"Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
and danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed and joined the tumbling mirth
of sun-split clouds - and done a hundred things
you have not dreamed of - wheeled and soared and swung
high in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there,
I've chased the shouting wind along and flung
my eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up, into the long delirious burning blue
I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace,
where never lark, nor even eagle, flew;
and, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod
the high untrespassed sanctity of space,
put out my hand, and touched the face of God."
"High Flight", by John Gillespie Magee, Jr.
This was written by a 19 year old American volunteer with the Royal Canadian Air Force,
who was killed in action, December 11, 1941.
For those hurt, a speedy recovery, and for those killed, peace.
Control freaks are to be found everywhere and they make the most despicable moves sometimes. This is truly one of the worst I have ever seen.
I've seen 'em called "pricks" and "dicks" in this thread, but let me add my opinion:
They're thugs.
They really do want to own dreams. And they want to own other people's dreams. God Dammit, we are the dreamers, and we dream the dreams!!
Thugs like this want to take all the dreams in the world and lock them up in their cabinet at home. I really believe it's because they don't have any dreams of their own.
And as people far wiser than I am have pointed out -- Terry Pratchett, or Eric Raymond -- that doesn't work very well.
Four YEARS of work by fans? NO! Don't take that! Don't let them have one INCH of that!!
Now is the time you're most challenged. Now you have to dream strong and sure. Do it.
Here are some idle thoughts...
The laws of other countries are not the laws of Germany.
-and-
Let me gently suggest that while it might look like an orc/ork/whatever to *them*, why, it looks like something else to me. "Orc"? Where did you get that idea? We don't need no steenking "orcs" to dream. They look like "ginks" to me.
And personally, I found the preview to be an interesting... oh... fan-built... (roll) allegory of... (roll) the ideals (roll) of Ayn Rand set against...(roll) a universe struggling against (roll)... the social implications of (roll)...the discovery of the first alien race... blah, blah, blah for another 12 paragraphs. What "warhammer"? I don't see a single "hammer" anywhere. I know several film students who would be happy to recut/redit this as a for-profit effort not involving Those-Whose-Name-Must-Not-Be-Said.
DO EVERYTHING!!! The most effective approach will become clear. Don't even consider doing nothing.
Hand out DVD's on the streets. Spread the word in the chat rooms. Satellites can microwave this data down. Plenty of "Public Channels" looking for a nice movie to show.
The scariest thing in the world is having someone tell you they've locked your dreams.
These are calm, soothing words, written by a professional indeed. I have respect for whoever wrote this. Terry Pratchett once wrote about soothing words.
Since I live in the United States, and have 1st Amendment protected speech, I can say my personal opinion is that this is bullshit. Sorry; I'm a professional writer too.
When you look this over carefully, it has almost zero real content.
Let's take this apart. 3 Paragraphs. Paragraph 1:
"Yahoo! shares the proponent's commitment to human rights," [[ Which is why Yahoo has already put censorship into place in China, right? ]]
(SKIP SOOTHING NULLS) "and as described in more detail in the board's statement in opposition to proposal no. 6 in this proxy statement, the Company's management team has already instituted practices and initiatives that are designed to assess the implications of the Company's activities and policies (END SKIP SOOTHING NULLS) and to protect and advance essential freedoms, such as freedom of expression and privacy rights." [[ So, Yahoo is "assessing" its censorship policies to see how those impact "freedom of expression and privacy rights".
Doh! That's a hard one! Censorship is real bad for freedom of expression and privacy rights! No one in China can read what I'm writing! I bet Yahoo's committees' figure that out in 12 seconds! ]]
[[Summary of #1 : We are going to study if censorship affects freedom of expression. (Hunh?] ]]
Paragraph 2:
To further advance thinking [[How do you advance thinking when you've already caved? ]] and practices [[ditto]] around the promotion of free expression and privacy, [[Which we're already not doing in China ]] Yahoo! is actively engaged in a formal dialogue, [[What *is* a "formal dialogue"? ]] co-facilitated by Business for Social Responsibility and the Center for Democracy & Technology, [[ Who are they? ]] that includes industry counterparts [[Name them]], various human rights groups [[Name them]], academic institutions [[Name them]] and socially responsible investors. [[ For Pete's sakes, name them! Investors are public knowledge. ]] This diverse group [[ DAMMIT, Name them!! ]] aims to produce a set of global principles [[ Why not use the UN rules? ]] and operating procedures [[ "Don't Cave" ? ]] on freedom of expression and privacy [[ Bill of Rights isn't bad ]] to guide company behavior when faced with laws, regulations and policies that interfere with human rights.
[[ So, a group of UN-NAMED organizations are going to advise Yahoo on what to do when faced with censorship laws... errrrrr, that it's already faced with. Ummm. This is backwards. Shouldn't the organizations be named, and shouldn't have this have been done *before* Yahoo caved to Chinese pressure? ]]
The group's goals also include creating an implementation, accountability and governance framework, as well as a forum for sharing ideas. [[ Given that Yahoo has already caved, somehow, I feel a strange reluctance to believe they'll be more than a PR puffery. ]]
Paragraph #3 of this:
"These practices and initiatives have been developed by Yahoo! management based on its thorough and careful consideration of the inherent complexities associated with operating under the laws of multiple foreign countries."
[[ So, Yahoo believes that putting a nameless advisory group into place after accepting censorship is a "thorough and careful" way to go. ]]
The board of directors believes that Yahoo!'s management team, with its day-to-day involvement in the Company's business operations and its detailed understanding of the legislative and regulatory landscape of the countries in which the Company operates, is in the best position to assess these matters and to make informed judgments as to what practices and policies are most likely to promote the interests of the Company and its stockholders and users."
[[ So, Yahoo believes its management team knows best what is good for Yahoo. What a surprise.
I usually have an old Linux laptop running tcpdump on a hub with all the computers on my home network. It scrolls and scrolls, but over time a certain pattern develops. When only one machine is on, the pattern is one pattern, generally Comcast saying, "Who's Online?" every few seconds. When surfing the Web and pulling up WWW pages, lots of activity, and so forth. The point is, it's a lot more *visual* information than a blinking router light.
Now if I wander by at 2 AM and one idle machine is on, and there's lots of activity, that's generally bad.
(If I wasn't so lazy, I could FIFO the data and record people trying to break in. But the truth is, I'm that lazy.)
Couple of things --
Remember, ya have to use a hub, not a switch -- switches don't let the data get to the laptop. It's getting harder to find hubs. (Yes, you sure could shoot the data through the laptop, if you have two network interfaces).
I tried to interest a local TV news guy in the story about botnets, basic theme: don't plug your computer into the Internet until its firewall was turned on, or you're screwed. It got shot down at the story meeting "by their IT guy". This was two years ago. *sigh*
I wonder if I should email him with the FBI story and ask him to forward it to his all-knowing IT guy...
Thanks,
Dave
p.s. Is a Linux laptop a GNU/Linux laptop? Or a Linux GNU Laptop? Or a Linux Lap GNU Top? Or...
Previous post said "if you're writing an emulator, you can easily build sandbox functionality into it."
Well, that's not necessarily true. The word "easily" gets used too much. To add a sandbox can clobber performance in software-only emulation. In those emulators you have to keep the fetch-dispatch loop down to the bare minimum (no code at all would be nice, but difficult to attain). Anytime you're adding range checks the performance drops very quickly.
In the case of the PC you can sometimes confine the range checks to the emulated BIOS (which you can rewrite in the target language and thus make very quick) and the emulated hardware for that fun I/O stuff. There's a great deal of bookkeeping in emulating PC hardware.
I'd be rather hesitant to trust the range-checks of a rewritten BIOS against all viruses. Bugs happen. People are creative, although fortunately creativity doesn't seem to happen to virus writers much.
