We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
Who, why, and what they were doing.
For example let's look at the first amendment:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
Obviously, this amendment applies everywhere and to everyone, because it's a negative. Nowhere is it implied that congress can do these things to foreigners.
Let's look at amendment 8.
Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.
No people mentioned at all. Obviously this applies outside the borders as well as inside.
Now let's look at Article III, section 2.
Section 2 - Trial by Jury, Original Jurisdiction, Jury Trials
(The judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution, the Laws of the United States, and Treaties made, or which shall be made, under their Authority; to all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls; to all Cases of admiralty and maritime Jurisdiction; to Controversies to which the United States shall be a Party; to Controversies between two or more States; between a State and Citizens of another State; between Citizens of different States; between Citizens of the same State claiming Lands under Grants of different States, and between a State, or the Citizens thereof, and foreign States, Citizens or Subjects.) (This section in parentheses is modified by the 11th Amendment.)
Here it mentions foreign States, their citizens and subjects. It specifically states that judicial power extends to them.
Amendment 11
The Judicial power of the United States shall not be construed to extend to any suit in law or equity, commenced or prosecuted against one of the United States by Citizens of another State, or by Citizens or Subjects of any Foreign State.
You can't sue another State, and foreigners can't sue a state. Later this was interpreted to mean that you can't sue your own state in Federal Court.
Finally, let's look at amendment 14, paragraph 1:
1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
It's very specific here. States can't abridge the rights of US citizens, and they can't deprive any person of "life, liberty, or property" except in Court. All persons have equal protection of the law.
Yes, the People of the United States, ordained and established the constitution, but it applies to all people everywhere. Since it mostly says what the government can't do, it applies to everyone. If you say otherwise, you could easily have been on the Supreme Court in 1856. (Yes, the SCOTUS makes mistakes, sometimes it even corrects them)
Just to clarify, the US Constitution does use the word "Citizen" in places and in other places it uses "Person." Thus only a Citizen can run for President, but many rights extend to non-citizens.
Were y'all CS majors perchance? (:-) Anyway, the "peer" review is you. You're just no supposed to start the review the day before the final. Of course, a decent prof would give a cookie to the first person who found a typo. Donald Knuth offered 1 penny to the first person to find a bug in TeX, 2 pennies to the 2nd, 4 to the 3rd, and so on. Last I heard he had paid out $10.24. http://www.truetex.com/knuthchk.htm
I know this is blasphemy in most schools, but the best teachers are the students. (An I would hope the best students are the teachers, but that's not always the cast)
As a matter of fact, putting textbooks on sourceforge wouldn't be a bad idea.
I ride metal bicycles, which slowly degrade after a point you're putting significant energy into flexing the frame because it looses stiffness. At or before this point is the time to buy a new bike. I've heard from people who ride composites that they tend to fail suddenly, like during a ride.
Anyway, the aerospace people have been using composites for longer than the bicycle people, so they've developed things like X and Gamma ray machines to look for defects before they become a problem. If Boeing can develop an inspection system that doesn't cost more than the new materials save, then they win, with no loss to safety.
People have suggested that since military aircraft have used composites, they must be safe. Yes, but... The Military needs planes that have certain performance characteristics, and cost is secondary.
Any teacher who can teach a class should be able to write the textbook. I had several in High School and College that did. In fact, it's a good learning process for the students to help. I don't know if your CC allows such things, but you could have the class this year work on next year's textbook, (or take two years for the first one) while using the current book. From then, every class works to improve the book for next year's class. Publish in electronic form. You could even use a password protected wiki to allow for changes.
One of the best teachers I had, was Professor Dave Meyer, at Purdue University. His book, "Little Bits of Digitail Wisdom" was published through Purdue publishing for around $7.00 in loose leaf format. The pages were only 1/2 complete, and during class he would put a copy on the overhead projector and fill in the blanks. This was a very effective teaching technique.
We really need a better system of compensating people for the work that they do when it isn't a tangible object.
Ahh, but the vast majority of that intangible stuff is total crap. Ted Sturgeon said 90%, but he was talking about only the stuff that actually got published.
How many wealthy and powerful people do you think have their DNA, or will ever have their DNA, in a government database?
How many notorious crimes involve weathly and powerful people? Going back to the disapearance of the Lindberg baby, 75% perhaps?
Given this, I'd say that we need to record the DNA of anyone famous enough to be mentioned several times in the newspapers, and at least twice on TV news. It's for their own safety, really. (:-)
I thought that DNA was supposed to be good at proving someone didn't commit the crime, not finding who did?:/ Or am I totally off-base with that?
