Before IBM are awarded a $3E9 judgement against them for barratry.
Interestingly, if IBM prevails (as most of the OSS community predicts) and is awarded huge damages, IBM may wind up owning the SysV code base after liquidation of SCO.
Can IBM use this power to make life difficult for the other vendors? Could IBM, for instance, drive HP off of HP-UX and SGI off of Irix? If so, where do they go? Do they join IBM in Linux or do they give IBM the finger and release a *BSD variant?
America looks like a lost cause, no chance to find intelligent life there. We should, as the parent suggests, concentrate on Europa.
Not a personal attack on you, azzy. you've been moderated funny, and I assume that is your intention.:)
I'm tired of hearing Europeans suggest that Europe is somehow more intelligent, sophisticated, and superior to America. Let's look at the last 250 years and keep score.
Number of times the continent has erupted in full scale war:
Europe: 7 Years War, Napoleanic Wars, Franco-Prussian War, WW I, WW II - 5 that I can count right off the bat.
America (excluding wars that started in Europe): American Civil War, Mexican War - hmm, only 2.
Winner - America
Number of Government Sponsered Mass Murders
Europe: The Terror (French Revolution), Great Potato Famine (English rulers continues to export grain from their land in Ireland as the Irish people starved to death), the Nazi Holocaust (which most of the French and much of the rest of the continent was more than willing to help with). I count at least 3.
America: The death of the American Indian population probably doesn't rank as high as the holocaust or the terror, but I have to include it since I included the Great Potato Famine. I count 1.
Winner - America
Meglomaniacal Dictators elected by democratic process, who then go on to become autocrats:
Europe: Two biggies - Napolean and Hitler.
America: None
Winner - America
Civil Rights:
Europe: currently pretty good, but generally guaranteed by tenuous laws. Democracy has progressed, but with lots of major setbacks when your neighbors were locking you in cattle trains and sending you off to camps where you would be worked to the bone, then gassed and incinerated.
America: African Americans in particular have had a rough time, but the general trend has been positive. At almost any time point civil rights were equal to or better than those in Europe for most everyone. Civil Rights have generally improved over time, with few major backward steps.
Winner - America
It seems that America is clearly more civilized than Europe.
PS - Potato Famine and American Indians - In both situations, the government chose to undertake an economic policy that would result in the massive displacement of people. Their intent was to gain the economic advantages regardless of the effect on the Irish or the Indians. The terror and the holocaust were both intended to murder large groups of "undesirable" people. The intent makes one a "manslaughter" charge and the other a "murder" charge. Not that it matters to those who died.
"The software has already been tested with air traffic controllers." Nice, safe place they found to beta test their stuff.
Read the article a little more closely. They tested their ability to gather data and build a model using ATCs. They didn't actually use their system to aid/interfere with the control of aircraft.
So, rather than trying to build a rule based expert system, they did the following...
Monitor the state of the ATC system
Monitor the actions of the controllers
Develop a database of patterns
Analyze the state of the ATC system
Search for similar patterns in the database
Predict the next action of the controller
Compare the actual next action with the predicted next action
At no point did a paperclip appear at the ATC terminal asking the controller if he wanted help directing a plane. The experiment was to determine how effectively an expert system could "learn" by observation instead of being programmed with sets of rules.
This is conceptually very similar to recent stories about transalation systems based on statistical analysis of a large database of translated material, rather than a grammar and dictionary approach.
Observationally trained systems, given enough "experience" (a large enough database and the abiltiy to access it efficiently) seem to be quite suited for all sorts of complex tasks. Rule based systems always suffer from the fact that real world systems - air traffic control or driving a car - are too complex to be efficiently described in a rule set. However, a database containing tens of millions of hours of air traffic control work will contain enough "experience" that virtually any situation could be handled optimally.
What is sorely needed is a public champion to advocate for increased NASA funding....
I don't think it is a budget issue, though. Throwing money at this sort of problem rarely solves anything. The problem is a cultural one.
Organisations frequently have an upward focus. Too many people concentrate on what their boss wants to hear, instead of what needs to be said. Everything is about satisfying one's boss by helping them satisfy their boss, by helping them satisfy their boss, ad nauseum. It is more important that things look right the most senior administrator than that they are right.
An organisation that depends on highly skilled highly professional people at relatively low levels needs to have a downward focus. The most senior people need to focus on how they can help their direct reports do their job, and those people need to focus on helping their direct reports do their jobs, ad nauseum. In the end, this type of culture helps the engineers and technicians actually do their job.
