i think Iran should be allowed to buy printers. Ink is more expensive than oil and with HP's / Lexmark's, etc. business model, I'd say making them buy ink to print is nearly an act of economic war more effective than the trade embargo itself.
i'll just settle for getting the flying cars they've been promising for the last 50 years. or just a direct brain interface to a standard PC/mac and a few applications that can take advantage of it.
imagination's nice and all, but frequently allows the marketing droids to lead us around by the nose.
note that the collision attack requires a bit of junk in the cert to make the hash be the same as for the original... this means the junk will not look like the rest of the cert. the rest of the cert is formatted and the collision noise will look mostly random. a simple test for unexpected randomness in the cert data (including Netscape comments) would reveal this sort of mischief. it just takes a bit of code on the browser to look for it. shouldn't even degrade browsing performance too much.
except that our presidents seem to feel no obligation to be fiscally responsible, whereas they and our representatives lambast actual CEOs for failing to do what government feels no responsibility to even try to do. in fact, excessive spending is claimed to be "key" to the health of the economy. what rubbish.
and as to the middle management, it seems that the only qualification those folks need is political obligation and connection, not managerial skill. and the people below appointees are unfirable despite manifest need for culling of dead wood. uggh.
Then what's all this malarkey from all sides questioning various candidates' "experience"? clearly Biden didn't need much experience! Therefore both Obama and Palin had ample "experience".
I begin to suspect that experience is code for "we're not sure this candidate's going to take care of the political machine members"
and it all stems from a nasty little late 1800s supreme court case that establishes personhood for corporations independent from their owners. Wikipedia got this one mostly right: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood
One of many problems is that there is no way for a company to suffer negative repercussions for its actions. The abstract company cannot serve jail time if its products say spontaneously combust and kill a real person. And the supreme court case largely shields the corporate officers from facing the repercussions of their actions directing the company. It's a farce of justice.
I'm sure he didn't just get elected to the us senate w/o ever holding state office. Please. That's a Hillary Clinton innovation. Surely there's a few DE laws still on the books Biden had his hands in... perhaps the original murder statute. i don't know.
The U.S. isn't a signatory to that treaty yet. We can live in our own little relativist linguist paradise where the RIAA links more loaded words to disproportionately stigmatize copyright infringers. Ah, I'd love to see us return to the sanity of the founders where copyright was like 12 years flat, not 70 years after the death of the author. I never did understand how a dead person profits from a monopoly. This isn't ancient Egypt ffs.
Don't worry, the Fed's on it already, and congress is helping. There's 75%+ more virtual greenbacks floating around the economy than there were in July. Oh, that's right, you were joking. Too bad you got the strategy right, inflation's a hell of a regressive tax.
a *well constructed* scientific hypothesis can be demonstrated to be false. there are many hypotheses that are postulated by scientists or those emulating them that do not meet the criteria. e.g. much work in social and economic "sciences".
my point is that we *have* well performing filesystems. So much so that investing money in developing improvements or new filesystems is producing little or no return in the form of greater performance. So why spend money you're not getting anything extra for? Spend it tuning the apps and improving the system bandwidth from hardware. Occasionally take a look to see whether there is a scaling issue with the filesystems against the new hardware and bandwidths. Meanwhile, perhaps push the filesystem into hardware. You might see general case performance gains from that. In any case, repeating the same previous behavior of investing in filesystems expecting different results than prior investments is insanity.
i think i'd file that under hardware improvements. i'd also file the cheapening of RAM and its use as primary storage as a hardware improvement. My point was that filesystems as a whole are as good as they are going to get barring something truly novel like neural-associative storage. of course then the storage would get CRS disease just like us. SSD doesn't change the fact that the storage system is a scarce (presumptively) shared resource with a fixed theoretical bandwidth and many ways to avoid achieving anything like the max theoretical. Touting SSDs as anything but an incremental improvement is just regurgitation of marketing drone rubbish. The same crap was rampant when fibre channel drives hit the street. yes they were better. no they weren't that different.
