Want more processing power? Pay more money, and the "customer engineer" turns more of it on.
I heard stories of this happening with HP (I think) in the late 1970's. To "install" the additional 64K RAM the technician would flip a switch somewhere inside the computer. The bill for this was in the thousands. But I had no idea the industry still worked that way!
Sure does. The term for turning on only as much as they bought is "feature protection", and engineering it (so the customer can't just throw the switch himself, and switch it back when the CE is onsite) is a significant effort.
Sort of like program keys for software. B-)
By the way - I don't think I answered all of your original question. Given that the machine is powerful and redundant enough to run continuously and error-free for decades, it greatly reduces construction and system admin costs to use one big one and partition it rather than a bunch of little ones.
The advantage of clusters occurs in less critical applications, like webservers, where you can let the individual systems fail without jepoardizing the mission. Then you can use a bunch of cheap, flakey machines ( and flakey software B-) ) rather than power-failure/radiation/bullet/lightning/earthquak e/etc. - proof boxes.
Within the machines they do the same - with large RAID systems stuffed full of commodity disks. But while you can make a big reliable disk out of little flakey ones it's not that easy for processors.
Also: Putting it all in one box cuts signal propagation time compared to scattering it across the room, for those big non-partitionalbe computations. And if you need more processor power, memory, etc. you can turn up the amount of resources allocated to the partition, rather than migrating the app to a better box.
Not a bad boint, but it's more likely that when the Chinese government wants to spy on someone with a cell phone, they just monitor the cellular networks.
But what if they want to spy on him when he's NOT ON THE PHONE? This way they can.
Which is probably why they're going with open source: So the people can check it, some of them will, and they'll thus trust the box and buy it.
You might have a machine with 16 processors, of which you licensed 12 (the rest are in-place spares). You throw 4 of them into each of two multi-CPU partitions, one for accounting and one for engineering...
Good lord, are you serious? I guess it's just the MSCE in me, but why wouldn't you just buy four different computers to do the work of four virtual computers?
Because mainframe computers create the illusion that they don't drop bits. (They actually do, but they catch it and fix it, so the result is as if they hadn't.)
This is VERY IMPORTANT for some businesses. Like long distance companies doing online billing - with all calls free if the machine is rebooting, to the tune of over 6 megabux per hour. Which is a drop in the bucket compared to the losses for a brokerage if their transaction support processing goes down.
It takes a lot of fancy hardware to do this. Designing it is most of the cost, which can only be spread across a limited number of customers.
But building a few extra chips is almost free, and wiring them up is a small cost compared to the total box (or to making a plethora of models in different sizes, and forklifting in a bigger one if the customer wants to upgrade his LIVE system). So it's convenient for the manufacturers to put a bunch of the chips in a box so they're already onsite and hooked up if the customer decides to buy more processor power, or if the magic smoke gets out of one of the chips that's in use.
Want more processing power? Pay more money, and the "customer engineer" turns more of it on. (It DOES cost the supplying company more if it's on, because it increases the amount of maintainence they need to do - like maybe hiring a couple extra guys just to work at that customer's site!)
We can't just open this up to the public. The minute we open it up we have in fact opened it up to the public and we can't restrict it in the future from a proprietary standpoint," said SCO CEO Darl McBride at conference in August this year. "
Besides which, this claim makes no sense -- letting people see the code doesn't give people the right to use the code -- SCO would still have the copyright on anything that they wrote (or, to be more accurate, bought the rights to).
SCO might argue that (micro?)somebody might be avoiding integrating the code into CLOSED source software for fear of the wrath of the herds of wild Gnus who scrutinize object code for infringement. But once the stuff that's "realy SCO's" is identified, so only tiny SCO has an interest in hunting for it, they might go ahead and use it.
Of course the argument is bullshit since the release of the various Unix code (by SCO among others) already points more directly to anything that would fit the argument - as if anybody in the proprietary sector was really interested.
... Cheney is impeached for helping Haliburton's war profiteering, the Red Sox win the world series, pigs fly and Commander Taco fixes the slashdot code to warn editors of imminent dupes.
And all's right with the world. B-)
But a nit: Clinton, not Bush, started the no-bid Haliburton contracts. (There ARE few choices in this industry, after all.)
Meanwhile, Cheney had to put his assets in a blind trust - where the trustee will by now have sold it off and converted the proceeds to a pot of random stuff. (And if he let Cheney know what was in the pot, or invested/left a disproportionate amount in Cheney's old interests, he's committed a felony, and the Dems can arrange to fry him after Cheney is out of office to deter such behavior in the future.)
For Cheney to get personal financial benefit (as if the VP had any real power in the first place) he has to improve the WHOLE US ECONOMY. (Maybe the whole WORLD economy). Which is what you WANT.
What if they don't? And more importantly, who's gonna make them?
They're their own country. They make their own laws.
GPL is based on copyright law, which is roughly the same for all signatories of the Berne Convention (of which China is one). So in principle it's enforcable against Chinese businesses or government operations in Chinese courts.
What that means is authors of the base code (or their assigns) might get Chinese courts to issue an injunction to block the distribution of the code or the selling of boxes containing it, if the source isn't available or is wrong. And maybe the government would enforce the injunction, to avoid reciprocal hassles protecting Chinese authors in international markets.
But the real teeth would be obtaining and enforcing injunctions against selling the product in other countries, for western hard currency, if the source isn't forthcoming.