The US military went through this kind of transition in the early 1980s. More and more command and control was moved lower and lower in the hierarchy. Tactics were left to the people on the scene. The senior personnel focused on strategy and logistics, coordinating and supplying, which enable the local personnel to do their jobs effectively. Taking out a machine gun nest is a job for a sargeant or lutenant on the scene - not a general in Washington.
As someone who enjoys driving, but at one time regularly commuted by bicycle, I think this system could be useful if properly implemented.
First, there should be a little gray area built in. It would not be hard to write a routine that would compare specific events to your recorded driving habits and decide whether to issue a summons. For instance, if one regularly drives within the speed limit, but occassionally excededs the limit for a brief period of time in order to pass safely or avoid an unsafe driver, they should not be penalized. Drivers who regularly excede the speed limit should be penalized.
Second, I have no quam with ticketing the owner of a vehicle. They are fundamentally (and legally) responsible for its safe and lawful operation.
I used to live in an apartment complex near a major highway. When that highway backed up, many drivers would drive at highway speed through the streets around the complex in order to bypass the traffic jam. I have been struck twice crossing the street by people who ignored a stop sign, knowing that cops were almost never there. Anyone who has lived in an area with 1) lots of pedestrians and 2) lots of drivers who skirt the law knows the sense of danger and would welcome anything that would bring a consequence to these drivers.
Exactly what they will be taxing isn't clear, since the tax amounts to 9% of... something.
Hmm. If you read the second page of the article you will learn that the tax is on...
Lease payments for leased network equipment.
Depreciation on purchased network equipment.
This brings up an interesting point. Home users may not be affected. If one does not claim depreciation for the equipment, then one can't be taxed on it, I would think. I am not a tax attorney.
The law of the United States was based upon the legal traditions of Great Britan. Amendments 9 and 10 specifically address the issues that concern rights so fundamental no one thought to explicitly mention them.
Amendment IX
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
Amendment X
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.
Among the rights implied by the ninth amendment is the right to enjoy the benefits of one's property. If someone else's speech has the effect of infringing on one's right to benefit from one's own property, that speech can be regulated. For instance, a person may not erect a sign on your lawn without your permission. While the sign may be a form of speech protected by the first amendment, your right to your own lawn trumps that person's right to speech.
In this case, California has said that, if the property in question was information and that information doesn't further the public debate about the issues of the day, it cannot be made public with the protection of free speech.
This should be an intuitively just ruling. If a thief broke into your doctor's office and stole your medical records, others should not be able to publish potentially embarrassing information about you from those records and then claim protection of the first amendment. The court specifically left wiggle room in their ruling that free speech could be applied to "Whistle Blowers" (insiders who expose wrongdoing in corporations or government agencies) and the like.
The court also remanded the case back to lower courts in order to examine the issues of whether the trade secret could be considered property in this context and whether the trade secret was acquired by illegal means.
Again, it seems intuitively just that if a thief were to break into the offices of Coca-Cola and steal the secret formula, the thief and third parties who pass on the secret formula should not be allowed to hide behind free speech in order to benefit from the theft.
Now the lower courts will visit the issue of whether the DeCSS people did anything wrong in creating DeCSS.
There was an article I read about red-tape and the cost of replacing a light-bulb in large businesses. This was a LONG time ago, but it was something like $25.00 when you included the price of the light bulb, the time it took an employee to fill out a request, the time it took an accountant to review the request, approve it and send it on to some scheduler in maintenance, and the time it took for the worker to actually replace the light bulb.
When the flourescent lamps in a typical office (usually F40CW or F40CW-U) start to fail, many property managers relamp the entire area at once. Most of the lamps are near the end of their service life anyway, so very little utility is lost. It is substantially more costly to carry the ladder from the storage closet, set up the ladder, bring in a new lamp, change the lamp, cart away the old lamp, and put away the ladder 50 times than to change all 50 lamps at once.
A lot of people have beat this to death, but I'd like to add my own spin...
According to the article, the "natural" elemements "run out" at 92.
1) What does this mean exactly?
With a few exceptions, all the elements with 92 protons or less have been observed in nature. They are proven to exist without human intervention. The elements with 93 or more protons have only been observed to exist as the result or side effect of some experiment we did. We've proven that they can exist, but we can't prove that they do exist (without our intervention).
