Strange link between this name and the name of the outfit that was promoting amorphous semiconductors with great performance promises about 30-35 years ago. It was headed by an inventor named Ovshinsky...
If you'll read all the foils you'll see they licensed the amorphous switching element from one of his companies (which is using it to make CD media.)
Another successful product from him is the flexible amorphous solar panel. Three layers of amorphous solar cell (intercepting three different bands of sunlight), electrically in series and grown on a stainless steel base.
Because it's amorphous it can be bent quite a bit without breaking (though it isn't quite as efficient as crystaline cells because there are more sites where carrier-pairs can anhialate rather than giving you current).
You see 'em on boats all the time. I've got one tied to the cabin-top on mine, keeping the battery up when the boat sits for a while. (On a previous boat it was the only thing charging the 85 AHr deep-cycle battery, which powered the radio and lights. It could bring the battery from 25% to full charge in a couple weeks. We never needed to hook up the charge circuit from the aux engine.)
One million memory accesses per second is not unrealistic. At that rate, your OUM will wear out in about four months.
What that number means is that they only TESTED it for a few months. B-) If you look at the curves, they were showing no sign of curving. So there's no indication that it would stop working after 10 trillion, or even 100 quintillion.
Read another foil, and you see that read is CONstructive when it's in the high-conductance state, and "the current is negligable" for the low-conductance state.
If there's any destructive effect, it would be the read current in the low-conductance state gradually coaxing the device to grow a crystal across the boundary and switch to the high-conductance. But even if you hammer on the bit that won't happen for at least four months.
So even if that turns out to be a problem, you could treat it like a dynamic RAM that has to be refreshed ONCE every FOUR MONTHS. B-) Much better than silicon DRAM that needs a refresh a thousand times a second or so. Kick off a cron job three times a year to refresh your RAM.
Do that and it looks like it could last until the rest of the computer fails from diffusion of impurities through the silicon.
"Have a look at this Businessweek article:... and this Mercury Center article... . Surprisingly, both articles suggest that things are going better and better." Very topical; the U.S. vote on permanent normalized trade relations is scheduled for today.
Isn't it just an AMAZING coincidence that these papers just HAPPENED to run articles "suggest[ing] that things are going better", just as the vote is coming up in congress?
From time to time you may notice that something is very wrong in some part of the world, and suddenly there are a bunch of stories that say it's right, or rapidly improving. Or you may notice that everybody you know is on one side of the issue and the media talks like everybody is on the other. Or the crowds are bigger on one side of the demonstration and the media reports them as bigger on the other. Or the media reports tiny demonstrations on one side of an issue and ignores big ones on the other. Or the media reports polls that claim you, and everybody you know, are members of a tiny minority on some big issue. And you may wonder why.
And you may wonder why they bother, since EVERYBODY knows things are the other way around.
Consider this:
The congressmen live in a very sheltered environment. They're buried in their work. They almost never get back to their own districts to listen and "soak" in the opinions of their constituents. Whether at work or back home, almost everybody they talk to is trying to convince them to take a side on some issue. And they can't afford to run a LOT of polls on their own. So how do they guage their consituents opinions?
They watch the media.
If the media want to control the country's laws, they don't have to convert the voters. They just have to convince the legislators that the voters are converted. They don't have to fix things in China, they just have to convince the legislators that things are fixed. And so on.
And it's the same when the media wants the executive branch to interpret or enforce laws in some way, put pressure put on or take it off a group or a country, start or stop a war, and so on.
In the sixties they were referred to as "The Establishment Media" and treated as part of a monster. Now the phrase is rarely heard - because the people who once uttered it are members of the very establishment media they once railed against. The slant is different, but the game is the same.
To use URL rewriting all of the links of the template need to be interpreted by a servlet. This can be done one of two ways, by using a HTML parser to find all of the links and manipulate them, or by using some kind of tag in your template to specify a link. The first seems way to CPU intensive to scale well, and the second is going to be nasty for the web designers.
The concern that the first might be "way too CPU intensive to scale well" presupposes that the page will be parsed by the server on-the-fly every time it is serverd.
Why not precompile it, having the compiler insert the tags?
Then the web authors can work on normal HTML, directly or using arbitrary tools. But the server can work with the fast, tagged form.
There are several ways to manage the compilation so the designer's process is either unmodified or requires just an extra click or so to view the page-under-construction as it would be seen externally.
Linix has software reliability - and can be hardened even more. But the platforms it runs on die when the bits get dropped.
On mainframes, no bits drop. (Actually, they do. But the mainframe fixes it and keeps on going. So as far as the software is concerned the computer is perfect.)
Now suppose you want to do a reliable web server for an enterprise:
- You could do a farm of PCs running Linux and Apache. But when a processor failes you lose the transactions in progress there.
- You could port Apache to (or write a web server for) an ordinary mainframe OS.
- You could port Apache to a mainframe Unix. (Has been done for UTS - Amdahl's mainframe SVR4. But while that will run on IBM mainframes it isn't from IBM.)
- You could port Linux to a mainframe. Apache and EVERYTHING ELSE UNIX/LINUX comes along for free.
Lots of other uses for Linux on a mainframe, of course. Mainframe reliability, capacity, and speed, combined with Linux reliability and functionality, is a powerful combination. But I bet enterprise-reliable web servers are the first "Killer App".
... the fact is, the text of the spec *is* copyrighted, and entitled to protection...
But IS it copyrighted? Or if it is, does Microsoft actually own the copyright? How much of it is a "derived work" of the Kerberos documents, and was that authorized?
If Microsoft DOES have a copyright, and Slashdot ends up taking down the full text postings, would posting only the portions of the document that describe Microsoft's changes to Kerberos constitute fair use?
(why isn't their a corporate death penalty? or corporate imprisonment?)
There is a corporate death penalty, and a breakup is it.
One of the ways a corporation reproduces is by spinning off a chunk of itself as a separate corporation. Initially the parent corporation owns the spinoff child. But it can sell all or part of its interest in the child. Once it has abandoned controlling interest the child is on its own.
A breakup is the splitting of the corporation into two or more children and destroying the parent. The original stockholders trade in their shares of the parent for shares of the children. (One of the children may keep the parent's name. Think "Microsoft, Jr!").
Microsoft already suffered probation (rules agreed to in settlement of previous actions) and violated it. Corporations can also suffer imprisonment (rules imposed and administered by a court).
Corporations aren't individuals. They're creations of the State.
The State grants the people who form corproations an immunity from claims against their own finances beyond what they invested in the corporation. To qualify for this privilege (and it IS a privilege) the corporation must operate under certain rules.
One of the rules is that if the corporation manages to obtain monopoly power in a market (and this does NOT mean a total monopoly - just enough to do certain things that would otherwise not be possible), there are extra limits on what they are allowed to do.
Much of the puropse of these limits is to keep them from using their monopoly power in one market segment to compete "unfairly" in another.
