The Austrian School is marginalized among people who actually know economics,
By which you mean the Keynsians and the Monitarists.
Which school predicted the crash, eh?... but you do hear a lot of neocons idolizing them (see the disconnect there?).
Actually the neocons are quite the fans of some of the mainstream economic schools. It's the (L/l)ibertarians, (C/c)onstitutionalists, and the like (whom the neocons HATE) who are big on the Austrian analysis.
(Big letter for members of a party or other organization or movement calling itself that. Little letter for someone who adheres to all or some of the philosophical principles.)
That same line of reasoning would apply not only to a GPS bug on your car, but also to someone following you around with a notepad.
But it's much CHEAPER to put a GPS box on the car than to put three shifts of police (at a minimum of two cars per shift) to following a suspect around.
While the principle may be the same, a lot of abuses were not brought up as issues in the past because they were rare due to the cost.
Also: With the higher cost, the administration would tend to reserve the procedure for targets where there was more signs that the surveillance would be productive - and that would usually translate to enough evidence to get a warrant. With the price drop it becomes economically feasible to "cast a broad net" - and departments that might never, or very rarely, have committed such abuses would commit them on a wholesale basis unless restrained.
So lowering the cost of tyranny can lead, not just to a quantitative, but to a qualitative change in the need for judicial intervention.
HA! Good luck getting the Supreme Court to overturn Wickard v. Filburn(1942)
Overturning Wickard v. Filburn is a major piece of what this new constitutionalist movement is about.
That decision (on a Great Depression era central-economic-planning law, during the runup to WW II) is what turned the commerce clause into a blank check for the Fed to regulate anything they damned well pleased - and has since been used for such things as justifying federal regulation of marijuana growing for personal consumption (because it would affect the traffic in out-of-state marijuana supplies!).
Do any of you really think that the people who wrote the Constitution would have considered banning growing of wheat to feed your own pigs to be a proper federal "regulation of interstate commerce in wheat"?
Slashdot does have a "friend" concept. I'm sure it's underutilized (and hopefully all dev time is spent elsewhere if that's true), but that gives it a social aspect.
Slashdot "friend" isn't a social tag. It's just the word they used for setting a bit that says "I'm more likely to want to see what this poster has to say than the general users' moderation would predict. So:
- show it to me at a lower moderation level,
- tag it with a colored dot to attract my attention, and
- also tag other posters that THIS poster has similarly tagged that HE wants to see."
That doesn't necessarily translate to the social meaning of "friend" (though it's likely to be positively correlated). For instance: While most of the people I've tagged as "friends" are, based on their online statements, also people I'd probably want to actually befriend, there are a couple that I tagged because they have opinions that diverge wildly from mine but are interestingly reasoned and/or phrased.
Given ALL the problems we see with corporations that carry debt, why on earth Microsoft would want to piss away a giant cash reserve AND borrow money...?
Perhaps they're expecting significant inflation, or even hyperinflation, of dollars (as is everybody with the least clue about the theories of the Austrian school of economics.)
Interest rates are massively depressed by the "printing press money" currently pouring out of Washington. The expectation that the money will devalue drastically over the next couple quarters to couple years (especially now that China has stopped buying US bonds). Meanwhile the artificially depressed (compared to borrowing only savings) interest rates continue the diversion of "stuff" from where it can build infrastructure to make a future profit and into either projects that can't be finished or won't have customers when they're done or immediate consumption. This turns a recession into a depression. It's exactly what happened to create the Great Depression, but the government is doing it more this time around and with no safety net from a gold standard - so the US could end up more like Weimar Germany than the US of the '30s.
If you believe that, the logical thing to do is to grab some of the dollars at the low interest rate before the inflation gets figured into their price and use them to buy assets that won't inflate or disintegrate in a depression. Pick off undervalued resources - commodities, potentially profitable companies, etc. Then when the inflation hits, cash things like your gold reserves and pay off the notes in inflated dollars.
To give you an idea of what hyperinflation is like: In the first year and a half after the Treaty of Versaille's reparation section took effect, the money inflated so much that, were it to happen here, a $200,000 mortgage could be paid off completely for the price of a slice of toast. (Over 9 years it inflated by a trillion-to-one, before they instituted a new money that was more solidly backed.)
