It looks like they're digging up the THOR idea from the Air Force "High Frontiers" project of the '70s.
THOR was a network of cheap satellites that orbited in such a way that they covered any spot on earth every 8 minutes. The sats were composed of a targeting system, optical trackers, and a few dozen steel (prob. depleted uranium these days) bars. On command the steel bars could be launched toward a target on earth, each bar impacting with the force of 25 tons of tnt (approx 12 times the power of the average AF bomb). Sort of like calling Lightening from the skies - hence Thor.
SF author Jerry Pournelle was a big advocate of this system, I believe you can find the actual text of the govt report in several of his short fiction anthologies.
For obvious reasons, this idea never flew, but the space plane is a new option. Rather than a sword poised over the worlds head, the plane only goes up when a strike is intended.
I know many will cry "My god, they're militarizing space, won't somebody please think about the children", but if you want a working space plane, this may be your only option in this lifetime.
NASA will never (and I speak from a position of some knowledge on this) get the kind of funding necessary to perfect a ssto plane. Industry will never put up the money to invent this kind of technology. If you want to see cheap space access anytime this century (barring some fundamental scientific advance that changes the mass/energy equations) let the AF have their plane, and fly it to the stars.
Except that oral contracts are only enforceable up to $500. I'm not certain whether that would mean that he only owed you $500, or if the entire agreement would be null and void.
Insightful?!?
"the Mig-33 is capable of outflying anything we have in the sky (including the F-22!) and while it isn't in production, the possibility remains that other nations could fund the production of those planes (china anyone?!)"
3) The Chinese HAVE been developing the Mig-33 as the FC-1 for almost ten years.
4) "However, the most apparent modifications to the MiG-33 design is the repositioning of the ventral fins from the engine compartment to the added tail edgings, providing aerial maneuverability that is claimed to match that of the American F16."
5) While the F-16 is one of the great all-time aircraft, a F-15 (a no holds barred air superiority fighter, as opposed to the multi-roll F-16) could knock it out of the sky without breaking a sweat. Following, the F-22, it's successor, could knock the F-15, F-16, and FC-1 out while the pilot was filing his nails.
6) We are spending multi-Billion (with a B) dollar bucketloads of money on aircraft modernization and development. If the DoD wants to do a little space R&D, more power to them. After all you can't do much with a fighter but fight, at least the X-33 could take us to the stars.
Good observation, and No, they don't have the equipment.
Congressional budgets for compters/staff/phones are extremely limited given the number of constituents they are there to serve. The budget process is perpetually 3-4 years behind the technology curve. The support staff that works for Congress as a whole is civil service, and loathe to adopt anything new. Many offices are still using Dos based applications, and cc:Mail is still the e-mail client for Senate offices. The average salary for a Senate sysadmin is $40,000 a year - to manage a system for 40-70 people, including 3-4 remote offices, massive amounts of e-mail, and generally clueless users. Oh, and they are usually the entire IT staff.
There are a number of staffers and members who would like to see this changed, but due to the self-fulfilling complaints that "Congress sucks" it is political suicide to attempt to increase the budgets to something even close to what is needed.
Come on, Adams agreed to have Dilbert and Dogbert appear on the package of a product that is as intergral to most nerd diets are reeces pieces, diet dr. pepper, microwave burritos, and cpt. crunch - a product that gives a not insignificant portion of its' profits to charity (or at least they did before the corporate takeover).
To say the relentlessly commercialized Simpsons only "aspire" to sell out as much is... well just wrong.
Not to say the Simpson's aren't sometimes very well written, but MG sure knows how to squeeze a buck out of everything.
Just for information - Rambus never signed an agreement - neither Hyundai or JEDEC is alledging this, because no one has been able to produce paper. They are arguing that through its' very attendence at meetings Rambus was a party to the rules of the group. No dues were paid and no agreements were signed.
One the other hand, Rambus did vote at the meetings. It's just that their only votes were to NOT adopt their technology.
Let's see: a) 4 protestors killed in a single flurry of gunfire by one scared, itchy, and poorly trained national guard unit. b) 1,000 (possibly many, many more) protestors killed by in sustained action by armor and assault units UNDER ORDERS to attack (not disperse) the crowd.
Your moral relativism throughout this arguement has clearly shown how, even in a open marketplace of ideas, one must be very cautious about who is selling. Beware the seemingly reasonable arguement that draws parallels like the one above.
Given the ultimate subjectiveness of good and evil to so many it can be simply put that the dictatorial, militaristic police state of the PRC is substantially more evil than the capitalistic, corporate dominated republic of the US. Therefore the US is justified, as a force of (comparitive) good to take action to defend itself and its' allies against the actions of the PRC.
Increased support/protection of personal privacy? So long as you don't use that privacy to view anything subversive or pornographic. The new administration has repeatedly pledged to "clean up the web."
Just saying nice things about individual rights is not enough - you need to defend those rights when people use them to do things you don't like. Otherwise it's hypocrisy, not advocacy.
appreciate the response. I just checked back this morning to see that my half-cocked response created some bad blood. I must admit that on second (and third) reading it still sounds (to me) like he's talking about weapons systems that do not have a human operator discriminating the targets - several other posters brought up this point as well. That being said, apparently, I was wrong, my apologies.
One of the responses indicated that they thought there really wouldn't be a human operator. I can tell you with the confidence of someone who has been briefed on this project that their will indeed be someone who pushes a button to fire the lazer at a target or a series of targets. The plane itself will not detect launches, that will be done by some (very good) sats. The information will be relayed to missile command and the plane, whose pilots will recieve immediate guidence on where to put the plane in optimal firing position (though the laser has a remarkable field of fire) An operator will then essentially "start" the laser, which will lock and destroy the target(s) it's been given.
Interestingly, the AF believes that if necessary the ABL could defend itself against incoming hostile aircraft (and even some of the larger SAMS) if necessary. I'll believe it (and be impressed) when I see it.