Microsoft's executives broke this rule, which is part of their corporation's license to evade personal liability for their actions. They did it willfully and repeatedly. Their victims complained. They got caught and convicted.
Now the corporation and its investors (who have the power to chose and depose the management and who invested or stayed invested knowing what they were joining and risking) must take the punishment.
... and the politicians know it. The relatively honest ones will even tell you so.
That's because it is essentially a training and research organization for all issues related to guns - starting with safety. It's the government-recognized regulatory organization for the shooting sports in the US. It trains the people who train the army and the police. Nearly every expert in technical issues related to guns is associated with it.
It got its start as a safety and training organization after the US got into a war and discovered that the draftees no longer knew enough about shooting to make decent (or safe) soldiers. It's focus was training - first safety, then accuracy. And it grew from there.
They are THE experts, and are jealous of that status. So they make a point of giving out information that is as correct as they can manage - to the point of NOT saying things that are very likely correct but not proven beyond controversy (much to the disgust of many of their members and EX members, who have founded other organizations to bring these points to light.)
Lobbying (through their separate ILA organization) is a relatively new thing for them. It started primarily in reaction to the anti-gun movement - which was getting to the point that they realized they were at risk of having nothing left to be experts about. And for a long time the lobbying arm was essentially lobbying for the country-club set, selling out many other sorts of gun-sport enthusiasts (such as the machinegun fans, the gun design hackers, and to some extent those who were mostly concerned with self-defense.) NRA-ILA is agruably STILL the most milksop of the pro-gun lobbying groups.
The anti-gun organizations, on the other hand, have quite a track record of publishing bogus numbers. Sometimes they have SOME basis in fact. Other times they seem made up from whole cloth.
Example: "X number of childeren killed by guns per day/year". Sometimes when the number is worked out against crime stats you find they're counting people up to age 25 as "children". This includes the members of teenage drug gangs, and most other murderers. (Murder is a young man's crime, and most murderers kill members of their own race, class, and age group.) Other times you wonder where the numbers come from, because they exceed the total number of gun deaths. For more reasonable definitions of "children" (like under-12) you'll have a hard time finding a year where the numbers get out of the low single-digits in states like California (with a high crime rate and pushing a fifth of the entire US population.)
Remember that moderators are chosen randomly from the population (mod a few tweaks like eliminating those who abused it) and only get a handful of moderation points each time they're chosen.
So you no doubt had different moderators than he did.
Also: The earlier you post, the more people with moderator points will see your post, and the more chances you have to get a point, plus or minus. Three reasons for this: - It's up longer. - It's higer in the thread tree, so fewer people will have gotten bored and moved on to another article. - It's higher in the thread tree, so fewer moderators will have responded to another posting, after which they can't moderate anything in that article.
Can you name me a SINGLE CASE brought by the ACLU that wasn't germane and noble?
Sure. (Actually, I can describe it for you - I don't have the cite handy.)
Man had a legally-owned gun locked in the safe at his office. Crook cracks the safe and steals the gun. Later, stolen gun is used in a crime where a victim is shot and injured. Victim sues the person from whom the gun was stolen. ACLU provides the lawyers for the plantif.
(For completeness: The guy whose gun was stolen from his office safe also held a post at the NRA.)
This was the same year the ACLU defended the American NAZI Party's right to march through a Polish suburb of Chicago. (I remember that because a Jewish friend didn't renew her ACLU membership the next time it came up. The ACLU asked her if it was because of the march. Nope: She thought the NAZIs should be able to march - at least partly so she could tell who they were and so they'd come within broom range of the Polish immigrants. B-) She quit over the suit against the guy whose gun was stolen and misused.)
The original web site design - even broken and incomplete - is a copyrightable work. Copyright is automatically with the actual author unless he has traded that right away in his contract - for instance: as a "work for hire".
If the author traded it to his consulting firm, then the consulting firm holds the copyright, unless THEY traded it in turn to the customer.
If the web designer/design house wrote the contract, you can bet that they kept all the rights except the right to use exactly the code they provided, unmodified. Assuming this is true, if the site wants upgrades, or even completion, they would have to go to the original firm.
It's like dealing with professional photographers. You own the prints, they own the negatives. Want more prints? Buy 'em from the photog. Don't copy 'em at the photo shop or you're in deep doo-doo. (If somebody else wants to use 'em he needs to buy 'em from the photog AND get permission from those photographed to use their image.)
Still assuming the speculation about the web design house writing the contract is correct: If the customer hired you to fix it, and you didn't redo it from scratch with a different "look and feel", you made a derivitave work. So you and/or the customer are infringing. Whether you personally are infringing separately or acting for the customer is an open issue. But if the only lawyers in this debate are the web designer's and the customer's, and you're named in the suit, you can bet you're about to spin in the wind.
GET YOUR OWN LAWYER! NOW!
Caveat: IANAL. So get your own lawyer and ask HIM!
It tells us why the media remain resistant to our attempt to correct their misusage, and also where to hack the problem:
Newsies are resistant because the dictionaries are giving them support for their misuse. So it isn't enough just to tell them how ignorant they sound, and how much it reduces their credibility, when they perpetuate the misuse. Instead the place to fix it is with the publishers of dictionaries.
Dictionary publishers are research organizations. The dictionaries are distilled from their (heavily documented) databases of historical usages. (Much of that is news articles, so it's somewhat circular. But they also include lots of other sources - letters, diaries, published books, etc.)
They also put in a few bogus words (just as mapmakers put in phantom roads and small towns) to check that their competition is doing its own research rather than plagarising their work.
The way to get them to modify an entry or include your definition is to give them documentation of the usage, with dates and references so they can check. The earlier the better for origins - some of them list words in order of first common use rather than current prevalence.
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By the way: The misuse of hacker for security breaker apparently came from a presentation by an early self-proclaimed "security expert" to early IT department managers and other upper management types. (One of the hackers in the audience was puzzled by the misuse, though he did not question the presenter about it.) It was the managers' first exposure both to many of the computer break-in threats and to the term "hacker", so the misuse apparently got going in the pointy-haired boss circles.
Of course, PHBs listen to each other - especially those one or two levels above them - a LOT more than they listen to their employees. So once it got started in management it tended to stick.
In those days the set "crackers" was nearly a strict subset of the (much larger) set "hackers", in the same way that "rustler" was nearly a strict subset of "cowboy" or "(sea) pirate" a strict subset of "sailor". There wasn't public access to an internet or a set of widely-distributed penetration tools - crackers had to roll their own. Even the basics - like a terminal or a modem - were mostly accessable only to people in the business.
Of course now it's a much different story. Powerful computers are readily available to all for cheap, as are modems and network access. Penetration tools are traded around freely. So a would-be computer cracker doesn't need to develop the skills of a hacker, or even of a programming duffer, to start breaking into systems.
So the set "crackers" now has about as much overlap with the set "hackers" as the set "taggers" has with the set "fine-art painters".
(And in case you're wondering why I told you a lot of stuff you already knew - it's because this might be read by some news editor or dictionary author who didn't already know it. B-) )
And in case any are listening:
- Someone who is an exceptionally skilled programmer is a "hacker" or "computer hacker".
