Most of these ideas of rejuvenation are based on attacking biological malfunctions. That's all well and good, but it misses something else - there'a a fair amount of nonliving tissue in our bodies.
The first thought would be bones, but for the moment let's not think about them. Instead think about the cartilage that keeps the joints from grinding themselves into oblivion. That stuff's nonliving and doesn't replenish. We build one supply of it as we grow to adulthood, and after that it's got to last. (Or get replaced, but thos don't last nearly as well as the OEM joints.)
Then someone else mentioned fertility, thinking more of population. But think in another way, for a moment. Menopause starts as the woman's egg supply runs out and the ovaries shut down. She was born with her full egg supply - it's finite. So yes, she maybe she can live to be 1000, but about 950 of those years will be post-menopause. There are similar considerations for men. (Much more could be said, even without intending to joke, but enough's enough.)
Finally, our flesh itself is anchored with nonliving membranes. That stuff is also laid down as we grow to adulthood, and then it's got to last. Old people get saggier, it's just years and years of gravity.
Teeth. We get two sets, and we drop the first early in life. The second set's got to last.
So yes, we can improve healing mechanisms, we can mitigate some types of damage. Maybe there would be some way to convince the body that our adult teeth are really baby teeth, and go through that cycle again. But there are aging issues for which the body has no healing or renewal mechanism, at all.
The image of "early 20's forever" is attractive, but it ain't quite real. Nor is "60 forever," but I suspect the form-factor that would live forever isn't here, yet. The "forever person" would have some 20's traits and some 60's traits. That is, until we figure out some mechanisms to tell the body to destroy tissue it's never destroyed before, and lay down replacement tissue that it hasn't laid down in decades - or centuries.
In this book, there is a rejuv treatment that is *very* tightly controlled by one corporation. In order to get your rejuv, they want all of your assets, but it's got to be above a certain minimum.
So you wind up with a lot of young-looking old people, and their biggest objective is to get enough money to guarantee their next rejuv. Their next biggest objective is to find a way to hide *more* money from the corporation, so they won't be broke when they get out. Beyond that, the expense of rejuv and the "all your assets" clause tend to make them moles instead of prominent citizens.
Oh, and you have this REALLY rich corporation with its fingers in just about every pie on the planet.
Shades of Heinlein's "Polkayne of Mars." Except in that case, they froze either embryos or newly-born babies. Even if that's silly, the essence was that a couple could do their genetic stuff when young, but raise their kids after they had a few years under their belts.
IMHO, there's a flaw in this. Nature/evolution equipped young adults with the ability to party all night. That ability wasn't put there to party, it was put there to take care of babies. Parties are the unexpected benefit.
But just imagine coming home from a business trip one evening, have a little time with the family, then put the kids to bed, and go yourself, shortly after, because you've had a long day. THEN both kids are up about 2:00 AM, BOTH sick at BOTH ends. Clean it all up, and a half hour the next wave of sickness starts. Clean it all up, and you're out of sheets, so start running the laundry around 3:00 AM. Etc.
Been there, done that - in my mid-30's. I sure wouldn't want to take that on in my late 40's or later.
Unfortunately these days in the US, "responsibility to society," means absolutely nothing next to, "responsiblity to stockholders." Even "responsiblity to stockholders," might be sufficiently meaningful if we had a *slightly* longer term outlook, around here.
The best short-term plan frequently turns out to be a long-term disaster.
A bigger window for voting also means a bigger window for fraud. At least with the current one-day polling, you can have volunteers from both parties monitoring the election. Once it becomes a multi-week process are we going to have sufficient volunteers so both parties can keep the ballot boxes under observation full-time? This of course excludes Badnarik and Nader fans, as well as Greens, but somehow in the current environment I doubt it would be possible to get Democrats and Republicans to cooperate long enough to disenfranchise minority parties.
I guess it's time to insist that ballots be kept in a multi-keyed vault, kind of like the safety deposit box in a bank. Then at least you get rid of the off-hours problem.
Get the Windows source code entered as evidence, then get it unsealed, same as this case.
Sometimes confidentiality is necessary. Sometimes confidentiality is timely Perhaps what we're really missing is a review process to determine what needs no sealing, what can be unsealed post-trial, what remains sealed through the appeals process, and what should remain trade secret.
Don't you mean "alive + 75 years" instead, and on the next extension it'll no doubt be "alive + 95 years" or more.
We're PAST the author's life, already. Copyright lives to maintain corporate monopolies. Face it. Get over it. Hope the rest of the world is more sane than the US.
