> However, the perpetual motion machine it describes is available for examination in every electron orbiting every nucleus.
They don't orbit. Get away from the pretty math and take a look at what an 'electron cloud' really means. And for elephants or onions, you should use as much as is necessary to explain the facts and keep Occam's Razor in mind.
That said, the Dirac equations are interesting and its descendants do try to explain an interesting problem.
There was also no theoretical reason for monopoles _to_ exist. If charge exists, and moving electric charges create magnetic fields, who do you _need_ magnetic charges? Making the equations "symmetrical" for both electric and magnetic charges does not make them any more elegant or powerful, any more than not having "negative mass" makes Newton's equations any less valid.
"Discrete units of net magnetic charge" may be a quantum effect of aligned, moving electrical charges. I still see no need for monopoles.
> Hold on. You didn't like DS9? It was the most-intelligent of the Treks...
That's because it wasn't really created by Paramount. It was created by JMS when pitched Babylon 5 to Paramount, and they refused his pitch but lifted the major structure from Babylon 5 wholesale, and rushed to production so that it would precede Babylon 5 to the marketplace. Yes, I remember the conflicts at the time, and the parallels for the first few seasons really are striking. Given the lack of creativity permitted by Paramount, it's unsurprising that it was easier to lift a promising premise wholesale from outside rather than negotiate it through the layers of turf-protecting executives in their own bureaucracy.
The only thing that stopped Gattaca from becoming reality is that the premise is deeply flawed: the genetic code has never been that understood, and the factors interweave with each other and the environment so extensively that that kind of prenatal gene-weaving and genetic selection remains infeasible for many years.
It's a social engineering attack, yes. It's one that is built into the current implementation of SSL: the central key authority has been over-trusted, and signed keys are far too easy to obtain.
And I'm sorry that I was confusing. It's not PGP that I was referring to as useful, but rather PGP's 'web-of-trust', where people whom you know personally sign keys for others whom they know personally, and you can trace that web to see who knows the final target's key owner. From my observation of the behavior of Verisign, the most common signature authority, they should not be trusted to vouch for whether they're wearing pants, much less sign anyone's SSL keys. And downstream signature authorities like GoDaddy are even worse at selling off keys to fraudulent users. So SSL, as implemented in the procedural sense, only provides a money-purchased pretense at authentication, and is only genuinely useful for encryption.
This problem is not going away because it would completely shaft Verisign's business model, and they'd have no reason to _permit_ its removal.
No, I'm afraid it's not. It's still vulnerable to "Do you accept this made-up key" attacks where people have become far too accustomed to accepting unsigned keys, and to the purchase of centrally signed keys. Because the key signatures belong to a central signing authorities that rely on valid credit cards, not personal authentication, there is still only a pretense at genuine security.
There have been other tools proposed to address these issues, such as the PGP web-of-trust, and the Palladium project's hardware encryption, but they've broken down in practice on the problem of US encryption export regulations, poor closed source implementation that turns out to be easily virtualized, and many essentially social rather than technological issues. Even SSL was handicapped for years by the USA's insane 80-bit limit for SSL in exported software.
Because we don't want another Typhoid Mary (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Mallon) or Paddy Chew (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paddy_Chew). Typhoid Mary, in particular, never meant to infect anyone, but gave 53 people typhoid fever as a cook who was infected.
It's not the arm skin. It's what's leaking out of your arm and may leak into my bleeding or injured arm, or be tranferred on the gloved hand which handles the BP cuff and then handles your wound.
Has anyone explained to you what the skin condition of street people, or a nursing home resident with bedsores, can be like? They _leak_. I'm old enough to have close relatives in nursing care, and the bad homes are _awful_ with infected bodily fluids. The better homes are expensive, but unless you can take care of a really infirm relative at home, they're worth every extra penny to take care of someone you love and want to live a while longer.
It's not the gray hair (or what is left of it!), and those aren't wrinkles. They're laugh lines from the terrific amusement when some youngster ignores the hard-won lessons of the last millennium, especially when they have to call me or someone like me to clean up the mess. The laugh lines are especially deep from when I collected a paper trail to show where their supervisor ignored my written warnings about the danger: those are used with caution, but can be very, very handy.
