whats outside the 4-d gravistar, since it WILL have an edge in that dimension then
That's like asking "What's outside the 3-D curved-space universe we're in, since it WILL have an edge in that fourth dimension then?" Or "What's outside the surface of the earth, since WILL have an edge in that up-down dimension then?"
Neither has an "edge" in the extra dimension. They ARE a "surface" - like a sphere. What's above the sphere? What's below the sphere? Separate issue, when your whole universe IS the spherical surface - or the volume of the gravistar - or the volume of the (hypothetically "closed but unbounded") universe we're in.
someone watching you fall into said hole (from the outside) would see you move slower and slower as you approached the event horizon and would observe your clock to be running "slow". At the instant you hit the event horizon, you would actually appear to "freeze", with no further updates (since you are now inside the horizon and light can not cross the boundary in the outward direction).
Check me on this:
From the frame of reference of an observer outside the hole, you are actually now inside the event horizon (with the light from your fall BEFORE you crossed it just taking its time spiraling out, creating a mirage).
He does not compute that you are actually not yet there, but still falling in with your clock slowed way down by time dialation. (And thus he doesn't compute that you never get there during the life of the universe, so in principle you might be rescued in a million years or so when AAA has developed a space towcraft that is up to the job.)
And despite the radical differences in the observer and observed's frames of reference, the question still has meaning.
The basic idea of the Nolan Chart and its variations are to clump the many separate components of political opinion into TWO groups, rather than one.
Measuring their values and laying out "political position" in two dimensions more clearly shows clustering of ideologies and differences between them than collapsing the many components of opinion into a single "left-right" scale. Using only one dimension causes ideologies with a pair of extreme positions to be mashed together with middle-of-the-road milksops, obscuring major difference.
More dimensions would be better. But opinions on various subjects tend to be highly correlated. So it's easy to pick two (or three) sets where cancelation won't confuse any two popular ideologies. Also: Examining (and naming) the nature of the subjects where opinions cluster can lead to additional insight into political thought.
My personal favorite version is World's Smallest Political Quiz, which groups opinion on ten subjects into two groups of five - half on regulation of personal behavior, half on economic behavior - then displays the data with the chart rotated into a "diamond" position, so that the traditional "left-right" axis (which ends up at 45 degrees in a 2-D cartesian plot) is left-right, while a new "authoritarian-libertarian" axis appears as up-down. (Of course the "libertarian" corner is at the top. But a communist, fascist, or member of a US political party might prefer to invert it. B-) )
So what's on the outside of this giant gravstar we're in?:)
The "other side" of the same gravistar.
It's like "what's beyond the north pole" on a sphere.
On the surface of a sphere there is no "beyond the edge". Inside a kliensphere there is no "beyond the rim", because there is no rim.
Imagine the space in the universe is the 2-D surface of the water hanging from a dripping faucet. You're on the new-forming drip. Then the drip comes lose. The surface you're on closes into the surface of the drop. In 2-D there IS no beyond - you need an extra dimension for that.
Now consider a dripping faucet in 4-space, where the "surface" of the 4-D drop is the 3-D space of our universe.
Please note, by the way, that Fascist regimes are NOT right-wing (despite propaganda to the contrary). They're a variant of socialist totalitarianism that lets the owners of large enterprises keep and run them (under tight government direction and control of distribution), rather than stealing them and attempting to operate them as government bureaus. Think "communism" with the former industry owners as the commisars.
This is somewhat more efficient than replacing the economically-cluefull with anti-property ideologues. (Also more popular with the currently rich, who stand to retain a high standard of living despite the regime change and enslavement of the common citizens.) But the rest of the side-effects and side-issues are remarkably similar.
For a nightmare-filled month read _The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich_ and compare the NAZIs to new-age greens. Vegitarianism. Mysticism. Health-fads and body-beautiful. Rule by consensus => organizational paralisys => social pressure to break paralisys by promoting consensus => dictatorship by charismatic holdouts. Animal rights => no medical experiments on animals => medical experiments on retarded => on criminals => on ememies of the state => on out-groups (Gypsies, Jews, Labor Unionists,...). It goes on and on.
Of course the left wing in academia got to write the history books after WW II. So "Fascism" is now defined as "extreme right-wing-ism". B-)
If they don't like it, STAY THE FUCK HOME. Or go to Florida and get murdered.
I take it you're referring to the media flap, a few years ago, abut the shootings of visitors to Florida. Some background:
* Florida (after a rash of rapes, drug-import related violence, and other crime) liberalized its firearm concealed-carry law, so that any law-abiding citizen could get a CCW after a background check and a short training program.
* Contrary to predictions of a bloodbath, violent crime dropped like a rock. It seems law-abiding citizens don't shoot others who aren't attacking them - and are VERY good at not making mistakes on this subject. (After several years - and hundreds of thousands of man-years of carry - under the new policy, only ONE CCW holder had improperly shot someone. The shooter turned out to be a crook they'd blown the background check on.)
* Now that carjacking the residents had become hazardous, an enterprising criminal gang recognized that people VISITING Florida wouldn't be armed - especially when coming out of an airport (where guns are federally banned) in a rental car. So they set up spotters at airports and also took advantage of the special license plates for rental cars, robbing and carjacking identified out-of-state visitors at rest stops.
* The increased rate of victimization of visitors was noticed - and made the news.
* Florida reacted in three ways:
1) They began issuing Florida CCWs to NON-residents. B-)
2) They took the special identifying plates off the rental cars.
3) They managed to catch SOME of the crooks.
The crime wave against visitors disappeared.
* But even during the peak of the anti-tourist crime wave, a visitor to Florida was MUCH less likely to be violently victimized than a visitor to its major competitor for sun-seeking vacationers: the gun-ban utopia of California.
Time shifting is both obvious and trivial, and hence any patent issued is invalid.
It is neither obvious nor trivial.
* Record and playback (with pause, fast-forward/reverse, and slow motion) are the two haves of emulating a tape recorder on a computer.
* Doing so simultaneously is fallout of doing the two halves of the emulation in separate tasks on a multiprocessing computer.
IMHO: Emulating on a computer (absent a non-obvious breakthrough needed to perform the emulation) anything that is already done without a computer is obvious and thus not patentable. Ditto with any straightforward side-effects of using a computer emulation rather than the thing emulated.
Time-shifting (like one-click shopping) would be non-patentable by this pair of rules.