I believe that if you look for it, you'll find that most of the default pointers for system crashes under the Windows desktop simply restart "Explorer.exe" (where Explorer is the 'Windows Desktop' Explorer, not the 'Internet' Explorer). In fact, it's useful to remember that if the desktop gets hung up, you can CTRL-ALT-DEL to the Windows Task Manager, then Kill -9... errr... End Process "Explorer.exe", then Run Process "Explorer.Exe", and the desktop will usually come back. I tend to clean up and reboot, according to my brother's Law of Windows: A Reboot Cures Many Ills Of Windows.
From time to time using Windows, you'll see the desktop blank out, replot all the icons with just the name and a generic icon, then fill in the icon with the correct graphics. I believe this is Yet Another Windows Desktop Crash. Of course, this is all just my (first-amendment protected) personal opinion. Please note how careful I am being in specifying this personal opinion, there is a very good reason for this.
I first came across this some time ago. My (new) HP laptop machine here crashes twice on every startup. This takes cubic time.
Is this a particularly big deal? Oh, I don't know. I've seen other computers do this. I can recall tracing startup on the Macintosh and seeing stores to location 0 (Nil pointer usage) that made the startup a real "Hmmm, how did that work, anyway?" philosophical question. Finder 1.1 and System 1.1g were the cleanest in this regard. System 7 was a nightmare, because it was the first true multitasking OS, and lots of programs hammered on location 0, and the ones who had been getting away with it because they stored to, then read from, 0 conflicted with others and the operating system, causing maddening, hard-to-trace errors.
I'd be interested in hearing if the current 10.x operating system has this fixed in hardware.
Effective immediately ICANN has terminated RegisterFly's right to use the ICANN Accredited Registrar logo on its website.
(snip)
"Terminating accreditation is the strongest measure ICANN is able to take against RegisterFly under its powers," Dr. Paul Twomey, President and CEO of ICANN said today.
I thought that when you tweaked entangled photon A, that entangled photon B changed almost instantly (or absolutely instantly). Now if the mechanism that tweaks A is a push button, and the result of flipping B is an LED, it seems like data is transferred.
It looks like there are several people in this thread who think so, and some who don't think so.
I would appreciate it if someone could explain this to me, either yea or nay.
It's very easy to become cynical when looking at government. But cynicism is a kind of trap.
I know people who have worked directly at both state and federal level (in the United States). They all tell me the same thing: A well written letter to a Congresscritter gets their attention in a big way.
Another general rule is that the effective Congresscritters -- the ones who truly get things done -- are not publicity hounds. One of the most effective lobbyists I know of says, "I stay out of newspapers on purpose; if I was in them, I couldn't get anything done." He has quietly done much good to the city I live in. "It's amazing what you can do, if you don't insist on credit for it", he tells me.
Concerned on the destructive effects of patents in software? Have you written a letter to your Congresscritter? Do so. It really makes a difference. You may want to give a simple and clear example why software patents are such bad news.
Writing such a letter isn't futile. That person is your *Representative*. It is their job to represent you. But it's an act of faith. You haven't given in and said, "My voice will make no difference." In fact, it will. (And it will be multiplied by the ones that have given up.)
I didn't know that dimmer switches and those compact flourescent lights don't mix. I learned the hard way, when smoke started pouring out of the base of the dimmer. I happened to be in the room at the time to shut it off.
I wonder how many people are going to learn this lesson the same way I did?
Thanks,
Dave Small
The Emperor doesn't have any clothes on.
The EU isn't such a good idea, are you starting to see why?
Now the EU has to ban sock puppets. I wonder what thoughts and forms of communications it will have to ban next. Frightened and vindictive little bureaucrats in little jobs always do things like this. Where my son works, he was told to "keep your feet off that trash can, it's company property!".
I do understand that it's traditional to blame America first, and to regard Americans as over-hasty nuclear cowboys. I would hate to break any traditions here. As Ted Taylor (the gifted nuclear weapon designer Taylor) noted, most of the theoretical group at Los Alamos were liberal Democrats. (from: The Curve of Binding Energy, John McPhee). It's a funny old world.
There is something just the littlest bit ironic about posts complaining of gullible Americans that originate in EU countries.
You may want to rethink any worries on "contaminating" Yucca Mountain by using it as a storage place for old nuclear material. Relax. It is one of the most contaminated places on the planet already. Yucca Mountain is right by Yucca Flats, where the U.S. AEC starting lighting off nuclear fission weapons tests in the early 1950's. One DOE list shows 100 aboveground tests and 828 underground tests.
The Nevada Test Site is 1,375 square miles around the test zone. Any leaks have to penetrate that -considerable- physical buffer. Thus, we are not talking about them just leaking down the street here.
Something worth seeing:
If you have not seen the craters from the very high yield underground tests, they are a spectacular sight; go to Google Earth, start at "Mercury, Nevada", then just follow the road North until you start seeing enormous craters where the earth has collapsed into the spherical chambers hollowed out by thermonuclear weapons tests. It's called "The Most Bombed Spot On Earth" for a good reason.
I find myself admittedly in the minority here, but I'd like to point out that:
(1) The New York Times ("The paper of record", as they arrogantly call themselves; seems a bit odd with British papers having been established some time prior) has published _sheer fiction_ made up by Jayson Blair, and kept that guy on long after everyone in the news room knew he was corrupt only because he was black; this caused a melt down in papers that ran articles from the Times, and had to retract them. This was an ideology problem.
(2) Routinely runs just about psychotic-level character assassination pieces in its Op-Ed from Maureen Dowd, who lives and breathes hatred for George Bush and cannot find what to do with herself now that Donald Rumsfeld is gone. This is an ideology problem.
(3) Printed an extremely questionable piece *in time of war* handing Al-Qaeda methods on how the NSA scans phone calls outbound from the United States, which not only gave out methods, but blew the operation in place. If you've read James Bamford's book on the NSA you understand how important SIGINT is in the war against Al-Qaeda (it's everything). They've quit using satellite phones and cell phones for a very good reason. They used to think land lines were secure. Now the fools at the NYT blew that. This is an ideology problem. Why did they do this?
Were they defending American's right to phone lines in America? Nope. These were international calls, outbound scans only. You concentrate your computing power and minimize the scanning load as much as possible.
Were they defending America's right to have phone sex with Pakistanis? Possibly this would explain a great deal about Maureen Dowd.
The words "Giving aid and comfort to the enemy" come to my mind, but then, I'm just an old softie.
There are people who seem to have retreated from the idea that the United States is at war with Al-Qaeda. Regrettably, Al-Qaeda has not.
I've read in this thread many, many people worried about censorship. But who worries about what the New York Times does every day? Its ideology warps what it prints. And, I think, it was more than happy to yowl about "censorship" as loudly as possible... even when it would not censor pure fiction coming from itself.
If you want to read really good books, you'd best not rely on the NYT's reviews. You'll miss books that a bunch of people found good, but that did not pass the *ideology* test of the NYT. "The Purpose Driven Life" comes to mind right off.
And by the way, I too have been to a third world country or two, and if you can't tell the difference between that and the United States, you badly need psychiatic help.
Thanks,
Dave Small
Personally, I thought that Quake 4 was rather good and had a better story than Doom 3, but it's all subjective.
There really is not a reason why Linux machines can't run Windows game code. Well, there is the usual semi-religious reason, but please. You just have to not judge the task to be impossible too quickly. It boils down to the game having a tangle of things it needs to work, and you need to connect those things to something on the Linux side. I know this because I have done a very similar thing.
You can do it with less quick hardware and go straight to the metal; I taught the Mac OS to come up on Atari ST hardware that way. At 8 Mhz there were not many cycles to waste. Some of the software I had to run was an utter nightmare because it caused bus errors in the 68000 on the Atari side, but not on the Mac side because of a fluke, so I had to teach the 68000 to ignore bus errors.
But as VMware and others have shown, Windows stuff will coexist with Linux, and they've worked out the six -billion- little details of getting the hardware to task-switch (and I bet it wasn't at all fun). One of the funniest things I've seen was getting my resume bounced from them. Heh!
