From the second the money comes out of your account, Wells Fargo records the bill as paid. Of course, there is a 5 day delay before your creditor receives payment, and possibly a bit longer before they say that you have paid.
This means that Wells Fargo is claiming to have paid something long before it is actually paid. They need another possible entry for the status column "payment allocated and pending" or some such.
Perhaps they should change the status to "payment cleared" after the money has actually been transferred.
Then you'll know when the creditor should has the money - and the information that he has the money.
This way Wells won't need to sound like they're doing anything less for you than with the current version, while the change will look to them like they're improving the service to their customers at essentially no cost to them (since they already have the info online and only need to get it to the display).
It's also a closer match to their current paper-based terminology. That will make the advantage more obvious to the decision makers.
If they take it and modifiy it, they have to distribute the mods under LGPL. Under GPL it infects their code if they use more than a Fair Use worth. (Isn't that about 10 lines.)
If they get in a situation where they are supposed to distribute all their source, and don't, they're on borrowed time. Piss off a developer and he might blow the whistle. Then the owners of the original copyright(left) can sue for the rest of the source, and use discovery to pry out internal documents to prove the case.
Who knows how the courts will rule - but it's a big risk to the company, so they'll probably try to keep it clean, least they get raked over the coals and maybe catch fire. Courts tend to favor the little guy if his story is good and his lawyer doesn't screw up. And Copyleft is set up so anything that breaks it proabably also breaks the parts of IP law that let the proprietary software people write and license their own stuff. B-)
Remember that copyright violation penalties, unlike most civil penalties, are puntative and draconian (at least partly to make up for the low probability of getting caught), not limited to the damages directly incurred by the copyright holder.
Meanwhile the whole software species improves, and the proprietary shops have about a 5-to-1 disadvantage in development speed, so they'll keep falling behind even with cannibalization.
Unix isn't going away any time soon.
on
The End of Unix?
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· Score: 2
The BSD family are firmly embedded in many vendors' networking infrastructure - both packet and TDM (telephony). Once it's there it will be there for some time. The penetration is increasing, as new entrants in these markets use FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and the like as convenient, stable, open platforms for their networking products. (It's particularly suited for packet routing, since BSDs are where the software was developed in the first place, and the BSD interfaces now serve as the default interchange language for exchanging software sources.)
Mainframes running UTS (mainframe-compatable clones of SVR2 and SVR4) now handle mission-critical functions for many large companies: All the Baby Bells, for instance, do their long distance billing data capture on it, and run their where-are-all-the-wires databases on it. (If it ever went down all the long distance calls would be free until it was back, which is why uptimes in years are mandatory.) Brokerages support their trading with it (even more $/second if it ever went away). Web sites run on it. (Apache has been there for a while.) And so on. And of course they fixed the Unix clock-rollover bug long ago, so they shouldn't have as many hiccups a few decades down the road when it finally rolls.
Semiconductor design is done with tools that run on Unixes. Some have been ported to Windows to try to take advantage of the cheaper crunch - but not many, and there's little demand for them, since they can't be easily combined into a design flow with scripts. Some of them are now being ported to Linux to achieve the same cost savings. This is easy. (For many, it's just copying the source tree and running "make", for some it's a little tweaking.) And on Linux you DO have the scripting tools, plug-and-play with Unix networks, and a familiar environment. So this IS being accepted - nay, demanded - by major ASIC design ooperations.
Billion-dollar companies in trillion-dollar industries are depending on hundreds of large applications written to run on unix. If they ever DO port them to something else, any bets on whether it will be something new, or another flavor of Unix?
(And right now Linux qualifies as a flavor of Unix for this discussion. Windows, NT, and OS2, of course, do not. What a pity.)
Who really cares if somebody patents something that doesn't actually work after all? So he's got a patent on something broken. Big deal. It costs a lot to patent, so most people won't bother unless they think they have something that works.
The PTO had to do something about perpetual motion machines because they're so popular that the examiners were getting buried. But the occasional warp drive / FTL communicator, or other probably bogus invention isn't as much of a load as having the examiners try to make a call on whether every darn thing submitted actually does what it's supposed to do.
And who knows? Maybe one of these days somebody will bring in a warp drive or FTL communicator that DOES work. B-)
They stopped requiring working models for everything but devices to violate the conservation of energy after they filled up a bunch of warehouses with working models of everything under the sun. (A lot of it was big farm implements.)
Many of the Smithsonian exhibits are old working models from patent applications.
Interestingly: A very efficient still (using counter-current heat exchangers and creating near-vacuum by being 30ish feet tall at approximately atmospheric pressure at the bottom) was initially rejected for being a perpetual motion machine (for which they have rather high standards, in addition to the working-model requirement. B-) ) But the inventer was able to convince them to grant the patent after he showed them that you still had to input the heat of solution plus some heat for various losses.
Virtually every other scarce resource has been allocated by ownership and markets, and this has proven to average out much fairer than the alternatives that have been tried. (Royal fiat and central planning, for instance, have generally proven disastrously unfair and restricting.)
Why should the radio spectrum be any different from land, water rights, natural resources, food, or any other limited resource?
Yet the United States persists in treating it differently - until now. And suddenly people are "viewing with alarm".
I'm cheering.
And the only thing I'm concerned about is the details of how, and how much, of this resource will transition to private ownership. (Uncle Sam has a patchy record on that issue.)
... and the splash line across the top of the referenced article says (approximately)
fast free fast free false...
Nevertheless, not explicitly mentioning it in the front-page article is a poor move. The readership is a very diverse group, with non-native speakers of English and people from a wide variety of subcultures even among the native speakers.
Like sarcasm, subtle hints that something is a hoax or a joke (rather than, say, being true but very funny) will not get across to a significant fraction of them. They may believe the posting, be burned by it, and end up distrusting or with enmity toward the poster and the site.
