Libertarian (or sometimes "classical liberal") ideas go back a good deal further, as you state; but they were, until fairly recently, seen as an anticonservative group, reacting against divine-right monarchies, state churches, and so forth.
Libertarianism is not new; but the idea that it is (largely) a wing of conservatism is.
I was thinking of some of the laws that applied to slaves(eg. state-level restrictions on educating them, for instance) and later the various jim-crow stuff.
The 14th amendment specifically codified certain rights in a way that likely contradicted the framers' intentions; but anything not so codified, and there was a lot, would presumably apply equally to the 'framers' understanding of the limits of a right' argument.
Wow. I don't get mistaken for a mac enthusiast often.
I think that your work in OS security may have induced a certain amount of myopia. My discussion purely applied to DRM systems because DRM systems are the only scenario where the 'attacker' has access to the system from day one(it's their device, or the software running on their PC); and wishes to compromise the system's security. With other classes of software, the person with personal access and the vendor are allies in wanting the system to be secure.
If you think I'm a non-technical idiot, pull your head out of the confines of one particular flavor of security work and do a little research:
It's pretty painless: Wikipedia has a list of iOS/baseband firmware versions, with handy notes about which baseband 'fixes' are there to deal with unlocking... A little googling will dig up some of the oddities involved in trying to mix versions.
For virtually any DRM/walled garden system in wide consumer use(say, iDevice/PS3/xbox/Wii/PSP/DS/DSi) a quick google of 'Name downgrade' will pull up a sheet of results containing, depending on the system, a mixture of information on how to downgrade to more vulnerable firmware before running a hack or people with presently unhacked firmware on their devices hunting for downgrading information.
For the software case, one can look up various DRM-stripping tools, many of which will specify themselves as working only with certain older versions of the application that they attack, or (holding one's nose) attempt to connect to a DRMed service and be informed that you will need to upgrade to get access.
Within the specific domain of OS security I have no interest in arguing with your correctness; but you appear to have stepped into something quite different in attempting to talk about anti-customer security features, which are subject to their own peculiar dynamics... Try not to be rude when travelling.
I find is argument a bit dodgy when it concerns a first-amendment challenge to a state law regulating adults.
If little Timmy Jones were to, after being denied a hit of sweet, sweet, GTA, file a civil-rights case against Mr. and Ms. Jones for the suppression of his free speech rights, the fact that the constitutional framers did not see themselves as freeing children from the restrictions of their parents/guardians would be relevant to his getting shot down. As far as suggesting that the mores of the writers(as well as the letter of the document) don't suggest that parents couldn't regulate their children, he is correct. That doesn't seem to go sufficiently far to justify the state regulating the 'speech' of sellers toward people who enter their stores.
The other thing that seems a little problematic, with his 'argument from the mores of the time the document was written' approach is that(for no reason to be found in any constitutional amendments), he focuses on a single aspect of those mores, rather than importing them wholesale: Even if there is concrete evidence that state restriction of people's speech to children was indeed accepted, the definition of "children" at the time almost certainly wouldn't have been "people under 18". That being the case, shouldn't the mores of the founders demand that a law restricting speech to/from those under the modern definition of child be shot down for infringing upon the rights of 15/16/17(or whatever the exact age range was at the time, consult your local historian) year old adults, while one that was careful to only apply to 'children' in the late 18th century sense would be ok?
In the same vein, other than a few, quite specific, places(abolition of slavery, voting rights for blacks/prior slaves/women, assurance of 18+ people the right to vote) the constitution doesn't bother mentioning mores at all. Unless the law specifically touches upon one of those amended rights, you could justify the constitutionality of anything that a late 18th century crowd would have been OK with.
If you feel that the government has any business deciding who can buy what games, you're not actually a conservative at all.
Historically speaking, conservatism's libertarian wing is something of an anomaly, and exists largely in reaction to the rise of the concept of welfare states. It's those scurrilous 'liberals' with their 'innovation' who want to destroy the moral foundations of society by decriminalizing blasphemy, lesse majesty, and other such crimes against the morality of the people.
I have no problem with the existence of the feature(though I'd much prefer it to be handled by firefox having a default config file/folder location and optionally being invoked with the location of a separate one). I object to the fact that, while the profile switching process is a touch too clunky to be a valuable feature for moving between preset combinations of, say, plugin settings, in routine use, it is too likely to poke its head up without you wanting it to if a silent firefox.exe process is hanging onto your default profile.
