Then there's the communications gap. Absolute minimum of, I forget, 20 minutes round trip to get a response from Earth? Going up to 40 minutes? Not >a huuuge gap, but it's there.
It's much less actually, (at least the mininum time).
I'm rather astonished at the number of people who are chanting this mantra. It is clear that you haven't read the article. The author makes a very good case that the whole thing stinks, no matter how you look at it, and that its sole effective purpose is to generate revenue, possibly at the expense of safety.
Driving isn't a right, but handing out arbitrary fines isn't either. The aricle takes every reason people give for these red light cameras, and gives very good reasons and evidence that it is misguided or even flat out wrong. A lot of people hate these things for selfish reasons. Nobody wants to get fined. On the other hand, why should we put up with something we hate if it doesn't do any good, and might do measurable harm?
I was hoping to find a comment that refuted something in the article, as it seems rather one sided. Unfortunately, I'm not seeing much of anything like that.
What's funny to me is that although it seems buggy under crossover, it's just about as bad under win2k. What's more, it supports windows media player now.
I do agree that we need to take some steps to assure that material which is, for example, broadcast across digital-television equipment should be protected in such a way as to disallow unauthorized copying and disallow uploading to the Internet.
This is interesting. Boucher does seem to be very clueful, but how in the heck can he say all of these things about being pro-fair use and then say something like this?
What, exactly, are they planning on doing to prevent this? There is no way to "disallow uploading to the Internet" without something like the CBDTPA. Everyone who owns a copyright would like to "disallow unauthorized copying" why is digital television different? Are routers supposed to be intellegent enough to know that you're uploading a "Friends" episode? What if I digitize a VCR recording and upload that, do we need to prevent that too?
I can only imagine what he means by this is more complex than he's letting on. OTOH It's discouraging for me to see this coming from our side of the fence. The whole problem with "digital rights management" is that it threatens to turn our society into some sort of copyright police state.
You can't have it both ways, it's either allowing technology to run its course and people to generally obey the law or you have to regulate everything. Regulating everything is distasteful, if not entirely unrealistic. What's worse is that it will prevent above the board people (e.g. libraries) from doing what just about anyone will be able to do covertly (with black market equipment and so forth).
I agree. There might be an arugment for the opposite (no taping of people in public places) might be able to stick, just as federal law can prevent racail discrimination in hotels and such.
However, I have trouble seeing how taping in private places falls under federal juristiction. It is unclear to me whether congress can pass laws to protect one's "right to privacy" since the power to make laws to enforce the fouth amendment is not explicitly granted.
I saw a show that talked about the HETE a few weeks ago. They were pissed that it was being put on a pegasus, since the rocket had a 50% failure rate or so. It seems unlikely that they would have put a nuclear battery on such a launch.
Also, if you read the article, you would have noticed that the battery died after a few days of being stuck inside the launch vehicle. Doesn't sound like a radioactive battery to me.
Finally, there are solar panels on the experiment. It would not make sense to have both a plutonium battery and solar panels on the same sattelite.
* income taxes - The government's motivation is to set the tax rate as high as possible without sparking a revolution, in order to maximize funds.
This assumes you can't vote against them, which of course you can. In Sweden, it used to be (and may still be) that you couldn't run on a platform of _lowering_ income tax.
Since there is no feedback loop (you have to work to eat, after all), these taxes tend to be very high - particularly so since the higher income earners are disproportionately taxed.
This is your thesis, which you have yet to prove. (Putting 50% of the taxes on 3% of the voters is not likely to get you kicked out of office.)
In some sort of grand scheme of things, I suppose this isn't just, but not many people will argue that a higher tax rate for the rich is truly unjust. All taxes are potentailly unjust, there is a long and proud history of unjust taxes. Some might consider sales taxes to be some of the most unjust (they tend to tax necessities).
You often use the arument that making taxes too high reduces revenue; certainly this is the view of many people as far as income tax is concerned. You make a very weak case for why this principle does not apply to income taxes, though it applies to tarriffs, import duties, sales taxes, user fees and property taxes. In fact, you make no case at all.
