I hate to beat a dead horse, but seriously: Why do you ridicule the efforts of the x-prize contestants?
At least they are making attempts at going into space. By far and away the most difficult aspect of private attempts for getting into space (and even government attempts for that matter) is the sheer bureaucracy of people who are trying to stop you at every step of the way.
Check out the Space Access Society website for further details, but I find it rediculous that if you had one of those Slaver-designed bio-engineered rocketships described by Larry Niven (a great SF story about bio-engineer rockets as powerful as a Saturn V... just add water and the plant makes you a personal rocketship for just the price of the water and a little bit of sunshine) it would still cost you over $1,000,000 just to file the paperwork to get flight clearance.
Something is definitely wrong here when this is the situation. The X-Prize folks are making some very real progress, and they are following an incremental design and engineering approach that is going to be very sustainable in the long run. If you check out Armadillo Aerospace you will see that they are planning for not if but when their spacecraft crashes/dies/blows up, and they are just going to take lessons learned and move on from there. With NASA's approach they are so paranoid to lose a vehicle that they are completely unable to even launch anything, and refuse to take any risks even after they eventually plan on any launches.
That and the approximately $500 million per launch is really quite overkill, but that is still another point to be made. NASA is doing a lousy job of lanching people into space and it is so obvious now that even a typical congressman can figure it out for themselves.
I have come to know on a first-hand basis what effects that ordinary people here on/. can have.
I posted the original story about deCSS back in November of 1999. It probabally would have been brought up eventually here on Slashdot, but it was amazing to me to see just how quickly this legal action (originally against Jon Johansen) spawned a whole battle cry from readers here on this site. I was an active participant on the LiVID discussion group back then and this was one situation where I knew that this really needed to be seen by a much larger audience. I had absolutely no idea just how far the/. community would go with this, but on the whole I'm fairly pleased with what has happened. It has helped to define the attitudes of a whole generation of programmers and set legal precedence that I hope is going to, in the long run make it easier to freely express myself in software. Yeah, my part was real tiny but it doesn't take much to get everything moving. I also deliberately tried to lay low during this entire controversy because I already saw the legal mess that everybody who came in contact with this whole affair went through. I made it through without one single problem.
My only regret is that similar actions haven't happened against the DVD Consortium (formerly DVD Forum and prior to that... well, does it really matter?) in regards to the DVD-Video specification. Although some of it is patented (mainly the MPEG-2 portions), for the most part that DVD-Video spec is protected by the same trade secret laws that the CSS algorithms were also protected by. The only problem is that the DVD-Video spec is much more complicated and won't simply fit on the back of a T-shirt.
I had the good fortune of actually being able to read the formal DVD-Video specs (as an employee), and implemented a multiplexor/authoring system following those specs. It is from this experience that I am absolutely committed to open specifications. There was so much I wanted to disclose to the other LiVID members information I knew about those specs, but I deliberately stayed on the sidelines and simply said "Yeah you are going in the right direction" or "No, I think you got that model wrong. Try something else."
The full potential of utilizing the DVD-Video still has yet to be realized, and unfortunately I don't think it ever will be. I'm talking a genuine "hacking" of the capabilities of a standard DVD-Video player like you have in your home entertainment system, not just the Linux box that you also want to play some DVD movies on (although knowledge of the spec can also help that effort). The DVD/optical disc format is a totally different medium of delivery from video tape, but unfortunately most movie studios simply treat it as only a glorified version of a VHS cassette (DVD extras on a typical release not withstanding). Worse yet, people who consider DVDs to be just another version of VCDs.
I also wouldn't mind trying to put something together right now, as I'm currently unemployed, but that is another story altogether. I can't afford the current specs even if I was fully employed right now.
Well, if that is the case, then please explain the Voyager spacecraft (both I & II).
There was a Pluto mission that had even been greenlighted with a NASA budget for planning, but when the chips went down in the House Science Comittee, the congresscritters decided that it could wait a generation or two before we actually got out there.
You know the usual mantra: Why spend billions on space when we have so many other pressing problems here on Earth? It was pointed out that some really good gravity assist boosts from some of the outer planets would be able to make it work, and that the alignment wouldn't be that good for a couple more centuries. This group of politicians felt we could do it sometime in a century or two. It's not like those planets are going anywhere.
A Pluto mission would be rather interesing right now as well because it is suspected that the outer crust of Pluto is thawing temporarily forming an atmosphere while it is nearing the closest approach to the sun in its entire orbit. It would have gathered data that will be simply unavailable even in a couple of decades, not to mention a couple of centuries later when a solar sail ship from Armadillo Aerospace carries some space tourists to complete the nine-planet tour.
I totally agree. I remember some of those very silly anti-priacy schemes on the Apple ][, some of which were rather inventive.
It all boils down to one simple thing: In order to run an application, you have to be able to load it into memory. Unless the software vendor has the computer itself sealed with propritary and private opcodes in the CPU with custom hardware that self-destructs when opened, you will always be able to follow the "boot" sequence of the software, be able to emulate the CPU directly, and in that manner be able to completely reverse engineer software. Code morphing only adds a speed bump, and a rather small one at that.
Code morphing is much more practical when done like the Transmeta folks are doing with their CPU's: To speed up processor utilization when the software is using a bloated CPU instruction set (like the x86 CPUs by Intel). Merely adjusting and changing pointers through some psudorandom algorithm just isn't going to work to really stop a determined and competent software engineer from being able to interpret the same code that a machine also has to be able to intrepret.
I thought that maybe using a true random number generator (like a radioactive source generating seeds for the generator), but even this could be defeated for the discussion described.
The iron-clad anti-priacy would only be practical for some very secure military applications where designing a CPU from scratch could be considered a resonable cost-center for the project. You will never see something like this in mass-consumer products.
Manufacturing issues with software development
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Hack Your Car
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· Score: 1
Keep in mind that the developer of this software is a harried engineer who is being pushed by management to get something out the door.
The largest distinction with writing software for a manufacturer as opposed to consumer software is that the bugs tend to be completely ignored unless something very serious happens. I've been in the industry and having to reverse engineer firmware code for products made by the company I was working for (where you would think that the souce code and engineering notes was available to its own employees). It is just like any other software development, where skill levels vary, and some developers are very poor. Degrees don't seem to have much of an impact either from my experience, although a love of coding and determination to get the job done can.
I knew of a local manufacturer in the town I live in (that I won't name but I'm sure you have heard of their products) who built an exercise treadmill that had an EPROM that under certain conditions would suddenly start running the treadmill at full-speed. In a situation very similar to Ralph Nadar's "Unsafe at Any Speed", this manufacturer decided that it was cheaper and easier to pay off the lawsuits from people injuried (and even killed) by this flaw rather than hire an electrical engineer to fix the problem. The firmware was written through an outsourced contract, but the original contractor refused to deal with that company (for various political and financial reasons).
That this person you are refering to about the PROM in the car found such innocent problems in the source code as to just idle issues is something that most engineering managers would probabally find as acceptable bugs they could live with and to move on with other projects.
I will conceed that the SCSC was a "big science" project with costs going totally out of control. There were some legitamate reasons for killing the program in terms of serverely underestimated costs for completion and the technical hurdles that needed to be resolved in order for the project to get meaningful results.
The point I'm making here is that it was killed largely because of political infighting from other scientific researchers who weren't a part of the project, and they were jealous that they weren't getting their "piece of the pie". I am also pointing out that, IMHO (and obvisouly not yours) the spending had already crossed the threashold that it really should have been completed. Portions of the accelerators are still being used for some particle physics experiments, but it could have been so much more, and achieved results not simply available anywhere else.