= = =
Then again:
- Maybe they see an acquisition target and need a bit more cash.
- Maybe they ARE, or expect to become, an acquisition target (due to the cash reserves and an expectation of a stock price drop) and are working on looking less attractive. B-)
Theoretically, you could "type 192.168.1.1 into your Web browser's address bar -- a trick well known to network gurus -- the MiFi's settings pages magically appear. Now you can do geeky, tweaky tasks like changing the password...
So once you've shown them the password couldn't THEY type 192.168.1.1 into THEIR web browser, change the password, and lock YOU out of kicking them off (or making further changes to your own WiFi card)?
Gubernator is the same play on "gubernatorial" (having to do with a governor) and "terminator".
It works better because the whole string is the leading part of "gubernatorial" but by chopping off the tail and shifting the stress pattern to match "terminator" you also end up with the two trailing sylables identical to those of the latter. (And it comes out sounding somewhat like his accent as well.)
For "governator", on the other hand, you arbitrarily splice parts of the two words, losing the marvelous coincidence in the existing words.
IANAL. And I don't recall if this was federal or Michigan. But...
I understand that using a directional microphone for eavesdropping requires a warrant. The reason: When nobody is within view in a location were nobody would be able to hide within earshot, you have the expectation that your conversation is private. So it requires probable cause and a warrant, rather than just "happening to overhear" with a directional microphone, to satisfy the Fourth Amendment.
Similarly if you throw out your documents intact the police can fish them out of your trash and, if they find anything incriminating, use it against you. But if you shred it they have to get a warrant to seize and reassemble the shreds and use them in an investigation or in court. Again this is because you have a reasonable expectation of privacy if you shred your documents and none if you discard them intact.
While a skilled surveillance operation (or traffic cameras "installed for other reasons") might be able to see where you are without your noticing, it would be hard to do this if you, for instance, traveled an untrafficked route with no security cameras and noticed that there were no cars or people nearby to observe you. In that case you would have a reasonable expectation that your whereabouts were unknown, despite being in a public place where, in principle, someone might happen to notice you. Yet a tracking device would record your whereabouts when police observers could not. So the same principle should apply.
I wonder about the quality of the workplace.
on
Cone of Silence 2.0
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Judging by the descripton this device apparently operates by beaming additional sound at the people who are not supposed to be in a conversation, rather than attempting to cancel the conversation at their ears. So this is a selective noise generator.
It's equivalent to creating enough background noise to drown out the conversations, but doing it selectively at the ears of the victims. Of course this means increasing, rather than decreasing, the noise level of the environment, and doing so with snippets of conversation that can ALMOST be understood - resulting in increased stress both from the high level of noise and the failed processing in the victims' brains.
Textbooks are a surprisingly controversial issue in California and there is a lot of political baggage and bureaucratic red tape that will make an open source textbook plan especially troublesome.
No kidding. It's called "bribery", "corruption", and "bureaucratic naivete".
See the seventh chapter of part 5 of Richard P. Feynman's book _"Surely you're Joking, Mr. Feynman!"_, which is titled "Judging Books by Their Covers" for a descripton of the process as of the year he let himself be dragged into it.
(The title comes from an incident where some members of the board submitted ratings for volumes of a textbook set which hadn't yet been completed and so were supplied with the full cover but blank pages.)
(Yes I know it's quoting TFA which is punctuated to indicate that it's quoting some third source. But it should at least have rated a [sic] if not an outright edit-in-square-brackets.)
From what I understand, these machines only have control of things that can affect money.
Medical records. Operation of automated medical tools. Communications used for bringing police, fire departments, ambulances, and other "first responders" to sites where people are in danger and/or injured. The components of the power grid, which operates life support systems, traffic lights, refrigeration preventing food poisoning, air-conditioning and heating equipment without which the elderly may die of heatstroke or hypothermia, etc. Railroad train signaling (preventing multi-train collisions, derailment - including into nearby structures and people. Water purification equipment. Sewage treatment equipment. Reservoir level control and irrigation water routing (which could lead to massive flooding if fouled). Industrial process control - which manages processes that could cause fires, explosions, and the release of toxic chemicals if fouled.