The Court’s decision today does not comport with the
original public understanding of the First Amendment.
The majority strikes down, as facially unconstitutional, a
state law that prohibits the direct sale or rental of certain
video games to minors because the law “abridg[es] the
freedom of speech.” U. S. Const., Amdt. 1. But I do not
think the First Amendment stretches that far.
The practices and beliefs of the founding generation establish that
“the freedom of speech,” as originally understood, does not
include a right to speak to minors (or a right of minors to
access speech) without going through the minors’ parents
or guardians. I would hold that the law at issue is not
facially unconstitutional under the First Amendment, and
reverse and remand for further proceedings."
Justice Thomas should, perhaps, stop to consider that the "practices and beliefs of the founding generation" establish a number of other interesting boundaries to the distribution of various freedoms...
There's also the fact that, since the US received a major slice of the most discontented(economically, politically, or both) Irish available, purged most of the British loyalists to Canada after the revolutionary war and didn't receive nearly as many brits thereafter, it isn't as though obtaining popular support was a terribly difficult PR coup on the IRA's part... The US has long been a major source of funds, and a steady stream of politicians who need votes in norther industrial cities and law-enforcement guys named "Agent Murphey" had a completely surprising amount of difficulty cutting off the funding of this foreign terrorist organization.
Although we have been Official Best Trans-Atlantic Buddies with Great Britain, home of the Europeans most likely to speak an endearingly accented dialect of American, for a long while now our support in the fight against the IRA has been practically Pakistani in its... er... somewhat variable... enthusiasm.
If you make the best browser available, you'll serve the needs of both businesses and individuals.
As long as the best browser available includes a binary-compatible emulation of IE6 running on XP(no service packs) with admin privileges, Macromedia Flash Player 6.0.21.0 and an MSJVM...
On the one hand, I am pleased by Mozilla's self-conscious understanding of the fact that 'enterprise' and home/SB are different, and that you can't really serve both simultaneously. Being stuck in the 'we can't kill IE6 until SA support for XP ends, if not even later" hell is lousy for the development of the browser and the web generally. Being willing to release early and often is a good thing. A few minor changes(ie. plugins check for compatibility by feature, rather than version number, and/or a "don't autoupdate until the plugins on this list have compatible versions" option) might be nice; but worrying about catering to the backwards compatibility needs of people's intranet crap and the like is a waste of time.
However, there are a few things that show up as painful most keenly in "enterprise" deployment scenarios; but which are more about remnants of archaic design, not tradeoffs between home and enterprise users. The fact that you can still run into the "Profiles" management dialog box without doing anything web-developery seems like something that crawled unbidden from the horrible days before multi-user OSes ran on desktops people could afford. Similarly, the fact that there is minimal treatment of installing a plugin for everybody on a machine, vs. installing it just for yourself(hardly an "enterprise" requirement: many home computers are shared by multiple people, and administered by the sort of people most likely to be unable to handle ad-blocking or the like at the network level)...
Umm... Also, Irish Catholics have been blowing shit up since well before the days when Bin Laden and his Jihad buddies were still CIA contractors in the war against the Evil Empire. They did tend to avoid suicide bombing, preferring a mixture of rifle attacks, the occasional RPG, and mortar and bomb attacks of varying degrees of sophistication...
1. In most walled gardens with cryptographically secured clients(either hardware devices or software DRM piles on general purpose PCs) downgrading is a valuable tool for attackers: unless a fundamental attack is found, most attacks are comparatively minor bugs in version N or game Y's savegame loading routine or whatever, which are then fixed in version N+1 or game Y Gold Edition. If downgrading is possible, it becomes pretty trivial for people to keep a copy of the easiest-to-exploit firmware or software version that ever received a cryptographic signature, and then downgrade to it. If downgrading isn't possible, they have to keep finding fresh exploits as old holes are closed. This is the same reason why software that connects to DRMed media sources tends to get updated a zillion times a year, and why such updates are generally made mandatory pretty quickly.
2. At least some of the updates, for Apple's flagship devices(upon which the iPod touch and wifi-only iPad are sort of hangers-on), aren't just OS update lumps, they also meddle with the embedded cellular hardware's firmware. Allowing downgrading would require dealing with v.N+1 basebands talking to v.N OSes, or involve allowing the baseband firmware to be downgraded(which is of interest to unlockers and other parties who Apple's carrier buddies don't approve of) and may involve some amount of bricking risk.
