Your comments about missions riddled with errors reminds me of Feynman's comments on that subject in his appendix to the Challenger failure report:
It is true that if the probability of failure was as low as 1 in 100,000 it would take an inordinate number of tests to determine it ( you would get nothing but a string of perfect flights from which no precise figure, other than that the probability is likely less than the number of such flights in the string so far). But, if the real probability is not so small, flights would show troubles, near failures, and possible actual failures with a reasonable number of trials, and standard statistical methods could give a reasonable estimate. In fact, previous NASA experience had shown, on occasion, just such difficulties, near accidents, and accidents, all giving warning that the probability of flight failure was not so very small.
One wonders to what degree failure analysis of such "near misses" and "minor errors" was really conducted post-Challenger to determine overall saftey and reliability. One also wonders if the economic and political infrastructure involved in the shuttle program would accomodate someone doing such analysis (which would likely be hard enough to defend and validate, the counter-intuitiveness of statistics being what it is.)
It does appear that most of the various "off-scale low" sensor errors/failures immediately before the Columbia breakup were considered routine and nothing directly to worry about.
For anyone interested in Texas or Louisiana geography when hearing about reports of debris, this MapQuest map may provide some helpful orientation. The towns I've heard mentioned so far are Nacogdoches (TX), Palestine (TX), and Shreveport (LA). The shuttle was heading southeast to land in Florida.
Almost all debris reports so far focus on Nacogdoches. Palestine and Shreveport stories seem to be more focused on hearing sound from the incident. Here's the best article on debris I found just now while searching Google news.
Thanks. I vaguely remembered an escape route/craft of some kind but didn't know that we had working unmanned supply vehicles; that's promising. Hopefully your response will get modded up as much as my inquiry...
President Reagan's Speech on The Challenger Disaster Oval Office of the White House January 28, 1986
Ladies and Gentlemen, I'd planned to speak to you tonight to report on the state of the Union, but the events of earlier today have led me to change those plans. Today is a day for mourning and remembering. Nancy and I are pained to the core by the tragedy of the shuttle Challenger. We know we share this pain with all of the people of our country. This is truly a national loss.
Nineteen years ago, almost to the day, we lost three astronauts in a terrible accident on the ground. But, we've never lost an astronaut in flight; we've never had a tragedy like this. And perhaps we've forgotten the courage it took for the crew of the shuttle; but they, the Challenger Seven, were aware of the dangers, but overcame them and did their jobs brilliantly. We mourn seven heroes: Michael Smith, Dick Scobee, Judith Resnik, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Gregory Jarvis, and Christa McAuliffe. We mourn their loss as a nation together.
For the families of the seven, we cannot bear, as you do, the full impact of this tragedy. But we feel the loss, and we're thinking about you so very much. Your loved ones were daring and brave, and they had that special grace, that special spirit that says, 'Give me a challenge and I'll meet it with joy.' They had a hunger to explore the universe and discover its truths. They wished to serve, and they did. They served all of us.
We've grown used to wonders in this century. It's hard to dazzle us. But for twenty-five years the United States space program has been doing just that. We've grown used to the idea of space, and perhaps we forget that we've only just begun. We're still pioneers. They, the members of the Challenger crew, were pioneers.
And I want to say something to the schoolchildren of America who were watching the live coverage of the shuttle's takeoff. I know it is hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen. It's all part of the process of exploration and discovery. It's all part of taking a chance and expanding man's horizons. The future doesn't belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave. The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we'll continue to follow them...
I've always had great faith in and respect for our space program, and what happened today does nothing to diminish it. We don't hide our space program. We don't keep secrets and cover things up. We do it all up front and in public. That's the way freedom is, and we wouldn't change it for a minute. We'll continue our quest in space. There will be more shuttle flights and more shuttle crews and, yes, more volunteers, more civilians, more teachers in space. Nothing ends here; our hopes and our journeys continue. I want to add that I wish I could talk to every man and woman who works for NASA or who worked on this mission and tell them: "Your dedication and professionalism have moved and impressed us for decades. And we know of your anguish. We share it."
There's a coincidence today. On this day 390 years ago, the great explorer Sir Francis Drake died aboard ship off the coast of Panama. In his lifetime the great frontiers were the oceans, and a historian later said, 'He lived by the sea, died on it, and was buried in it.' Well, today we can say of the Challenger crew: Their dedication was, like Drake's, complete.
