This constitution, and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, any thing in the constitution or laws of any state to the contrary notwithstanding.
Emphasis mine. See? Even the constitution takes a back seat to any agreements made in treaties.
That is incorrect. It's a very common error, and comes from misparsing the sentence. The same misparsing could be used to say that federal law overrides the constitution, or that the constitution overrides itself.
What it REALLY says is that the (federal constitution, federal laws, and treaties) override state (constitutions and laws).
The H1B long-term temporaries also allow management to avoid hiring blacks, hispanics, and women for high-tech positions.
Take a look at the composition of most engineering shops: Tech positions full of male and some female east Indians and Orientals, along with a few male WASPs, with a bias toward the young. Maybe an older male WASP or two in an architectural or technical lead position.
It's not because of a shortage of technically competent blacks, hispanics, or women.
In the case of women in the Bay Area, for example, the experiment has been done: More than one post-operative transexual who was also a talented engineer has found that the most painful part of the operation was the amputation of about 2/5ths of the salary. Behavior that was seen as dynamic and productive as a male was seen as bitchy, uppity, and conforntational as a female. HR people actually told one that the salary being offered was in the top x% of the salaries offered by the company to "any female".
Just as older workers often find themselves training immigrants to do thier work, then are laid off, women often find themselves training far less senior and less qualified men for positions with identical job responsibilities, starting salaries tens of thousands of dollars above their own, and very slightly differet job titles (so the disparity doesn't show in the paperwork).
Companies will, for instance, hire women and minorities with several college degrees and extensive job experience for lower-paid and lower-ranking jobs, and hire young, undegreed, and inexperienced WASPS for the higher-paid and higher-ranking jobs. Degreed H1Bs can fill higher-ranking positions without the higher pay, and fill the lower-ranking slots whenever the women and/or minorities get fed up with the situation and take a hike, or push for a raise or a promotion and end up laid off.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't he just port code that was already in the Public Domain? Many people at the time saw him as the thief, for selling what they said wasn't his in the first place.
If it's in the public domain you can modify it and sell your modified version. That doesn't stop anybody from using the UNmodified version.
At the time in question, Copyright had not been extended to computer software. (That debate came much later.) Neither had patent. The only protection available was trade secret. Once the cat's out of the bag on a trade secret it's public domain, and the only person the former owner of the secret has any claim against is the guy who opened the bag.
A thing to remember: Copyright, patent, trademark, service mark, and the rest of the "Intellectual Property" pantheon (except for trade secret) are NOT codifications of a "natural" right. They are the creation of government action, pure and simple.
This is not a claim that they're WRONG, or that creators SHOULDN'T have such "rights". That's a separate issue. But at the time, they DIDN'T have them. Bill was whistling into the wind when he complained about the hobbiests (except for the one who made the first copy) "stealing" his work.
the article shows the beginnings of the debate over the concept of whether or not software should be free.
It goes back WAY farther than that...
The earliest piece I'm aware of is an article in Communications of the ACM by Bernie Galler. In it he complained that the price being charged for a piece of software (I think it was $75) was greater than the cost of duplicating the card deck and mailing it. He warned that this could lead to the concept of software as a product, programming as a profession, and trade secret restrictions impeeding the free flow of software technology development.
I don't recall the exact date of the article. But it was in the same issue as Djikstra's "GOTO Considered Harmful" article which was the origin of the whole "structured programming" flap, and structured programming was well developed and in vogue by the end of the 1960s.
Now the interesting question. Did the gag order forbid these people from getting in contact with someone who might come to their aid? If not being allowed to make a press release kept the ACLU from getting interested, I'd say there is a pretty serious problem.
Or if it kept them from working with the EFF.
Or if it kept them from starting a defense fund...
I have no idea who originally came up with "hacking" as being someone who codes, but they're way off base. Hackers are people who compromise security on other systems. Crackers remove rotection/limitations on software. That's the way it's always been. Quit trying to change it.
You're wrong, and YOU're the one trying to rewrite history. See Steven Levy's book "Hackers" for some of the documentation.
