Counting is what machines are good at. I trust them (as long the code controlling them is open for public scrutiny) much more than some group of (always biased) humans.
Actually, what machines are good at is following orders. If they're ordered to count, they count. If they're orderd to fake it, they fake it.
I too trust them to do a better job of counting than people - as long as that's what their orders (the program) tells them to do. But I have no way of knowing that the code that the public examined is actually the code running on the machine - and I trust the machine to help hide what code it's running if THAT's what it's been ordered to do.
That's why I can never trust the machine to count.
Now, I CAN trust:
- the paper a machine prints to remain unchanged until the period for recounts is over.
- electors (who are paying attention) to become irate if the machine prints the wrong votes
- the partisans for MY candidates and side on ballot measures to do their best at any recount to assure that the partisans for the OTHER candidates and sides don't fake the count.
So I will trust the election if, and ONLY if, the machines are printing the TRUE ballot, which is then checked by the voters and stored in a ballot box, and the electronic count on the machines is simply an accelleration, subject to being tossed out in favor of the manual recount if there's any question.
Note that once the audit trail is in place there is much less incentive to hack the voting machines. It would be ineffectual AND it would be detected. Without the audit trail there's no way to correct such tampering, or even know it has occurred. So there's a much greater likelyhood it will be attempted.
Granted, I have seen antennas that defy logic until you really understand how they are working.... the Discone antenna for example... but this one still is baffling and the lack of details increases the skeptical thoughts.
It sounds like a cross between a capacitive hat and a rubber-ducky style helix.
A capacitive hat lets you expose the lower part of the 1/4 wave half-dipole (where most of the current is) then cut off the end. The remaining current goes into the capacitive hat and doesn't contribute to the magnetic field radiation.
A helix lets you shorten the entire half-dipole, but still ends up with the current decreasing in the classic cosine fashion as you go up the whip, until it goes to zero near the end.
This sounds like some cross of the two, with a variable wind and a distributed capacitive loading, which allegedly succeedes in keeping the current high (and in-phase) over the full length of the shortened half-dipole.
I'd love to see a better description than the one that was given.
Meanwhile, I'm suspicious of the claim that it is just as good as a dipole. If it's shorter, it's intercepting a smaller amount of the passing wave. To achieve equivalent gain it has to make up for that in some way (like being effectively broader, or the "capacitive loading" structure on the upper end of the device coupling to the electric field in the space beyond).
= = = =
By the way: My favorite "shrunken antenna" is the DDRR. Very narrow band, but tiny.
How do you "know" it got canned? As far as I'm aware it's still in SD and still has funding.
The article I saw about it CLAIMED it got canned.
Maybe it went deeper black.
Seems to me you could solve this problem with an active system - a crown of sector antennas and radar amplifiers: Whatever they see in one direction they repeat in the other, with gain in proportion to the ratio of the ship area to antenna area.
One problem with this is that if you get between two retroreflectors your active stealth device becomes the amplifier in a maser oscilator. B-) (But by then you're probably a BIG naked-eye target.)
Another is that you distort the delay time and phase, which might be detectable. But it would be a LOT less detectable than a big black arrowhead on the screen. B-)
A third is that you'll inject noise and still diffract the signal a bit, which would be detectable on passive and active systems respectively. But again it would still be a MUCH smaller target than a non-stealthy ship - like dinghy vs. cruiser.
If you google for skunkworks sea shadow, you should be able to find a picture of it.
So it didn't work then?
Correct - in a way. The stealth ship worked VERY well. It didn't reflect any radar.
The problem was that it wasn't TRANSPARENT. You see the WAVES reflect radar. So even on a low-tech search radar there's a low-grade speckle from the waves - which varies with the wind and wave condition.
The stealth ship blocked the wave reflection. So there was a blank spot where the ship was, and a big streak behind it that was blank as well.
It was like a big dark exclamation point, or an arrowhead, with the "stealth" ship right at the point.
Funny thing is, someone got a discount. $11000 = 15 * $699 + $515. Or did someone at SCO walk away with $184?
Probably rounded to the nearest thousand.
Which means (if they were all single-CPU licenses) exactly 16 licenses were sold. 15 or 17 licenses would both round to a different number of thousands.
No more than 16 people dumb enough to bite? Sounds promising. B-)
And I'm SURE SCO spent more than that on this move. So more money down the tubes for them.
Why are you implying that "armed insurrection" was Gore's only option to correct the results of the electoral congress?
I wasn't.
However, given that the supreme court had already spoken, further adventures in lower courts (or the supreme court itself) likely would have failed - even if the recounts had NOT continued to give Florida to Bush. There goes the Judicial branch.
Appeals to the legislative branch could only oust Bush by impeachment (essentially impossible, since it wasn't BUSH's fault the election was close - and the Repblicans had a majority in the house AND the senate at the time). Anything else - such as legislative non-cooperation - is business as usual.
Appeals to the executive branch or the population to ignore the results of the election would simply be calls for civil disobedience or violent revolt. Civil disobedience in the executive branch is dealt with by firing and/or trial and punishment if criminal, in the civilian population it's ignnored or dealt with by trial and punishment if criminal. What's left is VIOLENT resistance, i.e. armed insurrection.
