My vote would be military R&D. We're decades ahead of anybody we're likely to call our enemies in the next hundred years. Do we really need that next generation of fighter aircraft or tanks?
The real problem is that that there is little to nothing that the Federal government can do about the lack of competition in wired markets.
How about giving grants to communities to pay for them building their own community-owned infrastructure so that companies can lease access to fully built-out fiber networks instead of leasing access to the ground and running their own? Government-owned infrastructure eliminates the sole reason for granting monopoly status to telcos, and in so doing, opens up the possibility for broad competition because of the drastically lowered cost of entry into that local market.
The only real disadvantage is that the local government must either understand how to build out a fiber network or must bid-contract it out to a company to build and manage the infrastructure for them. Either way, the key requirement is that the company building out that infrastructure must have no ownership rights in the result, and that should be a precondition for any such grants.
A reasonable state should provide for decreasing levels of privacy as your power increases. For example, those with significant power to sway opinion—politicians, celebrities, etc.—should have much less right to privacy than Joe Random. Indeed, this is the way our privacy laws are structured today.
Where our privacy laws break down is when it comes to corporate privacy and government privacy—the privacy of large groups acting as a single hive mind. These groups should have almost no privacy because they have much greater power than the average citizen. Unfortunately, this is seldom the case, and this is the problem that needs to be fixed—not reducing the privacy of individuals, but rather reducing the privacy of individuals in their official capacity while working together in large groups. That's not very easy to do, though, at least without decreasing their privacy as individuals, which is why things go horribly wrong (whether because you gave them too much privacy and got corruption or too little privacy and got MonicaGate absurdity).
I tend to lean on the side of targeted laws in this area—sunshine laws, open records laws, open meetings laws, etc. When these are insufficient, the flaws should be corrected. When these are ignored, the perpetrators should do jail time to serve as an example to others. If this were happening consistently, we'd have a lot fewer problems with our democracy.
Worse, these aren't any less invasive of your privacy. They're still, by definition, still taking the image. The computer is just throwing away some of the data. Translation: it is just software that can change at any time, even to the point of sending a complete copy of the unprocessed image data to a porn site in Russia.
Just to put on my cynic hat, the government had better hope that they rounded up all those Anonymous hackers the other day. Otherwise, I'd give it a year, tops, before somebody manages to pull off "Girls Gone Wild, Airport Security Style". Really, when you have something so utterly ripe for abuse, it's not a question of if, but when.
I'm not ignoring it. I'm simply acknowledging that embedded devices are almost all specifically designed to not expose their UNIX/Linux underpinnings to users unless you take fairly drastic steps to gain access to it (jailbreaking, rooting, uploading custom firmware images, whatever). Therefore, at least as far as the user is concerned, they use a black box OS, not UNIX or Linux.
Further, many embedded devices don't even come with a shell installed, nor even the most basic command-line tools, much less a compiler, make, etc. You can't really call something UNIX/Linux if there are no UNIX/Linux bits above the kernel level. AFAIK, you can't even run the Single Unix Specification or POSIX test suites to test compliance without those bits, much less pass them.
Embedded devices are a far cry from Mac OS X or a desktop Linux distro, where you can simply run a terminal application and gain access to a full set of command line tools with a range of standard shells.
This is true, but I guess nobody gave Slashdot's IT guys the memo.
It gets even uglier when virtual hosting (multiple hostnames on a single IP) comes into play. The only real solution would be a browser plug-in that allows you to spoof DNS records in some way.
The outcry against bank bailouts was loud enough to be heard and acted upon by plenty of representatives, including my own. It wasn't enough to stop the measure from passing, but it was enough to make some reps worry about getting re-elected if they voted for it. That is the only measure of control we have over them, but in large enough numbers it can indeed be effective.
