Fans of Chinese slave labor can buy apparel here. If you're not a fan you might consider supporting legislation such as this. If you don't know enough about the topic to decide whether or not you're a fan, do some reading. My government has. Well, enough to have formed a policy on the matter. If you're all about self-reliance, just feed the term Laogai into Google.
Who said anything about credit? I was talking about life.
You were, and in doing so you confuse the matter. The purpose of this research is reducing bad press. If there was no bad press created when some child with both arms blown off gets paraded though Europe there would be no effort expended attempting to find a way not to create them. The motive is entirely selfish and is only indirectly related to collateral body counts.
If less shrapnel means we can fire a slug into a building without wiping out an innocent family across the street, that's great, and I'll be happy to pay the cost, as I already do is so many ways. My point was that it won't work; we could shoot whip-cream shells from our howitzers and still be considered the retches of Earth.
I'd be even happier if we didn't have to attack nations that surround their quasi-military facilities with neighborhoods, but if we don't care to have New York, London or Paris gassed, infected or nuked by theocratic zealots then we must act. If the rest of the world doesn't appreciate the effort, well, don't worry, we'll cope.
I think I understand you: preventing the death of injury of non combatants is only worthwhile if it results in some PR benefit. You confirm what I already suspected about the attitude of a large proportion of Americans.
Are you suggesting that the larger proportion of whatever people you're a part of have some more noble motivation? The BAF crowd has managed to induce a great deal of self loathing in my country by convincing people that you do. I, however, am not nearly naive enough to believe that tripe.
A decrease in collateral damage means fewer innocent civilians getting killed or wounded. How much money is that worth?
Nothing.
Nothing because the BAF crowd will still claim that our military is a bloodthirsty tool of imperialism, responsible for indiscriminantly murdering as many innocents as possible. We may as well use cheap, old fashioned shells for all the credit we'll be given.
Part of the point of having an email address is so that people can conract me without having a prior relationship.
Yes, obviously. Your client would accept messages not on your block lists. Before you open a new message you validate the signature. If it's not spam you "open, and accept future messages signed by this party," which updates your white list. If it's spam you "delete and block future messages signed by this party." If it's not signed you never see it or send it to another folder for examination. People having no prior relationship need only send a message that contains a valid signature. You only need to sign off on that signature one time. What's the problem?
so that I could be reasonably sure johndoe@hotmail.com actually is him and sent from hotmail
The messages would be signed using certs issued by ISPs which were signed by certificate authorities. If you trust that authority you would have your ability to verify the signature.
If an ISP starts selling bandwidth to spammers you can block that specific ISP. If someone's cert is compromised you can block that specific signature. Now that a universal method of identifying senders exists (independently of any namespace like DNS) we can easily build collaborate block lists....all we need are verifiable signatures
When I can convince my grandmother to establish a challenge-response system on her AOL account
Do you suppose AOL wouldn't be happy to establish it for her for a small fee? All that's left now is for your grandmother to ask for it. That's where you come in...
It can't just be the consumer solving this problem
Actually, it has to be. All other interests involved would very much like to either a.) send you spam, or b.) sell the means for spam to be sent to you. This includes your ISP, and your bought-and-paid-for government. The day the Senator from Disney is told of the need for an exception to whatever spam laws get created, the process of erosion will begin. I am predicting the ultimate fate of something that doesn't exist yet, but you know I'm right.
and with verifiable signatures, a question of creating a binding international law that would have most/.ers foaming over privacy concerns
Binding international law? What for? If I choose not to receive a message from you unless it's signed by a cert issued by an authority I trust, directly or indirectly, how would a global government improve my spam blocking ability?
Anonymity is the enabler of spam. If and when spam is ever dealt with anonymity, by definition, will be the first thing to go. Bank on it. Slashsnot may foam all it wants. It will anyway.
Otherwise our individual protection efforts will only divert the spam to the inbox of someone less savvy
When an individual can not send mail without a signature, signatures will become ubiquitous ISP provided built-in boiler-plate for the less savvy. Not a problem.
The story ends with the conclusion that the existence of spam is the consumers fault. The assertion is that if spam didn't generate responses and, in turn, revenue, these business interests wouldn't bother causing it to be created, however indirectly.
That logic is hard to argue with, but I have an additional way to fault the consumer. Why does the consumer continue to tolerate the open sewer that is contemporary email? It's not just spam. Millions of these sheeple have been infected with viruses sent via email. Spam and viruses, and a seaming endless ability to tolerate large quantities of both...
