And, of course, you've provided no less than four paragraphs advertising your expertise, and not one single statement about the actual validity of the patent. You must be _amazing_ at preparing defense witnesses for testimony: answering the question without providing the information someone was really looking for is, in fact, an art form which you've just demonstrated quite well.
"Simple farm boy"? Oh, my. I think you underestimate the skill of a "simple farm boy", and their musculature from working in a non-industrial age. A 140 pound pull, such as might be found in a medieval longbow, is quite a lot for a modern archer, but it's not that much to someone who helps plow fields. (Ask any modern farmer: muscle still matters.) And "years of training" are what Sunday afternoons were for, in villages all over Wales and England: it was apparently a weekly event in many districts.
You sign the package, yourself, with a stolen key. Since a local site repository may have far less security than a major repository like RedHat, and even RedHat has been compromised in the past (http://blog.internetnews.com/skerner/2009/03/red-hat-fedora-reveals-details.html), simply installing packages for any random user should not be permitted. In particular, the ability to install out-of-date, previously compromised, but previously signed packages without administrative privileges should be blocked.
This, also, is misleading. Some of the most spectacular remaining samples and artwork of armor are plate, but are for _jousting_. Like modern bomb-proof armor, what is worn for such a specialized use is far bulkier, more expensive, and heavier than actual combat armor. And even the best plate was often supplemented at joints such as knees and elbows and hands, with chain where making joints out of plate would be too awkward or expensive.
Also, the better plate of the Middle ages was certainly capable of stopping the ordinary "clothyard shaft" of the longbow. The tips of the clothyard shaft were typically rather soft, inexpensive steel: it _flattens_, bends, and glances off with even a quite direct hit on a good quality breast plate or helmet. (Yes, I've seen this tried.)
It is misleading to say "the bow and arrow drove the change" when the bow and arrow predate civilizaiton: plate armor does not. Other factors include the introduction of the _inexpensive_ long bow: the price of a single armored knight was easily undercut by the price of 20 farm boys with bows, and they could produce an arrow storm that would not only kill the knight's less armored steed, but was likely to put clothyard shafts in his joints. Couple that with a muddy field where a knight's boots and heavy armor will bog down, such as occurred at Agincourt, and the yeomen with daggers could easily beat the French knights to death, force their visors into the mud to drown, and shove daggers into their eye slits.
The concept of "plate" long predates the middle ages, remember: even the Greeks and wealthiest Egyptins had breast plates or bronze, quite effective against the weapons of their time. Their efforts were limited by weight and the strength of the metal, but it was certainly the ancestor of "plate".
You usually want "sudo -s -H". That gets you an active shell and the $HOME settings of the root user. Alternative, you can use "sudo -i -H" if you prefer to have root's normal shell instead of your own $SHELL. "sudo bash" inherits a lot of inappropriate settings from your local account, such as home directory and various mail settings.
It's amazing the things you can learn from reading the manual page for an old tool.
You need the package to have a signature that is already registered. Fedora 12, like early Fedora releases, doesn't register _any_ GPG keys for RPM until after manual authentication by the user. "yum install" asks for this during software installation. Unfortunately, many sites that deal with signed packages don't protect their signatures well, and it's dificult to tell which signatures for RPM are installed or appropriate. So it's a vector, just not as bad of one as you note.
Oh, yes, and that model works really well, doesn't it?
Enabling the installation of software is _precisely_ what sudo and controlled access to the "yum" command are for. Leaving this feature on by default is begging for script kiddies to slip their works into other "signed" repositories, such as RPMforge and EPEL and corporate yum repositories. Once I've gotten my GPG key into your system, I can install anything I want.
Fedora 12 is going to be blocked from my internal network until this is fixed. It can be installed in the DMZ, but will be considered an insecure and vulnerable system until then.
Oh? Have you looked at the history of the Catholic Church? Or of the priesthoods of Greece, Rome, or Israel before the modern age? Or the Church of England? Church leadership has occurred by many means.
