Unfortunately, there is no way of avoiding finger-pointing. As others have pointed out, if you go and get a single big vendor, they will keep bouncing you between project groups, who will keep remarking on what a fascinating problem you have or what a strange/nonstandard setup you have.
The best ways to get a problem fixed in a hurry is to keep escalating it. You don't want to be a 'problem customer', but it sounds like you are pumping plenty of moolah into this, so they won't be able to just brush you off.
Ultimately, picking a single vendor will better avoid the fingerpointing between unrelated service techs because you can always find someone who is superior to both of them. But if you pick an inferior system, you'll have to make more service calls.
If it is onsite service, throw a 'tea party'. Get all the techs from each software package which has been blamed, and say that none of them can leave until the problem is fixed. I've had three weeks of back and forth end in two hours that way-- usually the tech isn't going through his whole routine and so is missing something. Once he is in that environment, he will have to do everything, even the stuff he thinks he doesn't have to do.
I guess my answer to your question is to thoroughly explore interoperability before you buy, but then get the best stuff with the best service-- without trying to find the one company for everything. Make sure interoperability is explored before you buy, so the sales reps won't weasel out of it later.
Are you kidding? It's one of the best marketing moves they could have made. You can't buy publicity like that. Even if they weren't really nice guys they'd probably be doing it for the free advertising.
You're probably right, but that goes for any good deeds a company does. And usually, people get suspicious no matter how altruistic you are. Coors got in trouble for giving a hundred thousand dollars to a gay rights group with their community because the owners sometimes give money to conservative groups, too. Coors is one of the best places you can work if you're g/l/b, but get branded as an 'enemy' anyway.
I think you are totally correct when you say that this is a great move from a marketting standpoint, but I also get really annoyed when people get all suspicious of 'big corporations'. People don't seem to have any rational basis for their anti-company bias, other than something they heard on TV or in a movie.
Then you get companies like VA, which is filled with people who work their asses off to make great products, and they get jumped on. It is this kind of anti-corporatism bias which leads to script kiddie vigilantes. K5 was a volunteer effort, but the same principle applies: you get punished for being successful and useful for thousands of people.
With all that said, now that I think of it, everyone who reads K5 who would buy VA stuff probably already does. It isn't like they need more visibility or Open Source community legitimacy.
Hey, we're a community, right? And aren't community members supposed to help each other out in times of need?
Absolutely. This is what we need to be seeing. I am personally going through some pretty tough times, and it has been the support and assistance of my friends and my community which brought me through it. I am not a K5 reader, but it made my blood boil to hear about how someone tore them down.
I'm especially impressed that VA Linux is donating machinery to help. This is a time when we have to help one another out. So that, a year from now, the script kiddie is in jail or paying off a fine, while K5 is as strong as ever.
Blogs and discussion sites give people tremendous freedom. But things like this are a reminder that unless exercised responsibly, freedom is short lived. Sites which are constantly abused end up, if they survive at all, locked down, restricted and paranoid.
Once in court, we will only testify to things we put in print. We will not, under any circumstances, turn over reporter's notes or unpublished photographs. Folks I know have gone to jail for contempt.
The article says that Penenberg quit because he failed to testify the way the newspaper wanted him to. Forbes worked out a deal where all Penenburg would have had to say was that his article was accurate.
I'm not sure it is such martyrdom to lose your job to avoid saying, under oath, that what you've already printed is the truth.
Please mark these as posted by Jon Katz so that my Katz filter would work.
I've long since stopped complaining about his bad writing, recycled opinions and weak overall composition, since I finally just filtered him out. I've been much happier since then, but if he gets to post around my filters, I get to complain.
Currently, politicians get into office by NOT playing the middle.
In other words, the parties and their members are too extreme. Then, the response:
The result has been meaningless elections between nearly identical candidates full of moderately bad proposals.
In other words, the parties and their members are too moderate. They can't both be right, can they?
This is the beauty of the American system. In Europe, and other places with parliamentary systems, you can find a party that exactly, precisely fits you. Then, they get together in a back room to decidee who should compromise and how much, what issues are more important and what can be traded for the greater good.
In America, our system is designed so that we have to do the uncomfortable job of compromising and prioritizing our feelings ourselves.