One would think that after enough of this crap occurred, consumers would eventually consider dealing with it. RTFA to discover that you can't count on ISPs to deal with it. They value spammers and the extra money they're willing to pay. RTFA to discover that respectable companies participate via a web of indirection and plausible deniability. The only thing we have is the end user. If the end user isn't willing to deal with the problem, no one will.
If the end user was willing to deal with the problem, then it becomes a simple matter. All that would be needed is a requirement that senders provide a verifiable signature in all messages, and easy to use white lists to remember the 'ok' parties. If the end user were willing to a.) obtain a cert that allows them to sign and b.) tolerate the need to not blindly open mail that hadn't been placed on their white-list previously, spam would not exist.
The key here is the end user. Until they come around spam is inevitable.
Almost agreed. If you are allowed to unmount the volume, and root does not use the volume, it should be unmounted. The exception for root is quite necessary, i think. Root's actions should not be changed or delayed in any way by a user
Root's "actions" would not be changed or delayed in any way if non-root removes a mount that root is using. Any root "action" on such non-root mount implicitly includes the possibility that it may end abruptly when the non-root mount is removed; nothing has been changed or delayed. If root forms a dependency on a non-root mount and that mount vanishes, root gets what root deserves. If non-root users are allowed to disappear root's mounts, root again gets exactly what root deserves. What is the problem, specifically?
That is, the user should normally not be able to simply eject a CD, cause it might be that somebody else is the one using it.
Yes, the user should be able to simply eject a CD (the user has the authority simply because the user has direct access to the console,) or unmount any filesystem the user otherwise has the authority to have mounted. If this causes the process of someone else to fail, or wipe out hundreds of man-hours of work, or make the server erupt into a lava geyser from Hades, that is between the person managing the filesystems and those who depend on him. If some miracle of a program (including the kernel) can't fail gracefully when a volume disappears, that bug is between whoever cares and the software vendor. The policy of preventing unmounting while filehandles remain open is wrong headed and none of the kernel's damn business. The kernel is not supposed to be providing policy, and Unix is not supposed to be second guessing you for your own good.
If I want to umount/usr on a machine I administer in multiuser mode, the most backtalk I expect from the OS is a prompt, warning me of possible consequences and asking for confirmation. Beyond that, UNMOUNT THE FUCKING VOLUME NOW!
Groupwise wasn't half bad. At one time there was a genuine Unix client for it. I actually used it on HP-UX for a time. It was Motif based, so it sucked, but the fact that it existed still amazes me.
At the moment I'm dealing this Notes/Domino. This platform is also impressive, but they could learn a thing or two from Novell. Especially in the GUI department. The 5.x Notes client is still a buggy, weird mess, which is a shame because the server hiding behind is it very worthy of respect. The last version of Groupwise I used (6.x? perhaps? this was 3 years ago) worked like a normal, 3 pane Email client. It was stable on Win95, if a little piggy.
Yeah, me too. You lamers. All you're doing is adapting old ideas that you didn't invent to new situations. You should just deal with the problem and stop trying to improve your situation. Who do you think you are? People with free will? WTF is wrong with you?
If you want good behavior from your wireless system, you're supposed to go forth and spend large sums of money on exotic, highly vertical equipment from specialized vendors. How do you expect to command respect from anyone if you don't do it that way?
Idiots.
Re:Su-30 series or Quality/Quantity
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In-Flight Reboot?
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What about it? Did a Mig-42 shootdown something in Iraq, or are you just tossing off to exotic Mig fantasies because.... well, who knows why?
Re:Su-30 series or Quality/Quantity
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In-Flight Reboot?
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· Score: 3, Informative
"There is a good example of an air combat situation atht happened in the first gulf war. The only western plane to be shot down in air combat was an F-18 on an attack mission that was intercepted by an obviously experienced Iraqi Mig-25 pilot. The Mig-25 was already obsolete then in terms of technology but the sheer speed of the plane (Mach 2.8+) is unmatched by any other fighter. The Mig-25 went on after shooting down the F-18 to buzz an EF-111 raven that was providing ECM for the mission causing the raven to have to manouver to avoid the incoming missiles and drop back from the attack mission which was then unprotected by ECM and subsequently another F-18 was shot down by a SAM. No less than two F-15's and two F-16's all attempted to intercept the Mig-25, two of them firing missiles, but the Mig-25 used it's tremendous speed advantage to easily avoid the interceptors and reach its base."