If you think for a moment that the fact that "The fact that Gore acquiesced" counts him out, you are sadly mistaken and need to do some reading on how US Presidential Elections work.
I think you missed the poster's point about Gore acquiescing.
It was not a claim that his concession had anything to do with whether he'd be elected.
The point was that Gore threw in the towel rather than calling for an armed insurrection to "correct" the results of the electoral congress. This shows that our Republic is operating as designed.
The purpose of elections is NOT to be "fair".
The purpose of elections is to determine how the civil war would come out, so we don't have to FIGHT AND DIE in the bloody thing!
Adobe's Display Postscript is a separate implementation from considerably AFTER NeWS.
here is a previous posting on it by one of Slashdot's own, who was a principal in the early work.
By the way: NeWS itself was originally written by James Gosling and David Rosenthal, at Sun (according to this item by Don Hopkins, another of the early workers on it.)
Seems to me that Sun, and ONLY Sun, is in a position to let Henson, Gilmore, and Daniels open-source the code (as they would love to do).
I could be wrong, but IIRC Sun can't open NeWS because of a whole pile of Adobe Display Postscript crap.
I was under the impression that the postscript engine in X/NeWS was a separate implementation written by John Gillmore, Keith Henson and/or Hugh Daniels, rather than Adobe's or a derivate of it.
(I could be wrong, as I haven't explicitly asked them, but just assumed it.)
The problems with [...] just randomly posting stuff on the internet is that it hasn't had a level of peer review. Someone may have some great information out there, that everyone should read, and someone else might have a complete load of crap.
So here's an opportunity: Create a journal consisting of peer-reviewed links.
Submission consists of net-publishing the article, then giving the journal permission to review it, then archive (in case your copy goes away), publish links to it, and grant further reprint rights if they find it acceptable.
IMO, the cost of my subscriptions (which currently cost me a few hundred bucks a year) is pretty negligible compared to the benefit of keeping me up to date on the newest research in the field. What's more important is that the publications themselves contain high-quality, useful material.
The moderation model of a journal doesn't have to change (though it may be convenient for the journal to take advangage of the technology to make changes the believe to be desirable at the same time, or shortly thereafter).
Switching from dead-tree to magnetized-ground-rock publication can significantly cut the costs (and publication delays) of the operation of the journal. (Once you're in typeset form, you're done.) This might make the author-pays model for an electronic journal even less expensive for the authors than a both-pay model for a paper version.
And even if it ISN'T enough, the cost reductions and wider potential audience could make the readers-or-advertisers pay portion much smaller than with a dead-tree journal.
Or [Sun might be] plan[ning] to give SCO the bird and let them sue - They are already fighting on a dozen fronts anyway. Nothing like cranking up the burn rate another notch.
That wouldn't work - because SCO doesn't have to sue them right away.
SCO could wait until the other suits are done. If they lose they're dead anyhow. If they win, they would then have the resources to go after Sun, and LOTS of damages to show due to the wide distribution of the code.
[the] assets get assigned by the courts to 'heirs' according to an established pecking-order.
Something to the effect of Lawyers that are owed money by the company have first dibs (of course - law is made by lawyers) [...]
It's actually more benign than that.
If the loser COULDN'T pay his lawyers, it would be hard for anyone with a reasonable case but in a potentially bankrupt-if-losing situation to hire competent lawyers. This would greatly increase the ability of deep-pockets plantifs and corrupt officials to use the legal system to harass their enemies.
So it's really there for the benefit of little guys in trouble, preserving their right to obtain legal council. Keeping the lawyers fed, though it IS an effect, is secondary.
IBM should NOT give SCO twenty tons of paper - because SCO would use it as an excuse to drag out the suit.
IF IBM gives them anything at all it should be in electronic form, so there's no excuse for not processing it immediately.
But the info shouldn't go to SCO - from where it could be incorporated into SCO products or sold under-the-table to other IBM competitors. Instead IBM's code, along with SCOs, should be given to a third party, along with instructions to examine them for evidence supporting or refuting SCO's claims. (The subsets that are directly applicable to the case could then be given to SCO, leaving them in the dark about any other IBM IP.)
= = = =
The "twenty tons of paper" statement reminds me of a previous suit: Xerox vs. IBM, when Xerox thought IBM was beating the pants off its mainframe clone operation.
Xerox had shut it down and then sued IBM. IBM demanded the records. Xerox provided it - as tons of paper. IBM, taking advantage of its own data processing expertese, created an index and a searchable database for its legal team. B-)
Turns out that the killed-before-the-trial Xerox mainframe division (which, like IBM at the time, was a lease-based operation) had actually been making money hand-over-fist - but Xerox's accountants had screwed up so that it LOOKED like they were running at a loss. Big horselaugh on Xerox and a quick out-of-court settlement.
As part of the settlement IBM had to destroy the database.