Just looking here in my Xandros 3.0 manual, I also see:
Code Weaver's CrossOver, which runs Microsoft Office. That is extremely difficult and really well done because it handles really *fun* stuff like out-of-bounds memory access and nil pointer access that happens in Office (I had to fight with it too).
Win4Lin "runs Windows operating systems and applications in a window on the desktop. Almost any Windows application can be run." Eval copy available. I have not tried it personally.
VMWare "runs multiple operating systems and applications, not just Windows, in a window on the desktop. Almost any Windows application can be run."
There are also Terminal Server Client and Citrix Linux ICA Client, which run Windows apps on another machine and give you a window into them.
Now, if it were me, and I wanted to be able to have a pretty good chance of popping in a generic Windows game disk and running it with Linux, I would use one of the above, but I would also go hunting ready for bear: some sort of in-circuit emulator ready to trap absurd stuff, and work around it. I can sure tell you that a hardware ICE would have made my task far easier and enabled me to catch bugs in the Mac OS that were not findable otherwise.
This is all doable. It's just selecting the method of doing it. Other people have already done parts of it. Running Quake 4 under VMWare, then the others, would be a very interesting test indeed.
I believe that David Stein's proposal is brilliant and quite workable on several levels. This is a dangerous and really good idea. This note is about how to set that up, ideas and suggestions.
I'm not a lawyer... thank God.
A Wiki may be the best tool.
Seems to me we'll need to pull the patents somewhere, set them all as status: unread, then start going through them. It is not so easy to determine how we'll judge them right at this point. I think there will be levels of grey. Wikis allow this. I do think that after going over several hundred patents it will become clearer how to classify them, and we simply need to keep flexible, which Wiki lets us. Wikipedia's experience is a good guide here.
Thus, with experience, we can create a post-read status that is broad enough to classify the patents. If the post-read status is "this patent is absurd; need prior art" then we should issue a request for prior art. For example, we could put a stub in saying, "Need prior art for a 'bit-mapped screen' "
If we classify the patent as, "Probably a good patent on irritating animated paperclip", then, well, who cares? No sane person wants an irritating animated paperclip. We give it a "who cares" status as completely irrelevant.
All I'm pointing out here is the classifications will make themselves clearer as time goes by.
Do we have to be trained patent lawyers to read these things? I don't believe so. A patent is supposed to allow someone trained in the field to create the patented thing. I think after reading a few either we'll get it. People trained in patent law and IP can sure help a law, especially in tricky cases.
Just the fact that this structure is being set up to start work, and then is operating, will cause some -very- interesting activity (see also: Just What IP are we talking about here, Microsoft?). Therein is half the brilliance of David's idea.
If there are downstream consequences for knowing some patents then so be it. I can stand working in IT and never developing some software that Microsoft's patents cover (*yawn*).
We need ideas on how this could be implemented efficiently (e.g., how could these patents be accessed en masse, do they need to be scanned?), and so forth.
I'm a bit of an idealist so I'll just mention that the first time a bunch of software patents are openly checked could serve as a benchmark for how many software patents are appallingly bad, which in turn, might serve the purpose of turning them all off.
I think perhaps in all the very, very politically correct talk about how the United States is really just the same morally as other countries like Syria, Uganda and Russia is how incredibly _evil_ the KGB was/is. It is just not politically correct to say bad things about the ex-Soviet Union.
However, having been to Berlin a few days after the Wall came down, and having talked to people from the former Soviet Union, I can tell you that this remote academic theorizing is so much ear's wax, and some people really need to get outside more. In some ways it is fitting that the last of the ugly huge Lenin posters, etc, are by Chernobyl.
Pretty much everyone knows that PC conceals truth. What's the truth?
Putin rose to head the KGB because he's the chief scum of some extremely evil scum. They were the enforcement arm of a political system that killed more people, and enslaved more people, than any other this world has ever known.
The Soviet Union, which crashed Dec. 25 1991, has become a Third World country. I have friends who have left that place because they were under death threats to pay up or be killed. Another friend tried to set up an export business but was stopped by the Russian Mafia. The Museum of Soviet Spaceflight was burned to the ground because it could not pay off two rival "protection" gangs. The Buran "Space Shuttle Clone" sits in a park as a plaything.
So, do I think Putin would off this guy with polonium? Yep. It had a good chance of not being detected.
Has the KGB offed other people who gave them a bad time in England? Yep. They whacked Georgi Markov in 1978. He had a radio show that intensely annoyed them.
Did the KGB try to whack the Pope with a Bulgarian hitman? Yep. The East Germans were notified of this pre-whack try to cover themselves; this was found in their files.
It is within a pattern of consistent behavior for Putin and his KGB/NKVD/FSB buddies to whack this guy. People on this list are supposed to be rational. Pattern recognizers. If a Unix system kept popping the same output at the same time of day each day, you'd say, "Cron is doing something". If the KGB keeps killing people, you'd say, "Gee, that KGB keeps killing people."
But amazingly, given the evidence, people keep saying, "Why, no, that KGB has changed from its institutional roots, from the sociopath Laventina Beria under Stalin to now, and is now peaceful, cuddly, and furry."
Crap. They're killers.
-- thank you, have a nice day.
David Small
Actually, I'm wondering why the U.S. is bothering to go the table at all. What do we have to gain? Let's go and watch them squirm. They have *nothing* we want. Maybe if they offer up Kim for arrest? Possibly of interest. He's certainly a criminal to his country.
Let's skip the whole "they have the bomb" rhetoric. They don't. *That's* the reason they're coming to the table. If they had nukes, they would be acting Big And Bad.
But, their nukes just don't work, and just imagine the fun meeting where Kim learned that another test wouldn't make things any better: they *still* won't work. (He should have listened the first time. But Kim, like Stalin and Beria, tended to have hearing problems.)
They screwed up -and- got really bad economic sanctions handed to them. Double bad news.
Every country that's tried for 20 kt on its first explosion has succeeded until now, which makes the North Koreans the world's most incompetent nuclear scientists. Sixty years after the successful first try, they couldn't manage even this? Good grief.
Remember the seismograph readings: First, the chemical explosives, then the bad nuclear fizzle; then the rifles as the scientists were shot.
Okay, why don't I think they have nuclear weapons?
The North Korean test was a fizzle. Remember it yielded about 0.5 kiloton. Usually a first generation nuclear device (implosion - plutonium) yields right around 20 kilotons. Given that the source of their plutonium was fuel rods run in a power reactor (not in an environment specifically designed to make plutonium, a "driver reactor" -- there's a huge difference), the most likely problem is the plutonium-239 is contaminated with plutonium-240. Probably the whole North Korean supply of plutonium is contaminated. -240 is very active, enough so to screw up the first generations of a fission explosion, which mean the last generations, where all the real energy comes from, just don't happen.
The U.S. rather famously ran into this problem with its first plutonium from the big driver reactors at Hanford. It had Pu-240 contamination. We had to use implosion to get around the problem. No one knew if this was even possible, which made it a pretty tasty hack to pull off. I think the quote is, "Half the work of the Manhattan Project was getting implosion to work".
We then did the math, optimized the time that U-238 was put into the neutron flux to produce the most Pu-239 and minimize the Pu-240, because Pu-240 is *always* a problem. (To oversimplify, it's a matter of getting one neutron to stick to the U-238, eventually producing Pu-239; if two stick, you get Pu-240. You're always going to get a little -240. Obviously, neutrons are randomly flying, there are quantum effects, and so forth. And yes, I'm leaving out a lot of details to get to the point; if you want to get into the Neptunium and two weeks and so forth, Wikipedia will make you happy.)
When you're expressly making plutonium, you can run the reactor at a given neutron flux level and keep the U-238 rods in a certain amount of time. But when you're making electricity, you're going to want to run the U-235/U-238 fuel rods as long as is economically feasible, and you're going to run them at power levels to make steam for a given energy demand, which is a whole different timing. And you are going to get Pu-240 problems. (Well, there are ways, but it is much harder.)