Not bad, just haven't gotten around to it. The pwsafe that I'm using will yank one password out of the list, though that's not too hard, either. Does GPG decrypt to stdout? I'd rather not get interrupted halfway through and leave a cleartext file laying around.
And on this thread we have many password managers... One for Windows (I'm sure there are more) One for Palm (I'm sure there are more) One for Linux/Gnome One for Linux/KDE
Plus I use a thing called pwsafe, which I believe may be a back-level KeePass, which runs on command line under Linux.
NONE of these buggers are multi-platform. I've seen a package called Strip for Palm, and there's a read-only perl library to read the database under Linux. But it's not full-function dual, let alone multi-platform.
I want something I can put on a memory key, and plug into ANYTHING with a usb port, and use on that system. I don't mind that I'll have to store multiple executables on the key. There should be a common encryption engine for all platforms, and probably per-platform UI/storage that invokes the engine.
Does this exist, or am I going to have to find the time to write it?
From what I've heard elsewhere, there's also a shelf life issue with these IVF "leftovers." If we were *really* serious about saving these "babies" we'd either be locating host mothers for them, or we'd be investing in some good LH2 storage to increase their shelf-life instead of the LN2 currently used, maybe even fractions-above-0K storage. Either those possiblities, or we could outlaw IVF unless the couple agreed to implant ALL embryos, eventually.
I know those options are all absurd, but so is trying to take an ethically complex situation and force a simple answer. Another poster on this thread suggested that he would have been aborted had his mother not been strongly pro-life. A different poster on this thread mentioned his two IVF children. These two situations are flipsides of the same coin. IVF is almost intractably tied to abortion, unless you want to commit to fertilize-as-you-implant and/or implant-every-embryo as a matter of rigidly enforced policy.
Personally I'm pro-choice, and I don't believe ANYONE is really pro-abortion. I don't like abortion, (the later it's done, the less I like it.) but IMHO there are *worse* things, and one of them is pretending this is an ethically black-and-white issue. As a result of this, I find myself in disagreement with the Catholic Church. (I'm not a Catholic, but I'm married to one.) But I will grant them this: On the subject of fertility the Church is consistent. The Church does not approve of abortion. The Church does not approve of IVF. The Church does not approve of the Pill(*) or IUD.
*A little research finds that the low-dosage Pill, the only kind in common usage since the 80's, works by impairing formation of the uterine lining, so a fertilized egg can't implant. Effectively it's a very early abortion. I don't have a problem with that, since it's an undifferentiated blob of cells, but the Church does.
To be truly consistent, we would need laws to outlaw the Pill and tightly regulate IVF.
>(If I had had a deskfabber, I would have made explosives. I'm sure at least 50% of the hands-on techies here >on Slashdot would have done the same.)
During high-school chem class, they taught us balancing chemical equations, moles, and such. But I *really learned* the stuff when I heard about thermite, figured out the reaction, figured out the molar weights, and made it for myself.
The same "July Fourth" you fear has an analog in the biological world. We're also approaching the point when a college student could get the gene sequences for something really dastardly off the internet, and make it.
Just imagine the legislation and lawsuits! Hint: there are things called "design patents' that are meant to cover physical form and function. Regardless of any real IP issues, I'm sure there will be a TON of resistance to Desktop Fabricators, even as ordinary people embrace them.
Look at the Desktop Fabricator as a physical analog to general purpose computers and the Internet. Just like the computers and the Internet reduce the marginal cost of duplicating information, the Desktop Fabricator does the same for physical things.
There are a LOT of people making a LOT of money on scarce things, who won't want them to become plentiful. In truth the entrenched TPTB don't want an Economy of Abundance, because they make their money and garner their power based on control of scarce resources.
My post wasn't making any sort of value judgement. I was just extrapolating one way I could see things going, whether I like it or not.
I'd prefer to stay deregulated, but can't really see that happening. Too much of the economy is dependent on the Internet to allow spam, virii, DDOS, and the like to keep chipping away at it. One solution would be better control at the edge, but even that would be dangerous, because it turns the rest of us into second-class netizens.
I suspect some sort of dialog about how to keep the Internet safe without excess regulation is in order, because otherwise it's just a matter of time until we get regulation shoved down our throats. The only thing I can say about such regulation is that it will be crafted by non-expert legislators, guided by corporations.
I believe the same, that the free market needs some external nurturing in order to survive. Otherwise companies like Microsoft will drive it into monopolistic lock-up. For the moment, I wasn't trying to debate that point.
I was merely suggesting that from the Libertarian point of view, the Government would get out of the way and allow commercial-zapping electronics to sink or swim in the marketplace.
Plus I genuinely want to know the Libertarian view on copyrights, patents, and IP in general.
