The problem with the argument is that, according to Hollywood, no film ever makes money. Hollywood accounting is used to effectively deprive the actual artists and creative talent of their just compensation.
In light of this, it would seem that having extended copyright terms actually makes it impossible for Hollywood to make a profit. If they didn't enjoy a perpetual royalty on creative works, they would have to employ more creative talent in order to remain in business.
How many here would decry the Chinese and assorted third world countries for censorship of the internet, and yet, here we (in the US) act no differently. It makes me wonder how many things we just don't see, because the DNS entry doesn't even show up.
That is: is the theory falsifiable? Does the theory make predictions that could potentially be proven wrong by evidence? Intelligent Design fails this test.
Let's not forget that Evolution, especially with respect to the origin of species, also fails this test. As hard as one might try, postulates about things which happened in the past can't ever be proven false. Sure, there's plenty of speculation, but the bulk of evolutionary theory (wrt to the origin of species) does not contain any testable hypotheses.
Now sure, you can talk about micro-evolution, and perhaps even show examples. You can talk about biology, and genetics, which is on even firmer ground - these can be scientifically verified today. But when will the scientifically minded accept the fact that you can't design an experiment to falsify a theory about something which happened in the past? If I told you Paul Bunyan's Ox stomped out the Great Lakes, how could you prove it wrong? From a theoretical perspective, there's no test that we can do today which would show definitively that an ox of mythical proportions couldn't create footprints of likewise proportions which would subsequently fill with water.
I think evolution is nice speculation about what happened in the past, but it won't ever be true in the mathematical sense. Children often have problems dealing with ambiguity, and if you start teaching something that might be false, they'll assume everything you teach is either potentially, or completely, false. If the authority of the teacher, or what is taught, becomes suspect, children often become unmanageable, or worse, assume that, "there's no such thing as truth, and everything is relative..."
This bill isn't so much about acceptance of science as it is letting teachers manage their classrooms appropriately. If we can teach science by example, by showing things which can be verified, we will have people who expect to verify the truth. From a pedagogical perspective, teaching evolution is really teaching children to have a blind faith in science, because no high-schooler, much less a middle school student, will be able to independently verify the theories. And this is more important than teaching a particular pet scientific theory.
So which would you rather have - a population which believes in evolution and accepts everything told them, through blind faith; or a society which might not believe in evolution, but expects to test and independently verify everything?
Think about the implications this has on politics for a moment before replying...
Even when my battery was new, I still wouldn't get more than 3/4 of the way through a DVD before having to plug in.
Low end laptops never could play through a complete movie, regardless of whether it was on DVD or Blu Ray.
It doesn't matter how much power Blu Ray consumes - there will always be a laptop manufacturer who skimps on the battery to cut costs. If you want to watch movies on a portable device, you have to buy a personal media player. Sad, but true.
/* This determines how big the * telescope array size is. */ #define VERY_LARGE_ARRAY_SIZE REALLY_BIG
to:
/* This determines how big the * telescope array size is. * * 02-24-2008: s. coder: Change array size * for 2 GHz mod upgrade */ #define VERY_LARGE_ARRAY_SIZE EVEN_BIGGER
And you know what? They're right. But neither would I attempt to steal the artist's living through creative accounting. I think the point they're trying to make is that they're far bigger jerks than you could ever hope to be, so don't mess with them.
Next time someone talks about filesharing as if it's stealing, remind them that you lose money on every download. You have to pay for the bandwidth, the equipment, and - by golly! - that all gets very expensive. By the time you're done, you just don't have anything left to pay the record companies... sorry!
The class covered those things as well: lock the page in memory, and ensure that the compiler doesn't elide the call to memset(buffer,0,len) by reading back the data. A recent discussion on a crypto mailing list discussed this latter issue at great length, and the consensus was that while theoretically possible, no compiler actually elided calls to memset(), even if the compiler could prove that the memory would never be accessed again.
That is to say, the state of the memory will remain when power is lost, unless it's explicitly overwritten.
That is not what 'static' means. It means that the state of the flip flop doesn't change absent a reset signal, hence, the circuit is static as long as power is applied. Unlike DRAM, where the memory cell is a capacitor which gradually loses its charge and needs to be refreshed.