What's really interesting is that the proportions of Pu-239/Pu-240 are an exact signature of where the plutonium was made. Literally, what reactor, which batch, when. Sometimes, what part of the reactor! There are databooks of signatures. Given a sample or two of the North Korean plutonium, we'll know if it *ever* gets used, and the stated U.S. reply to such a use is something akin to a Trident D5 onto whereever Ki
I have some little experience with fairly draconian licenses in my time. I was quite careful to stay perfectly legal and still got nastygrams. Let me tell you, it is very disturbing to find out that the chief counsels of Microsoft and Apple have been discussing you.
This new EULA seems to me the work of attorneys playing "let's see how far we can sneak it" and actually thinking it's a good idea.
However:
There seems to a law of nature that no license can be written that a reasonably clever person cannot work around. People need to have the requisite qualities of the old-school hacker: curiosity, envelope-pushing, and a feeling that information likes to be free. Before the Web it was harder to swap information, but the power of investigating things together seems to increase as the square of the people doing it.
Microsoft appears to be irritating a number of people, and that just motivates people to learn all sorts of interesting things.
So... maybe ISO's can't be copied? I wonder just exactly how that was implemented? Is it a kludge just looking for filenames named "*.iso" ? That's certainly easy enough to workaround. Several solutions suggest themselves immediately, including something as dumb as using "filename.isi".
My point is, instead of saying, oh doom, we shall all be forced to live with this, or, this will be the thing that finally forces everyone to Linux... maybe we'll find a way to muddle through. I think a lot of Windows people muddle through with third party utilities. (Winzip seems to be essential, for example).
So... there's a restriction on the number of times the OS can be installed, down to one? I think that is not likely to stand.That's probably going to overwhelm their phone bank with irritated customers. It would be amusing if same customers started asking for refunds. For example, if I charged my OS purchase on my "worry free" Mastercard, can I apply to Mastercard for a refund that this is a "lemon" OS? Any car that failed once, then died for good, would pass the "lemon" test. Let Mastercard extract the money back from Microsoft.
Imagine what a nightmare this is going to be for repair shops. Replace the hard disk or motherboard, the Microsoft OS will not transfer, and they are going to try to pop the customer for a new OS? I don't think so.
I would imagine in the hacker talent base there are people who know _precisely_ how Microsoft hashes an ID for a machine. The hard disk info and the MAC address of the Ethernet adaptor are a big part of the uniqueness hash (that came to me from Microsoft tech support). Much is known of this process. I would imagine that a bit more investigation will tend to happen. And, maybe, we should look into registering by real slow mail. Costs far more time and money to process those.
I would also imagine there are people who know a very great deal about distribution CD's, and what makes, as a hypothetical example, a Microsoft distribution CD "unique" among CD. Should Microsoft go on with this, it looks to me that such knowledge will become quite in demand.
I think Bill Gates has completely forgotten -- or was never in touch with -- the sheer power of a number of irritated people working on fun little hobbyist projects.
I've seen it in action and am awed by it.
Again, I am commenting on what I see almost as a natural law -- when people throw restrictions on computers, it seems that a balance occurs. Other people restore the functionality that was taken away.
(1) And here in all the "Heroin was invented to... " theories and notes above in this thread, has been __lost__ the fact that Heroin, (tm), is a trademark of Bayer. Heroin (tm) was a cough syrup for small children originally marketed in the late 1800's. It was probably quite effective in the same way that, let's say, codeine in a cough syrup is effective. I am not a doctor but I can guess it was an expectorant.
Wikipedia -almost- has this right but is not correct.
If pressed I can come up with a.JPG of some Heroin (tm) bottles from Bayer.
That is really where it came from and that's the deal.
(Reference Book:
"Flowers In The Blood: The story of opium" by Dean Latimer. ISBN: 0531098591 )
(2) The British use heroin in terminal cancer patients on the practical idea of why worry about addiction?
Having really severely fractured my ankle eight years ago, I too can tell you that some opiates worked and some didn't, and "it's a funny old world" as to which ones work and which ones don't. It is certainly not the ol' "compared to morphine" scale I see written up in medical literature.
Hence I tend to believe the people who say "Well, I saw weird results" and I tend to shy away from the people who say "Well, things should always be this way because the theory says so!". It's almost ideology and idealists.
Politics re: George Bush don't even enter into this in my opinion, the drug wars have been raging in Democratic and Republican Administrations as far back as I remember, and I remember Lyndon Baines Johnson. Sorry, folks. I know it's a lot of fun to blame everything on George right now, but this one... I just can't see it.
I hope this clears some things up. I think you will find this information to be true as you search it out.
-- thanks,
David Small
p.s. This information is true to the best of my knowledge as I write this and represents my personal opinion.
Because satellites are in fixed, very predictable orbits, and SR-71's can go places that have (heaven forbid!) clouds and other things that really mess up satellite imaging. SR=71 imagery has prevented wars where the satellites have not.
But what you're really missing is that the SR-71 is beautiful, and we ought to be flying beautiful things.
Not putting them in museums so our kids can say, "Our country used to be cool".
I watched the demo of Time Machine with considerable shock, because it looks very, very much like the user interface for "HyperWeb", a product I was working on a long time ago, in fact, before the Web. I wrote about it in Current Notes way back when. It was named "HyperWeb" because it "Webbed" together files and made it very hard to lose them -- nothing whatsoever to do with the WWW.
It was like a very bad dream for me. For a day or two I actually re-ran the demo to make sure it -wasn't- a bad dream.
I wondered if the people I'd showed HyperWeb to under NDA had kept to the NDA, or if someone else had seen it, or... well, nuts. This can make you crazy.
This has been a tough week, wondering what happened. But I've finally come to this conclusion:
Apple is where I was at when I designed HyperWeb back twenty years ago, when I felt the problems of files-across-time, and the problems of files having multiple dimensions, needed to be addressed.
In 1986 I was a bit busy with the Mac Emulator thing.
I've also seen synchronous development. I got to talk to the German programmer who did the Mac emulator over there, and he and I started in the same month, possibly the same week. It does happen.
I'm not accusing anyone, nor Apple, nor Apple's lawyers. I have already had enough contact with Apple's lawyers and seem to have accidentally triggered a lawsuit between Apple and Microsoft. (Oops!). It's funny how life works.
Given that "Project Orion" is a very well known name for Ted Taylor's idea for a heavy-lift-to-space vehicle powered by small nuclear explosions, this has to be one of the more confusing names NASA is going to work with. Oh, well.
I do recommend "Project Orion", by George Dyson, as an excellent overview of the project. Remember that when Freeman Dyson heard of it, he dropped everything and came and helped.
They dreamed big in those days. The moon in 1965, Saturn in 1970. And since nuclear fuel is one million times more energetic than chemical fuel, _they could have done it_. No one talking about Project Orion says anything about "Would not have worked".
I wonder if we have paid too big a price to not dream this big anymore.
I would expect at the National Archives there is room to lose nearly anything. I'd say, look behind the Ark of the Covenant...
Sadly, on the Russian side, one of the Space Museums was burned down in a dispute between two "protection" rackets, so many one-of-a-kind items, such as Yuri Gagarin's helmet and so forth, are lost forever.
This occurred some time ago; it is unfortunate there are no high resolution pictures of these items.
The single best collection I know of on Soviet space science would be Robert Kennedy's CD, at www [period] ultimax [period] com , which has many highly unusual events from the space program on it. Very interesting stuff indeed. Also very funny review of the physics of "Independence Day" indeed.
Slashdot Mirror
"Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
and danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed and joined the tumbling mirth
of sun-split clouds - and done a hundred things
you have not dreamed of - wheeled and soared and swung
high in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there,
I've chased the shouting wind along and flung
my eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up, into the long delirious burning blue
I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace,
where never lark, nor even eagle, flew;
and, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod
the high untrespassed sanctity of space,
put out my hand, and touched the face of God."
