What do you mean, "that few people will actually buy"? Compaq has sold millions of iPaqs and recenly announced (again) an expansion of manufacturing. They've got a backlog of 700,000 orders at the moment. Every Palm user I show my iPaq to (who has the disposable income) orders one.
Now if only I could take it to work...(Los Alamos doesn't allow items with voice-recording capability behind the fence, which means no iPaq, note-taker, or Furby.)
I think the point is that no matter how many gTLDs are created, BigCompany is going to insist that it hold all combinations of BigCompany.gTLD and they will use the capitalist running-dog lackeys of WIPO to get them.
Thing is, it is absolutely crazy to let matters of national security rest on imported software. Maybe there are back doors in Windows and maybe there aren't -- but the fact that the government doesn't KNOW means they should have disqualified this software years ago. I hope other governments follow suit, including the US. Some things require the use of in-house products, whether that's more inefficient or not.
Who will end up owning this patent?
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One-Click Reprise
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I am one of the folks who thinks that Amazon's destined to go belly-up, that the reason they haven't yet is because they were the giant, and it's harder to get the big tree falling -- of course, once it starts it's impossible to stop.
So assuming that I'm right (and please save your joke about "assume", those of us out of elementary school have heard it already), Amazon's going to be having a great big "We've lost our lease, everything must go, we're holding nothing back!" sale. And then what will they have to offer? Limited inventory, a huge database of customers cross-correlated and analyzed out the wazoo...and, of course, a patent portfolio. One which if rigorously enforced pretty much gives the online store to whomever ends up owning the patent.
So what happens then? I'd especially like to hear from real live professionals, who might know what happens when the legal entity holding intellectual "property" dissolves.
Child pornography is illegal, whether in print, on film, or online. There's no legal uncertainty in that particular arena (save for the question of whether virtual kiddie porn with computer-generated "children" is really child pornography). That's not the pornography that the CIPA was intended to prevent children from seeing.
The kind of porn that the CIPA was intended to keep children from seeing is Miss July, or Brutus Beefcake's Backdoor Buddies or how to give a breast self-examination or what the warning signs for testicular cancer might be. Oh, wait -- those last two weren't meant to be kept from the kids because they aren't pornography. But the problem, you see, is that the software mandated by CIPA _does_ filter that sort of thing out. It prevents adults from accessing medical information; it prevents children from accessing medical information; it prevents people from accessing literature which may be of dubious quality but is nonetheless no more pornographic than the books on the shelf. The law is overbroad and it leads to legitimate expression being squelched, and _that_ is why the law should be held unconstitutional -- not because there isn't a desire to "protect" our children from human sexuality.
(Oh, and you might want to check your stats before throwing out bogus numbers like that 1-in-5 is raped; that's as indefensible as the 1-in-5 Americans is disabled "statistic".)
Ah, but you are missing the point that anti-DMCA people like me are trying to hammer home: this software will NOT allow legitimate, beneficial fair uses. The entire driving force behind the content industry's search for the perfect digital-rights management scheme is that digital control over digital content finally delivers the holy grail of pay-per-use into their hands. All they need is one or two more laws and maybe an object lesson or two wherein Norwegian teens or magazine publishers are slapped down by the bought guns of government to make their long-deferred dream a reality.
If I pay for a book or recording, I have an absolute and irrevocable right to do what I want to with it within my home. If I want to print a million copies and use the paper to insulate the house in winter, I have that right. Technology allows the publisher -- generally not the author, I might add -- to abridge my right. You'll pardon me if I don't get excited at that prospect.
Caught between a rock and a hard place: between distaste for those who would trade in copyrighted material without paying the creator his due and my utter loathing for the corporate swine whose millions have subverted the very government that allegedly exists to serve the people who feed the corporate machine.
The Holy Trinity for law enforcement is terrorsists, drug lord, and pedophiles. Whenever they argue for an expansion of power or a diminution of personal freedom they cite the Trinity and count on people like you to fall in line.
See, unlike (apparently) you, I don't happen to believe that the world is filled with wave after wave of pedophiles, held back only by the heroic efforts of American law enforcement. I believe that there are a few (relative to the hundreds of millions of Internet users of the world) who are some truly sick and demented bastards -- but I don't see how giving the government the authority to limit my encryption capability is going to reduce that.
I don't happen to believe that drug lords are a bigger threat to The American Way Of Life than the War On Drugs is. The wholesale discarding of the Bill of Rights (save the 3rd Amendment) in pursuit of the goal of eliminating a product that millions of Americans have decided for themselves is morally acceptable despite being illegal is what _I_ see as a threat. No one ever worries about Cotton Cartels and the evil ill-gotten gains of the textile lords. Make drugs a legal product whose business is conducted in the light of day with FDA and IRS oversight and the drug lord billionaires will go away. And it doesn't even require encryption limits!
