For some reason, corporate misbehavior is below the FBI's radar.
Oh please! This sounds like a typical anti-corporate rant.
Yeah... the government is owned by the big, evil corporations. The FBI is part of that corruption and never, ever goes after a corporation. In fact, if you owe a corporation money, the FBI will come and collect it from you and beat you up if you don't. Heck, the FBI itself is one big corporation, isn't it?
I have an older integrated phone/PDA (Kyocera smartphone). I got it to eliminate the need to carry two information widgets in my pocket.
The display on this thing sucks (IMHO if it ain't bright and probably color, it's hard for this old guy to read). BUT... I don't use it that often as a PDA. It's there when I need it, but like many Palm users, my Palm desktop (in this case running on [asbestos on] windows [asbestos off] ) is my true personal organizer.
But having a synched copy of all of my data in my phone is extremely handy.
Unfortunately, given the stupid fragmentation of the US cellular market, and the forced practice of buying your phone from the service provider, there aren't enough choices out there. I would like a new, smaller phone/PDA but QWest doesn't have them (gratuitous factoid: "QWest Sucks generates 37800 hits on google).
Furthermore, qworst informs me that the market doesn't seem too interested in pda/phones - consumers are more likely to have phone/lames... errr phone/games than phone/PDA's. And since the market is so fragmented, only the largest demographic groups get what they want.
On top of that, some of the cool PDA/phone combos don't do analog. That means that if you leave the big city, your phone is dead. Here in Arizona, where my favorite drive to the mountains has a 90 mile stretch without NO stores or gas stations, this is a non-starter. And of course when I go tornado chasing every year in the midwest, analog is needed most of the time.
(Okay... you wonder why I still have QWorst when I think they suck. It's because they are my home phone carrier and thus are the only people who can give me totally automatic one number service. If you call my home-office number and my cell phone is turned on, the cell rings. If the cell is off, the home phone rings. Very cool!)
Not only that but the electromagnetic environment on a ship is terrible. When it isn't running in stealth mode, it is likely to have a large number of radio transmitters operating at once, not to mention multi-megawatt radars. Furthermore there is a lot of electrical noise from all of the motors and servos, etc.
When you have a lot of transmitters running at the same time, their signals mix on anything nonlinear (this is called intermodulation). Nonlinear things include obvious stuff like the receiver and transmitter active electronics and less obvious things like rusty metal (and ships have a lot of metal exposed to salt - no wonder the swabbies get to chip and replace a lot of paint).
When I worked on the design of a warship, one group was assigned the fulltime job of analyzing the possible radio frequency interference potentials of all of the radios.
Having worked (a few decades ago) on Navy command and control computers (NTDS), I can say that at least then, they were beyond careful about computer security. We were contracted to do a system that would monitor and play back all of the CIC data inputs and outputs in order to monitor the performance of people during exercises or combat, and in order to record exactly the sensor and effector data.
We were not even allowed to run code in the computer! They were so paranoid that the only way we could build the device was to put probes on all I/O lines (parallel I/O in those days), and literally decode the entire action from watching the primitive I/O.
The military is a lot more careful about combat systems than they are about publicly accessible systems on the.mil network!
The article proposes a "compromise" between two unrelated issues!
Copyright term extension has been happening for far longer than digital technology. Hence the issue of copyright term extension is simply not something to be traded for digital technology restrictions! It is a different issue.
It is true that digital technology may change the feasibility of various copyright enforcement, but that does not have anything to do with the reasonableness of the term of copyrights.
If there were no internet, image scanners and printers, copyright extension would still be the same issue. Logically then, digital copyright protection schemes have no relationship to copyright extension issues.
Copyrights are too long. That is clear and should be changed.
Digital media is easily and routinely stolen. That is clear and presents us with challenges, the answers to which are not at all obvious.
There are ways to get 24x7 communications to the poles with only a few satellites. The Russians pioneered the approach of using a highly eliptical orbit where the satellite spends most of its orbit far away from earth above high latitudes. You *do* have to track the satellite and compensate for doppler, and you have to have a couple of them to maintain continuous coverage, but it does work.
OTOH it is a lot cheaper to just drag the fiber optic cable to the pole!
You don't have to pay attention to the Schema if you don't want to
I think you miss the point. When I am designing an interface, an important question is *whether to have a schema* in the first place!
And frankly, the less structure that is enforced on the XML file, the better! The important information is whether the XML file contains the necessary information, and a schema cannot provide you with that information because it cannot represent the semantic relationships except in the most trivial (CS 101) cases!
The purpose of an interface is to transmit information, not make people feel good because it conforms to some arbitrary structure!
If your talking about using XML for data messaging not using schemas is just lazy. XML Schema allows optional elements and attributes and/or default values. So if it isn't required, then just make it optional. If you want multiversion interfaces, you have a different XMLSchema for each version. Then each side knows explicitly what the messaging protocol is.
Lazy in this circumstance is often good. What you just described is a bunch of work, which translates into *money*. The important question to ask is what is the utility of creating this schema, vs what is the cost of doing so. The answer varies from case to case.
After all, do I really care that much that a message passes a schema validation? It doesn't tell me that it is valid, since most of the validity is determined by far more complex criteria than can be expressed in a schema. IOW, what you assert about underlying semantics of documents is even more true with business transactions. A schema doesn't *document* those details of the "protocol".
Furthermore, XML messages (with the exception of configuration files where schema may actually be quite useful) are normally generated by computers, not people. The rules to generate those messages are then embedded in code (or tables, which is code by another name). Once it works, it will usually continue to work. So again, the schema has offered no advantage, while adding bureaucracy.
As an analogy, consider a schema to be like a syntax checker. It can tell you if the niggling details are right, but it can't tell you about the whether the proram will work. Since in many cases of message exchange, the niggling details are not even important, this is often a waste of time!