Also, wouldn't a "set of partitioning tools" be something like Partition Magic or fdisk? Or are we using a more generic form of the word partition?
The latter.
You can "partition" anything computerish into several, virtual, smaller units.
This sort of stuff is much more common in mainframe shops. You might have a single machine with a bunch of processors, I/O channel processors, device controllers, and devices. You partition it into several smaller virtual mainframe machines, each called "partitions" and each composed of some subset of these resources.
For instance: You might have a machine with 16 processors, of which you licensed 12 (the rest are in-place spares). You throw 4 of them into each of two multi-CPU partitions, one for accounting and one for engineering, use 10% of the time of another in each of ten "slow" partitions for OS software development, linux systems running web servers, and so on. (Maybe the last three get switched between accounting near payroll time and engineering near product release time.) You allocate disks, tapes, memory devices, controllers, etc. (or slices of them), to each partition.
Of those 4 CPUs that are unlicensed spares, maybe one is fried and the other three are in the mainframe supplier's "diagnostic partition", constantly (or intermittently) running hardware diagnostics on themselves and any devices that the vendor's maintainence people are fixing, have fixed but haven't released back to the customer, are installing for "delivery" next month, or are on-site spares of something other than CPUs that haven't yet been bought/rented by the shop.
The one problem with his suggestion, as I understand it, is that the states are responsible for the design of the ballot in the USA. In Canada, the ballot design is dictated by Elections Canada [...]
The US is a federation of States - the first of which were independent countries that allied to form a common market and united political and military response to external powers. Many of the later states were also independent countries that joined the alliance (though some were created on land which was under control of the alliance.)
As independent, mostly-soverign, nations they each elect their own officials by their own rules. Similarly, their representatives, senators, and presidential electors are their own officials, also elected by their own rules (though with a bit more input from the federal government).
Indeed, that's why the presidential electors from SOME states are winner-take-all and from others are proportional to the popular vote. It depends on what the state decided.
If I ever run for office in Canada, I'm changing my name to Aaron Aabercrombie.
Which is why California used a "scrambled alphabet" - and started with a different letter in each precinct - when ordering the candidates for the replacement governor.
I have to agree with Cringely. Any paper-base receipt is suseptable to abuse. Specifically, this allows someone to confirm how another person voted. Bought votes are possible this way.
Cringley is perpeutating a misunderstanding about the so-called "paper receipts" - that the voter takes them home, and can show them to another person to collect his graft. This is NOT what they are about.
They are not "receipts". They are "ballots". They are the OFFICIAL record of the vote. They are collected in at the polling place and placed in the ballot box. If there's any question about an automated count, a manual recount of these papers becomes the final tally.
The voting machine helps you fill them out, so there's no issue of improperly marked votes (like "hanging" or "dimpled" chads, Xes outside the box, or lightly filled-in mark cards) and no ballots "spoiled" by over-voting or other improper marking. But after the machine fills out your ballot you can check that it did that part of its job correctly - and try again if it screws up.
The voting machine MAY also count your vote as it creates these cards, to speed up the report. But the marked cards trump the voting machine's tally, which means they're the REAL record.
So let's clear the air by calling them what they are - human-verifiable machine-printed BALLOTS.
The big fuss is that... the last US presidential election fell within the margin of error of the voting system. This created an atmosphere of crisis. So rather than having an evolution of voting machines, we are getting a substandard product of crisis politics.
Further, the scrutiny of the election process has exposed that the e-voting machines (which were already being phased in) were subject to undetectable election fraud, potentially corrupting the election and even resulting in a takeover of the country.
And beyond that, the scrutiny is exposing that OTHER election counting mechanisms, in use for decades HAVE MANY OF THE SAME PROBLEMS. The software to count punched-card and marked-card ballots is ALSO closed, proprietary, and subject to fraud and abuse. (Fortunately, in those cases the ballots themselves are available for scrutiny afterward, with the threat of exposure as a deterrent against taking advantage of the cheating potential.)
Mechanical machines are also subject to abuse, and lack the audit trail. But their cast-in-steel mechanism limits the AMOUNT of fraud that can be done without risking exposure by presenting unreasonable numbers (like more votes than voters, or tens-compliment "negative" vote totals for the cheated-against candidate). Voting machine fraud HAS occurred - because "0000" stickers, used in one fraud system, have been found when cleaning out the machines.
The people of the US want their elections to be right. And even most corrupt politicians realize that their political machines can't keep their opponents from using a broken e-voting system to kick them out. B-) Thus the flap.
The reason they don't want to use ethanol is precisely BECAUSE it is the same as alcohol.
If they use ethanol, they have to treat the refills just as they would have to treat vodka - they cannot sell it to anybody under-age, they have to have a liquor license to sell it, they got to prison if they violate the rules.
And they'd pay a lot of extra taxes.
Now, the COULD try to design the fuel cell to run on ethanol, as well, and leave the fact as a "back door" sort of issue, but any fuel they sell will have to be denatured in some form.
Given the toxicity of methanol, I'd like to see them design the fuel cell to run on ethanol with a small amount of methanol for denaturant.
That way the standard fuel still wouldn't be "drinking alcohol" - but it wouldn't do serious damage if you accidentally injested or absorbed a small amount of it. And in a pinch you could refuel with vodka without having the cell malfunction.
To get really pure ethanol you need to use benzene a carcinogen.