Even those who get that it might be a hoax right away will likely waste time checking - time that might have been spent on subjects they were MUCH more interested in.
I've seen this sort of posting several times on Slashdot, and they have annoyed me every time. But this is the most egregious. I'm a long-time Netcom subscriber, so it affects me enough that when an ambiguous posting about it comes up, no matter how ridiculous it seems, I need to check it out.
Today, between checking this and commenting about it I wasted the rest of the time I could have spent doing what I wanted to to - check the IMPORTANT news. So to me, it's NOT funny.
Just think: Once internet voting becomes standard the Chinese Army won't have to buy any more presidential elections. They can just put their new information warfare department to work and elect whomever they want.
Ok, congresscritters. You can stop doing the campaign-finance-laws dance.
The key here is "Armed". Should Joe Public be allowed to keep a SAW around? An RPG? Canisters of nerve gas? Perhaps some tanks? How about a few Atom Bombs? Back in the 1770's, the definition of "Armed" was much simplier. Should a group want to overthrow the current US government, it's not going to happen with a bunch of rifles and handguns.
The "Armed" of the 2nd Amendment doesn't just mean rifles and pistols. The founding fathers had personal cannon and warships, as well - the absolute latest high-tek superweapons of the day. And the general population's small arms ran to higher-accuracy longer-range rifles while the world's armies were still toting smoothbores.
There is no sign they intended that to change as technology improved - and plenty of sign that they intended the trend to continue. They knew about progress, especially in weaponry, and wrote about it incessantly. (Machine-guns, for instance, had already been prototyped at the time.) They stated clearly that they intended the population to always be BETTER armed than the government - both to stand off invasions from other governments and to their own government in its place - or destroy and replace it - if it ever got out of hand.
So if the minions of governments have SAWs, RPG, nerve gas, or nukes, what makes anyone think the founders would not have wanted the citizens to have them, too? The logic of the "balance of terror" is as valid between a population and its government as it is between two governments.
And what makes anyone think they're safer from a nuke in the hand of the likes of Hussein, or flammable-gas-projecting tanks in the hands of the likes of Horriuchi and Reno, than they are with them in the hands of a private citizen with the means to purchase them? (For myself, I'd trust any private citizen who could afford a nuke farther than most of the presidents since the start of the nuclear age.)
I grew up in a farm town, where I was about the weakest kid in school. So what's new?
And what's new for most of the readers of slashdot, eh? YOU remember being hazed by the Jocks, the socialite cliques, and every kid who looked more WASP - or more like the local adult power structure members - than you did, don't you?
Even if you're in the top couple percentile of intelligence now there are already millions smarter than you, and lots more who have learned advantageous techniques that you haven't.
Genetic "upgrading" - if it WORKS - will be just a change in degree, not a binary "Supermen vs. the Mud People".
Meanwhile (as has already been pointed out), tampering with a complex system like the human organism takes a lot of trial-and-error, and the generations are long. The first iteration will no doubt be the easy, sure things: eliminating well-defined genetic diseases, selecting sex and hair/skin/eye colors. Later maybe improved teeth, elimination of more subtle genetic diseases (obesity, receptor-mediated high cholesterol), selecting on well-defined appearance items like overbite fat storage distribution.
But even the easy stuff can be risky - as the NAZIs found out when their breed-more-blond-haired-blue-eyed-Arian-Supermen program produced thousands of new phenylketonuriacs - blond haired, blue eyed, and with varying amounts of brain damage, depending on the amount of phenylalenine in their childhood diets. (Perhaps this is part of the origin of the "dumb blonde" stereotype?)
Tampering with the brain is going to take a lot more research before one can expect the results to have a significant chance of improving, rather than harming the function. And once it's done in earnest, the result might be smarter but it will also be more uniform - which may make both individuals and populations more predicatble.
Then how long will it take before a significant number of prospective parents think it's safe enough to use on THEIR offspring-to-be?
How many people will chose to do it even when it IS practical. Remember: The more the genes are modified, the less the children are genetically THEIR children. I bet the fixups will be popular but the designer kids will be pretty rare - and faddish. (What do you do when you're eighteen, and blue eyes and pointy ears are SO fifteen-years-ago?)
Members of various ethnic groups may consider it genocide, and not only boycott it but create political pressure against it. (And that will create a backlash...) This could get interesting.
So for the first couple generations, at least, I'm not too worried about the upgrades taking over the world. The population will skew toward healthier and smarter, but mainly because the elimination of major genetic diseases will allow people to achieve more of their intellectual potential who would otherwise have suffered brain-harming "loads" from defective biochemical systems.
IMHO by the time "upgrades" become a significant factor, we'll be dealing with a post-singularity scenario. If I'm still alive it will be because medical technology will have improved drastically - to the point that similar benefits will be available as a retrofit.
It's the people who are making choices on the use of genetic upgrading on their offspring about twenty to forty years from now who may face the hard choice: Whether it's better for their genome and descendents to upgrade their children for better competition potential or leave them natural (or only-disease-deleted) for more gene transfer.
Meanwhile - there's some interesting speculative literature on the subject - some of it quite old. _Brave New World_ is a well-known dystopia where a totalitarian government engineers the population for its convenience. One of Heinlein's early novelettes dealt with the issue of what a society might look like after some of the people are upgraded by several generations of voluntary ability to select only the "good" traits from the parents' genomes.
And the Adam Warren _Dirty Pair_ graphic novels are set in a future that includes nanotech and genetic upgrades as major plot-driving elements. (The lead characters are themselves genetic upgrades, and an establishing scene in the current miniseries shows a confrontation between several young spacer upgrades and an older character from Mars who is biggotted against upgrades. He flames them for their comic-book appearnce and the taste buds in some private places. In return they razz him about his appendix. B-) )
(Speaking of which - they found out what the appendix - and the tonsils and adenoids - are for. And while not necessary for life they still work and are advantageous.)