Networks have used a five-second delay for live broadcasts to be able to bleep swearing for years. That's time-shifting. Does it make it suddenly patentable because someone used that idea in a home PVR?
Also instant replays. (TV signal to disk, disk to TV signal, though in this case using a two-headed disk, if I recall the process correctly.)
(Aside: I knew a college radio station that did on-the-cheap "tape delay" using two tape recorders at opposite ends of a hall, with the tape running down the hall between them. Guy at the recording end would hang a folded piece of paper on the tape when someone said something inappropriate, and an engineer, walking around in the hall, would "bleep" the item by wiping the tape with a permanent magnet, then return the folded paper tags for reuse.)
Everytime we hear about a new invention/method, we always go, dang, why didn't we think of that! why? cuz it seems so obvious and trivial.
Heard a story about that. (i.e. I haven't fact-checked this myself...)
The core of a flashlight battery is a zinc cup full of caustic paste capped by some asphalt-like material, with a carbon rod (wrapped in a bit of hydrogen scavenger if you don't want it to go soft on you under load) stuck down the middle. The cup is the negative electrode and the carbon rod the positive. Power is generated by the paste eating the cup from the inside.
At one time flashlight batteries were JUST that, wapped in cardboard and maybe with a metal cap over the tip of the rod to improve contact. This caused probles: Since the paste ate the cup, when the battery was nearly gone (but still producing plenty of power) the paste would eat a hole, soak the cardboard, and start destroying the (metal) flashlight.
Union Carbide (Eveready) "solved" this by guaranteeing that if their batteries ate your flashlight they'd give you another one. Didn't stop 'em eating the flashlights, of course. But they made good on their flashlights. By buying cheap flashlights wholesale. B-)
Of course everybody was trying to solve this problem. For years. Without success.
One day one of the engineers came home depressed and his wife (opening one of the newfangled steel cans of veggies for dinner) asked him why he was so down. "Because things weren't going well at work. We can't seem to solve the problem we're working on." he replied.
"What are you trying to do?"
"We're trying to find a way to keep batteries from leaking and destroying the flashlights."
"Well, why don't you seal them in a steel can?"
And thus was born the Ray-O-Vac sealed-in-steel battery.
Which they patented.
And which patent Eveready/Union Carbide challenged as "obvious".
Judge: "How long did you guys at Ray-O-Vac work on this problem and how much did it cost you?"
Ray-O-Vac: "This many years, this many dollars."
Judge: "How long did you guys at Union Carbide work on this problem and how much did it cost YOU?"
Union Carbide: "That many years, that many dollars."
Judge: "Doesn't sound obvious to me. Judgement for Ray-O-Vac."
MOST "AHA!" moments look obvious AFTER the fact.
= = = =
Having said that: Emulating something on a computer is IMHO obvious. So is taking advantage of the beneficial side-effects of the fact that you're dealing with an emulation on a computer rather than the thing emulated. Business methods, for instance.
Example: Use web page forms rather than a phone call or paper mail to do mail-order. Recognize the user by side-effects of his communication (preprinted order forms, recognizing his voice when he calls, browser cookies {which were ALWAYS intended to create a persistent identity across http requests},...) and look up his mailing address and credit account yourself, so you don't have to ask him for his credit account number or mailing address with every order. Bingo: One-click shopping.
Recording a TV signal to disk is half of the obvious emulation of a VCR on a computer. Playing disk data to a TV signal, with ability to pause/skip/fast-forward/fast-reverse is the other half.
Doing it on a multitasking computer, using separate applications for record and playback, has two side-effects:
- You can record one show while watching another.
- You can watch a show WHILE it's being recorded, pausing for munchies and bathroom breaks and skipping/fast-forwarding through commercials up to the real-time point where the show is being recorded and played back with imperceptable delay.
If I understand the patent correctly, this IS the time-shifting "invention". And as a straightforward emulation of a VCR on a computer it is thus obvious.
Additional side-effects are that you can record as many shows si
As I recall, IBM filed something electronically a few minutes past the deadline earlier in this case. When SCO tried to get it thrown out the judge kept it in - but told SCO that he'd let them file one a few minutes after the deadline, just to be fair. B-)
If you had an email account set up to automatically print any incoming messages (similar to a fax machine) you might be able to get it in under this law. However, I don't think you'd win a case just because your regular PC that you check your Hotmail with has a printer and modem.
The law only says that the system must be "capable" of transcribing a signal carried by a telephone to paper, not that it does it without human intervention (whether to load paper or to designate a particular transmission for printing or discard).
(Note that some current PBXes accept fax messages to extensions and allow them to be printed selectively. Does the law not apply to them? I think not.)
(I have heard that a court threw out the interpretation of email spam as fax spam, and am currently looking through the other postings in this article to see if I can find one that confirms or denies this, and if it confirms it gives the reasoning.)
So I guess the Linux Kernel-HOWTO just mysteriously disapeared all of a sudden.
No, that's not it.
The Linux Kernel-HOWTO Isn't in the documentation provided with the distribution.
Nor is a pointer to it.
(Prove me wrong: Give me a page number in a manual included with a Red Hat distribution with either a copy of this or a link to it.)
When a newbie buys a package from a distribution packager, it should INCLUDE documentation on how to do things as BASIC as build a patched kernel.
As for "go find it on the web" - there's a LOT of stuff on the web. Digging it out is a RESEARCH PROJECT.
A customer who PURCHASED a system from a repackager (who tweaked it) shouldn't have to DO that project - and then tune it for the repackager's tweaks - then iterate for every OTHER purchaser of that distro. The repackager should include a copy - with any tuning for that distro and release level already done and DEBUGGED BY HIS QA DEPARTMENT before the distro was released.
In Linux... (Score:-1, Troll) you have to spend 4 hours recompiling your kernel for stuff like this.
In Windows, you just install a small binary patch that takes less than a minute.
A few months later when/if they get around to releasing the small binary patch. B-)
But there IS a real problem - at least as of the last version of RedHat I installed. (And I'm presuming the same is true with other "commercial-grade" distros, so somebody PLEASE let me know if there's one where this is NOT true.)
In Linux the commercial distributions make it easy to do an initial install - once. But the included documentation doesn't tell a newbie how to compile and install a new kernel. Or how to download a kernel patch (unless, MAYBE, if he figures out it might be needed and digs deep and hard for it).
