Cryonic suspension includes reducing freezing damage by injecting large amounts of ice-crystal inhibiting chemicals. (Think "antifreeze".) Glycerol is one that is popular.
But explicit cryonic research tends to be done on a shoestring - because it isn't all that popular, and many of the suspendees need to put the resources they allocated for it into funding the suspension.
So (like most technologies) cryonics tries to get as much of a boost as it can from research done for other purposes.
This skin-transparency research has obvious medical applications, and the researchers are already talking about testing the toxicity of glycerol. This will no doubt lead to a lot of research into that, and a search for other, less toxic, chemicals that can infiltrate cells and smooth the refractive index to increase transparency.
Some of these are likely to be good candidates for cryonic preservatve agents, and thus this research should lead lower-damage preservatives, both for tissue banks and for the cryonic life-extension movement.
Hee hee! Shades of the early days at Bell Labs.
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Is UNIX An OS?
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· Score: 1
When K&R, Thompson, and Pike were originally hacking on Unix at Bell Labs they had actually been assigned to write a word processor for the legal department. The PHBs didn't want them to be working on an OS.
Now the Unix way was to push as much out of the kernel into application space as possible. So the command interpreter (shell) was a user program, as were a number of other things that up until then were typically built into the OS.
And whenever the PHBs would grump at them for spending time on an OS instead of doing their assigned work they could point at this stuff and say "Look! It's not an OS. It doesn't do X, Y, and Z!"
B-)
(Of course now it does do X. But that's another era. B-) )
My biggest gripe about Red Hat is their inadequate documentation and support.
IMHO, an install is not complete until you can/have:
- Gotten all the ordinary peripherals working.
- Tuned the graphic interface into comfortable usability.
- Connected to your ISP or gotten up on your LAN, as applicable.
- Rebuilt the equivalent of the installed kernel from source. ("Hello, kernel build world!\n")
- Downloaded and installed any post-release patches.
The documentation should walk you through all of that, cookbook style. "Type this. Push that button. Insert this disk." And if it doesn't, and you've paid for "instalation support", the company should bloody well SUPPORT you until you get to the equivalent point. (And cookbook patch install should be available no later than the first set of patches.)
I've been using Unix for decades, and hacked Linux drivers on a Cobalt Qube and some company Intel boxes a few years back, so I'm not a complete newbie.
But last winter I decided to abandon "My Three Suns" and Solaris, and switch my home net to a new OS for the millenium. (No more closed source and closed hardware designs for me!)
So I bought my first Intel-based machine since the 8080. I picked Linux over *BSD due to the larger developer base. And I shelled out the premium for a Red Hat distribution, mainly because it promised install support.
I'd expected problems with the Winmodem. But you can imagine my annoyance when:
- The ethernet card didn't talk to the LAN.
- There was no documentation (readily findable) that would tell how to adjust the resolution of the video driver (so I could take advantage of my shiny new multi-megapixel monitor).
- There was no documentation on how to build a kernel (in the package OR on the web site).
- Attempts to build the kernel, from the supplied sources, using what I believed to be the normal approach, crashed. ("make boot" says: "System is too big. Try using bzImage or modules.", making me suspect the supplied sources and their READMEs don't match the distribution build.)
- Red Hat considered their prepaid support committment to end once you had "installed" sufficiently that you could boot the machine and log in. They refused to help with a kernel build. They had no clue about the ethernet card (even after I identified it for them). "Configuring a kernel is beyond install. If kernel build is necessary to drive the card it's an unsupported card."
- Their web site (accessable through another computer, thank goodness!) was about as helpful as their phone support.
So I had to hack it.
- By looking through the/proc filesystem, pulling out cards and reading the numbers on the chips, and doing a bunch of web and netnews searches, I was able to identify the chip on the ethernet controller.
- Reading the source showed that the corresponding driver recognized that the particular model of the ethernet chip also understood homenet (think 1-megabit LAN on your home phone lines), and was hardcoded to use ONLY that mode whan that model chip was installed.
- Patching the driver to use the chip only in ethernet mode, hand-compiling the modified driver, substituting it for the module loaded by the modload distribution kernel, got me on the LAN.
Then I hacked my old sendmail configuration into the puppy, debugged THAT, and had everything working a few hours before local midnight. And missed the newyears party.
But that didn't deal with any of the other problems - like the sound card, the monitor resolution, or getting to where I could rebuild the kernel and hack drivers for new toys. (Not to mention the Winmodem, of course.) My brand-new multi-kilobuck box was just barely up and limping. (Eight months later I moved the printer to the Red Hat box and discovered that the printer driver module wasn't loaded - because they'd left a line out of a config file - and they STILL didn't have anything about it on their web site.)
Can you IMAGINE a WinTel user, testing the waters on Linux, in this situation?
And it's not like this was TOTALLY oddball hardware. It was a brand-shiny-new, top-of-the-line, Compaq Presario Athlon box. (But not SO new it should have been unsupported.) Compaq DOES like to do things their own way. But they're one of the biggest brands, and at the time they'd supposedly had an alliance with Red Hat for months.
Needless to say, I was PISSED at Red Hat. I'd just gotten out of the hospital for pneumonia, and this was NOT how I'd intended to spend all that was left of my winter holiday.
I do have a day job, guys! With my limited spare time chewed up by this bogosity I still, after 8 months, haven't had a chance to play with drivers for new toys, or even do a really proper job of configuring the box for everyday use.
And now I see that the "Linux for Dummies" books cover kernel build for the SuSE and Caldera distributions, but not for Red Hat. At first I was ticked off all over again, but then I began to wonder... Do I detect a pattern? Maybe THEY had similar problems with lack of kernel build support for Red Hat, and decided to skip it.
Needless to say, absent a major housecleaning in Red Hat's documentation and support departments, my next upgrade won't be to another Red Hat distribution.
I don't believe that's entirely the case. You can download info from LOC with any Z39.51 client... I've done it. And I know that many libraries subscribe to their cataloging service and use their own OPACs.
But maybe the subscription service is the deal you're talking about....
I understand the Library of Congress made a deal with a database company, which now has exclusive rights (and a compilation copyright?) to distribute the catalog information in electronic form.
Want it? Buy it from them. Complete with their software and a limited license.
I'll try to get the person I heard flaming about this ("Flagrant misappropriation of public records/product of tax dollars", etc.) to post with the details and whether it's still current.
The patent office aldo cut a similar deal at one point. It was still in effect as of maybe four years ago (when I interviewed at what turned out to be the database company that had the USPTO's sweatheart deal).
This reminds me of something more than 20 years back: Datapoint's "ArcLight", for their Arcnet.
Arcnet was a token-ring based network with a broadcast topology. Cut the connection between two parts and it immediately reconfigures into two nets. Plug it back in and it reconfigures into a single net.
Ran on 8080-based terminals.
To get between buildings they used a gadget with an infrared laser diode (which had just come out) and a photodiode - each behind a lens about 6 inches in diameter. The device looked somewat like a weatherproof half-height-full-width monitor case with a little bit of a lightshade and the screen replaced by a couple of big glass eyes.
In a city where most buildings weren't skyscrapers (so a little defocussing could deal with building sway and clear-air turbulence without too much energy loss and interference acceptance), clouds and fog were rare, and at a time when high-speed data lines were 300 baud, it was great. A LAN that spanned multiple buildings. If the fog rolled in the network partitioned until it went away (no data between the head office and the branch for a couple hours, but the nets WITHIN the buildings were still up. Birds were handled by retransmissions that were part of the normal protocol.
Something similar would be easy with IP these days: Run a low speed (56k, T1, whatever) between the buildings AND put up the high-speed link. On foggy days your bandwidth drops but your connection is still there. IP also understands flakey connections and rerouting around them, and TCP understands using retransmission to make a reliable connection over unreliable links.
- "Fiber" to mean very fast data sent via light (in something called "fibers" or "fiber optics" or something like that...)
- "Wireless" to mean signals sent between two stations without any hardware spanning the distance. (Just install a box at each end and maybe an antennaish thing on the roof.)
So "wireless fiber" produces the idea of sending high-speed data via light between two sites with gadgets on the roof without anything but open space in between them.
Even if the words don't really make sense when you look at them closely.
The US has the worst crime record in the developed world. And govt. misbehavior (ask your local trigger happy cop for details).
Actually, it doesn't.
Crime (both commission and victimization) among US residents of European descent in the US is lower than in their countries of origin. Ditto among US residents of African descent. Ditto among US residents of Japanese descent, etc.
