Furthermore, what crime was David Koresh guilty of? Are you ready for the answer? Failing to pay taxes on 2 machine guns.
It was more than that. They had a quarter million $ in unpaid bills outstanding. Even the real estate they were sitting on was no longer theirs.
But that's not BATF's jurisdiction. They're not a general-purpose collection agency. They're part of the Treasury Department of the US Federal Government. Their jurisdicton consists solely of enforcing federal tax laws. In this case: Requiring the paperwork be filled out and a $200-each tax collected on the two alleged machine guns.
Interestingly, one of the Branch Davidians was a Class-III dealer, duly licensed to fill out the forms and collect the tax in question. The Davadians earned money for their church by buying and selling at gun shows. (As a schism from the Seventh Day Adventists they had no religious prohibition on armament.)
Note, however, that the BATF usually just beats or shoots people and pets and breaks their stuff when their enforcement operations get out of hand. It's the FBI that's noted for fires once they get involved in a standoff with a political out-group (as they did in Waco).
This is all rubbish. The 9/11 hijackers were Saudi, there is no evidence that Iraq had anything to do with 9/11 and the anthrax mailings appear to be domestic.
I think you misunderstood my post. I made NO claims that Iraq had anything to do with either the hijackers or the anthrax.
What I did was point out that part of the support for the action in Iraq was the belief on the part of some people that he did have something to do with it.
It's funny. Laugh. (And remember that the Rs, as well as the Ds, are the but of the joke.)
(But as long as I'm playing truth squad...)
The theory that the anthrax mailings were domestic was based primarily on identification of the strain in question as one that had been used in US labs, combined with a "likely suspect", who had once written a description of such a scenario and had worked with microbiological agents.
But it turned out that the strain was one of the standard experimental strains which had been broadly distributed to labs worldwide. Meanwhile, none of the evidence against the suspect panned out (though his carreer WAS ruined in the witch hunt that ensued, despite his, and his relatives', complete cooperation with the investigators).
the 'echo' you hear in POTS phones is called 'sidetone', and it is intentional. I didn't know that IP phones don't have sidetone.
The main purpose of sidetone, by the way, is to help you control the level of your voice. Secondarily it also lets you know that the phone is working, removing a distraction.
Forking is like software evolution. One project may split into two, with slightly different plans. Mostlikely one will surpass the other. Kind of survival of the fittest. If neither one grows over the other, then you have something called choice.
Dead on.
Proprietary projects fork and change, too. But after that one fork generally gets dropped or spun out and the older system abandoned. Users are stuck with the vendor-chosen "upgrade", or with changing vendors.
With an open source product they CAN'T pull the rug out from under you. The older version is still there, as are the multiple newer versions. Pick a fork and upgrade in your own time - and if nobody wants to maintain it for you you can always maintain it yourself, until YOU chose to hop versions for some cost/benefit improvement to YOU.
I do remember... people... recommended putting heavy, static shields around the colonies. One meter or so of solid waste products... could effectively shield the inhabitants from cosmic radiation.
This... makes for a pretty massive structure -- difficult to move around the solar system with contemporary propulsion.
One alternative that has been considered is an Apollo asteroid shuttle.
* Take one of the Apollo asteroids (which have orbits that cross that of earth).
* Modify its orbit so that it shuttles between the orbits of Earth and Mars, arriving near each when the planet is also nearby. (Use solar sails or solar-powered mass drivers or ion accellerators throwing spare mass from the asteroid for propulsion, to get your delta-v without hauling up fuel.) Takes a while, but can be automated for most of that time.
* Build a base INSIDE the asteroid.
The asteroid provides the mass of shielding, plus raw materials for buildings and a mostly-closed ecosystem. It becomes an "orbital hotel", much like an interplanetary cruise ship, making a trip every couple years.
Once it's established you only need enough delta-v to get your passengers and freight between the planets at the end of the trip and the asteroid. This is the same amount of fuel as shipping them and their docking shuttle to Mars or back by the same orbit - but you DON'T need to ship their well-shielded vehicle or most of their consumables. MUCH cheaper. Radiation exposure in the hypothetically less-shielded shuttle is for a few hours at the ends of the trip, rather than for a couple years during the trip.
Well, not to sound too bitter, but going to Mars seems like a much better way to spend billions than going to Iraq.
If the Martians start flying spacecraft into buildings on Manhattan Island and mailing anthrax around the US, I'm sure that BOTH parties will agree with you.
Or even if the Jupiterians do, and the Martians are suspected of funding them.
The body would attack those things because they are foreign
Read the article, my friend - they're coated so they don't get recognised as antigens. Nor will they get stuck (they took care over this one, designed wuith reference to pore sizes), and in any case are biodegradable.
I read it too, and I see a couple problems with the claims.
First: While the propylene glycol coating will protect the basic particle (for a while), the active antibodies that cause it to latch onto targets have to stick out. If some of the body's own antibodies latch onto those, it ends up "decorated". This will almost certainly trigger a bunch of attacks on it - which could cause damage to normal tissues nearby even if they don't result in defeating the glycol coat and starting the disassembly or macrophage-consumption of the particle.
The side-effect attack could result in anaphylactic shock if it is large enough, so using it to clean out circulating antibodies may turn out to be probelematic - requiring careful control of dosage and time-before-cleanout.
Even if this scenario is true in practice, however, the technique might still be useful against auto-immune diseases, where the antibodies in question will already be triggering as much collateral-damage as if they were attacking the particles. If it turns out not to be an issue, lots of other severe allergies may be susceptable to treatment by this technique.
Second: The sizing of the particles prevents their being trapped in capilaries or dumped by kidneys. But if the thing they bind to happens to be anchored to the inside of a blood-vessel they still get stuck. This could produce clots blocking the vessel if there's a lot of anchored target in one place. Even if there isn't, the particle gets stuck until the glycol wears off and the biodegradable core breaks down, after which you're left with:
- Antibodies decorating the target. (This may actually be good, but will probably result in blood vessel inflamation which is not.)
- Magnetite particles in the blood stream. (Hard, sharp, reactive, iron oxide particles.) Same cleanup problem as the small number that didn't get cleaned out in the non-anchored case, but much larger. Iron ions are not nice.
