Well, one of the better arguments that the people of antiquity had for a round earth would be the simple fact that when a ship comes up over the horizon, the sails are seen before the hull. Since there are no reasonably permanent irregularities such as hills and valleys on the oceans, the only way to explain such a thing would be to theorize that the earth has a curve. Combining that with the curve seen on mountaintops it would not be difficult for the ancients to deduce the roundness of the earth. The phenomena of lunar eclipses would also provide more direct evidence for a round earth, as it would have been observed that the earth always casts a circular shadow on the moon. If it were a flat disc, they would have observed the shape of the shadow changing during the eclipse's progress, which they never did.
Yes, the ancients can and did use these arguments, and in fact the ancient Greek mathematician Eratosthenes in the 3rd century BC managed to estimate the circumference of the earth using geometric methods to an accuracy of 39,300 km, only seven hundred kilometers less than the modern figure.
While we don't know exactly where he came from or seen others of his species, it may be that Yoda's native language does make use of the OSV pattern that he tends to use, and he winds up reverting to that word order from time to time (he doesn't always speak like that, by the way).
A look at a small table of energy return on energy invested figures gives ethanol from corn a 1.3, ethanol from sugarcane something like 0.8 to 1.7 (meaning it could possibly be a net energy loser!), and ethanol from corn residues 0.7 to 1.8. Compare that with petroleum's EROEI, which is today something of the order of 23, and had once been higher than 100. Even at the maximum efficiency level, it would probably take dedicating all of the arable land in the United States to grow corn for conversion to ethanol to allow business as usual. Also, mechanized farming techniques are so heavily dependent on petroleum-based (and natural gas based) fertilizers and pesticides. Here's a good article on how to properly evaluate these schemes for alternative energy, and ethanol doesn't fare very well.
No, the only real solution to the energy crisis is to abandon the grossly wasteful American way of life, and take steps towards serious conservation efforts.
Graham certainly doesn't think luck doesn't have a large component in success. In another recent article, he writes about Bill Gates this way:
There is a large random factor in the success of any company. So the guys you end up reading about in the papers are the ones who are very smart, totally dedicated, and win the lottery. Certainly Bill is smart and dedicated, but Microsoft also happens to have been the beneficiary of one of the most spectacular blunders in the history of business: the licensing deal for DOS.
He's explaining what he sees as necessary conditions, but nowhere in any of his articles does he ever claim that his advice provides a sufficient condition for success.
Historically, the FSF has always aimed for compliance more than anything else. As Eben Moglen, chief counsel for the FSF and the main guy in charge of enforcing the GPL for FSF-copyright software writes:
In approximately a decade of enforcing the GPL, I have never insisted on payment of damages to the Foundation for violation of the license, and I have rarely required public admission of wrongdoing. Our position has always been that compliance with the license, and security for future good behavior, are the most important goals. We have done everything to make it easy for violators to comply, and we have offered oblivion with respect to past faults.
The FSF has always worked with the goal of furthering the cause of software freedom. If Moglen and Stallman won a judgment that caused a recall of the hardware and damages paid, it might be a victory in the courts for them, but a net loss for free software, as nobody would get to see the changes that had to be made to get the devices to work. On the other hand, making them comply with the license and promise to be good, as you have put it, has always been their policy, as it has the effect of strengthening software freedom.
They won't be able to do it because perfectly uncrackable DRM on a general-purpose computer is an impossible task. The only way to make uncrackable DRM is to remove the general-purpose ability from computers such as what is intended for Palladium/NGSCB, and I find it difficult to believe that Google is planning to get into the market of "trusted computing".
If you, the user, have an ultimate say on what software can and cannot be run on your own computer, then any uncrackable DRM is impossible.
Yeah, I'd say a week is a good estimate, if there are motivated people, and it looks like there's no shortage of those.
