Posts by John Savard 2460 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Sep 2007
Canadians can certainly be glad that this hacker is under arrest.
Mariposa is the name of the fictional town featured in the book Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, written by well-loved Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock. For its name to be sullied by association with a botnet, therefore, is an unforgivable insult to the Canadian people.
The UK should abolish license fees, and support the BBC on a reduced level from general revenues, requiring it to get most of its money from the sale of TV commercials just like what I believe you refer to as "ITV" or "Channel Four" - although these terms may be out of date.
This is what we do in Canada, but with the full American system of commercial announcements - so that the CBC does not need to resort to pledge breaks (a quaint American custom with which you might not be familiar, considering that you don't get the American stations, most specifically PBS, over there on cable or over the air across the border).
We should want to ensure that no person who is legally entitled to drink is turned away. And, also, that no one not legally entitled to drink can do so.
Clearly, what is needed is for someone coming into a pub to simply state his name and other information to uniquely identify himself... and, instead of carrying ID of any sort, the pub uses a computer terminal to pull up his photograph on a government database.
This way, people convicted of alcohol-related offences can also be prevented from drinking.
Since IBM charges more for zArchitecture cycles than for PowerPC cycles - but sells zArchitecture cycles at a discount in "zIIP"s, this is the logical conclusion - it lets them charge more for computing power on the zArchitecture, that lets people use certain desirable IBM and third-party software, but it also lets people who want mainframe security also buy computing power for other tasks at competitive rates.
I would have preferred them to sell zArchitecture cycles competitively, making it the standard instead of x86 - but it's hard to persuade people to pay what it's worth for software, so such contrivances seem necessary.
If there is illegal material, of course it should be dealt with.
But no innocent third parties should be affected if it can be avoided.
People using the service legally should be able to retrieve their data as soon as this can be done without interfering with the police investigation. If harm to law-abiding citizens can be avoided, it must be avoided, even if some additional expense is involved.
I shall have to look up that patent application while it's still there. Aside from sound, what else could travel through a submarine hull? One could have a glass window, and use a light beam. One could use X-rays, but they don't go that far even through air. (And communication by neutrinos is strictly science-fiction, of course. And don't get me started on moving a heavy weight around in the submarine to send gravitational waves.)
And a submarine hull isn't, and doesn't have to be, a perfect Faraday cage, But the trouble historically with radio from submarines is that the salt water around them forms a very effective barrier against anything but the very lowest-frequency electromagnetic signals.
Acoustics, if they're not at the frequency one is looking for, could certainly work. Why, one could have submarines mimic whale songs.
Living in chilly Edmonton, Alberta, a change in global climate that might make it a more comfortable place, like Phoenix, Arizona, might not seem so bad. This, though, would be far worse than even the most drastic climate change predictions.
Even a tiny increase in temperature will mean that some obscure species of frog will not be able to crawl to a pond further north in time. There will be extinctions, there will be invasive species - and there will also be food problems, because people in tropical countries don't have the option of migration in today's world with rigid national borders. Changing agricultural practices and diet takes time, and while the efficiency of agriculture goes down as you approach the poles, it also goes down as you approach the Equator.
All these consequences, though, are indeed miniscule in comparison to those of giving up modern technology, and trying to feed the world through only natural power sources like draft animals.
So? Hasn't anyone heard of nuclear power? We can have our cake (lots of abundant energy for high tech) and eat it too (no carbon emissions to speak of).
But first we have to turn off the oil tap and make it pinch a bit before people will decide to stop listening to the anti-nuclear prophets of doom. Unlike the global warming prophets of doom, they're actually not worth listening to.
Decimal instructions aren't used to avoid rounding. Even x86 computers use binary integers to calculate with; floating-point was added later as an optional extra, and later became standard by the time of the 486 (and even then you could get a 486 DX).
Instead, what is avoided is most of the work of converting from decimal to binary and back again, if you keep your numbers recorded in printed form (as many databases do) and only do a very tiny amount of calculating with them before writing them back out again (as is often the case in commercial applications).