Lastly, terrorists. This one got a huge boost after Tim McVeigh expressed his displeasure with American policy and the destruction of TWA Flight 800. The fact that 800 was destroyed in what was most likely a highly improbable but not impossible set of coincidental circumstances has had no effect on the certainty of many Americans that somehow, Moslem Extremists were involved. After all, planes with Americans on them never have anything bad happen to them unless there's a Moslem in the picture. McVeigh's actions, on the other hand, were horrible, evil, unjustifiable, and utterly unstoppable with limits on encryption. There was face-to-face communication with his partners and the purchases, truck rentals, etc. were all done in the light of day. Reductions on _our_ freedom could not have stopped him anymore than they could have stopped the men who bombed the World Trade Center.
Ah, you say, but some terrorist groups _have_ been caught when their coded messages have been intercepted and broken. We _have_ saved lives and preserved the order and safety of our American Way Of Life.
I don't care. I really don't. The fact that expansion of police power leads to expansion of arrests is a given; the question under discussion is "To what degree are we prepared to accept limits on our freedom and our privacy in exchange for the increases in a dubious public safety?" I say None. Yes, advances in technology make law enforcement's job harder. Tough titty. My life as a free man doesn't come with conditionals that can be dialed back if John Law finds himself having a tougher time. If encryption makes the time-honored wiretap (itself a disgusting violation of privacy) obsolete, then so be it.
Responding to your concluding comment that the crimes of the Trinity aren't important to fight: they are -- but they aren't nearly as important as the continuation of freedom and privacy. If my privacy means that one more child gets used in a porno flick made by a deviant, so be it. If it means that one more kilo of cocaine sneaks into the US undetected, bravo. If if means that US-Irish are able to raise money and ship it to Northern Ireland to further a bullshit revolution that kills innocents or that the bullshit revolution comes to my own soil, I can accept that. I do accept that. I would urge you to do so as well.
Porn has driven most new technologies. Some of the first uses of Gutenberg's new printing press was to mass-produce naughty (by the standards of the time) stories. The camera probably hadn't been in existence more than twenty seconds before Monsieur Daguerre took a snapshot of his skippy. Movies? There's silent-era porn still in existence. Usenet? Web? You got it. Argue morality until you're blue in the face but the industry definitely seems to attract the early adopter.
Customization. If I have no interest in using multimedia software, why should I have software which fills that niche taking up space on my PDA? If I don't plan to exchange data with IR, why should I have IR support taking up space? If I want to use the unit in a way that the hardware can support but which is absent from the initial install, I can add it myself.
You're right that not everything has to be Linux. It doesn't even have to be a BSD. What I demand is freedom -- in part for ideological reasons but mostly because free (open source) software lets me fit the machine to myself and not the other way 'round.
Also, let's not conflate the OS and the apps that run on it the way some large software companies do. I look at something like the PalmOS and I think about how difficult it was to program sophisticated software for. The OS is perfect for note-taking, expense accounts, address books, etc. I wouldn't want to run a MySQL client on it, though. The machines are getting more powerful by the day -- my iPaq has more horsepower than the PC I bought maybe 7 years ago (486/50, 8MB RAM...c'mon!) and while it's true that the primary use of a handheld today is to be an address book, why should that still be the case tomorrow? These little dudes are _computers_, man! Push 'em!
I'm curious: if HP is offering full refunds to people who aren't happy with the machines, then why would one join a class-action lawsuit? Or, for that matter, any other lawsuit?
Yes, I'm sure that some people are extremely irritated that the 16b hardware is only being used in a 12b mode by the software, but is it really something to sue over? If you really need the higher fidelity, why not just take the refund and get something else? Or if you're like me, who has no problem with the 4k colors of the iPaq, why not stick with what you've got?
I would not. Yes, I would rather pay money from my own pocket for an ad-free life. I would like to read magazines that are all content. I would like to watch television that is all content. I would like to read websites that are all content. I would like to carry a cellular telephone past a store without getting a page telling me the store has a sale on Dadjiframmises today only. And I would gladly pay a bit extra for the privilege of being left the hell alone.
Reading a web page nowadays is not unlike being in a Vegas casino. The effort required to concentrate on the purpose of your visit (a news story, a tutorial, a game of cards) in the face of things that move and flash and beep quickly makes the entire experience a headache-inducing grind. And it's simply not worth it.
Like many, I browse less and less because of the growing in-your-face nature of advertising. When a site is nice enough to serve their ads from an easily-filtered URL, I do it. When they are not, I decamp, never to return. In an ideal world, the bargain-conscious/cheapskates (choose your term depending on where you stand) would not be able to let their penny-pinching grasp dictate the terms of everyone's experience. Sadly, in the land of the fee and the home of the slave, they do.
"I think the reason that the popular media has been so obsessive about cloning while respectable journals avoid the issue is that the popular notion of "cloning" and the scientific notion are so very different."
I agree. From here on out we should use the term "deep copy" instead of "clone".
"Am I the only one who thinks it should be illegal for someone who currently holds office to be a PAID LOBBYIST?!?"
No, but since Mrs. Schroeder does not hold office there's no conflict here. Well, save for the inherent conflict of former Representatives drawing huge paychecks to get their still-serving friends to help 'em out a little. Or Senators, Presidents, appointees, etc.
