Probably beyond al Qaeda, who can't even manage high school chemistry but a rogue state like North Korea could do it and sell it to terrorists. Actually the A Q Khan network shows that a more sophisticated network of several rogue states is possible and they could do quite sophisticated bits of engineering between them by dividing the work up and sharing the results. If an bio-weapons equivalent of that exists, you could probably buy bio-weapons on the black market.
Incidentally at one point North Korea threatened that unless they where given aid they would sell 'fissile material, warheads or blueprints to anyone'. Which I thought was pretty funny - Stalinist North Korea reminded me a bit of the freewheeling capitalists at MIPS.
http://www.sensi.org/~alec/mips/byte_1991_12_p271.html
Although Mips makes and sells computer systems, it doesn't make chips. Instead, it operates as a 'fabless' design center and licenses other companies to create the silicon. Thus, it's important to Mips that the design for the R4000 be portable (i.e., manufacturable by a large number of vendors). The companies that actually make Mips chips--including IDT, PSC, LSI Logic, Siemens-Nixdorf, and NEC--all receive masks from Mips as well as copies of the CAD database that was used to produce them. Now the A Q Khan network really seems to work like this, only more flexible. It's sort of the Linux of nukes. If you had excess fissile material or warheads you could sell them to the network. Or if wanted to buy you could buy warheads, or blueprints or fissile material. It's like the ultimate bazaar. The worst thing is that no one has any responsibility for anything. So even though even rogue states presumably don't want a global smallpox epidemic (though North Korea is probably so closed that they're not vulnerable to it), this sort of bazaar means that they might colectively trigger one with a series of dodgy deals over a tiny amount of hard currency. Hopefully sythesizing the smallpox genome or even a small part of it would be caught in a Western country since they should scan any sequence they are paid to make against known pathogens, literally a virus scan. In one of the studies back before people took bioterrorism seriously, some of them already did. With a bit of luck, that is now mandatory.
But I bet the Kim Il Sung Biological Warfare Department would do it quite cheaply since they need the cash. Add some other things from a western supplier and you've got your weapon. The point is that you can split up a job which is beyond the capability of a typical rogue state into a load of smaller jobs which they can do and then trade the bits on the black market. I think if you can build nukes like this which must cost many billions of dollars, smallpox which can be done for a few hundred thousand is no problem.
. A successful immunization program does not require that everyone be immunized but it does require that most individuals be immunized. Government programs have been successful in this regard.
As far as I know, none of those programs have been compulsory. At least not in civilised countries. And actually the fact that you don't need to immunise the whole herd (good choice of phrase whilst arguing with Libertarians btw) means it doesn't need to be. You're better off advertising the benefits and offering it for free. That way you should get enough people to make it work. Hell the only people who die horribly are the ones that turned you down, so who cares. People are free to kill themselves in a variety of ways.
And, yes, there are potential risks and drawbacks to immunization, but the benefits to the community as a whole vastly outweigh those risks.
People said the same thing about eugenics and a lot of other frankly evil things like China's one child policy too. And quite often they were wrong - eugenics was pointless and inspired the holocaust, and China's one child policy will cause the population to age like Japan and Korea before China is anywhere near as rich as those countries. My guess is that it will probably put paid to China's ambitions as a superpower. So all the compulsion was actually bad for the community as well as the individual. And while those are examples that are extreme I can quite imagine the incompetent US government forcing the people to be vaccinated with a bunch of vaccinations that give 10% of the population Gulf War syndrome in response to an even more incompetent terrorist attack that kills a few dozen people.
Most of the time I suspect the problem with compulsion is that no one has enough information to decide which things people should be compelled to accept, since no one has a crystal ball. If anyone claims they do, they should probably be put under surveillance as a threat to a free society;-)
Mind you, people have worked out scenarios which I'm not going to describe where terrorists could expose very high percentage of the population to smallpox. If one of those happened or even if it seemed plausible, I'd get vaccinated, but only against smallpox.
So I can imagine both a situation where vaccinations are a good idea and one where they are a bad one. But I don't see the point of forcing people - I'd provide the jabs for free in a way that anyone who wanted one could get it easily and let people make their own decision.