Except that it didn't make any difference, and that was probably the largest outcry the U.S. public has made in decades. More to the point, it can never make any difference. Here's why: ultimately, no matter what the Democrats and Republicans might have said publicly, they both mostly just represent a desire for the status quo on every issue that matters. If there had been Democrats who were truly afraid of losing their seats, they would have convinced a few relatively "safe" Republicans to cast the votes for them, and would have then owed those Republicans a similar favor in the future.
I did just that. I wrote my state senators about a really bad IP law that in my view tightened the grip of established monopolies and harmed independent artists. One senator didn't bother to reply. The other sent a letter saying how much she valued my opinion, and that she considered IP to be very important, but that it was important to protect it judiciously.
I'm talking about California senators who are ostensibly supposed to represent Silicon Valley, where opposition to the law was almost universal. Further, I think it is safe to say that the overwhelming majority of people in the entire state of California, if polled, would have voted against the law. To the best of my knowledge, both senators voted for the bill, in spite of my very cogent arguments against it. In effect, my letter was ignored.
Letter writing does not work because for every one of us who writes a letter, there is a big business inviting that senator to a free $100-per-head dinner in Washington D.C. That's reality. As long as our senators and representatives are not required to vote remotely and spend their terms in their districts, we cannot have a functioning representative democracy. Period. (Recall that the original intent of the Founding Fathers was that Congress should meet once or twice a year, for a week or two per term, and that the rest of the time, the congresspeople should work their normal jobs and live in their districts....)
Having all of our representatives in Washington D.C. guarantees that the extremely wealthy (from everywhere in the country) will have vastly greater access to our representatives than the people who actually live in their districts, which is just plain fundamentally broken. There is simply no way to fix this short of the courts having the cojones to clarify the law by ruling that congresspeople are not really living in their districts when they are in Washington D.C.
For extended attributes like that, the right thing to do is probably to use it if it is there, and to use a SQL database if it isn't. Sure, that won't survive moving the file to another system as metadata would, but that's not generally a deal-breaker. For handling renames, store more than just the filename in the database. On most filesystems, for example, you can store an inode number and be reasonably assured that it won't change unless you move it to a different partition entirely. You could also use a hash as a fallback; if the name and content hash match, you can generally assume that it is the same file even if you find it at a different path.
It's important to support such fallbacks when the user chooses a root filesystem that doesn't support EA, if you need to run on an OS that has limits on the size of data in EA, if the user is accessing files from an SMB or NFS share, etc.
BTW, most of the BSDs should support POSIX extended attributes already. FreeBSD supports it on both UFS1 and UFS2; NetBSD supports it on UFS1 (but not UFS2 at last check); OpenBSD... I think it supports them, too.
Of course not. This is Slashdot. I read the summary, same as everybody else.;-)
Lennart was talking about free software developers that co[u]ld be held back by the differences between Linux and BSDs. Those differences add complexity to support another OS that has small market share in the desktop OS in comparison with Linux (and this point is assumed, I don't know if it's proved somewhere).
What you see as being "held back" is what I see as designing for portability. Linux isn't always going to be the dominant open source OS, just as GCC isn't always going to be the dominant compiler and Bash isn't always going to be the dominant shell.
When Debian moved their default/bin/sh from Bash to Dash (which is a port of Ash from NetBSD, BTW), a lot of stuff broke because developers were coding to Bash-isms instead of coding to a pure Single Unix Specification.
When Apple began their shift from GCC to Clang+LLVM, a lot of folks have had to significantly fix GCC-isms in their code (and Clang has had to work around and attempt to support lots more of them) because the open source compiler world had previously become such an utter monoculture.
Do we really need, as an open source community, to make the same mistakes again with Gnome? It is always a mistake to code only to a single platform. For an example of why, you need only look to Apple. For a decade, they kept most of Mac OS X at least minimally functional on x86. Then, when IBM couldn't handle the power consumption needs of laptops, suddenly it became important, and they were able to very rapidly shift to x86. That flexibility also allowed for rapid bring-up of ARM, which came in handy when they decided to switch their iPod offerings from an embedded OS to a subset of Mac OS X and add iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV. None of that would have been possible in such a short time span were it not for the continuous background effort to keep that OS functional on another architecture.