First, I am constantly amazed at how a technologicaly sophisticated group like/. readers becomes as your average nimby luddites when a technical issue you don't like/don't understand comes around. This weapon WILL NOT fire itself, to run off on that tangent is to put yourself on the level of people who believe that genetically modified corn might become an intelligent super-race.
When targets are detected, an operator will tell it to fire, it will lock on the targets and destroy them. It will not just decide it doesn't like the looks of a passing widebody and bisect it.
Second, all sorts of indiscriminate weapons are allowed under international law - landmines and sea mines to name a couple - no human identifies their targets. That this weapon might be illegal (I'm sorry, ILLEGAL) is no more true than the claim that Geneva convention outlaws the use of.50cal machine guns on people (another old chestnut).
$999 (in stores) for fake leather, or $1,199 for the real thing.
If they were smart they would also sell a version w/o the webtv device or keyboard, but still with the useful tray and cable conduits, (and space to put in one of those espresso minicomps if your chair isn't near your computer). It wouldn't cost them anymore to do, they'd sell more chairs, and get another whole audience who thought La-z-boy was for old farts (no offense dad).
I have been trying to find an appropriate living room computer chair - I swear, I would buy this thing without the webtv crap (for $899).
Oh, one more thing - it sounds like we came damn close to losing cmdrtaco - household current is not a toy. I can see it now - "/.er invents worlds most comfortable electric chair, Bush calls it soft on crime."
XXXXXX understands how central computers have become to each employee¦s work-day. Much as it has become acceptable for employees to use their phone for personal calls on their break or lunch hour, there are certain acceptable personal uses for your desktop computer. These include:
A reasonable number of personal e-mails
Web-browsing or other Internet activities
Writing personal letters
These acceptable uses are modified by the following restrictions:
Web browsing should be limited to sites appropriate for a business environment, particularly in view of the conduct policies listed above.
Downloads must not include copyrighted materials of any kind without the copyright holder¦s permission.
No printing of web content, letters or envelopes on Office printers.
Failure to follow these terms may result in disciplinary action.
Acceptable use may result in an employee¦s personal files, or records of personal activities, residing on the computer system. Employees should keep in mind that the Systems Administrator might need to access a particular computer for maintenance or security reasons. The Office reserves the right to access any computer or file at any time for official purposes. Every effort will be made to preserve the individuals users privacy. No files on an office desktop system should be considered secure or confidential.
While it is technologically possible to track each employee¦s personal use of the computers, it is the policy of the office not to monitor the file access or keystrokes of its employees. Review of system logs and other computer records may take place only after an allegation of misconduct has been made.
>>>>>>>>>>
The restrictions on printing, etc. are due to the fact that this policy is for a public office, the materials, paper, toner, etc. are therefore intended only for official use, and it would be irresponsible/illegal to allow private use. The same arguement might be made for your responsibility to shareholders, but I would generally allow some limited use of office materials.
This is a fairly indepth look at the issue. There was also an article I read once in the late 80's call "The Red Car and Roger Rabbit", in a transportation policy magazine - if one cares to track it down. If I remember, there was some nefarious goings on in that case at least.
On thing is for sure, Bob Hoskins comment about "who would want to have a car in LA - the Red Car goes everywhere you want to go" was true at one time.
Gee, that's funny, I thought Samsung (20.7% of the memory market), NEC, Hitachi, Elpida (the NEC/Hitachi successor - 13.6% of the memory market), Oki and several other smaller (less than 10% of the market) companies had all agreed to pay royalties for RAMBUS's intellectual property (all types of DDR RAM including RDRAM AND DDR SDRAM)
As far as downsizing and restructuring, RAMBUS is making money hand over fist now (doubling earnings estimates last quarter - that's earnings - making money, not shrinking their loss like many OS companies we know and love).
RAMBUS legal fees are now coming straight out of profits - there is no chance they will "run out of money before the cases settle", and legal fees, with Three major ongoing cases are less than 10% of earnings (notice that's earnings, not revenues)
Just some information to enlighten all the anti-RAMBUS posts.
Actually, I'm not arguing that the company isn't scum, but the technology has been bashed unthinkingly by people who think they're scum and can't differentiate between the technology and its' owners.
Let's see what Dr. Tom, a noted Rambus hater, has to say...
"You can see that the memory speed does indeed have a major impact on all the benchmark results except of the 3D Studio Max scores. In some cases the difference between the slowest and the fastest score is more than 10%! This proves clearly that Pentium 4 lives from the high memory bandwidth that RDRAM is finally able to deliver. Keep that in mind in case someone wants to sell you PC600 RDRAM!................What do I think of the components around Pentium 4? I have got to admit it, but with Pentium 4 Rambus is finally able to deliver for the first time. If you look at Pentium 4's design closely enough, you can see that it's engineered to live with RDRAM in perfect harmony. The memory benchmarks from above show that Pentium 4 really requires the 3,200 MB/s of data bandwidth supplied by the two Rambus channels. I doubt that it will perform as well with DDR-SDRAM, unless two channels will be used. One DDR-SDRAM channel offers 'only' 2,122 MB/s of data bandwidth, which might make quite a difference with Pentium 4."
The technology works as advertised, maybe we can stop all the mindless bashing now.
I submitted this as a story in its' own right last night (rejected) - anybody think this is a rather significant question in relation the position/. (and the open source movement as a whole) takes on the UCITA?
>>>>What is the story here -/. is leading voice of the Open Source movement and chief critic of the UCITA. Learned representatives of the Linux movement (as excerpted from Technology Daily below) seem to feel the two positions are incompatible? Who's right?
Consumer groups' opposition to current software licensing practices -- and to the Uniform Computer Information Transaction Act (UCITA), which is strongly supported by software manufacturers -- could have the unintended effect of threatening the existence of open source software, an attorney for companies and organizations that develop free software said Thursday.
