I've been thinking about what Google could do with all that IPO cash and BUYING and integrating Lexis-Nexis is about the most sensible use of those funds.
I'm not so sure - for the money it would cost them to buy L-N, I suspect they could do a much better job starting from scratch, using their own well-known brandname to compete.
But L-N owns a tremendous asset in it's news/legal database and the two companies would have tremendous synergies.
Hm. The data in it is valuable - but I wouldn't be surprised if Google could get all the data directly and assemble their own, better, database instead. They've already got relationships with a lot of news sources (crawling even the subscription services for news.google.com, just as L-N will do); building that up would surely make more sense. Look at Gmail, for example: rather than trying to buy a webmail provider (despite, at that point, having a close relationship with Yahoo for search services), they started their own from scratch.
Having said that, of course, they did buy Orkut, and buying L-N directly would be a big shortcut - but would there be anti-trust issues? The two combined would be big in terms of news resources...
What kind of laser beam weapon could be so ridiculously preposterous that it would be harder to explain to Congress than the fact that we're wasting money on teleportation??
It's not a preposterous one you should be looking for, but a perfectly plausible and genuine one they want to keep secret. Think about stealth technology, back before that was public knowledge - certainly not preposterous, and certainly not listed as such in the budget at the time. If this is genuine spending, it's probably going into project they just don't want the public to know they're working on - something like the passive radar using cellphone or TV transmission echoes, laser communications as a substitute for radio in some situations, clever new body armor materials (all of those are genuine and publicly reported, of course, but presumably others are not).
Next time I visit doctor/hospital, what restrictions are there on info from "my" tag being read?
It's a number. They can read that you have file number 9845029 with them - but exactly the same restrictions still apply to getting your file, whether I ask for it as "9845029's file" or "John M Doe's file".
Two possible options I can see:
- everyone can read my info, and now I have to worry about my health info being scanned by everyone with any remote interest in it. Get on a plane - *SCAN*; "Sorry sir, we believe your heart may give out on this flight and we don't want any lawsuits". Go to a job interview - *SCAN*; "Sorry but we won't employ someone with your health problems"
- nobody can read my info except for readers authorised by the single company controlling the implants. Hmm, now I wonder how they could conceivably abuse that information...
You missed the third option: the RFID tag just gives your reference number, just like looking your name up would do except without the risk of confusion with other patients with similar names. Airline scans it: "Oh, someone gave you a reference number 9845029 on RFID system 398428. Wonder what that means?" Job interview: "Oh, someone calls you 9845029, and they used an fairly new RFID system from IBM." Unless they already have access to your medical records anyway, they still can't look up that reference number.
Thanks, but no thanks - I'll take my chances with anonymity. The possibilities of abuse of this technology are just too high
You don't have any more anonymity without it: they'll still fill out a chart with details of your treatment, it'll still have a reference number and your name etc on. It'll just take a bit more effort (database query rather than an RFID scan) to find your file, and not be as likely to get the right one.
Now, RFID could carry a couple of standard numbers as a warning: a code to indicate you're allergic to penicillin, perhaps, or have a pacemaker (which might affect the use of a defibrilator, for example) which paramedics could check for before giving you any. It couldn't hold anything like your medical records, though: it's like a barcode, not a hard drive! The current RFID standard seems to be for something like a 96 bit number: enough for each company to have their own unique set of serial numbers, avoiding the risk of collisions you can get with barcodes - but not even enough to store some surnames, let alone anything more. The information - and the security applied to it - still lives in a database, just like it would with a hand-written nametag.
1)If you own a TV in the UK, can you receive any broadcast programming other than the BBC?
Yes; there are five analog TV stations, two of them BBC-owned, the other three commercial. If you get a digital converter - and you're one of the roughly 75% of people covered by digital broadcasts - you can get quite a few more channels (currently 41, it seems); some (currently 10) of these are encrypted, requiring a (small - GBP 7.99/month, just over US$14) subscription. Of the 31 unencrypted channels, 3 are general BBC channels, plus their documentary channel, news channel and BBC Parliament (roughly equivalent to CSPAN - indeed, it actually broadcasts CSPAN at times.)
2)Is cable service available there?
Yes; cable (to something like half the population, from whichever one of the two cable companies covers your area) and satellite (to virtually all of it, from Sky, owned by the same company as DirecTV, with their DirecTiVo equivalent being branded as Sky+). Not as common as in the US yet, but growing. You can also get some TV service over ADSL in a few areas, although this still seems to be a fringe market.
3)If cable is available, do the cable companies build the BBC channels in on their feed and then bill you (and presumably pay the BBC; you wouldn't have to twice), or if not can you tell the BBC to piss off because you don't watch them (showing your cable bill in explanation of your tele)?
Neither. You have to pay the BBC directly (or rather, their licensing contractor, the TV Licensing Agency), whether you want or watch their signal or not - indeed, even if you're in a signal blackspot where you can't receive the signal, you still have to pay for it. They do broadcast the BBC's channels (and the other broadcast channels) alongside their own.
4)Does any of this change if you can show you aren't using any broadcast functionality? Like, if it's plugged into your playstation, and when the BBC guys come in you show them that there's no antenna plugged in and the channels don't come in at all?
No. Own TV, pay TV license fee. It's a straight tax on TV ownership, except they give you a discount if you're blind, and waive the fee if you're over a certain age.
5)Do they sell TV's without broadcast capability? Owners of which the BBC presumably wouldn't harrass?
In a few cases, for other reasons (there's also an 16% import tax on "TVs", which doesn't apply to "monitors") - and they harass you even if you own no form of TV whatsoever, since they assume everyone has one really, they're just trying to dodge the license fee.
6)This local oscillator thingie...is that specific to CRT's?
The TV tuner circuit, IIRC.
7)Is the local oscillator specific to broadcast reception? (Would the hypothetical brodcastless TV's get picked up by the wardriving BBC guys?)
Stores are required by law to report the name and address of anyone buying any kind of TV device to the BBC: they don't need to pick up any signal, just look in their database.
8)Is the local oscillator part of the tuner? Like, would a "monitor" that had inputs for rca/component/svideo/etc. qualify, if it didn't have a tuner? Could you plug an LCD projector into a digital cable box and not pay the BBC?
A computer-like monitor wouldn't count - but I think the digital cable box in your second example would. (It receives a broadcast signal.) Not to mention getting harassed anyway, just because you don't have a TV license.
9)Are radios that pick up TV band sold in the UK? Are they taxed? Do they have local oscillators?
That would be considered a TV tuner, and so subject to the TV tax.
That doesn't seem like they are going to fight once litigation is started. That words leads me to believe that they would start litigation if anyone even brought up the idea that their IP was being used w/o permission in the kernel.
I think that's aimed at anyone planning an SCO-style FUD campaign, where they weren't actually suing people (for the most part), just using the threat to scare them. Your company comes out making SCO-like claims about products from Novell, they'll club it into submission with a truckload of patents. Remember, as SCO demonstrated, it doesn't take an actual lawsuit to scare people away from a product or into paying "protection money" - the threat alone is often enough. Until you make the mistake they did and sue IBM - which is rather like challenging a statue to a staring contest: you'll die long before it blinks...
The right wing is far more effective at making a mountain out of molehills like whether Clinton inhaled and the fact he had a consensual affair with a consenting adult.
The complaint there was the felony of lying under oath, rather than the affair in itself.
his refusal to take his Guard flight physical because they'd just instituted drug testing and he would have been busted
A common misconception - but the DoD didn't instigate cocaine testing until 1980 (apart from the trial period beginning in January 1979), making this a very odd reason to miss a medical exam nearly a decade before this. (In addition, you wouldn't want to conduct drug screening as part of a scheduled medical, for obvious reasons: too easy to keep clean and/or find a way round it.)
the felony outing of a CIA agent from within the White House,
Last time I looked, it hadn't been established that she had been deployed overseas within the previous five years (which is a requirement for the legal protection in question).
the massive deception of the case for the war in Iraq.
