You left out county and city taxes, social security, unemployment, pensions. This is one reason that so many companies contract out their payroll to specialists.
Yes, I do it routinely. Dig through instructions and code for "user-agent" in the configuration file. You can pick one, let it pick one, compile one in, relay whatever your browser says, etc. With a little code tweaking you could even have it randomly select a different one every time. (I wonder what that would do.)
Find your congressman and senators, write them letters, and mail them. Mail your own representatives. As a voter in their district you matter most to them. (Email is much less effective. They know about spam just like you do.) Whenever this issue moves into another stage (e.g., draft, committee, floor) write another.
If you want handbooks, check out Congressional Quarterly. The book Lobbying Congress, How the system works is quite relevant, although perhaps disturbing to some. It was written by lobbyists for lobbyists. You will also get other relevant hits with a "lobbying congress" query on Amazon.
Consider the following:
DMCA comments - 300 people wrote or emailed responses during the public comment period.
HIPAA comments - 40,000 people wrote or emailed responses to the Health Privacy regulations during the public comment period.
Home Schooling - Over 500,000 people (mostly opponents) wrote physical letters when government regulations of home schooling were proposed.
These things matter. Your letters matter. Hardcopy physical mail matters most. This is how politicians judge their constituent opinions.
Your congressman and senator has local office visiting times and DC visiting times. Have you ever visited? How about your state representatives? (I visited mine to make sure that if UCITA was brought up that she would know that at least one constituent was opposed.) They try to make these visits easy.
Have you ever been to a political fund raiser? (it is very different and rather entertaining.) Have you ever donated money to the local politicians who support your views? They keep track of these things. A few afternoons or evenings, your name on their mailing list, and a few dollars makes quite a difference. You cannot buy their vote for this, but it makes your opinions an important part of their determination of the public opinions that matter to them. Are your positions worth that effort?
Let's see, PGP was given away for free intially. GnuPG is GPL'ed. What he did was create and give away PGP. And now you demand more?
You are complaining that computers and network access are "unavailable to the poor". This is much less true than you think (at least in the US). A fully functional used computer costs less than a televison. Internet access costs less than cable. Television ownership with cable access is over 50% among the "poor" households. Your complaint is more accurately phrased, "The vast majority of those under the poverty line think that television and cable are more valuable than computers and privacy." What, if anything, are you doing to bridge this gap?
Communication does cost money, but reasonable dial internet access costs only 20-30% of what cable costs. The "digital divide" myth has been falling rapidly. Actual access by the poor has been climbing steadily. They are about 5yrs behind the middle class in terms of market penetration and following the same market growth path. This is in large part fueled by the very low cost of used computers, the growing number of people who know how to use computers, and the low incremental cost of limited use Internet access.
You don't really have to do anything. The poor are already catching up fast.
The experience with municipal power indicates that this is not beneficial in the long term. The municipal power systems grow to be more expensive, lower quality, poorer service than commercial power. This effect is also seen in things like the Post Office vs UPS or Fedex. At the beginning, they may be quite good, but it becomes a bureaucratic entitlement operation. Also, politics is a poor way to make strategic technology decisions. The local telephone company strategies were controlled by politicians and regulators for decades, and look how they dealt with innovation.
Much more effective is changing the regulatory and licensing cost structure so that there can be several alternatives. It is presently very expensive to get the licenses to install systems. Only the very high value streets (like office parks) are worth the cost. Elsewhere, it is limited to retrofits to pre-existing systems (cable, electric, etc.).
In my area, it is the towns with multiple alternative providers that get the best service. This has the unfortunate side effect that the towns with only one provider get the least investment and worsening service. For a while, this will widen the difference between the towns rather than reduce it. The same effect happens with monopoly municipal offerings.
There is often a problem attracting vendors to small markets. A better approach than the monopoly municipal is a non-monopoly cooperative. If the municipality makes the licensing easy for everyone, a cooperative can be set up. If the market remains very small, the coop may remain the only player. But if the market takes off, the coop knows that it must remain responsive or a commercial vendor will enter the market. Coops have been highly successful in other markets, and they co-exist well with commercial vendors. When the government remains neutral the coops that continue to provide good service thrive, the commercial operations that provide good service thrive, and the low quality vendors fail.
There are many good reasons sent in so far, but this one has been missed. Many commercial entities willingly share mutually beneficial actions for free. The classic example is the free sidewalk clearing. If each store owner clears their portion of the sidewalk, all benefit. It is silly to charge a fee.
Much of the bug fixing and feature enhancement falls into this category. We each fix our own and cooperate in developing the features that meet our needs. It is simpler and cheaper to just share these for free instead of wasting lots of money on lawyers.
This is also why the wars over licenses (like GPL) get so vehement. It is things like the GPL that keep this sharing of effort from benefitting the parasites. Local merchants associations get vehement about stores that don't take care of their portion of the sidewalk (e.g. freeloaders). Software developers care about the license to deal with freeloaders.
The book J.R.R. Tolkien by Tom Shippey is another interesting read for Tolkien fans. He reviews Tolkien from several literary perspectives: as myth, as related to Tolkien's life, as related to lingustics, and as story. Tolkien reviewers usually fall into either love or hate category with little middle ground. Shippey is in the love category.
