Re:Dumping rabbits
on
Easter Humor
·
· Score: 5, Informative
As a rabbit owner and heavy computer user (just google for my name if you don't believe me) I can positively confirm that a rabbit can be safely kept in the same room as the computer... in fact, that's where she lives. She even lived in my office at work for a while (and yes, she did run free when supervised.) What's the secret? Neat Ideas Cubes, and a little planning. These cheap little grid squares protect the backside of my desk where all the cords are, and cords that have to go through rabbit space are all wrapped in plastic piping -- makes them too big to chew comfortably, so she leaves them alone. Cute bunny in the office:)
If you look at the article, it's pretty obvious that her job is all about defusing criticism due to privacy concerns without actually doing anything to stop the march towards an Orwellian society. For that, she's perfect... she successfully defused public criticism about DoubleClick without significantly hampering their effort to collect every little bit of information about you.
IIRC, Apache started off as a clone of NCSA httpd. I can't find the reference (I thought it was in the config file or man page, but no), but I think they wanted identical functionality and config files at first.
Of course it has grown into so much more now.
Actually, Apache is a derivative (i.e. a fork) of NCSA httpd, which was also Open Source. A "clone" implies it is a re-implementation. The name "Apache" derives from being "a patchy server", which betrays its heritage as a collection of patches to NCSA httpd.
In theory, this is true (this is referred to as aneutronic fusion.)
Unfortunately, in the case of the H + He fuel mix, this is aneutronic in theory only. The reason for that is that the Coulomb barrier for H + He is vastly higher than H + H, because of the extra proton, and at the energies H + He is fusible you will also have substantial H + H fusion, which will either produce He + n, or produce H + H, after which will immediately follow (at these energies) a normal H + H reaction which produces neutrons...
Also, there isn't much He on Earth, although the moon could have considerable amounts. This implies that the main use of H + He fusion may very well be manned spaceships, where minimizing the amount of necessary shielding (compared to the power output of the engine) would matter greatly.
Actually, just electing a Democrat with Clinton's level of morality would do the trick. It was fascinating how conservative think tanks like the Manhatten Institute came up for so many 'random' IRS audits during the Clinton years.
The sad part is that this is pretty much the "state of the art" in politics for this country. Nixon was an avid user of this particular technique, and I believe every president since except perhaps Carter used it...
It seems, these days, that "conservative" (itself a misnomer, since it really means resistance to change) has turned into neo-facism in this country. Before people go ballistic, start looking at the original political tenets of facism, without the racist crap that Mussolini & Hitler added, and you'll recognize it very well today:
the State, and the survival of the State, are more important than the rights of individual citizens
close "cooperation" between government and large business
international power through strength and domination rather than cooperation.
I, for one, think this is an unbelievably scary development.
Back in the 60's a Swedish TV show host, Lennart Hyland, managed to convince some huge portion of the Swedish people to drape a nylon sock over their black-and-white TV in an effort to test a new technique to transmit colour TV without requiring new receivers.
This particular April Fools joke is still talked about...
Again, current RENs vary greatly, but back before 1984, there were standards. I was constantly hounded by my parents to disconnect my modem (300 baud acoustic) from the line when I wasn't using it.
OK I have to ask... how on Earth did you manage to plug an acoustic modeminto the line to begin with?
Anyway... in my home country on Sweden we had similar regulations; I remember most early answering machines had magnetic pickups which picked up the stray magnetic field from the voice transformer in the standard telephones. There were also so-called "dial assisters", which basically were advanced telephones that the telephone monopoly (Televerket) didn't sell, minus the handset, so you had to use them in conjunction with an approved telephone. That made them legal to sell, apparently.
I think it was in 1986 they finally gave up on that silliness, but not until Swedish television had managed to make a wonderful parody on the then-current situation based on the scifi miniseries "V", called, of course "T" - as in "Televerket". Whereas in "V" the story was about lizard aliens dressing up like humans, in "T" is was about Televerket workers dressing up like lizard-like aliens...
