Of course, there is little reason to worry about the long term if we use an intelegent reactor design.
The Integral Fast Reactor design's only waste products have a half life of 90 years or less, or 211,100 years or more. The latter components clearly give off very little radiation per unit time, so they can basically be ignored. It is the other components that give off significant radiation. However, within 200 years the waste radiation levels are no greater than that of natural ores. This means that it is reasonably safe to just bury it.
The design has other advantages too:
Fuel does not need to be precisely shaped, but can be cast into the correct shape
It is easier to make weapons-grade fuel from natural uranium than from the fuel. The waste contains no actinides so is worthless for creation of nuclear weapons. This means the reactor is really not a proliferation concern.
Because spent fuel is reprocessed in site to extract the non-spent components from it, the total amount of waste produced is tiny compared to the more common reactor designs
Of course, there are a few downsides, the most notable is the fact that the plant would have higher construction costs than most, and would have higher cost per kilowatt than most. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_Fast_Reactor for more information on this reactor design.
You don't buy an XP licence+cd combo for the downgrade. Instead you purchase an XP cd without license. How you buy one of those without being a corporation is not known by me. Of course, you may happen to have an old XP CD around whose license is used on another computer. In that case just use that CD. (I'm not sure that OEM CDs would work for this though).
Well actually, 2.6.26 is "Rotary Wombat", and 2.6.25 was "Funky Weasel is Jiggy wit it". Not quite Ubuntu's codenames, and nowhere near as publicized, but equally strange.
The Country code is part of international phone dialing. Since you are not aware of it, you probably live in the Unites States or Canada. The country code for the United States and Canada is "1". It is just a coincidence that 1 is also dialed before area codes in the United States or Canada (at least when dialing long distance).
As for what you put in the Company or Organization field when you are independent, I'm not sure.
Since you discovered this attack, can you confirm the following.
My basic understanding is that somebody realized a generic way to spoof DNS results delivered to caches (effectively poisoning the cache) that is not properly detectable by the DNS cache, due to the protocol design. The problem can be mitigated via port randomization, which was already known to be more secure, but was not the default in virtually all DNS servers (some of which may have even lacked this feature entirely). The reason why it was not the default would presumably be practicality.
The real proof that the Gnu/Linux has serious Desktop issues is the fact that even RHEL's desktops (which Red Hat has spent many hundreds of hours polishing) still feel like they lack the polish of Windows XP (after the Idiotic Luna theme is removed).
Applications don't have the same Level of UI consistance as Windows. Sure Windows has a few oddballs iTunes, Windows Media Player, and Office 2007 come to mind, but most have pretty good level of consistency. Even the Apps that come with the Desktop Environments of Linux lack the level of constancy of the non-oddball Windows apps. on Linux once you start using apps from another toolkit all hopes of UI consistancy are shattered.
Also copy and paste. There are still a few apps pairs where copy and paste don't work right. (Well, the middle click X11 buffer usually works well, but the other (primary) copy buffer seems to only be partially supported by some apps.)
And the terminology of Linux desktops is Awful. Take the term "Menu" which refers to the Start-Menu-like application launcher. That name is far too vague to be clear. If anything is just called the menu, it should be the optional MacOS style single menu bar feature.
At the very least, one would probably agree that GNU/Linux's only real rivals for servers would be the BSDs, or perhaps some commercial Unices. But this should not be surprising, as they share quite a bit of the design relevant to servers, and even some of the major software components (Apache for one).
Why do you use partial search templates rather than Quick searches? For example, try typing "google Firefox 3 release notes" into a new Firefox 3 profile and hitting enter. Obviously you can change the text "google" to whatever you want, and you can add similar quicksearches with relative ease. Basically, you are just replacing the down arrow key in your current work-flow with the space bar. For Wikipedia the default is "wp [search terms here]", but obviously that can be changed.
