1. get rid of the crown. It's long over due. Join the post-medieval world.
2. GET A CONSTITUTION.
Because that's done so well for you in the USA. Oh wait, the USA is only the second most monitored country in the world.
Really: what the hell does the system of government have to do with the existence of fascist CCTV cameras? The scum rises to the top in every system of government I'm aware of, whether democratic or otherwise.
So, is that an Imperial enormous amount, or a metric enormous amount?
I believe the correct unit for expressing such an enormous amount would be a "shitload". This is a well-known measure, used extensively in the civil and power engineering. It is frequently heard when discussing currency.
Wait a minute... supposing we leave 22 for non-porn ssh, 25 for non-porn smtp, and 80 for non-porn http.... that only leaves 65533 ports for porn. Is that enough? I don't think it's enough.
But wait! What other protocols have you forgotten about which you use on a daily basis?
DNS
NTP
HTTPS
IMAP
FTP
Telnet
Kerberos
POP
SFTP
IRC
VNC
LDAP
RTSP
Rsync
The list goes on and on. In fact, my/etc/services contains 4596 ports registered for TCP protocols.
Clearly the legislation should be amended to declare the MSB of the port number to be the "evil bit" similar to that specified in RFC3514.
Better, they could use a less broken solution such as a URL tagging system like PICS.
More information on this subject, including a detailed discussion of why content segregation is dangerous, can be found in RFC3675. It suggests an actual workable solution: PICS tags.
PICS Labels (Platform for Internet Content Selection) is a
generalized system for providing "ratings" for Internet accessible
material. The PICS documents should be consulted for details.
In general, PICS assumes an arbitrarily large number of rating
services and rating systems. Each service and system is identified
by a URL.
It would be quite reasonable to have multiple PICS services that, in
the aggregate, provided 300 bits of label information or more. There
could be a PICS service for every community of interest. This sort
of technology is really the only reasonable way to make
categorizations or labelings of material available in a diverse and
dynamic world.
While such PICS label services could be used to distribute government
promulgated censorship categories, for example, it is not clear how
this is any worse than government censorship via national firewalls.
A PICS rating system is essentially a definition of one or more
dimensions and the numeric range of the values that can be assigned
in each dimension to a rated object. A service is a source of labels
where a label includes actual ratings. Ratings are either specific
or generic. A specific rating applies only to the material at a
particular URL [RFC 2396] and does not cover anything referenced from
it, even included image files. A generic rating applies to the
specified URL and to all URLs for which the stated URL is a prefix.
This seems like very much the "right" way of doing it. It:
Doesn't break any existing systems,
Is plenty flexible enough to be used for flagging pr0n as such, but also could be used by services like del.icio.us to suggest similar content to the current page,
And gracefully degrades to support systems that are unaware of it.
Also, unlike their proposed port breakage, it can easily be turned off if you don't care about it.
Unfortunately port 69 is already assigned. From my/etc/services:
tftp 69/tcp tftp 69/udp
In any case, the concept is fundamentally flawed. Ports are designed to discriminate by protocol, not by service content. This is just another flawed implementation of RFC3514.
There's no way a jillion, zillion interconnected piezo-electric protein boogers are going to match the brutish output of a typical 10MW wind turbine for power generation.
Especially considering that the kinematic boundary layer between the wind flow and the building will almost certainly be several orders of magnitude larger than said proteins. Whoever suggested that has clearly forgotten their elementary fluid dynamics (the No-Slip Condition) and should have asked someone who would have a clue, i.e. an Engineer.
If I'm Google, I turn the morons off and see how fast they come screaming back when their ad revenue plummets. Seriously, IT'S FREE FREAKING ADVERTISING. Google should be charging *them*. You suck at teh internets. This is about the "google cache" link supplied on Google's search results page.