The crew of the space shuttle Challenger honoured us by the manner in which they lived their lives. We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for the journey and waved goodbye and 'slipped the surly bonds of earth' to 'touch the face of God.'
My understanding is that the space station requires re-supply by the shuttle. After the Challenger explosion, shuttles didn't fly for another two years. Clearly the people on the space station require at the very least rescue if not re-supply. My question is this: how long can the folks in the space station last without another shuttle flight?
Nowdays though there is a space station dependent on the shuttle, unlike when the Challenger blew up. It remains to be seen how that affects the amount of time the shuttles are grounded.
This makes about 2 failures out of about 100 flights. That's far higher than what we're used to from commercial aviation, but not completely unreasonable when you consider how much the space program pushes the envelope.
The module the astronauts are in is reinforcecd, and there are parachutes that can be used. While this could not be used at 200,000 feet (the edge of the atmosphere), if the reinforced front module survived the blast without breaking (unlikely) and the hatch didn't get jammed (unlikely), and the module was in free-fall (not at 12,500 mph) at under 30,000 feet, it's possible that the astronauts could parachute out.
But basically, it'd take a miracle. And someone probably would have visually seen/reported parachutes by now.
News that debris is falling southeast of Dallas, Texas, perhaps (ironicly?) in Palestine, TX. Still, Palestine police are not reporting that they've received debris reports.
It was covered by the Slashdot masses on another security-related thread earlier this morning.
If you want an non-editor-controlled story queue, with story selection subject to user moderation, try submitting/reading here; the capability is now possible on Slashdot. It's not as simple as it could be, and it's only a week old, but it works without you having to leave Slashdot.
--LP
Note the story submitter's name
on
Cross-Site-TRACE
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I went to see if I could find Judge's opinion online. Indeed, it is! In PDF form, I bring you Toy Biz, Inc. v. United States.
For those of you decrying our taxpayer dollars going to waste on such a suit, it appears some at least is being used to make such decisions more accessible, a fact which I hope we can all agree upon.
Personally, I think it was worth every penny to expose a fantastic example of corporate hypocracy. I read maybe a dozen X-Men comics (and didn't see the movie) and the main philosophical point I saw that the series revolved around (besides raw action) was that the X-Men should in fact be considered human despite their 'mutant' powers.
Given that, what could be more hypocritical than turning around and claiming that, while for storyline purposes the X-Men should be considered human, but for tax purposes, they are not.
But maybe I should read the Judge's opinion first. It's long, so I'm posting the link here before I read. Based on the first paragraph, it looks like the matter never went to a full trial and was decided in a pre-trial 'summary judgement'.
You guys are missing the main point!
on
New SGI Altix 3000
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
You guys are all missing the main point!
SGI is the first billion-dollar systems vendor to move their totally high-end million dollar hardware to run Linux, and not just to run Linux poorly, but instead their mega-boxes *require* Linux to performe excellently (unlike, say IBM "Linux/390" mainframes where Linux is not really the native OS supporting all the hardware features and is mostly a curiousity or very expensive Apache server.)
The other vendors, Sun, HP, DEC, IBM have not been nearly as aggressive and are depending on their own UNIXes to remain on their high-end boxes.
SGI is depending on Linux and has tweaked it enough to run huge, 64-way complex NUMA systems. This is a major infrastructure bet on Linux, and (assuming this is a shipping, working product) a huge mark of progress for Linux that it can, today, support this sort of high-end scalable hardware.
We all knew it *could*, in theory, but SGI has invested in making sure that *it does*!
This marks a major shift of SGI to an Intel/Linux pure play. It's not just a bunch of low-end Linux server boxes (which they've done before, and Sun/HP/IBM also do), or boxes that you can run either Linux or some proprietary UNIX. It's a full-scale massive 64-way NUMA SMP server that is optimized to run Linux.
Hats off to SGI, I say.
(I wish they had better business prospects but its hard to do that with a niche sort of product like high-end SMP/NUMA technical computing. We'll see if they can push it into a broader customer base with sufficient application support.)
I wonder how Oracle would do on this sort of puppy?
Gnostism was, in fact, the dominant form of Christianity by the 300's and in my humble opinion the group that became Orthodoxy later rewrote and destroyed history, books, and people since they were so furious about winning.
Let me toss a competing perspective your way.