Actually, the damned thing is that we know exactly what to do with the spent fuel rods. The IFR reactor design utilizes the fuel far more efficiently than most current reactor designs, meaning that the waste mass is smaller (most waste mass contains lots of still good fuel mixed with the spent fuel. Extracting the good fuel alone leaves us with significantly less waste mass). Further the IFR's waste's radioactivity level reaches that of the ore in only 200 years. The best part of the whole damn thing is that this reactor can be run primarily on the spent fuel of other reactors, rather than new fuel.
But the damn project was canceled due to proliferation concerns, despite the simple fact that this reactor has FAR LESS of a proliferation risk than most operating reactors. The reprocessing is done on site, and the processed fuel is highly radioactive making it almost impossible to sneak off with it.
No standard interface? My understanding was that the Windows drivers provided a file detailing capabilities and settings. Windows XP adds these to the print properties dialog. When printing the object to be printed is passed to the driver via the GDI interface, along with the values of all the settings selected by the user. The driver converts the GDI document to its native language and passes it on to the transport layer driver through another standard interface. This step allows the different physical transport layers (LPT, file, USB, windows network printing, and even the standard Unix print server system.)
I have found the HP standard printer system to be absolutely abysmal. It installs a bunch of crap (The "hp director" suite). And guess what, some HP printers and scanners will not share a single HP director suite, resulting in two copies of a bunch of bloated useless software that does not even generally work right. HP does not appear to have any way to download just the actual drivers for the printer. (The true drivers, not the drivers plus monitoring programs and other crap). Basically, after seeing how poorly HP does consumer printers I plan on buying Cannon printers in the future.
The problem with this idea is that people will end up using '.' (the root domain) as the top-level domain. I mean the technology would allow for a website at http://com./ just as much as it allows for http://www.slashdot.org./ If the ICANN agreement prevented use of the domains in that fashion, then expect to see many TLDs with only 'www' as a valid second level domain. For example we might see http://www.disney./ (the tailing slashes in this message are for clarity purposes. Obviously the root domain dot would still be optional.)
The result would be all the same problems that having just one TLD would have.
FreeDos is not nearly as desireable as other systems, because DOS's kernel itself is an extremely minimalistic kernel. It is not really modular or configurable, and drivers for DOS can be a bigger pain than for other systems. Using an embedded Linux Kernel is far more common. Linux may require a slightly greater footprint than raw DOS (I'm not sure it does, but it may), but has much better infrastructure available. Further DOS's design is (AIUI) not suitable for devices needing a real-time OS, so those devices would not use DOS either.
Courts have enforced verbal contracts many times. There is in general no legal need for any signatures on a written contract, must less a witness signature. That said having a witness signature makes the contract far easier to enforce, and a contract may certainly specify that it is not valid without a witness signature, but that does not mean the law in general requires it.
However, the whole contract/license GPL issue is generally moot. If they did not agree to the GPL, they have no right to distribution, and therefore are in violation of the copyright. If the GPL is not valid, the same thing is true. However, if the GPL is valid, and they did agree to it, they must follow the terms regardless of whether it is a contract or not.
Ok, ignore my previous post. After looking closely, I see the key concept "intent was to replicate, as exactly as possible, the image of certain Toyota vehicles". I suppose the "as exactly as possible" is the issue. This would not affect many models which are not intended to replicate "as exactly as possible", but rather as exactly as desired, which would likely have significant creative input.
So, If I use special equipment to automatically model some object without adding any creative input, I have no copyright? That is not a big surprise.
However, if I model the same object by hand, I would have copyright on the model? If so that sounds fine. A hand modeled object will have some level of creativity in which points of the polygon were chosen, what resolution he different components were modeled at, any intentional differences from the original for aesthetic reasons, etc.
If this ruling does have any impact on hand modeled objects it is a gross error of law.
I do further believe that if the ruling really does indicate that models cannot infringe existing copyrights, then it is a gross error of law too. An exact model of a sculpture infringes the copyright to the sculpture it in exactly the same way that an effectively exact recreation by hand would.
Corruption only becomes a concern to the public when it is backed by force, something which only the government can apply.
