"They didn't mention the little fact about having to get a frelling federal ethanol production license. I looked into this a few years back, and...YIKES. (Pay lots of money. Send in a sample. Keep logs of your activities, etc. etc.)"
Actually, on page 2 of TFA:
"In addition, it's illegal in the United States to operate a car on 100 percent ethanol, with exceptions for off-road vehicles like Indy cars and farm equipment. Quinn has a U.S. permit to make his own fuel, and believes that if MicroFuelers start popping up like swimming pools, regulators will adapt by certifying pure ethanol for cars."
(emphasis mine)
There are so many hurdles for breaking free of dependency on the oil economy... it's spectacular. I wonder if the hurdles are the reason for the stiff price tag for this glorified washing machine?
It should if you spend the cash to secure it. My bet is that it won't be, because it'll eventually lapse as a priority as health costs rise.
"The software they use should be secure..."
But it isn't. With the highly trusted Microsoft leading this effort, let me go out on a limb here and predict they're going to use Windows for this purpose. Duh. M$ has no incentive to make their product perfectly secure because they want to give you update bloat and want to be able to sell you their next OS (or a subscription at some point) and if you lack nothing, they won't be able to make money. Thus, their product will have security gaps and you (the health customer) will be the loser.
"The method you use to transmit your claims should be secure"
Transmission is only one part of security. Even if that is secure, there are plenty of other ways to get at your data.
Once your data becomes public, it will stay public. Before it is tracked down it can be transmitted to so many places that there is no way to be sure you have erased all of the copies of it. You should just assume that it is a one-way deal when data leaks.
"All you have to tell them is "don't email claim/medical record files" "
You can tell them things until you're blue in the face but you can't make people who lack computer sense into the sort of stoic user who dares not click on the little flashy icon inviting them to install the spyware, rootkits and so forth. At that point it doesn't matter how well they follow their other so-called security procedures.
Your data will get out. It will *pour* out like the blood from a samurai B-movie. Just ask the record companies and the movie companies. That's just the reality of converting anything over to a digital format.
It was only a matter of time before something like this happened.
Medical staff and any other people untrained in information security just aren't going to have the computer literacy or "computer common sense" to handle millions of peoples' medical records adequately.
On the other hand, if they were thoroughly trained, certified and passed through the wringer for those leet skillz, then the overhead for medical costs would balloon even higher as yet another bureaucracy (to manage *that*) is created within health maintenance providers.
But it's all in the name of tracking your every move, so I guess it's OK.
It would appear from reading the fine article that, due to a lack of grants for this leading-edge research, the 25 projects have been cut and there are only 5 left.
Well see, the thing with the T-rays is that if we can aim them towards the terrorists then hopefully we can "take a big bite out of crime" so to speak, or, if it's not like a T-Rex and it's more like a T-cell then at least we can cause them some sort of cancer. If we're lucky we'll give them a big whopping brain tumor and eventually our researchers will be able to outsmart them.
Of course, people will think your comment is funny, but back in 1933, Buckminster Fuller invented a very light three-wheeled three-engine car that got 30-50 mpg. His design was innovative in amazing ways compared to the cars of that period. (Who knows if it might have helped in the war effort by saving loads of fuel?) The first version was hard to steer, but I believe the second one fixed that problem.
Someone obviously didn't like the idea - the car companies turned him down and the car was never produced before Fuller ran out of money.
I guess the big question for conspiracy theorists now is, was the car's famous crash at the World's Fair really an accident or did it get a little push in that direction?
The following site has some info about the car itself:
Scenario: There's a war and a soldier is holding a rifle, but instead of a finger on the trigger, there's a cable going from the brain directly to the rifle. The soldier is alert. A bad guy could pop up from behind a rock at any moment.
Since the decision to shoot can be measured more quickly by this device, this shooter will win all the gunfights... (or at least that's how the Pentagon might see it, if they are funding it).
Once friendly fire becomes a problem, the standard excuse will be: "Oh, that wasn't me, the device must be malfunctioning." So then they'll take it out of the military and just sell it to some less critical force like law-enforcement or something.
Will our galaxy drift until it reaches a clump of galaxies (another universe?), where it will be compressed, or will the compression take place after all galaxies expand outward, slow down in their expansion, and then all slowly begin compressing in a big crunch?
Obviously, IANAPBICAT (I am not a physicist but I'm curious about this).
If true, then this eases Apple's worries about one company, but they still have to pursue every other company (or governmental entity, or non-profit) that might use a curvy fruit shape as a logo.
Particularly worrying is the business of agriculture... if an orchard can't put an apple logo on their product, then who can, right?
Even if all of this seems bizarre to most of us, that's the way the law is written, so the lawyers have to follow this practice to the ends of the earth if need be.
"I use a C-Media on board sound, but to get the mic to work was far from plug the mic in and it works. Windows blew on that one"
I can confirm this is a real anecdote because the C-Media mic problem hit me too. For a while I was convinced that it was actually a hardware problem, thinking it was a bad mic jack on my board, but after installing Linux it surprised me that it began to work. I didn't even have to know how to install a driver because it was detected by the installer. What I *did* have to know about was how to open a sound mixer and click on mic boost, but that was like a walk in the park compared to Windows. (Kudos to the driver writers!)