The Mig-25 borders on a desparation weapon. It was designed specifically to counter high altitude bombers and spy planes that the United States routinely flew over Soviet airspace. In that it failed. It's fairly clear today that a Mig-25 could not sustain the speed or attain the altitude necessary to attack an SR-71.
The Soviet Union pawned off various models of the Mig-25 to the third world. Iraq had probably 15 Mig-25s at the start of the Gulf War (the first), of which perhaps 7 were operational.
The shootdown happened because the Mig was misidentified multiple times as it flew past an American strike package. Had it been identified, it would have been killed. The shootdown was more the result of tactics than technology. That Mig pilot was both brave and lucky.
The Mig was not moving at Mach 2.8. A Mig-25 can only do this at high altitude (70K+) and only for a short time. The shootdown happened between 25-30K, where the F-18's were operating. Flying at almost Mach 3 destroys the engines of a Mig-25. This isn't a problem if you're goal is to hit one high-value, high-altitude target and glide back to base. It does matter if you intend to engage in sustained warfare.
In 1976, a Soviet defector landed a 1976-built Mig-25 in Japan. A few interesting things were learned; with a full load of weapons and fuel a Mig-25 can handle only slightly more than 2Gs of force. At it's best it can handle about 5gs. This is no dog fighter. An F-4 can do better, much less any modern aircraft.
It makes me wonder why the military has less stringent requirements.
They don't. The expectations on civilian aircraft are far lower that what we expect of a warplane. Civilian aircraft have no counter-measures, weapon systems or battlefield integration. Our military is building something that has never been built before and it's going to take a few years to finish it and figure it out.
When they do, an F-22 will wade into a crowd of whatever competition anyone else cares to throw at it and rack up a 10-1 kill ratio. That's how we do stuff.
Just wondering; with enough Javascript, could a contemporary browser implement XForms? My thinking is that a really hairy pile of XSLT could make your XHTML+Javascript do XForms.
XForms, as a replacement for "traditional" forms, while a good idea in theory, is a scary idea in practice because we all know we'll have to wait about half a decade for the implementations to catch up, and suffer all the bugs from half-baked implementations in the mean time. On the other hand, I've witnessed enough proprietary "form builder" and "form runtime" (think CICS, Oracle Forms 2.x and up, etc) systems to know that the world needs a generic, comprehensive starting point to build on. This wheel has been reinvented thousands of times already. Perhaps now it can stop. So as a general purpose forms mechanism, it's a great idea.
...a robot that could attend conferences in your behalf and allow you to communicate via video and audio applications...
I call this a memebite. Oversimplified to the point of absurdity, and then poorly translated by someone in a hurry. It takes all of 2ms to realize that employing a robot to attend a conference is a deeply absurd idea. Microsoft's products do not reflect the epitome of quality one would wish, but don't allow that fact to cause you to think the people working there are really *that* stupid.
Obviously, Microsoft has some sort of tele-presence research going on. The possible applications for tele-presence are many, and hardly absurd. That this got translated into "attending conferences" is the fault of some boothtending microsurf (probably a sexy female, by coincidence) that has spent a little too much time in "business" class flying between "conferences."
If you haven't actually posted some bit on just how stupid this idea actually is, you almost did. Since I have, I'll have a little fun with it;
This robot is going to take the seat on your flights, or just go as baggage?
What happens after hours in a multi-day conference? Imagine a storage room with a dozen remotely operated robots kicking around...
At what point do the presenters decide that in-person attendance is overkill and we find a room of 200+ people (or other bots...) waiting patiently for the bot to adjust the mic properly?
Will conference promoters all have lobotomies and forget that allowing someone to retransmit their product to "who knows where" is probably not going to contribute much revenue?
Will Larry Ellison's "conference bot" be 8' tall and gold plated?
This depends on just how "senior" your executive is. If you're dealing with the senior management of a struggling startup, you can have an indifferent attitude. On the other hand, if Rick Wagoner gets an add for "free porn" in his inbox, you can damn well bet all hell will break loose. If he gets spam it indicates a breakdown occurred in a chain of responsibilities shared by multiple highly paid people. I'd be mad too.