Perhaps the biggest demonstration of what real people can do on real science missions is the example of Harrison Schmitt on Apollo 17, where he, the only scientist (not jet test pilot) to ever walk on another celestial body, went exploring on foot for lunar geology. He discovered rock samples that would never have been found by any robotic survey, made quick assements while being physically on site, and I believe will eventually be remembered as _THE_ pioneer for exogeology field work. Much of his research is being used by the Spirit and Opportunity rover research teams, and forms a foundation for much of the current ideas about rock formation for smaller astronomical bodies. Yes, I know he was one of a team of geologists working for NASA, and I find it unfortunate that the Apollo program was killed before more members of that team were able to get up to the moon. He is also one of the biggest proponents of a manned return to the moon, and is currently involved with the He3 mining projects. His arguments about the problems with robotic exploration are even better than mine, primariliy because he has had to defend his own work for the past 30 years.
I am getting very, very, very tired of even trying to think about repling to comments like this one. At least you had the guts to post it, so I will give you credit.
Frankly, this isn't manned space exploration vs. robotic exploration. It is both, or neither. Please understand that very clearly. If you try to kill manned space exploration (and not this silly LEO garbage that the space shuttle did... I mean real people going places nobody has ever gone before) you will also kill robotic exploration. And manned exploration will be extreamly expensive (both in terms of human lives lost as well as money spent on the programs) if robotic exploration is dissed.
The people in the space science community need to really get a grip on this issue and bury the hatchet. Even more when marine scientist get their panties in a bunch over how much is spent on space when the equivalent to a single shuttle mission is the amount that gets spent on exploring the oceans for all other federal programs combined. The political infighting to get one pet project going at the expense of other major scientific endeavors kills all scientific progress, and ensures that none of it will happen with a disinterested congress and ordinary taxpayers give up in disgust. It was this attitude that ended up killing the SCSC when it was half built. If you want to see the future of martian projects with political infighting like your post, go down to Texas and see the remanents of that political/scientific waste of resources to a half-finished project.
You weren't there, and you apparently havn't been reading the comments from the veteran programmers here.
The folks who got started on Apple ][ computers (and TRS-80, Commodore, Atari, etc.) really needed to learn about the architecture to get stuff to work. Memory was measured in kilobytes, and that was only a two digit number at that. Even a typical programmer would eventually write a program that would use the entire available memory space, so you had to be forced into writing more efficient code and doing things that would never be done today with GB of RAM and TB of hard drive space.
One of the problems that I see is that even fairly good programmers that are graduating from CS programs now take for granted that there is going to be lots of memory availble, so they tend to be very wasteful with both memory and CPU cycles. Then they wonder why their software seems sluggish and why the old-timers just about throw up on their code.
Oh, BTW, in regards to who is going to move into management first, yeah, they may be able to impress some CEO if they have lots of flash, but that doesn't mean that some idiot who never really learned computer archetecture theory and became boss really knows what he (or she) is doing. It just means that the Peter Principle is at work. (Do a google search if you havn't heard about it.)
There is an amazing concept with Assembly programming: Macros!
Seriously, this difference isn't really all that big if you really know how to use the assembler properly, and with most of the modern assembly languages many of the concepts that you might be familiar with in HLL (High-Level Languages... does C++ count?) like arrays or even objects can be done fairly effectively in assembly as well. It is possible that you are using an underpowered assembler, but the same can be said of a poor compiler.
When I am programming, especially time critical functions even when using HLL, I am very much aware of what the compiler is going to translate that code to in assembly. I had a co-worker who was trying to review a particularly tight routine, so he challanged me to compare the compiler's output with what we would do by trying to do it by hand.
Besides some quirky register usage (which is typical with most compiler designs and a necessary component of designing a compiler) our code was identical.
The point is, like mentioned elsewhere, you really need to know assembler and how the computer archetecture is affecting your code to write quality code yourself.
I guess this is why I am anti-Java and to some extend dot Net (.net) or other similar VM implimentations: They keep adding abstraction that makes you lose sight of how the machine is actually functioning. These VMs have their place, don't make it sound like I hate the entire concept, but eventually you have to understand that individual gates inside a chip on actual hardware must be trying to interpret your code and if you can't translate a line of code down to that level you really don't know programming.
I'm sorry, but this isn't really a double standard.
Terrorism, particularly the state-sponsored terrorism as opposed to the usual group of sociopaths like McVeigh and the D.C. snipers (who just need to be caught and it ends) is really a form of warfare. Really.
When for usually domestic politics or for some other reason you want to engage in warfare without massing armies, you send in specialists who engage in random acts of violence: I.E. _TERRORISM_
The USA doesn't direcly send in the usual thugs you see around from other countries. We got instead "Special Forces" who can go in and really muck stuff up. Most of these units are organized along conventional military heirarchies, but don't let that fool you that they march around in parade dress acting like soldiers. These are real mean S.O.B.s that you don't want to even think they are after you. Not only will you be dead if they are, but so will your kids, wife, lovers, pets, animals, plants, and anything ever connected with you. On the other hand, if they are your friend you can rest real easy at night.
The only mistake to note is that terrorism will only be responded to with other terrorism. From my viewpoint, the only reason why Israel doesn't fight back harder in its fight against the seemingly constant terrorist attacks is that they don't (yet) want to take on the entire Arab world simultaneously in one big war. So they tolerate the current situation. The Arab nations don't want to escalate beyond the current terrorism mainly because they don't want to have the USA breathing down their throats if they are that overt. Hence the current stalemate in Israel.
Throughout most of the Cold War between the USSR and the USA there was a series of insurgant groups sponsored by both superpowers. Notable places where this really came to the front included Vietnam, El Salvador, and Afghanistan. Notably in both Vietnam and Afghanistan those terrorists came up against conventional military forces...which had to retreat from both to scale back to terrorists on terrorists.
The mistake of Al-Queida (whatever the current tranliteration spelling... it doesn't always work from Arabic to English) is to assume that an overt terrorist attack on the mainland of the USA is going to be met with a reciprocal terrorist attack on their homes. It shouldn't surprise anybody that after 9/11/2001 that territory was added to the USA (even if it will be given up again, but that is a domestic policy, not anything that really matters what world opinion of the idea of US occupation of Iraq).
If you are discussing this incident in Siberia as an example of a terrorist incident gone bad, you really don't see the whole picture.
BTW, my hometown has essentially been destroyed because of a deliberate Soviet-funded attempt to undermine coporate America. If you want details I can, but it reeks of tinfoil-hat conspiracies until you see what the results have been to a Midwestern small-town in the hartland of America. I do know this has gone both ways. Terrorists come in a good many colors and varieties.
To sum this up, most "Terrorism" is actually formally encouraged and funded by governments trying to get back against (usually) another government. As an American, I don't deny that the USA has also used terrorism against our enemies.
I was going to mod this one up, but I decided to give this reply some more emphasis by actually replying with some thoughtful encouraging words instead.
It would be nice to be able to have some folks at JPL throw down the source code and engineering schematics and say to the geek/space/engineering community at large "We have a problem here and could use your suggestions to see if we can get this fixed."
This (the mars missions) is obviously a big hit, as measured by replies on Slashdot, the number of hits on the website at JPL, stories in mainstream media, and other reasonable metrics to gague popularlity of a project. I'm sure that there are several geeks out there that wouldn't mind digging into the source code.