Speaking at a Federal Trade Commission workshop at which consumer groups and technology companies aired their views of UCITA and its impact of software licenses and warranties, attorney Carol Kunze said the open source and free software movements were extremely concerned about restrictions on their ability to license their programs.
"Licensing is critical, and the ability to embed the license in the product is critical," said Kunze -- who represents Red Hat, TurboLinux, and other companies and groups who create open source software, or free software, that is available for download and redistribution.
Although most of the consumer groups' complaints are directed at software companies that license software for a fee and require individuals to accept the terms of the license before they make a purchase, the dispute over licenses opens a new conflict between consumer groups and the open source movement. Kunze said that open software companies would be wiped out if they had to provide warranties about the software they distribute.
In particular, Kunze criticized a proposal that the Consumer Federation of America made to the FTC prior to the conference that software companies sell rather than license their wares. She expressed concern that this would subject software-makers to the 1975 Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act -- which requires that companies certify the reliability of their product before they sell it.
"Magnuson-Moss applies to the sale of consumer goods," said Kunze. "What we do is license. We are worried that people are arguing that it should apply."
She added: "Because the software is free, there are no license fees to support a warranty. If free software makers lose the right to disclaim all warranties and find themselves getting sued over the performance of the programs they've written, they will stop contributing free software to the world."
But Jonathan Band, an attorney at Morrison and Forester who represents technology companies that seek to develop interoperable systems, said that Kunze's defense of licensing was overwrought. "It is a given that people are going to license software," Band said. "Given that, the question is whether there certain terms that should be prohibited in licenses."
I don't have a lot of time for this right now, but this needs to be said, and this topic is probably as good as it gets.
This is how a Congressional mail operation works. There are slight variations office-to- office, but this is what you need to know in terms of influencing Congress.
An average Senate office receives approx. 2000 letters, and 500 e-mails each week. Each day mail is and sorted by interns into issue areas and then distributed to Legislative Correspondents. These LCs are usually 23-25 years old, and have a basic grounding in the issue area they are covering. It is their job to read the e-mails for nuances the interns may have missed, group them together, and write responses.
The responses are then given to a Legislative Assistant. (LAs, 25-50 yrs, (hopefully) experts on their area, usually superior in knowledge to the private sector experts who populate think tanks, universities, and lobbying firms. Most DC lobbyists and think tankers are ex-LAs. These are the people who write a vast majority of what comes out of Congress) They edit and approve them. In the mean time, the mail manager (sometimes also the SysAdmin) totals up the mail by area of concern and e-mails a report to the legislative and executive staff, including the Senator, once a week.
This is where you influence the process. If the office receives 5000 letters this week instead of 2000, the staff will tend to notice and take note of what issue the constituents are concerned with. This is combined with phone calls received, both in DC and in the State offices, to detect groundswells of interest in a particular issue. These groundswells are rarely detected. Most people just don't care enough. A well-organized and motivated group can therefore have quite an effect if they can truly deliver the numbers.
E-mails: I have stressed on/. before how important it is to write a paper letter and not e-mail. This is the relative regard with which each type of competition is held:
>Paper letter: The holy grail. Most offices have a strict policy of responding to every single paper letter they receive, not matter how bizarre (trust me), and losing or missing more than a handful can cost an LC their job. All letters are logged and read.
>Phone Call: You will generally get to speak to a Staff Assistant (receptionist/LC trainee). Office have one of two policies, either they tally the opinion of each caller and send it to the mail manager for inclusion in the mail report, or they take down the persons issue and information, and respond to the call as they would a letter. Very few offices will give you a call back from an LA, that's what the Staff Assistants are there for. This is partially self preservation, if the LA's were that accessible, they would never get any other work done (I know, you may like that idea, they certainly don't.)
>E-mail: Up until the last year, usually ignored. Now, maybe a third of the offices print out the e-mail and respond like a regular letter, the other 2/3 either continues to ignore them or simply tallies them like phone calls. Before you get all excited about "they print out e-mails", these people are not luddites (ed. >and no, Katz, the Luddites were not noble in any way), all mail goes out under the Senator's signature. Until we have an effective system of e-signatures not office will be able to respond officially by e-mail. That being said, there is not excuse for any office not treating e-mails as regular mail.
There is one crucial point here. Offices will only respond to their constituents (people who they represent.) It is generally always possible to tell where paper mail comes from. This is not the case with e-mail. Unless you include a full return mailing address, you will not receive a response, and you message will not be counted.
>Petitions/Post Cards: Many groups organize mass mailing campaigns with pre-printed postcards or petitions. Many rather questionable lobbies, and some that are outright fraudulent, use these methods to make their members feel that they are being heard. Other people try to make money by setting themselves up as an intermediary between themselves and Congress, vote.com is a modern, e-mail based iteration of this problem. The fact that e-mail makes it easier to prepackage this kind of contact is one of the reasons that it will take time for e-mail to be regarded on par with written communication.
Most petitions and post cards, if they are even looked at, are logged and disposed of. If they are logged, they are listed on a separate line on any mail report (ie. We have 800 letters on MP3, 500 on Social Security, and 1200 on H1-B, we also received approx 1500 postcards on the following subjects...)
The thing to remember is this, the people in Washington are not stupid (I know that may be hard for the average/.'er to believe, and sometimes I don't believe it myself.) They have seen every effort to hack the system, and have devised appropriate responses. You will not find an easy way to get around the requirement that many different individuals from all over the country write, call and visit their individual Congressmen and Senators if you want an effective lobby.
A million e-mail march sounds lovely, but if it is a million e-mails, all coming from the mp3.com site, with form letter language, without names and return mailing address, the entire effort will be dashed against the rocks of a system designed to respond to only honest, organized grassroots action.
I would like nothing more than to see an organized group of techs making noise and being heard on the issues we all rant about on/., but this looks like another false start. For the community, I am going to try and write a more organized, more extensive, and more lucid guide to action toward the end of the year. Hope this is helpful for now.