That's just to get the last of the water out of it, to get it beyond the 90ish% alcohol in water you can reach by distilation.
But the fuel cell doesn't NEED water-free alcohol. In fact, it needs VERY DILUTE alcohol - so dilute that they use the water from the reaction to further dilute the supplied alcohol (which is WAY under 90%). So there'd be no need to use benzene on ethanol to make it suitable for the fuel cell.
No one who is pro war... should ever be telling someone else to "rent a clue"
Where do you get the idea that I'm pro-war?
What my sig indicates is that I am is anti-knee-jerk-anti-war. (And anti-knee-jerk-pro-war while I'm at it.) Back in the 60s and 70s I put my LIFE (and carreer) on the line opposing a war.
War is a VERY BAD THING. But, very occasionally, it is MUCH better than the available alternatives. On those occasions being anti-war leads to wholesale death and destruction.
In those days there were a couple slogans bandied about: "Give Peace a Chance" and "Boycott the War Machine". And in those days, IMHO, they were the appropriate. The US government was using the threat of the draft to enslave a generation, "channeling" it into government-desired occupations in an attempt to hold off a depression, mortgaging future generations with printing-press money that would eventually have to be paid off with real taxes, and refusing to push the war to an end - either victory OR abandonment. Corporations, as always, were doing whatever they perceived as making a profit. So opposing the war politically and shifting the profit/loss equation economically were reasonable moves.
But THESE days the situation is different. In Iraq the US "gave peace a chance" for over a decade, while hundreds of thousands of Iraquis (including our allies in the LAST skirmish) died. And international terrorists (regardless of whether they were supported by Iraq) viewed our restraint as a sign of weakness, and began a campaign of attacks, culminating in one that resulted in more deaths than Pearl Harbor. So the US went to war. So now the US is in a situation where, if it backs out again, terrorists will be further emboldened and will stage still more attacks. We've taken on the bullies, and we have to follow through.
But the anti-war political machine created in opposition to the Vietnam engagement is running on regardless. And certain major corporations (mainly the same media conglomerates that we flame for other reasons here) are using the money they make to oppose the war regardless of its appropriateness (just as certain corporations supported the Vietnam engagement decades ago). So sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
To everything there is a season... and a time for every purpose... a time for war, a time for peace.
(But more importantly, inverting the slogans is FUNNY - in a REALLY black-humor way. When disaster strikes and people are dying all around, black-humor provides a release of tension that improves odds for the survivors.)
An awful lot of tollbooths also have license plate cameras, so who needs EZpass? Maybe they're just going to analog video recordings for now, but one assumes the license plate images are easy to OCR and that can be done in real time soon enough.
Bridges in the SF Bay area have TWO licence plate cameras of different vintages.
Any bets on whether the new one is for on OCR plate-tracker system?
(or they'd make political hay from mandating a no-evil-uses-with-EZPass policy, but this is Slashdot, so we all just assume a police state is inevitable, right?)
Ahh yes, our dear Slashdot, where tinfoil is headwear and 1984 is the bible.
Rent a clue.
People organize and strive to obtain more control over their environment. That tendency includes both governments obtaining more control over their citizens/subjects and citizens/subjects defending themselves against such control.
But institutional groups (such as governments) tend to go on for a long time, accumulating ever more power, while individuals are replaced from time to time. So if nothing is done about it the tendency will be for governments to accumulate ever more power, and become ever more oppressive, until they become so tyrannical that they're attacked from within and/or without and eventually overthrown (which may end up with an even worse situation).
The founders of this country recognized that tendency of government to accumulate ever more power. They prescribed a system of institutional restraints. But, because the government would eventual work its way around it, they ALSO prescribed ongoing watchfulness by the citizenry, so they can use NON-violent means to back the government off before it goes so far that only violent means will work. "Eternal Vigilance is the price of Liberty."
Which is EXACTLY what is going on now: New tech makes for new opportunity for spying and oppression. The government starts using it because there's no specific rule against it and it helps them "do their jobs". Eventually the citizens catch on and raise a ruckus. Sometimes this ruckus results in the creation of specific rules to suppress the misuse and restore the status quo ante (or even improve on it).
Slashdot is all about new uses of technology. "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters." And what matters more than government misuse of new tech to oppress the citizens?
So of COURSE it shows up here. Of COURSE it makes up a significant fraction of the news items. Anybody can post, but ordinary citizens greatly outnumber the elite controllers. So of COURSE the bulk of the voices are against the new misuses of technology.
No tinfoil hats required.
This is a very healthy process. It's exactly what the founders of the country prescribed, to keep the country from developing into a tyranny and prosperity from degenerating into civil war.
Ridiculing the people criticizing the government's misuse of technology is NOT "conducive to these ends". But it does tell us something about the ridiculer:
They're negotiating a surrender? Sounds like something I'd see on prime time USA, with a SWAT team and about fifty riflemen with guns trained on a panoramic storefront window.
You and me both. B-)
But I think this means that NC has the second guy in custody and the Virginia prosecutor is negotiating to have NC hand him over ("surrender him") to them.
This kind of thing (an "extradition proceeding") happens whenever one state has an accused crook that another one wants. The state that has him has to decide whether to hand him over or keep him.
They might keep him if he is accused of a BIGGER crime that they want to try there first, if they don't think the other state has a reasonable claim, if the state holding him doesn't treat the offense as a crime, or of if the governor of the state that has him likes him.