Think of what might have happened if the natural philosophers in the days of Kepler, Galileo, and Copernicus had at their disposal Fourier theory. They might never have abandoned the epicycles, as these epicycles, at their heart, would be described today as terms in a Fourier series. We would have been stuck with that cumbersome theory until some genius realized that Fourier analysis was the wrong way of looking at the problem, and the advance of physics might have been retarded for a century or more.
Perhaps modern physics has a similar problem, there being knowledge of too many mathematical tools that scientists have fallen into the rut of using certain ones because they seem to work so well. In the meantime, the edifice of modern physics grows more and more top-heavy.
I don't think that'd make much sense. If I were asked to design a similar device, it'd be a stripped-down phone with no audio capability. Just a radio transceiver and all the extra GSM circuitry, including a slot for the SIM card that would provide my dog's phone number, and of course the GPS. It'd work a lot like those mobile services that seem to be popular in countries that have heavy GSM deployments. Maybe I'd text it 'locate' and it would reply with the current readout of the GPS tracker. Or I could call my dog's number, which would immediately hang up and then send me the text message in response. It would notify me by text if the current GPS readout shows that my dog's out of the GeoFence area.
In fact, the GPS may not even be necessary, if one has access to cellsite location information, but of course this approach will never be as accurate as GPS, and the better accuracy for this application, the better the product, naturally.
It's not really "calling" your dog, but figuring out where your dog is.
The main problem with MD5 as it's used today comes when MD5 is used as a component of a digital signature scheme. Most digital signature schemes based on public key crypto work like this:
Generate hash of document to be signed
Encrypt hash of document using signer's private key (this is the signature)
Send document along with signed hash to whoever cares
To verify a digital signature, the following is performed:
Recompute hash of signed document
Decrypt signature using signer's public key, producing calculated hash
Compare computed hash and signed hash--if they match, signature is authentic
Now, it's easy to see why this spate of collision attacks on hashing algorithms is so deadly. If, given some signed document, you can produce another document that verifies to the same signature, well, I guess you're in a world of hurt. If these documents happen to be public key certificates, well, the whole PKI more or less collapses. And well, here's a bit of news: someone has done just that with X.509 certificates based on MD5.
Having worked in this business for three years, and being the CTO of a small company in the Third World actually doing it, I can see a bit of a problem with it.
While I cannot deny that it's a profitable business, it's not profitable enough to make most people engaged in it very wealthy. The main problem boils down to the fact that it doesn't scale very well. The only way to grow this kind of business would be to get more clients to do custom work for, and pretty soon, you wind up getting lots and lots of work but not enough people to do it all (we hit this stage early on, and nobody was happy, not us nor what clients we had). Company hires more people, and profit margins shrink accordingly. That's the main problem. The same is true of doing support work. Support work needs people to do it just the same as custom development, and the more support contracts you get the bigger your support staff needs to grow to accommodate all those contracts. The bigger your staff, the lower your profit margins become. The business can be stable, but stability also means few opportunities for growth.
Of course, combine this with globalization and you get outsourcing, and that's why I'm reasonably well off here in the Third World. Labor's cheap here, and while our profit margins shrink too as we hire more people, they don't shrink as much as they would elsewhere. We pay wages the equivalent of approximately US$200 a month for entry-level programmers, and they consider themselves reasonably compensated. I doubt that such wages would even be considered survivable in places like the United States, Japan, or much of Europe.
Gee, so Marx was right huh? Religion really is the opiate of the people.
But personally, I feel that if religion is placed in its perspective, it is a great source of meaning, and that's something that few people can go for long without. Science was never intended to answer the whys and wherefores of the universe and our place in it, that is a question for religions. Just as opiates have their uses in medicine, not all of them harmful. However, abusing religion by imposing religious dogma on what should be science, as the Catholic Church did 400 years ago with Galileo or this laughable debate on intelligent design/creationism vs. evolution is in the United States today, is a dangerous path to tread. It's like using opiates where they're not needed...
