Mod parent up, way up! This person has the whole picture, and can see the same problems I do.
BTW, I agree with his idea about rewards, but they should be made big enough to get somebody who's a little hungry interested. But even though m$ can well afford to offer $10,000 per valid bug or security hole found, I'm certainly not betting on that "reward thing" happening, ever. Country boy dumb? Maybe, but not stupid.
Being nice to M$? In this camp, it doesn't compute. Lifes a trade, and they've got nothing to offer me.
The Redmond behemoth can't move that fast. And its congenital. Hell, it takes their attornies a month to review how they can make the EULA even more restrictive than it is before they'll clear a patchset for download.
That said, I do agree with a notification to them, say 2 weeks ahead of the public release of the attack details. This wasn't kosher at all. OTOH, maybe he did try to notify them but his message went into a black hole, they do after all, make it extremely difficult to contact them by any means except the $$$ per hour support channels. Thats not this researchers fault.
The fact that it probably won't make any differences in the M$ response time hasn't got anything to do with it. Go ahead, start your timers... Just make sure they'll go past the end of the next month without overflowing when you do.
but if you force this on them too soon, you will get a backlash because the counties will have to pull the money from other parts of their budget.. AND that would piss voters off.
I'm sorry for those counties that have to do that. But since they made the decision to buy those POS in the first place, then in retrospect, I don't feel sorry for them.
Leaving a situation in place that allows even one election to be stolen by the likes of Diebold et all, is not a situation any voter should tolerate, ever. And if it means you don't get your street plowed till the next day after a snowstorm, so beit. The place to point your anger at in that case is the county commissioner who saved a buck by buying it from so-and-so without setting out a set of specifications that precluded such hanky-panky.
And, while I'm a firm believer in the one man, one vote rule, I'm a bit ambivalent about the isolation of the voters ident from the vote. Personally, I'd like to have the ability to go back after the election, and verify that the candidates I voted for did indeed get my actual vote.
To that end, a 2 kilobit pgp(or gpg) style public key for you as a receipt and a private key attached to the vote seems like a hell of a good idea. I could check my vote with my public key, but to check somebody elses would take a considerable computational effort.
Now all we have to do is convince TPTB that democracy, to be protected, must be well protected even from their prying eyes.
Also, does anyone know why the preview to post isn't working about 50% of the time?, it draws the column headings on the left at full screen width, and says its done. Like this is the second time in a row I've got to post blind...
Of course, if they were smart, they would've installed GOMF...
Naww, what they should have done is reamed the author to fix his proggy. I never once felt I needed to install GOMF. I installed software that didn't need it instead.
The amiga has one huge advantage over x86 stuffs, its memory model is flat.
The amiga has one huge achilles heel, its memory model is flat.
What this boils down to is that any program can take an unitialized pointer and scribble all over system memory with it in one swell foop. And thats where you get a GURU MEDITATION.
Programmers who paid attention to what they were doing never had a problem with that, but the languages available for the masses, like Arexx, sometimes didn't give any warnings that they were running on un-inititalized array pointers. SAS/C was a bit better at that, and would catch maybe half of them at compile time. Sometimes things were fine for many hours/days, but then something in the languages garbage collection would take it down.
OTOH, before my last hard drive failed, my big box 2000 running OS3.9, a very busy machine on the internet, could and did get uptimes of 2-3 weeks! And I co-wrote the EZCron that drove all that, also EZHome to automate the X10 equipt home.
Yes, one could have a relatively stable amiga if enough effort was put into the code it ran.
If it landed in D. McBride's back yard I wouldn't complain.
Oh? I believe you would, for a few hours maybe. After that, you wouldn't be alive to care, and neither would I even if we both lived in Bombay. The earthquake ripple alone would take care of us lowly humans and ALL our construction projects over the eons.
Do the math for a 570 mile diameter object coming in at at least 18 thousand miles an hour, the escape velocity plus a bit for the original nudge that headed it our way.
I doubt that this planet would survive the aftermath and still have any life on it other than possibly some deep sea vent stuffs that can survive in a ph of 10+ and several hundred atmospheres of ambient pressure. Even that may be dicey because it would be so scattered from its home by the time the temps returned to normal for them without slowing down much in the cooloff phase that followed, if nothing else 99.99% of them would starve or run out of whatever it is they use for energy.
A 570 mile diameter object would make Jerry Pournell and Larry Nivens "Lucifers Hammer" look like a sunday picnic.
It could even knock a piece off big enough to make us another moon, but much smaller, and probably in a rapidly decaying orbit in geologic time scales.
The recurring tides from that, while it lasted, would pretty much doom anything that wasn't buried in a couple of miles of solid rock. Its the same tides that would steal its orbital energy, making the eventual re-mergeing with our planet a certainty. Close enough the Chandrasakar(you spell it, I can't) limit comes to mind, so it might come back in in pieces only 5 miles in diameter, but many of them.
But, its orbit seems stable in that 3/2 neptune ordered gravitational tug of war, so I doubt we have to worry about it in the next 5 million years or so.
To relate a story that happened about 2 years ago when big red or sobig, I forget which, was running rampant, my local ISP was having a major portion of his bandwidth being used up by one machine, a server in an insurance office in a neighboring county seat town.
They were warned that their machine was infected by telephone on several occasions, and disconnected for a few hours several times in attempting to get them to reload the computer and put in the patches. Each time they were disconnected, their lawyer called in 30 minutes or so of opening hours threatening action for breach of contract.
I believe they were disconnected for good after the rest of the system covering a good portion of the state had been severely crippled for about a month. The ISP had to countersue to get them out of the ISP's collective hair. I don't know if they ever admitted their machine was at fault, or fixed it.
But this is a prime example of a situation where the machine owner WAS repeatedly notified and took no action. That to me, makes them 200% liable for the losses their poorly maintained machine cost each of the other thousands of victims.
Had they shut it down and yelled for their network guru to come and fix it immediately on the first notification, then I'm inclined to think they should not be held responsible. But that wasn't the case as that would have impinged on their own ability to do business. But their attitude was that "we are working, screw the world".