The only reason I could see the engineers not wanting to do that is to open themselves up to obvious scrutiny for poor engineering and coding. (Whadda you mean the global variable named temp is the only variable. We also have temp2, temp3, and temp4. What do the numbers mean in those mean? You can get it from context, can't you?) That and some people just aren't used to allowing other into their "domain".
Being 100% funded by public money should also be further reason for why this should be opened up. I also totally agree.
I'd have to agree that solar cells paved across the rooftops of America is not (yet) the best way to go, particularly if you are using Silicon-based Photocells.
Solar arrays are also infamous for the fact that it takes more energy to produce them than they will ever generate during their entire lifetimes. It takes quite a bit of sustained heat to crystalize Silicon (or other semiconductors that use the photoelectric effect for power generation). This is why it really isn't practical to cover everything yet unless you are in a very remote location where you can't get access to national power grids.
For rural applications, this is a good route to go.
The one problem with democracies (particularly coupled with sensationalist journalism rampant within the USA) there is a strong tendancy to solve problems after the fact.
With the military, it is often said that they are preparing to fight the last war very well. The US military is particularly noted for this.
Other examples can include hurricane preparation, earthquake & fire codes, and more, although in most of these cases the situation does actually work out due to the fact that these natural disasters do recurr time after time, with government agencies eventually getting it right. That still doesn't stop incredible government-sized screw ups though.
Another clear example is the knee-jerk reaction to security concerns after the Sept. 11th plane attacks. IMHO I seriously doubt that there will _EVER_ be another airplane attack like 9/11 for a variety of reasons. I'm not saying that a terrorist attack won't succeed in America, just that the terrorist needs to be a little more creative. It is now suicidal to even mention or describe explosives or talk about bombs in US airports as a result.
The only way that a major asteroid impact will be avoided is if an impact occurs in a major populated area. Particularly if it happens in an urban area in the USA. Then you will see billions of dollars suddenly freed for a major new space agency built to protect "the world" from astronomical hazards. You will also hear incesant dialog from opposition parties and candidates claiming "the government knew all along this could be avoided, and chose to do nothing to solve the problem!", and for once they would be correct.
5: Argue that tools that can, and are infact, be used for both lawful and unlawful purposes should not themselves be illegal.
Good point. But such tools usually have some redeeming quality to them. What can p2p do besides share music files and porn?
I would have to argue that P2P software architechtures offer the possibility of being able to truly realize the promise of the internet, when when one part or piece goes down (due to war, natural calamity, political repression, mechanical failure, etc.) the slack can be picked up by the other peers and nodes in the network. Admittedly I'm presuming a Freenet-type network, but I can think of other architectures that this also applies to.
The internet is all about many-to-many communication of ideas. Older business models that relied upon central control of information in order to "broadcast" that information. Tradional media such as newspapers, radio, television require huge amounts of capital (resources, large buildings to house staff and equipment, experienced technicians who are highly specialized to get the equipment to work) in order to start spreading content around.
Traditional web sites do substantially lower the traditional cost of entry, but even here the cost required to maintain a truly large website (like even Slashdot) still require professional full-time staff and a fairly healthy physical infrastructure. The Slashdot Effect is an example of what limited resource have on even fairly well developed websites with decent network connections.
The point here is that this is more an issue of control rather than an issue of specific content. With a good secure P2P system (full encryption between nodes, nearly untraceable (i.e. psuedo random) links between nodes to fetch the data, things like an FBI warrent or a cease and desist court order has practically no meaning, much less little effect to control the information.
Copyright is again a legal contruction, and it is precisely this many-to-many issue that is the problem Mr. Coleman is trying to grok. P2P networks are now large enough that non-technical people are being pushed into trying to resolve the issues that this sort of philosophy raises.
In writing this post, I guess that is the final point. We are talking philosophical views on how technology should be used. Mr. Wm. Gates talks about "software technologies" when in fact what is being done is a shift in ideas and thoughts on how existing technology can be used. General purpose finite state stored memory machines (i.e. computers) offer an incredible flexibility so that many different philosophies can be used for the exact piece of equipment. This is software. This can also be termed political viewpoints as well (including political such as political party).
Controlling any use of P2P organizations is controlling speech. The fundimental issue is then "Should speech be controlled and some forms of speech made illegal?" That is also what/. discussions usually degrade into when this issue comes up for discussion.
There have only been subtle differences, and major features (portrait of George Washington, size of the same portrait, position and size of seals, etc.) are still largely the same. Although you would certainly notice the differences, including fine print on a silver certificate that allows the bearer to obtain silver on demand from the US Treasury (If you try it, they will give you a Federal Reserve Note now and take the silver certificate... it is more valuable as a collector piece).
The changes that have been made to the $20 are much more drastic. There was an interesting police case just after the redesign of the $20 here in the USA where a bank robber came in and stole a big stack of the new bills. When they saw the redesign they thought it was a trick and a bunch of funny money that really didn't have any value, so they discarded the money (tossing it in a nearby trash dumpster), only later to learn that it was the real thing.
Of course, this may be an urban ledgend as well, but that is the kind of thing you get here on/.
First of all, the $1 bill hasn't changed for over fifty years (except for some signatures on the bottom of the bill). It is still pretty much identical to even when it was a Silver Certificate (pre WWII currency) although there were several (subtle) changes made when it became a Federal Reserve Note. Several $1 bank notes issued in the 19th Century by the US Treasury could probabally still be used today because of the similarity of the bill design, and it would be identifiable as a $1 bill.
Almost all of the new redesign efforts have been with the $20, $50, and $100 demoninations. Higher denominations do exist for US currency but are restricted from use by ordinary citizens (by IMHO stupid laws but that is another story). So if this was a genuine forgery it was never with a $1 bill.
In addition, you are suggesting that this bank note was passed outside the USA (hence the involvement of the Polish Police and not the US Secret Service) and it was done just after the release of the new currency when anybody is still trying to recognize the new bills. Keep in mind, if it was a forgery of one of the new notes, it would go through a bunch more review and be checked out more, simply because of the novelty of the note. That is not something a forger would really want to have happen.
Also, when you talk about "US Police Experts" you need to describe which of the 10,000 police agencies in the USA they were from? There are seven (yes, 7) local (not a part of the US federal government) police agencies with seperate budgets, different government bodies that they report to, and independent juristiction authorities that govern what happens when I walk out my front door in a small backwater part of the USA. There may even be more, but I don't know the names of all of them. I do know that the Secret Service (yes, the same agency that also acts as presidential body guards) does have personnel based in American Embassies to help assist governments that the USA has diplomatic relations with to examine US currency and to facilitate currency exchange with those countries. (not directly, but to encourage the exchange and otherwise authenticate US currency outside the US territorial boundaries).
That said, I have seen news reports of someone drawing out on paper with just a ball-point pen a copy of US currency. It was even called "art" and has been appraised to be more valuable than the denomination that was reproduced. Is this what you mean by "hand-made"?
As somebody very familiar with MS-DOS command line tools, I still use them on a regular basis in Windows 2000 Professional. There are a number of very good tools available, although I'll be the first to admit that many of the tools are ports of similar tools written for Unix. Indeed, several are open-source (with a BSD license) that Microsoft simply bundled with the OS.
You can even get BASH for Windows with the Cygwin tools, if you are a Unix guru who has to occasionally dabble with Windows, including man pages (which is really unusual for hardcore Windows folks, but that is another story.)