3. Apple has, at least until shitstorms forced their hand, never been much troubled at the idea that they are seen as forcing people to upgrade(remember their original response to the iPod battery life problem, until whining forced them to change it? Or the various OS 10.x releases that have dropped support for hardware configs upon which, once the version check is hacked away, it can in fact run?). This seems to be a matter both of business and of philosophy: Obviously, as a hardware maker, anything that makes people buy new hardware is profitable. Philosophically, they have never shied away from a pattern of releases of the form "Here is version N+1, it is insanely great. Everything prior to today is an obsolete archaism. On the plus side, this allows them to do interesting things with some regularity. On the minus side, this makes them quite happy to declare various features dead well before some of their customers are ready. The idea that they would dedicate engineering effort to allowing people with version N-1 or N-2 devices to run an obsolete OS runs against their priorities.
I eagerly await an explanation of how a private-sector NGO with a set of voluntary participants setting whatever terms and conditions of use they wish to for their own sites and servers represents "Communism", much less a "Ministry"...
Obtaining the precise numbers would be a bit hairy; but I suspect so.
Depending on the fuel in use, your heat->mechanical energy conversion will always live in the shadow of that spoil-sport Carnot, along with any engineering limitations. In practice, I'm told that you get something in the vicinity of 30-50 percent(of the fuel at the plant, it still has to be shipped there, though at least bulk shipping is easier, per unit goods, than household delivery). After that, you still have the generator that the turbine is driving, along with the power transmission apparatus.
By contrast, since heat is the desired product, the only 'waste' heat in an onsite burn is whatever goes up with the stack gasses and whatever goes to the delivery truck. At least with oil heat, in the northeast, we had about one delivery a year. Unless the truck managed to burn half its payload getting to us, I suspect that we came out ahead.
Peripheral electrical generation, with heat engines, is something you do only for backup purposes; because small heat engines pretty much inevitably suck more than huge ones; but when all you want is heat, the only real efficiency issues are the engineering problems of cooling the exhaust gasses before they leave the premises.
At least in the colder regions of the country, "heating" doesn't usually show up on the electric bill. Electric heating is extremely convenient to install, and good for point work; but the inefficiency of burning something, converting it to electricity, running that through transmission lines, just to dump it into a big resistor at the other end is a bit much.
Air conditioning is likely a lot worse; but, because everybody knows that it is extremely energy intensive, thermostatic regulation has been standard since the mechanisms for achieving it were bimetallic, and microproccessor based scheduling systems creep in pretty quickly once you get away from the nastiest of basic window units.
By contrast, it sounds like team STB has somehow managed to miss Every Single Development in computer and embedded device power management in the last decade. Ironically, they've probably even managed to achieve an outcome where Intel muscling in with their x86 (barely) SoC designs would actually be more efficient than highly-integrated task specific media SoCs; because at least they would incorporate their laptop power management techniques more or less for free. Impressive work.
"One thing I find myself wondering about is whether we shouldn’t try and make the "ACPI" extensions somehow Windows
specific.
It seems unfortunate if we do this work and get our partners to do the work and the result is that Linux works great without
having to do the work.
Maybe there is no way Io avoid this problem but it does bother me.
Maybe we couid define the APIs so that they work well with NT and not the others even if they are open."
While this article is a touch overblown, stories like this make me profoundly pessimistic about the advent of EFI...
Yeah, the BIOS pretty much sucks, and its horrible backwards-compatibility hackery makes purists cry; but the very fact that it sucks so much has had the basically positive effect of keeping vendors from trying to get too clever it. Given the results of their trying to do so(like everybody's favorite problem child, ACPI) this is probably a good thing.
EFI, especially in conjunction with CPUs that have hardware level virtualization support, is pretty much an entire second OS, moonlighting as a bootloader, that you either have to perform coreboot-platform-port level black magic to replace(if the board even allows you, you might also have to defeat some sort of firmware integrity check) or lament unto your motherboard vendor in hope of getting fixed. If buggy BIOSes are an issue now, buggy EFI will be a fucking nightmare. The last thing we want is more and more stuff going on under the surface, with development handled by motherboard OEMs with, to put it charitably, no OS-development experience worth putting on a CV...
At least the suckitude of the classic BIOS created a de-facto pressure toward "let the bootloader bootload and then GTFO so that the OS can handle things". Ideally, we could have just had a modern, lessons-learned, minimal bootloader, that could skip the brief sojourn to the 80s; but still bugger off as fast as possible. Instead, we are facing the looming advent of having every computer running two OSes with hardware access, even after the bootloading is done, the resultant messy(but model/firmware-revision specific) infighting of which are going to make ACPI look like an architecturally elegant story of idyllic peaceful cooperation...