If thats the case, lets clarify the word invent, shall we? Lets make it mean the most recent discovery of something, not the first.
I'm not exactly sure which coal mine, in the coal mining region of the french/german border country has it, but one of them has an artifact on display in the museum case in the front office that was analyzed and determined to be the equivilent of a well discharged flashlight battery, the usual carbon zinc style.
The seam of coal it came out of dates to be about 80 million years old...
Think about that for a minute. Or 20. Maybe even do a google search, I haven't. My mental references date back to mentions in schoolbooks of the late 40's before it was analyzed. The analysis, when finally done, was the subject of a science fact article in the magazine Analog, probably 20-25 years back up the log now.
Circa 17 years ago a family oriented pizza parlor opened up in a neighboring town, and they had a 5 piece robotic version of the Monkeys. It used a multitrack tape drive that had some tracks assigned to run the robotics in synch with the music, which was actually the Monkeys original stuff, or the Beach Boys mixed in with others from that musical genure. Good, get your bones to danceing music.
They ran it until the costumes were so ratty you could see the motors and air cylinders that ran it all, and that reduced the effects, not to mention if something quit working, it was stuck that way for the duration. Like most businesses that don't think they have to maintain anything and the crowds will still come and see it, they were gone in about 3 years. Then someone else bought the pieces, changed the name but didn't fix the by then broken bathroom fixtures & they lasted about 2 months.
Now its been remodeled into a Texas Road House, and is considered one of the finer eateries in the region. That bit of robotics has I assume been ripped out and sold to somebody who may have refurbished it and sold it elsewhere. I'd bet a copy of just one of those tapes was $50k or more by the time all the rights were paid for. Originally I think they started out with 3 tapes in order to randomize the sequences, but 5k passes will always do a tape in, so by the end they were down to one "show".
Has anyone else seen such a 100% roboticly driven show?
Chuckle... That seems to be one of my hangups, the miss-use of the '
And no, I never claimed to be to pass that 8th grade final exam from Salinas KS from about 190x that you can find links to all over the web.
That ones a cast iron bitch, and those who passed that test have much repsect from this old fart. Sadly, I expect most of that class has passed on.
Besides, thats just a wee bit, say about 30 years, before I was born. But, in school all those years ago, thru the 40's, I did get the benefit of the last few years of teaching phonics, so I cheerfully out read even those only 10 years behind me both for speed and comprehension. They taught me something else too, that reading is fun! I can cheerfully read everything that counts out of the daily paper over a sausage and egg and hash browns breakfast at Mac's Steak House, aka McDonalds. That includes scanning the want adds for a good deal on a motorcycle, something I told myself that I was getting too old & slow to ride anymore about 4 years back. But I keep looking anyway:-)
Yes, the two are mutually reinforcing. Many thanks to the framers. But I think the logic is there, that because we have the 2nd, we still have the first. Once we've lost the first, we are lost..
You may attempt to re-compose the Bill of Rights to suit yourself, but don't expect to be allowed anywhere near the actual document with an editors pencil. The fact remains that that is what was written some 215+ years ago, and we are stuck with it.
Personally, I find it very grammaticly correct.
And the framers knew exactly what they wrote.
I also don't know what Iraq's state of being was vis-a-vis gun laws before we attempted our little police action, but having the general populous so well armed with weapons we cannot now legally own is certainly being a PITA for our troops.
Can we disarm them? No, only they can do that to themselves because they want to.
Will they, being generally muslim, with their religious teachings telling them all other faiths are infidels to be killed with no remorse for having done so? Donbesilly. Their 'Allah' commands them to be stone aged killers of any who oppose them. Our attempts to bring a democracy there are doomed to be a failure in the long view, and I hope TPTB have brains enough to pack up and leave once an interim government is in place with enough clout to actually govern. And if they choose to wage war, then bounce the rubble again until they get smart, or there is no one left to shoot back.
But I suspect that will take a goodly portion of our GNP over the next eon or so to achieve.
As the population in general is so young, our money would be far better spent setting up schools with a curriculum at about our level as existed in say 1900, and a working truant system than in trying to establish a democracy. Given a decent education, democracy, and a tolerance for their non-muslim neighbors might develop a couple of centuries down the log. But I'm not placing any bets on it either when their clerics are preaching so diametricly opposite a view of a divine being to ours.
Make little mistake about this war, it isn't all about GWB's oil buddies in the long run, its the crusades, 21st century style, and there is lots more blood yet to be spilled. Hopefully not all ours, but our currant "rules of engagement" are, IMO, very much crippling our efforts there, and the moral of the troops. Our troops should not be sitting ducks for some 10 year old to toss a grenade at, who can then walk away un-molested because he is a child, who will then do it again next week because some cleric told him to. Thats what my next door neighbors man said when he was home for his 2 weeks of R & R just a bit ago. IMO thats grounds to declare both to be combatants, and dealt with accordingly. Eventually, according to the way we think, they might run out of clerics willing to sacrifice their children, but thats not how they think. To them, any losses, down to and including the last body still moving are acceptable.
Short of totally sterilizing the place and starting all over, which isn't practicle, I know of no "working" solution. But there are those there who would do it to us in a heartbeat.
Yes, its the crusades again/yet/still. Arm yourself accordingly, else we non-muslims as a people will not survive another century.
I'm no grammar expert, but I'd like to point out that some people miss 1 or 2 of the commas in the 2nd Amendment. From the Library of Congress version, there are 3 commas. "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." This sentence has 4 phrases. Not one of these phrases alone is a clause and cannot stand independently; no phrase has the proper subject-verb relationship to convey a complete thought. The phrase "being necessary to the security of a free state" is a present participle; it acts as an adjective modifying the noun "[a well regulated] militia." It contains neither the subject nor verb of the sentence. Taken together, "a well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state," is an absolute phrase; absolute phrases do not modify any specific word in a sentence, but rather modify the entire sentence by providing context. "The right of the people to keep and bear arms" is the subject phrase of the sentence. The subject is "the right." "Of the people" and "to keep and bear arms" are prepositional phrases modifying "the right." "Shall not be infringed" is the verb phrase of the sentence. "Shall not be" is an auxiliary verb string modifying the main verb "infringed."