Here will you find the mythic story relationships and linguistic relationships between Beowolf (the OE epic) and the Hobbit. There are also philological relationships between story, placenames, and character in the real british isles and their use in LOTR. This adds another dimension to the re-reading of LOTR.
There is an experimental system similar to what you describe. I do not have its present status. The first generation system was run and then shut down. It was a useful experiment but not cost effective. The second generation uses a central tower in a field of flat mirrors to heat salt. This generates a large pool of molten salt that can then be used for thermal power generation at times when power is most valuable, rather than times when the sun is shining. It also deals with the issue of power at night much better than batteries do.
Neither is likely to be cost effective at present electricity prices and construction costs. These are funded as research efforts to gain experience with the technology at full scale. Given present politics it will be very hard to make the change to price electricity high enough to justify this as a power source unless someone finds a way to drop construction costs and operating costs dramatically.
Meanwhile PV and wind both offer cost effective solutions in their individual niches.
The economics of solar power are actually excellent. A few pertinent facts:
1.) Solar cell sales have grown at a CAGR over 15% for the last 15 years. PV production has been running at capacity for over 10 years, despite construction of new PV manufacturing facilities. PV sales are on allocation and have multi-year backlogs.
2.) PV sales are now far more dominated by considerations of cost effective power generation than by considerations of cost effective publicity generation.
3.) US installations of solar cells are very widespread, but are now being installed mostly by people who do not spend money on publicity regarding the installations.
4.) Most installations are cost justified by the cost of installing grid power vs the cost of installing the PV system. For a small data monitoring system (commonly needed for railroads, natural resource sites, etc.) the cost of the PV system is usually less than the cost of installing one utility pole. So you see PV power even in fairly urban areas. For larger installations, the construction cost tradeoff is usually something like 1-2 miles from power line to power need. Then PV makes sense. There are lots of sites like these, but they are all miles from the nearest road and get little publicity.
Ah, the horrors of Unicode. The referenced article is too Sinocentric. Unicode's problems go further. Unicode is both a european solution to european problems and a european solution to asian problems.
The Japanese hate Unicode. If you bother to ask them, which the web did not, you find a loud and impolite dislike for Unicode. The Japanese want their ISO 2022 solution, aka shift-JIS.
The history of encodings is roughly:
1. There was chaos.
2. Then there was ASCII (the roman alphabet) pleasing to latin and english speakers.
3. Then there were all the ISO 8859 and ISO 2022 encodings. These let all the european languages mix together with ASCII.
4. Then Japan, Korea, and Vietnam define their own ISO 2022 encodings that make sense in the local language, and let these languages mix together with the european languages and ASCII.
5. But ISO 2022 is a complex patchwork of special cases. So at the same time the Asians were inventing their ISO 2022 solutions, Unicode was being invented.
Unicode 1.0 provided a viable solution to modern european languages, but could not encode historical documents or asian languages properly. The Unicode 2.0 effort fixed the historical european language problem by adding in the alphabets for these "dead" languages. Unicode 2.0 brought the asian encodings to the point where they were usable.
Japan and Korea get no benefit from Unicode. In fact, their ISO 2022 encodings are at least in "alphabetical order" for the relevant alphabets. Unicode is just a jumble.
Meanwhile China has a unique problem. They do not have an agreed alphabet. The Japanese all around the world agree on what characters define Kanji. There may be different fonts, but there is one agreed alphabet. Similarly, the Koreans and the Vietnamese have one agreed alphabet. These alphabets are huge, with thousands of characters, but they are fixed and agreed worldwide.
China has not agreed on an alphabet. Different regions use different alphabets. Chinese speak numerous different languages and have invented an amazing alphabet that works as a single writing form for all those languages. But there are disagreements. Furthermore, some regions of China are still inventing new letters for the alphabet. It is not a fixed and stable thing like european alphabets. You can invent new letters. (These really are new letters, not just new fonts.)
The Chinese have invented many encodings as a result. The two most popular (Big5 and GB2312) are not ISO 2022 compatible. There is a new, less widely used encoding that is a superset encoding of BIG5, GB2312, and other encodings, and that is ISO 2022 compatible.
Unicode did not accept the approach of leaving all these alphabets as different. They share most of their glyphs. Giving each region and language its own complete section would have blown the 50K limit of Unicode 2.0. They smushed all these different alphabets into one blob by combining anything that had similar glyphs into one character.
This left Unicode 2.0 telling the Chinese, ignore all those letters we don't like. You don't use them much anyhow. It destroyed any notion of alphabetic order in the encodings for any asian language. And it is usable for modern text communication. Unicode 3.0 promises to do better, and probably will.
But since all these languages can use the ISO 2022 encodings with fully compatable mixture of languages, why not just use ISO 2022 and forget Unicode? The problem is the patchwork nature of ISO 2022. The encoding rules are complex. ISO 2022 is a terrible internal format. A chinese character may take from 2 to 9 bytes to encode. And it gets worse as you dig further. UCS-2 and UCS-4 are very nice friendly internal formats for computers. It is trivial to convert from UCS-2 or UCS-4 into UTF-8 for transmission.