The difficulties with Scientology are many: the fraudulent claims for fiscal and physical benefit are one, the high pressure pyramid scheme sales tactics are another, and the deceit about the inner beliefs which are concealed from new members are another. But let's not presume that cults and religions have been immune to the power of money to attain leadership or to be redeemed.
Also note: the "most famous case" of Scientology censorship is probably the book "The Scandal of Scientology", which led to Mary Sue Hubbard and some of the leadership of Scientology's "Guardian Office" being convicted for planting fake bomb threats, infiltrating the IRS, and lots of other abuses. Look at the history over at www.xenu.net and www.facnet.org, it's fascinating material and also described in numerous books.
The non-profit status is a big help to them. By drawing the Constitutional cloak of "Freedom of Religion" over what they used to sell, fraudulently, as mental and physical self-help technologies, they avoided the FDA ban against making health claims for their techniques and avoided a lot of IRS difficulties for their fiscal abuse of their own members, especially staff.
And don't forget, stealing the money by the bucketload to fund their own brilliant investment schemes. Pay good attention to what happened to Swiss banks after WWII when survivors turned up to claim assets or recover ill-gotten gains of the German leadership: much of the money was missing.
Even if we export food as a net product, do you really think the American taxpayer is willing to do without coffee, chocolate, and fresh fruit out of season?
No, I mean that the _lack_ of UN support limited the US's efforts profoundly. Getting fuel and foodstuffs, getting permission to use airbases, getting native translators and local intelligence, and especially getting ground troops to actually help control the ground in Iraq has been very difficult without UN support. The difference between Afghanistan and Iraq in UN support was amazing, and directly discouraged trying it again with Iran (which, unlike Iraq, _is_ developing nuclear weapons).
Oh, my. I do seem to have made a fundamental error on this: I'm afraid I may have to chalk it up partly to age, and partly to thinking of tritium. Note that that their pellets call for both, and _tritium_ is normally produced in plutonium power plants from deuterium.
So it's still limited, but nowhere near so limited as I thought.
Hold it. I'm happy to believe that fusion research is useful and interesting. Physics is both useful and interesting. But 3.5 billion dollars for a technology that has such obvious flaws, and for which those flaws remain unaddressed, is like dotcom venture capital. Some people are getting jobs and exciting paragraphs on their resume, but this is unlikely to provide the return-on-investment which is being advertised.
If you're going to blow 3 billion on high energy physics, put it in the larger colliders. Or better yet, put it into lunar physics labs where vacuum is far cheaper, insulation is easier, neighbors won't get upset if something leaks, and the land isn't needed for housing and growing food.
That's still "limited". And notice the grotesque inefficiencies of all the proposed fusion techniques: you can't just compute the energy transformation directly, you have to factor out the refinement costs and the inefficiencies of the energy generation process. Even if it it reaches "break even" on the lasers used to pump the reaction, the losses elsewhere are _hideous_.
No, this is Lawrence Livermore Laboratories engaging in weapons research relabeled as "alternate energy" research. The primary use for such intense systems is fusion bombs, not peaceful energy.
And this is, of course, worse than saying that a computer is just a pile of transistors. The environment in which the object grows, its diet, the concentrations of salt and oxygen and the temperature of its environment all affect the most basic of its functions. Worse, it ignores the mitochondria and the environment of the egg in which it was hatched.
It may all be chemistry, physics, and math, but a lot of the most critical functions are completely unsoluble and intractable if you treat them this way. And the math make very clear that it is useless to attempt many of such models.
It's also "human nature" to try and control abuses. Sometimes it works, too. There are people building schools and educating women in Afghanistan, as well as the idiots who createed the encouraged torture at Abu Ghraib. Don't just say "it's human nature" and give up, because there are some successes, such as the prevention of World War III so far.