Hard to say without the exact specs of the machine, and probably a bunch of test-probes clipped in awkward places inside the laptop; but the overall trend in hardware does seem to have been toward ever higher theoretical maximum-if-we-felt-like-burning-that-much power draw(remember back when a ~50-80 watt CPU was considered a howling-mad-danger-to-self-and-others overclock/overvolt insanity demandng nerves of steel and custom cooling? Now boring retail CPUs have TDPs in the ~130 watt range); but a corresponding increase in the ability of hardware to throttle various clocks(CPU, GPU, high sped busses), sometimes cut Vcore as well, and turn off(or very nearly so) unused peripherals.
Exactly where the delta exists vs. Windows seems to be a matter of some confusion; but unless Linux is just plain burning more CPU time for housekeeping purposes(which, one assumes, is the sort of things that the Big Serious Corporate users of 1000+ node commodity server/compute setups would have noticed by now), it likely rests largely in the hands of a (no doubt alarmingly large and ever changing) set of hardware-specific power throttling stuff whose responsibilities were designed to be divided between the buggy BIOS and the vendor's Windows drivers. If it were Just One Mistake, it'd likely have been quashed by now...
Once upon a time, shortly after an asteroid impact wiped out the vacuum tubes; but before Steve Jobs invented aluminum, we had computers that plugged into the wall, with CPUs that ran all the time at pretty much the same power level. Even when idle. Back in those days, had most people's schedulers not kind of sucked, there may actually have been some "free" CPU time floating about.
Now, back to the present: On average, today's computer has a pretty substantial delta between power at full load and power at idle. This is almost 100% certainly the case if the computer is a laptop or embedded device of some kind(which is also where the difference in battery life will come to the user's notice most quickly). CPU load gets converted into heat, power draw, and fan noise within moments of being imposed.
Now, it still might be the case that wikipedia readers are feeling altruistic; but, if so, javascript is an unbelievably inefficient mechanism for attacking the sort of problems where you would want a large distributed computing system. A java plugin would be much better, an application better still, at which point you are right back to today, where we have a number of voluntary distributed computing projects.
If they wished to enforce, rather then persuade, they'd run into the unpleasant set of problems with people blocking/throttling/lying about the results of/etc. the computations being farmed out. Given wikipedia's popularity, plugins for doing so in all major browsers would be available within about 15 minutes. Even without them, most modern browsers pop up some sort of "a script on this page is using more CPU time than humanity possessed when you were born to twiddle the DOM to no apparent effect, would you like to give it the fate it deserves?" message if JS starts eating enough time to hurt responsiveness.
Aside from the(no doubt sticky) legal issues, there is the problem that for most purposes, the most 'local' portion of the network is not the limiting factor in the network's utility:
There've been a number of real-world cases, I believe in Canada, where the local good-guys-mom-'n-pop ISPs have been "neutral/non-throttling"; but the Evil Telco Empire from which they had to lease their access was engaged in throttling, so the fact that they weren't touching customers' packets didn't end up mattering much. Either you could buy direct from Evil Telco, and have your packets die, or buy from the good guys, and have your packets die when they went further upstream.
In practice, I suspect that a much better deterrent to various nefarious telco practices is simply municipal fiber installs. Based on the frankly vicious legal maneuvering that comes up every time one is mentioned, it would appear that the incumbents are very, very afraid of them. This suggests that they are a good thing. Obviously, one wants to ensure that the local godbots/RIAA flacks/national security fascists don't insert a "no evil upon the people's internet" provision into the municipal fiber buildout; but, as best I've been able to tell, net-nonneutrality efforts, so far, have pretty much entirely been rent-seeking measures that crop up because of seriously tepid competition. It's not that telcos have some ideological axe to grind, they just want to squeeze as much as they can out of you. Compete with them, and they'll either stop dicking around with things that customers hate, or at least make sucky internet extremely cheap.
Some of the attacks on companies appear to have been purely random; but some have been hit because(as here), there really isn't a sharp corporate/state divide...
Slashdot Mirror
Conservatism's libertarian wing...
Libertarian (or sometimes "classical liberal") ideas go back a good deal further, as you state; but they were, until fairly recently, seen as an anticonservative group, reacting against divine-right monarchies, state churches, and so forth.
