The virus infection threshold is based on something like this model:
1) Some set of nodes are infected
2) Each of those nodes has a probability of X of infecting it nearest neighbors.
3) repeat
I just made that up, and there are many oportunities for variations (add the ability for nodes to be cleaned and/or vaccinated), but under models like this:
random networks have a critical threshold for X, above which they will infect the whole network, below which they will die out.
scale-free networks will have a macroscopic fraction of the network infected for any value of X.
First of all, there are additional features not caputred in this model, which could be important for "viruses" like Bliss which have an extremely low probabiliy of infection.
Second, the internet is not exactly a scale free network. As mentioned in the article, while the dominant behavior is a power law, if you go high enough, you find exponential cutoffs. This could cause some viruses to die out (I am certain Bliss isn't the only one that never made it).
This is an idea that has certainly been discussed before, but the answer is "almost certainly not".
First of all, the formation of a scale free network was caused by measurable "evolutionary" pressures for fault tolerance. In the absence of some similar evolutionary advantage to developing a global conciousness, it doesn't seem likely that it would happen spontaneously.
On the other hand, if some (possibly unintentional) goal was aligned with that, I wouldn't be totally surprised if through maintenence and updates, some form of conciousness arose.
Except: characteristic time scales on the internet are very large compared to connections within the brain. Any large scale behavior, including conciousness, would be expected to be slower than a human brain by orders of magnitude.
That is probably illegal, and certainly a bad idea (self reproducing code almost always causes problems even when you don't intend it to) but what I wonder is if you could get away with creating a CGI called default.ida that attempted to automatically connect back to the client, disinfect the machine, and install a patch. It is much less dangerous since it doesn't reproduce, and you could certainly make the argument that it was only done in retaliation to someone (unwittingly) attempting to infect your computer with a virus.
Well, I do own and watch TV now, last year I was paying for cable without having a TV... My apartment complex had this deal where we got 1/3 off, but subscription was mandatory. It was pretty obviously a "we think more than 1/3 of you will steal cable anyway" type of move.
The P4 is single processor only. The Intel Xeon (P4 based) supports SMP.
Since I am a big believer in SMP, and the Xeon line is a little out of my price range, I will be switching to Athalons next time I upgrade (not until lower cost Athalon MP boards are available).
I hate to nitpick, but this is important. They say a wide spectrum of frequencies, which does not necessarily denote white noise. The article never mentions white noise.
Every signal can be broken into frequency components, and each component has an amplitude *and* phase (often this is expressed by adding negative and positive frequency components). The importance of these phases cannot be overemphasized. If you "coherently" add components with the same phase, you will get a delta function: a single large crack. If you add them with random phases, you end up with white noise.
It is quite possible that the sound they are talking about is more like a series of short, broadband "chirps" than white noise.
I don't know enough of the physiology of hearing to know what makes things easy or difficult to locate, but I expect the incoherent nature of white noise makes localization more diffcult, not less. A chirp on the other hand, has a very steep rise that makes time-of-arrival measurements relatively easy, and improves localizability.
What, psychologically compells one to look at the source I don't know, but I have serious doubts that it will be effective in the long term. Human brains have a remarkable ability to get used to things and start ignoring them. Only while this sound is new and rare will it excite such reactions.
Yeah, or you could put ANSI codes in zip file headers to bind 'e' to format c:. (if they had ansi.sys loaded)
It isn't like MS invented this type of security hole, you would just think that after this many years, things would have gotten better, not worse. It used to be that when a problem like this was discovered, the author would do something about it: strip ANSI codes, etc. Instead, MS, dealing with an audience about 100 times less computer literate on average than the people above, insits on using user education, rather than the "right" solution of making a language and sandbox that lets people have dancing babies but not damage their system.
I don't mean to knock user education: I am all for it. But in this case, even if possible, user education can't solve this problem. There is *no* way for a user to determine if a file is safe to open, without actually doing so.
My understanding was (I haven't heard about it in a while) that WinCE was going to continue to be targeted for palmtop systems with a windows-like interface, while NT Embedded (the kernel to be used by the X-box) would be targeted at more traditional embedded systems. But I haven't heard anything more about that in months.