Ah, but one of my Senators is in the Subject line, so I know in advance that it's no good writing to him about this. I've done so several times, though to his credit, I get answers back.
Actually I need to get on the stick about my next letter to Senator Leahy. I plan to write how BOTH sides are wrong in the copyright debates, not just the filesharers. I further plan to include "Courtney Love Does the Math" as well as similar articles I can readily find. I also plan to look up the Slashdot article about RIAA not paying royalties to artists from earlier this year. (Then settling for smaller amounts, where they were caught.) I'd like to make a brief case about how the RIAA is NOT protecting artists, but running a business even LESS efficient than the Pentagon. How else do you take $.25 hardware costs, (Need a royalty number, when the artist isn't cut out, entirely.) and then cry about NOT making a profit at $15.95?
I don't want to kill a tree on this, but if anyone has helpful links I can print, I'm interested.
Presumably, as a limiting example, Libertarians would have NO government interference in the free market. It cuts both ways. In this case, if the free market decides that there is a place for commercial-skipping playback, and people are willing to pay for it, then there WILL be commercial-skipping playback devices on the market.
What is the Libertarian position on copyright and patent law?
The real issues are interference and interoperation. The FCC has long been accepted as being in charge of layer 1 - the physical stuff. But in another way of thinking, one could consider DDOS attacks to be analogous to RFI. I'm not saying it's a perfect analogy, but it's certainly one that could be sold to a bureaucrat, maybe even to a legislator. So by this reasoning, the FCC may be trying to extend their authority into layer 2 and even layer 3, in order to meet their real requirements of interference and interoperation.
Now think about how they implement their authority over layer 1. There are things like FCC Type Acceptance, FCC Classes, and FCC Certification. You know that modem that operates over controlled wires, or that transmitter that operates over controlled frequencies... You can't TOUCH them without a LICENSE. So far, so good. If you touch it, you may change its operation, and make it cause interference. The device's FCC Type Acceptance is to guarantee that it will interoperate correctly. Your FCC License is supposed to guarantee that you know how to touch the device without breaking its FCC compliance.
Now extend that to layer 2. That means the FCC owns your ARP, and the bottom of your TCP stack. No more compiling from source without an FCC License, in fact you'd probably need signed modules. For that matter, you'd need a layer of the OS that guarantees that you can't load anything other than FCC certified modules for layer 2 - unless you've got an FCC License.
Now extend that to layer 3.... and the FCC owns the rest of your stack. And the part of the OS that checks its FCC signature and loads it.
This sounds terribly heavy-handed, but the Internet has become enough of a mess that the general public might well accept it. I see several major issues here: 1: Do the FCC and Congress realize what it *really* means to regulate PC communication. Do they understand that it also means requiring DRM Operating Systems to guarantee that an FCC Type Accepted stack is loaded. 2: What will licensing look like? How expensive will it be, and will it be truly knowledge based, or more interface based. (like MSCE) Will there be some sort of "Amateur Internet" equivalent to "Amateur Radio" and what will its requirements and capabilities be. 3: Will the Corporate Linux presence really care about ANY of this, because they'll just license their developers. 4: Finally, to they even understand that NONE of this MATTERS, because you don't stop DDOS or spam at layers 1, 2, or 3, anyway. To really stop DDOS and spam, you need to FCC certify *every single executable* that can connect to the stack, and that includes networked games. 4a: In reality, this probably means inserting the layer 3.5 shim, that *attempts* to police network connections, and prevents direct communication to layer 3. Of COURSE we all know how well that would work in practice, that it would preserve performance, as well as stop DDOS and spam.
As for anti-regulatory philosophies of Republican administrations, I don't buy it having any bearing here. In practice, I see two pieces of anti-regulatory agenda, owning weapons and making money. Allowing FCC increased domain over PCs does not directly affect either of those, so it could well happen. In fact, including FCC certification probably improves corporate control/profitability, so that's a plus.
I didn't even bother trying to put Gentoo on my Cyrix P150+ with 64MB. I'm slowly migrating those functions (+ new stuff) over to the Celeron machine, and then the old server will either be retired or turned into a tarpit.
>What makes it worse still is that this was done on a PIII-667.
I'll see your PIII-667, and I'll raise you my K6-3-400 and Celeron-333. (Mendocino - it has an L2.)
Compile time is only bad if you wait around and watch it. Otherwise just "nohup emerge -uD world &>20041115.lst &" and carry on with whatever you've been doing. Only hitch - leaving the system on for 48 hours solid so it can build OpenOffice. Normally I shut it down at night.