It is also pretty simple to translate from UCS-2 or UCS-4 into ISO 2022 encodings. So the ISO 2022 encodings actually can make sense for network transmission.
These issues will just get worse as you include other languages, like historical chinese, chinese border languages, and south asian languages. As with chinese, some of these have the fundamentally hard problem that they do not agree on a single alphabet.
Re:Question on brightness/contrast
on
XFree 4.1.0 Out
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· Score: 2
Modelines and LCDs are a long running problem for X. Very few laptop makers provide the documentation needed to get these configured entirely right. There is little X can do beyond begging, pleading, and asking customers to beg and plead. Threats don't work.
If the driver for your chip supports gamma (not all do), you could try various gamma settings. This is not really brightness controls but might accomplish what you need.
First, consider the sniffer. You go to another country, at an unknown company, where they say they want to watch how you crack systems, and you demonstrate how. I have to agree with the judge that you have no reasonable expectation of privacy.
Second, the abnormal sequence of penetrate, copy, then get warrant, then read is reasonable by analogy to other warrant exceptions. After arresting someone the police are permitted to seize or protect items that might reasonably be expected to be destroyed during the wait for a warrant. It is like seizing the automobile of a fleeing suspect. You can't get the warrant in advance because you do not know what car will be used. So you seize the car at the time of arrest, then get the warrant, then inspect the car. This abnormal sequence shows such care, and is reasonable considering that knowledge of the arrests might quickly trigger destruction of data. Penetrate and copy must be done fast. Then they can wait for the warrant before reading.
The option of warrant before arrest was not reasonable because prior to the arrest they lacked sufficient information to identify what they wanted to seize. It would have been an unacceptably generic and wide ranging warrant.
As a member of several industry associations I can testify to their significance. A well organized lobbying group can be very effective. But these are costly and require a few skilled staffers who can work effectively with politicians. I.e., self-righteous intolerant loudmouths need not apply.
There is another highly effective scenario that is open to anyone. Contact your own representative. My experience was:
Me: Hello. I'm from your district and I would like to talk to you about UCITA.
Rep: Pleased to meet you. What is UCITA?
Me:... explains UCITA, describes advocates and opponents, describes my opposition
Rep: Thank you. I'll inform you of any state actions regarding it. You might also want to contact Reps X and Y.
She was not going to commit a position on UCITA, but now understood that this was a controversial issue and not a "good for business" easy decision.
There are many more nukes, they are much *less* powerful, and somewhat more out of control. So the danger is different.
During the 60's the standard nuke was 10-20MT. That is a seriously huge bomb. One bomb will level metropolitan New York. And during the 60's the standard targeting was cities and industrial areas. Targeting precision was poor but when one bomb is that big it matters less. The threat of war is the threat of total civil destruction.
Current ICBM nukes are in the 50-300kT range. That is roughly 1% the size. Current targeting is specific military and industrial sites, and the current targeting has very high precision. This is one reason why the warhead count is so much higher. The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs flattened a roughly 1km radius, and did serious damage for about 5km radius. Current nukes are only a little bit larger.
Current tactical nukes are in the 1-100kT range. These are the ones that are really numerous. They are seriously destructive, but not an end to civilization. Think in terms of having the impact of a major tornado. We survive dozens of those each year. They cause widespread destruction, loss of life, and we recover from it.
The threat of an attack that causes huge damage is much higher than it was before. The threat of an attack that threatens the end of civilization is much lower.
The reason for concern and one motivation for missile defense is that this much lower level of destruction makes blackmail threats much more credible. Few doubt that Saddam Hussein would be willing to use a tactical nuke. The North Koreans have already made veiled threats about their willingness. The policy makers have to consider the potential of a secret threat to flatten downtown SF if some treay deal is not made.
There have been a variety of real world experiences with multi-threaded CPUs. Two of the more interesting are:
The Denelcor HEP. Only a few were made, and this dates way back to 1985, but it was a really neat multi-threaded CPU. It ran a variety of Unix, and had some reasonable extensions to adapt Fortran (even now probably the most popular number crunching language) to the multi-threaded CPU world.
The Alewife project at MIT. A variety of interesting ideas. Nothing ever really past the prototypes was finished to my knowledge. The concepts of operation are fun to examine.
These are an interesting complement to the SMP approach.
Building a community, real or virtual, is hard work. The really enduring communities have been ones that provide a mechanism to exclude unwanted outsiders. This seems a bit contradictory, but it is the reality. The community is open to those who share its ethos, it is closed to those who will not share its ethos, and it ejects those who attempt to disrupt it.
This is much easier in real world communities. The obnoxious teenager can be shunned. Body language, side conversations, polite hostility, and other powerful social tools can be used. The truly anti-social personalities are eventually ejected. Usually the social pressure of being openly unwelcome suffices. Sometimes the police are employed. This also has a beneficial side. The social reactions are usually modulated. They begin with discrete corrective suggestions. They escalate to the combined carrot and stick of rejection for bad behavior and acceptance for good behavior. This can change those who are open to change.
But there is a powerful mix of nihilism and solipcism at work in US and European cultures. Contemplate the horrifying changes to things like childrens sports. Where at one time (long ago, but I am old enough to remember it) these were a method for teaching children how to manage anger and conflict without becoming anti-social and violent. It taught the social skill of "Good Sportsmanship", albeit an ideal that was rarely acheived. The usual achievement was grudging politeness despite frustration and anger. Today it too has succumbed to the solipcist hostility and the nihilist willingness to destroy that which you cannot win.