Once you escalate a few levels they are OK. And the people I have talked to were friendly and honestly trying. They just were clueless. I worked with Oracle for a year and a half, and knew more about it that just about anyone I talked to there.
On the other hand, the one Oracle consultant I talked to was a genius. Unfortunately, he was way, way, way to expensive for us, and the 3rd party consultants we talked to sucked total ass.
Yeah, but you wouldn't think you you have joe average asking why their Oracle setup is generating redo logs at 200 MB/minute under light load. Yet, unless you have platinum support ${SO FUCKING HUGE NUMBER YOU CANT BELIEVE IT} you have to sit there explaining to first tier tech support what a redo log is.
Once you get to second teir, Oracle support is pretty good, though not spectacular. But of course, you have to pay $BIGNUMBER to get any support at all, and unless you even more, they hang up the phone at 5pm.
Not any more. IBM, Dell, and HP are all starting to sell servers with Linux preinstalled and supported. That was VAs ace. It used to be that if you were a startup with limited resources and you wanted to use Linux for whatever reason (cost, flexibility, etc), but either didn't have the expertise, or didn't want to waste you expertise on system administration VA was a good choice to sell you a well designed server that had been tested under linux and supported with Linux on it. Now you can just go to Dell.
Interestingly, I suspect that one reason they pulled out of the direct server market is that they can't really compete with IBM. Originally, VA filled a market demand for servers designed, tested, and supported to run Linux. Even (perhaps especially) for a startup getting computers that will be supported with the software you need or want to run is important.
Now, IBM, and to a lesser extent Dell and HP, are getting into that market, and companies migrating to Linux, or a dual environment that have large investments in servers made by one or the other are much more likely to stay with that vendor for all their hardware needs across NT and Linux platforms.
First of all, reasonably proper spelling and grammar indicate that someone put time and thought into what they wrote. It indicates to me as a reader that the author thought the subject was worth spending more than a few minutes on, and therefore is more likely to be worth my time to read.
Second, the ability to understand and apply the rules of English indicate a certain level of intelligence and education. Again, this is a clue to me as a reader that the author might have something worth reading.
Finally, poor spelling and grammar really do make things harder to read and understand. It causes the reader to spend more effort on understanding the important details, and less on deciphering the language. At the most extreme form of people trying to be cute with email "how r u doing", a lack of punctuation, capitalization, or any semblance of English is so distracting that the meager excuse for content is totally lost on the recipient.
That said, I have never found errors in the headlines and blurbs to be distracting. Sometimes the headlines do a poor job of conveying the topic of the link, but that is usually from some botched attempt at a journalistic "hook" than poor English.
This isn't meant to be a rant at the/. guys. They do a fine job, and as I said, their particular idiosyncrasies rarely bother me. What bother me are the legions of engineering students and former engineering students who think that as technical people they don't need to be able to speak and write intelligently.
I am especially annoyed by people who write like that in email. I don't really mind if people write like retarded 3rd graders to their friends (unless their friends includes me), but in an business setting even a brief and informal email to the person in the next cube deserves a few seconds of extra effort to translate it into real English.
While I certainly have my doubts about the stories authenticity, it would surprise me if it were accurate in any case. I have been in that place, and while I did try to keep my verbal abuse of the techs on hand to a miniumum (I just told myself "be glad you don't have their job"), communications weren't always friendly, either. And this was for a much smaller site.
1) In general, works of students remain the property of the student.
2) Work done for a graduate student thesis (ie, not classwork, but original research), software or otherwise is owned by the department, but may be given to the student at the discression of the department.
3) In any case, as a condition of receiving a degree, you implicitly give the university permission to use and distribute a "limited" number of copies of your thesis. (again, this is graduate thesis work, not classwork).
Occasionally, instructors will want to use your work in future years as an example, or framework for future projects. They always should, and usually do ask permission to do this. In this case, you would retain the copyright but give the instructor permission to use your work for teaching.
If your instructor provides you with a framework or skeleton code, you may own your modifications, but you don't automatically get rights to redistribute the combined work.
In short, if you are the sole author of your project, and want to GPL it and put it on Freshmeat, go ahead.