The unfortunately problem with these tools is the almost total lack of documentation and the fact that most Windows developers never take the time to learn them. There are tasks that are difficult if not impossible to accomplish from the Control Panel that are only a single command line to accomplish. The reason for this is partly due to Microsoft's insistance that Windows '95 was a whole new rewritten from scratch operating system, when in fact it was MS-DOS 7.0 with only slightly improved GUI shell placed over it. That culture that was fostered by Microsoft discouraged shell programming, which is still a very valuable skill.
As far as IDE engines, I personally prefer the Borland suites (C++ Builder has been mentioned by somebody else here). All of the current Borland compilers will also target.NET, and many of these applications will run in Mono as long as you don't get too fancy. #Develop is also a very good IDE that is written entirely in C#, and released under the GPL. It isn't running under Linux, unfortunately, but the long-term roadmap for that IDE is to get there soon. I would agree that Visual Studio is a pile of smelly effulgant, with my biggest complaints regarding bloat in both the documentation as well as with the compiler itself. I mean, if you get Visual Studio, it comes on multiple DVD-ROM discs. Shouldn't that in itself act as a warning?
Actually, if you read the book here, you will see that is was something similar. The only difference is that Jules Verne didn't know about nuclear energy.
To Quote:
"Here, Professor, I ought to give you some explanations. Will you be kind enough to listen to me?"
He was silent for a few moments, then he said:
"There is a powerful agent, obedient, rapid, easy, which conforms to every use, and reigns supreme on board my vessel. Everything is done by means of it. It lights, warms it, and is the soul of my mechanical apparatus. This agent is electricity."
"Electricity?" I cried in surprise.
"Yes, sir."
"Nevertheless, Captain, you possess an extreme rapidity of movement, which does not agree well with the power of electricity. Until now, its dynamic force has remained under restraint, and has only been able to produce a small amount of power."
"Professor," said Captain Nemo, "my electricity is not everybody's. You know what sea-water is composed of. In a thousand grammes are found 96 1/2 per cent. of water, and about 2 2/3 per cent of chloride of sodium; then, in a smaller quantity, chlorides of magnesium and of potassium, bromide of magnesium, sulphate of magnesia, sulphate and carbonate of lime. You see, then, that chloride of sodium forms a large part of it. So it is this sodium that I extract from the sea-water, and of which I compose my ingredients. I owe all to the ocean; it produces electricity, and electricity gives heat, light, motion, and, in a word, life to the Nautilus."
Especially the part of totally dissing the theory of the meteor. I can see that bringing up other theories can be useful, but it appears as though some folks are trying to suggest that meteors don't enter the Earth's atmosphere (or so seldom that it is a geological event, not something mere mortals will ever witness).
Having viewed several exploding meteors myself, I will have to say that it really isn't all that unusual. In my case, I didn't have a camera handy, and the whole event was over so fast that the people in the car I was riding in didn't even notice it either.
One time, however, I was lucky to be in a desert "sleeping under the stars" during a Persied shower, and it was just like the 4th of July fireworks, with a couple of fireballs that lit up the sky brighter than a full moon. In that case the rest of the folks I was camping with also saw the fireballs.
That said, a daylight visible fireball entering the sky in the evening (which BTW is the trailing side of the Earth as it goes through the solar system... much harder for anything to come into the sky from that angle) is going have to be viewed with some skecticism.
If the announcement has been made, it has been successful. Time to pop the champaign and give a solid salute on a major accomplishment.
For those in the United States, ABC News television program NightLine is doing a special 1 hour program on the subject. There are web links to the story on that page as well. This should be an interesting program to watch, and seeing it on television does bring some reality to the whole thing rather than reading about it on Slashdot. It is also nice to see the mainstream press talk about this stuff as well.
I would have to argue that this is indeed one huge problem. From plenty of experience developing software with projects much larger than the freenet project (unfortunately with propritary software goals) I have been burned whenever I got involved with a project that didn't try to get the documentation done ahead of time.
Indeed, the mantra "Resist the urge to code" is something that you really need to keep in mind, even with small projects. Freenet is not even a brand new project any more, so proceeding without a written standard and planning first without coding anything should be the current methodology.
A good example of what I feel a proper specification should follow when being written is the PNG Data Format. This has been fully vetted with many specification problems removed, the entire process was done in the open, and a product wasn't the primary emphasis of the project. Indeed, I wish most open source specifications followed this route more.
The point I'm trying to make here is that indeed this is a problem of Research vs. Production. Freenet is bent on testing and trying new and different methodologies. While this is a noble task to perform, with white papers and honest to goodness actual science in computer science (wow, does that actually happen?) there does reach a point that it needs to move more toward software engineering where specifications written in plain old English (or other common written language between developers) is used. In a production environment, you should argue what changes to the protocol need to be made, discuss them in detail just how these changes are going to affect everything (like the move from IPv4 to IPv6), perhaps do some research on just how these changes are going to affect everything, and then publish these changes as a formal specification document.
As far as the protocol being backward compatable, that is not necessarily the case. There has been a huge move with the current "research" branch of Freenet with a totally different schema on how nodes communicate with each other, and there have been several instances while I have run nodes where I was simply **REQUIRED** to upgrade if I wanted to stay with the main branch of Freenet because the protocol changes were so big that it broke with earlier versions. I know that they are still less than a 1.0 version of the project, but I'm just saying that one of the things necessary for them to get there (to version 1.0) is to do a thourough specification of the protocol.
Also, I feel that one of the reasons why you don't see alternate implementations of the Freenet protocol is two fold:
The complexity of the implementation
The lack of a compleated specification
When you have more than one implementation for a complex data format/protocol specification, you tend to find errors in each other, including the base specification.
This link is a fairly good representation of the protocol, but this isn't the final word, and if you tried to implement a Freenet node based on the information in this document, you still couldn't get a node to work with the other nodes of the base line Java implementation of Freenet.
The real documentation is in the source code, not in a protocol document. BTW, look at the date this was last changed: Tue Jul 2 07:44:08 2002 UTC
I believe that the protocol has changed quite a bit since then, and several improvements to Freenet have been made since. Also, there are a number of "TODO" notes in the specification document. In other words, there is absolutely no version of Freenet that uses the protocol that is described in this document. Certainly not the current version. All of the details needed in order to create your own node (in C++, Modula-2, Python, or what have you) can't be done just off of this document.
That said, this document would be very useful if you were trying to hack at the communications core of Freenet to try and understand the source code. That is the main value of this document.
Why have I not tried to update it myself? Time, and trying to go through the shifting source code itself and attempt to update it.
The largest complaint about freenet is that the communications protocol is largely undocumented. Sure, there are some white papers regarding the basic theory and even some substantial resources regarding what is going on down in the lower internals.
Unfortunately the only real documentation for what is happening is really at the source code level for the ubergeeks who are really into reading this and tweaking it to make it work. IMHO this is where the real "research" nature of freenet is happening.
Some very brilliant people (and I am not knocking them...I've had to work with low-level communications protocols like they are doing here for some projects of my own) are constantly coming up with new ideas to meet the overall goals of the Freenet project. Most of the time they are so excited to implement a new idea that they would rather just code it up than sit down and draft up some specification documents first. These are gennerally some very novel ideas and often they don't really turn out to help anyway, so the protocol is evolving very quickly as well.
What I think need to happen now (or very soon) is that some of the best of these ideas need to be formalized beyond the "base-line" standard code base for Freenet and put this into a formal written specification standard like an RFC, ISO, or ECMA document. This is not to say that development can't go on, but real-life network experiences have already been proven with a number of methods of very good ideas. When this is done, Freenet will indeed move into a production environment.
