Virtual items in this case can't be counterfeited,
Tell that to the record labels.
they can't be traded transparantly(ie. the government sees "billy the crack dealer" on the invoice at the end of the month and goes "hmmmm..."),
I give you my shopping list, you go buy groceries, I give you crack. I either use or sell groceries. Of course, a real scam would be arranged more subtly (hacked terminals and payed off staff), but the above is just a proof of concept.
The rest of the criticiosms of food stamps are just as applicable -- eg they are still a second currency to be abused by politicians, they still discourage budgeting (except, perversely, among drug addicts) etc. etc.
The point is that throwing in technology doesn't help when the problems are with the concept, not the implementation.
The only advantage to food stamps is that they allow politicians to pretend they are preventing people recieving benefits from acessing `luxuries'. They are purely a PR scheme, and one which imposes massive social and economic costs.
the US can put more money into the international project instead of its own.
The US wasn't putting any money into FIRE. $2 million for people to sit around tables saying `wouldn't it be nice if we had a fusion programme' (i.e. a pre-conceptual study) is nothing but a fig leaf. It was a place holder to say the US might set up a programme of it's own if it didn't get all it's own way with ITER. Aparently this didn't impress anyone, so there is no point in doing another $2million nothing next year.
Just look at the International Space Station for another example. In my mind, this project has unlimited potential.
The ISS never had any potential. It was a PR stunt for NASA who needed an excuse for keeping the shuttle flying, an excuse to pump money into the former SU for the white house, and the other `parnters' just saw free money for building bits of high-tech white elephant.
As an example of an international project which does produce results, look at CERN.
Let us say that the poor really should sell off their unnecessary belongings in order to qualify as poor (for the sake of social programs).
You missed an additional effect, this would destroy the second hand market for such things, and so the poor people in question would get mroe or less nothing for these things they were selling anyway.
The only people to benefit would be those who are well off enough to not need to get rid of their posessions, but tight enough to not want to pay for a spare TV for the garden shed, who could pick on out of the skip where some poor person had had to dump it.
Nothing like a scheme to redistribute property from the poorest to those with money. It's like the lottery but without the side effect of taxing the innumerate rich!
If you have a computer/TV that you haven't sold for food/rent money then you're not poor.
If someone has a TV they could sell for a fiver, and needs the fiver to eat this week, then clearly they will starve next week.
Thus, by your definition, there can be no poor people, except for the minute number in the gap between selling their last saleable capital asset and dieing.
Please god, don't let Tony or Shrub read this. I can just see them cutting benefits by 5 quid/ 10 dollars a year and giving every claiment an 80th hand TV, then claiming there is no more poverty.
So don't use stamps or tokens, use debit cards, like we do in the states.
So far as I can see, this has all the failings I listed, plus probably some more related to the technology. Adding technology to a bad social system just results in a bad social system with technological snafus.
We should do it that way here in the UK, rather than just handing money out on the benefits system.
Food stamps have three main effects. They provide a currency which can be used to purchase heroin or gin, but not (say) books or clothes, they remove any incentive to learn to budget and/or cook, resulting in a diet of junk food, and they provide something easier for forgers to tackle when currency it temporarilly made too hard to copy.
They have no significant effect on people thinking of cheating the system, since they will just sell the tokens through the black market. Indeed, they will tend to make the people administering the system less vigilant since they believe they aren't handing out cash.
Oh, yes, and they are another form of money for the government to print which comes under the control of the politicians, not the bankers, and so will tend to be abused and so have an inflationary effect.
On the other hand they do provide a boost to the vital pointless-paperwork industry, removing from small businesses owners the temptation to do something useful in the evening.
Maybe I'mmissing something, but none of the fed statements seem to explicitly say they are going to use the internet.
I was reading an article the other day about one of the big international financial networks switching to IP protocols, but they were going to do it over a private network. The fed could be going to IP via dial up to replace whatever dos monstrosity they have over dial up.
The funny part of the article I was reading was that they were supposedly moving from `outdated' X25 to `modern' IP. Aren't they both children of the 70s? (if you look closely, each packet has platform soles and flared trousers)
But nothing would be listening on anything other than loopback if lpd had a safe default.
From man lpd:
The -s (secure) flag causes lpd not to open an Internet listening
socket. This means that lpd will not accept any connections from
any remote hosts, although it will still accept print requests
from all local users.
Well, most of that comes with the small shell script and ghostscript. Eg, printing from windows in postsccript to a non postscript printer (though samba makes configuring the windows end easier).
Mind you, sticking the printer on a cheap networkable print server was the best move I ever made in that direction.
I can see it being useful for large, varied unix instalations.
