Putting your hands on a child for discipline is pretty serious business where I live. This is partly because the standards differ so much from family to family, that the swat on the ass that one family considers appropriate for sassing an elder would throw another family into a child's rights tantrum.
Remember, it's all fun and games until someone files a lawsuit.
"The middle of the Atlantic OCean" is a big place. However, "that maneuverable spot between the underwater mountains that shield you from sonar and doesn't have any currents that will smack you into rocks" is not perhaps such a big place, and it's less surprising that such places might be more frequented by submarines playing hide and seek.
In fact, it makes me wonder if _both_ subs were hiding from a Russian vessel nearby and pulled the same tricks of concealment.
It's not just patience and time. Compilation creates uncertainty in your code, because your compilation environment may be changed by utilities installed, or removed, for other reasons. A lot of software is _not_ gracefully integrated or bundled for multi-application environments. If it were, DLL-hell wouldn't be such a problem for Windows users, and the CPAN dependency hell of poorly written apps with the same filenames wouldn't fracture Perl tool chains.
Release to the public domain was added on, later. Just as more modern law has given women the right to vote and freed slaves, copyright law wasn't originally aimed to have such limited duration or to control competition. It was to provide monopoly power, for reasons its promoters thought good. When you have a state religion, having heretics publish their own Bibles with alternative contents is a bit upsetting: it's like having people publish alternative Constitutions and lauding them as the word of the Founding Fathers.
Not that some congresspeople don't act like that, or even some Presidents, but having them publish their alternative as authentic would be of some concern.
You have to understand copyright's roots to understand its nature. Just as you have to remember that "reading someone their rights", or "the right to an attorney" are relatively recent innovations and are not built into the Constitution, you have to remember that the Constitution is merely US law, and it is mererly a goal. Many users of copyright will seek it for reasons other than "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts", the Constitutional basis for copyright law.
Oh, my. Tongue out of cheek, the public Linux drivers were in fact already in the main kernel source tree, and were far better than Promise's 'Linux support'.
Promise is famous for many, many other manufacturing and design problems, so it's not a big surprise. It looks like S3 has similar historic quality problems.
"Release to the public domain" is not an inherent aspect of copyright. It's a common part of modern copyright laws nationally and internationally, true. But the history of copyright is to control publication: this was especially important when Gutenberg started printing Bibles, and the Catholic church became very, very upset.
Interesting. It sounds like Promise's Linux support: they used to publish customized versions of out-of-date versions of Linux patches that re-arranged your drive numbering without telling anyone and coulldn't be applied against any contemporary kernel source tree.
What NVidia publishes is a fascinating attempt to endrun around the GPL licenses. They publish a binary blob kernel driver, which 'taints' your kernel and legally prevents you from being able to publish it as part of your distribution. And for the features to work, they also replace the OpenGL libraries with closed source versions, which do not integrate well with _anyone's_ package management system, because they refuse to publish any RPM,.dep, or other package managed tool for it, nor does their license allow repackaging it and automating installation. If you want the drivers, you're compelled by their license to _manuall_ have each installer sign the agreement.
This is extremely painful in many environments, and leads to some extremely poorly done repackaging of their drivers and libraries for automated installation, and their exclusion form Linux distributions.
That actually makes more sense, technologically. But do _not_ underestimate the processing time to filter out background noise. While the US 'Green Zone' itself is isolated for a considerable distance around it, to control snipers, and sensors there might work well, try leaving them within a few hundred yards of an armored convoy or even a major middle eastern bazaar, and I would expect the background noise to be so high that tuning it would become a nightmare.
People do tend to forget about the phase delays in signal detection. You remember more about them if you're old enough to have dealt with a lot of older network and computer technologies, and substitute "let the computer fix it" for actually minimizing propagation delays. But for this? The delay matters!
No, no, you put the "dance like Jennifer Beals" armor on the president, not his guards. _HE_ is the one who absolutely needs to get out of the way of the bullet. Thinking in that situation is the job of the Secret Service personnel, who are supposed to be wearing the best possible body armor and know the escape routes.
Disabling presidential guards by planting a remote sniper to make them fall over does not seem like a good move.