I think the idea here is that if it isn't capitalism, it therefore must be Communism (with the big capital C).
I agree with you, although the philosophy behind the GPL and other open/free software licenses is not entirely supportive of pure capitalism, but it doesn't either support centralized command control economies (aka communism or at least strongly socialist governments). It is more a third philosphy that is based on the idea that status is derived from gifts to the community at large.
It also is based on the concept that ideas must be shared in order for them to be useful. Hiding under the banner of NDA's and non-compete agreements, patents, and strong central distributors who control from whom and to whom software can be distributed is what is challenged.
I wonder just what SCO is trying to do here? They want to control the "switch" that determines just who can own "Unix". The Free Software community is simply saying "What switch? It doesn't even exist!"
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I hate to beat a dead horse, but seriously: Why do you ridicule the efforts of the x-prize contestants?
At least they are making attempts at going into space. By far and away the most difficult aspect of private attempts for getting into space (and even government attempts for that matter) is the sheer bureaucracy of people who are trying to stop you at every step of the way.
Check out the Space Access Society website for further details, but I find it rediculous that if you had one of those Slaver-designed bio-engineered rocketships described by Larry Niven (a great SF story about bio-engineer rockets as powerful as a Saturn V... just add water and the plant makes you a personal rocketship for just the price of the water and a little bit of sunshine) it would still cost you over $1,000,000 just to file the paperwork to get flight clearance.
Something is definitely wrong here when this is the situation. The X-Prize folks are making some very real progress, and they are following an incremental design and engineering approach that is going to be very sustainable in the long run. If you check out Armadillo Aerospace you will see that they are planning for not if but when their spacecraft crashes/dies/blows up, and they are just going to take lessons learned and move on from there. With NASA's approach they are so paranoid to lose a vehicle that they are completely unable to even launch anything, and refuse to take any risks even after they eventually plan on any launches.
That and the approximately $500 million per launch is really quite overkill, but that is still another point to be made. NASA is doing a lousy job of lanching people into space and it is so obvious now that even a typical congressman can figure it out for themselves.
I have come to know on a first-hand basis what effects that ordinary people here on /. can have.
/. community would go with this, but on the whole I'm fairly pleased with what has happened. It has helped to define the attitudes of a whole generation of programmers and set legal precedence that I hope is going to, in the long run make it easier to freely express myself in software. Yeah, my part was real tiny but it doesn't take much to get everything moving. I also deliberately tried to lay low during this entire controversy because I already saw the legal mess that everybody who came in contact with this whole affair went through. I made it through without one single problem.
I posted the original story about deCSS back in November of 1999. It probabally would have been brought up eventually here on Slashdot, but it was amazing to me to see just how quickly this legal action (originally against Jon Johansen) spawned a whole battle cry from readers here on this site. I was an active participant on the LiVID discussion group back then and this was one situation where I knew that this really needed to be seen by a much larger audience. I had absolutely no idea just how far the
My only regret is that similar actions haven't happened against the DVD Consortium (formerly DVD Forum and prior to that... well, does it really matter?) in regards to the DVD-Video specification. Although some of it is patented (mainly the MPEG-2 portions), for the most part that DVD-Video spec is protected by the same trade secret laws that the CSS algorithms were also protected by. The only problem is that the DVD-Video spec is much more complicated and won't simply fit on the back of a T-shirt.
I had the good fortune of actually being able to read the formal DVD-Video specs (as an employee), and implemented a multiplexor/authoring system following those specs. It is from this experience that I am absolutely committed to open specifications. There was so much I wanted to disclose to the other LiVID members information I knew about those specs, but I deliberately stayed on the sidelines and simply said "Yeah you are going in the right direction" or "No, I think you got that model wrong. Try something else."
The full potential of utilizing the DVD-Video still has yet to be realized, and unfortunately I don't think it ever will be. I'm talking a genuine "hacking" of the capabilities of a standard DVD-Video player like you have in your home entertainment system, not just the Linux box that you also want to play some DVD movies on (although knowledge of the spec can also help that effort). The DVD/optical disc format is a totally different medium of delivery from video tape, but unfortunately most movie studios simply treat it as only a glorified version of a VHS cassette (DVD extras on a typical release not withstanding). Worse yet, people who consider DVDs to be just another version of VCDs.
I also wouldn't mind trying to put something together right now, as I'm currently unemployed, but that is another story altogether. I can't afford the current specs even if I was fully employed right now.
Well, if that is the case, then please explain the Voyager spacecraft (both I & II).
There was a Pluto mission that had even been greenlighted with a NASA budget for planning, but when the chips went down in the House Science Comittee, the congresscritters decided that it could wait a generation or two before we actually got out there.
You know the usual mantra: Why spend billions on space when we have so many other pressing problems here on Earth? It was pointed out that some really good gravity assist boosts from some of the outer planets would be able to make it work, and that the alignment wouldn't be that good for a couple more centuries. This group of politicians felt we could do it sometime in a century or two. It's not like those planets are going anywhere.
A Pluto mission would be rather interesing right now as well because it is suspected that the outer crust of Pluto is thawing temporarily forming an atmosphere while it is nearing the closest approach to the sun in its entire orbit. It would have gathered data that will be simply unavailable even in a couple of decades, not to mention a couple of centuries later when a solar sail ship from Armadillo Aerospace carries some space tourists to complete the nine-planet tour.
I totally agree. I remember some of those very silly anti-priacy schemes on the Apple ][, some of which were rather inventive.
It all boils down to one simple thing: In order to run an application, you have to be able to load it into memory. Unless the software vendor has the computer itself sealed with propritary and private opcodes in the CPU with custom hardware that self-destructs when opened, you will always be able to follow the "boot" sequence of the software, be able to emulate the CPU directly, and in that manner be able to completely reverse engineer software. Code morphing only adds a speed bump, and a rather small one at that.
Code morphing is much more practical when done like the Transmeta folks are doing with their CPU's: To speed up processor utilization when the software is using a bloated CPU instruction set (like the x86 CPUs by Intel). Merely adjusting and changing pointers through some psudorandom algorithm just isn't going to work to really stop a determined and competent software engineer from being able to interpret the same code that a machine also has to be able to intrepret.
I thought that maybe using a true random number generator (like a radioactive source generating seeds for the generator), but even this could be defeated for the discussion described.
The iron-clad anti-priacy would only be practical for some very secure military applications where designing a CPU from scratch could be considered a resonable cost-center for the project. You will never see something like this in mass-consumer products.
Keep in mind that the developer of this software is a harried engineer who is being pushed by management to get something out the door.
The largest distinction with writing software for a manufacturer as opposed to consumer software is that the bugs tend to be completely ignored unless something very serious happens. I've been in the industry and having to reverse engineer firmware code for products made by the company I was working for (where you would think that the souce code and engineering notes was available to its own employees). It is just like any other software development, where skill levels vary, and some developers are very poor. Degrees don't seem to have much of an impact either from my experience, although a love of coding and determination to get the job done can.
I knew of a local manufacturer in the town I live in (that I won't name but I'm sure you have heard of their products) who built an exercise treadmill that had an EPROM that under certain conditions would suddenly start running the treadmill at full-speed. In a situation very similar to Ralph Nadar's "Unsafe at Any Speed", this manufacturer decided that it was cheaper and easier to pay off the lawsuits from people injuried (and even killed) by this flaw rather than hire an electrical engineer to fix the problem. The firmware was written through an outsourced contract, but the original contractor refused to deal with that company (for various political and financial reasons).