This is a feature, not a bug. We are forced to associate with people we think are too radical, too moderate, or who worry about the unimportant issues. Our ideologues are on TV, those in other countries become policy makers. Most importantly, people get to make these decisions themselves. I'd much rather feel like I have no voice (when in fact those who participate in the system certainly do) because I feel drowned out by people who disagree with me, than feel like I have a voice even though I don't.
So who are elected, radicals or moderates? The answer is opinionated people who nonetheless work with one another whereever possible. But don't believe me, read Robert A. Heinlein's Take Back Your Government. It is old, outdated in places, but the best practical description of how to get things done in politics. Pundits and media-people hate it, because Heinlein basically tells to you ignore the marketting people and deal only with individual voters. But I know many successful politicians who have read it and use its techniques.
So, as a libertarian, I have a problem here.. An inner conflict, if you will. One one hand, I believe (like a good libertarian should) that there should be less government. That the government should keep its hands out of just about everything. But on the otherhand, without the government, toysmart can violate my rights. Microsoft can crush my company. And I cannot stop them.
That's the eternal question. Government can be a great force to protect those who it represents. But it can also easily trample on people's rights. Right now, libertarians and republicans believe that government is too big. Democrats and Green Party Members think that it isn't big enough.
The LP wants to have a government which is pared almost completely away-- ie no foreign policy other than national defense, no consumer protection laws, etc. An idea LP consists of the police, the military (but they only deal with threats once they are at our borders), and the judiciary.
Then you get something like this. Does this violate their privacy policy? Is this an assurance or a contract? I don't know, but I know it is a bad thing-- worse for the.com's which survive the current storm, and who have to deal with a suddenly more wary public. Many companies even used deceptive language to sell their data.
I don't know what the libertarians will say, other than perhaps "if noone buys from.coms, they'll have to enforce their privacy rules". It hasn't worked so far, and won't stop companies going bankrupt, but maybe give it time.
Of course, the Republicans have a more moderate view. They feel that there is a role for government in things like privacy, but that it is too big and powerful right now. You don't hear about it on the TV or in poly sci class, because they want you to think that Republicans Are Evil, but there is a very large number of republicans who adhere to libertarian principles but do see a need for government sometimes.
No offense to the libertarians here (i think they're the second best party in the US), but I think that being ideologically absolute isn't always such a great idea. Government does have a role, though the LP is right to think that it is way out of control. In EE class, they always used to say that the world is analog. I think they were right about that in more ways than one.
I think domain names have a good use. Distributed approaches lose accountability (ie how do you convince someone that you are the 'official' site for something?). Also, you need a consistent way to lead people to your site-- search engines will return multiple possibilities rather than the specific site you want people to go to.
But as the guy who wants to burn all TLDs, I do agree that we need to move to a more elegant system for universal addressing (I favor, basically, the idea of having everything being a TLD-- so unless you are a gov site or edu site, your TLD is your domain name). Ultimately, there will need to be addresses, and with those will go trademark and property issues.
What disappoints me about this NSI thing is that it is such pathetic customer service. Their draconian agreement, high price and poor service is going to screw them sooner or later-- we can just register with companies which are more on the ball. In the long run, companies which don't produce a useful product get swept aside. Legal sneaky games and clever tricks might help you a little on the margin, but you can't build your business on it. Unless you are a trial lawyer. But I digress....
Let me just take a moment to welcome our new rodent overlords. I think that as a commentator on Smartline, the best pundit show in Springfield, that I will be quite useful to our new masters. You will need someone with knowledge of your human subjects in your terrible new regime.
So what are we doing now? The International Space Station. Not only will this serve as an excellent scientific resource and a launching site for other space ventures, it also shows us that we are capable of organizing ourselves as a race to achieve things that are not merely "impossible", but rather are significantly useful.
The space station is a poor joke right now. While a space station is a good idea in principle, the one they have on the drawing board won't be much more than a sound studio for NASA's irrelevence. It is too small, too underpowered. Remember when they packaged the Shuttle as a space truck? Same deal: NASA's bureaucracy created the least common denominator of its leader's egos, a big expensive mess which isn't optimized for anything-- let alone the cheap workhorse they envisioned.
It wouldn't be so bad if we could point to it as a launching site for other ventures, like a moon or mars base. But it isn't. The thing has zero industrial capability, minor public relations capability, and minor scientific capability.