High velocity helps in that sense, yes. But it's _small_. And that "cluttered battlefield" constitutes a huge radar problem.
The radar's point of view constitutes another set of related issues. Is the person wearing the armor wearing the radar? Radar capable of detecting a single bullet at a range far enough to provide time to move has to be putting out quite a lot of radio energy, which also means big batteries or a generator. That's unlikely to fit in the armor itself, and it's painting a big target on the wearer saying "drop mortar shell here, please".
The 1500 fps I quote is the velocity for an M99 at 100 yards. The round starts out considerably faster, so the time is less than you think. Also, plot the timeline.
Sniper fires, at leisure. Traveling bullet triggers sensors of detection system. (This takes time.) Detection system actually detects bullet, as opposed to system and environmental noise. This time should _not_ be underestimated! Such a system will have a tremendous amount of "noise" from other sources, no matter what the detection method used, and while you can process and process and process to detect relevant gunfire, this takes significants amount of data and real-time-processing. Signal is transmitted to armor. (Small, but non-zero time, may not be relevant depending on signal encryption and local transmission conditions. The troops on convoys in Iraq, for example, are _blasting_ all over local radio signals to avoid radio triggers for IED, and I shudder to think what an improperly secured bionic armor could be made to do in combat.) Solder moves. Wearing armor, carrying weapons, etc. This is not the half-second or so you need to hit the brakes in a car, major muscles have to _move your body_, and that takes time.
So 2 seconds is not the generous amount of time you might think at first glance from a geek's armchair.
On further thought, I can see one use for it. Public speakers, like presidents, in a very controlled environment such as an inauguration. The nearby area is already secured, and there are plenty of people with better armor to jump _on top_ of the president to protect him where the bionic armor has thrown him. And it's potentially much lighter and less embarassing than a flak jacket.
OK, let's go down the list of possible sources of information, shall we?
Light? No good, the optical field is very confusing, with dust, buildings, etc. There's too much optical noise.
Radar? Oh, yes, that works well to track a small, high velocity object in a similarly cluttered field. Moreover, the radars have to be so scattered that they are also expensive to deploy.
Sound? Several of us have already mentioned the problems with that.
In _Iraq_? Darned straight they'll wear it on convoy duty or for presidential guard duty, if it works.
It's also _completely_ useless against long-range sniper rounds, since those exceed the speed of sound quite easily. I have a reference page for the US M99 open right now. At 1000 yards, which is well within the capabilities of a well-trained sniper, the velocity of a round is 1500 fps. That's roughly 40% faster than the speed of sound.
And simply peppering an area with remote gunfire causing US troops to dance like Jennifer Beals in Flashdance? Put a soundtrack of 'What A Feeling' on, and I'd pay to see it.
No, no. The'd rather spend the week making work schedules and powerpoint presentations and manpower allocation charts for the productivity idea, rather than actually doing the change. The time lost in the paperwork and bureaucracy are often so great that it's simply not worth the effort for minor, technologically or procedurally sensitive ideas because it has to go through 4 layers of management, all of them playing "telephone" and turning your idea for a safety switch into a complete sytem redesign, made by a new and unknown vendor who made a great presentation to people who know nothing about the field but spell their last name the same way as the company founder.
I saw this happen about 5 years ago: it was _amazing_ to watch the middle management burn the company to the ground with endless procedures and study groups, rather than knuckling down and doing the actually necessary work, and the results were evident in the handling of email and printers that I discussed with them as another business in the same building.
The 'someone' was a good catch, thank you. The parenthetical "historical" is, however, legitimate, although a bit odd. I actually write that way, and there's not a theoretical minimum size on parentheticals. The 'Or', while technically incorrect, is in fact a common usage.
So there's no need to call a war crimes tribunal for the grammar nazis, I just think that capturing France as well as Belgium was a bit too much.
Really? Then how will you extradite them if they're from someone where it wasn't illegal? Worse, how will you even find a competent prosecutor for computer crime?