Therefore, the main idea conveyed by this sentence is "the right shall not be infringed."
That is so clearly, concisely written that I cannot do the quote without doing the whole thing, all I can add is:
Hear! Hear! This was written back when people actually studied how the language worked, and those comma's are NOT mistakes, but inserted to make it damned clear to any wannabee tinpot dictators that this is how it works.
All these newbies that have no concept of how our chosen language is constructed, and therefore choose to interpret it in their own limited tunnel vision view of how things ought to be, often based on their own personal agenda, had best go back to school and actually STUDY the language.
Yes, I'm a firm believer in the 2nd amendment, in fact in all of them. The only thing I would change is the order of the list, because without the 2nd, we would not now have anything that even remotely resembles the 1st, which is vital to this conversation.
It would have been long since nibbled to death by those who could not stand to have their actions seen in the cold light of day.
I'm a bit like Mr. Heston, from my cold, dead, hands.
I certainly wouldn't waste any time dealing with a distributor or field rep. They rarely have an adequate understanding of the language even if they speak english as a 1st language, won't relay the message till next tuesdays weekly confab, and it will get routed first to the legal dept. for a 30 day review, then get bounced back to sales, who A: won't know by then what was asked and B: will call you and ask you how many units you're talking about. You'll explain that its data sheets you want and then the cycle starts all over again, and if you don't become frustrated and say screw 'em and the camel that rode in on them after about 4 months (or less depending on your deadlines) of this, during which time your competitive edge in terms of time has long since expired.
I can get samples and data sheets here in WV to my home mailing address's mailbox in 7 days or less from National Semi, Harris, Motorola, TI, AtMel and at times from AMD if its not a cpu. And do it in one phone call after looking them up in 1-800 info. Lifes too damned short to screw with the likes of VIA and their proprietary information attitude. Its a situation which ought to be self healing by their going away, unforch the big mobo contracts will keep them going for quite a while I suspect. Which is a shame. IMO, whats for sale ought to be fully available to anyone with the sheckles to pay for it. Quantities matter in the pricing of course, but probably in nowhere near the proper ratio when the qty's get below the 10K piece level by the time the support costs are added in for that small an order. Anyone who expects to pay only a 500% premium for a onsie/twosie order over the price Biostar pays for qty 100K is living in a highly addled mental state and should get over it, they simply don't understand the economics that make giving you a sample or 2 far cheaper than billing you for 2 of them.
Other semi people are falling all over each other to sell you their latest doodad, and a bit of searching might even find a better device than the one from VIA you've been contemplating the use of.
From the looks of it, Intuit sure got the message. The onerous validation procedure, and customers voting with their checkbooks cost Intuit at least 50 million last year. So its gone for this year. Too bad every company who thinks they are the king of the heap has to re-invent their own version of this square, rough riding wheel. Seems they ought to be able to read the history books without the company legal dept filtering their reading list. I would save them a bunch of money in the long run.
Well, to this admittedly old fart, both methods would seem to have advantages depending on the scenario being painted.
Matts ideas may, or may not work in the real world, and in due time the results will be known.
But he seems to understand the idea, and spent a few lines pointing out that his version was already many times more stable than 4.8, and which he claimed was losing its stability with each incremental issued. Right now, (& IIRC, check his site in case I've got it all fubar) about 90% of the locks have been removed in his code base.
In either case, going down an alternate path will be educational for those who care. A road less traveled for sure. A quicker way? We'll have to wait and see...
I'm not so sure its dying, but forked it certainly is. Go checkout whats going on in the "dragonflyBSD" camp. Most of the posts have been by Prof Matt Dillon, an experienced coder who came up thru the amiga ranks, writing the popular DICE C compiler for it many years ago.
What he has to say so far tells me that his version of BSD will both scale very well AND work great in the SMP dept. The process locks that slow down linux in SMP versions and prevent its doing x amount of work for each processor added are being done away with by Matt by subbing a job isolation scheme that assures each job runs on its own cpu rather than handing each call off to a freshly assigned one.
He seems to think it will scale a lot better with far fewer halts for cache flushing and reloads. What I've read so far would seem to make sense. He claims its already more stable and faster than FreeBSD in any version 4.8, which he used for the fork base. First release target is next year.
No, I don't think BSD is dying, just doing an end run to a higher place in the performance pack a year from now.
Also there's no/dev/pts so you have to recompile KDE to not use it...
And did you not turn it (/dev/pts (256)) on? I did, and after haveing my mobo's BIOSs redo the ESCD tables to move some IRQ's around, quite a bit of it is working. I'm booted to test3 right now, with kde3.1.1a as built by konstruct a couple of months back. Using mozilla-1.5a to do this little chore.
No sound just yet though as I was a registered OSS user before, and apparently alsa seems to have won the battle even if it doesn't want to handle a VIA8233-ac97 chipset.
If anyone has a recipe to bring the sound back to life please forward, I'm got all the ingrediants or can get them if they exist...
Has someone performed some experiments I haven't heard of?
The last I knew, we still didn't have any method of modifiying gravity... Like an anitgravity field generator or some other figment of someones imagination.
So tell me please, how does one go about measuring the speed of gravity if you have no known means to measure a change in its effect other than taking a very slow rocket ship someplace else. Doing so will effect the attraction felt by the distant object, eg the rocket, but not on a time scale that puts the speed of light well and truely out of the noise floor of other effects.
Assumeing anything else but C speed propagation for gravity would I think be a huge, huge problem for e=m*c*c. Eg if the suns mass were to be totally converted instantly to energy, we wouldn't know it for 8 minutes and a few seconds, but OTOH, we still wouldn't know it because this planet would be sterilized in another.5 seconds after that, and its plasma vapors would approach pluto only a few hours slower than the light from a supernova to top all supernova was seen for a few seconds before pluto was also converted to a plasma. Yes folks, a 100% mass to energy conversion of an object the size of our teeny little star called the sun, would be seen, with light speed delays of course, 20 billion light years away.