The virtual communities have it much harder. It is extremely hard to eject the destructive players. It is extremely hard to provide the gradual responses and discreet (un-embarassing) feedback for inappropriate behavior. And its openness makes it more attactive to those frustrated anti-social personalities that have been ejected from real world communities. These people share the human desire to be part of a community, but have yet to learn the skills needed. They flock to the wide open access of the virtual community and thereby increase the stress on it.
If you read the rest of the details you will find that the DoD is buying itself a worldwide phone system for real cheap. They are paying pennies on the dollar for use of the satellites. They are installing crypto phones in the field to use Iridium. This lets them shift routine traffic off the heavily loaded secure sats.
The other blather is just added benefits included to pacify public imbecility.
Yes. Aftermarket makers have been sued. In cases where the aftermarket offering might be confused with the original (e.g. counterfeits) they have lost. In cases like this, where it is clearly not the original, the suits have been resolved generally on an anti-trust basis or contract law basis. One fairly basic family of anti-trust cases revolves around the question of to what extent 3rd party service would invalidate warranty, service, or other contracts. E.g., does a 3rd party oil change invalidate the automobile engine warranty? What about a 3rd party engine rebuild?
Situations like the Cuecat revolve around ownership. If you own the cuecat (which in my opinion you do) then the most Cuecat can do is void all warranty and refuse to do business with you. No loss in my opinion. I don't want to do business with them either. The situation where you modify their device but then expect to make use of their services, e.g. the ID removal, are unclear.
Most Unix mail clients are able to support ISO-8859. Now, ISO 8859-1 (Western European) is almost ASCII for the first 128 characters. So a great many people say "ASCII" when they should say ISO 8859-1. As for why "American", well the Americans got their standardization act together much sooner than ISO (on this issue). The ASCII characterset is almost correct for Western European languages, and the spelling errors that result from using it do not cause confusion. It was tolerable while ISO worked out the rest of the issues for small alphabet languages. (In fact the international standard at the time was the Baudot characters dating way back to the days of the telegraph. Baudot was a small subset of the ASCII characterset, yet used for all international telegrams.)
These days, any decent mailer on Unix is capable of support all the ISO 8859 components: 8859-1 through 8859-10 at least. People still (incorrectly) call this 8bit text format ASCII. But by covering 8859 you have included Europe, North and South America, Australia, for native languages. Since English, Russian, and French are also official languages (or defacto languages) for much of Africa and Asia, you have pretty good coverage. Only East Asia is lacking support. In fact, many mailers (at least the ones that I use) are also JIS capable, so that intermixed 8859 and JIS is presented properly. This covers Japan. So the bulk of the worlds computer users are supported.
Unicode will spread, but much more slowly. The diffence between Unicode and 8859-x is much smaller. The win is in the Asian languages and other languages with really large charactersets. But Unicode made some unfortunate political errors. They angered the Japanese (somehow) and the Japanese still insist that the JIS standards be used rather than Unicode. (I've been in those standards meetings. If you bother to ask the Japanese you learn that they despise Unicode.) The Chinese and others seem more indifferent.
And when you say Unicode you really must decide what you mean. Do you mean Unicode, UTF-7, or UTF-8. And which Unicode? The defective 1.0, the revised 2.0, or the next 3.0?
I forsee 8859 surviving for a while further. UTF-8 is a nicer encoding, but it has this political baggage and its own set of problems.
I'm from the government, I'm here to help you. We know what that means.
Mostly nice meaningless words, the Open Source equivalent of motherhood and apple pie. Yep. We're all for it. But consider the one genuine proposed government action, and the other possible action that they did not propose.
The people who brought me Clipper, Carnivore, DMCA, mandatory library filters, and all the rest now propose to tell me what copyright terms I should put on my personal donation to society. Riiight. Will they eliminate the First Amendment to accomplish this goal? I doubt it. But why did they propose this step.
The real and powerful proposal that they did not make was:
Require that in all electronic data exchange to or from the Federal government at least one acceptable format shall be an open format, without patent, copyright, or other restrictions on its use.
This phrasing would permit things like PDF, since the format is open. It is Adobe's PDF generating software that is closed.
This phrasing would prohibit the present practice of requiring exclusively MS Word formats, or other closed formats. These would only be permitted if there was also an open format available as an alternative.
Then let the government stand back and let the public decide.
Changing the terminology used is vitally important, and articles like these help change the terminology. The use of words like "secure system" mislead the public into thinking that such things exist. Changing the terminology to terms like "takes longer to crack" generates the right thought processes. Systems will be broken. It is merely a matter of how long and how hard people try. This leads to the next important part of the thought process. How to detect breakins, how to reduce loss during breakins, etc.
Talking and thinking in these terms has importance far beyond securing your own system. It affects how users think about their participation and actions. It affects how law enforcement thinks about their reactions. It affects how legislators think. Right now they act like there is some sort of magic fairy dust that you sprinkle on your technology and poof --- an impenetrable secure system. The result is devastating losses when (often inadequate) security processes fail.