I am a user of Sprint Broadband Direct - a microwave broadband solution that provides excellent speeds (I routinely get 500k bytes/sec downloads). However, they are no longer selling it, and are working on "a new system." It sounds like the new system will be deployed at cell towers, so I suspect it is this evdo or something similar. Unfortunately, I can't get Sprint cell signals here and am afraid I will lose my service when they switch!
Does anyone know if Sprint going in this direction, and if not... just where are they going?
Schemas are often a bad idea
on
DTD vs. XML Schema
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
XML is a very powerful tool.
On very important use is in creating interfaces between heterogeneous systems. Areadable character set and meaningful tags is very handy for developers. The hierarchical structure is extremely powerful. And, of course, the fact that it is a standard with common tools is invaluable.
However, one useful principle of such interfaces is "if you don't understand it, ignore it." In other words, when you get a message, look for what you want in it and use it. Ignore anything that isn't what you want. XML is ideally suited for this approach - especially if you use path based access rather than DOM tree traversal.
This approach to interfaces allows systems to interchange messages without exact version consistency, and without requiring a tight congruence of the applications. It allows a system to "tell what it knows" and another system to "read what it needs" without further ado.
Unfortunately, the use of schemas goes against this idea. It is IMHO a more old fashioned approach of rigidly constraining the messages to an exact specification. This can make interfaces far less robust and flexible, and increase the amount of work.
Schema processing may also be promoted to "verify" message integrity before processing. However, it only does so in the most primitive ways. Real world messages, especially in the business world, tend to have integrity rules that go far beyond what can be expressed in anything short of a complex computer program or equivalent declarations.
I am sure there are plenty of places where schemas make sense, but in the areas of commercial message interchange, they take a powerful and flexible construct and hobble it.
I find it interesting seeing that security by obfuscation is a prevalent concept throughout mankinds realm.
That's because for most cases it works! While academic cryptographers argue that everything should be available except the keys, the cases where this actually improves security are limited.
Cypher systems that will be widely used benefit from open information because it allows many people to maximally attack the system, increasing the odds that weaknesses will be found by the white hats before everyone is using the system.
But most security involves a lot more than a single mathematical algorithm. A combination of obscurity, good technology (crypto, locks or whatever), and good procedures work together to usually increase security.
Thus the US NSA, which is responsible for developing crypto systems in addition to cracking them, often keeps secret almost every detail of a deployed system.
It is rather hard to comment on your totally vague assertions, other than to say that I am quite aware of what our government does and has done, and why it did it. If you disagree, be specific. Otherwise... why bother to post at all?
you really only need an airpressure based trigger and some time-sensitive detonation circuits to make it go boom.
This is incorrect. A modern bomb (as far as I know - I have no access to classified information) uses a high order explosion to compress the plutonium core into a critical mass (they call it an implosion). This requires extremely precise timing, because the shock wave must be very accurately shaped. And this, AFAIK, requires sophisticated electronics. On top of this, the warhead itself normally has a permissive action link to keep it from being detonated in the case of accident or theft.
The lost nuclear weapons case I was referring to was not the Spanish incident. It occurred in the Southeast US on land. I don't have the details but I'm sure a google search would find them.
Thereby forgetting that your much praised democracy also stemmed from Europe (not to mention your language, bulk of your culture and most of your country's inhabitants' ancestors).
No, just not having mentioned it. Of course, we made a few adaptations that made it more successful. I also remember that the French tried it next, and ended up with the French Revolution, one of the most brutal episodes in the history of the west.
As for the US having to clean up our mess, the US were too busy looking in the mirror to see Pearl Harbor coming. It's only then that you interfered in WWII. Not to save Europe, but to retain a market for your exporting companies and to save your OWN asses from communism that was closing in on you quite rapidly. Don't go telling me that the US were so noble to "save" Europe because Eisenhower/Roosevelt felt sorry for us. It's all about the Benjamins, it is now, and it was then.
What is a Benjamin?
Also, you seem a bit confused. WWII was a fight against the Nazis, not the communists. I suggest you check your history books.
And the US did a lot of noble things. Not *only* out of humanitarian reasons, of course, but noble none-the-less. We rebuilt a *competitor* (Europe) using our own money in the Marshall plan. We kept thousands of our young men in Europe for decades to protect Europe from the depradations of the Soviet empire. We brought Japan from a feudal state to a more modern, much freer democracy.
Would you have preferred to have been absorbed by the USSR? If so, I refer you to two books: "The Black Book of Communism "(written by French intellectuals) which highlights the crimes of communist governments throughout the world, and Alexander Yakovlev's "A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia." If those don't convince you of the evil of actual communist governments, you are hopeless!
What business did you have interfering in Vietnam? Korea? etc..
Stopping the global spread of imperial communist Russia. The Korean war was started *at the express order* of the KGB by Kim Il Sung, who spent World War II in Russia as a KGB asset. He invaded South Korea (in violation of treaties).
The Vietnam War was an (unfortunately successful) attempt by the Communist regime of Ho Chi Minh to conquer the South. A little history item for you: after the French colonialists (Europeans, btw) were thrown out of Vietnam, it was divided, and the people voted with their feet as to which regime they wanted. Huge numbers moved south to get away from the communists. The South Vietnamese government was hardly a shining example of democracy (or anything else), but it was preferred by its people to the alternative.
Also I hear of quite a few neighborhoods in the bigger cities of the US where the police don't even dare to patrol anymore.
Well, so much for the quality of European media! What you hear is total nonsense. Where did you hear it?
And how about slavery? Sure, there have always been regimes that made use of slave labor, but your fair and democratic USA made use of it on an enormous scale for centuries.
As did Europe, which initiated and profitted mightily from the African slave trade. And our country spent 500,000 lives to eliminate slavery in our country, and we did so!
If you are so exercised about slavery, how about condemning the Sudan, where slaves are still bought and sold? I have heard a lot of bloviations from Europeans about how bad the US is, but little about the real evil in the world! Selective morality seems to be a modern European attribute also.
