Good call! The FTC will be a profitmaking branch of the government, like the patent and trademark offices. They just have to change the law so that you need to buy a permit to break the (old) law. There's no law you couldn't do that with, right up to and including murder.
Of course it has been done before elsewhere (recall "indulgences", "letters of marque", "royal companies", and lots more variations) and it could have been done here any time. It was never a good idea before, but now somehow it is. When the government is populated with crooks and shysters, it gets hard to tell who's not one.
Never mind the helium-3. The amount of gravitational potential energy in moon rock is billions of times as much as could be got from the H3. Just boost it off the moon and catch it in low-earth orbit. I think Donald Kingsbury did a write-up.
Of course "catching" it without destroying the catching mitt demands some cleverness, but you have to be pretty clever to begin with to hit it at all.
OCaml was pretty much designed specifically for this sort of thing. Every part of the language system accepts plug-ins for your private variants. If you can bear to use a parsing language that is far more powerful than yacc, you might consider it.
That said, interpreted languages are stupidly easy to do, so much so that it's hard to learn much -- they forgive every mistake until long after it's too late to fix it. (Witness Perl.) A high-performance language is a Good Thing not particularly because the programs run faster, although that's a nice side benefit, but rather because it enforces a fundamental rigor. There's no faking performance. When you face that kind of problem squarely, God speaks to you, and if you listen carefully enough you can learn deep truths.
But that's not for everybody. Most people have had any desire to learn anything, deep or otherwise, beaten out of them. By all means go for easy comfort, the economic vitality of the nation depends on people like you. Forget I said anything.
Garbage collection, bytecodes, regexps, yeah!
These guys are guilty of mass murder. They just don't concentrate it all on a few. Instead, they spread it around, so we each give up some life. Responsible sysadmins give up more. Add up all the life they've cost... If ten million people have had two seconds wasted a thousand times, that's over 600 years, or the equivalent of ten murders. That time is stolen from the victims' children. One spammer, 600 person-years.
Bruce Tognazzini calculated that the accident death rate around Palo Alto would have to be several times what it was to justify the time wasted by all the extra signal-controlled turn lanes.
I used to say the death penalty should be restricted to public and corporate officials who abuse the authority of their (respective) office. E.g., using the Army to execute a private vendetta, or disposing of heat-resistant toxic industrial waste by diluting it in the company's gasoline product. One person, alone, can only do so much damage. The same person backed by industrial or military might can do unlimited harm, even just negligently. Tobacco company officials deserve to have the skin flayed from their flesh, and have salt water sprayed on them for weeks until they succumb; likewise prosecutors who conceal evidence of innocence. (But I digress.)
Bose is also well-known for suing anyone who gives them a bad review. Hence, no one reviews Bose without a kickback, and any review you find that is favorable is by either a shill or an ignoramus. But that's just what I hear.
Why would any sane person waste crushingly scarce ROM and RAM space on a Java interpreter? Everybody involved knows exactly what the target hardware is, and can compile directly to it. This has failure written all over it.
It really should be something that laptop vendors can use.
What I would rather see, instead of a card, particularly, would be a design for a generic register interface that any vendor can implement. Each vendor can provide as much optimization as their market will bear. The creator of the spec would have first-mover advantage, but eventually everybody would have to support it (in addition to whatever else they had). Then, any new laptop would work with at least the generic driver. I know VESA was an attempt at something similar, but it was at the wrong level and too weenie.
Maybe there is already an interface in use in some "obsolete" card that could be lifted wholesale, and then cleaned up and modernized. It seems a suitable subject for an ECMA standard.
About "System of the World"... We never do find out why Daniel Waterhouse is so dead set against Newton getting even a tiny sample of heavy gold -- nor why his punch-cards have to be made out of it, particularly. (Surely Newton would have been happy to swap regular gold, straight across.) Anyway, Newton himself says he has found counterfeit guineas in circulation made out of it; what happened to them? Futhermore, Daniel can't have got *all* of it; surely van Hoek and others kept back a bit for themselves. Knowing how keen Newton was on the stuff, why wouldn't they have offered to sell him some at usurious prices? And, what finally happened to the tiny scrap after the assay?