A couple of other things.
don't worry about taking down a members mail server. All offices are behind a central mail server for the entire House or Senate. It would be fairly hard to take these servers down (though the SysAdmins manage to do so on a regular basis;)
I'm sure MP3.com has some professional DC based advice on organizing this campaign. I sure it will look quite impressive on that lobbyist/lobbying firms record. That doesn't mean it will be effective. To the average lobbyist, the ultimate effort is one that generates a lot of "sound and fury, signifying nothing." If it looks impressive, but doesn't win the day, you can bet the clients going to be back for more. It is a system that rewards a lack of progress. But more on that later...
I'm not really sure what you mean by all this. No "lobbyist" from the Digital Media Association has ever been with in spitting distance of the tech policy makers on the hill. I'm not even sure they have a real lobbyist. A quick poll of House and Senate tech LA's tells me that not one of them has ever heard of the DiMA (unfortunately, six months ago 90% of them had never heard of Linux either, but that's another story)
I am all for (hell, I'm calling for) more lobbyists representing the tech producer/user in Washington, D.C., but it is counter productive to give credit to a group that is not accomplishing anything - it takes attention away from those who may be putting together viable efforts.
MP3.com, not my favorite company, did hire a lobbyist to draft sample legislation, and had the Pres and CEO on heavy rotation in House and Senate offices around the hill asking someone to introduce this bill. There was no pressure, or even a whisper, from any other source in support of legislation like this.
Tech users need to get more organized, the only tech lobbies here now are the companies (and they just want H1-B), and groups like the EFF (good group - no real lobby) and the Center for Democracy in Technology (nice, smart guys but not much direct policy input). The closest we have to a representative is the Consumer Electronics groups, because they want to make what the MPAA, RIAA, etc. want to ban, and they want to make it without restrictions. They're not perfect allies (few businesses are), but at least they have their nose to the wheel.
1) This has been stated, I cannot stress this strongly enough - Send a letter, and send it by snail mail. You can thank a whole industry that used to specialize in spamming Congress by snail mail, and has now moved to e-mail, for this.
2) Include your full home mailing address - you will only be logged ("Senator, we've gotten 1,200 letters this month encouraging you to support the MP3 bill") and receive a reply if they are sure you are a constituent.
3) This bill will not pass this session (which is supposed to end in a week, but will likely last a few weeks longer.) It just doesn't work that way - If Hatch or Wyden had introduced a Senate bill at the same time there might have been a chance, but it still would have been unlikely. The legislative process is meant to encourage sober;) reflection. If this moves, it will likely move in Feb-March of next year - however, you letters now will make a difference in that move.
4) To all those who seem to think this is part of some NSA conspiracy, I think you may have left your aluminum foil hat at (the) home today
sorry, but this is a fairly well written first step toward the kind of public policy that has been advocated on/. - it is extraordinarily irritating to see parinoid people attacking it - hell you just might have given the RIAA lobbyists an idea - go back the the Congressmens districts and tell their constituents that the congressmen supports tracking all of the music you listen to in a top secret database. The bill would die a quick and painful death.
5) Laws are written in a generally vague way - open to courts interpretation - because if you write them very specifically, there will be loopholes - it is almost impossible when dealing with a human based system, to write iron rules. Human beings are flexible and creative - either way we will have court interpretation, be being vague we insure deference to "legislative intent" (in this case, to allow MP3.com and its' followers to keep doing what they do).
I appreciate the thoughtful reply, and I don't know the etiquette of replying to ones own submission, but I thought I would elaborate on the idea.
This time next year I would expect 1Ghz level cpus with TV capable graphic cards and 40 Gig drives should have penetrated at least 10% of the home market. (This is 9+% higher than the current penetration of Tivo like devices.)
Stats show that this edge of the market tends to own 2 or more computers, (rising with the number of kids) and has at least one in the "living room". That doesn't really take into account us bleeding edge adopters (who are a substantial fraction of current Tivo customers) who may have one (older) machine as an MP3 jukebox, a home server, and several linux boxen running, well, stuff...
regardless, we appear to have the market penetration of hardware to make us of this kind of service, so the investment to launch is much lower - no hardware design, contract gaurentees or distribution. When you look at the difficulty of getting hardware into the home, the idea of using a pre-installed base should be an appealing business model. Heck, the software and weekly programming can be downloaded from a web site.
I'm not saying this is superior to a stand alone device, just that it should be a viable and desirable option to those who already have the hardware capability at home. It would be hard to recreate the device for the same price in a pc case, but if you already have the tools... After all, I don't need three power saws - or do I....
This has been bugging me for a while now. About 20 years ago (1980 was 20 years ago - yeesh) A SF writer had the foresight to put out a short story about a society where computer use had become ubiquitous, for banking, getting directions, playing games, ordering food, etc. The story centered around a character who had been convicted of a computer crime, was made unable to use a computer (the Mitnick case has gotten me to thinking about this) through operant conditioning (see A Clockwork Orange) and was consequently more helpless than a child.
The reason for bringing all of this up: His point was that in a society that has become dependent on the computer, computer crimes (cracking) would become a capitol offense, deserving of the kind of hostility we reserve for rapists or pedophiles today.
While society currently has some admiration for "those scrappy nerds and their new fangled computers" we can expect a day, sometime soon perhaps, when the cracker (and even the hacker) become the unseen menace, the criminal making sure that porn, copyrights, and dangerous ideas are foisted on our children in the dark corners of the Net.
That said, I do not agree with the speaker's overall point, and IMO security through obscurity is a fundamentally flawed idea.
Oh, and what's been bugging me. I read the story, heck, I'm pretty sure I own the book, but I can't for the life of me remember the author or find the source, I think it may have been edited by Asimov. As most good fiction does, I think the story provides an interesting perspective on the problem of script kiddies today and the implications of their depredations for the future.