But, if in the grand scheme of things, energy also has mass, and it should, then in reality we still have no means to measure the speed of the propagation of gravity. The gravitational field our sun generates would still be there as measured from a 'safe' distance, only slowly fading away if the energy passed the observer by, an effect explainable by simple spherical geometry.
Hell, last time Slashdot ran a contest asking for silly patents (a ways back, maybe a year ago), I searched for "computer". First ten hits contained the just-granted patent on the table-lookup optimization for computing CRC-32s.
Thats so damned old it can vote in some locales! I did that on a TRS-80 Color Computer nearly 20 years ago. And incorporated it into the last 2 or 3 versions of zmodem for os9 to boot, it was good for about a 200cps speedup on a machine that just barely able to do 4800 baud without flow controls.
If its patented, the reference materials (Byte magazine IIRC) I was using at the time sure as hell didn't mention it.
in another 100 years our production of radio waves will have increased by several orders. Your logic is flawed I think.
I have serious doubts about that, particularly the magnitude prediction.
Spectrum scarcity is driving more and more communications off the air and into cable or fiber even as I write this. In 100 years, tv as we know it will all be either satellite for the rural areas, or fiber for the municipalities. The FCC is in the middle of riding roughshod over broadcasters now in an effort to convert channels 2-6 at least, into something that handheld point to point stuff can use, where the point is wherever you are. That stuff is far less powerfull than the 100kw erp tv transmitters being relegated to the scrap heaps of time.
The mantra for doing so is public safety, but the real reason is that those 5 channels worth of spectrum, sold to the highest bidder, will (they think) bring in enough revenue to balance the federal budget. But strangely, no one is taking into account the rate of defaults for those that have won previous auctions when the business model that made them submit the winning bid cannot be converted into either a service to sell in the time frame the VC people will tolerate, or simply falls on its face in the marketplace. The last figures on the default rate I saw were above 90%, so there will be a rather large 'shakeout' that will take decades to settle.
The bottom line is that much of the single signal, higher powered broadcasts will be replaced by short range walkie talkie type stuff whose agregate power may well exceed whats there now, but which viewed from a distance, will more and more resemble raw white noise than any coherent signal. From that viewpoint, even a source of white noise that cannot be explained would be a candidate for further study.
Its been said that to detect any civilization from its radio emissions requires a very narrow time frame because that civilization will go from the tesla/marconi stage of megawatt broadcasts to the above scenario in less than 100 of our years, given enough technology to have invented it in the first place. Our black and white "I love Lucy"'s are now only 50 some light years out, and will be lost in the noise forever in another 25 given our present rate of stuffing broadcasters into a pipe of some kind where the spectrum becomes infinitly re-usable.
All that said, I've been doing seti almost from the gitgo, and am standing at 99.27% in the world in units processed, or someplace around 35,000 from the top in the rankings, but I've not hit the 5000 units processed marker yet, still about 150 short.
I know, I've suffered from the not enough coffee myself for quite a few years, the green tea I use for that just doesn't have the kick in terms of the caffiene content that a good cuppa joe has.
But that good cuppa joe had taken to keeping me up all night, instead of just half the night, hence the switch. The accumulated years tend to do that, and not much I can do about those, they just keep adding up.
I suspect I'm probably old enough to be your grandfather too, at 68. Hence the years to have learned as much about ballistics, both internal and external as I have. Thats been one of my hobbies while making a living in electronics for the last 55 years, the last 39 in broadcasting.
I'm the guy yhou never see, but who makes it all work when again after somebody else has let the smoke out or broken the mirrors, both of which is required to make it all work.
Guns don't use iron bullets. They use softer metals like copper, lead, uranium...
Except that this method requires an iron bullet due to its use of strong magnetic fields to move it, not the normal high pressure of burning gunpowder. You should have read the parent article, which tries to explain that, albeit not terribly well in laymans terms.
A normal guilding metal clad lead cored bullet would in this case, not do much except heat the bullet due to eddy current losses. Possibly enough to melt the lead, and certainly enough to cause heat damage in the surrounding parts of this type of gun.
Also, depleted uranium isn't terribly soft and usualy is equipt with both a base banding of some softer metal in order to properly engage the barrels rifling as its sized a few thou smaller than the barrel, and a forward band to help guide it. Its main claim to fame is that its heavier than lead by quite a bit. So its harder to launch it, requiring carefully profiled burn rates in order to maximize the total push without causing excessive barrel erosion from the hot gases, always a problem in larger cannon as it can litterally change the barrels perfomance on a shot to shot basis.
By the same token, holds up its velocity better than lead, making it capable of penetrating the average tanks armour plate where a steel cored 'AP' bullet would knock out a good sized cookie of armour and bounce back at the source of the shot even if the impact is at an angle, making the richochet dangerous to the shooter. We're talkng about springback in the struck surface, which will always bounce back on the same path as the incoming one. Mirror type analogs aren't valid here where the surfaces lock together for a few microseconds...
If you can penetrate, then no richochet to worry about, except inside the tank, which is where you want it to do maximum damage anyway:)
Slashdot Mirror
Mod parent up, way up! This person has the whole picture, and can see the same problems I do.
BTW, I agree with his idea about rewards, but they should be made big enough to get somebody who's a little hungry interested. But even though m$ can well afford to offer $10,000 per valid bug or security hole found, I'm certainly not betting on that "reward thing" happening, ever. Country boy dumb? Maybe, but not stupid.
Being nice to M$? In this camp, it doesn't compute. Lifes a trade, and they've got nothing to offer me.
--
Cheers, Gene
The Redmond behemoth can't move that fast. And its congenital. Hell, it takes their attornies a month to review how they can make the EULA even more restrictive than it is before they'll clear a patchset for download.