I could go on.
why is money more important than human life?
Money is crystallized labor. It represents a fraction of lifetime that a person worked to acquire it. Stealing or destroying it is stealing that portion of the person's life - enslaving them. It is well understood that deadly force is an appropriate response to attempts to enslave a person or hold them in slavery.
The Geneva Convention also gives a much lower standard of protection, if any at all, to those combatants who DON'T go around in uniforms, work for a nation or non-nation organization that can negotiate a cease-fire surrender which the combatant will honor, adhere to the principles of the Geneva Convention themselves, etc. Spies and saboteurs are still largely fair game.
This is at least partly to encourage everybody to play by the same rules.
If such a device could be activated only by the pilot, it wouldn't be so unreasonable.
If such a device could be activated only by the pilot it would mean:
a) The hijackers would keep the pilot from activating it as their first act upon storming the cabin.
b) If it got activated the pilot, minimum, would be far more likely to be killed than if he had no hand in activating it.
Also: If such a device existed, even if it required activation by the pilot, malfunctions could lead to a non-controllable plane or a plane that is remotely-hijackable even without pilot consent.
Glad they don't have commercial planes with complete remote control. Or do they?
That was proposed after 9/11 as a solution to hijacked planes. Remote control devices that could take over a hijacked plane, remotely, locking out control by those on board and allowing it to be landed safely. Remote devices strategically located at all major commercial airports - or at least those near high-value targets (which is pretty much all of 'em).
When the trial balloon went up it was soon pointed out that, with such a system, hijackers could use it to hijack the planes without even being on board. And the tech would be distributed to many locations (worldwide) from which it could be stolen.
Haven't heard much about it since. B-) Of course that means that it will fall off the mental horizon for decision makers and they might decide to do it after all. B-(
McDonalds (like some other chain restaurants) also designs their drive-through lanes so the driver is trapped in the car and can't get out and strip off the scalding clothing, mitigating the injury, in case of this foreseeable class of accident.
Oops. Should have looked into it more before posting.
In this case the car was already out of the lane and into a parking place when the mishap occurred.
McDonalds (like some other chain restaurants) also designs their drive-through lanes so the driver is trapped in the car and can't get out and strip off the scalding clothing, mitigating the injury, in case of this foreseeable class of accident.
Yep. As you can see, you're the second to catch it.
(I made a posting about Nortel elsewhere - comparing it to SCO and the tendency of a company switching to IP trolling as a grab-anything-that-floats move when they're going down (their own patents in Nortel's case). It must have gotten stuck in my Freudian-proto-typo buffer.)
Enough space between us and the destination is being created by "inflation" that more is created than is crossed by light, so the distance to the destination keeps increasing.... even from the point of view of the light attempting the trip. The destination is unreachable because it's "running away faster than light".
It would also require REVERSING cosmic expansion between the vehicle and the destination. Otherwise, while the distance to the daparture point increases, the distance to the destination does not increase.
Make that: Otherwise, while the distance to the departure point increases, the distance to the destination does not DEcrease.
It's also worth noting that it may still be going on - and from our viewpoint it's going on at a distance where things would "appear" to be receding at more than the speed of light. Enough space between us and the destination is being created by "inflation" that more is created than is crossed by light, so the distance to the destination keeps increasing.
Making a practical warp drive would take more than replicating cosmic inflation between the vehicle and the launch point. It would also require REVERSING cosmic expansion between the vehicle and the destination. Otherwise, while the distance to the daparture point increases, the distance to the destination does not increase.
Worse: Adding extra space between your starting point and a desirable destination (without removing an equivalent amount further on) would be bad for the NEXT vehicle to attempt the trip. Not to mention what that space expansion would do to other aspects of physics in the stressed space resulting. Stressing space corresponds to creating gravitational fields, as well as dumping energy into magnetic and electric fields passing through the areas where space is being created. Creating lightyears worth would correspond to a LOT of energy. B-(
I never understood why top-notch text was called "prose" and top-notch drawing were called "art", but putting the two together was always deemed "crap".
Because the people doing the namecalling had a vested interest in their own art establishment?