Slashdot Mirror
It looks like they're digging up the THOR idea from the Air Force "High Frontiers" project of the '70s.
THOR was a network of cheap satellites that orbited in such a way that they covered any spot on earth every 8 minutes. The sats were composed of a targeting system, optical trackers, and a few dozen steel (prob. depleted uranium these days) bars. On command the steel bars could be launched toward a target on earth, each bar impacting with the force of 25 tons of tnt (approx 12 times the power of the average AF bomb). Sort of like calling Lightening from the skies - hence Thor.
SF author Jerry Pournelle was a big advocate of this system, I believe you can find the actual text of the govt report in several of his short fiction anthologies.
For obvious reasons, this idea never flew, but the space plane is a new option. Rather than a sword poised over the worlds head, the plane only goes up when a strike is intended.
I know many will cry "My god, they're militarizing space, won't somebody please think about the children", but if you want a working space plane, this may be your only option in this lifetime.
NASA will never (and I speak from a position of some knowledge on this) get the kind of funding necessary to perfect a ssto plane. Industry will never put up the money to invent this kind of technology. If you want to see cheap space access anytime this century (barring some fundamental scientific advance that changes the mass/energy equations) let the AF have their plane, and fly it to the stars.
Except that oral contracts are only enforceable up to $500. I'm not certain whether that would mean that he only owed you $500, or if the entire agreement would be null and void.
Alright - the facts
1) http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/ac/row/fc-1.htm
2) The Mig-33 was at best comparable to the F-16
3) The Chinese HAVE been developing the Mig-33 as the FC-1 for almost ten years.
4) "However, the most apparent modifications to the MiG-33 design is the repositioning of the ventral fins from the engine compartment to the added tail edgings, providing aerial maneuverability that is claimed to match that of the American F16."
5) While the F-16 is one of the great all-time aircraft, a F-15 (a no holds barred air superiority fighter, as opposed to the multi-roll F-16) could knock it out of the sky without breaking a sweat. Following, the F-22, it's successor, could knock the F-15, F-16, and FC-1 out while the pilot was filing his nails.
6) We are spending multi-Billion (with a B) dollar bucketloads of money on aircraft modernization and development. If the DoD wants to do a little space R&D, more power to them. After all you can't do much with a fighter but fight, at least the X-33 could take us to the stars.
Good observation, and No, they don't have the equipment.
Congressional budgets for compters/staff/phones are extremely limited given the number of constituents they are there to serve. The budget process is perpetually 3-4 years behind the technology curve. The support staff that works for Congress as a whole is civil service, and loathe to adopt anything new. Many offices are still using Dos based applications, and cc:Mail is still the e-mail client for Senate offices. The average salary for a Senate sysadmin is $40,000 a year - to manage a system for 40-70 people, including 3-4 remote offices, massive amounts of e-mail, and generally clueless users. Oh, and they are usually the entire IT staff.
There are a number of staffers and members who would like to see this changed, but due to the self-fulfilling complaints that "Congress sucks" it is political suicide to attempt to increase the budgets to something even close to what is needed.
Come on, Adams agreed to have Dilbert and Dogbert appear on the package of a product that is as intergral to most nerd diets are reeces pieces, diet dr. pepper, microwave burritos, and cpt. crunch - a product that gives a not insignificant portion of its' profits to charity (or at least they did before the corporate takeover).
To say the relentlessly commercialized Simpsons only "aspire" to sell out as much is... well just wrong.
Not to say the Simpson's aren't sometimes very well written, but MG sure knows how to squeeze a buck out of everything.
long live Gnutella
Just for information - Rambus never signed an agreement - neither Hyundai or JEDEC is alledging this, because no one has been able to produce paper. They are arguing that through its' very attendence at meetings Rambus was a party to the rules of the group. No dues were paid and no agreements were signed.
One the other hand, Rambus did vote at the meetings. It's just that their only votes were to NOT adopt their technology.
Let's see: a) 4 protestors killed in a single flurry of gunfire by one scared, itchy, and poorly trained national guard unit. b) 1,000 (possibly many, many more) protestors killed by in sustained action by armor and assault units UNDER ORDERS to attack (not disperse) the crowd.
Your moral relativism throughout this arguement has clearly shown how, even in a open marketplace of ideas, one must be very cautious about who is selling. Beware the seemingly reasonable arguement that draws parallels like the one above.
Given the ultimate subjectiveness of good and evil to so many it can be simply put that the dictatorial, militaristic police state of the PRC is substantially more evil than the capitalistic, corporate dominated republic of the US. Therefore the US is justified, as a force of (comparitive) good to take action to defend itself and its' allies against the actions of the PRC.
Increased support/protection of personal privacy? So long as you don't use that privacy to view anything subversive or pornographic. The new administration has repeatedly pledged to "clean up the web."
Just saying nice things about individual rights is not enough - you need to defend those rights when people use them to do things you don't like. Otherwise it's hypocrisy, not advocacy.
One of the responses indicated that they thought there really wouldn't be a human operator. I can tell you with the confidence of someone who has been briefed on this project that their will indeed be someone who pushes a button to fire the lazer at a target or a series of targets. The plane itself will not detect launches, that will be done by some (very good) sats. The information will be relayed to missile command and the plane, whose pilots will recieve immediate guidence on where to put the plane in optimal firing position (though the laser has a remarkable field of fire) An operator will then essentially "start" the laser, which will lock and destroy the target(s) it's been given.
Interestingly, the AF believes that if necessary the ABL could defend itself against incoming hostile aircraft (and even some of the larger SAMS) if necessary. I'll believe it (and be impressed) when I see it.
First, I am constantly amazed at how a technologicaly sophisticated group like /. readers becomes as your average nimby luddites when a technical issue you don't like/don't understand comes around. This weapon WILL NOT fire itself, to run off on that tangent is to put yourself on the level of people who believe that genetically modified corn might become an intelligent super-race.