Unlike the rest of the "developed world" the US has a very diverse population, and doesn't insist that they stay separated or leave their cultures entirely behind.
But among those that do assimilate and reach "middle class" income, the crime rate drops, not just below that of their ancestrial country, but to that of US residents of white European descent - below that of, for instance, England.
>(I wonder what they'd think of an orchestrated letter campaign in the US calling
>for Japan to ban knives - especially deadly assault katanas?)
[] my understanding is that you're 50 years too late - swordmaking has been banned in Japan since WW2.
Please note that I was referring to possession, not manufacture, and knives, not just swords.
You'll notice that most of the murders in Japan are committed with knives or scissors. And that's true regardless of whether you include those that are counted as suicides in Japan but would be counted as the "murder" part of a "murder-suicide" in the US.
Yes I did mention katanas. And unless I'm mistaken the manufacturing ban you refer to was imposed by the US occupation at the end of WWII - as part of an attempt to break the aristocracy responsible for getting them into a war with the US while attempting to conquer the oriental portion of the world.
But the existing historical weapons can still be possessed. And recovering family heirlooms from WWII veterans who took them as souvenirs is quite the hot button. That's why I mentioned them - in the hope that it might help some readers to understand the enormity of the insult committed by the Japanese letter-writers who called for gun bans in the US.
By the way: In my opinion the US military may have made a mistake when, in imposing an edited version of the US system on Japan, they deleted the Second Amendment. In the short run it may have been necessary for the safety of the occupying troops. (Between WWI and WWII the Japanese military had been in control of the education of the population, to bad effect.) But a more effective way to break the aristocracy and empower the general populace would have been to dismantle the arms bans on the general population, erasing the distinction between the aristocracy and the pesants.
So the occupation actually succeeded in instilling the European, rather than the US, governmental model. To this day, in Japan, "the nail that stands out will be hammered down" rather than "the squeaky wheel gets the grease".
* If guns ensure liberty, why does the US have the highest gun ownership and the worst human rights record in the developed world?
The US has neither. Switzerland, for instance, beats it in gun ownership/access, by a considerable margin.
As for human rights records, the US is actually near the top. Consider: Bosnia, South Africa, the East Bank, the former Soviet Union, China, Biafra, Nazi Germany, East Germany. I could go on for pages - or just get a list of the countries of both now and the last two centuries and maybe edit out a few.
Nazi Germany is a case in point: At the time the US had its own version of that sort of politically powerful racists, in the form of the Ku Klux Klan. They had control of something near half the state governments at the time and a large chunk of the county and city governments as well. But they lost. And while the history books talk of congress and freedom rides, my wife will be happy to tell you about how her family came through: By holding them off with guns in at least two generations.
Yes I know you specified the "developed world". And I can show you how the US is near the top there, too. But it would take a while.
Instead I'll make three points:
- The US is where most of these ideals of freedom were first elucidated in a form accessable to European-derived culture. It is where people born into something less than a free society fought a war and founded a government dedicated to increasing freedom - a process that continues to this day.
- The US has a free press, which criticises it when it falls below its ideals. The others don't.
- While you're measuring limits on "freedom" don't forget to include wars and genocide. (Excuse me: "ethnic clensing").
* Liberty wasn't first brought by pioneering Americans using guns. Liberty has a long history, starting with the Magna Carta.
Ah, yes. The Magna Carta. Composed by Dead White Serfowning Males and imposed on an English King by rebellious English Lords, using force of arms.
The Magna Carta was indeed on the path (though much more may have come from "the other branch of the family", via its "shotgun wedding" to the Iriquois Confederacy). But consider what it was: a declaration by a few privileged aristocrats that they had rights enforcible against the King.
Just as those rights have since "trickled down" to lower classes in England, the rights proclaimed by The Founders have since been extended to more and more of the US population.
And that was deliberate. They phrased the rights as universals precicely so that would happen.
* The US is just one of dozens of countries which are founded on liberty. Many of these have been free for centuries longer than the US,
That's an interesting assertion - especially since the governments of nearly all the current countries of Europe date from events surrounding World War II or later, and their current forms of government were heavily influnced by that of the US.
Two exceptions are England and Switzerland, whose governmental forms came through WWII essentially unscathed. But even England's government went from a strong king to a strong parliment well after both the American Revolution and the founding of the US Federal Government.
... gun culture is not a part of these countries,
Switzerland is more gun-happy than the US. Not only are they all all required to have a machinegun and ammo handy, but may farmers have tanks stored in their barns. They often spend their weekends practicing with mortars, or moving the charges around on the bridges leading into the country. "Switzerland doesn't HAVE an army. It IS an army."
Isn't it interesting that, when World War II washed over most of the world, Swtizerland was a little island right in the middle of it, virtually unaffected? I wonder if there's a connection...
and they have a historically BETTER implementation of liberty than the US.
That's a value judgement. I'll pick the US
If you ask "when guns are gone, what is left to protect your freedom", I suggest you read a little background on how these countries have protected freedoms longer and better than the US.
As I say: "Better" is your claim, and the counter-claim takes too long to go into here. "Longer" is impossible, since they are younger.
But isn't it interesting that, twice in just the last century or so, these gun-poor "freer" countries got into such bad trouble that the "Armed retards" of the United States had to come over and die by the thousands to pull their freedom out of the fire?
* After the founding fathers wrote all those wonderful texts expounding liberty, they felt it fit to deny it to the MAJORITY of the US population (blacks+women > 50%). Next time you slavishly quote Jefferson, ask yourself whom you're impressing with a slave-owner's vision of human liberty.
The historical revisionists have been flaming the Founders for a while now. It's convenient, when they want to disassemble a constitutional Right, to deride it as the work of "dead white men who owned slaves". Of course Jefferson composed most of the documents stating the principles, so he gets most of the flamage.
But let's get a few pieces of suppressed history onto the table.
For starters, Jefferson inherited those slaves. Under English law they were part of the estate - "entailed" - so he had to keep 'em around to pass on to HIS heirs. (That's one of the things he was insturmental in changing when the post-revolutionary government was set up.)
Secondly, he tried to free the slaves as part of setting up the post-revolution government. He got voted down. So he settled for freeing the landowners and merchants, regardless of religion, and left those paper timebombs ticking away.
And the rights have since been extended progressively to one group after another. In each case that happened when the group in question proved itself to be a power block that could organize to commit violence and had to be bought off with voting rights. (And I bet your history books didn't tell you about THAT, either.) Most recent example: The 18-21 year age group, during the Vietnam riots.
Third: When in France as ambassador he took his alleged lover (his dead wife's half-black half-sister) with him. Once they reached France she was free. Had she stayed she'd likely have been quite successful. (For starters, given the culture in France at the time she'd have been a very suitable wife for a young aristocrat.) Jefferson tried to talk her into staying, rather than returning with him to Virginia and slavery. But she chose to return.
By the way: Jefferson also founded the Democratic party. Does that mean the Democrats and their politics are also tainted, as the product of a dead white slaveowning male?
* As for the US govt. turning your land into a nightmarish hell, go easy on the coffee, chill out, turn off the US media, and get a sound education.:)
* In the US, 51% of the population owns guns, and 40% of the population can't identify their country on the world map. Armed retards are good for population control, but bad at making logical arguments.
Sounds to me like you're the one whose been paying attention to the US media and skipping the education. B-)
hate to burst your bubble but the govt. isn't armed with muskets anymore. The 2nd amendment was designed at at time when both the govt. and the state militia carried muskets.
And rifles (the "assault weapons" of the time). And cannon. And fully-armed warships - privately owned, in the case of the militia. (And in the case of sea pirates, the "organized crime" of the era, which is why owning fully-armed warships was economically beneficial for private persons not currently engaged in a war.)
Historical illiteracy has been promoted by the governments of the world - including, sometimes, that of the United States and many of the several states.
A case in point is the use of "state militia". They weren't "state militias". They were "militias", generally deriving their authority (such as it was) from the members (just as governments of and within the United States are supposed to derive their authority solely from the consent of the citizens). A lot has changed in the last two centuries, including additional definitions for the word "militia" and the creation of the National Guard.
In any case, by your rationale, if the purpose of weapons is to fight against the untrusted govt., then pray explain why you're saying that the govt. can own nuclear weapons and tanks, but citizens should only own handguns and puny assault rifles.
Now when did chowda say that?