Jesus H. Christ, when is Taco going to implement a little quiz that determines whether or not a poster has any damn knowledge of the topic or if he's blowing smoke?
Patents do not have to be enforced to remain valid -- trademarks do. If you've a new patent, it might be worth your while to let it slide for a few years until it reaches a critical industrial mass and only _then_ lower the licensing boom. Or do you think that Fraunhofer only realized last year that all those MP3 players and encoders were infringing on their patents?
The media were the message...
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Obligatory Where Were You Moment: I was home sick from high school and watched the launch, such as it was, in real-time, and then watched the footage repeatedly all day, devouring the news coverage. In the fifteen years since the explosion, I've come to realize that the most significant result (for me) was a change in how I viewed the press.
The astronauts weren't heroes. We'd like to pretend that they were ennobled souls who gave their lives in pursuit of a dream, but they weren't. They were a couple of pilots whose "plane" was designed to go exoatmospheric, some scientists whose laboratories happened to be on that exo-"plane", and a joyrider whose presence was thought to be a PR coup. I'm sure that they were all dedicated, respectable individuals -- but their deaths no more made them heroes than the safe return of all the other shuttle crews made _them_ heroes.
The engineers had a bad day in that they couldn't make the managers understand the gravity of the situation. The management structure of NASA and its contractors was ill-suited for the activities they were conducting. Tight schedules, tight budgets, and tight-assed bureaucrats led into a dangerous situation where they accepted a risk higher than they should have and it jumped up and bit them hard. But that was not the end of the world. You grieve for the dead, you identify the breakdown in the system, you redesign where needed, either in a booster or an org chart, and you move forward with lessons learned.
But the press...ah, the press. The press (save CNN) couldn't be bothered to broadcast the launch. There was no "public interest" to be served there. Come the explosion, however, and they could hardly decide whether they needed to serve the public by showing the explosion, or the burned Apollo I capsule in the obligatory Solemn Look Backward, or the various self-aggrandizing political "leaders" arguing either that They Shall Not Give Their Lives In Vain or We Have Suffered Too Greatly, depending on whether the space program did or did not result in large sums of federal dollars being transferred into the said self-aggrandizing politician's district/state. They were positively relishing in just how awful it was; a national tragedy like that could really draw people to their TVs. That was the first time that I _really_ understood that the role of the news media is to draw eyes for the advertisers and that their proud defense of the public interest is just so much self-serving bullshit. "Oh, God, it was horrible! The flames, and the smoke, and the death! Let's see that again, Bernie!" I've been disgusted by the media since.
It's not arrogant; it's the scientific method. You know, the "develop a hypothesis, observe or experiment, revise or shitcan hypothesis, repeat until confident" bit.
Physics has rules. The universe and everything else is governed by these rules. We've been studying our brains out through observation and experiment for several centuries now and there has been good reason to believe that we'd puzzled out stuff like how planets form and how big they can be.
What would be frightening is if the reaction from the astronomical community was not "We thought we understood" but rather "We understand, so these cannot be planets. Now let's put all this behind us and get on with the business of running the country."
The point of the article was not whether people would switch from LinuxPPC to Mac OS in general but whether they'd switch to Mac OS X. You are correct that Mac OS 9 and previous versions are inadequate for the kind of person who would be in a position to consider the switch -- namely, people who are running LinuxPPC now, the power user folks -- but OS X ameliorates (get it? HAW!) many of those deficiencies. With the Darwin panties under its Aqua skirt, OS X provides a platform that combines the interface friendliness of the historical Mac with the ability to install the vast quantity of free|opensource software that we have come to expect...oh, and it also gives you stuff like a modern QuickTime for viewing those sweet movie trailers, like the full-screen one for "Cast Away"...where was I?
(What I found most interesting about the article was the lack of a prominent mention of the fact that at present, you don't get Mac OS X without getting Aqua, and that alone is sufficient to keep me from switching back.)
I'm sorry, but you're simply wrong. The material involved in a fusion reaction is in a plasma state, and you have a wild soup of 3 hydrogen isotopes, a couple of helium isotopes, the odd free neutron, and some heavier elements. The issue of blistering and sputtering of the walls of the containment vessel contaminates the fuel and both the vessel and the ejecta become radioactivated by exposure to the plasma. You end up with a facility which at end of life is as nasty as a fission reactor and throughout its operating life you have to accept that this helium you hail is contaminated with lithium, carbon, and given the likelihood of steel vessels, manganese, chromium, possibly cobalt, and (duh) iron.
It's cleaner than fission, all things considered, but fusion power is _not_ the free lunch you portray it as.
American reactors do not require weapons-grade uranium to function; they typically have new fuel enriched to around 4.some-odd percent in U-235. Weapons-grade is, shall we say, higher than that.
Many university research reactors used highly enriched fuel because they were significantly smaller and would not be going through repeated fuel cycles. The perceived terrorist threat has since caused many to change their configurations in such a way as to use lower-enrichment fuels. As an example, at the time I attended my alma mater the reactor was fueled with 90% U-235 and shortly after my graduation they moved to a 20% enrichment design. The 90% fuel elements are still in the pool, however, so I'm not entirely sure how the "terrorist threat" has been reduced...but I digress.