(Sorry to diverge. I tried to submit this as a reply to the article. But I already posted a direct reply to the article on a different piece of the issue, and the Slashdot software thinks this is a repeat and won't post it. This thread seems the most closely related.)
The UCITA and the DMCA seem to interact tightly.
UCITA's "self help" provision says companies can write code that they can turn off if there's a dispute - by remote control or time-bombs - before the dispute is resolved in court.
DMCA makes it a felony to defeat such software "protection" schemes.
Discovery in the court case of the original dispute would expose the defeat of the protection scheme, even if it hadn't already been obvious from the continued operation of the company.
So the software purchasers are totally at the mercy of the software vendors.
And the software vendors don't need to announce the protection schemes. So there's no way to tell if they're there without reverse-engineering (which is almost certainly banned by the license under the UCITA and may be a crime under the DMCA), or finding out when the software stops working - at which point you're a felon if you even try to turn it back on to keep your business running.
The National Conference of Commissions on Uniform State Laws adopted UCITA in July. The conference recommends commercial code law and sends it to the 50 states for their adoption.
This organization seems to be a multi-state collection of regulators (i.e. members of state executive branches) acting as a national legislature. They debate in private (or at least with zero press coverage) and are heavily lobied. They construct the text of proposed laws and submit them to the state legislatures simultaneously.
So the general public goes from nothing to a bunch of identical bills simultaneously submitted in state legislators all over the country. And if they want to oppose them, or even modify them, they have a war on dozens of fronts, against a very organized group that has almost achieved its objective. They almost certainly lose in several states, after which the proposed legislation, in its original form, becomes a de-facto national standard. So they can't even modify a line.
Such laws are pervasive as federal laws. But they draw power their power from the several states, which are not as limited by the federal constitution. And there's no central place to repeal these laws - you have to get ALL the states to go along simultaneously.
I think that, at a minimum, the organization needs some serious sunlight - in the form of investigation and exposure to press - or alternative press - coverage of their operations and deliberations. (At least that way people could find out earlier when their ox is about to be gored, and maybe have a chance to head off bad legislation when it's in the formative stages.)
Beyond that, there's the question of whether it's proper for state executive branches to participate in the crafting of multi-state legislation. Is it intrusion on another branch's prerogatives? Is this one of the powers that is supposed to be reserved to the Federal government? Are "sunshine laws" violated?
This kind of coup is hardly unprecedented: It's is how we got a federal constitution in the first place: The Continental Congress set up a committee to propose some amendments to the Articles of Confederation (their "constitution"). The Federalists took over the committee, drafted the US Constitution, and bypassed the Continental Congress, submitting it to the states directly. It had a "bootloading" provision that when more than a fixed number of the states adopted it, it started, the adopters were detached from the Continental Congress (leaving it without a quorum) and attached to the Federation, and the rest of the states were out in the cold unless they signed up, too. (The Bill of Rights was the result of a rear-guard holding action by the Anti-Federalists, an allegedly minor concession they won in return for surrendering in a battle they were already losing.)
This sounds to me like it's electron beam lithography, but not SCANNING electron beam lithography.
Electric fields can be used as lenses to focus electron beams, forming images of a stencil, just as physical lenses can be used to focus photon beams.
On one hand there's a complication because electrons mutually-repell and also affect the field that forms the lens, so higher beam currents tend to distort things somewhat.
On the other hand, the lenses are formed by an electric field's natural curvature. So small-scale optical imperfections just don't occur in a good vacuum, while gross imperfections are easy dealt with by maintaining decent tolerances in the construction and excitation of the electrodes.
Of course they COULD have made a breakthrough in scanning electron beam technology, and be talking about writing every chip one at a time. But that doesn't square with either the claims of "billions of transistors" and those of "speeding up the processing".
Yes, they could get DENSITIES of billions of transistors. But writing them one at a time takes a while. And keeping the beam alligned across a large chip is a problem. (Though the latter can be solved to some extent by first laying out a set of location markers and using them in later steps to figure out where the beam actually is.)
The whole point of modern mainframes can be summed up in one word: VOLUME.
Sorry, but that's the wrong word. Volume is necessary, but you can get that with either big machines or clusters of little ones.
The word you want is RELIABILITY.
And by reliability I don't mean just uptime (although that's a piece of it). I mean the machine does not drop bits. Period. Even though the PIECES of it are dropping bits all over the place. (When you have square feet of silicon intercepting cosmic ray secondaries and rattled by thermal vibration it's unaviodable.)
I know of at least one mainframe multi-CPU unix clone (UTS) which has sites with uptimes measured in years. In fact the last time I heard there were software patches that had been enqueued to be loaded the next time it went down, which have been waiting for years as well.
The CPUS are automatically switched out when they fail and manually switched back in once they're fixed. The show goes on. And the processes that were running on the cpu as it failed still do their computation correctly - because the broken bits were caught and fixed as the CPU/memory/whatever hiccupped.
Many of the people who are putting together clusters of machines of lower reliability - including those in the management of at least one mainframe company - haven't grokked that concept.
The more computations you do, the more likely you are to be hit with an error. If your process is mission critical you can use hardware that catches AND FIXES the error, or you can try to write software that detects and recovers.
The software solution is the MUCH harder problem. The hardware fix - which is the mainframe solution - is expensive. But when you're dealing with millions of bucks per hour of downtime, or perhaps per dropped bit (as phone companies, brokerages, banks, and the like are), you can afford it. Mainframes (less peripherals), redundancy and all, have been under a megabuck a pop for some years.
It obviously was meant to promote discussion on violence in video games: "Healthy outlet for stress or promoting violence in society?