IMHO graphic novels have precisely the same relation to novels as stage plays and motion pictures have to oral storytelling. Sure there's a Sturgeon's Law fraction of junk out there. But that in no way diminishes the quality of the good stuff.
= = = =
Note that they talked the same trash about Science Fiction, too. But there you can find another reason:
Mainstream Fiction is an artform that serves as a platform for propagandizing the non-technical masses. The central message is "It may be going to hell all around you, but if you try to fix it you'll just make it worse. Let the officials handle it, leave it alone, and suffer in silence."
Science Fiction is an artform for the techies who design, build, operate, and improve the infrastructure, where such a mindset would be a disaster. SF's central message is generally "Your application of intelligence to virtually any problem may solve it, to the benefit of yourself and humanity." (Except for the dystopian variant, which amounts to "If you break it THIS way it will be too broken to fix, so watch it!").
The techies are an isolated part of the population - especially in the institutes of advanced learning - and the "art establishment" is in charge of much of the rest of it. They truly believe that SF is a form of "escapist porn". ("Escapism" being an alleged sin consisting of getting yourself out from under the thumbs of your rulers and the trouble they cause - and in the process no longer "contributing to society" as much as you are expected to do.) So they slam it to try to keep their own charges indoctrinated in their own mind set and away from that of the techies.
Superhero comics ("There is evil and there is virtue in fighting it. You can - at least temporarily - hold it at bay and prevent greater disasters than if it were allowed to run rampant."), graphic novels (which can examine and take virtually any viewpoint but often take empowering ones), and other comic forms have content that deviates from politically-correct conformism. So of course it's "not art" according to that pack of group-thinkers.
I guess that my thought retention is shorter than 6 paragraphs...
Yep. Comes from reading too many comic books. Rots your brain. B-)
= = = =
At least that's what they used to tell ME when I was a kid. My place has a room half-buried in comic books now. The "kid stuff" got thrown out by the parents long ago. But there's some alternative press stuff from the 60s/70s and graphic novels I've been buying and reading since moving to Silicon Valley in the mid '80s and discovering Lee's Comics and Miller's adaptation of "The Dirty Pair". (Including TWO copies of an early run of "The Watchmen". My wife and I each brought one to the marriage. B-) )
Pity they didn't include any of Foglio's "Girl Genius" in that book. It's up for a Hugo and for a science-fiction themed strip it's hard to get more "best of the year" than that.
Would have helped their case if they'd checked before starting that they actually *owned* the copyrights they were trying to leverage.
Early on they published an excerpt from (what they claimed was) their agreement with Nortel which said that something to the effect that the copyrights didn't transfer except to the extent needed to put teeth in their operation of (exclusively) licensing and collecting royalties for Nortel.
I think they read that to mean that, while Nortel still had rights to use the code themselves, they had transferred what mattered of the copyright (for the purpose of licensing others to SCO). SCO paid a bundle for that exclusive right to license others and keep a small percentage of the license fees. So it's reasonable for them to think they had bought SOMETHING from Nortel.
I know I read the text as saying that either the minimal set of copyrights necessary to enforce Unix licensing agreements transferred to SCO with a perpetual license and future license-fee-payment obligations back to Nortel, or if not the copyrights themselves then the right to use the copyright to enforce licenses transferred, which is what mattered for SCO vs. IBM.
However a judge disagreed - and judges are far more expert in this than a non-lawyer like me. B-)
(Also: Nortel couldn't find the text in question in THEIR files, though as they were the plantif in the suit over the copyrights I'd expect that to not carry much weight.)
... when they started suing everybody who did anything SONET (including our company) over potential infringements of their patents. (I got dragged in because a chip I had co-architected included a SONET-like framer and some other telecom carrier framer stuff.)
When the company is sinking and the management is grabbing any floating debris that might keep their heads above water, the patent portfolio that USED to be just for protection against suits from others suddenly becomes a potential cash cow. (Or an inflatable life raft to continue the previous metaphor.) And a technology company starts taking on the appearance of a patent troll operation.
Of course in SCO's case it looks like the patent trolls bought into the sinking company so they could use it for trolling...
Slashdot Mirror
The Austrian School is marginalized among people who actually know economics,
By which you mean the Keynsians and the Monitarists.