I've never quite understood the US position on the international court: "we cannot accept this because our citizens might be tried on it on political grounds". That implicitly reads that "There is no justice outside the American system". An unbelievably arrogant stance.
That's because you fail to understand the nature of the US Federal Government.
The US is a Constitutional Republic. As such, the government has only the power granted to it by its citizens (as laid out in the Constitution and its amendments) - along with certain responsibilities (mandated in the same document). Unlike, say, European Monarchies, the government's "Right to Rule" is derived SOLELY from this source. Not from claims of divine right. Not from the "I can therefore I may" claims of tyrants. Not from claims of ownership of a region and its people. From the People, via the document wheren the People set down the rules.
These rules promise the People of the US certain rights. Among those are the right to a fair trial UNDER THE RULES, as administered by officials chosen by the people, UNDER THE RULES.
The rules do NOT empower the government to delegate the power to try the People of the US for crimes, or to punish them upon conviction, to others who were NOT chosen by the People of the US under the rules. To do so would require a Constitutional Amendment, to change the rules ACCORDING to the rules in order to make or allow such a delegation.
For government officials to attempt to delegate this power WITHOUT such a rule change would be the HEIGHT of arrogance, and a usurpation of the RIGHTS of the People.
Yes, for the People of the US there IS no justice outside the American system. Not because other people are incapable of dispensing justice. But because the rules of the US give the People of the US a RIGHT to have their justice dispensed by officials of the US chosen by the People of the US according to the rules of the US.
Of course the executives of the US have pointed out (quite rightly, by the way), that letting a World Court try US military personnel for "War Crimes" would lead to bogus suits by every petty tyrant that the US military has had to take action against. But that's really a side-issue. The core issue is that the US military is populated with US citizens - who have RIGHTS that the US government is bound to respect and protect.
Note that the decision in question convicts three broadcasters of genocide for talking about it on the air. Advocating = committing. Oops!
Scenario:
- You flame about some political A-hole, spammer, or annoying whatever on the net and mention that you wish he were dead.
- Somebody kills him.
- You get fried.
Scenario 2:
- You flame about some regime somewhere in the world and mention that it would be good if it were overthrown.
- You get hauled into international court and then handed over to the regime for the "crime" of criticizing it and advocating violence against it.
As to handing such power over to the UN, the US government is empowerd only by the Constitution. This means it cannot hand its citizens over to an international tribunal that considers speech to be the equivalent of action, in violation of their First Amendment rights.
Further, any action by US officials that PURPORTS to do so is (according to the Supreme Court) not an official action, but a personal action by the individuals in question - suitable for being disobeyed by any other government official (such as the police and military personnel charged with executing the order - who have sworn to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign or DOMESTIC) and opening them up to both impeachment and personal responsibility under such laws as the Civil Rights act.
Freedom of speech can never be absolute.
That reminds me of an Abbie Hoffman incident (which I'll paraphrase since I don't have the exact text handy).
Abbie on interview show in front of a studio audience:
Q: So you think freedom of speech is absolute?
A: Absolutely!
Q: But surely you don't believe it's all right to yell "Fire!" in a crowded theatre?
everyone must view each other as competitors to be fought instead of companions to collaborate with.
Try "everyone else is a potential competitor who, if you cooperate with them, may steal your work unless you have a contract limiting them from doing so".
Which is really what GPL is about, also. It specifically prevents others from making an improvement (or incompatible change) to your code and blocking YOU (and your colaborators) from using and/or distributing that improvement (or change), i.e. Microsoft's "Embrace, extend, extinguish" approach applied to the code itself.
The real difference between GPL users and Daryl is that GPL users want to be paid for their code with more code, good reputation, or advancement of the field. Daryl prefers to be paid by having money come directly to his company.
He's not getting that money because the GPL codebase has become too strong a competitor, and he believes that codebase is built on the work he believes his company bought, in ways that amount to stealing it.
And by starting the suit he touched the tarbaby. If he backs out now he has nothing - and has destroyed his company. So, as the attention the suit brings leads to discoveries that various pieces of it are bogus, he has to keep pushing. Thus he ends up making progressively more convoluted claims.
By the way: If I read the article correctly the fish don't actually glow. They fluoresce.
Actually "glowing" fish would manufacutre light from food energy. "Fluorescing" fish need a light shining on them to light up (though the light might be ultraviolet and so not itself visible).
Fluorescing fish nevertheless emit more light in the band of interest than strikes them, which under the right circumstances makes them much "brighter" (in that color) than a perfect reflector.
He fathered the bill that changed that odd, government and acedemic research network known as Arpanet into the Internet where people from all around can use it for all different sorts of purposes.
In particular, his bill legalized using the Internet for commercial purposes - a big no-no up until then.
Unfortunately, this had the unintended side-effect of legalizing spam (or at least giving spammers some ground for their argument that their activities are legitimate commercial use of a service for which they've paid).
You do realize that the subsidies that Amtrack and most local train utilities recieve are less than half of what similar road spending requires, right?
The roads carry a LOT more passengers and freight. (Actual cost per trip on subsidized urban mass transit, including the subsidy, is often in the hundreds of bucks.)
Roads carry passengers and fraight almost directly from where they were to where they want to go, too.
Most importantly, those "subsidies" are paid for primarily from fuel taxes and tolls, which come straight out of the pockets of the actual users of the roads. Yes there are other funding sources - but fuel taxes and tolls get ripped off big-time to subsidize other things too - mainly trains and busses. The fuel taxes collected have been more than enough to pay for the roads.
I don't think so. There have been terrorist attacks on trains (e.g., Carlos the Jackal's bombing in 1983). They just haven't been very successful and haven't led to cumbersome security measures.
But it IS hard to drive a train into the side of a skyscraper, the Pentagon, the Whitehouse, or Capitol Hill. Potential targets are limited when compared to a fully-fueled jumbo jet.
The first half of your post makes a number of points I've been trying to make here at work, to people you might characterize as "IP weenies". (They aren't onboard with VoIP yet. But they seem to think the digital convergence will occur by suddenly replacing all existing networks in toto with IP nets, inventing replacements for all previous wheels in IP format. No staged transition. No interfacing with legacy systems. Avoid all "That TDM shit" (actual quote at VP level) like the plague.)