The same thing happened, no doubt, in Linux at the kernel level when ARM-based netbooks started gaining popularity. That's why Android happened as quickly as it did; the OS stack had already been kept running on ARM by folks porting it to embedded systems, etc.
The same thing applies to higher level software like Gnome. The more you code to a single platform, the harder it becomes to port to other platforms in the future when the need arises... and eventually, it invariably arises.
Sorry. I should have been clear: I'm not including embedded systems in that calculation; I'm only talking about desktops and servers based on PC hardware and similar. By that standard, Mac OS X has more than double the Linux installed base by most estimates (the most optimistic estimates I've seen for linux are 25 million, where the most pessimistic Mac OS X estimates are around 53-54 million, growing by roughly the size of the entire Linux installed base every 1.5 years or so).
If you include embedded Linux, Linux is probably more widespread, but then we have to get into the argument over whether Android is Linux and whether iOS is BSD, and that just gets messy....
Seriously you're asking a linux developer his opinion on BSD? What answer were you expecting?
Something that doesn't make him sound like a complete idiot?
The core of Mac OS X borrows heavily from BSD, so one could legitimately argue that BSD is now the most widespread UNIX variant. In fact, I wouldn't swear to it, but I suspect that makes BSD (and Mac OS X, specifically) more popular than all of the other Linux and UNIX variants put together.
You'd pretty much have to be living under a rock to think that BSD isn't relevant. Either that or you have to believe that Windows is the way of the future. Take your pick.
On the other hand, if the cars know where they are, there's no reason for people to be driving, and thus no legitimate reason for any absolute speed limits to exist.
I've considered walking down the security line at a major airport randomly handing out $20 bills and Efferdent tablets under the condition that they each fake an epileptic seizure upon stepping through the full body scanner....
I got fed up with the airport one day and installed netatalk on my server home. It's been working for well over a year now with no problems.
Make absolutely certain that you are using the 2.2 beta versions of Netatalk and not the 2.1 stable versions. Only the 2.2 series implements the AFP replay cache and lock stealing so that you won't get data corruption when you put your machine to sleep in the middle of a backup. It's rather dangerous to use Netatalk 2.1 or earlier for backups. You might get lucky, but....
Then they returned it, saying that it was all loaded. So she took it home, and found that, while her files were loaded, they weren't in the same directory as before, so all sorts of things could[n't] find the files.
Let me guess. They restored the backup, but didn't do the next step, which is (after setting up the machine) to create a second user with the same username as the original user. Sloppy tech work.
As for your failed restore, I'm curious what error you got when you tried to restore it with the normal restore process. And please tell me you filed a bug at bugreport.apple.com.:-)
TB examination, as you say, is potentially medically necessary, as the only real alternatives (doing nothing or applying prophylactic treatment to an unnecessarily large population) would be expected to cause significantly greater rates of illness and deaths in those children. Clearly, that's not the case for airport scanners by any stretch of the imagination, as I'm sure you'll agree.
As for fleeing refugees hiding money and jewels in child toys, that's well and good, but all that stuff goes through the X-ray scanner anyway at an airport. And it's not like eliminating kids as a potential means of smuggling explosives or weapons would significantly reduce the risk to air travelers. I think it's safe to say that it would be a lot easier to convince somebody to smuggle bomb materials drug-mule-style than to get a parent to smuggle a bomb on his/her child (or any child, for that matter). It's just not a credible threat by comparison. It's like choosing to fight world hunger by providing food stamps to the American middle class. I mean, sure, a few of them might have trouble feeding their families someday, but it's not a very effective solution to the problem as a whole....
The white elephant in the room is that for the cost and troubles the current security theater inflicts upon the public for little actual "security", a *real* security system could be set up that doesn't require intrusive body searches or thousands of ultra-expensive taxpayer-funded machines contracted from a firm which a recently-departed high-ranking security official has a large interest in.