For me, the largely undisputed facts were more than sufficient - massive human rights abuses (gassing Kurds in Halabja, massacring the Shi'a for rising up against him after his Kuwait defeat, the hideously oppressive regime in general), funding foreign terrorists (the $25k suicide bombing rewards for example) and the fact the sanctions and no-fly zones just weren't a viable long-term solution - too damaging to his own population (destroying the Iraqi economy) and requiring the deployment of US troops in Saudi, a rallying cry used by Al Qaeda to great effect.
And your point is perhaps that you disagree with details of Clinton's policies? Or do you really think that the Bush administration's stances are exaggerated versions of precedents introduced by (or not explicitly opposed by) Clinton? I doubt many political historians would appreciate that comparison.
No, in fact I disagree with the reduction in H1b quotas (which certainly aren't an exaggerated version of Clinton's, since they're much smaller!) but think both Presidents are in general doing OK on that side. Are you trying the straw man of pretending I implied anything about "the Bush administration's stances" rather than sticking to the truth, that I was referring to immigration/trade policy?
[Clinton's "no-bid" contracts with Halliburton] Red Herring. Next.
How is that a "red herring" when it's exactly what the previous poster was complaining about?
Records suggest that Clinton, if president from 2001 to 2004, would have maintained a balanced budget.
"Suggest... if... would have..." Red herring. Next. (Predictions from that point, of course, couldn't take into account 9/11, Enron, the dot-com bubble, the telecomms bubble...)
The simple fact of the matter is that Bush did not alter his spending plans to accommodate the realities of the economy; he actually enhanced his extravagant spending.
Correct - and I do wish he'd spend less money, particularly on his Medicare expansion. Unfortunately there's no easy way to fix that until at least 2008 - Kerry's solution, for all his hot air about balancing budgets, is to virtually every problem is to spend more government money on it.
It's disgusting that people persist on pinning Bush's problems on Clinton.
Maybe - but I settle for pinning Clinton's own problems on Clinton. The excessive spending is Bush's fault; the so-called "no bid" contracts were on Clinton's watch, as was the first WTC bombing, several Al Qaeda attacks and the formation of the dot-com bubble. To me, it's disgusting that people conveniently forget who actually signed those Halliburton contracts, the Iraq Liberation Act (and the missile attacks on the basis of Iraq's WMDs), how much economic fallout came from that dot-com bubble (and how much it artificially inflated Clinton's apparent economic results at the time)...
If these problems are too tough for Bush to handle then maybe he should bring Clinton into his cabinet. Honestly, when you're POTUS you have to deal with some tough situations. So let's have less excuses and more results, hmmm?
I've seen plenty of results: Saddam Hussein in a jail cell, thousands of Al Qaeda/Taleban men buried and many of their bank accounts frozen, economy growing at a record pace and unemployment slightly lower than at the equivalent point in Clinton's presidency - hardly what I'd call a failure, even without making allowances for damage from events like 9/11. Yes, he's spending far too much money - but the national debt has expanded every single year since just after WWII, so that's hardly unique. No excuses needed: under the circumstances, he's doing a very good job indeed apart from spending too much money.
They also blame Bush for this Iraq quagmire that Clinton got us into, and for Clinton's support for outsourcing.
Well, Clinton did increase the H1b visa quotas massively (now reversed) and didn't (AFAIK) do anything to hinder outsourcing, but I'm not sure the decade-long standoff qualified as a "quagmire". A mess, certainly - and a recruiting poster for Al Qaeda, by keeping US troops on the "Holy Land of Mecca" (i.e. Saudi) to enforce the no-fly zones - but it was only a small open-ended situation in itself. The real problem there was that the situation wasn't sustainable long-term: growing pressure against, and breaches of, the sanctions, as well as a deteriorating situation in Iraq itself as the economy collapsed.
What next, it's Bush's fault that Clinton gave no-bid contracts to Halliburton?
That one's already been tried. The LOGCAP contracts weren't a bad idea, but they do seem to have a PR problem.
But I agree with you, the biggest problem that Clinton left us with was that HUGE budget deficit in 2000.
It wasn't that big - the problem was the huge and collapsing bubble that had made it seem much smaller. I get the impression you were trying to be sarcastic there, but the problem is that Clinton did give the no-bid LOGCAP contracts to Halliburton and run a deficit - the "surplus", like the dot-bomb profits which would have funded it, only ever existed in theoretical projections.
-- "The Iraqi insurgents are our best allies." - French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin
Places like Dell and Microsoft should be learning that you should send the things like programming utilities to India while keeping your services local. After all, people won't care too much of Windows was "Made in India" but they will certainly care if they can't communicate with the other person on the phone when they call for help!
The irony is, from what I've seen the coding that comes out is worse than the English! Indian call centers seem to be OK for simple tasks (I'm pretty sure when I called the airline to reschedule some tickets the handler was Indian) - taking down and checking details like flight number, name and date; it's when you need creativity (like real programming work) that they fall down. AIUI it's because the schools focus too much on blindly memorizing things, which is fine for following a call center script but useless for writing software. From what I've heard of companies trying this, even when you give clear instructions the code rarely works as required - by the time you either spoon-feed then what they need to do or fix their code yourself, it would have been quicker (hence faster) to write it yourself in the first place.
Perhaps the best approach would be to use Indian call centers for first level retail customer support, then transfer it to more suitable operators once you screen out the cup holder crowd ("help, the cup holder on my PC is broken...", "that's not a cup holder, it's the CD/DVD drive; give me your address, we'll have FedEx pick it up, fix it and have it back in a week - that'll cost $150.") Cisco use foreign call centers for two-thirds of their calls - but that's from having three call centers (in the US, Holland and Australia, I think?), each of which handles calls during their own daytime. Wherever the call goes, it's going to well-trained native English speakers, not cheap Indians with a script - then again, Cisco doesn't sell many $100k routers to the cup holder crowd.
And yet even if we assume the government is fudging the figures (e.g., the 'marginally employed' - I mean, c'mon!), the average wage has declined markedly. The new jobs created within the economy pay, on average, $9,000 less than the old jobs did.
The facts don't seem to match your version there...
These are facts. They aren't up for debate. Employment rates don't matter a whole lot if all you're doing is turning former middle-class folks into poor folks, while making rich folks richer. For the vast majority of the population things are considerably worse than they were four years ago.
Well, the $9000 claim isn't a fact at all, but you do have a point about the "middle class" (at least by one definition, those earning $25-75k/yr) having shrunk - what you missed, though, is that the upper class also shrank over the same (2000-2003) period! Incomes dropped across the board early on, due to the economic implosion (recession, dot-bomb bubble, telecoms, 9/11, Enron/MCI) - but the loss almost halted across 2002-2003, and has probably already reversed. For 2002-2003, the upper income category expanded again slightly, while the middle shrank by much less than it had previously. (Lots more figures here if you're interested.)
I'd also point out that employment is rather important for the people who don't currently have it: being unemployed with no income may still put you in the same bracket as having a $24k/yr job, but it's certainly a very different situation:-)
Neither party has done anything to improve the situation, nor will they so long as they are, or answer to, the people who profit from this situation. I don't expect Kerry to do any better; I only hope that he deadlocks the government and thereby prevents it from doing any more harm. Jesus, I'm getting depressed just thinking about how low my expectations have dropped....
In general, I'd say being left alone is the best most people can or should expect from the government. In the long term, even when the government actively props up failing businesses things usually get worse long-term as a result. (I'm not a hardcore anarchist/libertarian: I'm all in favor of the government regulating banks to make sure my money doesn't disappear, food to keep toxic additives or contamination out, etc - I just know they can't run an economy and shouldn't try.)