NASA is getting to the point where it is irrelevent. Pure research is good and all, but much cheaper when you did your industrial work first and just need a couple spare rooms for a researcher. We're putting the cart before the horse in our relentless race for tang and velcro.
I'm about as big a fan of space expansion as anyone there is. But NASA ain't it. If the choice were NASA or nothing, I'd pick NASA. But apart from those unmanned probes, they are doing nothing right now other than spinning their wheels and building big useless sound stages in space.
And I would have put your money that rabbits from England would never hack the Australian climate and indigenous life.
I know what you are saying (I live far from the natural habitat of kudzu, but it covers forests, houses, old cars, etc.) But I don't think that that applies here. The better example would be if those rabbits were brought deep beneath the ocean, where they would presumably outcompete the abyssal life.
Where the environment is largely the same (similar atmosphere, climate, available chemicals for food, etc), and the major difference is simple geographic partitioning, your argument is a good one. Where the environment is radically different, I don't think it holds much water.
OK, maybe I am missing something here, but isn't our highest duty to the Schizmatrix to bring another world up to the next Prigogenic Level of Complexity?
Humor aside, I think that NASA is overreacting. Either Europa has life or it doesn't. If it doesn't, we should hope that it is 'contaminated'. If it does, I would put my money on a planetful of life specially evolved for that planet's conditions over a couple dozen carpet-bagging bacteria from a warm and comfy inner-system world like Earth.
It is pathetic that the government's retreat from space is so complete that we are now trying to eradicating any evidence that we were even there.
When I get my asteroid-mining operation off the ground, I'm throwing all the profits into expansion and terraforming research.;)
We really need to cut all these cables, remove the wireless systems, and ban networking altogether. I think 40 years have demonstrated that networking gives unauthorized personnel to Secrets Man Was Not Meant To Know.
The real solution is to ban nothing, and try to educate the users about security.
This is totally dead on. Frankly, I use telnet mainly out of ingrained and ignorant habit. But any network service has security holes. The solution isn't to remove the service, it is to secure it. SSH, as everyone and their brother pointed out, is one answer.
But we shouldn't be thinking about what services we should be cutting off, we need to think about how they can be made secure.
This is what I think will happen. TLDs are still being used as some kind of pigeonholing mechanism. The fact is that life is more complicated than a series of categories.
ICANN's paper makes a great point: the stability of the DNS system is paramount. So while I strongly believe in burning all TLDs, I do think that we'll need some new TLDs as a test before this is possible.
Long term, though, remains the same: we don't need TLDs. They are from a time when the Internet was a regulated government system, and are now obsolete. Nowadays, everyone registers their name under all available TLDs anyway as legal protection. So adding more only will make the same small number of good TLDs more expensive for people like us.
Remove all TLDs, though, and people can establish their own heirarchies. Someone in another thread said this was like AOL keywords. Well, yes and no. It is more extensible, but ultimately, keywords are a better UI than long complex addresses.
That's why the only good solution is an onboard urinanalysis machine, bolted to your computer's case. This will indisputably verify your identity, and will also help prevent you from buying products on Ebay while drunk. Of course, you will need a six-pack on hand by your computer if you want to listen to a long playlist, but then again, who doesn't have that already?
This is a web tax. The tax is often higher due to the VAT computation for ecommerce than for brick and mortar.
Not only will this put many small companies (with razor-thin profit margins) out of business, it is also taxation without representation. Why should I, a US citizen, have to play tax collector for a government which I have no voice in and whose territory I don't even live in.
Taxes often do more harm (in productivity, lost income, higher prices, weakened economy, or business decisions) than good (increased revenue for a government agency). Look right now. Our great economy has changed our budget deficit in America into a surplus.
Anyway, I hope that US ecommerce companies boycott the EU should this happen.
I noticed on the Sealand website references to Prince Roy's ill health. With Michael of Sealand on your board of directors, how will the political and business arrangements be handled? In other words, what is the relationship between the Government of Sealand and Havenco? And what will that relationship be should Michael of Sealand ascend to the Throne.
I am sure this is some kind of hoax. Just ask Minsky. Neural networks don't and can't do anything. They are a dead end, and research must be supressed as Perceptron research was before them. You foolish mortals have no idea what a dangerous^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H silly idea neural networks are. After all, if it trains itself, how can I credit my genius for its success?