Not only is it the cultural and intellectual heritage of its citizens being sold here, but the rights and freedoms of its citizens as well. Copyrights and patents are a form of restriction on freedom of speech that is sanctioned because it is supposed to provide a useful purpose for the government's constituency, i.e. the granting of a temporary monopoly to the creator of a published work or an invention is supposed to provide a financial incentive to the creator to produce more works or inventions. Apart from the pecuniary reasons you've covered, increasingly powerful copyright laws are increasingly being used as a club to perform censorship. Which suits those powers that are working hard to turn the United States and its sphere of influence more and more into a totalitarian police state just fine. Sure, copyright has its uses, but the kind of runaway increase in copyright powers and duration over the last several years should have everyone who cares about civil rights worried...
Being seasoned in Linux enterprise deployments, I've had more than my share of frustration with some of HP's own storage appliances. Their entry-level storage appliances, the MSA series (which IIRC, they inherited from Compaq), seem to be pretty ok, but they're no good when you start growing to the point when more than several machines need to attach to the SAN. The VA series of high-end storage appliances are in contrast the very devil to deal with. I remember the problems a client of ours was having with these monsters when they were using it for Oracle 9i RAC. Their RAID management started having problems once the disks started filling up to more than 75% capacity, and HP never was able to give us a satisfactory solution, except to replace the damn storage array with something bigger and much more expensive. And so overtures from the likes of EMC began to reach much more receptive ears...
I certainly hope this helps with the engineering of HP's storage appliance line, and they can fix some of the brain damage that some of them have.
Re:If you want decent scientific articles..
on
Bad Science in the Press
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I remember an essay by Paul Graham: "The Submarine", where he discusses the effect of PR firms on journalism in general. Extrapolating from Graham's article, it seems like an honest blog by someone genuinely interested in scientific topics might be a better place to get good science news than mainstream media. Heck, in many of the science articles here on/. it seems that some of the comments make for better science reporting than the articles themselves.
If that's true (which I am uncertain), then this is the ultimate example of "turnabout is fair play." As everyone knows COINTELPRO then set its sights on Martin Luther King, the Black Panthers, and American leftist and civil rights advocacy organizations. Apparently they even covertly funneled aid to the Klan and other similar groups later on under the condition that they limit their activities to COINTELPRO targets.
Either way, it was an ugly business, and a part of American history that everyone would do well to remember, especially as America begins its slide into fascism post-September 11th.
At least we "geeks" have not been so foolish as to forget history. The FBI *earned* the mistrust and fear that we, and other people who haven't already been brainwashed yet. The story of COINTELPRO is a case in point. There are many other similarly creepy programs that they've embarked on in their history, and since the Patriot act has practically removed the checks on their authority that once existed, there is more reason than ever to be mistrustful and fearful of them.
Which is why competition is a good thing. Up until recently, here in my country (which is said to be the SMS capital of the world...), there were only two GSM mobile providers (Globe and Smart). They both had nearly the same rates and pricing, and your only reason for choosing one over the other was if all of your contacts were generally concentrated on one network or the other (because non-interconnect rates were slightly lower) And then came along a third (Sun Cellular), and they introduced a flat-rate pricing model for both SMS and voice within their own network. The previous oligopoly at first attempted to sue them for "predatory business practices" but were laughed out of court because this third provider accounts for (as of this writing) only about 5% of the GSM mobile market in this country. Now, there have been announcements and rumbles from the two giants (who both have more subscribers than the entire population of Sweden, in the case of Smart they have twice as many) that they too will begin offering a similar flat-rate service.
Given that PhP 250 (roughly US$5) is enough to provide 30 days of unlimited SMS and voice, it is very cheap indeed, even in this country where the cost of living is quite low. Previous voice call rates from the oligopoly were at PhP 8 (US$0.16) per minute, and each SMS message at PhP 1 (quite literally your 2 cents worth) each.
It seems that not only was Sun using it as a marketing tactic, but it seems that they are making money selling their services so cheaply. Of course, their service is not as good as it could be (there are times, in the early evening especially, when the lines are congested and it is very difficult to connect a call), but that's to be expected with a provider barely two years out, and whose infrastructure isn't fully developed yet.
