We've been predicting that commercial fusion is only 20 years away for the last 30 years. Does this mean we can safely predict that commerical fusion is now only 10 years away...for the next 30 years?
You really want to live in a world where people just bow to corporations unreasonable demands, don't you?
There are more important battles to fight than this, if you're going to pick fights with multi-national corporations, pick a fight that matters. Or better yet, pick one that is news worthy and that matters.
We should, perhaps, take a leaf out of Greenpeace's book. As an organisation they're into direct action, such actions could very well have had them branded eco-terrorists. Instead through carefully picking their battles they've built up a public image that is quasi-respectable. This lets them, every so often push an unpopular, not newsworthy, but important, cause into the limelight.
In short, this isn't a battle that matters. They should give this one a by...
I'll note that in my experience, when a company takes on co-op students from local colleges (this does not apply to all colleges, of course, but I'm talking here about the local ones and about students that are almost finished their programs), they simply aren't capable of anything more than menial work.
My experience is similar, I work as an astronomer/programmer and have ran a couple of co-op programmes. People coming in without a PhD in my place of work are usually assigned the grunt work (they're called grad students), when we have a undergraduate (college to you 'merkins), or a school pupil (err, 'college to you 'merkins) coming in for a couple of months, its fairly rare they can contribute anything other than hard work. Which isn't to say that the work isn't appreciated, it had to get done anyway, if they weren't doing it, we'd have to!
My advice is to work hard, do the stuff they assign you to do, ask for more, and look over the shoulder of the more approachable members of the team to have a look at the cool stuff you'll be able to do after another 10 years of schooling.
Sorry, but even ``trivial'' cool projects can sometimes get complicated very quickly, they aren't going to give you anything that might get complicated because if you fail that will discourage you, and make you think that engineering is too hard, and that sort of defeats the point of a co-op programme.
While its not Open Source, people might also like to look at Neverwinter Nights which is a 3D multi-player client/server architecture roleplay game due out sometime this year (based on AD&D 3rd Editon rules). They are promising multi-platform support, including Linux, and the movies showing the current version of the game, and scenario toolkit look very impressive. As someone that ran an LP MUD all through his undergraduate days (a few years ago now it must be admitted) this looks like something that could finally give you the same sort of atmosphere, but with decent graphics.
...if the US decides to back off of Selective Availability, what happens to cars in motion that find themselves suddenly hundreds of meters from where they were just a moment ago, due to suddenly and purposefully inaccurate data from the birds?
One of the reasons that the US government turned of SA was that it wasn't working anymore. You can now buy GPS recievers that get round it by various means, normally by triangulation with GPS recievers at known fixed positions, or if in motion itself with know speed and acceleration, making multiple measurements and fitting the data within the error bars.
I've had to speed to get past cars in other lanes so that I can change lanes. Where I live there a number of slow (old) drivers, if I dont hit the engine and get around them there is no chance of find a hole behind them to change into.
I don't consider changing lanes to be an emergency manouver. You should have been assessing the traffic conditions sufficently far enough in advance so that you end up inthe correct lane without having to "find a hole" in the traffic.
While I tend to agree with your conclusions, that acceleration to speeds above the limit are sometimes necessary to avoid accidents, you don't help your case by making arguements like this...
However, I would think it unlikely that the makers of the black box in question wouldn't have thought of this, it's a fairly obvious point and can easily be designed around. Driving with your speed consistently above the limit wouldn't be allowed, but briefly exceeding the limit could be allowed, perhaps with an warning from the box. Its not a totally unsurmountable design problem.
What happens when youre driving along in a 45 zone and the zone changes suddenly to 30? if its raining or there's snow on the ground, you're toast.
Why? Presumably the system would be designed to give some sort of audiable warning allowing the driver to break on their own, and then if they dom't comply, slowly break the vehicle down to the speed limit. It just plain silly to claim that it would be designed to slam on the anchors as soon as you crossed into a zone with a different speed limit.
Are they gonna have a live update of weather conditions at each and every zone as well?
Why would they need them...?
...after all, weather affects speed limits.
Not in the UK it doesn't, it certainly effects the advisory speed on Motorways, but not the maximum limit imposed by law...appart, of course, for the M25 which has variable speed limits, mostly due to...