That said, I do agree with a notification to them, say 2 weeks ahead of the public release of the attack details. This wasn't kosher at all. OTOH, maybe he did try to notify them but his message went into a black hole, they do after all, make it extremely difficult to contact them by any means except the $$$ per hour support channels. Thats not this researchers fault.
The fact that it probably won't make any differences in the M$ response time hasn't got anything to do with it. Go ahead, start your timers... Just make sure they'll go past the end of the next month without overflowing when you do.
A bit jaded? Yeah, I guess you could say that.
--
Cheers Gene
I doubt its made up. In my 69 years, I have pulled off similar putdowns several times.
OTOH, it just goes to enforce the idea that politicians are like diapers. Both should be regularly changed, usually for the same reason.
Cheers, Gene
but if you force this on them too soon, you will get a backlash because the counties will have to pull the money from other parts of their budget.. AND that would piss voters off.
I'm sorry for those counties that have to do that. But since they made the decision to buy those POS in the first place, then in retrospect, I don't feel sorry for them.
Leaving a situation in place that allows even one election to be stolen by the likes of Diebold et all, is not a situation any voter should tolerate, ever. And if it means you don't get your street plowed till the next day after a snowstorm, so beit. The place to point your anger at in that case is the county commissioner who saved a buck by buying it from so-and-so without setting out a set of specifications that precluded such hanky-panky.
And, while I'm a firm believer in the one man, one vote rule, I'm a bit ambivalent about the isolation of the voters ident from the vote. Personally, I'd like to have the ability to go back after the election, and verify that the candidates I voted for did indeed get my actual vote.
To that end, a 2 kilobit pgp(or gpg) style public key for you as a receipt and a private key attached to the vote seems like a hell of a good idea. I could check my vote with my public key, but to check somebody elses would take a considerable computational effort.
Now all we have to do is convince TPTB that democracy, to be protected, must be well protected even from their prying eyes.
Also, does anyone know why the preview to post isn't working about 50% of the time?, it draws the column headings on the left at full screen width, and says its done. Like this is the second time in a row I've got to post blind...
Cheers, Gene
Of course, if they were smart, they would've installed GOMF...
Naww, what they should have done is reamed the author to fix his proggy. I never once felt I needed to install GOMF. I installed software that didn't need it instead.
The amiga has one huge advantage over x86 stuffs, its memory model is flat.
The amiga has one huge achilles heel, its memory model is flat.
What this boils down to is that any program can take an unitialized pointer and scribble all over system memory with it in one swell foop. And thats where you get a GURU MEDITATION.
Programmers who paid attention to what they were doing never had a problem with that, but the languages available for the masses, like Arexx, sometimes didn't give any warnings that they were running on un-inititalized array pointers. SAS/C was a bit better at that, and would catch maybe half of them at compile time. Sometimes things were fine for many hours/days, but then something in the languages garbage collection would take it down.
OTOH, before my last hard drive failed, my big box 2000 running OS3.9, a very busy machine on the internet, could and did get uptimes of 2-3 weeks! And I co-wrote the EZCron that drove all that, also EZHome to automate the X10 equipt home.
Yes, one could have a relatively stable amiga if enough effort was put into the code it ran.
Cheers, Gene
If it landed in D. McBride's back yard I wouldn't complain.
Oh? I believe you would, for a few hours maybe. After that, you wouldn't be alive to care, and neither would I even if we both lived in Bombay. The earthquake ripple alone would take care of us lowly humans and ALL our construction projects over the eons.
Do the math for a 570 mile diameter object coming in at at least 18 thousand miles an hour, the escape velocity plus a bit for the original nudge that headed it our way.
I doubt that this planet would survive the aftermath and still have any life on it other than possibly some deep sea vent stuffs that can survive in a ph of 10+ and several hundred atmospheres of ambient pressure. Even that may be dicey because it would be so scattered from its home by the time the temps returned to normal for them without slowing down much in the cooloff phase that followed, if nothing else 99.99% of them would starve or run out of whatever it is they use for energy.
A 570 mile diameter object would make Jerry Pournell and Larry Nivens "Lucifers Hammer" look like a sunday picnic.
It could even knock a piece off big enough to make us another moon, but much smaller, and probably in a rapidly decaying orbit in geologic time scales.
The recurring tides from that, while it lasted, would pretty much doom anything that wasn't buried in a couple of miles of solid rock. Its the same tides that would steal its orbital energy, making the eventual re-mergeing with our planet a certainty. Close enough the Chandrasakar(you spell it, I can't) limit comes to mind, so it might come back in in pieces only 5 miles in diameter, but many of them.
But, its orbit seems stable in that 3/2 neptune ordered gravitational tug of war, so I doubt we have to worry about it in the next 5 million years or so.
Cheers, Gene
I think the subject says it all here folks.
To relate a story that happened about 2 years ago when big red or sobig, I forget which, was running rampant, my local ISP was having a major portion of his bandwidth being used up by one machine, a server in an insurance office in a neighboring county seat town.
They were warned that their machine was infected by telephone on several occasions, and disconnected for a few hours several times in attempting to get them to reload the computer and put in the patches. Each time they were disconnected, their lawyer called in 30 minutes or so of opening hours threatening action for breach of contract.
I believe they were disconnected for good after the rest of the system covering a good portion of the state had been severely crippled for about a month. The ISP had to countersue to get them out of the ISP's collective hair. I don't know if they ever admitted their machine was at fault, or fixed it.
But this is a prime example of a situation where the machine owner WAS repeatedly notified and took no action. That to me, makes them 200% liable for the losses their poorly maintained machine cost each of the other thousands of victims.
Had they shut it down and yelled for their network guru to come and fix it immediately on the first notification, then I'm inclined to think they should not be held responsible. But that wasn't the case as that would have impinged on their own ability to do business. But their attitude was that "we are working, screw the world".
My $0.02, adjusted for inflation.
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CHeers, Gene
The battery was invented in 1800.
If thats the case, lets clarify the word invent, shall we? Lets make it mean the most recent discovery of something, not the first.