Ok, in context, I guess you are telling a joke. I didn't find it very funny though. MAybe it will take you 48 work hours to get the ground-work set up for a business which may eventually become profitable though....
I think the point is that it takes two days of work to do the paperwork for forming a company - the tax forms, registration etc, not the groundwork for the business itself. If it's the one I'm thinking of, the same survey quoted much higher figures for other countries; IIRC, it was a few days for the UK - and almost a month for France, which apparently has far fewer self-employed people and very small businesses. So it is a serious figure, it just doesn't refer to the whole creation, just the legal paperwork side. (Understandable: how exactly would you get a figure for creating a business as a whole - a year or so to build a new restaurant? An hour of paperwork and a big investment to get a franchise?)
However, I have a different perspective on this job crunch. I think that we are in the midst of a major economic change in this country. It is going to take some time for businesses to understand how to best use off-shore outsourcing and global networks such as open source project teams. This transition creates an opportunity for me because many people feel orphaned by the current trends in the small business markets.
There have certainly been some surprises; ISTR Slashdot had an article about Dell moving many call center operations back to the US ("insourcing"?), after finding the cost savings weren't enough to offset the extra overhead, PR hit etc - and I still remember patching someone's outsourced code which had documentation obviously written by someone to whom English was a foreign language ("With Every Word Of The Documentation In Capitals!")
Of course, Linux itself entails a significant element of this: run SuSE, you're importing your distro from Germany; even the kernel itself has large elements developed in the UK (Alan Cox!) and many other countries, not to mention Linus himself - Finnish, after developing the early kernel in Finland he became another of those immigrants to the US other posters have been complaining about when he joined Transmeta. This is nothing new - Mr Einstein wasn't born in the US, nor was Werner von Braun (father of America's early rocket program) - and no doubt there were complaints about immigrants "taking jobs" then, too, just as there have been in all the Western economies since at least the early 20th century.
But given the logical assumption that you'd have filtering in place with or without NAT, people still said NAT is giving them security ("NAT blocks external connections"). That implies that they believe NAT alone is giving them security, which is wrong.
No - just using the "private" addresses in itself reduces external access: as you said earlier, getting past an unfiltered NAT connection requires you to be on the same network (cable modem segment, or equivalent) and to modify your routing tables to do so. That alone would keep out 100% of the worms which just probe random IPs (AFAIK none of them try changing routing tables like this on the offchance of getting through an insecure NAT!) and 99% of would-be intruders: even if I told you my external IP address and you were on (or controlled a machine on) my cable modem segment, you'd be at a slight disadvantage in terms of breaking in compared to if I used external addresses directly!
I wouldn't regard it as "secure", but even without filtering the NAT itself helps from a security point of view: it slashes the number of hosts capable of initiating communications to you, even making an effort to do so. Far less chance of Slammer dropping in uninvited, for example!
You seem to agree that NAT and filtering are two different things and one can be used without the other. Now if you agree that NAT alone does not provide sufficient security while filtering does, well that was my whole point.
I agree that NAT and filtering are distinct, but IME the two often go together in this context - and when using RFC1918 addresses, filtering is usually the only setup which makes sense: very few people would actually want their LAN externally accessable like that!
Every time IPv6 is discussed, a bunch of people talk about how afraid they are because NAT Will be unneccessary and they think their network will be less secure without NAT.
That's certainly a poor argument - but so, IMO, is the "NAT is evil, move to IPv6 to get rid of it" argument others here have been using. I'm not afraid IPv6 will eliminate NAT (or filtering, or the equivalent of RFC1918 addresses) - but nor am I jumping for joy because it will make NAT unnecessary.
You almost certainly had and have filtering rules in addition to the NAT. I can't imagine any kind of documentation or pre-built firewall setup scripts having you to not do the filtering too.
Correct. It wasn't pre-built, but when I wanted "a NAT setup", filtering was a natural part of using private IP addresses. You agree, I think, with my position that such filtering is part of a correct NAT-based connection such as mine, which was my original premise and the basis for the other posters' "NAT blocks external connections" assumption?
There's no such thing as a router that acts like a router to one network and doesn't act like a router to another network. A router has to route legitimate packets going in either direction or it wouldn't be a very useful router. Your router acts a router to you just as much as it acts like a router to slashdot.
No, to the outside world it appears to be a single host, with a single IP address, sending and receiving packets like any other host. The machines "behind" it are invisible to the outside world. It does not act like a router to Slashdot, it acts like a host.
Now your router may pick and choose what packets it wants to pass and what it wants to drop. This is packet filtering, and is distinct from routing and NAT. A router does not drop anything unless you set up packet filtering to make it do so.
True in a sense - but nor does it do NAT unless set up to do so. IMO, when NATting RFC1918 addresses in one direction, blocking them in the other direction also makes sense: the whole point there is to separate the private network from the general Internet.
A router without packet filtering is in no way not a "normal router". Most backbone routers do not do any kind of filtering. In fact, in my experience tier-1 ISPs are quite reluctant to do any kind of filtering for you (to say, stop a DOS attack) because applying filters to their routers increases their CPU load.
Yes, they'll usually dislike adding ACLs for performance reasons (and the admin overhead of adding and checking rules, then removing them again later), and a router with no ACLs is indeed perfectly normal - as is one not doing NAT. My statement was that the NAT router should not function as a "normal router" and pass the packets through, it should filter them out as mine does. There have been previous discussions here about randomizing the various parameters (as OpenBSD can) to make the illusion of a single host more convincing to your ISP; to then allow inbound connections to RFC1918 addresses would rather defeat the purpose:-)
Au contrare. In one of my other NAT discussions I actually set up a router to do only NAT. Inbound connections worked fine. Those connections were not the type of thing that we wanted NATed (only outbound connections) so NAT didn't pay any attention to it. Lacking any filtering rules, the connection just went right through.
It's certainly possible to set up a router to do that, and useful in some scenarios (as is the reverse; Slashdot itself is behind a load balancer which should do something similar) - but for the typical home use of NAT (putting machines on RFC1918 addresses, then mangling packets so the outside world sees only the single IP address their ISP provides, allowing inbound connections like that is bad. I know my OpenBSD firewall did block any such attempt, as its replacement appears to do.
One machine on this network is a router with public IP 172.30.0.2, not filtering anything. Behind this router is 10.0.0.0/24.
On another machine on this big network you type 'route add -net 10.0.0.0/24 gw 172.30.0.2'. Also on this machine you then type 'ping 10.0.0.1' and notice the reply.
If the router fails to filter such packets (or rather, it chooses to route them) then yes, you can get through. This would seem unlikely - apart from anything else, that shouldn't be a normal "router" on 172.30.0.2. My own NAT system, for example, doesn't act like a router at all to the outside world: any packet it gets that isn't aimed at its own IP is just dropped. Its predecessor (an OpenBSD machine) was, of course, capable of acting as a router - but would also drop anything remotely suspicious. (Being OpenBSD, it would probably also hunt down and kill the sender!)
Apart from anything else, the NAT router's configuration shouldn't let packets with RFC1918 source addresses leave the network - so if you try opening a connection to a machine behind such a gateway, your SYN packet will arrive - but the SYN|ACK reply won't make it back to you, hence no connection.
It will run fine, whoever bids for the max price gets the time slot. It fails when nobody is willing to work AT (not under) the maximum. This problem is fixable by increasing the max rate. (However, it is probably not that easy.) Hopefully, the max rate is something close to a fair rate for a nurse at each particular hospital.
I suspect the maximum will be set at, or just below, the level it costs to bring in an outside nurse from an agency. Essentially the logic will be "It would cost us $20/hr to bring in an outsider - is anyone on-staff willing to do the extra shift instead?" The hospital probably saves a couple of dollars, and is getting one of its own staff (who already knows the people, procedures, where everything's stored etc) instead of an outsider; their own staff can get some extra money when they need it - everybody wins, except the agency which is losing some business to the full-time nursing staff. Sounds OK to me.