...how will they correct for traffic conditions...
...traffic conditions. However these speed limits already update the speed cameras (something I haven't seen much of in the US, so maybe you guys don't have them?) wouldn't be much bother to have them update the black box via a local radio signal. Not a major design consideration really.
How will they resolve disputes like where the speed limit sign says one thing and the Central Database says another?
Well obviously you have to obey the signs, its no defence to say that your car was letting you go faster than the posted limit, or we'd all be able to speed any time we wanted. If the central database had a slower speed than the posted limit, well tough, you file a complaint.
How will they know how many people are in your car so as to know whether you should be in the HOV lane or not?
I'm a Brit, I couldn't even tell you what an HOV lane is, although I could take a decent guess from context. Whatever they are, we don't have them.
Will the argument, "I couldn't have been speeding, the guvnor was operating normally" be a legal defense? should it be?
Unlikely, how can you know that it operating normally at the time of the incident?
You can find an introductory article to solar and laser driven lightsails on my website. It was written more than a few years ago now, back when I was an undergraduate, but its aged fairly well (unfortunately). If you want a really in-depth look at this topic I'd recommend Colin McInnes' book Solar Sailing: Technology, Dynamics and Mission Applications.
I sort of telecommute, my boss and the bulk of the poeple I work with (for) are at RAL, in Oxford, while I'm at Keele University (a few hundred miles north). This is actually the standard way that the people I work for (the Starlink Project) hires programmers. There are six or seven of us scattered through different Universities thoughout the UK, we only meet up a couple of times a year to discuss stuff. Appart from those meetings everything goes over email, it seems to work okay.
Its not really working from home, although I have that option (and when I actually want to sit down and code something up I usually take it). However I don't really see much of a difference.
Wasn't one of the ideas put forward when people started talking about telecommuting back in the seventies that people would still go into central facilities and have a desk (and associated stuff) its just that these facilities wouldn't be owned by the company they work for, but it would be sort of clearning house type thing, and people from all different companies would work there side by side, the company they're working for only really existing in virtual space?
It just so happens that the organisation which I work for had at least 20 Y2K related incidents occur in the first week of 2000 but we have all be told to keep quiet...we are one of the largest organisations in the UK...
You wouldn't be working for the AA (Automobile Association for you 'merkins) would you? I've got it first hand from someone that a goodly portion of their automated stuff fell over quite dramatically with the Y2K roll over.
Fundamentally, H1-Bs and Green Cards are exporting the knowledge/expertise that such people gain back to their original country. The US has maintained it's economic lead primarily by skimming the best of the intellectuals from other countries via immigration.
I disagree, certainly in the high tech or scientific fields you've got it back to front, the US is taking advantage of skills and experience drained from abroad. In the UK there is still talk about the "brain drain" to the US, especially in the health care field. We spend lots of money training nurses for the NHS, and a considerable number of them immediately pack their bags and go abroad. Why? Because you guys value their skills more and are willing to pay them what their worth. None the less your still benefiting from the years of training (and money) spent on them in the UK. I don't think you've got anything to moan about.
If the shuttle was built to be used 20-30 times a year, it still would undergo the safety checks that NASA is giving it now, and if they wiring was bad on one of those shuttles, I'm sure NASA would take the time to check each one, and it would probably still have an excessive number of miles of wiring.
Actually thats the problem, the design compromises meant that the shuttle needs these checks. The entire point was to build something that you could turn around in a week with only minimal safety checks.
Rightly so, I might add, since protecting the lives of the passengers should be the top priority.
Very politically correct, my gut agrees with you. Unfortunately, I'm not sure my head does. Despite the number of flights, if it were an aircraft the shuttle wouldn't even be out of inital flight tests yet. Test pilots die on a (fairly) regular basis, nobody kicks up (much of) a fuss. The reason Challenger accident shut down the US manned space program is that NASA had sold the shuttle to the American public as as a reliable and safe route to orbit, it isn't, it can't be. Its still experimental technology.