- Someone who breaks system security is a "cracker" or "computer cracker". By analogy with "safe cracker".
- Someone who makes a profit from stolen computer programs or data (or otherwise distributes it without the permission of its proper owner) is a "pirate".
- Someone who damages data, programs, or system function or availability, is a "vandal". (This includes the computer equivalents of everything from graffiti through arson to germ warfare.)
A person may be a member of any or all of the above sets: For instance: Someone might steal and sell or use credit card info from a site he broke into using tools he wrote himself, and damage the site in the process (for instance - to cover his tracks). He might be all four:
- A pirate, for his use of the credit card info. - A cracker, for obtaining it by breaking system security. - A vandal, for damaging the database. - A hacker, for being skillful enough to write de-novo a tool capable of penetrating the system's security.
But these days little psycopaths usually skip "hacker" - because they can get the tools to do what they want without spending years becoming skilled enough at programming to write them for themselves. Why work so hard - and probably get caught during the learning process - when it's easy to get tools from others?
Meanwhile, the people who DO spend the time to become hackers have better, and more lucrative, things to do with their skills than steal credit cards and trash web sites.
If you want to get people to change their behavior you have to do more than tell them to stop the "bad" behavior. You have to give them a "good" alternative.
Instead of saying "I told you Microsoft was bad." we should be saying "Switch to Linux so you won't be vulnerable to this class of attack."
(Sure there are attacks that are possible on Linux. But they're fewer, and a damned sight harder to pull off. Microsoftware, on the other hand, has gaping holes all over the place, and no way for anybody who doesn't work for Bill's company, or hand-in-glove with it, to fix them.)
* Microsoft releases this document, with these trade secret and copyright claims and "technical means" to enforce them.
* Somebody posts the text. (Already done.)
* The Samba developers implement a compatable upgrade.
* Microsoft sues the Samba developers, alleging both trade secret violations and violation of the DCMA. (This would make them felons...)
* The court case is the Samba developers aided by the volunteers of the Free Software Movement versus the lawyers of the Richest Man in the World and the Big Company that made him all that money (and has even more).
Regardless of the outcome it's a BIG load on the Samba developers, and probably takes them down as far as spending time competing with Microsoft is concerned.
Note that this works for Microsoft even if the Samba developers stay strictly clear of the leaked "trade secret", working strictly by reverse engineering!
So Microsoft has put a spike in Samba's wheels. Kiss any future upgrades goodbye.
It doesn't realy matter if it is an error - or a self-con. They claim there may be an effect that could lead to a psychokenetic input device, and have patented the approach.
Now if it turns out it doesn't work, they're out the cost of getting the patent. But they might make that up and more by licensing it to people trying to find out if it works... B-)
And if it turns out it DOES work they have a monopoly on it for 17 years. And it could be worth billions.
So it's very low probability it works. So what? The cost is low and the potential payoff is high.
I'd rather the moderators erred by occasionally failing to filter out garbage than have them err by filtering out some real and important - but far-out-sounding - news.
I'll make my own determinations, thank you.
(But note that "occasionally"... If slashdot turns into a hi-tech Wiggly World News it will also lose its value.)
Help screens have natural boundaries that tend to bias the author toward "soundbite" terseness. Printed manuals aren't as restricting, which makes them more suited to more leisurely examination of deep subjects.
Cloning a paper-style manual to a screen doen't really help: The screen's limitations make reading a long flow more difficult. (Try reading the same document in Adobe Pageview and on bound paper.)
There's a lot of stuff you still can do better with a paper document than with an online book:
* Use it when the machine is down.
* Use it when something is fouled up, hung, or just busy with the thing the manual describes. (In particular, your first times through a complicated process you don't want to make it still more complicated by flipping to help screens - which may not be fully available at every micro-step of interaction.)
* Stick a finger or a bookmark in one passage while reading another, and flip between them (or among several).
* Highlight important passages.
* Take notes in the margins.
* Study it in bed.
I could go on.
Further: display technology is still orders of magnitude away from being able to display as much, as conveniently, as a couple hundred pages of paper. Imagine trying to read in bed with a megapixel monitor sitting on your belly. Then think about staking up a couple hundred of them, to simultaneously display the whole writeup.
Which is not to say that online help isn't good, too. For starters, it can do things that are difficult on printed paper, such as generalized searches. (An index is a pain to generate. And even when present it only covers what the writer thought was significant, which is usually not everything the reader wants to look up.)
I think I have a practical demostration that your point is deeply wrong:
In the rest of the "developed" nations, kids (and the rest of the population) don't have access to guns. All (not some) families are strongly, as you call them, anti-guns. And we don't have problems with them.
In Europe a very small portion of criminals are underage, and usually they are small offenders. Things like high school shooting are nearly unheard of. Except when we watch American news, of course.
I'm afraid that you're the one whose information is "deeply wrong". Part of the problem is that the media has fed you propaganda, and part is that the interpretation of the data is incorrect.
The relevant statistics are related, not to how many people are injured or killed with a gun, but how many people are injured or killed.
And a related issue is how diverse the population is, and how much of their culture is retained.
The United States has a much more diverse population than the states of Europe, which each tend to be primarily one cultural group with smaller admixtures of others.
Here in the US, a person of English descent experiences, and commits, lower rates violent crime and murder than a person of English descent in England. The same is true of a person of Japanese descent vs. such a person in Japan, a person of African descent vs. such a person in Africa, and so on.
A particular problem in Europe is home invasions - when the occupants are home. This is also a problem in Canada. But in most of the US (excluding a few mostly-disarmed cities and states) burglars are very careful to enter only when the home is UNoccupied. The ratio of invasions of occupied vs. unoccupied buildings is very strongly correlated with the local gun ownership percentage and with how the local laws affect the probability that an occupant will be able to defend with a gun.
Invasions of occupied homes are a big issue - because a crook who will do this is willing to injure or kill the occupants. Indeed, they often do this even if the occupants cooperate completely.
Here in the US we don't have "football hooligans".
I could go on.
Don't you think it's a lot safer here, where I can be sure no one, ever, is going to shoot me?
No, I don't. Because you can't be sure of that, and because being shot isn't all it's cracked up to be.
In the US it is estimated that victims or bystanders stop crimes by using a gun well over two milliion times a year - which is many times higher than the number of crimes that are successfully completed by a criminal with a gun.
A victim who fully cooperates with a criminal has about a 1/3 chance of experiencing serious injury or death. A victim who resists in any way (but one), by arguing, running away, fighting bare handed, or with a knife or other weapon has a much higher chance of injury. (Over 50% if resisting with a knife.) The exception is resistance with a gun. This cuts the risk almost in half compared to full cooperation, and is thus the most successful strategy.