I grew up in Hawai'i. I went barefoot until I was 12.
Now I'm 42, and I still wear flip-flops, even though I live in Massachusetts.
Re:Surely you must be joking Mr Feynman
on
Steel Bolt Hacking
·
· Score: 1
Isn't your aunt's father *your* grandfather...?
In fact, of my nine aunts' fathers, only two are my (lamented) grandfather. Precision in writing is nothing to be ashamed of, while careless reading habits are nothing to advertise.
What you need is an ozone generator. Park the equipment and the generator in a closed room for a few days, or weeks. Most ozone generators are built from a short-wavelength ultraviolet lamp in a box, sometimes with a fan. (Don't confuse ozone generators with negative ion generators. Ozone causes permanent lung damage, over time. Ozone generators also produce ions, but so what?.)
The ozone will oxidize the aromatic organic molecules, over time.
The example of Freud is particularly apt. Despite his widely accepted expertise at the time, his work and his opinions have since been roundly repudiated, and there is little of merit left to his name. Similar examples are legion. There would not even have been an entry in an "authoritative" encyclopedia for plate tectonics, the Cretaceous meteorite, or McClintock's transposons for many years after the important work has been done. Often progress waits for the incumbent authorities of the field to die.
Fields where current orthodoxy impedes progress include Alzheimer's research, biological interactions with varying electromagnetic fields and tiny currents, and fusion using electrically-accelerated nuclei producing energetic charged particles.
Authority is no guarantee of validity, although it may be promoted as, and easily be mistaken for one.
Any time a large number of internet hosts take new measures to interfere with spammers, the spammers adapt. SPF helps now just because the the spammers haven't adapted yet. Once it's adopted widely, the spammers will behave differently.
Not everybody will register SPF records, so they will forge addresses for domains that that don't. There will always be lots of those. Second, as I said, they will use zombie machines to send what seems to the ISP to be legitimate mail. Most (i.e., enough) ISPs are very reluctant to cut off saps just because their machines are infected.
So, you'll still get just as much spam. Checking SPF won't help, either because the spam comes from a domain with no SPF DNS entry, or because it appears legitimate according to SPF. You won't get so much spam with a yahoo or hotmail return address, which is good for Yahoo and MSN reputations, but that doesn't do you any good. It does put a big load on the DNS servers, though, which is too bad for something that doesn't do any good. (It's actually kind of irresponsible to use it if you don't have your own caching DNS server.)
So the short answer is that soon all the spam will pass SPF checks, and we're back where we started, but with a more complex mail system.
When they say "16 times as large as Earth", they don't say what they're measuring. Since they detected them by gravitational perturbation, I'm guessing they mean "16 Earth masses". In a rocky planet approximating Earth's density, that means just pow(16,0.33)=2.5 times the diameter, or 20k miles to Earth's 8k. That's really a lot closer to Earth's size than it might have seemed. At the same density, surface gravity would also be only 2.5G, to Earth's 1G.
On such a planet, albeit one not so close to its star as the ones they have found so far, it is easy to imagine creatures walking on stout legs -- never mind the insects and sea creatures that wouldn't even notice the "extra" weight.
When the sergeant on duty can't find anything wrong, but gets orders to arrest him anyway, it's obviously a politically motivated arrest. Here's hoping they can't keep him off the road for long.
Oops, I'm wrong. Double the density, and the volume goes down by half, so the radius goes down by just 1/(2**(1/3)), or just 0.79. Surface gravity increases, then, by a factor of 1/(0.79**2), or 1.59, for a total of just 2.41*1.59 = 3.8G. There's no way a 14-Earth-mass planet can pull much more than 4G surface gravity if the heaviest stuff you have to work with is iron, no matter how hard your little planet's gravity squeezes it.
So, your uranium planet (for as long as it would last) would be (1/(2.5**(1/3)))*0.79 = 0.58 the size of one with Earth's density. Its surface gravity would be 1/(0.58**2) times our
Earth-density planet, or just 2.41*2.94 = 7G. Still not very
close to 14G. (I guess you'd need some unobtainium.)