Except of course apparently where the RIAA is concerned where its ok to copy analog (fm stereo) but not digital (cd).
Actually it wasn't OK with the RIAA for you to copy FM radio to analog tape. But the courts made them allow it, by identifying a right to make a personal-use copy for listening to the broadcast program at a time other than that of the broadcast ("time-shifting").
VOIP customers will have broadband available to them which will obviate the need of a modem for internet access.
But it WON'T obviate the need for a FAX modem - either built into the legacy fax machine or for receiving FAX calls.
The compressed protocols won't carry FAX.
Uncompressed G.711 will (AND will carry 56k modem signals, too), but it puts extreme requirements on the clocking at the receiving end (or the FAX MODEM takes hits and keeps switching downspeed).
The third alternative is a FAX modem and protocol conversion in the gateway DSP's firmware. But the chip vendors I've looked at so far treat the DSP firmware as a vendor-supplied black-box and don't supply that feature.
So I'll be VERY intereste in what they actually use for their implementations.
If they're selling VoIP as a POTS replacement, people will expect to plug in their legacy FAX machine, their dialup modem (for visitors with laptops and for when the DSLAM isn't talking to the network properly), and any number of other devices with built-in modems (such as satellite TV settop boxes, TiVo, etc.). If these don't work they're going to get a LOT of trouble calls, which will make a big difference in the cost of providing the service.
'in a window free of navigation and other interface elements, known as "chrome," and browser security restrictions.'
So now we have microsoft with patenting a new way of creating macicious popups with windows.
Remember that, when they applied for the patent, Sun was trying to break their monopoly on OSes by creating, with Java and Javascript, a platform-independent secure sandbox within the web browser for running web-distributed mini-apps. Letting users build Windows-only apps that could escape the sandbox and use OS-dependent features (but only on Windows platforms) would seem like a plus.
Of course the patent would block others from doing the same on OTHER proprietary OSes. So web site designers could build portable content, Windows-only content, but not Other-OS-only content. This would help prevent another OS from displacing them as the monopolist and then using their own tricks on them to keep them out of the catbird seat.
Here's a tip on how to use "standard." If China releases its own specificiation, it's a propiertary spec, not a standard.
If I was to release my own specification, that doesn't make it a standard. Standards, by definition, are standard. You can't have a unilaterial standard.
Wrong. Standards are a set of rules to which an implimentation may comply or fail to comply. There may be competing standards
If China releases a standard, it's a Chinese National Standard.
If I release a standard, it's an Ungrounded Lightning Rod standard.
If the International Telecommunications Union releases a standard, it's an ITU standard. Similarly with IEEE, ANSI, etc.
Now you, or I, MIGHT try to get some international standards organization to adopt OUR standard as THEIR standard. And if our proposed standard doesn't ruffle their feathers they MIGHT do it. And there's a vanishingly small probability that they might adopt it completely unchanged (except for the standard boilerplate). If they do that, then it's an ITU, ANSI, IEEE, Chinese National, or what-have-you standard TOO.
But standards organizations almost never adopt a standard without making SOME change to it. And once one standards organization promulgates a standard, the others usually defer to them and incorporate it by reference rather than adopting an equivalent standard. (This is to prevent incompatibilities arising from minor differences and settle the issue of who makes the updated version if something needs tweaking.)
RBC: "We're altering the deal, pray we do not alter it further...
They aren't altering SCO's deal with the lawyers.
What they're doing is getting agreement from SCO that SCO will not take an additional unilateral action (such as selling the company) that will trigger the CYA part of the deal (giving 20% of the company to the lawyers) - unless SCO first gets investor approval.
"You promised them 20% of the company if you sold it. That would dilute our investment. So don't do that without asking us first."
NO change to the deal with the lawyers. Just don't push the red button (and give away a fifth of the store) without asking the owners first.
I'm not sure I really understand your point of using an existing asteroid for this.
To use material mined from the earth or moon you have to LIFT an ENORMOUS mass out of a deep gravity well. Very expensive. To use an existing asteroid you only have to slightly modify its orbit to have a MASSIVE shield in place for repeated trips.
You could use an asteroid from the main belt. But the Apollo asteroids are already almost in the right orbit. MUCH less work.
Since there is no fuel economy, since we still the same momentum to get to/from the asteroid on both ends as we would with a ship/probe.
There's no fuel economy for the passengers, which you have to inject into transfer orbit and then eject into planetary orbit each trip. There's an ENORMOUS fuel economy for the shield, which you only have to inject into the correct orbit ONCE for an arbitrary number of trips. Ditto for most of the life support (atmosphere, food plants and animals, recycling equipment, beds, furniture, computers, pressure doors, windows, walls, refrigerators, stoves, pots and pans, etc.) Put it in transfer orbit once, use it repeatedly at no further cost in delta-V.
The mass of a person is TINY compared to the mass of the stuff you need to keep him alive, happy, and shielded from radiation for a couple years.
Slashdot Mirror
Want more processing power? Pay more money, and the "customer engineer" turns more of it on.
k e/etc. - proof boxes.
I heard stories of this happening with HP (I think) in the late 1970's. To "install" the additional 64K RAM the technician would flip a switch somewhere inside the computer. The bill for this was in the thousands. But I had no idea the industry still worked that way!