If you want to teach someone a computer language so they can go out and maybe write a few programs to do things that should really be done by shell scripts, by all means use Java, or even VB. If you are trying to build a good foundation for a sound computer science career, or to develop top-notch programmers, do not teach them Java (or any other OO language) as a first language. OO provides some very useful and powerful tools for development, especially of large scale systems. It is not suitable for teaching people the foundations of computer science. If you want to take a theoretical approach to CS, a functional language would be a good choice as it exposes the logical formalisms that underly CS and information theory, for practial curricums, a procedural language is best since it closely mirrors the way computers actually work. Once someone has a strong foundation, they can learn any number of new techniques and languages easily.
Many OO programmers swear that people should start with an OO language for whatever reason, but I have quite a bit of experience with people who learned Java first, and C or Pascal first. Hands down, when it comes to understanding more complicated archetectures, even OO archetectures, the people who understand how those systems translate into something a computer can execute learn much faster and are better able to understand the tradeoffs in flexibility, convenience, and performance that different techniques make.
But the average user or corporate drone will as easily swollow the tripe that the tech firms' marketing people spew as a "fake" independent hardware site. If they really care, they ask a techie, who will tell them what is good and what isn't.
Hardware sites don't exist in a vacuum. The ones I refer to, I not only trust because of the quality of their content, but because of a long term trust they have built up by providing accurate information. If a new site has a lot info flies in the face of my experience, or the experience of people I know, or a widely held consensus among both hardware sites and other computer geeks on the internet, it will lose reputation, and I will likely never trust it again.
As for people who don't have the wide range of experience I and others do, try to do internet research on their own, yet are unable to tell the difference between glitter and content... Fuck 'em. They should learn to read through bullshit,
or ask someone for help.
An interesting tangent: It would be fun and interesting to study trust relationships on the internet. In the "traditional media", credibility is a function of money. The barriers to entry are high--it isn't cheap to run a newspaper or a TV station--and people assume that anyone putting that kind of money into something is credible. On the interent, anyone can put up a website with glitz and glamour, and it seems that credibility must be earned over time. This probably contributed to the failure of many dot coms that tried to go for the "big internet debut" approach.
And here I thought I was one of the more technically inclined people around (by "normal" if not/. standards), and my computer is on a different floor than my TV. Hell I know lots of people whose TVs aren't even connected to there stereo, but (gasp) use the internal speakers.
If I didn't have a good set of stereo speakers for my computer, I might be inclined to hook it up to play to my main stereo in the living room, but even then I wouldn't probably not want to run a second record cable. I can't tell from the article if it is a monitor cable hooked to your TV/amplifier, or just a microphone (even scarier)
DC needs to learn that their "value added content" is not so spectacular that people are going to go to extra truoble to make it work, even if it is really cool once set up. The reality is that their service is mediocre at best, and way too much work to justify.
Simple. In the interest of academic freedom, scientific journals (as opposed to magazines like science news) do not print advertisments, thus the entire cost of publication is borne by the authors and/or subscribers.
Many articles in physics appear on xxx.lanl.gov before they a published. However, these are pre-print drafts that haven't been peer reviewed or selected in any other way. Many, many of the articles published there are Just Plain Wrong. When you pay for a peer reviewed journal, you are paying for a lower (though not zero) probability of something being totally wrong.
That isn't to say that publication costs are not a major source of contention. Obviously, scientists want as wide of a distribution as possible, and university library budgets, especially at smaller schools is limited. Some journals Nature are real assholes about this sort of thing, others are not so bad, but in the end, someone needs to pay the bills.
Many researchers post some or all of their published papers in PDF format on their webpages, but journals differer on if, how, and when you are allowed to do so.
1) Most corporations are NOT publically traded. This issue, maximizing profits to run up stock prices, is only true for publically traded companies, a SMALL portion of corporations.
A small portion, but most of the larges companies in the world are publically traded. And while the small companies may outweigh the large companies in total revenues, the large companies have much more power.
Acting in shareholder interests is. If the board takes actions to hurt the company, they can get hit by a shareholder lawsuit. However, the shareholders can adopt whatever goals they want. If there was a shareholder vote, and they voted to give 20% of the profits to charity, the board would comply.
