The Linux kernel is under GPL v2. There is no "automatic upgrade" of future kernel versions to GPL v3. Even if there were, versions already released are unaffected. Once you have a copy of the kernel under GPL v2, that code's status can never be changed. Once something is released under a certain license, ceteris paribus that copy remains under it.
Software under this license can never be a protection device that people are not allowed to circumvent.
That would mean that any cryptographic software could never be GPL licensed.
Why? If the only thing keeping your cryptosystem secure is that people cannot legally reverse-engineer or decrypt it, you have bigger things to worry about.
The new material that cause light to bend the other way probably means C is higher than C(vacuum).
No, c is the absolute limit. Nothing -- not even light -- can go faster than c. (It's lower-case c.) Perhaps you're confused about phase velocity. (Also, if it were possible that the velocity of light in this material were higher than c, then its refractive index would be less than one, but never negative.)
I don't know what the original research actually was, but this article is crap. I can't understand what "steering it in the opposite direction of that found in the natural world" is supposed to mean. What "direction" is this "steering" found in the real world? If he means refraction, it's easiest to think of it as light wanting to bend towards the medium in which it moves slower. (Nothing mysterious about it either -- imagine on the floor you have two regions, one hardwood and one carpet. Take apart a toy so you have two wheels on an axle, and roll it towards the wood/carpet border, but at an angle. As it crosses, it will turn towards the carpet.)
So, since (group) velocity > c is not possible, does he mean that he is making light bend away from the medium in which it moves slower? In other words, Einstein and everyone after him was just full of crap?
It seems impossible for a keystroke logger to get installed on it....
Why?
It runs X11. It's perfectly simple -- well, not script kiddie simple, but if you know xlib, you can write a program that puts up a transparent window in front of every other window that can intercept all input, and of course it can read the screen at any time.
...get the UK police authorities involved with Sunbelt over copyright theft.
You mean Sunbelt stole the copyright to the program? Interesting. How does one steal a compyright? Is that something like stealing the deed to a house?
Retrocoder Limited as the copyright holder, has the right to say who may or may not have its program. If someone has its program without permission, are they not guilty of a criminal offence?
For example, if you have a copy of Windows without MicroSofts permission, is this not a crime?
Of course the law in the UK is different from that in the USA, but since US law is derived from UK law, it's unlikely there's any significant change -- especially copyright law in this Brave New Post-Berne-Convention World. Consider this: my friend Joe gave me a computer, and it has Windows installed on it. Did I ever get permission from Microsoft? No. Am I breaking the law? No. Does Microsoft have the right to say who Joe can give the computer to? No. Does Microsoft have the right to say "only white christian men can use Windows"? No.
This sounds pedantic, but I think it's important: Darl's SCO is not the same company as the "old" SCO that used to do Unix stuff. That Santa Cruz Ops -- "old" SCO -- changed its name to Tarantella (which was recently absorbed by Sun) and what used to be Caldera changed its name to "SCO".
It's not even Noorda's Caldera any more -- the Noorda family has long washed its hands of McBride and Co.
Darl McBride's SCO has nothing left in it from any technical company that may have existed at any time.
this isn't a first by any means.... I have a friend helping to build one of the next Mars orbiters, and students were also involved in builidng Spirit and Opportunity.
This is "a satellite designed by students". Seems to me there's a teeny difference between "helping to build" (or "involved in") and "designed by".
Sorry, if you're going to be pedantic you have to be accurate. A megameter would be Mm -- case is significant for units. There is no SI or cgs unit called an M: the closest is a maxwell (Mx), a unit of magnetic flux. 1 Mx = 10^-8 Wb (webers).
to their defense SCO has said they think the GPL is invalid
In that case, it's plain ol' copyright law that applies, and SCO are guilty of copyright infringement -- the Linux kernel code is copyrighted. You can think of the GPL as opening a hole in the shield of copyright -- no GPL, no hole.
It may work if you put the device near one corner and you have your conversation at the other corner.
Assume the loudness of the babble speaker is about the same as that of your voice. If the speaker is 3 feet from your head, and the phone microphone is 1 inch from your mouth, that's a ratio of 1/36. Now square that. You get.00077 -- that's how much quieter the babble will be. (Furthermore, phone mikes are usually set up so that ambient noise hits both sides of the diaphragm and gets cancelled out, but your voice only hits one side so is picked up.)