This is not feasible. Too much of our food (and opium) comes from the the third world, too many critical minerals come from there, and too much of our sales of arms, pharmaceuticals, entertainment, and other processed goods goes to third world purchasers. And make no mistake, "second world" nations make little pretense of being democratic.
Are you willing to pay twice the current rates for computers because gold and mercury prices used for their manufacture are quadrupled? Even if you're willing, do you think many slashdotters would still be employed in that economy?
The issue is systemic. Since torture, rape, collective punishment,and trade in nuclear weapons technologies are prohibited, and yet member nations commit them as federally sanctioned acts (and the US is not innocent, most clearly in torture in Afghan and Iraqi prisoners lately), the failures are clearly system.
It's just the alternative that's so much worse: can you folks imagine if the current US Imperial wars were not constrained by the lack of UN support, especially if we'd gone on from Afghanistan to chase Osama bin Laden into Pakistan? Pakistan has nuclear weapons, and few restraints against using them.
Deuterium is limited by the amount of deuterium in ocean water, which is the largest source on Earth but remains quite limited.
And sadly, unless these wishful dreamers can find an energy efficient way to harvest deuterium in bulk, there is very little point to this research. None of the available fusion processes work well with plain hydrogen, and barring a miracle occurring, deuterium refinement is still only done with stunningly high energy costs, nowhere near even theoretical break-even costs for bulk refinement and use in fusion.
No, this is an excuse to spend money on fusion weapons research under the guise of "energy research". It's flat-out pork-barrel money for military facilities who will otherwise "lose American jobs!". Spend it instead on solar mirror research, which has a much better return-on-investment and merely requires large-scale engineering, not hoped-for scientific breakthroughs that remain unlikely to occur in our lifetimes.
It's _because_ of Germany's history. In their desire to "move past" the horrors of the past, they're willing to let some people who committed truly horrific crimes go back to a private life after their jail terms, rather than continue reminding people of the events. This actually makes more sense considering the more recent history of East Germany and the Stasi than of World War I and World War II: there are a lot of people who were under incredible social and political and even economic pressure in East Germany who committed vile acts, and Germany as a whole wants to "get over it".
I personally think this is foolish: forgetting what cruelties ordinary people can do helps permit them to occur again. (Witness the American prison camps of the Japanese-Americans, and Guantanamo Bay's imprisonment of people without trial or notice to the world of their alleged crimes, and the continuing use of torture by the USA against "terrorists".)
If your application cannot tolerate a 50 msec pause in outbound traffic (which is what Remus seems to introduce, similar to VMWare switchovers) then you have no business running it over a network, much less over the Internet as a whole. Similar pauses are introduced in core switching and core routers on a fairly frequent basis, and are entirely unavoidable.
There are certainly classes of application sensitive to that kind of issue: various "real-time-programming" and motor control sensor systems require consistently low latency. But for public facing, high-availability services, it seems useful, and much lighter to implement than VMWare's expensive solutions.
The case you cite specifically refers to a news service that obtained early copies of news stories from another news service, rewrote them, and published those without attribution. (Sounds like Rupert Murdoch style news reporting to me!)It has _nothing_ to do with Murdoch's claims because Google is directly quoting, not rewriting and pretending to have actually been the source of that news. Google, however, is actually publishing excerpts from the website.
Please, before you make claims about a court ruling, actually read it or at least read a competent analysis.
I'd be curious to see the first study you mention, as well. I suspect that the life expectancy of the wealthy in the US is compromised by several factors, especially diet-related issues. And comparing the US's richest to the UK's poorest is apples and oranges: compare the poor and the middle class, because the rich have all sorts of other interesting issues of dietary abuse and can afford extraordinary treatments in both countries.
And actually, I could see government controlled care encouraging midwives and reducing over-medication, on simple economic grounds.