Then again, maybe there is some situation where I'd force people, I just can't think of it offhand. But the point of Ron Paul is that he's a Libertarian so he doesn't believe in taking away rights from the individual to benefit the community under any circumstances on a point of principle. Which I can respect, even if I don't agree with him 100%
http://www.ronpaul2008.com/issues/health-freedom/ I also opposed the Homeland Security Bill, H.R. 5005, which, in section 304, authorizes the forced vaccination of American citizens against small pox. The government should never have the power to require immunizations or vaccinations.
I'm not really sure I disagree with him to be honest. I don't like the idea of forced vaccination. More importantly, I don't think it would work. If people don't believe a vaccination is safe they'll find some way to avoid it. Personally I'd take the vaccination if some terrorist group weaponized it, but the pros and cons of doing so seem to be sufficiently well balance that I don't agree with forcing other people to do do.
E.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox_vaccine#Post-eradication_vaccination The vaccine consists of the virus which causes the related, yet far milder, cowpox disease; this virus is appropriately named vaccinia, from the Latin vaca which means cow. This vaccine has functional viruses in it which improves its effectiveness but, unfortunately, causes serious complications for people with impaired immune systems (for example chemotherapy and AIDS patients, and people with eczema) and is not yet considered safe for pregnant women. A woman planning on conceiving within one month should not receive the smallpox immunization until after the pregnancy. In the event of an outbreak the woman should delay pregnancy if possible. A small, yet significant, percentage of healthy individuals also suffer adverse side-effects which, in rare cases, include permanent neurological damage. Vaccines that only contain attenuated vaccinia viruses (an attenuated virus is one in which the pathogenicity has been decreased through serial passage) have been proposed but some researchers have questioned the possible effectiveness of such a vaccine. Others point out that mass vaccinations would probably not be needed to counter a bioterrorist attack if many millions of doses of the current (possibly improved) vaccine could be delivered to victims within several days of exposure. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention CDC, "vaccination within 3 days of exposure will prevent or significantly lessen the severity of smallpox symptoms in the vast majority of people. Vaccination 4 to 7 days after exposure likely offers some protection from disease or may modify the severity of disease." This, along with vaccinations of so-called first-responders, is the current plan of action being devised by the United States Department of Homeland Security and FEMA in the United States.
And if you look at Gulf War I when soldiers were given masses of vaccinations, some of them developed Gulf War Syndrome. Now as far as I know the link between the two things is not proven, but I'd be very wary of a rushed max vaccination program in response to terrorist attacks. This MD certainly believes in a link -
If we'd done a little more of that earlier, we'd have quite a bit less of it to do now.
Amen to that! I think killing a couple of Dresdens worth of Iraqis would have worked out better in the long run than the kid gloves treatment the US gave them. You'd claim to minimise collateral damage of course, but really you'd have some sort of theoretical model that correlates collateral damage during the war to the level of insurgency after it and inflict an optimised level during the war.
Mini PCI express only has a x1 PCI Express link. Graphics cards usually use x16. Graphics cards need far more power than you can safely dissipate in in Mini PCI Express slot.
NVidia tried to introduce MXM - essentially a standard for small x16 PCI Express cards. It's not particularly popular compared to Mini PCI express or Express Card as far as I can tell - most laptops still have a soldered GPU. Some MXM laptops are actually locked to only accept a small number of approved cards.
I have no idea. There isn't a blast radius as far as I know - the projectile destroys stuff with kinetic energy. And precision-wise, I think these shells have GPS guidance so they should be pretty good. ICBMs hit targets faster than Mach 8 as far as I know, and they have had guidance since the 1980's. So it should be possible to guide these projectiles.
Sdelete is a sysinternals utility. You can get the source code, or at least you could. Even if you can't you can still use File monitor to see what it does. It would seem like a very bad move for Microsoft to change it in a way that makes it send data off to them.
http://www.fredericksburg.com/News/FLS/2007/012007/01172007/251373
The prototype fired at Dahlgren is only an 8-megajoule electromagnetic device, but the one to be used on Navy ships will generate a massive 64 megajoules. Current Navy guns generate about 9 megajoules of muzzle energy. The same article talks about increasing range 'more than tenfold' to 200-250 nautical miles.
