There are foreseeable problems with this Net Neutrality provision:
The definition of what Neutrality is will be decided by FCC bureaucrats and by courts. Both are notoriously clueless about networking and the Internet. Yet we will rely upon their uninformed, harried rulings to decide how to run critical infrastructure. What can possibly go wrong?
I am blacklisting whole IP subnets in my mail server. Am I going to be sued by notorious spammers for preventing them from reaching my users? I am not neutral to spammers, that's for sure.
If I pay for some costly network infrastructure, can any two-bit business come along and use if for free?
I want to bar kiddie porn from my workplace. I am blacklisting the most notorious XXX web sites. Am I going to be sued by Young Flesh, Inc?
You see where this can go? Fuzzy regulations are often abused, this one will be no exception.
You're absolutely right. NASA killed the clipper because it was a threat to their employment-for-life guarantee, namely the Shuttle
Considering that the new prez owes votes to the Federal bureaucrats (93% of DC voted for him), it would be surprising to see him dismantle the NASA status quo. So any solution he'll consider will keep them employed and will not be cheaper.
Interesting posts, I regret that I don't have mod points right now.
Allow me to ask a question: what do you think of the statement "cheaper...while still providing jobs for much of the existing shuttle workforce"? If DIRECT is cheaper, won't it imply that most of the people employed by the Shuttle program will not be needed anymore? Or do they plan to keep these people and spread the salary costs on a very large number of DIRECT launches?
What's your BS-o-meter telling you there? Mine tells me that if they are really trying to keep the standing army of highly paid engineers currently working on the Shuttle, then DIRECT cannot be cheaper. If cheap is the target, then a lot of NASA people are going to be pink-slipped. Someone is lying here.
Your opinion?
Post by LifesABeach is dead accurate. The Delta Clipper demonstrator was an effective SSTO prototype. It was handled to NASA, which "accidentally" killed it on the first flight. Then they could not find $10 million to rebuild another one, while spending $500M a year on the Shuttle.
The Delta Clipper was a threat to the Shuttle milk cow, so it died. Technical superiority doesn't matter anymore at NASA.
NASA is great at science mission, but they have historically fought and destroyed every attempt to make access to space cheaper.
NASA used to be moon-conqueror heroes. Now it is a bureaucracy. The goal of a bureaucracy is to perpetuate itself. They are now standing firmly between mankind and cheap access to space.
Agreed. My first tech book was done in MS Word 6 (yeah, it was a long time ago). It was a nightmare. We had several production problems when it was time to produce the PostScript to send to the pre-press machine. Ugh.
The next books were done in LaTeX (my editor insisted on it for the 1st one, then I was sold). Sure, it's a bit of a learning curve, but the flexibility and control given by LaTeX are worth learning the tricks. Plus, Lamport's LaTex book is actually a well-written tutorial. Aspiring tech books authors would be well inspired to study its style and organization.
LyX reportedly goes a long way to making LaTeX easier to use. I haven't used it myself, though.
"Everybody knows that there is solar variability."
. Everyone, apparently, but the authors of the various global climate models, none of which currently include it.
Not true. There are models which include variation in the radiated solar input (that's sunshire for us laymen). Some even achieve a measure of success in reproducing the observed climate changes over the last few centuries. But as every other model, they don't explain everything and they cannot reproduce all the observed changes.
Moreover, to account for the most striking recent climate change episodes, these model presuppose a solar variation that is not backed by independent evidence. For example, the Medieval warming could be explained with solar activity increase, but we lack independent proof of it.
On the other hand, the climate change (cooling) that led to the demise of the Mayan empire can entirely be explained by solar forcing (that is, solar activity changes were the main cause), and this has been amply documented.
Yup, that's correct. My cousin did her thesis on conductive polymers.
The most interesting applications would be batteries, but right now, the capacity/weight ratio of polymer batteries doesn't look very good compared to metal-based couples.
The recession has largely corrected the copper thievery problem.
It *should* have corrected the problem... If copper thieves were smart. Meth heads aren't. Current news show that there are still dozen of cases a day. At best, we hope that the brightest (and probably the more organized) thieves will have gotten the message and chosen a more lucrative field.