That's oldschool DNA forensics. They are starting to be able to match offspring and brothers to DNA on file. It's not to the point where they can do a complete genome of everyone in the database, but as long as they keep the actual samples on ice, that's alway a future possibility.
You're right that if a person's parentage was completely outside the population, they'd temporarily be invisible, but as the DNA analysis gets better, faster, and cheaper, the police will be able to go up and down family trees. Mutations are such a little change in any one person's DNA, I don't think that will prevent a match, it might even help to narrow things down. i.e. if only.00001% of the population has a mutation found on a piece of DNA, the police could question everyone who carried that mutation.
They only need to get a snapshot of everyone in a given population. Then when the children of anyone whose DNA is in the database are involved in a crime, they can trace them through their parents/grandparents/greatgrandparents/...
Not all lasers have mirrors. Mirrors are a hack to get the gain of the tube > 1. If you're lasing media is long enough to have gain >.5, you only need 1 mirror at the back, but if you have enough lasing media you don't need any mirrors. Natural C02 lasers have been detected in the atmosphere of Mars that are miles long.
A mirror for gamma rays would be cool, but would probably so far I don't think there are mirrors for even X-Rays. (Although they have made gold Fresnel lens for X-Rays.
If they design it right, using the wrong type of cable will only degrade performance, your device will still work at USB 2.0 speeds. It's also likely that your computer will negotiate with the device so that if the device says 3.0 but there's no signal on the optical link, the computer will tell you. Any system should be designed to fail gracefully.
I'm having the GP's problem with an external Firewire drive. The power supply is where I'm going to check next, but I also suspect the connector to the PS is flaky.
Also, did you know that the USB connector is exactly as wide as an RJ45 network connector. No, neither did I, until my mother plugged her mouse into the ethernet port. (:-)
Seriously, the connector should have double the number of pins as it needs, and they should be symmetrical. That would also increase reliability, because if the cable didn't work one way because of a bad pin, just flip it over until you can buy a new cable.
John Steele. He's now listed as a Professor Emeritus. Compare his bio to other professors. Now, it's been 12 years since I was at Purdue, so he may have picked up a PhD or two in the meantime, however, from the history pages I can find online, he joined the faculty in 1963, but no mention is made of any of his degrees or where he came from.
You need to bring in $$$ to the university. The more you bring, the more profitable you are and the more they need to keep you around. But publishing is still more important.
I'm sure there's an equilibrium here where X dollars = Y articles. If you bring in several million in grant money a year, I doubt too many Universities would fire you. Purdue University had a fully tenured professor of Computer Science who only had a masters degree and I don't think he published too much, but he was a multi-millionaire.
Point taken. I like to live with the illusion that copyrights protect my work as much as they do MS's works, but the patent system is almost completely broken.
Microsoft uses contractual lockin, and special deals to keep other players out of the market. Their tricks would work without patents but would be difficult without copyright. They need trademarks so that consumers know who they are buying from. Corporate branding depends on trademarks. In the absence of goverment policing of trademarks and contracts, I suppose they could hire goons to enforce their rights.
If you've ever played the game "Monopoly" by Parker Brothers, after many games you'll notice that the systems tends to devole toward a monopoly. (Hence the name) I have played games that ended in a steady state, but they were rare. If the US legal system were thrown into a big simulator and run at hight speed I wonder what it's natural state would be and what small tweaks could be done to prevent monopoly lock-in.
Um, Microsoft is a government *convicted* monopolist. But, since it was convicted by the previous administration, the current admin isn't punishing them too much. I guess you could classify that as "protected" but it's a stretch.
If the pre-boomers were so smart, why did they let the boomers steal their thunder? All the ideas for companies like Apple, Microsoft, and Dell were persented to pre-boomer run companies, and they passed, or flubbed it. It took the boomers to see that the Personal Computer really was something important and make it so.
I've done this as well, but cut and paste predates photocopiers.
In the old days of typesetting machines, the output would be on a one line paper tape. The setup person would cut the paper tape and glue it to a larger paper to make paragraphs. This was then photographed on a type of film whose name escapes me now, but it had exactly two tones, black and white. By adjusting the exposure, all the seams and any dust or marks could be made to disappear. The phontnegative would then be contact printed onto a metal plate, which could be loaded into the printer. All very tedious, time consuming and expensive.