Alternately, the gnostic groups treasured their secret knowledge so much that they didn't share it. Instead, like the Masons or Scientology or any number of other similar religions, they had carried out secret ceremonies and had secret teachings only for the properly initiated and 'worthy'. This was kind of cool, but ultimately, smart people didn't want to join a religion where divine revelation was always subject to change or control or new revelation by the people at the top who handed out divine knowledge piecemeal to the people of their choice.
In contrast, the folks in charge of what became known as Orthodoxy conducted meetings (councils) to come to agreement on what the standard accepted revelatory texts (and doctrines) were, and those texts were propagated, "open source style", to the curious (at least for a while; absent any competition, the Roman Catholics lapsed on that for quite a time.) Secret, hidden teachings were shunned by the 'orthodox' church and became the hallmark of people trying to add, remove or twist the teachings of the Old and New Testament canons.
It's probably true that the Orthodox attempted to destroy books they viewed as leading to the eternal damnation of others, (note also that the Gnostics chose to protect a lot of their secret wisdom by conveying it verbally, no book destruction necessary.) I'd also agree that it seems likely that the hierarchical structure of the church (e.g. bishops ruling over multiple churches) grew in importance as that structure proved valuable in stomping out Gnostic competitors who were more fragmented and lacked similar unity.
But it's not fair to say that only the Orthodox pursued "power structure"s while Gnostics abstained; each had their own. Orthodoxy's hierarchical power structure was its relationships within and among churches, while Gnostic's hierarchical power was based on its select distribution of knowledge.
The gnostics shot themselves in the foot their "we are holders of the 'gnosis', the secret knowledge... we can't tell you until you're 'enlightened'" approach. The open knowledge infrastructure won out. And since then that approach has proved useful for everything from science to, dare I say it?, open source.
--LP, who doesn't claim to be an expert on the Gnostics, but has at least read "The Gnostic Gospels"
We developed nations will take a hit for the good of the planet, and hope that our good example will convince other nations follow.
You have *got* to be kidding. If a person can make a buck by arbitraging cheap, polluting tasks by moving them to certain countries (China, India, Eastern Europe), they will do so in a heartbeat. Given the interdependence of the world ecology, it shifts things around without any incentive for polluters to stop.
If the protocol held such countries to a lesser standard but required them to document what was going on and tighten up, just at a slower rate, that'd be unfair but perhaps OK for a while. But saying that there should be *no* controls for them is a big mistake that sets a really bad precedent IMHO.
It's sort of like telling poor people "you can steal from the rich for a while since you are poorer, but at some point in the future you're going to have to stop". A bit harsh, but tell me where I'm wrong here.
I agree that the law/behavior you suggest occurs. If you read the article, you'll see that this is really a different sort of article however.
The article doesn't say that Moore's law won't continue. It says, and attempts to show empirically, that the ill-defined Moore's Law never really was in effect to begin with; that the data in many cases doesn't really support Moore's Law(!) This is a new and distinctly different sort of claim.
--LP
P.S. I hate to bitch. Well, not always. But sigh: "2002-12-14 19:29:50 Moore's Law: the data doesn't fit (articles,hardware) (rejected)"
However, as the person who set up the versioning system, if I had gone bad I would have been able to sabotage the files under revision control as well.
I don't disagree with your points or overall perspective, but thought I'd toss out one fairly simple "reduce the odds" step that deals with one of the key issues you raised.
As part of an investment deal in a company I worked for, we put all our code, and in fact, CVS trees in CDs into third-party escrow on a regular basis. (The fairly inexpensive escrow package included one escrow update per month as part of the price.) We did it for different reasons, but this approach would be quite resistant to after-the-fact sysadmin tampering.
What happens when I get my artificially enhanced memory modules in 2025? Will the DMCA dictate what kind of memories I can have? Will media distributors discriminate against me as a buyer since I can play back my memories whenever I want?
Your argument, to my eyes, seems to miss a key point. (If not, I apologize and let's just drop it.) It is not sufficient for a technology to have potential ethical uses.
I can think of potentially ethical uses of VX nerve gas but as I technology, I think it should be 'stifled', with extreme prejudice. Now my comparison is unfair in terms of comparing lethal agents to copying a song or video, but I'm trying to make a legitimate point: the primary usages of the technology should be ethical to pass muster... I think the Betamax case hinged on this notion of "substantial non-infringing uses" which is pretty much what I'd like to see. The DMCA, from what I can tell, kind of moves the standard from "substantial non-infringing uses of a device means its OK" to "these dozen or so very narrowly defined usage circumstances are OK but devices in general, since they can be used to infringe in broader situations, are not OK."
