I was the impression (probably because of one of those feverish Discovery marathons I tend to engage in when I get tired of coding) that the nice folks who guard US installations that contain either nuclear weapons of nuclear materials are allowed under federal mandate to shoot to kill.
A former boss of mine once did a project at Lawrence Livermore, upgrading some of the remote detectors from '50s era electronics to more modern stuff. He told me his (Q?) clearance came up for renewal about a week before project completion. Rather than go to the trouble to renew it for that duration they fell back on an alternate waiver procedure.
As a result, all the while he was working on site there was an armed guard (uniformed military) about two paces away from him. The armed guard, continuously, had his left hand on his holstered pistol, his right hand extended (to fend off my ex-boss should he suddenly attack, giving him time to draw the pistol), and kept his eyes on my ex-boss constantly.
For > 8 hours per day.
My ex-boss had had it explained that, if the guard killed him - even due to halucinating an attack - he would NOT be brought up on charges, while if the guard DIDN'T shoot him in case of trouble he WOULD be brought up on charges. And that the guard knew this.
Needless to say this was a very stressful environment. And he did his best to finish the project before the guard decided to relieve the cramp in his right arm by plugging him. B-)
Remember the rubber-sheet/morning glory shaped deformation model of gravity? Some time back I recall a description of a black hole as dropping such a BIG marble on the rubber sheet that it keeps going down, stretching the "rubber sheet" forever, at least as fast as the speed of light. Think a "taffy sheet", or a "stem" of the "morning glory" stretching like a stream of honey.
It's easy to see why enough gravity keeps light ORBITING the gravity from spiraling out and away. But this also explains why light going STRAIGHT AWAY from the center of the hole never gets out - space is being stretched at least as fast as it moves (or maybe even faster), so it never makes it out of the hole.
Well, this got me thinking: "What does a black hole look like from the INSIDE? What would one see from the viewpoint of the matter that was already there when the event horizon formed?"
And the answer seemed to be: "An expanding universe, starting from a very small but finite volume and expanding indefinitely, containing a large-but-finite amount of matter, which was initially compressed into an EXTREMELY dense lump - perhaps a quark fluid or denser."
In other words, something like the current universe. Perhaps with the moment of the formation of the event horizon corresponding to the end of the big-bang model's "inflationary period", but eliminating the need for a faster-than-light inflationary period.
Cosmic background becomes the layer of matter and energy just below the event horizon, which is just getting here now. Cosmic background structure represents the matter distribution at that level at that time - a fossil of the orbital dynamics of the accretion cloud. (I don't think you get to see an "inside view" of the infalling half of the Hawking radiation.)
You can go in any direction at up to the speed of light and never reach "the edge", which is (from your viewpoint) receeding at lightspeed.
Not being a professional physicist, at this point I haven't attempted any mathematical models or resolutions with any of the current cosmological models. So I have no idea if I'm just spinning a yarn or if this can be pounded int shape for testing against the real universe. But it might be interesting to try some time.
(The concept of gravity indefinitely stretching the coordinate system also leads to another possibility: Can gravity be modeled as masses constantly "sucking up" the coordinate system, which stretches between them meanwhile?)
All that said, I still foamed at the mouth when I found out Verhoven had dropped the powered armor from Starship Troopers. He pretty much proved he couldn't direct, or select good actors, too.
And while we're at it: SURE the commanding officer is going to hold off on a RESCUE MISSION so two of his underlings can get in a little sex before the battle.
Compare and contrast the original Blade Runner with Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep.
While we're at it, compare either of them with the bood Blade Runner - by Alan E. Norse, I believe.
The latter was an EXCELLENT "what if" yarn:
- Suppose the Powers That Be decide medical treatment is an evolutionary dead end, due to the survival and reproduction of disease-susceptable people leading to the human race falling behind in the evolutionary war with the bugs.
- Suppose they pass a law: You can't have medical treatment unless you are first sterilized. Penalty for violation includes (of course) steriliztion.
Of course an underground bootleg-medicine industry develops - on the model of moonshining (this was written before the "drug war"). Now:
- Suppose a new superflu develops and is about to kill virtually everyone not immunized. Get immunized and sterilized or get the flu and probably get dead - and either way you're left with too few breeders to keep civilization going.
Of course there's no TIME to get the law repealed: The exponential spread is already started and the policitians have killed off too many people with the current legal regime to repeal it (or pass an exception) in time.
What do you do?
Protagonists include a bootleg doctor and a crippled dwarf who is his "blade runner" - a supplier of instruments for illegal surgeries.
This story has NOTHING to do with the movie or the book discussed above. And the title "Blade Runner" has NOTHING to do with those stories, either.
The movie company just ripped off the name of an author's work because it "sounded good" and applied it to something entirely different. And in the process they pretty much shafted any attempt to bring the novel Bladerunner to the silver screen.
But looking at this, all traffic is payed for twice (well, actually it already is in the current model): The one making the request pays for the data he receives, and the one serving it also pays for the very same data he sends.
Twice at half-rate each. Each site pays its own ISP for the load on that ISP's resources, both for incoming traffic and outgoing.
- No inter-ISP billing is required to get money from the sender's ISP to pay for resources used on the receiver's ISP.