Additionally, high income taxes foster an underground economy, which makes any sort of taxation difficult. Further, the government needs to know how much you earn, which is an invasion of your privacy. On top of that, they have to look through your bank account records to prevent cheating, regulate the use and transfer of your money to prevent tax avoidance, and many, many other tyrannies. It is for this reason that direct taxes, except based on head count, were prohibited in the US Constitution: to prevent the govenment from invading every aspect of your life.
This is a fine argument, and is too complex to get into here. You could make the same argument about any other of the taxes. All taxes require some sort of government interference. Businesses would have themselves immune to government prying, but many of your taxes require some snooping (sales taxes e.g.). It isn't clear to me exactly why this is entirely different.
You go on to make lots of plattitudes to imply that income taxes are evil, but it sounds mostly like retoric and hot air.
E.G.:
It is the income tax which poisons public debate by allowing people to obtain benefits without costs, and thus makes the incentive for an individual to go along with a government program - lest their own government teat be attacked by the beneficiaries of another program - unless they are in the unheard minority who have to fund whatever the latest government program might be.
How is this different from anything the government does? In the days before income taxes Tammany Hall used a similar system that kept a political machine going for the greater part of a century. By doling out tripe for the masses, they kept themselves in power. No income tax, but an example of government corruption that has few rivals.
1. The privacy policy is acquiring a disclaimer that amounts to "this is not true". It actually disclaims the entire privacy policy.
To say that the clause at the end claims the privacy policy is "not true" is pretty simplistic. It attempts to avoid iablility for circumstances beyond their control, which is a far cry from disclaiming the entire thing.
In other words if armed men break into our facilities and steal our database and sell it to spammers, or our daatabase administrator gets a brain tumor and tries to "MAKE MONEY FAST!", we think we shouldn't be sued.
I think this critisism is a bit harsh. Under certain circumstances the statement is necessarily true, depending on how you interpret it.
A fully compromised router should be able to at least match, and probably almost always exceed the capacity to cause problems for any machine upstream of it than any computer downstream of it, since any computer downstream of a router can't generate traffic any faster than that router can
This is true as long you make certain assumptions about how the router works, how computationally intensive the attack is, and the geometry of the network(*).
Also, the statement: "A router IS a computer, you fuckwit," is inflamatory and pedantic. For the purposes of what we are talking about a computer is something that traffic flows to and from, and a router is something traffic flows through. Everyone knows what he means, and the distinction is conceivably instructive; according to the article more DOS attacks are coming from things that are called routers. Lumping routers in with computers may be technically correct, but is not helpful. The aim of the article is to get out the message that the things commonly called routers are causing more DOS problems than things commonly called computers.
* E.g. assuming the router can do more than just copy traffic, that the attack doesn't require a lot CPU to generate the data for the attack, and there aren't many paths from the attacker and the attackee.
The Bundestag is just the German lower house of parliament, there are certainly other computers in the German government.
The wording of the article is a bit confusing, but I think they mean to try it out in the Bundestag before trying to implement a government wide policy of using Linux, which could save as much as $116 million.
Sometimes it seems like slashdot is this raving monster, destroying everything in its path. Small sites with cgi scripts seem particually vunerable to being sent into oblivion.
Isn't there a better way of doing things?
Maybe we could remind people to lay off just after the story is posted.
Maybe we could have a slashdot turnstile where you can wait in line to get into the site. The biggest problem I see is figuring out when people are have finished downloading.
Hopefully the Supreme Court will work out how this really infringes on civil liberties. My guess is that if they do anything, they will insist on some sort of delcaration of emergency and sunsetting clause on such a drastic set of restrictions.
Much of the Supreme Court is composed of conservatives that will try to see if this legislation fits in with the tradition of American law. I'm hoping that they'll find that such drastic measures go way too far without some sort of acknoledgement that this is a temporary change in policy due to extenuating circumstances.
What bothers me most about this is that the government actions seem to be in a wartime mentality, without a declaration of war, or even a declaration of a state of emergency. If an event that preciptates the overhaul of our law enforcement system isn't a national emergency, I don't know what is.
Even under the current system law enforcement has had been cracking down hard on a rather dizzying number of people. For now we haven't heard about a lot of abuses, but they almost certainly will occur. I'm afraid that this is turning into another Red Scare, where anyone who associates with "known terrorists" is thrown in jail.