I've had something like that happen. The recovery system for a partner had never been tested with a _full_ recovery, only with recovering a few selected files. But because someone decided to get cute with the backup system to pick and choose which targets got backed up, individual directories each got their own backup target. Thousands and thousands of them. And the backup system had a single tape drive, not a changer.
The result was that to restore the filesystem, the tapes had to be swapped in and out to get the last full dump, then the incremental dump, of _each_ of the thousands of targets. Fortunately for them, I managed to liberate an under-used tape library, but the incredible amount of time having the tape drive grind back and forth to find the different targets on each tape was also incredibly nasty. We helped them find other solutions for that issue, but it was nasty to clean up. And unfortunately for them, they didn't _have_ a large enough repository to have tested the full restoration procedure.
The point is that "random checks" are not enough. You have to actually do a full test, once a year. This is also why I despise people who sell monolithic, "high availability" storage systems that are not partitioned enough to create a mirror of your active data anywhere.
Where do you get this claim about "most infected before you get a single symptom"? The virus grows exponentially until it reaches a limit, one of immune response or other effects (such as destruction of your cells!!!!) causes enough damage that you can't support the infection. Given this, the amount of flu virus will continue growing while the immune response begins, even the effective immune response, _until_ the immune response is large enough to overwhelm that exponential growth.
And you've apparently not been educated in immunology, or contagion. If a disease is moderately virulent (like the common cold, or the flue), but the vaccine is prevalent (such as 90% or better of school children, who are incredibly susceptible), outbreaks are very small and likely not to spread. If the vaccine is rare, the disease can still spread as a serious contagion: a plague, if the disease is dangerous enough.
AIDS is a fascinating example. It takes serious work to get AIDS: blood-to-blood transfer is unusual. But the idiots who first got it spread it _virulently_ through the susceptible group, so broadly that it's entered the general population in places like South Africa. And a hospital is a festering ground for infection: the sick people go there, otherwise healthy people get the disease and spread it to other patients unless their clean procedures are ver, very good, and the same staff person may see many other patients or clean many other rooms or handle many other cafeteria trays and spread the disease wildly among otherwise weakened people. They _should_ be vaccinated, for the safety of the patients.
I'm looking at the Berkeley DB 4.8 release notes: thank you for the pointer. The claim in your first URL that Berkeley DB "requires zero administration" has me laughing so hard, I almost sprayed something nasty on my keyboard. And this release is roughly 18 months lsince the last minor version release: please exuse my surprise. Now, reviewing the release notes, is there anything that we should care about? Not much. db_sql might be handy, if anyone used Berkeley DB anymore. The only reason to have it is to _extract_ data from Berkeley DB and transfer it to a better database.
You have a point about SQLite. The rather thorough discarding of Berkeley DB in Fedora and RHEL seems to have been in favor of SQLite: the only thing left in Fedora 11 that really requires it seems to be RPM itself, which strikes me as foolish.
The problem isn't the database itself. For a lot of use, there's not much difference. It's the tools to write to, and access, that database. If I've got to replace all the CPAN published, developer abusing Perl that my MySQL users have become accustomed to, I want really compelling benefits from the switchover.
Oracle owns Berkeley DB, from when they bought Sleepy Cat Software. Has anyone heard of _any_ useful progress in Berkeley DB, which used to rule Linux for lightweight, small databases? I thought not: they supported it a little bit, and it's been profoundly ignored for years now, by both its owners and the open source community at large.
I'm afraid that MySQL is fated for the same end: Oracle has little incentive to support it properly or to expand its role when it competes directly with their core products. It can be forked, but how much will be left of the core development team that really understood its features and trade-offs after 3 years working at Oracle?
Oh, dear. I've had to hire and fire, and apply for work. Cover letters are what tell the company you paid attention to their job ad and the fancy certification they asked for is covered by your experience with a related technology, that you're dating the boss, that you _wrote_ a significant portion of the software application they need help with, or other data that is not in a CV but might be relevant.
I've seen all of these in cover letters. The "dating the boss" one was fascinating to deal with.