As for the criminal's choice of weapons when committing such things as armed robbery: You're much less likely to sustain death or permanent injury, or any injury at all, if the crook uses a gun than if he uses a knife or a club. This is both because you're more likely to go along with him if he threatens with a gun, and because if you are wounded you're more likely to survive, and likely to heal more quickly and completely, from a gunshot wound than from knife or club wounds.
As to not having to worry about the crooks having guns, that's totally bogus. They can easily import them disguised as harmless bales of illegal drugs. (Much of the European undergound is now armed with FULL-automatic AK-47s, military surplus from the former Soviet Union. Over here they tend to stick to semis or revolvers.) Well over a third of guns in criminal hands, both here and there, were stolen from military supplies or police departments (and often sold by the officers themselves).
If these supplies were ever to dry up (and let's see you disarm the police and the armies of Europe!), it's easy to make guns in a garage machine shop. (Indeed, some crooks are now turning out higher quality guns in undergound weapons mills than much of the commercial production available to civilians OR police.)
Finally, Europeans are subject to periodic bouts of tribal warfare, with death rates that make those of all civilian violence disappear into the noise. HOW many million died in World War II? How about the recent bouts of "ethnic clensing" (the politically correct term for genocide)? You're just a shot-dead if it's done in a war as if it's done by a crook.
The last time anything on a similar scale happened over here was about 140 years ago. But it's not for want of trying. Back about WW II we had a problem with the Klan similar to the one Germany had with the Brownshirts. But our people were armed. The Klan lost so badly you hardly hear about it any more.
We don't even have to shut them up. We still have a few dozen Klansmen, and perhaps a half-dozen Nazis, in each of our major cities. Every now and then they get a permit and stage a march. The streets are usually lined with jeering onlookers with picket signs (and who knows how many concealed pistols). Nobody gets hurt. It's all quite entertaining - especially their total frustration.
And you think it's responsible for a parent to teach a kid how to use a gun, and to buy one for an anniversary.
Absolutely.
Because I care about the child's safety, and the safety of the law-abiding citizens. Because I don't distinguish violence committed with a gun from violence committed with other weapons, or brute strength. And because I DO distinguish between violence used in attack and that used in defense, and put the safety of the child and the law-abiding citizen, who have violence thrust upon them, above that of the criminals who chose to initiate violence.
I don't know what the Pinkertons' current set of criteria are. But some of the other schemes that were bandied about after Columbine involved scoring systems that penalized the targeted individual for things like presence of guns in the house and experience with guns.
Approximately half of the households in the United States have one or more gun present. A large fraction of those households - probably the majority - are populated by members of one of the factions of the American Pluralist culture.
These people train their children in proper gun handling at an early age. They are generally gifted with a gun, as well, typically when the parents or guardians determine that they have demonstrated by their behavior that they are responsible to handle it, or at the first birthday thereafter. This may happen as early as age 12 (though the gun will be stored safely, and the child will lose access to it if he demonstrates irresponsibility later).
The criminal and violent activity of children who have been trained with guns by responsible adults has been studied, and compared with that of those who have not been so trained. It turns out that the overall delinquency rates of the two groups are about the same. But when you look at the TYPES of misbehavior, the difference is drastic.
While the kids not trained with guns are out selling drugs, mugging, and robbing liquor stores, the kids trained with guns are out after curfew, or smoking in the boy's room. Even when kids trained with guns become involved with local youth gangs or commit assaults (which they do much less frequently than those not so trained), there is a conspicuous difference: They don't use a gun in the assault.
And if you look at the perpetrators of the various highly-publicised school shootings, you'll see a significant fact that the press has missed: Virtually all of the perpetrators came from families that were strongly anti-gun. At least one was the child of a prominent activist in the anti-gun movement.
So I share with the rest of the posters the concern about labeling of intelligent tech-savvy kids who hang out with others of their kind, don't participate in sports, and are already the butt of the jocks' and authority figures' harrassment. And I share the concern about the use of such turn-in programs by the little psycopaths prevalent in schools to further harrass anyone who doesn't knuckle under to them or who reports THEIR misbehavior, to obtain gifts off the system, or to hassle people at random just for giggles. But I have an additional worry.
I'm concerned that the Pinkertons will become involved in the current culture war. I'm concerned that this tool will be used to stigmatize children who have the misfortune to be born into a household that is a member of one of a set of well-integrated, peaceful, social traditions that predates the American Revolution.
And I'm concerned that this will further the attempts at the eradication of those cultural groups.
For those not aware of it, "tooling" is MIT slang for (approximately) studying to the exclusion of all else (such as exploring the university's inner space) and a "tool" is a person who does such things and little else. Thus the "toomb of the unknown tool" is a site where one might imagine a bookworm studied so hard he didn't notice he was being walled in by a building renovation. B-)
The rhyme with "fool" is apparently deliberate, to give you an idea of the opinion of such activities held by the users of the slang.
Or at least that's how I (who never went to MIT) understand it third hand. B-)
Redundant memory, redundant hard drives, redundant processors,.... But what happens when the cleaning staff unplugs it from the UPS because they needed that plug for their vacuum?
They have redundant power feeds, too. And not just the whole machine - every box in the room has 'em, and each feed powers a separate set of power supplies in the box. (Some devices get their power from their controllers. And these are generally driven by multiple controllers...)
If they did it right, the power cords go to opposite sides of the room, thence by different paths to different feed points where the building gets power from separate feeds that came in from different parts of the grid (which was a consideration in chosing the site for the computer center: at a grid boundary, or close enough that you can pay to string a line from a different section.
There's at least one UPS, of course. On ONE of those two feeds. (A UPS, on the average, creates one extra power failure in its first year of operation. B-) )
And I'd like to see the janitorial staff try to plug into the connectors that feed the mainframe. They aren't your typical duplex outlet.
The point of concurrent maintainence, of course, is that ANYTHING in the box can fail, and be swapped out and replaced, without stopping the processes.
They might not get as much CPU time or disk response speed as usual while the system is in "degraded" mode due to failed parts waiting for or undergoing replacement. But they run continuously for years - and are shooting for forever.
I hear they once moved a Tandem across town by putting in a mainframe's frame and the comm lines, then gradually installing boards in the new location and unplugging them from the old, until the whole machine was at the new site. Still running.
It's tough to get the balance right for a walker, without being in it or being suspended and thrown around to mimic the slave's movements in a remote control center.
The latter is a bit safer - but a lot more expensive, and you can still get broken by it if something goes wrong and the limits don't function adequately (or maybe a sprain even if they do work).
That being said, there's a lot you could avoid by running it remotely (as you demonstrate with your landmine example). Working inside a radioactive, toxic, or biohazard environment come to mind, as does deep-sea, vacuum, earth-to-near-orbit, near-orbit-to-lander, etc.
But many of those have been anticipated as well.
See Heinlien's _Waldo_ for several of them. There's a story from similarly long ago by another author where the remote was biological, adapted for a methane environment, and controlled from orbit, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Strange link between this name and the name of the outfit that was promoting amorphous semiconductors with great performance promises about 30-35 years ago. It was headed by an inventor named Ovshinsky...