Also tell me which country in the EU still executes prisoners? None, I can tell you.
Actually, Britain still has capital punishment for sabotage of naval facilities. However, I am not ashamed of our record of capital punishment. My state also executes those who have preyed upon their fellow human beings.
You're also right in your previous statements. But the rant above just goes to show that bot the US and EU have dirty hands in many ways.
Every nation in the world and every group has dirty hands... it just depends on what the situation is and when it happened.
If it werent for The West as I'll call them collectively, there'd probably be a lot less war in this world than there is now.
That is pretty pathetic. You might be right - of course. Some brutal dictator *might* just take over the whole world - that would end war all right. But to blame the wars in the world on the west is so silly that I am not going to bother refuting it. --
Modern nuclear weapons all require electronics in order to detonate. In fact, those small enough to put on a missile require very sophisticated systems, because they must precisely create a high explosive shock wave in order to compress the plutonium core, and this requires high current precisely timed detonator pulses. This is what the crytrons that Saddam was buying in the '90s are used for - pulse shaping.
Furthermore, nuclear powers tend to want very sophisticated systems to prevent unauthorized detonation of the warheads ("Permissive Action Links"). These also will have vulnerable electronics in them.
If you can disable those electronics, either with high power microwaves or with nuclear radiation (the *most effective* way to stop inbound warheads is with a nuclear warhead), the weapon will not detonate. Then at worst you have a small amount of plutonium dispersal, which is nowhere near as dangerous as a detonation. In fact, there has been at least one case where a US thermonuclear weapon hit the ground in a plane crash, and I believe the explosives detonated with no nuclear detonation. No big deal.
However, it is probably fairly easy to shield a warhead from high power microwaves. It most likely needs no external sensors (relying on accelerometers). The entire package can thus be wrapped in a conductive material. If that shield is built right, not enough microwave energy will pass to cause any problem. Also, the warheads are no doubt already shielded, as a related problem - nuclear blast generated electromagnetic pulse (EMP) - also represents a significant threat to the warheads. EMP shielding uses the same principles as microwave shielding, although the details are likely to be different since EMP trends towards a lower frequency spectrum.
For various odd factoids on nuclear weapons and the reason that fears of radiation are overhyped, check out my nuke factoid page
So there is less of a clash of culture when considering open source, Europe understands why co-operation is good, that is how much of the European defence industry works already.
Hmm.... Europe certainly doesn't have much of a history of co-operation. World War I and II started in Europe (and the US had to come in and save you guys). Marxism and Nazism both came from Europe and between them resulted in over 100,000,000 deaths (mostly in USSR and China).
The European defence industry is a joke, which is one reason Europe has to call on the US to clean up its problems even today (anybody remember the Kosovo war?). Europeans today seem to imagine that internationial protocols and agreements are all that are necessary to solve the problems of war and aggression. Of course, they had *the same opinion* right up until the start of World War I.
As far as considering open source, I don't think that is much of a culture clash. There is lots of open source in use in the US. In fact, I would say that companies tend to use what (in their often flawed decision making process) will be best for them.
I have worked in Europe and the US, and worked for European companies. The main difference I see is that the European *companies* were more stratified and stultified, and less aggressive.
Meanwhile:
The violent crime rate in many countries in Europe is now significantly higher than that in the US. You are far safer walking the streets of New York City than those of London.
The European GDP/capita is 2/3 that of the US.
Europe is going to be unable to care for its elderly since its population is way below replacement rate.
Let's face it... the reason Europeans are so happy to attack the US today (and these attacks are increasing in the press and here on slashdot) is because Europe used to be the center around which the whole world rotated - militarily, in matters of culture, and economically. Now it is the US, and Europeans have great trouble with that (until they need our help fending off military threats).
But enough Europe bashing.... I just do it because I hear so much America bashing (and ignorant Bush bashing) on here...
Not to mention the fact that Americans INVENTED THE COMPUTER, which started the entire industry for which Europeons are patting themselves on the back for excelling at.
It *really pains me* to defend Europeans in this discussion, but I must point out that Alan Turing was English, and Colossus was one of the most significant developments in computers. And don't forget that Britain also made major contributions in the development of the atomic bomb and radar.
Of course, many of us don't consider Brits to be "true Europeans" since they speak a fractured form of English, which is the language of the most successful societies on earth.
While you can show statistically that the particles are linked, you cannot transmit any information. The linking is hidden is such a way that it is only apparent when you have the information from *both* ends, and of course to do that, you need to send it at light speed or less.
This "transcendental modem" idea has been around for a long time, and a lot of very smart people have considered this issue, without ever finding a way to violate the speed-of-light causality (transfer of information rule) - probably because it is inherent in how the universe functions.
On the campaign trail, Bush has consistently asked people to vote for him based on their own self-interest -- read "money".
To extrapolate that he does things for his own self-interest is elementary.
THAT is called logic? I never said Bush didn't do things for his own self interest - I asserted he probably did THIS for reasons other than his own self interest.
BIG DIFFERENCE.
Get it?
As for that old lie about Clinton, I believe he was going after al-Queda when he launched that attack.
No, he was attacking Iraq. He launched a war that started the first day of the house impeachment trial, and ended the last day.
By constantly mocking Clinton's attempt to rein in al Queda, Lott -- all the rightwing "Wag the Doggers" -- were hindering our leader's attempt to stop a threat which he and his advisors saw clearly, with superior abilty and prescience.
Oh yeah... really clearly. That is why, after hundreds of people were killed when our African embassies were bombed, he sent cruise missiles to hit an empty training camp and a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan, and then proclaimed that he had actually done something.
And when Al Queda, with help from an Iraqi agent who is still in Iraq, set of a huge bomb with a large chemical weapon in it (World Trade Center 1993 had a large amount of cyanide in the bomb, which fortunately was destroyed by the explosion), trying to kill 100,000 people, the Clintonians treated it like a local law enforcement matter, and did NOTHING other than hold a trial. Super ability, my ass.
