You have that exactly backwards. MS is profiting from a government-imposed monopoly, complete with fines and jail time for breaking the monopoly. Linux and Free Software on the other hand is a free market where anyone can sell what they want without government interference. (Ok with the minor exception of the terms of the GPL and other Free licenses.)
They also underpin the GPL and similar licences. Abolish copyright on software, and there's nothing to stop people and companies from taking source and incorporating it into closed source products.
Many people want to get us to that point; from my reading of what FSF has published they want that as well. Forcing people to hand over source code along with binaries is not a natural right. It is an evil that is temporarily necessary in order to make it possible for Free Software to thrive. Once copyright for software is abolished, the protections are hardly necessary. Sure someone might make open source software into closed source software, but a) the BSD argument applies: "The original software is still free" and b) they would not be able to stop me from decompiling the changes and incorporated them in the free version.
Sure, in a world without copyright Free Software would be facing challenges. It would still be a giant leap forward.
Theoretically possible, yes. But I doubt it. In theory a phone with the right firmware could act as a complete SIM card writer. I doubt that most phone firmwares have that kind of functionality by default.
Of course the phone can be identified independently of the SIM card. The phone has an IMEI number so its network access can be disabled if it gets stolen.
Anyway, the terrorists are not quite as stupid as you think. The neat thing about SIM cards is that they are user programmable. It seems that the terrorists, for some reason, kept transferring new accounts onto the special SIM card. You can have several accounts on one SIM card by the way; this can be very convenient if you have a company account and a private account.
Apparently it is possible to identify at least the manufacturer of the SIM card itself, not just the account that happens to be stored on it. That surprises me. Perhaps it is even possible to identify the specific SIM card itself.
I bet Richard Stallman looks forward to the day the GPL is rendered toothless by the revocation of copyright. The GPL is a temporary evil we must endure until the greater evil is defeated.
There is no significant atmosphere to make the elevator burn up or slow down. Also, it is easier to build the elevator in the first place due to the lower gravity. I am fairly sure Mars got a space elevator before Earth in the Mars trilogy (I'm too lazy to check). In that case it can be expected that the cable has more mass for the same tensile strength than a cable for use on Earth. That would probably lead to a sturdier cable that would cause more damage.
Don't blame Kim Stanley Robinson for the faults of his readers.
is that you need to put display: inline in the CSS. Of course display: inline makes no sense at all for a float, so sane browsers simply ignore it. When IE sees it, the annoying margin/spacing bug is turned off.
I really don't think you should complain that New Egg uses a shipping company that delivers the goods before they are even sent. I would personally label that as special rush delivery.
Or maybe the reason is that multicasting is fundamentally unworkable. A router supporting multicast needs to keep track of where to send packets belonging to each multicast group. And there would be as many multicast groups as there are people transmitting radio or video... Perhaps a few hundred thousand stations? Plus the streaming webcams that would appear instantly, a few million perhaps. The number of multicast groups gets way out of hand.
Multicast is intelligence in the routers. The solution is intelligence in the edges - machines should pass the packets on to the next radio listener, and so on. That would scale, since machines are fast, and the few people who want to listen to a hundred thousand radio channels at once probably have a pretty good internet connection and some decent hardware.
Re:ISP's still charge for extra IP's?
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The State of IPv6
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· Score: 1
You can have some billion IP's from me for free. Actually way more than that, I'm not stingy. If that's not enough there are lots and lots of tunnel providers out there.
If your ISP is being unreasonable about the number of IPv6-addresses they give you, you just borrow a bunch from someone who is close to you on the network. Sure the tunnelling will mean a few hops more when routing, but it won't be noticeable if you pick a good tunnel provider.
You can even do that if your ISP only provides a dynamic IPv4 address. Charging for IPv6 addresses is hopeless.
I wonder how long it will be before cars have HUD's that put hash marks around all other cars on the road and tell you their distance (from your car) and speeds...
Do you think a "couple extra bucks a month" are going to pay even the interest on the investment in burying a fiber to your home?
DC is better than AC for long distance
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Global Dimming
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· Score: 1
You are confusing DC with low-voltage and AC with high-voltage. At any given voltage, it is more efficient to transfer DC than AC. Historically it was only possible to get a high enough voltage with AC transformers, but with power electronics you can do high voltage DC. As a bonus you do not have to synchronize a DC grid, so major blackouts are unlikely.
I've said it time and time again - we need to drop GNOME or KDE (preferably keeping KDE, IMHO) and just run with that.
Yes, we need to stop wasting all that effort duplicating things and instead build the best solution the first time. I propose that we make the LUGs into committees and make a super-committee, the Union of Linux Committees, which will then delegate work. That way our leaders can decide what is most important for the Community, and their wisdom will ensure that we do not stray from the true path. History has shown that letting people influence their own lives only leads to confused running in all directions at once.
The phone is most likely using multiprocessing to provide isolation. Should the Linux kernel take an extended vacation of a few milliseconds, it is nice that the phone conversation still works and the GSM/GPRS packets still get sent and received. This can be achieved with the real time Linux extensions and appropriate buffering, but getting it right is not trivial - especially if you are close to the throughput limit of the CPU. It is only appropriate where you have more than one application running.