If you look at the statistics we can expect at least one more Challanger scale accident during the construction of the ISS. If the American public, and perhaps more importantly American politicians, react in the way they did to Challanger then NASA is in serious trouble. We're doing risky things here, sometimes people die when you take risks. Sure you manage the risks, but sometimes you have to go ahead and just cross your fingers. It'll be a long time before travelling to orbit is as safe as (for instance) flying a plane.
The current 'bad design' that's really only failed once in 20 years of usage, right?
Failed once catastrophically, there have been many minor failures that, with the right combination of circumstances, would have lead to similar Challanger-like incidents.
Anyway, I haven't said that the shuttle is a badly designed vehicle. There were, in my opinion, poor design choices. That doesn't mean that all the parts don't fit together right.
Then how can it be a bad design? It may not fulfill the initial design vision...
You just answered your own question. If you design something that doesn't do what it was supposed to do, no matter how well it does something else, then it is a bad design.
The shuttles themselves are probably in better shape than your current car, and they're certainly in better shape than any car you've owned for 20 years.
I don't strap my car to two solid rocket boosters and send it into orbit, at least not regularly. This is a very bogus comparison, the tolerances (e.g. heat, stress) required for normal operation of a car, and the tolerances required for a man rated launcher are not comparable.
Of course, I'm not saying that a newer design isn't warranted (and NASA has actively been researching towards that goal), but don't dismiss the shuttles because of the delays. It really isn't 'bad design' that's causing them.
Unfortunately is bad design thats causing the delays, the shuttle design was a compromise (much like the current ISS debacle) due to repeated budget cuts. Initially design targets were to have something that could fly and turn around again in a matter of days or weeks, they were looking for a shuttle that could fly (at a minimum) twenty or thirty times a year. What they ended up with falls very short of the mark, something that was actually more expensive to launch than a normal rocket. The shuttle is an aging launcher, with design compromises at every turn, it shows.
Hopefully, VentureStar won't be as big a disappointment, although personally I still think they should have gone with the Delta Clipper (at least they had a working prototype in hardware).
I think 20 years from now we'll still be able to use the shuttles, even if it's in a workhouse capacity
No way, we've already stretched the design lifetime well beyond the inital estimates.
I would. In a heartbeat, as long as the price was something I could afford. I find both vi & emacs almost intimidating with their REQUIREMENTS of learning the keyboard shortcuts. I can use vi to edit any file that I mess up and as a result am forced to boot into my system -- but that's the extent of where I use it. I've tried emacs. It's big, it's slow, it's powerful, and it's not for me.
If your looking for a relatively powerful GUI text editor then I would probably recommend NEdit, my editor of choice for larger documents when using X11. Lots of features, including syntax highlighting, programable learn/replay and macros. The next release (scheduled for this month) is under the GPL, previous releases have been under Fermitools license, which is why it isn't in widespread use.
But, the whole idea of needing a license to use the internet seems wrong. All needed audit trails should be kept by your ISP. If you hack into something, your IP will be recorded and your ISP should be able to match that up with who used that IP at that time.
In the end it doesn't matter, if won't get pushed through in every single country which has access to the internet (not everyone is that crazy), so how can it work?
Even if it did, well then I guess its time to go back to UUCP and forward packets through the modems again. Not as nice, or as fluffy as the web, but we got by for years doing it that way. We can do it again. How would they licence this? A totally seperate network(?) that isn't the internet (doesn't have to cross connect). You can't licence the internet, its just not possible.
Actually as an astronomer I somewhat want to disagree with that. In general in astronomy this is true but not in cosmology. It moves too fast, you can't wait the 9 months for an ApJ publication or you'll be too late. Hoever, its true that all preprints are not final so things can change.
Hmm, cosmologists always have to be the exception. In my corner of astrophysics we wouldn't dream of pushing a paper out the door onto a preprint server until we at least dickered with the referee about what needed fixing. I guess your milage may vary...and your damn lucky if you only have a 9 month lead time for ApJ, its pushing 11 for MNRAS these days.
Then again, I remember the welcome speech from the Keele IAU Colliquium "Even though you aren't Cosmologists, the secretaries may still look at you a bit strangely". Truer words have never been spoken...