No, he makes a good point. If someone files a lawsuit against Google, all Google would have to do to stop them would be to suspend their site from all indexing and search results. There's no God-given right to be indexed by a search engine. Bad analogy; imagine you sell hot meaty pies, and some random guy walks around the town carrying a board with the words, "Eat Anonymous Coward's Hot Meaty Pies Today!!!". Now imagine that guy does it for free. Suing Google is somewhat like taking the guy to court because "Anonymous Coward" is your trademark and he didn't pay for a license to use it.
In what ways is Wikipedia noxious? I can answer that.
But that's not what I asked. I asked, "In what way is the idea behind Wikipedia pretty noxious?" Perhaps the implementation of the idea has turned out to be non-ideal (is anything ever perfect, given humans' propensity for breaking anything that can be broken?) However, I would be loathe to write the whole thing off as a totally bad idea.
Even if the current embodiment of Wikimedia's ideas fails, I deeply hope that eventually someone will work out how to do it in such away that it succeeds. Because it is a good idea.
actually the reason i am attacking idea of moonbase at this point in our civilizational[sic] development is described in your last paragraph. we have so many issues that are directly solveable by investing the money in incomparably easier means in earth than investing in moon that, going to set up something on the moon for people to live in is just plain waste.
You're wrong. The issues you're thinking of are not going be solved by throwing money at them; they will only be solved by political, diplomatic and legislative means. This is a viewpoint borne ought by legions of economic and historical analyses of where the issues actually come from.
On the other hand, a relatively minuscule investment in something like the space industry can make a very large difference, if it isn't all spent on red tape.
and how is it gonna be ? it is further than any orbit hence difficult to reach,
Incorrect: if we can send multi-tonne satellites to geostationary orbit, we can send multi-ton payloads to the moon just as easily. The vast majority of effort done by a launcher is to get its payload out of the atmosphere: after that it's relatively plane sailing. There are also several possibilities involving the use of highly efficient automated cargo tugs to move cargo backwards and forwards between LEO and the moon.
you have lesser structural requirements in orbit as it is zero gravity but you will have to take care of moon gravity when building there, there are temperature extremes between night and day and so on.
This is also entirely false. The nature of microgravity conditions such as LEO are that all structures must be extremely carefully designed. Take for example the care that astronauts must take when assembling the space station or docking/undocking from it: a large impulse could cause major structural damage very easily, due to the vibrations induced that must be absorbed by the structure. In the case of a moon base, pretty much the same tried-and-tested construction techniques used on earth could be employed. As far as temperature extremes are concerned, once the base is buried underneath a metre or two of regolith in order to protect them from radiation, the temperature will be quite well regulated: why do you think that traditionally wine is stored in cellars? The regolith will act as an insulator and a heatsink.
I've noticed you've been continually attacking the idea of a moonbase with arguments that are at best specious and at worst ridiculously blinkered. Why don't you go and attack something else, like the obscene amount of money the US government spends of subsidising its farmers so that the excess produce can destroy farming economies in the developing world?
One more thing: why is the base covered with 3m of regolith? Is that a number you researched? I ask because I recently read an article that radiation on mars would kill all live up to 7m below the surface. I guess the moon has more radiation, being closer to the sun and having no athmosphere at all (well, not anything significant anyway). But since I can't find the article anymore, I might be wrong.
"After 6 m of depth no effects of radiation due to or induced by GCRs [Galactic Cosmic Rays] in both quiet and disturbed scenarios are observable in the simulation, and after far less than 1 m no effects of radiation due to or induced by SPE [Solar Particle Event] particles are observable.... with roof thickness of the order of 1-2 m, the doses are well below the montly, annual and career limits given by NCRP 132."
Thanks for the pointer -- I'll make sure to look into it! I've been using gnuplot directly for graphing, but it looks like R might be a better solution.
Nope, capacitors. I use Mills or Dayton non-inductive resistors. For capacitors I generally use Dayton Film/Foils. They're a metallized polypropylene film, and sound great. Kinda pricey compared to some others, but for a decent film/foil cap they are about as cheap as you can go. Some people like audiocap thetas a lot, but I can't really tell much of a difference and they are outrageously expensive.
