Worst case scenario - the voters get tired, and vote for the lesser of two evils. In other words, it degenerates to what we have now.
However, remember that when that happens, the major parties will have had their big boys cut, and so the odds are much better that a minor party player would win. Do you really think the Republicats would allow that? They would get their act together within two elections.
I wasn't trying to discredit your views, rather I was giving them more weight by showing that others had come to the same conclusion.
Also, I have read Heinlein's book, and in it you could serve in the military OR in civil service. In fact, a long passage in the book covered that very fact (in which the discussion was that if a very disabled individual were to desire citizenship, the government would go to great lengths to provide a chance to serve.)
The only problem I see with approval voting is, sad to say, the average person wouldn't understand it.
I think BNOTA has a better chance of being understood.
As for the primaries - Just don't let them ask what party you are registered for. Only let them ask "are you a registered voter in this district". Remove the party affiliation from the voter registration card. IMNSHO, the political parties have NO DAMN RIGHT to ask me my affiliation.
No, because everybody who ran in the first election is ineligable to run in the second (and any others). That's the "binding" part of binding NOTA.
So, Joe Bloggs runs for office, and gets knocked out by NOTA. Go home Joe. Joe needs no more money, because he can't run.
Meanwhile, Foo Bar runs in the second election. He needed little to no money for the first, since he wasn't running in it. Now he needs money.
Consider it from the point of view of a Big Corporation. Let's say Microsoft spends $1M on Joe Bloggs. Money down the drain, Joe's knocked out. Now, MS can spend another $1M on Foo Bar, but now it starts getting expensive for no guaranteed return. As it stands today, MS can give $1M to Bush, $1M to Gore, and know they've got it covered one way or the other.
I assert that it is not campain finance reform, but campain reform that we need.
Consider first why candidates need the huge amounts of money to be elected. They in effect need to run two entirely different campains - once for the primary, and once for the election. As a result, the cost more than doubles. Now, the thought is that once they've won the primary, their party will contribute to the main election. This is true but irrelevant to this discussion: the party must raise the money, and thus the need for money still is doubled.
Now, I assert that anytime there is a demand, there will be a supply. Consider the origins of soft money - in the old days you could directly support your candidate with any amount of cash you wished. This was deemed a bad thing and so limits were placed on direct contributions. Bang - you now have created "soft money" that doesn't get covered under the hard money laws. Do you really expect that as long as candidates need money they won't find a way around soft money? And realize this: if you put up a piece on your personal web page about how you feel candidate X is [good|bad], that can be considered a "soft" contribution. Do you really want to give the government that power?
Now, consider the 2000 elections. They were very close - so close that the actual vote difference between the candidates was lost in the noise floor. Was this really because the people were split 50/50 in liking Bush and Gore? Most people who voted for [Bush|Gore] did so because they disliked [Bush|Gore] marginally less than they disliked [Gore|Bush].
I assert that we need to make the following two changes to the system:
1) Allow anybody registered to vote to vote in any primary.
2) Require a binding "none of the above" entry on all elections.
Let's examine the results these two changes would have had on the 2000 US presidential election:
1) By allowing anybody registered to vote in any primary, we would de-emphasize the importance of the primaries and pull the results of the primaries back from the extremes. I doubt that Bush would have won the Republican primary, and I doubt that Gore would have won the Democrat primary. Additionally, candidates such as McCain would have had a much better chance of getting support.
2) By having a binding "none of the above", even if the election had been Bush/Gore, the bulk of people could have voted None Of the Above. Had None Of the Above won, then NOBODY in that election could hold the office, and there would have to be a new election. Ask yourself this: no matter your political affiliation, if you could have had a chance to block both Bush and Gore in favor of a shot at a better candidate, would you?
I assert that with these two changes, the following things would happen:
1) The third party candidates wouldn't run in the first race. Instead, they would encourage the voters to vote NOTA in the first race and knock the big boys out.
2) The big parties would no longer be able to take this "This is our guy, take it or leave it" attitude. Thus, they would tend to field more moderate candidates.
3) Because of 1 and 2, more people would feel their vote mattered, and we would get more turnout.
4) Because the primaries could no longer be used to limit our choices, they would become unimportant and would fad away. Remember - the primaries are entirely outside the election process as described in the Constitution.