Morris's site doesn't let users say anything. It gives you a carefully (mis?)worded poll. Then it automatically sends a form letter to the reps and president. So what do they learn? Only a boolean response to a manipulative question. Usually without any further information which would help them respond.
There are better sites than that. Even one paragraph telling how strongly you feel about something, or explaining under what conditions you would support something are meaningful. One thing the Internet will do is let people describe exactly how they feel, not what pigeonholes they fit into.
TV is driven by sound bites and images. The Web is driven by paragraphs and links. While I'm sure Morris thinks he's a big pioneer, I'd love to compare his site's traffic to Slashdot, where users can say exactly what they mean, rather than which pool they want to jump into. And remember that his audience is 250 million americans, while/. aims at only a small segment of it.
Some skeptics of Netpliance have speculated that these refurbished machines are a cheap way to conduct R&D through easily bought community members...
So what? This is the whole idea of releasing source code. The community gets cheap, cool xterms, they get cheap R&D. If a big Open Source project starts, sure they lose some code control, but in exchange they get an R&D Department that dwarfs MS, et al.
That's the reason Netscape released its code. Everyone benefits. You get vastly improved R&D and mindshare from the developer community. They get control over the code development, and a product that they want badly enough to be coding for themselves. Customers get peer-reviewed security and stability, feature rich and inexpensive products. Stockholders get improved profits due to quality and lower development and support costs. Everyone wins. Except your closed source competitors.
I'm not sure I would call myself a Netpliance skeptic (I'd love to see a computer that even my mom could use), but there is nothing wrong with pursuing a profit for their shareholders. This move maximizes that profit, so more power to them.
If this hurts your altruism gland, just remember that that stock price will be people's retirement plans and college savings funds. Or that when people make more money, that they tend to give more to worthy but unprofitable charities.
The same thing is true here in Atlanta. You can make $70K-$80K and have a standard of living as if you were making $90K-$100K. Reasons? Well, everyone is already saying them, but:
Lower taxes (this means that the cost of living is lower, too, because businesses don't pass those extra costs to their customers).
Low Prices (due to above): $800-$900 per month rent on a nice apartment (even one in the city!), $10 for an ok restaurant tab, cheap groceries. $1.36 for a gallon of gas (and this is unusually high right now).
Plenty of growth. Atlanta is growing ridiculously fast. There is plenty of room, land is cheap, and everything is brand-new.
None of this is anything that any amateur economist wouldn't notice, but people hear how red-hot California is. Then you hear about enormous salaries and don't think about cost of living. A friend recently worked out the numbers for $100K california vs $80K georgia, and realized that he'd keep more of what he earns down here.
Plus, we have Georgia Tech producing engineers and programmers, Emory producing marketting people, and both giving us managment/money people. And the venture capital is more plentiful and available on better terms.
One of the advantages of open source development is that, if you have enough projects going, you have a tremendous potential for reuse of code. Another is that since APIs and file formats are genuinely open standards, modules become more consistent and encapsulated. Still another consequence of using open standards is that 'embrace and extend' becomes very difficult, if not impossible. Adding new features is easy, but it is tough to lock your users into your product line.
Result: (ok this isn't anything new for us, but I'm getting to my point) UNIX-- where you have a million highly optimized tiny programs that do one thing well (and are reused everywhere by everything) instead of a few monolithic packages that barely interact with one another.
OK, nothing new so far. Here's the point: this is old hat to us, but a brand new concept to the end-user world! The whole idea that you could use parts of one application in another is just foreign to them. In the DOS/Mac world, features come from individual blocks of code. In the open source world, features are derived from the links between those blocks. If you didn't grow up with it, it is a totally new way to think about computing.
Another result- development of brand new applications will be faster, too, since good code gains value with every re-use with minimal development, rather than having to be reimplemented.
Say someone wants to create a WYSIWYG word processor, or a page layout program. Or some totally new application concept. Well, hey, let's just use pieces of Mozilla. And the program is in alpha release a few months later. I suspect that it will take years for the full significance of the concept to hit people.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, there is no way of avoiding finger-pointing. As others have pointed out, if you go and get a single big vendor, they will keep bouncing you between project groups, who will keep remarking on what a fascinating problem you have or what a strange/nonstandard setup you have.