That this person you are refering to about the PROM in the car found such innocent problems in the source code as to just idle issues is something that most engineering managers would probabally find as acceptable bugs they could live with and to move on with other projects.
It really doesn't surprise me at all.
I will conceed that the SCSC was a "big science" project with costs going totally out of control. There were some legitamate reasons for killing the program in terms of serverely underestimated costs for completion and the technical hurdles that needed to be resolved in order for the project to get meaningful results.
The point I'm making here is that it was killed largely because of political infighting from other scientific researchers who weren't a part of the project, and they were jealous that they weren't getting their "piece of the pie". I am also pointing out that, IMHO (and obvisouly not yours) the spending had already crossed the threashold that it really should have been completed. Portions of the accelerators are still being used for some particle physics experiments, but it could have been so much more, and achieved results not simply available anywhere else.
Perhaps the biggest demonstration of what real people can do on real science missions is the example of Harrison Schmitt on Apollo 17, where he, the only scientist (not jet test pilot) to ever walk on another celestial body, went exploring on foot for lunar geology. He discovered rock samples that would never have been found by any robotic survey, made quick assements while being physically on site, and I believe will eventually be remembered as _THE_ pioneer for exogeology field work. Much of his research is being used by the Spirit and Opportunity rover research teams, and forms a foundation for much of the current ideas about rock formation for smaller astronomical bodies. Yes, I know he was one of a team of geologists working for NASA, and I find it unfortunate that the Apollo program was killed before more members of that team were able to get up to the moon. He is also one of the biggest proponents of a manned return to the moon, and is currently involved with the He3 mining projects. His arguments about the problems with robotic exploration are even better than mine, primariliy because he has had to defend his own work for the past 30 years.
I am getting very, very, very tired of even trying to think about repling to comments like this one. At least you had the guts to post it, so I will give you credit.
Frankly, this isn't manned space exploration vs. robotic exploration. It is both, or neither. Please understand that very clearly. If you try to kill manned space exploration (and not this silly LEO garbage that the space shuttle did... I mean real people going places nobody has ever gone before) you will also kill robotic exploration. And manned exploration will be extreamly expensive (both in terms of human lives lost as well as money spent on the programs) if robotic exploration is dissed.
The people in the space science community need to really get a grip on this issue and bury the hatchet. Even more when marine scientist get their panties in a bunch over how much is spent on space when the equivalent to a single shuttle mission is the amount that gets spent on exploring the oceans for all other federal programs combined. The political infighting to get one pet project going at the expense of other major scientific endeavors kills all scientific progress, and ensures that none of it will happen with a disinterested congress and ordinary taxpayers give up in disgust. It was this attitude that ended up killing the SCSC when it was half built. If you want to see the future of martian projects with political infighting like your post, go down to Texas and see the remanents of that political/scientific waste of resources to a half-finished project.
You weren't there, and you apparently havn't been reading the comments from the veteran programmers here.
The folks who got started on Apple ][ computers (and TRS-80, Commodore, Atari, etc.) really needed to learn about the architecture to get stuff to work. Memory was measured in kilobytes, and that was only a two digit number at that. Even a typical programmer would eventually write a program that would use the entire available memory space, so you had to be forced into writing more efficient code and doing things that would never be done today with GB of RAM and TB of hard drive space.
One of the problems that I see is that even fairly good programmers that are graduating from CS programs now take for granted that there is going to be lots of memory availble, so they tend to be very wasteful with both memory and CPU cycles. Then they wonder why their software seems sluggish and why the old-timers just about throw up on their code.
Oh, BTW, in regards to who is going to move into management first, yeah, they may be able to impress some CEO if they have lots of flash, but that doesn't mean that some idiot who never really learned computer archetecture theory and became boss really knows what he (or she) is doing. It just means that the Peter Principle is at work. (Do a google search if you havn't heard about it.)
There is an amazing concept with Assembly programming: Macros!
Seriously, this difference isn't really all that big if you really know how to use the assembler properly, and with most of the modern assembly languages many of the concepts that you might be familiar with in HLL (High-Level Languages... does C++ count?) like arrays or even objects can be done fairly effectively in assembly as well. It is possible that you are using an underpowered assembler, but the same can be said of a poor compiler.
When I am programming, especially time critical functions even when using HLL, I am very much aware of what the compiler is going to translate that code to in assembly. I had a co-worker who was trying to review a particularly tight routine, so he challanged me to compare the compiler's output with what we would do by trying to do it by hand.
Besides some quirky register usage (which is typical with most compiler designs and a necessary component of designing a compiler) our code was identical.
The point is, like mentioned elsewhere, you really need to know assembler and how the computer archetecture is affecting your code to write quality code yourself.
I guess this is why I am anti-Java and to some extend dot Net (.net) or other similar VM implimentations: They keep adding abstraction that makes you lose sight of how the machine is actually functioning. These VMs have their place, don't make it sound like I hate the entire concept, but eventually you have to understand that individual gates inside a chip on actual hardware must be trying to interpret your code and if you can't translate a line of code down to that level you really don't know programming.
I'm sorry, but this isn't really a double standard.
Terrorism, particularly the state-sponsored terrorism as opposed to the usual group of sociopaths like McVeigh and the D.C. snipers (who just need to be caught and it ends) is really a form of warfare. Really.
When for usually domestic politics or for some other reason you want to engage in warfare without massing armies, you send in specialists who engage in random acts of violence: I.E. _TERRORISM_
The USA doesn't direcly send in the usual thugs you see around from other countries. We got instead "Special Forces" who can go in and really muck stuff up. Most of these units are organized along conventional military heirarchies, but don't let that fool you that they march around in parade dress acting like soldiers. These are real mean S.O.B.s that you don't want to even think they are after you. Not only will you be dead if they are, but so will your kids, wife, lovers, pets, animals, plants, and anything ever connected with you. On the other hand, if they are your friend you can rest real easy at night.
The only mistake to note is that terrorism will only be responded to with other terrorism. From my viewpoint, the only reason why Israel doesn't fight back harder in its fight against the seemingly constant terrorist attacks is that they don't (yet) want to take on the entire Arab world simultaneously in one big war. So they tolerate the current situation. The Arab nations don't want to escalate beyond the current terrorism mainly because they don't want to have the USA breathing down their throats if they are that overt. Hence the current stalemate in Israel.
Throughout most of the Cold War between the USSR and the USA there was a series of insurgant groups sponsored by both superpowers. Notable places where this really came to the front included Vietnam, El Salvador, and Afghanistan. Notably in both Vietnam and Afghanistan those terrorists came up against conventional military forces...which had to retreat from both to scale back to terrorists on terrorists.
The mistake of Al-Queida (whatever the current tranliteration spelling... it doesn't always work from Arabic to English) is to assume that an overt terrorist attack on the mainland of the USA is going to be met with a reciprocal terrorist attack on their homes. It shouldn't surprise anybody that after 9/11/2001 that territory was added to the USA (even if it will be given up again, but that is a domestic policy, not anything that really matters what world opinion of the idea of US occupation of Iraq).
If you are discussing this incident in Siberia as an example of a terrorist incident gone bad, you really don't see the whole picture.
BTW, my hometown has essentially been destroyed because of a deliberate Soviet-funded attempt to undermine coporate America. If you want details I can, but it reeks of tinfoil-hat conspiracies until you see what the results have been to a Midwestern small-town in the hartland of America. I do know this has gone both ways. Terrorists come in a good many colors and varieties.