Now, I don't assert that these changes would prevent lobbying by corporations. However, if a party knew that they could no longer annoint a golden child in the primaries and force them down our throats, they might be more aware of how the PEOPLE feel about an issue, rather than MONEY.
Make it unprofitable. That is the only way to stop spamming.
There is no need for a law - ISPs simply need to add a $10000 per incident "clean up fee" to their contract.
Now, I've seen some folks here on/. say they work for ISPs that have done this, and that the spammers just refuse to pay. If the ISP charges the spammer's credit card, they dispute the charge and the credit card dings the ISP.
Here's a possible solution to this. Since the spammer signed the contract agreeing to pay, then refusing to pay, along with the prima facia evidence that the spammer was planning on spamming all along should equal fraud, a criminal charge, right? And since the amount is over $1000, it is FELONY fraud, right? So, if the spammer disputes the charge, file fraud charges against them. Get a lein on their house, and hit them in civil court as well.
Get one precident that a clean-up charge in the contract is permissible, and you can start costing those bastards.
And as for all the spammers in fum buk tu, China - block those netblocks at the routers.
As I understand it, many cable modems are controlled by SNMP - that's how some folks are removing the upload speed caps.
Now, considering that many cable modems are owned by the USER, not by the cable supplier, how will they be updated?
If the modem can be updated remotely by the ISP, then it can also be updated by some 5|<r!97 |<!66!E, and that scares the hell out of me.
If the modem can only be updated from the client's side, then how the hell will the cable company know if what update to direct the user to?
And worst yet, what if the modem cannot be reflashed? I can just see the conversation now:
Cable Company Rep: Sir, your modem is bad, and needs to be updated.
Luser: But I'm connected just fine.
CCR: But your modem has the SNMP flaw and is being used by bad people to do bad things.
Luser: <Stack Fault> Me not understand. Me connected. You just trying make me spend money.
CCR: Look, sir, if you don't get a new modem we will have to turn off your service.
Luser (who had fully rebooted his speech centers): Fine! Then I won't pay my bill.
CCR: Money talks, bs walks. OK, we won't make you update, we couldn't really anyway, goodbye.
The "keep them on the line for three minutes so we can trace them" is pure Hollywood - it allows a hack writer or director to artificially increase the tension.
In reality, if the cops are watching a line, they will have the call traced before the first ring of the phone - the only time consuming part is getting the warrent and telling the phone company to be ready.
The only reason to keep the person on the line is so that they can roll a unit to the originating phone and arrest the miscreant there. That unit gets rolled as soon as the cops know this call is the one.
Semi-OT: I've oft wondered if one could use a Nimda infected machine as a relay for browsing or I-Phone to cover one's tracks. You could accumulate a list of these machines just by watching your logs, then when you felt the need you bounce off two or three, perhaps using SSL to hide the contents of the traffic until you got to the last machine....
The delta in focal length from the top to the bottom of the chip is going to be in the micron range - you have more focal length variation than that in a film camera just from the tolerances of the transport assembly.
1) send emails to his pbs.org mail address that will generate a reply (ether by nasty scripting tricks, or simply asking him to respond...)
2) Look at the IP address of the reply.
If he does it from his home, they have the IP of his buddy. End game.
Second trick - look around in the specified neighborhood for a transmitter at 2.6GHz. Sniff with Snort.
It reminds me of an old saying: "If you are breaking the the rules, be QUIET about it."
What I'd like to see them fix is the )(!@#*& mail and news client automatically rendering HTML mail messages - you get a spam, and there is no way to prevent Mozilla from rendering it when you select it to forward to Spamcop.
They are working on a pref to prevent Mozilla from hitting the network when rendering mail messages, but it's been pushed back.
I keep seeing people who don't understand what "sync on green" is, and this guy is one.
<Electronics_lession>
For *any* monitor, it is required to know when a horizontal scan line starts, when it stops, and where the top of the screen is. This information is called sync, and is seperate from the video data that paints the image.
In a normal, modern monitor, five signal lines go to the monitor:
Analog red
Analog green
Analog blue
digital vertical sync
digital horizontal sync
Now, the hsync line is in one state while the monitor is scanning across the display, and another state during the time the electron beam is being swept back across the display (the horizontal retrace interval). The vsync line is in one state when the screen is being painted, and another when the beam is brought back to the top of the screen (the vertical retrace.)