Which school predicted the crash, eh? ... but you do hear a lot of neocons idolizing them (see the disconnect there?).
Actually the neocons are quite the fans of some of the mainstream economic schools. It's the (L/l)ibertarians, (C/c)onstitutionalists, and the like (whom the neocons HATE) who are big on the Austrian analysis.
(Big letter for members of a party or other organization or movement calling itself that. Little letter for someone who adheres to all or some of the philosophical principles.)
That same line of reasoning would apply not only to a GPS bug on your car, but also to someone following you around with a notepad.
But it's much CHEAPER to put a GPS box on the car than to put three shifts of police (at a minimum of two cars per shift) to following a suspect around.
While the principle may be the same, a lot of abuses were not brought up as issues in the past because they were rare due to the cost.
Also: With the higher cost, the administration would tend to reserve the procedure for targets where there was more signs that the surveillance would be productive - and that would usually translate to enough evidence to get a warrant. With the price drop it becomes economically feasible to "cast a broad net" - and departments that might never, or very rarely, have committed such abuses would commit them on a wholesale basis unless restrained.
So lowering the cost of tyranny can lead, not just to a quantitative, but to a qualitative change in the need for judicial intervention.
HA! Good luck getting the Supreme Court to overturn Wickard v. Filburn(1942)
Overturning Wickard v. Filburn is a major piece of what this new constitutionalist movement is about.
That decision (on a Great Depression era central-economic-planning law, during the runup to WW II) is what turned the commerce clause into a blank check for the Fed to regulate anything they damned well pleased - and has since been used for such things as justifying federal regulation of marijuana growing for personal consumption (because it would affect the traffic in out-of-state marijuana supplies!).
Do any of you really think that the people who wrote the Constitution would have considered banning growing of wheat to feed your own pigs to be a proper federal "regulation of interstate commerce in wheat"?
Slashdot does have a "friend" concept. I'm sure it's underutilized (and hopefully all dev time is spent elsewhere if that's true), but that gives it a social aspect.
Slashdot "friend" isn't a social tag. It's just the word they used for setting a bit that says "I'm more likely to want to see what this poster has to say than the general users' moderation would predict. So:
- show it to me at a lower moderation level,
- tag it with a colored dot to attract my attention, and
- also tag other posters that THIS poster has similarly tagged that HE wants to see."
That doesn't necessarily translate to the social meaning of "friend" (though it's likely to be positively correlated). For instance: While most of the people I've tagged as "friends" are, based on their online statements, also people I'd probably want to actually befriend, there are a couple that I tagged because they have opinions that diverge wildly from mine but are interestingly reasoned and/or phrased.
Given ALL the problems we see with corporations that carry debt, why on earth Microsoft would want to piss away a giant cash reserve AND borrow money ...?
Perhaps they're expecting significant inflation, or even hyperinflation, of dollars (as is everybody with the least clue about the theories of the Austrian school of economics.)
Interest rates are massively depressed by the "printing press money" currently pouring out of Washington. The expectation that the money will devalue drastically over the next couple quarters to couple years (especially now that China has stopped buying US bonds). Meanwhile the artificially depressed (compared to borrowing only savings) interest rates continue the diversion of "stuff" from where it can build infrastructure to make a future profit and into either projects that can't be finished or won't have customers when they're done or immediate consumption. This turns a recession into a depression. It's exactly what happened to create the Great Depression, but the government is doing it more this time around and with no safety net from a gold standard - so the US could end up more like Weimar Germany than the US of the '30s.
If you believe that, the logical thing to do is to grab some of the dollars at the low interest rate before the inflation gets figured into their price and use them to buy assets that won't inflate or disintegrate in a depression. Pick off undervalued resources - commodities, potentially profitable companies, etc. Then when the inflation hits, cash things like your gold reserves and pay off the notes in inflated dollars.
To give you an idea of what hyperinflation is like: In the first year and a half after the Treaty of Versaille's reparation section took effect, the money inflated so much that, were it to happen here, a $200,000 mortgage could be paid off completely for the price of a slice of toast. (Over 9 years it inflated by a trillion-to-one, before they instituted a new money that was more solidly backed.)