Which I'd agree with you sucks. I prefer what I consider the Betamax standard.
Failing that, I would like a legal protection for citizen rights to time-shift and space-shift media. And perhaps some sort of archival right, although I understand why archival rights might need some restriction to preserve streaming media usage scenarios. Still, I don't want to end up in 25 years prosecuted for training my brain to memorize movie scenes and play them back to myself for my enjoyment... (I can see it now: "Your memory cells are an infringement technology! Really? I thought that was only if I had them artificially enhanced? Can I be prosecuted under the DMCA for giving birth to kids and enabling them to pass on the lyrics of a Disney song to their friends by singing them in a playground? Infringing technology indeed!")
--LP
Database filestores (was: Re:BeFS)
on
More on Longhorn
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· Score: 2
The article wasn't implying that large volume addressing was an extraordinarily difficult task, it was saying that a fast filesystem with a large address space and relational database properties was difficult.
Quite right. Mod the parent up.
In terms of such an effort "never reaching fruition" though, I'd add that the AS/400 has had a database filestore for well over a decade.
If you are bored with the OS concepts of UNIX and Windows, there's a lot of really unique conceptual stuff in AS/400 that is production-grade and real-world enough to account for billions of dollars of revenues in hardware and software.
Are they going to offer the content of spamarchive.org under an Open Content license, or is this just another database that will eventually be absorbed and closed to the public by some corporation protecting database copyrights?
This webpage from Cal Tech shows various relevant calculations of Van Allen radiation that suggest the dosage during the 1.5 hours of passage of the belts would be about 2 rem, about 100x less than an often-fatal dose.
Slashdot Mirror
Your comments about missions riddled with errors reminds me of Feynman's comments on that subject in his appendix to the Challenger failure report:
It is true that if the probability of failure was as low as 1 in 100,000 it would take an inordinate
number of tests to determine it ( you would get nothing but a string
of perfect flights from which no precise figure, other than that the
probability is likely less than the number of such flights in the
string so far). But, if the real probability is not so small, flights
would show troubles, near failures, and possible actual failures with
a reasonable number of trials, and standard statistical methods could
give a reasonable estimate. In fact, previous NASA experience had
shown, on occasion, just such difficulties, near accidents, and
accidents, all giving warning that the probability of flight failure
was not so very small.
One wonders to what degree failure analysis of such "near misses" and "minor errors" was really conducted post-Challenger to determine overall saftey and reliability. One also wonders if the economic and political infrastructure involved in the shuttle program would accomodate someone doing such analysis (which would likely be hard enough to defend and validate, the counter-intuitiveness of statistics being what it is.)
It does appear that most of the various "off-scale low" sensor errors/failures immediately before the Columbia breakup were considered routine and nothing directly to worry about.
--LP
For anyone interested in Texas or Louisiana geography when hearing about reports of debris, this MapQuest map may provide some helpful orientation. The towns I've heard mentioned so far are Nacogdoches (TX), Palestine (TX), and Shreveport (LA). The shuttle was heading southeast to land in Florida.
Almost all debris reports so far focus on Nacogdoches. Palestine and Shreveport stories seem to be more focused on hearing sound from the incident. Here's the best article on debris I found just now while searching Google news.
--LP
Thanks. I vaguely remembered an escape route/craft of some kind but didn't know that we had working unmanned supply vehicles; that's promising. Hopefully your response will get modded up as much as my inquiry...
--LP
[Taken from here. Emphasis mine... --LP]
President Reagan's Speech on The Challenger Disaster
Oval Office of the White House
January 28, 1986
Ladies and Gentlemen, I'd planned to speak to you tonight to report on the state of the Union, but the events of earlier today have led me to change those plans. Today is a day for mourning and remembering. Nancy and I are pained to the core by the tragedy of the shuttle Challenger. We know we share this pain with all of the people of our country. This is truly a national loss.
Nineteen years ago, almost to the day, we lost three astronauts in a terrible accident on the ground. But, we've never lost an astronaut in flight; we've never had a tragedy like this. And perhaps we've forgotten the courage it took for the crew of the shuttle; but they, the Challenger Seven, were aware of the dangers, but overcame them and did their jobs brilliantly. We mourn seven heroes: Michael Smith, Dick Scobee, Judith Resnik, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Gregory Jarvis, and Christa McAuliffe. We mourn their loss as a nation together.