The US record for convicting people for computer crime is, historically, awful. Even when they catch the guilty parties in the act, they traditionally attempt to try them for the wrong crime, fail to gather enough evidence to convince a judge or a jury as they run afoul of uncooperative schools where students have been active in criminal behavior, or plea bargain them to try and get the "big fish". Or the captured cracker pulls a "get out of jail free" card such as their father being the head of the NSA. (Look up the Morris Worm, if you don't believe me on that one.)
Remember, Microsoft offered the money for prosecution. There's little risk of their having to pay it.
They didn't buy it. They hired away David Cutler (whose latest work with the Prism project had just been discarded). David brought along a lot of VMS internals with him, in direct violation DEC's ownership of the material.
Well, don't underestimate Castro himself. This looks like just the sort of thing he'd have enjoyed, when active, to stick it to those American capitalist pig-dogs and actually have something working that can be done locally. Cuba's big problem is lack of connectivity: their biggest Internet neighbors do _not_ want to share bandwidth with them.
Would you care to bet on that? While decryption capability is fascinating, its use for DRM is not its strongest use. The keys are consistently handled quite badly. Witness the failures to protect the keys for DVD's and the very swift cracking of Blu-Ray protection for examples of how quickly such technologies can be cracked.
And you forgot VMS -> NT versions -> XP -> Windows 2003. OK, Microsoft didn't write VMS, but they surely stole wholesale from it for NT when they hired David Cutler, one of its authors.
Then stop doing a bait and switch with your claims. Since the nuclear reaction claims seem founded in palladium experiments, you _should not_ make claims about them for other technologies. You are consistently citing interesting, but incomplete research with wild-eyed excitement and expecting us to extrapolate them to wish-fulfilling promises for future energy. I'm apparently far, far more skeptical than you about these approaches because far too often, reality fails to fill those missing gaps.
Or simply put, cite the research you actually think works: don't waste my time on LENR when you, yourself, say it can be "safely ignored", and "much cheaper methods have been developed". You are claiming such technologies exist for energy production: name them. I'm not here to fill in the gaps in your claims for you.
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Putting your hands on a child for discipline is pretty serious business where I live. This is partly because the standards differ so much from family to family, that the swat on the ass that one family considers appropriate for sassing an elder would throw another family into a child's rights tantrum.
Remember, it's all fun and games until someone files a lawsuit.
"The middle of the Atlantic OCean" is a big place. However, "that maneuverable spot between the underwater mountains that shield you from sonar and doesn't have any currents that will smack you into rocks" is not perhaps such a big place, and it's less surprising that such places might be more frequented by submarines playing hide and seek.
In fact, it makes me wonder if _both_ subs were hiding from a Russian vessel nearby and pulled the same tricks of concealment.
It's not just patience and time. Compilation creates uncertainty in your code, because your compilation environment may be changed by utilities installed, or removed, for other reasons. A lot of software is _not_ gracefully integrated or bundled for multi-application environments. If it were, DLL-hell wouldn't be such a problem for Windows users, and the CPAN dependency hell of poorly written apps with the same filenames wouldn't fracture Perl tool chains.
Release to the public domain was added on, later. Just as more modern law has given women the right to vote and freed slaves, copyright law wasn't originally aimed to have such limited duration or to control competition. It was to provide monopoly power, for reasons its promoters thought good. When you have a state religion, having heretics publish their own Bibles with alternative contents is a bit upsetting: it's like having people publish alternative Constitutions and lauding them as the word of the Founding Fathers.
Not that some congresspeople don't act like that, or even some Presidents, but having them publish their alternative as authentic would be of some concern.
You have to understand copyright's roots to understand its nature. Just as you have to remember that "reading someone their rights", or "the right to an attorney" are relatively recent innovations and are not built into the Constitution, you have to remember that the Constitution is merely US law, and it is mererly a goal. Many users of copyright will seek it for reasons other than "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts", the Constitutional basis for copyright law.
Oh, my. Tongue out of cheek, the public Linux drivers were in fact already in the main kernel source tree, and were far better than Promise's 'Linux support'. Promise is famous for many, many other manufacturing and design problems, so it's not a big surprise. It looks like S3 has similar historic quality problems.