As long as they keep away from your money, you won't mind if they: * Monitor the books you buy at the store or check out at the library. * Declare US citizens "enemy combatants" and cart them off to Guantanamo Bay for indefinite detention without the right of judicial review. (You could be next, some night.) * Make sure you don't buy any of that evil "sex parahpenalia" for use with your wife in your own home. (Yes, this has happened.) * Limit your right to restitution from negligent business practices by corporations. (What's the acceptable death rate from this product - higher when there's a lawsuit cap, that's for sure.)
Yep, making and keeping money is much more important than any of those other things. (And that's just a few-minute list, I'm sure others could add.) Sometimes I think the line is blurred between true conservatism and pious greed. (OK, I know you may not be guilty of this last one, but IMHO plenty of others are.)
My brother used to say that out West they used to be so conservative that they looked liberal. Back 20 years ago, people used to mind their own business, and expected you to mind yours. They didn't want you to legislate their private lives, and expected the same from you. Those days are gone.
The problem is with the debris raining on our heads. I'm sure any significant battle at geosync would have blasts sufficient to de-orbit big chunks of metal. Plus if they're in geosync, they're going to take an "interest" in what's going on, below. I don't think I like that, either.
Slashdot Mirror
Most of these ideas of rejuvenation are based on attacking biological malfunctions. That's all well and good, but it misses something else - there'a a fair amount of nonliving tissue in our bodies.
The first thought would be bones, but for the moment let's not think about them. Instead think about the cartilage that keeps the joints from grinding themselves into oblivion. That stuff's nonliving and doesn't replenish. We build one supply of it as we grow to adulthood, and after that it's got to last. (Or get replaced, but thos don't last nearly as well as the OEM joints.)
Then someone else mentioned fertility, thinking more of population. But think in another way, for a moment. Menopause starts as the woman's egg supply runs out and the ovaries shut down. She was born with her full egg supply - it's finite. So yes, she maybe she can live to be 1000, but about 950 of those years will be post-menopause. There are similar considerations for men. (Much more could be said, even without intending to joke, but enough's enough.)
Finally, our flesh itself is anchored with nonliving membranes. That stuff is also laid down as we grow to adulthood, and then it's got to last. Old people get saggier, it's just years and years of gravity.
Teeth. We get two sets, and we drop the first early in life. The second set's got to last.
So yes, we can improve healing mechanisms, we can mitigate some types of damage. Maybe there would be some way to convince the body that our adult teeth are really baby teeth, and go through that cycle again. But there are aging issues for which the body has no healing or renewal mechanism, at all.
The image of "early 20's forever" is attractive, but it ain't quite real. Nor is "60 forever," but I suspect the form-factor that would live forever isn't here, yet. The "forever person" would have some 20's traits and some 60's traits. That is, until we figure out some mechanisms to tell the body to destroy tissue it's never destroyed before, and lay down replacement tissue that it hasn't laid down in decades - or centuries.
In this book, there is a rejuv treatment that is *very* tightly controlled by one corporation. In order to get your rejuv, they want all of your assets, but it's got to be above a certain minimum.
So you wind up with a lot of young-looking old people, and their biggest objective is to get enough money to guarantee their next rejuv. Their next biggest objective is to find a way to hide *more* money from the corporation, so they won't be broke when they get out. Beyond that, the expense of rejuv and the "all your assets" clause tend to make them moles instead of prominent citizens.
Oh, and you have this REALLY rich corporation with its fingers in just about every pie on the planet.
Shades of Heinlein's "Polkayne of Mars." Except in that case, they froze either embryos or newly-born babies. Even if that's silly, the essence was that a couple could do their genetic stuff when young, but raise their kids after they had a few years under their belts.
IMHO, there's a flaw in this. Nature/evolution equipped young adults with the ability to party all night. That ability wasn't put there to party, it was put there to take care of babies. Parties are the unexpected benefit.
But just imagine coming home from a business trip one evening, have a little time with the family, then put the kids to bed, and go yourself, shortly after, because you've had a long day. THEN both kids are up about 2:00 AM, BOTH sick at BOTH ends. Clean it all up, and a half hour the next wave of sickness starts. Clean it all up, and you're out of sheets, so start running the laundry around 3:00 AM. Etc.
Been there, done that - in my mid-30's. I sure wouldn't want to take that on in my late 40's or later.
Unfortunately these days in the US, "responsibility to society," means absolutely nothing next to, "responsiblity to stockholders." Even "responsiblity to stockholders," might be sufficiently meaningful if we had a *slightly* longer term outlook, around here.
The best short-term plan frequently turns out to be a long-term disaster.