[snip] And that official will be replaced by another corrupt official. As long as the government is able to manipulate the economy, individuals and businesses will flock to them to get manipulation in their favor (otherwise they risk seeing unfavorable legislation forced against them).
The problem is that even if the state cannot manipulate the market, there will still be business interests attempting to manipulate the government to effectively enforce said business's monopoly. You do correctly identify the end problem though being the state. The state must not be corruptible, or corporations will work tirelessly to corrupt it. It is as simple as that.
And please do note that the state does not have a monopoly on force. Physical force, sure, but sufficiently large corporations have a surprising amount of market force, which can sometimes be just as effective as physical force. (Consider a cabal of the worlds largest 30 or so corporations, and how they would be able to manipulate completely unregulated markets if no general regulation (such as anti-trust laws) were also present.).
Properly working regulation may keep corporations in check, but it still requires a state that the businesses really cannot corrupt. So the state is to blame for being corruptible, but the corporations are to blame for exploiting that fact. End result though is that the state needs to change.
Think more like StarOffice. StarOffice is OO.org + additional proprietary code. SunJDK form Version 7 on will be OpenJDK + additional proprietary code.
He was obviously trying to reference the 8086 compatibility inherent in Real Mode. (Some Bios'es limit the first few instructions to 8086 compatible code, despite real mode have some newer 80186 and I think even 80286 instructions available. It does seem a bit odd that there is a mode in current gen processors, (which by the old naming would be 80686, and by modern naming is 686) for the 8086 ( which by modern naming would be the 86, or perhaps 086). However, I must say that is excellent backwards compatibility.
You do realize that the W80 physics package has a max yield of 150 kt. It would fit in the trunk of a car. It would just about fit into a large backpack. I don't know how much space is needed for the rest of the bomb, but I would tend to suspect the physics package is the largest part. So to me it looks like a backpack-sized nuke of 100kt may indeed be possible. Now it would be too heavy to actually carry on your back, as the weight of the W80 is 290 lb, but it is still damn small. However, gathering the expertise and equipment to create a bomb that small with that high a yield would be noticed. A tactical strike on the production facility would eliminate the danger rather quickly. You do have a very good point about altitude of detonation.
So basically, USB 3 the real spec is available. This defines the USB interface. Any host controller designed that meets the USB 3 specification would work just fine. If it does not follow Intel's Host controller spec, it will just need to use a different driver. All USB 3 client devices should work with all USB 3 hosts, regardless of what standard the controller chip uses. Is that all correct?
If so, I really don't see what the big deal is. AMD can create their own host controller spec, or they can wait for Intel's free one. Since Intel is publishing this spec for free use by the others, I don't see what is wrong with them having them release to market first. Not releasing at the same time as Intel is simply the cost of using Intel's spec, rather than creating your own.
Well http://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/mandatory_deposit.html#mandatory seems to indicate otherwise. Granted that there are many exceptions to exclude classes of works where depositing is not possible or practical, or that the Library of Congress has no interest in.
Even the United States lacks this. Well, there is the Statutes at Large, which lists the bills passed exactly as passed in chronological order. This is terribly inconvenient. If one statute amends another, one would have to copy out the original, and then edit it as specified.
The US Code is an attempt at compiling the actual laws together as amended, with catagorical ordering. However, only certain titles of the code are enacted into positive law. Obviously a statute changing those titles amends the text of the Code. Those amendments are incorporated in the next printing.
However, other laws are codified separately. When possible the exact sections of the statue are inserted into the proper places in the code, with only minor editorial changes. However, not all law gets codified, meaning that one would still need to refer back to the Statues at Law. The sections not enacted into positive law also are problematic.
This situation though might be better than what the UK currently has. I am not familiar enough with the UK system to know for sure.
While you have a point, it is important to realize that the documents are generally available for reference at libraries or other public locations. Indeed the town hall (for local law) or state capitol (for State law) should have any standard referenced by applicable law available for public viewing. In the worst case you just request the document via inter-library loan, or view the mandatory deposited copy at the Library of Congress. I do agree though that this is less than ideal, but it is not quite as bad as your post makes it sound.