I won't bother to respond to the rest of your pathetic rant. When you can't even get your basic facts right, who cares about your other bloviations?
Worse... while I believe that Kennedy -also- used it as a political device, at least Kennedy was trying to boost our national pride and point out to the world that we have the best defense technology. I don't see Bush as doing this for anything other than personal reasons and pork barrel politics
So how about cooling it with the knee-jerk Bush bashing! Yours is a totally unsupported conclusion - basically just your own biases showing. If you are going to libel Bush (and I know, Bush bashing is great fun on slashdot), at least provide some support.
You are basically arguing that Bush is totally amoral in this and acting purely for his own benefit. That is a very strong charge, and IMHO offensive. Furthermore, it is ironic in that the previous president was the one who sent cruise missiles and bombers to distract people from his own political problems!
As for the "Bush Friends" and how they influence his decision making... consider this: Bush came out *against* the Kyoto treaty, and yet Enron (long held up as an example of a corporate friend of Bush) was strongly FOR the Kyoto treaty (they wanted to be the market for CO2 credits).
Has it occurred to you that Bush might also have a bit of vision, like Kennedy does? Kennedy did a great thing with the Moon program (other than that, he was a pretty ineffectual and mediocre president, remembered only for his tragic death).
Bush's policies are closer to Kennedy's policies than any Democrat president *since* Kennedy!
Most people really don't have time to filter the sewer by themselves. Publisher do provide that function (among others). The author suggested Bayesian intermediaries as an alternate filter. Some form of AI will indeed prove useful in this regard - just like google is useful for web searching.
But other approaches may work also. Here are a couple...
1) dmoz.org like things. Places where reviewers categorize works and list the good stuff. With slashdot-like (perhaps improved with time) moderation and metamoderation this may be a quite powerful content sorter and filter.
2) popularity based measurement... the web equivalent of the Nielson ratings.. but voluntary, automatic and anonymous. You download a song (or whatever), and your demographics automatically help sort that song by category - especially if you can (or have to) sample a bit first before downloading the whole thing. Inferences can then be made, by software, about what content appeals to what self-classified sort of person. Feedback on one's own personal choices (similar to the Bayesian idea), combined with this, can do an even better job of content filtering.
I know what sort of music I like. I don't know who performs it and I don't want to know. I just want the damned music!
Agreed that the Supreme Court uses intent, and has to use intent in many cases.
However, the argument the majority made, and I think that is reasonable, is that copyrights have not been extended indefinitely, but rather definitely. And they show history of these extensions going back to the early 19th century as precedent. Thus this particular act of congress didn't make it indefinite.
In other words, as a matter of fact, the copyright term is definite. They cannot rule on what a future congress *might* do, which is the only way it can become indefinite.
As far as the commerce clause, IMHO it has been interpreted extremely broadly. However, there is no doubt in my mind that at least in interstate commerce, the Congress can do pretty much anything they want with copyrights or most other things. Or as the court put it (without invoking the commerce clause), the intent phrase does not provide in itself a rule for deciding this stuff.
I would only hope that they are consistent in this regard. Using the first clause of the second amendment, they have at times used that to limit the reach of the rest of the second amendment, where in that case we are talking not the powers of congress but something even more sacred - the civil rights of citizens (i.e. those who keep and bear arms).
The people who wrote the constitution were not dumb - far from it. If they wanted a specific prohibition in the document, they would have put it. In the case of copyright, they could have said "Congress shall limit copyrights to X years" or something like that.
Much as I dislike the effect of this ruling, it is a correct one (see below). It properly limits the court's power rather than that of congress, and throws the issue back into the political (democratic) domain where it belongs.
For about the last 50 years, Americans have tried to get the Supreme Court to exceed the bounds of the constitution and legislate. In other words, they want the SC to decide based on "what is best" as opposed to "what is constitutional." And sometimes the court obliges (for notorious political rulings, see Dred Scott and Roe v Wade).
The tripartite system of government ("checks and balances") clearly places the legislative function in Congress, with two checks on it: the president's veto, and the Supreme Court's rulings.
The president is allowed to veto for any reason, but the Court's job is to uphold the constitution.
For this reason, members of the court are appointed for life - to be relatively immune to fads and whimsy and to stabilize government by limiting it only via the constitution.
In the case at hand, three arguments are made:
The law does not promote the sciences and art, as specified by the constitution, and is hence unconstitutional. HOWEVER, there is nothing in the constitution to prevent congress form enacting laws granting property rights of any sort to people, so the *purpose* of the constitutional clause does not constitute a constitutional *limitation*! Thus the utilitarian argument fails on constitutional grounds.
The law amounts to an infinite extension of copyrights. On the face of it, this is simply not the case. One cannot prove that copyrights are infinite from this law or previous laws. It just isn't factual. Furthermore, there is nothing in the constitution to prevent infinite copyrights! The constitution requires congress to enact copyrights, but it doesn't limit that right (the commerce clause, for example, can be read to also allow copyrights, with no such limitation).
The law amounts to a violation of free speech. As the court points out, the First Amendment and the Copyright Clause were enacted in close temporal proximity, and if the founders had wanted to limit copyrights for free speech reasons, they would have done so.
Once again, don't blame the court. Blame the Congress. In other words, blame the democratic process.
If you don't like this (and I don't), there are two courses of action:
Convince congress to change the laws. This is by far the best approach.
Amend the constitution.
Of course, this isn't easy, and money talks (as it *always* has in every governmental system ever developed, regardless of any bureaucratic measures such as campaign finance laws).
Since when did the businesses lowered prices because of efficieny increased? I think only their profit margin will increase. It must be more cost effective to deal with a few disturbed customers than to tolarate shoplifting.
Oh puleez.
How about since competition was invented, about 10000 years ago?