Top politicians of many countries have come in for an intense grilling off John Humprys and James Noughoty
I loved the interview with the saudi bod (ambasador? minister?) the other morning. After he sniffily said he was there to talk about Iraq, not the diplomatic immunity squabble, the interviewer politely said `yes I know' and asked him aboput the diplomatic immunity thing again. You could hear the guy's blood pressure going up. He was clearly not used to being actually expected to say something meaningful.
God no! That would mean I lived in (shudder) London.
I don't know what technology the Lothian ones are based on, I had assuemd they were not `RFID' mostly because they predate my being aware of RFID as a technology, and the very short range. Probably I have the wrong end of the `RFID' stick, as to what the term covers. I understood it to be a standard for low-capacity, wireless scanning (ie what you need to replace barcodes) and distinct from standards for smarter things (such as the ITSO transport smartcard standard).
Does anyone know of an overview so I can get my acronyms sorted out?
Can't say about retinal or iris patterns, but fingerprints are so dodgy, even when compared by experts, that the US government felt the need to ban funding of any study into how reliable they are. (New Scientist report).
I think we can assume that if they thought the results of such a study would be positive they would be pouring money at it, in the hope of being able ditch that embarassing `images are very like themselves' study.
I have a smart card which is a 12 month unlimited bus pass (and so worth more than my PDA now I come to think of it).
This is contactless, in the sense that it is read by just being placed on top of a box on the bus. I doubt it can be read from further away (or they'd just put detectors in the door and speed up the queue).
Luckily they use a worthwhile biometric for identification. There is a photo on the card and a human being looking at it.
OK, if I install a whole stack of packages, which no doubt drag in lots more, I can do what I have been doing for years with a one-page shell script, a two line printcap entry and ghostscript.
I'm sure there must be some advantage of using CUPS which my ancient brain has missed, so can someone enlighten me?
Apart from your obvious troll anyway, haven't you heard of nice -20 ?
No need for that even, unless you want to share with other batch processing jobs. BSD does quite a reasonable job of keeping interactive things going while batch jobs do their business.
I set off a recompile of samba on the wrong machine the other week, by typing at the wrong window, and didn't notice my desktop was 90-odd percent occupied with compilation until the bizzare throbbing red corpuscle gkrellm uses to indicate high load was uncovered when I moved a window.
Modern over-muscled CPUs, modern memory sizes and good disk access subsystems are wonderful things.
Surely if your business is in insuring against something, it's not in your interest to do the research to show exactly how that thing can be brought about, even if in the first instance it improves your sales?
Depends. If the Bad Thing takes a few years to actually happen, as is the case with court cases,then you can sell lots of policies and pay yourself a huge sallary with benefits for a few years. Then, when everything falls apart and your company goes bust, you take your accumulated savings and retire. Or start a new company.
How can you know which paper is important in 1000 years?
You can't either for paper or electonic data. The difference is that paper tends to hang around, electronic texts just evaporate. Often it's not the important data which is important, IYSWIM, it is the ordinary stuff. Clay tablets with beurocratic records or merchant's stock lists are often more illuminating than royal proclomations.
A large library used to keep dozens of people busy. If you want to store such a tiny amount of information today, you need a couple of hard drives and copy their content every year.
But the point is people don't do that. How far back do your electronic archives go? I'm a complete packrat, but even I don't have email from 10 years ago anymore (though I do remember when I made the decision to drop it). I do have letters and uninteresting financial paperwork (bank statements etc) back that far. If the bank had been emailing me statements they would be long gone. Now, I have no reason to think my data will be of interest, but the point is that almost no one's records will survive more than a decade.
Historians of 19th century music or literature may or may not manage to get their hands on notebooks in which the early versions of a symphonic passage or story were scribbled down. Students of the 21st century will be stuck except for the very rare artist who uses version control.
Well, some paper documents survived. But that is a tiny fraction of the paper that has been created.
Evolution in action.
Post printing, survival of texts basicly depends on whether anyone gives a damn about them.
If no-one anywhere keeps a copy of your novel, it was probably not a very good novel.
If you talk to archivists, it is not the hard copy information they worry about, it is the electronic information which is ephemeral. A 19th century politician probably left behind a mass of paper with only the most embarassing stuff deleted. A current politician will leave much less. Someone born today who becomes a politician will probably leave nothing except what they want to be seen.
One nice thing about paper books is that they are integrated hardware and software. I can grab one and read. I never have to hunt around for a reader.
I can give a visitor a book and they can read it without having to remember whether they brought their reader with them, and without worry about DRM or compatability (apple e-books vs M$ e-books vs sony e-books anyone?).