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Of course, there is little reason to worry about the long term if we use an intelegent reactor design.
The Integral Fast Reactor design's only waste products have a half life of 90 years or less, or 211,100 years or more. The latter components clearly give off very little radiation per unit time, so they can basically be ignored. It is the other components that give off significant radiation. However, within 200 years the waste radiation levels are no greater than that of natural ores. This means that it is reasonably safe to just bury it.
The design has other advantages too:
Of course, there are a few downsides, the most notable is the fact that the plant would have higher construction costs than most, and would have higher cost per kilowatt than most.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_Fast_Reactor for more information on this reactor design.
You don't buy an XP licence+cd combo for the downgrade. Instead you purchase an XP cd without license. How you buy one of those without being a corporation is not known by me. Of course, you may happen to have an old XP CD around whose license is used on another computer. In that case just use that CD. (I'm not sure that OEM CDs would work for this though).
Well actually, 2.6.26 is "Rotary Wombat", and 2.6.25 was "Funky Weasel is Jiggy wit it". Not quite Ubuntu's codenames, and nowhere near as publicized, but equally strange.
Brings back memories of the "Dole for Bananas" bumper stickers.
The Country code is part of international phone dialing. Since you are not aware of it, you probably live in the Unites States or Canada. The country code for the United States and Canada is "1". It is just a coincidence that 1 is also dialed before area codes in the United States or Canada (at least when dialing long distance).
As for what you put in the Company or Organization field when you are independent, I'm not sure.
Since you discovered this attack, can you confirm the following.
My basic understanding is that somebody realized a generic way to spoof DNS results delivered to caches (effectively poisoning the cache) that is not properly detectable by the DNS cache, due to the protocol design. The problem can be mitigated via port randomization, which was already known to be more secure, but was not the default in virtually all DNS servers (some of which may have even lacked this feature entirely). The reason why it was not the default would presumably be practicality.
Is that about right?
The real proof that the Gnu/Linux has serious Desktop issues is the fact that even RHEL's desktops (which Red Hat has spent many hundreds of hours polishing) still feel like they lack the polish of Windows XP (after the Idiotic Luna theme is removed).
Applications don't have the same Level of UI consistance as Windows. Sure Windows has a few oddballs iTunes, Windows Media Player, and Office 2007 come to mind, but most have pretty good level of consistency. Even the Apps that come with the Desktop Environments of Linux lack the level of constancy of the non-oddball Windows apps. on Linux once you start using apps from another toolkit all hopes of UI consistancy are shattered.
Also copy and paste. There are still a few apps pairs where copy and paste don't work right. (Well, the middle click X11 buffer usually works well, but the other (primary) copy buffer seems to only be partially supported by some apps.)
And the terminology of Linux desktops is Awful. Take the term "Menu" which refers to the Start-Menu-like application launcher. That name is far too vague to be clear. If anything is just called the menu, it should be the optional MacOS style single menu bar feature.
At the very least, one would probably agree that GNU/Linux's only real rivals for servers would be the BSDs, or perhaps some commercial Unices. But this should not be surprising, as they share quite a bit of the design relevant to servers, and even some of the major software components (Apache for one).
Only 413, as sadly I could not afford even one of those 875 core machines, much less 413.
Why do you use partial search templates rather than Quick searches? For example, try typing "google Firefox 3 release notes" into a new Firefox 3 profile and hitting enter. Obviously you can change the text "google" to whatever you want, and you can add similar quicksearches with relative ease. Basically, you are just replacing the down arrow key in your current work-flow with the space bar. For Wikipedia the default is "wp [search terms here]", but obviously that can be changed.
Actually, the damned thing is that we know exactly what to do with the spent fuel rods. The IFR reactor design utilizes the fuel far more efficiently than most current reactor designs, meaning that the waste mass is smaller (most waste mass contains lots of still good fuel mixed with the spent fuel. Extracting the good fuel alone leaves us with significantly less waste mass). Further the IFR's waste's radioactivity level reaches that of the ore in only 200 years. The best part of the whole damn thing is that this reactor can be run primarily on the spent fuel of other reactors, rather than new fuel.