To sum this up, most "Terrorism" is actually formally encouraged and funded by governments trying to get back against (usually) another government. As an American, I don't deny that the USA has also used terrorism against our enemies.
I was going to mod this one up, but I decided to give this reply some more emphasis by actually replying with some thoughtful encouraging words instead.
It would be nice to be able to have some folks at JPL throw down the source code and engineering schematics and say to the geek/space/engineering community at large "We have a problem here and could use your suggestions to see if we can get this fixed."
This (the mars missions) is obviously a big hit, as measured by replies on Slashdot, the number of hits on the website at JPL, stories in mainstream media, and other reasonable metrics to gague popularlity of a project. I'm sure that there are several geeks out there that wouldn't mind digging into the source code.
The only reason I could see the engineers not wanting to do that is to open themselves up to obvious scrutiny for poor engineering and coding. (Whadda you mean the global variable named temp is the only variable. We also have temp2, temp3, and temp4. What do the numbers mean in those mean? You can get it from context, can't you?) That and some people just aren't used to allowing other into their "domain".
Being 100% funded by public money should also be further reason for why this should be opened up. I also totally agree.
I'd have to agree that solar cells paved across the rooftops of America is not (yet) the best way to go, particularly if you are using Silicon-based Photocells.
Solar arrays are also infamous for the fact that it takes more energy to produce them than they will ever generate during their entire lifetimes. It takes quite a bit of sustained heat to crystalize Silicon (or other semiconductors that use the photoelectric effect for power generation). This is why it really isn't practical to cover everything yet unless you are in a very remote location where you can't get access to national power grids.
For rural applications, this is a good route to go.
The one problem with democracies (particularly coupled with sensationalist journalism rampant within the USA) there is a strong tendancy to solve problems after the fact.
With the military, it is often said that they are preparing to fight the last war very well. The US military is particularly noted for this.
Other examples can include hurricane preparation, earthquake & fire codes, and more, although in most of these cases the situation does actually work out due to the fact that these natural disasters do recurr time after time, with government agencies eventually getting it right. That still doesn't stop incredible government-sized screw ups though.
Another clear example is the knee-jerk reaction to security concerns after the Sept. 11th plane attacks. IMHO I seriously doubt that there will _EVER_ be another airplane attack like 9/11 for a variety of reasons. I'm not saying that a terrorist attack won't succeed in America, just that the terrorist needs to be a little more creative. It is now suicidal to even mention or describe explosives or talk about bombs in US airports as a result.
The only way that a major asteroid impact will be avoided is if an impact occurs in a major populated area. Particularly if it happens in an urban area in the USA. Then you will see billions of dollars suddenly freed for a major new space agency built to protect "the world" from astronomical hazards. You will also hear incesant dialog from opposition parties and candidates claiming "the government knew all along this could be avoided, and chose to do nothing to solve the problem!", and for once they would be correct.
I would have to argue that P2P software architechtures offer the possibility of being able to truly realize the promise of the internet, when when one part or piece goes down (due to war, natural calamity, political repression, mechanical failure, etc.) the slack can be picked up by the other peers and nodes in the network. Admittedly I'm presuming a Freenet-type network, but I can think of other architectures that this also applies to.
The internet is all about many-to-many communication of ideas. Older business models that relied upon central control of information in order to "broadcast" that information. Tradional media such as newspapers, radio, television require huge amounts of capital (resources, large buildings to house staff and equipment, experienced technicians who are highly specialized to get the equipment to work) in order to start spreading content around.
Traditional web sites do substantially lower the traditional cost of entry, but even here the cost required to maintain a truly large website (like even Slashdot) still require professional full-time staff and a fairly healthy physical infrastructure. The Slashdot Effect is an example of what limited resource have on even fairly well developed websites with decent network connections.
The point here is that this is more an issue of control rather than an issue of specific content. With a good secure P2P system (full encryption between nodes, nearly untraceable (i.e. psuedo random) links between nodes to fetch the data, things like an FBI warrent or a cease and desist court order has practically no meaning, much less little effect to control the information.
Copyright is again a legal contruction, and it is precisely this many-to-many issue that is the problem Mr. Coleman is trying to grok. P2P networks are now large enough that non-technical people are being pushed into trying to resolve the issues that this sort of philosophy raises.
In writing this post, I guess that is the final point. We are talking philosophical views on how technology should be used. Mr. Wm. Gates talks about "software technologies" when in fact what is being done is a shift in ideas and thoughts on how existing technology can be used. General purpose finite state stored memory machines (i.e. computers) offer an incredible flexibility so that many different philosophies can be used for the exact piece of equipment. This is software. This can also be termed political viewpoints as well (including political such as political party).
Controlling any use of P2P organizations is controlling speech. The fundimental issue is then "Should speech be controlled and some forms of speech made illegal?" That is also what
But this is just confirming my point:
/.
There have only been subtle differences, and major features (portrait of George Washington, size of the same portrait, position and size of seals, etc.) are still largely the same. Although you would certainly notice the differences, including fine print on a silver certificate that allows the bearer to obtain silver on demand from the US Treasury (If you try it, they will give you a Federal Reserve Note now and take the silver certificate... it is more valuable as a collector piece).
The changes that have been made to the $20 are much more drastic. There was an interesting police case just after the redesign of the $20 here in the USA where a bank robber came in and stole a big stack of the new bills. When they saw the redesign they thought it was a trick and a bunch of funny money that really didn't have any value, so they discarded the money (tossing it in a nearby trash dumpster), only later to learn that it was the real thing.
Of course, this may be an urban ledgend as well, but that is the kind of thing you get here on
This has the feel of an urban ledgend here.
First of all, the $1 bill hasn't changed for over fifty years (except for some signatures on the bottom of the bill). It is still pretty much identical to even when it was a Silver Certificate (pre WWII currency) although there were several (subtle) changes made when it became a Federal Reserve Note. Several $1 bank notes issued in the 19th Century by the US Treasury could probabally still be used today because of the similarity of the bill design, and it would be identifiable as a $1 bill.
Almost all of the new redesign efforts have been with the $20, $50, and $100 demoninations. Higher denominations do exist for US currency but are restricted from use by ordinary citizens (by IMHO stupid laws but that is another story). So if this was a genuine forgery it was never with a $1 bill.
In addition, you are suggesting that this bank note was passed outside the USA (hence the involvement of the Polish Police and not the US Secret Service) and it was done just after the release of the new currency when anybody is still trying to recognize the new bills. Keep in mind, if it was a forgery of one of the new notes, it would go through a bunch more review and be checked out more, simply because of the novelty of the note. That is not something a forger would really want to have happen.
Also, when you talk about "US Police Experts" you need to describe which of the 10,000 police agencies in the USA they were from? There are seven (yes, 7) local (not a part of the US federal government) police agencies with seperate budgets, different government bodies that they report to, and independent juristiction authorities that govern what happens when I walk out my front door in a small backwater part of the USA. There may even be more, but I don't know the names of all of them. I do know that the Secret Service (yes, the same agency that also acts as presidential body guards) does have personnel based in American Embassies to help assist governments that the USA has diplomatic relations with to examine US currency and to facilitate currency exchange with those countries. (not directly, but to encourage the exchange and otherwise authenticate US currency outside the US territorial boundaries).
That said, I have seen news reports of someone drawing out on paper with just a ball-point pen a copy of US currency. It was even called "art" and has been appraised to be more valuable than the denomination that was reproduced. Is this what you mean by "hand-made"?