Now, in older monitors, to save signal lines, they used a technique call "sync on green". During the normal horizontal scan, the green line was at a voltage between 0V and 1V, with 1V being full on green, and 0V being no green. During horizontal retrace, the green line went to -0.5V to signal sync. During vertical retrace, the green line was -0.5V during the whole scan line, and went to 0V during the horizontal retrace. By suitable filtering and phase-lock techniques the actual sync signals were recovered from this. Thus, a sync on green monitor required only 3 signal lines.
Now, if you take a normal monitor, and connect it to a sync-on-green system, the monitor's sync inputs will be undriven. A multirate monitor will simply turn off it's drive to the screen, assuming the computer is turned off.
Sync on green has nothing to do with "synchronizing the red and blue signals with the green" - they are synchronous in time already.
Your best bet for such things is to go to a computer graveyard, and try to find an old monitor. Many older monitors would do sync on green as well as normal discrete sync.
</Electronics_lession>
<Rant>
What I don't understand is why everybody is getting so excited about this. Sony is locking you away from the hardware - without a massive RE effort you are not going to be able to do much with this system. For the price of the PS2 and the Linux distro and hardware you could by far more useful devices (until somebody cracks all the hardware protection). Assuming somebody does manage to get raw HW access, Sony will make that person disappear in a puff of red smoke.
Why don't we all just ignore these people until they learn to play nice with others? Look at the Atari 2600, the Apple ][, the PC. They were successful because people could hack them. Sony and Apple learned the wrong lesson ("We must have total control! Nobody BUT US CAN MAKE MONEY OFF THIS") rather than the right lesson ("Hardware like parachute - works best when open.").
</Rant>
We need to hold MS's feet to the fire on this one. OK, let them have Feb. to lint their code. Let them have March to package it for release. In April, there had better be a service patch released for at least one of their OSs, that measurably improves the security or stability of the OS.
So, come May, it should be provable that they've done some good. It should be possible to take two identical hardware configurations, install the pre-Feb and post-Feb versions, and show that one is more secure, more stable, or both.
If this happens, we should all congratulate Microsoft.
And if this doesn't happen, we should all make damn sure the media doesn't forget.
Actually, all modern power supplies ARE isolated from the power line - that's the core of a switching power supply.
First, the incoming AC is rectified to DC and filtered. This gives you 300VDC on about 10 to 1000 microfarads of capacitance - enough to kill you dead if it goes through your chest. That part of the circuit is directly connected to the power line.
Then the DC is chopped by a transistor and fed into a transformer (this is the "switching" part of the power supply). This chopping is done at between 60 kHz and 1 MHz (depending upon the power supply). The other side of the transformer (the secondary) is completely isolated from the power line. This voltage is then rectified, filtered, and supplied to the rest of the device. The voltage is measured, and fed back to the switching controller, which drives the switching transistor through either an optocoupler or pulse transformer, closing the feedback loop and regulating the voltage.
If you look at a modern switcher, you will usually see the "hot" side is completely isolated - even unto having sections of the PCB cut to prevent arc-over.
So, the bulk of the power supply, and the rest of the chassis, are NOT electrically connected to the power line. In fact, less of the system is connected to the power line than in an old style line frequency tranformer design. (Now, there were some old designs that rectified the power line and used that directly. THOSE designs were "hot" chassis designs, and were widowmakers...)
That said, you shouldn't go poking around inside a monitor or TV unless you know what you are doing. The anode voltage on the CRT is between 12kV and 25kV (although the source impedance is high enough that it won't kill you). However, the deflection circuits that sweep the electron beam across the CRT are at about 400V and have enough energy to knock you on your ass.
I've worked on TVs, monitors, radio transmitters (including tube based 250 watt repeaters (3kV at.1 amp, never work alone, one hand in your back pocket)) I design these things for a living.
1) If Microsoft changes the spec for C# or CLI, can ECMA deny the changes?
1a) If they can deny the changes, can Microsoft still call C# "C#"?
2) Are C# and the CLI completely free of patents?
If the answer to 1) is false, then at any time MS can change the spec on what C# is, and leave Miquel to play catch-up.
If 1) is true and 1a) is true, again MS controls the table.