So 64MJ and Mach 8 is pretty impressive. It would mean that US ships would have a profound advantage of having ten times the range of their opponents. More to the point if they were attacking a country with not much navy but decent anti ship missiles, they could avoid getting too close to them. Actually this page says
China acquired SS-N-22 launchers and missiles (specifically, the for-export 3M-80E Moskit variant) with its 19992000 purchase of two Sovremenny destroyers from Russia. According to Russia, the Chinese funded the development of the SS-N-22 version for the People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN), which has the designation 3M-80MBE, and this version differs from earlier versions mainly in that the range is increased beyond 200 km, and these new missiles will be first onboard the second pair Sovremenny class destroyers. It is speculated that the PLAN intends to use it against the carrier battle groups deployed by United States Navy in case of any confrontation with Taiwan. Now the railgun can actually fire 200-250 nautical miles or about 460 km, so US ships could stay well out of range.
What about if you have a solid state drive? You can buy ultraportables with 32GB SSDs now. They cost a bit extra, but I'd definitely buy one. They're fast and will probably last longer than a hard disk.
But an extra 32GB of flash disk space will cost you $399.
Microsoft would never offer something like vLite or nLite to end users.
It's hard enough to test the current limited set of installation options. vLite gives far more possibilities and would therefore need far more testing. Most likely a commercial company that did it would get a reputation for producing unstable software. Microsoft don't have a perfect reputation with the limited options they offer now of course, but offering nLite would make things worse.
Open source stuff can do this of course, but that's because the people adding the options don't have to respond to clueless people misusing them. I noticed it with wget. The version I downloaded would die on an access violation if I used -np and -L. Which is legal as far as I can see, but the latest build crashes with that command line.
Now since it's free and open source, I just fiddled with the batch file that called it to work in a different way. But if it was commercial and as widely used as Windows that break would trigger an avalanche of tech support calls.
The economics are different in commercial software - you're better off offering a limit set of options and making sure you test every combination of them on the few supported platforms. With open source anyone can add an option, anyone can introduce a bug and anyone can fix it.
In fact I think Microsoft sit in the middle of scale of customizability - somewhere between Linux which is highly customizable and Mac which is almost totally locked down. They do offer embedded versions of desktop OSs incidentally which are more modular and customizable. But those are sold to engineers in very small volumes, and presumably have more expensive support contracts.
It's a marchitecture thing. They want to promote Notes and the want to promote Ubuntu so they make one run on the other.
Some years back when they were promoting OS/2 and PPC they tried to do a port of OS/2 to PPC. From a technical point of view, that's nonsense. The OS/2 kernel was very, very dependent on x86 protected mode, so the porting effort never produced anything that an end user could actually use. Wikipedia puts it this way
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC#Implementations
It took IBM two years to rewrite OS/2 for PowerPC, and by the time the operating system was ready, the market for OS/2 on PowerPC had evaporated. For this reason, the IBM PowerPC desktops did not ship, although the reference design (codenamed Sandalbow) based on the PowerPC 601 CPU was released as an RS/6000 model (Byte magazine 's April 1994 issue included an extensive article about the Apple and IBM PowerPC desktops).
Are you quoting a legal judgment, statement from the FSF, or otherwise? Or is that just your own misguided interpretation? A stetement from Eben Moglen, co writer of the GPL and legal council to the FSF.
http://impact.freethcartwright.com/2007/09/gpl3-impact-gui.html
When a program is labelled 'GPLv2 or any later version';... the author is delegating to the users a part of the authority to relicence. Now if the users can opt to license under GPLv3, they get the rights to patent licenses and encryption keys. The FSF is trying to force people like Tivo to provide these.
http://blog.actonline.org/gplv3/index.html
So how would this affect GPLv3? Lets take one provision in particular, the so-called anti-Tivo provision in section 6, which requires anyone that distributes GPLd code as part of a consumer product to include installation information and the ability to install modified versions of the code on the consumer product. One could argue that the FSF has limited the scope of the license to prohibit distribution in consumer devices that dont allow modification of device software, meaning that a breach would be copyright infringement. I think the more logical reading is that the FSF has imposed an additional obligation on producers of consumer devices. Failure to fulfill that obligation would be a breach of contract, not a copyright infringement. While it's not clear that any of this pseudo contract / pseudo license stuff designed to collectivise private property is enforceable, it's also not clear that it isn't. Some people - including Eben Moglen - have speculated that Microsoft may be distributing GPL3 software by selling vouchers and thus may have to license all its patents for free.
http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/05/16/MS-patent-claims-complicated-by-GPLv3_1.html
The provision was put in specifically to make deals such as the one Microsoft struck with Novell "useless" to Microsoft so that it cannot make similar pacts that include royalty payments with other companies, said Eben Moglen, chairman of the Software Freedom Law Center and a Columbia University professor of law and legal history who cowrote the GPLv3 draft with the Free Software Foundation's Richard Stallman.