I upgraded my copper plumbing and installed PVC everywhere I could. Then I asked my electrician to upgrade my copper wiring to PVC, and the bastard refused.
Them electricians are in league with the copper lobbies, I tall you. I hope they'll make a Federal law to mandate PVC wires!
Fortunately, copper thieves aren't the sharpest hammer in the bag. From time to time, one of them starts chopping a high voltage line and gets fried to a crisp. Every time that I read about such a thing, I throw a personal little celebration and I burn a commemorative slice of bread in my toaster. I am waiting for the image of Darwin to show up on the burnt toast.
In Europe, there are many war monuments made of solid brass. Some were stolen and turned into ingots.
For the record, there was an acorn boom a couple of years ago that was responsible for an increase of Lyme disease. Apparently, when you get more acorn, you get more ticks the next season.
You were probably hitting the Control-W key. It doesn't write the file, it wipes the current region between curson and mark (you set the mark by hitting C-Space, defaults to top of the file).
Hey, I earned some not negligible bucks (at the time) by selling a few TRS-80 BASIC game programs to magazines. The conscientious ones printed the code along with a checksum in a REM at the end of the line, and a small loader routine to verify these sums.
Flip-flopping? It's worse than that. The Federal Reserve pretty much destroyed our economy by causing the housing bubble, dot com bubble, snl crisis, etc etc. Their actions are more than just a bit criminal if you ask me.
Well, let's not exagerate. The Fed was but a factor in the current crisis. They set low rates. But you had to have other factors to create the crisis. You needed the conjonction of the Community Reinvestment Act punishing cautious lenders, the reckless practices of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae removing any semblance of loan application verification, their lobbying a Congress that was supposed to control them and not the other way around, the monetarization of mortgage-based securities, and various Federal agencies being effectively accomplices. So while the Fed was certainly a link in the chain, it was not even the main factor.
In the 1929 crisis, I read that the Fed had the very bad idea of tightening credit while cash was in short supply. This certainly made them an aggravator of the Depression.
As for the other financial crises, I don't have enough data to form an opinion.
Agreed. Even so, there are conceptual attacks against the crypto fob. The simplest is this: Say your Windows client is infected with a keylogger that transmits sniffed data in real time to a hostile remote machine. The hostile machine can duplicate your credentials and open a session to your server, and keep it active until its human owner emerges from its vodka-induced snooze to come and exploit your hapless machine.
So I don't have a solution right now, except maybe refuse connection from external IP addresses, which means no more legit remote access or working from home.
I second that. "I was for computing before I was against it". Flip-flopping is the last thing you want from a man that has his position.
Greespan spent years at the Fed happily spouting dictates that affected the world's economy. Then he wrote a book saying he disagrees with everything he did and disapproves Bush -- against which he never uttered a peep while he was at the helm.
This is the kind of guy who would open a restaurant specialized in rare bird meat and then become a member of PETA. Have some decency, man.
To be fair, I have lately seen several breaches where the security of the server wasn't the issue. The source of the problem seemed to be that a Windows client machine in the office was infected with a keylogger Trojan that faithfully sent all login credentials to its master.
By logging onto a server with a priviledged account, an employee unwillingly let the keylogger sniff the uid/password, and in due time, this data was exploited.
There are only two protections against that: 1. Ban Windows clients and use Mac or Linux machines only (since almost all keyloggers are written against Windows) or 2. Use a cryptographic fob for each user and authentify each logging with the pseudo-random digit sequence it provides.
From TFA: I can understand why a Windows environment would be considered desirable in an educational tool, since the children will be learning to use the OS and applications that theyâ(TM)ll be encountering in their adult life.
What a brillant insight!
See, a kid using Windows XP in high school will encounter Windows XP applications in ten or fifteen years. Why, he will work with only Windows XP his whole adult life. Otherwise, he'd have to be trained to be flexible and to learn by himself as soon as high school.
This brilliant insight also explains why Vista has failed on the marketplace. Why, when the average worker left high school school in the 80s, all the Apple IIs and C-64s in the school computer labs were running only Windows XP! No wonder he refuses Vista!