Sure does. The term for turning on only as much as they bought is "feature protection", and engineering it (so the customer can't just throw the switch himself, and switch it back when the CE is onsite) is a significant effort.
Sort of like program keys for software. B-)
By the way - I don't think I answered all of your original question. Given that the machine is powerful and redundant enough to run continuously and error-free for decades, it greatly reduces construction and system admin costs to use one big one and partition it rather than a bunch of little ones.
The advantage of clusters occurs in less critical applications, like webservers, where you can let the individual systems fail without jepoardizing the mission. Then you can use a bunch of cheap, flakey machines ( and flakey software B-) ) rather than power-failure/radiation/bullet/lightning/earthqua
Within the machines they do the same - with large RAID systems stuffed full of commodity disks. But while you can make a big reliable disk out of little flakey ones it's not that easy for processors.
Also: Putting it all in one box cuts signal propagation time compared to scattering it across the room, for those big non-partitionalbe computations. And if you need more processor power, memory, etc. you can turn up the amount of resources allocated to the partition, rather than migrating the app to a better box.
Not a bad boint, but it's more likely that when the Chinese government wants to spy on someone with a cell phone, they just monitor the cellular networks.
But what if they want to spy on him when he's NOT ON THE PHONE? This way they can.
Which is probably why they're going with open source: So the people can check it, some of them will, and they'll thus trust the box and buy it.
You might have a machine with 16 processors, of which you licensed 12 (the rest are in-place spares). You throw 4 of them into each of two multi-CPU partitions, one for accounting and one for engineering...
Good lord, are you serious? I guess it's just the MSCE in me, but why wouldn't you just buy four different computers to do the work of four virtual computers?
Because mainframe computers create the illusion that they don't drop bits. (They actually do, but they catch it and fix it, so the result is as if they hadn't.)
This is VERY IMPORTANT for some businesses. Like long distance companies doing online billing - with all calls free if the machine is rebooting, to the tune of over 6 megabux per hour. Which is a drop in the bucket compared to the losses for a brokerage if their transaction support processing goes down.
It takes a lot of fancy hardware to do this. Designing it is most of the cost, which can only be spread across a limited number of customers.
But building a few extra chips is almost free, and wiring them up is a small cost compared to the total box (or to making a plethora of models in different sizes, and forklifting in a bigger one if the customer wants to upgrade his LIVE system). So it's convenient for the manufacturers to put a bunch of the chips in a box so they're already onsite and hooked up if the customer decides to buy more processor power, or if the magic smoke gets out of one of the chips that's in use.
Want more processing power? Pay more money, and the "customer engineer" turns more of it on. (It DOES cost the supplying company more if it's on, because it increases the amount of maintainence they need to do - like maybe hiring a couple extra guys just to work at that customer's site!)
We can't just open this up to the public. The minute we open it up we have in fact opened it up to the public and we can't restrict it in the future from a proprietary standpoint," said SCO CEO Darl McBride at conference in August this year. "
Besides which, this claim makes no sense -- letting people see the code doesn't give people the right to use the code -- SCO would still have the copyright on anything that they wrote (or, to be more accurate, bought the rights to).
SCO might argue that (micro?)somebody might be avoiding integrating the code into CLOSED source software for fear of the wrath of the herds of wild Gnus who scrutinize object code for infringement. But once the stuff that's "realy SCO's" is identified, so only tiny SCO has an interest in hunting for it, they might go ahead and use it.
Of course the argument is bullshit since the release of the various Unix code (by SCO among others) already points more directly to anything that would fit the argument - as if anybody in the proprietary sector was really interested.
... Cheney is impeached for helping Haliburton's war profiteering, the Red Sox win the world series, pigs fly and Commander Taco fixes the slashdot code to warn editors of imminent dupes.
And all's right with the world. B-)
But a nit: Clinton, not Bush, started the no-bid Haliburton contracts. (There ARE few choices in this industry, after all.)
Meanwhile, Cheney had to put his assets in a blind trust - where the trustee will by now have sold it off and converted the proceeds to a pot of random stuff. (And if he let Cheney know what was in the pot, or invested/left a disproportionate amount in Cheney's old interests, he's committed a felony, and the Dems can arrange to fry him after Cheney is out of office to deter such behavior in the future.)
For Cheney to get personal financial benefit (as if the VP had any real power in the first place) he has to improve the WHOLE US ECONOMY. (Maybe the whole WORLD economy). Which is what you WANT.
Isn't it?
In SOVIET CHINA ... Phone Taps You!
Maybe literally.
A speakerphone with a web camera, running compromised softwre, also amounts to a DANDY audio/video room bug.
Perhaps the "Telescreen" has arrived in Eastasia, only 19 years after the prediction.
Do they make the source code available?
What if they don't? And more importantly, who's gonna make them?
They're their own country. They make their own laws.
GPL is based on copyright law, which is roughly the same for all signatories of the Berne Convention (of which China is one). So in principle it's enforcable against Chinese businesses or government operations in Chinese courts.
What that means is authors of the base code (or their assigns) might get Chinese courts to issue an injunction to block the distribution of the code or the selling of boxes containing it, if the source isn't available or is wrong. And maybe the government would enforce the injunction, to avoid reciprocal hassles protecting Chinese authors in international markets.
But the real teeth would be obtaining and enforcing injunctions against selling the product in other countries, for western hard currency, if the source isn't forthcoming.