"Release to the public domain" is not an inherent aspect of copyright. It's a common part of modern copyright laws nationally and internationally, true. But the history of copyright is to control publication: this was especially important when Gutenberg started printing Bibles, and the Catholic church became very, very upset.
Interesting. It sounds like Promise's Linux support: they used to publish customized versions of out-of-date versions of Linux patches that re-arranged your drive numbering without telling anyone and coulldn't be applied against any contemporary kernel source tree.
What NVidia publishes is a fascinating attempt to endrun around the GPL licenses. They publish a binary blob kernel driver, which 'taints' your kernel and legally prevents you from being able to publish it as part of your distribution. And for the features to work, they also replace the OpenGL libraries with closed source versions, which do not integrate well with _anyone's_ package management system, because they refuse to publish any RPM, .dep, or other package managed tool for it, nor does their license allow repackaging it and automating installation. If you want the drivers, you're compelled by their license to _manuall_ have each installer sign the agreement.
This is extremely painful in many environments, and leads to some extremely poorly done repackaging of their drivers and libraries for automated installation, and their exclusion form Linux distributions.
That actually makes more sense, technologically. But do _not_ underestimate the processing time to filter out background noise. While the US 'Green Zone' itself is isolated for a considerable distance around it, to control snipers, and sensors there might work well, try leaving them within a few hundred yards of an armored convoy or even a major middle eastern bazaar, and I would expect the background noise to be so high that tuning it would become a nightmare.
People do tend to forget about the phase delays in signal detection. You remember more about them if you're old enough to have dealt with a lot of older network and computer technologies, and substitute "let the computer fix it" for actually minimizing propagation delays. But for this? The delay matters!
No, no, you put the "dance like Jennifer Beals" armor on the president, not his guards. _HE_ is the one who absolutely needs to get out of the way of the bullet. Thinking in that situation is the job of the Secret Service personnel, who are supposed to be wearing the best possible body armor and know the escape routes.
Disabling presidential guards by planting a remote sniper to make them fall over does not seem like a good move.
High velocity helps in that sense, yes. But it's _small_. And that "cluttered battlefield" constitutes a huge radar problem. The radar's point of view constitutes another set of related issues. Is the person wearing the armor wearing the radar? Radar capable of detecting a single bullet at a range far enough to provide time to move has to be putting out quite a lot of radio energy, which also means big batteries or a generator. That's unlikely to fit in the armor itself, and it's painting a big target on the wearer saying "drop mortar shell here, please".
The 1500 fps I quote is the velocity for an M99 at 100 yards. The round starts out considerably faster, so the time is less than you think. Also, plot the timeline.
Sniper fires, at leisure.
Traveling bullet triggers sensors of detection system. (This takes time.)
Detection system actually detects bullet, as opposed to system and environmental noise. This time should _not_ be underestimated! Such a system will have a tremendous amount of "noise" from other sources, no matter what the detection method used, and while you can process and process and process to detect relevant gunfire, this takes significants amount of data and real-time-processing.
Signal is transmitted to armor. (Small, but non-zero time, may not be relevant depending on signal encryption and local transmission conditions. The troops on convoys in Iraq, for example, are _blasting_ all over local radio signals to avoid radio triggers for IED, and I shudder to think what an improperly secured bionic armor could be made to do in combat.)
Solder moves. Wearing armor, carrying weapons, etc. This is not the half-second or so you need to hit the brakes in a car, major muscles have to _move your body_, and that takes time.
So 2 seconds is not the generous amount of time you might think at first glance from a geek's armchair.
On further thought, I can see one use for it. Public speakers, like presidents, in a very controlled environment such as an inauguration. The nearby area is already secured, and there are plenty of people with better armor to jump _on top_ of the president to protect him where the bionic armor has thrown him. And it's potentially much lighter and less embarassing than a flak jacket.
OK, let's go down the list of possible sources of information, shall we?
Light? No good, the optical field is very confusing, with dust, buildings, etc. There's too much optical noise.
Radar? Oh, yes, that works well to track a small, high velocity object in a similarly cluttered field. Moreover, the radars have to be so scattered that they are also expensive to deploy.