The fact is, if Windows doesn't support your chipset, you are really up the creek. Microsoft has no incentive to go back and add complete support of older chipsets and won't cry any tears if you are left with useless hardware. The chipset vendor may not have an incentive either, especially if it has moved on to a new chipset that it wants you to buy instead. In either case, you are not going to get source code to build your own Windows driver. With Linux, support for existing chipsets is often better because adapting working, open source code to a new kernel is a zillion times easier than waiting for exactly one person to be paid to rewrite a driver every time. Because it is easier, it is thus more likely to get rolled into new kernels and more likely to stay supported. Because the code is open, you don't have to wait for a company to train someone to take over support of a driver. Any qualified person can do it, and so support is far more transferable.
Windows blows because its methodology is obsolete and broken by design. And we all suspected that the inherent disadvantages of closed source would eventually come back to roost. It is now doing so and the lack of driver support is crowing in a very obvious way.
What a lot of people don't realize is how aggressively lawyers are expected to defend a trademark. Apple's lawyers must show "due diligence" in cases like this, or else they are considered not to be doing their job. Their fear must be that Apple Records or some other preexisting "Apple" company may decide to sublicense their trademark to the makers of knockoff computer products and draw off some marketshare from Apple. Obviously, I think Apple would follow through with their suit and try to defend against borderline cases like this any way they can.
A long time ago, Apple got to keep their name only because they didn't sell records. That seemed fair enough at the time. Now it's not entirely clear who would win should there be a renewed dispute with Apple Records because the computer company has now become the #1 music seller. It would be very interesting to see what would happen if Apple Records began their own iTunes equivalent or licensed their brand to the makers of cheap ipod knockoffs. That would be ironic, but if it never happens it will be because of the credible threat of red ink flowing as a result, created by the lawyers acting as they do, regardless of what seems fair.
...Which comes to prove that lawyers would make really good terrorists.:-P
"How about a talking paperclip to help you do stuff?"
By all means, I'm adding it to the draft as we speak.
Of course, it will have duct tape over its mouth, and a camera with image recognition pointed to it in case it wiggles its eyebrows suggestively. Only then will the system retain its super-duper security properties.
If you're about to suggest the little doggy, that one will have to provide its services from the inside of a kennel box. This is because what with this OS not having facilities for garbage collection and with the little pup running around on the desktop, there might be a little overrun...
"...if everyone were to drive 25 miles per hour there would be far fewer accidents on the road."
I knew someone would pull a bad car analogy on me for this.
Where you went wrong is you mistook my argument as a qualitative argument. I was actually making a *quantitative* point. That is, I don't mind if 1% of web pages use assorted crappola. What I don't want is for 99% of websites to force-stuff a javascript operating system into their page (and down my throat) when all of their content could have been done statically.
That's right, I'm saying that 99% of web pages don't need a scripting language kernel embedded into it, 15 different plugins and other extraneous stuff to impart their information attractively. If all of those pages went static, the internet as a whole would be more secure. The clients would be more secure, the servers would be more secure, the tubes... they wouldn't get clogged as often.
That's all I'm saying.
Is it going to happen? No -- I never said it would happen. It's only in the interest of *everyone* for it to happen. That's why it will never happen
Excellent post, but I'm going to pick some bones anyhow.
"It's impossible to go back to static HTML documents by now."
A lot of pages are still static and they work just fine, so it's not quite impossible. Almost all pages that use a maze of scripts don't really need them. If you look at the information 99% of webpages present, they could have achieved the same presentation, or something reasonably close, statically. Some places like Google, Yahoo, Amazon, M$, etc., they will not want to go back to say the least. They've invested too heavily in this OS-on-a-page Web 2.0 stuff... but that doesn't mean that all other webpages have to be as fat as theirs. People think they are the holy example that has to followed, but that's not true in most cases.
"This approach allows for complex browsers to actually become safer, by simplifying them."
I'm all for simplifying, but I think we need a stronger commitment to that. The process separation idea sounds good too. A misbehaved page or plugin shouldn't crash the browser, let alone the system. I have wished for this for a long time (or alternatively something that can stop all running scripts dead in their tracks in case of an overrun). On the other hand, I sense that, in order to keep things entirely separate, the browser image and all of its libraries will be duplicated in memory for every open page... or some other such similar unwelcome inefficiency. However, someone like the military will buy this, add 16G of RAM and not think twice.
"a single communications channel which is created by, controlled, and mediated by the kernel process."
OK, that's where I can sense that this is going to be slow. *Really* slow. Tanenbaum must be involved in this somewhere.
"the operating system won't allow you to access the network, filesystem, or anything else."
Of course it won't, so now you have to trick the operating system into doing it for you, and you just might because it is now so complex that by some corollary of Murphy's Law it has proportionately that many more exploits and backdoors to take advantage of.
It's true that limiting the functionality of each individual component stands a better chance of containing any one exploit, but because of the additional complexity of the security framework and OS, keeping all of that code properly working after the original developers are gone will be difficult, and what with the constant urge for featureitis it just may be possible to produce a train of exploits to traverse the whole thing once it degrades to a "Fixing X breaks Y and Z" mess.
Compare Vishta, a gigantic OS with all of the security bells and whistles to any open source OS that is less imbued with featureitis. Which is more secure? In theory it should be the commercial product, but nobody I know believes that for a second. In the real world simplicity is the gift that keeps on giving, because if a patch is necessary it can be developed more quickly and be more likely to solve the problem permanently.