But the damn project was canceled due to proliferation concerns, despite the simple fact that this reactor has FAR LESS of a proliferation risk than most operating reactors. The reprocessing is done on site, and the processed fuel is highly radioactive making it almost impossible to sneak off with it.
No standard interface? My understanding was that the Windows drivers provided a file detailing capabilities and settings. Windows XP adds these to the print properties dialog. When printing the object to be printed is passed to the driver via the GDI interface, along with the values of all the settings selected by the user. The driver converts the GDI document to its native language and passes it on to the transport layer driver through another standard interface. This step allows the different physical transport layers (LPT, file, USB, windows network printing, and even the standard Unix print server system.)
I have found the HP standard printer system to be absolutely abysmal. It installs a bunch of crap (The "hp director" suite). And guess what, some HP printers and scanners will not share a single HP director suite, resulting in two copies of a bunch of bloated useless software that does not even generally work right. HP does not appear to have any way to download just the actual drivers for the printer. (The true drivers, not the drivers plus monitoring programs and other crap). Basically, after seeing how poorly HP does consumer printers I plan on buying Cannon printers in the future.
The problem with this idea is that people will end up using '.' (the root domain) as the top-level domain. I mean the technology would allow for a website at http://com./ just as much as it allows for http://www.slashdot.org./ If the ICANN agreement prevented use of the domains in that fashion, then expect to see many TLDs with only 'www' as a valid second level domain. For example we might see http://www.disney./ (the tailing slashes in this message are for clarity purposes. Obviously the root domain dot would still be optional.)
The result would be all the same problems that having just one TLD would have.
FreeDos is not nearly as desireable as other systems, because DOS's kernel itself is an extremely minimalistic kernel. It is not really modular or configurable, and drivers for DOS can be a bigger pain than for other systems. Using an embedded Linux Kernel is far more common. Linux may require a slightly greater footprint than raw DOS (I'm not sure it does, but it may), but has much better infrastructure available. Further DOS's design is (AIUI) not suitable for devices needing a real-time OS, so those devices would not use DOS either.
Courts have enforced verbal contracts many times. There is in general no legal need for any signatures on a written contract, must less a witness signature. That said having a witness signature makes the contract far easier to enforce, and a contract may certainly specify that it is not valid without a witness signature, but that does not mean the law in general requires it.
However, the whole contract/license GPL issue is generally moot. If they did not agree to the GPL, they have no right to distribution, and therefore are in violation of the copyright. If the GPL is not valid, the same thing is true. However, if the GPL is valid, and they did agree to it, they must follow the terms regardless of whether it is a contract or not.
Ok, ignore my previous post. After looking closely, I see the key concept "intent was to replicate, as exactly as possible, the image of certain Toyota vehicles". I suppose the "as exactly as possible" is the issue. This would not affect many models which are not intended to replicate "as exactly as possible", but rather as exactly as desired, which would likely have significant creative input.
So, If I use special equipment to automatically model some object without adding any creative input, I have no copyright? That is not a big surprise.
However, if I model the same object by hand, I would have copyright on the model? If so that sounds fine. A hand modeled object will have some level of creativity in which points of the polygon were chosen, what resolution he different components were modeled at, any intentional differences from the original for aesthetic reasons, etc.
If this ruling does have any impact on hand modeled objects it is a gross error of law.
I do further believe that if the ruling really does indicate that models cannot infringe existing copyrights, then it is a gross error of law too. An exact model of a sculpture infringes the copyright to the sculpture it in exactly the same way that an effectively exact recreation by hand would.
Corruption only becomes a concern to the public when it is backed by force, something which only the government can apply.
[snip]
And that official will be replaced by another corrupt official. As long as the government is able to manipulate the economy, individuals and businesses will flock to them to get manipulation in their favor (otherwise they risk seeing unfavorable legislation forced against them).