When targets are detected, an operator will tell it to fire, it will lock on the targets and destroy them. It will not just decide it doesn't like the looks of a passing widebody and bisect it.
Second, all sorts of indiscriminate weapons are allowed under international law - landmines and sea mines to name a couple - no human identifies their targets. That this weapon might be illegal (I'm sorry, ILLEGAL) is no more true than the claim that Geneva convention outlaws the use of .50cal machine guns on people (another old chestnut).
$999 (in stores) for fake leather, or $1,199 for the real thing.
If they were smart they would also sell a version w/o the webtv device or keyboard, but still with the useful tray and cable conduits, (and space to put in one of those espresso minicomps if your chair isn't near your computer). It wouldn't cost them anymore to do, they'd sell more chairs, and get another whole audience who thought La-z-boy was for old farts (no offense dad).
I have been trying to find an appropriate living room computer chair - I swear, I would buy this thing without the webtv crap (for $899).
Oh, one more thing - it sounds like we came damn close to losing cmdrtaco - household current is not a toy. I can see it now - "/.er invents worlds most comfortable electric chair, Bush calls it soft on crime."
XXXXXX understands how central computers have become to each employee¦s work-day. Much as it has become acceptable for employees to use their phone for personal calls on their break or lunch hour, there are certain acceptable personal uses for your desktop computer. These include:
A reasonable number of personal e-mails
Web-browsing or other Internet activities
Writing personal letters
These acceptable uses are modified by the following restrictions:
Web browsing should be limited to sites appropriate for a business environment, particularly in view of the conduct policies listed above.
Downloads must not include copyrighted materials of any kind without the copyright holder¦s permission.
No printing of web content, letters or envelopes on Office printers.
Failure to follow these terms may result in disciplinary action.
Acceptable use may result in an employee¦s personal files, or records of personal activities, residing on the computer system. Employees should keep in mind that the Systems Administrator might need to access a particular computer for maintenance or security reasons. The Office reserves the right to access any computer or file at any time for official purposes. Every effort will be made to preserve the individuals users privacy. No files on an office desktop system should be considered secure or confidential.
While it is technologically possible to track each employee¦s personal use of the computers, it is the policy of the office not to monitor the file access or keystrokes of its employees. Review of system logs and other computer records may take place only after an allegation of misconduct has been made.
>>>>>>>>>>
The restrictions on printing, etc. are due to the fact that this policy is for a public office, the materials, paper, toner, etc. are therefore intended only for official use, and it would be irresponsible/illegal to allow private use. The same arguement might be made for your responsibility to shareholders, but I would generally allow some limited use of office materials.
This is a fairly indepth look at the issue. There was also an article I read once in the late 80's call "The Red Car and Roger Rabbit", in a transportation policy magazine - if one cares to track it down. If I remember, there was some nefarious goings on in that case at least.
On thing is for sure, Bob Hoskins comment about "who would want to have a car in LA - the Red Car goes everywhere you want to go" was true at one time.
It's as much a 400mhz bus as the Athlon is a 200mhz bus, and I haven't seen anyone complaining about that.
Gee, that's funny, I thought Samsung (20.7% of the memory market), NEC, Hitachi, Elpida (the NEC/Hitachi successor - 13.6% of the memory market), Oki and several other smaller (less than 10% of the market) companies had all agreed to pay royalties for RAMBUS's intellectual property (all types of DDR RAM including RDRAM AND DDR SDRAM)
As far as downsizing and restructuring, RAMBUS is making money hand over fist now (doubling earnings estimates last quarter - that's earnings - making money, not shrinking their loss like many OS companies we know and love).
RAMBUS legal fees are now coming straight out of profits - there is no chance they will "run out of money before the cases settle", and legal fees, with Three major ongoing cases are less than 10% of earnings (notice that's earnings, not revenues)
Just some information to enlighten all the anti-RAMBUS posts.
Strap a bunch of these to the legs of Sealand and bang (or whoosh) a local, consistant power supply.
Actually, I'm not arguing that the company isn't scum, but the technology has been bashed unthinkingly by people who think they're scum and can't differentiate between the technology and its' owners.
Let's see what Dr. Tom, a noted Rambus hater, has to say...
................What do I think of the components around Pentium 4? I have got to admit it, but with Pentium 4 Rambus is finally able to deliver for the first time. If you look at Pentium 4's design closely enough, you can see that it's engineered to live with RDRAM in perfect harmony. The memory benchmarks from above show that Pentium 4 really requires the 3,200 MB/s of data bandwidth supplied by the two Rambus channels. I doubt that it will perform as well with DDR-SDRAM, unless two channels will be used. One DDR-SDRAM channel offers 'only' 2,122 MB/s of data bandwidth, which might make quite a difference with Pentium 4."
"You can see that the memory speed does indeed have a major impact on all the benchmark results except of the 3D Studio Max scores. In some cases the difference between the slowest and the fastest score is more than 10%! This proves clearly that Pentium 4 lives from the high memory bandwidth that RDRAM is finally able to deliver. Keep that in mind in case someone wants to sell you PC600 RDRAM!
The technology works as advertised, maybe we can stop all the mindless bashing now.
I submitted this as a story in its' own right last night (rejected) - anybody think this is a rather significant question in relation the position /. (and the open source movement as a whole) takes on the UCITA?
/. is leading voice of the Open Source movement and chief critic of the UCITA. Learned representatives of the Linux movement (as excerpted from Technology Daily below) seem to feel the two positions are incompatible? Who's right?
>>>>What is the story here -
Consumer groups' opposition to current software licensing practices -- and to the Uniform Computer Information Transaction Act (UCITA), which is strongly supported by software manufacturers -- could have the unintended effect of threatening the existence of open source software, an attorney for companies and organizations that develop free software said Thursday.