Pity you posted as an AC. I'd love to get together with you to talk strategy.
But VoIP isn't doomed, or even an uneconomic proposition right now. It just isn't quite ready to take over the ENTIRE world in one go.
For instance: A recent slashdot story told of how a college in Tennessee installed $3M of Cisco VoIP equipment and cut its phone bill by over $6M/year. The equipment pays for itself in under 6 months, and the phone company is out a LOT of green.
And THAT's a BIG driving force for deployment of VoIP, and the collapse of the existing TDM telecom infrastructure. (Once they collapse, of course, their TDM long-haul equipment doesn't go away - it just becomes available on-the-cheap to new IP-based providers, further lowering the costs and accellerating the industry's collapse.)
Yes, existing equipment (including especially Cisco's) doesn't do QoS right in all circumstances. But there are already workarounds for local plants and last-miles, with solutions being worked on for the network core. As more QoS-requiring traffic moves to the internet, there will be a financial incentive for providers to get QoS right in the core networ: They can charge more for transient end-to-end reserved bandwidth with delivery and latency guarantees. (And thus reinvent "long-distance toll-call connections" in the IP context.)
The idea of a nanobot twisting a pi-bond here and snapping a sigma-bond there seems quite ludicrous; where such reactions occcur in the real world it is because of the properties of the exact molecules involved and is reaction-specific.
And the same applies to macrotechnology. Look at an actual factory: It does NOT consist of a single robot arm with a single tool-tip. You have hundreds of specialized machines and jigs. (Just for starters you do NOT handle molten steel with a pair of pliers.)
The concept of an "assembler" as a single robot arm expected to build ANY molecular structure by positioning its component atoms, one at a time, regardless of the type of atom, the type of bond to be made, or the electromechanical environment of the partially-assembled product is a strawman. A real system will use multiple specialized jigs and tools - perhaps creating some on-the-fly - to apply force and fields in specialized situations - explicitly solving the "fat fingers" and "sticky fingers" problem Smalley claims is intractable.
Yes, there may be some configurations of atoms that are very hard, or even impossible, to construct. But given the ability to build nanoscopic jigs and specialized tools to apply mechaincal, electrical, and magnetic forces, tuned electromagnetic energy, and kinetic energy (in extreme amounts if necessary), a nanofactory should be able to make essentially everything that can be made any OTHER way, including duplicates or modified versions of everything we see around us now.
Richard Feynman talked about nanotechnology way back in 1959--before "nanotechnology" was even a word.
It kind of irks me that the person who coins a word gets more credit than a person who talked about the actual process--nearly thirty years prior.
Feynman talked about working downward using bulk mechanical processes. (That's exactly what the semiconductor industry has been doing, by the way.) When you approach the molecular level the rules change drastically. As with crossing the sound barrier, you need to make some fundamental changes.
Drexler took a different approach: START at the molecular/atomic level, working with molecular/atomic rules from the start. Biochem offers both a proof-of-principle (in the form of complex systems build from molecular machines) and bootstrapping tools for implementing your early designs.
So Drexler's work was profoundly distinct from Feynman's conjecture.
Also: Drexler followed through enough to inspire others to start both basic and applied research projects, and to form organizations for exchanging information and advancing the field (even if SOME of them are now taking Feynman's approach using mechanical scanning microscope technology).
Just as Columbus vs. Lief Ericsson (or Pythagoras), it's the person whose work leads to ongoing development, rather that the one who first speculated correctly, who gets the credit.
Good f[]ing definition. So what do those things mean?
POTS - Plain Old Telephone Service: The 48v (lower when connected), 100 ohm pair, 135ish v 20 hz square-wave ringer, two-wire, telephone service, and/or variants of it. (loop/ground/etc. start, touch-tone vs pulse dial, minor variations in standards with different vendors, etc.). The phone line to which you can hook up ordinary phones.
PSTN - Public Switched Telephone Network: The worldwide, multi-vendor, network that leases POTS lines (and other lines, such as base-rate and primary-rate ISDN) to essentially anyone who wants one, and switches calls between them. Think of it as the network hooking up everybody you can call from your home phone, by dialing or going through an operator. (Excludes some private networks, military/government networks such as AUTOVON, etc. though it may interconnect with them.)
Once you have any data stream over IP, it is pretty difficult to regulate, since it can be disguised on varying port numbers, encryption (which is probably a good idea anyway) and other techniques.
Unfortunately, to be a network you need to conform to a standard - in order to connect to all the OTHER users of the network. This exposes you to the regulators.
The techniques you describe would work fine for a small, closed community such as a criminal gang, terrorist cell, recreational club, or other small affinity group (until they were infiltrated by a government agent, of course. B-) ) But they would not work for a general, worldwide, everybody-with-a-VoIP-phone-can-play network.
Of course regulation attempts will drive herds of early-adopters from one VoIP variant to another in an effort to avoid them. But that's the sort of Red Queen's race where the costs of running exceed the costs of NOT running and eventually the bulk of the users will settle on a standard and pay a tax in order to stay connected and/or avoid hassle (or arrest).
The guy admits he was a "millionaire" (without any proof, naturally)
Big words from an Anonymous Coward. B-) Take it or leave it. I have nothing to prove.
but wasn't smart enough to hold onto it.
Yep.
I didn't think it would be POSSIBLE for our management to screw it up THAT badly, so I didn't cash it out in the gaps between the lockup periods. Oops! Silly me.
At least I wasn't as "incompetent" as one of my collegues - who cashed out a bunch and "diversified" - into a basket of other tek stocks that ALL crashed, leaving him with a BIG tax bill and no $.
But at least I got half a house out of it. Might still be a millionaire, or close, if the housing market doesn't crash before I cash out of THAT. B-)
You seem almost completely ignorant of the real effect of your support for the concept of "free" software. Lost jobs, stolen intellectual property and the erosion of the fundamental things that makes this country great. Go move back to your university (or Cuba, the same thing really) and come back here when you decide to join the real world where real effort costs real money.