Are we really doing nothing? People are waiting between 2 and 4 hours ast the Canadian border and hours to get aboard a plane. The government is freezing all sorts of assets, and arresting all sorts of people, along with thinking of loosening wiretap restrictions, tightenting encryption restrictions, and even asking the news to limit what they show on the news.
Is any of this going to help? Maybe or maybe not.
Should we take action just for the sake of taking action?
Personally I think that not all of it is bad, and action for the sake of action is probably OK as long as it makes people feel better, and it isn't too terribly intrusive. OTOH, when this is all over, we'll still be living in a police state. I would be far more willing to go along with these actions if I thought that they were temporary. It'd be a good precedent for national emergencies in general, and prevent the seemingly endless creep of authority. I'm not getting the idea that these actions are going to be short lived.
In a time of such uncertainty overrecation is inevitable, and not all bad. It's still unclear what precautions are going to seem reasonable, and which ones are going to be just a waste of time, or worse. Hopefully a balence will be struck and the government will see the wisdom in making these restrictions temporary.
A much more interesting thing to look at might be the various IPC mechanisms of both Windows and Linux and compare their performances. This would be a much more interesting and relevant article.
FWIW, even if Linux's pipes were faster, this would not necessarily mean the Windows pipes were inferior. You also have to test scalability, i.e. how much faster one or more pipes ran on a one or more processor machine.
If you look at Solaris pipes vs. Linux pipes, you'll see (or would have seen the last time I looked at it) that Linux pipes tended to be faster. This was mostly due to the many locks inside the Solaris kernel that were absent in Linux. The result is slighly worse performance for uniprocessor machines, and better performance for multiprocessor machines for Solaris.
Of course, as has been pointed out, this is all fairly moot, since pipes are apparently not used that much in Windows, which goes back to my first point.
IPC performance is a very interesting issue. Unfortunately this article doesn't really address it.
There's been a lot of moral and legal arguments about this issue of blocking ads. I think the issue is really much simpler than most people are making it out to be. People are going to go to various lengths to avoid ads. Content providers are going to try to prevent them from doing this.
This is going to go on forever. The content providers will further their interests. The users will further theirs. I don't have any particular problem with either side. I hope it doesn't come to providers threatening people over this issue, though it probably will eventually.
I don't think it takes much thought to realize that as long as we don't have standard issue Microsoft boxes that can't be modified, there is no way to prevent all ad blocking. Since it can't be prevented, all of this arguing is pretty moot.
I really can't understand that there should be some moral reason why I should force myself to be subjected to ads if I can avoid it. Advertising has always seemed to me to be morally bankrupt anyway, so what's a little tit for tat?
So I say relax, install junkbuster ( or whatever you use) and surf ad free for now, and be prepared to either give up escalating the battle or sinking a lot of time in your ad blocking.
You're right to say the networks would be upset if lots of people started skipping commercials, and that something would have to give.
But the idea that people should voluntarily refrain from skipping commercials is unrealistic, just as it would be unrealistic to ask people not to go to the bathroom during commercial breaks.
The technology exists. People are going to use it. It might be bad for everyone if such technology became popular, but arguing that I shouldn't skip commercials for the good of everyone doesn't make sense to me.
My girlfriend bought a computer recently, and the Gateway salesman steered her away from AMD, because "it's a dead end technology." I started spitting tacks when I heard that.
With an attitude like that, it's no wonder they didn't sell any.
Decoherence is definitely a problem, but it doesn't make calculations impossible. Theorists have shown that some form of quantum error correction should be possible, and probably necessary, especially if one wants arbitrary length calculations.
What is worst about this system is that it looks very difficult to entangle a large number of qbits, which is very important since you many qbits for the calcuation, and many bits for the correction.
NMR is fairly hopeless as far as real compution is concerned for a similar reason; it is unlikely that one would be able to get much farther than a dozen qbits.
Slashdot Mirror
Has any one else noticed that this is actaully an AP news wire, not a Salon article?
Is any one else irritated by the use of the phrase "quite the" in the submission?
Then there's the communications gap. Absolute minimum of, I forget, 20 minutes round trip to get a response from Earth? Going up to 40 minutes? Not >a huuuge gap, but it's there.
/3*10^8 m/s = 1337 sec (22 minutes)
r sfact.html
It's much less actually, (at least the mininum time).