Can you find anything in the Second Amendment that limits it to "handguns and puny assault rifles"? I sure can't.
(I always find it interesting when the anti-gun side of an argument about whether civilians should have a handgun to protect themselves from attack suddenly starts claiming they want nukes. B-) But it's a legitimate issue here, since we've segued to the defend-from-government-gone-bad issue.)
If you are serious about fighting the US govt., I'd recommend you upgrade your arsenal with 10,000 nuclear warheads, a few hundred F-16s, a bunch of U2s, AWACS, and assorted chemical weapons. That's what the "enemy" has, and any person of reasonable IQ wouldn't go fighting them with just simple handguns and rifles.
Just because the opposition (a hypothetical US government-gone-bad) has a particular weapon doesn't mean it's the right tool for the job if you have to fight them. For instance, a nuke or a biological would generally be counter-productive if you actually had to use it: You'd kill more of your own side than the opposition.
Weapons of mass destruction seem to be effective only as a threat, "Mutual Assured Destruction" style, to give psycopaths with power a personal consequence to think about. More precise weapons, in the hands of an adequately large and determined subset of a population, can create the "assured destruction" part of the threat while skipping the "mutual". Just as effective and much more satisfying.
(But one can always speculate whether there's be more Branch Davidians alive if they'd had a nuke or two, along with a delivery system that could reach Washington DC, as a barganing chip. Not that members of an apocalyptic sect would have done such a thing, of course.)
(Speaking of Davidians: I still recall when the morning news showed the fire. My wife's first comment was "They're not white". Turns out she'd guessed right: Less than half of them were caucasian.)
In any case, I'm curious as to why you gun nuts think citizens should be able to defend themselves against the govt., yet disagree about letting all citizens have access to full scale military weaponry (including missiles). thank you.
I don't see "gun nuts" disagreeing about "letting" all citizens have any weaponry they want. The principle is that the government does not have the power to prevent them from arming themselves with weapons of their own choice. If one potential use is as a check on government, how can it make sense to let that government pick the weapons their potential opposition may have? "We get vulcan cannon, at several thousand rounds per minute. You get one-shot-per-trigger-pull with no more than 10-round magazines."
There is considerable disagreement about what weapons they should chose. And there's considerable social pressure to avoid indiscriminate weapons and those that pose a storage hazard, in favor of things with precise control and a track record of being less of a hazard to the neighbors than a government run amok.
After all, despite ample evidence that armed citizens drastically reduce crime victimization, harm from government misbehavior, and risk of death from war, not all of the neighbors agree that armed civilians are a net benefit. The occasional personal nuke or cache of mutant plague agent, in the hands of someone with different beliefs (both political and religious) would no doubt worry them further. This would lead to more political pressure to disarm the "religious nuts with nukes", after which they'd work their way down through weapons useful against tyrants to the pocket pistol of every woman who'd rather "take back the night" than cower at home.
As with free speech, the technology may change but the principle is timeless.
> Can you fire at someone when your life or another life is not in danger?
Depends on the jurisdiction. In most states the rule is some variant on "You can fire only when 'a reasonable and prudent man' in your situation would believe he was in danger to life or limb." So you can usually defend when attacked, but must stop when the attack is broken off.
In some states (notably, Texas) you can fire to stop, for instance, a thief making off with your property under certain circumstances. In others you must retreat if possible when attacked - but generally not when in your own home. (One exception is Maryland, where you must retreat even in your own home.) In at least one (Oregon, due to a court interpretation), a woman attacked in her home doesn't have to stop shooting, say, when the housebreaker retreats toward his car - because he might be going for a gun.
Hell yeah Just a few years ago some (Texan?) shot to death a kid knocking at his door late at night.
To paraphrase the defence: "It was dark out and I was scared!"
If I remember, it was a exchange student from Asia, who just happened to knock on the wrong house. Not understanding or speaking English when challenged by a guy with a gun didn't help.
Let's get this straight. (Here's how I remember the story. But I got it from accounts of the trial, so I might have a detail or two off...)
The "kid" was teenager from Japan. He was about maximum-violence "gangsta" age. He was an exchange student, so he was moderately clueless about the local customs. Like many teenagers in/from Japan at the time he had a bad habit: He would suddenly run at people, yelling and making threatening gestures, then take a picture of their expressions of fear. (A disarmed society is NOT a polite society!)
It was Halloween. It was after dark. The "kid" and another teenage boy from his host's household showed up on the doorstep of a house and tried the door. When confronted, they claimed they were trying to find a party and gave a different address. They were told they were at the wrong address and to go away.
A few minutes later the householder was disturbed again: They were back, trying the door of the garage. The wife, understandably agitated, called the husband, who confronted them again.
They started to go again. But after a few steps the Japanese student suddenly turned, brandished a small black object, and ran roaring at the householder.
Oops!
The 'killer' got off scott free.
The killer (NOT murderer!) did indeed get off scott free (and rightly so.) Except, of course, for the expense and risk and stress of the trial. And the stress, for himself and his family, of having killed the "kid". And the stress from the liberal press having a field day with him.
Not to mention the orchestrated letter campaign from people in Japan, calling for the US to ban guns. (I wonder what they'd think of an orchestrated letter campaign in the US calling for Japan to ban knives - especially deadly assault katanas?)
One thing much of the rest of the world doesn't get about the United States: It was SUPPOSED to be a nation of free, armed people. (Think "nation of Samuari", though that isn't QUITE the right image. "Nation of Ronin" might be closer.) At this point, over half the households have at least one gun, so we're closer to that ideal than its opposite.
Now what would happen to a teenager in Japan who twice made like he was breaking into a Samurai's house, was twice told to leave by the alerted Samurai, who then suddenly roared and charged...
You've got to be careful doing that type of shit though. A few years back here in Ontario there were a COUPLE incidents of swat teams getting the wrong address and going in for bear.
Happens here, too.
BATF are big offenders, with a penchant for raiding at 4AM (to maximize the raidees' confusion), in black ski masks, breaking down doors. (One little old lady blew one away when they got the address wrong. She got off scott free, too.)
Another problem is police agencies after their cut of RICO gold. Like the ones who spotted a woman buying groceries with hundred-dollar bills. They investigated, and found she was the new wife of a fellow with a VERY large estate near Los Angeles, which some government agencies had been trying for years to get him to sell, without success. Someone made a crack about him being rich with drug money.
So they got together a multi-department task force and went after him. They managed to kill him in the process. No drugs were found.
Turns out they were honeymooning, and the hundred-dollar bills were from the weding present. As for being rich from "drug money", they sure were. The guy they blew away was named "Sandoz". He was the heir to the family fortune from the (completely legal) drug company of the same name.
Another one: The Gypsy Jokers bicycle gang was living in a house in a reasonably quiet neighborhood in Oregon. The cops decided to raid them. They also decided to "serve the warrant" by breaking down the door, guns out, in ski masks and black. The Jokers thought they were under attack by a rival gang and fought, killing at least one policeman.
The Jokers duly "got off". The judge agreed with them that they had good reason to believe, given the behavior of the police, that they were under attack by a rival gang and at risk to life or limb.
But don't expect such enlightened treatment in, say, Santa Clara, California. (I'll save THOSE stories for another time.)
One big caveat: If you're raided in the night and you blow one away, your mileage may vary, BIG time. (Remember Waco!)
if [Clinton] had been [convicted of perjuy], it would have been on a non-subject, and on a question he should never have been asked
Wrong.
Clinton's alleged perjury was not just a matter of lying in response to an immaterial question about his sexual conduct. (And nobody really cares if he slept with someone not his wife, or has a thing for redheads, amputees, or sheep, none of which would be an impeachable offense.)
It was about his testimony in a sexual harrassment lawsuit, where such perjury would constitute an obstruction of justice, denying a victim her fair trial. That IS an impeachable offense - especially when committed by someone whose position includes being "the chief law enforcement officer of the land".
As a result of his (allegedly?) getting away with it, the sexual harrassment laws of the United States have now become effectively moot. Offenders now use the "Clinton defense" and generally get off.
MRAM has the disadvantage that it can be erased by a strong magnetic field.
Amorphous silicon RAM works by melting the switch element and refreezing it, either so it crystalizes and is very conductive (but still resistive enough that you can remelt it) or becomes glassy and very resistive (but with a "breakover" voltage that lets you drive current into it to remelt it). Selection is by the length of time the write current is on, and thus the amount of heat deposited in the meltable bit.