The scary part is he isn't. The music industry actually has proposed making it illegal to produce analog-to-digital converters without DRM watermark recognition shutdown!
Note that any single IPv4 address can be used to claim a/48 -- that's 80 bits of address space -- of IPv6 address space by sticking 2002: in front of it, e.g. 192.0.2.69 -> 2002:c000:0245::/48. This is called 6to4; see RFC 3056.
If not then American would look more like Mexico or Argentina.
Bzzzt! Actually, there's strong statistical evidence that trade barriers make the people protected by them poorer. America historically has been a leader in lowering trade barriers, and that's part of why we're so rich.
Interestingly enough, both Mexico and Argentina has traditionally been highly protectionist countries.
Personally, I picked an ISP which sells you a NATting gateway (enabled by default); I actually ended up turning it off since I got a decent-size static IP space from them.
That being said, I think this kind of law is part of the distressing series of "monopoly enforcement laws" that we're seeing out there -- DCMA being, of course, the most egregorious ones. Somehow gov't seems to have forgotten that it's supposed to *prevent* monopolies...
The difference is that a small leakage of ozone leaks a gas that will break down in relatively short order; a small leakage of CFCs leaks a gas that will never break down and will simply accumulate.
The problem with CFCs is that no environment is ever fully closed, and the things are damned near indestructible.
There is a simple solution for those that care: maintain a trusted IPSec gateway for yourself somewhere (perhaps where you keep your mail and so on) and then just use IPSec for all traffic.
Encryption makes it practical to separate the service of connectivity from the service of trust, so an untrusted hotspot can be safely used for connectivity while still maintaining a trusted connection.
Morse certainly didn't invent the first electrical telegraph; he just invented the most practical one. Most of the previous electrical telegraphs had been either analog and highly unreliable or required multiple wires; some were even both.
The Morse telegraph required only one wire (the return went through the Earth), which was a huge cost savings in the time before cheap insulation, and yet was a binary on/off transmission with the associated reliability advantages. The original Morse code (sometimes called "railway Morse") used four symbol lengths; once the Morse telegraph spread and eventually went wireless the "international Morse code" simplified this to only two symbol lengths; this is the code which is invariably used even today.
OK, here we go... here is a rather technical summary of what a quantum computer would do:
Currently, one of the biggest unsolved problem is the "P != NP" presumption; although it has never been proven, it is widely assumed that the complexity class P (roughly defined as problems that can be *solved* in a reasonable amount of time) is not the same thing as complexity class NP (the class of problems which can be *verified* in a reasonable amount of time.) Most classes of cryptography, including all public-key cryptography, relies on this difference - the whole point is that it's too complex to solve the problem (find the secret key), but easy enough to verify the problem (decode the message given the secret key.)
A properly designed quantum computer makes the distinction meaningless, because the quantum computer doesn't need to "solve" the problem in the traditional sense. Instead, it "verifies" the problem in parallel *for each possible key.* The one computation that ends with the key coming out as "valid" is allowed to decohere the system and thus immediately obliterates all the other computations. The only thing left is the valid key.
In complexity theory, this is called a "nondeterministic computational model". It changes the bar for what is computational feasible from P to NP.
I think this goes in under the whole "give a man a fish, and he has food for the day; teach a man to fish and he has food for a lifetime" sort of concept. Consider the following: a lot of villagers in the world are suffering because the only way they can obtain capital to buy a small piece of land or tools for their farm is from local usurers. In some countries, like India, non-profit (but not "operating-at-a-loss" either) banks specializing in so-called "microloans" have sprung up and have substantially made it easier for the poorest of the poor to obtain credit. The biggest problem is the sheer cost of outreach...
(Also, because someone asked, this page describes the hardware and software... it's basically Linux with a localized version of KDE.