Just a quick comment on the "this is a preprint so it hasn't been refereed yet" comment. Erm, no exactly. In astronomy its very uncommon, and generally frowned upon, to release a paper to preprint before you've had it refereed. Certainly none of mine have ever landed on the preprint server before I fixed everything the referee wanted me to fix.
If my PHB wanted to pay me hourly I'd let him, I'd double my monthly salary easily. Of course after a couple of pay checks he'd realise he had made a big mistake and I'd be back on a salary so fast my head would spin.
We don't have mail and news but we should have everything else.
Good! I don't want my web browser to support mail or news. I wouldn't mind it being able to spawn a pine or trn session inside an xterm when it hits a mailto: or news: URL though.
I always assumed Alpha to be your development versions, and the last couple of versions before release are Beta. Beta is the stage where you have stopped adding features and are just working on clobbering bugs.
Alpha version is something that will crash, Beta version is something that may crash, Release version is something that shouldn't crash.
Ahah. So if you had a right to a gun, you still wouldn't need it and there would be no guns on your streets. In fact there would be no need for any gun restrictions, because of your natural aversion to guns.
Thats not what I said, or at least what I meant to say. Of course there are some people that would like more liberal gun laws in the UK. However, if the government wanted to liberalise the gun laws the general populace would be very much against it and would protest strongly against doing so...
Maybe British Nazi-style gun laws exist solely as a lesson to the rest of the world. Maybe they are in place to control unruly elements of the population that fall outside the designation "Brit". Anyway that statement is illogical and unrealistic, seems to be a case of "right-think", ignorance or plain ethnocentricity.
Nazi style guns laws? Give me a break! Personally I like the fact that in the UK you can't go into your local supermarket and walk out with a sub-machine gun. I see no reason why anybody would want to own a gun, except farmers who (obviously) need a shotgun (or the like) to protect their live stock against predators. The rest of us just don't need them.
Slashdot Mirror
We've been predicting that commercial fusion is only 20 years away for the last 30 years. Does this mean we can safely predict that commerical fusion is now only 10 years away...for the next 30 years?
Al.--
You really want to live in a world where people just bow to corporations unreasonable demands, don't you?
There are more important battles to fight than this, if you're going to pick fights with multi-national corporations, pick a fight that matters. Or better yet, pick one that is news worthy and that matters.
We should, perhaps, take a leaf out of Greenpeace's book. As an organisation they're into direct action, such actions could very well have had them branded eco-terrorists. Instead through carefully picking their battles they've built up a public image that is quasi-respectable. This lets them, every so often push an unpopular, not newsworthy, but important, cause into the limelight.
In short, this isn't a battle that matters. They should give this one a by...
Al. Al.--
Okay I admit it, I use tcsh rather than bash, burn me as a heretic. My prompt looks something like...
set prompt=`hostname | awk -F. '{print $1}'`set prompt="`echo $prompt`{`whoami`}: "
Al.
--
You can find more information on solar sails here.
Al.--
I'll note that in my experience, when a company takes on co-op students from local colleges (this does not apply to all colleges, of course, but I'm talking here about the local ones and about students that are almost finished their programs), they simply aren't capable of anything more than menial work.
My experience is similar, I work as an astronomer/programmer and have ran a couple of co-op programmes. People coming in without a PhD in my place of work are usually assigned the grunt work (they're called grad students), when we have a undergraduate (college to you 'merkins), or a school pupil (err, 'college to you 'merkins) coming in for a couple of months, its fairly rare they can contribute anything other than hard work. Which isn't to say that the work isn't appreciated, it had to get done anyway, if they weren't doing it, we'd have to!
My advice is to work hard, do the stuff they assign you to do, ask for more, and look over the shoulder of the more approachable members of the team to have a look at the cool stuff you'll be able to do after another 10 years of schooling.
Sorry, but even ``trivial'' cool projects can sometimes get complicated very quickly, they aren't going to give you anything that might get complicated because if you fail that will discourage you, and make you think that engineering is too hard, and that sort of defeats the point of a co-op programme.
Al.--
While its not Open Source, people might also like to look at Neverwinter Nights which is a 3D multi-player client/server architecture roleplay game due out sometime this year (based on AD&D 3rd Editon rules). They are promising multi-platform support, including Linux, and the movies showing the current version of the game, and scenario toolkit look very impressive. As someone that ran an LP MUD all through his undergraduate days (a few years ago now it must be admitted) this looks like something that could finally give you the same sort of atmosphere, but with decent graphics.
