It's that time again. Before anyone comments on GPL lifting, please take the GPL quiz:

The GPL Quiz

Anyone who gets a perfect score may comment in this thread, all others please keep uninformed conclusions out.

A prototype of Orion did get built in San Diego. The test flight was conducted from Point Loma (now the site of Space and Naval Warfare System Center's model ship-testing pool) using conventional explosives with a delivery tube. By all measures it was successful. Freeman Dyson then worked out the engineering needed for the pusher plate and delivery mechanism for the full nuclear-weapon version. I think there's quite a bit on this in John McPhee's excellent book, _The Curve of Binding Energy_.

Orion always bothered me because it seemed almost biblical (people ascending to the heavens, leaving behind a scorched earth). It would make a pretty good way to get a lot of stuff off the planet if something dire were about to happen -- meteor impact, decay of orbit, or something.

Anyway, I used to know where pictures of the test flight were, but I can't seem to find them at the moment :(. Perhaps some smarter googler than myself can point us in the right direction...

Reid

I'm an embedded systems developer. My flashes are all NAND and NOR.

The summarizer says:

But a lot of open source projects seem to treat the press as an annoyance...

And the press-person says:

'...it generally does mean, "Drop everything and answer us now." If the journalist doesn't give you a deadline ("I need to know by 2pm"), it's okay to ask how long you can take to reach the right developer in Poland, but err on the side of "emergency response." It's unreasonable, I know, but so are our deadlines.'

Wow, I can't imagine why volunteer developers consider the press an annoyance. Maybe the press should cut back on the 30-second deadline and take some time to actually get facts, instead of getting something out the door now, even if it isn't right. I think that journalists with this attitude are probably in the wrong business -- you should be doing research and finding the story, not demanding that a non-storyteller drops what they're doing to give you the story on a silver platter. Software only appears to move quickly...in reality, businesses are slow to adopt new software these days. Taking the time to do thorough research on an open source project will not kill the press, just like waiting a few weeks for a story on a software project will not kill the software project.

Me, I would prefer to read the right story than the first story. I wish that the press' job to make sure that the right story is the first story...but that shall continue to be my wish.

Not only that, but it would probably save money. I've often wondered what happens behind the scenes with bills...who writes the actual words? The politicians or their lawyers? And how do they deal with concurrency/locking issues (the potential money-saving part here for using some kind of RCS that can do merges nicely)?

RedHat's satellite server has some pretty options for this, if you dig deeply enough.

RHSS lets you create configuration files to deploy to all of your machines. It lets you use macros in deployed configuration files, and you can use server-specific variables (they call them Keys iirc) inside of the configuration files to be deployed on remote servers. For example, you create a generic firewall configuration with a macro block that queries the variable SMBALLOWED. If the value is set, it includes an accept rule for the smb ports. Otherwise, those lines aren't included in the deployed config. Every server that you deploy that you expect to run an SMB server on, you set the local server variable SMBALLOWED=1. Satellite server can also be set up to push config files via XMPP (every server on your network stays connected to the satellite via xmpp, the satellite issues commands like 'update blah_config' to the managed server, and the managed server retrieves the latest version of the config file from the satellite server).

Satellite is pretty darned fancy, but also was pretty buggy back when I used it. Good luck!

Reid

This Slashdot article is full of simplistic drivel designed to provoke ideologically based knee-jerk responses instead of any kind of reasoned debate.

You must be new here...

The report that this guy bases his entire premise on is a report that begs the reader specifically not to draw any conclusions yet. It simply indicates an anomaly of airspeed indicator readings. We don't know yet what caused the crash, and this schmuck drawing conclusions already just says that he deserves to be thrown in the clink by the blog police.

As for the counter-argument, just look at the cockpit flight recorder of the Buffalo plane that crashed last winter. The pilots were talking about how they never flew in snow and that snow and icing kind of freaked them out. And they were flying in the northeast. In winter. The stall indicator lit up, and so the pilots cut the throttle. 'Battle-hardened', right? Try tired and/or poorly trained.

2) I'm pretty sure Apple sill not sue. What legality is there around USB identifiers? Nothing. The only hook there is the Apple string in the ID, but I don't think it's enough to put a case around. Why bother with the expense of a suit.

Wrong. USB Identifiers are controlled by USB Implementor's Forum, Inc.

The USB logo and USB trademark are only allowed to be used by entities in compliance with the USB Implementor's Forum agreements (see the Vendor agreement here). One of those agreements is that you (the displayer of the logo and user of the trademarks) are not allowed to spoof another entity's Vendor ID.

This means that Palm lost their right to display the USB logo on their product, and that they are not allowed to claim USB compliance. This in turn may mean that anyone buying a Pre for its advertised USB support may be allowed to file a suit against Palm for misrepresenting their product.

I should add to myself (sorry for the self-reply): I hope I'm also not feeding the trolls. I mean, seriously, 10 klocs is too much? On second reflection, that has a mild troll odor to it. At least as far as I nose.

Yeah, you were probably feeding the troll. Allow me to entertain in the style of Nina Totenberg.

Question: what editor do you think the emacs maintainers use?

Answer: they eat their own dog food.