Quite a while back the Grasshopper Group (which was working on a NeWS for Macintosh at a garage-shop level) contracted with Sun to combine it with X as a Sun product. It didn't catch on. But the contract resulted in Sun having enough IP rights over the codebase that the developers couldn't open-source it. Since then they have tried several times to get Sun to allow them to release the code. But nothing ever came of it.
X is already open and NeWS is currently moribund. None of Sun's current or likely future market advantages are the restult of its windowing system, and an open version of NeWS wouldn't be any threat to Sun. (Even if it caught on big time Sun could just grab the open version and use it - and an open project would no doubt include a good Sun port anyhow.)
So if Sun is really interested in contributing to Open Source, here's something they can do on the cheap: Free the orphan.
Question 2: Why do majority ofpeople buy those instead of making their own?
Answer: Because it is a lot more convinient
Alternate answer: Because there's too little life.
It takes an ENORMOUS amount of material to form the basis of doing ANYTHING. If you try to make all your tools in order to be sure of their quality, you have no time left to USE them.
So people trying to be productive at their specialty try to throw as much as possible of their time at it - obtaining as many of their tools as possible from others for whom making tools is THEIR specialty, and making only those that can't be obtained any other way.
It's called "Division of Effort".
Would you rather your heart surgeon spent ten hours each week working on his personal firewll, software configuration, and recovering from the latest worm attack? Or would you rather he spent it studying the latest research on surgical technique?
The california energy crisis was caused by Enron gaming the system. Plain and simple.
The California energy crisis was caused by new regulations forcing Pacific Gas and Electric to:
- Divest itself of generators.
- Refrain from signing long-term contracts with suppliers.
- Sell as much electricity as the consumers wanted at a capped price.
- Buy electricity on the spot market for whatever was asked.
What this meant was whenever the demand outstripped the supply, PG&E was forced to bid the price up into a spike, draning its resources until it bankrupted itself.
Of COURSE it was in the interest of the suppliers to charge arbitratrarily high prices, and take generation out of service to create the pinch.
Enron apparently ADDITIONALLY broke a law by shipping some of their generated-in-California power out of the state at a pre-contracted low price and then shipping it back in at a high price. But that was an added straw. The results would have been only slightly less bad if Enron (and all other suppliers) had stayed strictly within the law. The situation was created by the regulations, NOT their lack.
Of COURSE the suppliers "gamed the system". But the government SET UP THE RULES OF THE GAME. To the extent that they played WITHIN the rules the government has NO GRIPE if they play hard and win big time.
Companies are in business to MAKE AS MUCH MONEY AS POSSIBLE. It's the job of governments to set the rules of the game so that maximizing profit creates social goods, rather than social bads.
Deregulation gave us the horrible consolidation that has six or seven companies owning all media.
Since when was that "deregulation"? That's like saying the electrical rate crisis in California was caused by "deregulation", when it was actually caused by changes to regulations that resulted in mandating a trap for the distribution utility and the consumers.
The FCC still controls the licenses - and effectively bans the entry of new broadcasters. You can't buy a license for any price, though there are plenty of slots available and (the last time I checked) broadcasting has THE highest return-on-investment of ANY industry.
Complicated problems result from applying complicated solutions to simple problems. This is nowhere more visible than in government.
When you have a complicated web of regulations, removing one of them while leaving the rest in place can be like removing one brick from a tottering building. The result can be FAR worse than either what preceeded it OR the complete removal of the building. But the real problem was nevertheless the result of the regulations / tottering building, not the lack of still more patches.
Back in '67 I was working in a radar lab and heard the story of the invention of the microwave oven (by a radar tech).
Apparently the first demo (to his boss) of the initial prototype (a pot with a hand-sawn microwave flange and a magnetron bolted on) involved an attempt to cook an egg, which exploded and sprayed half-cooked egg on boss' tie.
Fortunately for all concerned, the boss was a geek too (rather than a pointy-hair) and saw the possibilities despite the ruin of his tie. B-)
What about north? Coeur d'Alene and Hayden (where I live) are both north of the lake.
As another poster already mentioned, the service is available to non tribe member residents on the res.
If they haven't already put an access point on your side of the lake, how broad is the lake? If only a few miles, you should be able to hit the access point with a directional antenna.
24 db dishes can be had online for less than a hundred bux, and two of 'em face-to-face can easily go more than ten miles, while one of 'em pointing at an ordinary accesspoint can make several miles. Similarly, a short yagi (or a "pringles can" antenna) can get you considerable distance.
So even if they don't have an AP on your side of the lake, you may be able to connect.
And IF you can connect, you can stick a second card in your box, enable routing, and become a local access point for the others who can't hit directly. (Two such volunteers can provide a solid feed without leaving the rest of your community in the lurch when you're rebooting.)
And I think some cheap routers can also be configured for this - just replace one of the rubber duckies with a directional antenna - or plug two of 'em - one with a directional antenna, one with duckies or roof-mounted omnis - into your ethernet hub or back-to-back with a crossover ethernet cable.
But since the intent WAS to feed the whole community don't be surprised if such relay access points are already part of the plan. (Or, since they're so cheap to add, if they get added once they're suggested.)