That is all just my opinion, of course. If I try your browser and like it, I may still use it... on static HTML webpages.
OK, if you really want a truly secure safe OS (and by extension, to a browser mapped to the same address space), this is what you need in your OS:
Not one microkernel, for extra safety you need redundant nanokernels, with a microkernel over those, then the user kernel. To prevent buffer overruns, all messages passed between these are sent as emails, with spamassassin checking lest any of them get any ideas about sending spams.
OK, next you need lots of verification. Every time you write to disk there should be a second process to verify that what was written is correct. Then you need a process to check that the verifier process is checking things correctly. If memory doesn't run out while doing this, a body of processes should vote democratically as to whether the whole thing finished correctly. In case of collusion between the processes, some of them will be strictly dice rolls.
The least trusted part of the computer is the user, otherwise known as the "owner" of said computer. Thus, that person should not be allowed to do anything because that is a sure way to introduce problems. Harass that person with questions and popups at every opportunity. That will make sure they go out and read a book and not get in the way of the important things that the operating system is trying to do.
To prevent hardware from crashing any of the kernels, they must be separated
by a special interface layer that works a lot like a chat room (IRC). What
this means is that devices that speak the protocol correctly can connect and
be listened to by the kernel(s). Those that misbehave or that use foul
language are kicked off by the watchdog process. The watchdog process is
watched by a bulldog process. Sometimes the bulldog just barks, other times
the two are wrestling it out on the ground while the rest of the system waits
for them to sort out their differences. Alas, such is the price of progress.
To further prevent buffer overruns, a new character encoding is introduced where a previously one-byte code now needs ten bytes to encode it. This means that buffers have to be ten times bigger and thus there is a lot more space before an overrun occurs.
Let me know if you can think of any more features to add to this future super-OS.
The solution for a more secure browser isn't to guild it with ever-growing layers of security and virtual machines, quite the reverse, it's to keep things simple.
If we allow an internet to exist without the need for complex interpreted languages, if people open mostly static HTML documents when they open web pages instead of opening a pandora's box of plugins, languages, interpreted bytecodes, activeX gotchas and other unnecessary exploitable garbage, then the entire internet will be more secure.
By making it more complex, exploits and backdoors are virtually guaranteed. But well, that's just *my* ignorant opinion.
While us little people may not have any privacy, certain elites do have it on tap, if a court likes the idea.
Of course, I'm talking about none other than the SCO executive office. See here for the gory details.
What I don't understand is how the SCO executive office can be freed from the horrors of harassment due to a potential lack of privacy, but if helicopters want to buzz Barbra Streisand's house during her friends' private wedding, there is nothing a court is willing to do in her favor.
"As I observed earlier, we're already consuming an expensive product, oil to make a cheaper product, corn-based ethanol. "
That's OK, because we are producing proportionately larger quantities of the ethanol in favorable locations that help alleviate some of the pressure of refinery bottlenecks. As closed-loop production arrives the input concern vanishes. Ethanol also replaces MTBE as a way of boosting octane. MTBE is a known carcinogen that was poisoning wells until it was discontinued as an additive.
"subsidies are extremely irrational."
Probably so, but it's not like we can change that overnight.
"Corn ethanol is not a stepping stone to something better."
Of course it is. At the very least to more efficient ethanol production. The leftover mash is excellent animal feed, by the way, so it is very flexible to local needs/markets.
"the logical choices would be to subsidize something where you get more value out than you put in."
Right... and if petroleum is so great, why do we need to subsidize it?
"a project with negative economic value."
I don't agree. As I already pointed out, it's positive as demonstrated by the large price advantage of ethanol over gasoline, and it becomes even more attractive due to the location, its cleanliness, and its higher octane rating. Its actual value should be compared to premium fuel.
"Energy isn't a problem. It remains cheap."
If you think energy is cheap but it costs orders of magnitude more than animal feed, then doesn't that undermine your complaint about the rising cost of animal feed in an earlier post?
"The environment consequences of oil and other fossil fuels remain exaggerated. "
Until it affects you personally, but by then it's too late.
"And we have options that we can switch to, when oil no longer is viable."
To replace all of the oil we use in vehicles? How quickly can these options be put in full use? Wouldn't all of them take some time to get going in the case of a major supply disruption?
"My humble opinion is that we should take a hands-off approach and only intervene when there's a clear externality (like air pollution)."
But the lobbyists who set up the subsidies you don't like don't use a hands-off approach. Their hands are constantly reaching into in the free market's cookie jar, and that isn't likely to stop any time soon.
Don't be fooled, oil prices are not going to come down while India and China have growing populations and growing economies that also need oil. Basic supply and demand.
No question, ethanol has a lower energy density. However, even adjusting for that, it remains much cheaper and also burns much cleaner. Cleaner than gasoline and with fewer particulates than diesel, not to speak of the other nasty byproducts of oil that people also burn or spill on their thousand mile journeys to delivering it. With ethanol, the midwest has a local energy supply that doesn't have to go through the usual refinery bottlenecks and that doesn't have to traffic-jam the existing distribution networks. Local production and local use is more efficient than thousand-mile delivery chains for something that can only be extracted far away.