Clue-by-four time:
I haven't been in college since shortly after the vietnam war.
I've been a multi-millionaire through my own and my corporation's efforts. And busted back to a multi-thousandaire through government economic mismanagement and managerial incompetence.
I've been around since the Libertarian Party was the Society for Individual Liberty and a splinter not yet split off the Republican party.
And I've been described as "to the right of Attila the Hun" - with some justification, I might add.
But you need to learn a few things:
- Corporations are a collective.
- Private property is a formalization of a fundamental animal drive - but "Intellectual Property" is strictly a creation of government. It was tolerated by this country's founders only under strict time limits, in the hope that it would produce more benefit to the masses of citizens than it did harm.
- The things that made this country great included explicit violation of government attempts to enforce long-term monopolies on techniques of production and the destruction of perpetual institutions to sequester wealth and land far beyond the lifetime of their creators and owners.
- In political debate, "Intellectual Property" is a fancy buzzword to convince conservatives that it's moral to use government force to suppress innovation by the population in favor of subsidizing the economic interests of a small number of monopolists, corrupting Capitalism into Mercantilism. It does this by equating information (which does NOT go away if copied) with physical property (which goes away if taken).
What makes me think you're a college student is your use of the buzzwords of conservativism as magic incantations, without apparent understanding of their internal mechanisms. This is similar to the left-wing fallacy of youth: Ignoring the second-order unintended consequences of their well-meaning feel-good plans (the discovery of which turns many of them conservative as they age and think). But your this case it's ignoring the ENTIRE mechanism underlying the institutions whose names you wave like magic talismans.
If you are an Objectivist, get back to your studies. And if you don't understand how the institutions I'm advocating fit into the economic dreams of Rand, then at least remember the first rules of a free market: No hitting first, no depriving others of their products and other valuables without mutually-agreed payment, no using force to keep people from doing something YOU don't like.
Bernie lamented the choice of some programmers to charge more than reasonable media, copying, and shipping costs for a copy of some source they wrote.
So what was he saying? That code redistributors should give away their hard work for free out of the goodness of their hearts forever and always?
Bernie was a professor. I presume that his viewpoint was that of an academic, treating software development as research for publication, not a consumable commodity.
How exactly, do you suppose, our civilization would work if everyone did that?
In the same way that academia has ALWAYS worked: Academics do work for reputation points (much like open-source). Sponsors fund applied research directed at their particular problems while patrons fund basic research for the longer-term benefits it provides. A PARTICULAR patron of basic research doesn't know that the things his PARTICULAR contribution supported will benefit him personally. But DOES know that, on the average, such patronage will result in benefits for him (and others like him).
Remember that writing the original software may be expensive work, but copying it once it is written is nearly free. If the software does enough to pay for itself, its cost is already covered. Copying and giving away any useful portion (that isn't your company's particular buisness advantage) has a large net benefit to the commons and a tiny cost to the contributer.
It was the lack of freely-reusable source code, which forced me to spend extra time re-inventing a plethora of wheels before "assembling the wagons".
So you want someone to provide you free resources for you to build your company on? Again, this is an unsustainable model for software development! Someone, somewhere, has to pay for your "free wheels". If it were that easy, why doesn't the government give us all "free cars"? After all, that seems to be a big impediment to many people's career aspirations.
As I pointed out above, creating additional instances of a piece of software costs almost nothing (unlike creating additional instances of cars). That makes the economic proposition MUCH different.
I would pay for my "free" software by contributing non-mission-specific components that I wrote to the commons. This is a win-win proposition:
- I benefit because the amount of effort I save by incorporating and perhaps tuning, rather than writing, open-source software is FAR greater than the amount I contribute - even if I HADN'T had to write that contribution anyhow to get my job done. I benefit even more if I contribute a fix or enhancement to some maintained package - because it becomes part of the release and I can then upgrade to a later version and incorporate other fixes or enhancements without having to redo my changes.
- Others benefit because they get my contribution, which they otherwise would not have had. My contribution might be small - but with a large number of people making small contributions the commons continues to expand.
As for major packages (like OSes, compilers, and the plethora of other open-source tools), some will be maintained by people who can build a business model around them (i.e. by charging for convenient packaging, support, or customization) or find some other business benefit for doing so (such as being the arbiter of a defacto standard), while others will be built and maintained by academics (for carreer advancement), hobbyists (for fun and recognition), and zealots (for the good feeling of having benefitted mankind and/or influenced history).
There are a plethora of ways to be "paid" for writing software, beyond the simplistic model of taking a cut derived from retail sales.
As to the sustanability of the model: The longer it runs, the greater the benefit/cost ratio. Software contributed to the commons doesn't go away, either with time or when someone "takes" a copy. The benefits go on and on, while the cost of each contribution
How many people here are employed by companies doing software development? How many people here are PAID to develop software? How can any of you, in your right mind, even consider supporting the concept of "free" software?
I spent 35 years of my life making money as a programmer (before returning to the "Hard(ware) side of the Force").
And before that I studied under Bernie Galler. In the same issue of CACM as Djikstra's "GOTO considered Harmful" letter, Bernie lamented the choice of some programmers to charge more than reasonable media, copying, and shipping costs for a copy of some source they wrote. His lament predicted the entire commercialization of software and its resulting inhibitory effects on the advancement of the art.
As an author of custom software applications for clients, my main problem was not competition from free software vendors. It was the lack of freely-reusable source code, which forced me to spend extra time re-inventing a plethora of wheels before "assembling the wagons".
If I had had access to the current results of the open-source movement, I could have been far more valueable to my clients - by completing things more rapidly or building more capable software. Thus I could have charged each customer more and moved to new customers more quickly, establishing a better reputation for productivity.
It is only the commercial software market that has any need to adjust its business models due to "competition" from open-source. This market employs a very small subset of programmers. And they're primarily employed by a few, large companies where most of the profit goes to administrators and investors rather than individual contributors.
Slashdot Mirror
Furthermore, what crime was David Koresh guilty of? Are you ready for the answer? Failing to pay taxes on 2 machine guns.
It was more than that. They had a quarter million $ in unpaid bills outstanding. Even the real estate they were sitting on was no longer theirs.