"Rather than discriminating among parties so customers feel safe [from litigation] and not developers, we instead will be turning the Microsoft-Novell deal into a patent-insurance factor for everybody," he said.
The catch is that no one is sure if Microsoft's agreement to distribute coupons for Suse Linux Enterprise Support through the Novell deal would deem it a Linux distributor and require the company to be compliant with the GPL. And Moglen, who has examined the Microsoft-Novell deal but is under a nondisclosure agreement forbidding him from revealing specifics, said that the answer will remain unclear unless Microsoft and Novell go public with that element of their deal. So clearly the GPL3 is designed to trap people that distribute GPL3 or "GPL2 or later" software or even sell support vouchers for "GPL2 or a later" into being forced to license all their patents for free. It reminds me of the bit in Atlas Shrugged where the looters and moochers are hell bent on taking everthing away from successful innovators and putting it under collective ownership.
TiVo has no such obligation. They can continue to use software released under GPLv2. Not if they've used any software which the users can license under "version 2 or later" they can't. If any users opt for GPL3, Tivo has to give them those extra rights. Which was kind of the point of my post. Maybe I should put in bold, since it seems to be hard for you to grasp
If you release software under "GPL version x or later at the users choice", it is your users who decide which version they use. When Version x+1 is released it may try to force you to grant them rights which you are not able to grant grant them for legal and economic reasons
I'm not going to cry for TiVo. They may have complied with the letter of GPLv2, but not the spirit. Legal documents don't have a spirit, just words. The words have changed and the disadvantaged party has no say in the matter. Whatever you think about Tivo, and I certainly would never buy one, that's unjust.
All this mumbo jumbo about clarifying the GPL, or fixing loopholes whilst staying within the spirit is scary frankly. Contracts and licenses need to be agreed between free adults to be workable. Having it done by some unaccountable group of experts who claim to be working objectively for the benefit of humanity reminds me of the USSR.
How would you react if the Ministry Of Work Contracts decided that you weren't 'complying with the spirit of your job contract' by going home at the evenings and weekends and changed the contract so that you had to live at the office? Maybe they might decide that in the next version you had to be chained to the desk and not paid at all. Not much fun being a slave is it? And that's what you are when other people can change the conditions you work under against your interests and without your agreement.
He can in fact DO anything he wants. He just can't UNDO things unilaterally. Yeah, only the FSF can do that.
Consider Tivo. They use GPL software in good faith, complying with the GPL.
Then GPL3 comes along this would force Tivo to release their keys, which they presumably don't want to do. But that should matter since they complied with the GPL as it was when they released the product, right? Nope, if they use any software with the FSF recommended "this version or later" header at the top then their users can opt for a version 3 license of that code and any code it links to, which would force Tivo to release their keys. Something has unilaterally changed under Tivo.
Consider a company using embedded products. They release the source code, as required by the version of the GPL, 2, that was current when they released. They have exclusively licensed some patents from third parties - e.g. they could have codec which was released under a GPL2 or later license but which required them to license some patents. Now GPL 3 is released which forces them to grant a patent license to all their users. But they can't do that, the codec company only sells per company licenses. So because the GPL 3 was released, suddenly they have an oligation to do something they can't do, despite never having agreed to it.
The codec company could actually be thought of as a troll in this example - they are selling something which will make it illegal to distribute your software if you use theirs. But maybe some company has got into this situation by an honest mistake - you could release commercial software under "GPL version n or later" under good faith and find that both you and your users have severe problems when GPL n+1 comes out.
And note that if you release under "GPL version 2 or later", even if 99% of your users are happy to not have the extra rights they would have under GPL3, you still have to grant those rights to the 1% that opt to license your code under GPL3. Even if some of those users work for your competitors.
And GPL4 will probably move even more rights from producers of software to consumers. So even if the patent or key giveway that GPL3 forces you to do doesn't cause a problem, who knows that GPL4 or GPL5 might force you to giveaway.
The goto statement should be unacceptable where it unacceptable and acceptable elsewhere. Grand statements like the one in your sig do nothing but harm. Grand statements do harm where they do harm and are beneficial where they are beneficial surely?