The advantage of the CANDU is that by using a heavy water moderator instead of light water, they can use natural uranium and not enrich at all. Of course, you can also refule on the fly, which makes the CANDU a risk for proliferants -- and when you have to shut down your LWR every 18 months for refueling it gives you a built-in opportunity to perform inspection and maintenance of the entire facility. Don't knock the value of that.
Lest this degenerate into a cross-border "Our reactors are better than yours", let me hasten to state the obvious, that each design has features which can be considered good or bad depending on your priorities.
The accident at Chernobyl came about from the decision to conduct a specific low-power test; namely, if the plant scrammed and lost its connection to outside sources of power, would the residual power from decay products be enough to run the coolant pumps and so forth?
To drop the plant to a power level that would simulate that scenario, they had to move through several instability regions where the nuclear properties of the moderator and coolant caused positive feedback loops and the reactor's safety mechanisms kept "getting in the way". Xenon buildup made it difficult to work around these problems, and since the test was being conducted in the middle of the night and the reactor physicists were all snug in their beds, on-site personnel decided to disable the safety control mechanisms. They had the reactor down at (if memory serves) 30 kW or some trivial number when they hit another feedback loop. In the course of the next few seconds, the temperature of the coolant rose with the power level (power spiked to something like 30,000MW in a tenth of a second), the coolant then flashed into steam, the steam pressure blew the roof off the building, and the 3,000 degree graphite moderator was exposed to the air, at which time it burst into flame, cracked, and generaly became a Problem.
The RMBK design of reactor has positive reactivity coefficients. It's a "bad" design in that it requires intervention when the laws of physics want to put it on a runaway. However, unless things go horribly awry, human operators are more than capable of operating such a reactor safely.
The problem at Chernobyl was not the reactor, but the people operating it. Many people around the world want to see nuclear power eliminated because even with the safer designs of the Western world, a ragingly inept (or malicious) employee with access to the wrong places can make Bad Things happen. To me, that's the wrong reaction; a spiteful mechanic at United Airlines could cause the deaths of hundreds of people but we don't see a call for the elimination of air travel.
Having read the books, seen the movie, and now the miniseries, I've been thinking about what it would take to "do Dune right".
First up, money. Lots of money. I know that SciFi was on a budget, but you need to shoot as much as you can "on location". Much of the movie and the mini were shot on sets with backdrops and matte paintings and folks, it shows. Either you spend the money to take the entire production crew to someplace with a lot of water and plant life for Caladan or you pay computer whizzes to create a moving, three-dimensional world in the background. You have no choice but to go on location for Arrakis; there are just too many scenes that take place in the desert to do on a stage or in front of a greenscreen. You also need Giedi Prime, Kaitain, good space shots, and so on.
You also need time. Lots of time. There's very little in the book which can be left out and still end up with a coherent story. What people do is no more important than why they do it. You have to take the time to explain the events of humanity's past that led to the Empire in 10,191 and its blend of CHOAM, the Great Houses, the Imperium itself, the Bene Gesserit, the Bene Tleilax, the Mentats, the Suk doctors, the Spacing Guild, and so forth. It's all an elaborate, intricate world and even the small parts contribute to the whole.
You need computer whizzes. Think of the dinosaurs of "Jurassic Park" and consider that a sandworm can really only be done in that way. Models, even fancy controlled-by-ten-puppeteers models, don't look alive. Think of the Guild Navigators in both the movie and the mini -- that's what a puppet gets you. Now think again of the T. Rex chasing the Jeep in "Jurassic Park" -- that's what computers get you.
You have to be able to show it without commercial interruption. You take for granted that people will "set it aside" for meal and bathroom breaks, just like they do with the book, but the magic of "Dune" is the mood, the spell it casts over those who are willing to sink into a world where giant worms reign over the deserts where a mind-altering spice is gathered by randomly-stepping warriors in search of a Messiah to lead them to...whatever. You don't capture that mood by breaking to sell high-availability servers or home fitness machines.
Finally, you have to love "Dune." Not just as a rich source of a Messianic story that will let you play with some FX people, but as Frank Herbert saw it: the world central to the universe at a time when humanity itself stood poised either to sink back into its animal origins or make a Great Leap Forward and become something so different that only a special few could even comprehend what might be. You have to be willing to discount the fact that people will say "Lynch did this better" or "Harrison did that better" and just find out how to get on screen what Herbert put on paper.
Where's our eccentric billionaire and "Dune"-lover to fund such a thing?
It's the Accelerated yadda yadda, not that it really matters. Blue is online already in the form of two machines: Mountain Blue (SGI/Cray) here in Los Alamos and Pacific Blue (IBM) at Lawrence Livermore. Red (Intel) has been around at Sandia as the first of the ASCI machines. Initial delivery for Q (built for Los Alamos by Compaq) is expected to begin in a couple of months. For more information, see http://www.llnl.gov/asci/
Jim, who actually gets paid to use these bad boys.