Since I'm sure that everyone in Britain is perfectly well aware that Henry VIII didn't receive a miraculous vision from God telling him that the Catholic Church had fallen away from the truth, or that he came to this conclusion from deep study of the Scripture - but, instead, the Church of England was founded for purely political reasons, I don't understand why the people of Britain haven't, by now, returned to authentic forms of Christian worship.
If they feel there is something lacking about the Roman Catholic Church, they could always become Eastern Orthodox, or Protestants - instead of belonging to an imitation of the Catholic Church created by a tyrant - something that pretends to be a church, but is merely run by politicians.
They published the essays by Arthur C. Clarke that later formed his "Profiles of the Future". They published stories by Ray Bradbury and Ian Fleming. They interviewed Norman Mailer and Barbra Streisand.
I cannot, however, envisage Playboy returning to its past glories no matter who is in control of it.
Not so much because of the amount of porn on the Internet, but because its niche - something that is at once tasteful and yet does accept titillation as one of its purposes - has been rendered hard to comprehend, at least in the United States, as a consequence of the rise of feminism. In other cultures, Playboy's desperate fight to be taken seriously because male sexuality has never been delegitimized in those cultures as much as in the United States.
The "kind of man that reads Playboy", according to the advertisements for advertisers, might indeed have read it in 1963 - but since even reading Playboy is a furtive pleasure in today's climate, the less tasteful stuff drives it out much as crack cocaine drove out the powder that some claimed wasn't even addicting when they're both illegal.
Given that certain retail outlets in the U.S. have levelled the playing field by banning Maxim from their shelves along with Playboy, going after Esquire's turf won't work either.
Byte had its day, and Wired is filling its niche quite well; that's probably how far Playboy would have to be reinvented to be relevant, to be about something entirely different from beautiful women - as different as computers.
Maybe Harry Pearson could use a source of new investment capital? Music Lover: Entertainment for Golden Ears? After all, expensive hi-fi equipment was part of the Playboy lifestyle... and Playboy has an annual Sex and Music issue, so they acknowledge music satisfies a significant drive as well.
In another article, I saw a reference to the European Court of Human Rights blocking the extradition of Abu Hamza to the U.S.. And now this. Given terrorist attacks both in London and in Spain, I am surprised that Europe is not taking terrorism every bit as seriously as the United States does.
Perhaps they will have a commercial in which the high priest of the Great Old Ones informs a doomed humanity that he uses a Microsoft e-book reader to read his handy digital copy of the Necronomicon.
Or, if Cthulhu is deemed too controversial, how about a heartwarming commercial starring a brave little girl coping with a horrifying disability?
Of course, Microsoft would need to get permission from Yamaha to feature Tako-Luka in a commercial...
Since Prince's popularity is currently in decline, and since his decision to make himself temporarily unnameable was at least annoying, I'm not surprised there is negativity. This seems like a bargain price for his CDs.
Of course, though, I don't see how a CD (as opposed to a vinyl LP) will fail to "fill one's head with numbers" just as much as an MP3 would. But then I don't understand the nature of his objection, given that my brain, at least, isn't wired into the data bus of my PC, at least not yet.
Because airships are so large and light, they're very vulnerable to high winds. This is why the Akron experienced a disaster despite being helium-filled. Airship advocates have said that today's more accurate weather forecasting would solve this problem, but I think that many would be skeptical - particularly for journeys across the Atlantic, as opposed to short hops.
As far as I'm concerned, this business about non-XML tags is silly. Of course every browser must support sites written to support the first browsers ever made. New features can be added in an upwards-compatible manner; there is no excuse for fragmenting the web or requiring perfectly good web sites to be updated to display on newer browsers.
Of course, though, TeX should be extended to allow hyperlinks and images, so that people could navigate to .tex pages in addition to .htm pages, since there are things that HTML doesn't do well, or is excessively verbose in doing.