Also, wouldn't a "set of partitioning tools" be something like Partition Magic or fdisk? Or are we using a more generic form of the word partition?
The latter.
You can "partition" anything computerish into several, virtual, smaller units.
This sort of stuff is much more common in mainframe shops. You might have a single machine with a bunch of processors, I/O channel processors, device controllers, and devices. You partition it into several smaller virtual mainframe machines, each called "partitions" and each composed of some subset of these resources.
For instance: You might have a machine with 16 processors, of which you licensed 12 (the rest are in-place spares). You throw 4 of them into each of two multi-CPU partitions, one for accounting and one for engineering, use 10% of the time of another in each of ten "slow" partitions for OS software development, linux systems running web servers, and so on. (Maybe the last three get switched between accounting near payroll time and engineering near product release time.) You allocate disks, tapes, memory devices, controllers, etc. (or slices of them), to each partition.
Of those 4 CPUs that are unlicensed spares, maybe one is fried and the other three are in the mainframe supplier's "diagnostic partition", constantly (or intermittently) running hardware diagnostics on themselves and any devices that the vendor's maintainence people are fixing, have fixed but haven't released back to the customer, are installing for "delivery" next month, or are on-site spares of something other than CPUs that haven't yet been bought/rented by the shop.
The one problem with his suggestion, as I understand it, is that the states are responsible for the design of the ballot in the USA. In Canada, the ballot design is dictated by Elections Canada [...]
The US is a federation of States - the first of which were independent countries that allied to form a common market and united political and military response to external powers. Many of the later states were also independent countries that joined the alliance (though some were created on land which was under control of the alliance.)
As independent, mostly-soverign, nations they each elect their own officials by their own rules. Similarly, their representatives, senators, and presidential electors are their own officials, also elected by their own rules (though with a bit more input from the federal government).
Indeed, that's why the presidential electors from SOME states are winner-take-all and from others are proportional to the popular vote. It depends on what the state decided.
If I ever run for office in Canada, I'm changing my name to Aaron Aabercrombie.
Which is why California used a "scrambled alphabet" - and started with a different letter in each precinct - when ordering the candidates for the replacement governor.
Everyone gets to watch the count if they so choose, amazing! You could get real Democracy with that!
Naw.
As long as you're voting on who will represent you you only get a real Republic.
Now if you change the rules so you vote directly on all the issues, rather than electing people to do it FOR you, you'd have a Democracy.
But I bet you wouldn't want to spend as much of your life arguing and voting as your representatives do. B-)
I have to agree with Cringely. Any paper-base receipt is suseptable to abuse. Specifically, this allows someone to confirm how another person voted. Bought votes are possible this way.
Cringley is perpeutating a misunderstanding about the so-called "paper receipts" - that the voter takes them home, and can show them to another person to collect his graft. This is NOT what they are about.
They are not "receipts". They are "ballots". They are the OFFICIAL record of the vote. They are collected in at the polling place and placed in the ballot box. If there's any question about an automated count, a manual recount of these papers becomes the final tally.
The voting machine helps you fill them out, so there's no issue of improperly marked votes (like "hanging" or "dimpled" chads, Xes outside the box, or lightly filled-in mark cards) and no ballots "spoiled" by over-voting or other improper marking. But after the machine fills out your ballot you can check that it did that part of its job correctly - and try again if it screws up.
The voting machine MAY also count your vote as it creates these cards, to speed up the report. But the marked cards trump the voting machine's tally, which means they're the REAL record.
So let's clear the air by calling them what they are - human-verifiable machine-printed BALLOTS.
The big fuss is that ... the last US presidential election fell within the margin of error of the voting system. This created an atmosphere of crisis. So rather than having an evolution of voting machines, we are getting a substandard product of crisis politics.
Further, the scrutiny of the election process has exposed that the e-voting machines (which were already being phased in) were subject to undetectable election fraud, potentially corrupting the election and even resulting in a takeover of the country.
And beyond that, the scrutiny is exposing that OTHER election counting mechanisms, in use for decades HAVE MANY OF THE SAME PROBLEMS. The software to count punched-card and marked-card ballots is ALSO closed, proprietary, and subject to fraud and abuse. (Fortunately, in those cases the ballots themselves are available for scrutiny afterward, with the threat of exposure as a deterrent against taking advantage of the cheating potential.)
Mechanical machines are also subject to abuse, and lack the audit trail. But their cast-in-steel mechanism limits the AMOUNT of fraud that can be done without risking exposure by presenting unreasonable numbers (like more votes than voters, or tens-compliment "negative" vote totals for the cheated-against candidate). Voting machine fraud HAS occurred - because "0000" stickers, used in one fraud system, have been found when cleaning out the machines.
The people of the US want their elections to be right. And even most corrupt politicians realize that their political machines can't keep their opponents from using a broken e-voting system to kick them out. B-) Thus the flap.
The reason they don't want to use ethanol is precisely BECAUSE it is the same as alcohol.
If they use ethanol, they have to treat the refills just as they would have to treat vodka - they cannot sell it to anybody under-age, they have to have a liquor license to sell it, they got to prison if they violate the rules.
And they'd pay a lot of extra taxes.
Now, the COULD try to design the fuel cell to run on ethanol, as well, and leave the fact as a "back door" sort of issue, but any fuel they sell will have to be denatured in some form.
Given the toxicity of methanol, I'd like to see them design the fuel cell to run on ethanol with a small amount of methanol for denaturant.