The problem is that even if the state cannot manipulate the market, there will still be business interests attempting to manipulate the government to effectively enforce said business's
monopoly. You do correctly identify the end problem though being the state. The state must not be corruptible, or corporations will work tirelessly to corrupt it. It is as simple as that.
And please do note that the state does not have a monopoly on force. Physical force, sure, but sufficiently large corporations have a surprising amount of market force, which can sometimes be just as effective as physical force.
(Consider a cabal of the worlds largest 30 or so corporations, and how they would be able to manipulate completely unregulated markets if no general regulation (such as anti-trust laws) were also present.).
Properly working regulation may keep corporations in check, but it still requires a state that the businesses really cannot corrupt. So the state is to blame for being corruptible, but the corporations are to blame for exploiting that fact. End result though is that the state needs to change.
Think more like StarOffice. StarOffice is OO.org + additional proprietary code. SunJDK form Version 7 on will be OpenJDK + additional proprietary code.
He was obviously trying to reference the 8086 compatibility inherent in Real Mode. (Some Bios'es limit the first few instructions to 8086 compatible code, despite real mode have some newer 80186 and I think even 80286 instructions available. It does seem a bit odd that there is a mode in current gen processors, (which by the old naming would be 80686, and by modern naming is 686) for the 8086 ( which by modern naming would be the 86, or perhaps 086). However, I must say that is excellent backwards compatibility.
You do realize that the W80 physics package has a max yield of 150 kt. It would fit in the trunk of a car. It would just about fit into a large backpack. I don't know how much space is needed for the rest of the bomb, but I would tend to suspect the physics package is the largest part. So to me it looks like a backpack-sized nuke of 100kt may indeed be possible. Now it would be too heavy to actually carry on your back, as the weight of the W80 is 290 lb, but it is still damn small. However, gathering the expertise and equipment to create a bomb that small with that high a yield would be noticed. A tactical strike on the production facility would eliminate the danger rather quickly. You do have a very good point about altitude of detonation.
So basically, USB 3 the real spec is available. This defines the USB interface. Any host controller designed that meets the USB 3 specification would work just fine. If it does not follow Intel's Host controller spec, it will just need to use a different driver. All USB 3 client devices should work with all USB 3 hosts, regardless of what standard the controller chip uses. Is that all correct?
If so, I really don't see what the big deal is. AMD can create their own host controller spec, or they can wait for Intel's free one. Since Intel is publishing this spec for free use by the others, I don't see what is wrong with them having them release to market first. Not releasing at the same time as Intel is simply the cost of using Intel's spec, rather than creating your own.
Or am I missing something significant here?
Well http://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/mandatory_deposit.html#mandatory seems to indicate otherwise. Granted that there are many exceptions to exclude classes of works where depositing is not possible or practical, or that the Library of Congress has no interest in.
Even the United States lacks this. Well, there is the Statutes at Large, which lists the bills passed exactly as passed in chronological order. This is terribly inconvenient. If one statute amends another, one would have to copy out the original, and then edit it as specified.
The US Code is an attempt at compiling the actual laws together as amended, with catagorical ordering. However, only certain titles of the code are enacted into positive law. Obviously a statute changing those titles amends the text of the Code. Those amendments are incorporated in the next printing.
However, other laws are codified separately. When possible the exact sections of the statue are inserted into the proper places in the code, with only minor editorial changes. However, not all law gets codified, meaning that one would still need to refer back to the Statues at Law. The sections not enacted into positive law also are problematic.
This situation though might be better than what the UK currently has. I am not familiar enough with the UK system to know for sure.
While you have a point, it is important to realize that the documents are generally available for reference at libraries or other public locations. Indeed the town hall (for local law) or state capitol (for State law) should have any standard referenced by applicable law available for public viewing. In the worst case you just request the document via inter-library loan, or view the mandatory deposited copy at the Library of Congress.
I do agree though that this is less than ideal, but it is not quite as bad as your post makes it sound.