The best ways to get a problem fixed in a hurry is to keep escalating it. You don't want to be a 'problem customer', but it sounds like you are pumping plenty of moolah into this, so they won't be able to just brush you off.
Ultimately, picking a single vendor will better avoid the fingerpointing between unrelated service techs because you can always find someone who is superior to both of them. But if you pick an inferior system, you'll have to make more service calls.
If it is onsite service, throw a 'tea party'. Get all the techs from each software package which has been blamed, and say that none of them can leave until the problem is fixed. I've had three weeks of back and forth end in two hours that way-- usually the tech isn't going through his whole routine and so is missing something. Once he is in that environment, he will have to do everything, even the stuff he thinks he doesn't have to do.
I guess my answer to your question is to thoroughly explore interoperability before you buy, but then get the best stuff with the best service-- without trying to find the one company for everything. Make sure interoperability is explored before you buy, so the sales reps won't weasel out of it later.
Are you kidding? It's one of the best marketing moves they could have made. You can't buy publicity like that. Even if they weren't really nice guys they'd probably be doing it for the free advertising.
You're probably right, but that goes for any good deeds a company does. And usually, people get suspicious no matter how altruistic you are. Coors got in trouble for giving a hundred thousand dollars to a gay rights group with their community because the owners sometimes give money to conservative groups, too. Coors is one of the best places you can work if you're g/l/b, but get branded as an 'enemy' anyway.
I think you are totally correct when you say that this is a great move from a marketting standpoint, but I also get really annoyed when people get all suspicious of 'big corporations'. People don't seem to have any rational basis for their anti-company bias, other than something they heard on TV or in a movie.
Then you get companies like VA, which is filled with people who work their asses off to make great products, and they get jumped on. It is this kind of anti-corporatism bias which leads to script kiddie vigilantes. K5 was a volunteer effort, but the same principle applies: you get punished for being successful and useful for thousands of people.
With all that said, now that I think of it, everyone who reads K5 who would buy VA stuff probably already does. It isn't like they need more visibility or Open Source community legitimacy.
Hey, we're a community, right? And aren't community members supposed to help each other out in times of need?
Absolutely. This is what we need to be seeing. I am personally going through some pretty tough times, and it has been the support and assistance of my friends and my community which brought me through it. I am not a K5 reader, but it made my blood boil to hear about how someone tore them down.
I'm especially impressed that VA Linux is donating machinery to help. This is a time when we have to help one another out. So that, a year from now, the script kiddie is in jail or paying off a fine, while K5 is as strong as ever.
Blogs and discussion sites give people tremendous freedom. But things like this are a reminder that unless exercised responsibly, freedom is short lived. Sites which are constantly abused end up, if they survive at all, locked down, restricted and paranoid.
Once in court, we will only testify to things we put in print. We will not, under any circumstances, turn over reporter's notes or unpublished photographs. Folks I know have gone to jail for contempt.
The article says that Penenberg quit because he failed to testify the way the newspaper wanted him to. Forbes worked out a deal where all Penenburg would have had to say was that his article was accurate.
I'm not sure it is such martyrdom to lose your job to avoid saying, under oath, that what you've already printed is the truth.
If I write a bad review of Windows NT, does that mean I won't have to maintain it anymore?
Please mark these as posted by Jon Katz so that my Katz filter would work.
I've long since stopped complaining about his bad writing, recycled opinions and weak overall composition, since I finally just filtered him out. I've been much happier since then, but if he gets to post around my filters, I get to complain.
I love it. First:
Currently, politicians get into office by NOT playing the middle.
In other words, the parties and their members are too extreme. Then, the response:
The result has been meaningless elections between nearly identical candidates full of moderately bad proposals.
In other words, the parties and their members are too moderate. They can't both be right, can they?
This is the beauty of the American system. In Europe, and other places with parliamentary systems, you can find a party that exactly, precisely fits you. Then, they get together in a back room to decidee who should compromise and how much, what issues are more important and what can be traded for the greater good.
In America, our system is designed so that we have to do the uncomfortable job of compromising and prioritizing our feelings ourselves.