[It was all about paying off Clinton/Gore's contributors in Silicon Valley.]
Do you have any evidence that supports this... I have been suspect about your assertion for a while.
What hardcopy evidence could exist?
- Al Gore and/or Bill Clinton visit Silicon Valley about every other week (TOTALLY tying up traffic due to security - trust me, I was there) for face-to-face talks with executives.
- Executives contribute money (from their corporate coffers or laundered through their executives' salaries).
- Clinton/Gore, after reelection, impose an enormous tax on telephone service earmarked to buy the equipment that their contributors supply, designed so they can pull ANY amount of it through ANY school, and administered by thousands of low-level administrators nationwide, in THE most graft-ridden part of government operation.
Do you think they wrote anything down? Do you think there were any tapes made?
By the time someone reaches the highest offices of the land, if they're a graft-trader they've gotten VERY good at insuring that there's no evidence to find. People who leave evidence lying around tend to get weeded out at a low level.
NEC then sent a bill to the E-Rate administrators, a quasi-governmental agency for tens of millions of dollars more than the actual cost of the equipment.
If someone robs a bank overnight (no people harmed) and takes 10 million dollars the shit would hit the fan.
Since when do for-PROFIT companies sell at COST? If they did that they'd get sued by their shareholders, and rightly so.
If that should have been "tens of million dollars more than their LIST PRICE" or "... their CONTRACTED PRICE" or "for tens of millions of dollars worth of equipment that they DIDN'T INSTALL" it's another matter. But in that case the original poster (sorry MrRTFM) shoul have SAID so.
Which brings up another question. Why did the people letting the contract not get a price in advance, and do a due dilligence check that the design was appropriately sized and competitive?
Seems to me the people who should be hauled over the coals are the administrators who let the contract. A company can't just go out and wire schools without anybody's permission, then charge for it. (Even if that's the way governments claim to work. B-) )
Of COURSE collecting a big pot of tax money for "wiring the schools for internet" will attract those with the political connections to tap it. And of COURSE they will set their prices and install the equipment that gives them the entirety of that pot of money. Why the surprise?
If you want it done at a decent price you don't say: "Here's X billion dollars per year. Who can wire the schools for that?". You say: "School districts: Get hooked up. We've raised your budget a bit, but meet at least Y level of service and if there's any left over you can use it for equipment, supplies, teachers, books, software, sporting goods, building repairs, or whatever else you need."
But IMHO, while the opportunity for graft is ALWAYS a factor in new laws (even if not intentionally), this one DID have an ulterior motive:
By wiring the schools to the internet, the government added weight to the "protect the children" argument for passing regulations limiting what could be posted there.
You will recall the figurehead of this push was Al Gore, during the period when the air was filled with internet-content-regulation and for-the-CHILDren trial balloons - shortly after his wife Tipper's attempt to regulate music content was slapped down. (I believe the quote that got mangled into "Al Gore claims to have invented the Internet." came from that very push.)
The internet was created BY adults FOR adults - or at least the set of people that INCLUDES adults. It was intended to be a medium for transmitting ANY information, cheaply and without restriction. It's as much an adult world as the streets of a city. It has its universities, its industries, and its billboards. But it also has its red light districts, its radical political recruiters, and its underworld.
Children who are below the maturity level to wander this world unharmed should no more be encouraged to go there unsupervised than they should be bussed to the local "adult enterprise zone" and left on their own. And attempts to turn it into a padded cell for kids are as misguided, as tyrannical, and as futile as attempts to do the same to the streets of the city.
You MAY find that it's not necessary to go fancy (though the geek factor is great and the price may be lower). You can also get service from the tellcos. And it MAY no longer cost an arm and a leg, thanks to competition from the geek-factor technologies.
First option is a "Foreign Exchange" line. Phone at your home office, connected to a switchboard in the city of interest (transparently, via the long-distance infrastructure).
This USED to cost an arm and a leg (or have a large per-minute charge) because it potentially tied up a long distance trunk any time you were off-hook, and a business might be off-hook essentially all day. But now that bandwidth is cheaper than air it might be another story. (Worth a look.)
Second option is to install a phone with call-forwarding and a dirt-cheap flat rate long-distance service, with the jack installed somewhere handy in the distant service area. (If you do business there but don't have an office, you can probably talk someone into letting the jack be at their site.) Set the call-forwarding to your home-office phone, and unplug the distant instrument. People call you, it transfers to your home-office phone. You pay the long distance charge for the call - which is prepaid or nearly free.
Third: Some tellcos have a service (I don't recall what it's called) that is essentially equivalent to number two but without the line to the unplugged phone. (Check with the long-distance providers, too, not just the local tellcos.) Local tellcos might still price this one sky high, but I bet the long-distance companies have a deal on it.
If you enquire about number three, it's too pricey, but number two would do the job in your price range, be SURE not to talk about them both in the same call to the tellco in question. B-)
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Counting is what machines are good at. I trust them (as long the code controlling them is open for public scrutiny) much more than some group of (always biased) humans.