Slashdot Mirror
Very definitely put it in the review. If every music reviewers were to warn the buyers about unreadable CDs that will have a big effect.
You left out county and city taxes, social security, unemployment, pensions. This is one reason that so many companies contract out their payroll to specialists.
Yes, I do it routinely. Dig through instructions and code for "user-agent" in the configuration file. You can pick one, let it pick one, compile one in, relay whatever your browser says, etc. With a little code tweaking you could even have it randomly select a different one every time. (I wonder what that would do.)
- DMCA - 300 letters,
- Health care privacy - 40,000
- Home Schooling - 500,000+
Those physical letters count most. See the acm letter or the EFF for examples.Find your congressman and senators, write them letters, and mail them. Mail your own representatives. As a voter in their district you matter most to them. (Email is much less effective. They know about spam just like you do.) Whenever this issue moves into another stage (e.g., draft, committee, floor) write another.
If you want handbooks, check out Congressional Quarterly. The book Lobbying Congress, How the system works is quite relevant, although perhaps disturbing to some. It was written by lobbyists for lobbyists. You will also get other relevant hits with a "lobbying congress" query on Amazon.
Consider the following:
DMCA comments - 300 people wrote or emailed responses during the public comment period.
HIPAA comments - 40,000 people wrote or emailed responses to the Health Privacy regulations during the public comment period.
Home Schooling - Over 500,000 people (mostly opponents) wrote physical letters when government regulations of home schooling were proposed.
These things matter. Your letters matter. Hardcopy physical mail matters most. This is how politicians judge their constituent opinions.
Your congressman and senator has local office visiting times and DC visiting times. Have you ever visited? How about your state representatives? (I visited mine to make sure that if UCITA was brought up that she would know that at least one constituent was opposed.) They try to make these visits easy.
Have you ever been to a political fund raiser? (it is very different and rather entertaining.) Have you ever donated money to the local politicians who support your views? They keep track of these things. A few afternoons or evenings, your name on their mailing list, and a few dollars makes quite a difference. You cannot buy their vote for this, but it makes your opinions an important part of their determination of the public opinions that matter to them. Are your positions worth that effort?
If you care, get out and work with these people.
Let's see, PGP was given away for free intially. GnuPG is GPL'ed. What he did was create and give away PGP. And now you demand more?
You are complaining that computers and network access are "unavailable to the poor". This is much less true than you think (at least in the US). A fully functional used computer costs less than a televison. Internet access costs less than cable. Television ownership with cable access is over 50% among the "poor" households. Your complaint is more accurately phrased, "The vast majority of those under the poverty line think that television and cable are more valuable than computers and privacy." What, if anything, are you doing to bridge this gap?
Communication does cost money, but reasonable dial internet access costs only 20-30% of what cable costs. The "digital divide" myth has been falling rapidly. Actual access by the poor has been climbing steadily. They are about 5yrs behind the middle class in terms of market penetration and following the same market growth path. This is in large part fueled by the very low cost of used computers, the growing number of people who know how to use computers, and the low incremental cost of limited use Internet access.
You don't really have to do anything. The poor are already catching up fast.
The experience with municipal power indicates that this is not beneficial in the long term. The municipal power systems grow to be more expensive, lower quality, poorer service than commercial power. This effect is also seen in things like the Post Office vs UPS or Fedex. At the beginning, they may be quite good, but it becomes a bureaucratic entitlement operation. Also, politics is a poor way to make strategic technology decisions. The local telephone company strategies were controlled by politicians and regulators for decades, and look how they dealt with innovation.
Much more effective is changing the regulatory and licensing cost structure so that there can be several alternatives. It is presently very expensive to get the licenses to install systems. Only the very high value streets (like office parks) are worth the cost. Elsewhere, it is limited to retrofits to pre-existing systems (cable, electric, etc.).
In my area, it is the towns with multiple alternative providers that get the best service. This has the unfortunate side effect that the towns with only one provider get the least investment and worsening service. For a while, this will widen the difference between the towns rather than reduce it. The same effect happens with monopoly municipal offerings.
There is often a problem attracting vendors to small markets. A better approach than the monopoly municipal is a non-monopoly cooperative. If the municipality makes the licensing easy for everyone, a cooperative can be set up. If the market remains very small, the coop may remain the only player. But if the market takes off, the coop knows that it must remain responsive or a commercial vendor will enter the market. Coops have been highly successful in other markets, and they co-exist well with commercial vendors. When the government remains neutral the coops that continue to provide good service thrive, the commercial operations that provide good service thrive, and the low quality vendors fail.
There are many good reasons sent in so far, but this one has been missed. Many commercial entities willingly share mutually beneficial actions for free. The classic example is the free sidewalk clearing. If each store owner clears their portion of the sidewalk, all benefit. It is silly to charge a fee.
Much of the bug fixing and feature enhancement falls into this category. We each fix our own and cooperate in developing the features that meet our needs. It is simpler and cheaper to just share these for free instead of wasting lots of money on lawyers.
This is also why the wars over licenses (like GPL) get so vehement. It is things like the GPL that keep this sharing of effort from benefitting the parasites. Local merchants associations get vehement about stores that don't take care of their portion of the sidewalk (e.g. freeloaders). Software developers care about the license to deal with freeloaders.