Next, you're making the assumption that expensive and dirty fossil petroleum will forever be the only energy input into ethanol production, and I don't see any reason why farm equipment has to use that fuel specifically. If farm equipment were converted to flex-fuel, or used biodiesel grown at the same location, the process would reduce petroleum inputs to a minimum. Done this way, if oil production grinds to a halt, ethanol production continues unaffected. That capability is worth something, I think. In the past countries that could maintain energy security won wars over those that couldn't. Our current approach is to spend a lot of money building giant tanks to store extra oil, but that's a large one-time cost and offers no real sustainability.
"there are far better plants for conversion to ethanol"
I never disputed this. I just think corn is a foot in the door and am optimistic that farmers will switch to something better as clear and obvious improvements are found.
"you're still looking at an impressive amount of land area devoted to ethanol production."
To replace all of the oil, yes. But I didn't say ethanol should be the only energy solution. I expect there will need to be a variety of sources. Some regions will do better with solar and biodiesel, others with wind and ethanol, others geothermal (etc.), whatever is best locally. Once the oil starts to run out we will have to switch forcibly anyway. We can still afford to start with something imperfect and fix it as we go along. If we only keep using fossil fuels, we will end up in a hole that's hard to get out of.
"bring on the oil refineries...There's no reason to stick one in a suburb or crowded urban area."
Well, you may be surprised to find that a lot of refineries are located near urban areas, smokestacks blazing and all. If you don't believe me, try to remember what happened after Katrina. Katrina was a lesson for us not to think only in the short term, to act more preventively, and not to put all our eggs in one basket, but I'm not sure we collectively learned our lesson.
I agree with you that if subsidies were eliminated on both corn and petroleum, the free market might help sort things out. However, one could argue that we've already been waiting a long while for the free market to sort things out, and it doesn't seem very focused on solving our energy problems, or anything that requires a long-term approach.
"Oil prices do account for a good portion of these costs, but keep in mind that oil prices form only a portion of the overall costs"
Just a back of envelope calculation: if you buy enough corn cobs from a midwest farmer to fill your vehicle and transport it about 1000 miles (on average) and sell the corn cobs, what will be the largest price component in your selling price, the pittance you paid for the cobs themselves or your whopping fuel cost? An 18-wheeler can haul a lot more corn than a car but the principle is the same: the fuel cost is the killer. When you buy corn at the store your are paying much more for transportation and retail markup than you're paying the farmer for anything, and you haven't yet asked the farmer what the energy cost of producing that corn was. So, if it's only a portion, I would argue that it's a pretty *big* portion and getting bigger as oil goes over $100/barrel and keeps rising under the rising demand of developing economies.
Food costs have gone up, but consider that they may have gone up even more if the much cheaper ethanol weren't there to exert downward pressure and regulate price volatility somewhat. The falling/inflated dollar also makes a difference in terms of price increases.
"Even the most optimist are claiming 1.1-1.3 barrels of oil equivalent return for 1 barrel of oil input"
Since ethanol is from one third to one half the cost of gas, this paints a pretty damn convincing picture of how the total energy cost going into the process versus the output obtained is a favorable ratio. If you needed a gallon of gas to make a gallon of ethanol, your end product after profits & overhead would *certainly* cost more than gas! You may mention something about subsidies in response to this, but you're not accounting for the subsidies and free passes that oil generally gets (in the U.S. at least). Then consider that when the one-time costs of gearing up for ethanol production are paid off, it keeps getting cheaper. Next, it is a process which lends itself to lots of possible efficiency improvements, *much* unlike oil development where we have been burning up the sweetest crude up to this point and now we will increasingly have to turn to dirtier wells, more expensive and/or energy-intensive extraction procedures, politically touchy situations.... Ethanol (and more efficient altfuels) will get better, cheaper and cleaner while oil will only get worse over time.
Also, would you prefer that instead of receiving a subsidy that farmers be paid not to grow anything? Would you prefer that, as a result of a lack of ethanol capacity someone had to build an oil refinery close to where you live to pick up the slack? Or, are you OK with it as long as it's in someone else's backyard?
Even at the current inefficiency and price distortions, I still prefer ethanol to oil. In time better solutions will come along, but one thing's for sure, fossil fuel isn't going to solve us any problems.
"it has caused some farmers to switch over from other agriculture products"
I really doubt this. Most likely what you're noticing is that the sharply increased price of *fossil fuel* ($100 a barrel) has increased transportation costs for all foods. The further we transport foodstuffs and the more refrigeration is used, the larger the price component of energy in the cost of food. In general, we're used to getting our food from far away instead of growing it locally and that's why you're seeing the price of various things increase.
In general, a climate suitable for growing one crop (say a hillside good for grapes) can't be easily replanted with corn. Same goes for potatoes, barley and a host of other crops, especially orchards and groves of trees. I don't think all farmers in all climates will just uproot whatever they're planting in favor of corn, it's much more likely that otherwise idle acreage (you know, paying the farmer not to grow anything?) is instead being used for ethanol production.
Of course, I'm not advocating all-out ethanol production from edible corn kernels, just saying that even the worst choice is not nearly as bad as some people make it sound, because the alternative that those people usually have in mind is to keep using petroleum, without accounting for the full environmental costs of *that*.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, on page 2 of TFA:
(emphasis mine)
There are so many hurdles for breaking free of dependency on the oil economy... it's spectacular. I wonder if the hurdles are the reason for the stiff price tag for this glorified washing machine?