While the BBC has a well-earned reputation for quality journalism, especially in international news, make no mistake. They are not "publicly funded" in the United States common sense of "non-profit" organization. They are a a tax-funded civil service. (Look up the annual UK "license fee" on televisions, to understand their funding.)
This doubtless affects their news coverage, although I'm not familiar enough with other British newspapers to compare and contrast them.
Oh, dear. Ignoring their own charter and the problems that creates, I leave to people who understand the idea of keeping the NSA out of domestic security for excellent reasons.
And your listing of "70 people prosecuted"? Wrong. That's 70 people arrested. do you see a prosecution there? Me, neither. And your "8 more here"? Please actually go and _read_ the articles you cite. And look for signs of an actual prosecution, rather than merely an arrest. The "misdemeanors" you cite also show little sign of prosecution, because the people arrested were protesting, not being violent. The "assassination" business is even more ludicrous: a terrifying situation which was discovered because the man was driving erratically, and you're trying to pretend that domestic surveillance somehow is related.
Faithful Slashdot readers, am I just feeding a troll here? Or is my exposition of this sort of ludicrous claim useful to the rest of you?
Ahh, yes. It's to stop the terrorists and block crimes. That's why we violate the NSA charter (by doing domestic spying), the Constitution (by monitoring without court order or any evidence of wrong-doing). And the infiltration was to "stop crimes". R-i-i-g-h-t. And declaring a "free-speech zone" is one thing, secret monitoring and infiltration is another. That's straight out of the 1960's Vietnam era playbook, and McCarthy eara as well.
And it's done "to stop crime". Sure, that's the excuse given. But please name a _single prosecution_ or a single crime actually stopped by either of those efforts. Then tell me how it's "different" from McCarthy era wiretaps. The difference is one of degree, not of kind.
> For the one or two packages you absolutely need a more up-to-date version, there's always backports.
Then it's not purely "-stable", is it? Backports is useful, I approve of backports. But it's like saying "We run on pure RHEL" and then installing components from RPMforge, or installing components from CPAN: you get more usable software, but lose that assurance of server grade software and of component compatibility and consistency.
Go watch Fox News. The attitudes that senator McCarthy embodied and fostered are alive and well, and frighteningly accepted by some listeners. And dear god, if you actually read the Patriot Act, you see the fostering of exactly the same sort of star chamber and secret political monitoring "to stop terrorism" that McCarthy rode on "to stop Communism".
I'm not saying it's gotten as bad as it was in McCarthy's hey-day, but given the AT&T fiber-optic spying and similar behavior, and the clear use of domestic and foreign intelligence and security resources for political uses (especially under Bush and Cheney), it's hard to ignore the continuing risks. (Go review what happened to the protesters of the Republican national convention in 2004 for examples.)
As opposed to the complete joke that is FOIA in the US, and the Patriot Act? The various porn regulations in the US, capriciously decided on a state-by-state basis? The DMCA? Software patents? Disney and the insanely extendend copyright laws? The very strange regulations in the US about publication of encryption technologies? "Hate speech" is an understandable concern both for crime prevention, and for free speech reasons. But in my opinion as an outsider, both Canada and Sweden are noticeably better about it.
For US citizens, the McCarthy era is still in living memory, for some of us. So are the 1960's and their repression of anti-Vietnam speech. I like to think we've progressed, and the Internet is very useful for getting around the current round of restrictions. But make no mistake, they still happen, sometimes in new guises.
This is closer to what I have seen in my Debian and Ubuntu experience. Critical components, not part of "-stable" have to be integrated with some attention to detail. And _uninstalling_ them is a potential nightmare, particularly due to packages that are not well integrated or closely based on the current "-stable" repositories.
It's more difficult and requires more attention than merely sticking to "-stable". And notice that of the others who've responded so far, one had to step away from "-stable" for ClamAV when the next release was looming, and another had to grab PHP 5. That _counts_ as deviating from "-stable".
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, dear. You made a big whopper:
> However, the perpetual motion machine it describes is available for examination in every electron orbiting every nucleus.