Given that XFS, a 15+ year old file system, is still a serious contender, one would think enough blood has been squeezed from this stone. What is left to us is application tuning and hardware improvements, possibly including filesystem management hardware. It seems to me that teaching application developers how to write their programs to best utilize the filesystem is more likely to yield better performance gains for the effort expended than trying to make a general purpose filesystem good at any flavor of IO that application developers naively throw at it. Simple rules: buffer your IO yourself, perform raw accesses in multiples of the sector/stripe size size.
just because the congress passes a law does not make it legal if it is unconstitutional to begin with. That's what the courts are for. an example of this was the violation of our treaties with the Cherokee nation by Andrew Jackson and his congress. It happened anyways, but i don't think you'll find too many people defending the action as in accordance with the body of law (other than the law that violated the treaty), the constitution, ethics, or morality.
Correspondingly, your statements on the matter above equate to gloating that your side "got one over" on "my side". The fact of things happening and congress going back to "patch things up" does not provide vindication or confer any change in the underlying ethical and legal problems.
As to the wiretap program, you should familiarize yourself with the details of some of the cases, particularly those of the state telecom regulation bodies versus the telcos. They did not ask about any federal actions. They did not ask for details about any individual releases of information without warrants to any particular entity. They asked for discovery on whether their state laws had been broken. Thus, an answer to their question would have included all instances of records being passed to the federal government, but would also have covered telcos handing out calling records to PIs and marketing organizations. The intervention in these cases is particularly egregious to me because it is in direct contravention to the 10th ammendment. Why even have state laws? The federal government will rewrite them or nullify them at whim and for discriminatory benefit of certain individuals and companies who it likes. That certainly is not justice, nor is it equal protection under the law.
Additionally, you seem to assume that I am a Democrat politically. I am not. I am a fiscal and legal conservative. As such, I know that there are minimal differences between the two major party candidates on any issue. Both are Keynsians economically. Both are big spenders. Both are interventionists. The only difference is whose pockets get lined from the public coffer.
Also, as a conservative of the sort that has been thrown out of the Republican party, you might want to consider whether falling away from that side of what latterly were core conservative principles in the last 6-8 years has weakened the party and perhaps invite us back in in a meaningful way. Perhaps by promising removal of troops from at least those installations around the world where there is no burgeoning conflict. Germany comes to mind. Or perhaps the medicare prescription drug benefit was a bad idea. or maybe that $700 bm bailout. Maybe then Republicans could win again and have meaningful differences from their Democratic rivals. I don't know.
So how about addressing some of my other points? Have you no good arguments against those, or are we in some sort of agreement?
I think that *not* following the Constitution is a long-term suicide pact. Today it's "just a piece of paper" to our president. It exists only as an emotional trigger and rhetorical bludgeon.
The Constitution is a supple contract, and ought to be amended as needed. Instead we make blithe statements about it "not being a suicide pact" and violate it with impunity and without regard for the consequences. Wisdom and leadership in my mind consist mainly of the patience and humility to know that most times taking action is going to exacerbate the given problem. The currently burgeoning recession that our leaders seem intent on turning into a depression is but one easily visible example of the opposite approach we currently have.
As to blaming lawmakers, i do, but I also blame the presidential bully-pulpit and his shrink-wrapped 5,000+ page legislation that gets passed in so short a time that it beggars the imagination to think anyone could have read it, much less considered it on its merits. Specifically, though there are many others, i reference the PATRIOT act, which is the single largest erosion of our rights and in my opinion actively discourages Americans from *being* patriots.
"I agree with you that the law=enforcement tools should not be used for any jerk you can find,"
In a post- and extra- constitutional executive-driven government full of secrecy (even in covering up its own failures for image purposes only) where does this forbearance originate exactly? the executive? that's the fox guarding the hen house.