Naw. As I see it, it was meant to bash the networks' competition for eyeball time - by spreading the meme that video games need to be suppressed. (It promotes that discussion only as a tool.) If they're lucky, they get government anti-videogame action going. If not, at least it gets a lot of parents to restrict their kids' video-gaming and switches their eyeball time to TV.
It also gives them a scapegoat when the censors come after them for the violence on their shows. "You think WE're violent? Look at Slasher Deathmath VII!". (Meanwhile they get to do an ultra-violent episode themselves and call it socially responsible.)
They've done lots of stuff like this in the past: Alleged entertainment that makes villans or monsters of home computer users, the web, role-playing games, and even cable channel broadcasters. (I recall one cop show, for instance, where the murderer was a cable-channel operator, as part of a scheme to get access to a cable system.)
You'll also see a lot of it in network news: Computer programmers are evil "hackers" (always misused to discredit the experts), tearing down the business infrastructure and compromising national security. Computer games turn children into violent criminals and mass murderers. The web is full of skinheads, revolutionaries, cults, and child molesters. And so on.
It's interesting to see that they're STILL up to their old tricks.
I'm wondering, how does this system deal with people with different eye spacings?
If your eyes are farther apart than the ones the screen was designed for, sit proportionally farther back. Closer together, proportionally closer to the screen.
Think of the light for the right and left eyes as a pair of beams that diverge from the screen. Farther back, farther apart.
There's a limit to this, because the screen is wide so there has to be a small difference in the direction of the light as you go from side to side. This results in an approximation of focusing the light at the stock eye locations. So if your eyes are TOO far off the standard, you won't be able to get the whole screen to work right at the same time - if you've got the middle right the edges will start to blurr together. But your eye separation would have to be WAY off the normal for this to happen.
I saw a demonstration of a simple hack to convert a laptop to do this at a conference a few years back. (Cost: About 15 cents.)
You make a moire plate by hacking up a postscript program to draw thin lines across a page with a spacing of half the pixel spacing on your LCD panel. (Tune the program as necessary to get the spacing right.) Print it on an overhead-projector transparency and mount it over your LCD display. Each eye sees half the scan lines, with the other half are blocked by the black stripes. One eye gets one half, the other eye the other half.
You typically have to rotate the display a quarter turn, because the typical display has vertical color stripes, so using it in the normal position will give you half the colors, rather than half the scanlines, into each eye.
In addition to having the right spacing on the plate (very slightly closer together than twice the line spacing), and the right distance from the plate to the pixels (which you get by tuning that "slightly" so the plate can sit on the screen, typically with the toner on the side toward your eye), you have to be roughly centered in front of the screen and roughly the right distance from it.
The obvious improvement(which I've been meaning to do for a couple years, if nobody got around to it commercially - and it looks like these guys did) is to replace the flat plastic sheet with light-absorbent stripes with one with triangular and slightly curved ridges - exactly the sort of plastic stuff you see in those thick, non-holographic pictures, some of which are 3-D, others animated-when-you-move-your-head-or-the-picture. This does the same thing by bending, rather than blocking, the light, so you don't have to waste half of it.
Comparing the data from passes at different times will show the change in elevation as a nice contour map.
Changes in elevation are closely related to the earth stresses that are released by earthquakes and vulcanism.
Such a change-of-height map should make regions that have just had (or are about to have) earthquakes or volcanic eruptions stand out like a forest fire.
On the subject of internet and political organization, I can think of a few others who might be better candidates for such interviews than Gore's internet guy.
For starters: Newt - or his internet guy. He was the first established politician to make serious use of the internet for political organization and campaigning. It was an underpinning of his contract-with-America push to obtain a congressional majority.
Next: The people who organized the grass-roots networks that took down some major political figures. Here are the organization names. (I can dig out contact info if there's interest)
Citizens Against Corruption: Organized (at least one of the two) grass-roots letter-to-every-voter-in-his-district campaigns that took out Roberti and Roos in California.
De-Foley-8: Organized a grass-roots campaign that took out Foley - the only time a sitting speaker of the house was taken down in an election.
These last two represent three successful kick-the-bastard-out campaigns organized entirely over the internet, powered primarily by members of one interest group (pro-gun), acting in retaliation against powerful political figures who had passed legislation against their interests.
Think how many more people might participate in campaigns against the authors of legislation goring internet oxen - such as censorship, crypto bans, nettapping, anti-reverse-engineering, etc.
Not to mention "campaign reform" laws designed to make such grass roots campaigns impossible.
The general mood on Slashdot about those pages is that it contains lies. So, which one of those is not true:
Windows runs 25 percent of Web sites worldwide; Sun runs 19 percent. (Source: Netcraft 12/99)
45 percent of secure Web sites run on Windows; Sun runs 11 percent. (Source: Netcraft 12/99)
That's an apples-to-oranges comparison. A better comparison than "Windows to Sun" is "Windows to *N*X".
Notice that Windows is significantly under 50%? How much of that >50% non-Windows is *N*X? B-)
52 of the top 100 Internet shopping sites run on Windows. (Source: Media Metrix; Netcraft)
One word: Legacy. Windows was out there for a long time before Linux began to be accepted by business. And Windows has always been popular in the executive suite, regardless of the input from the poor workers who have to use and administer it.
Another: Volume. What fraction of the transactions are handled by Microsoft, what fraction by *N*X?
57 percent of top business-to-business marketplaces run on Windows. (Source: Goldman Sachs; Netcraft)
Care to define "top business-to-business marketplace"?
Slashdot Mirror
The Alien II forklift-armor was inspired by the previous generation of powered-suit research by the military - with a little obvious extrapolation.
Remote-control master-slave manipulators and the like dates from Heinlein's story "Waldo", back about world war II
They've been doing this stuff since the fifties.
They used to call 'em "Man Amplifiers" (which dates them to before the Women's Lib movement.)