We need to move beyond email. If executive management is using email to do actual business then it needs to grow up. Messages need electronic signatures than can be examined and verified before a message is accessed. Getting a worthy signature needs to cost a bit of money. That's all it would take to kill spam. If you want to get a message to me I require that you pony up and get yourself a signature, otherwise, forget it. Send messages to people who like dysfunctional communication mechanisms.
Why, in this day-in-age, would whale hunting be useful? What can be produced from a dead whale that doesn't have a better alternative in-use already? My limited knowledge of the history of whaling tells me the most important product was whale oil. It's really hard to believe that other forms of oil are more expensive to produce than what it must cost to hunt whales. The hide, perhaps?
As far as the study goes, it is easy to have suspicions about the motives of the researchers. If the motive is to determine long-ago whale populations so that someone can either justify or prevent future whaling, a study coming from university is likely to be shifted toward the latter. In this case it's Stanford and one of the main researchers (Prof. Palumbi) is a "protected marine reserves" advocate.
If this is junk science I don't really care if it prevents whaling; I'm fairly certain the world will survive without the practice. But extrapolating the history of species through genetic analysis is a young field and it would suck to have it be generally discounted before we see what is possible. The moment the political class decides that the results of research might actually matter politically, the who-what-when-where-why of research gets politicized too.
it would free the rest of us to create, inspire, and innovate
Yes it would. Unfortunately, this is bad.
Humans require a certain level of ambient drama in their lives. The amount differs from one specimen to the next but all humans need it. When the world fails to provide the necessary amount of drama, individual humans create it for themselves.
How many people can you have sex with in one day? How many piercing can you have done before it kills you? Who's oppressing you and exactly how do you plan to kill them? How many cults can you be a member of and which is the most extreme?
"Idle hands do the devils work." For most people the stress induced by "work" is necessary to prevent them running amok and ruining themselves or those around them. Sheeple need work.
This is the greatest danger posed by automating away work. Billions of bored people trying to entertain themselves.
You don't have to dream up exotic applications to figure out how we'll end up running out of IPv6 address space. History will repeat itself and we'll run out of IPv6 the same way we ran out of IPv4; lack of foresight.
Huge slices of the IPv4 space have been squandered on poorly thought out allocations. At one time it was common for a university or large corporation to grab up a class A, then proceed to actually use 2% of it. 16 million addresses are simply unavailable due to the 10.x.x.x subnet in RFC1918. That's enough space to operate about 250 class Bs ISPs each having about 250 class C subnets.
When it gets down to brass tacks and we slice up the IPv6 space between the governments, schools, telecoms and other corporations and institutions, you can bet the same inability to predict the future will reveal itself and we'll screw it up all over again.
IPv6 already has many built-in assumptions about the structure of the global Internet. The space isn't a free-for-all; there are official segregations at/32,/48 and/64 (probably others, haven't read the spec in a couple years.) There are "reserved" bits that, no doubt, most device firmware implemented today will assume can never be anything but zero. Unofficially there will be many more, and far more arbitrary segregations, with organizations acting in there own interest to acquire the largest possible piece of the pie. Who's going to tell the military they don't deserve a few million of those 4+ billion/32's?
This is just another baby step in the history of networking. That you think it's a big deal, or some sort of "final solution", is due to a lacking sense of proportion about such technical trivia.
If the global Internet (with IPv4) had existed prior to World War 2, you can bet that political forces would have had a say in the structure of the address space. Sovereign nations would have regulated the space with their own minders running the "official" routers. Enemy states would have claimed authority over the network and issued overlapping ranges. Militaries would have assumed control over vast swaths of space "in the national interest."
Don't assume that there is some grand genius behind IPv6. People can talk all they want about the address space being larger than some vast collection of atoms. The fallibility of our limited intellects will always find a way to mess it up. Bank on it.
How long has that server been in operation? How long will it persist? Slashdotting causes extreme load for, perhaps, one day. Define "brought down." The link is saturated and timeouts occur? Load goes to 100% and requests get ignored? What tragic consequences are there of this? It's a temporary DOS. Is the server actually physically being damaged and costing someone extraordinary amounts of money? I doubt it. Slashdotting may be rude, but it isn't a crime and it's probably not even much of an actual problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Any proof for child or slave labor there?
You're kidding right?