With Red Hat:
- The install tools are all directed at getting him from bare (or windows-loaded) machine to login prompt.
- The phone support included with the distro (before the recent policy changes at least) stops when you get installed to where you have a login prompt.
- The admin tools are essentially all directed at tuning that initial install. (Exception is rpm - with some of the most convoluted manual pages I've seen in a long time. But even that leaves him in the same position as a Windows user - waiting for an RPM patch.)
Source included but NO documentation on how to build from source. The nicey-nice admin tools make it worse, by hiding what's going on from the user so he has NO clue what's going on behind the pretty GUIs.
I'll believe Linux is ready for prime-time when the distro documentation includes:
- A keystroke-by-keystroke walkthrough of applying a patch.
- A keystroke-by-keystroke walkthrough of building and installing a distribution-equivalent kernel from source (so the user has a trusted baseline from which to make ONLY the changes he intended).
- Explanations of the configuration-file twiddling done by the admin tools - broken down by GUI page.
Anything less leaves him in a position much like a windows user - dependent on the vendor or a consultant. Unable to make his own changes (beyond config-tool knob-twiddling) without a long learning process (much like becoming a MSCE) because any change he makes might shatter his configuration beyond his own ability to recover (short of a reinstall from scratch).
Yes, with Linux you can learn this stuff without having to go buy a monopoly's school supplies. But at least Microsoft understands that a user has other things to do than become a guru. Linux distro providers and hackers, on the other hand, seem to have forgotten the learning curve they climbed.
Linux is still in the model-T / hot-rodder stage. Versus, say, Microsoft, which has advanced to black-box engine control / recall and dealer-fix stage. (Except that the recalls are too few and too often not-free. Unlike the "big three" plus foreign compeition, a dissatisfied customer can't dump the latest in a series of lemons and switch to a competitor's functionally-equivalent peach.)
You want SEC to actually do anything? Don't vote Republican next year for any office.
You mean like the Democrats who were in office when the SEC turned their back on the likes of Enron and Worldtalk while they were actually DOING their monkeyshines?"
[...] what about next month, next year? By then folks, we'll have no SCO. It'll only be Microsoft and IBM/SUN (on alternating Thursdays) to bash around.
Don't sweat it. Somebody else will screw up badly enough to give us a third target. B-)
DMCA means you can't reverse eng the code, so weather Linux wrote it from scratch or not isn't the issue, it's the patches after, and the fact that the code was reverse eng from the unix.
Reverse engineering was legal before the DMCA was passed. If I understand it correctly, it still is in some cases. But now, if the owner of proprietary code takes certain steps to guard it - such as encryption and restrictive EULAs - the DMCA criminalizes bypassing the encryption and makes the EULA enforcable in civil court.
If the claim is that Linus reverse engineered trade-secret code pre-DMCA, tough rocks. Wasn't a crime, and once the cat's out of the bag a trade secret is legally ancient history.
But that's NOT the claim. The claim is that he COPIED COPYRIGHTED code. It's clear that what he did is write new code, then warp it toward open and published standards - which happened to be equivalent to the code SCO alleges is proprietary. SCO loses on that claims.
Also: Haven't the federal courts decided that cloning an interface definition for interoperability purposes is fair use? Didn't they decide this SPECIFICIALLY in a DMCA case? If so, SCO claiming DMCA violation for a near-clone of a handful of interface files seems a real desperation move - and one that could open them up to suits.
I think we've clearly determined that SCO's claims (at least up till now) are completely baseless to the point of laughability. The problem here is that by Linus and various other open source figures discussing this, it almost gives credibility to their claims.
Not true.
What would give credibility to their claims is letting them stand unopposed.
Especially after the pins we've put in each of their trial balloons up to now. Sudden silence would convince observers that the latest sh*t was actually shinola.... this is only giving SCO publicity...SCO knows that if they can get their name in the news (even in a negative light), it's still better than fading away...
If news sites refuse to carry SCO's press releases, the whole thing would be moot
But the news sites DON'T refuse to carry SCO's press releases. Given that, quickly countering and ridiculing them is the best move.
unfortunately jounalists don't read slashdot or Groklaw. It is very obvious for us that SCOs claims are baseless, but obviously not for mainstream press.
So when you see a journalist who is clueless, write a letter (to his editor if you can't figure out how to contact him)
- politely correcting him,
- linking to the most authoritative postings (i.e. Linus' letter) refuting SCO's claim that you can find, and
- pointing out sites (such as groklaw and slashdot) where a truth-squad is digging out and posting refutations as fast as SCO makes up another claim.
And don't sweat it if a lot of other people do it too. The more the merrier. (It creates an unspoken subtext: "If a LOT of people know this, Mr, Reporter, why don't you?")
Reporters don't like to be played for fools. It ruins their reputations and hurts their carreers. Some polite letters turning them on to new sources could get a couple of them posting our side of the story - if only for the appearance of balance. And once one or two do that, any of the rest that don't follow along look like idiots - so the herd stampeeds.
Imagine the whole establishment media looking at SCO's claims, through a microscope, skeptically.
It may sound unlikely, it may even BE unlikely... but fundamentally the 2nd Amendment is all about making sure that the ultimate power lies in the hands of "the people" where it belongs.
And it works. So well that some people now believe that a conversion to a tyranny is so unlikely that they argue for the elimination of guns as an unnecessary hazard - completely oblivious to WHY it is unlikely.
But it will only remain unlikely as long as a large part of the population is armed. The US has had a number of near-misses with tyranny even in recent times. Some examples:
In the period just before WWII, when the NAZIs were coming to power in Germany, the KKK actually HELD power (especially in law enforcement) in many of the towns, counties, and states of the US. Their ideology was similar. But in the US people were able to resist with firearms. (My wife is here because, in separate incidents, her grandfather and mother held off the Klan in battle.) So while the NAZIs were able to suppress opposition and rise to power in Germany, the Klan in the US was held at bay, and finally defeated, in thousands of tiny battles.)
Nixon, president during the peak of the '60s anti-war movement (with a terrorist faction that makes Alkaida look tame), actually hired a think-tank to examine what would happen if he suspended the presidential election. Answer: That would precipitate the population to oust him by armed might and restore the election - and this would succeed, mainly because over half the population was armed and partly because some of the military would side with them.