"Your network should be secure..."
It should if you spend the cash to secure it. My bet is that it won't be, because it'll eventually lapse as a priority as health costs rise.
"The software they use should be secure..."
But it isn't. With the highly trusted Microsoft leading this effort, let me go out on a limb here and predict they're going to use Windows for this purpose. Duh. M$ has no incentive to make their product perfectly secure because they want to give you update bloat and want to be able to sell you their next OS (or a subscription at some point) and if you lack nothing, they won't be able to make money. Thus, their product will have security gaps and you (the health customer) will be the loser.
"The method you use to transmit your claims should be secure"
Transmission is only one part of security. Even if that is secure, there are plenty of other ways to get at your data.
Once your data becomes public, it will stay public. Before it is tracked down it can be transmitted to so many places that there is no way to be sure you have erased all of the copies of it. You should just assume that it is a one-way deal when data leaks.
"All you have to tell them is "don't email claim/medical record files" "
You can tell them things until you're blue in the face but you can't make people who lack computer sense into the sort of stoic user who dares not click on the little flashy icon inviting them to install the spyware, rootkits and so forth. At that point it doesn't matter how well they follow their other so-called security procedures.
Your data will get out. It will *pour* out like the blood from a samurai B-movie. Just ask the record companies and the movie companies. That's just the reality of converting anything over to a digital format.
It was only a matter of time before something like this happened.
Medical staff and any other people untrained in information security just aren't going to have the computer literacy or "computer common sense" to handle millions of peoples' medical records adequately.
On the other hand, if they were thoroughly trained, certified and passed through the wringer for those leet skillz, then the overhead for medical costs would balloon even higher as yet another bureaucracy (to manage *that*) is created within health maintenance providers.
But it's all in the name of tracking your every move, so I guess it's OK.
It would appear from reading the fine article that, due to a lack of grants for this leading-edge research, the 25 projects have been cut and there are only 5 left.
Well see, the thing with the T-rays is that if we can aim them towards the terrorists then hopefully we can "take a big bite out of crime" so to speak, or, if it's not like a T-Rex and it's more like a T-cell then at least we can cause them some sort of cancer. If we're lucky we'll give them a big whopping brain tumor and eventually our researchers will be able to outsmart them.
Maybe not.
"The odds of an impact with a satellite should be vastly below 1 in 450"
Are you talking about the known satellites, or all of those unknown ones *gulp* that no one wants to talk about?
Of course, people will think your comment is funny, but back in 1933, Buckminster Fuller invented a very light three-wheeled three-engine car that got 30-50 mpg. His design was innovative in amazing ways compared to the cars of that period. (Who knows if it might have helped in the war effort by saving loads of fuel?) The first version was hard to steer, but I believe the second one fixed that problem.
Someone obviously didn't like the idea - the car companies turned him down and the car was never produced before Fuller ran out of money.
I guess the big question for conspiracy theorists now is, was the car's famous crash at the World's Fair really an accident or did it get a little push in that direction?
The following site has some info about the car itself:
http://www.washedashore.com/projects/dymax/
Scenario: There's a war and a soldier is holding a rifle, but instead of a finger on the trigger, there's a cable going from the brain directly to the rifle. The soldier is alert. A bad guy could pop up from behind a rock at any moment.
Since the decision to shoot can be measured more quickly by this device, this shooter will win all the gunfights... (or at least that's how the Pentagon might see it, if they are funding it).
Once friendly fire becomes a problem, the standard excuse will be: "Oh, that wasn't me, the device must be malfunctioning." So then they'll take it out of the military and just sell it to some less critical force like law-enforcement or something.
I know of one that *claims* to protect your privacy:
ixquick.com
who are being watched by ECHELON instead.
That is, big brother is either watching you with his right eye or with his left eye, but rest assured he is watching the hell out of you. :)
Will our galaxy drift until it reaches a clump of galaxies (another universe?), where it will be compressed, or will the compression take place after all galaxies expand outward, slow down in their expansion, and then all slowly begin compressing in a big crunch?
Obviously, IANAPBICAT (I am not a physicist but I'm curious about this).
Thanks for your update, I never heard about that.
If true, then this eases Apple's worries about one company, but they still have to pursue every other company (or governmental entity, or non-profit) that might use a curvy fruit shape as a logo.
Particularly worrying is the business of agriculture... if an orchard can't put an apple logo on their product, then who can, right?
Even if all of this seems bizarre to most of us, that's the way the law is written, so the lawyers have to follow this practice to the ends of the earth if need be.
"I use a C-Media on board sound, but to get the mic to work was far from plug the mic in and it works. Windows blew on that one"
I can confirm this is a real anecdote because the C-Media mic problem hit me too. For a while I was convinced that it was actually a hardware problem, thinking it was a bad mic jack on my board, but after installing Linux it surprised me that it began to work. I didn't even have to know how to install a driver because it was detected by the installer. What I *did* have to know about was how to open a sound mixer and click on mic boost, but that was like a walk in the park compared to Windows. (Kudos to the driver writers!)