However, it is much easier to prove direct monetary loss rather than more nebulous concepts. Sure, if there is a vote to give x% to charity that is one things. However, if a company doesn't enforce a patent, or doesn't apply for one, or licenses it cheaply because it is deemed too important to restrict, they will in all likelyhood be prosecuted by their shareholders or by Milberg Weiss and friends. *EVEN IF* in the long run such an action is beneficial to the company. Likewise, directors of a corporation can take actions that the majority of the shareholders wouldn't approve of, but as long as it doesn't show up as red ink, they are in practice pretty safe from prosecution (again, unless they are directly violating something the shareholders voted on)
Don't get me wrong, I am not really anti-corporation. I just think that governments and corporations should be seperate entities. Corporations are gaining political power so fast that it looks like soon there will be little pratical distiction.
Right. In particular, to be slander or libel, something has to be both "factual" (not a matter of opinion) and believable. I think (but am not sure) that you must also demonstrate that you were materially harmed...
Thus, saying that a restraunt's food is terrible, that the proprieters are ugly, and the staff is rude are not slander. Saying the beef is actually rat meat, and you are in trouble.
Likewise, if you say that George Bush shot Lincoln, it is obviously false, and therefore not slander.
The 2600 case is interesting as it isn't clear what they were saying -- they never really said "ford registered fuckceneralmotors.com" -- in fact the nameserver responses presumably came from 2600's nameservers. On the other hand, most people do not know enough about internet infrastructure to realize that you can't really prevent people from pointing domains at your website.
The real lesson here is that if you don't want this kind of thing to happen to you, set your webservers to reject Host: headers not from your domain.
Count yourself lucky you don't have to use any other UNIX vendors compilers. Sun's compiler is about another factor of 2 faster than HPs aCC or SGIs compiler (obviously running on different, though nominally comprable hardware).
Re:No, a bomb isn't so easy
on
Duct Tape
·
· Score: 2
Yes, if you have the materials, U-235 bombs are easy to construct. However, you may find unrefined, or even energy-grade uranium in reactors or universities, but you will not find the required amount of weapons grade uranium easy to come by. Refining U235 is extremely difficult, time consuming, and expensive.
Plutonium bombs are not as easy to make, and you are almost guaranteed to kill yourself while machining it unless you have pretty good safety equipment -- even a small filing of plutonium can kill you if taken internally.
Both can be acheived by someone with enough money and expetise but they aren't "easy."
Slashdot Mirror
The virus infection threshold is based on something like this model:
1) Some set of nodes are infected
2) Each of those nodes has a probability of X of infecting it nearest neighbors.
3) repeat
I just made that up, and there are many oportunities for variations (add the ability for nodes to be cleaned and/or vaccinated), but under models like this:
random networks have a critical threshold for X, above which they will infect the whole network, below which they will die out.
scale-free networks will have a macroscopic fraction of the network infected for any value of X.
First of all, there are additional features not caputred in this model, which could be important for "viruses" like Bliss which have an extremely low probabiliy of infection.
Second, the internet is not exactly a scale free network. As mentioned in the article, while the dominant behavior is a power law, if you go high enough, you find exponential cutoffs. This could cause some viruses to die out (I am certain Bliss isn't the only one that never made it).
This is an idea that has certainly been discussed before, but the answer is "almost certainly not".
First of all, the formation of a scale free network was caused by measurable "evolutionary" pressures for fault tolerance. In the absence of some similar evolutionary advantage to developing a global conciousness, it doesn't seem likely that it would happen spontaneously.
On the other hand, if some (possibly unintentional) goal was aligned with that, I wouldn't be totally surprised if through maintenence and updates, some form of conciousness arose.
Except: characteristic time scales on the internet are very large compared to connections within the brain. Any large scale behavior, including conciousness, would be expected to be slower than a human brain by orders of magnitude.
That is probably illegal, and certainly a bad idea (self reproducing code almost always causes problems even when you don't intend it to) but what I wonder is if you could get away with creating a CGI called default.ida that attempted to automatically connect back to the client, disinfect the machine, and install a patch. It is much less dangerous since it doesn't reproduce, and you could certainly make the argument that it was only done in retaliation to someone (unwittingly) attempting to infect your computer with a virus.
Well, I do own and watch TV now, last year I was paying for cable without having a TV... My apartment complex had this deal where we got 1/3 off, but subscription was mandatory. It was pretty obviously a "we think more than 1/3 of you will steal cable anyway" type of move.