It is likely that, if one of these trans-uranic elements was later found in nature, it would still not be called "natural" because it was first observed in a laboratory.
2) Is it not possible for us to discover other natural elements?
Never say never, but if these elements are created in nature, they tend to be in such tiny amounts that they are effectively undetectable. Furthermore, these elements tend to be created under such extreme conditions and usually exist for such a short time that they are additionally difficult to detect.
You may have better luck trying to indirectly observe these elements in nature by looking for longer lived elements that result when the transuranic decays. Think of it as infering that wood once existed by looking for wood ash.
3) Is it inconceivable that our "new" elements could also be produced under similar conditions in nature?
It is quite conceivable - by the same logic that enough monkeys working at enough typewriters would produce the works of Shakespeare. The universe is big enough for it to happen somewhere at some time, but it is unusual enough that it would likely not be detected.
4) Have all of these new elements only existed in very small quantities for short periods of time, under controlled conditions?
Some of them are relatively stable. Plutonium and Americium have appreciable half lives. Others exist for only a fraction of a second.
Back in 1991, the Intel x86 architecture was just gettting to the point where the features of the chip deserved attention from serious Operating System developers. The 80386 chip was the first product in the line that had a usable protected memory mode. Prior to the 386, any program could write data anywhere in memory - writing over other programs and over the operating system itself. The 386 allowed a operating system to prevent a program from writing outside its own space.
BSD had been alive for quite a while at this point - frequently running on Digital's VAX hardware and other hardware more suited to running multitasking operating systems. But BSD was the subject of a lawsuit amongst AT&T/USL, UC-Berkeley, and another commercial venture that wanted to sell BSD Unix but whose name escapes me. No one knew who owned BSD and whether the code was encumbered.
So when Linus began writing his own OS, he started from scratch rather than work from BSD's code base. Once the court cases were settled and BSD was declared free of IP encumbrance, Linux had already developed a head of steam.
The BSD community continued to develop BSD for their more traditional Unix hardware while Linux continued to grow in the PC market. Some BSD developers, however, did port back to the x86 architecture. Gradually the x86 based chips grew in power to rival the traditional Unix hardware and now the BSD and Linux systems are competing in the same marketplace.
Today the major differences between BSD and Linux are the developer communities. Linux has a very large community, hence it has more hardware support. The three main BSD (OpenBSD, FreeBSD, and NetBSD) communities are smaller and tighter knit. There may be a level of elitism, in that the BSD people tended to come from professional Unix backgrounds while the Linux culture was formed by people who played with computers in their basements. Imagine that there was a contest to build an ultra-light aircraft of certain capability. The BSD people are the team made up of Boeing Engineers and NASA scientists while the Linux people are the people that build kites, fly RC aircraft, and launch model rockets in their spare time.
That being said, the three flavors of BSD offer a lot to the community. FreeBSD is a rock solid general purpose OS. It is most notably the core of Apple's OS-X. The NetBSD community has focused on porting to every platform known to man. Rather than concentrate on special features, they make sure that virtually every modern processor and chipset can run NetBSD. The OpenBSD community has focused on security a properly administered OpenBSD server is probably more secure than just about any other system that can be put on the network. It has been several years since anyone has found a bug in OpenBSD that would allow someone to run arbitrary code as root.
A smart thing to do is to allow the OSs to play to their strengths. If I were setting up a corporate environment, I'd probably use OpenBSD based servers on the edge of my network as internet webservers, mailservers, etc. Inside my network, I'd probably use Linux for application and resource servers (file sharing, databases, etc) since a lot of commercial support form companies like IBM and Oracle is available for Linux. At the desktop, I'd probably use Linux as well, for the greater hardware support. However, if I had a significant MAC user community I might use FreeBSD instead of Linux.
So I guess my Athlon XP won't fit in their CPU socket will it? Damn... So much for cheap AMD CPUs for supercomputers.
Stop being silly. The cooling requirements of an Athlon based massively powerful supercomputer would eat up the savings from using standard parts.
Seriously, though - I would guess, actually, that if one were to build a supercomputer from a "desktop" processor, the PPC970 (aka G5) chips would be a good choice. They have a solid vector unit, are RISCier, have a wider bus, and a better pipeline design. Plus IBM's fabrication capabilities are excellent - which helps in reliability and upgradability.
The abortion issue is not as cut and dried as you make it seem... In this country where close to half of the population opposes abortion...