If Bubba's in the next cube (or a few cubes away) your voice and the babble are approximately the same distance away, and will sound equally loud.
And how come no one has mentioned The Cone of Silence?
There are plenty of electrical engineering students who know what NPN and PNP mean, and haven't a clue about, say, the pros and cons of classes versus structs re functional programming and modularization.
Hold on there, buckaroo! NPN vs. PNP is something like heapsort vs. quicksort. All that other stuff is like Verilog vs. VHDL. Whoops, software again! No, it's like Spice vs. gEDA. Whoops, software again! It's all software! Soylent Green is software!
Screw the hi-tech gadgets, think about water. You can go a week without food or listening to your iPod, but you won't go more than a couple of days without water.
Remember your water heater -- lots of clean water there. Turn off the input valve in case the water supply gets contaminated.
Get a good water filter, and possibly something to kill viruses, like iodine.
... or you know, whaver actually happens when you get sucked into a black hole.
If you get sucked towards a black hole, assuming you survive the tidal forces, you will never reach the event horizon. Time dilates in the strong gravitational field, and at the event horizon the time dilation is infinite. At small distances from the event horizon you could watch the rest of the universe speed up. (In fact the Restaurant At The End of The Universe is very close to an event horizon!)
[Dow purchased Union Carbide after Union Carbide killed tens of thousands of Indian people when a chemical plant in Bhopal released methyl isocyanate]
ivan256 asks:
What would you have prefered to happen? Somebody has to end up owning that mess.
Red herring or not, it's not the case that someone "owns that mess." Thanks to the excellent corporate atmosphere in the US, Dow only has the assets, not the liability. There are variouswebsites up in arms about it. Also a parody site http://www.dowethics.com/.
Sun was in the best position to capitalize on the Linux wave....I can only imagine how much better a position Sun would be in if Sun had re-centered themselves around Linux kernels going forward back in the late 90's or even 2001-ish.
What "wave" would that be? Sun already had a Unix at least as good as Linux. Face it, the only thing Linux has going for it is support for all sorts of hardware. Other than that, Linux can be supremely annoying -- no manpages, for one thing. Add the Solaris 10 features like dtrace and Linux starts to look a little less appealing. And remember that in the late-90s, Linux was still a little more primitive than Solaris. They'd have been better off spending money on Solaris x86 back then instead of almost abandoning it.
Disclaimer: I run mostly Linux at home, alongside a couple of OpenBSD machines. At work, Linux and Solaris x86. IMHO what Sun should do is stop treating Gnu software like orphans and make all the Gnu tools -- not just gcc -- easy to install, preferably installed by default.
Over the past 30 years or so the politicians have been constantly changing the duration of daylight savings time to suit the needs of different political parties... the dates change each year (because they correspond to Hebrew calendar dates)
Ye Gods! That does sound like a mess. Why does the authority need to be given to someone? Just pass a law in the Knesset defining it, in terms of the Hebrew calendar as reqd. I assume the Hebrew calendar is not arbitrary, i.e. given a date, a computer can always calculate what tomorrow's date is.
I guess it's just another example of things that would work better if the geeks were in charge!
(I was planning to read your tutorial, but alas, Hebrew is not a language I can read.)
In one college I teach in they have an internal time server, and that server is one hour off... The way they set it to daylight savings time is by adding one hour to UTC...
Great Scott! The rest of the world (including weird places like Arizona that don't use summer time while everyone around them does) has no problem with shifting UTC offsets. (NTP itself is UTC, it doesn't care about time zones -- that's upto the user applications.) Why is Israel in this mysterious temporal anomaly?
The "Blue Book" from Adobe. It's called "Tutorials" or something, it's part of the Red/Green/Blue trilogy that defined PostScript Level 1.
PostScript really is a very nice language -- any geek with an interest in languages and/or graphics should learn it. For hand-editing, Level 1 is fine, ignore all the new stuff. Algorithmic images like fractals are pleasingly easy to do. Also, anywhere you need precise placing of text and logos, like posters, or CD inserts, or paper airplane folding patterns -- PostScript makes it really easy. All wrapped in a cool stack-based Forth-like interpreter.