My bad. I mostly do high-frequency, surface mount stuff, and couldn't really care less about what goes down at the low hertz to kilohertz end of things -- I guess that's why I hadn't come across film/foil caps. Anything with any significant ESR tends to be a problem.
Thanks for the info & references -- looks like I need to do some reading!
I do a lot of DIY speaker building and there definitely is a difference between Film/Foil caps and electrolytics. A speaker crossover made with Electrolytic caps sounds like crap compared to one made with even the cheapest of film/foil caps.
Firstly, WTF are film/foil capacitors? As far as I am aware, the only major types of capacitors used are:
Aluminium electrolytic capacitors (aluminium foil, tightly would in a dielectric fluid)
Ceramic capacitors (single- or multi-layer, using EIA Class 1 or Class 2 dielectric ceramics)
Tantalum- and niobium-based capacitors (chip or electrolytic styles)
Are you thinking of resistors? I use thin-film SMT resistors all the time...
Which part of the crossover are we talking about? Which design do you use? Do you have inductors in there? Quite a few performance issues when using electrolytic capacitors are due to an inappropriate choice of inductors, IMHO.
Also, I've got a friend who does psycho-acoustics research, and he did an interesting series of experiments a couple of years ago that indicated that systems that performed technically very well (almost perfect filter characteristics, no harmonic errors) actually were rated worse than a system that had all sorts of junk spewing out of it, when the audiophiles participating weren't told which system they were listening to...
Secondly, there is no outstanding debate in the industry on whether or not polypropylene, film, or even tantalum capacitors (what they're referring to as solid, though they're probably talking about tantalums) are of superior quality to electrolytics for audio applications. Electrolytics have changing thermal characteristics, worse tolerances, and tend to introduce a small amount of phase shift into whatever AC signal you're passing through them. Yes, these properties are measurable with the right equipment and are not generally questioned.
Agreed. Tantalum capacitors have much better performance than electrolytics in most circumstances. However, there is outstanding debate about whether the use of tantalum capacitors is ethical, as tantalum is just about the rarest element that's actually used in the electronics industry and most of the deposits are in developing countries. Accusations have been levelled that electronics manufacturers are going to inordinate lengths to secure tantalum deposits, and the people who live there are the losers (especially since the by-products of processing tantalum ore are decidedly unpleasant).
I try to avoid using tantalum capacitors in my own designs as far as possible, trying to keep to NASA's guidelines for component derating when using electrolytics. Where I need precision capacitances I design the circuit so that a ceramic NP0 or similar EIA Class 1 capacitor can be used instead. I haven't had any capacitors fail yet.
The ONLY people who think Java is in decline in favor of Ruby or Python are the ivory tower academics who aren't actually developing large scale enterprise applications.
Hmm... heard of a game called 'EVE Online'? Their server -- which serves provides an entire 3D universe to over 33000 users simultaneously (without instancing as in WoW or Guild Wars) -- has the game logic implemented almost entirely in StacklessPython, with shared state across tens of thousands of CPUs. Or what about that small and insignificant search engine, Google? They seem to rely quite heavily on Python too.
Oh, I'm sorry. Perhaps those aren't "large scale" enough for you. What sort of "large scale enterprise applications" did you have in mind?
As for slow, I don't know where you get your data from, but comparing my gaming XP box to my SuSE Linux 10.0 box, XP actually boots faster, and the GUI is quite a bit more responsive than X with either KDE or Gnome too.
Curious -- what are the specs of your "gaming XP box"? And you SuSE box? If you're like most folks, your gaming rig will pack quite a bit more horsepower than your Linux box. Seems to me that could invalidate this point. (At least the GUI responsiveness aspect -- all variants of linux I've tried boot slow as molasses next to WinXP and even Win2K)
I dual boot, and my XP Home installation exists only for the purpose of playing games. And yes, it does boot up quite a bit more quickly than my Fedora Core Linux does. On the other hand, my Linux installation does so much stuff and has so many useful features that aren't in XP that it's not surprising that it takes longer to get it all running.