While I myself am strongly in the pro-life camp, in reality I believe most Americans disagree with both the pro-life and pro-choice positions. I'd estimate that 75% of the population want to see early abortions (first trimester) legally available, but 75% also wants to see late abortions (third trimester - after the baby is viable) banned. They subconsciously balance the rights of the mother and child, and find that the mother's rights predominate initial but that the balance gradually shifts to the baby's right to life. There are 25% who believe that the child has an absolutely right to life from the moment of conception, 25% who believe that the mother can decide to kill her child up to the moment of birth, and 50% in between.
A major problem the pro-lifers have with stem cell research is that, if it is successful, it might create a marketplace for aborted fetus tissue. Today people do sell other tissues - everyone has heard of selling blood to private blood banks or selling sperm and eggs to fertitlity clinics. I've actually had a coworker tell me - in seriousness - that a fetus "is no different than a tumor." Is it implausible that some people may take the next step and create fetuses for the purpose of harvesting stem cells? People have had children for the express purpose of creating a potential bone marrow donor for a sibling. I don't think it is terribly far fetched.
Great! It is also useful for protewcting the keyboard!
Re:Can anyone list pros of debian vs gentoo
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Debian Turning 10
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· Score: 1
Parent is 100% right. I've used both, although I now run Debian.
Debian is - by design - meticulously assembled for reliable use/administration. Debian just works.
Gentoo is - by design - for the builder who wants to tweak their system for every drop of performance or every neat feature.
Which you use depends on your wants and needs. If you are someone who enjoys squeezing a little more out of your system, if you want to develop kernel code, if you are running a production server that needs a lot of TLC, Gentoo is a great distirbution. It does take a lot of care and feeding
On the other hand, if you want to run a "convential" system with few headaches and minimum chasing your tail, Debian is great.
...as long as the richest countries keep exploiting the poorest countries (and hence keep the poor countries poor) there will be individuals who refuse to live the life they are born to.
While I agree with much of what you said, this statement deserves some criticism.
Poverty has many causes. Exploitation by "the richest countries" sometimes is a factor. It is by no means to only or most important factor.
International trade is a two way street. In the long run whenever I buy something from a foreign nation using a US Dollar, that dollar must eventually be used to buy from or invest in the US. Dollars without a US economy are just pieces of paper.
In the days after WWII the US was far richer than any other country in the world. Products from Japan, S. Korea, Taiwan, and Western Europe were very cheap for American consumers. Businesses in those countries used the dollars from their exports in order to buy American capital goods, which started them on the track to build their nations to a US style standard of living. The US still engages in lucrative trade with those countries.
After the colapse of the Soviet Block, the "poor" countries in Eastern Europe have engaged in trade, and reinvested their profits. Their standard of living is rising toward "Western" levels.
India is combating poverty by "tele-exporting" technology skills.
Too many nations of the "third world", however, are led by corrupt leaders who squander the procedes of what trade they have not to reinvest in their economy and improve their standard of living for all, but to coddle a ruling class while oppressing the people. When a business owner makes a profit through foreign trade, he takes much of those profits and uses it to expand his business. When a corrupt politician, however, siezes most of that profit for his own gain, however, the reinvestment does not happen. Look at Iraq: how much money was spent on opulent Palaces for Saddam, his sons, and Ba'ath party elite? If that money had been spend on modern farm equipment, quality manufacturing tools, etc. Iraq might today be a rich country.
The root cause of poverty is a stagnant aristocratic class system.
If the Republic had depended on "honesty and virtuous politicians" to run government, it would have collapsed sometime shortly after George Washington left office.
I must differ on this. John Adams was quite honest and virtuous. Hamilton and Jefferson were responsible for letting party politics get in the way of the public good.
I guess this will accelerate the need for IPv6, since Chimeric Twins will needs twice as many IP addresses. Sure, they can use NAT, but what is the point to having the extra DNA if you can't independantly address it.
Buy somethig to match your other equipment
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Buying a New TV?
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· Score: 1
Other considerations being reasonable, it may be worth it to stick with one brand of equipment.
I use Sony produced DirecTV receivers, incliding a Sony DirecTiVo upgraded to store 150 hours of TV. Going with a Sony TV means that I can always use just one remote.
I like the Panasonic and Sony televisions. I would personally spend $300 on a mid-line TV and worry about HDTV in a few years, but I'm trying to watch TV, not have a home theater.
They also apply a unique bar code to each piece of first class mail.
The barcode is far from unique. It is a simple encoding of the zip, zip+4,or zip+4+2 for the address.