= = =
Then again:
- Maybe they see an acquisition target and need a bit more cash.
- Maybe they ARE, or expect to become, an acquisition target (due to the cash reserves and an expectation of a stock price drop) and are working on looking less attractive. B-)
Theoretically, you could "type 192.168.1.1 into your Web browser's address bar -- a trick well known to network gurus -- the MiFi's settings pages magically appear. Now you can do geeky, tweaky tasks like changing the password ...
So once you've shown them the password couldn't THEY type 192.168.1.1 into THEIR web browser, change the password, and lock YOU out of kicking them off (or making further changes to your own WiFi card)?
Whoosh right back at you.
Gubernator is the same play on "gubernatorial" (having to do with a governor) and "terminator".
It works better because the whole string is the leading part of "gubernatorial" but by chopping off the tail and shifting the stress pattern to match "terminator" you also end up with the two trailing sylables identical to those of the latter. (And it comes out sounding somewhat like his accent as well.)
For "governator", on the other hand, you arbitrarily splice parts of the two words, losing the marvelous coincidence in the existing words.
IANAL. And I don't recall if this was federal or Michigan. But...
I understand that using a directional microphone for eavesdropping requires a warrant. The reason: When nobody is within view in a location were nobody would be able to hide within earshot, you have the expectation that your conversation is private. So it requires probable cause and a warrant, rather than just "happening to overhear" with a directional microphone, to satisfy the Fourth Amendment.
Similarly if you throw out your documents intact the police can fish them out of your trash and, if they find anything incriminating, use it against you. But if you shred it they have to get a warrant to seize and reassemble the shreds and use them in an investigation or in court. Again this is because you have a reasonable expectation of privacy if you shred your documents and none if you discard them intact.
While a skilled surveillance operation (or traffic cameras "installed for other reasons") might be able to see where you are without your noticing, it would be hard to do this if you, for instance, traveled an untrafficked route with no security cameras and noticed that there were no cars or people nearby to observe you. In that case you would have a reasonable expectation that your whereabouts were unknown, despite being in a public place where, in principle, someone might happen to notice you. Yet a tracking device would record your whereabouts when police observers could not. So the same principle should apply.
Judging by the descripton this device apparently operates by beaming additional sound at the people who are not supposed to be in a conversation, rather than attempting to cancel the conversation at their ears. So this is a selective noise generator.
It's equivalent to creating enough background noise to drown out the conversations, but doing it selectively at the ears of the victims. Of course this means increasing, rather than decreasing, the noise level of the environment, and doing so with snippets of conversation that can ALMOST be understood - resulting in increased stress both from the high level of noise and the failed processing in the victims' brains.
Sounds like a lawsuit waiting to happen.
Textbooks are a surprisingly controversial issue in California and there is a lot of political baggage and bureaucratic red tape that will make an open source textbook plan especially troublesome.
No kidding. It's called "bribery", "corruption", and "bureaucratic naivete".
See the seventh chapter of part 5 of Richard P. Feynman's book _"Surely you're Joking, Mr. Feynman!"_, which is titled "Judging Books by Their Covers" for a descripton of the process as of the year he let himself be dragged into it.
(The title comes from an incident where some members of the board submitted ratings for volumes of a textbook set which hadn't yet been completed and so were supplied with the full cover but blank pages.)
As in gubernatorial.
(Yes I know it's quoting TFA which is punctuated to indicate that it's quoting some third source. But it should at least have rated a [sic] if not an outright edit-in-square-brackets.)
From what I understand, these machines only have control of things that can affect money.
Medical records. Operation of automated medical tools. Communications used for bringing police, fire departments, ambulances, and other "first responders" to sites where people are in danger and/or injured. The components of the power grid, which operates life support systems, traffic lights, refrigeration preventing food poisoning, air-conditioning and heating equipment without which the elderly may die of heatstroke or hypothermia, etc. Railroad train signaling (preventing multi-train collisions, derailment - including into nearby structures and people. Water purification equipment. Sewage treatment equipment. Reservoir level control and irrigation water routing (which could lead to massive flooding if fouled). Industrial process control - which manages processes that could cause fires, explosions, and the release of toxic chemicals if fouled.
I could go on.
why is money more important than human life?