Fans of Chinese slave labor can buy apparel here. If you're not a fan you might consider supporting legislation such as this. If you don't know enough about the topic to decide whether or not you're a fan, do some reading. My government has. Well, enough to have formed a policy on the matter. If you're all about self-reliance, just feed the term Laogai into Google.
Enjoy your Chinese laptop.
Who said anything about credit? I was talking about life.
You were, and in doing so you confuse the matter. The purpose of this research is reducing bad press. If there was no bad press created when some child with both arms blown off gets paraded though Europe there would be no effort expended attempting to find a way not to create them. The motive is entirely selfish and is only indirectly related to collateral body counts.
If less shrapnel means we can fire a slug into a building without wiping out an innocent family across the street, that's great, and I'll be happy to pay the cost, as I already do is so many ways. My point was that it won't work; we could shoot whip-cream shells from our howitzers and still be considered the retches of Earth.
I'd be even happier if we didn't have to attack nations that surround their quasi-military facilities with neighborhoods, but if we don't care to have New York, London or Paris gassed, infected or nuked by theocratic zealots then we must act. If the rest of the world doesn't appreciate the effort, well, don't worry, we'll cope.
I think I understand you: preventing the death of injury of non combatants is only worthwhile if it results in some PR benefit. You confirm what I already suspected about the attitude of a large proportion of Americans.
Are you suggesting that the larger proportion of whatever people you're a part of have some more noble motivation? The BAF crowd has managed to induce a great deal of self loathing in my country by convincing people that you do. I, however, am not nearly naive enough to believe that tripe.
A decrease in collateral damage means fewer innocent civilians getting killed or wounded. How much money is that worth?
Nothing.
Nothing because the BAF crowd will still claim that our military is a bloodthirsty tool of imperialism, responsible for indiscriminantly murdering as many innocents as possible. We may as well use cheap, old fashioned shells for all the credit we'll be given.
Part of the point of having an email address is so that people can conract me without having a prior relationship.
...all we need are verifiable signatures
Yes, obviously. Your client would accept messages not on your block lists. Before you open a new message you validate the signature. If it's not spam you "open, and accept future messages signed by this party," which updates your white list. If it's spam you "delete and block future messages signed by this party." If it's not signed you never see it or send it to another folder for examination. People having no prior relationship need only send a message that contains a valid signature. You only need to sign off on that signature one time. What's the problem?
so that I could be reasonably sure johndoe@hotmail.com actually is him and sent from hotmail
The messages would be signed using certs issued by ISPs which were signed by certificate authorities. If you trust that authority you would have your ability to verify the signature.
If an ISP starts selling bandwidth to spammers you can block that specific ISP. If someone's cert is compromised you can block that specific signature. Now that a universal method of identifying senders exists (independently of any namespace like DNS) we can easily build collaborate block lists.
When I can convince my grandmother to establish a challenge-response system on her AOL account
/.ers foaming over privacy concerns
Do you suppose AOL wouldn't be happy to establish it for her for a small fee? All that's left now is for your grandmother to ask for it. That's where you come in...
It can't just be the consumer solving this problem
Actually, it has to be. All other interests involved would very much like to either a.) send you spam, or b.) sell the means for spam to be sent to you. This includes your ISP, and your bought-and-paid-for government. The day the Senator from Disney is told of the need for an exception to whatever spam laws get created, the process of erosion will begin. I am predicting the ultimate fate of something that doesn't exist yet, but you know I'm right.
and with verifiable signatures, a question of creating a binding international law that would have most
Binding international law? What for? If I choose not to receive a message from you unless it's signed by a cert issued by an authority I trust, directly or indirectly, how would a global government improve my spam blocking ability?
Anonymity is the enabler of spam. If and when spam is ever dealt with anonymity, by definition, will be the first thing to go. Bank on it. Slashsnot may foam all it wants. It will anyway.
Otherwise our individual protection efforts will only divert the spam to the inbox of someone less savvy
When an individual can not send mail without a signature, signatures will become ubiquitous ISP provided built-in boiler-plate for the less savvy. Not a problem.
The story ends with the conclusion that the existence of spam is the consumers fault. The assertion is that if spam didn't generate responses and, in turn, revenue, these business interests wouldn't bother causing it to be created, however indirectly.
That logic is hard to argue with, but I have an additional way to fault the consumer. Why does the consumer continue to tolerate the open sewer that is contemporary email? It's not just spam. Millions of these sheeple have been infected with viruses sent via email. Spam and viruses, and a seaming endless ability to tolerate large quantities of both...
