooth types (which pretends to be a headset as far as the phone is concerned) the direct-connect types are only for a particular cellphone model so you lose your investment when you switch handsets.
= = = = =
NO FAX / modems / satellite pay-per-view uplink:
Note that cellphones, with or without POTS adapters, will NOT carry high-speed modem signals. No FAX, 56K modems, satellite pay-per-view connections, etc. (Those require the full 64K-equivalent DS0 signal to carry their bandwidth, while the cellphones use a lower bit rate and run a voice-optimized CODEC.)
Same is true of VoIP adapters (i.e. Magic Jack), but for a different reason: While the software and POTS card/dongle could convert to/from DS0 byte streams with A-law or u-law CODEC, the high-speed modems also require a very accurate (Stratum-III) clock synchronized with the phone system's clocking. While your DSL or whatever may use this clocking for its hop to the net, it isn't forwarded to your computer. (Maybe once Synchronous Ethernet is deployed this will change.) Even IEEE-1588 isn't good enough for this timing.
Touching one of the wires shouldn't be a problem -- birds do it all the time. Touching two of the wires, or getting between one of the wires and a path to ground IS a big problem.
The line he was using to rappel probably wasn't sufficiently insulating to avoid being a conductor to ground. Especially after he handled it with his sweaty body.
Also, the field strength (volts/inch) is significantly higher near the tower than on the span (because the tower brings ground up near the wires, reducing their effective spacing.) The insulator stacks are designed to be close to breakover, both to save money and so they are self-cleaning. (Dust gets blasted off by a quick arc in damp weather). Bypass too much of that gap with a conductive body and the arc will jump the rest of the way, filling in the gaps both between the wire and you and between you and the tower.
Doing the "cherry-picker tied to the line" or "helicopter to the line and crawl along it" stunts for working bare-handed require care to avoid having the power "reach out and touch" you. Dropping onto a highline with rappel gear doesn't cut it.
(As the article notes) it's probably a lot harder to have the blood pressure to pump blood all the way up that column to the head. Blood pressure is one of the things they can't explain about their model. The article says, "Estimates of blood pressure also suggested that it would have been very difficult for sauropods to pump their blood up to such a height."
Presuming you do it all with the heart.
But it's similarly hard for a human to pump the blood back up from his/her feet. And if we stand still the blood WILL pool down there, the veins expand, and damage take place over a while. And if we don't flex our legs but stand still for a long time, enough blood will pool down there that we'll pass out. (This happens to people in the military when standing at attention for a long time when they're new to it and don't know the trick of flexing the legs occasionally.)
The way it works is similar to how some trees use wind power to pump sap up to the upper branches: With valves and swaying. We have valves in the leg veins. The intermittent squeezing of the muscles around the veins which go through them and/or stretching of the veins as the leg bends makes the vein/valve system act like a distributed heart, pumping the blood up past the next valve, then the one after that, etc.
Why shouldn't the long-necked dinosaurs have a similar mechanism for neck arteries? (If not actual additional heart-like devices partway up the neck - perhaps as an additional function of a gizzard?) These would be made of soft tissue and typically wouldn't make it into the fossil record.
Another tweak that works is to make the bulb spherical and give it a coating that reflects infrared while passing visible light. The reflected infrared photons are reabsorbed by the filament and the energy gets another chance to be emitted as a visible photon. This also makes a big improvement.
Combining the two might be even better.
If the figures in TFA are correct, these slightly more efficient incandescents are about half as efficient as a CFL.
The operative word in that sentence is "these".
- I've seen reports that incandescent filaments with other nanostructures on their surfaces can beat or tie with CFLs.
- These are only about half the improvement needed to match CFLs. But the modification can be easily applied by zapping an ALREADY CONSTRUCTED bulb, creating a very randomized nanostructure.
And this group is still experimenting - getting more structure to the tweak, adjusting color balance, polarization...
Any bets on whether they (or another group) gets near to or beats CFL efficiency within the next year or so?
No. It means it will continue to go up (on a basis of watts per cubic foot).