Thank God we have good, insightful journalists in this country. Otherwise, we might see all kind of crap printed on the web.
Note: yes, that was sarcasm. All of it. Thank you for noticing.
Or just see how Massachusetts authorities persecuted a guy who had done nothing illegal, then are desperately trying to come up with some trumped up charges to avoid the lawsuit they so richly deserve.
So if we base a clever article on a leaked document, shouldn't we first assume that the document is truthful?
When a high-profile person commits suicide because of the pressure of an investigation, the authorities will always try to justify their action. This was observed many times. I do remember a big scandal where a perfectly honest corner shop owner was investigated by the IRS and harassed in the worst possible ways. He turned out that his books were perfectly clean, but there was nevertheless an attempt at a smear campaign against the poor guy after his death.
I am sure that this suicide is embarrassing some higher-ups at the FBI and that they will do their best to avoid being blamed.
So I'd take these revelations with a grain of salt.
I think that even without the benefits of insight, it was pretty obvious that this CPU chip thing had a bright future. One obvious application at the time was replacing the complex TTL boards (or relays and switches) of automata sequencers in production lines. That application alone sold tens of thousands of CPUs a year as soon as microprocessors became available.
CTC/Datapoint could have become a giant on the automation market alone. And that's not even taking the yet non-existent microcomputer market into consideration. Or the countless other uses for microprocessors that popped up since.
Let me summarize a few salient points of TFA here:
CTC management refused to buy the IP rights of the microprocessor for a paltry 50K (about $300K in today's dollars), a ridiculously low sum as far as circuit design is concerned.
The same management (maybe not the same persons though) were then caught cooking the books after CTC became Datapoint
It's very nice that the name of Roche was documented in this article for posterity. But what we really want is to have the name of these managers documented and written down in business textbook, along with their pictures, the history of their glorious achievements, and maybe a warning such as "Do not hire, consult, play golf with, or even breathe the same air as those morons".
I'd call this a case of terminal stupidity, but this pun is way too refined for the monstrous cluster-f*ck that these PHBs achieved.
Slashdot Mirror
There are foreseeable problems with this Net Neutrality provision:
You see where this can go? Fuzzy regulations are often abused, this one will be no exception.
Good going, guys.
You're absolutely right. NASA killed the clipper because it was a threat to their employment-for-life guarantee, namely the Shuttle
Considering that the new prez owes votes to the Federal bureaucrats (93% of DC voted for him), it would be surprising to see him dismantle the NASA status quo. So any solution he'll consider will keep them employed and will not be cheaper.
evanbd,
Interesting posts, I regret that I don't have mod points right now.
Allow me to ask a question: what do you think of the statement "cheaper...while still providing jobs for much of the existing shuttle workforce"? If DIRECT is cheaper, won't it imply that most of the people employed by the Shuttle program will not be needed anymore? Or do they plan to keep these people and spread the salary costs on a very large number of DIRECT launches?
What's your BS-o-meter telling you there? Mine tells me that if they are really trying to keep the standing army of highly paid engineers currently working on the Shuttle, then DIRECT cannot be cheaper. If cheap is the target, then a lot of NASA people are going to be pink-slipped. Someone is lying here.
Your opinion?
Post by LifesABeach is dead accurate. The Delta Clipper demonstrator was an effective SSTO prototype. It was handled to NASA, which "accidentally" killed it on the first flight. Then they could not find $10 million to rebuild another one, while spending $500M a year on the Shuttle.
The Delta Clipper was a threat to the Shuttle milk cow, so it died. Technical superiority doesn't matter anymore at NASA.
NASA is great at science mission, but they have historically fought and destroyed every attempt to make access to space cheaper.
NASA used to be moon-conqueror heroes. Now it is a bureaucracy. The goal of a bureaucracy is to perpetuate itself. They are now standing firmly between mankind and cheap access to space.
Agreed. My first tech book was done in MS Word 6 (yeah, it was a long time ago). It was a nightmare. We had several production problems when it was time to produce the PostScript to send to the pre-press machine. Ugh.