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What do you mean, "that few people will actually buy"? Compaq has sold millions of iPaqs and recenly announced (again) an expansion of manufacturing. They've got a backlog of 700,000 orders at the moment. Every Palm user I show my iPaq to (who has the disposable income) orders one.
Now if only I could take it to work...(Los Alamos doesn't allow items with voice-recording capability behind the fence, which means no iPaq, note-taker, or Furby.)
I think the point is that no matter how many gTLDs are created, BigCompany is going to insist that it hold all combinations of BigCompany.gTLD and they will use the capitalist running-dog lackeys of WIPO to get them.
More to the point: since my bosses evaluate the quality of something by its price tag, when will someone generously assemble the CostlyBSD package?
Thing is, it is absolutely crazy to let matters of national security rest on imported software. Maybe there are back doors in Windows and maybe there aren't -- but the fact that the government doesn't KNOW means they should have disqualified this software years ago. I hope other governments follow suit, including the US. Some things require the use of in-house products, whether that's more inefficient or not.
I am one of the folks who thinks that Amazon's destined to go belly-up, that the reason they haven't yet is because they were the giant, and it's harder to get the big tree falling -- of course, once it starts it's impossible to stop.
So assuming that I'm right (and please save your joke about "assume", those of us out of elementary school have heard it already), Amazon's going to be having a great big "We've lost our lease, everything must go, we're holding nothing back!" sale. And then what will they have to offer? Limited inventory, a huge database of customers cross-correlated and analyzed out the wazoo...and, of course, a patent portfolio. One which if rigorously enforced pretty much gives the online store to whomever ends up owning the patent.
So what happens then? I'd especially like to hear from real live professionals, who might know what happens when the legal entity holding intellectual "property" dissolves.
Child pornography is illegal, whether in print, on film, or online. There's no legal uncertainty in that particular arena (save for the question of whether virtual kiddie porn with computer-generated "children" is really child pornography). That's not the pornography that the CIPA was intended to prevent children from seeing.
The kind of porn that the CIPA was intended to keep children from seeing is Miss July, or Brutus Beefcake's Backdoor Buddies or how to give a breast self-examination or what the warning signs for testicular cancer might be. Oh, wait -- those last two weren't meant to be kept from the kids because they aren't pornography. But the problem, you see, is that the software mandated by CIPA _does_ filter that sort of thing out. It prevents adults from accessing medical information; it prevents children from accessing medical information; it prevents people from accessing literature which may be of dubious quality but is nonetheless no more pornographic than the books on the shelf. The law is overbroad and it leads to legitimate expression being squelched, and _that_ is why the law should be held unconstitutional -- not because there isn't a desire to "protect" our children from human sexuality.
(Oh, and you might want to check your stats before throwing out bogus numbers like that 1-in-5 is raped; that's as indefensible as the 1-in-5 Americans is disabled "statistic".)
Ah, but you are missing the point that anti-DMCA people like me are trying to hammer home: this software will NOT allow legitimate, beneficial fair uses. The entire driving force behind the content industry's search for the perfect digital-rights management scheme is that digital control over digital content finally delivers the holy grail of pay-per-use into their hands. All they need is one or two more laws and maybe an object lesson or two wherein Norwegian teens or magazine publishers are slapped down by the bought guns of government to make their long-deferred dream a reality.
If I pay for a book or recording, I have an absolute and irrevocable right to do what I want to with it within my home. If I want to print a million copies and use the paper to insulate the house in winter, I have that right. Technology allows the publisher -- generally not the author, I might add -- to abridge my right. You'll pardon me if I don't get excited at that prospect.
Caught between a rock and a hard place: between distaste for those who would trade in copyrighted material without paying the creator his due and my utter loathing for the corporate swine whose millions have subverted the very government that allegedly exists to serve the people who feed the corporate machine.
The Holy Trinity for law enforcement is terrorsists, drug lord, and pedophiles. Whenever they argue for an expansion of power or a diminution of personal freedom they cite the Trinity and count on people like you to fall in line.
See, unlike (apparently) you, I don't happen to believe that the world is filled with wave after wave of pedophiles, held back only by the heroic efforts of American law enforcement. I believe that there are a few (relative to the hundreds of millions of Internet users of the world) who are some truly sick and demented bastards -- but I don't see how giving the government the authority to limit my encryption capability is going to reduce that.
I don't happen to believe that drug lords are a bigger threat to The American Way Of Life than the War On Drugs is. The wholesale discarding of the Bill of Rights (save the 3rd Amendment) in pursuit of the goal of eliminating a product that millions of Americans have decided for themselves is morally acceptable despite being illegal is what _I_ see as a threat. No one ever worries about Cotton Cartels and the evil ill-gotten gains of the textile lords. Make drugs a legal product whose business is conducted in the light of day with FDA and IRS oversight and the drug lord billionaires will go away. And it doesn't even require encryption limits!