SRAM is probably the best place to store the key, because recovery of SRAM contents, while sometimes possible, is much harder. Unlike capacitors, which are designed to store a charge, the state of SRAM is designed to be stable when power is applied. That is, a pair of cross-coupled transistors prevent another pair of cross-coupled transistors from turning on. Determining which pair of transistors was turned on after power is removed is much more difficult than checking the residual charge on the capacitors used in DRAM.
we know of no simple remedy that would eliminate them...
As part of a secure programming course I recently took, we were instructed to overwrite keys with zeros when done using them. It's that simple - you don't leave the key in memory for any longer than you need it.
When the machine is powered down, your application's exit routine zeros all of the memory, and then free()s it. Nothing that good programming practices can't address.
Generally speaking, it's the keys on the disk(!) that are the problem. Without two factor authentication, you need merely to scan disk sectors...
The problem is that invading one's privacy, even if only a suspected invasion, is damaging to the individual.
How is this any different from the police coming to visit you every night, and sticking around until you go to bed? When it comes down to it, you'd be hard pressed to show any actual damages from such behavior, yet the thought of this is unsettling to even the most radical neo-cons.
The problem is that freedom, even if it does not have a monetary equivalent, still has tremendous value. The government listening in on your conversations is little different from them actually trespassing on your property. Neither have imposed a monetary cost on you, but they have infringed on the most basic human freedom, the freedom of thought and conscience. In a likewise manner, if people suspect that their conversations are monitored, they will not express their most intimate thoughts, for fear that they may used against them. Worse, such restrictions on human freedom stifle the relationships we have with others.
The fact that the government is let off the hook because the victims can't legally show harm - that is, they are prevented from actually knowing if their privacy is invaded - is quite disturbing. A child pornographer could use the same argument; that because his children (err, victims...) aren't old enough to understand the harm done to them, that they have no grounds for objecting to their pictures being taken.
I think, though, that there's a double standard when it comes to government. Unlike "terrorists" - which are presumed guilty except when there exists incontrovertible exculpatory evidece - the government is presumed innocent, and its evidence and intentions beyond reproach, except when the accused manage, by some legal loophole, to show otherwise.
Justice at the federal level has completely changed:
Instead of being presumed innocent, the accused are presumed guilty, and not even tried, except in cases where their lawyers manage to find some way around the executive branch.
Even when the accused do get to trial, they are tried in secret courts, where they are not allowed to see the evidence against them, if they are allowed to attend the trial at all.
"If you aren't doing anything wrong, what do you have to hide?"
Indeed, all patriotic Americans need to ask themselves this question of the government, particularly the executive branch. If indeed, they aren't doing anything wrong, why must they keep everything so secret - even from Congress and the Courts? Isn't it more likely that they are using the secrecy to cover up activities that most Americans would consider wrong?
Most worrisome is the fact that we have gone from an open society which feared nothing ("The only thing we have to fear is fear itself...") to a society where everyone is suspect and fear of what one might do is sufficient to deny anyone and everyone their rights under the law. The justice system has been transformed from an open and transparent process which followed the principles of fairness to a capricious and arbitrary exercise of power.
In one of their recent episodes, Mythbusters researched using compressed air and water "bottle rockets". The highest flight to date of a compressed air and water rocket was about 500 meters, IIRC. And it was made from materials far stronger than a 2 liter bottle.
The fundamental problem, as Mythbusters showed, is that a 2 liter bottle just can't hold enough pressure for the impulse necessary to put the bottle into orbit.
So, what exactly, defines a server? When you think about it, there's just traffic between two points. From a semantic perspective, posting to/. could be seen as "serving" text to a remote computer...
But, I think this kind of highlights the apparent Cox conceptual model of the internet:
Businesses create the news, opinions, and "interactive" content. The subscriber consumes the content business creates. Subscribers do not participate in opinion, create content, or otherwise create outbound traffic, with the exception of:
Email.
Games, filesharing, IM, and the like are all under the radar - they are "server-like" applications when it comes to dealing with the subscriber, so they can arbitrarily be denied service without breaking the TOS.
Web servers, SSH, terminal services, VPNs, etc... are business class services, for which a commercial account is required.
The optimist in me hopes I'm wrong on some of the above points, but the pessimist knows to suspect the worst.
We didn't go with a monolithic Linux over the once-Apple-sponsored mkLinux because it was inherently better for every possible task under the sun, we went with it because it was better for some tasks and good enough for others and it had more support from interested parties, i.e. marketplace factors.