"Hacker" was MIT AI-lab slang for an exceptionally talented and persistent programmer - someone who could substitute that talent and persistence for a lack of tools and achieve impressive results. (This was particularly important at the time, beacuse to a large extent there WEREN'T any tools yet...)
One possible precursor was a Yiddish term meaning approximately "someone who builds furniture with an axe", and carrying the same positive connotation. (Contrast vs. a "hack" writer.)
To hack a problem was to attack it with all the skill you had and find a way to solve it. Yes, it could apply to hacking through a security barrier - but only to the extent that defeating a security barrier was a member of the set of all difficult software problems.
Saying "hacker" when you mean "(computer security) cracker" is like saying "sailor" when you mean "(sea) pirate" or "cowboy" when you mean "cattle rustler". Yes, crackers tended to be a subset of hackers, just as cattle rustlers were a subset of cowboys and sea pirates a subset of sailors. (Or at least that was true before the script-kiddie phenomenon lowered the bar on cracking.) But the misuse is exactly the same.
The misuse apparently began with an early self-appoionted security expert's presentation to early information-system management. He went on a lecture circuit trying to alert MIS people to the dangers of crackers (and to drum up consulting business). He used "hackers" as a term for crackers - much to the confusion of the techies in the audience (who recognized the misuse but considered it a sign of the cluelessness of the presenter).
But for many of the MIS executives (and the members of the trade press) this was their first in-depth exposure to both the threat of crackers and the term "hacker". So the misuse quickly caught on among the suits, and from there spread to the general media.
To this day one of the most effective ways to separate the technically literate from the hangers-on is to determine how they use the term "hacker".
What kind of radio equipment would we be talking about here? Can they be built from consumer tems?
Possibly. Satellite dishes come to mind.
You need a timing reference between the dishes that's accurate to a small fraction of a cycle of the frequency you're looking at.
You might do a low-frequency radar image of the moon using GPS to synchronize your antennas.
But if you're playing that game you can go one better: The moon is very stiff. It doesn't change shape much over a few minutes - compared to radar frequencies. So put a few antennas at different latitudes to get a big north-south aperture and use the motion of the earth (which moves the antennas many hundreds of miles in an hour) to give you your east-west aperture.
Record the data on video tape or DVD and post-process it at your leisure.
... with the same law they used to get Morris (author of the internet worm) and the virus writers. (Sorry, I don't recall the name of it at the moment.)
Unauthorized use of somebody else's computer resources, at least in the United States, is a federal felony. It has nasty penalties.
DNS servers are provided to perform DNS lookups. Using them as an IP tunnel is obviously far beyond their authorized use. It should be trivial to convince a jury that the conditions of the law are met.
And the law was in place and tested in court long before the DCMA was a gleam in the software industry's eye.
hook up like 10 digital cameras or so into small telescopes and spread them along an area... then use some kind of interferometric whizzbang techniques to take lovely high-resolution images of the Moon? Can it be done?
Can't be done.
You have to preserve the phase information to pull off that trick, not just intensity. Easy with radio, difficult with optics, impossible with separate charge-storage sensors.
I think this is a wonderful step in the right direction, but I wonder how many other regions in the United States don't have access to a high-speed connection?
Lots.
This isn't the first radio ISP for rural areas, by a number of years. (One rural southern valley got wired this way using spread-spectrum quite a few years back, starting from a link from the town, with its phone center, to a college tens of miles up the valley.)
But it's nice to see it's catching on more generally.
This idea has a beautiful symmetry with DSL.
DSL is dandy for dense urban areas. It's distance limited and the costs rise with distance from the central sites, so you need a concentration of customers and infrastructure to be practical.
Line-of-sight radio is similarly dandy for rural areas. It's limited by obstructions rather than distance, but in the absense of urban obstructions the costs are approximately constant out to the horizon. That's quite a distance if the central site is elevated - either by a tall structure on flat land, or a tall peak where things are bumpier. So you can collect enough customers in a sparsely-populated area to support a POP. If your area starts to populate, drop power and add more antennas, until things are thick enough to switch to providing DSL.
(Now we just need solutions for people scattered in dense forest, deep mountaion valleys, spread WAY OUT on deserts, on small islands far from land, or moving about on the roads, skies, and high seas...)