If you'll read all the foils you'll see they licensed the amorphous switching element from one of his companies (which is using it to make CD media.)
Another successful product from him is the flexible amorphous solar panel. Three layers of amorphous solar cell (intercepting three different bands of sunlight), electrically in series and grown on a stainless steel base.
Because it's amorphous it can be bent quite a bit without breaking (though it isn't quite as efficient as crystaline cells because there are more sites where carrier-pairs can anhialate rather than giving you current).
You see 'em on boats all the time. I've got one tied to the cabin-top on mine, keeping the battery up when the boat sits for a while. (On a previous boat it was the only thing charging the 85 AHr deep-cycle battery, which powered the radio and lights. It could bring the battery from 25% to full charge in a couple weeks. We never needed to hook up the charge circuit from the aux engine.)
One million memory accesses per second is not unrealistic. At that rate, your OUM will wear out in about four months.
What that number means is that they only TESTED it for a few months. B-) If you look at the curves, they were showing no sign of curving. So there's no indication that it would stop working after 10 trillion, or even 100 quintillion.
Read another foil, and you see that read is CONstructive when it's in the high-conductance state, and "the current is negligable" for the low-conductance state.
If there's any destructive effect, it would be the read current in the low-conductance state gradually coaxing the device to grow a crystal across the boundary and switch to the high-conductance. But even if you hammer on the bit that won't happen for at least four months.
So even if that turns out to be a problem, you could treat it like a dynamic RAM that has to be refreshed ONCE every FOUR MONTHS. B-) Much better than silicon DRAM that needs a refresh a thousand times a second or so. Kick off a cron job three times a year to refresh your RAM.
Do that and it looks like it could last until the rest of the computer fails from diffusion of impurities through the silicon.
"Have a look at this Businessweek article: ... and this Mercury Center article ... . Surprisingly, both articles suggest that things are going better and better." Very topical; the U.S. vote on permanent normalized trade relations is scheduled for today.
Isn't it just an AMAZING coincidence that these papers just HAPPENED to run articles "suggest[ing] that things are going better", just as the vote is coming up in congress?
From time to time you may notice that something is very wrong in some part of the world, and suddenly there are a bunch of stories that say it's right, or rapidly improving. Or you may notice that everybody you know is on one side of the issue and the media talks like everybody is on the other. Or the crowds are bigger on one side of the demonstration and the media reports them as bigger on the other. Or the media reports tiny demonstrations on one side of an issue and ignores big ones on the other. Or the media reports polls that claim you, and everybody you know, are members of a tiny minority on some big issue. And you may wonder why.
And you may wonder why they bother, since EVERYBODY knows things are the other way around.
Consider this:
The congressmen live in a very sheltered environment. They're buried in their work. They almost never get back to their own districts to listen and "soak" in the opinions of their constituents. Whether at work or back home, almost everybody they talk to is trying to convince them to take a side on some issue. And they can't afford to run a LOT of polls on their own. So how do they guage their consituents opinions?
They watch the media.
If the media want to control the country's laws, they don't have to convert the voters. They just have to convince the legislators that the voters are converted. They don't have to fix things in China, they just have to convince the legislators that things are fixed. And so on.
And it's the same when the media wants the executive branch to interpret or enforce laws in some way, put pressure put on or take it off a group or a country, start or stop a war, and so on.
In the sixties they were referred to as "The Establishment Media" and treated as part of a monster. Now the phrase is rarely heard - because the people who once uttered it are members of the very establishment media they once railed against. The slant is different, but the game is the same.
"Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss."
To use URL rewriting all of the links of the template need to be interpreted by a servlet. This can be done one of two ways, by using a HTML parser to find all of the links and manipulate them, or by using some kind of tag in your template to specify a link. The first seems way to CPU intensive to scale well, and the second is going to be nasty for the web designers.
The concern that the first might be "way too CPU intensive to scale well" presupposes that the page will be parsed by the server on-the-fly every time it is serverd.
Why not precompile it, having the compiler insert the tags?
Then the web authors can work on normal HTML, directly or using arbitrary tools. But the server can work with the fast, tagged form.
There are several ways to manage the compilation so the designer's process is either unmodified or requires just an extra click or so to view the page-under-construction as it would be seen externally.
Linix has software reliability - and can be hardened even more. But the platforms it runs on die when the bits get dropped.
On mainframes, no bits drop. (Actually, they do. But the mainframe fixes it and keeps on going. So as far as the software is concerned the computer is perfect.)
Now suppose you want to do a reliable web server for an enterprise:
- You could do a farm of PCs running Linux and Apache. But when a processor failes you lose the transactions in progress there.
- You could port Apache to (or write a web server for) an ordinary mainframe OS.
- You could port Apache to a mainframe Unix. (Has been done for UTS - Amdahl's mainframe SVR4. But while that will run on IBM mainframes it isn't from IBM.)
- You could port Linux to a mainframe. Apache and EVERYTHING ELSE UNIX/LINUX comes along for free.
Lots of other uses for Linux on a mainframe, of course. Mainframe reliability, capacity, and speed, combined with Linux reliability and functionality, is a powerful combination. But I bet enterprise-reliable web servers are the first "Killer App".
... the fact is, the text of the spec *is* copyrighted, and entitled to protection ...
But IS it copyrighted? Or if it is, does Microsoft actually own the copyright? How much of it is a "derived work" of the Kerberos documents, and was that authorized?
If Microsoft DOES have a copyright, and Slashdot ends up taking down the full text postings, would posting only the portions of the document that describe Microsoft's changes to Kerberos constitute fair use?
(why isn't their a corporate death penalty? or corporate imprisonment?)
There is a corporate death penalty, and a breakup is it.
One of the ways a corporation reproduces is by spinning off a chunk of itself as a separate corporation. Initially the parent corporation owns the spinoff child. But it can sell all or part of its interest in the child. Once it has abandoned controlling interest the child is on its own.
A breakup is the splitting of the corporation into two or more children and destroying the parent. The original stockholders trade in their shares of the parent for shares of the children. (One of the children may keep the parent's name. Think "Microsoft, Jr!").
Microsoft already suffered probation (rules agreed to in settlement of previous actions) and violated it. Corporations can also suffer imprisonment (rules imposed and administered by a court).
Corporations aren't individuals. They're creations of the State.
The State grants the people who form corproations an immunity from claims against their own finances beyond what they invested in the corporation. To qualify for this privilege (and it IS a privilege) the corporation must operate under certain rules.
One of the rules is that if the corporation manages to obtain monopoly power in a market (and this does NOT mean a total monopoly - just enough to do certain things that would otherwise not be possible), there are extra limits on what they are allowed to do.
Much of the puropse of these limits is to keep them from using their monopoly power in one market segment to compete "unfairly" in another.
Microsoft's executives broke this rule, which is part of their corporation's license to evade personal liability for their actions. They did it willfully and repeatedly. Their victims complained. They got caught and convicted.