Same argument works just as well for Windows (better, actually):
We didn't go with a Proprietary Windows over the open-source Linux because it was inherently better for every possible task under the sun, we went with it because it was better for some tasks and good enough for others and it had more support from interested parties, i.e. marketplace factors. It had better driver support, was more widely adopted, and more familiar to the majority of people. We found that the things which differentiated Linux - better security, higher reliability - were just not important enough to most users to justify the time expenditure of learning a new operating system.
There's no point in re-inventing the wheel if you aren't going to do it right. Granted, I like Linux better than Windows, and it does have some really compelling advantages for those able to benefit, but the Micro-vs-Monolithic kernel argument was lost a long time ago. We know that Linux is suboptimal. But even for its shortfalls, it is still by far the best choice available. It is not merely "good enough" - it is the best option one has for a PC operating system.
And please don't troll about the Windows statement. That was for demonstration purposes only.
our combined income will be well over six times what either of our parents brings home right now
And you still won't be able to afford a house in the suburbs. At least not one comparable to the one you probably grew up in. Chances are good that your parents live in a house that neither of you could afford on the open market in the suburbs.
And what will happen when your wife wants children? When she wants to stop working to stay at home with the children? Will you be able to afford your mortgage then?
I've seen this firsthand. You know, growing up, I really believed that if I got a degree that I'd be better off than my parents. Well, I'm not. In fact, in economic terms, I'm making less today that a factory worker made 30 years ago. And I'm making more money than anyone else in my family.
You know, there was a time when the welfare class was comprised mainly of the illiterate and lazy. But in the last decade I've seen it go from folks who just plain didn't want to work to hard-working people, displaced by outsourcing. First, it factory workers. Now, I'm seeing people with college degrees who - even though they work when they can - simply can't make ends meet.
I understand that you'll be a lawyer, so good luck with that. But I doubt that, even with your salary, you will be able to afford the traditional American family lifestyle with a breadwinner and a stay-at-home-mom.
As to the exact number in my view that would follow a review of a number of things. Number 1: What's the overall economy doing? What's happening to the size of our workforce. Number 2: What's happening to our own capacity in the jobs that are being requested. Number 3: What are the demands from our employers? How many additional folks do they need? You'd have to do an assessment of that on a regular basis, but my overall view is we need more H1B visas, not less.
He's not wishy-washy, he's pandering to corporate America. Not once did he mention the plight of the worker or the effect that H1B visas have on the American family. So, you can count on him introducing enough H1B visa holders into the US until it reaches a point where programmers and engineers can no longer make a decent living. Today, to pay off your house in Silicon Valley, you need about $200,000 a year of family income. That means that stay-at-home moms have to live elsewhere. That means that engineers like me aren't going to move there. Does it surprise anyone that people won't move to an area where they can't make a living?
There is no so-called shortage of high-tech workers in this country. There are plenty. The problem is that we are worth more than our employers wish to pay us, and that is a problem from the perspective of the elite class, who depend on the labor of others to finance their million-dollar estates and summer homes.
I never thought I'd see the day when I made 4 times what my father did, and yet, am still unable to buy a house. There is something *really* wrong with this country when a person who spent 4 years in the military to pay for 4 years of college still can't afford a house after becoming a "senior" in his profession.
My dad bought his first house when he was 21. I know people pushing 40, married, with no children, who still can't afford a house.
I do believe in many of the principles espoused by the Republican party. But I'm having a real hard time with their feigned ignorance of what unrestrained capitalism does to the American family. I think the fundamental disconnect comes when they believe that money can solve every problem. Our government should remain focused on the family, and yes, while more money would help out most families, we have to recognize that money is not the object; it is the means. We can't make a more family-friendly place to live simply by increasing the flow of money!
As one who has had to endure the suffering of a polyester-cotton blend, I, for one, think Moses got that one right the first time. We'd all be much better off without polyester (well, except maybe baseball players, with apologies to George Costanza...)
But in all seriousness, there are some very good theological reasons why the civil parts of Mosaic law were discarded while the moral parts remained in force. It has to do with the coming of what had been promised by Moses, the fulfillment of prophecy, and the establishment of a New Covenant. Hopefully, I've given you enough to research for yourself, but this shift was not merely an arbitrary change in religion, but rather, the expected outcome. Even the Jews, who do not accept Jesus Christ as Messiah, still await the coming Messiah. So while the continued condemnation of homosexuality without the attendant adherence to the civil law of the Torah may appear completely arbitrary, it was the side effect of a long awaited event promised by scripture.