Actually, what machines are good at is following orders. If they're ordered to count, they count. If they're orderd to fake it, they fake it.
I too trust them to do a better job of counting than people - as long as that's what their orders (the program) tells them to do. But I have no way of knowing that the code that the public examined is actually the code running on the machine - and I trust the machine to help hide what code it's running if THAT's what it's been ordered to do.
That's why I can never trust the machine to count.
Now, I CAN trust:
- the paper a machine prints to remain unchanged until the period for recounts is over.
- electors (who are paying attention) to become irate if the machine prints the wrong votes
- the partisans for MY candidates and side on ballot measures to do their best at any recount to assure that the partisans for the OTHER candidates and sides don't fake the count.
So I will trust the election if, and ONLY if, the machines are printing the TRUE ballot, which is then checked by the voters and stored in a ballot box, and the electronic count on the machines is simply an accelleration, subject to being tossed out in favor of the manual recount if there's any question.
Note that once the audit trail is in place there is much less incentive to hack the voting machines. It would be ineffectual AND it would be detected. Without the audit trail there's no way to correct such tampering, or even know it has occurred. So there's a much greater likelyhood it will be attempted.
How do you know it hasn't happened already?
Granted, I have seen antennas that defy logic until you really understand how they are working.... the Discone antenna for example... but this one still is baffling and the lack of details increases the skeptical thoughts.
It sounds like a cross between a capacitive hat and a rubber-ducky style helix.
A capacitive hat lets you expose the lower part of the 1/4 wave half-dipole (where most of the current is) then cut off the end. The remaining current goes into the capacitive hat and doesn't contribute to the magnetic field radiation.
A helix lets you shorten the entire half-dipole, but still ends up with the current decreasing in the classic cosine fashion as you go up the whip, until it goes to zero near the end.
This sounds like some cross of the two, with a variable wind and a distributed capacitive loading, which allegedly succeedes in keeping the current high (and in-phase) over the full length of the shortened half-dipole.
I'd love to see a better description than the one that was given.
Meanwhile, I'm suspicious of the claim that it is just as good as a dipole. If it's shorter, it's intercepting a smaller amount of the passing wave. To achieve equivalent gain it has to make up for that in some way (like being effectively broader, or the "capacitive loading" structure on the upper end of the device coupling to the electric field in the space beyond).
= = = =
By the way: My favorite "shrunken antenna" is the DDRR. Very narrow band, but tiny.
How do you "know" it got canned? As far as I'm aware it's still in SD and still has funding.
The article I saw about it CLAIMED it got canned.
Maybe it went deeper black.
Seems to me you could solve this problem with an active system - a crown of sector antennas and radar amplifiers: Whatever they see in one direction they repeat in the other, with gain in proportion to the ratio of the ship area to antenna area.
One problem with this is that if you get between two retroreflectors your active stealth device becomes the amplifier in a maser oscilator. B-) (But by then you're probably a BIG naked-eye target.)
Another is that you distort the delay time and phase, which might be detectable. But it would be a LOT less detectable than a big black arrowhead on the screen. B-)
A third is that you'll inject noise and still diffract the signal a bit, which would be detectable on passive and active systems respectively. But again it would still be a MUCH smaller target than a non-stealthy ship - like dinghy vs. cruiser.
If you google for skunkworks sea shadow, you should be able to find a picture of it.
So it didn't work then?
Correct - in a way. The stealth ship worked VERY well. It didn't reflect any radar.
The problem was that it wasn't TRANSPARENT. You see the WAVES reflect radar. So even on a low-tech search radar there's a low-grade speckle from the waves - which varies with the wind and wave condition.
The stealth ship blocked the wave reflection. So there was a blank spot where the ship was, and a big streak behind it that was blank as well.
It was like a big dark exclamation point, or an arrowhead, with the "stealth" ship right at the point.
So the project got canned.
Funny thing is, someone got a discount. $11000 = 15 * $699 + $515. Or did someone at SCO walk away with $184?
Probably rounded to the nearest thousand.
Which means (if they were all single-CPU licenses) exactly 16 licenses were sold. 15 or 17 licenses would both round to a different number of thousands.
No more than 16 people dumb enough to bite? Sounds promising. B-)
And I'm SURE SCO spent more than that on this move. So more money down the tubes for them.
Why are you implying that "armed insurrection" was Gore's only option to correct the results of the electoral congress?
I wasn't.
However, given that the supreme court had already spoken, further adventures in lower courts (or the supreme court itself) likely would have failed - even if the recounts had NOT continued to give Florida to Bush. There goes the Judicial branch.
Appeals to the legislative branch could only oust Bush by impeachment (essentially impossible, since it wasn't BUSH's fault the election was close - and the Repblicans had a majority in the house AND the senate at the time). Anything else - such as legislative non-cooperation - is business as usual.
Appeals to the executive branch or the population to ignore the results of the election would simply be calls for civil disobedience or violent revolt. Civil disobedience in the executive branch is dealt with by firing and/or trial and punishment if criminal, in the civilian population it's ignnored or dealt with by trial and punishment if criminal. What's left is VIOLENT resistance, i.e. armed insurrection.