I can take a book with me and drop it in a puddle and not worry to much because it will probably dry out and still work, and if not it's not too expensive an accident.
I can stick a bookmark in a book and it is there when I come back to it 3 years later.
If a book drops down the back of the bed, I can read another one, and fish the dropped one out next month when I happen to be fetching something from under the bed.
ISTM, to get close to this I would need a reader which is cheap enough that I can own as many of them as I own teaspoons or pencils, and they all need to share state (for bookmarks, and so losing one isn't painful). So not only do we need display, battery and other technology beyond the state of the art, we need it to sell for pennies.
We haven't yet reached this level of simple omnipresence for things as simple as TV remote controls. Next time you're hunting for your RC, imagine doing this every time you wanted to read something.
Slashdot Mirror
But don't trust any orders which some in with digital signatures.
Tell that to the record labels.
they can't be traded transparantly(ie. the government sees "billy the crack dealer" on the invoice at the end of the month and goes "hmmmm..."),
I give you my shopping list, you go buy groceries, I give you crack. I either use or sell groceries. Of course, a real scam would be arranged more subtly (hacked terminals and payed off staff), but the above is just a proof of concept.
The rest of the criticiosms of food stamps are just as applicable -- eg they are still a second currency to be abused by politicians, they still discourage budgeting (except, perversely, among drug addicts) etc. etc.
The point is that throwing in technology doesn't help when the problems are with the concept, not the implementation.
The only advantage to food stamps is that they allow politicians to pretend they are preventing people recieving benefits from acessing `luxuries'. They are purely a PR scheme, and one which imposes massive social and economic costs.
The US wasn't putting any money into FIRE. $2 million for people to sit around tables saying `wouldn't it be nice if we had a fusion programme' (i.e. a pre-conceptual study) is nothing but a fig leaf. It was a place holder to say the US might set up a programme of it's own if it didn't get all it's own way with ITER. Aparently this didn't impress anyone, so there is no point in doing another $2million nothing next year.
The ISS never had any potential. It was a PR stunt for NASA who needed an excuse for keeping the shuttle flying, an excuse to pump money into the former SU for the white house, and the other `parnters' just saw free money for building bits of high-tech white elephant.
As an example of an international project which does produce results, look at CERN.
You missed an additional effect, this would destroy the second hand market for such things, and so the poor people in question would get mroe or less nothing for these things they were selling anyway.
The only people to benefit would be those who are well off enough to not need to get rid of their posessions, but tight enough to not want to pay for a spare TV for the garden shed, who could pick on out of the skip where some poor person had had to dump it.
Nothing like a scheme to redistribute property from the poorest to those with money. It's like the lottery but without the side effect of taxing the innumerate rich!
If someone has a TV they could sell for a fiver, and needs the fiver to eat this week, then clearly they will starve next week.
Thus, by your definition, there can be no poor people, except for the minute number in the gap between selling their last saleable capital asset and dieing.
Please god, don't let Tony or Shrub read this. I can just see them cutting benefits by 5 quid/ 10 dollars a year and giving every claiment an 80th hand TV, then claiming there is no more poverty.
So far as I can see, this has all the failings I listed, plus probably some more related to the technology. Adding technology to a bad social system just results in a bad social system with technological snafus.
Nothing. No one gives a shit if someone getting food stamps dies.:-(
Food stamps have three main effects. They provide a currency which can be used to purchase heroin or gin, but not (say) books or clothes, they remove any incentive to learn to budget and/or cook, resulting in a diet of junk food, and they provide something easier for forgers to tackle when currency it temporarilly made too hard to copy.
They have no significant effect on people thinking of cheating the system, since they will just sell the tokens through the black market. Indeed, they will tend to make the people administering the system less vigilant since they believe they aren't handing out cash.
Oh, yes, and they are another form of money for the government to print which comes under the control of the politicians, not the bankers, and so will tend to be abused and so have an inflationary effect.
On the other hand they do provide a boost to the vital pointless-paperwork industry, removing from small businesses owners the temptation to do something useful in the evening.
I was reading an article the other day about one of the big international financial networks switching to IP protocols, but they were going to do it over a private network. The fed could be going to IP via dial up to replace whatever dos monstrosity they have over dial up.
The funny part of the article I was reading was that they were supposedly moving from `outdated' X25 to `modern' IP. Aren't they both children of the 70s? (if you look closely, each packet has platform soles and flared trousers)
From man lpd:
So maybe you need to get a real lpd:-)
Mind you, sticking the printer on a cheap networkable print server was the best move I ever made in that direction.
I can see it being useful for large, varied unix instalations.
"Will you guys shut the hell up!"