This is a feature, not a bug. We are forced to associate with people we think are too radical, too moderate, or who worry about the unimportant issues. Our ideologues are on TV, those in other countries become policy makers. Most importantly, people get to make these decisions themselves. I'd much rather feel like I have no voice (when in fact those who participate in the system certainly do) because I feel drowned out by people who disagree with me, than feel like I have a voice even though I don't.
So who are elected, radicals or moderates? The answer is opinionated people who nonetheless work with one another whereever possible. But don't believe me, read Robert A. Heinlein's Take Back Your Government. It is old, outdated in places, but the best practical description of how to get things done in politics. Pundits and media-people hate it, because Heinlein basically tells to you ignore the marketting people and deal only with individual voters. But I know many successful politicians who have read it and use its techniques.
So, as a libertarian, I have a problem here.. An inner conflict, if you will. One one hand, I believe (like a good libertarian should) that there should be less government. That the government should keep its hands out of just about everything. But on the otherhand, without the government, toysmart can violate my rights. Microsoft can crush my company. And I cannot stop them.
That's the eternal question. Government can be a great force to protect those who it represents. But it can also easily trample on people's rights. Right now, libertarians and republicans believe that government is too big. Democrats and Green Party Members think that it isn't big enough.
The LP wants to have a government which is pared almost completely away-- ie no foreign policy other than national defense, no consumer protection laws, etc. An idea LP consists of the police, the military (but they only deal with threats once they are at our borders), and the judiciary.
Then you get something like this. Does this violate their privacy policy? Is this an assurance or a contract? I don't know, but I know it is a bad thing-- worse for the .com's which survive the current storm, and who have to deal with a suddenly more wary public. Many companies even used deceptive language to sell their data.
I don't know what the libertarians will say, other than perhaps "if noone buys from .coms, they'll have to enforce their privacy rules". It hasn't worked so far, and won't stop companies going bankrupt, but maybe give it time.
Of course, the Republicans have a more moderate view. They feel that there is a role for government in things like privacy, but that it is too big and powerful right now. You don't hear about it on the TV or in poly sci class, because they want you to think that Republicans Are Evil, but there is a very large number of republicans who adhere to libertarian principles but do see a need for government sometimes.
No offense to the libertarians here (i think they're the second best party in the US), but I think that being ideologically absolute isn't always such a great idea. Government does have a role, though the LP is right to think that it is way out of control. In EE class, they always used to say that the world is analog. I think they were right about that in more ways than one.
I think domain names have a good use. Distributed approaches lose accountability (ie how do you convince someone that you are the 'official' site for something?). Also, you need a consistent way to lead people to your site-- search engines will return multiple possibilities rather than the specific site you want people to go to.
But as the guy who wants to burn all TLDs , I do agree that we need to move to a more elegant system for universal addressing (I favor, basically, the idea of having everything being a TLD-- so unless you are a gov site or edu site, your TLD is your domain name). Ultimately, there will need to be addresses, and with those will go trademark and property issues.
What disappoints me about this NSI thing is that it is such pathetic customer service. Their draconian agreement, high price and poor service is going to screw them sooner or later-- we can just register with companies which are more on the ball. In the long run, companies which don't produce a useful product get swept aside. Legal sneaky games and clever tricks might help you a little on the margin, but you can't build your business on it. Unless you are a trial lawyer. But I digress....
You have no idea. The rodent invasion has already begun!
Let me just take a moment to welcome our new rodent overlords. I think that as a commentator on Smartline, the best pundit show in Springfield, that I will be quite useful to our new masters. You will need someone with knowledge of your human subjects in your terrible new regime.
So what are we doing now? The International Space Station. Not only will this serve as an excellent scientific resource and a launching site for other space ventures, it also shows us that we are capable of organizing ourselves as a race to achieve things that are not merely "impossible", but rather are significantly useful.
The space station is a poor joke right now. While a space station is a good idea in principle, the one they have on the drawing board won't be much more than a sound studio for NASA's irrelevence. It is too small, too underpowered. Remember when they packaged the Shuttle as a space truck? Same deal: NASA's bureaucracy created the least common denominator of its leader's egos, a big expensive mess which isn't optimized for anything-- let alone the cheap workhorse they envisioned.
It wouldn't be so bad if we could point to it as a launching site for other ventures, like a moon or mars base. But it isn't. The thing has zero industrial capability, minor public relations capability, and minor scientific capability.