I'm afraid your columnist, Mr. Wildstrom (in "Big Fly", 8/13), has been taken
in by some who envy the success of Linux and GNU Project software.
Every success is dogged by advice to abandon the wellspring of that success.
For Linux, that wellspring is the GNU General Public License. IBM could (and
can) as easily adopt a BSD-based OS, just as Apple did. With the best legal
advice available on the planet, IBM chose the GPL.
The GPL has rarely been to court precisely because its implications are clear. Violators settle quickly because the alternative is to stop shipping product.
Grumblings about "murky" license terms amount to nothing more than sour grapes.
In any case, changing Linux's license is a practical impossibility. Hundreds
of people and companies own bits of it, and all would have to agree to a
change. Linux is condemned to retain the source of its success indefinitely.
First, they didn't "complete a migration". They're still deep in the middle of it, and will be for years to come.
Second, this failure isn't in the Sabre reservations system, it's in some ancillary product, so who knows? Maybe they have no intention of switching it to Unix.
Third, he didn't say so, but the migration isn't just to Unix. It's also migration to MySQL! (Hahahahahahahaha. Then again, coming from TPF, coded in assembly language for 4Kword pages, and a hierarchical database, that might seem pretty advanced.) Sabre had to fund a MySQL port to 64 bits, and a new "stored procedures" feature.
I attended the LinuxBIOS BOF at Usenix this summer.
AMD has seen the light and has become the most forthcoming of all chipset vendors, so Athlon and Opteron motherboards tend to be very well supported. (VIA, by contrast, is still a problem). Tyan has a full-time LinuxBIOS engineer, and several system vendors, among Linuxnetworx, ship machines with LinuxBIOS installed.
They have solved the VGA init problem by importing an 8086 emulator that (strangely) runs faster than the hardware version in P4 and Athlon. For x86 they have a funny compiler called romcc that uses registers as main memory, for use before the memory controller has been initialized. (Opteron doesn't need it because ~450 bytes of the cache works as RAM immediately after power-up.) What the project needs most now is some institutional support, so they can run regression tests on all the hardware they support.
The project is far from dead: they are fixing to release major version 2. When will it be ready? Sooner if you help.
His work can be hard to find, these days. "Revolution from Rosinante", "Long Shot for Rosinante", and "Pirates of Rosinante" were truly remarkable. Mostly what you'll find, though, if you look for Gilliland, are volumes from his Wizenbeak fantasy-political series, which are also remarkable in their way, but not what you asked for.
What's more ironic is that they won't be able to apply fixes, including security fixes, without going through the whole process again. Since they can't afford to do that, they will be running "secure" code with known security holes.
The only measure of efficiency that matters much is peak Watts per dollar cost. Of course that's variable, increasing along the learning curve as the manufacturing process improves, so you have to guess where it will end up. The absolute energetic efficiency (joules of electrical energy out per joules of electromagnetic energy in only needs to be above maybe 10%.
Slashdot Mirror
Good call! The FTC will be a profitmaking branch of the government, like the patent and trademark offices. They just have to change the law so that you need to buy a permit to break the (old) law. There's no law you couldn't do that with, right up to and including murder.
Of course it has been done before elsewhere (recall "indulgences", "letters of marque", "royal companies", and lots more variations) and it could have been done here any time. It was never a good idea before, but now somehow it is. When the government is populated with crooks and shysters, it gets hard to tell who's not one.
Of course "catching" it without destroying the catching mitt demands some cleverness, but you have to be pretty clever to begin with to hit it at all.
That said, interpreted languages are stupidly easy to do, so much so that it's hard to learn much -- they forgive every mistake until long after it's too late to fix it. (Witness Perl.) A high-performance language is a Good Thing not particularly because the programs run faster, although that's a nice side benefit, but rather because it enforces a fundamental rigor. There's no faking performance. When you face that kind of problem squarely, God speaks to you, and if you listen carefully enough you can learn deep truths.