I'm not exactly sure which coal mine, in the coal mining region of the french/german border country has it, but one of them has an artifact on display in the museum case in the front office that was analyzed and determined to be the equivilent of a well discharged flashlight battery, the usual carbon zinc style.
The seam of coal it came out of dates to be about 80 million years old...
Think about that for a minute. Or 20. Maybe even do a google search, I haven't. My mental references date back to mentions in schoolbooks of the late 40's before it was analyzed. The analysis, when finally done, was the subject of a science fact article in the magazine Analog, probably 20-25 years back up the log now.
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Cheers, Gene
And in the past there were all robotic bands.
Circa 17 years ago a family oriented pizza parlor opened up in a neighboring town, and they had a 5 piece robotic version of the Monkeys. It used a multitrack tape drive that had some tracks assigned to run the robotics in synch with the music, which was actually the Monkeys original stuff, or the Beach Boys mixed in with others from that musical genure. Good, get your bones to danceing music.
They ran it until the costumes were so ratty you could see the motors and air cylinders that ran it all, and that reduced the effects, not to mention if something quit working, it was stuck that way for the duration. Like most businesses that don't think they have to maintain anything and the crowds will still come and see it, they were gone in about 3 years. Then someone else bought the pieces, changed the name but didn't fix the by then broken bathroom fixtures & they lasted about 2 months.
Now its been remodeled into a Texas Road House, and is considered one of the finer eateries in the region. That bit of robotics has I assume been ripped out and sold to somebody who may have refurbished it and sold it elsewhere. I'd bet a copy of just one of those tapes was $50k or more by the time all the rights were paid for. Originally I think they started out with 3 tapes in order to randomize the sequences, but 5k passes will always do a tape in, so by the end they were down to one "show".
Has anyone else seen such a 100% roboticly driven show?
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Cheers, Gene
Chuckle... That seems to be one of my hangups, the miss-use of the '
:-)
And no, I never claimed to be to pass that 8th grade final exam from Salinas KS from about 190x that you can find links to all over the web.
That ones a cast iron bitch, and those who passed that test have much repsect from this old fart. Sadly, I expect most of that class has passed on.
Besides, thats just a wee bit, say about 30 years, before I was born. But, in school all those years ago, thru the 40's, I did get the benefit of the last few years of teaching phonics, so I cheerfully out read even those only 10 years behind me both for speed and comprehension. They taught me something else too, that reading is fun!
I can cheerfully read everything that counts out of the daily paper over a sausage and egg and hash browns breakfast at Mac's Steak House, aka McDonalds. That includes scanning the want adds for a good deal on a motorcycle, something I told myself that I was getting too old & slow to ride anymore about 4 years back. But I keep looking anyway
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Cheers, Gene
One has to admit though, that it made you think.
.
Yes, the two are mutually reinforcing. Many thanks to the framers. But I think the logic is there, that because we have the 2nd, we still have the first. Once we've lost the first, we are lost.
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Cheers, Gene
You may attempt to re-compose the Bill of Rights to suit yourself, but don't expect to be allowed anywhere near the actual document with an editors pencil. The fact remains that that is what was written some 215+ years ago, and we are stuck with it.
Personally, I find it very grammaticly correct.
And the framers knew exactly what they wrote.
I also don't know what Iraq's state of being was vis-a-vis gun laws before we attempted our little police action, but having the general populous so well armed with weapons we cannot now legally own is certainly being a PITA for our troops.
Can we disarm them? No, only they can do that to themselves because they want to.
Will they, being generally muslim, with their religious teachings telling them all other faiths are infidels to be killed with no remorse for having done so? Donbesilly. Their 'Allah' commands them to be stone aged killers of any who oppose them. Our attempts to bring a democracy there are doomed to be a failure in the long view, and I hope TPTB have brains enough to pack up and leave once an interim government is in place with enough clout to actually govern. And if they choose to wage war, then bounce the rubble again until they get smart, or there is no one left to shoot back.
But I suspect that will take a goodly portion of our GNP over the next eon or so to achieve.
As the population in general is so young, our money would be far better spent setting up schools with a curriculum at about our level as existed in say 1900, and a working truant system than in trying to establish a democracy. Given a decent education, democracy, and a tolerance for their non-muslim neighbors might develop a couple of centuries down the log. But I'm not placing any bets on it either when their clerics are preaching so diametricly opposite a view of a divine being to ours.
Make little mistake about this war, it isn't all about GWB's oil buddies in the long run, its the crusades, 21st century style, and there is lots more blood yet to be spilled. Hopefully not all ours, but our currant "rules of engagement" are, IMO, very much crippling our efforts there, and the moral of the troops. Our troops should not be sitting ducks for some 10 year old to toss a grenade at, who can then walk away un-molested because he is a child, who will then do it again next week because some cleric told him to. Thats what my next door neighbors man said when he was home for his 2 weeks of R & R just a bit ago. IMO thats grounds to declare both to be combatants, and dealt with accordingly. Eventually, according to the way we think, they might run out of clerics willing to sacrifice their children, but thats not how they think. To them, any losses, down to and including the last body still moving are acceptable.
Short of totally sterilizing the place and starting all over, which isn't practicle, I know of no "working" solution. But there are those there who would do it to us in a heartbeat.
Yes, its the crusades again/yet/still. Arm yourself accordingly, else we non-muslims as a people will not survive another century.
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Cheers, Gene
I'm no grammar expert, but I'd like to point out that some people miss 1 or 2 of the commas in the 2nd Amendment. From the Library of Congress version, there are 3 commas. "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." This sentence has 4 phrases. Not one of these phrases alone is a clause and cannot stand independently; no phrase has the proper subject-verb relationship to convey a complete thought. The phrase "being necessary to the security of a free state" is a present participle; it acts as an adjective modifying the noun "[a well regulated] militia." It contains neither the subject nor verb of the sentence. Taken together, "a well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state," is an absolute phrase; absolute phrases do not modify any specific word in a sentence, but rather modify the entire sentence by providing context. "The right of the people to keep and bear arms" is the subject phrase of the sentence. The subject is "the right." "Of the people" and "to keep and bear arms" are prepositional phrases modifying "the right." "Shall not be infringed" is the verb phrase of the sentence. "Shall not be" is an auxiliary verb string modifying the main verb "infringed."