But, this is my major beef with them:
From the second the money comes out of your account, Wells Fargo records the bill as paid. Of course, there is a 5 day delay before your creditor receives payment, and possibly a bit longer before they say that you have paid.
This means that Wells Fargo is claiming to have paid something long before it is actually paid. They need another possible entry for the status column "payment allocated and pending" or some such.
Perhaps they should change the status to "payment cleared" after the money has actually been transferred.
Then you'll know when the creditor should has the money - and the information that he has the money.
This way Wells won't need to sound like they're doing anything less for you than with the current version, while the change will look to them like they're improving the service to their customers at essentially no cost to them (since they already have the info online and only need to get it to the display).
It's also a closer match to their current paper-based terminology. That will make the advantage more obvious to the decision makers.
That's what Open Source is about, after all.
If they take it unmodified, they're within LGPL.
If they take it and modifiy it, they have to distribute the mods under LGPL. Under GPL it infects their code if they use more than a Fair Use worth. (Isn't that about 10 lines.)
If they get in a situation where they are supposed to distribute all their source, and don't, they're on borrowed time. Piss off a developer and he might blow the whistle. Then the owners of the original copyright(left) can sue for the rest of the source, and use discovery to pry out internal documents to prove the case.
Who knows how the courts will rule - but it's a big risk to the company, so they'll probably try to keep it clean, least they get raked over the coals and maybe catch fire. Courts tend to favor the little guy if his story is good and his lawyer doesn't screw up. And Copyleft is set up so anything that breaks it proabably also breaks the parts of IP law that let the proprietary software people write and license their own stuff. B-)
Remember that copyright violation penalties, unlike most civil penalties, are puntative and draconian (at least partly to make up for the low probability of getting caught), not limited to the damages directly incurred by the copyright holder.
Meanwhile the whole software species improves, and the proprietary shops have about a 5-to-1 disadvantage in development speed, so they'll keep falling behind even with cannibalization.
The BSD family are firmly embedded in many vendors' networking infrastructure - both packet and TDM (telephony). Once it's there it will be there for some time. The penetration is increasing, as new entrants in these markets use FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and the like as convenient, stable, open platforms for their networking products. (It's particularly suited for packet routing, since BSDs are where the software was developed in the first place, and the BSD interfaces now serve as the default interchange language for exchanging software sources.)
Mainframes running UTS (mainframe-compatable clones of SVR2 and SVR4) now handle mission-critical functions for many large companies: All the Baby Bells, for instance, do their long distance billing data capture on it, and run their where-are-all-the-wires databases on it. (If it ever went down all the long distance calls would be free until it was back, which is why uptimes in years are mandatory.) Brokerages support their trading with it (even more $/second if it ever went away). Web sites run on it. (Apache has been there for a while.) And so on. And of course they fixed the Unix clock-rollover bug long ago, so they shouldn't have as many hiccups a few decades down the road when it finally rolls.
Semiconductor design is done with tools that run on Unixes. Some have been ported to Windows to try to take advantage of the cheaper crunch - but not many, and there's little demand for them, since they can't be easily combined into a design flow with scripts. Some of them are now being ported to Linux to achieve the same cost savings. This is easy. (For many, it's just copying the source tree and running "make", for some it's a little tweaking.) And on Linux you DO have the scripting tools, plug-and-play with Unix networks, and a familiar environment. So this IS being accepted - nay, demanded - by major ASIC design ooperations.
Billion-dollar companies in trillion-dollar industries are depending on hundreds of large applications written to run on unix. If they ever DO port them to something else, any bets on whether it will be something new, or another flavor of Unix?
(And right now Linux qualifies as a flavor of Unix for this discussion. Windows, NT, and OS2, of course, do not. What a pity.)
Who really cares if somebody patents something that doesn't actually work after all? So he's got a patent on something broken. Big deal. It costs a lot to patent, so most people won't bother unless they think they have something that works.
The PTO had to do something about perpetual motion machines because they're so popular that the examiners were getting buried. But the occasional warp drive / FTL communicator, or other probably bogus invention isn't as much of a load as having the examiners try to make a call on whether every darn thing submitted actually does what it's supposed to do.
And who knows? Maybe one of these days somebody will bring in a warp drive or FTL communicator that DOES work. B-)
They stopped requiring working models for everything but devices to violate the conservation of energy after they filled up a bunch of warehouses with working models of everything under the sun. (A lot of it was big farm implements.)
Many of the Smithsonian exhibits are old working models from patent applications.
Interestingly: A very efficient still (using counter-current heat exchangers and creating near-vacuum by being 30ish feet tall at approximately atmospheric pressure at the bottom) was initially rejected for being a perpetual motion machine (for which they have rather high standards, in addition to the working-model requirement. B-) ) But the inventer was able to convince them to grant the patent after he showed them that you still had to input the heat of solution plus some heat for various losses.
Virtually every other scarce resource has been allocated by ownership and markets, and this has proven to average out much fairer than the alternatives that have been tried. (Royal fiat and central planning, for instance, have generally proven disastrously unfair and restricting.)
Why should the radio spectrum be any different from land, water rights, natural resources, food, or any other limited resource?
Yet the United States persists in treating it differently - until now. And suddenly people are "viewing with alarm".
I'm cheering.
And the only thing I'm concerned about is the details of how, and how much, of this resource will transition to private ownership. (Uncle Sam has a patchy record on that issue.)
... and the splash line across the top of the referenced article says (approximately)
...
fast free fast free false
Nevertheless, not explicitly mentioning it in the front-page article is a poor move. The readership is a very diverse group, with non-native speakers of English and people from a wide variety of subcultures even among the native speakers.
Like sarcasm, subtle hints that something is a hoax or a joke (rather than, say, being true but very funny) will not get across to a significant fraction of them. They may believe the posting, be burned by it, and end up distrusting or with enmity toward the poster and the site.