(Of course not all near-misses were averted by an aroused, armed population, or the threat of one. For instance, there was the "Butler Plot" in 1933, when the heads of several of the US' largest corporations plotted a coup to replace Roosevelt with a fascist regime under general Butler. Butler was appalled, went to a congressional committee (the predecessor of HUAC) about it, and the plot was suppressed. Imagine if they'd found a more sympathetic general...)
The writer above has lots of good ideas for reforming the American DMCA law, but it goes against the current American political climate for any positive changes to take place.
And if nearly everybody believes that and acts on it, your prophecies (and their related gloom-and-doom) self-fulfill.
However, there are a lot of people in the US who believe in fixing the system - either with patches or with piecemeal rewrites - and occasionally they get the power to actually DO it.
Indeed, this usually happens when (as now with the DMCA) a bad chunk of law starts showing a massive amount of unfortunate side-effects. The set of bad side-effects gradually converts people to the "fix it" side of the fence and energises them, in some cases as their individual oxen are gored, in others as events bring the problems with the law to their attention.
But even if your prophecies of the collapse of the US come true, Argentina is the wrong model.
The correct model (and a very close match) is the Roman Empire. But that took centuries - at five generations per century - to fall.
Indeed, from the viewpoint of its citizens it didn't actually fall. Things just gradually changed. From our viewpoint they rotted. But the last reminants didn't go until the Communists exterminated the family of the Czar (= Caesar) in 1918.
It is true that it takes non-trivial effort to implement triangulation based upon the signal strength of your cellular phone, but it also would take non-trivial effort to put a GPS solution onto a cellular phone. What is more important is which system is more precise, accurate, and reliable -- that would be GPS.
No, that would probably be the cell-based system.
It's not really "triangulation". Triangulation uses the observed DIRECTION of the signal, locating the transmitter on a (hopefully) narrow fan based at the reciever. Two receivers locate the transmitter where the "beams" intersect, and the "beams" plus the baseline between the receivers form a triangle.
This system uses the round-trip transit time, much like radar, to locate the transmitter on a circle around each "receiver" (actually an active transciever), putting the transmitter where the circles intersect. (You still get the triangle of the locations. But it's a different system than "triangulation".)
You can also locate the transmitter if all, or all-but-one, of the receivers is passive, but they can compare notes on signal arrival time.
If all are passive, two receivers locate the transmitter on a hyperbola, three narrow it to two intersecting hyperbolas, four pin it (or three if one or more can distinguish the two intersections by antenna sectoring).
If one "receiver" is active, it locates the transmitter on a circle, the second adds a hyperbola intersecting the circle at two points, the third (or sector antennas) adds another hyperbola that intersects differently with the circle to distinguish the points. (This is much like LORAN.)
The accuracy depends on the angles, the accuracy of the arrival-time measurements, and the accuracy of the knowlege of the locations of the base stations. Ground-based systems have an advantage in the angles (being roughly in a plain with the transmitter). They also have better knowlege of antenna location than orbiting satellites. Both have comparable time bases (based on atomic-clock-referenced Stratum-III clocks in the cell base stations and atomic clocks in the satellites). GPS was optimized for location tracking so it MAY measure the signal arrival time more accurately. But that's a "maybe", since the base stations need it accurate, too, and can throw more electronics at the problem than the portable GPS receiver. (Anybody have the real stats?)
Now that selective availability is turned off GPS MIGHT be as accurate as cell systems. But it's still fighting some handicaps, so I'd be surprised if it's better.
The description above is OK as far as it goes. But radiolocation by cellphone is MUCH more accurate than that, because it uses an extra piece of information.
In addition to signal strength (which varies not just with distance but with transmission path artifacts, like trees and moisture), digital cellphone base stations keep track of out-and-back signal turnaround time - to an extremely fine granularity. They do this to assign timeslots for the phone-to-tower signals, to make maximum use of the channel.
Assuming the strongest path is the line-of-sight path (rather than, say, a bounce off a building), this gives them the distance to the phone, within a few feet. (This assumption is usually true.)
The geometry is the same. But with the distance information added, each tower can put the phone on a sphere of a particular radius around the tower. Assuming the phone is on or near roughly flat ground (not in an aircraft or climing a steep mountain - also usually true), that becomes a circle where it intersects the ground, with an uncertainty stripe width of a few feet.
Add a second tower and you get two intersecting circles - and two lozenge-shaped patches where they intersect. A third cell tower can tell you whitch patch (and shrink it further by cutting off the long ends).
The advantage of adding a GPS to the phone is that you only need a SINGLE cell tower to interrogate the GPS in order to locate the user to GPS acuracy. This is handy for trouble calls where only one or two cells can reach the phone, so you don't have to dispatch two ambulances (for two cells) or a search plane (for one).
The distance information is available any time the phone is on. When it's switched on, switched off, and about every five minutes in between, it checkes in with the cell system. (Get one of those "cell-phone jewels", a blinky antenna, or a battery pack with a blinks-when-transmitting gadget to see when. Or just lay the antenna on a cheap transistor radio tuned to a quiet spot and listen to the pops and buzzes.) This is to update the system's database so it knows where to send incoming calls. But it also updates the distance information necessary to locate the phone within a few feet.
This information has been available to law enforcement for a while.
Years ago, back in the prime of the dialup days, we just couldn't hate any company more than AOL. Anything involving them might as well have had leprosy, as far as geeks felt.
And yet now, with this tossup (WMP vs RealOne), I just realized that I currently use both a browser (Mozilla) and a media player (WinAmp) heavily funded by AOL.
Strange, how times can change.
Plenty of precedent for this.
For instance: Back before home computers, when minicomputers were young (and expensive), IBM was the monster. The "Immense Blue Mother". Locked competing peripheral manufacturers and mainframe makers out of the market. Other monopolistic offenses too numerous to go into here.
But that was a quarter century or more ago, and a lot has happened since. Like the time they opened their home-computer archetecture at the same time Apple closed theirs, spawning the PC Clone market and bringing the price of home computers far below that of the cheapest car.
Now they're pouring over a Billion Buck$ into open source and are the point team for defending the freedom of Linux and tempering the GPL in court. Meanwhile, SCO has gone from a Linux promoter to the dark side of the farce.
Slashdot Mirror
whats outside the 4-d gravistar, since it WILL have an edge in that dimension then
That's like asking "What's outside the 3-D curved-space universe we're in, since it WILL have an edge in that fourth dimension then?" Or "What's outside the surface of the earth, since WILL have an edge in that up-down dimension then?"