Often it is treated with radioactive seeds implanted into the prostate Umm, that's not true. They tell people this and the ones that are stupid enough to believe it get sterilised. It's actually a eugenics program.
Slashdot Mirror
based on Winmin
It is spelled wymyn you sexist pig!
I don't think it's that hard to do. Someone worked it out how.
http://paulboutin.weblogger.com/stories/storyReader$1439
Probably beyond al Qaeda, who can't even manage high school chemistry but a rogue state like North Korea could do it and sell it to terrorists. Actually the A Q Khan network shows that a more sophisticated network of several rogue states is possible and they could do quite sophisticated bits of engineering between them by dividing the work up and sharing the results. If an bio-weapons equivalent of that exists, you could probably buy bio-weapons on the black market.
Incidentally at one point North Korea threatened that unless they where given aid they would sell 'fissile material, warheads or blueprints to anyone'. Which I thought was pretty funny - Stalinist North Korea reminded me a bit of the freewheeling capitalists at MIPS.
http://www.sensi.org/~alec/mips/byte_1991_12_p271.html Although Mips makes and sells computer systems, it doesn't make chips. Instead, it operates as a 'fabless' design center and licenses other companies to create the silicon. Thus, it's important to Mips that the design for the R4000 be portable (i.e., manufacturable by a large number of vendors). The companies that actually make Mips chips--including IDT, PSC, LSI Logic, Siemens-Nixdorf, and NEC--all receive masks from Mips as well as copies of the CAD database that was used to produce them. Now the A Q Khan network really seems to work like this, only more flexible. It's sort of the Linux of nukes. If you had excess fissile material or warheads you could sell them to the network. Or if wanted to buy you could buy warheads, or blueprints or fissile material. It's like the ultimate bazaar. The worst thing is that no one has any responsibility for anything. So even though even rogue states presumably don't want a global smallpox epidemic (though North Korea is probably so closed that they're not vulnerable to it), this sort of bazaar means that they might colectively trigger one with a series of dodgy deals over a tiny amount of hard currency. Hopefully sythesizing the smallpox genome or even a small part of it would be caught in a Western country since they should scan any sequence they are paid to make against known pathogens, literally a virus scan. In one of the studies back before people took bioterrorism seriously, some of them already did. With a bit of luck, that is now mandatory.
But I bet the Kim Il Sung Biological Warfare Department would do it quite cheaply since they need the cash. Add some other things from a western supplier and you've got your weapon. The point is that you can split up a job which is beyond the capability of a typical rogue state into a load of smaller jobs which they can do and then trade the bits on the black market. I think if you can build nukes like this which must cost many billions of dollars, smallpox which can be done for a few hundred thousand is no problem.
. A successful immunization program does not require that everyone be immunized but it does require that most individuals be immunized. Government programs have been successful in this regard.
;-)
As far as I know, none of those programs have been compulsory. At least not in civilised countries. And actually the fact that you don't need to immunise the whole herd (good choice of phrase whilst arguing with Libertarians btw) means it doesn't need to be. You're better off advertising the benefits and offering it for free. That way you should get enough people to make it work. Hell the only people who die horribly are the ones that turned you down, so who cares. People are free to kill themselves in a variety of ways.
And, yes, there are potential risks and drawbacks to immunization, but the benefits to the community as a whole vastly outweigh those risks.
People said the same thing about eugenics and a lot of other frankly evil things like China's one child policy too. And quite often they were wrong - eugenics was pointless and inspired the holocaust, and China's one child policy will cause the population to age like Japan and Korea before China is anywhere near as rich as those countries. My guess is that it will probably put paid to China's ambitions as a superpower. So all the compulsion was actually bad for the community as well as the individual. And while those are examples that are extreme I can quite imagine the incompetent US government forcing the people to be vaccinated with a bunch of vaccinations that give 10% of the population Gulf War syndrome in response to an even more incompetent terrorist attack that kills a few dozen people.
Most of the time I suspect the problem with compulsion is that no one has enough information to decide which things people should be compelled to accept, since no one has a crystal ball. If anyone claims they do, they should probably be put under surveillance as a threat to a free society
Mind you, people have worked out scenarios which I'm not going to describe where terrorists could expose very high percentage of the population to smallpox. If one of those happened or even if it seemed plausible, I'd get vaccinated, but only against smallpox.