I guess that's what being a "monopoly" is then -- when it's no longer in your self-interests to "play nice" with others.
Heh, I had a compulsory business economics lecture this morning -- ooh lookey, a chance to show off my mad economikz skillz.
In a normal competitive or semi-competitive market, firms try to maximise their profit by following the supply and demand curve. The cost for a firm to enter or leave a market is negligible, and consumers will always go for the best product at the lowest price (i.e. the optimal price/quality point). This is the optimal sort of market from almost everyones' point of view the best product will always win, and it turns out that this is a really good thing for the economy.
Let's assume that to start off with, the market for audio player software is a perfect competitive market. All media files are stored in an easy to implement format (e.g. MP3 or WAV) and so one audio player can easily be replaced by another.
Now, Microsoft decides to enter the market. They realise that they can get a huge install base by bundling their audio software with their operating system (which is more or less a monopoly product). This is an attempt to gain a monopoly in one market by leveraging a monopoly in another, which is illegal in some places such as the USA and EU. They then decide to reduce the contestability of the market by making their audio software default to creating files which competing firms' software cannot read without a license from Microsoft.
There are many more examles of Microsoft doing (or attempting to do) this.
Operating system -> media player -> portable media player/online music store -> reinforce operating system
Operating system -> office suite -> mail/database server software -> reinforces operating system
Operating system -> web browser -> online news/shopping/weather/search engine
Operating system -> instant messenger
All involve deliberate breakage of interoperability and backwards compatibility by either undocumented protocols/file formats or perversion of existing standards for them.
Slashdot Mirror
2. GET A CONSTITUTION.
Because that's done so well for you in the USA. Oh wait, the USA is only the second most monitored country in the world.
Really: what the hell does the system of government have to do with the existence of fascist CCTV cameras? The scum rises to the top in every system of government I'm aware of, whether democratic or otherwise.
I believe the correct unit for expressing such an enormous amount would be a "shitload". This is a well-known measure, used extensively in the civil and power engineering. It is frequently heard when discussing currency.
But wait! What other protocols have you forgotten about which you use on a daily basis?
The list goes on and on. In fact, my /etc/services contains 4596 ports registered for TCP protocols.
Clearly the legislation should be amended to declare the MSB of the port number to be the "evil bit" similar to that specified in RFC3514.
Better, they could use a less broken solution such as a URL tagging system like PICS.
More information on this subject, including a detailed discussion of why content segregation is dangerous, can be found in RFC3675. It suggests an actual workable solution: PICS tags.
PICS Labels (Platform for Internet Content Selection) is a generalized system for providing "ratings" for Internet accessible material. The PICS documents should be consulted for details. In general, PICS assumes an arbitrarily large number of rating services and rating systems. Each service and system is identified by a URL.
It would be quite reasonable to have multiple PICS services that, in the aggregate, provided 300 bits of label information or more. There could be a PICS service for every community of interest. This sort of technology is really the only reasonable way to make categorizations or labelings of material available in a diverse and dynamic world.
While such PICS label services could be used to distribute government promulgated censorship categories, for example, it is not clear how this is any worse than government censorship via national firewalls.
A PICS rating system is essentially a definition of one or more dimensions and the numeric range of the values that can be assigned in each dimension to a rated object. A service is a source of labels where a label includes actual ratings. Ratings are either specific or generic. A specific rating applies only to the material at a particular URL [RFC 2396] and does not cover anything referenced from it, even included image files. A generic rating applies to the specified URL and to all URLs for which the stated URL is a prefix.
This seems like very much the "right" way of doing it. It:
Also, unlike their proposed port breakage, it can easily be turned off if you don't care about it.