Min:
54.5 * 10^9 m / 3*10^8 m/s = 181 sec (3.02 min)
Max:
401.3 * 10^9 m
Ref:
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/ma
I spent a good minute reading this story before I had any idea of what they were talking about.
Could he have at least said 77kw+? Solar Ark isn't very discriptive.
The use of the term "Feng Shui" is not necessary, and prettry much improper in this context.
Sheesh. Can't we do better than this?
I'm rather astonished at the number of people who are chanting this mantra. It is clear that you haven't read the article. The author makes a very good case that the whole thing stinks, no matter how you look at it, and that its sole effective purpose is to generate revenue, possibly at the expense of safety.
Driving isn't a right, but handing out arbitrary fines isn't either. The aricle takes every reason people give for these red light cameras, and gives very good reasons and evidence that it is misguided or even flat out wrong. A lot of people hate these things for selfish reasons. Nobody wants to get fined. On the other hand, why should we put up with something we hate if it doesn't do any good, and might do measurable harm?
I was hoping to find a comment that refuted something in the article, as it seems rather one sided. Unfortunately, I'm not seeing much of anything like that.
What's funny to me is that although it seems buggy under crossover, it's just about as bad under win2k. What's more, it supports windows media player now.
I do agree that we need to take some steps to assure that material which is, for example, broadcast across digital-television equipment should be protected in such a way as to disallow unauthorized copying and disallow uploading to the Internet.
This is interesting. Boucher does seem to be very clueful, but how in the heck can he say all of these things about being pro-fair use and then say something like this?
What, exactly, are they planning on doing to prevent this? There is no way to "disallow uploading to the Internet" without something like the CBDTPA. Everyone who owns a copyright would like to "disallow unauthorized copying" why is digital television different? Are routers supposed to be intellegent enough to know that you're uploading a "Friends" episode? What if I digitize a VCR recording and upload that, do we need to prevent that too?
I can only imagine what he means by this is more complex than he's letting on. OTOH It's discouraging for me to see this coming from our side of the fence. The whole problem with "digital rights management" is that it threatens to turn our society into some sort of copyright police state.
You can't have it both ways, it's either allowing technology to run its course and people to generally obey the law or you have to regulate everything. Regulating everything is distasteful, if not entirely unrealistic. What's worse is that it will prevent above the board people (e.g. libraries) from doing what just about anyone will be able to do covertly (with black market equipment and so forth).
I agree. There might be an arugment for the opposite (no taping of people in public places) might be able to stick, just as federal law can prevent racail discrimination in hotels and such.
However, I have trouble seeing how taping in private places falls under federal juristiction. It is unclear to me whether congress can pass laws to protect one's "right to privacy" since the power to make laws to enforce the fouth amendment is not explicitly granted.
You're a moron.
I saw a show that talked about the HETE a few weeks ago. They were pissed that it was being put on a pegasus, since the rocket had a 50% failure rate or so. It seems unlikely that they would have put a nuclear battery on such a launch.
Also, if you read the article, you would have noticed that the battery died after a few days of being stuck inside the launch vehicle. Doesn't sound like a radioactive battery to me.
Finally, there are solar panels on the experiment. It would not make sense to have both a plutonium battery and solar panels on the same sattelite.
This assumes you can't vote against them, which of course you can. In Sweden, it used to be (and may still be) that you couldn't run on a platform of _lowering_ income tax.
Since there is no feedback loop (you have to work to eat, after all), these taxes tend to be very high - particularly so since the higher income earners are disproportionately taxed.
This is your thesis, which you have yet to prove.
(Putting 50% of the taxes on 3% of the voters is not likely to get you kicked out of office.)
In some sort of grand scheme of things, I suppose this isn't just, but not many people will argue that a higher tax rate for the rich is truly unjust. All taxes are potentailly unjust, there is a long and proud history of unjust taxes. Some might consider sales taxes to be some of the most unjust (they tend to tax necessities).
You often use the arument that making taxes too high reduces revenue; certainly this is the view of many people as far as income tax is concerned. You make a very weak case for why this principle does not apply to income taxes, though it applies to tarriffs, import duties, sales taxes, user fees and property taxes. In fact, you make no case at all.
Additionally, high income taxes foster an underground economy, which makes any sort of taxation difficult.