The one-time pad is in no danger of being broken by quantum computers or anything else because it's provably unbreakable. (Unless there is operator error, and sometimes that's the case)
The Good Guys(tm) want to have this so that they know what The Bad Guys(tm) might have, and that way they can change their systems before they are cracked. I could imagine some crime syndicate paying the millions for a working quantum computer and the PhD talent to run it so that they could break into international banking systems.
On the flip side, pressing exactly two HD-DVDs with random data, and distributing these to your bankings sites for the most sensitive information is getting more and more cost effective.
I think you can pretty much assume the NSA and perhaps the former KGB (what's their new name?) can already do this. Does anyone know the name of the Chinese equivalent of the CIA, KGB and MI6?
There's an old story, probably a cold war urban legend, that the Soviet government wanted to show it's people how bad things were in America, so they showed them the film, "The Grapes of Wrath." The takeaway that the russian peasants got from the film was "Wow, in America no matter how poor you are, you have a truck!"
Slashdot Mirror
For example let's look at the first amendment: Obviously, this amendment applies everywhere and to everyone, because it's a negative. Nowhere is it implied that congress can do these things to foreigners.
Let's look at amendment 8. No people mentioned at all. Obviously this applies outside the borders as well as inside. Now let's look at Article III, section 2. Here it mentions foreign States, their citizens and subjects. It specifically states that judicial power extends to them.
Amendment 11 You can't sue another State, and foreigners can't sue a state. Later this was interpreted to mean that you can't sue your own state in Federal Court. Finally, let's look at amendment 14, paragraph 1: It's very specific here. States can't abridge the rights of US citizens, and they can't deprive any person of "life, liberty, or property" except in Court. All persons have equal protection of the law.
Yes, the People of the United States, ordained and established the constitution, but it applies to all people everywhere. Since it mostly says what the government can't do, it applies to everyone. If you say otherwise, you could easily have been on the Supreme Court in 1856. (Yes, the SCOTUS makes mistakes, sometimes it even corrects them)
My thoughts exactly. Gartner is always wrong, so when they say everyone will be using Open Source, my head explodes.
Just to clarify, the US Constitution does use the word "Citizen" in places and in other places it uses "Person." Thus only a Citizen can run for President, but many rights extend to non-citizens.
Were y'all CS majors perchance? (:-) Anyway, the "peer" review is you. You're just no supposed to start the review the day before the final. Of course, a decent prof would give a cookie to the first person who found a typo. Donald Knuth offered 1 penny to the first person to find a bug in TeX, 2 pennies to the 2nd, 4 to the 3rd, and so on. Last I heard he had paid out $10.24. http://www.truetex.com/knuthchk.htm
I know this is blasphemy in most schools, but the best teachers are the students. (An I would hope the best students are the teachers, but that's not always the cast)
As a matter of fact, putting textbooks on sourceforge wouldn't be a bad idea.
Uhm, what about the .edu's or .mil's? I know Purdue was on Arpanet long before DNS, but I don't know when they registered their DNS domain.
I ride metal bicycles, which slowly degrade after a point you're putting significant energy into flexing the frame because it looses stiffness. At or before this point is the time to buy a new bike. I've heard from people who ride composites that they tend to fail suddenly, like during a ride.
Anyway, the aerospace people have been using composites for longer than the bicycle people, so they've developed things like X and Gamma ray machines to look for defects before they become a problem. If Boeing can develop an inspection system that doesn't cost more than the new materials save, then they win, with no loss to safety.
People have suggested that since military aircraft have used composites, they must be safe. Yes, but... The Military needs planes that have certain performance characteristics, and cost is secondary.
Any teacher who can teach a class should be able to write the textbook. I had several in High School and College that did. In fact, it's a good learning process for the students to help. I don't know if your CC allows such things, but you could have the class this year work on next year's textbook, (or take two years for the first one) while using the current book. From then, every class works to improve the book for next year's class. Publish in electronic form. You could even use a password protected wiki to allow for changes.
One of the best teachers I had, was Professor Dave Meyer, at Purdue University. His book, "Little Bits of Digitail Wisdom" was published through Purdue publishing for around $7.00 in loose leaf format. The pages were only 1/2 complete, and during class he would put a copy on the overhead projector and fill in the blanks. This was a very effective teaching technique.
Given this, I'd say that we need to record the DNA of anyone famous enough to be mentioned several times in the newspapers, and at least twice on TV news. It's for their own safety, really. (:-)
You're right that if a person's parentage was completely outside the population, they'd temporarily be invisible, but as the DNA analysis gets better, faster, and cheaper, the police will be able to go up and down family trees. Mutations are such a little change in any one person's DNA, I don't think that will prevent a match, it might even help to narrow things down. i.e. if only
They only need to get a snapshot of everyone in a given population. Then when the children of anyone whose DNA is in the database are involved in a crime, they can trace them through their parents/grandparents/greatgrandparents/...