They don't orbit. Get away from the pretty math and take a look at what an 'electron cloud' really means. And for elephants or onions, you should use as much as is necessary to explain the facts and keep Occam's Razor in mind.
That said, the Dirac equations are interesting and its descendants do try to explain an interesting problem.
There was also no theoretical reason for monopoles _to_ exist. If charge exists, and moving electric charges create magnetic fields, who do you _need_ magnetic charges? Making the equations "symmetrical" for both electric and magnetic charges does not make them any more elegant or powerful, any more than not having "negative mass" makes Newton's equations any less valid.
"Discrete units of net magnetic charge" may be a quantum effect of aligned, moving electrical charges. I still see no need for monopoles.
commodore64_love wrote:
> Hold on. You didn't like DS9? It was the most-intelligent of the Treks...
That's because it wasn't really created by Paramount. It was created by JMS when pitched Babylon 5 to Paramount, and they refused his pitch but lifted the major structure from Babylon 5 wholesale, and rushed to production so that it would precede Babylon 5 to the marketplace. Yes, I remember the conflicts at the time, and the parallels for the first few seasons really are striking. Given the lack of creativity permitted by Paramount, it's unsurprising that it was easier to lift a promising premise wholesale from outside rather than negotiate it through the layers of turf-protecting executives in their own bureaucracy.
The only thing that stopped Gattaca from becoming reality is that the premise is deeply flawed: the genetic code has never been that understood, and the factors interweave with each other and the environment so extensively that that kind of prenatal gene-weaving and genetic selection remains infeasible for many years.
It's a social engineering attack, yes. It's one that is built into the current implementation of SSL: the central key authority has been over-trusted, and signed keys are far too easy to obtain.
And I'm sorry that I was confusing. It's not PGP that I was referring to as useful, but rather PGP's 'web-of-trust', where people whom you know personally sign keys for others whom they know personally, and you can trace that web to see who knows the final target's key owner. From my observation of the behavior of Verisign, the most common signature authority, they should not be trusted to vouch for whether they're wearing pants, much less sign anyone's SSL keys. And downstream signature authorities like GoDaddy are even worse at selling off keys to fraudulent users. So SSL, as implemented in the procedural sense, only provides a money-purchased pretense at authentication, and is only genuinely useful for encryption.
This problem is not going away because it would completely shaft Verisign's business model, and they'd have no reason to _permit_ its removal.
No, I'm afraid it's not. It's still vulnerable to "Do you accept this made-up key" attacks where people have become far too accustomed to accepting unsigned keys, and to the purchase of centrally signed keys. Because the key signatures belong to a central signing authorities that rely on valid credit cards, not personal authentication, there is still only a pretense at genuine security.
There have been other tools proposed to address these issues, such as the PGP web-of-trust, and the Palladium project's hardware encryption, but they've broken down in practice on the problem of US encryption export regulations, poor closed source implementation that turns out to be easily virtualized, and many essentially social rather than technological issues. Even SSL was handicapped for years by the USA's insane 80-bit limit for SSL in exported software.
Because we don't want another Typhoid Mary (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Mallon) or Paddy Chew (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paddy_Chew). Typhoid Mary, in particular, never meant to infect anyone, but gave 53 people typhoid fever as a cook who was infected.
It's not the arm skin. It's what's leaking out of your arm and may leak into my bleeding or injured arm, or be tranferred on the gloved hand which handles the BP cuff and then handles your wound.
Has anyone explained to you what the skin condition of street people, or a nursing home resident with bedsores, can be like? They _leak_. I'm old enough to have close relatives in nursing care, and the bad homes are _awful_ with infected bodily fluids. The better homes are expensive, but unless you can take care of a really infirm relative at home, they're worth every extra penny to take care of someone you love and want to live a while longer.
That's not dating! That's "learning deskwork".
Not really Linux, but worth the blast from the past.
Fedora has a shocking number of games in the 'Everything' repository, including 'OpenArena' and many others.
It's not the gray hair (or what is left of it!), and those aren't wrinkles. They're laugh lines from the terrific amusement when some youngster ignores the hard-won lessons of the last millennium, especially when they have to call me or someone like me to clean up the mess. The laugh lines are especially deep from when I collected a paper trail to show where their supervisor ignored my written warnings about the danger: those are used with caution, but can be very, very handy.