But that's not for everybody. Most people have had any desire to learn anything, deep or otherwise, beaten out of them. By all means go for easy comfort, the economic vitality of the nation depends on people like you. Forget I said anything. Garbage collection, bytecodes, regexps, yeah!
Bruce Tognazzini calculated that the accident death rate around Palo Alto would have to be several times what it was to justify the time wasted by all the extra signal-controlled turn lanes.
I used to say the death penalty should be restricted to public and corporate officials who abuse the authority of their (respective) office. E.g., using the Army to execute a private vendetta, or disposing of heat-resistant toxic industrial waste by diluting it in the company's gasoline product. One person, alone, can only do so much damage. The same person backed by industrial or military might can do unlimited harm, even just negligently. Tobacco company officials deserve to have the skin flayed from their flesh, and have salt water sprayed on them for weeks until they succumb; likewise prosecutors who conceal evidence of innocence. (But I digress.)
Now I think spammers should get it, too.
No offense intended. I should have said, "any magazine that reviews Bose..."
Bose is also well-known for suing anyone who gives them a bad review. Hence, no one reviews Bose without a kickback, and any review you find that is favorable is by either a shill or an ignoramus. But that's just what I hear.
Just give me the raw hardware, I'll program that.
It really should be something that laptop vendors can use.
What I would rather see, instead of a card, particularly, would be a design for a generic register interface that any vendor can implement. Each vendor can provide as much optimization as their market will bear. The creator of the spec would have first-mover advantage, but eventually everybody would have to support it (in addition to whatever else they had). Then, any new laptop would work with at least the generic driver. I know VESA was an attempt at something similar, but it was at the wrong level and too weenie.
Maybe there is already an interface in use in some "obsolete" card that could be lifted wholesale, and then cleaned up and modernized. It seems a suitable subject for an ECMA standard.
About "System of the World"... We never do find out why Daniel Waterhouse is so dead set against Newton getting even a tiny sample of heavy gold -- nor why his punch-cards have to be made out of it, particularly. (Surely Newton would have been happy to swap regular gold, straight across.) Anyway, Newton himself says he has found counterfeit guineas in circulation made out of it; what happened to them? Futhermore, Daniel can't have got *all* of it; surely van Hoek and others kept back a bit for themselves. Knowing how keen Newton was on the stuff, why wouldn't they have offered to sell him some at usurious prices? And, what finally happened to the tiny scrap after the assay?
So I guess we must deduce from reading the article that "SFF" means "Small Form Factor". It wasn't worth the effort it took to find out.
"Slippers"? Hah! They were called "robbah sleepah". There's no "schwa" sound in the Hawaiian creole language.
(Fockeen Haole.)
Now I'm 42, and I still wear flip-flops, even though I live in Massachusetts.
In fact, of my nine aunts' fathers, only two are my (lamented) grandfather. Precision in writing is nothing to be ashamed of, while careless reading habits are nothing to advertise.
What you need is an ozone generator. Park the equipment and the generator in a closed room for a few days, or weeks. Most ozone generators are built from a short-wavelength ultraviolet lamp in a box, sometimes with a fan. (Don't confuse ozone generators with negative ion generators. Ozone causes permanent lung damage, over time. Ozone generators also produce ions, but so what?.) The ozone will oxidize the aromatic organic molecules, over time.
The example of Freud is particularly apt. Despite his widely accepted expertise at the time, his work and his opinions have since been roundly repudiated, and there is little of merit left to his name. Similar examples are legion. There would not even have been an entry in an "authoritative" encyclopedia for plate tectonics, the Cretaceous meteorite, or McClintock's transposons for many years after the important work has been done. Often progress waits for the incumbent authorities of the field to die.
Fields where current orthodoxy impedes progress include Alzheimer's research, biological interactions with varying electromagnetic fields and tiny currents, and fusion using electrically-accelerated nuclei producing energetic charged particles.
Authority is no guarantee of validity, although it may be promoted as, and easily be mistaken for one.