He didn't take his physical because this is when the Guard instituted drug testing as part of it. Its ridiculous to suggest he'd risk landing in Vietnam just because taking the physical was not fun. Its no secret was a frequent cocaine user during this period. He would have been nailed for drug use if he hadn't so he refused.
Wrong - the DoD introduced testing for cocaine in 1980 (after a brief trial program beginning in January 1979) - and do you really think they'd have been dumb enough to give everyone a year's notice when their next drugs test would be by putting it in the annual physical, rather than conducting them randomly?
(There's an element of truth to the "drug testing introduced then" claim - but cocaine wasn't tested for until years later; those tests targetting morphine and amphetamine abuse, which were a problem in Vietnam, perhaps because morphine is included in triage kits hence easy for troops to get. Claiming someone would miss a physical in '72 to avoid drug testing is a sign of having little or no knowledge of the subject.)
As you point out it is easily checked and that is why we can be certain the right is not going to do the checking. They want to believe that the memos are forged for as long as they possibly can.
So far, every attempt at refuting the proof of forgery has fallen flat on its face - look at the link to an authentic page of Bush's record claiming the font is "identical" to CBS's PDFs - except the linked record is monospaced using "open" 4s, the CBS memos are proportionally-spaced using closed 4s.
There is a very simple way to end all this, all Bush needs to do is to allow access to his military record, something he has refused to do so far. The only documents that have been allowed out have been edited by the WH and its supporters.
There are plenty of pages out there - and it seemsKerry has released no more than 6% (4th paragraph from the bottom) of his own. There is, however, a simple way to end this controversy: CBS can produce the originals, and/or produce their anonymous "document expert" who allegedly authenticated these documents yet disagrees utterly with the leading authority in the field.
The document's already been compared to one authentic page of Bush's record - and isn't even similar. Why would the microfiche copy show anything different?
Bush refused a direct order to take a medical shortly after random drug testing for pilots was introduced. Those are the facts, deal with them.
Actually the fact is that cocaine testing was introduced by the military in 1980 ("By July 1980 methaqualone was dropped and cocaine was added to the test panel"), and wouldn't be done as part of your annual physical anyway (that would be stupid: give everyone a year's notice of their next drugs test?!). This rather bursts the whole "Bush was avoiding a drugs test" theory.
yeh, its a good thing that other records fro shrub dont contain the exact same font, with the mysterious superscript th
Except that isn't the same font. The spacing is completely different (monospaced rather than proportional), the 4 is also a different type ("open" in your link, "closed" in the CBS scan).
you're a fucking liar.
Perhaps you should have compared the two fonts properly before making that claim.
A bullet is also too big to knock out individual parts of a DNA sequence. Can we therefore conclude that bullets impacting the body at high velocity are not harmful?
No, but we can conclude that high velocity bullet impacts don't cause cancer, because they can't corrupt DNA in the way required.
Not many people are using their cellphones for hours each day, I hope. (If so, their most urgent health need is to hang up and get an effing life.)
No, in many cases it's part of their job. Telco engineers I've known tend to spend a lot of time in contact with their operations people to run diagnostics, enable/disable lines, things like that.
And it hasn't been many years since cellphones becamse popular. It may (or may not) be the case that, like other environmental factors like smoking or diet, it takes years of use for effects to manifest.
Possible, yes, but we've been using similar radio waves for a lot longer at much higher signal intensities, including far more powerful signals for radar since the 40s - and I've been using cellphones since early 1989.
Hmmm, interesting - thanks for that. I'd still quibble that it's a license to operate equipment, rather than a license to receive content, but 20 years on it's somewhat moot!
The problem is that the licensing system was designed on the assumption that having the theoretical ability to access the BBC's services meant you should pay for doing so. Rather SCO-like, but in the days when this was invented we were nowhere near to having the encryption technology to enforce it more accurately as cable and satellite operators do now. Of course the licensing approach leads to stupid anomalies - your TV used as a monitor forcing you to pay the BBC for a service you don't want, a friend of mine in a valley in Scotland where the BBC didn't even broadcast having to pay for channels she couldn't receive - but it doesn't seem there's enough pressure for a change yet.
(Indeed, this is a change the BBC has been fighting against: note that when they took over the ITV Digital operation, they completely removed the 'conditional access' mechanism precisely to prevent a change to TV License enforcement through the same means Sky and cable operators use.)
Officially, the license is for "permission" to use that equipment - but in practice it is collected by and for the BBC to pay for their content, rather than anything else.
The bus shouldn't be a problem, because even a lowly 32 bit 33 MHz PCI bus has a theoretical 1.056 Gb/s data rate.
As soon as you factor in any overhead at all - or of course any other devices on that PCI bus, like a graphics card or storage - your 32bit 33MHz PCI bus has less available bandwidth than the network connection. Then you have TCP ACKs: full-duplex GbE is 1 Gbit/sec in each direction; 32x33 PCI is 1Gbit/sec total... If you're streaming data between disk and network, of course, you also need to double the PCI bandwidth needed (or put the storage and NIC on different busses!).
With anything more than basic PCI (moving to 64 bit PCI and/or 66MHz), you should be fine though; I'd expect 32x33 PCI to be just about OK for IPerf in one direction only with nothing else running, but you'd be hitting a bottleneck as soon as anything else is using the bus as well, including network traffic in the other direction.
It's 25 minutes of memory is used for antiskip. It has a 20GB harddrive for storage.
Not just anti-skip (which would only need a matter of seconds) - the idea is to read the music in 25 minute bursts, powering the HDD down for the other 24+ minutes. (This should also slash the risk of damage from shocks - the drive will be powered down nearly all the time the unit's playing.)
Okay. In that case, there are 13 000 more gun-related killings in the US than there really ought to be. That's an extra 13 000 people with absolutely no freedoms because they are *dead*. That's not a price that I'm willing to make other people pay on my behalf.
Fortunately, the 16,000 total figure from which the 13,000 figure comes isn't real: 2000's total murder count was just 15,517; I somehow doubt that more than all of them were committed using guns. A lot of those counted as "gun deaths" are in fact suicides - a price the 'victim' is choosing to pay. (Meanwhile, US murder rates have fallen to levels last seen when they included a well-known shooting in Dallas in 1963...) Getting rid of the real gun murders - roughly 10,000 more than the adjusted UK figure - would be nice (and is slowly happening already), but not worth sacrificing fundamental rights for.
Here, high earners *don't* pay a greater percentage of their total income. The tax rate increases with increasing gross income, but the allowances and deductions more than counteract this increase. In some extreme cases it might not even be true that high earners pay more in absolute terms.
I find that literally unbelievable, as well as at variance with the actual IRS figures, particularly with AMT which eliminates virtually all deductions and shifts to a slightly higher percentage above a certain income threshold. High earners also bear a far greater share of the overall tax burden - IMHO, far too large a share. A few months ago I actually went into great detail examining the tax burden on each segment of the population by gross earnings - the figures were very different from your assertions. It's just one of those pieces of political propoganda that always seems to hit home with some people, despite having no basis in reality - hence the creation of AMT in the first place...
There are numerous additional concerns regarding low-earners like, for example, lack of medical insurance or affordable healthcare.
Having had the misfortune to be on the business end of the NHS several times, I'd have to count the UK as lacking affordable healthcare too - it has something 'affordable', at 'only' 13% of your gross income, but it can't honestly be called healthcare. Yes, those on low incomes have problems, but paying the negative amount of "tax" the US system imposes can't be one of them!
The two things that come immediately to mind (irrespective of whether I might be doing them) are oral sex and giving my 19 year old son (or 14 year old for that matter) a glass of wine with their Sunday dinner.