That way the standard fuel still wouldn't be "drinking alcohol" - but it wouldn't do serious damage if you accidentally injested or absorbed a small amount of it. And in a pinch you could refuel with vodka without having the cell malfunction.
To get really pure ethanol you need to use benzene a carcinogen.
That's just to get the last of the water out of it, to get it beyond the 90ish% alcohol in water you can reach by distilation.
But the fuel cell doesn't NEED water-free alcohol. In fact, it needs VERY DILUTE alcohol - so dilute that they use the water from the reaction to further dilute the supplied alcohol (which is WAY under 90%). So there'd be no need to use benzene on ethanol to make it suitable for the fuel cell.
No one who is pro war ... should ever be telling someone else to "rent a clue"
... and a time for every purpose ... a time for war, a time for peace.
Where do you get the idea that I'm pro-war?
What my sig indicates is that I am is anti-knee-jerk-anti-war. (And anti-knee-jerk-pro-war while I'm at it.) Back in the 60s and 70s I put my LIFE (and carreer) on the line opposing a war.
War is a VERY BAD THING. But, very occasionally, it is MUCH better than the available alternatives. On those occasions being anti-war leads to wholesale death and destruction.
In those days there were a couple slogans bandied about: "Give Peace a Chance" and "Boycott the War Machine". And in those days, IMHO, they were the appropriate. The US government was using the threat of the draft to enslave a generation, "channeling" it into government-desired occupations in an attempt to hold off a depression, mortgaging future generations with printing-press money that would eventually have to be paid off with real taxes, and refusing to push the war to an end - either victory OR abandonment. Corporations, as always, were doing whatever they perceived as making a profit. So opposing the war politically and shifting the profit/loss equation economically were reasonable moves.
But THESE days the situation is different. In Iraq the US "gave peace a chance" for over a decade, while hundreds of thousands of Iraquis (including our allies in the LAST skirmish) died. And international terrorists (regardless of whether they were supported by Iraq) viewed our restraint as a sign of weakness, and began a campaign of attacks, culminating in one that resulted in more deaths than Pearl Harbor. So the US went to war. So now the US is in a situation where, if it backs out again, terrorists will be further emboldened and will stage still more attacks. We've taken on the bullies, and we have to follow through.
But the anti-war political machine created in opposition to the Vietnam engagement is running on regardless. And certain major corporations (mainly the same media conglomerates that we flame for other reasons here) are using the money they make to oppose the war regardless of its appropriateness (just as certain corporations supported the Vietnam engagement decades ago). So sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
To everything there is a season
(But more importantly, inverting the slogans is FUNNY - in a REALLY black-humor way. When disaster strikes and people are dying all around, black-humor provides a release of tension that improves odds for the survivors.)
An awful lot of tollbooths also have license plate cameras, so who needs EZpass? Maybe they're just going to analog video recordings for now, but one assumes the license plate images are easy to OCR and that can be done in real time soon enough.
Bridges in the SF Bay area have TWO licence plate cameras of different vintages.
Any bets on whether the new one is for on OCR plate-tracker system?
(or they'd make political hay from mandating a no-evil-uses-with-EZPass policy, but this is Slashdot, so we all just assume a police state is inevitable, right?)
Ahh yes, our dear Slashdot, where tinfoil is headwear and 1984 is the bible.
Rent a clue.
People organize and strive to obtain more control over their environment. That tendency includes both governments obtaining more control over their citizens/subjects and citizens/subjects defending themselves against such control.
But institutional groups (such as governments) tend to go on for a long time, accumulating ever more power, while individuals are replaced from time to time. So if nothing is done about it the tendency will be for governments to accumulate ever more power, and become ever more oppressive, until they become so tyrannical that they're attacked from within and/or without and eventually overthrown (which may end up with an even worse situation).
The founders of this country recognized that tendency of government to accumulate ever more power. They prescribed a system of institutional restraints. But, because the government would eventual work its way around it, they ALSO prescribed ongoing watchfulness by the citizenry, so they can use NON-violent means to back the government off before it goes so far that only violent means will work. "Eternal Vigilance is the price of Liberty."
Which is EXACTLY what is going on now: New tech makes for new opportunity for spying and oppression. The government starts using it because there's no specific rule against it and it helps them "do their jobs". Eventually the citizens catch on and raise a ruckus. Sometimes this ruckus results in the creation of specific rules to suppress the misuse and restore the status quo ante (or even improve on it).
Slashdot is all about new uses of technology. "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters." And what matters more than government misuse of new tech to oppress the citizens?
So of COURSE it shows up here. Of COURSE it makes up a significant fraction of the news items. Anybody can post, but ordinary citizens greatly outnumber the elite controllers. So of COURSE the bulk of the voices are against the new misuses of technology.
No tinfoil hats required.
This is a very healthy process. It's exactly what the founders of the country prescribed, to keep the country from developing into a tyranny and prosperity from degenerating into civil war.
Ridiculing the people criticizing the government's misuse of technology is NOT "conducive to these ends". But it does tell us something about the ridiculer:
Either he's a fool -
or he's on the wrong side.
They're negotiating a surrender? Sounds like something I'd see on prime time USA, with a SWAT team and about fifty riflemen with guns trained on a panoramic storefront window.
You and me both. B-)
But I think this means that NC has the second guy in custody and the Virginia prosecutor is negotiating to have NC hand him over ("surrender him") to them.