Lastly, terrorists. This one got a huge boost after Tim McVeigh expressed his displeasure with American policy and the destruction of TWA Flight 800. The fact that 800 was destroyed in what was most likely a highly improbable but not impossible set of coincidental circumstances has had no effect on the certainty of many Americans that somehow, Moslem Extremists were involved. After all, planes with Americans on them never have anything bad happen to them unless there's a Moslem in the picture. McVeigh's actions, on the other hand, were horrible, evil, unjustifiable, and utterly unstoppable with limits on encryption. There was face-to-face communication with his partners and the purchases, truck rentals, etc. were all done in the light of day. Reductions on _our_ freedom could not have stopped him anymore than they could have stopped the men who bombed the World Trade Center.
Ah, you say, but some terrorist groups _have_ been caught when their coded messages have been intercepted and broken. We _have_ saved lives and preserved the order and safety of our American Way Of Life.
I don't care. I really don't. The fact that expansion of police power leads to expansion of arrests is a given; the question under discussion is "To what degree are we prepared to accept limits on our freedom and our privacy in exchange for the increases in a dubious public safety?" I say None. Yes, advances in technology make law enforcement's job harder. Tough titty. My life as a free man doesn't come with conditionals that can be dialed back if John Law finds himself having a tougher time. If encryption makes the time-honored wiretap (itself a disgusting violation of privacy) obsolete, then so be it.
Responding to your concluding comment that the crimes of the Trinity aren't important to fight: they are -- but they aren't nearly as important as the continuation of freedom and privacy. If my privacy means that one more child gets used in a porno flick made by a deviant, so be it. If it means that one more kilo of cocaine sneaks into the US undetected, bravo. If if means that US-Irish are able to raise money and ship it to Northern Ireland to further a bullshit revolution that kills innocents or that the bullshit revolution comes to my own soil, I can accept that. I do accept that. I would urge you to do so as well.
Porn has driven most new technologies. Some of the first uses of Gutenberg's new printing press was to mass-produce naughty (by the standards of the time) stories. The camera probably hadn't been in existence more than twenty seconds before Monsieur Daguerre took a snapshot of his skippy. Movies? There's silent-era porn still in existence. Usenet? Web? You got it. Argue morality until you're blue in the face but the industry definitely seems to attract the early adopter.
Customization. If I have no interest in using multimedia software, why should I have software which fills that niche taking up space on my PDA? If I don't plan to exchange data with IR, why should I have IR support taking up space? If I want to use the unit in a way that the hardware can support but which is absent from the initial install, I can add it myself.
You're right that not everything has to be Linux. It doesn't even have to be a BSD. What I demand is freedom -- in part for ideological reasons but mostly because free (open source) software lets me fit the machine to myself and not the other way 'round.
Also, let's not conflate the OS and the apps that run on it the way some large software companies do. I look at something like the PalmOS and I think about how difficult it was to program sophisticated software for. The OS is perfect for note-taking, expense accounts, address books, etc. I wouldn't want to run a MySQL client on it, though. The machines are getting more powerful by the day -- my iPaq has more horsepower than the PC I bought maybe 7 years ago (486/50, 8MB RAM...c'mon!) and while it's true that the primary use of a handheld today is to be an address book, why should that still be the case tomorrow? These little dudes are _computers_, man! Push 'em!
I'm curious: if HP is offering full refunds to people who aren't happy with the machines, then why would one join a class-action lawsuit? Or, for that matter, any other lawsuit?
Yes, I'm sure that some people are extremely irritated that the 16b hardware is only being used in a 12b mode by the software, but is it really something to sue over? If you really need the higher fidelity, why not just take the refund and get something else? Or if you're like me, who has no problem with the 4k colors of the iPaq, why not stick with what you've got?
I would not. Yes, I would rather pay money from my own pocket for an ad-free life. I would like to read magazines that are all content. I would like to watch television that is all content. I would like to read websites that are all content. I would like to carry a cellular telephone past a store without getting a page telling me the store has a sale on Dadjiframmises today only. And I would gladly pay a bit extra for the privilege of being left the hell alone.
Reading a web page nowadays is not unlike being in a Vegas casino. The effort required to concentrate on the purpose of your visit (a news story, a tutorial, a game of cards) in the face of things that move and flash and beep quickly makes the entire experience a headache-inducing grind. And it's simply not worth it.
Like many, I browse less and less because of the growing in-your-face nature of advertising. When a site is nice enough to serve their ads from an easily-filtered URL, I do it. When they are not, I decamp, never to return. In an ideal world, the bargain-conscious/cheapskates (choose your term depending on where you stand) would not be able to let their penny-pinching grasp dictate the terms of everyone's experience. Sadly, in the land of the fee and the home of the slave, they do.
"Worth a thought?"
No.
"I think the reason that the popular media has been so obsessive about cloning while respectable journals avoid the issue is that the popular notion of "cloning" and the scientific notion are so very different."
I agree. From here on out we should use the term "deep copy" instead of "clone".
"Am I the only one who thinks it should be illegal for someone who currently holds office to be a PAID LOBBYIST?!?"
No, but since Mrs. Schroeder does not hold office there's no conflict here. Well, save for the inherent conflict of former Representatives drawing huge paychecks to get their still-serving friends to help 'em out a little. Or Senators, Presidents, appointees, etc.