Even those who get that it might be a hoax right away will likely waste time checking - time that might have been spent on subjects they were MUCH more interested in.
I've seen this sort of posting several times on Slashdot, and they have annoyed me every time. But this is the most egregious. I'm a long-time Netcom subscriber, so it affects me enough that when an ambiguous posting about it comes up, no matter how ridiculous it seems, I need to check it out.
Today, between checking this and commenting about it I wasted the rest of the time I could have spent doing what I wanted to to - check the IMPORTANT news. So to me, it's NOT funny.
Not plugging it in doesn't help if it's integrated with the modem and there's only one plug.
Just think: Once internet voting becomes standard the Chinese Army won't have to buy any more presidential elections. They can just put their new information warfare department to work and elect whomever they want.
Ok, congresscritters. You can stop doing the campaign-finance-laws dance.
The key here is "Armed". Should Joe Public be allowed to keep a SAW around? An RPG? Canisters of nerve gas? Perhaps some tanks? How about a few Atom Bombs? Back in the 1770's, the definition of "Armed" was much simplier. Should a group want to overthrow the current US government, it's not going to happen with a bunch of rifles and handguns.
The "Armed" of the 2nd Amendment doesn't just mean rifles and pistols. The founding fathers had personal cannon and warships, as well - the absolute latest high-tek superweapons of the day. And the general population's small arms ran to higher-accuracy longer-range rifles while the world's armies were still toting smoothbores.
There is no sign they intended that to change as technology improved - and plenty of sign that they intended the trend to continue. They knew about progress, especially in weaponry, and wrote about it incessantly. (Machine-guns, for instance, had already been prototyped at the time.) They stated clearly that they intended the population to always be BETTER armed than the government - both to stand off invasions from other governments and to their own government in its place - or destroy and replace it - if it ever got out of hand.
So if the minions of governments have SAWs, RPG, nerve gas, or nukes, what makes anyone think the founders would not have wanted the citizens to have them, too? The logic of the "balance of terror" is as valid between a population and its government as it is between two governments.
And what makes anyone think they're safer from a nuke in the hand of the likes of Hussein, or flammable-gas-projecting tanks in the hands of the likes of Horriuchi and Reno, than they are with them in the hands of a private citizen with the means to purchase them? (For myself, I'd trust any private citizen who could afford a nuke farther than most of the presidents since the start of the nuclear age.)
I grew up in a farm town, where I was about the weakest kid in school. So what's new?
And what's new for most of the readers of slashdot, eh? YOU remember being hazed by the Jocks, the socialite cliques, and every kid who looked more WASP - or more like the local adult power structure members - than you did, don't you?
Even if you're in the top couple percentile of intelligence now there are already millions smarter than you, and lots more who have learned advantageous techniques that you haven't.
Genetic "upgrading" - if it WORKS - will be just a change in degree, not a binary "Supermen vs. the Mud People".
Meanwhile (as has already been pointed out), tampering with a complex system like the human organism takes a lot of trial-and-error, and the generations are long. The first iteration will no doubt be the easy, sure things: eliminating well-defined genetic diseases, selecting sex and hair/skin/eye colors. Later maybe improved teeth, elimination of more subtle genetic diseases (obesity, receptor-mediated high cholesterol), selecting on well-defined appearance items like overbite fat storage distribution.
But even the easy stuff can be risky - as the NAZIs found out when their breed-more-blond-haired-blue-eyed-Arian-Supermen program produced thousands of new phenylketonuriacs - blond haired, blue eyed, and with varying amounts of brain damage, depending on the amount of phenylalenine in their childhood diets. (Perhaps this is part of the origin of the "dumb blonde" stereotype?)
Tampering with the brain is going to take a lot more research before one can expect the results to have a significant chance of improving, rather than harming the function. And once it's done in earnest, the result might be smarter but it will also be more uniform - which may make both individuals and populations more predicatble.
Then how long will it take before a significant number of prospective parents think it's safe enough to use on THEIR offspring-to-be?
How many people will chose to do it even when it IS practical. Remember: The more the genes are modified, the less the children are genetically THEIR children. I bet the fixups will be popular but the designer kids will be pretty rare - and faddish. (What do you do when you're eighteen, and blue eyes and pointy ears are SO fifteen-years-ago?)
Members of various ethnic groups may consider it genocide, and not only boycott it but create political pressure against it. (And that will create a backlash...) This could get interesting.
So for the first couple generations, at least, I'm not too worried about the upgrades taking over the world. The population will skew toward healthier and smarter, but mainly because the elimination of major genetic diseases will allow people to achieve more of their intellectual potential who would otherwise have suffered brain-harming "loads" from defective biochemical systems.
IMHO by the time "upgrades" become a significant factor, we'll be dealing with a post-singularity scenario. If I'm still alive it will be because medical technology will have improved drastically - to the point that similar benefits will be available as a retrofit.
It's the people who are making choices on the use of genetic upgrading on their offspring about twenty to forty years from now who may face the hard choice: Whether it's better for their genome and descendents to upgrade their children for better competition potential or leave them natural (or only-disease-deleted) for more gene transfer.
Meanwhile - there's some interesting speculative literature on the subject - some of it quite old. _Brave New World_ is a well-known dystopia where a totalitarian government engineers the population for its convenience. One of Heinlein's early novelettes dealt with the issue of what a society might look like after some of the people are upgraded by several generations of voluntary ability to select only the "good" traits from the parents' genomes.
And the Adam Warren _Dirty Pair_ graphic novels are set in a future that includes nanotech and genetic upgrades as major plot-driving elements. (The lead characters are themselves genetic upgrades, and an establishing scene in the current miniseries shows a confrontation between several young spacer upgrades and an older character from Mars who is biggotted against upgrades. He flames them for their comic-book appearnce and the taste buds in some private places. In return they razz him about his appendix. B-) )
(Speaking of which - they found out what the appendix - and the tonsils and adenoids - are for. And while not necessary for life they still work and are advantageous.)