For the families of the seven, we cannot bear, as you do, the full impact of this tragedy. But we feel the loss, and we're thinking about you so very much. Your loved ones were daring and brave, and they had that special grace, that special spirit that says, 'Give me a challenge and I'll meet it with joy.' They had a hunger to explore the universe and discover its truths. They wished to serve, and they did. They served all of us.
We've grown used to wonders in this century. It's hard to dazzle us. But for twenty-five years the United States space program has been doing just that. We've grown used to the idea of space, and perhaps we forget that we've only just begun. We're still pioneers. They, the members of the Challenger crew, were pioneers.
And I want to say something to the schoolchildren of America who were watching the live coverage of the shuttle's takeoff. I know it is hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen. It's all part of the process of exploration and discovery. It's all part of taking a chance and expanding man's horizons. The future doesn't belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave. The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we'll continue to follow them...
I've always had great faith in and respect for our space program, and what happened today does nothing to diminish it. We don't hide our space program. We don't keep secrets and cover things up. We do it all up front and in public. That's the way freedom is, and we wouldn't change it for a minute. We'll continue our quest in space. There will be more shuttle flights and more shuttle crews and, yes, more volunteers, more civilians, more teachers in space. Nothing ends here; our hopes and our journeys continue. I want to add that I wish I could talk to every man and woman who works for NASA or who worked on this mission and tell them: "Your dedication and professionalism have moved and impressed us for decades. And we know of your anguish. We share it."
There's a coincidence today. On this day 390 years ago, the great explorer Sir Francis Drake died aboard ship off the coast of Panama. In his lifetime the great frontiers were the oceans, and a historian later said, 'He lived by the sea, died on it, and was buried in it.' Well, today we can say of the Challenger crew: Their dedication was, like Drake's, complete.
The crew of the space shuttle Challenger honoured us by the manner in which they lived their lives. We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for the journey and waved goodbye and 'slipped the surly bonds of earth' to 'touch the face of God.'
Jan 27, 1967: Apollo 1 fire
Jan 28, 1986: Challenger explosion
Feb 1, 2003 Columbia breakup
--LP
My understanding is that the space station requires re-supply by the shuttle. After the Challenger explosion, shuttles didn't fly for another two years. Clearly the people on the space station require at the very least rescue if not re-supply. My question is this: how long can the folks in the space station last without another shuttle flight?
--LP
Nowdays though there is a space station dependent on the shuttle, unlike when the Challenger blew up. It remains to be seen how that affects the amount of time the shuttles are grounded.
This makes about 2 failures out of about 100 flights. That's far higher than what we're used to from commercial aviation, but not completely unreasonable when you consider how much the space program pushes the envelope.
--LP
The module the astronauts are in is reinforcecd, and there are parachutes that can be used. While this could not be used at 200,000 feet (the edge of the atmosphere), if the reinforced front module survived the blast without breaking (unlikely) and the hatch didn't get jammed (unlikely), and the module was in free-fall (not at 12,500 mph) at under 30,000 feet, it's possible that the astronauts could parachute out.
But basically, it'd take a miracle. And someone probably would have visually seen/reported parachutes by now.
--LP
News that debris is falling southeast of Dallas, Texas, perhaps (ironicly?) in Palestine, TX. Still, Palestine police are not reporting that they've received debris reports.
Souce: ABC Radio.
--LP
It was covered by the Slashdot masses on another security-related thread earlier this morning.
If you want an non-editor-controlled story queue, with story selection subject to user moderation, try submitting/reading here; the capability is now possible on Slashdot. It's not as simple as it could be, and it's only a week old, but it works without you having to leave Slashdot.
--LP
Note the story submitters name.
Quack King.
Next!
--LP
I went to see if I could find Judge's opinion online. Indeed, it is! In PDF form, I bring you Toy Biz, Inc. v. United States.
For those of you decrying our taxpayer dollars going to waste on such a suit, it appears some at least is being used to make such decisions more accessible, a fact which I hope we can all agree upon.
Personally, I think it was worth every penny to expose a fantastic example of corporate hypocracy. I read maybe a dozen X-Men comics (and didn't see the movie) and the main philosophical point I saw that the series revolved around (besides raw action) was that the X-Men should in fact be considered human despite their 'mutant' powers.