Jesus H. Christ, when is Taco going to implement a little quiz that determines whether or not a poster has any damn knowledge of the topic or if he's blowing smoke?
Patents do not have to be enforced to remain valid -- trademarks do. If you've a new patent, it might be worth your while to let it slide for a few years until it reaches a critical industrial mass and only _then_ lower the licensing boom. Or do you think that Fraunhofer only realized last year that all those MP3 players and encoders were infringing on their patents?
Obligatory Where Were You Moment: I was home sick from high school and watched the launch, such as it was, in real-time, and then watched the footage repeatedly all day, devouring the news coverage. In the fifteen years since the explosion, I've come to realize that the most significant result (for me) was a change in how I viewed the press.
The astronauts weren't heroes. We'd like to pretend that they were ennobled souls who gave their lives in pursuit of a dream, but they weren't. They were a couple of pilots whose "plane" was designed to go exoatmospheric, some scientists whose laboratories happened to be on that exo-"plane", and a joyrider whose presence was thought to be a PR coup. I'm sure that they were all dedicated, respectable individuals -- but their deaths no more made them heroes than the safe return of all the other shuttle crews made _them_ heroes.
The engineers had a bad day in that they couldn't make the managers understand the gravity of the situation. The management structure of NASA and its contractors was ill-suited for the activities they were conducting. Tight schedules, tight budgets, and tight-assed bureaucrats led into a dangerous situation where they accepted a risk higher than they should have and it jumped up and bit them hard. But that was not the end of the world. You grieve for the dead, you identify the breakdown in the system, you redesign where needed, either in a booster or an org chart, and you move forward with lessons learned.
But the press...ah, the press. The press (save CNN) couldn't be bothered to broadcast the launch. There was no "public interest" to be served there. Come the explosion, however, and they could hardly decide whether they needed to serve the public by showing the explosion, or the burned Apollo I capsule in the obligatory Solemn Look Backward, or the various self-aggrandizing political "leaders" arguing either that They Shall Not Give Their Lives In Vain or We Have Suffered Too Greatly, depending on whether the space program did or did not result in large sums of federal dollars being transferred into the said self-aggrandizing politician's district/state. They were positively relishing in just how awful it was; a national tragedy like that could really draw people to their TVs. That was the first time that I _really_ understood that the role of the news media is to draw eyes for the advertisers and that their proud defense of the public interest is just so much self-serving bullshit. "Oh, God, it was horrible! The flames, and the smoke, and the death! Let's see that again, Bernie!" I've been disgusted by the media since.
It's not arrogant; it's the scientific method. You know, the "develop a hypothesis, observe or experiment, revise or shitcan hypothesis, repeat until confident" bit.
Physics has rules. The universe and everything else is governed by these rules. We've been studying our brains out through observation and experiment for several centuries now and there has been good reason to believe that we'd puzzled out stuff like how planets form and how big they can be.
What would be frightening is if the reaction from the astronomical community was not "We thought we understood" but rather "We understand, so these cannot be planets. Now let's put all this behind us and get on with the business of running the country."
The point of the article was not whether people would switch from LinuxPPC to Mac OS in general but whether they'd switch to Mac OS X. You are correct that Mac OS 9 and previous versions are inadequate for the kind of person who would be in a position to consider the switch -- namely, people who are running LinuxPPC now, the power user folks -- but OS X ameliorates (get it? HAW!) many of those deficiencies. With the Darwin panties under its Aqua skirt, OS X provides a platform that combines the interface friendliness of the historical Mac with the ability to install the vast quantity of free|opensource software that we have come to expect...oh, and it also gives you stuff like a modern QuickTime for viewing those sweet movie trailers, like the full-screen one for "Cast Away"...where was I?
(What I found most interesting about the article was the lack of a prominent mention of the fact that at present, you don't get Mac OS X without getting Aqua, and that alone is sufficient to keep me from switching back.)
I'm sorry, but you're simply wrong. The material involved in a fusion reaction is in a plasma state, and you have a wild soup of 3 hydrogen isotopes, a couple of helium isotopes, the odd free neutron, and some heavier elements. The issue of blistering and sputtering of the walls of the containment vessel contaminates the fuel and both the vessel and the ejecta become radioactivated by exposure to the plasma. You end up with a facility which at end of life is as nasty as a fission reactor and throughout its operating life you have to accept that this helium you hail is contaminated with lithium, carbon, and given the likelihood of steel vessels, manganese, chromium, possibly cobalt, and (duh) iron.
It's cleaner than fission, all things considered, but fusion power is _not_ the free lunch you portray it as.
American reactors do not require weapons-grade uranium to function; they typically have new fuel enriched to around 4.some-odd percent in U-235. Weapons-grade is, shall we say, higher than that.
Many university research reactors used highly enriched fuel because they were significantly smaller and would not be going through repeated fuel cycles. The perceived terrorist threat has since caused many to change their configurations in such a way as to use lower-enrichment fuels. As an example, at the time I attended my alma mater the reactor was fueled with 90% U-235 and shortly after my graduation they moved to a 20% enrichment design. The 90% fuel elements are still in the pool, however, so I'm not entirely sure how the "terrorist threat" has been reduced...but I digress.