As for religion getting it wrong, I was referring to the various dead religions, such as the Greco-Roman gods, and to the various cults which spring up from time to time, only to splinter off and die later when people wake up and realize the truth.
Yes, being able to correct mistakes is the glory of science. But being right the first time is the glory of religion.
When religion doesn't get it right, people abandon it completely. When science doesn't get it right, they say, "well, that's just part of the process..."
Each particular method has its strengths and weaknesses:
Religion reveals the truth of divine revelation. Which means that it is true by axiom, not proof. If the "revealed truth" isn't actually true, then it isn't of divine origin. Which does much to explain why religious institutions are very conservative when it comes to accepting new ideas.
Mathematics is provably correct. That is, apart from an error in the proof, what is true today will always be true.
Science is experimentally correct. That is, the hypotheses called true today may be shown false tomorrow with the discovery of additional data.
The key, I think, is not to confuse the various levels of truth. Those who take religion as if it were a scientifically-verifiable fact are just as confused as those who think scientific theorems are as reliable and trustworthy as the Gospel or mathematical proofs. There is a large difference between the three, and understanding the subtle limitations of each is just as important as understanding the ideas they espouse.
The government is _not_ out to get you if you aren't breaking any laws.
Actually, this is not true - the search and seizure laws passed as part of the War on Drugs allowed law enforcement to seize money and property from suspects without ever charging them with a crime. Having myself been deprived of property by the police in just such a situation, I would be inclined to disagree with you. You seem to believe that the power wielded by the FBI has no implications for corrupt individuals. I would argue that such power is specifically sought by corrupt individuals, and the web is full of supporting evidence. Research McCarthyism sometime. Or the civil rights struggle of the sixties.
Or even the story of Randy Weaver, whose wife and infant were shot and killed by an FBI sniper. (And this because the Justice Department moved up his trial date without informing him. When he missed it, they issued a warrant for his arrest. And in spite of the fact that the sniper killed an innocent bystander, the sniper was given an award by the FBI. Think about that for a moment: our government issued an award to someone who killed an innocent woman and her infant child. And was later forced to pay a settlement - of taxpayer money, mind you - to her husband and children.)
And let's not forget that Egyptian student that from which the FBI wrested a confession under duress. A confession that was later shown to be false. And no, the FBI did not compensate him for his lost time.
But that's not the biggest problem, though. Certain laws are just plain immoral, and one cannot follow them without doing something wrong. For example, for many years in the US, racial discrimination was enshrined in law. In my state, Catholic pharmacists cannot legally practice their religion - they are forced to dispense birth control, even abortifacients, or face legal penalties. In the US, you are required to pay taxes on loan interest, even if you didn't collect any interest at all (because doing so would violate Mosaic law).
So, if you are an advocate for any type of social change, you can be considered a disturber of the peace, and prosecuted for just about anything. The idea is not that they believe you are actually guilty, but rather, by using the government's seemingly unlimited resources against an individual, they can deny the individual the ability to effectively function as an activist. The problem with email scanning, as I see it, is that just about anyone's words can be taken out of context to mean something nefarious. Which means that - even though you, if innocent, and able to afford a lawyer - will eventually be exonerated, the process will drain you financially and take away years from your life. Sure, its better than prison, but the act of being charged in the first place is a de facto fine.
Terrorists who get caught don't continue to plan attacks...
The fundamental problem with the privacy-vs-security argument is that it is a false dichotomy:
When someone says, "I have no problem with the government listening in on my conversations or reading my emails," I ask, "Are you a terrorist?". Inevitably, they reply in the negative. Which leads me to ask, "How then, does the government reading your emails make anyone more secure?" Often, this results in an awkward silence, and then they begin to get it.
Sometimes, they'll quip, "Well, how do they know who the terrorists are if they don't read all of the emails..." To which I reply, "If a terrorist is so dumb so as to discuss their plans over the phone or email, how much damage could they do?" I'll remind them of Richard Reid, who was so dumb he didn't know plastic explosives couldn't be detonated with matches.