The P4 is single processor only. The Intel Xeon (P4 based) supports SMP.
Since I am a big believer in SMP, and the Xeon line is a little out of my price range, I will be switching to Athalons next time I upgrade (not until lower cost Athalon MP boards are available).
I hate to nitpick, but this is important. They say a wide spectrum of frequencies, which does not necessarily denote white noise. The article never mentions white noise.
Every signal can be broken into frequency components, and each component has an amplitude *and* phase (often this is expressed by adding negative and positive frequency components). The importance of these phases cannot be overemphasized. If you "coherently" add components with the same phase, you will get a delta function: a single large crack. If you add them with random phases, you end up with white noise.
It is quite possible that the sound they are talking about is more like a series of short, broadband "chirps" than white noise.
I don't know enough of the physiology of hearing to know what makes things easy or difficult to locate, but I expect the incoherent nature of white noise makes localization more diffcult, not less. A chirp on the other hand, has a very steep rise that makes time-of-arrival measurements relatively easy, and improves localizability.
What, psychologically compells one to look at the source I don't know, but I have serious doubts that it will be effective in the long term. Human brains have a remarkable ability to get used to things and start ignoring them. Only while this sound is new and rare will it excite such reactions.
Yeah, or you could put ANSI codes in zip file headers to bind 'e' to format c:. (if they had ansi.sys loaded)
It isn't like MS invented this type of security hole, you would just think that after this many years, things would have gotten better, not worse. It used to be that when a problem like this was discovered, the author would do something about it: strip ANSI codes, etc. Instead, MS, dealing with an audience about 100 times less computer literate on average than the people above, insits on using user education, rather than the "right" solution of making a language and sandbox that lets people have dancing babies but not damage their system.
I don't mean to knock user education: I am all for it. But in this case, even if possible, user education can't solve this problem. There is *no* way for a user to determine if a file is safe to open, without actually doing so.
My understanding was (I haven't heard about it in a while) that WinCE was going to continue to be targeted for palmtop systems with a windows-like interface, while NT Embedded (the kernel to be used by the X-box) would be targeted at more traditional embedded systems. But I haven't heard anything more about that in months.
Once you escalate a few levels they are OK. And the people I have talked to were friendly and honestly trying. They just were clueless. I worked with Oracle for a year and a half, and knew more about it that just about anyone I talked to there.
On the other hand, the one Oracle consultant I talked to was a genius. Unfortunately, he was way, way, way to expensive for us, and the 3rd party consultants we talked to sucked total ass.
Yeah, but you wouldn't think you you have joe average asking why their Oracle setup is generating redo logs at 200 MB/minute under light load. Yet, unless you have platinum support ${SO FUCKING HUGE NUMBER YOU CANT BELIEVE IT} you have to sit there explaining to first tier tech support what a redo log is.
Once you get to second teir, Oracle support is pretty good, though not spectacular. But of course, you have to pay $BIGNUMBER to get any support at all, and unless you even more, they hang up the phone at 5pm.
Not any more. IBM, Dell, and HP are all starting to sell servers with Linux preinstalled and supported. That was VAs ace. It used to be that if you were a startup with limited resources and you wanted to use Linux for whatever reason (cost, flexibility, etc), but either didn't have the expertise, or didn't want to waste you expertise on system administration VA was a good choice to sell you a well designed server that had been tested under linux and supported with Linux on it. Now you can just go to Dell.
Interestingly, I suspect that one reason they pulled out of the direct server market is that they can't really compete with IBM. Originally, VA filled a market demand for servers designed, tested, and supported to run Linux. Even (perhaps especially) for a startup getting computers that will be supported with the software you need or want to run is important.
Now, IBM, and to a lesser extent Dell and HP, are getting into that market, and companies migrating to Linux, or a dual environment that have large investments in servers made by one or the other are much more likely to stay with that vendor for all their hardware needs across NT and Linux platforms.
First of all, reasonably proper spelling and grammar indicate that someone put time and thought into what they wrote. It indicates to me as a reader that the author thought the subject was worth spending more than a few minutes on, and therefore is more likely to be worth my time to read.
/. guys. They do a fine job, and as I said, their particular idiosyncrasies rarely bother me. What bother me are the legions of engineering students and former engineering students who think that as technical people they don't need to be able to speak and write intelligently.