"High Flight", by John Gillespie Magee, Jr.
This was written by a 19 year old American volunteer with the Royal Canadian Air Force, who was killed in action, December 11, 1941.
For those hurt, a speedy recovery, and for those killed, peace.
David M. Small
Denver, Colorado
Control freaks are to be found everywhere and they make the most despicable moves sometimes. This is truly one of the worst I have ever seen.
... fan-built ... (roll) allegory of ... (roll) the ideals (roll) of Ayn Rand set against ...(roll) a universe struggling against (roll) ... the social implications of (roll) ...the discovery of the first alien race ... blah, blah, blah for another 12 paragraphs. What "warhammer"? I don't see a single "hammer" anywhere. I know several film students who would be happy to recut/redit this as a for-profit effort not involving Those-Whose-Name-Must-Not-Be-Said.
I've seen 'em called "pricks" and "dicks" in this thread, but let me add my opinion:
They're thugs.
They really do want to own dreams. And they want to own other people's dreams. God Dammit, we are the dreamers, and we dream the dreams!!
Thugs like this want to take all the dreams in the world and lock them up in their cabinet at home. I really believe it's because they don't have any dreams of their own.
And as people far wiser than I am have pointed out -- Terry Pratchett, or Eric Raymond -- that doesn't work very well.
Four YEARS of work by fans? NO! Don't take that! Don't let them have one INCH of that!!
Now is the time you're most challenged. Now you have to dream strong and sure. Do it.
Here are some idle thoughts...
The laws of other countries are not the laws of Germany.
-and-
Let me gently suggest that while it might look like an orc/ork/whatever to *them*, why, it looks like something else to me. "Orc"? Where did you get that idea? We don't need no steenking "orcs" to dream. They look like "ginks" to me.
And personally, I found the preview to be an interesting... oh
DO EVERYTHING!!! The most effective approach will become clear. Don't even consider doing nothing. Hand out DVD's on the streets. Spread the word in the chat rooms. Satellites can microwave this data down. Plenty of "Public Channels" looking for a nice movie to show.
The scariest thing in the world is having someone tell you they've locked your dreams.
This is a direct offer to help. Email me.
davidmsmall-at-gmail.com
These are calm, soothing words, written by a professional indeed. I have respect for whoever wrote this. Terry Pratchett once wrote about soothing words.
Since I live in the United States, and have 1st Amendment protected speech, I can say my personal opinion is that this is bullshit. Sorry; I'm a professional writer too.
When you look this over carefully, it has almost zero real content.
Let's take this apart. 3 Paragraphs. Paragraph 1:
"Yahoo! shares the proponent's commitment to human rights," [[ Which is why Yahoo has already put censorship into place in China, right? ]]
(SKIP SOOTHING NULLS) "and as described in more detail in the board's statement in opposition to proposal no. 6 in this proxy statement, the Company's management team has already instituted practices and initiatives that are designed to assess the implications of the Company's activities and policies (END SKIP SOOTHING NULLS) and to protect and advance essential freedoms, such as freedom of expression and privacy rights." [[ So, Yahoo is "assessing" its censorship policies to see how those impact "freedom of expression and privacy rights".
Doh! That's a hard one! Censorship is real bad for freedom of expression and privacy rights! No one in China can read what I'm writing! I bet Yahoo's committees' figure that out in 12 seconds! ]] [[Summary of #1 : We are going to study if censorship affects freedom of expression. (Hunh?] ]]
Paragraph 2:
To further advance thinking [[How do you advance thinking when you've already caved? ]] and practices [[ditto]] around the promotion of free expression and privacy, [[Which we're already not doing in China ]] Yahoo! is actively engaged in a formal dialogue, [[What *is* a "formal dialogue"? ]] co-facilitated by Business for Social Responsibility and the Center for Democracy & Technology, [[ Who are they? ]] that includes industry counterparts [[Name them]], various human rights groups [[Name them]], academic institutions [[Name them]] and socially responsible investors. [[ For Pete's sakes, name them! Investors are public knowledge. ]] This diverse group [[ DAMMIT, Name them!! ]] aims to produce a set of global principles [[ Why not use the UN rules? ]] and operating procedures [[ "Don't Cave" ? ]] on freedom of expression and privacy [[ Bill of Rights isn't bad ]] to guide company behavior when faced with laws, regulations and policies that interfere with human rights.
[[ So, a group of UN-NAMED organizations are going to advise Yahoo on what to do when faced with censorship laws
The group's goals also include creating an implementation, accountability and governance framework, as well as a forum for sharing ideas. [[ Given that Yahoo has already caved, somehow, I feel a strange reluctance to believe they'll be more than a PR puffery. ]]
Paragraph #3 of this:
"These practices and initiatives have been developed by Yahoo! management based on its thorough and careful consideration of the inherent complexities associated with operating under the laws of multiple foreign countries."
[[ So, Yahoo believes that putting a nameless advisory group into place after accepting censorship is a "thorough and careful" way to go. ]]
The board of directors believes that Yahoo!'s management team, with its day-to-day involvement in the Company's business operations and its detailed understanding of the legislative and regulatory landscape of the countries in which the Company operates, is in the best position to assess these matters and to make informed judgments as to what practices and policies are most likely to promote the interests of the Company and its stockholders and users."
[[ So, Yahoo believes its management team knows best what is good for Yahoo. What a surprise.
B
I usually have an old Linux laptop running tcpdump on a hub with all the computers on my home network. It scrolls and scrolls, but over time a certain pattern develops. When only one machine is on, the pattern is one pattern, generally Comcast saying, "Who's Online?" every few seconds. When surfing the Web and pulling up WWW pages, lots of activity, and so forth. The point is, it's a lot more *visual* information than a blinking router light.
Now if I wander by at 2 AM and one idle machine is on, and there's lots of activity, that's generally bad. (If I wasn't so lazy, I could FIFO the data and record people trying to break in. But the truth is, I'm that lazy.)
Couple of things --
Remember, ya have to use a hub, not a switch -- switches don't let the data get to the laptop. It's getting harder to find hubs. (Yes, you sure could shoot the data through the laptop, if you have two network interfaces).
I tried to interest a local TV news guy in the story about botnets, basic theme: don't plug your computer into the Internet until its firewall was turned on, or you're screwed. It got shot down at the story meeting "by their IT guy". This was two years ago. *sigh*
I wonder if I should email him with the FBI story and ask him to forward it to his all-knowing IT guy...
Thanks,
Dave
p.s. Is a Linux laptop a GNU/Linux laptop? Or a Linux GNU Laptop? Or a Linux Lap GNU Top? Or
Previous post said "if you're writing an emulator, you can easily build sandbox functionality into it."
Well, that's not necessarily true. The word "easily" gets used too much. To add a sandbox can clobber performance in software-only emulation. In those emulators you have to keep the fetch-dispatch loop down to the bare minimum (no code at all would be nice, but difficult to attain). Anytime you're adding range checks the performance drops very quickly.
In the case of the PC you can sometimes confine the range checks to the emulated BIOS (which you can rewrite in the target language and thus make very quick) and the emulated hardware for that fun I/O stuff. There's a great deal of bookkeeping in emulating PC hardware.
I'd be rather hesitant to trust the range-checks of a rewritten BIOS against all viruses. Bugs happen. People are creative, although fortunately creativity doesn't seem to happen to virus writers much.
-- thanks,
Dave Small
I believe that if you look for it, you'll find that most of the default pointers for system crashes under the Windows desktop simply restart "Explorer.exe" (where Explorer is the 'Windows Desktop' Explorer, not the 'Internet' Explorer). In fact, it's useful to remember that if the desktop gets hung up, you can CTRL-ALT-DEL to the Windows Task Manager, then Kill -9
From time to time using Windows, you'll see the desktop blank out, replot all the icons with just the name and a generic icon, then fill in the icon with the correct graphics. I believe this is Yet Another Windows Desktop Crash. Of course, this is all just my (first-amendment protected) personal opinion. Please note how careful I am being in specifying this personal opinion, there is a very good reason for this.