Therefore, the main idea conveyed by this sentence is "the right shall not be infringed."
That is so clearly, concisely written that I cannot do the quote without doing the whole thing, all I can add is:
Hear! Hear! This was written back when people actually studied how the language worked, and those comma's are NOT mistakes, but inserted to make it damned clear to any wannabee tinpot dictators that this is how it works.
All these newbies that have no concept of how our chosen language is constructed, and therefore choose to interpret it in their own limited tunnel vision view of how things ought to be, often based on their own personal agenda, had best go back to school and actually STUDY the language.
Yes, I'm a firm believer in the 2nd amendment, in fact in all of them. The only thing I would change is the order of the list, because without the 2nd, we would not now have anything that even remotely resembles the 1st, which is vital to this conversation.
It would have been long since nibbled to death by those who could not stand to have their actions seen in the cold light of day.
I'm a bit like Mr. Heston, from my cold, dead, hands.
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Cheers, Gene
You know what they say: "Good enough for government work."
Yup, and lemme tell ya what, that isn't anywhere near "good enough for the girls I go with..."
My apologies to an ex-brother-in-law who first used that line on me.
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Cheers, Gene
I certainly wouldn't waste any time dealing with a distributor or field rep. They rarely have an adequate understanding of the language even if they speak english as a 1st language, won't relay the message till next tuesdays weekly confab, and it will get routed first to the legal dept. for a 30 day review, then get bounced back to sales, who A: won't know by then what was asked and B: will call you and ask you how many units you're talking about. You'll explain that its data sheets you want and then the cycle starts all over again, and if you don't become frustrated and say screw 'em and the camel that rode in on them after about 4 months (or less depending on your deadlines) of this, during which time your competitive edge in terms of time has long since expired.
I can get samples and data sheets here in WV to my home mailing address's mailbox in 7 days or less from National Semi, Harris, Motorola, TI, AtMel and at times from AMD if its not a cpu. And do it in one phone call after looking them up in 1-800 info. Lifes too damned short to screw with the likes of VIA and their proprietary information attitude. Its a situation which ought to be self healing by their going away, unforch the big mobo contracts will keep them going for quite a while I suspect. Which is a shame. IMO, whats for sale ought to be fully available to anyone with the sheckles to pay for it. Quantities matter in the pricing of course, but probably in nowhere near the proper ratio when the qty's get below the 10K piece level by the time the support costs are added in for that small an order. Anyone who expects to pay only a 500% premium for a onsie/twosie order over the price Biostar pays for qty 100K is living in a highly addled mental state and should get over it, they simply don't understand the economics that make giving you a sample or 2 far cheaper than billing you for 2 of them.
Other semi people are falling all over each other to sell you their latest doodad, and a bit of searching might even find a better device than the one from VIA you've been contemplating the use of.
Your call of course.
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Cheers, Gene
A mostly retired old coot.
A good discussion, thank you.
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Cheers, Gene
From the looks of it, Intuit sure got the message. The onerous validation procedure, and customers voting with their checkbooks cost Intuit at least 50 million last year. So its gone for this year. Too bad every company who thinks they are the king of the heap has to re-invent their own version of this square, rough riding wheel. Seems they ought to be able to read the history books without the company legal dept filtering their reading list. I would save them a bunch of money in the long run.
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Cheers, Gene
Well, to this admittedly old fart, both methods would seem to have advantages depending on the scenario being painted.
Matts ideas may, or may not work in the real world, and in due time the results will be known.
But he seems to understand the idea, and spent a few lines pointing out that his version was already many times more stable than 4.8, and which he claimed was losing its stability with each incremental issued. Right now, (& IIRC, check his site in case I've got it all fubar) about 90% of the locks have been removed in his code base.
In either case, going down an alternate path will be educational for those who care. A road less traveled for sure. A quicker way? We'll have to wait and see...
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Cheers, Gene
I'm not so sure its dying, but forked it certainly is. Go checkout whats going on in the "dragonflyBSD" camp. Most of the posts have been by Prof Matt Dillon, an experienced coder who came up thru the amiga ranks, writing the popular DICE C compiler for it many years ago.
What he has to say so far tells me that his version of BSD will both scale very well AND work great in the SMP dept. The process locks that slow down linux in SMP versions and prevent its doing x amount of work for each processor added are being done away with by Matt by subbing a job isolation scheme that assures each job runs on its own cpu rather than handing each call off to a freshly assigned one.
He seems to think it will scale a lot better with far fewer halts for cache flushing and reloads. What I've read so far would seem to make sense. He claims its already more stable and faster than FreeBSD in any version 4.8, which he used for the fork base. First release target is next year.
No, I don't think BSD is dying, just doing an end run to a higher place in the performance pack a year from now.
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Cheers, Gene
Also there's no /dev/pts so you have to recompile KDE to not use it...
And did you not turn it (/dev/pts (256)) on? I did, and after haveing my mobo's BIOSs redo the ESCD tables to move some IRQ's around, quite a bit of it is working. I'm booted to test3 right now, with kde3.1.1a as built by konstruct a couple of months back. Using mozilla-1.5a to do this little chore.
No sound just yet though as I was a registered OSS user before, and apparently alsa seems to have won the battle even if it doesn't want to handle a VIA8233-ac97 chipset.
If anyone has a recipe to bring the sound back to life please forward, I'm got all the ingrediants or can get them if they exist...
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Cheers, Gene
Gravity, FTL?
.5 seconds after that, and its plasma vapors would approach pluto only a few hours slower than the light from a supernova to top all supernova was seen for a few seconds before pluto was also converted to a plasma. Yes folks, a 100% mass to energy conversion of an object the size of our teeny little star called the sun, would be seen, with light speed delays of course, 20 billion light years away.