A long line (1) is used as a start and stop bit at each end. Within the barcode, a simple 2of5 encoding is done. Each bit is weighted at 7,4,2,1, and 0. The value of the digit is evaluated by summing the values of the two bits selected. By definition, ||... (11) is zero.
That map is very cool. One question, though. What is the basis for the realtionships?
For instance, Linix is shown as an offshoot of Minix. I was an avid reader of comp.os.minix in 1991-1992, so I understand the "social" relationship. The early linux community was formed in large part from the active minix community. On the other hand, linux is architecturally quite different. It doesn't seem right to connect them in a technical sense. For that matter, minix is listed as a offshoot of Unix V7. AST's state goal was to mimic the API of V7, but the kernel is closer to Mach and Hurd from an architecture standpoint.
I suscribe to Consumer Reports online. I mostly need access to their reviews - and it is easier to compare air conditioners online than try to find the issue from 4 months ago.
Slashdot Mirror
Interestingly, if IBM prevails (as most of the OSS community predicts) and is awarded huge damages, IBM may wind up owning the SysV code base after liquidation of SCO.
Can IBM use this power to make life difficult for the other vendors? Could IBM, for instance, drive HP off of HP-UX and SGI off of Irix? If so, where do they go? Do they join IBM in Linux or do they give IBM the finger and release a *BSD variant?
Bonus Points!!
Not a personal attack on you, azzy. you've been moderated funny, and I assume that is your intention. :)
I'm tired of hearing Europeans suggest that Europe is somehow more intelligent, sophisticated, and superior to America. Let's look at the last 250 years and keep score.
Number of times the continent has erupted in full scale war:
Europe: 7 Years War, Napoleanic Wars, Franco-Prussian War, WW I, WW II - 5 that I can count right off the bat.
America (excluding wars that started in Europe): American Civil War, Mexican War - hmm, only 2.
Winner - America
Number of Government Sponsered Mass Murders
Europe: The Terror (French Revolution), Great Potato Famine (English rulers continues to export grain from their land in Ireland as the Irish people starved to death), the Nazi Holocaust (which most of the French and much of the rest of the continent was more than willing to help with). I count at least 3.
America: The death of the American Indian population probably doesn't rank as high as the holocaust or the terror, but I have to include it since I included the Great Potato Famine. I count 1.
Winner - America
Meglomaniacal Dictators elected by democratic process, who then go on to become autocrats:
Europe: Two biggies - Napolean and Hitler.
America: None
Winner - America
Civil Rights:
Europe: currently pretty good, but generally guaranteed by tenuous laws. Democracy has progressed, but with lots of major setbacks when your neighbors were locking you in cattle trains and sending you off to camps where you would be worked to the bone, then gassed and incinerated.
America: African Americans in particular have had a rough time, but the general trend has been positive. At almost any time point civil rights were equal to or better than those in Europe for most everyone. Civil Rights have generally improved over time, with few major backward steps.
Winner - America
It seems that America is clearly more civilized than Europe.
PS - Potato Famine and American Indians - In both situations, the government chose to undertake an economic policy that would result in the massive displacement of people. Their intent was to gain the economic advantages regardless of the effect on the Irish or the Indians. The terror and the holocaust were both intended to murder large groups of "undesirable" people. The intent makes one a "manslaughter" charge and the other a "murder" charge. Not that it matters to those who died.
Read the article a little more closely. They tested their ability to gather data and build a model using ATCs. They didn't actually use their system to aid/interfere with the control of aircraft.
So, rather than trying to build a rule based expert system, they did the following...
- Monitor the state of the ATC system
- Monitor the actions of the controllers
- Develop a database of patterns
- Analyze the state of the ATC system
- Search for similar patterns in the database
- Predict the next action of the controller
- Compare the actual next action with the predicted next action
At no point did a paperclip appear at the ATC terminal asking the controller if he wanted help directing a plane. The experiment was to determine how effectively an expert system could "learn" by observation instead of being programmed with sets of rules.This is conceptually very similar to recent stories about transalation systems based on statistical analysis of a large database of translated material, rather than a grammar and dictionary approach.
Observationally trained systems, given enough "experience" (a large enough database and the abiltiy to access it efficiently) seem to be quite suited for all sorts of complex tasks. Rule based systems always suffer from the fact that real world systems - air traffic control or driving a car - are too complex to be efficiently described in a rule set. However, a database containing tens of millions of hours of air traffic control work will contain enough "experience" that virtually any situation could be handled optimally.