But that's not BATF's jurisdiction. They're not a general-purpose collection agency. They're part of the Treasury Department of the US Federal Government. Their jurisdicton consists solely of enforcing federal tax laws. In this case: Requiring the paperwork be filled out and a $200-each tax collected on the two alleged machine guns.
Interestingly, one of the Branch Davidians was a Class-III dealer, duly licensed to fill out the forms and collect the tax in question. The Davadians earned money for their church by buying and selling at gun shows. (As a schism from the Seventh Day Adventists they had no religious prohibition on armament.)
Note, however, that the BATF usually just beats or shoots people and pets and breaks their stuff when their enforcement operations get out of hand. It's the FBI that's noted for fires once they get involved in a standoff with a political out-group (as they did in Waco).
This is all rubbish. The 9/11 hijackers were Saudi, there is no evidence that Iraq had anything to do with 9/11 and the anthrax mailings appear to be domestic.
...)
I think you misunderstood my post. I made NO claims that Iraq had anything to do with either the hijackers or the anthrax.
What I did was point out that part of the support for the action in Iraq was the belief on the part of some people that he did have something to do with it.
It's funny. Laugh. (And remember that the Rs, as well as the Ds, are the but of the joke.)
(But as long as I'm playing truth squad
The theory that the anthrax mailings were domestic was based primarily on identification of the strain in question as one that had been used in US labs, combined with a "likely suspect", who had once written a description of such a scenario and had worked with microbiological agents.
But it turned out that the strain was one of the standard experimental strains which had been broadly distributed to labs worldwide. Meanwhile, none of the evidence against the suspect panned out (though his carreer WAS ruined in the witch hunt that ensued, despite his, and his relatives', complete cooperation with the investigators).
the 'echo' you hear in POTS phones is called 'sidetone', and it is intentional. I didn't know that IP phones don't have sidetone.
The main purpose of sidetone, by the way, is to help you control the level of your voice. Secondarily it also lets you know that the phone is working, removing a distraction.
Forking is like software evolution. One project may split into two, with slightly different plans. Mostlikely one will surpass the other. Kind of survival of the fittest. If neither one grows over the other, then you have something called choice.
Dead on.
Proprietary projects fork and change, too. But after that one fork generally gets dropped or spun out and the older system abandoned. Users are stuck with the vendor-chosen "upgrade", or with changing vendors.
With an open source product they CAN'T pull the rug out from under you. The older version is still there, as are the multiple newer versions. Pick a fork and upgrade in your own time - and if nobody wants to maintain it for you you can always maintain it yourself, until YOU chose to hop versions for some cost/benefit improvement to YOU.
Forking is a PLUS for open source, not a minus.
I do remember ... people ... recommended putting heavy, static shields around the colonies. One meter or so of solid waste products ... could effectively shield the inhabitants from cosmic radiation.
... makes for a pretty massive structure -- difficult to move around the solar system with contemporary propulsion.
This
One alternative that has been considered is an Apollo asteroid shuttle.
* Take one of the Apollo asteroids (which have orbits that cross that of earth).
* Modify its orbit so that it shuttles between the orbits of Earth and Mars, arriving near each when the planet is also nearby. (Use solar sails or solar-powered mass drivers or ion accellerators throwing spare mass from the asteroid for propulsion, to get your delta-v without hauling up fuel.) Takes a while, but can be automated for most of that time.
* Build a base INSIDE the asteroid.
The asteroid provides the mass of shielding, plus raw materials for buildings and a mostly-closed ecosystem. It becomes an "orbital hotel", much like an interplanetary cruise ship, making a trip every couple years.
Once it's established you only need enough delta-v to get your passengers and freight between the planets at the end of the trip and the asteroid. This is the same amount of fuel as shipping them and their docking shuttle to Mars or back by the same orbit - but you DON'T need to ship their well-shielded vehicle or most of their consumables. MUCH cheaper. Radiation exposure in the hypothetically less-shielded shuttle is for a few hours at the ends of the trip, rather than for a couple years during the trip.
Well, not to sound too bitter, but going to Mars seems like a much better way to spend billions than going to Iraq.
If the Martians start flying spacecraft into buildings on Manhattan Island and mailing anthrax around the US, I'm sure that BOTH parties will agree with you.
Or even if the Jupiterians do, and the Martians are suspected of funding them.
B-)
The body would attack those things because they are foreign
Read the article, my friend - they're coated so they don't get recognised as antigens. Nor will they get stuck (they took care over this one, designed wuith reference to pore sizes), and in any case are biodegradable.
I read it too, and I see a couple problems with the claims.
First: While the propylene glycol coating will protect the basic particle (for a while), the active antibodies that cause it to latch onto targets have to stick out. If some of the body's own antibodies latch onto those, it ends up "decorated". This will almost certainly trigger a bunch of attacks on it - which could cause damage to normal tissues nearby even if they don't result in defeating the glycol coat and starting the disassembly or macrophage-consumption of the particle.
The side-effect attack could result in anaphylactic shock if it is large enough, so using it to clean out circulating antibodies may turn out to be probelematic - requiring careful control of dosage and time-before-cleanout.
Even if this scenario is true in practice, however, the technique might still be useful against auto-immune diseases, where the antibodies in question will already be triggering as much collateral-damage as if they were attacking the particles. If it turns out not to be an issue, lots of other severe allergies may be susceptable to treatment by this technique.
Second: The sizing of the particles prevents their being trapped in capilaries or dumped by kidneys. But if the thing they bind to happens to be anchored to the inside of a blood-vessel they still get stuck. This could produce clots blocking the vessel if there's a lot of anchored target in one place. Even if there isn't, the particle gets stuck until the glycol wears off and the biodegradable core breaks down, after which you're left with:
- Antibodies decorating the target. (This may actually be good, but will probably result in blood vessel inflamation which is not.)
- Magnetite particles in the blood stream. (Hard, sharp, reactive, iron oxide particles.) Same cleanup problem as the small number that didn't get cleaned out in the non-anchored case, but much larger. Iron ions are not nice.
I've never quite understood the US position on the international court: "we cannot accept this because our citizens might be tried on it on political grounds". That implicitly reads that "There is no justice outside the American system". An unbelievably arrogant stance.