Libertarianism is not new; but the idea that it is (largely) a wing of conservatism is.
I was thinking of some of the laws that applied to slaves(eg. state-level restrictions on educating them, for instance) and later the various jim-crow stuff.
The 14th amendment specifically codified certain rights in a way that likely contradicted the framers' intentions; but anything not so codified, and there was a lot, would presumably apply equally to the 'framers' understanding of the limits of a right' argument.
Wow. I don't get mistaken for a mac enthusiast often.
I think that your work in OS security may have induced a certain amount of myopia. My discussion purely applied to DRM systems because DRM systems are the only scenario where the 'attacker' has access to the system from day one(it's their device, or the software running on their PC); and wishes to compromise the system's security. With other classes of software, the person with personal access and the vendor are allies in wanting the system to be secure.
If you think I'm a non-technical idiot, pull your head out of the confines of one particular flavor of security work and do a little research:
It's pretty painless: Wikipedia has a list of iOS/baseband firmware versions, with handy notes about which baseband 'fixes' are there to deal with unlocking... A little googling will dig up some of the oddities involved in trying to mix versions. For virtually any DRM/walled garden system in wide consumer use(say, iDevice/PS3/xbox/Wii/PSP/DS/DSi) a quick google of 'Name downgrade' will pull up a sheet of results containing, depending on the system, a mixture of information on how to downgrade to more vulnerable firmware before running a hack or people with presently unhacked firmware on their devices hunting for downgrading information.
For the software case, one can look up various DRM-stripping tools, many of which will specify themselves as working only with certain older versions of the application that they attack, or (holding one's nose) attempt to connect to a DRMed service and be informed that you will need to upgrade to get access.
Within the specific domain of OS security I have no interest in arguing with your correctness; but you appear to have stepped into something quite different in attempting to talk about anti-customer security features, which are subject to their own peculiar dynamics... Try not to be rude when travelling.
I find is argument a bit dodgy when it concerns a first-amendment challenge to a state law regulating adults.
If little Timmy Jones were to, after being denied a hit of sweet, sweet, GTA, file a civil-rights case against Mr. and Ms. Jones for the suppression of his free speech rights, the fact that the constitutional framers did not see themselves as freeing children from the restrictions of their parents/guardians would be relevant to his getting shot down. As far as suggesting that the mores of the writers(as well as the letter of the document) don't suggest that parents couldn't regulate their children, he is correct. That doesn't seem to go sufficiently far to justify the state regulating the 'speech' of sellers toward people who enter their stores.
The other thing that seems a little problematic, with his 'argument from the mores of the time the document was written' approach is that(for no reason to be found in any constitutional amendments), he focuses on a single aspect of those mores, rather than importing them wholesale: Even if there is concrete evidence that state restriction of people's speech to children was indeed accepted, the definition of "children" at the time almost certainly wouldn't have been "people under 18". That being the case, shouldn't the mores of the founders demand that a law restricting speech to/from those under the modern definition of child be shot down for infringing upon the rights of 15/16/17(or whatever the exact age range was at the time, consult your local historian) year old adults, while one that was careful to only apply to 'children' in the late 18th century sense would be ok?
In the same vein, other than a few, quite specific, places(abolition of slavery, voting rights for blacks/prior slaves/women, assurance of 18+ people the right to vote) the constitution doesn't bother mentioning mores at all. Unless the law specifically touches upon one of those amended rights, you could justify the constitutionality of anything that a late 18th century crowd would have been OK with.
If you feel that the government has any business deciding who can buy what games, you're not actually a conservative at all.
Historically speaking, conservatism's libertarian wing is something of an anomaly, and exists largely in reaction to the rise of the concept of welfare states. It's those scurrilous 'liberals' with their 'innovation' who want to destroy the moral foundations of society by decriminalizing blasphemy, lesse majesty, and other such crimes against the morality of the people.
I have no problem with the existence of the feature(though I'd much prefer it to be handled by firefox having a default config file/folder location and optionally being invoked with the location of a separate one). I object to the fact that, while the profile switching process is a touch too clunky to be a valuable feature for moving between preset combinations of, say, plugin settings, in routine use, it is too likely to poke its head up without you wanting it to if a silent firefox.exe process is hanging onto your default profile.
" JUSTICE THOMAS, dissenting.
The Court’s decision today does not comport with the original public understanding of the First Amendment. The majority strikes down, as facially unconstitutional, a state law that prohibits the direct sale or rental of certain video games to minors because the law “abridg[es] the freedom of speech.” U. S. Const., Amdt. 1. But I do not think the First Amendment stretches that far.