Two nice long contiguous metallic conductors. Even if they are quasi grounded, they'll act as a good RF waveguide at some frequency.
Nope. Their resistance to ground is very small compared with the resistance of the track. Very lossy.
And a train is a rolling short. At best you'd get trains or data but not both at once. B-)
Besides, they ALREADY have LOTS of dark fibers buried alongside them. (Sprint developed from the Southern Pacific Railroad's own network, for starters.) Just rent a couple of 'em and run OC-192 (or whatever) to any convenient population center. That'll beat any concevable data rate you could get from the tracks.
It says they spent $10 million AND a year.
So... is this profitable?
4,000 customers * $40/month * 12 months/year = $1,900,000/year. And that's just the start.
$2,500 capital cost per customer is in the ballpark with the costs of rolling out DSL. Cost per customer will drop with time.
Unlike DSL in a city they don't have to tear up streets and string more wire all over the place, or test and upgrade existing wire. And they don't have to install a DSLAM in every two-bit switching center and wire up separate pairs for each customer to it.
Instead they have one, or a few, antenna sites, plus an antenna and a box at each customer's house, and only air in between. The customer covers the cost of their setup with an install fee. The base station and internet connection is already set up. (If they need several antenna sites they might radio-link them to each other, too, and only need a landline to one of 'em.)
The small number of antenna drivers also limits the amount of routing boxes they need. (They can probably drop it all into a single Redback box.) Ditto with limiting the number of backbone connections (maybe two, running by divergent routes). Piece of cake.
I won't predict whether THIS one will succeed. (Think how many cable companies went belly up in the early days.) But I can't see anything that would doom it.
I thought the Olympics were about amateurs (some of 'em) doing their best in front of thr world, about striving for the ultimatre glory.
Actually the Olympics (both the original and the restart around the time of the World Wars) are a way for nations to show off the warrior skills of their citizens, for prestige and to intimidate potential opponents.
Consider events such as "biathlon": Cross-country skiing while carrying a rifle and target shooting along the way. (This was used very effectively against the NAZIs by resistance movements.)
I guess the IOC is like the NCAA: Exploit those amateurs for $$$$. How sad.
True. But they've got to fund it SOMEHOW if they're going to do it at all. (And successful athletes get to make big bux from endorsements.)
Some things that bug me:
- The suppression of the shooting events in the news coverage (especially in the US - which takes most of the gold in these events).
- The move to eliminate politically incorrect competitions (like biathlon) so gun-unfriendly countries (like Japan) can avoid citizen unrest when their people see the athletes training and realize that people in other countries are freer than they are.
it is going by earth at about 0.0317 AU, a close call by cosmic terms but definitely a miss.
I disagree with the characterization of 3% of the distance between the Earth and the Sun as a "close call". I'd save it for things that come a LOT closer - like the big one that passed inside the orbit of the Moon in the last decade or so.
But rest easy, since "there is absolutely no danger of a collision." As if they'd tell us
But they DID tell us last time they had one where the preliminary figures put the Earth inside the uncertainty boundary of the initial orbital calculations. ("They" in this case was a researcher, not NASA administrators {who didn't even know about the object yet}.)
It caused a flap, and maybe the researchers won't be so quick to talk to the press NEXT time. But once an object is spotted a call goes out to astronomers all over the world for possible previous spottings, to refine the orbit. That's a big audience (and includes lots of amateur comet spotters). Once the numbers are out anybody with the tools can crunch their own confirmation and/or look at the object in the sky and make their own measurements. So I wouldn't sweat being kept in the dark.
Ultimately, the scariest aspect of this is to be reminded we don't have an organized program monitoring for killer asteroids.
Didn't you follow the link to the NEAT project? What do you think found THIS one?
You might argue that it's underfunded, will take too long, might miss something significant, might not spot a collider in time to do something about it, or that it will only spot asteroids and not comets (or at least not in time).
But I recall a decade ago when we DIDN'T have such a project in place AT ALL and I'm MUCH happier with the current situation.