Or, put more simply:
Remember that when terrorists blow up the next plane, it will be because the TSA was too busy groping the children, the elderly, and harmless people like us.
Slashdot Mirror
My vote would be military R&D. We're decades ahead of anybody we're likely to call our enemies in the next hundred years. Do we really need that next generation of fighter aircraft or tanks?
How about giving grants to communities to pay for them building their own community-owned infrastructure so that companies can lease access to fully built-out fiber networks instead of leasing access to the ground and running their own? Government-owned infrastructure eliminates the sole reason for granting monopoly status to telcos, and in so doing, opens up the possibility for broad competition because of the drastically lowered cost of entry into that local market.
The only real disadvantage is that the local government must either understand how to build out a fiber network or must bid-contract it out to a company to build and manage the infrastructure for them. Either way, the key requirement is that the company building out that infrastructure must have no ownership rights in the result, and that should be a precondition for any such grants.
A reasonable state should provide for decreasing levels of privacy as your power increases. For example, those with significant power to sway opinion—politicians, celebrities, etc.—should have much less right to privacy than Joe Random. Indeed, this is the way our privacy laws are structured today.
Where our privacy laws break down is when it comes to corporate privacy and government privacy—the privacy of large groups acting as a single hive mind. These groups should have almost no privacy because they have much greater power than the average citizen. Unfortunately, this is seldom the case, and this is the problem that needs to be fixed—not reducing the privacy of individuals, but rather reducing the privacy of individuals in their official capacity while working together in large groups. That's not very easy to do, though, at least without decreasing their privacy as individuals, which is why things go horribly wrong (whether because you gave them too much privacy and got corruption or too little privacy and got MonicaGate absurdity).
I tend to lean on the side of targeted laws in this area—sunshine laws, open records laws, open meetings laws, etc. When these are insufficient, the flaws should be corrected. When these are ignored, the perpetrators should do jail time to serve as an example to others. If this were happening consistently, we'd have a lot fewer problems with our democracy.
Worse, these aren't any less invasive of your privacy. They're still, by definition, still taking the image. The computer is just throwing away some of the data. Translation: it is just software that can change at any time, even to the point of sending a complete copy of the unprocessed image data to a porn site in Russia.
Just to put on my cynic hat, the government had better hope that they rounded up all those Anonymous hackers the other day. Otherwise, I'd give it a year, tops, before somebody manages to pull off "Girls Gone Wild, Airport Security Style". Really, when you have something so utterly ripe for abuse, it's not a question of if, but when.
If the higher-ups anonymized their communications correctly, the cannon fodder won't be able to identify them even if they want to.
No, I mean something that doesn't involve you providing investigators with a detailed list of the specific banned sites that you frequent.
I'm not ignoring it. I'm simply acknowledging that embedded devices are almost all specifically designed to not expose their UNIX/Linux underpinnings to users unless you take fairly drastic steps to gain access to it (jailbreaking, rooting, uploading custom firmware images, whatever). Therefore, at least as far as the user is concerned, they use a black box OS, not UNIX or Linux.
Further, many embedded devices don't even come with a shell installed, nor even the most basic command-line tools, much less a compiler, make, etc. You can't really call something UNIX/Linux if there are no UNIX/Linux bits above the kernel level. AFAIK, you can't even run the Single Unix Specification or POSIX test suites to test compliance without those bits, much less pass them.
Embedded devices are a far cry from Mac OS X or a desktop Linux distro, where you can simply run a terminal application and gain access to a full set of command line tools with a range of standard shells.
Restore all your settings? Only if you jailbreak. Normally, the upgrade process does not involve any sort of restore....
This is true, but I guess nobody gave Slashdot's IT guys the memo.
It gets even uglier when virtual hosting (multiple hostnames on a single IP) comes into play. The only real solution would be a browser plug-in that allows you to spoof DNS records in some way.