I first came across this some time ago. My (new) HP laptop machine here crashes twice on every startup. This takes cubic time.
Is this a particularly big deal? Oh, I don't know. I've seen other computers do this. I can recall tracing startup on the Macintosh and seeing stores to location 0 (Nil pointer usage) that made the startup a real "Hmmm, how did that work, anyway?" philosophical question. Finder 1.1 and System 1.1g were the cleanest in this regard. System 7 was a nightmare, because it was the first true multitasking OS, and lots of programs hammered on location 0, and the ones who had been getting away with it because they stored to, then read from, 0 conflicted with others and the operating system, causing maddening, hard-to-trace errors.
I'd be interested in hearing if the current 10.x operating system has this fixed in hardware.
Thanks, Dave Small
In my day we had ... SPINAL TAP !!
"Give me give me some money"
This is interesting:
In the article, there's this quote:
Effective immediately ICANN has terminated RegisterFly's right to use the ICANN Accredited Registrar logo on its website.
(snip)
"Terminating accreditation is the strongest measure ICANN is able to take against RegisterFly under its powers," Dr. Paul Twomey, President and CEO of ICANN said today.
However, over at registerfly.com, we see:
http://registerfly.com/info/benefits.php
"Quick Facts
Founded in 2000
ICANN Accredited
100% Debt Free
( and etc, etc)"
Wow, it sure is good to see Registerfly just toeing the line there.
I wonder what ICANN will do next? Send an angry email?
-- thanks, Dave
Assume an entangled pair A and B.
I thought that when you tweaked entangled photon A, that entangled photon B changed almost instantly (or absolutely instantly). Now if the mechanism that tweaks A is a push button, and the result of flipping B is an LED, it seems like data is transferred.
It looks like there are several people in this thread who think so, and some who don't think so.
I would appreciate it if someone could explain this to me, either yea or nay.
Thanks, Dave
It's very easy to become cynical when looking at government. But cynicism is a kind of trap.
I know people who have worked directly at both state and federal level (in the United States). They all tell me the same thing: A well written letter to a Congresscritter gets their attention in a big way.
Another general rule is that the effective Congresscritters -- the ones who truly get things done -- are not publicity hounds. One of the most effective lobbyists I know of says, "I stay out of newspapers on purpose; if I was in them, I couldn't get anything done." He has quietly done much good to the city I live in. "It's amazing what you can do, if you don't insist on credit for it", he tells me.
Concerned on the destructive effects of patents in software? Have you written a letter to your Congresscritter? Do so. It really makes a difference. You may want to give a simple and clear example why software patents are such bad news.
Writing such a letter isn't futile. That person is your *Representative*. It is their job to represent you. But it's an act of faith. You haven't given in and said, "My voice will make no difference." In fact, it will. (And it will be multiplied by the ones that have given up.)
Write.
David Small
I didn't know that dimmer switches and those compact flourescent lights don't mix. I learned the hard way, when smoke started pouring out of the base of the dimmer. I happened to be in the room at the time to shut it off.
I wonder how many people are going to learn this lesson the same way I did?
Thanks,
Dave Small
The Emperor doesn't have any clothes on. The EU isn't such a good idea, are you starting to see why?
Now the EU has to ban sock puppets. I wonder what thoughts and forms of communications it will have to ban next. Frightened and vindictive little bureaucrats in little jobs always do things like this. Where my son works, he was told to "keep your feet off that trash can, it's company property!".
I do understand that it's traditional to blame America first, and to regard Americans as over-hasty nuclear cowboys. I would hate to break any traditions here. As Ted Taylor (the gifted nuclear weapon designer Taylor) noted, most of the theoretical group at Los Alamos were liberal Democrats. (from: The Curve of Binding Energy, John McPhee). It's a funny old world.
There is something just the littlest bit ironic about posts complaining of gullible Americans that originate in EU countries.
I read, I smile, I move on. -- thanks, Dave Small
You may want to rethink any worries on "contaminating" Yucca Mountain by using it as a storage place for old nuclear material. Relax. It is one of the most contaminated places on the planet already. Yucca Mountain is right by Yucca Flats, where the U.S. AEC starting lighting off nuclear fission weapons tests in the early 1950's. One DOE list shows 100 aboveground tests and 828 underground tests.
The Nevada Test Site is 1,375 square miles around the test zone. Any leaks have to penetrate that -considerable- physical buffer. Thus, we are not talking about them just leaking down the street here.
Something worth seeing:
If you have not seen the craters from the very high yield underground tests, they are a spectacular sight; go to Google Earth, start at "Mercury, Nevada", then just follow the road North until you start seeing enormous craters where the earth has collapsed into the spherical chambers hollowed out by thermonuclear weapons tests. It's called "The Most Bombed Spot On Earth" for a good reason.
-- thanks, Dave
I find myself admittedly in the minority here, but I'd like to point out that:
... even when it would not censor pure fiction coming from itself.
(1) The New York Times ("The paper of record", as they arrogantly call themselves; seems a bit odd with British papers having been established some time prior) has published _sheer fiction_ made up by Jayson Blair, and kept that guy on long after everyone in the news room knew he was corrupt only because he was black; this caused a melt down in papers that ran articles from the Times, and had to retract them. This was an ideology problem.
(2) Routinely runs just about psychotic-level character assassination pieces in its Op-Ed from Maureen Dowd, who lives and breathes hatred for George Bush and cannot find what to do with herself now that Donald Rumsfeld is gone. This is an ideology problem.
(3) Printed an extremely questionable piece *in time of war* handing Al-Qaeda methods on how the NSA scans phone calls outbound from the United States, which not only gave out methods, but blew the operation in place. If you've read James Bamford's book on the NSA you understand how important SIGINT is in the war against Al-Qaeda (it's everything). They've quit using satellite phones and cell phones for a very good reason. They used to think land lines were secure. Now the fools at the NYT blew that. This is an ideology problem. Why did they do this?
Were they defending American's right to phone lines in America? Nope. These were international calls, outbound scans only. You concentrate your computing power and minimize the scanning load as much as possible.
Were they defending America's right to have phone sex with Pakistanis? Possibly this would explain a great deal about Maureen Dowd.
The words "Giving aid and comfort to the enemy" come to my mind, but then, I'm just an old softie.
There are people who seem to have retreated from the idea that the United States is at war with Al-Qaeda. Regrettably, Al-Qaeda has not.
I've read in this thread many, many people worried about censorship. But who worries about what the New York Times does every day? Its ideology warps what it prints. And, I think, it was more than happy to yowl about "censorship" as loudly as possible
If you want to read really good books, you'd best not rely on the NYT's reviews. You'll miss books that a bunch of people found good, but that did not pass the *ideology* test of the NYT. "The Purpose Driven Life" comes to mind right off.
And by the way, I too have been to a third world country or two, and if you can't tell the difference between that and the United States, you badly need psychiatic help.
Thanks, Dave Small
Personally, I thought that Quake 4 was rather good and had a better story than Doom 3, but it's all subjective.
There really is not a reason why Linux machines can't run Windows game code. Well, there is the usual semi-religious reason, but please. You just have to not judge the task to be impossible too quickly. It boils down to the game having a tangle of things it needs to work, and you need to connect those things to something on the Linux side. I know this because I have done a very similar thing.
You can do it with less quick hardware and go straight to the metal; I taught the Mac OS to come up on Atari ST hardware that way. At 8 Mhz there were not many cycles to waste. Some of the software I had to run was an utter nightmare because it caused bus errors in the 68000 on the Atari side, but not on the Mac side because of a fluke, so I had to teach the 68000 to ignore bus errors.
But as VMware and others have shown, Windows stuff will coexist with Linux, and they've worked out the six -billion- little details of getting the hardware to task-switch (and I bet it wasn't at all fun). One of the funniest things I've seen was getting my resume bounced from them. Heh!