Second, the ability to understand and apply the rules of English indicate a certain level of intelligence and education. Again, this is a clue to me as a reader that the author might have something worth reading.
Finally, poor spelling and grammar really do make things harder to read and understand. It causes the reader to spend more effort on understanding the important details, and less on deciphering the language. At the most extreme form of people trying to be cute with email "how r u doing", a lack of punctuation, capitalization, or any semblance of English is so distracting that the meager excuse for content is totally lost on the recipient.
That said, I have never found errors in the headlines and blurbs to be distracting. Sometimes the headlines do a poor job of conveying the topic of the link, but that is usually from some botched attempt at a journalistic "hook" than poor English.
This isn't meant to be a rant at the
I am especially annoyed by people who write like that in email. I don't really mind if people write like retarded 3rd graders to their friends (unless their friends includes me), but in an business setting even a brief and informal email to the person in the next cube deserves a few seconds of extra effort to translate it into real English.
While I certainly have my doubts about the stories authenticity, it would surprise me if it were accurate in any case. I have been in that place, and while I did try to keep my verbal abuse of the techs on hand to a miniumum (I just told myself "be glad you don't have their job"), communications weren't always friendly, either. And this was for a much smaller site.
Yeah, but right in the U of I guidelines it says:
1) In general, works of students remain the property of the student.
2) Work done for a graduate student thesis (ie, not classwork, but original research), software or otherwise is owned by the department, but may be given to the student at the discression of the department.
3) In any case, as a condition of receiving a degree, you implicitly give the university permission to use and distribute a "limited" number of copies of your thesis. (again, this is graduate thesis work, not classwork).
Occasionally, instructors will want to use your work in future years as an example, or framework for future projects. They always should, and usually do ask permission to do this. In this case, you would retain the copyright but give the instructor permission to use your work for teaching.
If your instructor provides you with a framework or skeleton code, you may own your modifications, but you don't automatically get rights to redistribute the combined work.
In short, if you are the sole author of your project, and want to GPL it and put it on Freshmeat, go ahead.
If you want to teach someone a computer language so they can go out and maybe write a few programs to do things that should really be done by shell scripts, by all means use Java, or even VB. If you are trying to build a good foundation for a sound computer science career, or to develop top-notch programmers, do not teach them Java (or any other OO language) as a first language. OO provides some very useful and powerful tools for development, especially of large scale systems. It is not suitable for teaching people the foundations of computer science. If you want to take a theoretical approach to CS, a functional language would be a good choice as it exposes the logical formalisms that underly CS and information theory, for practial curricums, a procedural language is best since it closely mirrors the way computers actually work. Once someone has a strong foundation, they can learn any number of new techniques and languages easily.
Many OO programmers swear that people should start with an OO language for whatever reason, but I have quite a bit of experience with people who learned Java first, and C or Pascal first. Hands down, when it comes to understanding more complicated archetectures, even OO archetectures, the people who understand how those systems translate into something a computer can execute learn much faster and are better able to understand the tradeoffs in flexibility, convenience, and performance that different techniques make.
But the average user or corporate drone will as easily swollow the tripe that the tech firms' marketing people spew as a "fake" independent hardware site. If they really care, they ask a techie, who will tell them what is good and what isn't.
Hardware sites don't exist in a vacuum. The ones I refer to, I not only trust because of the quality of their content, but because of a long term trust they have built up by providing accurate information. If a new site has a lot info flies in the face of my experience, or the experience of people I know, or a widely held consensus among both hardware sites and other computer geeks on the internet, it will lose reputation, and I will likely never trust it again.
As for people who don't have the wide range of experience I and others do, try to do internet research on their own, yet are unable to tell the difference between glitter and content... Fuck 'em. They should learn to read through bullshit,
or ask someone for help.
An interesting tangent: It would be fun and interesting to study trust relationships on the internet. In the "traditional media", credibility is a function of money. The barriers to entry are high--it isn't cheap to run a newspaper or a TV station--and people assume that anyone putting that kind of money into something is credible. On the interent, anyone can put up a website with glitz and glamour, and it seems that credibility must be earned over time. This probably contributed to the failure of many dot coms that tried to go for the "big internet debut" approach.