Neither has an "edge" in the extra dimension. They ARE a "surface" - like a sphere. What's above the sphere? What's below the sphere? Separate issue, when your whole universe IS the spherical surface - or the volume of the gravistar - or the volume of the (hypothetically "closed but unbounded") universe we're in.
someone watching you fall into said hole (from the outside) would see you move slower and slower as you approached the event horizon and would observe your clock to be running "slow". At the instant you hit the event horizon, you would actually appear to "freeze", with no further updates (since you are now inside the horizon and light can not cross the boundary in the outward direction).
Check me on this:
From the frame of reference of an observer outside the hole, you are actually now inside the event horizon (with the light from your fall BEFORE you crossed it just taking its time spiraling out, creating a mirage).
He does not compute that you are actually not yet there, but still falling in with your clock slowed way down by time dialation. (And thus he doesn't compute that you never get there during the life of the universe, so in principle you might be rescued in a million years or so when AAA has developed a space towcraft that is up to the job.)
And despite the radical differences in the observer and observed's frames of reference, the question still has meaning.
Right?
Looks like another variation of the Nolan Chart.
The basic idea of the Nolan Chart and its variations are to clump the many separate components of political opinion into TWO groups, rather than one.
Measuring their values and laying out "political position" in two dimensions more clearly shows clustering of ideologies and differences between them than collapsing the many components of opinion into a single "left-right" scale. Using only one dimension causes ideologies with a pair of extreme positions to be mashed together with middle-of-the-road milksops, obscuring major difference.
More dimensions would be better. But opinions on various subjects tend to be highly correlated. So it's easy to pick two (or three) sets where cancelation won't confuse any two popular ideologies. Also: Examining (and naming) the nature of the subjects where opinions cluster can lead to additional insight into political thought.
My personal favorite version is World's Smallest Political Quiz, which groups opinion on ten subjects into two groups of five - half on regulation of personal behavior, half on economic behavior - then displays the data with the chart rotated into a "diamond" position, so that the traditional "left-right" axis (which ends up at 45 degrees in a 2-D cartesian plot) is left-right, while a new "authoritarian-libertarian" axis appears as up-down. (Of course the "libertarian" corner is at the top. But a communist, fascist, or member of a US political party might prefer to invert it. B-) )
So what's on the outside of this giant gravstar we're in? :)
The "other side" of the same gravistar.
It's like "what's beyond the north pole" on a sphere.
On the surface of a sphere there is no "beyond the edge". Inside a kliensphere there is no "beyond the rim", because there is no rim.
Imagine the space in the universe is the 2-D surface of the water hanging from a dripping faucet. You're on the new-forming drip. Then the drip comes lose. The surface you're on closes into the surface of the drop. In 2-D there IS no beyond - you need an extra dimension for that.
Now consider a dripping faucet in 4-space, where the "surface" of the 4-D drop is the 3-D space of our universe.
Please note, by the way, that Fascist regimes are NOT right-wing (despite propaganda to the contrary). They're a variant of socialist totalitarianism that lets the owners of large enterprises keep and run them (under tight government direction and control of distribution), rather than stealing them and attempting to operate them as government bureaus. Think "communism" with the former industry owners as the commisars.
...). It goes on and on.
This is somewhat more efficient than replacing the economically-cluefull with anti-property ideologues. (Also more popular with the currently rich, who stand to retain a high standard of living despite the regime change and enslavement of the common citizens.) But the rest of the side-effects and side-issues are remarkably similar.
For a nightmare-filled month read _The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich_ and compare the NAZIs to new-age greens. Vegitarianism. Mysticism. Health-fads and body-beautiful. Rule by consensus => organizational paralisys => social pressure to break paralisys by promoting consensus => dictatorship by charismatic holdouts. Animal rights => no medical experiments on animals => medical experiments on retarded => on criminals => on ememies of the state => on out-groups (Gypsies, Jews, Labor Unionists,
Of course the left wing in academia got to write the history books after WW II. So "Fascism" is now defined as "extreme right-wing-ism". B-)
If they don't like it, STAY THE FUCK HOME. Or go to Florida and get murdered.
I take it you're referring to the media flap, a few years ago, abut the shootings of visitors to Florida. Some background:
* Florida (after a rash of rapes, drug-import related violence, and other crime) liberalized its firearm concealed-carry law, so that any law-abiding citizen could get a CCW after a background check and a short training program.
* Contrary to predictions of a bloodbath, violent crime dropped like a rock. It seems law-abiding citizens don't shoot others who aren't attacking them - and are VERY good at not making mistakes on this subject. (After several years - and hundreds of thousands of man-years of carry - under the new policy, only ONE CCW holder had improperly shot someone. The shooter turned out to be a crook they'd blown the background check on.)
* Now that carjacking the residents had become hazardous, an enterprising criminal gang recognized that people VISITING Florida wouldn't be armed - especially when coming out of an airport (where guns are federally banned) in a rental car. So they set up spotters at airports and also took advantage of the special license plates for rental cars, robbing and carjacking identified out-of-state visitors at rest stops.
* The increased rate of victimization of visitors was noticed - and made the news.
* Florida reacted in three ways:
1) They began issuing Florida CCWs to NON-residents. B-)
2) They took the special identifying plates off the rental cars.
3) They managed to catch SOME of the crooks.
The crime wave against visitors disappeared.
* But even during the peak of the anti-tourist crime wave, a visitor to Florida was MUCH less likely to be violently victimized than a visitor to its major competitor for sun-seeking vacationers: the gun-ban utopia of California.
Time shifting is both obvious and trivial, and hence any patent issued is invalid.
It is neither obvious nor trivial.
* Record and playback (with pause, fast-forward/reverse, and slow motion) are the two haves of emulating a tape recorder on a computer.
* Doing so simultaneously is fallout of doing the two halves of the emulation in separate tasks on a multiprocessing computer.
IMHO: Emulating on a computer (absent a non-obvious breakthrough needed to perform the emulation) anything that is already done without a computer is obvious and thus not patentable. Ditto with any straightforward side-effects of using a computer emulation rather than the thing emulated.
Time-shifting (like one-click shopping) would be non-patentable by this pair of rules.
Networks have used a five-second delay for live broadcasts to be able to bleep swearing for years. That's time-shifting. Does it make it suddenly patentable because someone used that idea in a home PVR?