The last thing I want is a behind-the-firewall 10 Mbps network link on my phone line going outside the house.
Who needs a Tempest box to tap you when your whole net is on your phone line?
(Sorry to diverge. I tried to submit this as a reply to the article. But I already posted a direct reply to the article on a different piece of the issue, and the Slashdot software thinks this is a repeat and won't post it. This thread seems the most closely related.)
The UCITA and the DMCA seem to interact tightly.
UCITA's "self help" provision says companies can write code that they can turn off if there's a dispute - by remote control or time-bombs - before the dispute is resolved in court.
DMCA makes it a felony to defeat such software "protection" schemes.
Discovery in the court case of the original dispute would expose the defeat of the protection scheme, even if it hadn't already been obvious from the continued operation of the company.
So the software purchasers are totally at the mercy of the software vendors.
And the software vendors don't need to announce the protection schemes. So there's no way to tell if they're there without reverse-engineering (which is almost certainly banned by the license under the UCITA and may be a crime under the DMCA), or finding out when the software stops working - at which point you're a felon if you even try to turn it back on to keep your business running.
Nasty.
The National Conference of Commissions on Uniform State Laws adopted UCITA in July. The conference recommends commercial code law and sends it to the 50 states for their adoption.
This organization seems to be a multi-state collection of regulators (i.e. members of state executive branches) acting as a national legislature. They debate in private (or at least with zero press coverage) and are heavily lobied. They construct the text of proposed laws and submit them to the state legislatures simultaneously.
So the general public goes from nothing to a bunch of identical bills simultaneously submitted in state legislators all over the country. And if they want to oppose them, or even modify them, they have a war on dozens of fronts, against a very organized group that has almost achieved its objective. They almost certainly lose in several states, after which the proposed legislation, in its original form, becomes a de-facto national standard. So they can't even modify a line.
Such laws are pervasive as federal laws. But they draw power their power from the several states, which are not as limited by the federal constitution. And there's no central place to repeal these laws - you have to get ALL the states to go along simultaneously.
I think that, at a minimum, the organization needs some serious sunlight - in the form of investigation and exposure to press - or alternative press - coverage of their operations and deliberations. (At least that way people could find out earlier when their ox is about to be gored, and maybe have a chance to head off bad legislation when it's in the formative stages.)
Beyond that, there's the question of whether it's proper for state executive branches to participate in the crafting of multi-state legislation. Is it intrusion on another branch's prerogatives? Is this one of the powers that is supposed to be reserved to the Federal government? Are "sunshine laws" violated?
This kind of coup is hardly unprecedented: It's is how we got a federal constitution in the first place: The Continental Congress set up a committee to propose some amendments to the Articles of Confederation (their "constitution"). The Federalists took over the committee, drafted the US Constitution, and bypassed the Continental Congress, submitting it to the states directly. It had a "bootloading" provision that when more than a fixed number of the states adopted it, it started, the adopters were detached from the Continental Congress (leaving it without a quorum) and attached to the Federation, and the rest of the states were out in the cold unless they signed up, too. (The Bill of Rights was the result of a rear-guard holding action by the Anti-Federalists, an allegedly minor concession they won in return for surrendering in a battle they were already losing.)
This sounds to me like it's electron beam lithography, but not SCANNING electron beam lithography.
Electric fields can be used as lenses to focus electron beams, forming images of a stencil, just as physical lenses can be used to focus photon beams.
On one hand there's a complication because electrons mutually-repell and also affect the field that forms the lens, so higher beam currents tend to distort things somewhat.
On the other hand, the lenses are formed by an electric field's natural curvature. So small-scale optical imperfections just don't occur in a good vacuum, while gross imperfections are easy dealt with by maintaining decent tolerances in the construction and excitation of the electrodes.
Of course they COULD have made a breakthrough in scanning electron beam technology, and be talking about writing every chip one at a time. But that doesn't square with either the claims of "billions of transistors" and those of "speeding up the processing".
Yes, they could get DENSITIES of billions of transistors. But writing them one at a time takes a while. And keeping the beam alligned across a large chip is a problem. (Though the latter can be solved to some extent by first laying out a set of location markers and using them in later steps to figure out where the beam actually is.)
... Even if it is now owned by the japanese.
Talk about IBM clones... B-) It's hard to get more accurate than one done in the company started by the guy that used to design 'em for IBM.
The whole point of modern mainframes can be summed up in one word: VOLUME.
Sorry, but that's the wrong word. Volume is necessary, but you can get that with either big machines or clusters of little ones.
The word you want is RELIABILITY.
And by reliability I don't mean just uptime (although that's a piece of it). I mean the machine does not drop bits. Period. Even though the PIECES of it are dropping bits all over the place. (When you have square feet of silicon intercepting cosmic ray secondaries and rattled by thermal vibration it's unaviodable.)
I know of at least one mainframe multi-CPU unix clone (UTS) which has sites with uptimes measured in years. In fact the last time I heard there were software patches that had been enqueued to be loaded the next time it went down, which have been waiting for years as well.
The CPUS are automatically switched out when they fail and manually switched back in once they're fixed. The show goes on. And the processes that were running on the cpu as it failed still do their computation correctly - because the broken bits were caught and fixed as the CPU/memory/whatever hiccupped.
Many of the people who are putting together clusters of machines of lower reliability - including those in the management of at least one mainframe company - haven't grokked that concept.
The more computations you do, the more likely you are to be hit with an error. If your process is mission critical you can use hardware that catches AND FIXES the error, or you can try to write software that detects and recovers.