What i want is a restoration of checks and balances, reinforced by pushing responsibility for most things as far towards the local level as possible, with recourse through the courts to correct for fairness. That way you don't have federal judges on the federal payroll making judgements on whether federal actions taken by those signing the judges' checks are legitimate. but i don't want much.
but apparently not when collectivism is desired and marketed by the powerful to enhance their own power.
I understand the point, but I disagree with the extent to which we've gone and the purity of motivation you assume on the parts of our beloved leaders. A nation whose government cannot follow its own laws or constitution will not remain a nation of laws for long.
I think our society was far more open at the begining of this decade when one had reasonable confidence that the government wasn't spying on and abducting Americans without a warrant. I think our society was far more open when in the 90s I could drive past the white house. I think our society was far more open in the 80s when I could get on a plane without showing ID. I think it was far more open in my mother's childhood when one could take a picnic on the white house lawn.
These things seem to me to be increasing in severity as we fall further down that slippery slope. One would have thought we'd have learned this lesson with greater durability from J. Edgar Hoover and McCarthy's time. Instead we've leaders who actively throw that lesson under the bus for expediency's sake.
One of my favorites was Elliot Spitzer being caught for fraud, etc. in a surveillance program he authorized for terrorism. An authorization that at the time we were promised was only for terrorism and wouldn't be used for anything less "critically" threatening.
but is it worth the cost? i like the idea of living in a free country. But they're spreading this presumption of guilt tripe everywhere. Its on trains now, or coming at least to the NE corridor. I'd say that the terrorists have achieved their aims: many people are so terrified that they accept ever increasing government power in their lives. And the elected officials and bureaucrats are more than happy to have the extra power. I don't imply causality, more opportunism. We will all die eventually. Perfect safety is a myth. I'd rather be free and die sooner than be reduced to slavery. IIRC, that was at one time part of the American frontier spirit. It must have gone the way of the small government Republican.
Slashdot Mirror
PC load letter! FSCK!
i think Iran should be allowed to buy printers. Ink is more expensive than oil and with HP's / Lexmark's, etc. business model, I'd say making them buy ink to print is nearly an act of economic war more effective than the trade embargo itself.
[/humor]
And 640K of memory is enough for anyone...
i'll just settle for getting the flying cars they've been promising for the last 50 years. or just a direct brain interface to a standard PC/mac and a few applications that can take advantage of it.
imagination's nice and all, but frequently allows the marketing droids to lead us around by the nose.
note that the collision attack requires a bit of junk in the cert to make the hash be the same as for the original... this means the junk will not look like the rest of the cert. the rest of the cert is formatted and the collision noise will look mostly random. a simple test for unexpected randomness in the cert data (including Netscape comments) would reveal this sort of mischief. it just takes a bit of code on the browser to look for it. shouldn't even degrade browsing performance too much.
except that our presidents seem to feel no obligation to be fiscally responsible, whereas they and our representatives lambast actual CEOs for failing to do what government feels no responsibility to even try to do. in fact, excessive spending is claimed to be "key" to the health of the economy. what rubbish.
and as to the middle management, it seems that the only qualification those folks need is political obligation and connection, not managerial skill. and the people below appointees are unfirable despite manifest need for culling of dead wood. uggh.
Then what's all this malarkey from all sides questioning various candidates' "experience"? clearly Biden didn't need much experience! Therefore both Obama and Palin had ample "experience".
I begin to suspect that experience is code for "we're not sure this candidate's going to take care of the political machine members"
and it all stems from a nasty little late 1800s supreme court case that establishes personhood for corporations independent from their owners. Wikipedia got this one mostly right: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood
One of many problems is that there is no way for a company to suffer negative repercussions for its actions. The abstract company cannot serve jail time if its products say spontaneously combust and kill a real person. And the supreme court case largely shields the corporate officers from facing the repercussions of their actions directing the company. It's a farce of justice.
I'm sure he didn't just get elected to the us senate w/o ever holding state office. Please. That's a Hillary Clinton innovation. Surely there's a few DE laws still on the books Biden had his hands in... perhaps the original murder statute. i don't know.