A Google search turned up the fact that an even prettier blonde named Anna Chapman is the girlfriend of an American billionaire. So at least the Russian spy network, if such it is, has not infiltrated that far.
Of course, it was discovering Russian spies trying to get their hands on the A-bomb that kicked off the last Cold War, and since the invasion of Georgia, we've been somewhat overdue for another one in any event.
I do know that many of the old mainframe computers, and also some avionics, distributed power as 400 Hz alternating current. The use of alternating current, of course, was for the same reason as its general use in the electrical power system - so that voltage could easily be stepped up and then back down again, allowing the need for really thick wires to handle lots of current to be avoided. The higher frequency was so that they could get by with smaller transformers and smaller capacitors in the power supplies that finally converted the AC power to the DC power that the electronics actually used.
I thought that the British Post Office could be trusted to voluntarily avoid interfering with aviation and the BBC, even in the absence of specific legislation, what with it being an arm of the government and all.
Evidently, your country must have looked enviously at the success of the Yanks with this futuristic Internet stuff, and it decided to let some private enterprise in. That could be your problem right there.
But this Ofcom of which you speak is Britain's telecommunications regulator. Does it lack authority to regulate that power companies acting as Internet providers not go around jamming the airwaves? Or perhaps it is not to Ofcom that ITV must hearken to get its licences to operate its broadcasting stations?
I was worried, on reading this article, that this fellow had just gone off the deep end.
However, I see that what he is proposing isn't nearly as bad as, say, The Bible Code, or the codes that prove Bacon wrote Shakespeare. Unfortunately, it may also be harder to falsify because it's less complicated.
Basically, his theory appears to me to be this: chop Plato's books up into 12 equal parts, assign the 12 notes of the musical scale to them (apparently the ancient Greeks knew about sharps and flats), and ignore the pieces that correspond to sour notes.
Then, instead of just arguing about in circles, it becomes apparent that Plato actually had some definite opinions, which were kept secret among his initiates.
Apparently it is more complicated than that, but if one chops up Plato's works into such large pieces, instead of trying to scramble around individual letters, it is at least guaranteed that what is left will actually still make sense. Which, of course, speaks more to a lack of falsifiability than to the truth of the hypothesis in itself, but it should still be possible to determine if these ideas do, in fact, lead to a consistent thread of thought from Plato.
To allow an airship to stay up without the constant consumption of fuel, and yet to have it land without venting helium... one could have it get most of its buoyancy from large helium gasbags, but to have a small hydrogen balloon tethered far above the rest of the airship at a safe distance to pull it upwards for that last little bit of lift.
That would allow indefinite hovering, and if the hydrogen balloon is lost, the other techniques remain for landing gradually.
Googling for pictures of radishes, I saw that they were spherical and perhaps an inch or two in diameter, contrasting with the image, as some posters noted. But further searching for different varieties of radish turned up a winter radish, called the "China Rose", which has a somewhat longer planting cycle than some other varieties, and corresponds roughly to the image.
Closely related to this Chinese variety of radish is a Korean variety, the Diakon, which is known to the Japanese as the Kowari radish (a Kowari is a small furry animal, though, so don't just ask for a Kowari). This could be what we're seeing in the photograph, but images I have seen of that variety of radish show it as having a white color, and being slimmer than those in the picture.
So presumably, they grow more than one kind of radish in North Korea, and these are China Rose radishes that he is inspecting: this variety is even grown in the United States.
The Italian Candle of Fire radish looks a bit like this kind of radish as well: although it's considerably slimmer, at least it's the right color.
I have no doubt that North Korean TV will be running a certain clip of Brazil's game against the Ivory Coast to show what horrible brutes the North Korean team was facing in their first game.
Remember the TV show "Is Your Brain Really Necessary?", which showed that perfectly normal people had brains left hollow by an accumulation of fluid during a certain portion of early development? What if this condition could be induced... and then the fluid removed at the opportune moment, leading to a cranium filled with richly convoluted grey matter?
And there have also been impressive results in treating cichlid fish with lithium chloride in early development.