So I can imagine both a situation where vaccinations are a good idea and one where they are a bad one. But I don't see the point of forcing people - I'd provide the jabs for free in a way that anyone who wanted one could get it easily and let people make their own decision.
Then again, maybe there is some situation where I'd force people, I just can't think of it offhand. But the point of Ron Paul is that he's a Libertarian so he doesn't believe in taking away rights from the individual to benefit the community under any circumstances on a point of principle. Which I can respect, even if I don't agree with him 100%
Actually he said -
http://www.ronpaul2008.com/issues/health-freedom/
I also opposed the Homeland Security Bill, H.R. 5005, which, in section 304, authorizes the forced vaccination of American citizens against small pox. The government should never have the power to require immunizations or vaccinations.
I'm not really sure I disagree with him to be honest. I don't like the idea of forced vaccination. More importantly, I don't think it would work. If people don't believe a vaccination is safe they'll find some way to avoid it. Personally I'd take the vaccination if some terrorist group weaponized it, but the pros and cons of doing so seem to be sufficiently well balance that I don't agree with forcing other people to do do.
E.g.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox_vaccine#Post-eradication_vaccination
The vaccine consists of the virus which causes the related, yet far milder, cowpox disease; this virus is appropriately named vaccinia, from the Latin vaca which means cow. This vaccine has functional viruses in it which improves its effectiveness but, unfortunately, causes serious complications for people with impaired immune systems (for example chemotherapy and AIDS patients, and people with eczema) and is not yet considered safe for pregnant women. A woman planning on conceiving within one month should not receive the smallpox immunization until after the pregnancy. In the event of an outbreak the woman should delay pregnancy if possible. A small, yet significant, percentage of healthy individuals also suffer adverse side-effects which, in rare cases, include permanent neurological damage. Vaccines that only contain attenuated vaccinia viruses (an attenuated virus is one in which the pathogenicity has been decreased through serial passage) have been proposed but some researchers have questioned the possible effectiveness of such a vaccine. Others point out that mass vaccinations would probably not be needed to counter a bioterrorist attack if many millions of doses of the current (possibly improved) vaccine could be delivered to victims within several days of exposure. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention CDC, "vaccination within 3 days of exposure will prevent or significantly lessen the severity of smallpox symptoms in the vast majority of people. Vaccination 4 to 7 days after exposure likely offers some protection from disease or may modify the severity of disease." This, along with vaccinations of so-called first-responders, is the current plan of action being devised by the United States Department of Homeland Security and FEMA in the United States.
And if you look at Gulf War I when soldiers were given masses of vaccinations, some of them developed Gulf War Syndrome. Now as far as I know the link between the two things is not proven, but I'd be very wary of a rushed max vaccination program in response to terrorist attacks. This MD certainly believes in a link -
http://thyroid.about.com/library/news/blsmallpoxthyroid.htm
Ron Paul is the Cowboy Neal option.
127.0.0.1
If we'd done a little more of that earlier, we'd have quite a bit less of it to do now.
Amen to that! I think killing a couple of Dresdens worth of Iraqis would have worked out better in the long run than the kid gloves treatment the US gave them. You'd claim to minimise collateral damage of course, but really you'd have some sort of theoretical model that correlates collateral damage during the war to the level of insurgency after it and inflict an optimised level during the war.
Would you be in favour of, to borrow a Fark phrase, GLASS PARKING LOT NOW!! in the Middle East?
So what if he does? Even if he were elected President he wouldn't be able to implement this.
Mini PCI express only has a x1 PCI Express link. Graphics cards usually use x16. Graphics cards need far more power than you can safely dissipate in in Mini PCI Express slot.
NVidia tried to introduce MXM - essentially a standard for small x16 PCI Express cards. It's not particularly popular compared to Mini PCI express or Express Card as far as I can tell - most laptops still have a soldered GPU. Some MXM laptops are actually locked to only accept a small number of approved cards.
If the law doesn't pass, Bush could just pardon the telcos before he leaves office.
I have no idea. There isn't a blast radius as far as I know - the projectile destroys stuff with kinetic energy. And precision-wise, I think these shells have GPS guidance so they should be pretty good. ICBMs hit targets faster than Mach 8 as far as I know, and they have had guidance since the 1980's. So it should be possible to guide these projectiles.