Unfortunately port 69 is already assigned. From my /etc/services:
In any case, the concept is fundamentally flawed. Ports are designed to discriminate by protocol, not by service content. This is just another flawed implementation of RFC3514.
Especially considering that the kinematic boundary layer between the wind flow and the building will almost certainly be several orders of magnitude larger than said proteins. Whoever suggested that has clearly forgotten their elementary fluid dynamics (the No-Slip Condition) and should have asked someone who would have a clue, i.e. an Engineer.
No, he makes a good point. If someone files a lawsuit against Google, all Google would have to do to stop them would be to suspend their site from all indexing and search results. There's no God-given right to be indexed by a search engine. Bad analogy; imagine you sell hot meaty pies, and some random guy walks around the town carrying a board with the words, "Eat Anonymous Coward's Hot Meaty Pies Today!!!". Now imagine that guy does it for free. Suing Google is somewhat like taking the guy to court because "Anonymous Coward" is your trademark and he didn't pay for a license to use it.
But that's not what I asked. I asked, "In what way is the idea behind Wikipedia pretty noxious?" Perhaps the implementation of the idea has turned out to be non-ideal (is anything ever perfect, given humans' propensity for breaking anything that can be broken?) However, I would be loathe to write the whole thing off as a totally bad idea.
Even if the current embodiment of Wikimedia's ideas fails, I deeply hope that eventually someone will work out how to do it in such away that it succeeds. Because it is a good idea.
Answer the question, please.
Please elaborate. In what way is the idea behind Wikipedia "pretty noxious"? I'm really curious as to what your objections to it are.
You're wrong. The issues you're thinking of are not going be solved by throwing money at them; they will only be solved by political, diplomatic and legislative means. This is a viewpoint borne ought by legions of economic and historical analyses of where the issues actually come from.
On the other hand, a relatively minuscule investment in something like the space industry can make a very large difference, if it isn't all spent on red tape.
and how is it gonna be ? it is further than any orbit hence difficult to reach,
Incorrect: if we can send multi-tonne satellites to geostationary orbit, we can send multi-ton payloads to the moon just as easily. The vast majority of effort done by a launcher is to get its payload out of the atmosphere: after that it's relatively plane sailing. There are also several possibilities involving the use of highly efficient automated cargo tugs to move cargo backwards and forwards between LEO and the moon.
you have lesser structural requirements in orbit as it is zero gravity but you will have to take care of moon gravity when building there, there are temperature extremes between night and day and so on.
This is also entirely false. The nature of microgravity conditions such as LEO are that all structures must be extremely carefully designed. Take for example the care that astronauts must take when assembling the space station or docking/undocking from it: a large impulse could cause major structural damage very easily, due to the vibrations induced that must be absorbed by the structure. In the case of a moon base, pretty much the same tried-and-tested construction techniques used on earth could be employed. As far as temperature extremes are concerned, once the base is buried underneath a metre or two of regolith in order to protect them from radiation, the temperature will be quite well regulated: why do you think that traditionally wine is stored in cellars? The regolith will act as an insulator and a heatsink.
I've noticed you've been continually attacking the idea of a moonbase with arguments that are at best specious and at worst ridiculously blinkered. Why don't you go and attack something else, like the obscene amount of money the US government spends of subsidising its farmers so that the excess produce can destroy farming economies in the developing world?
I doubt it, as I've heard (fairly reliably) that astronauts take drugs that suppress their sex drive while they're on-mission.
Maybe, what with budget cuts and all, we might just get a Minnie Driver
If you're really lucky you might even get a Mini Driver.
Gaah, I seem to have to post a link to this paper on every article about the moon: G. De Angelis, J.W.Wilson, M.S.Clowdsley, J.E.Nealy, D.Humes and J.M.Clem, 'Lunar Lava Tube Radiation Safety Analysis'.
Hope that answers your question.
Windoze is teh suck, Macs R 4 lusers!