I don't think it is a budget issue, though. Throwing money at this sort of problem rarely solves anything. The problem is a cultural one.
Organisations frequently have an upward focus. Too many people concentrate on what their boss wants to hear, instead of what needs to be said. Everything is about satisfying one's boss by helping them satisfy their boss, by helping them satisfy their boss, ad nauseum. It is more important that things look right the most senior administrator than that they are right.
An organisation that depends on highly skilled highly professional people at relatively low levels needs to have a downward focus. The most senior people need to focus on how they can help their direct reports do their job, and those people need to focus on helping their direct reports do their jobs, ad nauseum. In the end, this type of culture helps the engineers and technicians actually do their job.
The US military went through this kind of transition in the early 1980s. More and more command and control was moved lower and lower in the hierarchy. Tactics were left to the people on the scene. The senior personnel focused on strategy and logistics, coordinating and supplying, which enable the local personnel to do their jobs effectively. Taking out a machine gun nest is a job for a sargeant or lutenant on the scene - not a general in Washington.
First, there should be a little gray area built in. It would not be hard to write a routine that would compare specific events to your recorded driving habits and decide whether to issue a summons. For instance, if one regularly drives within the speed limit, but occassionally excededs the limit for a brief period of time in order to pass safely or avoid an unsafe driver, they should not be penalized. Drivers who regularly excede the speed limit should be penalized.
Second, I have no quam with ticketing the owner of a vehicle. They are fundamentally (and legally) responsible for its safe and lawful operation.
I used to live in an apartment complex near a major highway. When that highway backed up, many drivers would drive at highway speed through the streets around the complex in order to bypass the traffic jam. I have been struck twice crossing the street by people who ignored a stop sign, knowing that cops were almost never there. Anyone who has lived in an area with 1) lots of pedestrians and 2) lots of drivers who skirt the law knows the sense of danger and would welcome anything that would bring a consequence to these drivers.
Hmm. If you read the second page of the article you will learn that the tax is on...
- Lease payments for leased network equipment.
- Depreciation on purchased network equipment.
This brings up an interesting point. Home users may not be affected. If one does not claim depreciation for the equipment, then one can't be taxed on it, I would think. I am not a tax attorney.Amendment IX
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
Amendment X
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.
Among the rights implied by the ninth amendment is the right to enjoy the benefits of one's property. If someone else's speech has the effect of infringing on one's right to benefit from one's own property, that speech can be regulated. For instance, a person may not erect a sign on your lawn without your permission. While the sign may be a form of speech protected by the first amendment, your right to your own lawn trumps that person's right to speech.
In this case, California has said that, if the property in question was information and that information doesn't further the public debate about the issues of the day, it cannot be made public with the protection of free speech.
This should be an intuitively just ruling. If a thief broke into your doctor's office and stole your medical records, others should not be able to publish potentially embarrassing information about you from those records and then claim protection of the first amendment. The court specifically left wiggle room in their ruling that free speech could be applied to "Whistle Blowers" (insiders who expose wrongdoing in corporations or government agencies) and the like.
The court also remanded the case back to lower courts in order to examine the issues of whether the trade secret could be considered property in this context and whether the trade secret was acquired by illegal means.
Again, it seems intuitively just that if a thief were to break into the offices of Coca-Cola and steal the secret formula, the thief and third parties who pass on the secret formula should not be allowed to hide behind free speech in order to benefit from the theft.
Now the lower courts will visit the issue of whether the DeCSS people did anything wrong in creating DeCSS.
When the flourescent lamps in a typical office (usually F40CW or F40CW-U) start to fail, many property managers relamp the entire area at once. Most of the lamps are near the end of their service life anyway, so very little utility is lost. It is substantially more costly to carry the ladder from the storage closet, set up the ladder, bring in a new lamp, change the lamp, cart away the old lamp, and put away the ladder 50 times than to change all 50 lamps at once.
According to the article, the "natural" elemements "run out" at 92.
1) What does this mean exactly?
With a few exceptions, all the elements with 92 protons or less have been observed in nature. They are proven to exist without human intervention. The elements with 93 or more protons have only been observed to exist as the result or side effect of some experiment we did. We've proven that they can exist, but we can't prove that they do exist (without our intervention). It is likely that, if one of these trans-uranic elements was later found in nature, it would still not be called "natural" because it was first observed in a laboratory.