The next books were done in LaTeX (my editor insisted on it for the 1st one, then I was sold). Sure, it's a bit of a learning curve, but the flexibility and control given by LaTeX are worth learning the tricks. Plus, Lamport's LaTex book is actually a well-written tutorial. Aspiring tech books authors would be well inspired to study its style and organization.
LyX reportedly goes a long way to making LaTeX easier to use. I haven't used it myself, though.
"Everybody knows that there is solar variability."
. Everyone, apparently, but the authors of the various global climate models, none of which currently include it.
Not true. There are models which include variation in the radiated solar input (that's sunshire for us laymen). Some even achieve a measure of success in reproducing the observed climate changes over the last few centuries. But as every other model, they don't explain everything and they cannot reproduce all the observed changes.
Moreover, to account for the most striking recent climate change episodes, these model presuppose a solar variation that is not backed by independent evidence. For example, the Medieval warming could be explained with solar activity increase, but we lack independent proof of it.
On the other hand, the climate change (cooling) that led to the demise of the Mayan empire can entirely be explained by solar forcing (that is, solar activity changes were the main cause), and this has been amply documented.
Yup, that's correct. My cousin did her thesis on conductive polymers.
The most interesting applications would be batteries, but right now, the capacity/weight ratio of polymer batteries doesn't look very good compared to metal-based couples.
The recession has largely corrected the copper thievery problem.
It *should* have corrected the problem... If copper thieves were smart. Meth heads aren't. Current news show that there are still dozen of cases a day. At best, we hope that the brightest (and probably the more organized) thieves will have gotten the message and chosen a more lucrative field.
VernonNemitz,
This is interesting, I was not aware of this.
Please mod up.
I upgraded my copper plumbing and installed PVC everywhere I could. Then I asked my electrician to upgrade my copper wiring to PVC, and the bastard refused.
Them electricians are in league with the copper lobbies, I tall you. I hope they'll make a Federal law to mandate PVC wires!
I agree this is a problem.
Fortunately, copper thieves aren't the sharpest hammer in the bag. From time to time, one of them starts chopping a high voltage line and gets fried to a crisp. Every time that I read about such a thing, I throw a personal little celebration and I burn a commemorative slice of bread in my toaster. I am waiting for the image of Darwin to show up on the burnt toast.
In Europe, there are many war monuments made of solid brass. Some were stolen and turned into ingots.
For the record, there was an acorn boom a couple of years ago that was responsible for an increase of Lyme disease. Apparently, when you get more acorn, you get more ticks the next season.
For the uninitiated, GPW is Great Patriotic War, Russian parlance for Word War II.
BlackDragon,
You were probably hitting the Control-W key. It doesn't write the file, it wipes the current region between curson and mark (you set the mark by hitting C-Space, defaults to top of the file).
As for tabs, what exactly do you want to achieve?
Hey, I earned some not negligible bucks (at the time) by selling a few TRS-80 BASIC game programs to magazines. The conscientious ones printed the code along with a checksum in a REM at the end of the line, and a small loader routine to verify these sums.
Flip-flopping? It's worse than that. The Federal Reserve pretty much destroyed our economy by causing the housing bubble, dot com bubble, snl crisis, etc etc. Their actions are more than just a bit criminal if you ask me.
Well, let's not exagerate. The Fed was but a factor in the current crisis. They set low rates. But you had to have other factors to create the crisis. You needed the conjonction of the Community Reinvestment Act punishing cautious lenders, the reckless practices of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae removing any semblance of loan application verification, their lobbying a Congress that was supposed to control them and not the other way around, the monetarization of mortgage-based securities, and various Federal agencies being effectively accomplices. So while the Fed was certainly a link in the chain, it was not even the main factor.
In the 1929 crisis, I read that the Fed had the very bad idea of tightening credit while cash was in short supply. This certainly made them an aggravator of the Depression.
As for the other financial crises, I don't have enough data to form an opinion.
Agreed. Even so, there are conceptual attacks against the crypto fob. The simplest is this: Say your Windows client is infected with a keylogger that transmits sniffed data in real time to a hostile remote machine. The hostile machine can duplicate your credentials and open a session to your server, and keep it active until its human owner emerges from its vodka-induced snooze to come and exploit your hapless machine.