I am not a lawyer, but I follow legal issues every now and then (and that's probably the best you're gong to find on Slashdot.) I believe the courts have ruled again and again that making something available for download is distribution, so the fundamental assumption made in the original post is plainly flawed. This is a good thing when dealing with GPL software, because it makes clause 3(b) of the GPL a hell of a lot easier to deal with. Since today the Internet is very much "a medium customarily used for software interchange", it pretty much boils down to: "it needs to be on a website, you have to include a URL to it in your documentation, and you have to make sure that URL stays valid for at least three years."
I would suggest looking up court cases that publishing on the Internet equals distribution. They can't be very hard to find.
I don't think anyone is arguing that antimatter would be just unbelievably useful to spacecraft, but the cost needs to be taken down by something like nine orders of magnitude -- the currently going rate for antiprotons is something like a million dollars per nanogram.
The cooling ring only helps you once you have antiprotons to cool down to antihydrogen. Right now the production of antiprotons itself is just too expensive.
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Of course, the Earth isn't a closed system, so the entrophy argument is complete bull; you see, there is this little thing called the Sun...
Of course, so's the rest of this. Today's Doonesbury is kind of apt...
As a rabbit owner and heavy computer user (just google for my name if you don't believe me) I can positively confirm that a rabbit can be safely kept in the same room as the computer... in fact, that's where she lives. She even lived in my office at work for a while (and yes, she did run free when supervised.) What's the secret? Neat Ideas Cubes, and a little planning. These cheap little grid squares protect the backside of my desk where all the cords are, and cords that have to go through rabbit space are all wrapped in plastic piping -- makes them too big to chew comfortably, so she leaves them alone. Cute bunny in the office :)
No, that's a Dan Quayle quote.
If you look at the article, it's pretty obvious that her job is all about defusing criticism due to privacy concerns without actually doing anything to stop the march towards an Orwellian society. For that, she's perfect... she successfully defused public criticism about DoubleClick without significantly hampering their effort to collect every little bit of information about you.
In theory, this is true (this is referred to as aneutronic fusion.)
Unfortunately, in the case of the H + He fuel mix, this is aneutronic in theory only. The reason for that is that the Coulomb barrier for H + He is vastly higher than H + H, because of the extra proton, and at the energies H + He is fusible you will also have substantial H + H fusion, which will either produce He + n, or produce H + H, after which will immediately follow (at these energies) a normal H + H reaction which produces neutrons...
Also, there isn't much He on Earth, although the moon could have considerable amounts. This implies that the main use of H + He fusion may very well be manned spaceships, where minimizing the amount of necessary shielding (compared to the power output of the engine) would matter greatly.
- the State, and the survival of the State, are more important than the rights of individual citizens
- close "cooperation" between government and large business
- international power through strength and domination rather than cooperation.
I, for one, think this is an unbelievably scary development.Back in the 60's a Swedish TV show host, Lennart Hyland, managed to convince some huge portion of the Swedish people to drape a nylon sock over their black-and-white TV in an effort to test a new technique to transmit colour TV without requiring new receivers.
This particular April Fools joke is still talked about...
Anyway... in my home country on Sweden we had similar regulations; I remember most early answering machines had magnetic pickups which picked up the stray magnetic field from the voice transformer in the standard telephones. There were also so-called "dial assisters", which basically were advanced telephones that the telephone monopoly (Televerket) didn't sell, minus the handset, so you had to use them in conjunction with an approved telephone. That made them legal to sell, apparently.
I think it was in 1986 they finally gave up on that silliness, but not until Swedish television had managed to make a wonderful parody on the then-current situation based on the scifi miniseries "V", called, of course "T" - as in "Televerket". Whereas in "V" the story was about lizard aliens dressing up like humans, in "T" is was about Televerket workers dressing up like lizard-like aliens...
The scary part is he isn't. The music industry actually has proposed making it illegal to produce analog-to-digital converters without DRM watermark recognition shutdown!
Note that any single IPv4 address can be used to claim a /48 -- that's 80 bits of address space -- of IPv6 address space by sticking 2002: in front of it, e.g. 192.0.2.69 -> 2002:c000:0245::/48. This is called 6to4; see RFC 3056.