The fundamental problem with eavesdropping is that it assumes that the bad guys are willing to divulge key operational details over an insecure channel. Even the dumbest of criminals knows to shut up when the cops are around. So who do the feds expect to catch? That's right - ordinary Americans like you and me. When we become a "problem" to those in power, they'll have hours of phone calls and pages of emails, in which they will find something - no matter how innocent - which, when taken out of context, sounds nefarious. The famous quote, "Give me six sentences by even the most upright man and I will find a reason to hang him..." (or similar) comes to mind.
Rather, I think it is helpful to expose the lies used to increase the amount of political power wielded by the executive branch.
265 million hours of computing time, how much do they really have?
Assuming they've donated this time to be used during one year, that means they've got around 30,000 processors idle.
Which makes me wonder how much computing power the NSA has. I had always assumed that it would be less than the number of people on the planet, but now I'm not so sure...
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with the argument is that, according to Hollywood, no film ever makes money. Hollywood accounting is used to effectively deprive the actual artists and creative talent of their just compensation.
In light of this, it would seem that having extended copyright terms actually makes it impossible for Hollywood to make a profit. If they didn't enjoy a perpetual royalty on creative works, they would have to employ more creative talent in order to remain in business.
How many here would decry the Chinese and assorted third world countries for censorship of the internet, and yet, here we (in the US) act no differently. It makes me wonder how many things we just don't see, because the DNS entry doesn't even show up.
Are we truly free? Or is that just an illusion?
That is: is the theory falsifiable? Does the theory make predictions that could potentially be proven wrong by evidence? Intelligent Design fails this test.
Let's not forget that Evolution, especially with respect to the origin of species, also fails this test. As hard as one might try, postulates about things which happened in the past can't ever be proven false. Sure, there's plenty of speculation, but the bulk of evolutionary theory (wrt to the origin of species) does not contain any testable hypotheses.
Now sure, you can talk about micro-evolution, and perhaps even show examples. You can talk about biology, and genetics, which is on even firmer ground - these can be scientifically verified today. But when will the scientifically minded accept the fact that you can't design an experiment to falsify a theory about something which happened in the past? If I told you Paul Bunyan's Ox stomped out the Great Lakes, how could you prove it wrong? From a theoretical perspective, there's no test that we can do today which would show definitively that an ox of mythical proportions couldn't create footprints of likewise proportions which would subsequently fill with water.
I think evolution is nice speculation about what happened in the past, but it won't ever be true in the mathematical sense. Children often have problems dealing with ambiguity, and if you start teaching something that might be false, they'll assume everything you teach is either potentially, or completely, false. If the authority of the teacher, or what is taught, becomes suspect, children often become unmanageable, or worse, assume that, "there's no such thing as truth, and everything is relative..."
This bill isn't so much about acceptance of science as it is letting teachers manage their classrooms appropriately. If we can teach science by example, by showing things which can be verified, we will have people who expect to verify the truth. From a pedagogical perspective, teaching evolution is really teaching children to have a blind faith in science, because no high-schooler, much less a middle school student, will be able to independently verify the theories. And this is more important than teaching a particular pet scientific theory.
So which would you rather have - a population which believes in evolution and accepts everything told them, through blind faith; or a society which might not believe in evolution, but expects to test and independently verify everything?
Think about the implications this has on politics for a moment before replying...
Tell Safari users to stop using PayPal...
Even when my battery was new, I still wouldn't get more than 3/4 of the way through a DVD before having to plug in.
Low end laptops never could play through a complete movie, regardless of whether it was on DVD or Blu Ray.
It doesn't matter how much power Blu Ray consumes - there will always be a laptop manufacturer who skimps on the battery to cut costs. If you want to watch movies on a portable device, you have to buy a personal media player. Sad, but true.
They had to change one line of code:
to:goes the familiar RIAA/MPAA-endorsed jingle...
And you know what? They're right. But neither would I attempt to steal the artist's living through creative accounting. I think the point they're trying to make is that they're far bigger jerks than you could ever hope to be, so don't mess with them.
Next time someone talks about filesharing as if it's stealing, remind them that you lose money on every download. You have to pay for the bandwidth, the equipment, and - by golly! - that all gets very expensive. By the time you're done, you just don't have anything left to pay the record companies... sorry!
The class covered those things as well: lock the page in memory, and ensure that the compiler doesn't elide the call to memset(buffer,0,len) by reading back the data. A recent discussion on a crypto mailing list discussed this latter issue at great length, and the consensus was that while theoretically possible, no compiler actually elided calls to memset(), even if the compiler could prove that the memory would never be accessed again.
That is to say, the state of the memory will remain when power is lost, unless it's explicitly overwritten.
That is not what 'static' means. It means that the state of the flip flop doesn't change absent a reset signal, hence, the circuit is static as long as power is applied. Unlike DRAM, where the memory cell is a capacitor which gradually loses its charge and needs to be refreshed.
SRAM is probably the best place to store the key, because recovery of SRAM contents, while sometimes possible, is much harder. Unlike capacitors, which are designed to store a charge, the state of SRAM is designed to be stable when power is applied. That is, a pair of cross-coupled transistors prevent another pair of cross-coupled transistors from turning on. Determining which pair of transistors was turned on after power is removed is much more difficult than checking the residual charge on the capacitors used in DRAM.
we know of no simple remedy that would eliminate them...
As part of a secure programming course I recently took, we were instructed to overwrite keys with zeros when done using them. It's that simple - you don't leave the key in memory for any longer than you need it.
When the machine is powered down, your application's exit routine zeros all of the memory, and then free()s it. Nothing that good programming practices can't address.
Generally speaking, it's the keys on the disk(!) that are the problem. Without two factor authentication, you need merely to scan disk sectors...
The problem is that invading one's privacy, even if only a suspected invasion, is damaging to the individual.
How is this any different from the police coming to visit you every night, and sticking around until you go to bed? When it comes down to it, you'd be hard pressed to show any actual damages from such behavior, yet the thought of this is unsettling to even the most radical neo-cons.
The problem is that freedom, even if it does not have a monetary equivalent, still has tremendous value. The government listening in on your conversations is little different from them actually trespassing on your property. Neither have imposed a monetary cost on you, but they have infringed on the most basic human freedom, the freedom of thought and conscience. In a likewise manner, if people suspect that their conversations are monitored, they will not express their most intimate thoughts, for fear that they may used against them. Worse, such restrictions on human freedom stifle the relationships we have with others.
The fact that the government is let off the hook because the victims can't legally show harm - that is, they are prevented from actually knowing if their privacy is invaded - is quite disturbing. A child pornographer could use the same argument; that because his children (err, victims...) aren't old enough to understand the harm done to them, that they have no grounds for objecting to their pictures being taken.
I think, though, that there's a double standard when it comes to government. Unlike "terrorists" - which are presumed guilty except when there exists incontrovertible exculpatory evidece - the government is presumed innocent, and its evidence and intentions beyond reproach, except when the accused manage, by some legal loophole, to show otherwise.
Justice at the federal level has completely changed:
"If you aren't doing anything wrong, what do you have to hide?"
Indeed, all patriotic Americans need to ask themselves this question of the government, particularly the executive branch. If indeed, they aren't doing anything wrong, why must they keep everything so secret - even from Congress and the Courts? Isn't it more likely that they are using the secrecy to cover up activities that most Americans would consider wrong?
Most worrisome is the fact that we have gone from an open society which feared nothing ("The only thing we have to fear is fear itself...") to a society where everyone is suspect and fear of what one might do is sufficient to deny anyone and everyone their rights under the law. The justice system has been transformed from an open and transparent process which followed the principles of fairness to a capricious and arbitrary exercise of power.
Our accelerator is longer.
In one of their recent episodes, Mythbusters researched using compressed air and water "bottle rockets". The highest flight to date of a compressed air and water rocket was about 500 meters, IIRC. And it was made from materials far stronger than a 2 liter bottle.
The fundamental problem, as Mythbusters showed, is that a 2 liter bottle just can't hold enough pressure for the impulse necessary to put the bottle into orbit.
Nice dream, though.
If he had a million dollars?
Two eggs at the same time...
Or server-like functionality?
So, what exactly, defines a server? When you think about it, there's just traffic between two points. From a semantic perspective, posting to /. could be seen as "serving" text to a remote computer...
But, I think this kind of highlights the apparent Cox conceptual model of the internet:
The optimist in me hopes I'm wrong on some of the above points, but the pessimist knows to suspect the worst.
We didn't go with a monolithic Linux over the once-Apple-sponsored mkLinux because it was inherently better for every possible task under the sun, we went with it because it was better for some tasks and good enough for others and it had more support from interested parties, i.e. marketplace factors.
Same argument works just as well for Windows (better, actually):
We didn't go with a Proprietary Windows over the open-source Linux because it was inherently better for every possible task under the sun, we went with it because it was better for some tasks and good enough for others and it had more support from interested parties, i.e. marketplace factors. It had better driver support, was more widely adopted, and more familiar to the majority of people. We found that the things which differentiated Linux - better security, higher reliability - were just not important enough to most users to justify the time expenditure of learning a new operating system.
There's no point in re-inventing the wheel if you aren't going to do it right. Granted, I like Linux better than Windows, and it does have some really compelling advantages for those able to benefit, but the Micro-vs-Monolithic kernel argument was lost a long time ago. We know that Linux is suboptimal. But even for its shortfalls, it is still by far the best choice available. It is not merely "good enough" - it is the best option one has for a PC operating system.
And please don't troll about the Windows statement. That was for demonstration purposes only.
Still hasn't found what he's looking for. (Ducks) Thanks, folks, I'll be here all day...
our combined income will be well over six times what either of our parents brings home right now
And you still won't be able to afford a house in the suburbs. At least not one comparable to the one you probably grew up in. Chances are good that your parents live in a house that neither of you could afford on the open market in the suburbs.
And what will happen when your wife wants children? When she wants to stop working to stay at home with the children? Will you be able to afford your mortgage then?
I've seen this firsthand. You know, growing up, I really believed that if I got a degree that I'd be better off than my parents. Well, I'm not. In fact, in economic terms, I'm making less today that a factory worker made 30 years ago. And I'm making more money than anyone else in my family.
You know, there was a time when the welfare class was comprised mainly of the illiterate and lazy. But in the last decade I've seen it go from folks who just plain didn't want to work to hard-working people, displaced by outsourcing. First, it factory workers. Now, I'm seeing people with college degrees who - even though they work when they can - simply can't make ends meet.
I understand that you'll be a lawyer, so good luck with that. But I doubt that, even with your salary, you will be able to afford the traditional American family lifestyle with a breadwinner and a stay-at-home-mom.
As to the exact number in my view that would follow a review of a number of things. Number 1: What's the overall economy doing? What's happening to the size of our workforce. Number 2: What's happening to our own capacity in the jobs that are being requested. Number 3: What are the demands from our employers? How many additional folks do they need? You'd have to do an assessment of that on a regular basis, but my overall view is we need more H1B visas, not less.
He's not wishy-washy, he's pandering to corporate America. Not once did he mention the plight of the worker or the effect that H1B visas have on the American family. So, you can count on him introducing enough H1B visa holders into the US until it reaches a point where programmers and engineers can no longer make a decent living. Today, to pay off your house in Silicon Valley, you need about $200,000 a year of family income. That means that stay-at-home moms have to live elsewhere. That means that engineers like me aren't going to move there. Does it surprise anyone that people won't move to an area where they can't make a living?
There is no so-called shortage of high-tech workers in this country. There are plenty. The problem is that we are worth more than our employers wish to pay us, and that is a problem from the perspective of the elite class, who depend on the labor of others to finance their million-dollar estates and summer homes.
I never thought I'd see the day when I made 4 times what my father did, and yet, am still unable to buy a house. There is something *really* wrong with this country when a person who spent 4 years in the military to pay for 4 years of college still can't afford a house after becoming a "senior" in his profession.
My dad bought his first house when he was 21. I know people pushing 40, married, with no children, who still can't afford a house.
I do believe in many of the principles espoused by the Republican party. But I'm having a real hard time with their feigned ignorance of what unrestrained capitalism does to the American family. I think the fundamental disconnect comes when they believe that money can solve every problem. Our government should remain focused on the family, and yes, while more money would help out most families, we have to recognize that money is not the object; it is the means. We can't make a more family-friendly place to live simply by increasing the flow of money!
As one who has had to endure the suffering of a polyester-cotton blend, I, for one, think Moses got that one right the first time. We'd all be much better off without polyester (well, except maybe baseball players, with apologies to George Costanza...)
But in all seriousness, there are some very good theological reasons why the civil parts of Mosaic law were discarded while the moral parts remained in force. It has to do with the coming of what had been promised by Moses, the fulfillment of prophecy, and the establishment of a New Covenant. Hopefully, I've given you enough to research for yourself, but this shift was not merely an arbitrary change in religion, but rather, the expected outcome. Even the Jews, who do not accept Jesus Christ as Messiah, still await the coming Messiah. So while the continued condemnation of homosexuality without the attendant adherence to the civil law of the Torah may appear completely arbitrary, it was the side effect of a long awaited event promised by scripture.
As for religion getting it wrong, I was referring to the various dead religions, such as the Greco-Roman gods, and to the various cults which spring up from time to time, only to splinter off and die later when people wake up and realize the truth.
Yes, being able to correct mistakes is the glory of science. But being right the first time is the glory of religion.
When religion doesn't get it right, people abandon it completely. When science doesn't get it right, they say, "well, that's just part of the process..."
Each particular method has its strengths and weaknesses:
The key, I think, is not to confuse the various levels of truth. Those who take religion as if it were a scientifically-verifiable fact are just as confused as those who think scientific theorems are as reliable and trustworthy as the Gospel or mathematical proofs. There is a large difference between the three, and understanding the subtle limitations of each is just as important as understanding the ideas they espouse.
The government is _not_ out to get you if you aren't breaking any laws.
Actually, this is not true - the search and seizure laws passed as part of the War on Drugs allowed law enforcement to seize money and property from suspects without ever charging them with a crime. Having myself been deprived of property by the police in just such a situation, I would be inclined to disagree with you. You seem to believe that the power wielded by the FBI has no implications for corrupt individuals. I would argue that such power is specifically sought by corrupt individuals, and the web is full of supporting evidence. Research McCarthyism sometime. Or the civil rights struggle of the sixties.
Or even the story of Randy Weaver, whose wife and infant were shot and killed by an FBI sniper. (And this because the Justice Department moved up his trial date without informing him. When he missed it, they issued a warrant for his arrest. And in spite of the fact that the sniper killed an innocent bystander, the sniper was given an award by the FBI. Think about that for a moment: our government issued an award to someone who killed an innocent woman and her infant child. And was later forced to pay a settlement - of taxpayer money, mind you - to her husband and children.)
And let's not forget that Egyptian student that from which the FBI wrested a confession under duress. A confession that was later shown to be false. And no, the FBI did not compensate him for his lost time.
But that's not the biggest problem, though. Certain laws are just plain immoral, and one cannot follow them without doing something wrong. For example, for many years in the US, racial discrimination was enshrined in law. In my state, Catholic pharmacists cannot legally practice their religion - they are forced to dispense birth control, even abortifacients, or face legal penalties. In the US, you are required to pay taxes on loan interest, even if you didn't collect any interest at all (because doing so would violate Mosaic law).
So, if you are an advocate for any type of social change, you can be considered a disturber of the peace, and prosecuted for just about anything. The idea is not that they believe you are actually guilty, but rather, by using the government's seemingly unlimited resources against an individual, they can deny the individual the ability to effectively function as an activist. The problem with email scanning, as I see it, is that just about anyone's words can be taken out of context to mean something nefarious. Which means that - even though you, if innocent, and able to afford a lawyer - will eventually be exonerated, the process will drain you financially and take away years from your life. Sure, its better than prison, but the act of being charged in the first place is a de facto fine.
Terrorists who get caught don't continue to plan attacks...
The fundamental problem with the privacy-vs-security argument is that it is a false dichotomy:
The fundamental problem with eavesdropping is that it assumes that the bad guys are willing to divulge key operational details over an insecure channel. Even the dumbest of criminals knows to shut up when the cops are around. So who do the feds expect to catch? That's right - ordinary Americans like you and me. When we become a "problem" to those in power, they'll have hours of phone calls and pages of emails, in which they will find something - no matter how innocent - which, when taken out of context, sounds nefarious. The famous quote, "Give me six sentences by even the most upright man and I will find a reason to hang him..." (or similar) comes to mind.
Rather, I think it is helpful to expose the lies used to increase the amount of political power wielded by the executive branch.
265 million hours of computing time, how much do they really have?
Assuming they've donated this time to be used during one year, that means they've got around 30,000 processors idle.
Which makes me wonder how much computing power the NSA has. I had always assumed that it would be less than the number of people on the planet, but now I'm not so sure...