And here I thought I was one of the more technically inclined people around (by "normal" if not /. standards), and my computer is on a different floor than my TV. Hell I know lots of people whose TVs aren't even connected to there stereo, but (gasp) use the internal speakers.
If I didn't have a good set of stereo speakers for my computer, I might be inclined to hook it up to play to my main stereo in the living room, but even then I wouldn't probably not want to run a second record cable. I can't tell from the article if it is a monitor cable hooked to your TV/amplifier, or just a microphone (even scarier)
DC needs to learn that their "value added content" is not so spectacular that people are going to go to extra truoble to make it work, even if it is really cool once set up. The reality is that their service is mediocre at best, and way too much work to justify.
Simple. In the interest of academic freedom, scientific journals (as opposed to magazines like science news) do not print advertisments, thus the entire cost of publication is borne by the authors and/or subscribers.
Many articles in physics appear on xxx.lanl.gov before they a published. However, these are pre-print drafts that haven't been peer reviewed or selected in any other way. Many, many of the articles published there are Just Plain Wrong. When you pay for a peer reviewed journal, you are paying for a lower (though not zero) probability of something being totally wrong.
That isn't to say that publication costs are not a major source of contention. Obviously, scientists want as wide of a distribution as possible, and university library budgets, especially at smaller schools is limited. Some journals Nature are real assholes about this sort of thing, others are not so bad, but in the end, someone needs to pay the bills.
Many researchers post some or all of their published papers in PDF format on their webpages, but journals differer on if, how, and when you are allowed to do so.
Or, when they develop completely self organizing semiconductors that can be quickly grown from a single nucleation point.
:)
I am not sure which is more likely
A small portion, but most of the larges companies in the world are publically traded. And while the small companies may outweigh the large companies in total revenues, the large companies have much more power.
However, it is much easier to prove direct monetary loss rather than more nebulous concepts. Sure, if there is a vote to give x% to charity that is one things. However, if a company doesn't enforce a patent, or doesn't apply for one, or licenses it cheaply because it is deemed too important to restrict, they will in all likelyhood be prosecuted by their shareholders or by Milberg Weiss and friends. *EVEN IF* in the long run such an action is beneficial to the company. Likewise, directors of a corporation can take actions that the majority of the shareholders wouldn't approve of, but as long as it doesn't show up as red ink, they are in practice pretty safe from prosecution (again, unless they are directly violating something the shareholders voted on)
Don't get me wrong, I am not really anti-corporation. I just think that governments and corporations should be seperate entities. Corporations are gaining political power so fast that it looks like soon there will be little pratical distiction.
Right. In particular, to be slander or libel, something has to be both "factual" (not a matter of opinion) and believable. I think (but am not sure) that you must also demonstrate that you were materially harmed...
Thus, saying that a restraunt's food is terrible, that the proprieters are ugly, and the staff is rude are not slander. Saying the beef is actually rat meat, and you are in trouble.
Likewise, if you say that George Bush shot Lincoln, it is obviously false, and therefore not slander.
The 2600 case is interesting as it isn't clear what they were saying -- they never really said "ford registered fuckceneralmotors.com" -- in fact the nameserver responses presumably came from 2600's nameservers. On the other hand, most people do not know enough about internet infrastructure to realize that you can't really prevent people from pointing domains at your website.
The real lesson here is that if you don't want this kind of thing to happen to you, set your webservers to reject Host: headers not from your domain.
Count yourself lucky you don't have to use any other UNIX vendors compilers. Sun's compiler is about another factor of 2 faster than HPs aCC or SGIs compiler (obviously running on different, though nominally comprable hardware).
Yes, if you have the materials, U-235 bombs are easy to construct. However, you may find unrefined, or even energy-grade uranium in reactors or universities, but you will not find the required amount of weapons grade uranium easy to come by. Refining U235 is extremely difficult, time consuming, and expensive.
Plutonium bombs are not as easy to make, and you are almost guaranteed to kill yourself while machining it unless you have pretty good safety equipment -- even a small filing of plutonium can kill you if taken internally.
Both can be acheived by someone with enough money and expetise but they aren't "easy."
I am absolutely thrilled to see companies agreeing on standard technology. I never want to by another VESA local bus machine...
Competition is good. So are standards, and the fewer of them out there the better.