Sdelete is a sysinternals utility. You can get the source code, or at least you could. Even if you can't you can still use File monitor to see what it does. It would seem like a very bad move for Microsoft to change it in a way that makes it send data off to them.
You can use sdelete on Windows
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/Security/SDelete.mspx
This article about proposals for guns on new destroyers for a talks about muzzle velocities of 800-900 metres per second, or about Mach 2.5. Wikipedia says that 1800 mps or about Mach 5 is 'close to the limit achievable with chemical propellants'
So 64MJ and Mach 8 is pretty impressive. It would mean that US ships would have a profound advantage of having ten times the range of their opponents. More to the point if they were attacking a country with not much navy but decent anti ship missiles, they could avoid getting too close to them. Actually this page says China acquired SS-N-22 launchers and missiles (specifically, the for-export 3M-80E Moskit variant) with its 19992000 purchase of two Sovremenny destroyers from Russia. According to Russia, the Chinese funded the development of the SS-N-22 version for the People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN), which has the designation 3M-80MBE, and this version differs from earlier versions mainly in that the range is increased beyond 200 km, and these new missiles will be first onboard the second pair Sovremenny class destroyers. It is speculated that the PLAN intends to use it against the carrier battle groups deployed by United States Navy in case of any confrontation with Taiwan. Now the railgun can actually fire 200-250 nautical miles or about 460 km, so US ships could stay well out of range.
How do we know you're not an NSA mole, paid to persuade us that one pass is enough? Or maybe your experts are an NSA moles and they've tricked you.
What about if you have a solid state drive? You can buy ultraportables with 32GB SSDs now. They cost a bit extra, but I'd definitely buy one. They're fast and will probably last longer than a hard disk.
But an extra 32GB of flash disk space will cost you $399.
Microsoft would never offer something like vLite or nLite to end users.
It's hard enough to test the current limited set of installation options. vLite gives far more possibilities and would therefore need far more testing. Most likely a commercial company that did it would get a reputation for producing unstable software. Microsoft don't have a perfect reputation with the limited options they offer now of course, but offering nLite would make things worse.
Open source stuff can do this of course, but that's because the people adding the options don't have to respond to clueless people misusing them. I noticed it with wget. The version I downloaded would die on an access violation if I used -np and -L. Which is legal as far as I can see, but the latest build crashes with that command line.
Now since it's free and open source, I just fiddled with the batch file that called it to work in a different way. But if it was commercial and as widely used as Windows that break would trigger an avalanche of tech support calls.
The economics are different in commercial software - you're better off offering a limit set of options and making sure you test every combination of them on the few supported platforms. With open source anyone can add an option, anyone can introduce a bug and anyone can fix it.
In fact I think Microsoft sit in the middle of scale of customizability - somewhere between Linux which is highly customizable and Mac which is almost totally locked down. They do offer embedded versions of desktop OSs incidentally which are more modular and customizable. But those are sold to engineers in very small volumes, and presumably have more expensive support contracts.
Some years back when they were promoting OS/2 and PPC they tried to do a port of OS/2 to PPC. From a technical point of view, that's nonsense. The OS/2 kernel was very, very dependent on x86 protected mode, so the porting effort never produced anything that an end user could actually use. Wikipedia puts it this way
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC#Implementations It took IBM two years to rewrite OS/2 for PowerPC, and by the time the operating system was ready, the market for OS/2 on PowerPC had evaporated. For this reason, the IBM PowerPC desktops did not ship, although the reference design (codenamed Sandalbow) based on the PowerPC 601 CPU was released as an RS/6000 model (Byte magazine 's April 1994 issue included an extensive article about the Apple and IBM PowerPC desktops).
http://impact.freethcartwright.com/2007/09/gpl3-impact-gui.html When a program is labelled 'GPLv2 or any later version';... the author is delegating to the users a part of the authority to relicence. Now if the users can opt to license under GPLv3, they get the rights to patent licenses and encryption keys. The FSF is trying to force people like Tivo to provide these.
http://blog.actonline.org/gplv3/index.html So how would this affect GPLv3? Lets take one provision in particular, the so-called anti-Tivo provision in section 6, which requires anyone that distributes GPLd code as part of a consumer product to include installation information and the ability to install modified versions of the code on the consumer product. One could argue that the FSF has limited the scope of the license to prohibit distribution in consumer devices that dont allow modification of device software, meaning that a breach would be copyright infringement. I think the more logical reading is that the FSF has imposed an additional obligation on producers of consumer devices. Failure to fulfill that obligation would be a breach of contract, not a copyright infringement. While it's not clear that any of this pseudo contract / pseudo license stuff designed to collectivise private property is enforceable, it's also not clear that it isn't. Some people - including Eben Moglen - have speculated that Microsoft may be distributing GPL3 software by selling vouchers and thus may have to license all its patents for free.