If 2) is false (it is, by the way...) then at any time MS can jerk Miquel up short and deny everybody the right to use the code without paying them a royalty (think Unisys and LZW).
I assure you, I am neither a troll nor an idiot - rather I am a person who can see beyond "that's cool" and ask myself what the downsides are.
If you play
Society's Rules
Then you become
Society's Fools....
Devo, Society's Fools
Porting Gnome to.Net is playing Microsoft's game. The problem is that the first rule of Microsoft's game is "Microsoft wins".
I love the idea of a common runtime environment that supports C++, Java, Perl, Python, etc., runs on all platforms, etc. etc. etc., but I DON'T want that platform in any way controlled by Microsoft (or by Sun, or RedHat, or me!) If any one entity controls the platform, that one entity has entirely too much power - we've simply traded one monopolist for another.
Now, if Miquel wishes to create such an environment under GPL, with no patents held by any organization, then I'm all for it - that way no one organization can embrace and extend the spec. But.Net is neither under GPL nor is it patent unencumbered - the owners can change the rules as they see fit. The fact that the owners are Microsoft is only minimally relevant - Sun, Apple, SGI, RedHat, or IBM could also force the issue.
A 33.6kbps modem runs about 3 kilobaud, with an 11 bit per symbol QAM constellation.
A 56kbps modem runs 8 kilobaud, with 8 bits per symbol. The telco digitizes voice at 8 bits per sample, 8 ksamples/sec, and the modem actually is just using that. However, the phone company "bit-robs" the signal, taking a few bits here and there to do in-band signaling on the line, hence why the modem cannot rely upon getting all the bits, all the time.
I know you're out there. I can feel you now. I know that you're afraid... afraid of us. You're afraid of change. I don't know the future. I didn't come here to tell you how this is going to end. I came here to tell how it's going to begin. I'm going to hang up this phone, and then show these people what you don't want them to see. I'm going to show them a world without you. A world without rules or controls, borders or boundaries. A world where anything is possible. Where we go from there is a choice I leave to you.
Unforturnately for Larry, the same quote is being said to him by the Free Software movement....
I love the part about how the monkey, once it realized that it didn't have to move in order to get the computer to respond, became reluctant to move.
This is much like what happens when a man gets a remote control - he becomes reluctant to move...
Seriously though, the question is, are the neurons they are watching affected by diseases like ALS? If so, then this sort of technique wouldn't benefit people like Dr. Hawking....
Slashdot Mirror
Worst case scenario - the voters get tired, and vote for the lesser of two evils. In other words, it degenerates to what we have now.
However, remember that when that happens, the major parties will have had their big boys cut, and so the odds are much better that a minor party player would win. Do you really think the Republicats would allow that? They would get their act together within two elections.
I wasn't trying to discredit your views, rather I was giving them more weight by showing that others had come to the same conclusion.
Also, I have read Heinlein's book, and in it you could serve in the military OR in civil service. In fact, a long passage in the book covered that very fact (in which the discussion was that if a very disabled individual were to desire citizenship, the government would go to great lengths to provide a chance to serve.)
I suggest YOU go re-read the book.
I knew it! Robert Anson Heinlein LIVES! He faked his death!
/.'ers have read Starship Troopers....
You might wish to credit your source - many
The only problem I see with approval voting is, sad to say, the average person wouldn't understand it.
I think BNOTA has a better chance of being understood.
As for the primaries - Just don't let them ask what party you are registered for. Only let them ask "are you a registered voter in this district". Remove the party affiliation from the voter registration card. IMNSHO, the political parties have NO DAMN RIGHT to ask me my affiliation.
Then if they are private bodies, why cannot I join both the Democrats and Republicans and vote in both primaries?
No, because everybody who ran in the first election is ineligable to run in the second (and any others). That's the "binding" part of binding NOTA.
So, Joe Bloggs runs for office, and gets knocked out by NOTA. Go home Joe. Joe needs no more money, because he can't run.
Meanwhile, Foo Bar runs in the second election. He needed little to no money for the first, since he wasn't running in it. Now he needs money.
Consider it from the point of view of a Big Corporation. Let's say Microsoft spends $1M on Joe Bloggs. Money down the drain, Joe's knocked out. Now, MS can spend another $1M on Foo Bar, but now it starts getting expensive for no guaranteed return. As it stands today, MS can give $1M to Bush, $1M to Gore, and know they've got it covered one way or the other.