Over the years I've accumulated a "library" of functions I use, so I even use it for typesetting smaller jobs.
Another thing: it's about time we got rid of that pesky non-repeating infinite crap that pi gives us. Let's pass a law that pi = 3, because when I make a circular thing that's ten cubits from rim to rim, it sucks that it doesn't take exactly thirty cubits to measure around it! Cutting sheet metal for cylindrical tubs is too hard -- have you ever tried to measure out 31.4159265358979323846... cubits? You can't even write it out!
We'll all be dealing with their Greenland ice melting. Unlike the floating Arctic ice, which brings subtler (though devastating) problems, Greenland's landborne runoff will probably raise the global seas around 20 feet, on average.
Not just that: the decreased salinity in the North Atlantic will result in the Gulf Stream "shutting off" -- in other words, Europe will enjoy the same climate that Siberia does today. Look up Global Conveyer, for instance.
A little postage-stamp size rock that's ice-bound 364 days of the year with a population of exactly zero (0) -- who gives a shit? These governments need to get out more: go to the pub, lift a drink or two, get a date, get a life!
(At least we geeks only argue about important things like the superiority of emacs over vi.)
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I don't know what the original research actually was, but this article is crap. I can't understand what "steering it in the opposite direction of that found in the natural world" is supposed to mean. What "direction" is this "steering" found in the real world? If he means refraction, it's easiest to think of it as light wanting to bend towards the medium in which it moves slower. (Nothing mysterious about it either -- imagine on the floor you have two regions, one hardwood and one carpet. Take apart a toy so you have two wheels on an axle, and roll it towards the wood/carpet border, but at an angle. As it crosses, it will turn towards the carpet.)
So, since (group) velocity > c is not possible, does he mean that he is making light bend away from the medium in which it moves slower? In other words, Einstein and everyone after him was just full of crap?
It runs X11. It's perfectly simple -- well, not script kiddie simple, but if you know xlib, you can write a program that puts up a transparent window in front of every other window that can intercept all input, and of course it can read the screen at any time.
What an idiot.
It's not even Noorda's Caldera any more -- the Noorda family has long washed its hands of McBride and Co.
Darl McBride's SCO has nothing left in it from any technical company that may have existed at any time.
EAA.
Meter (or metre) is abbreviated m.
If Bubba's in the next cube (or a few cubes away) your voice and the babble are approximately the same distance away, and will sound equally loud.
And how come no one has mentioned The Cone of Silence?
Remember your water heater -- lots of clean water there. Turn off the input valve in case the water supply gets contaminated.
Get a good water filter, and possibly something to kill viruses, like iodine.
Disclaimer: I run mostly Linux at home, alongside a couple of OpenBSD machines. At work, Linux and Solaris x86. IMHO what Sun should do is stop treating Gnu software like orphans and make all the Gnu tools -- not just gcc -- easy to install, preferably installed by default.
Today's state of the art -- mostly-linear flow of control, mostly-planar hardware -- will have to change for the next generation.
I guess it's just another example of things that would work better if the geeks were in charge!
(I was planning to read your tutorial, but alas, Hebrew is not a language I can read.)
PostScript really is a very nice language -- any geek with an interest in languages and/or graphics should learn it. For hand-editing, Level 1 is fine, ignore all the new stuff. Algorithmic images like fractals are pleasingly easy to do. Also, anywhere you need precise placing of text and logos, like posters, or CD inserts, or paper airplane folding patterns -- PostScript makes it really easy. All wrapped in a cool stack-based Forth-like interpreter.
Over the years I've accumulated a "library" of functions I use, so I even use it for typesetting smaller jobs.
Another thing: it's about time we got rid of that pesky non-repeating infinite crap that pi gives us. Let's pass a law that pi = 3, because when I make a circular thing that's ten cubits from rim to rim, it sucks that it doesn't take exactly thirty cubits to measure around it! Cutting sheet metal for cylindrical tubs is too hard -- have you ever tried to measure out 31.4159265358979323846... cubits? You can't even write it out!
(At least we geeks only argue about important things like the superiority of emacs over vi.)