As somebody very familiar with MS-DOS command line tools, I still use them on a regular basis in Windows 2000 Professional. There are a number of very good tools available, although I'll be the first to admit that many of the tools are ports of similar tools written for Unix. Indeed, several are open-source (with a BSD license) that Microsoft simply bundled with the OS.
.NET, and many of these applications will run in Mono as long as you don't get too fancy. #Develop is also a very good IDE that is written entirely in C#, and released under the GPL. It isn't running under Linux, unfortunately, but the long-term roadmap for that IDE is to get there soon. I would agree that Visual Studio is a pile of smelly effulgant, with my biggest complaints regarding bloat in both the documentation as well as with the compiler itself. I mean, if you get Visual Studio, it comes on multiple DVD-ROM discs. Shouldn't that in itself act as a warning?
You can even get BASH for Windows with the Cygwin tools, if you are a Unix guru who has to occasionally dabble with Windows, including man pages (which is really unusual for hardcore Windows folks, but that is another story.)
The unfortunately problem with these tools is the almost total lack of documentation and the fact that most Windows developers never take the time to learn them. There are tasks that are difficult if not impossible to accomplish from the Control Panel that are only a single command line to accomplish. The reason for this is partly due to Microsoft's insistance that Windows '95 was a whole new rewritten from scratch operating system, when in fact it was MS-DOS 7.0 with only slightly improved GUI shell placed over it. That culture that was fostered by Microsoft discouraged shell programming, which is still a very valuable skill.
As far as IDE engines, I personally prefer the Borland suites (C++ Builder has been mentioned by somebody else here). All of the current Borland compilers will also target
To Quote:
That was 20,000 leagues of distance traveled. Not depth. Reread the book to confirm.
Of course, the only real way to do that is with a nuclear submarine, but that is a different story.
Especially the part of totally dissing the theory of the meteor. I can see that bringing up other theories can be useful, but it appears as though some folks are trying to suggest that meteors don't enter the Earth's atmosphere (or so seldom that it is a geological event, not something mere mortals will ever witness).
Having viewed several exploding meteors myself, I will have to say that it really isn't all that unusual. In my case, I didn't have a camera handy, and the whole event was over so fast that the people in the car I was riding in didn't even notice it either.
One time, however, I was lucky to be in a desert "sleeping under the stars" during a Persied shower, and it was just like the 4th of July fireworks, with a couple of fireballs that lit up the sky brighter than a full moon. In that case the rest of the folks I was camping with also saw the fireballs.
That said, a daylight visible fireball entering the sky in the evening (which BTW is the trailing side of the Earth as it goes through the solar system... much harder for anything to come into the sky from that angle) is going have to be viewed with some skecticism.
If the announcement has been made, it has been successful. Time to pop the champaign and give a solid salute on a major accomplishment.
For those in the United States, ABC News television program NightLine is doing a special 1 hour program on the subject. There are web links to the story on that page as well. This should be an interesting program to watch, and seeing it on television does bring some reality to the whole thing rather than reading about it on Slashdot. It is also nice to see the mainstream press talk about this stuff as well.
Indeed, the mantra "Resist the urge to code" is something that you really need to keep in mind, even with small projects. Freenet is not even a brand new project any more, so proceeding without a written standard and planning first without coding anything should be the current methodology.
A good example of what I feel a proper specification should follow when being written is the PNG Data Format. This has been fully vetted with many specification problems removed, the entire process was done in the open, and a product wasn't the primary emphasis of the project. Indeed, I wish most open source specifications followed this route more.
The point I'm trying to make here is that indeed this is a problem of Research vs. Production. Freenet is bent on testing and trying new and different methodologies. While this is a noble task to perform, with white papers and honest to goodness actual science in computer science (wow, does that actually happen?) there does reach a point that it needs to move more toward software engineering where specifications written in plain old English (or other common written language between developers) is used. In a production environment, you should argue what changes to the protocol need to be made, discuss them in detail just how these changes are going to affect everything (like the move from IPv4 to IPv6), perhaps do some research on just how these changes are going to affect everything, and then publish these changes as a formal specification document.
As far as the protocol being backward compatable, that is not necessarily the case. There has been a huge move with the current "research" branch of Freenet with a totally different schema on how nodes communicate with each other, and there have been several instances while I have run nodes where I was simply **REQUIRED** to upgrade if I wanted to stay with the main branch of Freenet because the protocol changes were so big that it broke with earlier versions. I know that they are still less than a 1.0 version of the project, but I'm just saying that one of the things necessary for them to get there (to version 1.0) is to do a thourough specification of the protocol.
Also, I feel that one of the reasons why you don't see alternate implementations of the Freenet protocol is two fold:
When you have more than one implementation for a complex data format/protocol specification, you tend to find errors in each other, including the base specification.
I still stand by what I said.
This link is a fairly good representation of the protocol, but this isn't the final word, and if you tried to implement a Freenet node based on the information in this document, you still couldn't get a node to work with the other nodes of the base line Java implementation of Freenet.
The real documentation is in the source code, not in a protocol document. BTW, look at the date this was last changed: Tue Jul 2 07:44:08 2002 UTC
I believe that the protocol has changed quite a bit since then, and several improvements to Freenet have been made since. Also, there are a number of "TODO" notes in the specification document. In other words, there is absolutely no version of Freenet that uses the protocol that is described in this document. Certainly not the current version. All of the details needed in order to create your own node (in C++, Modula-2, Python, or what have you) can't be done just off of this document.
That said, this document would be very useful if you were trying to hack at the communications core of Freenet to try and understand the source code. That is the main value of this document.
Why have I not tried to update it myself? Time, and trying to go through the shifting source code itself and attempt to update it.
The largest complaint about freenet is that the communications protocol is largely undocumented. Sure, there are some white papers regarding the basic theory and even some substantial resources regarding what is going on down in the lower internals.
Unfortunately the only real documentation for what is happening is really at the source code level for the ubergeeks who are really into reading this and tweaking it to make it work. IMHO this is where the real "research" nature of freenet is happening.
Some very brilliant people (and I am not knocking them...I've had to work with low-level communications protocols like they are doing here for some projects of my own) are constantly coming up with new ideas to meet the overall goals of the Freenet project. Most of the time they are so excited to implement a new idea that they would rather just code it up than sit down and draft up some specification documents first. These are gennerally some very novel ideas and often they don't really turn out to help anyway, so the protocol is evolving very quickly as well.
What I think need to happen now (or very soon) is that some of the best of these ideas need to be formalized beyond the "base-line" standard code base for Freenet and put this into a formal written specification standard like an RFC, ISO, or ECMA document. This is not to say that development can't go on, but real-life network experiences have already been proven with a number of methods of very good ideas. When this is done, Freenet will indeed move into a production environment.
I think the idea here is that if it isn't capitalism, it therefore must be Communism (with the big capital C).
I agree with you, although the philosophy behind the GPL and other open/free software licenses is not entirely supportive of pure capitalism, but it doesn't either support centralized command control economies (aka communism or at least strongly socialist governments). It is more a third philosphy that is based on the idea that status is derived from gifts to the community at large.
It also is based on the concept that ideas must be shared in order for them to be useful. Hiding under the banner of NDA's and non-compete agreements, patents, and strong central distributors who control from whom and to whom software can be distributed is what is challenged.
I wonder just what SCO is trying to do here? They want to control the "switch" that determines just who can own "Unix". The Free Software community is simply saying "What switch? It doesn't even exist!"