Slashdot Mirror
And, of course, you've provided no less than four paragraphs advertising your expertise, and not one single statement about the actual validity of the patent. You must be _amazing_ at preparing defense witnesses for testimony: answering the question without providing the information someone was really looking for is, in fact, an art form which you've just demonstrated quite well.
"Simple farm boy"? Oh, my. I think you underestimate the skill of a "simple farm boy", and their musculature from working in a non-industrial age. A 140 pound pull, such as might be found in a medieval longbow, is quite a lot for a modern archer, but it's not that much to someone who helps plow fields. (Ask any modern farmer: muscle still matters.) And "years of training" are what Sunday afternoons were for, in villages all over Wales and England: it was apparently a weekly event in many districts.
You sign the package, yourself, with a stolen key. Since a local site repository may have far less security than a major repository like RedHat, and even RedHat has been compromised in the past (http://blog.internetnews.com/skerner/2009/03/red-hat-fedora-reveals-details.html), simply installing packages for any random user should not be permitted. In particular, the ability to install out-of-date, previously compromised, but previously signed packages without administrative privileges should be blocked.
This, also, is misleading. Some of the most spectacular remaining samples and artwork of armor are plate, but are for _jousting_. Like modern bomb-proof armor, what is worn for such a specialized use is far bulkier, more expensive, and heavier than actual combat armor. And even the best plate was often supplemented at joints such as knees and elbows and hands, with chain where making joints out of plate would be too awkward or expensive.
Also, the better plate of the Middle ages was certainly capable of stopping the ordinary "clothyard shaft" of the longbow. The tips of the clothyard shaft were typically rather soft, inexpensive steel: it _flattens_, bends, and glances off with even a quite direct hit on a good quality breast plate or helmet. (Yes, I've seen this tried.)
It is misleading to say "the bow and arrow drove the change" when the bow and arrow predate civilizaiton: plate armor does not. Other factors include the introduction of the _inexpensive_ long bow: the price of a single armored knight was easily undercut by the price of 20 farm boys with bows, and they could produce an arrow storm that would not only kill the knight's less armored steed, but was likely to put clothyard shafts in his joints. Couple that with a muddy field where a knight's boots and heavy armor will bog down, such as occurred at Agincourt, and the yeomen with daggers could easily beat the French knights to death, force their visors into the mud to drown, and shove daggers into their eye slits.
The concept of "plate" long predates the middle ages, remember: even the Greeks and wealthiest Egyptins had breast plates or bronze, quite effective against the weapons of their time. Their efforts were limited by weight and the strength of the metal, but it was certainly the ancestor of "plate".
You usually want "sudo -s -H". That gets you an active shell and the $HOME settings of the root user. Alternative, you can use "sudo -i -H" if you prefer to have root's normal shell instead of your own $SHELL. "sudo bash" inherits a lot of inappropriate settings from your local account, such as home directory and various mail settings.
It's amazing the things you can learn from reading the manual page for an old tool.
You need the package to have a signature that is already registered. Fedora 12, like early Fedora releases, doesn't register _any_ GPG keys for RPM until after manual authentication by the user. "yum install" asks for this during software installation. Unfortunately, many sites that deal with signed packages don't protect their signatures well, and it's dificult to tell which signatures for RPM are installed or appropriate. So it's a vector, just not as bad of one as you note.
Oh, yes, and that model works really well, doesn't it?
Enabling the installation of software is _precisely_ what sudo and controlled access to the "yum" command are for. Leaving this feature on by default is begging for script kiddies to slip their works into other "signed" repositories, such as RPMforge and EPEL and corporate yum repositories. Once I've gotten my GPG key into your system, I can install anything I want.
Fedora 12 is going to be blocked from my internal network until this is fixed. It can be installed in the DMZ, but will be considered an insecure and vulnerable system until then.
Oh? Have you looked at the history of the Catholic Church? Or of the priesthoods of Greece, Rome, or Israel before the modern age? Or the Church of England? Church leadership has occurred by many means.