The practices and beliefs of the founding generation establish that “the freedom of speech,” as originally understood, does not include a right to speak to minors (or a right of minors to access speech) without going through the minors’ parents or guardians. I would hold that the law at issue is not facially unconstitutional under the First Amendment, and reverse and remand for further proceedings."
Justice Thomas should, perhaps, stop to consider that the "practices and beliefs of the founding generation" establish a number of other interesting boundaries to the distribution of various freedoms...
The version that the vendor wants you to be running is always the best version. It's axiomatic.
There's also the fact that, since the US received a major slice of the most discontented(economically, politically, or both) Irish available, purged most of the British loyalists to Canada after the revolutionary war and didn't receive nearly as many brits thereafter, it isn't as though obtaining popular support was a terribly difficult PR coup on the IRA's part... The US has long been a major source of funds, and a steady stream of politicians who need votes in norther industrial cities and law-enforcement guys named "Agent Murphey" had a completely surprising amount of difficulty cutting off the funding of this foreign terrorist organization.
Although we have been Official Best Trans-Atlantic Buddies with Great Britain, home of the Europeans most likely to speak an endearingly accented dialect of American, for a long while now our support in the fight against the IRA has been practically Pakistani in its... er... somewhat variable... enthusiasm.
If you make the best browser available, you'll serve the needs of both businesses and individuals.
As long as the best browser available includes a binary-compatible emulation of IE6 running on XP(no service packs) with admin privileges, Macromedia Flash Player 6.0.21.0 and an MSJVM...
On the one hand, I am pleased by Mozilla's self-conscious understanding of the fact that 'enterprise' and home/SB are different, and that you can't really serve both simultaneously. Being stuck in the 'we can't kill IE6 until SA support for XP ends, if not even later" hell is lousy for the development of the browser and the web generally. Being willing to release early and often is a good thing. A few minor changes(ie. plugins check for compatibility by feature, rather than version number, and/or a "don't autoupdate until the plugins on this list have compatible versions" option) might be nice; but worrying about catering to the backwards compatibility needs of people's intranet crap and the like is a waste of time.
However, there are a few things that show up as painful most keenly in "enterprise" deployment scenarios; but which are more about remnants of archaic design, not tradeoffs between home and enterprise users. The fact that you can still run into the "Profiles" management dialog box without doing anything web-developery seems like something that crawled unbidden from the horrible days before multi-user OSes ran on desktops people could afford. Similarly, the fact that there is minimal treatment of installing a plugin for everybody on a machine, vs. installing it just for yourself(hardly an "enterprise" requirement: many home computers are shared by multiple people, and administered by the sort of people most likely to be unable to handle ad-blocking or the like at the network level)...
Umm... Also, Irish Catholics have been blowing shit up since well before the days when Bin Laden and his Jihad buddies were still CIA contractors in the war against the Evil Empire. They did tend to avoid suicide bombing, preferring a mixture of rifle attacks, the occasional RPG, and mortar and bomb attacks of varying degrees of sophistication...
Three reasons, I suspect:
1. In most walled gardens with cryptographically secured clients(either hardware devices or software DRM piles on general purpose PCs) downgrading is a valuable tool for attackers: unless a fundamental attack is found, most attacks are comparatively minor bugs in version N or game Y's savegame loading routine or whatever, which are then fixed in version N+1 or game Y Gold Edition. If downgrading is possible, it becomes pretty trivial for people to keep a copy of the easiest-to-exploit firmware or software version that ever received a cryptographic signature, and then downgrade to it. If downgrading isn't possible, they have to keep finding fresh exploits as old holes are closed. This is the same reason why software that connects to DRMed media sources tends to get updated a zillion times a year, and why such updates are generally made mandatory pretty quickly.
2. At least some of the updates, for Apple's flagship devices(upon which the iPod touch and wifi-only iPad are sort of hangers-on), aren't just OS update lumps, they also meddle with the embedded cellular hardware's firmware. Allowing downgrading would require dealing with v.N+1 basebands talking to v.N OSes, or involve allowing the baseband firmware to be downgraded(which is of interest to unlockers and other parties who Apple's carrier buddies don't approve of) and may involve some amount of bricking risk.