Money is crystallized labor. It represents a fraction of lifetime that a person worked to acquire it. Stealing or destroying it is stealing that portion of the person's life - enslaving them. It is well understood that deadly force is an appropriate response to attempts to enslave a person or hold them in slavery.
The Geneva Convention also gives a much lower standard of protection, if any at all, to those combatants who DON'T go around in uniforms, work for a nation or non-nation organization that can negotiate a cease-fire surrender which the combatant will honor, adhere to the principles of the Geneva Convention themselves, etc. Spies and saboteurs are still largely fair game.
This is at least partly to encourage everybody to play by the same rules.
If such a device could be activated only by the pilot, it wouldn't be so unreasonable.
If such a device could be activated only by the pilot it would mean:
a) The hijackers would keep the pilot from activating it as their first act upon storming the cabin.
b) If it got activated the pilot, minimum, would be far more likely to be killed than if he had no hand in activating it.
Also: If such a device existed, even if it required activation by the pilot, malfunctions could lead to a non-controllable plane or a plane that is remotely-hijackable even without pilot consent.
Glad they don't have commercial planes with complete remote control. Or do they?
That was proposed after 9/11 as a solution to hijacked planes. Remote control devices that could take over a hijacked plane, remotely, locking out control by those on board and allowing it to be landed safely. Remote devices strategically located at all major commercial airports - or at least those near high-value targets (which is pretty much all of 'em).
When the trial balloon went up it was soon pointed out that, with such a system, hijackers could use it to hijack the planes without even being on board. And the tech would be distributed to many locations (worldwide) from which it could be stolen.
Haven't heard much about it since. B-) Of course that means that it will fall off the mental horizon for decision makers and they might decide to do it after all. B-(
McDonalds (like some other chain restaurants) also designs their drive-through lanes so the driver is trapped in the car and can't get out and strip off the scalding clothing, mitigating the injury, in case of this foreseeable class of accident.
Oops. Should have looked into it more before posting.
In this case the car was already out of the lane and into a parking place when the mishap occurred.
McDonalds (like some other chain restaurants) also designs their drive-through lanes so the driver is trapped in the car and can't get out and strip off the scalding clothing, mitigating the injury, in case of this foreseeable class of accident.
Don't you mean Novell and not Nortel?
Yep. As you can see, you're the second to catch it.
(I made a posting about Nortel elsewhere - comparing it to SCO and the tendency of a company switching to IP trolling as a grab-anything-that-floats move when they're going down (their own patents in Nortel's case). It must have gotten stuck in my Freudian-proto-typo buffer.)
(Trying a new interface and blew the edit...)
Enough space between us and the destination is being created by "inflation" that more is created than is crossed by light, so the distance to the destination keeps increasing. ... even from the point of view of the light attempting the trip. The destination is unreachable because it's "running away faster than light".
It would also require REVERSING cosmic expansion between the vehicle and the destination. Otherwise, while the distance to the daparture point increases, the distance to the destination does not increase.
Make that: Otherwise, while the distance to the departure point increases, the distance to the destination does not DEcrease.
It's also worth noting that it may still be going on - and from our viewpoint it's going on at a distance where things would "appear" to be receding at more than the speed of light. Enough space between us and the destination is being created by "inflation" that more is created than is crossed by light, so the distance to the destination keeps increasing.
Making a practical warp drive would take more than replicating cosmic inflation between the vehicle and the launch point. It would also require REVERSING cosmic expansion between the vehicle and the destination. Otherwise, while the distance to the daparture point increases, the distance to the destination does not increase.
Worse: Adding extra space between your starting point and a desirable destination (without removing an equivalent amount further on) would be bad for the NEXT vehicle to attempt the trip. Not to mention what that space expansion would do to other aspects of physics in the stressed space resulting. Stressing space corresponds to creating gravitational fields, as well as dumping energy into magnetic and electric fields passing through the areas where space is being created. Creating lightyears worth would correspond to a LOT of energy. B-(
I never understood why top-notch text was called "prose" and top-notch drawing were called "art", but putting the two together was always deemed "crap".
Because the people doing the namecalling had a vested interest in their own art establishment?