There seems to be no cure for ignorant anti-business ranting!
It doesn't take weapons technology to develop asphalt eating bacteria! After all, the oil industry developed hydrocarbon eaters for oil spill remediation!
The US ended its bioweapons program 30 years ago. You are the only person I have heard that calls these anti-structure agents "biological weapons." If it were the accepted terminology, there would be a huge outcry all over the world about this development, and there is not one.
If you still want to maintain your definitional quibble... have fun with it.
The US cannot be compared in any meaningful sense to the USSR, Iraq and other countries when it comes to this sort of thing.
Slashdot Mirror
For some reason, corporate misbehavior is below the FBI's radar.
Oh please! This sounds like a typical anti-corporate rant.
Yeah... the government is owned by the big, evil corporations. The FBI is part of that corruption and never, ever goes after a corporation. In fact, if you owe a corporation money, the FBI will come and collect it from you and beat you up if you don't. Heck, the FBI itself is one big corporation, isn't it?
Grow up!
I have an older integrated phone/PDA (Kyocera smartphone). I got it to eliminate the need to carry two information widgets in my pocket.
The display on this thing sucks (IMHO if it ain't bright and probably color, it's hard for this old guy to read). BUT... I don't use it that often as a PDA. It's there when I need it, but like many Palm users, my Palm desktop (in this case running on [asbestos on] windows [asbestos off] ) is my true personal organizer.
But having a synched copy of all of my data in my phone is extremely handy.
Unfortunately, given the stupid fragmentation of the US cellular market, and the forced practice of buying your phone from the service provider, there aren't enough choices out there. I would like a new, smaller phone/PDA but QWest doesn't have them (gratuitous factoid: "QWest Sucks generates 37800 hits on google).
Furthermore, qworst informs me that the market doesn't seem too interested in pda/phones - consumers are more likely to have phone/lames... errr phone/games than phone/PDA's. And since the market is so fragmented, only the largest demographic groups get what they want.
On top of that, some of the cool PDA/phone combos don't do analog. That means that if you leave the big city, your phone is dead. Here in Arizona, where my favorite drive to the mountains has a 90 mile stretch without NO stores or gas stations, this is a non-starter. And of course when I go tornado chasing every year in the midwest, analog is needed most of the time.
(Okay... you wonder why I still have QWorst when I think they suck. It's because they are my home phone carrier and thus are the only people who can give me totally automatic one number service. If you call my home-office number and my cell phone is turned on, the cell rings. If the cell is off, the home phone rings. Very cool!)
Not only that but the electromagnetic environment on a ship is terrible. When it isn't running in stealth mode, it is likely to have a large number of radio transmitters operating at once, not to mention multi-megawatt radars. Furthermore there is a lot of electrical noise from all of the motors and servos, etc.
When you have a lot of transmitters running at the same time, their signals mix on anything nonlinear (this is called intermodulation). Nonlinear things include obvious stuff like the receiver and transmitter active electronics and less obvious things like rusty metal (and ships have a lot of metal exposed to salt - no wonder the swabbies get to chip and replace a lot of paint).
When I worked on the design of a warship, one group was assigned the fulltime job of analyzing the possible radio frequency interference potentials of all of the radios.
Having worked (a few decades ago) on Navy command and control computers (NTDS), I can say that at least then, they were beyond careful about computer security. We were contracted to do a system that would monitor and play back all of the CIC data inputs and outputs in order to monitor the performance of people during exercises or combat, and in order to record exactly the sensor and effector data.
.mil network!
We were not even allowed to run code in the computer! They were so paranoid that the only way we could build the device was to put probes on all I/O lines (parallel I/O in those days), and literally decode the entire action from watching the primitive I/O.
The military is a lot more careful about combat systems than they are about publicly accessible systems on the
The article proposes a "compromise" between two unrelated issues!
Copyright term extension has been happening for far longer than digital technology. Hence the issue of copyright term extension is simply not something to be traded for digital technology restrictions! It is a different issue.
It is true that digital technology may change the feasibility of various copyright enforcement, but that does not have anything to do with the reasonableness of the term of copyrights.
If there were no internet, image scanners and printers, copyright extension would still be the same issue. Logically then, digital copyright protection schemes have no relationship to copyright extension issues.
Copyrights are too long. That is clear and should be changed.
Digital media is easily and routinely stolen. That is clear and presents us with challenges, the answers to which are not at all obvious.
There are ways to get 24x7 communications to the poles with only a few satellites. The Russians pioneered the approach of using a highly eliptical orbit where the satellite spends most of its orbit far away from earth above high latitudes. You *do* have to track the satellite and compensate for doppler, and you have to have a couple of them to maintain continuous coverage, but it does work.
OTOH it is a lot cheaper to just drag the fiber optic cable to the pole!
You don't have to pay attention to the Schema if you don't want to
I think you miss the point. When I am designing an interface, an important question is *whether to have a schema* in the first place!
And frankly, the less structure that is enforced on the XML file, the better! The important information is whether the XML file contains the necessary information, and a schema cannot provide you with that information because it cannot represent the semantic relationships except in the most trivial (CS 101) cases!
The purpose of an interface is to transmit information, not make people feel good because it conforms to some arbitrary structure!
If your talking about using XML for data messaging not using schemas is just lazy. XML Schema allows optional elements and attributes and/or default values. So if it isn't required, then just make it optional. If you want multiversion interfaces, you have a different XMLSchema for each version. Then each side knows explicitly what the messaging protocol is.
Lazy in this circumstance is often good. What you just described is a bunch of work, which translates into *money*. The important question to ask is what is the utility of creating this schema, vs what is the cost of doing so. The answer varies from case to case.
After all, do I really care that much that a message passes a schema validation? It doesn't tell me that it is valid, since most of the validity is determined by far more complex criteria than can be expressed in a schema. IOW, what you assert about underlying semantics of documents is even more true with business transactions. A schema doesn't *document* those details of the "protocol".