One would think that after enough of this crap occurred, consumers would eventually consider dealing with it. RTFA to discover that you can't count on ISPs to deal with it. They value spammers and the extra money they're willing to pay. RTFA to discover that respectable companies participate via a web of indirection and plausible deniability. The only thing we have is the end user. If the end user isn't willing to deal with the problem, no one will.
If the end user was willing to deal with the problem, then it becomes a simple matter. All that would be needed is a requirement that senders provide a verifiable signature in all messages, and easy to use white lists to remember the 'ok' parties. If the end user were willing to a.) obtain a cert that allows them to sign and b.) tolerate the need to not blindly open mail that hadn't been placed on their white-list previously, spam would not exist.
The key here is the end user. Until they come around spam is inevitable.
Almost agreed. If you are allowed to unmount the volume, and root does not use the volume, it should be unmounted. The exception for root is quite necessary, i think. Root's actions should not be changed or delayed in any way by a user
Root's "actions" would not be changed or delayed in any way if non-root removes a mount that root is using. Any root "action" on such non-root mount implicitly includes the possibility that it may end abruptly when the non-root mount is removed; nothing has been changed or delayed. If root forms a dependency on a non-root mount and that mount vanishes, root gets what root deserves. If non-root users are allowed to disappear root's mounts, root again gets exactly what root deserves. What is the problem, specifically?
That is, the user should normally not be able to simply eject a CD, cause it might be that somebody else is the one using it.
/usr on a machine I administer in multiuser mode, the most backtalk I expect from the OS is a prompt, warning me of possible consequences and asking for confirmation. Beyond that, UNMOUNT THE FUCKING VOLUME NOW!
Yes, the user should be able to simply eject a CD (the user has the authority simply because the user has direct access to the console,) or unmount any filesystem the user otherwise has the authority to have mounted. If this causes the process of someone else to fail, or wipe out hundreds of man-hours of work, or make the server erupt into a lava geyser from Hades, that is between the person managing the filesystems and those who depend on him. If some miracle of a program (including the kernel) can't fail gracefully when a volume disappears, that bug is between whoever cares and the software vendor. The policy of preventing unmounting while filehandles remain open is wrong headed and none of the kernel's damn business. The kernel is not supposed to be providing policy, and Unix is not supposed to be second guessing you for your own good.
If I want to umount
It's 3:00 on the East coast. I wonder if the site is based on that Windows 95 thingy he's made...
Groupwise wasn't half bad. At one time there was a genuine Unix client for it. I actually used it on HP-UX for a time. It was Motif based, so it sucked, but the fact that it existed still amazes me.
At the moment I'm dealing this Notes/Domino. This platform is also impressive, but they could learn a thing or two from Novell. Especially in the GUI department. The 5.x Notes client is still a buggy, weird mess, which is a shame because the server hiding behind is it very worthy of respect. The last version of Groupwise I used (6.x? perhaps? this was 3 years ago) worked like a normal, 3 pane Email client. It was stable on Win95, if a little piggy.
Color me unimpressed.
Yeah, me too. You lamers. All you're doing is adapting old ideas that you didn't invent to new situations. You should just deal with the problem and stop trying to improve your situation. Who do you think you are? People with free will? WTF is wrong with you?
If you want good behavior from your wireless system, you're supposed to go forth and spend large sums of money on exotic, highly vertical equipment from specialized vendors. How do you expect to command respect from anyone if you don't do it that way?
Idiots.
What about it? Did a Mig-42 shootdown something in Iraq, or are you just tossing off to exotic Mig fantasies because.... well, who knows why?
"There is a good example of an air combat situation atht happened in the first gulf war. The only western plane to be shot down in air combat was an F-18 on an attack mission that was intercepted by an obviously experienced Iraqi Mig-25 pilot. The Mig-25 was already obsolete then in terms of technology but the sheer speed of the plane (Mach 2.8+) is unmatched by any other fighter. The Mig-25 went on after shooting down the F-18 to buzz an EF-111 raven that was providing ECM for the mission causing the raven to have to manouver to avoid the incoming missiles and drop back from the attack mission which was then unprotected by ECM and subsequently another F-18 was shot down by a SAM. No less than two F-15's and two F-16's all attempted to intercept the Mig-25, two of them firing missiles, but the Mig-25 used it's tremendous speed advantage to easily avoid the interceptors and reach its base."