Every time they spot a new one that comes anywhere near close enough they get another opportunity to publish an estimate of the number they HAVEN'T found. A nice argument for a few more bux for telescopes and observers.
Just think: If we stop one extinction-event rock, humans and technology will have prevented vastly more environmental damage in a single operation than has been caused by all the humans since we first appeared. Take THAT, Earth First!
You might argue that it's underfunded, will take too long, might miss something significant, might not spot a collider in time to do something about it, or that it will only spot asteroids and not comets (or at least not in time).
But I recall a decade ago when we DIDN'T have such a project in place AT ALL and I'm MUCH happier with the current situation.
Every time they spot a new one that comes anywhere near close enough they get another opportunity to publish an estimate of the number they HAVEN'T found. A nice argument for a few more bux for telescopes and observers.
Just think: If we stop one extinction-event rock, humans and technology will have prevented vastly more environmental damage in a single operation than has been caused by all the humans since we first appeared. Take THAT, Earth First!
they move in the night sky because THE PLANET ROTATES.
And so do all the sagans-and-sagans of "fixed stars". So how do you differentiate the incoming object from J. Random Ordinary Nova?
If you're VERY LUCKY you spot it while it's still far enough out that the orbital mechanics makes it appear to move slightly relative to the stellar background. But when it's far out it's a lot dimmer, looking like the rest of the asteroidal junkpile. It doesn't take a very big rock to create an extinction event.
Hate to break it to you.. but that "face" upon closer inspection turned out to be a more natural random formation of rocks that look nothing like a face.
The human brain has a very large section specifically for perceiving faces. It hunts for faces in the visual field, and will spot them in virtually any pattern that vuagely suggests a face. It also attempts to identify identity, emotion, and a number of other factors.
So everywhere we look we see faces - in light sockets, on the lids of cans of grated parmesan cheese, and in the shadows of topographic features on Mars.
One description of this effect, and an interesting exercise utilizing it, occurs in the book "understanding comics" by Scott McCloud. The exercise:
- Draw a random squiggly closed curve. (Think "amoeba".) It looks like a random squiggly closed curve.
- Add an "eye" composed of a small circle with a dot in its center, somewhere inside the closed curve (preferably near an edge). Now it looks like a "comic book" head.
As for Mars: Shortly after the "Face on Mars" flap started NASA published another photograph from the same probe, which had found a feature that might as well have been a deliberate sculpture of Kermit the Frog.
IMHO there is enough interest in the "Face" site (both by believers and debunkers) that NASA should spend a little of a probe's time to re-image it, and publish a radar topographic probe and reflectivity map.
Plug that into some existing software and you could do a virtual flyby and walkthrough of the site. You could set the viewpoint and illumination to replicate the original image (to see that it was the right spot), then wander over and around it, illuminating it from other angles, to see what it's really like.
It has been said that there needs to be a revolution every ten years in order to keep the government honest. I think we're long overdue.
Actually it was said by that dead, white, male, slaveowner, Thomas Jefferson. You know: The guy who planted those paper timebombs that ended up freeing the slaves and giving women the vote.
The time he suggested was twenty years, and the quote was to the effect of ~heaven forbid that [the US] ever go twenty years without a revolution~
Nope. That's for cars, and it's neurotoxic. Preserving the brain is the most important part of Cryonic suspension. Indeed, most suspendees are head-only, hoping for a replacement body or a fully-regrown body with brain downloaded with data extracted from the old brain.
Glycerol is one of the chemicals that has been used for tissue. (I don't know if it's part of the current protocol, or of the one that they've used to freeze rat hearts to liquid nitrogen temperatures and get them to beat when rewarmed.)
See the back issues of Cryonics magazine to track the technology.
Slashdot Mirror
That is incorrect. It's a very common error, and comes from misparsing the sentence. The same misparsing could be used to say that federal law overrides the constitution, or that the constitution overrides itself.
What it REALLY says is that the (federal constitution, federal laws, and treaties) override state (constitutions and laws).
No, folks, I'm not one of the postoperative transexuals referred to in the post. B-)
The only "Rod" I've had slashed off (so far, at least, knock wood) is the one on my former slashdot handle.