IMHO graphic novels have precisely the same relation to novels as stage plays and motion pictures have to oral storytelling. Sure there's a Sturgeon's Law fraction of junk out there. But that in no way diminishes the quality of the good stuff.
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Note that they talked the same trash about Science Fiction, too. But there you can find another reason:
Mainstream Fiction is an artform that serves as a platform for propagandizing the non-technical masses. The central message is "It may be going to hell all around you, but if you try to fix it you'll just make it worse. Let the officials handle it, leave it alone, and suffer in silence."
Science Fiction is an artform for the techies who design, build, operate, and improve the infrastructure, where such a mindset would be a disaster. SF's central message is generally "Your application of intelligence to virtually any problem may solve it, to the benefit of yourself and humanity." (Except for the dystopian variant, which amounts to "If you break it THIS way it will be too broken to fix, so watch it!").
The techies are an isolated part of the population - especially in the institutes of advanced learning - and the "art establishment" is in charge of much of the rest of it. They truly believe that SF is a form of "escapist porn". ("Escapism" being an alleged sin consisting of getting yourself out from under the thumbs of your rulers and the trouble they cause - and in the process no longer "contributing to society" as much as you are expected to do.) So they slam it to try to keep their own charges indoctrinated in their own mind set and away from that of the techies.
Superhero comics ("There is evil and there is virtue in fighting it. You can - at least temporarily - hold it at bay and prevent greater disasters than if it were allowed to run rampant."), graphic novels (which can examine and take virtually any viewpoint but often take empowering ones), and other comic forms have content that deviates from politically-correct conformism. So of course it's "not art" according to that pack of group-thinkers.
Miller's adaptation of "The Dirty Pair"
Adam Warren's adaptation! (Argh! Guess my brain rot is showing, too.)
I guess that my thought retention is shorter than 6 paragraphs...
Yep. Comes from reading too many comic books. Rots your brain. B-)
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At least that's what they used to tell ME when I was a kid. My place has a room half-buried in comic books now. The "kid stuff" got thrown out by the parents long ago. But there's some alternative press stuff from the 60s/70s and graphic novels I've been buying and reading since moving to Silicon Valley in the mid '80s and discovering Lee's Comics and Miller's adaptation of "The Dirty Pair". (Including TWO copies of an early run of "The Watchmen". My wife and I each brought one to the marriage. B-) )
Pity they didn't include any of Foglio's "Girl Genius" in that book. It's up for a Hugo and for a science-fiction themed strip it's hard to get more "best of the year" than that.
Would have helped their case if they'd checked before starting that they actually *owned* the copyrights they were trying to leverage.
Early on they published an excerpt from (what they claimed was) their agreement with Nortel which said that something to the effect that the copyrights didn't transfer except to the extent needed to put teeth in their operation of (exclusively) licensing and collecting royalties for Nortel.
I think they read that to mean that, while Nortel still had rights to use the code themselves, they had transferred what mattered of the copyright (for the purpose of licensing others to SCO). SCO paid a bundle for that exclusive right to license others and keep a small percentage of the license fees. So it's reasonable for them to think they had bought SOMETHING from Nortel.
I know I read the text as saying that either the minimal set of copyrights necessary to enforce Unix licensing agreements transferred to SCO with a perpetual license and future license-fee-payment obligations back to Nortel, or if not the copyrights themselves then the right to use the copyright to enforce licenses transferred, which is what mattered for SCO vs. IBM.
However a judge disagreed - and judges are far more expert in this than a non-lawyer like me. B-)
(Also: Nortel couldn't find the text in question in THEIR files, though as they were the plantif in the suit over the copyrights I'd expect that to not carry much weight.)
... when they started suing everybody who did anything SONET (including our company) over potential infringements of their patents. (I got dragged in because a chip I had co-architected included a SONET-like framer and some other telecom carrier framer stuff.)
When the company is sinking and the management is grabbing any floating debris that might keep their heads above water, the patent portfolio that USED to be just for protection against suits from others suddenly becomes a potential cash cow. (Or an inflatable life raft to continue the previous metaphor.) And a technology company starts taking on the appearance of a patent troll operation.
Of course in SCO's case it looks like the patent trolls bought into the sinking company so they could use it for trolling...