Al.--
One of the reasons that the US government turned of SA was that it wasn't working anymore. You can now buy GPS recievers that get round it by various means, normally by triangulation with GPS recievers at known fixed positions, or if in motion itself with know speed and acceleration, making multiple measurements and fitting the data within the error bars.
Al.--
I've had to speed to get past cars in other lanes so that I can change lanes. Where I live there a number of slow (old) drivers, if I dont hit the engine and get around them there is no chance of find a hole behind them to change into.
I don't consider changing lanes to be an emergency manouver. You should have been assessing the traffic conditions sufficently far enough in advance so that you end up inthe correct lane without having to "find a hole" in the traffic.
While I tend to agree with your conclusions, that acceleration to speeds above the limit are sometimes necessary to avoid accidents, you don't help your case by making arguements like this...
However, I would think it unlikely that the makers of the black box in question wouldn't have thought of this, it's a fairly obvious point and can easily be designed around. Driving with your speed consistently above the limit wouldn't be allowed, but briefly exceeding the limit could be allowed, perhaps with an warning from the box. Its not a totally unsurmountable design problem.
Al.--
What happens when youre driving along in a 45 zone and the zone changes suddenly to 30? if its raining or there's snow on the ground, you're toast.
Why? Presumably the system would be designed to give some sort of audiable warning allowing the driver to break on their own, and then if they dom't comply, slowly break the vehicle down to the speed limit. It just plain silly to claim that it would be designed to slam on the anchors as soon as you crossed into a zone with a different speed limit.
Are they gonna have a live update of weather conditions at each and every zone as well?
Why would they need them...?
Not in the UK it doesn't, it certainly effects the advisory speed on Motorways, but not the maximum limit imposed by law...appart, of course, for the M25 which has variable speed limits, mostly due to...
...traffic conditions. However these speed limits already update the speed cameras (something I haven't seen much of in the US, so maybe you guys don't have them?) wouldn't be much bother to have them update the black box via a local radio signal. Not a major design consideration really.
How will they resolve disputes like where the speed limit sign says one thing and the Central Database says another?
Well obviously you have to obey the signs, its no defence to say that your car was letting you go faster than the posted limit, or we'd all be able to speed any time we wanted. If the central database had a slower speed than the posted limit, well tough, you file a complaint.
How will they know how many people are in your car so as to know whether you should be in the HOV lane or not?
I'm a Brit, I couldn't even tell you what an HOV lane is, although I could take a decent guess from context. Whatever they are, we don't have them.
Will the argument, "I couldn't have been speeding, the guvnor was operating normally" be a legal defense? should it be?
Unlikely, how can you know that it operating normally at the time of the incident?
Al.--
You can find an introductory article to solar and laser driven lightsails on my website. It was written more than a few years ago now, back when I was an undergraduate, but its aged fairly well (unfortunately). If you want a really in-depth look at this topic I'd recommend Colin McInnes' book Solar Sailing: Technology, Dynamics and Mission Applications .
Al.--
Actually the UK (there is more than just England here you know) is now on 220V and has been for a good five years or more.
Al.--
I sort of telecommute, my boss and the bulk of the poeple I work with (for) are at RAL, in Oxford, while I'm at Keele University (a few hundred miles north). This is actually the standard way that the people I work for (the Starlink Project) hires programmers. There are six or seven of us scattered through different Universities thoughout the UK, we only meet up a couple of times a year to discuss stuff. Appart from those meetings everything goes over email, it seems to work okay.
Its not really working from home, although I have that option (and when I actually want to sit down and code something up I usually take it). However I don't really see much of a difference.
Wasn't one of the ideas put forward when people started talking about telecommuting back in the seventies that people would still go into central facilities and have a desk (and associated stuff) its just that these facilities wouldn't be owned by the company they work for, but it would be sort of clearning house type thing, and people from all different companies would work there side by side, the company they're working for only really existing in virtual space?