I assert that it is not campain finance reform, but campain reform that we need.
Consider first why candidates need the huge amounts of money to be elected. They in effect need to run two entirely different campains - once for the primary, and once for the election. As a result, the cost more than doubles. Now, the thought is that once they've won the primary, their party will contribute to the main election. This is true but irrelevant to this discussion: the party must raise the money, and thus the need for money still is doubled.
Now, I assert that anytime there is a demand, there will be a supply. Consider the origins of soft money - in the old days you could directly support your candidate with any amount of cash you wished. This was deemed a bad thing and so limits were placed on direct contributions. Bang - you now have created "soft money" that doesn't get covered under the hard money laws. Do you really expect that as long as candidates need money they won't find a way around soft money? And realize this: if you put up a piece on your personal web page about how you feel candidate X is [good|bad], that can be considered a "soft" contribution. Do you really want to give the government that power?
Now, consider the 2000 elections. They were very close - so close that the actual vote difference between the candidates was lost in the noise floor. Was this really because the people were split 50/50 in liking Bush and Gore? Most people who voted for [Bush|Gore] did so because they disliked [Bush|Gore] marginally less than they disliked [Gore|Bush].
I assert that we need to make the following two changes to the system:
1) Allow anybody registered to vote to vote in any primary.
2) Require a binding "none of the above" entry on all elections.
Let's examine the results these two changes would have had on the 2000 US presidential election:
1) By allowing anybody registered to vote in any primary, we would de-emphasize the importance of the primaries and pull the results of the primaries back from the extremes. I doubt that Bush would have won the Republican primary, and I doubt that Gore would have won the Democrat primary. Additionally, candidates such as McCain would have had a much better chance of getting support.
2) By having a binding "none of the above", even if the election had been Bush/Gore, the bulk of people could have voted None Of the Above. Had None Of the Above won, then NOBODY in that election could hold the office, and there would have to be a new election. Ask yourself this: no matter your political affiliation, if you could have had a chance to block both Bush and Gore in favor of a shot at a better candidate, would you?
I assert that with these two changes, the following things would happen:
1) The third party candidates wouldn't run in the first race. Instead, they would encourage the voters to vote NOTA in the first race and knock the big boys out.
2) The big parties would no longer be able to take this "This is our guy, take it or leave it" attitude. Thus, they would tend to field more moderate candidates.
3) Because of 1 and 2, more people would feel their vote mattered, and we would get more turnout.
4) Because the primaries could no longer be used to limit our choices, they would become unimportant and would fad away. Remember - the primaries are entirely outside the election process as described in the Constitution.
Now, I don't assert that these changes would prevent lobbying by corporations. However, if a party knew that they could no longer annoint a golden child in the primaries and force them down our throats, they might be more aware of how the PEOPLE feel about an issue, rather than MONEY.
Discussion?
Make it unprofitable. That is the only way to stop spamming.
/. say they work for ISPs that have done this, and that the spammers just refuse to pay. If the ISP charges the spammer's credit card, they dispute the charge and the credit card dings the ISP.
There is no need for a law - ISPs simply need to add a $10000 per incident "clean up fee" to their contract.
Now, I've seen some folks here on
Here's a possible solution to this. Since the spammer signed the contract agreeing to pay, then refusing to pay, along with the prima facia evidence that the spammer was planning on spamming all along should equal fraud, a criminal charge, right? And since the amount is over $1000, it is FELONY fraud, right? So, if the spammer disputes the charge, file fraud charges against them. Get a lein on their house, and hit them in civil court as well.
Get one precident that a clean-up charge in the contract is permissible, and you can start costing those bastards.
And as for all the spammers in fum buk tu, China - block those netblocks at the routers.
Now, considering that many cable modems are owned by the USER, not by the cable supplier, how will they be updated?
If the modem can be updated remotely by the ISP, then it can also be updated by some 5|<r!97 |<!66!E, and that scares the hell out of me.
If the modem can only be updated from the client's side, then how the hell will the cable company know if what update to direct the user to?
And worst yet, what if the modem cannot be reflashed? I can just see the conversation now:
The "keep them on the line for three minutes so we can trace them" is pure Hollywood - it allows a hack writer or director to artificially increase the tension.