For the next couple years it will go up as this high-leakage stuff is deployed (although there are already some low-power chips in the works that will drop in and be deployed with them, which will mitigate it.) Then newer stuff will start coming out.
But the newer stuff won't necessarily replace the older stuff, which will stay in service for years. And the newer stuff will trade the lower power for more packet processing - both more "services" (such as packet filtering) and more bandwidth per box.
The boxes will always be designed to put as much as possible into the space - and the big limit is getting rid of heat. It's possible that the result will be lower volume - fewer "rack-inches" - dedicated to networking boxes in later data centers (or upgrades to current ones). But I'm betting that, until there's a fundamental breakthrough or a fundamental saturation of demand, the explosion of bandwidth and functionality will continue to absorb the technological improvements on the networking side.
As someone involved in designing the servers ...
Make that "... designing the networking equipment ..."
Sounds fishy to me.
Power demands of rack servers have been falling dramatically for years...
Read the post more closely. It's the networking equipment that is chewing up more power. You have to make up for it by using lower-power(-input) servers.
As someone involved in designing the servers I can attest that they ARE taking more power. (Part of that is that they're doing more stuff than just hot-potatoing packets. Part is that they're putting more bandwidth into each RU (Rack Unit {of height in a rack}). And part is that the currently-deploying generation of networking equipment uses custom chips built in the stage of silicon feature shrinkage where the leakage got so big that it is consuming as much power as the computation - the generation before the foundaries figured out a way around that and started cutting the leakage fraction back down.
What's going on with slashdot? If I click on a story link, like http://hardware.slashdot.org/... I get a "connection reset by peer" error message. ... But if I change the url to http://slashdot.org/... then everything works fine.
Maybe Slashdot ran out of data center space and had to throw out the hardware.slashdot.org servers.
What happens if you don't like your little tech company? uh, you're screwed. In Silicon Valley you always had a network three deep that could get you a fun, interesting job in a little bit. ... In smaller towns you're running without a safety net. If you leave the relocated tech-company, you've got the small-town mindset and businesses.
To create a hi-tech center you need to create the whole structure. You can't just attract a single hi-tech company for the cheap labor, for the reasons given above. You need job mobility - which means both a LOT of companies (along with other infrastructure such as universities) and (most importantly) the ability for the workers to move out and start their own new operation. That last is the key to CREATING, EXPANDING, and MAINTAINING the rich mix of companies and further opportunities.
Lots of states have excellent universities, trained personnel, low taxes, fine social and recreational opportunities, etc. But they're missing a key element that led to the creation of Silicon Valley in Califonia: A little piece of Intellectual Property law.
In California there is a state law that overrides employment law for a "pressing state interest". You'll find it quoted on one of the appendix pages of any California knowledge-worker employment contract: If the employee makes an invention that is not in the company's current or expected immediate future business line, and does so without using company facilities and materials, it belongs to the EMPLOYEE. He can move across the street, rent a garage, bing in a few of his buddies, and found a new startup to develop it.
This "budding off" mechanism, like yeast, is what created Silicon Valley's rich culture of diverse companies and employment opportunities.
If any other state wants to replicate the success of Silicon Valley, rather than providing a site for a US-internal equivalent of third-world offshoreing for a hi-tech firm, the FIRST thing they need to do is clone this bit of employment law.
A quote from the report in TFA refers to "ilicit downloads" in the billions, at 65 times the "legal download" rate.
As I recall, Canada charges a tax on recording media to pay the content producers for copies of copyright works made on them. Seems to me that, if the downloades burn the downloaded content onto such taxed media (or have purchased enough taxed media to hold it - and left it empty or used it for other purposes) they've already paid for the content and the download should be licit.
Note that this is NOT legal advice. (And I suspect the MAFIAA have gotten the Canadian legal system set up so they can double-dip already, so attempting this will still get you hosed.) But it seems like an interesting question to bring up whenever they cry about the amount of "illicit" downloading and ask for still MORE dips into your pocketbook.