Al.--
It just so happens that the organisation which I work for had at least 20 Y2K related incidents occur in the first week of 2000 but we have all be told to keep quiet...we are one of the largest organisations in the UK...
You wouldn't be working for the AA (Automobile Association for you 'merkins) would you? I've got it first hand from someone that a goodly portion of their automated stuff fell over quite dramatically with the Y2K roll over.
--
Fundamentally, H1-Bs and Green Cards are exporting the knowledge/expertise that such people gain back to their original country. The US has maintained it's economic lead primarily by skimming the best of the intellectuals from other countries via immigration.
I disagree, certainly in the high tech or scientific fields you've got it back to front, the US is taking advantage of skills and experience drained from abroad. In the UK there is still talk about the "brain drain" to the US, especially in the health care field. We spend lots of money training nurses for the NHS, and a considerable number of them immediately pack their bags and go abroad. Why? Because you guys value their skills more and are willing to pay them what their worth. None the less your still benefiting from the years of training (and money) spent on them in the UK. I don't think you've got anything to moan about.
Al.
--
If the shuttle was built to be used 20-30 times a year, it still would undergo the safety checks that NASA is giving it now, and if they wiring was bad on one of those shuttles, I'm sure NASA would take the time to check each one, and it would probably still have an excessive number of miles of wiring.
Actually thats the problem, the design compromises meant that the shuttle needs these checks. The entire point was to build something that you could turn around in a week with only minimal safety checks.
Rightly so, I might add, since protecting the lives of the passengers should be the top priority.
Very politically correct, my gut agrees with you. Unfortunately, I'm not sure my head does. Despite the number of flights, if it were an aircraft the shuttle wouldn't even be out of inital flight tests yet. Test pilots die on a (fairly) regular basis, nobody kicks up (much of) a fuss. The reason Challenger accident shut down the US manned space program is that NASA had sold the shuttle to the American public as as a reliable and safe route to orbit, it isn't, it can't be. Its still experimental technology.
If you look at the statistics we can expect at least one more Challanger scale accident during the construction of the ISS. If the American public, and perhaps more importantly American politicians, react in the way they did to Challanger then NASA is in serious trouble. We're doing risky things here, sometimes people die when you take risks. Sure you manage the risks, but sometimes you have to go ahead and just cross your fingers. It'll be a long time before travelling to orbit is as safe as (for instance) flying a plane.
The current 'bad design' that's really only failed once in 20 years of usage, right?
Failed once catastrophically, there have been many minor failures that, with the right combination of circumstances, would have lead to similar Challanger-like incidents.
Anyway, I haven't said that the shuttle is a badly designed vehicle. There were, in my opinion, poor design choices. That doesn't mean that all the parts don't fit together right.
Then how can it be a bad design? It may not fulfill the initial design vision...
You just answered your own question. If you design something that doesn't do what it was supposed to do, no matter how well it does something else, then it is a bad design.
Al.
--
The shuttles themselves are probably in better shape than your current car, and they're certainly in better shape than any car you've owned for 20 years.
I don't strap my car to two solid rocket boosters and send it into orbit, at least not regularly. This is a very bogus comparison, the tolerances (e.g. heat, stress) required for normal operation of a car, and the tolerances required for a man rated launcher are not comparable.
Of course, I'm not saying that a newer design isn't warranted (and NASA has actively been researching towards that goal), but don't dismiss the shuttles because of the delays. It really isn't 'bad design' that's causing them.
Unfortunately is bad design thats causing the delays, the shuttle design was a compromise (much like the current ISS debacle) due to repeated budget cuts. Initially design targets were to have something that could fly and turn around again in a matter of days or weeks, they were looking for a shuttle that could fly (at a minimum) twenty or thirty times a year. What they ended up with falls very short of the mark, something that was actually more expensive to launch than a normal rocket. The shuttle is an aging launcher, with design compromises at every turn, it shows.
Hopefully, VentureStar won't be as big a disappointment, although personally I still think they should have gone with the Delta Clipper (at least they had a working prototype in hardware).
I think 20 years from now we'll still be able to use the shuttles, even if it's in a workhouse capacity
No way, we've already stretched the design lifetime well beyond the inital estimates.
Al.