Speaking at a Federal Trade Commission workshop at which consumer groups and technology companies aired their views of UCITA and its impact of software licenses and warranties, attorney Carol Kunze said the open source and free software movements were extremely concerned about restrictions on their ability to license their programs.
"Licensing is critical, and the ability to embed the license in the product is critical," said Kunze -- who represents Red Hat, TurboLinux, and other companies and groups who create open source software, or free software, that is available for download and redistribution.
Although most of the consumer groups' complaints are directed at software companies that license software for a fee and require individuals to accept the terms of the license before they make a purchase, the dispute over licenses opens a new conflict between consumer groups and the open source movement. Kunze said that open software companies would be wiped out if they had to provide warranties about the software they distribute.
In particular, Kunze criticized a proposal that the Consumer Federation of America made to the FTC prior to the conference that software companies sell rather than license their wares. She expressed concern that this would subject software-makers to the 1975 Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act -- which requires that companies certify the reliability of their product before they sell it.
"Magnuson-Moss applies to the sale of consumer goods," said Kunze. "What we do is license. We are worried that people are arguing that it should apply."
She added: "Because the software is free, there are no license fees to support a warranty. If free software makers lose the right to disclaim all warranties and find themselves getting sued over the performance of the programs they've written, they will stop contributing free software to the world."
But Jonathan Band, an attorney at Morrison and Forester who represents technology companies that seek to develop interoperable systems, said that Kunze's defense of licensing was overwrought. "It is a given that people are going to license software," Band said. "Given that, the question is whether there certain terms that should be prohibited in licenses."
I don't have a lot of time for this right now, but this needs to be said, and this topic is probably as good as it gets.
/. before how important it is to write a paper letter and not e-mail. This is the relative regard with which each type of competition is held:
/.'er to believe, and sometimes I don't believe it myself.) They have seen every effort to hack the system, and have devised appropriate responses. You will not find an easy way to get around the requirement that many different individuals from all over the country write, call and visit their individual Congressmen and Senators if you want an effective lobby.
/., but this looks like another false start. For the community, I am going to try and write a more organized, more extensive, and more lucid guide to action toward the end of the year. Hope this is helpful for now.
;)
This is how a Congressional mail operation works. There are slight variations office-to- office, but this is what you need to know in terms of influencing Congress.
An average Senate office receives approx. 2000 letters, and 500 e-mails each week. Each day mail is and sorted by interns into issue areas and then distributed to Legislative Correspondents. These LCs are usually 23-25 years old, and have a basic grounding in the issue area they are covering. It is their job to read the e-mails for nuances the interns may have missed, group them together, and write responses.
The responses are then given to a Legislative Assistant. (LAs, 25-50 yrs, (hopefully) experts on their area, usually superior in knowledge to the private sector experts who populate think tanks, universities, and lobbying firms. Most DC lobbyists and think tankers are ex-LAs. These are the people who write a vast majority of what comes out of Congress) They edit and approve them. In the mean time, the mail manager (sometimes also the SysAdmin) totals up the mail by area of concern and e-mails a report to the legislative and executive staff, including the Senator, once a week.
This is where you influence the process. If the office receives 5000 letters this week instead of 2000, the staff will tend to notice and take note of what issue the constituents are concerned with. This is combined with phone calls received, both in DC and in the State offices, to detect groundswells of interest in a particular issue. These groundswells are rarely detected. Most people just don't care enough. A well-organized and motivated group can therefore have quite an effect if they can truly deliver the numbers.
E-mails: I have stressed on
>Paper letter: The holy grail. Most offices have a strict policy of responding to every single paper letter they receive, not matter how bizarre (trust me), and losing or missing more than a handful can cost an LC their job. All letters are logged and read.
>Phone Call: You will generally get to speak to a Staff Assistant (receptionist/LC trainee). Office have one of two policies, either they tally the opinion of each caller and send it to the mail manager for inclusion in the mail report, or they take down the persons issue and information, and respond to the call as they would a letter. Very few offices will give you a call back from an LA, that's what the Staff Assistants are there for. This is partially self preservation, if the LA's were that accessible, they would never get any other work done (I know, you may like that idea, they certainly don't.)
>E-mail: Up until the last year, usually ignored. Now, maybe a third of the offices print out the e-mail and respond like a regular letter, the other 2/3 either continues to ignore them or simply tallies them like phone calls. Before you get all excited about "they print out e-mails", these people are not luddites (ed. >and no, Katz, the Luddites were not noble in any way), all mail goes out under the Senator's signature. Until we have an effective system of e-signatures not office will be able to respond officially by e-mail. That being said, there is not excuse for any office not treating e-mails as regular mail.
There is one crucial point here. Offices will only respond to their constituents (people who they represent.) It is generally always possible to tell where paper mail comes from. This is not the case with e-mail. Unless you include a full return mailing address, you will not receive a response, and you message will not be counted.
>Petitions/Post Cards: Many groups organize mass mailing campaigns with pre-printed postcards or petitions. Many rather questionable lobbies, and some that are outright fraudulent, use these methods to make their members feel that they are being heard. Other people try to make money by setting themselves up as an intermediary between themselves and Congress, vote.com is a modern, e-mail based iteration of this problem. The fact that e-mail makes it easier to prepackage this kind of contact is one of the reasons that it will take time for e-mail to be regarded on par with written communication.
Most petitions and post cards, if they are even looked at, are logged and disposed of. If they are logged, they are listed on a separate line on any mail report (ie. We have 800 letters on MP3, 500 on Social Security, and 1200 on H1-B, we also received approx 1500 postcards on the following subjects...)
The thing to remember is this, the people in Washington are not stupid (I know that may be hard for the average
A million e-mail march sounds lovely, but if it is a million e-mails, all coming from the mp3.com site, with form letter language, without names and return mailing address, the entire effort will be dashed against the rocks of a system designed to respond to only honest, organized grassroots action.