The H1B long-term temporaries also allow management to avoid hiring blacks, hispanics, and women for high-tech positions.
Take a look at the composition of most engineering shops: Tech positions full of male and some female east Indians and Orientals, along with a few male WASPs, with a bias toward the young. Maybe an older male WASP or two in an architectural or technical lead position.
It's not because of a shortage of technically competent blacks, hispanics, or women.
In the case of women in the Bay Area, for example, the experiment has been done: More than one post-operative transexual who was also a talented engineer has found that the most painful part of the operation was the amputation of about 2/5ths of the salary. Behavior that was seen as dynamic and productive as a male was seen as bitchy, uppity, and conforntational as a female. HR people actually told one that the salary being offered was in the top x% of the salaries offered by the company to "any female".
Just as older workers often find themselves training immigrants to do thier work, then are laid off, women often find themselves training far less senior and less qualified men for positions with identical job responsibilities, starting salaries tens of thousands of dollars above their own, and very slightly differet job titles (so the disparity doesn't show in the paperwork).
Companies will, for instance, hire women and minorities with several college degrees and extensive job experience for lower-paid and lower-ranking jobs, and hire young, undegreed, and inexperienced WASPS for the higher-paid and higher-ranking jobs. Degreed H1Bs can fill higher-ranking positions without the higher pay, and fill the lower-ranking slots whenever the women and/or minorities get fed up with the situation and take a hike, or push for a raise or a promotion and end up laid off.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't he just port code that was already in the Public Domain? Many people at the time saw him as the thief, for selling what they said wasn't his in the first place.
If it's in the public domain you can modify it and sell your modified version. That doesn't stop anybody from using the UNmodified version.
At the time in question, Copyright had not been extended to computer software. (That debate came much later.) Neither had patent. The only protection available was trade secret. Once the cat's out of the bag on a trade secret it's public domain, and the only person the former owner of the secret has any claim against is the guy who opened the bag.
A thing to remember: Copyright, patent, trademark, service mark, and the rest of the "Intellectual Property" pantheon (except for trade secret) are NOT codifications of a "natural" right. They are the creation of government action, pure and simple.
This is not a claim that they're WRONG, or that creators SHOULDN'T have such "rights". That's a separate issue. But at the time, they DIDN'T have them. Bill was whistling into the wind when he complained about the hobbiests (except for the one who made the first copy) "stealing" his work.
the article shows the beginnings of the debate over the concept of whether or not software should be free.
It goes back WAY farther than that...
The earliest piece I'm aware of is an article in Communications of the ACM by Bernie Galler. In it he complained that the price being charged for a piece of software (I think it was $75) was greater than the cost of duplicating the card deck and mailing it. He warned that this could lead to the concept of software as a product, programming as a profession, and trade secret restrictions impeeding the free flow of software technology development.
I don't recall the exact date of the article. But it was in the same issue as Djikstra's "GOTO Considered Harmful" article which was the origin of the whole "structured programming" flap, and structured programming was well developed and in vogue by the end of the 1960s.
Now the interesting question. Did the gag order forbid these people from getting in contact with someone who might come to their aid? If not being allowed to make a press release kept the ACLU from getting interested, I'd say there is a pretty serious problem.
Or if it kept them from working with the EFF.
Or if it kept them from starting a defense fund...
Federal judges are appointed by the president. G. W. Bush is not, and never has been the president. So he didn't appoint that judge.
Any bets on whether the judge was appointed by a Republican or Democratic president? Shall we start a pool on which one? B-)
I have no idea who originally came up with "hacking" as being someone who codes, but they're way off base. Hackers are people who compromise security on other systems. Crackers remove rotection/limitations on software. That's the way it's always been. Quit trying to change it.
You're wrong, and YOU're the one trying to rewrite history. See Steven Levy's book "Hackers" for some of the documentation.
"Hacker" was MIT AI-lab slang for an exceptionally talented and persistent programmer - someone who could substitute that talent and persistence for a lack of tools and achieve impressive results. (This was particularly important at the time, beacuse to a large extent there WEREN'T any tools yet...)