Except that it didn't make any difference, and that was probably the largest outcry the U.S. public has made in decades. More to the point, it can never make any difference. Here's why: ultimately, no matter what the Democrats and Republicans might have said publicly, they both mostly just represent a desire for the status quo on every issue that matters. If there had been Democrats who were truly afraid of losing their seats, they would have convinced a few relatively "safe" Republicans to cast the votes for them, and would have then owed those Republicans a similar favor in the future.
I did just that. I wrote my state senators about a really bad IP law that in my view tightened the grip of established monopolies and harmed independent artists. One senator didn't bother to reply. The other sent a letter saying how much she valued my opinion, and that she considered IP to be very important, but that it was important to protect it judiciously.
I'm talking about California senators who are ostensibly supposed to represent Silicon Valley, where opposition to the law was almost universal. Further, I think it is safe to say that the overwhelming majority of people in the entire state of California, if polled, would have voted against the law. To the best of my knowledge, both senators voted for the bill, in spite of my very cogent arguments against it. In effect, my letter was ignored.
Letter writing does not work because for every one of us who writes a letter, there is a big business inviting that senator to a free $100-per-head dinner in Washington D.C. That's reality. As long as our senators and representatives are not required to vote remotely and spend their terms in their districts, we cannot have a functioning representative democracy. Period. (Recall that the original intent of the Founding Fathers was that Congress should meet once or twice a year, for a week or two per term, and that the rest of the time, the congresspeople should work their normal jobs and live in their districts....)
Having all of our representatives in Washington D.C. guarantees that the extremely wealthy (from everywhere in the country) will have vastly greater access to our representatives than the people who actually live in their districts, which is just plain fundamentally broken. There is simply no way to fix this short of the courts having the cojones to clarify the law by ruling that congresspeople are not really living in their districts when they are in Washington D.C.
I bet your hospital loves you.... :-D
Which is what, one half of one percent of all computers sold?
Yeah, but again, I'm not including embedded devices.
For extended attributes like that, the right thing to do is probably to use it if it is there, and to use a SQL database if it isn't. Sure, that won't survive moving the file to another system as metadata would, but that's not generally a deal-breaker. For handling renames, store more than just the filename in the database. On most filesystems, for example, you can store an inode number and be reasonably assured that it won't change unless you move it to a different partition entirely. You could also use a hash as a fallback; if the name and content hash match, you can generally assume that it is the same file even if you find it at a different path.
It's important to support such fallbacks when the user chooses a root filesystem that doesn't support EA, if you need to run on an OS that has limits on the size of data in EA, if the user is accessing files from an SMB or NFS share, etc.
BTW, most of the BSDs should support POSIX extended attributes already. FreeBSD supports it on both UFS1 and UFS2; NetBSD supports it on UFS1 (but not UFS2 at last check); OpenBSD... I think it supports them, too.
Of course not. This is Slashdot. I read the summary, same as everybody else. ;-)
What you see as being "held back" is what I see as designing for portability. Linux isn't always going to be the dominant open source OS, just as GCC isn't always going to be the dominant compiler and Bash isn't always going to be the dominant shell.
When Debian moved their default /bin/sh from Bash to Dash (which is a port of Ash from NetBSD, BTW), a lot of stuff broke because developers were coding to Bash-isms instead of coding to a pure Single Unix Specification.
When Apple began their shift from GCC to Clang+LLVM, a lot of folks have had to significantly fix GCC-isms in their code (and Clang has had to work around and attempt to support lots more of them) because the open source compiler world had previously become such an utter monoculture.