What isolated country, ruled by a leader not bound by ordinary rules of ethics, would experiment with such techniques on human beings, in hopes of artificially creating a super-brained genius who could invent world-conquering weapons for it?
I think the West should be alert to this danger, and start testing these techniques now on chimpanzees, so that once they're proven safe and effective, and we can use them somewhat ethically on people, at least we won't be too far behind North Korea!
It's not at all surprising to me that disadvantaged children might achieve even less well if they have new ways of wasting time. However, not having access to Wikipedia, for example, is a disadvantage, and not being computer-literate will be a disadvantage as well.
I suspect the professors work is accurate, but it shows only short-term effects, not long-term ones, and so making the policy decision to abandon closing the digital divide based on it would be a mistake.
After all, people in the Islamic world got all fired up over those Muhammad cartoons in Danish newspapers, when they so casually and blindly accept Hamas terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians. I'm afraid in both cases, it's just a matter of whose ox is gored.
The problem is, though, given the strength of the Western world in clumsy and unselective thermonuclear warheads, and the patience thereof having been largely exhausted by the events of September 11, 2001, it would seem appropriate for the Islamic world to be extremely cautious about any activities on its part that would be annoying to us, and to be eager and swift to distance itself from the forces of terrorism in general.
This does not seem to have been happening to the extent one might like.
In the event of a major war like World War II, in which the radio stations no longer give weather reports, so as to prevent enemy bombers from learning where the good pickings are... the government having the power to cut off the connections between the part of the Internet in their own country and the whole outside world would actually make sense.
And disconnecting the Internet at the backbone level from the outside world is not likely to be all that preposterous. If the United States and Canada could cooperate, that would basically leave only the land lines to Mexico and undersea cables to worry about. Dozens, not thousands, of choke points.
Blocking dial-up ISPs from accepting incoming long-distance telephone calls might take a bit of work at the phone company; but even that is doable, and if that sort of thing is what remains to be worried about, I'd say the plan has succeeded.
It would be a bad idea to use this power for the wrong reasons. But there could be circumstances under which it would make sense, and the technical issues are not insuperable.
I thought they banned applications from the iPad, not content; because one can surf to web sites with it, and surely they don't check every image on every web site on the whole Internet.
Of course, standards are different in North America than in Britain; while in Canada we do have tabloid newspapers that include a picture of a pretty girl (they used to have her on page 3, but now they moved the picture to the sports section in the name of gender equality) she keeps that part of her kit on over here.
Jane and Modesty Blaise would be much too shocking for our comics pages as well.
Even if she has more money now than she used to, what with being the governor of Alaska and the Vice President and all, one really would have thought that if she were going to get implants, she would have done that back in her beauty contest days.
At this point, even if she does still look pretty good, I suspect that in the area of cosmetic surgery, it would be, say, a face lift that she would be shopping for at this time. And, unlike implants, a face lift to get rid of wrinkles probably is something that a female politician actually has to consider - not something that would disqualify her from being taken seriously.
Indeed, though, her opponents should focus on her policies and not bother with unfair blows because she is a woman. There's plenty to object to there; and I can say that even though I liked G. W. Bush as President.
Given the evident purpose of such comic book titles as Power Girl, Danger Girl, and Tarot, is there going to be a minimum standard that women in comic books have to look like that, unless the publisher can prove no intent of titillation?
It would seem that reducing the frequency of unrealistic D-cups would be the more decent direction... and, of course, the suggestion that a woman of modest endowments in that area can only be attractive to a pedophile is disturbing.
On the other hand, it is ironic that one has to be 18 to act in hard-core pornography, and 21 to buy it in the United States (but perhaps not in the same jurisdictions).
If he is indeed responsible for the acts of which he is accused, I'm glad he finally brought himself to the attention of a law-enforcement agency with the ability and determination to bring him to justice.