Can I give one to the VP who keeps coming up with "exciting big vision projects" based on Slashdot articles?
I've had something like that happen. The recovery system for a partner had never been tested with a _full_ recovery, only with recovering a few selected files. But because someone decided to get cute with the backup system to pick and choose which targets got backed up, individual directories each got their own backup target. Thousands and thousands of them. And the backup system had a single tape drive, not a changer.
The result was that to restore the filesystem, the tapes had to be swapped in and out to get the last full dump, then the incremental dump, of _each_ of the thousands of targets. Fortunately for them, I managed to liberate an under-used tape library, but the incredible amount of time having the tape drive grind back and forth to find the different targets on each tape was also incredibly nasty. We helped them find other solutions for that issue, but it was nasty to clean up. And unfortunately for them, they didn't _have_ a large enough repository to have tested the full restoration procedure.
The point is that "random checks" are not enough. You have to actually do a full test, once a year. This is also why I despise people who sell monolithic, "high availability" storage systems that are not partitioned enough to create a mirror of your active data anywhere.
Where do you get this claim about "most infected before you get a single symptom"? The virus grows exponentially until it reaches a limit, one of immune response or other effects (such as destruction of your cells!!!!) causes enough damage that you can't support the infection. Given this, the amount of flu virus will continue growing while the immune response begins, even the effective immune response, _until_ the immune response is large enough to overwhelm that exponential growth.
So where are you getting this claim?
And you've apparently not been educated in immunology, or contagion. If a disease is moderately virulent (like the common cold, or the flue), but the vaccine is prevalent (such as 90% or better of school children, who are incredibly susceptible), outbreaks are very small and likely not to spread. If the vaccine is rare, the disease can still spread as a serious contagion: a plague, if the disease is dangerous enough.
AIDS is a fascinating example. It takes serious work to get AIDS: blood-to-blood transfer is unusual. But the idiots who first got it spread it _virulently_ through the susceptible group, so broadly that it's entered the general population in places like South Africa. And a hospital is a festering ground for infection: the sick people go there, otherwise healthy people get the disease and spread it to other patients unless their clean procedures are ver, very good, and the same staff person may see many other patients or clean many other rooms or handle many other cafeteria trays and spread the disease wildly among otherwise weakened people. They _should_ be vaccinated, for the safety of the patients.
I'm looking at the Berkeley DB 4.8 release notes: thank you for the pointer. The claim in your first URL that Berkeley DB "requires zero administration" has me laughing so hard, I almost sprayed something nasty on my keyboard. And this release is roughly 18 months lsince the last minor version release: please exuse my surprise. Now, reviewing the release notes, is there anything that we should care about? Not much. db_sql might be handy, if anyone used Berkeley DB anymore. The only reason to have it is to _extract_ data from Berkeley DB and transfer it to a better database.
You have a point about SQLite. The rather thorough discarding of Berkeley DB in Fedora and RHEL seems to have been in favor of SQLite: the only thing left in Fedora 11 that really requires it seems to be RPM itself, which strikes me as foolish.
The problem isn't the database itself. For a lot of use, there's not much difference. It's the tools to write to, and access, that database. If I've got to replace all the CPAN published, developer abusing Perl that my MySQL users have become accustomed to, I want really compelling benefits from the switchover.
Oracle owns Berkeley DB, from when they bought Sleepy Cat Software. Has anyone heard of _any_ useful progress in Berkeley DB, which used to rule Linux for lightweight, small databases? I thought not: they supported it a little bit, and it's been profoundly ignored for years now, by both its owners and the open source community at large.
I'm afraid that MySQL is fated for the same end: Oracle has little incentive to support it properly or to expand its role when it competes directly with their core products. It can be forked, but how much will be left of the core development team that really understood its features and trade-offs after 3 years working at Oracle?
Oh, dear. I've had to hire and fire, and apply for work. Cover letters are what tell the company you paid attention to their job ad and the fancy certification they asked for is covered by your experience with a related technology, that you're dating the boss, that you _wrote_ a significant portion of the software application they need help with, or other data that is not in a CV but might be relevant.