Magnetic fields won't touch it. EMP strong enough to affect it will fry the whole box anyhow. Ditto heat.
Write time is in single-digit nanoseconds. Read is as fast as ROM.
(But will it ever come to market? Same question for MRAM.)
manager: Gee, Michel, IBM is getting a lot of press for pushing this Linux thing.
Dell: Nah, Linux sux
manager: yes, but it gets a lot of coverage lately. We should really come up with something.
Dell: Nah, Linux sux.
manager: Michael, you will [be?] slashdoted.
Dell: Darn, you are convicing. Call our PR department...
Interesting point...
Are there any Windows-related news media that have such a large following that mere mention of a URL will bring down a server? I don't THINK so... (Otherwise it would be called "WinNewsing" or some such rather than "slashdotting".)
So perhaps this can be turned to Linux's advantage...
"Look, guys. There are so many Linux fans on this one news board that just the mention of your site there will bring so many hits that you'll think you're under a DOS attack. Don't you think there might be a market for a linux port of your ?"
(Yes, I know there's some *BSD, BeOS, and Mac fans here too. But I still think it's a fair characterization.)
[] distribute the AOL client with their own [] Linux [distro] on those [] CDs [.] just boot from the CD-ROM and voila! Instant AOL.
Considering that Linux doesn't support many winmodems, that might not go over very well...
If there's one company with enough pull go get the Winmodem manufacturers to do a Linux driver, or at least release enough info on the chips, it's AOL.
The internet is an entire world. It was constructed primarily by adults, primarily for adults.
Just like the non-electronic world, it has the equivalent of libraries, newspapers, and shopping malls. And also like the non-electronic world it has its bars, X-rated theaters, and red-light districts.
When children go out into this virtual world, the ways available to protect them are limited:
- They can be accompanied by adults.
- They can be restricted to areas known to be safe.
And that's about it.
Some people have tried to provide a robot companion to cover their eyes when they come to the seamier side of town. But robots are still too dumb. They often cover the eyes when they shouldn't, and don't cover them when they should. (And how can you expect a poor robot to figure out what is "improper" for a child when adults can't agree on that and courts can't define it?)
Some people have tried to remove from the adults' virtual world anything that is "unsuitable" for children, just as they have tried this with the physical world, throughout history. The courts stopped them - and rightly so. (And even if the courts hadn't stopped them, they'd no doubt have as much success as the book-burners of the past.) Just as with the physical world, creating a padded-nursery world for children ruins the world for adults.
Restricting children's access to known safe places restricts them to the tiny space that has been checked. "Don't cross the street!" works - for some value of works. But it eliminates the park, and Disneyland, and Africa,...
So the only real choice for a child's guardian is to escort the child, or hire a babysitter, until the child can be trusted to wander on his own.
Your business is creating a door into the virtual world. So your decision-makers have to decide: Are they going to let children wander freely through that door? Are they going to demand permissions from their guardians to pass through alone? Are they going to demand the guardians accompany them or hire a baby sitter to do so? Are they going to provide the (necessarily defective) robot? Are they going to restrict the children (and perhaps everyone else) to the local block? Or are they going to bar children entirely?
Now that the issue of record companies stealing the rights of musicians in perpetuity have received such a public airing, perhaps new talent has been avoiding signing with RIAA companies - insisting on contract modifications or going with self-publishing (especially via online techniques).
Calling for a reversal is a freebie for RIAA anyhow. The law is in place, so the call for reversing it (especially if they DON'T fund their lobbiests to pushe it the way they did the original change) is just noise.
There are applications where throughput is more important than a significant amount of latency.
An example is context-switched highly-parallel processing, where the number of crunches per second on each piece is relatively low and fixed. You pipeline and context-switch, and get multiple virtual processors from one set of gates and a RAM. The higher your bandwidth the more virtual processors you get. This is important in many applications. Sometimes space for the box is more expensive than the box itself. Sometimes the cost per virtual processor is critical.
But some problems don't parallelize well. And even for those that do, parallizing them can be a real bitch. So your desktop or laptop (which tends to be doing only one or a few crunch-intensive things at a time) is organized to stick with a task for a significant time, then hop to another. RAMBUS isn't a match for that.
And it looks like it has some other kisses-of-death even for interleaved context-switched stuff. Oh, well...
Interestingly, if Harris were to somehow win this one it would probably be worse for them than if they lost it.
With Harris removed from the RBL database by injunction after all that publicity, a significant number of sysadmins at major ISPs are likely to put them in their individual blackhole lists or configuration files. This will disrupt their mail about as badly as the RBL would.
But with Harris in the RBL they can easily get out again. All they have to do is convince MAPS they've cleaned up their act. With Harris in individual blackhole lists at a hundred or a thousand ISPs, getting out is NOT automatic, or easy.
First, they'd have to get the word out to ALL those sysadmins and convince EACH of them to do some extra work. As a former unrepentant spammer who went so far as to sue to block MAPS, forcing those sysadmins to do extra work already, they'll have little sympathy among even those sysadmins who DO get the word. So some won't pull them out, and their mail will continue to be disrupted.
Then they'll have to hunt down all the disruptions and talk to all those remaining ISPs. And some still might not pull them out. The next step is back to court for injunctions on those remaining ISPs - probably repeatedly as more are identified. And to prevail they'd have to prove that the ISPs have an obligation to forward their mail. Even if that succeeds their mail could be disrupted for years.
Additionally, with the source available it could be:
- ported to a more secure operating system.
- examined for flaws.
- easily patched if any security bugs are detected.
- fixed if it has a bug that interferes with an ISP's systems.
And with the configuration done by the ISP the ISP can look out for its subscribers' interests by refusing to tap anyone without the presentation of the appropriate court order. The FBI has a poor track record in that regard.
ISP configuration of software on an ISP-constructed platform (in an ISP-supplied locked cage locked cage) using ISP-tweaked software has no more problems for evidence custody tracking than the ISP-provided signals to an FBI-operated box. (Especially one that is remotely accessable and reconfigurable.) The ISP might have to provide an expert witness to describe their tweaks. But the evidentiary issues are mainly that the evidence isn't forged or altered, not that the sampling filter is incorrect.
the LASER was invented in 1949 and Star Trek first went on the air September of 1966.
... so Roddenbury called his beam weapons "phasers" to sound vaugely like "LASERs" but avoid people saying "But LASERs don't work like THAT!".
Did you ever notice that Star Trek's ship-mounted phasers and photon torpedos behaved JUST like the torpedo and beam weapons in the original PDP-1 spacewar game (right down to the blinking intensity of the phasers' beams in some of the early shows' special effects)?
What can a free software project do about this? Close the mailing lists or newsgroups to the media? Flame/sue the people who screw up? What?
First: You can't stop anybody from creating a "bag on the side of your project" to attempt adding some functionality as a patch. (i.e. embedding Microsoft Office functionality in your project's product)
The best you can do (if you have that much centralized control) is not accept their patches into your project's mainline and not warp your design to provide hooks to support them (unless such hooks look like a good way to support something else specific or as a general support hook).
Second: It's the media. Unless they've libeled you all you can do is ridicule them for their errors (and the people who believed them for paying attention to such a ludicruous story).
If a media outlet does such stuff often enough, it eventually lowers their credibility as a source, placing them at a competitive disadvantage. But eventually is a long time. For now the best you can hope for meanwhile is the equivalent of a page-9 retraction of their page-1 feature - which won't stop the flames at you.
I would [] start writing in english. Once I was done [] I took the text, pasted it into the existing source code and started translating it to code.
I've met programmers who do this as a general technique for coding. It works for code generation but can be hard to debug.
The solution is to add a simple step. After you write it in English, paste it in TWICE. Then turn the first pasteup into comments and convert the second.
Shazam! DOCUMENTED code!
And if you ever have to make a mod to that part, and you start suffering from coder's block, start switching your attention between the comments and the code.
Most of the solutions to blocking that I know of fall into two variations of one category: Stop concentrating on the subject, for a short or a long time. (Get rest. Do something unrelated. Do something related but different. Radically change your schedule.) This thread leads to more variants of the theme:
- Write in English and convert. (Change an element of your coding style.)
- Swtich focus between comments and code. (Do something related but different.) Leads to:
- Compare the code to the comments, analyze aspects of the differences and/or check for bugs. (Again, do something related but different.)
Slashdot Mirror
Cryonic suspension includes reducing freezing damage by injecting large amounts of ice-crystal inhibiting chemicals. (Think "antifreeze".) Glycerol is one that is popular.