As for indecent images: if this isn't actual child porn, but stuff taken from, say, nudist magazines, yes, something can be "indecent" without being illegal. Janet Jackson's breast during the Super Bowl was indecent, but that doesn't mean that magazines with pictures of topless women are illegal in the U.S. - even if you don't see them on Page 3 of American newspapers.
Also, this could be something that happened before the FBI began its investigation, sparked by the threats to U. S. Vice President Joseph Biden, so those charges might be absent due to related evidence not being available, even if the images were child pornography.
One of Gugielmo Marconi's ancestors was a photographer, a number of whose photographs were of nudes. I am not sure at this time if this ancestor was also named Guglielmo, or whether Gaudenzio Marconi is the photographer I am thinking of, or another one not related to the radio pioneer, though.
The Nehalem EX chips are, of course, exciting because they bring reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS) features previously reserved for mainframes (and the Itanium) to the x86 world.
I agree that HP shouldn't push its OpenVMS and HP-UX customers through an unnecessary architectural transition. But because the future availability of Itanium is in doubt, it should still port those operating systems so as to give new customers an alternative. There are people out there who would like the advantages of a "real" Unix, and why shouldn't they buy HP-UX instead of Solaris x86, who would balk at going for the Itanium.
And, in my opinion, Open VMS qualifies as a "real mainframe operating system", which is more than you can say for Unix, let alone Windows.
I realize that the Nehalem-EX is too expensive at the moment for mass-market desktops, and persuading customers to use the X Window System on top of Open VMS instead of Microsoft Windows would seem to be much more difficult than persuading them to buy a Macintosh, or even more difficult than it had been to persuade them to use OS/2... but there is a desperate need for competition.
After reading the other news item, about applications being banned from the iPad because they include things that look like widgets in their interfaces, I am inclined to favor Windows Mobile for portable devices over the App Store.
But when I hear that a Windows tablet will be "more beautiful than the iPad, I put its face to shame", I am reminded that, like Marjoly in the video game Rhapsody, Microsoft is evil!
I looked at the high-resolution version of the image, and then with a Google image search, turned up a Pyrex timer that looked just like the ones on the shuttle. Except that instead of the red Pyrex logo, there's a smaller black logo looking like a check mark with two words on it on the one on the right. The one on the left has a different logo, and that one matches the logo on the CDN version of the timer, apparently model PT1A.
It may well be true that GEM Desktop and GeoWorks (OS/2, of course, came much later, and was an offshoot of Windows in any case) weren't serious competitors to the Macintosh. While Windows 3.0 came close to being such a competitor, it still fell short in enough respects that it wasn't until Windows 3.1 came along that the Macintosh had real competition.
Ironically, it was TrueType, licensed from Apple, that made the difference, allowing Windows to be effectively used for desktop publishing without purchasing Adobe Type Manager and typefaces for it as expensive add-ons.
Incidentally, Windows 3.0 and 3.1 did let you run them under protected mode, but it was 16-bit protected mode. To run applications that were in the 32-bit mode of the 386 architecture, you needed to add Win32s, which was a free upgrade to Windows 3.1 that could be packaged with 32-bit applications.
Obviously, if someone is innocent of any crime, then they should not have to pay one cent out of their own pocket if, as a result of being accused of a crime, they need to hire a lawyer. So I fail to see how the standard being requested could be granted. Of course, the big problem is that the $2 million they won in another suit likely will never be seen, while the $300,000 awarded here really will have to get paid.
The Americas are three continents, North, South, and Central America.
America is one country, the United States of America, just as Canada is the Dominion of Canada and Australia is the Commonwealth of Australia and so on.
In Spanish and French, the same word is used for "the Americas" and "America", leading to some confusion, but this is not the case in English.
It would seem reasonable to view the actions of the cable company as separate from the woman's own adulterous affair. But many people resist viewing it that way.
Would it seem reasonable for terrorists to sue a cable TV company because a billing slip-up exposed their plot to kill thousands of people? Or someone planning a bank robbery? Or someone running a hydroponic marijuana farm in their basement?