- The guy with the site at the back of the expensive link pays his ISP the appropriately higher price both for his incoming and outgoing traffic.
Suppose the case of a customer who runs a SMTP server. A spammer tries to connects to it, the server accepts. The spammer sends a few gig of spam to him, which procmail or something ends up throwing away. Technically, this is "solicited" since the user's machine did accept the connection. But it is abuse, and wasn't really "solicited" in the way that we humans normally think of it.
Modern MTAs accept the connection but reject blacklisted sites, or attempts to use them to relay when they're configured not to relay, before they get to the body of the email. So the rejected spammer can only chew up a little bandwidth on each connection. Rejected spammers are thus demoted to a DoS attack.
If a billing regime like the one I described becomes available, it will encourage the authors of MTAs to just refuse connections from blacklisted IP addresses, and temporarily blacklist any IP address that rapidly makes several consecutive spam attempts that are rejected.
Problem solved.
You know, that MTA hack might be a good idea even WIHTOUT the billing regime. It would cause open relays and ISPs catering to spammers to temporarily lose their outgoing mail connectivity whenever the spammers start up and the MTAs notice it. That will not only save resources on the MTA machine, but penalize open relays and SPAM-friendly ISPs, giving them added incentive to police their outgoing traffic.
[ISPs] have something a 2 mbit line feeding 254 1 mbit lines. They assume that users are not maxing out their connections 100% of the time. If they didn't make this assumtion dsl/broadband would be alot more expensive.
The hardware is there for a few users to max out their connections at one point in time but not for all users to be even using their connections at any one time.
And a per-megabyte billing does two things:
- It encourages careful use of the available bandwidth.
- It pays to upgrade the uplinks from the edge routers if the users want bandwidth badly enough to keep using it despite the cost.
Every ISP should base charges only on how much traffic you send. That would give people a real incentive to keep their systems patched and secured. You wouldn't have to pay a ridiculous amount if you're on the receiving end of a DOS. You would have to pay if your systems get hacked or catch a worm though.
Good idea but it doesn't quite go far enough.
You should be billed for the traffic you CAUSE or SOLICIT, and thus have control over. Much of internet traffic is things like web browsing, which invovles a small request soliciting a large reply. If you suck down 60 megabytes of web porn, MP3s, or ftp downloads, it's your bill. Similarly if you host a server, which accepts little requests and pours out data, it's your bill.
But if somebody starts sending you unsolicited packets, that's like somebody making nuisance calls or pages. (You will notice that pagers, at least, are generally NOT billed by the page. They tried that, and the customers rebelled because they had no way to block idiots with autodialers.)
So something with a little deeper visibility is in order. Here's a fair approach:
TCP: You get billed if you make, attempt to make, or accept, a connection. You don't get billed for attempted connections you refuse or that don't get completed (i.e. SYN and other DOS attacks).
UDP: You get billed for outgoing UDP packets. If the billing machine is sufficiently stateful, you might also be billed for incoming UDP packets that ARE replies to a recent outgoing UDP request using a well-known UDP request/reply protocol. (This would prevent cheating but still protect you against getting billed for both DOS attacks and forged-reply billing attacks.)
ICMP: All are free except outgoing EHCO REQUEST (ping), because they're a mandated part of the network overhead. (You don't want to bill inbound ECHO REPLIES to prevent billing for forged reply attacks. But you might bill ECHO REQUEST as if it went both inbound and outbound, to cover the expected ECHO REPLY without making the billing machine stateful about ping "connections".)
That should pretty much cover it. Customers would:
- be fairly billed for the bandwidth they used, caused to be used, or allowed to be used,
- not be billed for unsolicited "phone calls", DoS attacks, or mandated network overhed, and
- have a strong financial incentive to keep their system secured against crackers and malware (such as viruses and worms).
And installing a get-around-the-billing hack (like PPP-over-ECHOREPLY) would be a violation of terms-of-service and cause for disconnection - or changing the billing of that customer back to "all bandwidth co$t$" B-)
And the formula is clearly wrong, since g shouldn't be in it if you're going for angular velocity - unless you're solving for the angular velocity needed at launch to get the pancake back into the pan (in which case r shouldn't be there).
Oops. I take that back.
g, r and omega should all be there to let you solve for time-of-flight from angular velocity. So rearranging should let us solve first for circumferential velocity, then for flight time, and finally for height-of-throw, giving the formulation I was after.
- First you make a circular movement [...] - Then you tilt the end of the pan down slightly - and make a short, sharp inward movement [...] - Then you sharply flick the pan up - so that the pancake goes between one and two feet in the air [...]
Thank you, both for the pointers and an approximation of what they formula should be rearranged to give.
The formula expressed in the article purports to give you the angular velocity of the pancake. Perhaps useful as one step in the process of computing how to build a flipping machine, but NOT the whole story even for a machine design, and definitely not what you need for training a human.
And the formula is clearly wrong, since g shouldn't be in it if you're going for angular velocity - unless you're solving for the angular velocity needed at launch to get the pancake back into the pan (in which case r shouldn't be there). So something in the article's description is wrong (though perhaps the original research was correct).