Here will you find the mythic story relationships and linguistic relationships between Beowolf (the OE epic) and the Hobbit. There are also philological relationships between story, placenames, and character in the real british isles and their use in LOTR. This adds another dimension to the re-reading of LOTR.
There is an experimental system similar to what you describe. I do not have its present status. The first generation system was run and then shut down. It was a useful experiment but not cost effective. The second generation uses a central tower in a field of flat mirrors to heat salt. This generates a large pool of molten salt that can then be used for thermal power generation at times when power is most valuable, rather than times when the sun is shining. It also deals with the issue of power at night much better than batteries do.
Neither is likely to be cost effective at present electricity prices and construction costs. These are funded as research efforts to gain experience with the technology at full scale. Given present politics it will be very hard to make the change to price electricity high enough to justify this as a power source unless someone finds a way to drop construction costs and operating costs dramatically.
Meanwhile PV and wind both offer cost effective solutions in their individual niches.
The economics of solar power are actually excellent. A few pertinent facts:
1.) Solar cell sales have grown at a CAGR over 15% for the last 15 years. PV production has been running at capacity for over 10 years, despite construction of new PV manufacturing facilities. PV sales are on allocation and have multi-year backlogs.
2.) PV sales are now far more dominated by considerations of cost effective power generation than by considerations of cost effective publicity generation.
3.) US installations of solar cells are very widespread, but are now being installed mostly by people who do not spend money on publicity regarding the installations.
4.) Most installations are cost justified by the cost of installing grid power vs the cost of installing the PV system. For a small data monitoring system (commonly needed for railroads, natural resource sites, etc.) the cost of the PV system is usually less than the cost of installing one utility pole. So you see PV power even in fairly urban areas. For larger installations, the construction cost tradeoff is usually something like 1-2 miles from power line to power need. Then PV makes sense. There are lots of sites like these, but they are all miles from the nearest road and get little publicity.
Ah, the horrors of Unicode. The referenced article is too Sinocentric. Unicode's problems go further. Unicode is both a european solution to european problems and a european solution to asian problems.
The Japanese hate Unicode. If you bother to ask them, which the web did not, you find a loud and impolite dislike for Unicode. The Japanese want their ISO 2022 solution, aka shift-JIS.
The history of encodings is roughly:
1. There was chaos.
2. Then there was ASCII (the roman alphabet) pleasing to latin and english speakers.
3. Then there were all the ISO 8859 and ISO 2022 encodings. These let all the european languages mix together with ASCII.
4. Then Japan, Korea, and Vietnam define their own ISO 2022 encodings that make sense in the local language, and let these languages mix together with the european languages and ASCII.
5. But ISO 2022 is a complex patchwork of special cases. So at the same time the Asians were inventing their ISO 2022 solutions, Unicode was being invented.
Unicode 1.0 provided a viable solution to modern european languages, but could not encode historical documents or asian languages properly. The Unicode 2.0 effort fixed the historical european language problem by adding in the alphabets for these "dead" languages. Unicode 2.0 brought the asian encodings to the point where they were usable.
Japan and Korea get no benefit from Unicode. In fact, their ISO 2022 encodings are at least in "alphabetical order" for the relevant alphabets. Unicode is just a jumble.
Meanwhile China has a unique problem. They do not have an agreed alphabet. The Japanese all around the world agree on what characters define Kanji. There may be different fonts, but there is one agreed alphabet. Similarly, the Koreans and the Vietnamese have one agreed alphabet. These alphabets are huge, with thousands of characters, but they are fixed and agreed worldwide.
China has not agreed on an alphabet. Different regions use different alphabets. Chinese speak numerous different languages and have invented an amazing alphabet that works as a single writing form for all those languages. But there are disagreements. Furthermore, some regions of China are still inventing new letters for the alphabet. It is not a fixed and stable thing like european alphabets. You can invent new letters. (These really are new letters, not just new fonts.)
The Chinese have invented many encodings as a result. The two most popular (Big5 and GB2312) are not ISO 2022 compatible. There is a new, less widely used encoding that is a superset encoding of BIG5, GB2312, and other encodings, and that is ISO 2022 compatible.
Unicode did not accept the approach of leaving all these alphabets as different. They share most of their glyphs. Giving each region and language its own complete section would have blown the 50K limit of Unicode 2.0. They smushed all these different alphabets into one blob by combining anything that had similar glyphs into one character.
This left Unicode 2.0 telling the Chinese, ignore all those letters we don't like. You don't use them much anyhow. It destroyed any notion of alphabetic order in the encodings for any asian language. And it is usable for modern text communication. Unicode 3.0 promises to do better, and probably will.
But since all these languages can use the ISO 2022 encodings with fully compatable mixture of languages, why not just use ISO 2022 and forget Unicode? The problem is the patchwork nature of ISO 2022. The encoding rules are complex. ISO 2022 is a terrible internal format. A chinese character may take from 2 to 9 bytes to encode. And it gets worse as you dig further. UCS-2 and UCS-4 are very nice friendly internal formats for computers. It is trivial to convert from UCS-2 or UCS-4 into UTF-8 for transmission.