Technically illegal in both countries in the 14 year old's case - though of course you're unlikely to get caught. I do tend to agree 21 for drinking is too high, but oral sex (in private, between consenting adults) shouldn't be illegal anywhere in the US, at least since Lawrence v Texas. Meanwhile, I'll point out that merely defending yourself and harming an intruder in your home can land you in court in the UK - IMHO, a far greater infringement of rights. For that matter, you don't need to take any action against an intruder to be sued in the UK for injuries sustained breaking into your home - insane!
True, and in certain places I wish they were much more common here in the states. I'd happily walk around the streets at 4am anywhere in London. I definitely wouldn't do that in most of LA.
I certainly wouldn't feel safe walking around parts of London at 4am - or 4pm for that matter - and I was born there. With or without those cameras. (For that matter, I've seen the police in London beating a suspect in public - although since he'd knifed one of their colleagues ealier, I wasn't feeling particularly sympathetic.)
And that's why it is so easy to get a gun here in the states just because some people believe that they need to defend themselves from the king of England, or whatever. ~600 killings with guns in the UK every year. ~16000 in the US. Hmmm. I wonder whether carrying a gun actually makes people feel that they have more freedom?
Adjust for population, you're looking at more like five times as many shootings in the US as the UK - personally, that's a price I'm more than willing to pay for the freedom to defend myself, family and property effectively.
In the US, middle-earners and below get taxed heavily, while high earners are comparatively taxed less. Why to the rich deserve more "freedom"?
That has to be a very strange definition of 'comparatively' you're using. High earners pay more money in absolute terms, and a greater percentage of their total income, so how can this ever be 'comparatively less'? The lowest earners pay no income tax whatsoever (or a negative amount, thanks to 'tax credits'), the lower 50% pay virtually none. Looks to me like they are the ones paying less, comparatively or otherwise.
In fact, there are many things that I am free to do in the privacy of my own home in the UK that I can 't (legally) do in my home in the US.
I'd be interested to hear what those are - I've lived for a short time in the US, and the rest of my life in the UK, and can't think of any.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not so sure - for the money it would cost them to buy L-N, I suspect they could do a much better job starting from scratch, using their own well-known brandname to compete.
But L-N owns a tremendous asset in it's news/legal database and the two companies would have tremendous synergies.
Hm. The data in it is valuable - but I wouldn't be surprised if Google could get all the data directly and assemble their own, better, database instead. They've already got relationships with a lot of news sources (crawling even the subscription services for news.google.com, just as L-N will do); building that up would surely make more sense. Look at Gmail, for example: rather than trying to buy a webmail provider (despite, at that point, having a close relationship with Yahoo for search services), they started their own from scratch.
Having said that, of course, they did buy Orkut, and buying L-N directly would be a big shortcut - but would there be anti-trust issues? The two combined would be big in terms of news resources...
It's not a preposterous one you should be looking for, but a perfectly plausible and genuine one they want to keep secret. Think about stealth technology, back before that was public knowledge - certainly not preposterous, and certainly not listed as such in the budget at the time. If this is genuine spending, it's probably going into project they just don't want the public to know they're working on - something like the passive radar using cellphone or TV transmission echoes, laser communications as a substitute for radio in some situations, clever new body armor materials (all of those are genuine and publicly reported, of course, but presumably others are not).
It's a number. They can read that you have file number 9845029 with them - but exactly the same restrictions still apply to getting your file, whether I ask for it as "9845029's file" or "John M Doe's file".
Two possible options I can see: - everyone can read my info, and now I have to worry about my health info being scanned by everyone with any remote interest in it. Get on a plane - *SCAN*; "Sorry sir, we believe your heart may give out on this flight and we don't want any lawsuits". Go to a job interview - *SCAN*; "Sorry but we won't employ someone with your health problems" - nobody can read my info except for readers authorised by the single company controlling the implants. Hmm, now I wonder how they could conceivably abuse that information...
You missed the third option: the RFID tag just gives your reference number, just like looking your name up would do except without the risk of confusion with other patients with similar names. Airline scans it: "Oh, someone gave you a reference number 9845029 on RFID system 398428. Wonder what that means?" Job interview: "Oh, someone calls you 9845029, and they used an fairly new RFID system from IBM." Unless they already have access to your medical records anyway, they still can't look up that reference number.
Thanks, but no thanks - I'll take my chances with anonymity. The possibilities of abuse of this technology are just too high
You don't have any more anonymity without it: they'll still fill out a chart with details of your treatment, it'll still have a reference number and your name etc on. It'll just take a bit more effort (database query rather than an RFID scan) to find your file, and not be as likely to get the right one.
Now, RFID could carry a couple of standard numbers as a warning: a code to indicate you're allergic to penicillin, perhaps, or have a pacemaker (which might affect the use of a defibrilator, for example) which paramedics could check for before giving you any. It couldn't hold anything like your medical records, though: it's like a barcode, not a hard drive! The current RFID standard seems to be for something like a 96 bit number: enough for each company to have their own unique set of serial numbers, avoiding the risk of collisions you can get with barcodes - but not even enough to store some surnames, let alone anything more. The information - and the security applied to it - still lives in a database, just like it would with a hand-written nametag.
Yes; there are five analog TV stations, two of them BBC-owned, the other three commercial. If you get a digital converter - and you're one of the roughly 75% of people covered by digital broadcasts - you can get quite a few more channels (currently 41, it seems); some (currently 10) of these are encrypted, requiring a (small - GBP 7.99/month, just over US$14) subscription. Of the 31 unencrypted channels, 3 are general BBC channels, plus their documentary channel, news channel and BBC Parliament (roughly equivalent to CSPAN - indeed, it actually broadcasts CSPAN at times.)
2)Is cable service available there?
Yes; cable (to something like half the population, from whichever one of the two cable companies covers your area) and satellite (to virtually all of it, from Sky, owned by the same company as DirecTV, with their DirecTiVo equivalent being branded as Sky+). Not as common as in the US yet, but growing. You can also get some TV service over ADSL in a few areas, although this still seems to be a fringe market.
3)If cable is available, do the cable companies build the BBC channels in on their feed and then bill you (and presumably pay the BBC; you wouldn't have to twice), or if not can you tell the BBC to piss off because you don't watch them (showing your cable bill in explanation of your tele)?
Neither. You have to pay the BBC directly (or rather, their licensing contractor, the TV Licensing Agency), whether you want or watch their signal or not - indeed, even if you're in a signal blackspot where you can't receive the signal, you still have to pay for it. They do broadcast the BBC's channels (and the other broadcast channels) alongside their own.
4)Does any of this change if you can show you aren't using any broadcast functionality? Like, if it's plugged into your playstation, and when the BBC guys come in you show them that there's no antenna plugged in and the channels don't come in at all?
No. Own TV, pay TV license fee. It's a straight tax on TV ownership, except they give you a discount if you're blind, and waive the fee if you're over a certain age.
5)Do they sell TV's without broadcast capability? Owners of which the BBC presumably wouldn't harrass?
In a few cases, for other reasons (there's also an 16% import tax on "TVs", which doesn't apply to "monitors") - and they harass you even if you own no form of TV whatsoever, since they assume everyone has one really, they're just trying to dodge the license fee.
6)This local oscillator thingie...is that specific to CRT's?
The TV tuner circuit, IIRC.
7)Is the local oscillator specific to broadcast reception? (Would the hypothetical brodcastless TV's get picked up by the wardriving BBC guys?)
Stores are required by law to report the name and address of anyone buying any kind of TV device to the BBC: they don't need to pick up any signal, just look in their database.
8)Is the local oscillator part of the tuner? Like, would a "monitor" that had inputs for rca/component/svideo/etc. qualify, if it didn't have a tuner? Could you plug an LCD projector into a digital cable box and not pay the BBC?