--
I would. In a heartbeat, as long as the price was something I could afford. I find both vi & emacs almost intimidating with their REQUIREMENTS of learning the keyboard shortcuts. I can use vi to edit any file that I mess up and as a result am forced to boot into my system -- but that's the extent of where I use it. I've tried emacs. It's big, it's slow, it's powerful, and it's not for me.
If your looking for a relatively powerful GUI text editor then I would probably recommend NEdit, my editor of choice for larger documents when using X11. Lots of features, including syntax highlighting, programable learn/replay and macros. The next release (scheduled for this month) is under the GPL, previous releases have been under Fermitools license, which is why it isn't in widespread use.
Al.
--
...a tiny violation of your privacy, which I can certainly live with, over id's support of Linux gaming...
A tiny violation of privacy is like being a tiny bit pregnant, neither of them are possible.
Al.
--
But, the whole idea of needing a license to use the internet seems wrong. All needed audit trails should be kept by your ISP. If you hack into something, your IP will be recorded and your ISP should be able to match that up with who used that IP at that time.
In the end it doesn't matter, if won't get pushed through in every single country which has access to the internet (not everyone is that crazy), so how can it work?
Even if it did, well then I guess its time to go back to UUCP and forward packets through the modems again. Not as nice, or as fluffy as the web, but we got by for years doing it that way. We can do it again. How would they licence this? A totally seperate network(?) that isn't the internet (doesn't have to cross connect). You can't licence the internet, its just not possible.
Al.
--
Actually as an astronomer I somewhat want to disagree with that. In general in astronomy this is true but not in cosmology. It moves too fast, you can't wait the 9 months for an ApJ publication or you'll be too late. Hoever, its true that all preprints are not final so things can change.
Hmm, cosmologists always have to be the exception. In my corner of astrophysics we wouldn't dream of pushing a paper out the door onto a preprint server until we at least dickered with the referee about what needed fixing. I guess your milage may vary...and your damn lucky if you only have a 9 month lead time for ApJ, its pushing 11 for MNRAS these days.
Then again, I remember the welcome speech from the Keele IAU Colliquium "Even though you aren't Cosmologists, the secretaries may still look at you a bit strangely". Truer words have never been spoken...
Al.
--
Just a quick comment on the "this is a preprint so it hasn't been refereed yet" comment. Erm, no exactly. In astronomy its very uncommon, and generally frowned upon, to release a paper to preprint before you've had it refereed. Certainly none of mine have ever landed on the preprint server before I fixed everything the referee wanted me to fix.
Al.
--
If my PHB wanted to pay me hourly I'd let him, I'd double my monthly salary easily. Of course after a couple of pay checks he'd realise he had made a big mistake and I'd be back on a salary so fast my head would spin.
Al.
--
We don't have mail and news but we should have everything else.
Good! I don't want my web browser to support mail or news. I wouldn't mind it being able to spawn a pine or trn session inside an xterm when it hits a mailto: or news: URL though.
Al.
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I always assumed Alpha to be your development versions, and the last couple of versions before release are Beta. Beta is the stage where you have stopped adding features and are just working on clobbering bugs.
Alpha version is something that will crash, Beta version is something that may crash, Release version is something that shouldn't crash.
Al.
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Ahah. So if you had a right to a gun, you still wouldn't need it and there would be no guns on your streets. In fact there would be no need for any gun restrictions, because of your natural aversion to guns.
Thats not what I said, or at least what I meant to say. Of course there are some people that would like more liberal gun laws in the UK. However, if the government wanted to liberalise the gun laws the general populace would be very much against it and would protest strongly against doing so...
Maybe British Nazi-style gun laws exist solely as a lesson to the rest of the world. Maybe they are in place to control unruly elements of the population that fall outside the designation "Brit". Anyway that statement is illogical and unrealistic, seems to be a case of "right-think", ignorance or plain ethnocentricity.
Nazi style guns laws? Give me a break! Personally I like the fact that in the UK you can't go into your local supermarket and walk out with a sub-machine gun. I see no reason why anybody would want to own a gun, except farmers who (obviously) need a shotgun (or the like) to protect their live stock against predators. The rest of us just don't need them.
Al.
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