Can you suggest an additional option?
If you think for a moment that the fact that "The fact that Gore acquiesced" counts him out, you are sadly mistaken and need to do some reading on how US Presidential Elections work.
I think you missed the poster's point about Gore acquiescing.
It was not a claim that his concession had anything to do with whether he'd be elected.
The point was that Gore threw in the towel rather than calling for an armed insurrection to "correct" the results of the electoral congress. This shows that our Republic is operating as designed.
The purpose of elections is NOT to be "fair".
The purpose of elections is to determine how the civil war would come out, so we don't have to FIGHT AND DIE in the bloody thing!
Adobe's Display Postscript is a separate implementation from considerably AFTER NeWS.
here is a previous posting on it by one of Slashdot's own, who was a principal in the early work.
By the way: NeWS itself was originally written by James Gosling and David Rosenthal, at Sun (according to this item by Don Hopkins, another of the early workers on it.)
Seems to me that Sun, and ONLY Sun, is in a position to let Henson, Gilmore, and Daniels open-source the code (as they would love to do).
I could be wrong, but IIRC Sun can't open NeWS because of a whole pile of Adobe Display Postscript crap.
I was under the impression that the postscript engine in X/NeWS was a separate implementation written by John Gillmore, Keith Henson and/or Hugh Daniels, rather than Adobe's or a derivate of it.
(I could be wrong, as I haven't explicitly asked them, but just assumed it.)
The problems with [...] just randomly posting stuff on the internet is that it hasn't had a level of peer review. Someone may have some great information out there, that everyone should read, and someone else might have a complete load of crap.
So here's an opportunity: Create a journal consisting of peer-reviewed links.
Submission consists of net-publishing the article, then giving the journal permission to review it, then archive (in case your copy goes away), publish links to it, and grant further reprint rights if they find it acceptable.
IMO, the cost of my subscriptions (which currently cost me a few hundred bucks a year) is pretty negligible compared to the benefit of keeping me up to date on the newest research in the field. What's more important is that the publications themselves contain high-quality, useful material.
The moderation model of a journal doesn't have to change (though it may be convenient for the journal to take advangage of the technology to make changes the believe to be desirable at the same time, or shortly thereafter).
Switching from dead-tree to magnetized-ground-rock publication can significantly cut the costs (and publication delays) of the operation of the journal. (Once you're in typeset form, you're done.) This might make the author-pays model for an electronic journal even less expensive for the authors than a both-pay model for a paper version.
And even if it ISN'T enough, the cost reductions and wider potential audience could make the readers-or-advertisers pay portion much smaller than with a dead-tree journal.
Or [Sun might be] plan[ning] to give SCO the bird and let them sue - They are already fighting on a dozen fronts anyway. Nothing like cranking up the burn rate another notch.
That wouldn't work - because SCO doesn't have to sue them right away.
SCO could wait until the other suits are done. If they lose they're dead anyhow. If they win, they would then have the resources to go after Sun, and LOTS of damages to show due to the wide distribution of the code.
[the] assets get assigned by the courts to 'heirs' according to an established pecking-order.
Something to the effect of Lawyers that are owed money by the company have first dibs (of course - law is made by lawyers) [...]
It's actually more benign than that.
If the loser COULDN'T pay his lawyers, it would be hard for anyone with a reasonable case but in a potentially bankrupt-if-losing situation to hire competent lawyers. This would greatly increase the ability of deep-pockets plantifs and corrupt officials to use the legal system to harass their enemies.
So it's really there for the benefit of little guys in trouble, preserving their right to obtain legal council. Keeping the lawyers fed, though it IS an effect, is secondary.
IBM should NOT give SCO twenty tons of paper - because SCO would use it as an excuse to drag out the suit.
IF IBM gives them anything at all it should be in electronic form, so there's no excuse for not processing it immediately.
But the info shouldn't go to SCO - from where it could be incorporated into SCO products or sold under-the-table to other IBM competitors. Instead IBM's code, along with SCOs, should be given to a third party, along with instructions to examine them for evidence supporting or refuting SCO's claims. (The subsets that are directly applicable to the case could then be given to SCO, leaving them in the dark about any other IBM IP.)
= = = =
The "twenty tons of paper" statement reminds me of a previous suit: Xerox vs. IBM, when Xerox thought IBM was beating the pants off its mainframe clone operation.
Xerox had shut it down and then sued IBM. IBM demanded the records. Xerox provided it - as tons of paper. IBM, taking advantage of its own data processing expertese, created an index and a searchable database for its legal team. B-)
Turns out that the killed-before-the-trial Xerox mainframe division (which, like IBM at the time, was a lease-based operation) had actually been making money hand-over-fist - but Xerox's accountants had screwed up so that it LOOKED like they were running at a loss. Big horselaugh on Xerox and a quick out-of-court settlement.
As part of the settlement IBM had to destroy the database.