Now the corporation and its investors (who have the power to chose and depose the management and who invested or stayed invested knowing what they were joining and risking) must take the punishment.
... and the politicians know it. The relatively honest ones will even tell you so.
That's because it is essentially a training and research organization for all issues related to guns - starting with safety. It's the government-recognized regulatory organization for the shooting sports in the US. It trains the people who train the army and the police. Nearly every expert in technical issues related to guns is associated with it.
It got its start as a safety and training organization after the US got into a war and discovered that the draftees no longer knew enough about shooting to make decent (or safe) soldiers. It's focus was training - first safety, then accuracy. And it grew from there.
They are THE experts, and are jealous of that status. So they make a point of giving out information that is as correct as they can manage - to the point of NOT saying things that are very likely correct but not proven beyond controversy (much to the disgust of many of their members and EX members, who have founded other organizations to bring these points to light.)
Lobbying (through their separate ILA organization) is a relatively new thing for them. It started primarily in reaction to the anti-gun movement - which was getting to the point that they realized they were at risk of having nothing left to be experts about. And for a long time the lobbying arm was essentially lobbying for the country-club set, selling out many other sorts of gun-sport enthusiasts (such as the machinegun fans, the gun design hackers, and to some extent those who were mostly concerned with self-defense.) NRA-ILA is agruably STILL the most milksop of the pro-gun lobbying groups.
The anti-gun organizations, on the other hand, have quite a track record of publishing bogus numbers. Sometimes they have SOME basis in fact. Other times they seem made up from whole cloth.
Example: "X number of childeren killed by guns per day/year". Sometimes when the number is worked out against crime stats you find they're counting people up to age 25 as "children". This includes the members of teenage drug gangs, and most other murderers. (Murder is a young man's crime, and most murderers kill members of their own race, class, and age group.) Other times you wonder where the numbers come from, because they exceed the total number of gun deaths. For more reasonable definitions of "children" (like under-12) you'll have a hard time finding a year where the numbers get out of the low single-digits in states like California (with a high crime rate and pushing a fifth of the entire US population.)
Remember that moderators are chosen randomly from the population (mod a few tweaks like eliminating those who abused it) and only get a handful of moderation points each time they're chosen.
So you no doubt had different moderators than he did.
Also: The earlier you post, the more people with moderator points will see your post, and the more chances you have to get a point, plus or minus. Three reasons for this:
- It's up longer.
- It's higer in the thread tree, so fewer people will have gotten bored and moved on to another article.
- It's higher in the thread tree, so fewer moderators will have responded to another posting, after which they can't moderate anything in that article.
Can you name me a SINGLE CASE brought by the ACLU that wasn't germane and noble?
Sure. (Actually, I can describe it for you - I don't have the cite handy.)
Man had a legally-owned gun locked in the safe at his office. Crook cracks the safe and steals the gun. Later, stolen gun is used in a crime where a victim is shot and injured. Victim sues the person from whom the gun was stolen. ACLU provides the lawyers for the plantif.
(For completeness: The guy whose gun was stolen from his office safe also held a post at the NRA.)
This was the same year the ACLU defended the American NAZI Party's right to march through a Polish suburb of Chicago. (I remember that because a Jewish friend didn't renew her ACLU membership the next time it came up. The ACLU asked her if it was because of the march. Nope: She thought the NAZIs should be able to march - at least partly so she could tell who they were and so they'd come within broom range of the Polish immigrants. B-) She quit over the suit against the guy whose gun was stolen and misused.)
I have a domain that predates NSI's spinout as a for-profit registry. I wonder if my status is different from that of those who registered afterward?
The contract is CENTRAL to the issue.
The original web site design - even broken and incomplete - is a copyrightable work. Copyright is automatically with the actual author unless he has traded that right away in his contract - for instance: as a "work for hire".
If the author traded it to his consulting firm, then the consulting firm holds the copyright, unless THEY traded it in turn to the customer.
If the web designer/design house wrote the contract, you can bet that they kept all the rights except the right to use exactly the code they provided, unmodified. Assuming this is true, if the site wants upgrades, or even completion, they would have to go to the original firm.
It's like dealing with professional photographers. You own the prints, they own the negatives. Want more prints? Buy 'em from the photog. Don't copy 'em at the photo shop or you're in deep doo-doo. (If somebody else wants to use 'em he needs to buy 'em from the photog AND get permission from those photographed to use their image.)
Still assuming the speculation about the web design house writing the contract is correct: If the customer hired you to fix it, and you didn't redo it from scratch with a different "look and feel", you made a derivitave work. So you and/or the customer are infringing. Whether you personally are infringing separately or acting for the customer is an open issue. But if the only lawyers in this debate are the web designer's and the customer's, and you're named in the suit, you can bet you're about to spin in the wind.
GET YOUR OWN LAWYER! NOW!
Caveat: IANAL. So get your own lawyer and ask HIM!
This is great!
It tells us why the media remain resistant to our attempt to correct their misusage, and also where to hack the problem:
Newsies are resistant because the dictionaries are giving them support for their misuse. So it isn't enough just to tell them how ignorant they sound, and how much it reduces their credibility, when they perpetuate the misuse. Instead the place to fix it is with the publishers of dictionaries.
Dictionary publishers are research organizations. The dictionaries are distilled from their (heavily documented) databases of historical usages. (Much of that is news articles, so it's somewhat circular. But they also include lots of other sources - letters, diaries, published books, etc.)
They also put in a few bogus words (just as mapmakers put in phantom roads and small towns) to check that their competition is doing its own research rather than plagarising their work.
The way to get them to modify an entry or include your definition is to give them documentation of the usage, with dates and references so they can check. The earlier the better for origins - some of them list words in order of first common use rather than current prevalence.
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By the way: The misuse of hacker for security breaker apparently came from a presentation by an early self-proclaimed "security expert" to early IT department managers and other upper management types. (One of the hackers in the audience was puzzled by the misuse, though he did not question the presenter about it.) It was the managers' first exposure both to many of the computer break-in threats and to the term "hacker", so the misuse apparently got going in the pointy-haired boss circles.
Of course, PHBs listen to each other - especially those one or two levels above them - a LOT more than they listen to their employees. So once it got started in management it tended to stick.
In those days the set "crackers" was nearly a strict subset of the (much larger) set "hackers", in the same way that "rustler" was nearly a strict subset of "cowboy" or "(sea) pirate" a strict subset of "sailor". There wasn't public access to an internet or a set of widely-distributed penetration tools - crackers had to roll their own. Even the basics - like a terminal or a modem - were mostly accessable only to people in the business.
Of course now it's a much different story. Powerful computers are readily available to all for cheap, as are modems and network access. Penetration tools are traded around freely. So a would-be computer cracker doesn't need to develop the skills of a hacker, or even of a programming duffer, to start breaking into systems.
So the set "crackers" now has about as much overlap with the set "hackers" as the set "taggers" has with the set "fine-art painters".