Also (La)TeX has become de rigeur for publishing in scientific journals. Compare the submission guidelines for sending an article to any The Physical Review journals in any of the TeX variants they prefer to that of doing a submission with MS Word. The American Mathematical Society apparently won't even accept papers typeset in anything other than LaTeX.
For scientific publishing, LaTeX really is the way to go.
So the guy hacks in to the network, steals personal information, downloads private pictures, sells all this stuff... and then he's able to get away with just one felony, no jail time, and even a work offer for the Secret Service?
Nothing new here. Ever hear of the Nicaraguan drug trafficker Oscar Danilo Blandon Reyes? He was a major operator who had smuggled tons of cocaine into the United States. He was busted in 1992, but instead of receiving a life sentence and a US$ 4 million fine, he was in prison for only 48 months, received no fine, and has been working for the DEA as a confidential informant since 1994. He was described as having "almost unlimited potential to assist the United States." The fact that he was connected to the CIA-sponsored Nicaraguan Contras may have something to do with it...
What would be better would be to make Thunderbird's Bayesian filter read the site and use the site's content as supplemental information for determining whether a message is spam or not. A filter that fights back. If enough people used this feature it would increase the cost of running a spamvertised site and put a bigger dent in spam revenue possibilities.
Re:Trusted Solaris 8 / SELinux
on
Sun-isms Debunked
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Read the whole quote, specifically this sentence: 'It is expected that this work would be combined with other efforts (e.g., auditing and documentation) to construct a "trusted" system.' In other words SELinux is only the foundation for developing a version of GNU/Linux that can potentially pass the criteria required for classified / secure US government systems.
Trusted Solaris 8 / SELinux
on
Sun-isms Debunked
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Other GNU/Linux distros may not have military grade security like Trusted Solaris 8, but Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux) was developed by the National Security Agency -- surely that's good enough for government work.
It's a bit more complicated than that. If you read the SELinux FAQ:
12. Is Security-enhanced Linux a Trusted Operating System?
No. The phrase "Trusted Operating System" generally refers to an operating system that provides sufficient support for multilevel security and evidence of correctness to meet a particular set of government requirements. Security-enhanced Linux incorporates useful ideas from these systems but focuses upon mandatory access controls. It is expected that this work would be combined with other efforts (e.g., auditing and documentation) to construct a "trusted" system. The initial focus of Security-enhanced Linux development has been to create useful functionality that delivers tangible protection benefits in a wide range of real-world environments in order to demonstrate the technology.
The NSA itself says that it's NOT one, so on its own SELinux is not good enough for secure US government work, despite its being developed by the NSA.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, one of the better arguments that the people of antiquity had for a round earth would be the simple fact that when a ship comes up over the horizon, the sails are seen before the hull. Since there are no reasonably permanent irregularities such as hills and valleys on the oceans, the only way to explain such a thing would be to theorize that the earth has a curve. Combining that with the curve seen on mountaintops it would not be difficult for the ancients to deduce the roundness of the earth. The phenomena of lunar eclipses would also provide more direct evidence for a round earth, as it would have been observed that the earth always casts a circular shadow on the moon. If it were a flat disc, they would have observed the shape of the shadow changing during the eclipse's progress, which they never did.
Yes, the ancients can and did use these arguments, and in fact the ancient Greek mathematician Eratosthenes in the 3rd century BC managed to estimate the circumference of the earth using geometric methods to an accuracy of 39,300 km, only seven hundred kilometers less than the modern figure.
While we don't know exactly where he came from or seen others of his species, it may be that Yoda's native language does make use of the OSV pattern that he tends to use, and he winds up reverting to that word order from time to time (he doesn't always speak like that, by the way).