But explicit cryonic research tends to be done on a shoestring - because it isn't all that popular, and many of the suspendees need to put the resources they allocated for it into funding the suspension.
So (like most technologies) cryonics tries to get as much of a boost as it can from research done for other purposes.
This skin-transparency research has obvious medical applications, and the researchers are already talking about testing the toxicity of glycerol. This will no doubt lead to a lot of research into that, and a search for other, less toxic, chemicals that can infiltrate cells and smooth the refractive index to increase transparency.
Some of these are likely to be good candidates for cryonic preservatve agents, and thus this research should lead lower-damage preservatives, both for tissue banks and for the cryonic life-extension movement.
When K&R, Thompson, and Pike were originally hacking on Unix at Bell Labs they had actually been assigned to write a word processor for the legal department. The PHBs didn't want them to be working on an OS.
Now the Unix way was to push as much out of the kernel into application space as possible. So the command interpreter (shell) was a user program, as were a number of other things that up until then were typically built into the OS.
And whenever the PHBs would grump at them for spending time on an OS instead of doing their assigned work they could point at this stuff and say "Look! It's not an OS. It doesn't do X, Y, and Z!"
B-)
(Of course now it does do X. But that's another era. B-) )
(I'll get to "Linux for Dummies" in a moment...)
/proc filesystem, pulling out cards and reading the numbers on the chips, and doing a bunch of web and netnews searches, I was able to identify the chip on the ethernet controller.
My biggest gripe about Red Hat is their inadequate documentation and support.
IMHO, an install is not complete until you can/have:
- Gotten all the ordinary peripherals working.
- Tuned the graphic interface into comfortable usability.
- Connected to your ISP or gotten up on your LAN, as applicable.
- Rebuilt the equivalent of the installed kernel from source. ("Hello, kernel build world!\n")
- Downloaded and installed any post-release patches.
The documentation should walk you through all of that, cookbook style. "Type this. Push that button. Insert this disk." And if it doesn't, and you've paid for "instalation support", the company should bloody well SUPPORT you until you get to the equivalent point. (And cookbook patch install should be available no later than the first set of patches.)
I've been using Unix for decades, and hacked Linux drivers on a Cobalt Qube and some company Intel boxes a few years back, so I'm not a complete newbie.
But last winter I decided to abandon "My Three Suns" and Solaris, and switch my home net to a new OS for the millenium. (No more closed source and closed hardware designs for me!)
So I bought my first Intel-based machine since the 8080. I picked Linux over *BSD due to the larger developer base. And I shelled out the premium for a Red Hat distribution, mainly because it promised install support.
I'd expected problems with the Winmodem. But you can imagine my annoyance when:
- The ethernet card didn't talk to the LAN.
- There was no documentation (readily findable) that would tell how to adjust the resolution of the video driver (so I could take advantage of my shiny new multi-megapixel monitor).
- There was no documentation on how to build a kernel (in the package OR on the web site).
- Attempts to build the kernel, from the supplied sources, using what I believed to be the normal approach, crashed. ("make boot" says: "System is too big. Try using bzImage or modules.", making me suspect the supplied sources and their READMEs don't match the distribution build.)
- Red Hat considered their prepaid support committment to end once you had "installed" sufficiently that you could boot the machine and log in. They refused to help with a kernel build. They had no clue about the ethernet card (even after I identified it for them). "Configuring a kernel is beyond install. If kernel build is necessary to drive the card it's an unsupported card."
- Their web site (accessable through another computer, thank goodness!) was about as helpful as their phone support.
So I had to hack it.
- By looking through the
- Reading the source showed that the corresponding driver recognized that the particular model of the ethernet chip also understood homenet (think 1-megabit LAN on your home phone lines), and was hardcoded to use ONLY that mode whan that model chip was installed.
- Patching the driver to use the chip only in ethernet mode, hand-compiling the modified driver, substituting it for the module loaded by the modload distribution kernel, got me on the LAN.
Then I hacked my old sendmail configuration into the puppy, debugged THAT, and had everything working a few hours before local midnight. And missed the newyears party.
But that didn't deal with any of the other problems - like the sound card, the monitor resolution, or getting to where I could rebuild the kernel and hack drivers for new toys. (Not to mention the Winmodem, of course.) My brand-new multi-kilobuck box was just barely up and limping. (Eight months later I moved the printer to the Red Hat box and discovered that the printer driver module wasn't loaded - because they'd left a line out of a config file - and they STILL didn't have anything about it on their web site.)
Can you IMAGINE a WinTel user, testing the waters on Linux, in this situation?
And it's not like this was TOTALLY oddball hardware. It was a brand-shiny-new, top-of-the-line, Compaq Presario Athlon box. (But not SO new it should have been unsupported.) Compaq DOES like to do things their own way. But they're one of the biggest brands, and at the time they'd supposedly had an alliance with Red Hat for months.
Needless to say, I was PISSED at Red Hat. I'd just gotten out of the hospital for pneumonia, and this was NOT how I'd intended to spend all that was left of my winter holiday.
I do have a day job, guys! With my limited spare time chewed up by this bogosity I still, after 8 months, haven't had a chance to play with drivers for new toys, or even do a really proper job of configuring the box for everyday use.
And now I see that the "Linux for Dummies" books cover kernel build for the SuSE and Caldera distributions, but not for Red Hat. At first I was ticked off all over again, but then I began to wonder... Do I detect a pattern? Maybe THEY had similar problems with lack of kernel build support for Red Hat, and decided to skip it.
Needless to say, absent a major housecleaning in Red Hat's documentation and support departments, my next upgrade won't be to another Red Hat distribution.
Or maybe it will even be to a BSD.
I don't believe that's entirely the case. You can download info from LOC with any Z39.51 client... I've done it. And I know that many libraries subscribe to their cataloging service and use their own OPACs.
But maybe the subscription service is the deal you're talking about....
Or maybe my info is out of date.
I understand the Library of Congress made a deal with a database company, which now has exclusive rights (and a compilation copyright?) to distribute the catalog information in electronic form.
Want it? Buy it from them. Complete with their software and a limited license.
I'll try to get the person I heard flaming about this ("Flagrant misappropriation of public records/product of tax dollars", etc.) to post with the details and whether it's still current.
The patent office aldo cut a similar deal at one point. It was still in effect as of maybe four years ago (when I interviewed at what turned out to be the database company that had the USPTO's sweatheart deal).
This reminds me of something more than 20 years back: Datapoint's "ArcLight", for their Arcnet.
Arcnet was a token-ring based network with a broadcast topology. Cut the connection between two parts and it immediately reconfigures into two nets. Plug it back in and it reconfigures into a single net.
Ran on 8080-based terminals.
To get between buildings they used a gadget with an infrared laser diode (which had just come out) and a photodiode - each behind a lens about 6 inches in diameter. The device looked somewat like a weatherproof half-height-full-width monitor case with a little bit of a lightshade and the screen replaced by a couple of big glass eyes.
In a city where most buildings weren't skyscrapers (so a little defocussing could deal with building sway and clear-air turbulence without too much energy loss and interference acceptance), clouds and fog were rare, and at a time when high-speed data lines were 300 baud, it was great. A LAN that spanned multiple buildings. If the fog rolled in the network partitioned until it went away (no data between the head office and the branch for a couple hours, but the nets WITHIN the buildings were still up. Birds were handled by retransmissions that were part of the normal protocol.
Something similar would be easy with IP these days: Run a low speed (56k, T1, whatever) between the buildings AND put up the high-speed link. On foggy days your bandwidth drops but your connection is still there. IP also understands flakey connections and rerouting around them, and TCP understands using retransmission to make a reliable connection over unreliable links.
The purchasers of bandwidth understand:
- "Fiber" to mean very fast data sent via light (in something called "fibers" or "fiber optics" or something like that...)
- "Wireless" to mean signals sent between two stations without any hardware spanning the distance. (Just install a box at each end and maybe an antennaish thing on the roof.)
So "wireless fiber" produces the idea of sending high-speed data via light between two sites with gadgets on the roof without anything but open space in between them.
Even if the words don't really make sense when you look at them closely.
The US has the worst crime record in the developed world. And govt. misbehavior (ask your local trigger happy cop for details).
Actually, it doesn't.
Crime (both commission and victimization) among US residents of European descent in the US is lower than in their countries of origin. Ditto among US residents of African descent. Ditto among US residents of Japanese descent, etc.