Do we really need, as an open source community, to make the same mistakes again with Gnome? It is always a mistake to code only to a single platform. For an example of why, you need only look to Apple. For a decade, they kept most of Mac OS X at least minimally functional on x86. Then, when IBM couldn't handle the power consumption needs of laptops, suddenly it became important, and they were able to very rapidly shift to x86. That flexibility also allowed for rapid bring-up of ARM, which came in handy when they decided to switch their iPod offerings from an embedded OS to a subset of Mac OS X and add iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV. None of that would have been possible in such a short time span were it not for the continuous background effort to keep that OS functional on another architecture.
The same thing happened, no doubt, in Linux at the kernel level when ARM-based netbooks started gaining popularity. That's why Android happened as quickly as it did; the OS stack had already been kept running on ARM by folks porting it to embedded systems, etc.
The same thing applies to higher level software like Gnome. The more you code to a single platform, the harder it becomes to port to other platforms in the future when the need arises... and eventually, it invariably arises.
Sorry. I should have been clear: I'm not including embedded systems in that calculation; I'm only talking about desktops and servers based on PC hardware and similar. By that standard, Mac OS X has more than double the Linux installed base by most estimates (the most optimistic estimates I've seen for linux are 25 million, where the most pessimistic Mac OS X estimates are around 53-54 million, growing by roughly the size of the entire Linux installed base every 1.5 years or so).
If you include embedded Linux, Linux is probably more widespread, but then we have to get into the argument over whether Android is Linux and whether iOS is BSD, and that just gets messy....
Something that doesn't make him sound like a complete idiot?
The core of Mac OS X borrows heavily from BSD, so one could legitimately argue that BSD is now the most widespread UNIX variant. In fact, I wouldn't swear to it, but I suspect that makes BSD (and Mac OS X, specifically) more popular than all of the other Linux and UNIX variants put together.
You'd pretty much have to be living under a rock to think that BSD isn't relevant. Either that or you have to believe that Windows is the way of the future. Take your pick.
On the other hand, if the cars know where they are, there's no reason for people to be driving, and thus no legitimate reason for any absolute speed limits to exist.
I've considered walking down the security line at a major airport randomly handing out $20 bills and Efferdent tablets under the condition that they each fake an epileptic seizure upon stepping through the full body scanner....
Make absolutely certain that you are using the 2.2 beta versions of Netatalk and not the 2.1 stable versions. Only the 2.2 series implements the AFP replay cache and lock stealing so that you won't get data corruption when you put your machine to sleep in the middle of a backup. It's rather dangerous to use Netatalk 2.1 or earlier for backups. You might get lucky, but....
Let me guess. They restored the backup, but didn't do the next step, which is (after setting up the machine) to create a second user with the same username as the original user. Sloppy tech work.
As for your failed restore, I'm curious what error you got when you tried to restore it with the normal restore process. And please tell me you filed a bug at bugreport.apple.com. :-)
Hello, China? I think I have something you may want, but it's gonna cost you. Yeah. That's right. All the tea.
I read it as "Security Prisoner Experiment" and the TSA airport experience suddenly made sense. *sigh*
TB examination, as you say, is potentially medically necessary, as the only real alternatives (doing nothing or applying prophylactic treatment to an unnecessarily large population) would be expected to cause significantly greater rates of illness and deaths in those children. Clearly, that's not the case for airport scanners by any stretch of the imagination, as I'm sure you'll agree.
As for fleeing refugees hiding money and jewels in child toys, that's well and good, but all that stuff goes through the X-ray scanner anyway at an airport. And it's not like eliminating kids as a potential means of smuggling explosives or weapons would significantly reduce the risk to air travelers. I think it's safe to say that it would be a lot easier to convince somebody to smuggle bomb materials drug-mule-style than to get a parent to smuggle a bomb on his/her child (or any child, for that matter). It's just not a credible threat by comparison. It's like choosing to fight world hunger by providing food stamps to the American middle class. I mean, sure, a few of them might have trouble feeding their families someday, but it's not a very effective solution to the problem as a whole....
Or, put more simply:
Remember that when terrorists blow up the next plane, it will be because the TSA was too busy groping the children, the elderly, and harmless people like us.