(And in case you're wondering why I told you a lot of stuff you already knew - it's because this might be read by some news editor or dictionary author who didn't already know it. B-) )
And in case any are listening:
- Someone who is an exceptionally skilled programmer is a "hacker" or "computer hacker".
- Someone who breaks system security is a "cracker" or "computer cracker". By analogy with "safe cracker".
- Someone who makes a profit from stolen computer programs or data (or otherwise distributes it without the permission of its proper owner) is a "pirate".
- Someone who damages data, programs, or system function or availability, is a "vandal". (This includes the computer equivalents of everything from graffiti through arson to germ warfare.)
A person may be a member of any or all of the above sets: For instance: Someone might steal and sell or use credit card info from a site he broke into using tools he wrote himself, and damage the site in the process (for instance - to cover his tracks). He might be all four:
- A pirate, for his use of the credit card info.
- A cracker, for obtaining it by breaking system security.
- A vandal, for damaging the database.
- A hacker, for being skillful enough to write de-novo a tool capable of penetrating the system's security.
But these days little psycopaths usually skip "hacker" - because they can get the tools to do what they want without spending years becoming skilled enough at programming to write them for themselves. Why work so hard - and probably get caught during the learning process - when it's easy to get tools from others?
Meanwhile, the people who DO spend the time to become hackers have better, and more lucrative, things to do with their skills than steal credit cards and trash web sites.
If you want to get people to change their behavior you have to do more than tell them to stop the "bad" behavior. You have to give them a "good" alternative.
Instead of saying "I told you Microsoft was bad." we should be saying "Switch to Linux so you won't be vulnerable to this class of attack."
(Sure there are attacks that are possible on Linux. But they're fewer, and a damned sight harder to pull off. Microsoftware, on the other hand, has gaping holes all over the place, and no way for anybody who doesn't work for Bill's company, or hand-in-glove with it, to fix them.)
Scenario:
* Microsoft releases this document, with these trade secret and copyright claims and "technical means" to enforce them.
* Somebody posts the text. (Already done.)
* The Samba developers implement a compatable upgrade.
* Microsoft sues the Samba developers, alleging both trade secret violations and violation of the DCMA. (This would make them felons...)
* The court case is the Samba developers aided by the volunteers of the Free Software Movement versus the lawyers of the Richest Man in the World and the Big Company that made him all that money (and has even more).
Regardless of the outcome it's a BIG load on the Samba developers, and probably takes them down as far as spending time competing with Microsoft is concerned.
Note that this works for Microsoft even if the Samba developers stay strictly clear of the leaked "trade secret", working strictly by reverse engineering!
So Microsoft has put a spike in Samba's wheels. Kiss any future upgrades goodbye.
It doesn't realy matter if it is an error - or a self-con. They claim there may be an effect that could lead to a psychokenetic input device, and have patented the approach.
Now if it turns out it doesn't work, they're out the cost of getting the patent. But they might make that up and more by licensing it to people trying to find out if it works... B-)
And if it turns out it DOES work they have a monopoly on it for 17 years. And it could be worth billions.
So it's very low probability it works. So what? The cost is low and the potential payoff is high.
It's almost Pascall's wager.
I'd rather the moderators erred by occasionally failing to filter out garbage than have them err by filtering out some real and important - but far-out-sounding - news.
I'll make my own determinations, thank you.
(But note that "occasionally"... If slashdot turns into a hi-tech Wiggly World News it will also lose its value.)
Help screens have natural boundaries that tend to bias the author toward "soundbite" terseness. Printed manuals aren't as restricting, which makes them more suited to more leisurely examination of deep subjects.
Cloning a paper-style manual to a screen doen't really help: The screen's limitations make reading a long flow more difficult. (Try reading the same document in Adobe Pageview and on bound paper.)
There's a lot of stuff you still can do better with a paper document than with an online book:
* Use it when the machine is down.
* Use it when something is fouled up, hung, or just busy with the thing the manual describes. (In particular, your first times through a complicated process you don't want to make it still more complicated by flipping to help screens - which may not be fully available at every micro-step of interaction.)
* Stick a finger or a bookmark in one passage while reading another, and flip between them (or among several).
* Highlight important passages.
* Take notes in the margins.
* Study it in bed.
I could go on.
Further: display technology is still orders of magnitude away from being able to display as much, as conveniently, as a couple hundred pages of paper. Imagine trying to read in bed with a megapixel monitor sitting on your belly. Then think about staking up a couple hundred of them, to simultaneously display the whole writeup.
Which is not to say that online help isn't good, too. For starters, it can do things that are difficult on printed paper, such as generalized searches. (An index is a pain to generate. And even when present it only covers what the writer thought was significant, which is usually not everything the reader wants to look up.)
I think I have a practical demostration that your point is deeply wrong:
In the rest of the "developed" nations, kids (and the rest of the population) don't have access to guns. All (not some) families are strongly, as you call them, anti-guns. And we don't have problems with them.
In Europe a very small portion of criminals are underage, and usually they are small offenders. Things like high school shooting are nearly unheard of. Except when we watch American news, of course.
I'm afraid that you're the one whose information is "deeply wrong". Part of the problem is that the media has fed you propaganda, and part is that the interpretation of the data is incorrect.
The relevant statistics are related, not to how many people are injured or killed with a gun, but how many people are injured or killed.
And a related issue is how diverse the population is, and how much of their culture is retained.
The United States has a much more diverse population than the states of Europe, which each tend to be primarily one cultural group with smaller admixtures of others.
Here in the US, a person of English descent experiences, and commits, lower rates violent crime and murder than a person of English descent in England. The same is true of a person of Japanese descent vs. such a person in Japan, a person of African descent vs. such a person in Africa, and so on.
A particular problem in Europe is home invasions - when the occupants are home. This is also a problem in Canada. But in most of the US (excluding a few mostly-disarmed cities and states) burglars are very careful to enter only when the home is UNoccupied. The ratio of invasions of occupied vs. unoccupied buildings is very strongly correlated with the local gun ownership percentage and with how the local laws affect the probability that an occupant will be able to defend with a gun.
Invasions of occupied homes are a big issue - because a crook who will do this is willing to injure or kill the occupants. Indeed, they often do this even if the occupants cooperate completely.
Here in the US we don't have "football hooligans".
I could go on.
Don't you think it's a lot safer here, where I can be sure no one, ever, is going to shoot me?
No, I don't. Because you can't be sure of that, and because being shot isn't all it's cracked up to be.
In the US it is estimated that victims or bystanders stop crimes by using a gun well over two milliion times a year - which is many times higher than the number of crimes that are successfully completed by a criminal with a gun.
A victim who fully cooperates with a criminal has about a 1/3 chance of experiencing serious injury or death. A victim who resists in any way (but one), by arguing, running away, fighting bare handed, or with a knife or other weapon has a much higher chance of injury. (Over 50% if resisting with a knife.) The exception is resistance with a gun. This cuts the risk almost in half compared to full cooperation, and is thus the most successful strategy.