Not all lasers have mirrors. Mirrors are a hack to get the gain of the tube > 1. If you're lasing media is long enough to have gain > .5, you only need 1 mirror at the back, but if you have enough lasing media you don't need any mirrors. Natural C02 lasers have been detected in the atmosphere of Mars that are miles long.
A mirror for gamma rays would be cool, but would probably so far I don't think there are mirrors for even X-Rays. (Although they have made gold Fresnel lens for X-Rays.
Homer: Lisa, in this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!!!
If they design it right, using the wrong type of cable will only degrade performance, your device will still work at USB 2.0 speeds. It's also likely that your computer will negotiate with the device so that if the device says 3.0 but there's no signal on the optical link, the computer will tell you. Any system should be designed to fail gracefully.
I'm having the GP's problem with an external Firewire drive. The power supply is where I'm going to check next, but I also suspect the connector to the PS is flaky.
Also, did you know that the USB connector is exactly as wide as an RJ45 network connector. No, neither did I, until my mother plugged her mouse into the ethernet port. (:-)
Seriously, the connector should have double the number of pins as it needs, and they should be symmetrical. That would also increase reliability, because if the cable didn't work one way because of a bad pin, just flip it over until you can buy a new cable.
John Steele. He's now listed as a Professor Emeritus. Compare his bio to other professors. Now, it's been 12 years since I was at Purdue, so he may have picked up a PhD or two in the meantime, however, from the history pages I can find online, he joined the faculty in 1963, but no mention is made of any of his degrees or where he came from.
Point taken. I like to live with the illusion that copyrights protect my work as much as they do MS's works, but the patent system is almost completely broken.
Microsoft uses contractual lockin, and special deals to keep other players out of the market. Their tricks would work without patents but would be difficult without copyright. They need trademarks so that consumers know who they are buying from. Corporate branding depends on trademarks. In the absence of goverment policing of trademarks and contracts, I suppose they could hire goons to enforce their rights.
If you've ever played the game "Monopoly" by Parker Brothers, after many games you'll notice that the systems tends to devole toward a monopoly. (Hence the name) I have played games that ended in a steady state, but they were rare. If the US legal system were thrown into a big simulator and run at hight speed I wonder what it's natural state would be and what small tweaks could be done to prevent monopoly lock-in.
Um, Microsoft is a government *convicted* monopolist. But, since it was convicted by the previous administration, the current admin isn't punishing them too much. I guess you could classify that as "protected" but it's a stretch.
If the pre-boomers were so smart, why did they let the boomers steal their thunder? All the ideas for companies like Apple, Microsoft, and Dell were persented to pre-boomer run companies, and they passed, or flubbed it. It took the boomers to see that the Personal Computer really was something important and make it so.
I've done this as well, but cut and paste predates photocopiers.
In the old days of typesetting machines, the output would be on a one line paper tape. The setup person would cut the paper tape and glue it to a larger paper to make paragraphs. This was then photographed on a type of film whose name escapes me now, but it had exactly two tones, black and white. By adjusting the exposure, all the seams and any dust or marks could be made to disappear. The phontnegative would then be contact printed onto a metal plate, which could be loaded into the printer. All very tedious, time consuming and expensive.
Governments still use one-time pads for the really sensitive stuff.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_station
The one-time pad is in no danger of being broken by quantum computers or anything else because it's provably unbreakable. (Unless there is operator error, and sometimes that's the case)
The Good Guys(tm) want to have this so that they know what The Bad Guys(tm) might have, and that way they can change their systems before they are cracked. I could imagine some crime syndicate paying the millions for a working quantum computer and the PhD talent to run it so that they could break into international banking systems.
On the flip side, pressing exactly two HD-DVDs with random data, and distributing these to your bankings sites for the most sensitive information is getting more and more cost effective.
I think you can pretty much assume the NSA and perhaps the former KGB (what's their new name?) can already do this. Does anyone know the name of the Chinese equivalent of the CIA, KGB and MI6?
There's an old story, probably a cold war urban legend, that the Soviet government wanted to show it's people how bad things were in America, so they showed them the film, "The Grapes of Wrath." The takeaway that the russian peasants got from the film was "Wow, in America no matter how poor you are, you have a truck!"