Has someone performed some experiments I haven't heard of?
The last I knew, we still didn't have any method of modifiying gravity... Like an anitgravity field generator or some other figment of someones imagination.
So tell me please, how does one go about measuring the speed of gravity if you have no known means to measure a change in its effect other than taking a very slow rocket ship someplace else. Doing so will effect the attraction felt by the distant object, eg the rocket, but not on a time scale that puts the speed of light well and truely out of the noise floor of other effects.
Assumeing anything else but C speed propagation for gravity would I think be a huge, huge problem for e=m*c*c. Eg if the suns mass were to be totally converted instantly to energy, we wouldn't know it for 8 minutes and a few seconds, but OTOH, we still wouldn't know it because this planet would be sterilized in another
But, if in the grand scheme of things, energy also has mass, and it should, then in reality we still have no means to measure the speed of the propagation of gravity. The gravitational field our sun generates would still be there as measured from a 'safe' distance, only slowly fading away if the energy passed the observer by, an effect explainable by simple spherical geometry.
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Cheers, Gene
Hell, last time Slashdot ran a contest asking for silly patents (a ways back, maybe a year ago), I searched for "computer". First ten hits contained the just-granted patent on the table-lookup optimization for computing CRC-32s.
Thats so damned old it can vote in some locales! I did that on a TRS-80 Color Computer nearly 20 years ago. And incorporated it into the last 2 or 3 versions of zmodem for os9 to boot, it was good for about a 200cps speedup on a machine that just barely able to do 4800 baud without flow controls.
If its patented, the reference materials (Byte magazine IIRC) I was using at the time sure as hell didn't mention it.
Would that constitute prior art?
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Cheers, Gene
in another 100 years our production of radio waves will have increased by several orders. Your logic is flawed I think.
I have serious doubts about that, particularly the magnitude prediction.
Spectrum scarcity is driving more and more communications off the air and into cable or fiber even as I write this. In 100 years, tv as we know it will all be either satellite for the rural areas, or fiber for the municipalities. The FCC is in the middle of riding roughshod over broadcasters now in an effort to convert channels 2-6 at least, into something that handheld point to point stuff can use, where the point is wherever you are. That stuff is far less powerfull than the 100kw erp tv transmitters being relegated to the scrap heaps of time.
The mantra for doing so is public safety, but the real reason is that those 5 channels worth of spectrum, sold to the highest bidder, will (they think) bring in enough revenue to balance the federal budget. But strangely, no one is taking into account the rate of defaults for those that have won previous auctions when the business model that made them submit the winning bid cannot be converted into either a service to sell in the time frame the VC people will tolerate, or simply falls on its face in the marketplace. The last figures on the default rate I saw were above 90%, so there will be a rather large 'shakeout' that will take decades to settle.
The bottom line is that much of the single signal, higher powered broadcasts will be replaced by short range walkie talkie type stuff whose agregate power may well exceed whats there now, but which viewed from a distance, will more and more resemble raw white noise than any coherent signal. From that viewpoint, even a source of white noise that cannot be explained would be a candidate for further study.
Its been said that to detect any civilization from its radio emissions requires a very narrow time frame because that civilization will go from the tesla/marconi stage of megawatt broadcasts to the above scenario in less than 100 of our years, given enough technology to have invented it in the first place. Our black and white "I love Lucy"'s are now only 50 some light years out, and will be lost in the noise forever in another 25 given our present rate of stuffing broadcasters into a pipe of some kind where the spectrum becomes infinitly re-usable.
All that said, I've been doing seti almost from the gitgo, and am standing at 99.27% in the world in units processed, or someplace around 35,000 from the top in the rankings, but I've not hit the 5000 units processed marker yet, still about 150 short.
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Cheers, Gene
I know, I've suffered from the not enough coffee myself for quite a few years, the green tea I use for that just doesn't have the kick in terms of the caffiene content that a good cuppa joe has.
But that good cuppa joe had taken to keeping me up all night, instead of just half the night, hence the switch. The accumulated years tend to do that, and not much I can do about those, they just keep adding up.
I suspect I'm probably old enough to be your grandfather too, at 68. Hence the years to have learned as much about ballistics, both internal and external as I have. Thats been one of my hobbies while making a living in electronics for the last 55 years, the last 39 in broadcasting.
I'm the guy yhou never see, but who makes it all work when again after somebody else has let the smoke out or broken the mirrors, both of which is required to make it all work.
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Cheers, Gene
Guns don't use iron bullets. They use softer metals like copper, lead, uranium...
:)
Except that this method requires an iron bullet due to its use of strong magnetic fields to move it, not the normal high pressure of burning gunpowder. You should have read the parent article, which tries to explain that, albeit not terribly well in laymans terms.
A normal guilding metal clad lead cored bullet would in this case, not do much except heat the bullet due to eddy current losses. Possibly enough to melt the lead, and certainly enough to cause heat damage in the surrounding parts of this type of gun.
Also, depleted uranium isn't terribly soft and usualy is equipt with both a base banding of some softer metal in order to properly engage the barrels rifling as its sized a few thou smaller than the barrel, and a forward band to help guide it. Its main claim to fame is that its heavier than lead by quite a bit. So its harder to launch it, requiring carefully profiled burn rates in order to maximize the total push without causing excessive barrel erosion from the hot gases, always a problem in larger cannon as it can litterally change the barrels perfomance on a shot to shot basis.
By the same token, holds up its velocity better than lead, making it capable of penetrating the average tanks armour plate where a steel cored 'AP' bullet would knock out a good sized cookie of armour and bounce back at the source of the shot even if the impact is at an angle, making the richochet dangerous to the shooter. We're talkng about springback in the struck surface, which will always bounce back on the same path as the incoming one. Mirror type analogs aren't valid here where the surfaces lock together for a few microseconds...
If you can penetrate, then no richochet to worry about, except inside the tank, which is where you want it to do maximum damage anyway
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Cheers, Gene