The difficulties with Scientology are many: the fraudulent claims for fiscal and physical benefit are one, the high pressure pyramid scheme sales tactics are another, and the deceit about the inner beliefs which are concealed from new members are another. But let's not presume that cults and religions have been immune to the power of money to attain leadership or to be redeemed.
Also note: the "most famous case" of Scientology censorship is probably the book "The Scandal of Scientology", which led to Mary Sue Hubbard and some of the leadership of Scientology's "Guardian Office" being convicted for planting fake bomb threats, infiltrating the IRS, and lots of other abuses. Look at the history over at www.xenu.net and www.facnet.org, it's fascinating material and also described in numerous books.
The non-profit status is a big help to them. By drawing the Constitutional cloak of "Freedom of Religion" over what they used to sell, fraudulently, as mental and physical self-help technologies, they avoided the FDA ban against making health claims for their techniques and avoided a lot of IRS difficulties for their fiscal abuse of their own members, especially staff.
Oh, that's listed under hobbies, specifically "cave diving".
And don't forget, stealing the money by the bucketload to fund their own brilliant investment schemes. Pay good attention to what happened to Swiss banks after WWII when survivors turned up to claim assets or recover ill-gotten gains of the German leadership: much of the money was missing.
Even if we export food as a net product, do you really think the American taxpayer is willing to do without coffee, chocolate, and fresh fruit out of season?
No, I mean that the _lack_ of UN support limited the US's efforts profoundly. Getting fuel and foodstuffs, getting permission to use airbases, getting native translators and local intelligence, and especially getting ground troops to actually help control the ground in Iraq has been very difficult without UN support. The difference between Afghanistan and Iraq in UN support was amazing, and directly discouraged trying it again with Iran (which, unlike Iraq, _is_ developing nuclear weapons).
Oh, my. I do seem to have made a fundamental error on this: I'm afraid I may have to chalk it up partly to age, and partly to thinking of tritium. Note that that their pellets call for both, and _tritium_ is normally produced in plutonium power plants from deuterium.
So it's still limited, but nowhere near so limited as I thought.
Hold it. I'm happy to believe that fusion research is useful and interesting. Physics is both useful and interesting. But 3.5 billion dollars for a technology that has such obvious flaws, and for which those flaws remain unaddressed, is like dotcom venture capital. Some people are getting jobs and exciting paragraphs on their resume, but this is unlikely to provide the return-on-investment which is being advertised.
If you're going to blow 3 billion on high energy physics, put it in the larger colliders. Or better yet, put it into lunar physics labs where vacuum is far cheaper, insulation is easier, neighbors won't get upset if something leaks, and the land isn't needed for housing and growing food.
That's still "limited". And notice the grotesque inefficiencies of all the proposed fusion techniques: you can't just compute the energy transformation directly, you have to factor out the refinement costs and the inefficiencies of the energy generation process. Even if it it reaches "break even" on the lasers used to pump the reaction, the losses elsewhere are _hideous_.
No, this is Lawrence Livermore Laboratories engaging in weapons research relabeled as "alternate energy" research. The primary use for such intense systems is fusion bombs, not peaceful energy.
And this is, of course, worse than saying that a computer is just a pile of transistors. The environment in which the object grows, its diet, the concentrations of salt and oxygen and the temperature of its environment all affect the most basic of its functions. Worse, it ignores the mitochondria and the environment of the egg in which it was hatched.
It may all be chemistry, physics, and math, but a lot of the most critical functions are completely unsoluble and intractable if you treat them this way. And the math make very clear that it is useless to attempt many of such models.
It's also "human nature" to try and control abuses. Sometimes it works, too. There are people building schools and educating women in Afghanistan, as well as the idiots who createed the encouraged torture at Abu Ghraib. Don't just say "it's human nature" and give up, because there are some successes, such as the prevention of World War III so far.