Also instant replays. (TV signal to disk, disk to TV signal, though in this case using a two-headed disk, if I recall the process correctly.)
(Aside: I knew a college radio station that did on-the-cheap "tape delay" using two tape recorders at opposite ends of a hall, with the tape running down the hall between them. Guy at the recording end would hang a folded piece of paper on the tape when someone said something inappropriate, and an engineer, walking around in the hall, would "bleep" the item by wiping the tape with a permanent magnet, then return the folded paper tags for reuse.)
Everytime we hear about a new invention/method, we always go, dang, why didn't we think of that! why? cuz it seems so obvious and trivial.
...) and look up his mailing address and credit account yourself, so you don't have to ask him for his credit account number or mailing address with every order. Bingo: One-click shopping.
Heard a story about that. (i.e. I haven't fact-checked this myself...)
The core of a flashlight battery is a zinc cup full of caustic paste capped by some asphalt-like material, with a carbon rod (wrapped in a bit of hydrogen scavenger if you don't want it to go soft on you under load) stuck down the middle. The cup is the negative electrode and the carbon rod the positive. Power is generated by the paste eating the cup from the inside.
At one time flashlight batteries were JUST that, wapped in cardboard and maybe with a metal cap over the tip of the rod to improve contact. This caused probles: Since the paste ate the cup, when the battery was nearly gone (but still producing plenty of power) the paste would eat a hole, soak the cardboard, and start destroying the (metal) flashlight.
Union Carbide (Eveready) "solved" this by guaranteeing that if their batteries ate your flashlight they'd give you another one. Didn't stop 'em eating the flashlights, of course. But they made good on their flashlights. By buying cheap flashlights wholesale. B-)
Of course everybody was trying to solve this problem. For years. Without success.
One day one of the engineers came home depressed and his wife (opening one of the newfangled steel cans of veggies for dinner) asked him why he was so down. "Because things weren't going well at work. We can't seem to solve the problem we're working on." he replied.
"What are you trying to do?"
"We're trying to find a way to keep batteries from leaking and destroying the flashlights."
"Well, why don't you seal them in a steel can?"
And thus was born the Ray-O-Vac sealed-in-steel battery.
Which they patented.
And which patent Eveready/Union Carbide challenged as "obvious".
Judge: "How long did you guys at Ray-O-Vac work on this problem and how much did it cost you?"
Ray-O-Vac: "This many years, this many dollars."
Judge: "How long did you guys at Union Carbide work on this problem and how much did it cost YOU?"
Union Carbide: "That many years, that many dollars."
Judge: "Doesn't sound obvious to me. Judgement for Ray-O-Vac."
MOST "AHA!" moments look obvious AFTER the fact.
= = = =
Having said that: Emulating something on a computer is IMHO obvious. So is taking advantage of the beneficial side-effects of the fact that you're dealing with an emulation on a computer rather than the thing emulated. Business methods, for instance.
Example: Use web page forms rather than a phone call or paper mail to do mail-order. Recognize the user by side-effects of his communication (preprinted order forms, recognizing his voice when he calls, browser cookies {which were ALWAYS intended to create a persistent identity across http requests},
Recording a TV signal to disk is half of the obvious emulation of a VCR on a computer. Playing disk data to a TV signal, with ability to pause/skip/fast-forward/fast-reverse is the other half.
Doing it on a multitasking computer, using separate applications for record and playback, has two side-effects:
- You can record one show while watching another.
- You can watch a show WHILE it's being recorded, pausing for munchies and bathroom breaks and skipping/fast-forwarding through commercials up to the real-time point where the show is being recorded and played back with imperceptable delay.
If I understand the patent correctly, this IS the time-shifting "invention". And as a straightforward emulation of a VCR on a computer it is thus obvious.
Additional side-effects are that you can record as many shows si
As I recall, IBM filed something electronically a few minutes past the deadline earlier in this case. When SCO tried to get it thrown out the judge kept it in - but told SCO that he'd let them file one a few minutes after the deadline, just to be fair. B-)
If you had an email account set up to automatically print any incoming messages (similar to a fax machine) you might be able to get it in under this law. However, I don't think you'd win a case just because your regular PC that you check your Hotmail with has a printer and modem.
The law only says that the system must be "capable" of transcribing a signal carried by a telephone to paper, not that it does it without human intervention (whether to load paper or to designate a particular transmission for printing or discard).
(Note that some current PBXes accept fax messages to extensions and allow them to be printed selectively. Does the law not apply to them? I think not.)
(I have heard that a court threw out the interpretation of email spam as fax spam, and am currently looking through the other postings in this article to see if I can find one that confirms or denies this, and if it confirms it gives the reasoning.)
So I guess the Linux Kernel-HOWTO just mysteriously disapeared all of a sudden.
No, that's not it.
The Linux Kernel-HOWTO Isn't in the documentation provided with the distribution.
Nor is a pointer to it.
(Prove me wrong: Give me a page number in a manual included with a Red Hat distribution with either a copy of this or a link to it.)
When a newbie buys a package from a distribution packager, it should INCLUDE documentation on how to do things as BASIC as build a patched kernel.
As for "go find it on the web" - there's a LOT of stuff on the web. Digging it out is a RESEARCH PROJECT.
A customer who PURCHASED a system from a repackager (who tweaked it) shouldn't have to DO that project - and then tune it for the repackager's tweaks - then iterate for every OTHER purchaser of that distro. The repackager should include a copy - with any tuning for that distro and release level already done and DEBUGGED BY HIS QA DEPARTMENT before the distro was released.
This is BASIC to a ready-for-prime-time product.
In Linux... (Score:-1, Troll) you have to spend 4 hours recompiling your kernel for stuff like this.
In Windows, you just install a small binary patch that takes less than a minute.
A few months later when/if they get around to releasing the small binary patch. B-)
But there IS a real problem - at least as of the last version of RedHat I installed. (And I'm presuming the same is true with other "commercial-grade" distros, so somebody PLEASE let me know if there's one where this is NOT true.)
In Linux the commercial distributions make it easy to do an initial install - once. But the included documentation doesn't tell a newbie how to compile and install a new kernel. Or how to download a kernel patch (unless, MAYBE, if he figures out it might be needed and digs deep and hard for it).
With Red Hat:
- The install tools are all directed at getting him from bare (or windows-loaded) machine to login prompt.
- The phone support included with the distro (before the recent policy changes at least) stops when you get installed to where you have a login prompt.