That's because you fail to understand the nature of the US Federal Government.
The US is a Constitutional Republic. As such, the government has only the power granted to it by its citizens (as laid out in the Constitution and its amendments) - along with certain responsibilities (mandated in the same document). Unlike, say, European Monarchies, the government's "Right to Rule" is derived SOLELY from this source. Not from claims of divine right. Not from the "I can therefore I may" claims of tyrants. Not from claims of ownership of a region and its people. From the People, via the document wheren the People set down the rules.
These rules promise the People of the US certain rights. Among those are the right to a fair trial UNDER THE RULES, as administered by officials chosen by the people, UNDER THE RULES.
The rules do NOT empower the government to delegate the power to try the People of the US for crimes, or to punish them upon conviction, to others who were NOT chosen by the People of the US under the rules. To do so would require a Constitutional Amendment, to change the rules ACCORDING to the rules in order to make or allow such a delegation.
For government officials to attempt to delegate this power WITHOUT such a rule change would be the HEIGHT of arrogance, and a usurpation of the RIGHTS of the People.
Yes, for the People of the US there IS no justice outside the American system. Not because other people are incapable of dispensing justice. But because the rules of the US give the People of the US a RIGHT to have their justice dispensed by officials of the US chosen by the People of the US according to the rules of the US.
Of course the executives of the US have pointed out (quite rightly, by the way), that letting a World Court try US military personnel for "War Crimes" would lead to bogus suits by every petty tyrant that the US military has had to take action against. But that's really a side-issue. The core issue is that the US military is populated with US citizens - who have RIGHTS that the US government is bound to respect and protect.
What exactly are the purposes and principles of the United Nations?
Like not serving as a platform for nazis and war criminals ?
Note that the decision in question convicts three broadcasters of genocide for talking about it on the air. Advocating = committing. Oops!
Scenario:
- You flame about some political A-hole, spammer, or annoying whatever on the net and mention that you wish he were dead.
- Somebody kills him.
- You get fried.
Scenario 2:
- You flame about some regime somewhere in the world and mention that it would be good if it were overthrown.
- You get hauled into international court and then handed over to the regime for the "crime" of criticizing it and advocating violence against it.
As to handing such power over to the UN, the US government is empowerd only by the Constitution. This means it cannot hand its citizens over to an international tribunal that considers speech to be the equivalent of action, in violation of their First Amendment rights.
Further, any action by US officials that PURPORTS to do so is (according to the Supreme Court) not an official action, but a personal action by the individuals in question - suitable for being disobeyed by any other government official (such as the police and military personnel charged with executing the order - who have sworn to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign or DOMESTIC) and opening them up to both impeachment and personal responsibility under such laws as the Civil Rights act.
Freedom of speech can never be absolute.
That reminds me of an Abbie Hoffman incident (which I'll paraphrase since I don't have the exact text handy).
Abbie on interview show in front of a studio audience:
Q: So you think freedom of speech is absolute?
A: Absolutely!
Q: But surely you don't believe it's all right to yell "Fire!" in a crowded theatre?
A: FIRE!
everyone must view each other as competitors to be fought instead of companions to collaborate with.
Try "everyone else is a potential competitor who, if you cooperate with them, may steal your work unless you have a contract limiting them from doing so".
Which is really what GPL is about, also. It specifically prevents others from making an improvement (or incompatible change) to your code and blocking YOU (and your colaborators) from using and/or distributing that improvement (or change), i.e. Microsoft's "Embrace, extend, extinguish" approach applied to the code itself.
The real difference between GPL users and Daryl is that GPL users want to be paid for their code with more code, good reputation, or advancement of the field. Daryl prefers to be paid by having money come directly to his company.
He's not getting that money because the GPL codebase has become too strong a competitor, and he believes that codebase is built on the work he believes his company bought, in ways that amount to stealing it.
And by starting the suit he touched the tarbaby. If he backs out now he has nothing - and has destroyed his company. So, as the attention the suit brings leads to discoveries that various pieces of it are bogus, he has to keep pushing. Thus he ends up making progressively more convoluted claims.
You can TunA program but you can't...oh nevermind....
But you CAN tuna fish. In little bitty cans.
By the way: If I read the article correctly the fish don't actually glow. They fluoresce.
Actually "glowing" fish would manufacutre light from food energy. "Fluorescing" fish need a light shining on them to light up (though the light might be ultraviolet and so not itself visible).
Fluorescing fish nevertheless emit more light in the band of interest than strikes them, which under the right circumstances makes them much "brighter" (in that color) than a perfect reflector.
He fathered the bill that changed that odd, government and acedemic research network known as Arpanet into the Internet where people from all around can use it for all different sorts of purposes.
In particular, his bill legalized using the Internet for commercial purposes - a big no-no up until then.
Unfortunately, this had the unintended side-effect of legalizing spam (or at least giving spammers some ground for their argument that their activities are legitimate commercial use of a service for which they've paid).
You do realize that the subsidies that Amtrack and most local train utilities recieve are less than half of what similar road spending requires, right?
The roads carry a LOT more passengers and freight. (Actual cost per trip on subsidized urban mass transit, including the subsidy, is often in the hundreds of bucks.)
Roads carry passengers and fraight almost directly from where they were to where they want to go, too.
Most importantly, those "subsidies" are paid for primarily from fuel taxes and tolls, which come straight out of the pockets of the actual users of the roads. Yes there are other funding sources - but fuel taxes and tolls get ripped off big-time to subsidize other things too - mainly trains and busses. The fuel taxes collected have been more than enough to pay for the roads.
361MPH for those of us who don't use that artificial metric crap.
Or mach 0.487 (for those of us who don't like English units EITHER when something handier applies).
I don't think so. There have been terrorist attacks on trains (e.g., Carlos the Jackal's bombing in 1983). They just haven't been very successful and haven't led to cumbersome security measures.
But it IS hard to drive a train into the side of a skyscraper, the Pentagon, the Whitehouse, or Capitol Hill. Potential targets are limited when compared to a fully-fueled jumbo jet.