In reality, if the cops are watching a line, they will have the call traced before the first ring of the phone - the only time consuming part is getting the warrent and telling the phone company to be ready.
The only reason to keep the person on the line is so that they can roll a unit to the originating phone and arrest the miscreant there. That unit gets rolled as soon as the cops know this call is the one.
Semi-OT: I've oft wondered if one could use a Nimda infected machine as a relay for browsing or I-Phone to cover one's tracks. You could accumulate a list of these machines just by watching your logs, then when you felt the need you bounce off two or three, perhaps using SSL to hide the contents of the traffic until you got to the last machine....
The delta in focal length from the top to the bottom of the chip is going to be in the micron range - you have more focal length variation than that in a film camera just from the tolerances of the transport assembly.
I can think of one way the ISP could track him:
1) send emails to his pbs.org mail address that will generate a reply (ether by nasty scripting tricks, or simply asking him to respond...)
2) Look at the IP address of the reply.
If he does it from his home, they have the IP of his buddy. End game.
Second trick - look around in the specified neighborhood for a transmitter at 2.6GHz. Sniff with Snort.
It reminds me of an old saying: "If you are breaking the the rules, be QUIET about it."
Let's see them make it do a Hammerhead stall.
Then, we arm it, and figure out how to put booster jet engines on it.
THEN we call Stringfellow.
Unless the contract you've signed with them gives them those rights, they have no rights to your code.
What I'd like to see them fix is the )(!@#*& mail and news client automatically rendering HTML mail messages - you get a spam, and there is no way to prevent Mozilla from rendering it when you select it to forward to Spamcop.
d =2 8327
They are working on a pref to prevent Mozilla from hitting the network when rendering mail messages, but it's been pushed back.
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/showvotes.cgi?bug_i
If anyone cares, vote for it.
This unavoidable viewing of a message when it is selected is almost as much of a security hole under Linux as LookOut(TM) is for Windows.
We just need to build a large fleet of spacecraft, and place all these seeds in orbit around Saturn....
<Electronics_lession>
For *any* monitor, it is required to know when a horizontal scan line starts, when it stops, and where the top of the screen is. This information is called sync, and is seperate from the video data that paints the image.
In a normal, modern monitor, five signal lines go to the monitor:
Now, the hsync line is in one state while the monitor is scanning across the display, and another state during the time the electron beam is being swept back across the display (the horizontal retrace interval). The vsync line is in one state when the screen is being painted, and another when the beam is brought back to the top of the screen (the vertical retrace.)
Now, in older monitors, to save signal lines, they used a technique call "sync on green". During the normal horizontal scan, the green line was at a voltage between 0V and 1V, with 1V being full on green, and 0V being no green. During horizontal retrace, the green line went to -0.5V to signal sync. During vertical retrace, the green line was -0.5V during the whole scan line, and went to 0V during the horizontal retrace. By suitable filtering and phase-lock techniques the actual sync signals were recovered from this. Thus, a sync on green monitor required only 3 signal lines.
Now, if you take a normal monitor, and connect it to a sync-on-green system, the monitor's sync inputs will be undriven. A multirate monitor will simply turn off it's drive to the screen, assuming the computer is turned off.
Sync on green has nothing to do with "synchronizing the red and blue signals with the green" - they are synchronous in time already.
Your best bet for such things is to go to a computer graveyard, and try to find an old monitor. Many older monitors would do sync on green as well as normal discrete sync.
</Electronics_lession>
<Rant>
What I don't understand is why everybody is getting so excited about this. Sony is locking you away from the hardware - without a massive RE effort you are not going to be able to do much with this system. For the price of the PS2 and the Linux distro and hardware you could by far more useful devices (until somebody cracks all the hardware protection). Assuming somebody does manage to get raw HW access, Sony will make that person disappear in a puff of red smoke.
Why don't we all just ignore these people until they learn to play nice with others? Look at the Atari 2600, the Apple ][, the PC. They were successful because people could hack them. Sony and Apple learned the wrong lesson ("We must have total control! Nobody BUT US CAN MAKE MONEY OFF THIS") rather than the right lesson ("Hardware like parachute - works best when open.").
</Rant>
Don't you all see, this is what it is going to take to prove to the rest of the universe that we actually are worth talking to.