The fact is, if Windows doesn't support your chipset, you are really up the creek. Microsoft has no incentive to go back and add complete support of older chipsets and won't cry any tears if you are left with useless hardware. The chipset vendor may not have an incentive either, especially if it has moved on to a new chipset that it wants you to buy instead. In either case, you are not going to get source code to build your own Windows driver. With Linux, support for existing chipsets is often better because adapting working, open source code to a new kernel is a zillion times easier than waiting for exactly one person to be paid to rewrite a driver every time. Because it is easier, it is thus more likely to get rolled into new kernels and more likely to stay supported. Because the code is open, you don't have to wait for a company to train someone to take over support of a driver. Any qualified person can do it, and so support is far more transferable.
Windows blows because its methodology is obsolete and broken by design. And we all suspected that the inherent disadvantages of closed source would eventually come back to roost. It is now doing so and the lack of driver support is crowing in a very obvious way.
What a lot of people don't realize is how aggressively lawyers are expected to defend a trademark. Apple's lawyers must show "due diligence" in cases like this, or else they are considered not to be doing their job. Their fear must be that Apple Records or some other preexisting "Apple" company may decide to sublicense their trademark to the makers of knockoff computer products and draw off some marketshare from Apple. Obviously, I think Apple would follow through with their suit and try to defend against borderline cases like this any way they can.
A long time ago, Apple got to keep their name only because they didn't sell records. That seemed fair enough at the time. Now it's not entirely clear who would win should there be a renewed dispute with Apple Records because the computer company has now become the #1 music seller. It would be very interesting to see what would happen if Apple Records began their own iTunes equivalent or licensed their brand to the makers of cheap ipod knockoffs. That would be ironic, but if it never happens it will be because of the credible threat of red ink flowing as a result, created by the lawyers acting as they do, regardless of what seems fair.
"How about a talking paperclip to help you do stuff?"
By all means, I'm adding it to the draft as we speak.
Of course, it will have duct tape over its mouth, and a camera with image recognition pointed to it in case it wiggles its eyebrows suggestively. Only then will the system retain its super-duper security properties.
If you're about to suggest the little doggy, that one will have to provide its services from the inside of a kennel box. This is because what with this OS not having facilities for garbage collection and with the little pup running around on the desktop, there might be a little overrun...
"...if everyone were to drive 25 miles per hour there would be far fewer accidents on the road."
I knew someone would pull a bad car analogy on me for this.
Where you went wrong is you mistook my argument as a qualitative argument. I was actually making a *quantitative* point. That is, I don't mind if 1% of web pages use assorted crappola. What I don't want is for 99% of websites to force-stuff a javascript operating system into their page (and down my throat) when all of their content could have been done statically.
That's right, I'm saying that 99% of web pages don't need a scripting language kernel embedded into it, 15 different plugins and other extraneous stuff to impart their information attractively. If all of those pages went static, the internet as a whole would be more secure. The clients would be more secure, the servers would be more secure, the tubes... they wouldn't get clogged as often.
That's all I'm saying.
Is it going to happen? No -- I never said it would happen. It's only in the interest of *everyone* for it to happen. That's why it will never happen
Excellent post, but I'm going to pick some bones anyhow.
"It's impossible to go back to static HTML documents by now."
A lot of pages are still static and they work just fine, so it's not quite impossible. Almost all pages that use a maze of scripts don't really need them. If you look at the information 99% of webpages present, they could have achieved the same presentation, or something reasonably close, statically. Some places like Google, Yahoo, Amazon, M$, etc., they will not want to go back to say the least. They've invested too heavily in this OS-on-a-page Web 2.0 stuff... but that doesn't mean that all other webpages have to be as fat as theirs. People think they are the holy example that has to followed, but that's not true in most cases.
"This approach allows for complex browsers to actually become safer, by simplifying them."
I'm all for simplifying, but I think we need a stronger commitment to that. The process separation idea sounds good too. A misbehaved page or plugin shouldn't crash the browser, let alone the system. I have wished for this for a long time (or alternatively something that can stop all running scripts dead in their tracks in case of an overrun). On the other hand, I sense that, in order to keep things entirely separate, the browser image and all of its libraries will be duplicated in memory for every open page... or some other such similar unwelcome inefficiency. However, someone like the military will buy this, add 16G of RAM and not think twice.
"a single communications channel which is created by, controlled, and mediated by the kernel process."
OK, that's where I can sense that this is going to be slow. *Really* slow. Tanenbaum must be involved in this somewhere.
"the operating system won't allow you to access the network, filesystem, or anything else."
Of course it won't, so now you have to trick the operating system into doing it for you, and you just might because it is now so complex that by some corollary of Murphy's Law it has proportionately that many more exploits and backdoors to take advantage of.
It's true that limiting the functionality of each individual component stands a better chance of containing any one exploit, but because of the additional complexity of the security framework and OS, keeping all of that code properly working after the original developers are gone will be difficult, and what with the constant urge for featureitis it just may be possible to produce a train of exploits to traverse the whole thing once it degrades to a "Fixing X breaks Y and Z" mess.
Compare Vishta, a gigantic OS with all of the security bells and whistles to any open source OS that is less imbued with featureitis. Which is more secure? In theory it should be the commercial product, but nobody I know believes that for a second. In the real world simplicity is the gift that keeps on giving, because if a patch is necessary it can be developed more quickly and be more likely to solve the problem permanently.
That is all just my opinion, of course. If I try your browser and like it, I may still use it... on static HTML webpages.