Unlike the rest of the "developed world" the US has a very diverse population, and doesn't insist that they stay separated or leave their cultures entirely behind.
But among those that do assimilate and reach "middle class" income, the crime rate drops, not just below that of their ancestrial country, but to that of US residents of white European descent - below that of, for instance, England.
>(I wonder what they'd think of an orchestrated letter campaign in the US calling
>for Japan to ban knives - especially deadly assault katanas?)
[] my understanding is that you're 50 years too late - swordmaking has been banned in Japan since WW2.
Please note that I was referring to possession, not manufacture, and knives, not just swords.
You'll notice that most of the murders in Japan are committed with knives or scissors. And that's true regardless of whether you include those that are counted as suicides in Japan but would be counted as the "murder" part of a "murder-suicide" in the US.
Yes I did mention katanas. And unless I'm mistaken the manufacturing ban you refer to was imposed by the US occupation at the end of WWII - as part of an attempt to break the aristocracy responsible for getting them into a war with the US while attempting to conquer the oriental portion of the world.
But the existing historical weapons can still be possessed. And recovering family heirlooms from WWII veterans who took them as souvenirs is quite the hot button. That's why I mentioned them - in the hope that it might help some readers to understand the enormity of the insult committed by the Japanese letter-writers who called for gun bans in the US.
By the way: In my opinion the US military may have made a mistake when, in imposing an edited version of the US system on Japan, they deleted the Second Amendment. In the short run it may have been necessary for the safety of the occupying troops. (Between WWI and WWII the Japanese military had been in control of the education of the population, to bad effect.) But a more effective way to break the aristocracy and empower the general populace would have been to dismantle the arms bans on the general population, erasing the distinction between the aristocracy and the pesants.
So the occupation actually succeeded in instilling the European, rather than the US, governmental model. To this day, in Japan, "the nail that stands out will be hammered down" rather than "the squeaky wheel gets the grease".
* If guns ensure liberty, why does the US have the highest gun ownership and the worst human rights record in the developed world?
... gun culture is not a part of these countries,
:)
The US has neither. Switzerland, for instance, beats it in gun ownership/access, by a considerable margin.
As for human rights records, the US is actually near the top. Consider: Bosnia, South Africa, the East Bank, the former Soviet Union, China, Biafra, Nazi Germany, East Germany. I could go on for pages - or just get a list of the countries of both now and the last two centuries and maybe edit out a few.
Nazi Germany is a case in point: At the time the US had its own version of that sort of politically powerful racists, in the form of the Ku Klux Klan. They had control of something near half the state governments at the time and a large chunk of the county and city governments as well. But they lost. And while the history books talk of congress and freedom rides, my wife will be happy to tell you about how her family came through: By holding them off with guns in at least two generations.
Yes I know you specified the "developed world". And I can show you how the US is near the top there, too. But it would take a while.
Instead I'll make three points:
- The US is where most of these ideals of freedom were first elucidated in a form accessable to European-derived culture. It is where people born into something less than a free society fought a war and founded a government dedicated to increasing freedom - a process that continues to this day.
- The US has a free press, which criticises it when it falls below its ideals. The others don't.
- While you're measuring limits on "freedom" don't forget to include wars and genocide. (Excuse me: "ethnic clensing").
* Liberty wasn't first brought by pioneering Americans using guns. Liberty has a long history, starting with the Magna Carta.
Ah, yes. The Magna Carta. Composed by Dead White Serfowning Males and imposed on an English King by rebellious English Lords, using force of arms.
The Magna Carta was indeed on the path (though much more may have come from "the other branch of the family", via its "shotgun wedding" to the Iriquois Confederacy). But consider what it was: a declaration by a few privileged aristocrats that they had rights enforcible against the King.
Just as those rights have since "trickled down" to lower classes in England, the rights proclaimed by The Founders have since been extended to more and more of the US population.
And that was deliberate. They phrased the rights as universals precicely so that would happen.
* The US is just one of dozens of countries which are founded on liberty. Many of these have been free for centuries longer than the US,
That's an interesting assertion - especially since the governments of nearly all the current countries of Europe date from events surrounding World War II or later, and their current forms of government were heavily influnced by that of the US.
Two exceptions are England and Switzerland, whose governmental forms came through WWII essentially unscathed. But even England's government went from a strong king to a strong parliment well after both the American Revolution and the founding of the US Federal Government.
Switzerland is more gun-happy than the US. Not only are they all all required to have a machinegun and ammo handy, but may farmers have tanks stored in their barns. They often spend their weekends practicing with mortars, or moving the charges around on the bridges leading into the country. "Switzerland doesn't HAVE an army. It IS an army."
Isn't it interesting that, when World War II washed over most of the world, Swtizerland was a little island right in the middle of it, virtually unaffected? I wonder if there's a connection...
and they have a historically BETTER implementation of liberty than the US.
That's a value judgement. I'll pick the US
If you ask "when guns are gone, what is left to protect your freedom", I suggest you read a little background on how these countries have protected freedoms longer and better than the US.
As I say: "Better" is your claim, and the counter-claim takes too long to go into here. "Longer" is impossible, since they are younger.
But isn't it interesting that, twice in just the last century or so, these gun-poor "freer" countries got into such bad trouble that the "Armed retards" of the United States had to come over and die by the thousands to pull their freedom out of the fire?
* After the founding fathers wrote all those wonderful texts expounding liberty, they felt it fit to deny it to the MAJORITY of the US population (blacks+women > 50%). Next time you slavishly quote Jefferson, ask yourself whom you're impressing with a slave-owner's vision of human liberty.
The historical revisionists have been flaming the Founders for a while now. It's convenient, when they want to disassemble a constitutional Right, to deride it as the work of "dead white men who owned slaves". Of course Jefferson composed most of the documents stating the principles, so he gets most of the flamage.
But let's get a few pieces of suppressed history onto the table.
For starters, Jefferson inherited those slaves. Under English law they were part of the estate - "entailed" - so he had to keep 'em around to pass on to HIS heirs. (That's one of the things he was insturmental in changing when the post-revolutionary government was set up.)
Secondly, he tried to free the slaves as part of setting up the post-revolution government. He got voted down. So he settled for freeing the landowners and merchants, regardless of religion, and left those paper timebombs ticking away.
And the rights have since been extended progressively to one group after another. In each case that happened when the group in question proved itself to be a power block that could organize to commit violence and had to be bought off with voting rights. (And I bet your history books didn't tell you about THAT, either.) Most recent example: The 18-21 year age group, during the Vietnam riots.
Third: When in France as ambassador he took his alleged lover (his dead wife's half-black half-sister) with him. Once they reached France she was free. Had she stayed she'd likely have been quite successful. (For starters, given the culture in France at the time she'd have been a very suitable wife for a young aristocrat.) Jefferson tried to talk her into staying, rather than returning with him to Virginia and slavery. But she chose to return.
By the way: Jefferson also founded the Democratic party. Does that mean the Democrats and their politics are also tainted, as the product of a dead white slaveowning male?
* As for the US govt. turning your land into a nightmarish hell, go easy on the coffee, chill out, turn off the US media, and get a sound education.
* In the US, 51% of the population owns guns, and 40% of the population can't identify their country on the world map. Armed retards are good for population control, but bad at making logical arguments.
Sounds to me like you're the one whose been paying attention to the US media and skipping the education. B-)
hate to burst your bubble but the govt. isn't armed with muskets anymore. The 2nd amendment was designed at at time when both the govt. and the state militia carried muskets.
And rifles (the "assault weapons" of the time). And cannon. And fully-armed warships - privately owned, in the case of the militia. (And in the case of sea pirates, the "organized crime" of the era, which is why owning fully-armed warships was economically beneficial for private persons not currently engaged in a war.)
Historical illiteracy has been promoted by the governments of the world - including, sometimes, that of the United States and many of the several states.
A case in point is the use of "state militia". They weren't "state militias". They were "militias", generally deriving their authority (such as it was) from the members (just as governments of and within the United States are supposed to derive their authority solely from the consent of the citizens). A lot has changed in the last two centuries, including additional definitions for the word "militia" and the creation of the National Guard.
In any case, by your rationale, if the purpose of weapons is to fight against the untrusted govt., then pray explain why you're saying that the govt. can own nuclear weapons and tanks, but citizens should only own handguns and puny assault rifles.
Now when did chowda say that?
Can you find anything in the Second Amendment that limits it to "handguns and puny assault rifles"? I sure can't.