This kind of thing (an "extradition proceeding") happens whenever one state has an accused crook that another one wants. The state that has him has to decide whether to hand him over or keep him.
They might keep him if he is accused of a BIGGER crime that they want to try there first, if they don't think the other state has a reasonable claim, if the state holding him doesn't treat the offense as a crime, or of if the governor of the state that has him likes him.
Except of course apparently where the RIAA is concerned where its ok to copy analog (fm stereo) but not digital (cd).
Actually it wasn't OK with the RIAA for you to copy FM radio to analog tape. But the courts made them allow it, by identifying a right to make a personal-use copy for listening to the broadcast program at a time other than that of the broadcast ("time-shifting").
VOIP customers will have broadband available to them which will obviate the need of a modem for internet access.
But it WON'T obviate the need for a FAX modem - either built into the legacy fax machine or for receiving FAX calls.
The compressed protocols won't carry FAX.
Uncompressed G.711 will (AND will carry 56k modem signals, too), but it puts extreme requirements on the clocking at the receiving end (or the FAX MODEM takes hits and keeps switching downspeed).
The third alternative is a FAX modem and protocol conversion in the gateway DSP's firmware. But the chip vendors I've looked at so far treat the DSP firmware as a vendor-supplied black-box and don't supply that feature.
So I'll be VERY intereste in what they actually use for their implementations.
If they're selling VoIP as a POTS replacement, people will expect to plug in their legacy FAX machine, their dialup modem (for visitors with laptops and for when the DSLAM isn't talking to the network properly), and any number of other devices with built-in modems (such as satellite TV settop boxes, TiVo, etc.). If these don't work they're going to get a LOT of trouble calls, which will make a big difference in the cost of providing the service.
'in a window free of navigation and other interface elements, known as "chrome," and browser security restrictions .'
So now we have microsoft with patenting a new way of creating macicious popups with windows.
Remember that, when they applied for the patent, Sun was trying to break their monopoly on OSes by creating, with Java and Javascript, a platform-independent secure sandbox within the web browser for running web-distributed mini-apps. Letting users build Windows-only apps that could escape the sandbox and use OS-dependent features (but only on Windows platforms) would seem like a plus.
Of course the patent would block others from doing the same on OTHER proprietary OSes. So web site designers could build portable content, Windows-only content, but not Other-OS-only content. This would help prevent another OS from displacing them as the monopolist and then using their own tricks on them to keep them out of the catbird seat.
Here's a tip on how to use "standard." If China releases its own specificiation, it's a propiertary spec, not a standard.
If I was to release my own specification, that doesn't make it a standard. Standards, by definition, are standard. You can't have a unilaterial standard.
Wrong. Standards are a set of rules to which an implimentation may comply or fail to comply. There may be competing standards
If China releases a standard, it's a Chinese National Standard.
If I release a standard, it's an Ungrounded Lightning Rod standard.
If the International Telecommunications Union releases a standard, it's an ITU standard. Similarly with IEEE, ANSI, etc.
Now you, or I, MIGHT try to get some international standards organization to adopt OUR standard as THEIR standard. And if our proposed standard doesn't ruffle their feathers they MIGHT do it. And there's a vanishingly small probability that they might adopt it completely unchanged (except for the standard boilerplate). If they do that, then it's an ITU, ANSI, IEEE, Chinese National, or what-have-you standard TOO.
But standards organizations almost never adopt a standard without making SOME change to it. And once one standards organization promulgates a standard, the others usually defer to them and incorporate it by reference rather than adopting an equivalent standard. (This is to prevent incompatibilities arising from minor differences and settle the issue of who makes the updated version if something needs tweaking.)
SCO's lawyers: "That wasn't part of the bargain!"
RBC: "We're altering the deal, pray we do not alter it further...
They aren't altering SCO's deal with the lawyers.
What they're doing is getting agreement from SCO that SCO will not take an additional unilateral action (such as selling the company) that will trigger the CYA part of the deal (giving 20% of the company to the lawyers) - unless SCO first gets investor approval.
"You promised them 20% of the company if you sold it. That would dilute our investment. So don't do that without asking us first."
NO change to the deal with the lawyers. Just don't push the red button (and give away a fifth of the store) without asking the owners first.
I'm not sure I really understand your point of using an existing asteroid for this.
To use material mined from the earth or moon you have to LIFT an ENORMOUS mass out of a deep gravity well. Very expensive. To use an existing asteroid you only have to slightly modify its orbit to have a MASSIVE shield in place for repeated trips.
You could use an asteroid from the main belt. But the Apollo asteroids are already almost in the right orbit. MUCH less work.
Since there is no fuel economy, since we still the same momentum to get to/from the asteroid on both ends as we would with a ship/probe.
There's no fuel economy for the passengers, which you have to inject into transfer orbit and then eject into planetary orbit each trip. There's an ENORMOUS fuel economy for the shield, which you only have to inject into the correct orbit ONCE for an arbitrary number of trips. Ditto for most of the life support (atmosphere, food plants and animals, recycling equipment, beds, furniture, computers, pressure doors, windows, walls, refrigerators, stoves, pots and pans, etc.) Put it in transfer orbit once, use it repeatedly at no further cost in delta-V.
The mass of a person is TINY compared to the mass of the stuff you need to keep him alive, happy, and shielded from radiation for a couple years.