One possible precursor was a Yiddish term meaning approximately "someone who builds furniture with an axe", and carrying the same positive connotation. (Contrast vs. a "hack" writer.)
To hack a problem was to attack it with all the skill you had and find a way to solve it. Yes, it could apply to hacking through a security barrier - but only to the extent that defeating a security barrier was a member of the set of all difficult software problems.
Saying "hacker" when you mean "(computer security) cracker" is like saying "sailor" when you mean "(sea) pirate" or "cowboy" when you mean "cattle rustler". Yes, crackers tended to be a subset of hackers, just as cattle rustlers were a subset of cowboys and sea pirates a subset of sailors. (Or at least that was true before the script-kiddie phenomenon lowered the bar on cracking.) But the misuse is exactly the same.
The misuse apparently began with an early self-appoionted security expert's presentation to early information-system management. He went on a lecture circuit trying to alert MIS people to the dangers of crackers (and to drum up consulting business). He used "hackers" as a term for crackers - much to the confusion of the techies in the audience (who recognized the misuse but considered it a sign of the cluelessness of the presenter).
But for many of the MIS executives (and the members of the trade press) this was their first in-depth exposure to both the threat of crackers and the term "hacker". So the misuse quickly caught on among the suits, and from there spread to the general media.
To this day one of the most effective ways to separate the technically literate from the hangers-on is to determine how they use the term "hacker".
Please, consider calling such code "unlicensed" instead. The distinction is that all other DVD player software has a CSS license from DVD-CCA.
Better yet, call it "competitive". That brings one of OUR issues - violation of antitrust law - back to people's attention.
What kind of radio equipment would we be talking about here? Can they be built from consumer tems?
Possibly. Satellite dishes come to mind.
You need a timing reference between the dishes that's accurate to a small fraction of a cycle of the frequency you're looking at.
You might do a low-frequency radar image of the moon using GPS to synchronize your antennas.
But if you're playing that game you can go one better: The moon is very stiff. It doesn't change shape much over a few minutes - compared to radar frequencies. So put a few antennas at different latitudes to get a big north-south aperture and use the motion of the earth (which moves the antennas many hundreds of miles in an hour) to give you your east-west aperture.
Record the data on video tape or DVD and post-process it at your leisure.
... with the same law they used to get Morris (author of the internet worm) and the virus writers. (Sorry, I don't recall the name of it at the moment.)
Unauthorized use of somebody else's computer resources, at least in the United States, is a federal felony. It has nasty penalties.
DNS servers are provided to perform DNS lookups. Using them as an IP tunnel is obviously far beyond their authorized use. It should be trivial to convince a jury that the conditions of the law are met.
And the law was in place and tested in court long before the DCMA was a gleam in the software industry's eye.
hook up like 10 digital cameras or so into small telescopes and spread them along an area... then use some kind of interferometric whizzbang techniques to take lovely high-resolution images of the Moon? Can it be done?
Can't be done.
You have to preserve the phase information to pull off that trick, not just intensity. Easy with radio, difficult with optics, impossible with separate charge-storage sensors.
I think this is a wonderful step in the right direction, but I wonder how many other regions in the United States don't have access to a high-speed connection?
Lots.
This isn't the first radio ISP for rural areas, by a number of years. (One rural southern valley got wired this way using spread-spectrum quite a few years back, starting from a link from the town, with its phone center, to a college tens of miles up the valley.)
But it's nice to see it's catching on more generally.
This idea has a beautiful symmetry with DSL.
DSL is dandy for dense urban areas. It's distance limited and the costs rise with distance from the central sites, so you need a concentration of customers and infrastructure to be practical.
Line-of-sight radio is similarly dandy for rural areas. It's limited by obstructions rather than distance, but in the absense of urban obstructions the costs are approximately constant out to the horizon. That's quite a distance if the central site is elevated - either by a tall structure on flat land, or a tall peak where things are bumpier. So you can collect enough customers in a sparsely-populated area to support a POP. If your area starts to populate, drop power and add more antennas, until things are thick enough to switch to providing DSL.