A computer-like monitor wouldn't count - but I think the digital cable box in your second example would. (It receives a broadcast signal.) Not to mention getting harassed anyway, just because you don't have a TV license.
9)Are radios that pick up TV band sold in the UK? Are they taxed? Do they have local oscillators?
That would be considered a TV tuner, and so subject to the TV tax.
I think that's aimed at anyone planning an SCO-style FUD campaign, where they weren't actually suing people (for the most part), just using the threat to scare them. Your company comes out making SCO-like claims about products from Novell, they'll club it into submission with a truckload of patents. Remember, as SCO demonstrated, it doesn't take an actual lawsuit to scare people away from a product or into paying "protection money" - the threat alone is often enough. Until you make the mistake they did and sue IBM - which is rather like challenging a statue to a staring contest: you'll die long before it blinks...
The complaint there was the felony of lying under oath, rather than the affair in itself.
his refusal to take his Guard flight physical because they'd just instituted drug testing and he would have been busted
A common misconception - but the DoD didn't instigate cocaine testing until 1980 (apart from the trial period beginning in January 1979), making this a very odd reason to miss a medical exam nearly a decade before this. (In addition, you wouldn't want to conduct drug screening as part of a scheduled medical, for obvious reasons: too easy to keep clean and/or find a way round it.)
the felony outing of a CIA agent from within the White House,
Last time I looked, it hadn't been established that she had been deployed overseas within the previous five years (which is a requirement for the legal protection in question).
the massive deception of the case for the war in Iraq.
For me, the largely undisputed facts were more than sufficient - massive human rights abuses (gassing Kurds in Halabja, massacring the Shi'a for rising up against him after his Kuwait defeat, the hideously oppressive regime in general), funding foreign terrorists (the $25k suicide bombing rewards for example) and the fact the sanctions and no-fly zones just weren't a viable long-term solution - too damaging to his own population (destroying the Iraqi economy) and requiring the deployment of US troops in Saudi, a rallying cry used by Al Qaeda to great effect.
No, in fact I disagree with the reduction in H1b quotas (which certainly aren't an exaggerated version of Clinton's, since they're much smaller!) but think both Presidents are in general doing OK on that side. Are you trying the straw man of pretending I implied anything about "the Bush administration's stances" rather than sticking to the truth, that I was referring to immigration/trade policy?
[Clinton's "no-bid" contracts with Halliburton] Red Herring. Next.
How is that a "red herring" when it's exactly what the previous poster was complaining about?
Records suggest that Clinton, if president from 2001 to 2004, would have maintained a balanced budget.
"Suggest... if... would have..." Red herring. Next. (Predictions from that point, of course, couldn't take into account 9/11, Enron, the dot-com bubble, the telecomms bubble...)
The simple fact of the matter is that Bush did not alter his spending plans to accommodate the realities of the economy; he actually enhanced his extravagant spending.
Correct - and I do wish he'd spend less money, particularly on his Medicare expansion. Unfortunately there's no easy way to fix that until at least 2008 - Kerry's solution, for all his hot air about balancing budgets, is to virtually every problem is to spend more government money on it.
It's disgusting that people persist on pinning Bush's problems on Clinton.
Maybe - but I settle for pinning Clinton's own problems on Clinton. The excessive spending is Bush's fault; the so-called "no bid" contracts were on Clinton's watch, as was the first WTC bombing, several Al Qaeda attacks and the formation of the dot-com bubble. To me, it's disgusting that people conveniently forget who actually signed those Halliburton contracts, the Iraq Liberation Act (and the missile attacks on the basis of Iraq's WMDs), how much economic fallout came from that dot-com bubble (and how much it artificially inflated Clinton's apparent economic results at the time)...
If these problems are too tough for Bush to handle then maybe he should bring Clinton into his cabinet. Honestly, when you're POTUS you have to deal with some tough situations. So let's have less excuses and more results, hmmm?
I've seen plenty of results: Saddam Hussein in a jail cell, thousands of Al Qaeda/Taleban men buried and many of their bank accounts frozen, economy growing at a record pace and unemployment slightly lower than at the equivalent point in Clinton's presidency - hardly what I'd call a failure, even without making allowances for damage from events like 9/11. Yes, he's spending far too much money - but the national debt has expanded every single year since just after WWII, so that's hardly unique. No excuses needed: under the circumstances, he's doing a very good job indeed apart from spending too much money.
Well, Clinton did increase the H1b visa quotas massively (now reversed) and didn't (AFAIK) do anything to hinder outsourcing, but I'm not sure the decade-long standoff qualified as a "quagmire". A mess, certainly - and a recruiting poster for Al Qaeda, by keeping US troops on the "Holy Land of Mecca" (i.e. Saudi) to enforce the no-fly zones - but it was only a small open-ended situation in itself. The real problem there was that the situation wasn't sustainable long-term: growing pressure against, and breaches of, the sanctions, as well as a deteriorating situation in Iraq itself as the economy collapsed.
What next, it's Bush's fault that Clinton gave no-bid contracts to Halliburton?
That one's already been tried. The LOGCAP contracts weren't a bad idea, but they do seem to have a PR problem.
But I agree with you, the biggest problem that Clinton left us with was that HUGE budget deficit in 2000.
It wasn't that big - the problem was the huge and collapsing bubble that had made it seem much smaller. I get the impression you were trying to be sarcastic there, but the problem is that Clinton did give the no-bid LOGCAP contracts to Halliburton and run a deficit - the "surplus", like the dot-bomb profits which would have funded it, only ever existed in theoretical projections.
--
"The Iraqi insurgents are our best allies." - French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin
The irony is, from what I've seen the coding that comes out is worse than the English! Indian call centers seem to be OK for simple tasks (I'm pretty sure when I called the airline to reschedule some tickets the handler was Indian) - taking down and checking details like flight number, name and date; it's when you need creativity (like real programming work) that they fall down. AIUI it's because the schools focus too much on blindly memorizing things, which is fine for following a call center script but useless for writing software. From what I've heard of companies trying this, even when you give clear instructions the code rarely works as required - by the time you either spoon-feed then what they need to do or fix their code yourself, it would have been quicker (hence faster) to write it yourself in the first place.
Perhaps the best approach would be to use Indian call centers for first level retail customer support, then transfer it to more suitable operators once you screen out the cup holder crowd ("help, the cup holder on my PC is broken...", "that's not a cup holder, it's the CD/DVD drive; give me your address, we'll have FedEx pick it up, fix it and have it back in a week - that'll cost $150.") Cisco use foreign call centers for two-thirds of their calls - but that's from having three call centers (in the US, Holland and Australia, I think?), each of which handles calls during their own daytime. Wherever the call goes, it's going to well-trained native English speakers, not cheap Indians with a script - then again, Cisco doesn't sell many $100k routers to the cup holder crowd.
The facts don't seem to match your version there...
These are facts. They aren't up for debate. Employment rates don't matter a whole lot if all you're doing is turning former middle-class folks into poor folks, while making rich folks richer. For the vast majority of the population things are considerably worse than they were four years ago.
Well, the $9000 claim isn't a fact at all, but you do have a point about the "middle class" (at least by one definition, those earning $25-75k/yr) having shrunk - what you missed, though, is that the upper class also shrank over the same (2000-2003) period! Incomes dropped across the board early on, due to the economic implosion (recession, dot-bomb bubble, telecoms, 9/11, Enron/MCI) - but the loss almost halted across 2002-2003, and has probably already reversed. For 2002-2003, the upper income category expanded again slightly, while the middle shrank by much less than it had previously. (Lots more figures here if you're interested.)
I'd also point out that employment is rather important for the people who don't currently have it: being unemployed with no income may still put you in the same bracket as having a $24k/yr job, but it's certainly a very different situation :-)
Neither party has done anything to improve the situation, nor will they so long as they are, or answer to, the people who profit from this situation. I don't expect Kerry to do any better; I only hope that he deadlocks the government and thereby prevents it from doing any more harm. Jesus, I'm getting depressed just thinking about how low my expectations have dropped....