It is also pretty simple to translate from UCS-2 or UCS-4 into ISO 2022 encodings. So the ISO 2022 encodings actually can make sense for network transmission.
These issues will just get worse as you include other languages, like historical chinese, chinese border languages, and south asian languages. As with chinese, some of these have the fundamentally hard problem that they do not agree on a single alphabet.
Modelines and LCDs are a long running problem for X. Very few laptop makers provide the documentation needed to get these configured entirely right. There is little X can do beyond begging, pleading, and asking customers to beg and plead. Threats don't work.
If the driver for your chip supports gamma (not all do), you could try various gamma settings. This is not really brightness controls but might accomplish what you need.
First, consider the sniffer. You go to another country, at an unknown company, where they say they want to watch how you crack systems, and you demonstrate how. I have to agree with the judge that you have no reasonable expectation of privacy.
Second, the abnormal sequence of penetrate, copy, then get warrant, then read is reasonable by analogy to other warrant exceptions. After arresting someone the police are permitted to seize or protect items that might reasonably be expected to be destroyed during the wait for a warrant. It is like seizing the automobile of a fleeing suspect. You can't get the warrant in advance because you do not know what car will be used. So you seize the car at the time of arrest, then get the warrant, then inspect the car. This abnormal sequence shows such care, and is reasonable considering that knowledge of the arrests might quickly trigger destruction of data. Penetrate and copy must be done fast. Then they can wait for the warrant before reading.
The option of warrant before arrest was not reasonable because prior to the arrest they lacked sufficient information to identify what they wanted to seize. It would have been an unacceptably generic and wide ranging warrant.
As a member of several industry associations I can testify to their significance. A well organized lobbying group can be very effective. But these are costly and require a few skilled staffers who can work effectively with politicians. I.e., self-righteous intolerant loudmouths need not apply.
... explains UCITA, describes advocates and opponents, describes my opposition
There is another highly effective scenario that is open to anyone. Contact your own representative. My experience was:
Me: Hello. I'm from your district and I would like to talk to you about UCITA.
Rep: Pleased to meet you. What is UCITA?
Me:
Rep: Thank you. I'll inform you of any state actions regarding it. You might also want to contact Reps X and Y.
She was not going to commit a position on UCITA, but now understood that this was a controversial issue and not a "good for business" easy decision.
There are many more nukes, they are much *less* powerful, and somewhat more out of control. So the danger is different.
During the 60's the standard nuke was 10-20MT. That is a seriously huge bomb. One bomb will level metropolitan New York. And during the 60's the standard targeting was cities and industrial areas. Targeting precision was poor but when one bomb is that big it matters less. The threat of war is the threat of total civil destruction.
Current ICBM nukes are in the 50-300kT range. That is roughly 1% the size. Current targeting is specific military and industrial sites, and the current targeting has very high precision. This is one reason why the warhead count is so much higher. The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs flattened a roughly 1km radius, and did serious damage for about 5km radius. Current nukes are only a little bit larger.
Current tactical nukes are in the 1-100kT range. These are the ones that are really numerous. They are seriously destructive, but not an end to civilization. Think in terms of having the impact of a major tornado. We survive dozens of those each year. They cause widespread destruction, loss of life, and we recover from it.
The threat of an attack that causes huge damage is much higher than it was before. The threat of an attack that threatens the end of civilization is much lower.
The reason for concern and one motivation for missile defense is that this much lower level of destruction makes blackmail threats much more credible. Few doubt that Saddam Hussein would be willing to use a tactical nuke. The North Koreans have already made veiled threats about their willingness. The policy makers have to consider the potential of a secret threat to flatten downtown SF if some treay deal is not made.
The Denelcor HEP. Only a few were made, and this dates way back to 1985, but it was a really neat multi-threaded CPU. It ran a variety of Unix, and had some reasonable extensions to adapt Fortran (even now probably the most popular number crunching language) to the multi-threaded CPU world.
The Alewife project at MIT. A variety of interesting ideas. Nothing ever really past the prototypes was finished to my knowledge. The concepts of operation are fun to examine.
These are an interesting complement to the SMP approach.
Very good. I like it.
Building a community, real or virtual, is hard work. The really enduring communities have been ones that provide a mechanism to exclude unwanted outsiders. This seems a bit contradictory, but it is the reality. The community is open to those who share its ethos, it is closed to those who will not share its ethos, and it ejects those who attempt to disrupt it. This is much easier in real world communities. The obnoxious teenager can be shunned. Body language, side conversations, polite hostility, and other powerful social tools can be used. The truly anti-social personalities are eventually ejected. Usually the social pressure of being openly unwelcome suffices. Sometimes the police are employed. This also has a beneficial side. The social reactions are usually modulated. They begin with discrete corrective suggestions. They escalate to the combined carrot and stick of rejection for bad behavior and acceptance for good behavior. This can change those who are open to change. But there is a powerful mix of nihilism and solipcism at work in US and European cultures. Contemplate the horrifying changes to things like childrens sports. Where at one time (long ago, but I am old enough to remember it) these were a method for teaching children how to manage anger and conflict without becoming anti-social and violent. It taught the social skill of "Good Sportsmanship", albeit an ideal that was rarely acheived. The usual achievement was grudging politeness despite frustration and anger. Today it too has succumbed to the solipcist hostility and the nihilist willingness to destroy that which you cannot win. The virtual communities have it much harder. It is extremely hard to eject the destructive players. It is extremely hard to provide the gradual responses and discreet (un-embarassing) feedback for inappropriate behavior. And its openness makes it more attactive to those frustrated anti-social personalities that have been ejected from real world communities. These people share the human desire to be part of a community, but have yet to learn the skills needed. They flock to the wide open access of the virtual community and thereby increase the stress on it.