Furthermore, XML messages (with the exception of configuration files where schema may actually be quite useful) are normally generated by computers, not people. The rules to generate those messages are then embedded in code (or tables, which is code by another name). Once it works, it will usually continue to work. So again, the schema has offered no advantage, while adding bureaucracy.
As an analogy, consider a schema to be like a syntax checker. It can tell you if the niggling details are right, but it can't tell you about the whether the proram will work. Since in many cases of message exchange, the niggling details are not even important, this is often a waste of time!
I am a user of Sprint Broadband Direct - a microwave broadband solution that provides excellent speeds (I routinely get 500k bytes/sec downloads). However, they are no longer selling it, and are working on "a new system." It sounds like the new system will be deployed at cell towers, so I suspect it is this evdo or something similar. Unfortunately, I can't get Sprint cell signals here and am afraid I will lose my service when they switch!
Does anyone know if Sprint going in this direction, and if not... just where are they going?
XML is a very powerful tool.
On very important use is in creating interfaces between heterogeneous systems. Areadable character set and meaningful tags is very handy for developers. The hierarchical structure is extremely powerful. And, of course, the fact that it is a standard with common tools is invaluable.
However, one useful principle of such interfaces is "if you don't understand it, ignore it." In other words, when you get a message, look for what you want in it and use it. Ignore anything that isn't what you want. XML is ideally suited for this approach - especially if you use path based access rather than DOM tree traversal.
This approach to interfaces allows systems to interchange messages without exact version consistency, and without requiring a tight congruence of the applications. It allows a system to "tell what it knows" and another system to "read what it needs" without further ado.
Unfortunately, the use of schemas goes against this idea. It is IMHO a more old fashioned approach of rigidly constraining the messages to an exact specification. This can make interfaces far less robust and flexible, and increase the amount of work.
Schema processing may also be promoted to "verify" message integrity before processing. However, it only does so in the most primitive ways. Real world messages, especially in the business world, tend to have integrity rules that go far beyond what can be expressed in anything short of a complex computer program or equivalent declarations.
I am sure there are plenty of places where schemas make sense, but in the areas of commercial message interchange, they take a powerful and flexible construct and hobble it.
I find it interesting seeing that security by obfuscation is a prevalent concept throughout mankinds realm.
That's because for most cases it works! While academic cryptographers argue that everything should be available except the keys, the cases where this actually improves security are limited.
Cypher systems that will be widely used benefit from open information because it allows many people to maximally attack the system, increasing the odds that weaknesses will be found by the white hats before everyone is using the system.
But most security involves a lot more than a single mathematical algorithm. A combination of obscurity, good technology (crypto, locks or whatever), and good procedures work together to usually increase security.
Thus the US NSA, which is responsible for developing crypto systems in addition to cracking them, often keeps secret almost every detail of a deployed system.
Perhaps you could be more specific.
It is rather hard to comment on your totally vague assertions, other than to say that I am quite aware of what our government does and has done, and why it did it. If you disagree, be specific. Otherwise... why bother to post at all?
you really only need an airpressure based trigger and some time-sensitive detonation circuits to make it go boom.
This is incorrect. A modern bomb (as far as I know - I have no access to classified information) uses a high order explosion to compress the plutonium core into a critical mass (they call it an implosion). This requires extremely precise timing, because the shock wave must be very accurately shaped. And this, AFAIK, requires sophisticated electronics. On top of this, the warhead itself normally has a permissive action link to keep it from being detonated in the case of accident or theft.
The lost nuclear weapons case I was referring to was not the Spanish incident. It occurred in the Southeast US on land. I don't have the details but I'm sure a google search would find them.
Thereby forgetting that your much praised democracy also stemmed from Europe (not to mention your language, bulk of your culture and most of your country's inhabitants' ancestors).
No, just not having mentioned it. Of course, we made a few adaptations that made it more successful. I also remember that the French tried it next, and ended up with the French Revolution, one of the most brutal episodes in the history of the west.
As for the US having to clean up our mess, the US were too busy looking in the mirror to see Pearl Harbor coming. It's only then that you interfered in WWII.
Not to save Europe, but to retain a market for your exporting companies and to save your OWN asses from communism that was closing in on you quite rapidly. Don't go telling me that the US were so noble to "save" Europe because Eisenhower/Roosevelt felt sorry for us. It's all about the Benjamins, it is now, and it was then.
What is a Benjamin?
Also, you seem a bit confused. WWII was a fight against the Nazis, not the communists. I suggest you check your history books.
And the US did a lot of noble things. Not *only* out of humanitarian reasons, of course, but noble none-the-less. We rebuilt a *competitor* (Europe) using our own money in the Marshall plan. We kept thousands of our young men in Europe for decades to protect Europe from the depradations of the Soviet empire. We brought Japan from a feudal state to a more modern, much freer democracy.
Would you have preferred to have been absorbed by the USSR? If so, I refer you to two books: "The Black Book of Communism "(written by French intellectuals) which highlights the crimes of communist governments throughout the world, and Alexander Yakovlev's "A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia." If those don't convince you of the evil of actual communist governments, you are hopeless!
What business did you have interfering in Vietnam? Korea? etc..
Stopping the global spread of imperial communist Russia. The Korean war was started *at the express order* of the KGB by Kim Il Sung, who spent World War II in Russia as a KGB asset. He invaded South Korea (in violation of treaties).
The Vietnam War was an (unfortunately successful) attempt by the Communist regime of Ho Chi Minh to conquer the South. A little history item for you: after the French colonialists (Europeans, btw) were thrown out of Vietnam, it was divided, and the people voted with their feet as to which regime they wanted. Huge numbers moved south to get away from the communists. The South Vietnamese government was hardly a shining example of democracy (or anything else), but it was preferred by its people to the alternative.
Also I hear of quite a few neighborhoods in the bigger cities of the US where the police don't even dare to patrol anymore.