The Mig-25 borders on a desparation weapon. It was designed specifically to counter high altitude bombers and spy planes that the United States routinely flew over Soviet airspace. In that it failed. It's fairly clear today that a Mig-25 could not sustain the speed or attain the altitude necessary to attack an SR-71.
The Soviet Union pawned off various models of the Mig-25 to the third world. Iraq had probably 15 Mig-25s at the start of the Gulf War (the first), of which perhaps 7 were operational.
The shootdown happened because the Mig was misidentified multiple times as it flew past an American strike package. Had it been identified, it would have been killed. The shootdown was more the result of tactics than technology. That Mig pilot was both brave and lucky.
The Mig was not moving at Mach 2.8. A Mig-25 can only do this at high altitude (70K+) and only for a short time. The shootdown happened between 25-30K, where the F-18's were operating. Flying at almost Mach 3 destroys the engines of a Mig-25. This isn't a problem if you're goal is to hit one high-value, high-altitude target and glide back to base. It does matter if you intend to engage in sustained warfare.
In 1976, a Soviet defector landed a 1976-built Mig-25 in Japan. A few interesting things were learned; with a full load of weapons and fuel a Mig-25 can handle only slightly more than 2Gs of force. At it's best it can handle about 5gs. This is no dog fighter. An F-4 can do better, much less any modern aircraft.
It makes me wonder why the military has less stringent requirements.
They don't. The expectations on civilian aircraft are far lower that what we expect of a warplane. Civilian aircraft have no counter-measures, weapon systems or battlefield integration. Our military is building something that has never been built before and it's going to take a few years to finish it and figure it out.
When they do, an F-22 will wade into a crowd of whatever competition anyone else cares to throw at it and rack up a 10-1 kill ratio. That's how we do stuff.
Just wondering; with enough Javascript, could a contemporary browser implement XForms? My thinking is that a really hairy pile of XSLT could make your XHTML+Javascript do XForms.
XForms, as a replacement for "traditional" forms, while a good idea in theory, is a scary idea in practice because we all know we'll have to wait about half a decade for the implementations to catch up, and suffer all the bugs from half-baked implementations in the mean time. On the other hand, I've witnessed enough proprietary "form builder" and "form runtime" (think CICS, Oracle Forms 2.x and up, etc) systems to know that the world needs a generic, comprehensive starting point to build on. This wheel has been reinvented thousands of times already. Perhaps now it can stop. So as a general purpose forms mechanism, it's a great idea.
...a robot that could attend conferences in your behalf and allow you to communicate via video and audio applications...
I call this a memebite. Oversimplified to the point of absurdity, and then poorly translated by someone in a hurry. It takes all of 2ms to realize that employing a robot to attend a conference is a deeply absurd idea. Microsoft's products do not reflect the epitome of quality one would wish, but don't allow that fact to cause you to think the people working there are really *that* stupid.
Obviously, Microsoft has some sort of tele-presence research going on. The possible applications for tele-presence are many, and hardly absurd. That this got translated into "attending conferences" is the fault of some boothtending microsurf (probably a sexy female, by coincidence) that has spent a little too much time in "business" class flying between "conferences."
If you haven't actually posted some bit on just how stupid this idea actually is, you almost did. Since I have, I'll have a little fun with it;
This robot is going to take the seat on your flights, or just go as baggage?
What happens after hours in a multi-day conference? Imagine a storage room with a dozen remotely operated robots kicking around...
At what point do the presenters decide that in-person attendance is overkill and we find a room of 200+ people (or other bots...) waiting patiently for the bot to adjust the mic properly?
Will conference promoters all have lobotomies and forget that allowing someone to retransmit their product to "who knows where" is probably not going to contribute much revenue?
Will Larry Ellison's "conference bot" be 8' tall and gold plated?
Who said the chip was named 'Midori'?
More reading, less typing, eh?
This depends on just how "senior" your executive is. If you're dealing with the senior management of a struggling startup, you can have an indifferent attitude. On the other hand, if Rick Wagoner gets an add for "free porn" in his inbox, you can damn well bet all hell will break loose. If he gets spam it indicates a breakdown occurred in a chain of responsibilities shared by multiple highly paid people. I'd be mad too.