A look at a small table of energy return on energy invested figures gives ethanol from corn a 1.3, ethanol from sugarcane something like 0.8 to 1.7 (meaning it could possibly be a net energy loser!), and ethanol from corn residues 0.7 to 1.8. Compare that with petroleum's EROEI, which is today something of the order of 23, and had once been higher than 100. Even at the maximum efficiency level, it would probably take dedicating all of the arable land in the United States to grow corn for conversion to ethanol to allow business as usual. Also, mechanized farming techniques are so heavily dependent on petroleum-based (and natural gas based) fertilizers and pesticides. Here's a good article on how to properly evaluate these schemes for alternative energy, and ethanol doesn't fare very well.
No, the only real solution to the energy crisis is to abandon the grossly wasteful American way of life, and take steps towards serious conservation efforts.
Graham certainly doesn't think luck doesn't have a large component in success. In another recent article, he writes about Bill Gates this way:
He's explaining what he sees as necessary conditions, but nowhere in any of his articles does he ever claim that his advice provides a sufficient condition for success.
Rule #3
If someone bugs out or clunks down, taps out, the session is over.
Rule #4
Only one guy to design.
Rule #5
One project at a time.
Rule #6
No ties, no suits.
Rule #7
If this is your first night with the Open Source Community, you HAVE to code!
Historically, the FSF has always aimed for compliance more than anything else. As Eben Moglen, chief counsel for the FSF and the main guy in charge of enforcing the GPL for FSF-copyright software writes:
The FSF has always worked with the goal of furthering the cause of software freedom. If Moglen and Stallman won a judgment that caused a recall of the hardware and damages paid, it might be a victory in the courts for them, but a net loss for free software, as nobody would get to see the changes that had to be made to get the devices to work. On the other hand, making them comply with the license and promise to be good, as you have put it, has always been their policy, as it has the effect of strengthening software freedom.
By the way, there's a Korean translation of the page...
They won't be able to do it because perfectly uncrackable DRM on a general-purpose computer is an impossible task. The only way to make uncrackable DRM is to remove the general-purpose ability from computers such as what is intended for Palladium/NGSCB, and I find it difficult to believe that Google is planning to get into the market of "trusted computing".
If you, the user, have an ultimate say on what software can and cannot be run on your own computer, then any uncrackable DRM is impossible.
Yeah, I'd say a week is a good estimate, if there are motivated people, and it looks like there's no shortage of those.
Think of what might have happened if the natural philosophers in the days of Kepler, Galileo, and Copernicus had at their disposal Fourier theory. They might never have abandoned the epicycles, as these epicycles, at their heart, would be described today as terms in a Fourier series. We would have been stuck with that cumbersome theory until some genius realized that Fourier analysis was the wrong way of looking at the problem, and the advance of physics might have been retarded for a century or more.
Perhaps modern physics has a similar problem, there being knowledge of too many mathematical tools that scientists have fallen into the rut of using certain ones because they seem to work so well. In the meantime, the edifice of modern physics grows more and more top-heavy.
I don't think that'd make much sense. If I were asked to design a similar device, it'd be a stripped-down phone with no audio capability. Just a radio transceiver and all the extra GSM circuitry, including a slot for the SIM card that would provide my dog's phone number, and of course the GPS. It'd work a lot like those mobile services that seem to be popular in countries that have heavy GSM deployments. Maybe I'd text it 'locate' and it would reply with the current readout of the GPS tracker. Or I could call my dog's number, which would immediately hang up and then send me the text message in response. It would notify me by text if the current GPS readout shows that my dog's out of the GeoFence area.
In fact, the GPS may not even be necessary, if one has access to cellsite location information, but of course this approach will never be as accurate as GPS, and the better accuracy for this application, the better the product, naturally.
It's not really "calling" your dog, but figuring out where your dog is.
The main problem with MD5 as it's used today comes when MD5 is used as a component of a digital signature scheme. Most digital signature schemes based on public key crypto work like this:
To verify a digital signature, the following is performed:
Now, it's easy to see why this spate of collision attacks on hashing algorithms is so deadly. If, given some signed document, you can produce another document that verifies to the same signature, well, I guess you're in a world of hurt. If these documents happen to be public key certificates, well, the whole PKI more or less collapses. And well, here's a bit of news: someone has done just that with X.509 certificates based on MD5.