Further, the government needs to know how much you earn, which is an invasion of your privacy. On top of that, they have to look through your bank account records to prevent cheating, regulate the use and transfer of your money to prevent tax avoidance, and many, many other tyrannies. It is for this reason that direct taxes, except based on head count, were prohibited in the US Constitution: to prevent the govenment from invading every aspect of your life.
This is a fine argument, and is too complex to get into here. You could make the same argument about any other of the taxes. All taxes require some sort of government interference. Businesses would have themselves immune to government prying, but many of your taxes require some snooping (sales taxes e.g.). It isn't clear to me exactly why this is entirely different.
You go on to make lots of plattitudes to imply that income taxes are evil, but it sounds mostly like retoric and hot air.
E.G.:
It is the income tax which poisons public debate by allowing people to obtain benefits without costs, and thus makes the incentive for an individual to go along with a government program - lest their own government teat be attacked by the beneficiaries of another program - unless they are in the unheard minority who have to fund whatever the latest government program might be.
How is this different from anything the government does? In the days before income taxes Tammany Hall used a similar system that kept a political machine going for the greater part of a century. By doling out tripe for the masses, they kept themselves in power. No income tax, but an example of government corruption that has few rivals.
Let's tax the sh*t out of all those Lexus SUV's and Land Rovers, single occupant vehicles every one, driving onto the Micro$oft "campus" every day!
How about slashdot posts? Might cut down on the trolls.
1. The privacy policy is acquiring a disclaimer that amounts to "this is not true". It actually disclaims the entire privacy policy.
To say that the clause at the end claims the privacy policy is "not true" is pretty simplistic. It attempts to avoid iablility for circumstances beyond their control, which is a far cry from disclaiming the entire thing.
In other words if armed men break into our facilities and steal our database and sell it to spammers, or our daatabase administrator gets a brain tumor and tries to "MAKE MONEY FAST!", we think we shouldn't be sued.
flashhack.c
I have a script ~/bin/mozilla that I use to run mozilla which has:
#!/bin/sh
export LD_PRELOAD=/whereever/it/is/flashhack.so
/usr/local/bin/mozilla $@
Compiling instructions are in the file.
It just makes sure to do a nonblocking open if you open the file /dev/dsp
Totally hacky, I take no resposibilty for any nasty side effects.
The printf ("foo!\n") is there purly for aesthetic reasons.:)
Is this why Microsoft reps have their heads up their asses?
All this talk about PETA and bites is amking me hungry. Anyone want to go out for a burger?
I think this critisism is a bit harsh. Under certain circumstances the statement is necessarily true, depending on how you interpret it.
A fully compromised router should be able to at least match, and probably almost always exceed the capacity to cause problems for any machine upstream of it than any computer downstream of it, since any computer downstream of a router can't generate traffic any faster than that router can
This is true as long you make certain assumptions about how the router works, how computationally intensive the attack is, and the geometry of the network(*).
Also, the statement: "A router IS a computer, you fuckwit," is inflamatory and pedantic. For the purposes of what we are talking about a computer is something that traffic flows to and from, and a router is something traffic flows through. Everyone knows what he means, and the distinction is conceivably instructive; according to the article more DOS attacks are coming from things that are called routers. Lumping routers in with computers may be technically correct, but is not helpful. The aim of the article is to get out the message that the things commonly called routers are causing more DOS problems than things commonly called computers.
* E.g. assuming the router can do more than just copy traffic, that the attack doesn't require a lot CPU to generate the data for the attack, and there aren't many paths from the attacker and the attackee.
The wording of the article is a bit confusing, but I think they mean to try it out in the Bundestag before trying to implement a government wide policy of using Linux, which could save as much as $116 million.
Good point. I should have looked closer before choosing the title, but I think the point is still valid.
I was just rather astonished at the amount of time it took for the site grind to a screaching halt.
Isn't there a better way of doing things?
Maybe we could remind people to lay off just after the story is posted.
Maybe we could have a slashdot turnstile where you can wait in line to get into the site. The biggest problem I see is figuring out when people are have finished downloading.
Much of the Supreme Court is composed of conservatives that will try to see if this legislation fits in with the tradition of American law. I'm hoping that they'll find that such drastic measures go way too far without some sort of acknoledgement that this is a temporary change in policy due to extenuating circumstances.