I loved the interview with the saudi bod (ambasador? minister?) the other morning. After he sniffily said he was there to talk about Iraq, not the diplomatic immunity squabble, the interviewer politely said `yes I know' and asked him aboput the diplomatic immunity thing again. You could hear the guy's blood pressure going up. He was clearly not used to being actually expected to say something meaningful.
God no! That would mean I lived in (shudder) London.
I don't know what technology the Lothian ones are based on, I had assuemd they were not `RFID' mostly because they predate my being aware of RFID as a technology, and the very short range. Probably I have the wrong end of the `RFID' stick, as to what the term covers. I understood it to be a standard for low-capacity, wireless scanning (ie what you need to replace barcodes) and distinct from standards for smarter things (such as the ITSO transport smartcard standard).
Does anyone know of an overview so I can get my acronyms sorted out?
I think we can assume that if they thought the results of such a study would be positive they would be pouring money at it, in the hope of being able ditch that embarassing `images are very like themselves' study.
This is contactless, in the sense that it is read by just being placed on top of a box on the bus. I doubt it can be read from further away (or they'd just put detectors in the door and speed up the queue).
Luckily they use a worthwhile biometric for identification. There is a photo on the card and a human being looking at it.
So there is no point in having the identification hardware in the first place.
if someone has the resources to fabricate fingerprints that will fool the reader,[...]
IIRC, this consists of a small quantity of gelatine.
I'm sure there must be some advantage of using CUPS which my ancient brain has missed, so can someone enlighten me?
If you have any interfaces you are at all worried about you are running a firewall, right?
No need for that even, unless you want to share with other batch processing jobs. BSD does quite a reasonable job of keeping interactive things going while batch jobs do their business.
I set off a recompile of samba on the wrong machine the other week, by typing at the wrong window, and didn't notice my desktop was 90-odd percent occupied with compilation until the bizzare throbbing red corpuscle gkrellm uses to indicate high load was uncovered when I moved a window.
Modern over-muscled CPUs, modern memory sizes and good disk access subsystems are wonderful things.
Depends. If the Bad Thing takes a few years to actually happen, as is the case with court cases,then you can sell lots of policies and pay yourself a huge sallary with benefits for a few years. Then, when everything falls apart and your company goes bust, you take your accumulated savings and retire. Or start a new company.
You can't either for paper or electonic data. The difference is that paper tends to hang around, electronic texts just evaporate. Often it's not the important data which is important, IYSWIM, it is the ordinary stuff. Clay tablets with beurocratic records or merchant's stock lists are often more illuminating than royal proclomations.
A large library used to keep dozens of people busy. If you want to store such a tiny amount of information today, you need a couple of hard drives and copy their content every year.
But the point is people don't do that. How far back do your electronic archives go? I'm a complete packrat, but even I don't have email from 10 years ago anymore (though I do remember when I made the decision to drop it). I do have letters and uninteresting financial paperwork (bank statements etc) back that far. If the bank had been emailing me statements they would be long gone. Now, I have no reason to think my data will be of interest, but the point is that almost no one's records will survive more than a decade.
Historians of 19th century music or literature may or may not manage to get their hands on notebooks in which the early versions of a symphonic passage or story were scribbled down. Students of the 21st century will be stuck except for the very rare artist who uses version control.
Evolution in action.
Post printing, survival of texts basicly depends on whether anyone gives a damn about them.
If no-one anywhere keeps a copy of your novel, it was probably not a very good novel.
If you talk to archivists, it is not the hard copy information they worry about, it is the electronic information which is ephemeral. A 19th century politician probably left behind a mass of paper with only the most embarassing stuff deleted. A current politician will leave much less. Someone born today who becomes a politician will probably leave nothing except what they want to be seen.
I can give a visitor a book and they can read it without having to remember whether they brought their reader with them, and without worry about DRM or compatability (apple e-books vs M$ e-books vs sony e-books anyone?).
I can take a book with me and drop it in a puddle and not worry to much because it will probably dry out and still work, and if not it's not too expensive an accident.
I can stick a bookmark in a book and it is there when I come back to it 3 years later.
If a book drops down the back of the bed, I can read another one, and fish the dropped one out next month when I happen to be fetching something from under the bed.
ISTM, to get close to this I would need a reader which is cheap enough that I can own as many of them as I own teaspoons or pencils, and they all need to share state (for bookmarks, and so losing one isn't painful). So not only do we need display, battery and other technology beyond the state of the art, we need it to sell for pennies.
We haven't yet reached this level of simple omnipresence for things as simple as TV remote controls. Next time you're hunting for your RC, imagine doing this every time you wanted to read something.