The U.S. isn't a signatory to that treaty yet. We can live in our own little relativist linguist paradise where the RIAA links more loaded words to disproportionately stigmatize copyright infringers. Ah, I'd love to see us return to the sanity of the founders where copyright was like 12 years flat, not 70 years after the death of the author. I never did understand how a dead person profits from a monopoly. This isn't ancient Egypt ffs.
Don't worry, the Fed's on it already, and congress is helping. There's 75%+ more virtual greenbacks floating around the economy than there were in July. Oh, that's right, you were joking. Too bad you got the strategy right, inflation's a hell of a regressive tax.
a *well constructed* scientific hypothesis can be demonstrated to be false. there are many hypotheses that are postulated by scientists or those emulating them that do not meet the criteria. e.g. much work in social and economic "sciences".
but not as hard to see as ninjas.
now all we need is a pirate comment to complete the circle.
my point is that we *have* well performing filesystems. So much so that investing money in developing improvements or new filesystems is producing little or no return in the form of greater performance. So why spend money you're not getting anything extra for? Spend it tuning the apps and improving the system bandwidth from hardware. Occasionally take a look to see whether there is a scaling issue with the filesystems against the new hardware and bandwidths. Meanwhile, perhaps push the filesystem into hardware. You might see general case performance gains from that. In any case, repeating the same previous behavior of investing in filesystems expecting different results than prior investments is insanity.
i think i'd file that under hardware improvements. i'd also file the cheapening of RAM and its use as primary storage as a hardware improvement. My point was that filesystems as a whole are as good as they are going to get barring something truly novel like neural-associative storage. of course then the storage would get CRS disease just like us. SSD doesn't change the fact that the storage system is a scarce (presumptively) shared resource with a fixed theoretical bandwidth and many ways to avoid achieving anything like the max theoretical. Touting SSDs as anything but an incremental improvement is just regurgitation of marketing drone rubbish. The same crap was rampant when fibre channel drives hit the street. yes they were better. no they weren't that different.
size size.
pizza pizza.
Given that XFS, a 15+ year old file system, is still a serious contender, one would think enough blood has been squeezed from this stone. What is left to us is application tuning and hardware improvements, possibly including filesystem management hardware. It seems to me that teaching application developers how to write their programs to best utilize the filesystem is more likely to yield better performance gains for the effort expended than trying to make a general purpose filesystem good at any flavor of IO that application developers naively throw at it. Simple rules: buffer your IO yourself, perform raw accesses in multiples of the sector/stripe size size.
you expect consistency in human affairs? silly /.er But the general point is a matter of dictionary definition. Few would have called Caesar king.
that's Emperor / Empress. A King / Queen is a step down, ruling a mere kingdom.
I wonder if he gets his facts from the storm troopers.
just because the congress passes a law does not make it legal if it is unconstitutional to begin with. That's what the courts are for. an example of this was the violation of our treaties with the Cherokee nation by Andrew Jackson and his congress. It happened anyways, but i don't think you'll find too many people defending the action as in accordance with the body of law (other than the law that violated the treaty), the constitution, ethics, or morality.
Correspondingly, your statements on the matter above equate to gloating that your side "got one over" on "my side". The fact of things happening and congress going back to "patch things up" does not provide vindication or confer any change in the underlying ethical and legal problems.
As to the wiretap program, you should familiarize yourself with the details of some of the cases, particularly those of the state telecom regulation bodies versus the telcos. They did not ask about any federal actions. They did not ask for details about any individual releases of information without warrants to any particular entity. They asked for discovery on whether their state laws had been broken. Thus, an answer to their question would have included all instances of records being passed to the federal government, but would also have covered telcos handing out calling records to PIs and marketing organizations. The intervention in these cases is particularly egregious to me because it is in direct contravention to the 10th ammendment. Why even have state laws? The federal government will rewrite them or nullify them at whim and for discriminatory benefit of certain individuals and companies who it likes. That certainly is not justice, nor is it equal protection under the law.