What I'd like to see is a function giving the target height for the top of the pancake's arc in terms of the radius from pivot point (probably elbow) to the center of the pancake (and possibly also parameters for the mass and diameter of the pancake if air resistance is significant.
It's a lot easier to target a particular height-of-toss than some other control parameter (such as speed), and the height will vary with the individual flipper's arm-plus-pan length.
Since the pancake has to land back in the pan the toss has to be close to straight up, which puts the pan about horizontal at launch. There will be some small inward motion from the air resistance, because the up and down trip have the 'cake at opposite angles to the wind, which might be compensated for by outward motion from sliding on the pan during the angular swing of the launch.
So if I want to use a torch to send morse signals in UK, I need a license?
In principle, yes. And if you automate it, crank it up to 1200 baud or higher, and use it to broadcast entertainment or surf the net without a government-approved connection, they'll probably bother to enforce it, too.
I'm not sure about your use of the word "Philistine". Did you mean "A person who is uninterested in intellectual pursuits"? Or did you mean Palestinians instead?
The latter.
As I understand it, their own name for their region is pronounced FAHLL-is-stin, named after the tribes which settled it in several waves. When the Jews came out of the desert into the promised "Land of Milk and Honey", it was such a land because the Philistines were already there, with cattle and beehives.
The word entered both Greek (as "the Philistine Syria") and Latin ("Provincia Syria Palaestina"). In English "Philistine" is descended from the Greek form, "Palestine" from the Latin.
More here. And there's plenty more to be found - both scholarly and propaganda - by doing a google search for 'philistine palestine'.
The Philistines never went away or got evicted. Even the Romans and the British didn't push them out. They did became somewhat diluted by intermarriage with other tribes who settled in the area. But to the extent that there are still Philistines in the world, they're still there - and still use the same name for their people (with the word absorbed essentially unchanged into Arabic).
They shined an infrared laser straight up, and modulated it with an entire FM band full of radio stations [...]
By the way: Don't try that in the US. The FAA bans shining lasers up into the air where they might blind or distract pilots. Low power and near-horizontal or you're ban.
How long do you suppose the lack of federal regulation will last?
I don't know about the US. (The FCC has been moving to open, rather than close, bands for some time now.) But it's already banned in Britain.
You probably already know that radio broadcasting in Britain is (or was a few years back - just in case they've changed their mind) a government monopoly. People tried to work around that in various ways.
One of them was a company that did a cute hack: They shined an infrared laser straight up, and modulated it with an entire FM band full of radio stations (similar to the way you can put a private FM band on a cable TV wire). Anybody who wanted to could mount a photocell or infrared-sensing diode (in a little telescope) on their window sill, point it at the invisible pillar of light, and couple it to a radio to receive the new band. Business model was to rent the stations out as commercial broadcast stations with all of London as target market.
The agency in charge of the British radio monopoly (British Post Office?) complained. And parlement extended the top end of their jurisdiction from whatever the previous legal end of the microwave spectrum was to infinity.
So in Britain, if it's electromagnetic energy (even gamma rays) and you can use it to beamcast or broadcast information, you need a license.
If they won't enforce their own edicts by going after a dictator who makes, and has a record of using, banned weapons of mass destruction, why should any country or multinational corporation pay any attention to their documents and edicts?
But this has already been proven... Just look at all the unenforced resolutions toward Isreal
No argument that the UN is not enforcing edicts against Israel. And the parties whose oxen have been gored by that (the philistines, for starters) have already taken that fight into their own hands. The US has a large voting block of citiens who identify themselves as Jewish and align with Israel, so the US government tends to look the other way on that.
(And that actually makes some sense. You want the prosecution done by somebody with the victims' interests in mind, not the perpetrator's.)
But this is a dispute where it's the US' ox which has been gored - along with that of the rest of the signatories of the nonproliferation treaty, etc. This has the protential to undo about a century of work to get rid of chemical, biological, and nuclear war on a global scale. It is precicely those threats which the UN was supposed to prevent.
And as the owner of the gored ox, the US is the country pushing the agenda. W. has gone to the UN and said "put up or shut up" in this particular dispute. The UN is now on notice that, if it doesn't move on this it will be the US with its armies, military tech, and as many allies as it can muster that will be ignoring them, not the population of a small occupied country armed mostly with rocks, explosives, and vests.
The Philistines ignoring the UN is no big deal. The US, NATO, their allies, and everybody they can impress, all ignoring it as a group, IS a big deal. If they sit THIS one out, who will pay any attention the next time they try to influence world events? (And who will pay their UN dues? B-) )
Meanwhile: Israel enjoys a privileged position with respect to the US because Jews are a big voting block in the US. But (beginning recently) US Muslims now outnumber US Jews. If they ever start voting as a block that effect could turn around big time.
How long would the Israel-Philistine conflict last if it was the Philistines getting the billions in military aid rather than the Israelis? (Or even if they both got aid equally?)
I think it is a joke that you idiots elected the son of a former president... why not just switch to a monarchy, that would suit your god-forsaken country a lot more.