Since adultery can have serious consequences - it can spread venereal disease, and it can lead to a man being fraudulently caused to support children under the belief that they are his children - it is not a victimless act. So rather than seeing any privacy rights pertaining to that act, many feel she should simply have the right to remain silent, as anything she may say can, and will, be used against her in a court of law.
It is true that adultery is not a criminal offence in many jurisdictions. And there are good reasons for this, so it is not really a bizarre anomaly that Parliament should hasten to correct, althoug sometimes it may seem like that to some.
Something in this general direction may work out well.
But looking at the specifics of this, it seems to have two big problems. Would people buy an iPad just for this, people who would be more likely to already have a netbook or laptop? Would people be more inclined to pay for access to a newspaper which removed the added value of having convenient web-like hyperlinks?
I think that newspapers will eventually start pulling free content from the web that they haven't been able to monetize; at present, I consider that the free content is being treated as a way to maintain an Internet presence because they are concerned that the Internet is the wave of the future and are hoping a business model will present itself. So this won't go on forever; they know they're shooting themselves in the foot, but the alternative seems worse.
If one is growing legal plants for resale, one has to do other things legally.
Like pay for the electricity you're using to grow them. Like have a business license for one's greenhouse, and locate it out of town where the zoning bylaws allow that sort of thing.
And if your business is legal, you will, of course, have plenty of competitors who can grow what you're growing at the same cost you're paying. So it doesn't surprise me that people are growing marijuana instead of attempting to meet the demand for other more legitimate horticultural products; those who are professionals in the greenhouse business will handle growing the orchids for which there is a demand, and your typical grow-op operator would not have the competency to survive in competition with those professionals.
Since the alleged criminal acts took place while the suspect was entirely within the Ukraine, I'm not surprised that extradition would be unlikely to happen. But under normal circumstances, such as if the criminal acts had taken place within the United Kingdom or Australia, wouldn't people be prosecuted for hacking into a foreign computer system right in their home countries?
Extradition normally would not even be possible in such cases, but attacking foreign countries is still a crime, because not prosecuting it could lead to a war.
Naturally, there is some awkwardness when the witnesses for the prosecution chiefly live in a foreign country. Perhaps new treaties have been signed which permit extradition in such cases, although this is contrary to the usual international practice as it obtained, say, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, during which each sovereign state was essentially a self-contained legal regime.
I'm sure that many people will side with Adobe, simply on the basis that a lot of sites do insist on Flash, it's not reasonable to expect them all to change over quickly, and so if Apple makes it harder for them to convert, this will make it harder to surf the web with the iPad.
But, at the same time, many people will remember some sites that use too much Flash and take too long to open as a result, and wouldn't mind if there was a bit less of it around.
So for Adobe to aggressively take its case to the public seems to me to be just asking for a "plague on both your houses" reaction.
Britain has coal under the ground. So what? Using that to produce electricity produces carbon emissions. Nuclear power does not.
Yes, all a breeder reactor does is make sure all the uranium is put to good use, the U-238 in addition to the U-235. It doesn't produce an endless supply of fuel from nothing. However, you can import uranium from friendly stable Canada, or, for that matter, given the effect of EU membership on the Sterling exchange group and Commonwealth preferences, from the friendly stable Czech Republic.
Conservation and wind power have huge costs, so if that's all you have to depend on, the result will be to make energy dear and labour cheap. Nuclear power, on the other hand, supports the economic growth desperately needed so that the common man can live a decent life.
As noted, "you can't pull on pressure". Hence, the weight of the fluid in the longer arm of the siphon does not pull the fluid up in the shorter arm. What, then, does cause the fluid to ascend in the shorter arm?
It is air pressure after all; while the air pressure is higher at the lower level, the weight of the fluid in the longer arm more than counterbalances the difference in air pressures. So we have:
push of air pressure at the top overpowers push of air pressure at the bottom minus the weight of the extra fluid in the longer arm.
So instead of "air pressure" being wrong and "weight of fluid" being right, the right answer is both of them.
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