NASA is getting to the point where it is irrelevent. Pure research is good and all, but much cheaper when you did your industrial work first and just need a couple spare rooms for a researcher. We're putting the cart before the horse in our relentless race for tang and velcro.
I'm about as big a fan of space expansion as anyone there is. But NASA ain't it. If the choice were NASA or nothing, I'd pick NASA. But apart from those unmanned probes, they are doing nothing right now other than spinning their wheels and building big useless sound stages in space.
And I would have put your money that rabbits from England would never hack the Australian climate and indigenous life.
I know what you are saying (I live far from the natural habitat of kudzu, but it covers forests, houses, old cars, etc.) But I don't think that that applies here. The better example would be if those rabbits were brought deep beneath the ocean, where they would presumably outcompete the abyssal life.
Where the environment is largely the same (similar atmosphere, climate, available chemicals for food, etc), and the major difference is simple geographic partitioning, your argument is a good one. Where the environment is radically different, I don't think it holds much water.
OK, maybe I am missing something here, but isn't our highest duty to the Schizmatrix to bring another world up to the next Prigogenic Level of Complexity?
Humor aside, I think that NASA is overreacting. Either Europa has life or it doesn't. If it doesn't, we should hope that it is 'contaminated'. If it does, I would put my money on a planetful of life specially evolved for that planet's conditions over a couple dozen carpet-bagging bacteria from a warm and comfy inner-system world like Earth.
It is pathetic that the government's retreat from space is so complete that we are now trying to eradicating any evidence that we were even there.
When I get my asteroid-mining operation off the ground, I'm throwing all the profits into expansion and terraforming research. ;)
We really need to cut all these cables, remove the wireless systems, and ban networking altogether. I think 40 years have demonstrated that networking gives unauthorized personnel to Secrets Man Was Not Meant To Know.
The real solution is to ban nothing, and try to educate the users about security.
This is totally dead on. Frankly, I use telnet mainly out of ingrained and ignorant habit. But any network service has security holes. The solution isn't to remove the service, it is to secure it. SSH, as everyone and their brother pointed out, is one answer.
But we shouldn't be thinking about what services we should be cutting off, we need to think about how they can be made secure.
Visit the National Security Agency's website!
The NSA: Get to know us as well as we know you.
This is what I think will happen. TLDs are still being used as some kind of pigeonholing mechanism. The fact is that life is more complicated than a series of categories.
ICANN's paper makes a great point: the stability of the DNS system is paramount. So while I strongly believe in burning all TLDs, I do think that we'll need some new TLDs as a test before this is possible.
Long term, though, remains the same: we don't need TLDs. They are from a time when the Internet was a regulated government system, and are now obsolete. Nowadays, everyone registers their name under all available TLDs anyway as legal protection. So adding more only will make the same small number of good TLDs more expensive for people like us.
Remove all TLDs, though, and people can establish their own heirarchies. Someone in another thread said this was like AOL keywords. Well, yes and no. It is more extensible, but ultimately, keywords are a better UI than long complex addresses.
Of course, wearing a Tommy Hilfiger shirt is itself a felony, so no harm is done in this case.
That's why the only good solution is an onboard urinanalysis machine, bolted to your computer's case. This will indisputably verify your identity, and will also help prevent you from buying products on Ebay while drunk. Of course, you will need a six-pack on hand by your computer if you want to listen to a long playlist, but then again, who doesn't have that already?
This is a web tax. The tax is often higher due to the VAT computation for ecommerce than for brick and mortar.
Not only will this put many small companies (with razor-thin profit margins) out of business, it is also taxation without representation. Why should I, a US citizen, have to play tax collector for a government which I have no voice in and whose territory I don't even live in.
Taxes often do more harm (in productivity, lost income, higher prices, weakened economy, or business decisions) than good (increased revenue for a government agency). Look right now. Our great economy has changed our budget deficit in America into a surplus.
Anyway, I hope that US ecommerce companies boycott the EU should this happen.
I noticed on the Sealand website references to Prince Roy's ill health. With Michael of Sealand on your board of directors, how will the political and business arrangements be handled? In other words, what is the relationship between the Government of Sealand and Havenco? And what will that relationship be should Michael of Sealand ascend to the Throne.