Given that, what could be more hypocritical than turning around and claiming that, while for storyline purposes the X-Men should be considered human, but for tax purposes, they are not.
But maybe I should read the Judge's opinion first. It's long, so I'm posting the link here before I read. Based on the first paragraph, it looks like the matter never went to a full trial and was decided in a pre-trial 'summary judgement'.
--LP
Yeah, that was pretty interesting, wasn't it? I've had the same experience of getting my story idea rejected.
Think we could moderate the 'story queue' submissions ourselves? I say let's try it- check out my journal.
--LinuxParanoid
You guys are all missing the main point!
SGI is the first billion-dollar systems vendor to move their totally high-end million dollar hardware to run Linux, and not just to run Linux poorly, but instead their mega-boxes *require* Linux to performe excellently (unlike, say IBM "Linux/390" mainframes where Linux is not really the native OS supporting all the hardware features and is mostly a curiousity or very expensive Apache server.)
The other vendors, Sun, HP, DEC, IBM have not been nearly as aggressive and are depending on their own UNIXes to remain on their high-end boxes.
SGI is depending on Linux and has tweaked it enough to run huge, 64-way complex NUMA systems. This is a major infrastructure bet on Linux, and (assuming this is a shipping, working product) a huge mark of progress for Linux that it can, today, support this sort of high-end scalable hardware.
We all knew it *could*, in theory, but SGI has invested in making sure that *it does*!
This marks a major shift of SGI to an Intel/Linux pure play. It's not just a bunch of low-end Linux server boxes (which they've done before, and Sun/HP/IBM also do), or boxes that you can run either Linux or some proprietary UNIX. It's a full-scale massive 64-way NUMA SMP server that is optimized to run Linux.
Hats off to SGI, I say.
(I wish they had better business prospects but its hard to do that with a niche sort of product like high-end SMP/NUMA technical computing. We'll see if they can push it into a broader customer base with sufficient application support.)
I wonder how Oracle would do on this sort of puppy?
--LP
Gnostism was, in fact, the dominant form of Christianity by the 300's and in my humble opinion the group that became Orthodoxy later rewrote and destroyed history, books, and people since they were so furious about winning.
Let me toss a competing perspective your way.
Alternately, the gnostic groups treasured their secret knowledge so much that they didn't share it. Instead, like the Masons or Scientology or any number of other similar religions, they had carried out secret ceremonies and had secret teachings only for the properly initiated and 'worthy'. This was kind of cool, but ultimately, smart people didn't want to join a religion where divine revelation was always subject to change or control or new revelation by the people at the top who handed out divine knowledge piecemeal to the people of their choice.
In contrast, the folks in charge of what became known as Orthodoxy conducted meetings (councils) to come to agreement on what the standard accepted revelatory texts (and doctrines) were, and those texts were propagated, "open source style", to the curious (at least for a while; absent any competition, the Roman Catholics lapsed on that for quite a time.) Secret, hidden teachings were shunned by the 'orthodox' church and became the hallmark of people trying to add, remove or twist the teachings of the Old and New Testament canons.
It's probably true that the Orthodox attempted to destroy books they viewed as leading to the eternal damnation of others, (note also that the Gnostics chose to protect a lot of their secret wisdom by conveying it verbally, no book destruction necessary.) I'd also agree that it seems likely that the hierarchical structure of the church (e.g. bishops ruling over multiple churches) grew in importance as that structure proved valuable in stomping out Gnostic competitors who were more fragmented and lacked similar unity.
But it's not fair to say that only the Orthodox pursued "power structure"s while Gnostics abstained; each had their own. Orthodoxy's hierarchical power structure was its relationships within and among churches, while Gnostic's hierarchical power was based on its select distribution of knowledge.
The gnostics shot themselves in the foot their "we are holders of the 'gnosis', the secret knowledge... we can't tell you until you're 'enlightened'" approach. The open knowledge infrastructure won out. And since then that approach has proved useful for everything from science to, dare I say it?, open source.
--LP, who doesn't claim to be an expert on the Gnostics, but has at least read "The Gnostic Gospels"
We developed nations will take a hit for the good of the planet, and hope that our good example will convince other nations follow.
You have *got* to be kidding. If a person can make a buck by arbitraging cheap, polluting tasks by moving them to certain countries (China, India, Eastern Europe), they will do so in a heartbeat. Given the interdependence of the world ecology, it shifts things around without any incentive for polluters to stop.