Thanks for the pointer -- I'll make sure to look into it! I've been using gnuplot directly for graphing, but it looks like R might be a better solution.
My bad. I mostly do high-frequency, surface mount stuff, and couldn't really care less about what goes down at the low hertz to kilohertz end of things -- I guess that's why I hadn't come across film/foil caps. Anything with any significant ESR tends to be a problem.
Thanks for the info & references -- looks like I need to do some reading!
Firstly, WTF are film/foil capacitors? As far as I am aware, the only major types of capacitors used are:
Are you thinking of resistors? I use thin-film SMT resistors all the time...
Which part of the crossover are we talking about? Which design do you use? Do you have inductors in there? Quite a few performance issues when using electrolytic capacitors are due to an inappropriate choice of inductors, IMHO.
Also, I've got a friend who does psycho-acoustics research, and he did an interesting series of experiments a couple of years ago that indicated that systems that performed technically very well (almost perfect filter characteristics, no harmonic errors) actually were rated worse than a system that had all sorts of junk spewing out of it, when the audiophiles participating weren't told which system they were listening to...
Agreed. Tantalum capacitors have much better performance than electrolytics in most circumstances. However, there is outstanding debate about whether the use of tantalum capacitors is ethical, as tantalum is just about the rarest element that's actually used in the electronics industry and most of the deposits are in developing countries. Accusations have been levelled that electronics manufacturers are going to inordinate lengths to secure tantalum deposits, and the people who live there are the losers (especially since the by-products of processing tantalum ore are decidedly unpleasant).
I try to avoid using tantalum capacitors in my own designs as far as possible, trying to keep to NASA's guidelines for component derating when using electrolytics. Where I need precision capacitances I design the circuit so that a ceramic NP0 or similar EIA Class 1 capacitor can be used instead. I haven't had any capacitors fail yet.
Sounds like a good idea :)
Hmm... heard of a game called 'EVE Online'? Their server -- which serves provides an entire 3D universe to over 33000 users simultaneously (without instancing as in WoW or Guild Wars) -- has the game logic implemented almost entirely in Stackless Python, with shared state across tens of thousands of CPUs. Or what about that small and insignificant search engine, Google? They seem to rely quite heavily on Python too.
Oh, I'm sorry. Perhaps those aren't "large scale" enough for you. What sort of "large scale enterprise applications" did you have in mind?
Can you post your .emacs somewhere? I'd love to see what you've put in there to make it that large!
I dual boot, and my XP Home installation exists only for the purpose of playing games. And yes, it does boot up quite a bit more quickly than my Fedora Core Linux does. On the other hand, my Linux installation does so much stuff and has so many useful features that aren't in XP that it's not surprising that it takes longer to get it all running.
Heh, I had a compulsory business economics lecture this morning -- ooh lookey, a chance to show off my mad economikz skillz.
In a normal competitive or semi-competitive market, firms try to maximise their profit by following the supply and demand curve. The cost for a firm to enter or leave a market is negligible, and consumers will always go for the best product at the lowest price (i.e. the optimal price/quality point). This is the optimal sort of market from almost everyones' point of view the best product will always win, and it turns out that this is a really good thing for the economy.
Let's assume that to start off with, the market for audio player software is a perfect competitive market. All media files are stored in an easy to implement format (e.g. MP3 or WAV) and so one audio player can easily be replaced by another.
Now, Microsoft decides to enter the market. They realise that they can get a huge install base by bundling their audio software with their operating system (which is more or less a monopoly product). This is an attempt to gain a monopoly in one market by leveraging a monopoly in another, which is illegal in some places such as the USA and EU. They then decide to reduce the contestability of the market by making their audio software default to creating files which competing firms' software cannot read without a license from Microsoft.
There are many more examles of Microsoft doing (or attempting to do) this.
All involve deliberate breakage of interoperability and backwards compatibility by either undocumented protocols/file formats or perversion of existing standards for them.
May I please refer you to: