I went to the The Linux Documentation Project, got to the HOW-TOs, and grabbed the tar.gz file of all the HOW-TO pages (multiple archive formats and document formats available, NO, Word isn't one of them). Then I grabbed the same in mini-how-to. Found other things to do while I waited for the files to download via dialup. It links to the collected man pages in html, I may grab it, there seem to be man pages missing from my RH-8.0 installation.
I've got a "virus-contaminated" e-mail folder and 1.13 megs of intrusion logs off ZoneAlarm that suggest that there have been hundreds of attempts on my dialup system.
I turned off the intrusion alarm long ago becaus it popped off so often that I couldn't get anything else done.
Why would anyone want to run an exploit on my box? Ask the people who sent me Klez or have been running portscans or trying to get into port 137.
most interesting thing about this post is that the mistakes made in syntax are of the sort I'd expect from a native Indian who learned English as a second or fourth language.
How can there be any such thing as liberal or conservative science?
How can there be "Jewish science"? If this were 1942 and you were in Germany, I'm sure you'd be happy to explain to us what the answer is.
If the new conclusions are consistent with scientific principles, then they are scientific. The end.
Where the fuck did you get the idea that rewrites of scientific papers done by political propagandists are consistent with scientific principles? Because a government you support says so?
Science doesn't care what you think or what you wish to be true. And guess what -- sometimes science just happens to support the positions of the political right. Anyone who is intellectually honest will just have to accept that.
So accepting the rewritten conclusions of a scientific report is a sign of intellectual honesty when the underlying research hasn't been redone to provide information to support it?
And I'm not just some right-wing Bible thumper. I happen to be an atheist and a strong advocate of science.
Anyone willing to accept the output of Bush regime bureaucrats who know no more of science than Jerry Falwell as TRUTH is no longer an atheist. You have become something even more pathetic than a right-wing Bible thumper. You are a right-wing worshiper of George Bush. Suck it up and deal with it. If this is what you want to be, set up an altar with our Presidential shrub's face on it.
I don't know the legal system in Mexico, other than that it has a reputation for corruption (rather like the US Congress) or the respective organization. I'm interested in comments from people who actually know the situation down there.
Is it possible for the company who had its CDRs ripped off to sue the Mexican equivalent of RIAA into oblivion, i.e. to... outbid the recording industry for justice?
I guess its all true about US public schools
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Christmas in 2050
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· Score: 2
Your comparison of the space program to the 1960s to the pyramids means that what you learned about it in school was clearly inadequate. I'll simply say that without it, most of the technological innovations you take for granted that were created in the last 30 years would simply not exist. We wouldn't have personal computers, your living room wouldn't be filled with neat little electronic entertainment project, you wouldn't even have Teflon(tm) coated frying pans. Before the space program, the electronic devices in a living room were a TV and radio and maybe a stereo. Even the phone was basically electromechanical.
Basically, if it requires miniaturization (like 300M transistors on a chip, before the 60s, transistors were made one at a time), low weight and high strength, you can trace the origins of whatever the product is to the space program.
Find a copy of Robert Heinlein's Expanded Universe, there's a short article that'll give you the highlights.
Advanced Technology Paths to Global Climate Stability is a reprint of that Science article discussing the future alternative energy sources civilization will need when the oil runs out.
Powersats are on the list. As I see it, we are basically a few years of R&D away from being able to build the kind of space infrastructure that will be required to make building them relatively easy. It's basically a matter of government and major corporations being willing to put major money for a project with 10-15 years before a major return on investment. It's not a matter of discovering new laws of nature, it's a problem that can be solved by throwing money at it.
Remember that sooner or later, the Third World is going to become industrialized and will have per capita resource requirements comparable to the US and EU. What's left of the world's oil just won't do it.
With respect to all of us (Americans, I guess) having maids again, either the resource problems of this planet will be solved in such a way that you won't be able to get cheap domestic help from south of the border, or you won't be able to afford it anyway because your tax money at tax rates you don't want to imagine will be going into military expenditures designed to make sure that the US and allied countries have control over what's left of the world's resources.
How do you like the taste of shoe leather?
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Christmas in 2050
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Pull your foot out of your mouth before responding. I'm amazed you managed to find 3 moderators having off-days at the same time, even here. Technology is something we're supposed to know about. At least some of us.
I found most of the projections timid.
The "kitchen assistant" stuff is largely available in component form (mixers, ovens, etc. that can sync to a recipe and will tell the chef what to put in when, monitor quantities of ingredients, turn the oven on to a defined time/temperature, etc.) NOW. Ambitious would be to project that we'll have fully automated kitchens. That can be done in today's technology, though not in a form that'll fit a household kitchen. In the 2050 fast food restaurant, you'll be able to get things ranging from the current menu to anything available at the 5 star restaurants of today, but fast food restaurants will have disappeared as a separate category whose memory will linger only in brand names. Restaurants with human cooks and service will be considered superpremium places and will have prices to match.
"there will be screens lining the wall."
The price of flat-panel display technology is dropping and the availability is increasing. OLED is screen-printed, not vacuum deposited.
Do you really think that videophones that can be attached to the network aren't going to be available for the price of a cheap one-piece deskphone now, and that the problems building a Net appliance that'll be secure and "Just Works" and of universal broadband availability won't be solved in 48 years?
With the exception of thought recording and transference hardware, everything discussed is in either research or early pre-alpha. It is hardly the author's fault you haven't been paying attention, most of what's in the article has been bloglinked from here.
The problem with this kind of futurism is that
the futurist considers the future to be a linear extension of the present... while his predictions might be accurate, they look more like 2012 than 2050 to me.
The problems with a robotic household all-purpose servant that can use human tools will be solved by then, but people may be so used to intelligent point-solution household appliances (automated vacuum cleaners, etc.) that nobody will care.
The writer doesn't deal with space at all. One prediction I'm certain of. Either the human race will be exploiting the Solar System as a whole by then or nobody will have pleasant Xmases by then, people will be too busy suffering the kind of deprivations that go with cultures in a state of permanent war, in this case, over who gets enough of the Earth's dwindling resources of materials required to sustain technological society in order to keep one. I'm not talking about oil here, by then, we won't have a technological culture burning oil for fuel. That's why auto manufacturers are converting their assembly lines over to high-efficiency or fuel-cell vehicles. Even Toyota, who's going over to superefficient hybrid engines says that the vehicles are intended for easy conversion to fuel cells.
However, some dreams are less likely than others. The problem with a personal jet pack is sort of obvious, a device that has to provide all its lift as well as forward motion via reaction sucks up a hell of a lot of fuel.
Will we ever find the exceptions or reinterpetation of physical law that'll make a starship possible? I certainly don't know. Check the NASA "Warp Drive When" site for their Advanced Propulsion project for the latest.
The powerline stuff is just a "last mile" solution. The article says this uses the power company fiber-optic infrastructure already. So this is something that could be used in the US, since the US power companies also have this in place.
However, power companies could deliver via fiber optic or coax direct to the home as well. I'd love to see the US electric utility companies decide to compete with the telco/cable duopoly no matter how they do it. The advantage to us other than the obvious one is that the power industry doesn't have a vested interest in protecting either telephone service or television content providers.
You appear to be as ignorant of current events as you are of the history of capitalism.
The Chinese have simply discovered like Hitler's Germans and the modern Singapore that it is possible to implement capitalism under a totalitarian dictatorship.
What the Chinese have is the purest form of robber-baron capitalism, which pays its taxes and bribes to a bunch of Commies. In order to make it possible for the new companies to pay lots of taxes and bribes, the government is deploying its power in support of these new capitalists to assist them in exploiting their workers. Just as the US government did with its capitalists up to the 1930s.
Communism vs free enterprise isn't necessarily good vs. evil. A person shot dead in a convenience store robbery is just as dead regardless of the ideology of the killer.
Find a decent history of America to read about the activities of the US government in breaking up strikes and using other methods for attacking the early labor movement. The justification for expending taxpayer funds was that "the labor movement is a bunch of COMMUNISTS!" Find out how Pinkerton got its start.
I'm surprised you aren't posting from China, you seem to be the kind of guy who's appreciate this kind of capitalism. I suggest getting your opinions through research more profound than listening to Rush Limbaugh and learn to think for yourself, should you be capable of doing so.
It wasn't until the 20th century that workers were explicitly guaranteed the right to strike in the USA. In China, they don't have this right yet and it's unlikely that they will short of a change in government. Which I regard as a very good idea, there are very good reasons why pure capitalism is no longer practiced in any civilized country.
WARNING: The following are from the New York Times and the San Jose Mercury News, two information sources your leader has forbidden to Limbots.
Here's a quote from a recent article comparing the Indian and Chinese economies:
India's continued backwardness compared with its neighbor across the Himalayas has become a national obsession. The world's two most populous countries, China and India were close economic rivals just two decades ago, each struggling to bring progress to vast numbers of impoverished peasants.
But now China, by quickly converting much of its economy to an unfettered and even rapacious version of capitalism, has surged far ahead. The average Chinese citizen now earns $890 a year, compared with $460 for the typical Indian, according to the World Bank.
From an article about computer recycling in China:
At the back end, the industry downplays its responsibility for the toxic chemicals and metals used in its short- lived products.
In the Pearl River Delta and other regions, spotless new factories have made China the world's premier electronics workshop by drawing young women from the desperately poor countryside to work most of their waking hours for 30 cents an hour. These are the kind of labor practices made notorious by apparel factories used by Nike and the Gap in the 1990s.
In Guiyu, as in similar dumping grounds in India, Pakistan and the Philippines, migrant workers are paid pennies to crack open and sort the parts of monitors and circuit boards, exposing themselves to toxic metals like lead, mercury and cadmium. They burn PVC cables to extract copper, poisoning the air. They dip circuit boards and chips in acid to recover small amounts of gold, inhaling the fumes and dumping the acid into a nearby river that is dying.
Finally, if you want to know what's inside a CPU, reverse engineer it. If you want to know if it's identifying itself for its masters, throw a packet sniffer on it and see if it's trying to phone home.
From what I've been reading in various places about HD failures, HDs as used in desktops are designed to be run horizontally or vertically... period, in between puts unusual stress on the main bearing.
From what I can see, the spherical case increases the amount of volume and incidentally, empty space taken up by the thing.
As for cooling, the sphere has the least surface area for a given volume, so no advantages there.
If one has a mini-ITX form factor motherboard, why not do something intelligent with it?
The hazard of mechanical impact if the thing falls out of its stand is sort of obvious. Did you know Japan is earthquake country?
With a built-in LCD monitor, it might manage cool , but there isn't one.
Fail-unsafe
An article in c't (the article is in English) demonstrated methods for spoofing every major biometric ID technology, including ones too expensive and cumbersome to fit into anything recognizable as a gun. So you wake up to find your own gun pointed at your face and laugh... and wonder where the hole in your head came from.
Fail-safe
Someone has just broken into your house and your "smart gun" goes stupid right when you find out he is armed and NOT with a "smart gun". You think the biometric ID thingie is going to be any more reliable than any other electronic consumer gadget manufactured in the last few years?
Hint: the environment of a gun is even less benign than your living room. Ever hear of recoil, as in high-acceleration transients? If you'd like to get a full understanding of this, make sure you don't have a current backup of your stuff, take the hard drive on your computer, raise it over your head, and drop it on the sidewalk.
Hopefully, anyone who thinks this is a good idea, will discover why I don't agree from experience and I'll get to read about it on one of the 'Official Darwin' sites.
This is just another example of legislators trying to write biometric requirements into law without being remotely clued as to why no application related to public safety should be authenticated exclusively by biometric ID, whether it's software or a handgun.
People have been bending over and polluting the air telling us how wonderful the idea of a gun that can't be used against the owner is.
"Weapons used by law enforcement officers would be exempt until a separate decision on whether the requirement should apply to them."
Interesting that there doesn't seem to be a public demand for these from public safety officers who know their lives depend on the proper operation of their guns. Apparently, they feel that the device is potentially more hazardous to their health than the risk of having a gun taken by an attacker is. Is the safety of government employees more important than your safety or mine? Yours, maybe.
In the final analysis, a "smart gun locking device" is just something else that can go wrong. Like a DRM module added to your computer. Come to think of it, this IS a digital rights module by any reasonable definition of the term. The gun is available when a government-mandated thing says its available.
Interesting that a fair number of people who have said elsewhere "DRM over my dead body" seem to think this a good idea. People willing to challenge the government to keep their own files available don't quite seem to get the idea that people might want to keep their own guns available.
With respect to the idea that this will depend on an AG's evaluation of handgun safety, is he going to care if the gun always fires when the owner needs it to, or that it never fires when an unauthorized user has it?
The prospect of a DRM free CPU looks commendable to me.
As for child labor sweatshops, we can be reasonably confident that these chips are NOT going to be manufactured in them. Chip fabs are automated because there is no way manual processing can be done without the kind of human error which would trash entire fab runs at a time.
In any case, the "Communism" you're complaining about is in fact, the kind of pure early 1900s US-style capitalism (management with a callous disregard for working conditions and safety, attempts to organize workers met by government agents kicking down one's door, etc.) I would expect you to be praising.
This was what capitalism was like before child labor laws, OSHA, pure food and drug laws enforced by the FDA, and other things Libertarians consider immoral interference between the contract between businesses and individuals.
Try breaking with/. tradition and actually learn something about public policy issues before exposing your ignorance in public. Read up on the history of the American labor movement sometime.
This isn't to say the Chinese government deserves support, but find out what you're complaining about before you start howling COMMUNISM!
If you want to buy a red, white, and blue Palladium-disabled CPU from AMD or Intel on which Linux might not run, go for it.
Given the direction in which freedom and civil liberties in the US are going post 9/11, how much difference there's going to be by the time Palladium and a Dragon II CPU hit the market between the US and Chinese governments is decidedly open to question.
"People always get the local governments they deserve."
E.E. "Doc" Smith
As to which set of people this will be a grimmer comment about, ask me in 2004 or 2005.
Whether you're talking chips or software packages, in high volumes (say, over 1M units) the designer costs for a chip aren't exactly important in terms of chip design cost, and even in production, fabs are rather automated, labor is a significant cost percentage there but not all that gigantic.
If you want to see a product where labor is 90% of the cost, go look at a Big Mac.
At least it isn't about securing cyberspace either for the end user or for business.
Liability laws holding businesses responsible in the civil sense for damage done to end users or other businesses using their computers and networks would clean up the "corporate idiots spreading [virus of the week]" problem, the insurance companies will force their customers to clean up their acts immediately.
Liability laws holding end users responsible the same way and a few high-profile lawsuits will have the same impact.
A "safe harbor" for "best practices" makes this fair. Perhaps ISPs could be required to distribute anti-viral software or firewall software that updates automatically with their installation, or to require their use via TOS.
If you're a home user:
do you have a currently updated antiviral?
do you have a working firewall?
Is your software currently patched? (for Windoze users, the OS, OE, IE, WMP, Excel, Word...)
Best practices for businesses depends largely on business size. Consensus can be created to provide explicit guidelines as to what businesses in X size range should be doing without limiting overly what businesses can use for servers and workstations. If a business wants to run IIS/XP, I think it stupid, but as long as they're competently managed, OK, the dangerous installations are the ones run right out of the box by people whose MSCE certificates are still drying anyway.
Cost to taxpayers? Pretty minimal, much of it would largely be recovered by court costs.
Effectiveness? If you are not a member of the Bush Administration, you know that about 99% of all malware depends on somebody leaving a gateway for trouble, patches not up to date, antivirus not up to date, or not bothering to read the articles that would tell the user not to click on file attachments from unknown people.
The stuff we need end users to do is NOT rocket science. The stuff businesses need to do can be done by any competent sysadmin. If they don't have one, what the hell are they doing on the Internet? They are no more entitled to dump bad packets on the Net than they are to dump their raw sewage into the people's drinking water.
The zero-day exploits we're mostly all vulnerable to, but they are also pretty rare.
So we have a simple and relatively cheap way to make people and businesses responsible for cleaning up their own acts.
Who says that this is impossible?
Why does the Bush Adminstration want to create a single monitoring point / single attack point for enemies? Answer that question for yourself. It isn't like there's no other choices for securing the Net.
I'm sure there are other ways to accomplish this as well, and I'd like to see some discussed.
I don't think Ralsky's denials about kiddy porn are believed here. Particularly since IIRC, references to complaints about kiddy porn spam on the abuse newsgroups apparently originating from Ralsky's House of Spam were referenced during the discussion.
People making serious money off a seriously illegal product get very touchy about their activities being inquired into. Perhaps there are other things than kiddy porn illegal in the USA that Ralsky is helping sell.
Remember, the business associates of a spammer aren't going to be nice people. At minimum, the guy in the Jaguar had reason to fear discovery of his association with Ralsky.
Hopefully, the person discovering this has gotten the image to some people with serious expertise in image enhancement, forensic or intelligence in the hopes of getting the Jaguar's license number.
An unsucessful boycott would simply demonstrate the impotence of the high-tech community with respect to any kind of political action, particularly since success in terms of affecting sales would require selling this outside the community, and would be worse than useless.
However, there will be a consumer boycott, and it will be effective. The next generation of DRM disabled audio gear with no analog or digital outputs, i.e. encrypted from source to speakers or CRT is on its way and was discussed yesterday here.
The public will scream its heads off when they find out what's in it, "You mean my VCR won't work, either?" and when they're told "DRM TV or NO TV", will be calling their Congresscritters telling them to tell the FCC to put off digital-only TV.
Hollywood won't lose any money over this, but the high-tech manufacturers who bought into Hollywood bullshit will lose billions, and a lot of jobs are going to get lost. Hopefully, including those of the CEOs who were stupid enough to roll over and play dead for their new masters.
We're well on our way to squelching what gives this country an edge. What would it take to kill innovation altogether?
Following Ben Stein's implied prescription as to the cure to what ails America would do it once and for all. If he'd ever done anything constructive with technology for a living, he might be clued enough to make his perceptions about what makes technological innovation of value. Reading his article makes him wonder what planet he moved to after his job with Nixon quit him. As well as why he returned and why Forbes decided to give him a public forum.
As a casual observer of what makes this country work and what stops it cold, I hereby offer a few suggestions on how we can ruin American competitiveness and innovation in the course of this century.
His suggestions might be worth something if he'd ever gotten closer to real technologists than any article in the financial press could have taken him.
I think the reader will agree with me that we are already far down the road on many of them:
1) Allow schools to fall into useless decay. Do not teach civics or history except to describe America as a hopelessly fascistic, reactionary pit.
He wants schools to leave the Nixon era out of history books? Not that I blame him, he's one of the guilty parties, he was on the Nixon staff. But he isn't important enough to be mentioned by name.
Do not expect students to know the basics of mathematics, chemistry and physics.
A couple of hours ago, I helped an average high school student in an average suburban high school make a model of the sodium atom. In large part, the science textbooks are finally becoming adequate and much better than the ones I used in high school (graduated at mid-term in 1972).
Working closely with the teachers' unions, make sure that you dumb down standards so that children who make the most minimal effort still get by with flying colors. Destroy the knowledge base on which all of mankind's scientific progress has been built by guaranteeing that such learning is confined to only a few, and spread ignorance and complacency among the many. Watch America lose its scientific and competitive edge to other nations that make a comprehensive knowledge base a rule of the society.
We're going to lose our competitive edge to the RIAA/MPAA cartel long before the educational system has time to do what he describes.
While public education is in serious disrepair, the problem (at least in California and other states which are finally enforcing some) isn't standards, it's structure and methods. The standards for high school graduation in a local California school district I reviewed are perfectly adequate. I'm at something of a loss as to how their educational methods are going to accomplish this, from what I've been able to see, the teachers are using homework not to reinforce the classroom instruction given during the school day, but to force parents to provide the instruction the teachers weren't able to provide. The money is probably adequate, but is dissipated in "administrative expenses" having little discernable relationship to classroom instruction.
2) Encourage the making of laws and rules by trial lawyers and sympathetic judges, especially through class actions. Bypass the legislative mechanisms that involve elected representatives and a president. This will stop--or at least greatly slow down--innovation, as corporations and individuals hesitate to explore new ideas for fear of getting punished (or regulated to death) by litigation for any misstep, no matter how slight, in the creation of new products and services. Make sure that lawsuits against drugmakers are especially encouraged so that the companies are afraid to develop new lifesaving drugs, lest they be sued for sums that will bankrupt them. Make trial lawyers and judges, not scientists, responsible for the flow of new products and services.
I'm a hell of a lot more concerned about the unrestrained influence of the lobbyists of the Hollywood content cartel than I am about tort law, which has largely already been reformed in the direction Mr. Stein asks for. The factors that restrain innovation in the pharmaceutical industry are more that companies have found that paying lawyers to build patent portfolios from previous work is more profitable than hiring scientists and engineers.
We're finding that entertainment industry executives are even less safe technology gatekeepers than trial lawyers ever were. If he wants to point a finger, he should look to his own employers.
3) Create a culture that blames the other guy for everything and discourages any form of individual self-restraint or self-control. Promote litigation to punish tobacco companies on the theory that they compel innocent people to smoke. Make it second nature for someone who is overweight to blame the restaurant that served him fries. Encourage a legal process that can kill a drug company for any mistakes in self-medication.
IIRC, the overweight person got his fat ass kicked in court, and he can't name any drug companies that have gone out of business over a patient's fuckups any more than you or I can. However, the evidence is simply inconclusive. I can cite examples where these cases got tossed out of court and cases where the plaintiffs won.
Make it a general rule that anyone with more money than a plaintiff is responsible for anything harmful that a plaintiff does. Promulgate the pitiful joke that Americans are hereby exempt from any responsibility for their own actions--so long as there are deep pockets around to be rifled.
4) Sneer at hard work and thrift. Encourage the belief that all true wealth comes from skillful manipulation and cunning, or from sudden, brilliant and lucky strokes that leave the plodding, ordinary worker and saver in the dust.
Does anyone know of any examples of people who've gotten seriously rich (say, over $100M) solely by hard work and thrift? It's rather telling that Ben doesn't know of any, either. We know this because he didn't cite examples. Hard work only counts when one is doing the right things, and thrift is only a good thing when one economizes on the right things... i.e. don't spend $1K of your investors' money per employee on office furniture in a high tech startup, and DON'T try squeezing nickels when it comes to picking server hardware when your site is already getting 1M hits a day.
Make sure that society's idols are men and women who got rich from being sexy in public
Presumably, he means entertainers. Hmmm... why are we using the badly informed remarks of an entertainer as a basis of public debate?
or through gambling or playing tricks, not from hard work or patience. Make the citizenry permanently envious and bewildered about where real success comes from.
Anybody sufficiently interested in finding out can discover where most individual fortunes came from, including the parts the founders of thse fortunes would really rather we didn't know about. Of course, knowing where wealth comes from doesn't necessarily imply that one can make it even if one has the knowledge and talent to create intellectual capital. Knowing who Ann Winblad is doesn't mean she'll give you the time of day, unless you encounter her through the right "insider" VC community channels.
Hint: If Bill Gates hadn't had substantial family money behind him, would we have ever heard of either him or Microsoft?
5) Hold the managers of corporations to extremely lax standards of conduct and allow them to get off with a slap on the wrist when they betray the trust of shareholders. This will discourage thrift and investment and ensure that Americans will have far less capital to work with than other societies, while simultaneously developing that contempt for law and social standards that is the hallmark of failing nations. Hold the management of labor unions to no ethical standards.
Odd that he got that one almost right. Now why did he personally invest in Enron and Worldcom to begin with?
If he's as well informed as he pretends to be, he'd know that the reason for the spectacular stock swindles perpetrated by Enron, Worldcom, and many other companies was reduced oversight by the SEC, which the Bush Administration insured by gutting the agency's funding. Corporate leaders will cheat if they can get away with it, that's why the SEC was invented in the 1930s. Why is he putting Ben Stein's money into funding the GOP if he really believes there's a problem?
6) While you're at it, discourage respect for law in every possible way. This will dissolve the glue that holds the nation together, and dissuade any long- term thinking. Societies in which the law can be clearly seen to apply to some and not to others are doomed to decay, in terms of innovation and everything else.
No argument here. However, he's a former scriptwriter for Richard Nixon, who left the White House barely in time to avoid public trial for "high crimes and misdemeanors". The GOP is the very center of the cultural imperative that says the law is for everyone except the wealthy. A good argument, but is he really the one to make it?
7) Encourage a mass culture that spits on intelligence and study and instead elevates drug use, coolness through sex and violence, and contempt for school. As children learn to be stupid instead of smart, the national intelligence base needed for innovation will simply vanish into MTV- land.
Still whining about youth culture after all these years. I guess he figures that he fooled the public during the Nixon era with this, (the 1972 Nixon campaign was basically an attack on youth culture) he can still get away with it. He will be happy to know that the current version of youth culture is just as likely to turn out amoral suits to provide the kind of "innovative" business leadership he seems to be looking for as any idealism out of the hippie era.
The PC he presumably typed these grave pronouncements on and the ones we're reading and writing this on are as much a product of the 1960s youth culture as acid rock and love beads. Those of you who are too young to remember this from being there can pick up the history from Hackers by Stephen Levy. Though looking at pictures of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak around when they started Apple should give you the idea. Those of you who are a bit older will remember when I say Whole Earth Catalogue gave Homebrew Computer Club its startup funding. And the world indeed changed as a result.
What will the current participants in the current revision of youth culture come up with in the way of technology? There are more young computer programmers around than in any time in previous history, and most of you are probably here. Isn't it sad that Ben Stein doesn't like your musical tastes?
8) Mock and belittle the family.
Last time I heard, The Osbournes are still the hottest show on TV... the family might not be the one that Ben Stein grew up with and Ozzy Osbourne isn't exactly Ozzie Nelson, but the family actually seems to work.
Provide financial incentives to people willing to live an isolated existence, vulnerable and frightened. This guarantees that men and women of sufficient character to bring about innovation will be psychologically stifled from an early age.
Let's be polite here and figure that he botched this one on the basis that he stopped doing his own income taxes as soon as he could afford to do so, probably in the early 1970s. The rest of us need only flip through our form 1040 booklets to figure out what tax breaks families get that singles aren't eligible for.
9) Develop a suicidal immigration policy that keeps out educated, hardworking men and women from friendly nations and, instead, takes in vast numbers of angry, uneducated immigrants from nations that hate us. This, too, leads to the shrinking of our knowledge base and the eventual disappearance of social cohesion.
He's never heard of H1B and we're supposed to take his pronouncements on how immigration law works seriously? Perhaps Forbes should have gotten Madonna or Eminem to write the article instead. I don't see how they could have done a worse job. Where the hell does he think the casual labor that keeps his yard in good shape comes from, under a cabbage patch?
10) Enact a tax system that encourages class antagonism and punishes saving, while rewarding indebtedness, frivolity and consumption. Tax the fruits of labor many times:
First tax it as income. Then tax it as real or personal property. Then tax it as capital gains. Then tax it again, at a staggeringly high level, at death. This way, Americans are taught that only fools save, and that it is entirely proper for us to have the lowest savings rate in the developed world.
We also have the lowest total tax rate in the developed world once all these layers are added up, and those who invest as companies in technological businesses can pick up an R&D tax credit. If he were qualified to speak on technological innovation, he'd know it.
This will deprive us of much-needed capital for new investment, for innovation and our own personal aspirations. It will compel us to ask foreigners for ever more capital and allow them to own more of America. It will also promote an attitude of carelessness about the future and, once again, encourage disrespect for law.
Tell that to Bill Gates. Fortunes are still being made in America. Though Gates doesn't have much to do with innovation, there are others who've made high-tech fortunes in the system he condemns, and a whole lot of us who'd be happy to give it a try given access to venture capital.
11) Have a socialized medical system that scrimps on badly needed drugs and procedures, resorts to only the cheapest practices and discourages drug companies from developing new drugs by not paying them enough to cover their costs of experimentation, trial and error.
Which country does he think he lives in? The USA has the most expensive medical system in the world on either a per capita basis or in terms of total dollars. Attempts to introduce universal health care have been uniformly squelched by millions of dollars spent by the US health care industry and in particular, insurance companies who would be forced to stop profiting from health care if the US health care system became "socialized".
12) Elevate mysticism, tribalism, shamanism and fundamentalism--and be sure to exclude educated, hardworking men and women--to an equal status with technology in the public mind.
With the exception of the Xtian fundamentalists, all the groups he's whining about are very well represented in technological innovation. Anyone who doesn't quite get this should try googling for:
technopagan VRML
Make sure that, in order to pay proper (and politically correct) respect to all different ethnic groups in America, you act as if science were on an equal footing with voodoo and history with ethnic fable.
If he'd had the guts to go after fundamentalist Christians pushing "Creation Science", I'd agree with him. As far as I know, this is the only significant example of religion overriding science that's going on right now.
My list need not end here.
Would it be uncharitable to suggest that it ended because he'd run out of ideas? Perhaps a few more hours of listening to Rush Limbaugh would have given him some.
But I stopped at a dozen because I realized that this is already, in large measure, the program of so many of our elected representatives. The debauchery of our tort system is already in place, and the rest of the agenda is under way.
The only agendas I see in progress right now are that of restricting civil liberties in the guise of "protecting us from terrorists" and the Hollywood content cartel's anti-tech agenda. Either are as dangerous to America's ability to innovate and compete as the decline of public education. Ben Stein deals with neither. If Ben Stein got paid for this article, Forbes should retract the article and try to get their money back from him.
Ben Stein was practically the only GOP contributor among the ranks of Hollywood entertainers, look him up. (search under individual donors, enter STEIN, BENJAMIN)
Benjamin J. Stein is a lawyer, economist, writer and actor, and host of the game show Win Ben Stein's Money.
If Ben Stein ever devotes a show segment to public policy and has an honest judge score the contestants, he's going to lose a bunch of Ben Stein's money. The guy does have style, but I never realized before reading his article how little he's got to back it up with.
Quite a few years ago, one of my female friends had an abusive and aggressive ex-boyfriend. She asked me to stay with her for a few days and bring my gun along. This was back when California had a law that said that if one shoots an intruder who broke in, that the shooter would be presumed innocent.
He started beating and kicking on the door about 3 days later. I came up and aimed my gun at the door. He ran away and called the police.
I and my friend described the circumstances to the policewoman, who got a good laugh out of the fact that the guy was stupid enough to call.
She had no further problems with the guy.
Presumably, the anti-gun crazies around here would consider that my interference with the guy's 'right' to beat the shit out of a woman using an evil GUN!!! makes me an evil person. I've actually seen people take that position when I (rarely) mention this in public. This is useful, though, I know a few more people to hold in utter contempt and not to do business with.
It also puts me in a position to say I've used a gun to deter violence.
Unfortunately, the law was repealed a few years later by the California State Supreme Court.
Unless one has a system that doesn't have any legacy hardware which your Linux distribution won't recognize during the installation, or unless one is running the kind of configuration Linux expects to see, the chances of a successful install in which everything works without seeing a command line, that doesn't require modifying configuration files from the CLI is roughly zero. I found out the first day that gedit won't run out of root and actually allow modifying root-only files, I got a prompt saying the program won't handle authorization.
I've found the GUI config applets I've uses so far marginally useful at best. In my 3rd day of running Linux, I had to modify fstab and System.map (yes, this is RH 8.0) using vim. On my 4th day, I grabbed a RPM of nano (updated pico for those of you who've used pine) and don't have to remember vi(m) commands anymore.
I've got to get my Winmodem working and my HP Series II printer running as well.
OK, I'm not that new to linux, I've had a linux shell account for years, this is just the first time I've ever installed it.
My system runs two mobile drive racks, one for Windows (and soon, Linux) backup, the other for the unix drive. Took me the longest time to realize the reason why grub just sat there and beeped instead of booting Windoze when I pulled the unix drive was that grub.conf file was on it. I had unplugged the Windows backup drive during the original install, I didn't want to chance my backup data to anything going wrong during the Linux install.
I had to put a MBR on the Linux drive running a grub boot disk.
If I were depending on the GUI only, I'd be completely SOL.
Just how would getting your ass sued if you were the proud owner of an open access point through which a successful hack of somebody's credit card database was committed discourage securing it?
If someone hops on an access point with a localhost IP, the packets that leave/enter the account are going to be tagged with the access point's IP... and if the owner says "I created an open access point, I have no idea who used it", the owner doesn't get off the hook in a civil lawsuit this would be a response to.
That's what pushing liability back onto the responsible party means.
What I'm calling for is liability law applied to cyberspace, not just for open access 802.11(whatever), but for everybody. Starting with the idiots with cablemodems, no firewalls, and 0wN3d computers.
The good news is that there's an opposing precedent from one of the other appeals courts, this decision may be cited elsewhere but is only binding on the 9th Circuit jurisdiction.
This also means that sooner or later, this will probably wind up being resolved at the Supreme Court level.
Holding people legally responsible and financially liable for the damage their hacked Windoze boxes do as zombies and open relays connected to cablemodems and companies legally and financially responsible for the damage their unpatched IIS servers do when r00ted would clean up the Internet a lot faster than "black helicopter" crap about EVIL WARDRIVING TERRORISTS. It would also drastically reduce the spam problem as well.
When companies discover that not bringing their servers up to "best practices" standards doubles their insurance premiums and that running IIs with half-competent MCSEs is an expensive luxury for them as well as the rest of us and broadband home users running open relay boxes get sued, the word to "tighten up or else" will get around real fast.
It isn't just open access Wi-Fi ports that are the problem. Yes, these things should default to "secure" out of the box. However, cablemodem setups should also come with firewalls installed out of the box as well.
I only suggested that you post his contact information for the benefit of the online community, so that we can let him know how much we appreciate his efforts.
A spammer is essentially a declared enemy of humanity with his only justification being that of profit. Is he the moral equal of a terrorist or pedophile or kiddie pornographer? I assume a spammer would sell kiddie porn or commit terrorist acts instead of spamming if he thought he could get away with it and there was more money than in kiddie porn or terror.
In fact, if your friend is a mega-spammer, he probably is spam-promoting kiddie porn regardless of what he's telling you. Presumably, the people who sell the hot young Lolita ads pay in cash and on time. Is he promoting terrorism? That probably depends on whether or not any terrorists have offered him money to do this or not. Has he showed you his customer lists? Than how do you know what he does and doesn't do? You're taking his word for it?
If you willingly associate with people like that, I'm glad I'm not your friend.
Slashdot Mirror
I went to the The Linux Documentation Project, got to the HOW-TOs, and grabbed the tar.gz file of all the HOW-TO pages (multiple archive formats and document formats available, NO, Word isn't one of them). Then I grabbed the same in mini-how-to. Found other things to do while I waited for the files to download via dialup. It links to the collected man pages in html, I may grab it, there seem to be man pages missing from my RH-8.0 installation.
I turned off the intrusion alarm long ago becaus it popped off so often that I couldn't get anything else done.
Why would anyone want to run an exploit on my box? Ask the people who sent me Klez or have been running portscans or trying to get into port 137.
Would you know if your machine was 0wn3d? Would you believe differently if you knew it was?
Unfortunately, he's right about the US.
How can there be "Jewish science"? If this were 1942 and you were in Germany, I'm sure you'd be happy to explain to us what the answer is.
If the new conclusions are consistent with scientific principles, then they are scientific. The end.
Where the fuck did you get the idea that rewrites of scientific papers done by political propagandists are consistent with scientific principles? Because a government you support says so?
Science doesn't care what you think or what you wish to be true. And guess what -- sometimes science just happens to support the positions of the political right. Anyone who is intellectually honest will just have to accept that. So accepting the rewritten conclusions of a scientific report is a sign of intellectual honesty when the underlying research hasn't been redone to provide information to support it?
And I'm not just some right-wing Bible thumper. I happen to be an atheist and a strong advocate of science.
Anyone willing to accept the output of Bush regime bureaucrats who know no more of science than Jerry Falwell as TRUTH is no longer an atheist. You have become something even more pathetic than a right-wing Bible thumper. You are a right-wing worshiper of George Bush. Suck it up and deal with it. If this is what you want to be, set up an altar with our Presidential shrub's face on it.
Is it possible for the company who had its CDRs ripped off to sue the Mexican equivalent of RIAA into oblivion, i.e. to ... outbid the recording industry for justice?
Basically, if it requires miniaturization (like 300M transistors on a chip, before the 60s, transistors were made one at a time), low weight and high strength, you can trace the origins of whatever the product is to the space program.
Find a copy of Robert Heinlein's Expanded Universe, there's a short article that'll give you the highlights. Advanced Technology Paths to Global Climate Stability is a reprint of that Science article discussing the future alternative energy sources civilization will need when the oil runs out.
Powersats are on the list. As I see it, we are basically a few years of R&D away from being able to build the kind of space infrastructure that will be required to make building them relatively easy. It's basically a matter of government and major corporations being willing to put major money for a project with 10-15 years before a major return on investment. It's not a matter of discovering new laws of nature, it's a problem that can be solved by throwing money at it.
Remember that sooner or later, the Third World is going to become industrialized and will have per capita resource requirements comparable to the US and EU. What's left of the world's oil just won't do it.
With respect to all of us (Americans, I guess) having maids again, either the resource problems of this planet will be solved in such a way that you won't be able to get cheap domestic help from south of the border, or you won't be able to afford it anyway because your tax money at tax rates you don't want to imagine will be going into military expenditures designed to make sure that the US and allied countries have control over what's left of the world's resources.
I found most of the projections timid.
The "kitchen assistant" stuff is largely available in component form (mixers, ovens, etc. that can sync to a recipe and will tell the chef what to put in when, monitor quantities of ingredients, turn the oven on to a defined time/temperature, etc.) NOW. Ambitious would be to project that we'll have fully automated kitchens. That can be done in today's technology, though not in a form that'll fit a household kitchen. In the 2050 fast food restaurant, you'll be able to get things ranging from the current menu to anything available at the 5 star restaurants of today, but fast food restaurants will have disappeared as a separate category whose memory will linger only in brand names. Restaurants with human cooks and service will be considered superpremium places and will have prices to match.
"there will be screens lining the wall."
The price of flat-panel display technology is dropping and the availability is increasing. OLED is screen-printed, not vacuum deposited.
Do you really think that videophones that can be attached to the network aren't going to be available for the price of a cheap one-piece deskphone now, and that the problems building a Net appliance that'll be secure and "Just Works" and of universal broadband availability won't be solved in 48 years?
With the exception of thought recording and transference hardware, everything discussed is in either research or early pre-alpha. It is hardly the author's fault you haven't been paying attention, most of what's in the article has been bloglinked from here.
The problem with this kind of futurism is that the futurist considers the future to be a linear extension of the present... while his predictions might be accurate, they look more like 2012 than 2050 to me.
The problems with a robotic household all-purpose servant that can use human tools will be solved by then, but people may be so used to intelligent point-solution household appliances (automated vacuum cleaners, etc.) that nobody will care.
The writer doesn't deal with space at all. One prediction I'm certain of. Either the human race will be exploiting the Solar System as a whole by then or nobody will have pleasant Xmases by then, people will be too busy suffering the kind of deprivations that go with cultures in a state of permanent war, in this case, over who gets enough of the Earth's dwindling resources of materials required to sustain technological society in order to keep one. I'm not talking about oil here, by then, we won't have a technological culture burning oil for fuel. That's why auto manufacturers are converting their assembly lines over to high-efficiency or fuel-cell vehicles. Even Toyota, who's going over to superefficient hybrid engines says that the vehicles are intended for easy conversion to fuel cells.
However, some dreams are less likely than others. The problem with a personal jet pack is sort of obvious, a device that has to provide all its lift as well as forward motion via reaction sucks up a hell of a lot of fuel.
Will we ever find the exceptions or reinterpetation of physical law that'll make a starship possible? I certainly don't know. Check the NASA "Warp Drive When" site for their Advanced Propulsion project for the latest.
However, power companies could deliver via fiber optic or coax direct to the home as well. I'd love to see the US electric utility companies decide to compete with the telco/cable duopoly no matter how they do it. The advantage to us other than the obvious one is that the power industry doesn't have a vested interest in protecting either telephone service or television content providers.
See how they do this in Alameda, California. (Alameda is in the SF Bay Area, next to Berkeley)
The Chinese have simply discovered like Hitler's Germans and the modern Singapore that it is possible to implement capitalism under a totalitarian dictatorship.
What the Chinese have is the purest form of robber-baron capitalism, which pays its taxes and bribes to a bunch of Commies. In order to make it possible for the new companies to pay lots of taxes and bribes, the government is deploying its power in support of these new capitalists to assist them in exploiting their workers. Just as the US government did with its capitalists up to the 1930s.
Communism vs free enterprise isn't necessarily good vs. evil. A person shot dead in a convenience store robbery is just as dead regardless of the ideology of the killer.
Find a decent history of America to read about the activities of the US government in breaking up strikes and using other methods for attacking the early labor movement. The justification for expending taxpayer funds was that "the labor movement is a bunch of COMMUNISTS!" Find out how Pinkerton got its start.
I'm surprised you aren't posting from China, you seem to be the kind of guy who's appreciate this kind of capitalism. I suggest getting your opinions through research more profound than listening to Rush Limbaugh and learn to think for yourself, should you be capable of doing so.
It wasn't until the 20th century that workers were explicitly guaranteed the right to strike in the USA. In China, they don't have this right yet and it's unlikely that they will short of a change in government. Which I regard as a very good idea, there are very good reasons why pure capitalism is no longer practiced in any civilized country.
WARNING: The following are from the New York Times and the San Jose Mercury News, two information sources your leader has forbidden to Limbots.
Here's a quote from a recent article comparing the Indian and Chinese economies:
India's continued backwardness compared with its neighbor across the Himalayas has become a national obsession. The world's two most populous countries, China and India were close economic rivals just two decades ago, each struggling to bring progress to vast numbers of impoverished peasants.
But now China, by quickly converting much of its economy to an unfettered and even rapacious version of capitalism, has surged far ahead. The average Chinese citizen now earns $890 a year, compared with $460 for the typical Indian, according to the World Bank.
From an article about computer recycling in China:
At the back end, the industry downplays its responsibility for the toxic chemicals and metals used in its short- lived products.
In the Pearl River Delta and other regions, spotless new factories have made China the world's premier electronics workshop by drawing young women from the desperately poor countryside to work most of their waking hours for 30 cents an hour. These are the kind of labor practices made notorious by apparel factories used by Nike and the Gap in the 1990s.
In Guiyu, as in similar dumping grounds in India, Pakistan and the Philippines, migrant workers are paid pennies to crack open and sort the parts of monitors and circuit boards, exposing themselves to toxic metals like lead, mercury and cadmium. They burn PVC cables to extract copper, poisoning the air. They dip circuit boards and chips in acid to recover small amounts of gold, inhaling the fumes and dumping the acid into a nearby river that is dying.
Finally, if you want to know what's inside a CPU, reverse engineer it. If you want to know if it's identifying itself for its masters, throw a packet sniffer on it and see if it's trying to phone home.
From what I can see, the spherical case increases the amount of volume and incidentally, empty space taken up by the thing.
As for cooling, the sphere has the least surface area for a given volume, so no advantages there.
If one has a mini-ITX form factor motherboard, why not do something intelligent with it?
The hazard of mechanical impact if the thing falls out of its stand is sort of obvious. Did you know Japan is earthquake country?
With a built-in LCD monitor, it might manage cool , but there isn't one.
I don't see this selling even in Japan.
Fail-unsafe
An article in c't (the article is in English) demonstrated methods for spoofing every major biometric ID technology, including ones too expensive and cumbersome to fit into anything recognizable as a gun. So you wake up to find your own gun pointed at your face and laugh... and wonder where the hole in your head came from.
Fail-safe
Someone has just broken into your house and your "smart gun" goes stupid right when you find out he is armed and NOT with a "smart gun". You think the biometric ID thingie is going to be any more reliable than any other electronic consumer gadget manufactured in the last few years?
Hint: the environment of a gun is even less benign than your living room. Ever hear of recoil, as in high-acceleration transients? If you'd like to get a full understanding of this, make sure you don't have a current backup of your stuff, take the hard drive on your computer, raise it over your head, and drop it on the sidewalk.
Hopefully, anyone who thinks this is a good idea, will discover why I don't agree from experience and I'll get to read about it on one of the 'Official Darwin' sites.
This is just another example of legislators trying to write biometric requirements into law without being remotely clued as to why no application related to public safety should be authenticated exclusively by biometric ID, whether it's software or a handgun.
People have been bending over and polluting the air telling us how wonderful the idea of a gun that can't be used against the owner is.
"Weapons used by law enforcement officers would be exempt until a separate decision on whether the requirement should apply to them."
Interesting that there doesn't seem to be a public demand for these from public safety officers who know their lives depend on the proper operation of their guns. Apparently, they feel that the device is potentially more hazardous to their health than the risk of having a gun taken by an attacker is. Is the safety of government employees more important than your safety or mine? Yours, maybe.
In the final analysis, a "smart gun locking device" is just something else that can go wrong. Like a DRM module added to your computer. Come to think of it, this IS a digital rights module by any reasonable definition of the term. The gun is available when a government-mandated thing says its available.
Interesting that a fair number of people who have said elsewhere "DRM over my dead body" seem to think this a good idea. People willing to challenge the government to keep their own files available don't quite seem to get the idea that people might want to keep their own guns available.
With respect to the idea that this will depend on an AG's evaluation of handgun safety, is he going to care if the gun always fires when the owner needs it to, or that it never fires when an unauthorized user has it?
As for child labor sweatshops, we can be reasonably confident that these chips are NOT going to be manufactured in them. Chip fabs are automated because there is no way manual processing can be done without the kind of human error which would trash entire fab runs at a time.
In any case, the "Communism" you're complaining about is in fact, the kind of pure early 1900s US-style capitalism (management with a callous disregard for working conditions and safety, attempts to organize workers met by government agents kicking down one's door, etc.) I would expect you to be praising.
This was what capitalism was like before child labor laws, OSHA, pure food and drug laws enforced by the FDA, and other things Libertarians consider immoral interference between the contract between businesses and individuals.
Try breaking with /. tradition and actually learn something about public policy issues before exposing your ignorance in public. Read up on the history of the American labor movement sometime.
This isn't to say the Chinese government deserves support, but find out what you're complaining about before you start howling COMMUNISM!
If you want to buy a red, white, and blue Palladium-disabled CPU from AMD or Intel on which Linux might not run, go for it.
Given the direction in which freedom and civil liberties in the US are going post 9/11, how much difference there's going to be by the time Palladium and a Dragon II CPU hit the market between the US and Chinese governments is decidedly open to question.
"People always get the local governments they deserve."
E.E. "Doc" Smith
As to which set of people this will be a grimmer comment about, ask me in 2004 or 2005.
If you want to see a product where labor is 90% of the cost, go look at a Big Mac.
Liability laws holding businesses responsible in the civil sense for damage done to end users or other businesses using their computers and networks would clean up the "corporate idiots spreading [virus of the week]" problem, the insurance companies will force their customers to clean up their acts immediately.
Liability laws holding end users responsible the same way and a few high-profile lawsuits will have the same impact.
A "safe harbor" for "best practices" makes this fair. Perhaps ISPs could be required to distribute anti-viral software or firewall software that updates automatically with their installation, or to require their use via TOS.
If you're a home user:
Best practices for businesses depends largely on business size. Consensus can be created to provide explicit guidelines as to what businesses in X size range should be doing without limiting overly what businesses can use for servers and workstations. If a business wants to run IIS/XP, I think it stupid, but as long as they're competently managed, OK, the dangerous installations are the ones run right out of the box by people whose MSCE certificates are still drying anyway.
Cost to taxpayers? Pretty minimal, much of it would largely be recovered by court costs.
Effectiveness? If you are not a member of the Bush Administration, you know that about 99% of all malware depends on somebody leaving a gateway for trouble, patches not up to date, antivirus not up to date, or not bothering to read the articles that would tell the user not to click on file attachments from unknown people.
The stuff we need end users to do is NOT rocket science. The stuff businesses need to do can be done by any competent sysadmin. If they don't have one, what the hell are they doing on the Internet? They are no more entitled to dump bad packets on the Net than they are to dump their raw sewage into the people's drinking water.
The zero-day exploits we're mostly all vulnerable to, but they are also pretty rare.
So we have a simple and relatively cheap way to make people and businesses responsible for cleaning up their own acts.
Who says that this is impossible?
Why does the Bush Adminstration want to create a single monitoring point / single attack point for enemies? Answer that question for yourself. It isn't like there's no other choices for securing the Net.
I'm sure there are other ways to accomplish this as well, and I'd like to see some discussed.
People making serious money off a seriously illegal product get very touchy about their activities being inquired into. Perhaps there are other things than kiddy porn illegal in the USA that Ralsky is helping sell.
Remember, the business associates of a spammer aren't going to be nice people. At minimum, the guy in the Jaguar had reason to fear discovery of his association with Ralsky.
Hopefully, the person discovering this has gotten the image to some people with serious expertise in image enhancement, forensic or intelligence in the hopes of getting the Jaguar's license number.
An unsucessful boycott would simply demonstrate the impotence of the high-tech community with respect to any kind of political action, particularly since success in terms of affecting sales would require selling this outside the community, and would be worse than useless.
However, there will be a consumer boycott, and it will be effective. The next generation of DRM disabled audio gear with no analog or digital outputs, i.e. encrypted from source to speakers or CRT is on its way and was discussed yesterday here.
The public will scream its heads off when they find out what's in it, "You mean my VCR won't work, either?" and when they're told "DRM TV or NO TV", will be calling their Congresscritters telling them to tell the FCC to put off digital-only TV.
Hollywood won't lose any money over this, but the high-tech manufacturers who bought into Hollywood bullshit will lose billions, and a lot of jobs are going to get lost. Hopefully, including those of the CEOs who were stupid enough to roll over and play dead for their new masters.
Following Ben Stein's implied prescription as to the cure to what ails America would do it once and for all. If he'd ever done anything constructive with technology for a living, he might be clued enough to make his perceptions about what makes technological innovation of value. Reading his article makes him wonder what planet he moved to after his job with Nixon quit him. As well as why he returned and why Forbes decided to give him a public forum.
As a casual observer of what makes this country work and what stops it cold, I hereby offer a few suggestions on how we can ruin American competitiveness and innovation in the course of this century.
His suggestions might be worth something if he'd ever gotten closer to real technologists than any article in the financial press could have taken him.
I think the reader will agree with me that we are already far down the road on many of them:
1) Allow schools to fall into useless decay. Do not teach civics or history except to describe America as a hopelessly fascistic, reactionary pit.
He wants schools to leave the Nixon era out of history books? Not that I blame him, he's one of the guilty parties, he was on the Nixon staff. But he isn't important enough to be mentioned by name.
Do not expect students to know the basics of mathematics, chemistry and physics.
A couple of hours ago, I helped an average high school student in an average suburban high school make a model of the sodium atom. In large part, the science textbooks are finally becoming adequate and much better than the ones I used in high school (graduated at mid-term in 1972).
Working closely with the teachers' unions, make sure that you dumb down standards so that children who make the most minimal effort still get by with flying colors. Destroy the knowledge base on which all of mankind's scientific progress has been built by guaranteeing that such learning is confined to only a few, and spread ignorance and complacency among the many. Watch America lose its scientific and competitive edge to other nations that make a comprehensive knowledge base a rule of the society.
We're going to lose our competitive edge to the RIAA/MPAA cartel long before the educational system has time to do what he describes.
While public education is in serious disrepair, the problem (at least in California and other states which are finally enforcing some) isn't standards, it's structure and methods. The standards for high school graduation in a local California school district I reviewed are perfectly adequate. I'm at something of a loss as to how their educational methods are going to accomplish this, from what I've been able to see, the teachers are using homework not to reinforce the classroom instruction given during the school day, but to force parents to provide the instruction the teachers weren't able to provide. The money is probably adequate, but is dissipated in "administrative expenses" having little discernable relationship to classroom instruction.
2) Encourage the making of laws and rules by trial lawyers and sympathetic judges, especially through class actions. Bypass the legislative mechanisms that involve elected representatives and a president. This will stop--or at least greatly slow down--innovation, as corporations and individuals hesitate to explore new ideas for fear of getting punished (or regulated to death) by litigation for any misstep, no matter how slight, in the creation of new products and services. Make sure that lawsuits against drugmakers are especially encouraged so that the companies are afraid to develop new lifesaving drugs, lest they be sued for sums that will bankrupt them. Make trial lawyers and judges, not scientists, responsible for the flow of new products and services.
I'm a hell of a lot more concerned about the unrestrained influence of the lobbyists of the Hollywood content cartel than I am about tort law, which has largely already been reformed in the direction Mr. Stein asks for. The factors that restrain innovation in the pharmaceutical industry are more that companies have found that paying lawyers to build patent portfolios from previous work is more profitable than hiring scientists and engineers.
We're finding that entertainment industry executives are even less safe technology gatekeepers than trial lawyers ever were. If he wants to point a finger, he should look to his own employers.
3) Create a culture that blames the other guy for everything and discourages any form of individual self-restraint or self-control. Promote litigation to punish tobacco companies on the theory that they compel innocent people to smoke. Make it second nature for someone who is overweight to blame the restaurant that served him fries. Encourage a legal process that can kill a drug company for any mistakes in self-medication.
IIRC, the overweight person got his fat ass kicked in court, and he can't name any drug companies that have gone out of business over a patient's fuckups any more than you or I can. However, the evidence is simply inconclusive. I can cite examples where these cases got tossed out of court and cases where the plaintiffs won.
Make it a general rule that anyone with more money than a plaintiff is responsible for anything harmful that a plaintiff does. Promulgate the pitiful joke that Americans are hereby exempt from any responsibility for their own actions--so long as there are deep pockets around to be rifled.
4) Sneer at hard work and thrift. Encourage the belief that all true wealth comes from skillful manipulation and cunning, or from sudden, brilliant and lucky strokes that leave the plodding, ordinary worker and saver in the dust.
Does anyone know of any examples of people who've gotten seriously rich (say, over $100M) solely by hard work and thrift? It's rather telling that Ben doesn't know of any, either. We know this because he didn't cite examples. Hard work only counts when one is doing the right things, and thrift is only a good thing when one economizes on the right things... i.e. don't spend $1K of your investors' money per employee on office furniture in a high tech startup, and DON'T try squeezing nickels when it comes to picking server hardware when your site is already getting 1M hits a day.
Make sure that society's idols are men and women who got rich from being sexy in public
Presumably, he means entertainers. Hmmm... why are we using the badly informed remarks of an entertainer as a basis of public debate?
or through gambling or playing tricks, not from hard work or patience. Make the citizenry permanently envious and bewildered about where real success comes from.
Anybody sufficiently interested in finding out can discover where most individual fortunes came from, including the parts the founders of thse fortunes would really rather we didn't know about. Of course, knowing where wealth comes from doesn't necessarily imply that one can make it even if one has the knowledge and talent to create intellectual capital. Knowing who Ann Winblad is doesn't mean she'll give you the time of day, unless you encounter her through the right "insider" VC community channels.
Hint: If Bill Gates hadn't had substantial family money behind him, would we have ever heard of either him or Microsoft?
5) Hold the managers of corporations to extremely lax standards of conduct and allow them to get off with a slap on the wrist when they betray the trust of shareholders. This will discourage thrift and investment and ensure that Americans will have far less capital to work with than other societies, while simultaneously developing that contempt for law and social standards that is the hallmark of failing nations. Hold the management of labor unions to no ethical standards.
Odd that he got that one almost right. Now why did he personally invest in Enron and Worldcom to begin with?
If he's as well informed as he pretends to be, he'd know that the reason for the spectacular stock swindles perpetrated by Enron, Worldcom, and many other companies was reduced oversight by the SEC, which the Bush Administration insured by gutting the agency's funding. Corporate leaders will cheat if they can get away with it, that's why the SEC was invented in the 1930s. Why is he putting Ben Stein's money into funding the GOP if he really believes there's a problem?
6) While you're at it, discourage respect for law in every possible way. This will dissolve the glue that holds the nation together, and dissuade any long- term thinking. Societies in which the law can be clearly seen to apply to some and not to others are doomed to decay, in terms of innovation and everything else.
No argument here. However, he's a former scriptwriter for Richard Nixon, who left the White House barely in time to avoid public trial for "high crimes and misdemeanors". The GOP is the very center of the cultural imperative that says the law is for everyone except the wealthy. A good argument, but is he really the one to make it?
7) Encourage a mass culture that spits on intelligence and study and instead elevates drug use, coolness through sex and violence, and contempt for school. As children learn to be stupid instead of smart, the national intelligence base needed for innovation will simply vanish into MTV- land.
Still whining about youth culture after all these years. I guess he figures that he fooled the public during the Nixon era with this, (the 1972 Nixon campaign was basically an attack on youth culture) he can still get away with it. He will be happy to know that the current version of youth culture is just as likely to turn out amoral suits to provide the kind of "innovative" business leadership he seems to be looking for as any idealism out of the hippie era.
The PC he presumably typed these grave pronouncements on and the ones we're reading and writing this on are as much a product of the 1960s youth culture as acid rock and love beads. Those of you who are too young to remember this from being there can pick up the history from Hackers by Stephen Levy. Though looking at pictures of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak around when they started Apple should give you the idea. Those of you who are a bit older will remember when I say Whole Earth Catalogue gave Homebrew Computer Club its startup funding. And the world indeed changed as a result.
What will the current participants in the current revision of youth culture come up with in the way of technology? There are more young computer programmers around than in any time in previous history, and most of you are probably here. Isn't it sad that Ben Stein doesn't like your musical tastes?
8) Mock and belittle the family.
Last time I heard, The Osbournes are still the hottest show on TV... the family might not be the one that Ben Stein grew up with and Ozzy Osbourne isn't exactly Ozzie Nelson, but the family actually seems to work.
Provide financial incentives to people willing to live an isolated existence, vulnerable and frightened. This guarantees that men and women of sufficient character to bring about innovation will be psychologically stifled from an early age.
Let's be polite here and figure that he botched this one on the basis that he stopped doing his own income taxes as soon as he could afford to do so, probably in the early 1970s. The rest of us need only flip through our form 1040 booklets to figure out what tax breaks families get that singles aren't eligible for.
9) Develop a suicidal immigration policy that keeps out educated, hardworking men and women from friendly nations and, instead, takes in vast numbers of angry, uneducated immigrants from nations that hate us. This, too, leads to the shrinking of our knowledge base and the eventual disappearance of social cohesion.
He's never heard of H1B and we're supposed to take his pronouncements on how immigration law works seriously? Perhaps Forbes should have gotten Madonna or Eminem to write the article instead. I don't see how they could have done a worse job. Where the hell does he think the casual labor that keeps his yard in good shape comes from, under a cabbage patch?
10) Enact a tax system that encourages class antagonism and punishes saving, while rewarding indebtedness, frivolity and consumption. Tax the fruits of labor many times:
First tax it as income. Then tax it as real or personal property. Then tax it as capital gains. Then tax it again, at a staggeringly high level, at death. This way, Americans are taught that only fools save, and that it is entirely proper for us to have the lowest savings rate in the developed world.
We also have the lowest total tax rate in the developed world once all these layers are added up, and those who invest as companies in technological businesses can pick up an R&D tax credit. If he were qualified to speak on technological innovation, he'd know it.
This will deprive us of much-needed capital for new investment, for innovation and our own personal aspirations. It will compel us to ask foreigners for ever more capital and allow them to own more of America. It will also promote an attitude of carelessness about the future and, once again, encourage disrespect for law.
Tell that to Bill Gates. Fortunes are still being made in America. Though Gates doesn't have much to do with innovation, there are others who've made high-tech fortunes in the system he condemns, and a whole lot of us who'd be happy to give it a try given access to venture capital.
11) Have a socialized medical system that scrimps on badly needed drugs and procedures, resorts to only the cheapest practices and discourages drug companies from developing new drugs by not paying them enough to cover their costs of experimentation, trial and error.
Which country does he think he lives in? The USA has the most expensive medical system in the world on either a per capita basis or in terms of total dollars. Attempts to introduce universal health care have been uniformly squelched by millions of dollars spent by the US health care industry and in particular, insurance companies who would be forced to stop profiting from health care if the US health care system became "socialized".
12) Elevate mysticism, tribalism, shamanism and fundamentalism--and be sure to exclude educated, hardworking men and women--to an equal status with technology in the public mind.
With the exception of the Xtian fundamentalists, all the groups he's whining about are very well represented in technological innovation. Anyone who doesn't quite get this should try googling for:
technopagan VRML
Make sure that, in order to pay proper (and politically correct) respect to all different ethnic groups in America, you act as if science were on an equal footing with voodoo and history with ethnic fable.
If he'd had the guts to go after fundamentalist Christians pushing "Creation Science", I'd agree with him. As far as I know, this is the only significant example of religion overriding science that's going on right now.
My list need not end here.
Would it be uncharitable to suggest that it ended because he'd run out of ideas? Perhaps a few more hours of listening to Rush Limbaugh would have given him some.
But I stopped at a dozen because I realized that this is already, in large measure, the program of so many of our elected representatives. The debauchery of our tort system is already in place, and the rest of the agenda is under way.
The only agendas I see in progress right now are that of restricting civil liberties in the guise of "protecting us from terrorists" and the Hollywood content cartel's anti-tech agenda. Either are as dangerous to America's ability to innovate and compete as the decline of public education. Ben Stein deals with neither. If Ben Stein got paid for this article, Forbes should retract the article and try to get their money back from him.
Ben Stein was practically the only GOP contributor among the ranks of Hollywood entertainers, look him up. (search under individual donors, enter STEIN, BENJAMIN)
Benjamin J. Stein is a lawyer, economist, writer and actor, and host of the game show Win Ben Stein's Money.
If Ben Stein ever devotes a show segment to public policy and has an honest judge score the contestants, he's going to lose a bunch of Ben Stein's money. The guy does have style, but I never realized before reading his article how little he's got to back it up with.
Quite a few years ago, one of my female friends had an abusive and aggressive ex-boyfriend. She asked me to stay with her for a few days and bring my gun along. This was back when California had a law that said that if one shoots an intruder who broke in, that the shooter would be presumed innocent.
He started beating and kicking on the door about 3 days later. I came up and aimed my gun at the door. He ran away and called the police.
I and my friend described the circumstances to the policewoman, who got a good laugh out of the fact that the guy was stupid enough to call.
She had no further problems with the guy.
Presumably, the anti-gun crazies around here would consider that my interference with the guy's 'right' to beat the shit out of a woman using an evil GUN!!! makes me an evil person. I've actually seen people take that position when I (rarely) mention this in public. This is useful, though, I know a few more people to hold in utter contempt and not to do business with.
It also puts me in a position to say I've used a gun to deter violence.
Unfortunately, the law was repealed a few years later by the California State Supreme Court.
I've found the GUI config applets I've uses so far marginally useful at best. In my 3rd day of running Linux, I had to modify fstab and System.map (yes, this is RH 8.0) using vim. On my 4th day, I grabbed a RPM of nano (updated pico for those of you who've used pine) and don't have to remember vi(m) commands anymore.
I've got to get my Winmodem working and my HP Series II printer running as well.
OK, I'm not that new to linux, I've had a linux shell account for years, this is just the first time I've ever installed it.
My system runs two mobile drive racks, one for Windows (and soon, Linux) backup, the other for the unix drive. Took me the longest time to realize the reason why grub just sat there and beeped instead of booting Windoze when I pulled the unix drive was that grub.conf file was on it. I had unplugged the Windows backup drive during the original install, I didn't want to chance my backup data to anything going wrong during the Linux install.
I had to put a MBR on the Linux drive running a grub boot disk.
If I were depending on the GUI only, I'd be completely SOL.
If someone hops on an access point with a localhost IP, the packets that leave/enter the account are going to be tagged with the access point's IP... and if the owner says "I created an open access point, I have no idea who used it", the owner doesn't get off the hook in a civil lawsuit this would be a response to.
That's what pushing liability back onto the responsible party means.
What I'm calling for is liability law applied to cyberspace, not just for open access 802.11(whatever), but for everybody. Starting with the idiots with cablemodems, no firewalls, and 0wN3d computers.
This also means that sooner or later, this will probably wind up being resolved at the Supreme Court level.
When companies discover that not bringing their servers up to "best practices" standards doubles their insurance premiums and that running IIs with half-competent MCSEs is an expensive luxury for them as well as the rest of us and broadband home users running open relay boxes get sued, the word to "tighten up or else" will get around real fast.
It isn't just open access Wi-Fi ports that are the problem. Yes, these things should default to "secure" out of the box. However, cablemodem setups should also come with firewalls installed out of the box as well.
I think the evidence for the existence of hydrinos is better than evidence that intelligent people have ever trusted the Bush Administration.
A spammer is essentially a declared enemy of humanity with his only justification being that of profit. Is he the moral equal of a terrorist or pedophile or kiddie pornographer? I assume a spammer would sell kiddie porn or commit terrorist acts instead of spamming if he thought he could get away with it and there was more money than in kiddie porn or terror.
In fact, if your friend is a mega-spammer, he probably is spam-promoting kiddie porn regardless of what he's telling you. Presumably, the people who sell the hot young Lolita ads pay in cash and on time. Is he promoting terrorism? That probably depends on whether or not any terrorists have offered him money to do this or not. Has he showed you his customer lists? Than how do you know what he does and doesn't do? You're taking his word for it?
If you willingly associate with people like that, I'm glad I'm not your friend.