Having worked in this business for three years, and being the CTO of a small company in the Third World actually doing it, I can see a bit of a problem with it.
While I cannot deny that it's a profitable business, it's not profitable enough to make most people engaged in it very wealthy. The main problem boils down to the fact that it doesn't scale very well. The only way to grow this kind of business would be to get more clients to do custom work for, and pretty soon, you wind up getting lots and lots of work but not enough people to do it all (we hit this stage early on, and nobody was happy, not us nor what clients we had). Company hires more people, and profit margins shrink accordingly. That's the main problem. The same is true of doing support work. Support work needs people to do it just the same as custom development, and the more support contracts you get the bigger your support staff needs to grow to accommodate all those contracts. The bigger your staff, the lower your profit margins become. The business can be stable, but stability also means few opportunities for growth.
Of course, combine this with globalization and you get outsourcing, and that's why I'm reasonably well off here in the Third World. Labor's cheap here, and while our profit margins shrink too as we hire more people, they don't shrink as much as they would elsewhere. We pay wages the equivalent of approximately US$200 a month for entry-level programmers, and they consider themselves reasonably compensated. I doubt that such wages would even be considered survivable in places like the United States, Japan, or much of Europe.
Gee, so Marx was right huh? Religion really is the opiate of the people.
But personally, I feel that if religion is placed in its perspective, it is a great source of meaning, and that's something that few people can go for long without. Science was never intended to answer the whys and wherefores of the universe and our place in it, that is a question for religions. Just as opiates have their uses in medicine, not all of them harmful. However, abusing religion by imposing religious dogma on what should be science, as the Catholic Church did 400 years ago with Galileo or this laughable debate on intelligent design/creationism vs. evolution is in the United States today, is a dangerous path to tread. It's like using opiates where they're not needed...
Not only is it the cultural and intellectual heritage of its citizens being sold here, but the rights and freedoms of its citizens as well. Copyrights and patents are a form of restriction on freedom of speech that is sanctioned because it is supposed to provide a useful purpose for the government's constituency, i.e. the granting of a temporary monopoly to the creator of a published work or an invention is supposed to provide a financial incentive to the creator to produce more works or inventions. Apart from the pecuniary reasons you've covered, increasingly powerful copyright laws are increasingly being used as a club to perform censorship. Which suits those powers that are working hard to turn the United States and its sphere of influence more and more into a totalitarian police state just fine. Sure, copyright has its uses, but the kind of runaway increase in copyright powers and duration over the last several years should have everyone who cares about civil rights worried...
Being seasoned in Linux enterprise deployments, I've had more than my share of frustration with some of HP's own storage appliances. Their entry-level storage appliances, the MSA series (which IIRC, they inherited from Compaq), seem to be pretty ok, but they're no good when you start growing to the point when more than several machines need to attach to the SAN. The VA series of high-end storage appliances are in contrast the very devil to deal with. I remember the problems a client of ours was having with these monsters when they were using it for Oracle 9i RAC. Their RAID management started having problems once the disks started filling up to more than 75% capacity, and HP never was able to give us a satisfactory solution, except to replace the damn storage array with something bigger and much more expensive. And so overtures from the likes of EMC began to reach much more receptive ears...
I certainly hope this helps with the engineering of HP's storage appliance line, and they can fix some of the brain damage that some of them have.
I remember an essay by Paul Graham: "The Submarine", where he discusses the effect of PR firms on journalism in general. Extrapolating from Graham's article, it seems like an honest blog by someone genuinely interested in scientific topics might be a better place to get good science news than mainstream media. Heck, in many of the science articles here on /. it seems that some of the comments make for better science reporting than the articles themselves.
Male scientists!