Just looking here in my Xandros 3.0 manual, I also see:
Code Weaver's CrossOver, which runs Microsoft Office. That is extremely difficult and really well done because it handles really *fun* stuff like out-of-bounds memory access and nil pointer access that happens in Office (I had to fight with it too).
Win4Lin "runs Windows operating systems and applications in a window on the desktop. Almost any Windows application can be run." Eval copy available. I have not tried it personally.
VMWare "runs multiple operating systems and applications, not just Windows, in a window on the desktop. Almost any Windows application can be run."
There are also Terminal Server Client and Citrix Linux ICA Client, which run Windows apps on another machine and give you a window into them.
Now, if it were me, and I wanted to be able to have a pretty good chance of popping in a generic Windows game disk and running it with Linux, I would use one of the above, but I would also go hunting ready for bear: some sort of in-circuit emulator ready to trap absurd stuff, and work around it. I can sure tell you that a hardware ICE would have made my task far easier and enabled me to catch bugs in the Mac OS that were not findable otherwise.
This is all doable. It's just selecting the method of doing it. Other people have already done parts of it. Running Quake 4 under VMWare, then the others, would be a very interesting test indeed.
Thanks,
David Small
davetracer@aol.com
David Stein, could you contact me off /. to discuss this? Thank you.
David Small
davetracer@aol.com
I believe that David Stein's proposal is brilliant and quite workable on several levels. This is a dangerous and really good idea. This note is about how to set that up, ideas and suggestions.
I'm not a lawyer
A Wiki may be the best tool.
Seems to me we'll need to pull the patents somewhere, set them all as status: unread, then start going through them. It is not so easy to determine how we'll judge them right at this point. I think there will be levels of grey. Wikis allow this. I do think that after going over several hundred patents it will become clearer how to classify them, and we simply need to keep flexible, which Wiki lets us. Wikipedia's experience is a good guide here.
Thus, with experience, we can create a post-read status that is broad enough to classify the patents. If the post-read status is "this patent is absurd; need prior art" then we should issue a request for prior art. For example, we could put a stub in saying, "Need prior art for a 'bit-mapped screen' "
If we classify the patent as, "Probably a good patent on irritating animated paperclip", then, well, who cares? No sane person wants an irritating animated paperclip. We give it a "who cares" status as completely irrelevant.
All I'm pointing out here is the classifications will make themselves clearer as time goes by.
Do we have to be trained patent lawyers to read these things? I don't believe so. A patent is supposed to allow someone trained in the field to create the patented thing. I think after reading a few either we'll get it. People trained in patent law and IP can sure help a law, especially in tricky cases.
Just the fact that this structure is being set up to start work, and then is operating, will cause some -very- interesting activity (see also: Just What IP are we talking about here, Microsoft?). Therein is half the brilliance of David's idea.
If there are downstream consequences for knowing some patents then so be it. I can stand working in IT and never developing some software that Microsoft's patents cover (*yawn*).
We need ideas on how this could be implemented efficiently (e.g., how could these patents be accessed en masse, do they need to be scanned?), and so forth.
I'm a bit of an idealist so I'll just mention that the first time a bunch of software patents are openly checked could serve as a benchmark for how many software patents are appallingly bad, which in turn, might serve the purpose of turning them all off.
Thanks, David Small
davetracer@aol.com
I think perhaps in all the very, very politically correct talk about how the United States is really just the same morally as other countries like Syria, Uganda and Russia is how incredibly _evil_ the KGB was/is. It is just not politically correct to say bad things about the ex-Soviet Union.
However, having been to Berlin a few days after the Wall came down, and having talked to people from the former Soviet Union, I can tell you that this remote academic theorizing is so much ear's wax, and some people really need to get outside more. In some ways it is fitting that the last of the ugly huge Lenin posters, etc, are by Chernobyl.
Pretty much everyone knows that PC conceals truth. What's the truth?
Putin rose to head the KGB because he's the chief scum of some extremely evil scum. They were the enforcement arm of a political system that killed more people, and enslaved more people, than any other this world has ever known.
The Soviet Union, which crashed Dec. 25 1991, has become a Third World country. I have friends who have left that place because they were under death threats to pay up or be killed. Another friend tried to set up an export business but was stopped by the Russian Mafia. The Museum of Soviet Spaceflight was burned to the ground because it could not pay off two rival "protection" gangs. The Buran "Space Shuttle Clone" sits in a park as a plaything.
So, do I think Putin would off this guy with polonium? Yep. It had a good chance of not being detected.
Has the KGB offed other people who gave them a bad time in England? Yep. They whacked Georgi Markov in 1978. He had a radio show that intensely annoyed them.
Did the KGB try to whack the Pope with a Bulgarian hitman? Yep. The East Germans were notified of this pre-whack try to cover themselves; this was found in their files.
It is within a pattern of consistent behavior for Putin and his KGB/NKVD/FSB buddies to whack this guy. People on this list are supposed to be rational. Pattern recognizers. If a Unix system kept popping the same output at the same time of day each day, you'd say, "Cron is doing something". If the KGB keeps killing people, you'd say, "Gee, that KGB keeps killing people."
But amazingly, given the evidence, people keep saying, "Why, no, that KGB has changed from its institutional roots, from the sociopath Laventina Beria under Stalin to now, and is now peaceful, cuddly, and furry."
Crap. They're killers.
-- thank you, have a nice day.
David Small
Actually, I'm wondering why the U.S. is bothering to go the table at all. What do we have to gain? Let's go and watch them squirm. They have *nothing* we want. Maybe if they offer up Kim for arrest? Possibly of interest. He's certainly a criminal to his country.
Let's skip the whole "they have the bomb" rhetoric. They don't. *That's* the reason they're coming to the table. If they had nukes, they would be acting Big And Bad.
But, their nukes just don't work, and just imagine the fun meeting where Kim learned that another test wouldn't make things any better: they *still* won't work. (He should have listened the first time. But Kim, like Stalin and Beria, tended to have hearing problems.)
They screwed up -and- got really bad economic sanctions handed to them. Double bad news.
Every country that's tried for 20 kt on its first explosion has succeeded until now, which makes the North Koreans the world's most incompetent nuclear scientists. Sixty years after the successful first try, they couldn't manage even this? Good grief.
Remember the seismograph readings: First, the chemical explosives, then the bad nuclear fizzle; then the rifles as the scientists were shot.
Okay, why don't I think they have nuclear weapons?
The North Korean test was a fizzle. Remember it yielded about 0.5 kiloton. Usually a first generation nuclear device (implosion - plutonium) yields right around 20 kilotons. Given that the source of their plutonium was fuel rods run in a power reactor (not in an environment specifically designed to make plutonium, a "driver reactor" -- there's a huge difference), the most likely problem is the plutonium-239 is contaminated with plutonium-240. Probably the whole North Korean supply of plutonium is contaminated. -240 is very active, enough so to screw up the first generations of a fission explosion, which mean the last generations, where all the real energy comes from, just don't happen.
The U.S. rather famously ran into this problem with its first plutonium from the big driver reactors at Hanford. It had Pu-240 contamination. We had to use implosion to get around the problem. No one knew if this was even possible, which made it a pretty tasty hack to pull off. I think the quote is, "Half the work of the Manhattan Project was getting implosion to work".
We then did the math, optimized the time that U-238 was put into the neutron flux to produce the most Pu-239 and minimize the Pu-240, because Pu-240 is *always* a problem. (To oversimplify, it's a matter of getting one neutron to stick to the U-238, eventually producing Pu-239; if two stick, you get Pu-240. You're always going to get a little -240. Obviously, neutrons are randomly flying, there are quantum effects, and so forth. And yes, I'm leaving out a lot of details to get to the point; if you want to get into the Neptunium and two weeks and so forth, Wikipedia will make you happy.)