So I don't have a solution right now, except maybe refuse connection from external IP addresses, which means no more legit remote access or working from home.
I second that. "I was for computing before I was against it". Flip-flopping is the last thing you want from a man that has his position.
Greespan spent years at the Fed happily spouting dictates that affected the world's economy. Then he wrote a book saying he disagrees with everything he did and disapproves Bush -- against which he never uttered a peep while he was at the helm.
This is the kind of guy who would open a restaurant specialized in rare bird meat and then become a member of PETA. Have some decency, man.
To be fair, I have lately seen several breaches where the security of the server wasn't the issue. The source of the problem seemed to be that a Windows client machine in the office was infected with a keylogger Trojan that faithfully sent all login credentials to its master.
By logging onto a server with a priviledged account, an employee unwillingly let the keylogger sniff the uid/password, and in due time, this data was exploited.
There are only two protections against that:
1. Ban Windows clients and use Mac or Linux machines only (since almost all keyloggers are written against Windows)
or
2. Use a cryptographic fob for each user and authentify each logging with the pseudo-random digit sequence it provides.
Safersys.org runs IIS on Windows Server 2003.
I really wonder how these hackers managed to crack they way into such a well-known paragon of security and reliability.
From TFA: I can understand why a Windows environment would be considered desirable in an educational tool, since the children will be learning to use the OS and applications that theyâ(TM)ll be encountering in their adult life.
What a brillant insight!
See, a kid using Windows XP in high school will encounter Windows XP applications in ten or fifteen years. Why, he will work with only Windows XP his whole adult life. Otherwise, he'd have to be trained to be flexible and to learn by himself as soon as high school.
This brilliant insight also explains why Vista has failed on the marketplace. Why, when the average worker left high school school in the 80s, all the Apple IIs and C-64s in the school computer labs were running only Windows XP! No wonder he refuses Vista!
Thank God we have good, insightful journalists in this country. Otherwise, we might see all kind of crap printed on the web.
Note: yes, that was sarcasm. All of it. Thank you for noticing.
Or just see how Massachusetts authorities persecuted a guy who had done nothing illegal, then are desperately trying to come up with some trumped up charges to avoid the lawsuit they so richly deserve.
Five seconds of Googling find some juicy cases of suicide by IRS. The first link: here.
So unfortunately, it's not just in movies.
Now, remember, I am not saying that the evidences cited in TFA are fake or incorrect. I am just citing precedent to show what is at stake here.
So if we base a clever article on a leaked document, shouldn't we first assume that the document is truthful?
When a high-profile person commits suicide because of the pressure of an investigation, the authorities will always try to justify their action. This was observed many times. I do remember a big scandal where a perfectly honest corner shop owner was investigated by the IRS and harassed in the worst possible ways. He turned out that his books were perfectly clean, but there was nevertheless an attempt at a smear campaign against the poor guy after his death.
I am sure that this suicide is embarrassing some higher-ups at the FBI and that they will do their best to avoid being blamed.
So I'd take these revelations with a grain of salt.
I think that even without the benefits of insight, it was pretty obvious that this CPU chip thing had a bright future. One obvious application at the time was replacing the complex TTL boards (or relays and switches) of automata sequencers in production lines. That application alone sold tens of thousands of CPUs a year as soon as microprocessors became available.
CTC/Datapoint could have become a giant on the automation market alone. And that's not even taking the yet non-existent microcomputer market into consideration. Or the countless other uses for microprocessors that popped up since.
1. Hire enginners
2. Do the opposite of what they recommend
3. ????
4. Errr... Where is the profit?
Ye flippin' gods.
Let me summarize a few salient points of TFA here:
It's very nice that the name of Roche was documented in this article for posterity. But what we really want is to have the name of these managers documented and written down in business textbook, along with their pictures, the history of their glorious achievements, and maybe a warning such as "Do not hire, consult, play golf with, or even breathe the same air as those morons".
I'd call this a case of terminal stupidity, but this pun is way too refined for the monstrous cluster-f*ck that these PHBs achieved.