Personally, I picked an ISP which sells you a NATting gateway (enabled by default); I actually ended up turning it off since I got a decent-size static IP space from them.
That being said, I think this kind of law is part of the distressing series of "monopoly enforcement laws" that we're seeing out there -- DCMA being, of course, the most egregorious ones. Somehow gov't seems to have forgotten that it's supposed to *prevent* monopolies...
The difference is that a small leakage of ozone leaks a gas that will break down in relatively short order; a small leakage of CFCs leaks a gas that will never break down and will simply accumulate.
The problem with CFCs is that no environment is ever fully closed, and the things are damned near indestructible.
There is a simple solution for those that care: maintain a trusted IPSec gateway for yourself somewhere (perhaps where you keep your mail and so on) and then just use IPSec for all traffic.
Encryption makes it practical to separate the service of connectivity from the service of trust, so an untrusted hotspot can be safely used for connectivity while still maintaining a trusted connection.
Code size matters because *cache* isn't cheap. Worse, you can't make L1 cache arbitrarily fast without slowing down your chip big time.
It was supposed to say:
Actually the symbol ...-.- (written @ or <SK>) is the recognized International Morse Code symbol for End of Text, equivalent to ASCII 04h .
It might have a history from old American Morse, but it's nothing "incorrect" about it being used in International Morse Code.
It is not ... -.- (SK), just as the I.M.C. distress call is the single symbol ...---... (<SOS>) and not the three letters ... --- ... (SOS).
Actually the symbol ...-.- (written @ or ) is the recognized International Morse Code symbol for End of Text, equivalent to ASCII 04h .
... -.- (SK), just as the I.M.C. distress call is the single symbol ...---... () and not the three letters ... --- ... (SOS).
It might have a history from old American Morse, but it's nothing "incorrect" about it being used in International Morse Code.
It is *not*
Morse certainly didn't invent the first electrical telegraph; he just invented the most practical one. Most of the previous electrical telegraphs had been either analog and highly unreliable or required multiple wires; some were even both.
The Morse telegraph required only one wire (the return went through the Earth), which was a huge cost savings in the time before cheap insulation, and yet was a binary on/off transmission with the associated reliability advantages. The original Morse code (sometimes called "railway Morse") used four symbol lengths; once the Morse telegraph spread and eventually went wireless the "international Morse code" simplified this to only two symbol lengths; this is the code which is invariably used even today.
250 microseconds (s), not 250 milliseconds. 250 s is 1/4 of a millisecond, or 1/4000 of a second.
OK, here we go... here is a rather technical summary of what a quantum computer would do:
Currently, one of the biggest unsolved problem is the "P != NP" presumption; although it has never been proven, it is widely assumed that the complexity class P (roughly defined as problems that can be *solved* in a reasonable amount of time) is not the same thing as complexity class NP (the class of problems which can be *verified* in a reasonable amount of time.) Most classes of cryptography, including all public-key cryptography, relies on this difference - the whole point is that it's too complex to solve the problem (find the secret key), but easy enough to verify the problem (decode the message given the secret key.)
A properly designed quantum computer makes the distinction meaningless, because the quantum computer doesn't need to "solve" the problem in the traditional sense. Instead, it "verifies" the problem in parallel *for each possible key.* The one computation that ends with the key coming out as "valid" is allowed to decohere the system and thus immediately obliterates all the other computations. The only thing left is the valid key.
In complexity theory, this is called a "nondeterministic computational model". It changes the bar for what is computational feasible from P to NP.
(Also, because someone asked, this page describes the hardware and software... it's basically Linux with a localized version of KDE.
I would suggest looking up court cases that publishing on the Internet equals distribution. They can't be very hard to find.
I don't think anyone is arguing that antimatter would be just unbelievably useful to spacecraft, but the cost needs to be taken down by something like nine orders of magnitude -- the currently going rate for antiprotons is something like a million dollars per nanogram.
The cooling ring only helps you once you have antiprotons to cool down to antihydrogen. Right now the production of antiprotons itself is just too expensive.