A lot of people died a couple centuries ago to insure that, if we happened to CHOSE a man, and then his son, to be chief executive, we wouldn't be sadded with his grandson, and great grandson, and so on until the next civil war (or the one after that...). And also to insure that his powers are limited, rather than dictatorial. And that we get to CHOSE his successor. And if we really get fed up we get to CHOSE to rehack the whole structure.
Unfortunately the warlike tribes of Europe and Asia didn't get it right away. In fact they still haven't really caught on to this self-government thing. So we had to keep coming to their rescue from time to time when their genocide got so far out of hand that it impacted our interests or revolted our citizens enough to get a 2/3s vote in our Senate, or some equivalent.
One side-effect of mining the moon and smelting metal out of the oxides is air pollution.
Really.
All that oxygen release could easily pollute the moon with air.
The lunar gravity is not sufficient to hold onto an atmosphere for geologic time. But it IS sufficient to hold down Oxygen and other heavy gasses for periods of interest to humans.
(I forget the half-life of free oxygen in the solar wind down that gravity well, but I think it's somewhere between centuries and millenia.)
A little oxygen, excited by the sun, could lead to ozone corrosion on exposed metals. More would cause increased friction on space vehicles and payloads to be launched by electromagnetic catapults.
Of course if you release ENOUGH, and maybe crash in a few comets or ice asteroids for water, you could end up with a thin but breathable atmosphere and do away with those suits. B-) Something that thick would make it a lot harder to launch (though still nowhere NEAR as hard as getting to low orbit from Earth.)
But can you IMAGINE an environmentalist trying to convince lunar settlers to "go back to nature" - and have their atmosphere leak away over a few dozen generations due to lack of replenishment by industrial activity?
United Nations treaties!!! Nations sure do love to follow them!
B-)
I don't know if anyone noticed. But the recent appeals by the US for UN to join it in the coming war in Iraq were phrased in a way that sets the stage for the US ignoring the UN in the future if it doesn't join up.
Basically Bush is saying that if the UN won't back up its resolutions with force when the crunch comes, it's just a joke, a debating and posturing society with no teeth, a sideshow.
If they won't enforce their own edicts by going after a dictator who makes, and has a record of using, banned weapons of mass destruction, why should any country or multinational corporation pay any attention to their documents and edicts?
(Especially if the mine's transport terminal is, as a side-effect, a weapon suitable for leveling anything of interest on Earth.)
McDonalds lost a similar suit against a restaurant in Scottland called McDonalds.
And then there was McDonalds Canada.
Seems McDonalds neglected to register the trademark in Canada at first. An entrepenuer went ahead and cloned the ENTIRE McDONALDS SPEEDY SERVICE SYSTEM - decor, golden-arch sign, cuisine, uniforms, catchphrases, you-name-it. Did his best to be as close as possible in every aspect, including especially the flavor. The only difference was a tiny red maple-leaf logo right where the arches cross. (And of course he couldn't use McDonalds in-house meat packing plant.)
He set up a store just off the end of the Ambassador Bridge (which runs over the Detroit River between Detroit and Windsor). ENORMOUS sign visible from the middle of the bridge to anybody driving toward the east.
So of course one day a lawer from McDonalds shows up and demands they pay up and join up or rename. Says the owner: "Did you notice the painted line across the bridge on your way over here? You're in Canada now, and I'VE got the trademark here."
Eventually they threw in the towel and bought him out. B-)
(Or so I heard it. I don't claim direct knowledge.)
Actually, if you look back in history, the free software types, hackers and geeks were fiercly opposed to Apple's look-n-feel lawsuits.
Including especially John Gilmore, who printed and passed out some really ugly buttons slamming Apple.
There was fallout well beyond the suit. For a very long time (is this still going on?) the Gnu project wouldn't support the Apple platforms (i.e. Macintosh), especailly with gcc, gdb, make, and the rest of the software development toolsets.
Of course individual Apple fans would port each new release of gcc as soon as they got their hands on it. But those were the early days, when things were flakey, complicated internally, and changing rapidly. So the unofficial gcc-on-macintosh would be months behind, at a time when a couple weeks lead could be a make-or-break proposition. (And the gnu folk would not be particularly interested in bug reports against the apple port, either, so bugs that only manefested on apples would have to be fixed in release after release.)
IMHO this was a significant impediment to software development for apples and a major factor in the company's slide.
There's virtually no other Unix platforms [than Java/Solaris, C++/Solaris, scripting/database, or COBOL/mainframe in banking legacy.]
In telecom legacy there's UTS - which is SVR4 (and a legacy SVR(3?)) for mainframes from Amdahl (now Fujitsu). It's also used in commodities brokerages and other "one hour downtime = several megabux down the drain" financial applications.
Ever see an uptime of multiple years? B-)
And yes, virgina, "Real Programmers" DO sometimes edit on 3270 emulators. (And you can even get decent unix console and terminal behavior out of 'em.)
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A former boss of mine once did a project at Lawrence Livermore
Oops. Los Alamos test site.
I was the impression (probably because of one of those feverish Discovery marathons I tend to engage in when I get tired of coding) that the nice folks who guard US installations that contain either nuclear weapons of nuclear materials are allowed under federal mandate to shoot to kill.
A former boss of mine once did a project at Lawrence Livermore, upgrading some of the remote detectors from '50s era electronics to more modern stuff. He told me his (Q?) clearance came up for renewal about a week before project completion. Rather than go to the trouble to renew it for that duration they fell back on an alternate waiver procedure.
As a result, all the while he was working on site there was an armed guard (uniformed military) about two paces away from him. The armed guard, continuously, had his left hand on his holstered pistol, his right hand extended (to fend off my ex-boss should he suddenly attack, giving him time to draw the pistol), and kept his eyes on my ex-boss constantly.
For > 8 hours per day.
My ex-boss had had it explained that, if the guard killed him - even due to halucinating an attack - he would NOT be brought up on charges, while if the guard DIDN'T shoot him in case of trouble he WOULD be brought up on charges. And that the guard knew this.
Needless to say this was a very stressful environment. And he did his best to finish the project before the guard decided to relieve the cramp in his right arm by plugging him. B-)
Remember the rubber-sheet/morning glory shaped deformation model of gravity? Some time back I recall a description of a black hole as dropping such a BIG marble on the rubber sheet that it keeps going down, stretching the "rubber sheet" forever, at least as fast as the speed of light. Think a "taffy sheet", or a "stem" of the "morning glory" stretching like a stream of honey.
It's easy to see why enough gravity keeps light ORBITING the gravity from spiraling out and away. But this also explains why light going STRAIGHT AWAY from the center of the hole never gets out - space is being stretched at least as fast as it moves (or maybe even faster), so it never makes it out of the hole.
Well, this got me thinking: "What does a black hole look like from the INSIDE? What would one see from the viewpoint of the matter that was already there when the event horizon formed?"
And the answer seemed to be: "An expanding universe, starting from a very small but finite volume and expanding indefinitely, containing a large-but-finite amount of matter, which was initially compressed into an EXTREMELY dense lump - perhaps a quark fluid or denser."
In other words, something like the current universe. Perhaps with the moment of the formation of the event horizon corresponding to the end of the big-bang model's "inflationary period", but eliminating the need for a faster-than-light inflationary period.
Cosmic background becomes the layer of matter and energy just below the event horizon, which is just getting here now. Cosmic background structure represents the matter distribution at that level at that time - a fossil of the orbital dynamics of the accretion cloud. (I don't think you get to see an "inside view" of the infalling half of the Hawking radiation.)
You can go in any direction at up to the speed of light and never reach "the edge", which is (from your viewpoint) receeding at lightspeed.
Not being a professional physicist, at this point I haven't attempted any mathematical models or resolutions with any of the current cosmological models. So I have no idea if I'm just spinning a yarn or if this can be pounded int shape for testing against the real universe. But it might be interesting to try some time.
(The concept of gravity indefinitely stretching the coordinate system also leads to another possibility: Can gravity be modeled as masses constantly "sucking up" the coordinate system, which stretches between them meanwhile?)
All that said, I still foamed at the mouth when I found out Verhoven had dropped the powered armor from Starship Troopers. He pretty much proved he couldn't direct, or select good actors, too.
And while we're at it: SURE the commanding officer is going to hold off on a RESCUE MISSION so two of his underlings can get in a little sex before the battle.
Compare and contrast the original Blade Runner with Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep.
While we're at it, compare either of them with the bood Blade Runner - by Alan E. Norse, I believe.
The latter was an EXCELLENT "what if" yarn:
- Suppose the Powers That Be decide medical treatment is an evolutionary dead end, due to the survival and reproduction of disease-susceptable people leading to the human race falling behind in the evolutionary war with the bugs.
- Suppose they pass a law: You can't have medical treatment unless you are first sterilized. Penalty for violation includes (of course) steriliztion.
Of course an underground bootleg-medicine industry develops - on the model of moonshining (this was written before the "drug war"). Now:
- Suppose a new superflu develops and is about to kill virtually everyone not immunized. Get immunized and sterilized or get the flu and probably get dead - and either way you're left with too few breeders to keep civilization going.
Of course there's no TIME to get the law repealed: The exponential spread is already started and the policitians have killed off too many people with the current legal regime to repeal it (or pass an exception) in time.
What do you do?
Protagonists include a bootleg doctor and a crippled dwarf who is his "blade runner" - a supplier of instruments for illegal surgeries.
This story has NOTHING to do with the movie or the book discussed above. And the title "Blade Runner" has NOTHING to do with those stories, either.
The movie company just ripped off the name of an author's work because it "sounded good" and applied it to something entirely different. And in the process they pretty much shafted any attempt to bring the novel Bladerunner to the silver screen.
But looking at this, all traffic is payed for twice (well, actually it already is in the current model): The one making the request pays for the data he receives, and the one serving it also pays for the very same data he sends.
Twice at half-rate each. Each site pays its own ISP for the load on that ISP's resources, both for incoming traffic and outgoing.
- No inter-ISP billing is required to get money from the sender's ISP to pay for resources used on the receiver's ISP.
- The guy with the site at the back of the expensive link pays his ISP the appropriately higher price both for his incoming and outgoing traffic.
Suppose the case of a customer who runs a SMTP server. A spammer tries to connects to it, the server accepts. The spammer sends a few gig of spam to him, which procmail or something ends up throwing away. Technically, this is "solicited" since the user's machine did accept the connection. But it is abuse, and wasn't really "solicited" in the way that we humans normally think of it.
Modern MTAs accept the connection but reject blacklisted sites, or attempts to use them to relay when they're configured not to relay, before they get to the body of the email. So the rejected spammer can only chew up a little bandwidth on each connection. Rejected spammers are thus demoted to a DoS attack.
If a billing regime like the one I described becomes available, it will encourage the authors of MTAs to just refuse connections from blacklisted IP addresses, and temporarily blacklist any IP address that rapidly makes several consecutive spam attempts that are rejected.
Problem solved.
You know, that MTA hack might be a good idea even WIHTOUT the billing regime. It would cause open relays and ISPs catering to spammers to temporarily lose their outgoing mail connectivity whenever the spammers start up and the MTAs notice it. That will not only save resources on the MTA machine, but penalize open relays and SPAM-friendly ISPs, giving them added incentive to police their outgoing traffic.
[ISPs] have something a 2 mbit line feeding 254 1 mbit lines. They assume that users are not maxing out their connections 100% of the time. If they didn't make this assumtion dsl/broadband would be alot more expensive.
The hardware is there for a few users to max out their connections at one point in time but not for all users to be even using their connections at any one time.
And a per-megabyte billing does two things:
- It encourages careful use of the available bandwidth.
- It pays to upgrade the uplinks from the edge routers if the users want bandwidth badly enough to keep using it despite the cost.
Every ISP should base charges only on how much traffic you send. That would give people a real incentive to keep their systems patched and secured. You wouldn't have to pay a ridiculous amount if you're on the receiving end of a DOS. You would have to pay if your systems get hacked or catch a worm though.
Good idea but it doesn't quite go far enough.
You should be billed for the traffic you CAUSE or SOLICIT, and thus have control over. Much of internet traffic is things like web browsing, which invovles a small request soliciting a large reply. If you suck down 60 megabytes of web porn, MP3s, or ftp downloads, it's your bill. Similarly if you host a server, which accepts little requests and pours out data, it's your bill.
But if somebody starts sending you unsolicited packets, that's like somebody making nuisance calls or pages. (You will notice that pagers, at least, are generally NOT billed by the page. They tried that, and the customers rebelled because they had no way to block idiots with autodialers.)
So something with a little deeper visibility is in order. Here's a fair approach:
TCP: You get billed if you make, attempt to make, or accept, a connection. You don't get billed for attempted connections you refuse or that don't get completed (i.e. SYN and other DOS attacks).
UDP: You get billed for outgoing UDP packets. If the billing machine is sufficiently stateful, you might also be billed for incoming UDP packets that ARE replies to a recent outgoing UDP request using a well-known UDP request/reply protocol. (This would prevent cheating but still protect you against getting billed for both DOS attacks and forged-reply billing attacks.)
ICMP: All are free except outgoing EHCO REQUEST (ping), because they're a mandated part of the network overhead. (You don't want to bill inbound ECHO REPLIES to prevent billing for forged reply attacks. But you might bill ECHO REQUEST as if it went both inbound and outbound, to cover the expected ECHO REPLY without making the billing machine stateful about ping "connections".)
That should pretty much cover it. Customers would:
- be fairly billed for the bandwidth they used, caused to be used, or allowed to be used,
- not be billed for unsolicited "phone calls", DoS attacks, or mandated network overhed, and
- have a strong financial incentive to keep their system secured against crackers and malware (such as viruses and worms).
And installing a get-around-the-billing hack (like PPP-over-ECHOREPLY) would be a violation of terms-of-service and cause for disconnection - or changing the billing of that customer back to "all bandwidth co$t$" B-)
And the formula is clearly wrong, since g shouldn't be in it if you're going for angular velocity - unless you're solving for the angular velocity needed at launch to get the pancake back into the pan (in which case r shouldn't be there).
Oops. I take that back.
g, r and omega should all be there to let you solve for time-of-flight from angular velocity. So rearranging should let us solve first for circumferential velocity, then for flight time, and finally for height-of-throw, giving the formulation I was after.
- First you make a circular movement [...]
- Then you tilt the end of the pan down slightly
- and make a short, sharp inward movement [...]
- Then you sharply flick the pan up
- so that the pancake goes between one and two feet in the air [...]
Thank you, both for the pointers and an approximation of what they formula should be rearranged to give.
The formula expressed in the article purports to give you the angular velocity of the pancake. Perhaps useful as one step in the process of computing how to build a flipping machine, but NOT the whole story even for a machine design, and definitely not what you need for training a human.
And the formula is clearly wrong, since g shouldn't be in it if you're going for angular velocity - unless you're solving for the angular velocity needed at launch to get the pancake back into the pan (in which case r shouldn't be there). So something in the article's description is wrong (though perhaps the original research was correct).
What I'd like to see is a function giving the target height for the top of the pancake's arc in terms of the radius from pivot point (probably elbow) to the center of the pancake (and possibly also parameters for the mass and diameter of the pancake if air resistance is significant.
It's a lot easier to target a particular height-of-toss than some other control parameter (such as speed), and the height will vary with the individual flipper's arm-plus-pan length.