If a single CPU does not have the power to handle one application you are screwed; you have to split it up and parallelize, and you most likely need closely-coupled SMP instead. SMP for a single real-time application is hard to get right.
That is the whole point of having the appeal to the second level. Now the matter will be settled for good - and if he wins, all the first level courts will just throw out similar cases. If the case had not been appealed, only the much weaker precedent from a first level court would be there, and people could get dragged into court on this issue forever. Indeed, had it not been appealed, Jon might end up being tried for hacking iTunes.
What makes you think AC is somehow immune to (or less susceptible to) voltage drop over distance? If anything, AC is worse, since you don't get to use the full width of a massive cable, and you get hit by inductance and capacitance in addition to plain resistance.
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You have that exactly backwards. MS is profiting from a government-imposed monopoly, complete with fines and jail time for breaking the monopoly. Linux and Free Software on the other hand is a free market where anyone can sell what they want without government interference. (Ok with the minor exception of the terms of the GPL and other Free licenses.)
Many people want to get us to that point; from my reading of what FSF has published they want that as well. Forcing people to hand over source code along with binaries is not a natural right. It is an evil that is temporarily necessary in order to make it possible for Free Software to thrive. Once copyright for software is abolished, the protections are hardly necessary. Sure someone might make open source software into closed source software, but a) the BSD argument applies: "The original software is still free" and b) they would not be able to stop me from decompiling the changes and incorporated them in the free version.
Sure, in a world without copyright Free Software would be facing challenges. It would still be a giant leap forward.
Theoretically possible, yes. But I doubt it. In theory a phone with the right firmware could act as a complete SIM card writer. I doubt that most phone firmwares have that kind of functionality by default.
Anyway, the terrorists are not quite as stupid as you think. The neat thing about SIM cards is that they are user programmable. It seems that the terrorists, for some reason, kept transferring new accounts onto the special SIM card. You can have several accounts on one SIM card by the way; this can be very convenient if you have a company account and a private account.
Apparently it is possible to identify at least the manufacturer of the SIM card itself, not just the account that happens to be stored on it. That surprises me. Perhaps it is even possible to identify the specific SIM card itself.
...as long as it is legal to defeat it.
I bet Richard Stallman looks forward to the day the GPL is rendered toothless by the revocation of copyright. The GPL is a temporary evil we must endure until the greater evil is defeated.
Don't blame Kim Stanley Robinson for the faults of his readers.
I will feel so much more comfortable knowing that the global warming is completely natural.
is that you need to put display: inline in the CSS. Of course display: inline makes no sense at all for a float, so sane browsers simply ignore it. When IE sees it, the annoying margin/spacing bug is turned off.
It is too bad you get confused. There really was no choice there.
I really don't think you should complain that New Egg uses a shipping company that delivers the goods before they are even sent. I would personally label that as special rush delivery.
Danish VAT is 25%. So is Hungarian (but the Hungarian VAT depends on what you buy).
Multicast is intelligence in the routers. The solution is intelligence in the edges - machines should pass the packets on to the next radio listener, and so on. That would scale, since machines are fast, and the few people who want to listen to a hundred thousand radio channels at once probably have a pretty good internet connection and some decent hardware.
You can have some billion IP's from me for free. Actually way more than that, I'm not stingy. If that's not enough there are lots and lots of tunnel providers out there.
You can even do that if your ISP only provides a dynamic IPv4 address. Charging for IPv6 addresses is hopeless.
Heh, I want beeps and flashing diamonds.
That is what missile defense is all about.
FastTCP is utterly useless on the kind of connections you and I have. Regular TCP easily maxes those out.
Do you think a "couple extra bucks a month" are going to pay even the interest on the investment in burying a fiber to your home?
You are confusing DC with low-voltage and AC with high-voltage. At any given voltage, it is more efficient to transfer DC than AC. Historically it was only possible to get a high enough voltage with AC transformers, but with power electronics you can do high voltage DC. As a bonus you do not have to synchronize a DC grid, so major blackouts are unlikely.
Yes, we need to stop wasting all that effort duplicating things and instead build the best solution the first time. I propose that we make the LUGs into committees and make a super-committee, the Union of Linux Committees, which will then delegate work. That way our leaders can decide what is most important for the Community, and their wisdom will ensure that we do not stray from the true path. History has shown that letting people influence their own lives only leads to confused running in all directions at once.
If a single CPU does not have the power to handle one application you are screwed; you have to split it up and parallelize, and you most likely need closely-coupled SMP instead. SMP for a single real-time application is hard to get right.
That is the whole point of having the appeal to the second level. Now the matter will be settled for good - and if he wins, all the first level courts will just throw out similar cases. If the case had not been appealed, only the much weaker precedent from a first level court would be there, and people could get dragged into court on this issue forever. Indeed, had it not been appealed, Jon might end up being tried for hacking iTunes.
What makes you think AC is somehow immune to (or less susceptible to) voltage drop over distance? If anything, AC is worse, since you don't get to use the full width of a massive cable, and you get hit by inductance and capacitance in addition to plain resistance.
Vector-based CRTs have existed. There are probably a few around in museums still.