The first half of your post makes a number of points I've been trying to make here at work, to people you might characterize as "IP weenies". (They aren't onboard with VoIP yet. But they seem to think the digital convergence will occur by suddenly replacing all existing networks in toto with IP nets, inventing replacements for all previous wheels in IP format. No staged transition. No interfacing with legacy systems. Avoid all "That TDM shit" (actual quote at VP level) like the plague.)
Pity you posted as an AC. I'd love to get together with you to talk strategy.
But VoIP isn't doomed, or even an uneconomic proposition right now. It just isn't quite ready to take over the ENTIRE world in one go.
For instance: A recent slashdot story told of how a college in Tennessee installed $3M of Cisco VoIP equipment and cut its phone bill by over $6M/year. The equipment pays for itself in under 6 months, and the phone company is out a LOT of green.
And THAT's a BIG driving force for deployment of VoIP, and the collapse of the existing TDM telecom infrastructure. (Once they collapse, of course, their TDM long-haul equipment doesn't go away - it just becomes available on-the-cheap to new IP-based providers, further lowering the costs and accellerating the industry's collapse.)
Yes, existing equipment (including especially Cisco's) doesn't do QoS right in all circumstances. But there are already workarounds for local plants and last-miles, with solutions being worked on for the network core. As more QoS-requiring traffic moves to the internet, there will be a financial incentive for providers to get QoS right in the core networ: They can charge more for transient end-to-end reserved bandwidth with delivery and latency guarantees. (And thus reinvent "long-distance toll-call connections" in the IP context.)
The idea of a nanobot twisting a pi-bond here and snapping a sigma-bond there seems quite ludicrous; where such reactions occcur in the real world it is because of the properties of the exact molecules involved and is reaction-specific.
And the same applies to macrotechnology. Look at an actual factory: It does NOT consist of a single robot arm with a single tool-tip. You have hundreds of specialized machines and jigs. (Just for starters you do NOT handle molten steel with a pair of pliers.)
The concept of an "assembler" as a single robot arm expected to build ANY molecular structure by positioning its component atoms, one at a time, regardless of the type of atom, the type of bond to be made, or the electromechanical environment of the partially-assembled product is a strawman. A real system will use multiple specialized jigs and tools - perhaps creating some on-the-fly - to apply force and fields in specialized situations - explicitly solving the "fat fingers" and "sticky fingers" problem Smalley claims is intractable.
Yes, there may be some configurations of atoms that are very hard, or even impossible, to construct. But given the ability to build nanoscopic jigs and specialized tools to apply mechaincal, electrical, and magnetic forces, tuned electromagnetic energy, and kinetic energy (in extreme amounts if necessary), a nanofactory should be able to make essentially everything that can be made any OTHER way, including duplicates or modified versions of everything we see around us now.
Richard Feynman talked about nanotechnology way back in 1959--before "nanotechnology" was even a word.
It kind of irks me that the person who coins a word gets more credit than a person who talked about the actual process--nearly thirty years prior.
Feynman talked about working downward using bulk mechanical processes. (That's exactly what the semiconductor industry has been doing, by the way.) When you approach the molecular level the rules change drastically. As with crossing the sound barrier, you need to make some fundamental changes.
Drexler took a different approach: START at the molecular/atomic level, working with molecular/atomic rules from the start. Biochem offers both a proof-of-principle (in the form of complex systems build from molecular machines) and bootstrapping tools for implementing your early designs.
So Drexler's work was profoundly distinct from Feynman's conjecture.
Also: Drexler followed through enough to inspire others to start both basic and applied research projects, and to form organizations for exchanging information and advancing the field (even if SOME of them are now taking Feynman's approach using mechanical scanning microscope technology).
Just as Columbus vs. Lief Ericsson (or Pythagoras), it's the person whose work leads to ongoing development, rather that the one who first speculated correctly, who gets the credit.
Good f[]ing definition. So what do those things mean?
POTS - Plain Old Telephone Service: The 48v (lower when connected), 100 ohm pair, 135ish v 20 hz square-wave ringer, two-wire, telephone service, and/or variants of it. (loop/ground/etc. start, touch-tone vs pulse dial, minor variations in standards with different vendors, etc.). The phone line to which you can hook up ordinary phones.
PSTN - Public Switched Telephone Network: The worldwide, multi-vendor, network that leases POTS lines (and other lines, such as base-rate and primary-rate ISDN) to essentially anyone who wants one, and switches calls between them. Think of it as the network hooking up everybody you can call from your home phone, by dialing or going through an operator. (Excludes some private networks, military/government networks such as AUTOVON, etc. though it may interconnect with them.)
Once you have any data stream over IP, it is pretty difficult to regulate, since it can be disguised on varying port numbers, encryption (which is probably a good idea anyway) and other techniques.
Unfortunately, to be a network you need to conform to a standard - in order to connect to all the OTHER users of the network. This exposes you to the regulators.
The techniques you describe would work fine for a small, closed community such as a criminal gang, terrorist cell, recreational club, or other small affinity group (until they were infiltrated by a government agent, of course. B-) ) But they would not work for a general, worldwide, everybody-with-a-VoIP-phone-can-play network.
Of course regulation attempts will drive herds of early-adopters from one VoIP variant to another in an effort to avoid them. But that's the sort of Red Queen's race where the costs of running exceed the costs of NOT running and eventually the bulk of the users will settle on a standard and pay a tax in order to stay connected and/or avoid hassle (or arrest).
Big words from Anonymous Cowards.
The guy admits he was a "millionaire" (without any proof, naturally)
Big words from an Anonymous Coward. B-) Take it or leave it. I have nothing to prove.
but wasn't smart enough to hold onto it.
Yep.
I didn't think it would be POSSIBLE for our management to screw it up THAT badly, so I didn't cash it out in the gaps between the lockup periods. Oops! Silly me.
At least I wasn't as "incompetent" as one of my collegues - who cashed out a bunch and "diversified" - into a basket of other tek stocks that ALL crashed, leaving him with a BIG tax bill and no $.
But at least I got half a house out of it. Might still be a millionaire, or close, if the housing market doesn't crash before I cash out of THAT. B-)
You liberals rally crack me up.
And you RINOs are really a scream.