(Now we just need solutions for people scattered in dense forest, deep mountaion valleys, spread WAY OUT on deserts, on small islands far from land, or moving about on the roads, skies, and high seas...)
Two nice long contiguous metallic conductors. Even if they are quasi grounded, they'll act as a good RF waveguide at some frequency.
Nope. Their resistance to ground is very small compared with the resistance of the track. Very lossy.
And a train is a rolling short. At best you'd get trains or data but not both at once. B-)
Besides, they ALREADY have LOTS of dark fibers buried alongside them. (Sprint developed from the Southern Pacific Railroad's own network, for starters.) Just rent a couple of 'em and run OC-192 (or whatever) to any convenient population center. That'll beat any concevable data rate you could get from the tracks.
It says they spent $10 million AND a year.
So... is this profitable?
4,000 customers * $40/month * 12 months/year = $1,900,000/year. And that's just the start.
$2,500 capital cost per customer is in the ballpark with the costs of rolling out DSL. Cost per customer will drop with time.
Unlike DSL in a city they don't have to tear up streets and string more wire all over the place, or test and upgrade existing wire. And they don't have to install a DSLAM in every two-bit switching center and wire up separate pairs for each customer to it.
Instead they have one, or a few, antenna sites, plus an antenna and a box at each customer's house, and only air in between. The customer covers the cost of their setup with an install fee. The base station and internet connection is already set up. (If they need several antenna sites they might radio-link them to each other, too, and only need a landline to one of 'em.)
The small number of antenna drivers also limits the amount of routing boxes they need. (They can probably drop it all into a single Redback box.) Ditto with limiting the number of backbone connections (maybe two, running by divergent routes). Piece of cake.
I won't predict whether THIS one will succeed. (Think how many cable companies went belly up in the early days.) But I can't see anything that would doom it.
Many of the early crackers were phone phreaks. Looks like we've come full circle.
I thought the Olympics were about amateurs (some of 'em) doing their best in front of thr world, about striving for the ultimatre glory.
Actually the Olympics (both the original and the restart around the time of the World Wars) are a way for nations to show off the warrior skills of their citizens, for prestige and to intimidate potential opponents.
Consider events such as "biathlon": Cross-country skiing while carrying a rifle and target shooting along the way. (This was used very effectively against the NAZIs by resistance movements.)
I guess the IOC is like the NCAA: Exploit those amateurs for $$$$. How sad.
True. But they've got to fund it SOMEHOW if they're going to do it at all. (And successful athletes get to make big bux from endorsements.)
Some things that bug me:
- The suppression of the shooting events in the news coverage (especially in the US - which takes most of the gold in these events).
- The move to eliminate politically incorrect competitions (like biathlon) so gun-unfriendly countries (like Japan) can avoid citizen unrest when their people see the athletes training and realize that people in other countries are freer than they are.
it is going by earth at about 0.0317 AU, a close call by cosmic terms but definitely a miss.
I disagree with the characterization of 3% of the distance between the Earth and the Sun as a "close call". I'd save it for things that come a LOT closer - like the big one that passed inside the orbit of the Moon in the last decade or so.
But rest easy, since "there is absolutely no danger of a collision." As if they'd tell us
But they DID tell us last time they had one where the preliminary figures put the Earth inside the uncertainty boundary of the initial orbital calculations. ("They" in this case was a researcher, not NASA administrators {who didn't even know about the object yet}.)
It caused a flap, and maybe the researchers won't be so quick to talk to the press NEXT time. But once an object is spotted a call goes out to astronomers all over the world for possible previous spottings, to refine the orbit. That's a big audience (and includes lots of amateur comet spotters). Once the numbers are out anybody with the tools can crunch their own confirmation and/or look at the object in the sky and make their own measurements. So I wouldn't sweat being kept in the dark.
AARGH! Hit the wrong button. Let's try again...
Ultimately, the scariest aspect of this is to be reminded we don't have an organized program monitoring for killer asteroids.
Didn't you follow the link to the NEAT project? What do you think found THIS one?
You might argue that it's underfunded, will take too long, might miss something significant, might not spot a collider in time to do something about it, or that it will only spot asteroids and not comets (or at least not in time).