3. Apple has, at least until shitstorms forced their hand, never been much troubled at the idea that they are seen as forcing people to upgrade(remember their original response to the iPod battery life problem, until whining forced them to change it? Or the various OS 10.x releases that have dropped support for hardware configs upon which, once the version check is hacked away, it can in fact run?). This seems to be a matter both of business and of philosophy: Obviously, as a hardware maker, anything that makes people buy new hardware is profitable. Philosophically, they have never shied away from a pattern of releases of the form "Here is version N+1, it is insanely great. Everything prior to today is an obsolete archaism. On the plus side, this allows them to do interesting things with some regularity. On the minus side, this makes them quite happy to declare various features dead well before some of their customers are ready. The idea that they would dedicate engineering effort to allowing people with version N-1 or N-2 devices to run an obsolete OS runs against their priorities.
I eagerly await an explanation of how a private-sector NGO with a set of voluntary participants setting whatever terms and conditions of use they wish to for their own sites and servers represents "Communism", much less a "Ministry"...
Wikilove isn't; but WikiTrue, whose agents spend their days marking ideologically problematic material with a "citation needed", is.
Obtaining the precise numbers would be a bit hairy; but I suspect so.
Depending on the fuel in use, your heat->mechanical energy conversion will always live in the shadow of that spoil-sport Carnot, along with any engineering limitations. In practice, I'm told that you get something in the vicinity of 30-50 percent(of the fuel at the plant, it still has to be shipped there, though at least bulk shipping is easier, per unit goods, than household delivery). After that, you still have the generator that the turbine is driving, along with the power transmission apparatus.
By contrast, since heat is the desired product, the only 'waste' heat in an onsite burn is whatever goes up with the stack gasses and whatever goes to the delivery truck. At least with oil heat, in the northeast, we had about one delivery a year. Unless the truck managed to burn half its payload getting to us, I suspect that we came out ahead.
Peripheral electrical generation, with heat engines, is something you do only for backup purposes; because small heat engines pretty much inevitably suck more than huge ones; but when all you want is heat, the only real efficiency issues are the engineering problems of cooling the exhaust gasses before they leave the premises.
At least in the colder regions of the country, "heating" doesn't usually show up on the electric bill. Electric heating is extremely convenient to install, and good for point work; but the inefficiency of burning something, converting it to electricity, running that through transmission lines, just to dump it into a big resistor at the other end is a bit much.
Air conditioning is likely a lot worse; but, because everybody knows that it is extremely energy intensive, thermostatic regulation has been standard since the mechanisms for achieving it were bimetallic, and microproccessor based scheduling systems creep in pretty quickly once you get away from the nastiest of basic window units.
By contrast, it sounds like team STB has somehow managed to miss Every Single Development in computer and embedded device power management in the last decade. Ironically, they've probably even managed to achieve an outcome where Intel muscling in with their x86 (barely) SoC designs would actually be more efficient than highly-integrated task specific media SoCs; because at least they would incorporate their laptop power management techniques more or less for free. Impressive work.
This behavior is by design:
"One thing I find myself wondering about is whether we shouldn’t try and make the "ACPI" extensions somehow Windows specific.
It seems unfortunate if we do this work and get our partners to do the work and the result is that Linux works great without having to do the work.
Maybe there is no way Io avoid this problem but it does bother me. Maybe we couid define the APIs so that they work well with NT and not the others even if they are open."
William H. Gates III
While this article is a touch overblown, stories like this make me profoundly pessimistic about the advent of EFI...
Yeah, the BIOS pretty much sucks, and its horrible backwards-compatibility hackery makes purists cry; but the very fact that it sucks so much has had the basically positive effect of keeping vendors from trying to get too clever it. Given the results of their trying to do so(like everybody's favorite problem child, ACPI) this is probably a good thing.
EFI, especially in conjunction with CPUs that have hardware level virtualization support, is pretty much an entire second OS, moonlighting as a bootloader, that you either have to perform coreboot-platform-port level black magic to replace(if the board even allows you, you might also have to defeat some sort of firmware integrity check) or lament unto your motherboard vendor in hope of getting fixed. If buggy BIOSes are an issue now, buggy EFI will be a fucking nightmare. The last thing we want is more and more stuff going on under the surface, with development handled by motherboard OEMs with, to put it charitably, no OS-development experience worth putting on a CV...
At least the suckitude of the classic BIOS created a de-facto pressure toward "let the bootloader bootload and then GTFO so that the OS can handle things". Ideally, we could have just had a modern, lessons-learned, minimal bootloader, that could skip the brief sojourn to the 80s; but still bugger off as fast as possible. Instead, we are facing the looming advent of having every computer running two OSes with hardware access, even after the bootloading is done, the resultant messy(but model/firmware-revision specific) infighting of which are going to make ACPI look like an architecturally elegant story of idyllic peaceful cooperation...