If the protocol held such countries to a lesser standard but required them to document what was going on and tighten up, just at a slower rate, that'd be unfair but perhaps OK for a while. But saying that there should be *no* controls for them is a big mistake that sets a really bad precedent IMHO.
It's sort of like telling poor people "you can steal from the rich for a while since you are poorer, but at some point in the future you're going to have to stop". A bit harsh, but tell me where I'm wrong here.
--LP
I agree that the law/behavior you suggest occurs. If you read the article, you'll see that this is really a different sort of article however.
The article doesn't say that Moore's law won't continue. It says, and attempts to show empirically, that the ill-defined Moore's Law never really was in effect to begin with; that the data in many cases doesn't really support Moore's Law(!) This is a new and distinctly different sort of claim.
--LP
P.S. I hate to bitch. Well, not always. But sigh: "2002-12-14 19:29:50 Moore's Law: the data doesn't fit (articles,hardware) (rejected)"
However, as the person who set up the versioning system, if I had gone bad I would have been able to sabotage the files under revision control as well.
I don't disagree with your points or overall perspective, but thought I'd toss out one fairly simple "reduce the odds" step that deals with one of the key issues you raised.
As part of an investment deal in a company I worked for, we put all our code, and in fact, CVS trees in CDs into third-party escrow on a regular basis. (The fairly inexpensive escrow package included one escrow update per month as part of the price.) We did it for different reasons, but this approach would be quite resistant to after-the-fact sysadmin tampering.
--LP
What happens when I get my artificially enhanced memory modules in 2025? Will the DMCA dictate what kind of memories I can have? Will media distributors discriminate against me as a buyer since I can play back my memories whenever I want?
--LinuxParanoid, only somewhat tongue in cheek
Your argument, to my eyes, seems to miss a key point. (If not, I apologize and let's just drop it.) It is not sufficient for a technology to have potential ethical uses.
I can think of potentially ethical uses of VX nerve gas but as I technology, I think it should be 'stifled', with extreme prejudice. Now my comparison is unfair in terms of comparing lethal agents to copying a song or video, but I'm trying to make a legitimate point: the primary usages of the technology should be ethical to pass muster... I think the Betamax case hinged on this notion of "substantial non-infringing uses" which is pretty much what I'd like to see. The DMCA, from what I can tell, kind of moves the standard from "substantial non-infringing uses of a device means its OK" to "these dozen or so very narrowly defined usage circumstances are OK but devices in general, since they can be used to infringe in broader situations, are not OK."
Which I'd agree with you sucks. I prefer what I consider the Betamax standard.
Failing that, I would like a legal protection for citizen rights to time-shift and space-shift media. And perhaps some sort of archival right, although I understand why archival rights might need some restriction to preserve streaming media usage scenarios. Still, I don't want to end up in 25 years prosecuted for training my brain to memorize movie scenes and play them back to myself for my enjoyment... (I can see it now: "Your memory cells are an infringement technology! Really? I thought that was only if I had them artificially enhanced? Can I be prosecuted under the DMCA for giving birth to kids and enabling them to pass on the lyrics of a Disney song to their friends by singing them in a playground? Infringing technology indeed!")
--LP
The article wasn't implying that large volume addressing was an extraordinarily difficult task, it was saying that a fast filesystem with a large address space and relational database properties was difficult.
Quite right. Mod the parent up.
In terms of such an effort "never reaching fruition" though, I'd add that the AS/400 has had a database filestore for well over a decade.
If you are bored with the OS concepts of UNIX and Windows, there's a lot of really unique conceptual stuff in AS/400 that is production-grade and real-world enough to account for billions of dollars of revenues in hardware and software.
--LP
Are they going to offer the content of spamarchive.org under an Open Content license, or is this just another database that will eventually be absorbed and closed to the public by some corporation protecting database copyrights?
--LP
This webpage from Cal Tech shows various relevant calculations of Van Allen radiation that suggest the dosage during the 1.5 hours of passage of the belts would be about 2 rem, about 100x less than an often-fatal dose.
--LP
For a good debunking to that publicity-seeking video-selling moon conspiracy theorist, check out this.
--LP
Could the Slashdot crew fix this "security hole"?
A super-long URL ending in *http://www.goatse.cx/ at the end of a URL should be detectable.
Looks like Yahoo, but really it's Google...
Curiously, vice-versa doesn't work...
--LP