In general, I'd say being left alone is the best most people can or should expect from the government. In the long term, even when the government actively props up failing businesses things usually get worse long-term as a result. (I'm not a hardcore anarchist/libertarian: I'm all in favor of the government regulating banks to make sure my money doesn't disappear, food to keep toxic additives or contamination out, etc - I just know they can't run an economy and shouldn't try.)
I think the point is that it takes two days of work to do the paperwork for forming a company - the tax forms, registration etc, not the groundwork for the business itself. If it's the one I'm thinking of, the same survey quoted much higher figures for other countries; IIRC, it was a few days for the UK - and almost a month for France, which apparently has far fewer self-employed people and very small businesses. So it is a serious figure, it just doesn't refer to the whole creation, just the legal paperwork side. (Understandable: how exactly would you get a figure for creating a business as a whole - a year or so to build a new restaurant? An hour of paperwork and a big investment to get a franchise?)
However, I have a different perspective on this job crunch. I think that we are in the midst of a major economic change in this country. It is going to take some time for businesses to understand how to best use off-shore outsourcing and global networks such as open source project teams. This transition creates an opportunity for me because many people feel orphaned by the current trends in the small business markets.
There have certainly been some surprises; ISTR Slashdot had an article about Dell moving many call center operations back to the US ("insourcing"?), after finding the cost savings weren't enough to offset the extra overhead, PR hit etc - and I still remember patching someone's outsourced code which had documentation obviously written by someone to whom English was a foreign language ("With Every Word Of The Documentation In Capitals!")
Of course, Linux itself entails a significant element of this: run SuSE, you're importing your distro from Germany; even the kernel itself has large elements developed in the UK (Alan Cox!) and many other countries, not to mention Linus himself - Finnish, after developing the early kernel in Finland he became another of those immigrants to the US other posters have been complaining about when he joined Transmeta. This is nothing new - Mr Einstein wasn't born in the US, nor was Werner von Braun (father of America's early rocket program) - and no doubt there were complaints about immigrants "taking jobs" then, too, just as there have been in all the Western economies since at least the early 20th century.
No - just using the "private" addresses in itself reduces external access: as you said earlier, getting past an unfiltered NAT connection requires you to be on the same network (cable modem segment, or equivalent) and to modify your routing tables to do so. That alone would keep out 100% of the worms which just probe random IPs (AFAIK none of them try changing routing tables like this on the offchance of getting through an insecure NAT!) and 99% of would-be intruders: even if I told you my external IP address and you were on (or controlled a machine on) my cable modem segment, you'd be at a slight disadvantage in terms of breaking in compared to if I used external addresses directly!
I wouldn't regard it as "secure", but even without filtering the NAT itself helps from a security point of view: it slashes the number of hosts capable of initiating communications to you, even making an effort to do so. Far less chance of Slammer dropping in uninvited, for example!
I agree that NAT and filtering are distinct, but IME the two often go together in this context - and when using RFC1918 addresses, filtering is usually the only setup which makes sense: very few people would actually want their LAN externally accessable like that!
Every time IPv6 is discussed, a bunch of people talk about how afraid they are because NAT Will be unneccessary and they think their network will be less secure without NAT.
That's certainly a poor argument - but so, IMO, is the "NAT is evil, move to IPv6 to get rid of it" argument others here have been using. I'm not afraid IPv6 will eliminate NAT (or filtering, or the equivalent of RFC1918 addresses) - but nor am I jumping for joy because it will make NAT unnecessary.
You almost certainly had and have filtering rules in addition to the NAT. I can't imagine any kind of documentation or pre-built firewall setup scripts having you to not do the filtering too.
Correct. It wasn't pre-built, but when I wanted "a NAT setup", filtering was a natural part of using private IP addresses. You agree, I think, with my position that such filtering is part of a correct NAT-based connection such as mine, which was my original premise and the basis for the other posters' "NAT blocks external connections" assumption?
No, to the outside world it appears to be a single host, with a single IP address, sending and receiving packets like any other host. The machines "behind" it are invisible to the outside world. It does not act like a router to Slashdot, it acts like a host.
Now your router may pick and choose what packets it wants to pass and what it wants to drop. This is packet filtering, and is distinct from routing and NAT. A router does not drop anything unless you set up packet filtering to make it do so.
True in a sense - but nor does it do NAT unless set up to do so. IMO, when NATting RFC1918 addresses in one direction, blocking them in the other direction also makes sense: the whole point there is to separate the private network from the general Internet.
A router without packet filtering is in no way not a "normal router". Most backbone routers do not do any kind of filtering. In fact, in my experience tier-1 ISPs are quite reluctant to do any kind of filtering for you (to say, stop a DOS attack) because applying filters to their routers increases their CPU load.
Yes, they'll usually dislike adding ACLs for performance reasons (and the admin overhead of adding and checking rules, then removing them again later), and a router with no ACLs is indeed perfectly normal - as is one not doing NAT. My statement was that the NAT router should not function as a "normal router" and pass the packets through, it should filter them out as mine does. There have been previous discussions here about randomizing the various parameters (as OpenBSD can) to make the illusion of a single host more convincing to your ISP; to then allow inbound connections to RFC1918 addresses would rather defeat the purpose :-)
Au contrare. In one of my other NAT discussions I actually set up a router to do only NAT. Inbound connections worked fine. Those connections were not the type of thing that we wanted NATed (only outbound connections) so NAT didn't pay any attention to it. Lacking any filtering rules, the connection just went right through.
It's certainly possible to set up a router to do that, and useful in some scenarios (as is the reverse; Slashdot itself is behind a load balancer which should do something similar) - but for the typical home use of NAT (putting machines on RFC1918 addresses, then mangling packets so the outside world sees only the single IP address their ISP provides, allowing inbound connections like that is bad. I know my OpenBSD firewall did block any such attempt, as its replacement appears to do.
On another machine on this big network you type 'route add -net 10.0.0.0/24 gw 172.30.0.2'. Also on this machine you then type 'ping 10.0.0.1' and notice the reply.
If the router fails to filter such packets (or rather, it chooses to route them) then yes, you can get through. This would seem unlikely - apart from anything else, that shouldn't be a normal "router" on 172.30.0.2. My own NAT system, for example, doesn't act like a router at all to the outside world: any packet it gets that isn't aimed at its own IP is just dropped. Its predecessor (an OpenBSD machine) was, of course, capable of acting as a router - but would also drop anything remotely suspicious. (Being OpenBSD, it would probably also hunt down and kill the sender!)
Apart from anything else, the NAT router's configuration shouldn't let packets with RFC1918 source addresses leave the network - so if you try opening a connection to a machine behind such a gateway, your SYN packet will arrive - but the SYN|ACK reply won't make it back to you, hence no connection.
I suspect the maximum will be set at, or just below, the level it costs to bring in an outside nurse from an agency. Essentially the logic will be "It would cost us $20/hr to bring in an outsider - is anyone on-staff willing to do the extra shift instead?" The hospital probably saves a couple of dollars, and is getting one of its own staff (who already knows the people, procedures, where everything's stored etc) instead of an outsider; their own staff can get some extra money when they need it - everybody wins, except the agency which is losing some business to the full-time nursing staff. Sounds OK to me.
Wrong - the DoD introduced testing for cocaine in 1980 (after a brief trial program beginning in January 1979) - and do you really think they'd have been dumb enough to give everyone a year's notice when their next drugs test would be by putting it in the annual physical, rather than conducting them randomly?
(There's an element of truth to the "drug testing introduced then" claim - but cocaine wasn't tested for until years later; those tests targetting morphine and amphetamine abuse, which were a problem in Vietnam, perhaps because morphine is included in triage kits hence easy for troops to get. Claiming someone would miss a physical in '72 to avoid drug testing is a sign of having little or no knowledge of the subject.)