Since the pancake has to land back in the pan the toss has to be close to straight up, which puts the pan about horizontal at launch. There will be some small inward motion from the air resistance, because the up and down trip have the 'cake at opposite angles to the wind, which might be compensated for by outward motion from sliding on the pan during the angular swing of the launch.
So if I want to use a torch to send morse signals in UK, I need a license?
In principle, yes. And if you automate it, crank it up to 1200 baud or higher, and use it to broadcast entertainment or surf the net without a government-approved connection, they'll probably bother to enforce it, too.
I'm not sure about your use of the word "Philistine". Did you mean "A person who is uninterested in intellectual pursuits"? Or did you mean Palestinians instead?
The latter.
As I understand it, their own name for their region is pronounced FAHLL-is-stin, named after the tribes which settled it in several waves. When the Jews came out of the desert into the promised "Land of Milk and Honey", it was such a land because the Philistines were already there, with cattle and beehives.
The word entered both Greek (as "the Philistine Syria") and Latin ("Provincia Syria Palaestina"). In English "Philistine" is descended from the Greek form, "Palestine" from the Latin.
More here. And there's plenty more to be found - both scholarly and propaganda - by doing a google search for 'philistine palestine'.
The Philistines never went away or got evicted. Even the Romans and the British didn't push them out. They did became somewhat diluted by intermarriage with other tribes who settled in the area. But to the extent that there are still Philistines in the world, they're still there - and still use the same name for their people (with the word absorbed essentially unchanged into Arabic).
They shined an infrared laser straight up, and modulated it with an entire FM band full of radio stations [...]
By the way: Don't try that in the US. The FAA bans shining lasers up into the air where they might blind or distract pilots. Low power and near-horizontal or you're ban.
How long do you suppose the lack of federal regulation will last?
I don't know about the US. (The FCC has been moving to open, rather than close, bands for some time now.) But it's already banned in Britain.
You probably already know that radio broadcasting in Britain is (or was a few years back - just in case they've changed their mind) a government monopoly. People tried to work around that in various ways.
One of them was a company that did a cute hack: They shined an infrared laser straight up, and modulated it with an entire FM band full of radio stations (similar to the way you can put a private FM band on a cable TV wire). Anybody who wanted to could mount a photocell or infrared-sensing diode (in a little telescope) on their window sill, point it at the invisible pillar of light, and couple it to a radio to receive the new band. Business model was to rent the stations out as commercial broadcast stations with all of London as target market.
The agency in charge of the British radio monopoly (British Post Office?) complained. And parlement extended the top end of their jurisdiction from whatever the previous legal end of the microwave spectrum was to infinity.
So in Britain, if it's electromagnetic energy (even gamma rays) and you can use it to beamcast or broadcast information, you need a license.
If they won't enforce their own edicts by going after a dictator who makes, and has a record of using, banned weapons of mass destruction, why should any country or multinational corporation pay any attention to their documents and edicts?
But this has already been proven... Just look at all the unenforced resolutions toward Isreal
No argument that the UN is not enforcing edicts against Israel. And the parties whose oxen have been gored by that (the philistines, for starters) have already taken that fight into their own hands. The US has a large voting block of citiens who identify themselves as Jewish and align with Israel, so the US government tends to look the other way on that.
(And that actually makes some sense. You want the prosecution done by somebody with the victims' interests in mind, not the perpetrator's.)
But this is a dispute where it's the US' ox which has been gored - along with that of the rest of the signatories of the nonproliferation treaty, etc. This has the protential to undo about a century of work to get rid of chemical, biological, and nuclear war on a global scale. It is precicely those threats which the UN was supposed to prevent.
And as the owner of the gored ox, the US is the country pushing the agenda. W. has gone to the UN and said "put up or shut up" in this particular dispute. The UN is now on notice that, if it doesn't move on this it will be the US with its armies, military tech, and as many allies as it can muster that will be ignoring them, not the population of a small occupied country armed mostly with rocks, explosives, and vests.
The Philistines ignoring the UN is no big deal. The US, NATO, their allies, and everybody they can impress, all ignoring it as a group, IS a big deal. If they sit THIS one out, who will pay any attention the next time they try to influence world events? (And who will pay their UN dues? B-) )
Meanwhile: Israel enjoys a privileged position with respect to the US because Jews are a big voting block in the US. But (beginning recently) US Muslims now outnumber US Jews. If they ever start voting as a block that effect could turn around big time.
How long would the Israel-Philistine conflict last if it was the Philistines getting the billions in military aid rather than the Israelis? (Or even if they both got aid equally?)
I think it is a joke that you idiots elected the son of a former president... why not just switch to a monarchy, that would suit your god-forsaken country a lot more.
A lot of people died a couple centuries ago to insure that, if we happened to CHOSE a man, and then his son, to be chief executive, we wouldn't be sadded with his grandson, and great grandson, and so on until the next civil war (or the one after that...). And also to insure that his powers are limited, rather than dictatorial. And that we get to CHOSE his successor. And if we really get fed up we get to CHOSE to rehack the whole structure.