http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/05/16/MS-patent-claims-complicated-by-GPLv3_1.html The provision was put in specifically to make deals such as the one Microsoft struck with Novell "useless" to Microsoft so that it cannot make similar pacts that include royalty payments with other companies, said Eben Moglen, chairman of the Software Freedom Law Center and a Columbia University professor of law and legal history who cowrote the GPLv3 draft with the Free Software Foundation's Richard Stallman.
"Rather than discriminating among parties so customers feel safe [from litigation] and not developers, we instead will be turning the Microsoft-Novell deal into a patent-insurance factor for everybody," he said.
The catch is that no one is sure if Microsoft's agreement to distribute coupons for Suse Linux Enterprise Support through the Novell deal would deem it a Linux distributor and require the company to be compliant with the GPL. And Moglen, who has examined the Microsoft-Novell deal but is under a nondisclosure agreement forbidding him from revealing specifics, said that the answer will remain unclear unless Microsoft and Novell go public with that element of their deal. So clearly the GPL3 is designed to trap people that distribute GPL3 or "GPL2 or later" software or even sell support vouchers for "GPL2 or a later" into being forced to license all their patents for free. It reminds me of the bit in Atlas Shrugged where the looters and moochers are hell bent on taking everthing away from successful innovators and putting it under collective ownership.
If you release software under "GPL version x or later at the users choice", it is your users who decide which version they use. When Version x+1 is released it may try to force you to grant them rights which you are not able to grant grant them for legal and economic reasons I'm not going to cry for TiVo. They may have complied with the letter of GPLv2, but not the spirit. Legal documents don't have a spirit, just words. The words have changed and the disadvantaged party has no say in the matter. Whatever you think about Tivo, and I certainly would never buy one, that's unjust.
All this mumbo jumbo about clarifying the GPL, or fixing loopholes whilst staying within the spirit is scary frankly. Contracts and licenses need to be agreed between free adults to be workable. Having it done by some unaccountable group of experts who claim to be working objectively for the benefit of humanity reminds me of the USSR.
How would you react if the Ministry Of Work Contracts decided that you weren't 'complying with the spirit of your job contract' by going home at the evenings and weekends and changed the contract so that you had to live at the office? Maybe they might decide that in the next version you had to be chained to the desk and not paid at all. Not much fun being a slave is it? And that's what you are when other people can change the conditions you work under against your interests and without your agreement.
Consider Tivo. They use GPL software in good faith, complying with the GPL.
Then GPL3 comes along this would force Tivo to release their keys, which they presumably don't want to do. But that should matter since they complied with the GPL as it was when they released the product, right? Nope, if they use any software with the FSF recommended "this version or later" header at the top then their users can opt for a version 3 license of that code and any code it links to, which would force Tivo to release their keys. Something has unilaterally changed under Tivo.
Consider a company using embedded products. They release the source code, as required by the version of the GPL, 2, that was current when they released. They have exclusively licensed some patents from third parties - e.g. they could have codec which was released under a GPL2 or later license but which required them to license some patents. Now GPL 3 is released which forces them to grant a patent license to all their users. But they can't do that, the codec company only sells per company licenses. So because the GPL 3 was released, suddenly they have an oligation to do something they can't do, despite never having agreed to it.
The codec company could actually be thought of as a troll in this example - they are selling something which will make it illegal to distribute your software if you use theirs. But maybe some company has got into this situation by an honest mistake - you could release commercial software under "GPL version n or later" under good faith and find that both you and your users have severe problems when GPL n+1 comes out.
And note that if you release under "GPL version 2 or later", even if 99% of your users are happy to not have the extra rights they would have under GPL3, you still have to grant those rights to the 1% that opt to license your code under GPL3. Even if some of those users work for your competitors.
And GPL4 will probably move even more rights from producers of software to consumers. So even if the patent or key giveway that GPL3 forces you to do doesn't cause a problem, who knows that GPL4 or GPL5 might force you to giveaway.
Precioussssss