(I always find it interesting when the anti-gun side of an argument about whether civilians should have a handgun to protect themselves from attack suddenly starts claiming they want nukes. B-) But it's a legitimate issue here, since we've segued to the defend-from-government-gone-bad issue.)
If you are serious about fighting the US govt., I'd recommend you upgrade your arsenal with 10,000 nuclear warheads, a few hundred F-16s, a bunch of U2s, AWACS, and assorted chemical weapons. That's what the "enemy" has, and any person of reasonable IQ wouldn't go fighting them with just simple handguns and rifles.
Just because the opposition (a hypothetical US government-gone-bad) has a particular weapon doesn't mean it's the right tool for the job if you have to fight them. For instance, a nuke or a biological would generally be counter-productive if you actually had to use it: You'd kill more of your own side than the opposition.
Weapons of mass destruction seem to be effective only as a threat, "Mutual Assured Destruction" style, to give psycopaths with power a personal consequence to think about. More precise weapons, in the hands of an adequately large and determined subset of a population, can create the "assured destruction" part of the threat while skipping the "mutual". Just as effective and much more satisfying.
(But one can always speculate whether there's be more Branch Davidians alive if they'd had a nuke or two, along with a delivery system that could reach Washington DC, as a barganing chip. Not that members of an apocalyptic sect would have done such a thing, of course.)
(Speaking of Davidians: I still recall when the morning news showed the fire. My wife's first comment was "They're not white". Turns out she'd guessed right: Less than half of them were caucasian.)
In any case, I'm curious as to why you gun nuts think citizens should be able to defend themselves against the govt., yet disagree about letting all citizens have access to full scale military weaponry (including missiles). thank you.
I don't see "gun nuts" disagreeing about "letting" all citizens have any weaponry they want. The principle is that the government does not have the power to prevent them from arming themselves with weapons of their own choice. If one potential use is as a check on government, how can it make sense to let that government pick the weapons their potential opposition may have? "We get vulcan cannon, at several thousand rounds per minute. You get one-shot-per-trigger-pull with no more than 10-round magazines."
There is considerable disagreement about what weapons they should chose. And there's considerable social pressure to avoid indiscriminate weapons and those that pose a storage hazard, in favor of things with precise control and a track record of being less of a hazard to the neighbors than a government run amok.
After all, despite ample evidence that armed citizens drastically reduce crime victimization, harm from government misbehavior, and risk of death from war, not all of the neighbors agree that armed civilians are a net benefit. The occasional personal nuke or cache of mutant plague agent, in the hands of someone with different beliefs (both political and religious) would no doubt worry them further. This would lead to more political pressure to disarm the "religious nuts with nukes", after which they'd work their way down through weapons useful against tyrants to the pocket pistol of every woman who'd rather "take back the night" than cower at home.
As with free speech, the technology may change but the principle is timeless.
> Can you fire at someone when your life or another life is not in danger?
Depends on the jurisdiction. In most states the rule is some variant on "You can fire only when 'a reasonable and prudent man' in your situation would believe he was in danger to life or limb." So you can usually defend when attacked, but must stop when the attack is broken off.
In some states (notably, Texas) you can fire to stop, for instance, a thief making off with your property under certain circumstances. In others you must retreat if possible when attacked - but generally not when in your own home. (One exception is Maryland, where you must retreat even in your own home.) In at least one (Oregon, due to a court interpretation), a woman attacked in her home doesn't have to stop shooting, say, when the housebreaker retreats toward his car - because he might be going for a gun.
Hell yeah Just a few years ago some (Texan?) shot to death a kid knocking at his door late at night.
To paraphrase the defence: "It was dark out and I was scared!"
If I remember, it was a exchange student from Asia, who just happened to knock on the wrong house. Not understanding or speaking English when challenged by a guy with a gun didn't help.
Let's get this straight. (Here's how I remember the story. But I got it from accounts of the trial, so I might have a detail or two off...)
The "kid" was teenager from Japan. He was about maximum-violence "gangsta" age. He was an exchange student, so he was moderately clueless about the local customs. Like many teenagers in/from Japan at the time he had a bad habit: He would suddenly run at people, yelling and making threatening gestures, then take a picture of their expressions of fear. (A disarmed society is NOT a polite society!)
It was Halloween. It was after dark. The "kid" and another teenage boy from his host's household showed up on the doorstep of a house and tried the door. When confronted, they claimed they were trying to find a party and gave a different address. They were told they were at the wrong address and to go away.
A few minutes later the householder was disturbed again: They were back, trying the door of the garage. The wife, understandably agitated, called the husband, who confronted them again.
They started to go again. But after a few steps the Japanese student suddenly turned, brandished a small black object, and ran roaring at the householder.
Oops!
The 'killer' got off scott free.
The killer (NOT murderer!) did indeed get off scott free (and rightly so.) Except, of course, for the expense and risk and stress of the trial. And the stress, for himself and his family, of having killed the "kid". And the stress from the liberal press having a field day with him.
Not to mention the orchestrated letter campaign from people in Japan, calling for the US to ban guns. (I wonder what they'd think of an orchestrated letter campaign in the US calling for Japan to ban knives - especially deadly assault katanas?)
One thing much of the rest of the world doesn't get about the United States: It was SUPPOSED to be a nation of free, armed people. (Think "nation of Samuari", though that isn't QUITE the right image. "Nation of Ronin" might be closer.) At this point, over half the households have at least one gun, so we're closer to that ideal than its opposite.
Now what would happen to a teenager in Japan who twice made like he was breaking into a Samurai's house, was twice told to leave by the alerted Samurai, who then suddenly roared and charged...
You've got to be careful doing that type of shit though. A few years back here in Ontario there were a COUPLE incidents of swat teams getting the wrong address and going in for bear.
Happens here, too.
BATF are big offenders, with a penchant for raiding at 4AM (to maximize the raidees' confusion), in black ski masks, breaking down doors. (One little old lady blew one away when they got the address wrong. She got off scott free, too.)
Another problem is police agencies after their cut of RICO gold. Like the ones who spotted a woman buying groceries with hundred-dollar bills. They investigated, and found she was the new wife of a fellow with a VERY large estate near Los Angeles, which some government agencies had been trying for years to get him to sell, without success. Someone made a crack about him being rich with drug money.
So they got together a multi-department task force and went after him. They managed to kill him in the process. No drugs were found.
Turns out they were honeymooning, and the hundred-dollar bills were from the weding present. As for being rich from "drug money", they sure were. The guy they blew away was named "Sandoz". He was the heir to the family fortune from the (completely legal) drug company of the same name.
Another one: The Gypsy Jokers bicycle gang was living in a house in a reasonably quiet neighborhood in Oregon. The cops decided to raid them. They also decided to "serve the warrant" by breaking down the door, guns out, in ski masks and black. The Jokers thought they were under attack by a rival gang and fought, killing at least one policeman.
The Jokers duly "got off". The judge agreed with them that they had good reason to believe, given the behavior of the police, that they were under attack by a rival gang and at risk to life or limb.
But don't expect such enlightened treatment in, say, Santa Clara, California. (I'll save THOSE stories for another time.)
One big caveat: If you're raided in the night and you blow one away, your mileage may vary, BIG time. (Remember Waco!)
if [Clinton] had been [convicted of perjuy], it would have been on a non-subject, and on a question he should never have been asked
Wrong.
Clinton's alleged perjury was not just a matter of lying in response to an immaterial question about his sexual conduct. (And nobody really cares if he slept with someone not his wife, or has a thing for redheads, amputees, or sheep, none of which would be an impeachable offense.)
It was about his testimony in a sexual harrassment lawsuit, where such perjury would constitute an obstruction of justice, denying a victim her fair trial. That IS an impeachable offense - especially when committed by someone whose position includes being "the chief law enforcement officer of the land".
As a result of his (allegedly?) getting away with it, the sexual harrassment laws of the United States have now become effectively moot. Offenders now use the "Clinton defense" and generally get off.
MRAM has the disadvantage that it can be erased by a strong magnetic field.
Amorphous silicon RAM works by melting the switch element and refreezing it, either so it crystalizes and is very conductive (but still resistive enough that you can remelt it) or becomes glassy and very resistive (but with a "breakover" voltage that lets you drive current into it to remelt it). Selection is by the length of time the write current is on, and thus the amount of heat deposited in the meltable bit.
Magnetic fields won't touch it. EMP strong enough to affect it will fry the whole box anyhow. Ditto heat.