2) Is it not possible for us to discover other natural elements?
Never say never, but if these elements are created in nature, they tend to be in such tiny amounts that they are effectively undetectable. Furthermore, these elements tend to be created under such extreme conditions and usually exist for such a short time that they are additionally difficult to detect.
You may have better luck trying to indirectly observe these elements in nature by looking for longer lived elements that result when the transuranic decays. Think of it as infering that wood once existed by looking for wood ash.
3) Is it inconceivable that our "new" elements could also be produced under similar conditions in nature?
It is quite conceivable - by the same logic that enough monkeys working at enough typewriters would produce the works of Shakespeare. The universe is big enough for it to happen somewhere at some time, but it is unusual enough that it would likely not be detected.
4) Have all of these new elements only existed in very small quantities for short periods of time, under controlled conditions?
Some of them are relatively stable. Plutonium and Americium have appreciable half lives. Others exist for only a fraction of a second.
BSD had been alive for quite a while at this point - frequently running on Digital's VAX hardware and other hardware more suited to running multitasking operating systems. But BSD was the subject of a lawsuit amongst AT&T/USL, UC-Berkeley, and another commercial venture that wanted to sell BSD Unix but whose name escapes me. No one knew who owned BSD and whether the code was encumbered.
So when Linus began writing his own OS, he started from scratch rather than work from BSD's code base. Once the court cases were settled and BSD was declared free of IP encumbrance, Linux had already developed a head of steam.
The BSD community continued to develop BSD for their more traditional Unix hardware while Linux continued to grow in the PC market. Some BSD developers, however, did port back to the x86 architecture. Gradually the x86 based chips grew in power to rival the traditional Unix hardware and now the BSD and Linux systems are competing in the same marketplace.
Today the major differences between BSD and Linux are the developer communities. Linux has a very large community, hence it has more hardware support. The three main BSD (OpenBSD, FreeBSD, and NetBSD) communities are smaller and tighter knit. There may be a level of elitism, in that the BSD people tended to come from professional Unix backgrounds while the Linux culture was formed by people who played with computers in their basements. Imagine that there was a contest to build an ultra-light aircraft of certain capability. The BSD people are the team made up of Boeing Engineers and NASA scientists while the Linux people are the people that build kites, fly RC aircraft, and launch model rockets in their spare time.
That being said, the three flavors of BSD offer a lot to the community. FreeBSD is a rock solid general purpose OS. It is most notably the core of Apple's OS-X. The NetBSD community has focused on porting to every platform known to man. Rather than concentrate on special features, they make sure that virtually every modern processor and chipset can run NetBSD. The OpenBSD community has focused on security a properly administered OpenBSD server is probably more secure than just about any other system that can be put on the network. It has been several years since anyone has found a bug in OpenBSD that would allow someone to run arbitrary code as root.
A smart thing to do is to allow the OSs to play to their strengths. If I were setting up a corporate environment, I'd probably use OpenBSD based servers on the edge of my network as internet webservers, mailservers, etc. Inside my network, I'd probably use Linux for application and resource servers (file sharing, databases, etc) since a lot of commercial support form companies like IBM and Oracle is available for Linux. At the desktop, I'd probably use Linux as well, for the greater hardware support. However, if I had a significant MAC user community I might use FreeBSD instead of Linux.
Real men used WordStar! Quick Quiz - What did Control-B do?
And the Uber-men (like me) use vi and TeX!
It is like rain on your wedding day, a free ride when you've already paid...
Sorry, couldn't help myself.
Stop being silly. The cooling requirements of an Athlon based massively powerful supercomputer would eat up the savings from using standard parts.
Seriously, though - I would guess, actually, that if one were to build a supercomputer from a "desktop" processor, the PPC970 (aka G5) chips would be a good choice. They have a solid vector unit, are RISCier, have a wider bus, and a better pipeline design. Plus IBM's fabrication capabilities are excellent - which helps in reliability and upgradability.
The abortion issue is not as cut and dried as you make it seem... In this country where close to half of the population opposes abortion...
While I myself am strongly in the pro-life camp, in reality I believe most Americans disagree with both the pro-life and pro-choice positions. I'd estimate that 75% of the population want to see early abortions (first trimester) legally available, but 75% also wants to see late abortions (third trimester - after the baby is viable) banned. They subconsciously balance the rights of the mother and child, and find that the mother's rights predominate initial but that the balance gradually shifts to the baby's right to life. There are 25% who believe that the child has an absolutely right to life from the moment of conception, 25% who believe that the mother can decide to kill her child up to the moment of birth, and 50% in between.