I am sure this is some kind of hoax. Just ask Minsky. Neural networks don't and can't do anything. They are a dead end, and research must be supressed as Perceptron research was before them. You foolish mortals have no idea what a dangerous^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H silly idea neural networks are. After all, if it trains itself, how can I credit my genius for its success?
(Humor)
Morris's site doesn't let users say anything. It gives you a carefully (mis?)worded poll. Then it automatically sends a form letter to the reps and president. So what do they learn? Only a boolean response to a manipulative question. Usually without any further information which would help them respond.
There are better sites than that. Even one paragraph telling how strongly you feel about something, or explaining under what conditions you would support something are meaningful. One thing the Internet will do is let people describe exactly how they feel, not what pigeonholes they fit into.
TV is driven by sound bites and images. The Web is driven by paragraphs and links. While I'm sure Morris thinks he's a big pioneer, I'd love to compare his site's traffic to Slashdot, where users can say exactly what they mean, rather than which pool they want to jump into. And remember that his audience is 250 million americans, while /. aims at only a small segment of it.
Some skeptics of Netpliance have speculated that these refurbished machines are a cheap way to conduct R&D through easily bought community members...
So what? This is the whole idea of releasing source code. The community gets cheap, cool xterms, they get cheap R&D. If a big Open Source project starts, sure they lose some code control, but in exchange they get an R&D Department that dwarfs MS, et al.
That's the reason Netscape released its code. Everyone benefits. You get vastly improved R&D and mindshare from the developer community. They get control over the code development, and a product that they want badly enough to be coding for themselves. Customers get peer-reviewed security and stability, feature rich and inexpensive products. Stockholders get improved profits due to quality and lower development and support costs. Everyone wins. Except your closed source competitors.
I'm not sure I would call myself a Netpliance skeptic (I'd love to see a computer that even my mom could use), but there is nothing wrong with pursuing a profit for their shareholders. This move maximizes that profit, so more power to them.
If this hurts your altruism gland, just remember that that stock price will be people's retirement plans and college savings funds. Or that when people make more money, that they tend to give more to worthy but unprofitable charities.
The same thing is true here in Atlanta. You can make $70K-$80K and have a standard of living as if you were making $90K-$100K. Reasons? Well, everyone is already saying them, but:
Lower taxes (this means that the cost of living is lower, too, because businesses don't pass those extra costs to their customers).
Low Prices (due to above): $800-$900 per month rent on a nice apartment (even one in the city!), $10 for an ok restaurant tab, cheap groceries. $1.36 for a gallon of gas (and this is unusually high right now).
Plenty of growth. Atlanta is growing ridiculously fast. There is plenty of room, land is cheap, and everything is brand-new.
None of this is anything that any amateur economist wouldn't notice, but people hear how red-hot California is. Then you hear about enormous salaries and don't think about cost of living. A friend recently worked out the numbers for $100K california vs $80K georgia, and realized that he'd keep more of what he earns down here.
Plus, we have Georgia Tech producing engineers and programmers, Emory producing marketting people, and both giving us managment/money people. And the venture capital is more plentiful and available on better terms.
I'm not surprised.
One of the advantages of open source development is that, if you have enough projects going, you have a tremendous potential for reuse of code. Another is that since APIs and file formats are genuinely open standards, modules become more consistent and encapsulated. Still another consequence of using open standards is that 'embrace and extend' becomes very difficult, if not impossible. Adding new features is easy, but it is tough to lock your users into your product line.
Result: (ok this isn't anything new for us, but I'm getting to my point) UNIX-- where you have a million highly optimized tiny programs that do one thing well (and are reused everywhere by everything) instead of a few monolithic packages that barely interact with one another.
OK, nothing new so far. Here's the point: this is old hat to us, but a brand new concept to the end-user world! The whole idea that you could use parts of one application in another is just foreign to them. In the DOS/Mac world, features come from individual blocks of code. In the open source world, features are derived from the links between those blocks. If you didn't grow up with it, it is a totally new way to think about computing.
Another result- development of brand new applications will be faster, too, since good code gains value with every re-use with minimal development, rather than having to be reimplemented.
Say someone wants to create a WYSIWYG word processor, or a page layout program. Or some totally new application concept. Well, hey, let's just use pieces of Mozilla. And the program is in alpha release a few months later. I suspect that it will take years for the full significance of the concept to hit people.