/cvs/linux-2.4-xfs/linux/Makefile,v
The first interstellar message we receive will start out:
RCS file:
retrieving revision 1.146
diff -r1.146 Makefile
We need to hold MS's feet to the fire on this one. OK, let them have Feb. to lint their code. Let them have March to package it for release. In April, there had better be a service patch released for at least one of their OSs, that measurably improves the security or stability of the OS.
So, come May, it should be provable that they've done some good. It should be possible to take two identical hardware configurations, install the pre-Feb and post-Feb versions, and show that one is more secure, more stable, or both.
If this happens, we should all congratulate Microsoft.
And if this doesn't happen, we should all make damn sure the media doesn't forget.
Actually, all modern power supplies ARE isolated from the power line - that's the core of a switching power supply.
.1 amp, never work alone, one hand in your back pocket)) I design these things for a living.
First, the incoming AC is rectified to DC and filtered. This gives you 300VDC on about 10 to 1000 microfarads of capacitance - enough to kill you dead if it goes through your chest. That part of the circuit is directly connected to the power line.
Then the DC is chopped by a transistor and fed into a transformer (this is the "switching" part of the power supply). This chopping is done at between 60 kHz and 1 MHz (depending upon the power supply). The other side of the transformer (the secondary) is completely isolated from the power line. This voltage is then rectified, filtered, and supplied to the rest of the device. The voltage is measured, and fed back to the switching controller, which drives the switching transistor through either an optocoupler or pulse transformer, closing the feedback loop and regulating the voltage.
If you look at a modern switcher, you will usually see the "hot" side is completely isolated - even unto having sections of the PCB cut to prevent arc-over.
So, the bulk of the power supply, and the rest of the chassis, are NOT electrically connected to the power line. In fact, less of the system is connected to the power line than in an old style line frequency tranformer design. (Now, there were some old designs that rectified the power line and used that directly. THOSE designs were "hot" chassis designs, and were widowmakers...)
That said, you shouldn't go poking around inside a monitor or TV unless you know what you are doing. The anode voltage on the CRT is between 12kV and 25kV (although the source impedance is high enough that it won't kill you). However, the deflection circuits that sweep the electron beam across the CRT are at about 400V and have enough energy to knock you on your ass.
I've worked on TVs, monitors, radio transmitters (including tube based 250 watt repeaters (3kV at
Answer the following questions, truthfully:
1) If Microsoft changes the spec for C# or CLI, can ECMA deny the changes?
1a) If they can deny the changes, can Microsoft still call C# "C#"?
2) Are C# and the CLI completely free of patents?
If the answer to 1) is false, then at any time MS can change the spec on what C# is, and leave Miquel to play catch-up.
If 1) is true and 1a) is true, again MS controls the table.
If 2) is false (it is, by the way...) then at any time MS can jerk Miquel up short and deny everybody the right to use the code without paying them a royalty (think Unisys and LZW).
I assure you, I am neither a troll nor an idiot - rather I am a person who can see beyond "that's cool" and ask myself what the downsides are.
Porting Gnome to
I love the idea of a common runtime environment that supports C++, Java, Perl, Python, etc., runs on all platforms, etc. etc. etc., but I DON'T want that platform in any way controlled by Microsoft (or by Sun, or RedHat, or me!) If any one entity controls the platform, that one entity has entirely too much power - we've simply traded one monopolist for another.
Now, if Miquel wishes to create such an environment under GPL, with no patents held by any organization, then I'm all for it - that way no one organization can embrace and extend the spec. But
A 33.6kbps modem runs about 3 kilobaud, with an 11 bit per symbol QAM constellation.
A 56kbps modem runs 8 kilobaud, with 8 bits per symbol. The telco digitizes voice at 8 bits per sample, 8 ksamples/sec, and the modem actually is just using that. However, the phone company "bit-robs" the signal, taking a few bits here and there to do in-band signaling on the line, hence why the modem cannot rely upon getting all the bits, all the time.
Unforturnately for Larry, the same quote is being said to him by the Free Software movement....
I love the part about how the monkey, once it realized that it didn't have to move in order to get the computer to respond, became reluctant to move.
This is much like what happens when a man gets a remote control - he becomes reluctant to move...
Seriously though, the question is, are the neurons they are watching affected by diseases like ALS? If so, then this sort of technique wouldn't benefit people like Dr. Hawking....