I would like nothing more than to see an organized group of techs making noise and being heard on the issues we all rant about on
A couple of other things.
don't worry about taking down a members mail server. All offices are behind a central mail server for the entire House or Senate. It would be fairly hard to take these servers down (though the SysAdmins manage to do so on a regular basis
I'm sure MP3.com has some professional DC based advice on organizing this campaign. I sure it will look quite impressive on that lobbyist/lobbying firms record. That doesn't mean it will be effective. To the average lobbyist, the ultimate effort is one that generates a lot of "sound and fury, signifying nothing." If it looks impressive, but doesn't win the day, you can bet the clients going to be back for more. It is a system that rewards a lack of progress. But more on that later...
I'm not really sure what you mean by all this. No "lobbyist" from the Digital Media Association has ever been with in spitting distance of the tech policy makers on the hill. I'm not even sure they have a real lobbyist. A quick poll of House and Senate tech LA's tells me that not one of them has ever heard of the DiMA (unfortunately, six months ago 90% of them had never heard of Linux either, but that's another story)
I am all for (hell, I'm calling for) more lobbyists representing the tech producer/user in Washington, D.C., but it is counter productive to give credit to a group that is not accomplishing anything - it takes attention away from those who may be putting together viable efforts.
MP3.com, not my favorite company, did hire a lobbyist to draft sample legislation, and had the Pres and CEO on heavy rotation in House and Senate offices around the hill asking someone to introduce this bill. There was no pressure, or even a whisper, from any other source in support of legislation like this.
Tech users need to get more organized, the only tech lobbies here now are the companies (and they just want H1-B), and groups like the EFF (good group - no real lobby) and the Center for Democracy in Technology (nice, smart guys but not much direct policy input). The closest we have to a representative is the Consumer Electronics groups, because they want to make what the MPAA, RIAA, etc. want to ban, and they want to make it without restrictions. They're not perfect allies (few businesses are), but at least they have their nose to the wheel.
1) This has been stated, I cannot stress this strongly enough - Send a letter, and send it by snail mail. You can thank a whole industry that used to specialize in spamming Congress by snail mail, and has now moved to e-mail, for this.
;) reflection. If this moves, it will likely move in Feb-March of next year - however, you letters now will make a difference in that move.
/. - it is extraordinarily irritating to see parinoid people attacking it - hell you just might have given the RIAA lobbyists an idea - go back the the Congressmens districts and tell their constituents that the congressmen supports tracking all of the music you listen to in a top secret database. The bill would die a quick and painful death.
2) Include your full home mailing address - you will only be logged ("Senator, we've gotten 1,200 letters this month encouraging you to support the MP3 bill") and receive a reply if they are sure you are a constituent.
3) This bill will not pass this session (which is supposed to end in a week, but will likely last a few weeks longer.) It just doesn't work that way - If Hatch or Wyden had introduced a Senate bill at the same time there might have been a chance, but it still would have been unlikely. The legislative process is meant to encourage sober
4) To all those who seem to think this is part of some NSA conspiracy, I think you may have left your aluminum foil hat at (the) home today
sorry, but this is a fairly well written first step toward the kind of public policy that has been advocated on
5) Laws are written in a generally vague way - open to courts interpretation - because if you write them very specifically, there will be loopholes - it is almost impossible when dealing with a human based system, to write iron rules. Human beings are flexible and creative - either way we will have court interpretation, be being vague we insure deference to "legislative intent" (in this case, to allow MP3.com and its' followers to keep doing what they do).
6)
I appreciate the thoughtful reply, and I don't know the etiquette of replying to ones own submission, but I thought I would elaborate on the idea.
This time next year I would expect 1Ghz level cpus with TV capable graphic cards and 40 Gig drives should have penetrated at least 10% of the home market. (This is 9+% higher than the current penetration of Tivo like devices.)
Stats show that this edge of the market tends to own 2 or more computers, (rising with the number of kids) and has at least one in the "living room". That doesn't really take into account us bleeding edge adopters (who are a substantial fraction of current Tivo customers) who may have one (older) machine as an MP3 jukebox, a home server, and several linux boxen running, well, stuff...
regardless, we appear to have the market penetration of hardware to make us of this kind of service, so the investment to launch is much lower - no hardware design, contract gaurentees or distribution. When you look at the difficulty of getting hardware into the home, the idea of using a pre-installed base should be an appealing business model. Heck, the software and weekly programming can be downloaded from a web site.
I'm not saying this is superior to a stand alone device, just that it should be a viable and desirable option to those who already have the hardware capability at home. It would be hard to recreate the device for the same price in a pc case, but if you already have the tools... After all, I don't need three power saws - or do I....
This has been bugging me for a while now. About 20 years ago (1980 was 20 years ago - yeesh) A SF writer had the foresight to put out a short story about a society where computer use had become ubiquitous, for banking, getting directions, playing games, ordering food, etc. The story centered around a character who had been convicted of a computer crime, was made unable to use a computer (the Mitnick case has gotten me to thinking about this) through operant conditioning (see A Clockwork Orange) and was consequently more helpless than a child.
The reason for bringing all of this up: His point was that in a society that has become dependent on the computer, computer crimes (cracking) would become a capitol offense, deserving of the kind of hostility we reserve for rapists or pedophiles today.
While society currently has some admiration for "those scrappy nerds and their new fangled computers" we can expect a day, sometime soon perhaps, when the cracker (and even the hacker) become the unseen menace, the criminal making sure that porn, copyrights, and dangerous ideas are foisted on our children in the dark corners of the Net.
That said, I do not agree with the speaker's overall point, and IMO security through obscurity is a fundamentally flawed idea.
Oh, and what's been bugging me. I read the story, heck, I'm pretty sure I own the book, but I can't for the life of me remember the author or find the source, I think it may have been edited by Asimov. As most good fiction does, I think the story provides an interesting perspective on the problem of script kiddies today and the implications of their depredations for the future.