So far, every attempt at refuting the proof of forgery has fallen flat on its face - look at the link to an authentic page of Bush's record claiming the font is "identical" to CBS's PDFs - except the linked record is monospaced using "open" 4s, the CBS memos are proportionally-spaced using closed 4s.
There is a very simple way to end all this, all Bush needs to do is to allow access to his military record, something he has refused to do so far. The only documents that have been allowed out have been edited by the WH and its supporters.
There are plenty of pages out there - and it seems Kerry has released no more than 6% (4th paragraph from the bottom) of his own. There is, however, a simple way to end this controversy: CBS can produce the originals, and/or produce their anonymous "document expert" who allegedly authenticated these documents yet disagrees utterly with the leading authority in the field.
The document's already been compared to one authentic page of Bush's record - and isn't even similar. Why would the microfiche copy show anything different?
Bush refused a direct order to take a medical shortly after random drug testing for pilots was introduced. Those are the facts, deal with them.
Actually the fact is that cocaine testing was introduced by the military in 1980 ("By July 1980 methaqualone was dropped and cocaine was added to the test panel"), and wouldn't be done as part of your annual physical anyway (that would be stupid: give everyone a year's notice of their next drugs test?!). This rather bursts the whole "Bush was avoiding a drugs test" theory.
Except that isn't the same font. The spacing is completely different (monospaced rather than proportional), the 4 is also a different type ("open" in your link, "closed" in the CBS scan).
you're a fucking liar.
Perhaps you should have compared the two fonts properly before making that claim.
No, but we can conclude that high velocity bullet impacts don't cause cancer, because they can't corrupt DNA in the way required.
Not many people are using their cellphones for hours each day, I hope. (If so, their most urgent health need is to hang up and get an effing life.)
No, in many cases it's part of their job. Telco engineers I've known tend to spend a lot of time in contact with their operations people to run diagnostics, enable/disable lines, things like that.
And it hasn't been many years since cellphones becamse popular. It may (or may not) be the case that, like other environmental factors like smoking or diet, it takes years of use for effects to manifest.
Possible, yes, but we've been using similar radio waves for a lot longer at much higher signal intensities, including far more powerful signals for radar since the 40s - and I've been using cellphones since early 1989.
The problem is that the licensing system was designed on the assumption that having the theoretical ability to access the BBC's services meant you should pay for doing so. Rather SCO-like, but in the days when this was invented we were nowhere near to having the encryption technology to enforce it more accurately as cable and satellite operators do now. Of course the licensing approach leads to stupid anomalies - your TV used as a monitor forcing you to pay the BBC for a service you don't want, a friend of mine in a valley in Scotland where the BBC didn't even broadcast having to pay for channels she couldn't receive - but it doesn't seem there's enough pressure for a change yet.
(Indeed, this is a change the BBC has been fighting against: note that when they took over the ITV Digital operation, they completely removed the 'conditional access' mechanism precisely to prevent a change to TV License enforcement through the same means Sky and cable operators use.)
Officially, the license is for "permission" to use that equipment - but in practice it is collected by and for the BBC to pay for their content, rather than anything else.
As soon as you factor in any overhead at all - or of course any other devices on that PCI bus, like a graphics card or storage - your 32bit 33MHz PCI bus has less available bandwidth than the network connection. Then you have TCP ACKs: full-duplex GbE is 1 Gbit/sec in each direction; 32x33 PCI is 1Gbit/sec total... If you're streaming data between disk and network, of course, you also need to double the PCI bandwidth needed (or put the storage and NIC on different busses!).
With anything more than basic PCI (moving to 64 bit PCI and/or 66MHz), you should be fine though; I'd expect 32x33 PCI to be just about OK for IPerf in one direction only with nothing else running, but you'd be hitting a bottleneck as soon as anything else is using the bus as well, including network traffic in the other direction.
Not just anti-skip (which would only need a matter of seconds) - the idea is to read the music in 25 minute bursts, powering the HDD down for the other 24+ minutes. (This should also slash the risk of damage from shocks - the drive will be powered down nearly all the time the unit's playing.)
Fortunately, the 16,000 total figure from which the 13,000 figure comes isn't real: 2000's total murder count was just 15,517; I somehow doubt that more than all of them were committed using guns. A lot of those counted as "gun deaths" are in fact suicides - a price the 'victim' is choosing to pay. (Meanwhile, US murder rates have fallen to levels last seen when they included a well-known shooting in Dallas in 1963...) Getting rid of the real gun murders - roughly 10,000 more than the adjusted UK figure - would be nice (and is slowly happening already), but not worth sacrificing fundamental rights for.
Here, high earners *don't* pay a greater percentage of their total income. The tax rate increases with increasing gross income, but the allowances and deductions more than counteract this increase. In some extreme cases it might not even be true that high earners pay more in absolute terms.
I find that literally unbelievable, as well as at variance with the actual IRS figures, particularly with AMT which eliminates virtually all deductions and shifts to a slightly higher percentage above a certain income threshold. High earners also bear a far greater share of the overall tax burden - IMHO, far too large a share. A few months ago I actually went into great detail examining the tax burden on each segment of the population by gross earnings - the figures were very different from your assertions. It's just one of those pieces of political propoganda that always seems to hit home with some people, despite having no basis in reality - hence the creation of AMT in the first place...
There are numerous additional concerns regarding low-earners like, for example, lack of medical insurance or affordable healthcare.
Having had the misfortune to be on the business end of the NHS several times, I'd have to count the UK as lacking affordable healthcare too - it has something 'affordable', at 'only' 13% of your gross income, but it can't honestly be called healthcare. Yes, those on low incomes have problems, but paying the negative amount of "tax" the US system imposes can't be one of them!
The two things that come immediately to mind (irrespective of whether I might be doing them) are oral sex and giving my 19 year old son (or 14 year old for that matter) a glass of wine with their Sunday dinner.
Technically illegal in both countries in the 14 year old's case - though of course you're unlikely to get caught. I do tend to agree 21 for drinking is too high, but oral sex (in private, between consenting adults) shouldn't be illegal anywhere in the US, at least since Lawrence v Texas. Meanwhile, I'll point out that merely defending yourself and harming an intruder in your home can land you in court in the UK - IMHO, a far greater infringement of rights. For that matter, you don't need to take any action against an intruder to be sued in the UK for injuries sustained breaking into your home - insane!
I certainly wouldn't feel safe walking around parts of London at 4am - or 4pm for that matter - and I was born there. With or without those cameras. (For that matter, I've seen the police in London beating a suspect in public - although since he'd knifed one of their colleagues ealier, I wasn't feeling particularly sympathetic.)
And that's why it is so easy to get a gun here in the states just because some people believe that they need to defend themselves from the king of England, or whatever. ~600 killings with guns in the UK every year. ~16000 in the US. Hmmm. I wonder whether carrying a gun actually makes people feel that they have more freedom?
Adjust for population, you're looking at more like five times as many shootings in the US as the UK - personally, that's a price I'm more than willing to pay for the freedom to defend myself, family and property effectively.
In the US, middle-earners and below get taxed heavily, while high earners are comparatively taxed less. Why to the rich deserve more "freedom"?
That has to be a very strange definition of 'comparatively' you're using. High earners pay more money in absolute terms, and a greater percentage of their total income, so how can this ever be 'comparatively less'? The lowest earners pay no income tax whatsoever (or a negative amount, thanks to 'tax credits'), the lower 50% pay virtually none. Looks to me like they are the ones paying less, comparatively or otherwise.
In fact, there are many things that I am free to do in the privacy of my own home in the UK that I can 't (legally) do in my home in the US.
I'd be interested to hear what those are - I've lived for a short time in the US, and the rest of my life in the UK, and can't think of any.