If I've got this right:
Quite a while back the Grasshopper Group (which was working on a NeWS for Macintosh at a garage-shop level) contracted with Sun to combine it with X as a Sun product. It didn't catch on. But the contract resulted in Sun having enough IP rights over the codebase that the developers couldn't open-source it. Since then they have tried several times to get Sun to allow them to release the code. But nothing ever came of it.
X is already open and NeWS is currently moribund. None of Sun's current or likely future market advantages are the restult of its windowing system, and an open version of NeWS wouldn't be any threat to Sun. (Even if it caught on big time Sun could just grab the open version and use it - and an open project would no doubt include a good Sun port anyhow.)
So if Sun is really interested in contributing to Open Source, here's something they can do on the cheap: Free the orphan.
Question 2: Why do majority ofpeople buy those instead of making their own?
Answer: Because it is a lot more convinient
Alternate answer: Because there's too little life.
It takes an ENORMOUS amount of material to form the basis of doing ANYTHING. If you try to make all your tools in order to be sure of their quality, you have no time left to USE them.
So people trying to be productive at their specialty try to throw as much as possible of their time at it - obtaining as many of their tools as possible from others for whom making tools is THEIR specialty, and making only those that can't be obtained any other way.
It's called "Division of Effort".
Would you rather your heart surgeon spent ten hours each week working on his personal firewll, software configuration, and recovering from the latest worm attack? Or would you rather he spent it studying the latest research on surgical technique?
The california energy crisis was caused by Enron gaming the system. Plain and simple.
The California energy crisis was caused by new regulations forcing Pacific Gas and Electric to:
- Divest itself of generators.
- Refrain from signing long-term contracts with suppliers.
- Sell as much electricity as the consumers wanted at a capped price.
- Buy electricity on the spot market for whatever was asked.
What this meant was whenever the demand outstripped the supply, PG&E was forced to bid the price up into a spike, draning its resources until it bankrupted itself.
Of COURSE it was in the interest of the suppliers to charge arbitratrarily high prices, and take generation out of service to create the pinch.
Enron apparently ADDITIONALLY broke a law by shipping some of their generated-in-California power out of the state at a pre-contracted low price and then shipping it back in at a high price. But that was an added straw. The results would have been only slightly less bad if Enron (and all other suppliers) had stayed strictly within the law. The situation was created by the regulations, NOT their lack.
Of COURSE the suppliers "gamed the system". But the government SET UP THE RULES OF THE GAME. To the extent that they played WITHIN the rules the government has NO GRIPE if they play hard and win big time.
Companies are in business to MAKE AS MUCH MONEY AS POSSIBLE. It's the job of governments to set the rules of the game so that maximizing profit creates social goods, rather than social bads.
Deregulation gave us the horrible consolidation that has six or seven companies owning all media.
Since when was that "deregulation"? That's like saying the electrical rate crisis in California was caused by "deregulation", when it was actually caused by changes to regulations that resulted in mandating a trap for the distribution utility and the consumers.
The FCC still controls the licenses - and effectively bans the entry of new broadcasters. You can't buy a license for any price, though there are plenty of slots available and (the last time I checked) broadcasting has THE highest return-on-investment of ANY industry.
Complicated problems result from applying complicated solutions to simple problems. This is nowhere more visible than in government.
When you have a complicated web of regulations, removing one of them while leaving the rest in place can be like removing one brick from a tottering building. The result can be FAR worse than either what preceeded it OR the complete removal of the building. But the real problem was nevertheless the result of the regulations / tottering building, not the lack of still more patches.
Back in '67 I was working in a radar lab and heard the story of the invention of the microwave oven (by a radar tech).
Apparently the first demo (to his boss) of the initial prototype (a pot with a hand-sawn microwave flange and a magnetron bolted on) involved an attempt to cook an egg, which exploded and sprayed half-cooked egg on boss' tie.
Fortunately for all concerned, the boss was a geek too (rather than a pointy-hair) and saw the possibilities despite the ruin of his tie. B-)
What about north? Coeur d'Alene and Hayden (where I live) are both north of the lake.
As another poster already mentioned, the service is available to non tribe member residents on the res.
If they haven't already put an access point on your side of the lake, how broad is the lake? If only a few miles, you should be able to hit the access point with a directional antenna.
24 db dishes can be had online for less than a hundred bux, and two of 'em face-to-face can easily go more than ten miles, while one of 'em pointing at an ordinary accesspoint can make several miles. Similarly, a short yagi (or a "pringles can" antenna) can get you considerable distance.
So even if they don't have an AP on your side of the lake, you may be able to connect.
And IF you can connect, you can stick a second card in your box, enable routing, and become a local access point for the others who can't hit directly. (Two such volunteers can provide a solid feed without leaving the rest of your community in the lurch when you're rebooting.)
And I think some cheap routers can also be configured for this - just replace one of the rubber duckies with a directional antenna - or plug two of 'em - one with a directional antenna, one with duckies or roof-mounted omnis - into your ethernet hub or back-to-back with a crossover ethernet cable.
But since the intent WAS to feed the whole community don't be surprised if such relay access points are already part of the plan. (Or, since they're so cheap to add, if they get added once they're suggested.)