If you read the rest of the details you will find that the DoD is buying itself a worldwide phone system for real cheap. They are paying pennies on the dollar for use of the satellites. They are installing crypto phones in the field to use Iridium. This lets them shift routine traffic off the heavily loaded secure sats.
The other blather is just added benefits included to pacify public imbecility.
Yes. Aftermarket makers have been sued. In cases where the aftermarket offering might be confused with the original (e.g. counterfeits) they have lost. In cases like this, where it is clearly not the original, the suits have been resolved generally on an anti-trust basis or contract law basis. One fairly basic family of anti-trust cases revolves around the question of to what extent 3rd party service would invalidate warranty, service, or other contracts. E.g., does a 3rd party oil change invalidate the automobile engine warranty? What about a 3rd party engine rebuild?
Situations like the Cuecat revolve around ownership. If you own the cuecat (which in my opinion you do) then the most Cuecat can do is void all warranty and refuse to do business with you. No loss in my opinion. I don't want to do business with them either. The situation where you modify their device but then expect to make use of their services, e.g. the ID removal, are unclear.
Most Unix mail clients are able to support ISO-8859. Now, ISO 8859-1 (Western European) is almost ASCII for the first 128 characters. So a great many people say "ASCII" when they should say ISO 8859-1. As for why "American", well the Americans got their standardization act together much sooner than ISO (on this issue). The ASCII characterset is almost correct for Western European languages, and the spelling errors that result from using it do not cause confusion. It was tolerable while ISO worked out the rest of the issues for small alphabet languages. (In fact the international standard at the time was the Baudot characters dating way back to the days of the telegraph. Baudot was a small subset of the ASCII characterset, yet used for all international telegrams.)
These days, any decent mailer on Unix is capable of support all the ISO 8859 components: 8859-1 through 8859-10 at least. People still (incorrectly) call this 8bit text format ASCII. But by covering 8859 you have included Europe, North and South America, Australia, for native languages. Since English, Russian, and French are also official languages (or defacto languages) for much of Africa and Asia, you have pretty good coverage. Only East Asia is lacking support. In fact, many mailers (at least the ones that I use) are also JIS capable, so that intermixed 8859 and JIS is presented properly. This covers Japan. So the bulk of the worlds computer users are supported.
Unicode will spread, but much more slowly. The diffence between Unicode and 8859-x is much smaller. The win is in the Asian languages and other languages with really large charactersets. But Unicode made some unfortunate political errors. They angered the Japanese (somehow) and the Japanese still insist that the JIS standards be used rather than Unicode. (I've been in those standards meetings. If you bother to ask the Japanese you learn that they despise Unicode.) The Chinese and others seem more indifferent.
And when you say Unicode you really must decide what you mean. Do you mean Unicode, UTF-7, or UTF-8. And which Unicode? The defective 1.0, the revised 2.0, or the next 3.0?
I forsee 8859 surviving for a while further. UTF-8 is a nicer encoding, but it has this political baggage and its own set of problems.
I'm from the government, I'm here to help you. We know what that means.
Mostly nice meaningless words, the Open Source equivalent of motherhood and apple pie. Yep. We're all for it. But consider the one genuine proposed government action, and the other possible action that they did not propose.
The people who brought me Clipper, Carnivore, DMCA, mandatory library filters, and all the rest now propose to tell me what copyright terms I should put on my personal donation to society. Riiight. Will they eliminate the First Amendment to accomplish this goal? I doubt it. But why did they propose this step.
The real and powerful proposal that they did not make was:
Require that in all electronic data exchange to or from the Federal government at least one acceptable format shall be an open format, without patent, copyright, or other restrictions on its use.
This phrasing would permit things like PDF, since the format is open. It is Adobe's PDF generating software that is closed.
This phrasing would prohibit the present practice of requiring exclusively MS Word formats, or other closed formats. These would only be permitted if there was also an open format available as an alternative.
Then let the government stand back and let the public decide.
Changing the terminology used is vitally important, and articles like these help change the terminology. The use of words like "secure system" mislead the public into thinking that such things exist. Changing the terminology to terms like "takes longer to crack" generates the right thought processes. Systems will be broken. It is merely a matter of how long and how hard people try. This leads to the next important part of the thought process. How to detect breakins, how to reduce loss during breakins, etc.
Talking and thinking in these terms has importance far beyond securing your own system. It affects how users think about their participation and actions. It affects how law enforcement thinks about their reactions. It affects how legislators think. Right now they act like there is some sort of magic fairy dust that you sprinkle on your technology and poof --- an impenetrable secure system. The result is devastating losses when (often inadequate) security processes fail.
UCITA permits license changes to software already delivered.