Hiroshima sized yield doesn't mean Hiroshima sized device or Hiroshima technology device. (Note that the Little Boy bomb is reported to be about 13-18 Kiloton while the Nagasaki bomb - a plutonium pinch device - only 21.)
The Hiroshima bomb was dropped without testing because it was such a near-sure-thing. The Nagasaki bomb had a prototype tested at Trinity because it was it was more iffy: Any screwup in the explosive focus, the calculations, the isotope mix, the timing of the neutron strobelamp, or more stray neutrons than expected would cause it to perform badly or just spray its material around in a conventional explosion. (They even constructed a bottle to hold the debris in case it failed, to catch the material for another try, though they changed their minds and left the bottle lying near ground zero.)
North Korea's first test apparently didn't work anywhere near as well as intended. They have a parallel missile program for a delivery system - developed on a very limted budget compared to that of WW II USA. And in sixty years a lot of stuff about what works has leaked out, while the Manhattan project had to roll their own from scratch.
So I'd bet that the bomb they tested is a prototype of one that would work as a payload on the missiles they're testing, not a new "Little Boy" - or even "Fat Man".
Do you refuse to pull over for the cops because they're unconstitutionally depriving you of ten cents of gasoline?
Of course not.
(But billing them for it might be an interesting idea if I feel like giving them as much trouble as they gave me. Thanks. B-) )
They have long forgotten (systemically not always individually there are plenty of good cops out there) their job is to serve and protect the people.
Their job is not, and never was, to "serve and protect the people". It is to "maintain public order" - with the bulk of the decisions about what that consists of left to the police (though there's lots of law about what they aren't supposed to do).
There are plenty of court decisions on this. It usually comes up when somebody is threatened by crookies and demands protection, or when the cops take a long time to arrive. The cops have no obligation to protect any particular person (except in very limited circumstances where the cops' actions put the person in exceptional jepoardy.)
(It also comes up in debates over whether private citizens should be able to arm themselves to protect themselves. Those saying "no" often claim that the cops will take care of it. Those saying "yes" point out that there's no mandate for them to do so.)
They now mostly exist to serve government and its all controlling pervasive aims.
Which is what government power always gravitates toward, and why fighting for your rights is an ongoing matter, rather than something a bunch of revolutionaries do and make it stick for centuries or all time.
Letting other people do things you don't like is the price of freedom.
Neither you nor the power company, for instance, are required to give free power to oldsters who will freeze to death in the winter or die of heatstroke in the summer absent heating and air conditioning. You and they aren't even required to give free power to somebody in an iron lung. As a public utility the power company IS required to give them power, even reduced rate power, WHEN arrangements are made to pay appropriately for it. This stuff has come up over and over again.
Similarly with the phone company.
Cops said: "Turn the phone on so we can find him."
Phone company said "Sure. We'll do it for $20 - much less than his outstanding balance - as soon as you tell where to send the bill."
Cops said: "We won't pay."
Family said: "We won't pay."
Phone company said: "Call us when you figure out where to send the bill. We're all set to push the button."
Fifth amendment: "... nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation."
The cops were trying to steal service. The phone company knew damn well that if they turned on the phone without the necessary promise to pay they'd never see the money.
Now the media are dumping on the phone company - in an obvious attempt to let such attempts to steal service succeed in the future. IMHO the blame should be placed where it belongs: On the police department and/or the family (to the extent that they should have paid up as part of THEIR obligations). Not on the phone company (which would then be drafted into funding a never-ending set of demands for free service whenever someone decided the situation was some sort of emergency).
Linux is more than ready for the Desktop. Hardware manufacturers are getting on board far more rapidly than you might believe, ...
And with the depression upon us a lot of people - both individual an business users, are looking at cutting their costs. Manufacturers of equipment are aware of this and are starting to support Linux in order to avoid loss of market share. And with big players like IBM in the support business it's no longer a major risk for corporate IT.
When the high costs of the old proprietary solutions start to make the difference, not between having more or less money left over, but between having a working modern system and not having one, people are far more willing to put up with some learning curve.