Additionally, you seem to assume that I am a Democrat politically. I am not. I am a fiscal and legal conservative. As such, I know that there are minimal differences between the two major party candidates on any issue. Both are Keynsians economically. Both are big spenders. Both are interventionists. The only difference is whose pockets get lined from the public coffer.
Also, as a conservative of the sort that has been thrown out of the Republican party, you might want to consider whether falling away from that side of what latterly were core conservative principles in the last 6-8 years has weakened the party and perhaps invite us back in in a meaningful way. Perhaps by promising removal of troops from at least those installations around the world where there is no burgeoning conflict. Germany comes to mind. Or perhaps the medicare prescription drug benefit was a bad idea. or maybe that $700 bm bailout. Maybe then Republicans could win again and have meaningful differences from their Democratic rivals. I don't know.
So how about addressing some of my other points? Have you no good arguments against those, or are we in some sort of agreement?
because it's an unpopular perspective.
fEh
I think that *not* following the Constitution is a long-term suicide pact. Today it's "just a piece of paper" to our president. It exists only as an emotional trigger and rhetorical bludgeon.
The Constitution is a supple contract, and ought to be amended as needed. Instead we make blithe statements about it "not being a suicide pact" and violate it with impunity and without regard for the consequences. Wisdom and leadership in my mind consist mainly of the patience and humility to know that most times taking action is going to exacerbate the given problem. The currently burgeoning recession that our leaders seem intent on turning into a depression is but one easily visible example of the opposite approach we currently have.
As to blaming lawmakers, i do, but I also blame the presidential bully-pulpit and his shrink-wrapped 5,000+ page legislation that gets passed in so short a time that it beggars the imagination to think anyone could have read it, much less considered it on its merits. Specifically, though there are many others, i reference the PATRIOT act, which is the single largest erosion of our rights and in my opinion actively discourages Americans from *being* patriots.
"I agree with you that the law=enforcement tools should not be used for any jerk you can find,"
In a post- and extra- constitutional executive-driven government full of secrecy (even in covering up its own failures for image purposes only) where does this forbearance originate exactly? the executive? that's the fox guarding the hen house.
What i want is a restoration of checks and balances, reinforced by pushing responsibility for most things as far towards the local level as possible, with recourse through the courts to correct for fairness. That way you don't have federal judges on the federal payroll making judgements on whether federal actions taken by those signing the judges' checks are legitimate. but i don't want much.
but apparently not when collectivism is desired and marketed by the powerful to enhance their own power.
I understand the point, but I disagree with the extent to which we've gone and the purity of motivation you assume on the parts of our beloved leaders. A nation whose government cannot follow its own laws or constitution will not remain a nation of laws for long.
I think our society was far more open at the begining of this decade when one had reasonable confidence that the government wasn't spying on and abducting Americans without a warrant. I think our society was far more open when in the 90s I could drive past the white house. I think our society was far more open in the 80s when I could get on a plane without showing ID. I think it was far more open in my mother's childhood when one could take a picnic on the white house lawn.
These things seem to me to be increasing in severity as we fall further down that slippery slope. One would have thought we'd have learned this lesson with greater durability from J. Edgar Hoover and McCarthy's time. Instead we've leaders who actively throw that lesson under the bus for expediency's sake.
One of my favorites was Elliot Spitzer being caught for fraud, etc. in a surveillance program he authorized for terrorism. An authorization that at the time we were promised was only for terrorism and wouldn't be used for anything less "critically" threatening.
but is it worth the cost? i like the idea of living in a free country. But they're spreading this presumption of guilt tripe everywhere. Its on trains now, or coming at least to the NE corridor. I'd say that the terrorists have achieved their aims: many people are so terrified that they accept ever increasing government power in their lives. And the elected officials and bureaucrats are more than happy to have the extra power. I don't imply causality, more opportunism. We will all die eventually. Perfect safety is a myth. I'd rather be free and die sooner than be reduced to slavery. IIRC, that was at one time part of the American frontier spirit. It must have gone the way of the small government Republican.