[It was all about paying off Clinton/Gore's contributors in Silicon Valley.]
Do you have any evidence that supports this... I have been suspect about your assertion for a while.
What hardcopy evidence could exist?
- Al Gore and/or Bill Clinton visit Silicon Valley about every other week (TOTALLY tying up traffic due to security - trust me, I was there) for face-to-face talks with executives.
- Executives contribute money (from their corporate coffers or laundered through their executives' salaries).
- Clinton/Gore, after reelection, impose an enormous tax on telephone service earmarked to buy the equipment that their contributors supply, designed so they can pull ANY amount of it through ANY school, and administered by thousands of low-level administrators nationwide, in THE most graft-ridden part of government operation.
Do you think they wrote anything down? Do you think there were any tapes made?
By the time someone reaches the highest offices of the land, if they're a graft-trader they've gotten VERY good at insuring that there's no evidence to find. People who leave evidence lying around tend to get weeded out at a low level.
NEC then sent a bill to the E-Rate administrators, a quasi-governmental agency for tens of millions of dollars more than the actual cost of the equipment.
If someone robs a bank overnight (no people harmed) and takes 10 million dollars the shit would hit the fan.
Since when do for-PROFIT companies sell at COST? If they did that they'd get sued by their shareholders, and rightly so.
If that should have been "tens of million dollars more than their LIST PRICE" or "... their CONTRACTED PRICE" or "for tens of millions of dollars worth of equipment that they DIDN'T INSTALL" it's another matter. But in that case the original poster (sorry MrRTFM) shoul have SAID so.
Which brings up another question. Why did the people letting the contract not get a price in advance, and do a due dilligence check that the design was appropriately sized and competitive?
Seems to me the people who should be hauled over the coals are the administrators who let the contract. A company can't just go out and wire schools without anybody's permission, then charge for it. (Even if that's the way governments claim to work. B-) )
"Every new law is a new opportunity for graft."
One of Heinlein's. It seems appropriate here.
Of COURSE collecting a big pot of tax money for "wiring the schools for internet" will attract those with the political connections to tap it. And of COURSE they will set their prices and install the equipment that gives them the entirety of that pot of money. Why the surprise?
If you want it done at a decent price you don't say: "Here's X billion dollars per year. Who can wire the schools for that?". You say: "School districts: Get hooked up. We've raised your budget a bit, but meet at least Y level of service and if there's any left over you can use it for equipment, supplies, teachers, books, software, sporting goods, building repairs, or whatever else you need."
But IMHO, while the opportunity for graft is ALWAYS a factor in new laws (even if not intentionally), this one DID have an ulterior motive:
By wiring the schools to the internet, the government added weight to the "protect the children" argument for passing regulations limiting what could be posted there.
You will recall the figurehead of this push was Al Gore, during the period when the air was filled with internet-content-regulation and for-the-CHILDren trial balloons - shortly after his wife Tipper's attempt to regulate music content was slapped down. (I believe the quote that got mangled into "Al Gore claims to have invented the Internet." came from that very push.)
The internet was created BY adults FOR adults - or at least the set of people that INCLUDES adults. It was intended to be a medium for transmitting ANY information, cheaply and without restriction. It's as much an adult world as the streets of a city. It has its universities, its industries, and its billboards. But it also has its red light districts, its radical political recruiters, and its underworld.
Children who are below the maturity level to wander this world unharmed should no more be encouraged to go there unsupervised than they should be bussed to the local "adult enterprise zone" and left on their own. And attempts to turn it into a padded cell for kids are as misguided, as tyrannical, and as futile as attempts to do the same to the streets of the city.
You MAY find that it's not necessary to go fancy (though the geek factor is great and the price may be lower). You can also get service from the tellcos. And it MAY no longer cost an arm and a leg, thanks to competition from the geek-factor technologies.
First option is a "Foreign Exchange" line. Phone at your home office, connected to a switchboard in the city of interest (transparently, via the long-distance infrastructure).
This USED to cost an arm and a leg (or have a large per-minute charge) because it potentially tied up a long distance trunk any time you were off-hook, and a business might be off-hook essentially all day. But now that bandwidth is cheaper than air it might be another story. (Worth a look.)
Second option is to install a phone with call-forwarding and a dirt-cheap flat rate long-distance service, with the jack installed somewhere handy in the distant service area. (If you do business there but don't have an office, you can probably talk someone into letting the jack be at their site.) Set the call-forwarding to your home-office phone, and unplug the distant instrument. People call you, it transfers to your home-office phone. You pay the long distance charge for the call - which is prepaid or nearly free.
Third: Some tellcos have a service (I don't recall what it's called) that is essentially equivalent to number two but without the line to the unplugged phone. (Check with the long-distance providers, too, not just the local tellcos.) Local tellcos might still price this one sky high, but I bet the long-distance companies have a deal on it.
If you enquire about number three, it's too pricey, but number two would do the job in your price range, be SURE not to talk about them both in the same call to the tellco in question. B-)
... you steal the entire body.