You seem almost completely ignorant of the real effect of your support for the concept of "free" software. Lost jobs, stolen intellectual property and the erosion of the fundamental things that makes this country great. Go move back to your university (or Cuba, the same thing really) and come back here when you decide to join the real world where real effort costs real money.
Clue-by-four time:
I haven't been in college since shortly after the vietnam war.
I've been a multi-millionaire through my own and my corporation's efforts. And busted back to a multi-thousandaire through government economic mismanagement and managerial incompetence.
I've been around since the Libertarian Party was the Society for Individual Liberty and a splinter not yet split off the Republican party.
And I've been described as "to the right of Attila the Hun" - with some justification, I might add.
But you need to learn a few things:
- Corporations are a collective.
- Private property is a formalization of a fundamental animal drive - but "Intellectual Property" is strictly a creation of government. It was tolerated by this country's founders only under strict time limits, in the hope that it would produce more benefit to the masses of citizens than it did harm.
- The things that made this country great included explicit violation of government attempts to enforce long-term monopolies on techniques of production and the destruction of perpetual institutions to sequester wealth and land far beyond the lifetime of their creators and owners.
- In political debate, "Intellectual Property" is a fancy buzzword to convince conservatives that it's moral to use government force to suppress innovation by the population in favor of subsidizing the economic interests of a small number of monopolists, corrupting Capitalism into Mercantilism. It does this by equating information (which does NOT go away if copied) with physical property (which goes away if taken).
What makes me think you're a college student is your use of the buzzwords of conservativism as magic incantations, without apparent understanding of their internal mechanisms. This is similar to the left-wing fallacy of youth: Ignoring the second-order unintended consequences of their well-meaning feel-good plans (the discovery of which turns many of them conservative as they age and think). But your this case it's ignoring the ENTIRE mechanism underlying the institutions whose names you wave like magic talismans.
If you are an Objectivist, get back to your studies. And if you don't understand how the institutions I'm advocating fit into the economic dreams of Rand, then at least remember the first rules of a free market: No hitting first, no depriving others of their products and other valuables without mutually-agreed payment, no using force to keep people from doing something YOU don't like.
Bernie lamented the choice of some programmers to charge more than reasonable media, copying, and shipping costs for a copy of some source they wrote.
So what was he saying? That code redistributors should give away their hard work for free out of the goodness of their hearts forever and always?
Bernie was a professor. I presume that his viewpoint was that of an academic, treating software development as research for publication, not a consumable commodity.
How exactly, do you suppose, our civilization would work if everyone did that?
In the same way that academia has ALWAYS worked: Academics do work for reputation points (much like open-source). Sponsors fund applied research directed at their particular problems while patrons fund basic research for the longer-term benefits it provides. A PARTICULAR patron of basic research doesn't know that the things his PARTICULAR contribution supported will benefit him personally. But DOES know that, on the average, such patronage will result in benefits for him (and others like him).
Remember that writing the original software may be expensive work, but copying it once it is written is nearly free. If the software does enough to pay for itself, its cost is already covered. Copying and giving away any useful portion (that isn't your company's particular buisness advantage) has a large net benefit to the commons and a tiny cost to the contributer.
It was the lack of freely-reusable source code, which forced me to spend extra time re-inventing a plethora of wheels before "assembling the wagons".
So you want someone to provide you free resources for you to build your company on? Again, this is an unsustainable model for software development! Someone, somewhere, has to pay for your "free wheels". If it were that easy, why doesn't the government give us all "free cars"? After all, that seems to be a big impediment to many people's career aspirations.
As I pointed out above, creating additional instances of a piece of software costs almost nothing (unlike creating additional instances of cars). That makes the economic proposition MUCH different.
I would pay for my "free" software by contributing non-mission-specific components that I wrote to the commons. This is a win-win proposition:
- I benefit because the amount of effort I save by incorporating and perhaps tuning, rather than writing, open-source software is FAR greater than the amount I contribute - even if I HADN'T had to write that contribution anyhow to get my job done. I benefit even more if I contribute a fix or enhancement to some maintained package - because it becomes part of the release and I can then upgrade to a later version and incorporate other fixes or enhancements without having to redo my changes.
- Others benefit because they get my contribution, which they otherwise would not have had. My contribution might be small - but with a large number of people making small contributions the commons continues to expand.
As for major packages (like OSes, compilers, and the plethora of other open-source tools), some will be maintained by people who can build a business model around them (i.e. by charging for convenient packaging, support, or customization) or find some other business benefit for doing so (such as being the arbiter of a defacto standard), while others will be built and maintained by academics (for carreer advancement), hobbyists (for fun and recognition), and zealots (for the good feeling of having benefitted mankind and/or influenced history).
There are a plethora of ways to be "paid" for writing software, beyond the simplistic model of taking a cut derived from retail sales.
As to the sustanability of the model: The longer it runs, the greater the benefit/cost ratio. Software contributed to the commons doesn't go away, either with time or when someone "takes" a copy. The benefits go on and on, while the cost of each contribution
How many people here are employed by companies doing software development? How many people here are PAID to develop software? How can any of you, in your right mind, even consider supporting the concept of "free" software?
I spent 35 years of my life making money as a programmer (before returning to the "Hard(ware) side of the Force").
And before that I studied under Bernie Galler. In the same issue of CACM as Djikstra's "GOTO considered Harmful" letter, Bernie lamented the choice of some programmers to charge more than reasonable media, copying, and shipping costs for a copy of some source they wrote. His lament predicted the entire commercialization of software and its resulting inhibitory effects on the advancement of the art.
As an author of custom software applications for clients, my main problem was not competition from free software vendors. It was the lack of freely-reusable source code, which forced me to spend extra time re-inventing a plethora of wheels before "assembling the wagons".
If I had had access to the current results of the open-source movement, I could have been far more valueable to my clients - by completing things more rapidly or building more capable software. Thus I could have charged each customer more and moved to new customers more quickly, establishing a better reputation for productivity.
It is only the commercial software market that has any need to adjust its business models due to "competition" from open-source. This market employs a very small subset of programmers. And they're primarily employed by a few, large companies where most of the profit goes to administrators and investors rather than individual contributors.