OK, if you really want a truly secure safe OS (and by extension, to a browser mapped to the same address space), this is what you need in your OS:
Not one microkernel, for extra safety you need redundant nanokernels, with a microkernel over those, then the user kernel. To prevent buffer overruns, all messages passed between these are sent as emails, with spamassassin checking lest any of them get any ideas about sending spams.
OK, next you need lots of verification. Every time you write to disk there should be a second process to verify that what was written is correct. Then you need a process to check that the verifier process is checking things correctly. If memory doesn't run out while doing this, a body of processes should vote democratically as to whether the whole thing finished correctly. In case of collusion between the processes, some of them will be strictly dice rolls.
The least trusted part of the computer is the user, otherwise known as the "owner" of said computer. Thus, that person should not be allowed to do anything because that is a sure way to introduce problems. Harass that person with questions and popups at every opportunity. That will make sure they go out and read a book and not get in the way of the important things that the operating system is trying to do.
To prevent hardware from crashing any of the kernels, they must be separated by a special interface layer that works a lot like a chat room (IRC). What this means is that devices that speak the protocol correctly can connect and be listened to by the kernel(s). Those that misbehave or that use foul language are kicked off by the watchdog process. The watchdog process is watched by a bulldog process. Sometimes the bulldog just barks, other times the two are wrestling it out on the ground while the rest of the system waits for them to sort out their differences. Alas, such is the price of progress.
To further prevent buffer overruns, a new character encoding is introduced where a previously one-byte code now needs ten bytes to encode it. This means that buffers have to be ten times bigger and thus there is a lot more space before an overrun occurs.
Let me know if you can think of any more features to add to this future super-OS.
The solution for a more secure browser isn't to guild it with ever-growing layers of security and virtual machines, quite the reverse, it's to keep things simple.
If we allow an internet to exist without the need for complex interpreted languages, if people open mostly static HTML documents when they open web pages instead of opening a pandora's box of plugins, languages, interpreted bytecodes, activeX gotchas and other unnecessary exploitable garbage, then the entire internet will be more secure.
By making it more complex, exploits and backdoors are virtually guaranteed. But well, that's just *my* ignorant opinion.
In Soviet Russia, bird watches YOU.
While us little people may not have any privacy, certain elites do have it on tap, if a court likes the idea.
Of course, I'm talking about none other than the SCO executive office. See here for the gory details.
What I don't understand is how the SCO executive office can be freed from the horrors of harassment due to a potential lack of privacy, but if helicopters want to buzz Barbra Streisand's house during her friends' private wedding, there is nothing a court is willing to do in her favor.
One elite yes, another elite, no.
I'm having trouble understanding justice lately.
select * from countries where cameras == 0 and wiretaps == 0 and privacy > 'NONEXISTING';
No records found.
Maybe, just maybe, in an alternate reality, this might have been useful.
"As I observed earlier, we're already consuming an expensive product, oil to make a cheaper product, corn-based ethanol. "
That's OK, because we are producing proportionately larger quantities of the ethanol in favorable locations that help alleviate some of the pressure of refinery bottlenecks. As closed-loop production arrives the input concern vanishes. Ethanol also replaces MTBE as a way of boosting octane. MTBE is a known carcinogen that was poisoning wells until it was discontinued as an additive.
"subsidies are extremely irrational."
Probably so, but it's not like we can change that overnight.
"Corn ethanol is not a stepping stone to something better."
Of course it is. At the very least to more efficient ethanol production. The leftover mash is excellent animal feed, by the way, so it is very flexible to local needs/markets.
"the logical choices would be to subsidize something where you get more value out than you put in."
Right... and if petroleum is so great, why do we need to subsidize it?
"a project with negative economic value."
I don't agree. As I already pointed out, it's positive as demonstrated by the large price advantage of ethanol over gasoline, and it becomes even more attractive due to the location, its cleanliness, and its higher octane rating. Its actual value should be compared to premium fuel.
"Energy isn't a problem. It remains cheap."
If you think energy is cheap but it costs orders of magnitude more than animal feed, then doesn't that undermine your complaint about the rising cost of animal feed in an earlier post?
"The environment consequences of oil and other fossil fuels remain exaggerated. "
Until it affects you personally, but by then it's too late.
"And we have options that we can switch to, when oil no longer is viable."
To replace all of the oil we use in vehicles? How quickly can these options be put in full use? Wouldn't all of them take some time to get going in the case of a major supply disruption?
"My humble opinion is that we should take a hands-off approach and only intervene when there's a clear externality (like air pollution)."
But the lobbyists who set up the subsidies you don't like don't use a hands-off approach. Their hands are constantly reaching into in the free market's cookie jar, and that isn't likely to stop any time soon.
Don't be fooled, oil prices are not going to come down while India and China have growing populations and growing economies that also need oil. Basic supply and demand.
No question, ethanol has a lower energy density. However, even adjusting for that, it remains much cheaper and also burns much cleaner. Cleaner than gasoline and with fewer particulates than diesel, not to speak of the other nasty byproducts of oil that people also burn or spill on their thousand mile journeys to delivering it. With ethanol, the midwest has a local energy supply that doesn't have to go through the usual refinery bottlenecks and that doesn't have to traffic-jam the existing distribution networks. Local production and local use is more efficient than thousand-mile delivery chains for something that can only be extracted far away.