Hard to say without the exact specs of the machine, and probably a bunch of test-probes clipped in awkward places inside the laptop; but the overall trend in hardware does seem to have been toward ever higher theoretical maximum-if-we-felt-like-burning-that-much power draw(remember back when a ~50-80 watt CPU was considered a howling-mad-danger-to-self-and-others overclock/overvolt insanity demandng nerves of steel and custom cooling? Now boring retail CPUs have TDPs in the ~130 watt range); but a corresponding increase in the ability of hardware to throttle various clocks(CPU, GPU, high sped busses), sometimes cut Vcore as well, and turn off(or very nearly so) unused peripherals.
Exactly where the delta exists vs. Windows seems to be a matter of some confusion; but unless Linux is just plain burning more CPU time for housekeeping purposes(which, one assumes, is the sort of things that the Big Serious Corporate users of 1000+ node commodity server/compute setups would have noticed by now), it likely rests largely in the hands of a (no doubt alarmingly large and ever changing) set of hardware-specific power throttling stuff whose responsibilities were designed to be divided between the buggy BIOS and the vendor's Windows drivers. If it were Just One Mistake, it'd likely have been quashed by now...
Let me tell you a little story:
Once upon a time, shortly after an asteroid impact wiped out the vacuum tubes; but before Steve Jobs invented aluminum, we had computers that plugged into the wall, with CPUs that ran all the time at pretty much the same power level. Even when idle. Back in those days, had most people's schedulers not kind of sucked, there may actually have been some "free" CPU time floating about.
Now, back to the present: On average, today's computer has a pretty substantial delta between power at full load and power at idle. This is almost 100% certainly the case if the computer is a laptop or embedded device of some kind(which is also where the difference in battery life will come to the user's notice most quickly). CPU load gets converted into heat, power draw, and fan noise within moments of being imposed.
Now, it still might be the case that wikipedia readers are feeling altruistic; but, if so, javascript is an unbelievably inefficient mechanism for attacking the sort of problems where you would want a large distributed computing system. A java plugin would be much better, an application better still, at which point you are right back to today, where we have a number of voluntary distributed computing projects.
If they wished to enforce, rather then persuade, they'd run into the unpleasant set of problems with people blocking/throttling/lying about the results of/etc. the computations being farmed out. Given wikipedia's popularity, plugins for doing so in all major browsers would be available within about 15 minutes. Even without them, most modern browsers pop up some sort of "a script on this page is using more CPU time than humanity possessed when you were born to twiddle the DOM to no apparent effect, would you like to give it the fate it deserves?" message if JS starts eating enough time to hurt responsiveness.
In summary: Terrible Plan.
That seems logical. I suspect that that is the part, if any, that would give it teeth.
Aside from the(no doubt sticky) legal issues, there is the problem that for most purposes, the most 'local' portion of the network is not the limiting factor in the network's utility:
There've been a number of real-world cases, I believe in Canada, where the local good-guys-mom-'n-pop ISPs have been "neutral/non-throttling"; but the Evil Telco Empire from which they had to lease their access was engaged in throttling, so the fact that they weren't touching customers' packets didn't end up mattering much. Either you could buy direct from Evil Telco, and have your packets die, or buy from the good guys, and have your packets die when they went further upstream.
In practice, I suspect that a much better deterrent to various nefarious telco practices is simply municipal fiber installs. Based on the frankly vicious legal maneuvering that comes up every time one is mentioned, it would appear that the incumbents are very, very afraid of them. This suggests that they are a good thing. Obviously, one wants to ensure that the local godbots/RIAA flacks/national security fascists don't insert a "no evil upon the people's internet" provision into the municipal fiber buildout; but, as best I've been able to tell, net-nonneutrality efforts, so far, have pretty much entirely been rent-seeking measures that crop up because of seriously tepid competition. It's not that telcos have some ideological axe to grind, they just want to squeeze as much as they can out of you. Compete with them, and they'll either stop dicking around with things that customers hate, or at least make sucky internet extremely cheap.
Y'know, in terms of 'collateral damage per unit freedom', Lulzsec is still doing pretty well...
Some of the attacks on companies appear to have been purely random; but some have been hit because(as here), there really isn't a sharp corporate/state divide...