- The admin tools are essentially all directed at tuning that initial install. (Exception is rpm - with some of the most convoluted manual pages I've seen in a long time. But even that leaves him in the same position as a Windows user - waiting for an RPM patch.)
Source included but NO documentation on how to build from source. The nicey-nice admin tools make it worse, by hiding what's going on from the user so he has NO clue what's going on behind the pretty GUIs.
I'll believe Linux is ready for prime-time when the distro documentation includes:
- A keystroke-by-keystroke walkthrough of applying a patch.
- A keystroke-by-keystroke walkthrough of building and installing a distribution-equivalent kernel from source (so the user has a trusted baseline from which to make ONLY the changes he intended).
- Explanations of the configuration-file twiddling done by the admin tools - broken down by GUI page.
Anything less leaves him in a position much like a windows user - dependent on the vendor or a consultant. Unable to make his own changes (beyond config-tool knob-twiddling) without a long learning process (much like becoming a MSCE) because any change he makes might shatter his configuration beyond his own ability to recover (short of a reinstall from scratch).
Yes, with Linux you can learn this stuff without having to go buy a monopoly's school supplies. But at least Microsoft understands that a user has other things to do than become a guru. Linux distro providers and hackers, on the other hand, seem to have forgotten the learning curve they climbed.
Linux is still in the model-T / hot-rodder stage. Versus, say, Microsoft, which has advanced to black-box engine control / recall and dealer-fix stage. (Except that the recalls are too few and too often not-free. Unlike the "big three" plus foreign compeition, a dissatisfied customer can't dump the latest in a series of lemons and switch to a competitor's functionally-equivalent peach.)
You want SEC to actually do anything? Don't vote Republican next year for any office.
You mean like the Democrats who were in office when the SEC turned their back on the likes of Enron and Worldtalk while they were actually DOING their monkeyshines?"
[...] what about next month, next year? By then folks, we'll have no SCO. It'll only be Microsoft and IBM/SUN (on alternating Thursdays) to bash around.
Don't sweat it. Somebody else will screw up badly enough to give us a third target. B-)
DMCA means you can't reverse eng the code, so weather Linux wrote it from scratch or not isn't the issue, it's the patches after, and the fact that the code was reverse eng from the unix.
Reverse engineering was legal before the DMCA was passed. If I understand it correctly, it still is in some cases. But now, if the owner of proprietary code takes certain steps to guard it - such as encryption and restrictive EULAs - the DMCA criminalizes bypassing the encryption and makes the EULA enforcable in civil court.
If the claim is that Linus reverse engineered trade-secret code pre-DMCA, tough rocks. Wasn't a crime, and once the cat's out of the bag a trade secret is legally ancient history.
But that's NOT the claim. The claim is that he COPIED COPYRIGHTED code. It's clear that what he did is write new code, then warp it toward open and published standards - which happened to be equivalent to the code SCO alleges is proprietary. SCO loses on that claims.
Also: Haven't the federal courts decided that cloning an interface definition for interoperability purposes is fair use? Didn't they decide this SPECIFICIALLY in a DMCA case? If so, SCO claiming DMCA violation for a near-clone of a handful of interface files seems a real desperation move - and one that could open them up to suits.
I think we've clearly determined that SCO's claims (at least up till now) are completely baseless to the point of laughability. The problem here is that by Linus and various other open source figures discussing this, it almost gives credibility to their claims.
... this is only giving SCO publicity...SCO knows that if they can get their name in the news (even in a negative light), it's still better than fading away...
Not true.
What would give credibility to their claims is letting them stand unopposed.
Especially after the pins we've put in each of their trial balloons up to now. Sudden silence would convince observers that the latest sh*t was actually shinola.
If news sites refuse to carry SCO's press releases, the whole thing would be moot
But the news sites DON'T refuse to carry SCO's press releases. Given that, quickly countering and ridiculing them is the best move.
unfortunately jounalists don't read slashdot or Groklaw. It is very obvious for us that SCOs claims are baseless, but obviously not for mainstream press.
So when you see a journalist who is clueless, write a letter (to his editor if you can't figure out how to contact him)
- politely correcting him,
- linking to the most authoritative postings (i.e. Linus' letter) refuting SCO's claim that you can find, and
- pointing out sites (such as groklaw and slashdot) where a truth-squad is digging out and posting refutations as fast as SCO makes up another claim.
And don't sweat it if a lot of other people do it too. The more the merrier. (It creates an unspoken subtext: "If a LOT of people know this, Mr, Reporter, why don't you?")
Reporters don't like to be played for fools. It ruins their reputations and hurts their carreers. Some polite letters turning them on to new sources could get a couple of them posting our side of the story - if only for the appearance of balance. And once one or two do that, any of the rest that don't follow along look like idiots - so the herd stampeeds.
Imagine the whole establishment media looking at SCO's claims, through a microscope, skeptically.
It may sound unlikely, it may even BE unlikely... but fundamentally the 2nd Amendment is all about making sure that the ultimate power lies in the hands of "the people" where it belongs.
And it works. So well that some people now believe that a conversion to a tyranny is so unlikely that they argue for the elimination of guns as an unnecessary hazard - completely oblivious to WHY it is unlikely.
But it will only remain unlikely as long as a large part of the population is armed. The US has had a number of near-misses with tyranny even in recent times. Some examples:
In the period just before WWII, when the NAZIs were coming to power in Germany, the KKK actually HELD power (especially in law enforcement) in many of the towns, counties, and states of the US. Their ideology was similar. But in the US people were able to resist with firearms. (My wife is here because, in separate incidents, her grandfather and mother held off the Klan in battle.) So while the NAZIs were able to suppress opposition and rise to power in Germany, the Klan in the US was held at bay, and finally defeated, in thousands of tiny battles.)
Nixon, president during the peak of the '60s anti-war movement (with a terrorist faction that makes Alkaida look tame), actually hired a think-tank to examine what would happen if he suspended the presidential election. Answer: That would precipitate the population to oust him by armed might and restore the election - and this would succeed, mainly because over half the population was armed and partly because some of the military would side with them.
The Battle of Athens is another county-level example.
(Of course not all near-misses were averted by an aroused, armed population, or the threat of one. For instance, there was the "Butler Plot" in 1933, when the heads of several of the US' largest corporations plotted a coup to replace Roosevelt with a fascist regime under general Butler. Butler was appalled, went to a congressional committee (the predecessor of HUAC) about it, and the plot was suppressed. Imagine if they'd found a more sympathetic general...)