Well, so much for the quality of European media! What you hear is total nonsense. Where did you hear it?
And how about slavery? Sure, there have always been regimes that made use of slave labor, but your fair and democratic USA made use of it on an enormous scale for centuries.
As did Europe, which initiated and profitted mightily from the African slave trade. And our country spent 500,000 lives to eliminate slavery in our country, and we did so!
If you are so exercised about slavery, how about condemning the Sudan, where slaves are still bought and sold? I have heard a lot of bloviations from Europeans about how bad the US is, but little about the real evil in the world! Selective morality seems to be a modern European attribute also.
Also tell me which country in the EU still executes prisoners? None, I can tell you.
Actually, Britain still has capital punishment for sabotage of naval facilities. However, I am not ashamed of our record of capital punishment. My state also executes those who have preyed upon their fellow human beings.
You're also right in your previous statements. But the rant above just goes to show that bot the US and EU have dirty hands in many ways.
Every nation in the world and every group has dirty hands... it just depends on what the situation is and when it happened.
If it werent for The West as I'll call them collectively, there'd probably be a lot less war in this world than there is now.
That is pretty pathetic. You might be right - of course. Some brutal dictator *might* just take over the whole world - that would end war all right. But to blame the wars in the world on the west is so silly that I am not going to bother refuting it.
--
Modern nuclear weapons all require electronics in order to detonate. In fact, those small enough to put on a missile require very sophisticated systems, because they must precisely create a high explosive shock wave in order to compress the plutonium core, and this requires high current precisely timed detonator pulses. This is what the crytrons that Saddam was buying in the '90s are used for - pulse shaping.
Furthermore, nuclear powers tend to want very sophisticated systems to prevent unauthorized detonation of the warheads ("Permissive Action Links"). These also will have vulnerable electronics in them.
If you can disable those electronics, either with high power microwaves or with nuclear radiation (the *most effective* way to stop inbound warheads is with a nuclear warhead), the weapon will not detonate. Then at worst you have a small amount of plutonium dispersal, which is nowhere near as dangerous as a detonation. In fact, there has been at least one case where a US thermonuclear weapon hit the ground in a plane crash, and I believe the explosives detonated with no nuclear detonation. No big deal.
However, it is probably fairly easy to shield a warhead from high power microwaves. It most likely needs no external sensors (relying on accelerometers). The entire package can thus be wrapped in a conductive material. If that shield is built right, not enough microwave energy will pass to cause any problem. Also, the warheads are no doubt already shielded, as a related problem - nuclear blast generated electromagnetic pulse (EMP) - also represents a significant threat to the warheads. EMP shielding uses the same principles as microwave shielding, although the details are likely to be different since EMP trends towards a lower frequency spectrum.
For various odd factoids on nuclear weapons and the reason that fears of radiation are overhyped, check out my nuke factoid page
So there is less of a clash of culture when considering open source, Europe understands why co-operation is good, that is how much of the European defence industry works already.
Hmm.... Europe certainly doesn't have much of a history of co-operation. World War I and II started in Europe (and the US had to come in and save you guys). Marxism and Nazism both came from Europe and between them resulted in over 100,000,000 deaths (mostly in USSR and China).
The European defence industry is a joke, which is one reason Europe has to call on the US to clean up its problems even today (anybody remember the Kosovo war?). Europeans today seem to imagine that internationial protocols and agreements are all that are necessary to solve the problems of war and aggression. Of course, they had *the same opinion* right up until the start of World War I.
As far as considering open source, I don't think that is much of a culture clash. There is lots of open source in use in the US. In fact, I would say that companies tend to use what (in their often flawed decision making process) will be best for them.
I have worked in Europe and the US, and worked for European companies. The main difference I see is that the European *companies* were more stratified and stultified, and less aggressive.
Meanwhile:
The violent crime rate in many countries in Europe is now significantly higher than that in the US. You are far safer walking the streets of New York City than those of London.
The European GDP/capita is 2/3 that of the US.
Europe is going to be unable to care for its elderly since its population is way below replacement rate.
Let's face it... the reason Europeans are so happy to attack the US today (and these attacks are increasing in the press and here on slashdot) is because Europe used to be the center around which the whole world rotated - militarily, in matters of culture, and economically. Now it is the US, and Europeans have great trouble with that (until they need our help fending off military threats).
But enough Europe bashing.... I just do it because I hear so much America bashing (and ignorant Bush bashing) on here...
Not to mention the fact that Americans INVENTED THE COMPUTER, which started the entire industry for which Europeons are patting themselves on the back for excelling at.
It *really pains me* to defend Europeans in this discussion, but I must point out that Alan Turing was English, and Colossus was one of the most significant developments in computers. And don't forget that Britain also made major contributions in the development of the atomic bomb and radar.
Of course, many of us don't consider Brits to be "true Europeans" since they speak a fractured form of English, which is the language of the most successful societies on earth.
While you can show statistically that the particles are linked, you cannot transmit any information. The linking is hidden is such a way that it is only apparent when you have the information from *both* ends, and of course to do that, you need to send it at light speed or less.
This "transcendental modem" idea has been around for a long time, and a lot of very smart people have considered this issue, without ever finding a way to violate the speed-of-light causality (transfer of information rule) - probably because it is inherent in how the universe functions.
On the campaign trail, Bush has consistently asked people to vote for him based on their own self-interest -- read "money".
To extrapolate that he does things for his own self-interest is elementary.
THAT is called logic? I never said Bush didn't do things for his own self interest - I asserted he probably did THIS for reasons other than his own self interest.
BIG DIFFERENCE.
Get it?
As for that old lie about Clinton, I believe he was going after al-Queda when he launched that attack.
No, he was attacking Iraq. He launched a war that started the first day of the house impeachment trial, and ended the last day.