Question: and how many lines of code is emacs?

Answer: over one million lines (of lisp!)

Question: is RMS insane?

Answer: possibly, but emacs is still a nice editor (even if you don't use it and you hate it, you have to acknowledge that a lot of people do use it and like it).

Question: what about the linux kernel?

Answer: well, it's gargantuan...

Question: okay, how big was it in 1995 [when linus was still doing a lot of work himself]

Answer: still pretty large, at least hundreds of thousands of lines

Question: what fancy IDEs existed back then?

Answer: let's see, 1) vi + make 2) emacs + make ... 3) ... I can't think of a third that ran under linux

Science.

As in: "We can take these deadites! We can take 'em...with science!"

As soon as Word deals with figures correctly, and lets me easily float their position around text to wherever they look good.

As soon as Word deals with cross-references correctly, both citations and figures.

As soon as Word does bibliographies/works cited well, and doesn't require some third-party extra-cost bibliography management software to do things well.

As soon as Word stops leaking information, like putting my Windows domain and login information embedded into my documents.

As soon as Word stops being Word I guess, and starts being TeX. I don't even know TeX all that well, but I do know that it's easier for me to make a pretty-looking academic document using an 'obscure language' (I still edit my TeX using a text editor and a Makefile) than it is using what is supposed to be a WYSIWYG editor.

I think it says something about Word's usefulness as an academic tool when many computer scientists won't use it because it's difficult to understand and somewhat magical-seeming in its decision-making.

The problem with this argument is that it is very short-sighted. Yes with current technology it is expensive to find/isolate/etc genes. It was even more expensive to do so 10 years ago. It was impossible to do so 20 years ago. However in another 20 years it could be cheap and not because of the work that these researchers are doing but because completely unrelated technology (better tools) will allow researchers to do the same work in 1/100th the time.

The problem with this argument is that it is very short-sighted. It costs a metric boatload to do the research *now*. If in the future genetic discovery becomes easy enough for me to do it in 1/100th the time and I can buy the equipment and a 'For Dummies' book on Amazon, *then* we can go back and re-examine gene patents. Until then, let's encourage people to spend their time and money making genetic discoveries by giving them the peace-of-mind that they can try to recoup some of the money that they pumped into research.

I *do* hope that gene patents are unnecessary some day. But today is not that day. (Tomorrow is not looking so good, either...but I will bet that you're right -- in 10-20 years, the cost will make gene patents unnecessary).

And this is where someone should point out that this would be an excellent reason to support government funded general scientific research.

Funny thing about that...

Government-funded research does not belong to the public. Thanks to the Bayh-Dole act (wikipedia link), my girlfriend's university gets to keep the patents on whatever she discovers (she is funded by the National Science Foundation). Her university will not give out access to the patent. They charge an arm and a leg just like any company (and they're a state university!).

Reid

Can someone explain to me why it's legal to patent genes in the first place? I thought patents were supposed to be for new and unique inventions.

You don't patent the gene, you patent the process of identifying and using knowledge about the gene.

The reason that it's legal to 'patent genes' is that is very, very, very (did I mention very?) expensive to discover which gene(s) control an aspect of a plant or animal. My girlfriend is a molecular scientist, so I get to hear about her research woes all of the time. Without some protection of a genetic discovery, it makes no financial sense for a company to actually do the research and discover which genes control an aspect of a plant or animal's composition. A discovery takes at least 5-6 years of research from several researchers, associated support staff, and requires some fairly expensive equipment.

There seems to be a lot of people calling Myriad a big, evil, genetic patent holding corporation. All that I can say is, look at their financials. They spend hundreds of millions of dollars per year doing genetic research, and they make very little money in return for their investment. When I last examined their financials (beginning of 2008 I think), they had been operating at a loss since they went public. They are advancing human knowledge quite a bit, and they will probably go out of business for it within a few years. I posted their financials to slashdot some time ago (feel free to look up their tax forms, they're a publicly traded company). In 2007, they reported a huge operating loss and came out and said in their disclosure that they are in business because of continued shareholder investment.

I, for one, see genetic patents as a necessary evil. If someone or some company is going to take the time and money to make a genetic discovery, they ought to be given some time to try and profit from that discovery. Genetic sequencing is not a quick nor an easy task -- there's a lot more to it than just throwing some genes in the PCR machine and pushing the 'sequence' button. For what it's worth, my girlfriend is also a likely candidate of the BRCA1 gene, as every female in her family that has been tested for it, has it. She is still okay with genetic patents. And no, we're not cold, heartless capitalists...we shop at the co-op, have a garden, brew our own beer, make our own biodiesel, and do all the things that good hippies should do...it's just that without Myriad, *no one* would know that having the BRCA1 gene was a precursor to breast cancer.

Reid

That must be why Windows Vista has an astronomically awesome EAL1 rating by NIAP labs (link to PDF), why Windows Vista SP2 is trusted by the US government to divide classified networks (oh, wait, did I say Windows? I meant Solaris, SELinux, or HP/UX, mybad), or why my Vista PC got infected with Conficker while my Linux box hasn't had such problems (and it's in my DMZ, while my Vista box ain't!).

Go Microsoft Go.