But I recall a decade ago when we DIDN'T have such a project in place AT ALL and I'm MUCH happier with the current situation.
Every time they spot a new one that comes anywhere near close enough they get another opportunity to publish an estimate of the number they HAVEN'T found. A nice argument for a few more bux for telescopes and observers.
Just think: If we stop one extinction-event rock, humans and technology will have prevented vastly more environmental damage in a single operation than has been caused by all the humans since we first appeared. Take THAT, Earth First!
Ultimately, the scariest aspect of this is to be reminded we don't have an organized program monitoring for killer asteroids.
Didn't you follow the link to the ? What do you think found THIS one?
You might argue that it's underfunded, will take too long, might miss something significant, might not spot a collider in time to do something about it, or that it will only spot asteroids and not comets (or at least not in time).
But I recall a decade ago when we DIDN'T have such a project in place AT ALL and I'm MUCH happier with the current situation.
Every time they spot a new one that comes anywhere near close enough they get another opportunity to publish an estimate of the number they HAVEN'T found. A nice argument for a few more bux for telescopes and observers.
Just think: If we stop one extinction-event rock, humans and technology will have prevented vastly more environmental damage in a single operation than has been caused by all the humans since we first appeared. Take THAT, Earth First!
they move in the night sky because THE PLANET ROTATES.
And so do all the sagans-and-sagans of "fixed stars". So how do you differentiate the incoming object from J. Random Ordinary Nova?
If you're VERY LUCKY you spot it while it's still far enough out that the orbital mechanics makes it appear to move slightly relative to the stellar background. But when it's far out it's a lot dimmer, looking like the rest of the asteroidal junkpile. It doesn't take a very big rock to create an extinction event.
Hate to break it to you.. but that "face" upon closer inspection turned out to be a more natural random formation of rocks that look nothing like a face.
The human brain has a very large section specifically for perceiving faces. It hunts for faces in the visual field, and will spot them in virtually any pattern that vuagely suggests a face. It also attempts to identify identity, emotion, and a number of other factors.
So everywhere we look we see faces - in light sockets, on the lids of cans of grated parmesan cheese, and in the shadows of topographic features on Mars.
One description of this effect, and an interesting exercise utilizing it, occurs in the book "understanding comics" by Scott McCloud. The exercise:
- Draw a random squiggly closed curve. (Think "amoeba".) It looks like a random squiggly closed curve.
- Add an "eye" composed of a small circle with a dot in its center, somewhere inside the closed curve (preferably near an edge). Now it looks like a "comic book" head.
As for Mars: Shortly after the "Face on Mars" flap started NASA published another photograph from the same probe, which had found a feature that might as well have been a deliberate sculpture of Kermit the Frog.
IMHO there is enough interest in the "Face" site (both by believers and debunkers) that NASA should spend a little of a probe's time to re-image it, and publish a radar topographic probe and reflectivity map.
Plug that into some existing software and you could do a virtual flyby and walkthrough of the site. You could set the viewpoint and illumination to replicate the original image (to see that it was the right spot), then wander over and around it, illuminating it from other angles, to see what it's really like.
Did he just make the whole point of hypertext illegal?
I think he made footnotes (to "illegal information") illegal.
It has been said that there needs to be a revolution every ten years in order to keep the government honest. I think we're long overdue.
Actually it was said by that dead, white, male, slaveowner, Thomas Jefferson. You know: The guy who planted those paper timebombs that ended up freeing the slaves and giving women the vote.
The time he suggested was twenty years, and the quote was to the effect of ~heaven forbid that [the US] ever go twenty years without a revolution~
Are you thinking ot Ethelyne Glycol?
Nope. That's for cars, and it's neurotoxic. Preserving the brain is the most important part of Cryonic suspension. Indeed, most suspendees are head-only, hoping for a replacement body or a fully-regrown body with brain downloaded with data extracted from the old brain.
Glycerol is one of the chemicals that has been used for tissue. (I don't know if it's part of the current protocol, or of the one that they've used to freeze rat hearts to liquid nitrogen temperatures and get them to beat when rewarmed.)
See the back issues of Cryonics magazine to track the technology.