And I could go on.
The writer above has lots of good ideas for reforming the American DMCA law, but it goes against the current American political climate for any positive changes to take place.
And if nearly everybody believes that and acts on it, your prophecies (and their related gloom-and-doom) self-fulfill.
However, there are a lot of people in the US who believe in fixing the system - either with patches or with piecemeal rewrites - and occasionally they get the power to actually DO it.
Indeed, this usually happens when (as now with the DMCA) a bad chunk of law starts showing a massive amount of unfortunate side-effects. The set of bad side-effects gradually converts people to the "fix it" side of the fence and energises them, in some cases as their individual oxen are gored, in others as events bring the problems with the law to their attention.
But even if your prophecies of the collapse of the US come true, Argentina is the wrong model.
The correct model (and a very close match) is the Roman Empire. But that took centuries - at five generations per century - to fall.
Indeed, from the viewpoint of its citizens it didn't actually fall. Things just gradually changed. From our viewpoint they rotted. But the last reminants didn't go until the Communists exterminated the family of the Czar (= Caesar) in 1918.
It is true that it takes non-trivial effort to implement triangulation based upon the signal strength of your cellular phone, but it also would take non-trivial effort to put a GPS solution onto a cellular phone. What is more important is which system is more precise, accurate, and reliable -- that would be GPS.
No, that would probably be the cell-based system.
It's not really "triangulation". Triangulation uses the observed DIRECTION of the signal, locating the transmitter on a (hopefully) narrow fan based at the reciever. Two receivers locate the transmitter where the "beams" intersect, and the "beams" plus the baseline between the receivers form a triangle.
This system uses the round-trip transit time, much like radar, to locate the transmitter on a circle around each "receiver" (actually an active transciever), putting the transmitter where the circles intersect. (You still get the triangle of the locations. But it's a different system than "triangulation".)
You can also locate the transmitter if all, or all-but-one, of the receivers is passive, but they can compare notes on signal arrival time.
If all are passive, two receivers locate the transmitter on a hyperbola, three narrow it to two intersecting hyperbolas, four pin it (or three if one or more can distinguish the two intersections by antenna sectoring).
If one "receiver" is active, it locates the transmitter on a circle, the second adds a hyperbola intersecting the circle at two points, the third (or sector antennas) adds another hyperbola that intersects differently with the circle to distinguish the points. (This is much like LORAN.)
The accuracy depends on the angles, the accuracy of the arrival-time measurements, and the accuracy of the knowlege of the locations of the base stations. Ground-based systems have an advantage in the angles (being roughly in a plain with the transmitter). They also have better knowlege of antenna location than orbiting satellites. Both have comparable time bases (based on atomic-clock-referenced Stratum-III clocks in the cell base stations and atomic clocks in the satellites). GPS was optimized for location tracking so it MAY measure the signal arrival time more accurately. But that's a "maybe", since the base stations need it accurate, too, and can throw more electronics at the problem than the portable GPS receiver. (Anybody have the real stats?)
Now that selective availability is turned off GPS MIGHT be as accurate as cell systems. But it's still fighting some handicaps, so I'd be surprised if it's better.
The description above is OK as far as it goes. But radiolocation by cellphone is MUCH more accurate than that, because it uses an extra piece of information.
In addition to signal strength (which varies not just with distance but with transmission path artifacts, like trees and moisture), digital cellphone base stations keep track of out-and-back signal turnaround time - to an extremely fine granularity. They do this to assign timeslots for the phone-to-tower signals, to make maximum use of the channel.
Assuming the strongest path is the line-of-sight path (rather than, say, a bounce off a building), this gives them the distance to the phone, within a few feet. (This assumption is usually true.)
The geometry is the same. But with the distance information added, each tower can put the phone on a sphere of a particular radius around the tower. Assuming the phone is on or near roughly flat ground (not in an aircraft or climing a steep mountain - also usually true), that becomes a circle where it intersects the ground, with an uncertainty stripe width of a few feet.
Add a second tower and you get two intersecting circles - and two lozenge-shaped patches where they intersect. A third cell tower can tell you whitch patch (and shrink it further by cutting off the long ends).
The advantage of adding a GPS to the phone is that you only need a SINGLE cell tower to interrogate the GPS in order to locate the user to GPS acuracy. This is handy for trouble calls where only one or two cells can reach the phone, so you don't have to dispatch two ambulances (for two cells) or a search plane (for one).
The distance information is available any time the phone is on. When it's switched on, switched off, and about every five minutes in between, it checkes in with the cell system. (Get one of those "cell-phone jewels", a blinky antenna, or a battery pack with a blinks-when-transmitting gadget to see when. Or just lay the antenna on a cheap transistor radio tuned to a quiet spot and listen to the pops and buzzes.) This is to update the system's database so it knows where to send incoming calls. But it also updates the distance information necessary to locate the phone within a few feet.
This information has been available to law enforcement for a while.
The choice on where to build the reactor currently stands between Japan and France [,,,]
They should build it in Greenland, Iceland, or Siberia. Then they could achieve cold fusion.
B-)
This is like a steel cage match between bin Laden and Hitler. Who the hell do I root for?
Is there a scenario where both can lose?
Yes.
They could take it to court.
B-)
Years ago, back in the prime of the dialup days, we just couldn't hate any company more than AOL. Anything involving them might as well have had leprosy, as far as geeks felt.
And yet now, with this tossup (WMP vs RealOne), I just realized that I currently use both a browser (Mozilla) and a media player (WinAmp) heavily funded by AOL.
Strange, how times can change.
Plenty of precedent for this.
For instance: Back before home computers, when minicomputers were young (and expensive), IBM was the monster. The "Immense Blue Mother". Locked competing peripheral manufacturers and mainframe makers out of the market. Other monopolistic offenses too numerous to go into here.
But that was a quarter century or more ago, and a lot has happened since. Like the time they opened their home-computer archetecture at the same time Apple closed theirs, spawning the PC Clone market and bringing the price of home computers far below that of the cheapest car.
Now they're pouring over a Billion Buck$ into open source and are the point team for defending the freedom of Linux and tempering the GPL in court. Meanwhile, SCO has gone from a Linux promoter to the dark side of the farce.
Cha-cha-cha-cha-CHAIN-GES!