What bothers me most about this is that the government actions seem to be in a wartime mentality, without a declaration of war, or even a declaration of a state of emergency. If an event that preciptates the overhaul of our law enforcement system isn't a national emergency, I don't know what is.
Even under the current system law enforcement has had been cracking down hard on a rather dizzying number of people. For now we haven't heard about a lot of abuses, but they almost certainly will occur. I'm afraid that this is turning into another Red Scare, where anyone who associates with "known terrorists" is thrown in jail.
Are we really doing nothing? People are waiting between 2 and 4 hours ast the Canadian border and hours to get aboard a plane. The government is freezing all sorts of assets, and arresting all sorts of people, along with thinking of loosening wiretap restrictions, tightenting encryption restrictions, and even asking the news to limit what they show on the news.
Is any of this going to help? Maybe or maybe not.
Should we take action just for the sake of taking action?
Personally I think that not all of it is bad, and action for the sake of action is probably OK as long as it makes people feel better, and it isn't too terribly intrusive. OTOH, when this is all over, we'll still be living in a police state. I would be far more willing to go along with these actions if I thought that they were temporary. It'd be a good precedent for national emergencies in general, and prevent the seemingly endless creep of authority. I'm not getting the idea that these actions are going to be short lived.
In a time of such uncertainty overrecation is inevitable, and not all bad. It's still unclear what precautions are going to seem reasonable, and which ones are going to be just a waste of time, or worse. Hopefully a balence will be struck and the government will see the wisdom in making these restrictions temporary.
A much more interesting thing to look at might be the various IPC mechanisms of both Windows and Linux and compare their performances. This would be a much more interesting and relevant article.
FWIW, even if Linux's pipes were faster, this would not necessarily mean the Windows pipes were inferior. You also have to test scalability, i.e. how much faster one or more pipes ran on a one or more processor machine.
If you look at Solaris pipes vs. Linux pipes, you'll see (or would have seen the last time I looked at it) that Linux pipes tended to be faster. This was mostly due to the many locks inside the Solaris kernel that were absent in Linux. The result is slighly worse performance for uniprocessor machines, and better performance for multiprocessor machines for Solaris.
Of course, as has been pointed out, this is all fairly moot, since pipes are apparently not used that much in Windows, which goes back to my first point.
IPC performance is a very interesting issue. Unfortunately this article doesn't really address it.
There's been a lot of moral and legal arguments about this issue of blocking ads. I think the issue is really much simpler than most people are making it out to be. People are going to go to various lengths to avoid ads. Content providers are going to try to prevent them from doing this.
This is going to go on forever. The content providers will further their interests. The users will further theirs. I don't have any particular problem with either side. I hope it doesn't come to providers threatening people over this issue, though it probably will eventually.
I don't think it takes much thought to realize that as long as we don't have standard issue Microsoft boxes that can't be modified, there is no way to prevent all ad blocking. Since it can't be prevented, all of this arguing is pretty moot.
I really can't understand that there should be some moral reason why I should force myself to be subjected to ads if I can avoid it. Advertising has always seemed to me to be morally bankrupt anyway, so what's a little tit for tat?
So I say relax, install junkbuster ( or whatever you use) and surf ad free for now, and be prepared to either give up escalating the battle or sinking a lot of time in your ad blocking.
This argument makes no sense.
You're right to say the networks would be upset if lots of people started skipping commercials, and that something would have to give.
But the idea that people should voluntarily refrain from skipping commercials is unrealistic, just as it would be unrealistic to ask people not to go to the bathroom during commercial breaks.
The technology exists. People are going to use it. It might be bad for everyone if such technology became popular, but arguing that I shouldn't skip commercials for the good of everyone doesn't make sense to me.
My girlfriend bought a computer recently, and the Gateway salesman steered her away from AMD, because "it's a dead end technology." I started spitting tacks when I heard that.
With an attitude like that, it's no wonder they didn't sell any.
Decoherence is definitely a problem, but it doesn't make calculations impossible. Theorists have shown that some form of quantum error correction should be possible, and probably necessary, especially if one wants arbitrary length calculations.
What is worst about this system is that it looks very difficult to entangle a large number of qbits, which is very important since you many qbits for the calcuation, and many bits for the correction.
NMR is fairly hopeless as far as real compution is concerned for a similar reason; it is unlikely that one would be able to get much farther than a dozen qbits.