This is not feasible. Too much of our food (and opium) comes from the the third world, too many critical minerals come from there, and too much of our sales of arms, pharmaceuticals, entertainment, and other processed goods goes to third world purchasers. And make no mistake, "second world" nations make little pretense of being democratic.
Are you willing to pay twice the current rates for computers because gold and mercury prices used for their manufacture are quadrupled? Even if you're willing, do you think many slashdotters would still be employed in that economy?
The issue is systemic. Since torture, rape, collective punishment,and trade in nuclear weapons technologies are prohibited, and yet member nations commit them as federally sanctioned acts (and the US is not innocent, most clearly in torture in Afghan and Iraqi prisoners lately), the failures are clearly system.
It's just the alternative that's so much worse: can you folks imagine if the current US Imperial wars were not constrained by the lack of UN support, especially if we'd gone on from Afghanistan to chase Osama bin Laden into Pakistan? Pakistan has nuclear weapons, and few restraints against using them.
Deuterium is limited by the amount of deuterium in ocean water, which is the largest source on Earth but remains quite limited.
And sadly, unless these wishful dreamers can find an energy efficient way to harvest deuterium in bulk, there is very little point to this research. None of the available fusion processes work well with plain hydrogen, and barring a miracle occurring, deuterium refinement is still only done with stunningly high energy costs, nowhere near even theoretical break-even costs for bulk refinement and use in fusion.
No, this is an excuse to spend money on fusion weapons research under the guise of "energy research". It's flat-out pork-barrel money for military facilities who will otherwise "lose American jobs!". Spend it instead on solar mirror research, which has a much better return-on-investment and merely requires large-scale engineering, not hoped-for scientific breakthroughs that remain unlikely to occur in our lifetimes.
It's _because_ of Germany's history. In their desire to "move past" the horrors of the past, they're willing to let some people who committed truly horrific crimes go back to a private life after their jail terms, rather than continue reminding people of the events. This actually makes more sense considering the more recent history of East Germany and the Stasi than of World War I and World War II: there are a lot of people who were under incredible social and political and even economic pressure in East Germany who committed vile acts, and Germany as a whole wants to "get over it".
I personally think this is foolish: forgetting what cruelties ordinary people can do helps permit them to occur again. (Witness the American prison camps of the Japanese-Americans, and Guantanamo Bay's imprisonment of people without trial or notice to the world of their alleged crimes, and the continuing use of torture by the USA against "terrorists".)
If your application cannot tolerate a 50 msec pause in outbound traffic (which is what Remus seems to introduce, similar to VMWare switchovers) then you have no business running it over a network, much less over the Internet as a whole. Similar pauses are introduced in core switching and core routers on a fairly frequent basis, and are entirely unavoidable.
There are certainly classes of application sensitive to that kind of issue: various "real-time-programming" and motor control sensor systems require consistently low latency. But for public facing, high-availability services, it seems useful, and much lighter to implement than VMWare's expensive solutions.
The case you cite specifically refers to a news service that obtained early copies of news stories from another news service, rewrote them, and published those without attribution. (Sounds like Rupert Murdoch style news reporting to me!)It has _nothing_ to do with Murdoch's claims because Google is directly quoting, not rewriting and pretending to have actually been the source of that news. Google, however, is actually publishing excerpts from the website.
Please, before you make claims about a court ruling, actually read it or at least read a competent analysis.
> The senile old cunt with the chameleon nationality is just getting what he asked for.
Roman Polanski is dating teenagers again?
I'd be curious to see the first study you mention, as well. I suspect that the life expectancy of the wealthy in the US is compromised by several factors, especially diet-related issues. And comparing the US's richest to the UK's poorest is apples and oranges: compare the poor and the middle class, because the rich have all sorts of other interesting issues of dietary abuse and can afford extraordinary treatments in both countries.
And actually, I could see government controlled care encouraging midwives and reducing over-medication, on simple economic grounds.