Any time a large number of internet hosts take new measures to interfere with spammers, the spammers adapt. SPF helps now just because the the spammers haven't adapted yet. Once it's adopted widely, the spammers will behave differently.
Not everybody will register SPF records, so they will forge addresses for domains that that don't. There will always be lots of those. Second, as I said, they will use zombie machines to send what seems to the ISP to be legitimate mail. Most (i.e., enough) ISPs are very reluctant to cut off saps just because their machines are infected.
So, you'll still get just as much spam. Checking SPF won't help, either because the spam comes from a domain with no SPF DNS entry, or because it appears legitimate according to SPF. You won't get so much spam with a yahoo or hotmail return address, which is good for Yahoo and MSN reputations, but that doesn't do you any good. It does put a big load on the DNS servers, though, which is too bad for something that doesn't do any good. (It's actually kind of irresponsible to use it if you don't have your own caching DNS server.)
So the short answer is that soon all the spam will pass SPF checks, and we're back where we started, but with a more complex mail system.
On such a planet, albeit one not so close to its star as the ones they have found so far, it is easy to imagine creatures walking on stout legs -- never mind the insects and sea creatures that wouldn't even notice the "extra" weight.
When the sergeant on duty can't find anything wrong, but gets orders to arrest him anyway, it's obviously a politically motivated arrest. Here's hoping they can't keep him off the road for long.
So, your uranium planet (for as long as it would last) would be (1/(2.5**(1/3)))*0.79 = 0.58 the size of one with Earth's density. Its surface gravity would be 1/(0.58**2) times our Earth-density planet, or just 2.41*2.94 = 7G. Still not very close to 14G. (I guess you'd need some unobtainium.)
The GPL has rarely been to court precisely because its implications are clear. Violators settle quickly because the alternative is to stop shipping product. Grumblings about "murky" license terms amount to nothing more than sour grapes.
In any case, changing Linux's license is a practical impossibility. Hundreds of people and companies own bits of it, and all would have to agree to a change. Linux is condemned to retain the source of its success indefinitely.
Second, this failure isn't in the Sabre reservations system, it's in some ancillary product, so who knows? Maybe they have no intention of switching it to Unix.
Third, he didn't say so, but the migration isn't just to Unix. It's also migration to MySQL! (Hahahahahahahaha. Then again, coming from TPF, coded in assembly language for 4Kword pages, and a hierarchical database, that might seem pretty advanced.) Sabre had to fund a MySQL port to 64 bits, and a new "stored procedures" feature.
AMD has seen the light and has become the most forthcoming of all chipset vendors, so Athlon and Opteron motherboards tend to be very well supported. (VIA, by contrast, is still a problem). Tyan has a full-time LinuxBIOS engineer, and several system vendors, among Linuxnetworx, ship machines with LinuxBIOS installed.
They have solved the VGA init problem by importing an 8086 emulator that (strangely) runs faster than the hardware version in P4 and Athlon. For x86 they have a funny compiler called romcc that uses registers as main memory, for use before the memory controller has been initialized. (Opteron doesn't need it because ~450 bytes of the cache works as RAM immediately after power-up.) What the project needs most now is some institutional support, so they can run regression tests on all the hardware they support.
The project is far from dead: they are fixing to release major version 2. When will it be ready? Sooner if you help.
I'll bet you haven't read any Alexis Gilliland.
His work can be hard to find, these days. "Revolution from Rosinante", "Long Shot for Rosinante", and "Pirates of Rosinante" were truly remarkable. Mostly what you'll find, though, if you look for Gilliland, are volumes from his Wizenbeak fantasy-political series, which are also remarkable in their way, but not what you asked for.
What's more ironic is that they won't be able to apply fixes, including security fixes, without going through the whole process again. Since they can't afford to do that, they will be running "secure" code with known security holes.
It's too bad they didn't certify GNU TLS instead.
The only measure of efficiency that matters much is peak Watts per dollar cost. Of course that's variable, increasing along the learning curve as the manufacturing process improves, so you have to guess where it will end up. The absolute energetic efficiency (joules of electrical energy out per joules of electromagnetic energy in only needs to be above maybe 10%.