A major problem the pro-lifers have with stem cell research is that, if it is successful, it might create a marketplace for aborted fetus tissue. Today people do sell other tissues - everyone has heard of selling blood to private blood banks or selling sperm and eggs to fertitlity clinics. I've actually had a coworker tell me - in seriousness - that a fetus "is no different than a tumor." Is it implausible that some people may take the next step and create fetuses for the purpose of harvesting stem cells? People have had children for the express purpose of creating a potential bone marrow donor for a sibling. I don't think it is terribly far fetched.
Great! It is also useful for protewcting the keyboard!
Parent is 100% right. I've used both, although I now run Debian.
Debian is - by design - meticulously assembled for reliable use/administration. Debian just works.
Gentoo is - by design - for the builder who wants to tweak their system for every drop of performance or every neat feature.
Which you use depends on your wants and needs. If you are someone who enjoys squeezing a little more out of your system, if you want to develop kernel code, if you are running a production server that needs a lot of TLC, Gentoo is a great distirbution. It does take a lot of care and feeding
On the other hand, if you want to run a "convential" system with few headaches and minimum chasing your tail, Debian is great.
While I agree with much of what you said, this statement deserves some criticism.
Poverty has many causes. Exploitation by "the richest countries" sometimes is a factor. It is by no means to only or most important factor.
International trade is a two way street. In the long run whenever I buy something from a foreign nation using a US Dollar, that dollar must eventually be used to buy from or invest in the US. Dollars without a US economy are just pieces of paper.
In the days after WWII the US was far richer than any other country in the world. Products from Japan, S. Korea, Taiwan, and Western Europe were very cheap for American consumers. Businesses in those countries used the dollars from their exports in order to buy American capital goods, which started them on the track to build their nations to a US style standard of living. The US still engages in lucrative trade with those countries.
After the colapse of the Soviet Block, the "poor" countries in Eastern Europe have engaged in trade, and reinvested their profits. Their standard of living is rising toward "Western" levels.
India is combating poverty by "tele-exporting" technology skills.
Too many nations of the "third world", however, are led by corrupt leaders who squander the procedes of what trade they have not to reinvest in their economy and improve their standard of living for all, but to coddle a ruling class while oppressing the people. When a business owner makes a profit through foreign trade, he takes much of those profits and uses it to expand his business. When a corrupt politician, however, siezes most of that profit for his own gain, however, the reinvestment does not happen. Look at Iraq: how much money was spent on opulent Palaces for Saddam, his sons, and Ba'ath party elite? If that money had been spend on modern farm equipment, quality manufacturing tools, etc. Iraq might today be a rich country.
The root cause of poverty is a stagnant aristocratic class system.
I must differ on this. John Adams was quite honest and virtuous. Hamilton and Jefferson were responsible for letting party politics get in the way of the public good.
I guess this will accelerate the need for IPv6, since Chimeric Twins will needs twice as many IP addresses. Sure, they can use NAT, but what is the point to having the extra DNA if you can't independantly address it.
I use Sony produced DirecTV receivers, incliding a Sony DirecTiVo upgraded to store 150 hours of TV. Going with a Sony TV means that I can always use just one remote.
I like the Panasonic and Sony televisions. I would personally spend $300 on a mid-line TV and worry about HDTV in a few years, but I'm trying to watch TV, not have a home theater.
The barcode is far from unique. It is a simple encoding of the zip, zip+4,or zip+4+2 for the address.
A long line (1) is used as a start and stop bit at each end. Within the barcode, a simple 2of5 encoding is done. Each bit is weighted at 7,4,2,1, and 0. The value of the digit is evaluated by summing the values of the two bits selected. By definition, ||... (11) is zero.
For instance, Linix is shown as an offshoot of Minix. I was an avid reader of comp.os.minix in 1991-1992, so I understand the "social" relationship. The early linux community was formed in large part from the active minix community. On the other hand, linux is architecturally quite different. It doesn't seem right to connect them in a technical sense. For that matter, minix is listed as a offshoot of Unix V7. AST's state goal was to mimic the API of V7, but the kernel is closer to Mach and Hurd from an architecture standpoint.
If the content is worth it, people will pay.
Hmm. Maybe not. TiVo licenses their technology but the actual OEMs are Sony and Philips. Sounds even better!