Sound? Several of us have already mentioned the problems with that.
In _Iraq_? Darned straight they'll wear it on convoy duty or for presidential guard duty, if it works.
It's also _completely_ useless against long-range sniper rounds, since those exceed the speed of sound quite easily. I have a reference page for the US M99 open right now. At 1000 yards, which is well within the capabilities of a well-trained sniper, the velocity of a round is 1500 fps. That's roughly 40% faster than the speed of sound.
And simply peppering an area with remote gunfire causing US troops to dance like Jennifer Beals in Flashdance? Put a soundtrack of 'What A Feeling' on, and I'd pay to see it.
No, no. The'd rather spend the week making work schedules and powerpoint presentations and manpower allocation charts for the productivity idea, rather than actually doing the change. The time lost in the paperwork and bureaucracy are often so great that it's simply not worth the effort for minor, technologically or procedurally sensitive ideas because it has to go through 4 layers of management, all of them playing "telephone" and turning your idea for a safety switch into a complete sytem redesign, made by a new and unknown vendor who made a great presentation to people who know nothing about the field but spell their last name the same way as the company founder.
I saw this happen about 5 years ago: it was _amazing_ to watch the middle management burn the company to the ground with endless procedures and study groups, rather than knuckling down and doing the actually necessary work, and the results were evident in the handling of email and printers that I discussed with them as another business in the same building.
The 'someone' was a good catch, thank you. The parenthetical "historical" is, however, legitimate, although a bit odd. I actually write that way, and there's not a theoretical minimum size on parentheticals. The 'Or', while technically incorrect, is in fact a common usage.
So there's no need to call a war crimes tribunal for the grammar nazis, I just think that capturing France as well as Belgium was a bit too much.
Really? Then how will you extradite them if they're from someone where it wasn't illegal? Worse, how will you even find a competent prosecutor for computer crime?
The US record for convicting people for computer crime is, historically, awful. Even when they catch the guilty parties in the act, they traditionally attempt to try them for the wrong crime, fail to gather enough evidence to convince a judge or a jury as they run afoul of uncooperative schools where students have been active in criminal behavior, or plea bargain them to try and get the "big fish". Or the captured cracker pulls a "get out of jail free" card such as their father being the head of the NSA. (Look up the Morris Worm, if you don't believe me on that one.)
Remember, Microsoft offered the money for prosecution. There's little risk of their having to pay it.
They didn't buy it. They hired away David Cutler (whose latest work with the Prism project had just been discarded). David brought along a lot of VMS internals with him, in direct violation DEC's ownership of the material.
I hear they're emptying out Guantanamo. I'm sure there'll be one empty cell that can hold them all.
Well, don't underestimate Castro himself. This looks like just the sort of thing he'd have enjoyed, when active, to stick it to those American capitalist pig-dogs and actually have something working that can be done locally. Cuba's big problem is lack of connectivity: their biggest Internet neighbors do _not_ want to share bandwidth with them.
Would you care to bet on that? While decryption capability is fascinating, its use for DRM is not its strongest use. The keys are consistently handled quite badly. Witness the failures to protect the keys for DVD's and the very swift cracking of Blu-Ray protection for examples of how quickly such technologies can be cracked.
And you forgot VMS -> NT versions -> XP -> Windows 2003. OK, Microsoft didn't write VMS, but they surely stole wholesale from it for NT when they hired David Cutler, one of its authors.
Can I send you mine? The import duties might be expensive.
Then stop doing a bait and switch with your claims. Since the nuclear reaction claims seem founded in palladium experiments, you _should not_ make claims about them for other technologies. You are consistently citing interesting, but incomplete research with wild-eyed excitement and expecting us to extrapolate them to wish-fulfilling promises for future energy. I'm apparently far, far more skeptical than you about these approaches because far too often, reality fails to fill those missing gaps.
Or simply put, cite the research you actually think works: don't waste my time on LENR when you, yourself, say it can be "safely ignored", and "much cheaper methods have been developed". You are claiming such technologies exist for energy production: name them. I'm not here to fill in the gaps in your claims for you.