Next, you're making the assumption that expensive and dirty fossil petroleum will forever be the only energy input into ethanol production, and I don't see any reason why farm equipment has to use that fuel specifically. If farm equipment were converted to flex-fuel, or used biodiesel grown at the same location, the process would reduce petroleum inputs to a minimum. Done this way, if oil production grinds to a halt, ethanol production continues unaffected. That capability is worth something, I think. In the past countries that could maintain energy security won wars over those that couldn't. Our current approach is to spend a lot of money building giant tanks to store extra oil, but that's a large one-time cost and offers no real sustainability.
"there are far better plants for conversion to ethanol"
I never disputed this. I just think corn is a foot in the door and am optimistic that farmers will switch to something better as clear and obvious improvements are found.
"you're still looking at an impressive amount of land area devoted to ethanol production."
To replace all of the oil, yes. But I didn't say ethanol should be the only energy solution. I expect there will need to be a variety of sources. Some regions will do better with solar and biodiesel, others with wind and ethanol, others geothermal (etc.), whatever is best locally. Once the oil starts to run out we will have to switch forcibly anyway. We can still afford to start with something imperfect and fix it as we go along. If we only keep using fossil fuels, we will end up in a hole that's hard to get out of.
"bring on the oil refineries...There's no reason to stick one in a suburb or crowded urban area."
Well, you may be surprised to find that a lot of refineries are located near urban areas, smokestacks blazing and all. If you don't believe me, try to remember what happened after Katrina. Katrina was a lesson for us not to think only in the short term, to act more preventively, and not to put all our eggs in one basket, but I'm not sure we collectively learned our lesson.
I agree with you that if subsidies were eliminated on both corn and petroleum, the free market might help sort things out. However, one could argue that we've already been waiting a long while for the free market to sort things out, and it doesn't seem very focused on solving our energy problems, or anything that requires a long-term approach.
"Oil prices do account for a good portion of these costs, but keep in mind that oil prices form only a portion of the overall costs"
Just a back of envelope calculation: if you buy enough corn cobs from a midwest farmer to fill your vehicle and transport it about 1000 miles (on average) and sell the corn cobs, what will be the largest price component in your selling price, the pittance you paid for the cobs themselves or your whopping fuel cost? An 18-wheeler can haul a lot more corn than a car but the principle is the same: the fuel cost is the killer. When you buy corn at the store your are paying much more for transportation and retail markup than you're paying the farmer for anything, and you haven't yet asked the farmer what the energy cost of producing that corn was. So, if it's only a portion, I would argue that it's a pretty *big* portion and getting bigger as oil goes over $100/barrel and keeps rising under the rising demand of developing economies.
Food costs have gone up, but consider that they may have gone up even more if the much cheaper ethanol weren't there to exert downward pressure and regulate price volatility somewhat. The falling/inflated dollar also makes a difference in terms of price increases.
"Even the most optimist are claiming 1.1-1.3 barrels of oil equivalent return for 1 barrel of oil input"
Since ethanol is from one third to one half the cost of gas, this paints a pretty damn convincing picture of how the total energy cost going into the process versus the output obtained is a favorable ratio. If you needed a gallon of gas to make a gallon of ethanol, your end product after profits & overhead would *certainly* cost more than gas! You may mention something about subsidies in response to this, but you're not accounting for the subsidies and free passes that oil generally gets (in the U.S. at least). Then consider that when the one-time costs of gearing up for ethanol production are paid off, it keeps getting cheaper. Next, it is a process which lends itself to lots of possible efficiency improvements, *much* unlike oil development where we have been burning up the sweetest crude up to this point and now we will increasingly have to turn to dirtier wells, more expensive and/or energy-intensive extraction procedures, politically touchy situations.... Ethanol (and more efficient altfuels) will get better, cheaper and cleaner while oil will only get worse over time.
Also, would you prefer that instead of receiving a subsidy that farmers be paid not to grow anything? Would you prefer that, as a result of a lack of ethanol capacity someone had to build an oil refinery close to where you live to pick up the slack? Or, are you OK with it as long as it's in someone else's backyard?
Even at the current inefficiency and price distortions, I still prefer ethanol to oil. In time better solutions will come along, but one thing's for sure, fossil fuel isn't going to solve us any problems.
"it has caused some farmers to switch over from other agriculture products"
I really doubt this. Most likely what you're noticing is that the sharply increased price of *fossil fuel* ($100 a barrel) has increased transportation costs for all foods. The further we transport foodstuffs and the more refrigeration is used, the larger the price component of energy in the cost of food. In general, we're used to getting our food from far away instead of growing it locally and that's why you're seeing the price of various things increase.
In general, a climate suitable for growing one crop (say a hillside good for grapes) can't be easily replanted with corn. Same goes for potatoes, barley and a host of other crops, especially orchards and groves of trees. I don't think all farmers in all climates will just uproot whatever they're planting in favor of corn, it's much more likely that otherwise idle acreage (you know, paying the farmer not to grow anything?) is instead being used for ethanol production.
Of course, I'm not advocating all-out ethanol production from edible corn kernels, just saying that even the worst choice is not nearly as bad as some people make it sound, because the alternative that those people usually have in mind is to keep using petroleum, without accounting for the full environmental costs of *that*.