I've seen all of these in cover letters. The "dating the boss" one was fascinating to deal with.
While the BBC has a well-earned reputation for quality journalism, especially in international news, make no mistake. They are not "publicly funded" in the United States common sense of "non-profit" organization. They are a a tax-funded civil service. (Look up the annual UK "license fee" on televisions, to understand their funding.)
This doubtless affects their news coverage, although I'm not familiar enough with other British newspapers to compare and contrast them.
Oh, dear. Ignoring their own charter and the problems that creates, I leave to people who understand the idea of keeping the NSA out of domestic security for excellent reasons.
And your listing of "70 people prosecuted"? Wrong. That's 70 people arrested. do you see a prosecution there? Me, neither. And your "8 more here"? Please actually go and _read_ the articles you cite. And look for signs of an actual prosecution, rather than merely an arrest. The "misdemeanors" you cite also show little sign of prosecution, because the people arrested were protesting, not being violent. The "assassination" business is even more ludicrous: a terrifying situation which was discovered because the man was driving erratically, and you're trying to pretend that domestic surveillance somehow is related.
Faithful Slashdot readers, am I just feeding a troll here? Or is my exposition of this sort of ludicrous claim useful to the rest of you?
Ahh, yes. It's to stop the terrorists and block crimes. That's why we violate the NSA charter (by doing domestic spying), the Constitution (by monitoring without court order or any evidence of wrong-doing). And the infiltration was to "stop crimes". R-i-i-g-h-t. And declaring a "free-speech zone" is one thing, secret monitoring and infiltration is another. That's straight out of the 1960's Vietnam era playbook, and McCarthy eara as well.
And it's done "to stop crime". Sure, that's the excuse given. But please name a _single prosecution_ or a single crime actually stopped by either of those efforts. Then tell me how it's "different" from McCarthy era wiretaps. The difference is one of degree, not of kind.
Let me quote you, here:
> For the one or two packages you absolutely need a more up-to-date version, there's always backports.
Then it's not purely "-stable", is it? Backports is useful, I approve of backports. But it's like saying "We run on pure RHEL" and then installing components from RPMforge, or installing components from CPAN: you get more usable software, but lose that assurance of server grade software and of component compatibility and consistency.
Go watch Fox News. The attitudes that senator McCarthy embodied and fostered are alive and well, and frighteningly accepted by some listeners. And dear god, if you actually read the Patriot Act, you see the fostering of exactly the same sort of star chamber and secret political monitoring "to stop terrorism" that McCarthy rode on "to stop Communism".
I'm not saying it's gotten as bad as it was in McCarthy's hey-day, but given the AT&T fiber-optic spying and similar behavior, and the clear use of domestic and foreign intelligence and security resources for political uses (especially under Bush and Cheney), it's hard to ignore the continuing risks. (Go review what happened to the protesters of the Republican national convention in 2004 for examples.)
As opposed to the complete joke that is FOIA in the US, and the Patriot Act? The various porn regulations in the US, capriciously decided on a state-by-state basis? The DMCA? Software patents? Disney and the insanely extendend copyright laws? The very strange regulations in the US about publication of encryption technologies? "Hate speech" is an understandable concern both for crime prevention, and for free speech reasons. But in my opinion as an outsider, both Canada and Sweden are noticeably better about it.
For US citizens, the McCarthy era is still in living memory, for some of us. So are the 1960's and their repression of anti-Vietnam speech. I like to think we've progressed, and the Internet is very useful for getting around the current round of restrictions. But make no mistake, they still happen, sometimes in new guises.
This is closer to what I have seen in my Debian and Ubuntu experience. Critical components, not part of "-stable" have to be integrated with some attention to detail. And _uninstalling_ them is a potential nightmare, particularly due to packages that are not well integrated or closely based on the current "-stable" repositories.
It's more difficult and requires more attention than merely sticking to "-stable". And notice that of the others who've responded so far, one had to step away from "-stable" for ClamAV when the next release was looming, and another had to grab PHP 5. That _counts_ as deviating from "-stable".