When you're expressly making plutonium, you can run the reactor at a given neutron flux level and keep the U-238 rods in a certain amount of time. But when you're making electricity, you're going to want to run the U-235/U-238 fuel rods as long as is economically feasible, and you're going to run them at power levels to make steam for a given energy demand, which is a whole different timing. And you are going to get Pu-240 problems. (Well, there are ways, but it is much harder.)
What's really interesting is that the proportions of Pu-239/Pu-240 are an exact signature of where the plutonium was made. Literally, what reactor, which batch, when. Sometimes, what part of the reactor! There are databooks of signatures. Given a sample or two of the North Korean plutonium, we'll know if it *ever* gets used, and the stated U.S. reply to such a use is something akin to a Trident D5 onto whereever Ki
I have some little experience with fairly draconian licenses in my time. I was quite careful to stay perfectly legal and still got nastygrams. Let me tell you, it is very disturbing to find out that the chief counsels of Microsoft and Apple have been discussing you.
... maybe ISO's can't be copied? I wonder just exactly how that was implemented? Is it a kludge just looking for filenames named "*.iso" ? That's certainly easy enough to workaround. Several solutions suggest themselves immediately, including something as dumb as using "filename.isi".
... maybe we'll find a way to muddle through. I think a lot of Windows people muddle through with third party utilities. (Winzip seems to be essential, for example).
... there's a restriction on the number of times the OS can be installed, down to one?
This new EULA seems to me the work of attorneys playing "let's see how far we can sneak it" and actually thinking it's a good idea.
However:
There seems to a law of nature that no license can be written that a reasonably clever person cannot work around. People need to have the requisite qualities of the old-school hacker: curiosity, envelope-pushing, and a feeling that information likes to be free. Before the Web it was harder to swap information, but the power of investigating things together seems to increase as the square of the people doing it.
Microsoft appears to be irritating a number of people, and that just motivates people to learn all sorts of interesting things.
So
My point is, instead of saying, oh doom, we shall all be forced to live with this, or, this will be the thing that finally forces everyone to Linux
So
I think that is not likely to stand.That's probably going to overwhelm their phone bank with irritated customers. It would be amusing if same customers started asking for refunds. For example, if I charged my OS purchase on my "worry free" Mastercard, can I apply to Mastercard for a refund that this is a "lemon" OS? Any car that failed once, then died for good, would pass the "lemon" test. Let Mastercard extract the money back from Microsoft.
Imagine what a nightmare this is going to be for repair shops. Replace the hard disk or motherboard, the Microsoft OS will not transfer, and they are going to try to pop the customer for a new OS? I don't think so.
I would imagine in the hacker talent base there are people who know _precisely_ how Microsoft hashes an ID for a machine. The hard disk info and the MAC address of the Ethernet adaptor are a big part of the uniqueness hash (that came to me from Microsoft tech support). Much is known of this process. I would imagine that a bit more investigation will tend to happen. And, maybe, we should look into registering by real slow mail. Costs far more time and money to process those.
I would also imagine there are people who know a very great deal about distribution CD's, and what makes, as a hypothetical example, a Microsoft distribution CD "unique" among CD. Should Microsoft go on with this, it looks to me that such knowledge will become quite in demand.
I think Bill Gates has completely forgotten -- or was never in touch with -- the sheer power of a number of irritated people working on fun little hobbyist projects.
I've seen it in action and am awed by it.
Again, I am commenting on what I see almost as a natural law -- when people throw restrictions on computers, it seems that a balance occurs. Other people restore the functionality that was taken away.
All of this is my personal opinion.
-- thanks,
David Small
(1) And here in all the "Heroin was invented to ... " theories and notes above in this thread, has been __lost__ the fact that Heroin, (tm), is a trademark of Bayer. Heroin (tm) was a cough syrup for small children originally marketed in the late 1800's. It was probably quite effective in the same way that, let's say, codeine in a cough syrup is effective. I am not a doctor but I can guess it was an expectorant.
.JPG of some Heroin (tm) bottles from Bayer.
... I just can't see it.
Wikipedia -almost- has this right but is not correct.
If pressed I can come up with a
That is really where it came from and that's the deal.
(Reference Book:
"Flowers In The Blood: The story of opium" by Dean Latimer. ISBN: 0531098591 )
(2) The British use heroin in terminal cancer patients on the practical idea of why worry about addiction?
Having really severely fractured my ankle eight years ago, I too can tell you that some opiates worked and some didn't, and "it's a funny old world" as to which ones work and which ones don't. It is certainly not the ol' "compared to morphine" scale I see written up in medical literature.
Hence I tend to believe the people who say "Well, I saw weird results" and I tend to shy away from the people who say "Well, things should always be this way because the theory says so!". It's almost ideology and idealists.
Politics re: George Bush don't even enter into this in my opinion, the drug wars have been raging in Democratic and Republican Administrations as far back as I remember, and I remember Lyndon Baines Johnson. Sorry, folks. I know it's a lot of fun to blame everything on George right now, but this one
I hope this clears some things up. I think you will find this information to be true as you search it out.
-- thanks,
David Small
p.s. This information is true to the best of my knowledge as I write this and represents my personal opinion.
Because satellites are in fixed, very predictable orbits, and SR-71's can go places that have (heaven forbid!) clouds and other things that really mess up satellite imaging. SR=71 imagery has prevented wars where the satellites have not.
But what you're really missing is that the SR-71 is beautiful, and we ought to be flying beautiful things.
Not putting them in museums so our kids can say, "Our country used to be cool".
-- David Small
I watched the demo of Time Machine with considerable shock, because it looks very, very much like the user interface for "HyperWeb", a product I was working on a long time ago, in fact, before the Web. I wrote about it in Current Notes way back when. It was named "HyperWeb" because it "Webbed" together files and made it very hard to lose them -- nothing whatsoever to do with the WWW.
... well, nuts. This can make you crazy.
It was like a very bad dream for me. For a day or two I actually re-ran the demo to make sure it -wasn't- a bad dream.
I wondered if the people I'd showed HyperWeb to under NDA had kept to the NDA, or if someone else had seen it, or
This has been a tough week, wondering what happened. But I've finally come to this conclusion:
Apple is where I was at when I designed HyperWeb back twenty years ago, when I felt the problems of files-across-time, and the problems of files having multiple dimensions, needed to be addressed.
In 1986 I was a bit busy with the Mac Emulator thing.
I've also seen synchronous development. I got to talk to the German programmer who did the Mac emulator over there, and he and I started in the same month, possibly the same week. It does happen.
I'm not accusing anyone, nor Apple, nor Apple's lawyers. I have already had enough contact with Apple's lawyers and seem to have accidentally triggered a lawsuit between Apple and Microsoft. (Oops!). It's funny how life works.
-- thanks,
Dave Small
Given that "Project Orion" is a very well known name for Ted Taylor's idea for a heavy-lift-to-space vehicle powered by small nuclear explosions, this has to be one of the more confusing names NASA is going to work with. Oh, well.
I do recommend "Project Orion", by George Dyson, as an excellent overview of the project. Remember that when Freeman Dyson heard of it, he dropped everything and came and helped.
They dreamed big in those days. The moon in 1965, Saturn in 1970. And since nuclear fuel is one million times more energetic than chemical fuel, _they could have done it_. No one talking about Project Orion says anything about "Would not have worked".
I wonder if we have paid too big a price to not dream this big anymore.
Thanks,
David Small
I would expect at the National Archives there is room to lose nearly anything. I'd say, look behind the Ark of the Covenant...
Sadly, on the Russian side, one of the Space Museums was burned down in a dispute between two "protection" rackets, so many one-of-a-kind items, such as Yuri Gagarin's helmet and so forth, are lost forever.
This occurred some time ago; it is unfortunate there are no high resolution pictures of these items.
The single best collection I know of on Soviet space science would be Robert Kennedy's CD, at www [period] ultimax [period] com , which has many highly unusual events from the space program on it. Very interesting stuff indeed. Also very funny review of the physics of "Independence Day" indeed.
-- thanks,
Dave Small