The software solution is the MUCH harder problem. The hardware fix - which is the mainframe solution - is expensive. But when you're dealing with millions of bucks per hour of downtime, or perhaps per dropped bit (as phone companies, brokerages, banks, and the like are), you can afford it. Mainframes (less peripherals), redundancy and all, have been under a megabuck a pop for some years.
It obviously was meant to promote discussion on violence in video games: "Healthy outlet for stress or promoting violence in society?
Naw. As I see it, it was meant to bash the networks' competition for eyeball time - by spreading the meme that video games need to be suppressed. (It promotes that discussion only as a tool.) If they're lucky, they get government anti-videogame action going. If not, at least it gets a lot of parents to restrict their kids' video-gaming and switches their eyeball time to TV.
It also gives them a scapegoat when the censors come after them for the violence on their shows. "You think WE're violent? Look at Slasher Deathmath VII!". (Meanwhile they get to do an ultra-violent episode themselves and call it socially responsible.)
They've done lots of stuff like this in the past: Alleged entertainment that makes villans or monsters of home computer users, the web, role-playing games, and even cable channel broadcasters. (I recall one cop show, for instance, where the murderer was a cable-channel operator, as part of a scheme to get access to a cable system.)
You'll also see a lot of it in network news: Computer programmers are evil "hackers" (always misused to discredit the experts), tearing down the business infrastructure and compromising national security. Computer games turn children into violent criminals and mass murderers. The web is full of skinheads, revolutionaries, cults, and child molesters. And so on.
It's interesting to see that they're STILL up to their old tricks.
I'm wondering, how does this system deal with people with different eye spacings?
If your eyes are farther apart than the ones the screen was designed for, sit proportionally farther back. Closer together, proportionally closer to the screen.
Think of the light for the right and left eyes as a pair of beams that diverge from the screen. Farther back, farther apart.
There's a limit to this, because the screen is wide so there has to be a small difference in the direction of the light as you go from side to side. This results in an approximation of focusing the light at the stock eye locations. So if your eyes are TOO far off the standard, you won't be able to get the whole screen to work right at the same time - if you've got the middle right the edges will start to blurr together. But your eye separation would have to be WAY off the normal for this to happen.
I saw a demonstration of a simple hack to convert a laptop to do this at a conference a few years back. (Cost: About 15 cents.)
You make a moire plate by hacking up a postscript program to draw thin lines across a page with a spacing of half the pixel spacing on your LCD panel. (Tune the program as necessary to get the spacing right.) Print it on an overhead-projector transparency and mount it over your LCD display.
Each eye sees half the scan lines, with the other half are blocked by the black stripes. One eye gets one half, the other eye the other half.
You typically have to rotate the display a quarter turn, because the typical display has vertical color stripes, so using it in the normal position will give you half the colors, rather than half the scanlines, into each eye.
In addition to having the right spacing on the plate (very slightly closer together than twice the line spacing), and the right distance from the plate to the pixels (which you get by tuning that "slightly" so the plate can sit on the screen, typically with the toner on the side toward your eye), you have to be roughly centered in front of the screen and roughly the right distance from it.
The obvious improvement(which I've been meaning to do for a couple years, if nobody got around to it commercially - and it looks like these guys did) is to replace the flat plastic sheet with light-absorbent stripes with one with triangular and slightly curved ridges - exactly the sort of plastic stuff you see in those thick, non-holographic pictures, some of which are 3-D, others animated-when-you-move-your-head-or-the-picture. This does the same thing by bending, rather than blocking, the light, so you don't have to waste half of it.
Comparing the data from passes at different times will show the change in elevation as a nice contour map.
Changes in elevation are closely related to the earth stresses that are released by earthquakes and vulcanism.
Such a change-of-height map should make regions that have just had (or are about to have) earthquakes or volcanic eruptions stand out like a forest fire.
On the subject of internet and political organization, I can think of a few others who might be better candidates for such interviews than Gore's internet guy.
For starters: Newt - or his internet guy. He was the first established politician to make serious use of the internet for political organization and campaigning. It was an underpinning of his contract-with-America push to obtain a congressional majority.
Next: The people who organized the grass-roots networks that took down some major political figures. Here are the organization names. (I can dig out contact info if there's interest)
Citizens Against Corruption: Organized (at least one of the two) grass-roots letter-to-every-voter-in-his-district campaigns that took out Roberti and Roos in California.
De-Foley-8: Organized a grass-roots campaign that took out Foley - the only time a sitting speaker of the house was taken down in an election.
These last two represent three successful kick-the-bastard-out campaigns organized entirely over the internet, powered primarily by members of one interest group (pro-gun), acting in retaliation against powerful political figures who had passed legislation against their interests.
Think how many more people might participate in campaigns against the authors of legislation goring internet oxen - such as censorship, crypto bans, nettapping, anti-reverse-engineering, etc.
Not to mention "campaign reform" laws designed to make such grass roots campaigns impossible.
Windows runs 25 percent of Web sites worldwide; Sun runs 19 percent. (Source: Netcraft 12/99)
45 percent of secure Web sites run on Windows; Sun runs 11 percent. (Source: Netcraft 12/99)
That's an apples-to-oranges comparison. A better comparison than "Windows to Sun" is "Windows to *N*X".
Notice that Windows is significantly under 50%? How much of that >50% non-Windows is *N*X? B-)
52 of the top 100 Internet shopping sites run on Windows. (Source: Media Metrix; Netcraft)
One word: Legacy. Windows was out there for a long time before Linux began to be accepted by business. And Windows has always been popular in the executive suite, regardless of the input from the poor workers who have to use and administer it.
Another: Volume. What fraction of the transactions are handled by Microsoft, what fraction by *N*X?
57 percent of top business-to-business marketplaces run on Windows. (Source: Goldman Sachs; Netcraft)
Care to define "top business-to-business marketplace"?