The advantage of the CANDU is that by using a heavy water moderator instead of light water, they can use natural uranium and not enrich at all. Of course, you can also refule on the fly, which makes the CANDU a risk for proliferants -- and when you have to shut down your LWR every 18 months for refueling it gives you a built-in opportunity to perform inspection and maintenance of the entire facility. Don't knock the value of that.
Lest this degenerate into a cross-border "Our reactors are better than yours", let me hasten to state the obvious, that each design has features which can be considered good or bad depending on your priorities.
The accident at Chernobyl came about from the decision to conduct a specific low-power test; namely, if the plant scrammed and lost its connection to outside sources of power, would the residual power from decay products be enough to run the coolant pumps and so forth?
To drop the plant to a power level that would simulate that scenario, they had to move through several instability regions where the nuclear properties of the moderator and coolant caused positive feedback loops and the reactor's safety mechanisms kept "getting in the way". Xenon buildup made it difficult to work around these problems, and since the test was being conducted in the middle of the night and the reactor physicists were all snug in their beds, on-site personnel decided to disable the safety control mechanisms. They had the reactor down at (if memory serves) 30 kW or some trivial number when they hit another feedback loop. In the course of the next few seconds, the temperature of the coolant rose with the power level (power spiked to something like 30,000MW in a tenth of a second), the coolant then flashed into steam, the steam pressure blew the roof off the building, and the 3,000 degree graphite moderator was exposed to the air, at which time it burst into flame, cracked, and generaly became a Problem.
The RMBK design of reactor has positive reactivity coefficients. It's a "bad" design in that it requires intervention when the laws of physics want to put it on a runaway. However, unless things go horribly awry, human operators are more than capable of operating such a reactor safely.
The problem at Chernobyl was not the reactor, but the people operating it. Many people around the world want to see nuclear power eliminated because even with the safer designs of the Western world, a ragingly inept (or malicious) employee with access to the wrong places can make Bad Things happen. To me, that's the wrong reaction; a spiteful mechanic at United Airlines could cause the deaths of hundreds of people but we don't see a call for the elimination of air travel.
Having read the books, seen the movie, and now the miniseries, I've been thinking about what it would take to "do Dune right".
First up, money. Lots of money. I know that SciFi was on a budget, but you need to shoot as much as you can "on location". Much of the movie and the mini were shot on sets with backdrops and matte paintings and folks, it shows. Either you spend the money to take the entire production crew to someplace with a lot of water and plant life for Caladan or you pay computer whizzes to create a moving, three-dimensional world in the background. You have no choice but to go on location for Arrakis; there are just too many scenes that take place in the desert to do on a stage or in front of a greenscreen. You also need Giedi Prime, Kaitain, good space shots, and so on.
You also need time. Lots of time. There's very little in the book which can be left out and still end up with a coherent story. What people do is no more important than why they do it. You have to take the time to explain the events of humanity's past that led to the Empire in 10,191 and its blend of CHOAM, the Great Houses, the Imperium itself, the Bene Gesserit, the Bene Tleilax, the Mentats, the Suk doctors, the Spacing Guild, and so forth. It's all an elaborate, intricate world and even the small parts contribute to the whole.
You need computer whizzes. Think of the dinosaurs of "Jurassic Park" and consider that a sandworm can really only be done in that way. Models, even fancy controlled-by-ten-puppeteers models, don't look alive. Think of the Guild Navigators in both the movie and the mini -- that's what a puppet gets you. Now think again of the T. Rex chasing the Jeep in "Jurassic Park" -- that's what computers get you.
You have to be able to show it without commercial interruption. You take for granted that people will "set it aside" for meal and bathroom breaks, just like they do with the book, but the magic of "Dune" is the mood, the spell it casts over those who are willing to sink into a world where giant worms reign over the deserts where a mind-altering spice is gathered by randomly-stepping warriors in search of a Messiah to lead them to...whatever. You don't capture that mood by breaking to sell high-availability servers or home fitness machines.
Finally, you have to love "Dune." Not just as a rich source of a Messianic story that will let you play with some FX people, but as Frank Herbert saw it: the world central to the universe at a time when humanity itself stood poised either to sink back into its animal origins or make a Great Leap Forward and become something so different that only a special few could even comprehend what might be. You have to be willing to discount the fact that people will say "Lynch did this better" or "Harrison did that better" and just find out how to get on screen what Herbert put on paper.
Where's our eccentric billionaire and "Dune"-lover to fund such a thing?
No kidding -- I was halfway through that ad before it dawned on me that we weren't back in the program watching Paul have a vision.
It's the Accelerated yadda yadda, not that it really matters. Blue is online already in the form of two machines: Mountain Blue (SGI/Cray) here in Los Alamos and Pacific Blue (IBM) at Lawrence Livermore. Red (Intel) has been around at Sandia as the first of the ASCI machines. Initial delivery for Q (built for Los Alamos by Compaq) is expected to begin in a couple of months. For more information, see http://www.llnl.gov/asci/
Jim, who actually gets paid to use these bad boys.