As for the criminal's choice of weapons when committing such things as armed robbery: You're much less likely to sustain death or permanent injury, or any injury at all, if the crook uses a gun than if he uses a knife or a club. This is both because you're more likely to go along with him if he threatens with a gun, and because if you are wounded you're more likely to survive, and likely to heal more quickly and completely, from a gunshot wound than from knife or club wounds.
As to not having to worry about the crooks having guns, that's totally bogus. They can easily import them disguised as harmless bales of illegal drugs. (Much of the European undergound is now armed with FULL-automatic AK-47s, military surplus from the former Soviet Union. Over here they tend to stick to semis or revolvers.) Well over a third of guns in criminal hands, both here and there, were stolen from military supplies or police departments (and often sold by the officers themselves).
If these supplies were ever to dry up (and let's see you disarm the police and the armies of Europe!), it's easy to make guns in a garage machine shop. (Indeed, some crooks are now turning out higher quality guns in undergound weapons mills than much of the commercial production available to civilians OR police.)
Finally, Europeans are subject to periodic bouts of tribal warfare, with death rates that make those of all civilian violence disappear into the noise. HOW many million died in World War II? How about the recent bouts of "ethnic clensing" (the politically correct term for genocide)? You're just a shot-dead if it's done in a war as if it's done by a crook.
The last time anything on a similar scale happened over here was about 140 years ago. But it's not for want of trying. Back about WW II we had a problem with the Klan similar to the one Germany had with the Brownshirts. But our people were armed. The Klan lost so badly you hardly hear about it any more.
We don't even have to shut them up. We still have a few dozen Klansmen, and perhaps a half-dozen Nazis, in each of our major cities. Every now and then they get a permit and stage a march. The streets are usually lined with jeering onlookers with picket signs (and who knows how many concealed pistols). Nobody gets hurt. It's all quite entertaining - especially their total frustration.
And you think it's responsible for a parent to teach a kid how to use a gun, and to buy one for an anniversary.
Absolutely.
Because I care about the child's safety, and the safety of the law-abiding citizens. Because I don't distinguish violence committed with a gun from violence committed with other weapons, or brute strength. And because I DO distinguish between violence used in attack and that used in defense, and put the safety of the child and the law-abiding citizen, who have violence thrust upon them, above that of the criminals who chose to initiate violence.
I don't know what the Pinkertons' current set of criteria are. But some of the other schemes that were bandied about after Columbine involved scoring systems that penalized the targeted individual for things like presence of guns in the house and experience with guns.
Approximately half of the households in the United States have one or more gun present. A large fraction of those households - probably the majority - are populated by members of one of the factions of the American Pluralist culture.
These people train their children in proper gun handling at an early age. They are generally gifted with a gun, as well, typically when the parents or guardians determine that they have demonstrated by their behavior that they are responsible to handle it, or at the first birthday thereafter. This may happen as early as age 12 (though the gun will be stored safely, and the child will lose access to it if he demonstrates irresponsibility later).
The criminal and violent activity of children who have been trained with guns by responsible adults has been studied, and compared with that of those who have not been so trained. It turns out that the overall delinquency rates of the two groups are about the same. But when you look at the TYPES of misbehavior, the difference is drastic.
While the kids not trained with guns are out selling drugs, mugging, and robbing liquor stores, the kids trained with guns are out after curfew, or smoking in the boy's room. Even when kids trained with guns become involved with local youth gangs or commit assaults (which they do much less frequently than those not so trained), there is a conspicuous difference: They don't use a gun in the assault.
And if you look at the perpetrators of the various highly-publicised school shootings, you'll see a significant fact that the press has missed: Virtually all of the perpetrators came from families that were strongly anti-gun. At least one was the child of a prominent activist in the anti-gun movement.
So I share with the rest of the posters the concern about labeling of intelligent tech-savvy kids who hang out with others of their kind, don't participate in sports, and are already the butt of the jocks' and authority figures' harrassment. And I share the concern about the use of such turn-in programs by the little psycopaths prevalent in schools to further harrass anyone who doesn't knuckle under to them or who reports THEIR misbehavior, to obtain gifts off the system, or to hassle people at random just for giggles. But I have an additional worry.
I'm concerned that the Pinkertons will become involved in the current culture war. I'm concerned that this tool will be used to stigmatize children who have the misfortune to be born into a household that is a member of one of a set of well-integrated, peaceful, social traditions that predates the American Revolution.
And I'm concerned that this will further the attempts at the eradication of those cultural groups.
For those not aware of it, "tooling" is MIT slang for (approximately) studying to the exclusion of all else (such as exploring the university's inner space) and a "tool" is a person who does such things and little else. Thus the "toomb of the unknown tool" is a site where one might imagine a bookworm studied so hard he didn't notice he was being walled in by a building renovation. B-)
The rhyme with "fool" is apparently deliberate, to give you an idea of the opinion of such activities held by the users of the slang.
Or at least that's how I (who never went to MIT) understand it third hand. B-)
Redundant memory, redundant hard drives, redundant processors, .... But what happens when the cleaning staff unplugs it from the UPS because they needed that plug for their vacuum?
They have redundant power feeds, too. And not just the whole machine - every box in the room has 'em, and each feed powers a separate set of power supplies in the box. (Some devices get their power from their controllers. And these are generally driven by multiple controllers...)
If they did it right, the power cords go to opposite sides of the room, thence by different paths to different feed points where the building gets power from separate feeds that came in from different parts of the grid (which was a consideration in chosing the site for the computer center: at a grid boundary, or close enough that you can pay to string a line from a different section.
There's at least one UPS, of course. On ONE of those two feeds. (A UPS, on the average, creates one extra power failure in its first year of operation. B-) )
And I'd like to see the janitorial staff try to plug into the connectors that feed the mainframe. They aren't your typical duplex outlet.
The point of concurrent maintainence, of course, is that ANYTHING in the box can fail, and be swapped out and replaced, without stopping the processes.
They might not get as much CPU time or disk response speed as usual while the system is in "degraded" mode due to failed parts waiting for or undergoing replacement. But they run continuously for years - and are shooting for forever.
I hear they once moved a Tandem across town by putting in a mainframe's frame and the comm lines, then gradually installing boards in the new location and unplugging them from the old, until the whole machine was at the new site. Still running.
Try THAT with your PC. B-)
It's tough to get the balance right for a walker, without being in it or being suspended and thrown around to mimic the slave's movements in a remote control center.
The latter is a bit safer - but a lot more expensive, and you can still get broken by it if something goes wrong and the limits don't function adequately (or maybe a sprain even if they do work).
That being said, there's a lot you could avoid by running it remotely (as you demonstrate with your landmine example). Working inside a radioactive, toxic, or biohazard environment come to mind, as does deep-sea, vacuum, earth-to-near-orbit, near-orbit-to-lander, etc.
But many of those have been anticipated as well.
See Heinlien's _Waldo_ for several of them. There's a story from similarly long ago by another author where the remote was biological, adapted for a methane environment, and controlled from orbit, etc.