Write time is in single-digit nanoseconds. Read is as fast as ROM.
(But will it ever come to market? Same question for MRAM.)
manager: Gee, Michel, IBM is getting a lot of press for pushing this Linux thing.
Dell: Nah, Linux sux
manager: yes, but it gets a lot of coverage lately. We should really come up with something.
Dell: Nah, Linux sux.
manager: Michael, you will [be?] slashdoted.
Dell: Darn, you are convicing. Call our PR department...
Interesting point...
Are there any Windows-related news media that have such a large following that mere mention of a URL will bring down a server? I don't THINK so... (Otherwise it would be called "WinNewsing" or some such rather than "slashdotting".)
So perhaps this can be turned to Linux's advantage...
"Look, guys. There are so many Linux fans on this one news board that just the mention of your site there will bring so many hits that you'll think you're under a DOS attack. Don't you think there might be a market for a linux port of your ?"
(Yes, I know there's some *BSD, BeOS, and Mac fans here too. But I still think it's a fair characterization.)
[] distribute the AOL client with their own [] Linux [distro] on those [] CDs [.] just boot from the CD-ROM and voila! Instant AOL.
Considering that Linux doesn't support many winmodems, that might not go over very well...
If there's one company with enough pull go get the Winmodem manufacturers to do a Linux driver, or at least release enough info on the chips, it's AOL.
Maybe we'll get Winmodem support out of this. B-)
If this is to be a point on the Moore's law curve it will have to be in production in just over 6 years.
Can't have it both ways. Either it (or something of equivalent density) is out then or Moore's law finally breaks down.
The internet is an entire world. It was constructed primarily by adults, primarily for adults.
...
Just like the non-electronic world, it has the equivalent of libraries, newspapers, and shopping malls. And also like the non-electronic world it has its bars, X-rated theaters, and red-light districts.
When children go out into this virtual world, the ways available to protect them are limited:
- They can be accompanied by adults.
- They can be restricted to areas known to be safe.
And that's about it.
Some people have tried to provide a robot companion to cover their eyes when they come to the seamier side of town. But robots are still too dumb. They often cover the eyes when they shouldn't, and don't cover them when they should. (And how can you expect a poor robot to figure out what is "improper" for a child when adults can't agree on that and courts can't define it?)
Some people have tried to remove from the adults' virtual world anything that is "unsuitable" for children, just as they have tried this with the physical world, throughout history. The courts stopped them - and rightly so. (And even if the courts hadn't stopped them, they'd no doubt have as much success as the book-burners of the past.) Just as with the physical world, creating a padded-nursery world for children ruins the world for adults.
Restricting children's access to known safe places restricts them to the tiny space that has been checked. "Don't cross the street!" works - for some value of works. But it eliminates the park, and Disneyland, and Africa,
So the only real choice for a child's guardian is to escort the child, or hire a babysitter, until the child can be trusted to wander on his own.
Your business is creating a door into the virtual world. So your decision-makers have to decide: Are they going to let children wander freely through that door? Are they going to demand permissions from their guardians to pass through alone? Are they going to demand the guardians accompany them or hire a baby sitter to do so? Are they going to provide the (necessarily defective) robot? Are they going to restrict the children (and perhaps everyone else) to the local block? Or are they going to bar children entirely?
I wonder what changed their minds.
Now that the issue of record companies stealing the rights of musicians in perpetuity have received such a public airing, perhaps new talent has been avoiding signing with RIAA companies - insisting on contract modifications or going with self-publishing (especially via online techniques).
Calling for a reversal is a freebie for RIAA anyhow. The law is in place, so the call for reversing it (especially if they DON'T fund their lobbiests to pushe it the way they did the original change) is just noise.
There are applications where throughput is more important than a significant amount of latency.
An example is context-switched highly-parallel processing, where the number of crunches per second on each piece is relatively low and fixed. You pipeline and context-switch, and get multiple virtual processors from one set of gates and a RAM. The higher your bandwidth the more virtual processors you get. This is important in many applications. Sometimes space for the box is more expensive than the box itself. Sometimes the cost per virtual processor is critical.
But some problems don't parallelize well. And even for those that do, parallizing them can be a real bitch. So your desktop or laptop (which tends to be doing only one or a few crunch-intensive things at a time) is organized to stick with a task for a significant time, then hop to another. RAMBUS isn't a match for that.
And it looks like it has some other kisses-of-death even for interleaved context-switched stuff. Oh, well...
Interestingly, if Harris were to somehow win this one it would probably be worse for them than if they lost it.
With Harris removed from the RBL database by injunction after all that publicity, a significant number of sysadmins at major ISPs are likely to put them in their individual blackhole lists or configuration files. This will disrupt their mail about as badly as the RBL would.
But with Harris in the RBL they can easily get out again. All they have to do is convince MAPS they've cleaned up their act. With Harris in individual blackhole lists at a hundred or a thousand ISPs, getting out is NOT automatic, or easy.
First, they'd have to get the word out to ALL those sysadmins and convince EACH of them to do some extra work. As a former unrepentant spammer who went so far as to sue to block MAPS, forcing those sysadmins to do extra work already, they'll have little sympathy among even those sysadmins who DO get the word. So some won't pull them out, and their mail will continue to be disrupted.
Then they'll have to hunt down all the disruptions and talk to all those remaining ISPs. And some still might not pull them out. The next step is back to court for injunctions on those remaining ISPs - probably repeatedly as more are identified. And to prevail they'd have to prove that the ISPs have an obligation to forward their mail. Even if that succeeds their mail could be disrupted for years.
Additionally, with the source available it could be:
- ported to a more secure operating system.
- examined for flaws.
- easily patched if any security bugs are detected.
- fixed if it has a bug that interferes with an ISP's systems.
And with the configuration done by the ISP the ISP can look out for its subscribers' interests by refusing to tap anyone without the presentation of the appropriate court order. The FBI has a poor track record in that regard.
ISP configuration of software on an ISP-constructed platform (in an ISP-supplied locked cage locked cage) using ISP-tweaked software has no more problems for evidence custody tracking than the ISP-provided signals to an FBI-operated box. (Especially one that is remotely accessable and reconfigurable.) The ISP might have to provide an expert witness to describe their tweaks. But the evidentiary issues are mainly that the evidence isn't forged or altered, not that the sampling filter is incorrect.
the LASER was invented in 1949 and Star Trek first went on the air September of 1966.
... so Roddenbury called his beam weapons "phasers" to sound vaugely like "LASERs" but avoid people saying "But LASERs don't work like THAT!".
Did you ever notice that Star Trek's ship-mounted phasers and photon torpedos behaved JUST like the torpedo and beam weapons in the original PDP-1 spacewar game (right down to the blinking intensity of the phasers' beams in some of the early shows' special effects)?
What can a free software project do about this? Close the mailing lists or newsgroups to the media? Flame/sue the people who screw up? What?
First: You can't stop anybody from creating a "bag on the side of your project" to attempt adding some functionality as a patch. (i.e. embedding Microsoft Office functionality in your project's product)
The best you can do (if you have that much centralized control) is not accept their patches into your project's mainline and not warp your design to provide hooks to support them (unless such hooks look like a good way to support something else specific or as a general support hook).
Second: It's the media. Unless they've libeled you all you can do is ridicule them for their errors (and the people who believed them for paying attention to such a ludicruous story).
If a media outlet does such stuff often enough, it eventually lowers their credibility as a source, placing them at a competitive disadvantage. But eventually is a long time. For now the best you can hope for meanwhile is the equivalent of a page-9 retraction of their page-1 feature - which won't stop the flames at you.
I would [] start writing in english. Once I was done [] I took the text, pasted it into the existing source code and started translating it to code.
I've met programmers who do this as a general technique for coding. It works for code generation but can be hard to debug.
The solution is to add a simple step. After you write it in English, paste it in TWICE. Then turn the first pasteup into comments and convert the second.
Shazam! DOCUMENTED code!
And if you ever have to make a mod to that part, and you start suffering from coder's block, start switching your attention between the comments and the code.
Most of the solutions to blocking that I know of fall into two variations of one category: Stop concentrating on the subject, for a short or a long time. (Get rest. Do something unrelated. Do something related but different. Radically change your schedule.) This thread leads to more variants of the theme:
- Write in English and convert. (Change an element of your coding style.)
- Swtich focus between comments and code. (Do something related but different.) Leads to:
- Compare the code to the comments, analyze aspects of the differences and/or check for bugs. (Again, do something related but different.)