We need to move beyond email. If executive management is using email to do actual business then it needs to grow up. Messages need electronic signatures than can be examined and verified before a message is accessed. Getting a worthy signature needs to cost a bit of money. That's all it would take to kill spam. If you want to get a message to me I require that you pony up and get yourself a signature, otherwise, forget it. Send messages to people who like dysfunctional communication mechanisms.
Why, in this day-in-age, would whale hunting be useful? What can be produced from a dead whale that doesn't have a better alternative in-use already? My limited knowledge of the history of whaling tells me the most important product was whale oil. It's really hard to believe that other forms of oil are more expensive to produce than what it must cost to hunt whales. The hide, perhaps?
As far as the study goes, it is easy to have suspicions about the motives of the researchers. If the motive is to determine long-ago whale populations so that someone can either justify or prevent future whaling, a study coming from university is likely to be shifted toward the latter. In this case it's Stanford and one of the main researchers (Prof. Palumbi) is a "protected marine reserves" advocate.
If this is junk science I don't really care if it prevents whaling; I'm fairly certain the world will survive without the practice. But extrapolating the history of species through genetic analysis is a young field and it would suck to have it be generally discounted before we see what is possible. The moment the political class decides that the results of research might actually matter politically, the who-what-when-where-why of research gets politicized too.
it would free the rest of us to create, inspire, and innovate
Yes it would. Unfortunately, this is bad.
Humans require a certain level of ambient drama in their lives. The amount differs from one specimen to the next but all humans need it. When the world fails to provide the necessary amount of drama, individual humans create it for themselves.
How many people can you have sex with in one day? How many piercing can you have done before it kills you? Who's oppressing you and exactly how do you plan to kill them? How many cults can you be a member of and which is the most extreme?
"Idle hands do the devils work." For most people the stress induced by "work" is necessary to prevent them running amok and ruining themselves or those around them. Sheeple need work.
This is the greatest danger posed by automating away work. Billions of bored people trying to entertain themselves.
They've found a way to keep their programmers from spending most of the day browsing Slashdot...
Hmm.
You don't have to dream up exotic applications to figure out how we'll end up running out of IPv6 address space. History will repeat itself and we'll run out of IPv6 the same way we ran out of IPv4; lack of foresight.
/32, /48 and /64 (probably others, haven't read the spec in a couple years.) There are "reserved" bits that, no doubt, most device firmware implemented today will assume can never be anything but zero. Unofficially there will be many more, and far more arbitrary segregations, with organizations acting in there own interest to acquire the largest possible piece of the pie. Who's going to tell the military they don't deserve a few million of those 4+ billion /32's?
Huge slices of the IPv4 space have been squandered on poorly thought out allocations. At one time it was common for a university or large corporation to grab up a class A, then proceed to actually use 2% of it. 16 million addresses are simply unavailable due to the 10.x.x.x subnet in RFC1918. That's enough space to operate about 250 class Bs ISPs each having about 250 class C subnets.
When it gets down to brass tacks and we slice up the IPv6 space between the governments, schools, telecoms and other corporations and institutions, you can bet the same inability to predict the future will reveal itself and we'll screw it up all over again.
IPv6 already has many built-in assumptions about the structure of the global Internet. The space isn't a free-for-all; there are official segregations at
This is just another baby step in the history of networking. That you think it's a big deal, or some sort of "final solution", is due to a lacking sense of proportion about such technical trivia.
If the global Internet (with IPv4) had existed prior to World War 2, you can bet that political forces would have had a say in the structure of the address space. Sovereign nations would have regulated the space with their own minders running the "official" routers. Enemy states would have claimed authority over the network and issued overlapping ranges. Militaries would have assumed control over vast swaths of space "in the national interest."
Don't assume that there is some grand genius behind IPv6. People can talk all they want about the address space being larger than some vast collection of atoms. The fallibility of our limited intellects will always find a way to mess it up. Bank on it.
I am a Republican, so I *MUST* be bigoted, homophobic, chauvinist.
I don't like it much either, hypocrite.
How long has that server been in operation? How long will it persist? Slashdotting causes extreme load for, perhaps, one day. Define "brought down." The link is saturated and timeouts occur? Load goes to 100% and requests get ignored? What tragic consequences are there of this? It's a temporary DOS. Is the server actually physically being damaged and costing someone extraordinary amounts of money? I doubt it. Slashdotting may be rude, but it isn't a crime and it's probably not even much of an actual problem.