By constantly mocking Clinton's attempt to rein in al Queda, Lott -- all the rightwing "Wag the Doggers" -- were hindering our leader's attempt to stop a threat which he and his advisors saw clearly, with superior abilty and prescience.
Oh yeah... really clearly. That is why, after hundreds of people were killed when our African embassies were bombed, he sent cruise missiles to hit an empty training camp and a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan, and then proclaimed that he had actually done something.
And when Al Queda, with help from an Iraqi agent who is still in Iraq, set of a huge bomb with a large chemical weapon in it (World Trade Center 1993 had a large amount of cyanide in the bomb, which fortunately was destroyed by the explosion), trying to kill 100,000 people, the Clintonians treated it like a local law enforcement matter, and did NOTHING other than hold a trial. Super ability, my ass.
I won't bother to respond to the rest of your pathetic rant. When you can't even get your basic facts right, who cares about your other bloviations?
Worse ... while I believe that Kennedy -also- used it as a political device, at least Kennedy was trying to boost our national pride and point out to the world that we have the best defense technology. I don't see Bush as doing this for anything other than personal reasons and pork barrel politics
So how about cooling it with the knee-jerk Bush bashing! Yours is a totally unsupported conclusion - basically just your own biases showing. If you are going to libel Bush (and I know, Bush bashing is great fun on slashdot), at least provide some support.
You are basically arguing that Bush is totally amoral in this and acting purely for his own benefit. That is a very strong charge, and IMHO offensive. Furthermore, it is ironic in that the previous president was the one who sent cruise missiles and bombers to distract people from his own political problems!
As for the "Bush Friends" and how they influence his decision making... consider this: Bush came out *against* the Kyoto treaty, and yet Enron (long held up as an example of a corporate friend of Bush) was strongly FOR the Kyoto treaty (they wanted to be the market for CO2 credits).
Has it occurred to you that Bush might also have a bit of vision, like Kennedy does? Kennedy did a great thing with the Moon program (other than that, he was a pretty ineffectual and mediocre president, remembered only for his tragic death).
Bush's policies are closer to Kennedy's policies than any Democrat president *since* Kennedy!
Most people really don't have time to filter the sewer by themselves. Publisher do provide that function (among others). The author suggested Bayesian intermediaries as an alternate filter. Some form of AI will indeed prove useful in this regard - just like google is useful for web searching.
But other approaches may work also. Here are a couple...
1) dmoz.org like things. Places where reviewers categorize works and list the good stuff. With slashdot-like (perhaps improved with time) moderation and metamoderation this may be a quite powerful content sorter and filter.
2) popularity based measurement... the web equivalent of the Nielson ratings.. but voluntary, automatic and anonymous. You download a song (or whatever), and your demographics automatically help sort that song by category - especially if you can (or have to) sample a bit first before downloading the whole thing. Inferences can then be made, by software, about what content appeals to what self-classified sort of person. Feedback on one's own personal choices (similar to the Bayesian idea), combined with this, can do an even better job of content filtering.
I know what sort of music I like. I don't know who performs it and I don't want to know. I just want the damned music!
Agreed that the Supreme Court uses intent, and has to use intent in many cases.
However, the argument the majority made, and I think that is reasonable, is that copyrights have not been extended indefinitely, but rather definitely. And they show history of these extensions going back to the early 19th century as precedent. Thus this particular act of congress didn't make it indefinite.
In other words, as a matter of fact, the copyright term is definite. They cannot rule on what a future congress *might* do, which is the only way it can become indefinite.
As far as the commerce clause, IMHO it has been interpreted extremely broadly. However, there is no doubt in my mind that at least in interstate commerce, the Congress can do pretty much anything they want with copyrights or most other things. Or as the court put it (without invoking the commerce clause), the intent phrase does not provide in itself a rule for deciding this stuff.
I would only hope that they are consistent in this regard. Using the first clause of the second amendment, they have at times used that to limit the reach of the rest of the second amendment, where in that case we are talking not the powers of congress but something even more sacred - the civil rights of citizens (i.e. those who keep and bear arms).
The people who wrote the constitution were not dumb - far from it. If they wanted a specific prohibition in the document, they would have put it. In the case of copyright, they could have said "Congress shall limit copyrights to X years" or something like that.
For about the last 50 years, Americans have tried to get the Supreme Court to exceed the bounds of the constitution and legislate. In other words, they want the SC to decide based on "what is best" as opposed to "what is constitutional." And sometimes the court obliges (for notorious political rulings, see Dred Scott and Roe v Wade).
The tripartite system of government ("checks and balances") clearly places the legislative function in Congress, with two checks on it: the president's veto, and the Supreme Court's rulings.
The president is allowed to veto for any reason, but the Court's job is to uphold the constitution.
For this reason, members of the court are appointed for life - to be relatively immune to fads and whimsy and to stabilize government by limiting it only via the constitution.
In the case at hand, three arguments are made:
Once again, don't blame the court. Blame the Congress. In other words, blame the democratic process.
If you don't like this (and I don't), there are two courses of action:
Of course, this isn't easy, and money talks (as it *always* has in every governmental system ever developed, regardless of any bureaucratic measures such as campaign finance laws).
Since when did the businesses lowered prices because of efficieny increased? I think only their profit margin will increase. It must be more cost effective to deal with a few disturbed customers than to tolarate shoplifting.
Oh puleez.
How about since competition was invented, about 10000 years ago?
There seems to be no cure for ignorant anti-business ranting!
This is getting down to a definitional quibble.
It doesn't take weapons technology to develop asphalt eating bacteria! After all, the oil industry developed hydrocarbon eaters for oil spill remediation!
The US ended its bioweapons program 30 years ago. You are the only person I have heard that calls these anti-structure agents "biological weapons." If it were the accepted terminology, there would be a huge outcry all over the world about this development, and there is not one.
If you still want to maintain your definitional quibble... have fun with it.
The US cannot be compared in any meaningful sense to the USSR, Iraq and other countries when it comes to this sort of thing.