Unfortunately the warlike tribes of Europe and Asia didn't get it right away. In fact they still haven't really caught on to this self-government thing. So we had to keep coming to their rescue from time to time when their genocide got so far out of hand that it impacted our interests or revolted our citizens enough to get a 2/3s vote in our Senate, or some equivalent.
That, and a change to the slashcode that shortened the sig line.
Oops. I mean that shortened the handle, 'Slashing off the " Rod"'.
The shortening of the sigline length came later, which is why it's now "/." rather than "slashdot" in the sig line.
I think it's a joke about eunuchs.
Yep. That, and a change to the slashcode that shortened the sig line.
It's a pun. Laugh. B-)
One side-effect of mining the moon and smelting metal out of the oxides is air pollution.
Really.
All that oxygen release could easily pollute the moon with air.
The lunar gravity is not sufficient to hold onto an atmosphere for geologic time. But it IS sufficient to hold down Oxygen and other heavy gasses for periods of interest to humans.
(I forget the half-life of free oxygen in the solar wind down that gravity well, but I think it's somewhere between centuries and millenia.)
A little oxygen, excited by the sun, could lead to ozone corrosion on exposed metals. More would cause increased friction on space vehicles and payloads to be launched by electromagnetic catapults.
Of course if you release ENOUGH, and maybe crash in a few comets or ice asteroids for water, you could end up with a thin but breathable atmosphere and do away with those suits. B-) Something that thick would make it a lot harder to launch (though still nowhere NEAR as hard as getting to low orbit from Earth.)
But can you IMAGINE an environmentalist trying to convince lunar settlers to "go back to nature" - and have their atmosphere leak away over a few dozen generations due to lack of replenishment by industrial activity?
United Nations treaties!!! Nations sure do love to follow them!
B-)
I don't know if anyone noticed. But the recent appeals by the US for UN to join it in the coming war in Iraq were phrased in a way that sets the stage for the US ignoring the UN in the future if it doesn't join up.
Basically Bush is saying that if the UN won't back up its resolutions with force when the crunch comes, it's just a joke, a debating and posturing society with no teeth, a sideshow.
If they won't enforce their own edicts by going after a dictator who makes, and has a record of using, banned weapons of mass destruction, why should any country or multinational corporation pay any attention to their documents and edicts?
(Especially if the mine's transport terminal is, as a side-effect, a weapon suitable for leveling anything of interest on Earth.)
Kodak is the leading developer of OLEDs and owns almost all the patents on them.
Which really makes sense, since organic LEDs are fancy organic chemicals printed on a film, along with printed wiring.
Right up a film manufacturer's alley.
Only surprise (if any) is that Kodak beat Polaroid to it. Polaroid has always been about doing off-the-beaten-track tricks with films.
McDonalds lost a similar suit against a restaurant in Scottland called McDonalds.
And then there was McDonalds Canada.
Seems McDonalds neglected to register the trademark in Canada at first. An entrepenuer went ahead and cloned the ENTIRE McDONALDS SPEEDY SERVICE SYSTEM - decor, golden-arch sign, cuisine, uniforms, catchphrases, you-name-it. Did his best to be as close as possible in every aspect, including especially the flavor. The only difference was a tiny red maple-leaf logo right where the arches cross. (And of course he couldn't use McDonalds in-house meat packing plant.)
He set up a store just off the end of the Ambassador Bridge (which runs over the Detroit River between Detroit and Windsor). ENORMOUS sign visible from the middle of the bridge to anybody driving toward the east.
So of course one day a lawer from McDonalds shows up and demands they pay up and join up or rename. Says the owner: "Did you notice the painted line across the bridge on your way over here? You're in Canada now, and I'VE got the trademark here."
Eventually they threw in the towel and bought him out. B-)
(Or so I heard it. I don't claim direct knowledge.)
Actually, if you look back in history, the free software types, hackers and geeks were fiercly opposed to Apple's look-n-feel lawsuits.
Including especially John Gilmore, who printed and passed out some really ugly buttons slamming Apple.
There was fallout well beyond the suit. For a very long time (is this still going on?) the Gnu project wouldn't support the Apple platforms (i.e. Macintosh), especailly with gcc, gdb, make, and the rest of the software development toolsets.
Of course individual Apple fans would port each new release of gcc as soon as they got their hands on it. But those were the early days, when things were flakey, complicated internally, and changing rapidly. So the unofficial gcc-on-macintosh would be months behind, at a time when a couple weeks lead could be a make-or-break proposition. (And the gnu folk would not be particularly interested in bug reports against the apple port, either, so bugs that only manefested on apples would have to be fixed in release after release.)
IMHO this was a significant impediment to software development for apples and a major factor in the company's slide.
There's virtually no other Unix platforms [than Java/Solaris, C++/Solaris, scripting/database, or COBOL/mainframe in banking legacy.]
In telecom legacy there's UTS - which is SVR4 (and a legacy SVR(3?)) for mainframes from Amdahl (now Fujitsu). It's also used in commodities brokerages and other "one hour downtime = several megabux down the drain" financial applications.
Ever see an uptime of multiple years? B-)
And yes, virgina, "Real Programmers" DO sometimes edit on 3270 emulators. (And you can even get decent unix console and terminal behavior out of 'em.)