Sounds like an old Peanuts cartoon in reverse...
If that's true (which I am uncertain), then this is the ultimate example of "turnabout is fair play." As everyone knows COINTELPRO then set its sights on Martin Luther King, the Black Panthers, and American leftist and civil rights advocacy organizations. Apparently they even covertly funneled aid to the Klan and other similar groups later on under the condition that they limit their activities to COINTELPRO targets.
Either way, it was an ugly business, and a part of American history that everyone would do well to remember, especially as America begins its slide into fascism post-September 11th.
At least we "geeks" have not been so foolish as to forget history. The FBI *earned* the mistrust and fear that we, and other people who haven't already been brainwashed yet. The story of COINTELPRO is a case in point. There are many other similarly creepy programs that they've embarked on in their history, and since the Patriot act has practically removed the checks on their authority that once existed, there is more reason than ever to be mistrustful and fearful of them.
So does that mean that he doesn't get to keep any of his money? ;)
Seems like a very badly ambiguous way of putting it.
Which is why competition is a good thing. Up until recently, here in my country (which is said to be the SMS capital of the world...), there were only two GSM mobile providers (Globe and Smart). They both had nearly the same rates and pricing, and your only reason for choosing one over the other was if all of your contacts were generally concentrated on one network or the other (because non-interconnect rates were slightly lower) And then came along a third (Sun Cellular), and they introduced a flat-rate pricing model for both SMS and voice within their own network. The previous oligopoly at first attempted to sue them for "predatory business practices" but were laughed out of court because this third provider accounts for (as of this writing) only about 5% of the GSM mobile market in this country. Now, there have been announcements and rumbles from the two giants (who both have more subscribers than the entire population of Sweden, in the case of Smart they have twice as many) that they too will begin offering a similar flat-rate service.
Given that PhP 250 (roughly US$5) is enough to provide 30 days of unlimited SMS and voice, it is very cheap indeed, even in this country where the cost of living is quite low. Previous voice call rates from the oligopoly were at PhP 8 (US$0.16) per minute, and each SMS message at PhP 1 (quite literally your 2 cents worth) each.
It seems that not only was Sun using it as a marketing tactic, but it seems that they are making money selling their services so cheaply. Of course, their service is not as good as it could be (there are times, in the early evening especially, when the lines are congested and it is very difficult to connect a call), but that's to be expected with a provider barely two years out, and whose infrastructure isn't fully developed yet.
Also (La)TeX has become de rigeur for publishing in scientific journals. Compare the submission guidelines for sending an article to any The Physical Review journals in any of the TeX variants they prefer to that of doing a submission with MS Word. The American Mathematical Society apparently won't even accept papers typeset in anything other than LaTeX.
For scientific publishing, LaTeX really is the way to go.
Nothing new here. Ever hear of the Nicaraguan drug trafficker Oscar Danilo Blandon Reyes? He was a major operator who had smuggled tons of cocaine into the United States. He was busted in 1992, but instead of receiving a life sentence and a US$ 4 million fine, he was in prison for only 48 months, received no fine, and has been working for the DEA as a confidential informant since 1994. He was described as having "almost unlimited potential to assist the United States." The fact that he was connected to the CIA-sponsored Nicaraguan Contras may have something to do with it...
What would be better would be to make Thunderbird's Bayesian filter read the site and use the site's content as supplemental information for determining whether a message is spam or not. A filter that fights back. If enough people used this feature it would increase the cost of running a spamvertised site and put a bigger dent in spam revenue possibilities.
Read the whole quote, specifically this sentence: 'It is expected that this work would be combined with other efforts (e.g., auditing and documentation) to construct a "trusted" system.' In other words SELinux is only the foundation for developing a version of GNU/Linux that can potentially pass the criteria required for classified / secure US government systems.
It's a bit more complicated than that. If you read the SELinux FAQ:
The NSA itself says that it's NOT one, so on its own SELinux is not good enough for secure US government work, despite its being developed by the NSA.