A bigger window for voting also means a bigger window for fraud. At least with the current one-day polling, you can have volunteers from both parties monitoring the election. Once it becomes a multi-week process are we going to have sufficient volunteers so both parties can keep the ballot boxes under observation full-time? This of course excludes Badnarik and Nader fans, as well as Greens, but somehow in the current environment I doubt it would be possible to get Democrats and Republicans to cooperate long enough to disenfranchise minority parties.
I guess it's time to insist that ballots be kept in a multi-keyed vault, kind of like the safety deposit box in a bank. Then at least you get rid of the off-hours problem.
Get the Windows source code entered as evidence, then get it unsealed, same as this case.
Sometimes confidentiality is necessary.
Sometimes confidentiality is timely
Perhaps what we're really missing is a review process to determine what needs no sealing, what can be unsealed post-trial, what remains sealed through the appeals process, and what should remain trade secret.
Don't you mean "alive + 75 years" instead, and on the next extension it'll no doubt be "alive + 95 years" or more.
We're PAST the author's life, already. Copyright lives to maintain corporate monopolies. Face it. Get over it. Hope the rest of the world is more sane than the US.
Not bad, just haven't gotten around to it. The pwsafe that I'm using will yank one password out of the list, though that's not too hard, either. Does GPG decrypt to stdout? I'd rather not get interrupted halfway through and leave a cleartext file laying around.
Oh, and PalmOS is not on the list.
Then get run over by a bus while on the way to the Post Office to file for a patent on your Secret?
And on this thread we have many password managers...
One for Windows (I'm sure there are more)
One for Palm (I'm sure there are more)
One for Linux/Gnome
One for Linux/KDE
Plus I use a thing called pwsafe, which I believe may be a back-level KeePass, which runs on command line under Linux.
NONE of these buggers are multi-platform. I've seen a package called Strip for Palm, and there's a read-only perl library to read the database under Linux. But it's not full-function dual, let alone multi-platform.
I want something I can put on a memory key, and plug into ANYTHING with a usb port, and use on that system. I don't mind that I'll have to store multiple executables on the key. There should be a common encryption engine for all platforms, and probably per-platform UI/storage that invokes the engine.
Does this exist, or am I going to have to find the time to write it?
From what I've heard elsewhere, there's also a shelf life issue with these IVF "leftovers." If we were *really* serious about saving these "babies" we'd either be locating host mothers for them, or we'd be investing in some good LH2 storage to increase their shelf-life instead of the LN2 currently used, maybe even fractions-above-0K storage. Either those possiblities, or we could outlaw IVF unless the couple agreed to implant ALL embryos, eventually.
I know those options are all absurd, but so is trying to take an ethically complex situation and force a simple answer.
Another poster on this thread suggested that he would have been aborted had his mother not been strongly pro-life.
A different poster on this thread mentioned his two IVF children.
These two situations are flipsides of the same coin. IVF is almost intractably tied to abortion, unless you want to commit to fertilize-as-you-implant and/or implant-every-embryo as a matter of rigidly enforced policy.
Personally I'm pro-choice, and I don't believe ANYONE is really pro-abortion. I don't like abortion, (the later it's done, the less I like it.) but IMHO there are *worse* things, and one of them is pretending this is an ethically black-and-white issue. As a result of this, I find myself in disagreement with the Catholic Church. (I'm not a Catholic, but I'm married to one.) But I will grant them this: On the subject of fertility the Church is consistent.
The Church does not approve of abortion.
The Church does not approve of IVF.
The Church does not approve of the Pill(*) or IUD.
*A little research finds that the low-dosage Pill, the only kind in common usage since the 80's, works by impairing formation of the uterine lining, so a fertilized egg can't implant. Effectively it's a very early abortion. I don't have a problem with that, since it's an undifferentiated blob of cells, but the Church does.
To be truly consistent, we would need laws to outlaw the Pill and tightly regulate IVF.
>(If I had had a deskfabber, I would have made explosives. I'm sure at least 50% of the hands-on techies here
>on Slashdot would have done the same.)
During high-school chem class, they taught us balancing chemical equations, moles, and such. But I *really learned* the stuff when I heard about thermite, figured out the reaction, figured out the molar weights, and made it for myself.
The same "July Fourth" you fear has an analog in the biological world. We're also approaching the point when a college student could get the gene sequences for something really dastardly off the internet, and make it.
Just imagine the legislation and lawsuits! Hint: there are things called "design patents' that are meant to cover physical form and function. Regardless of any real IP issues, I'm sure there will be a TON of resistance to Desktop Fabricators, even as ordinary people embrace them.
Look at the Desktop Fabricator as a physical analog to general purpose computers and the Internet. Just like the computers and the Internet reduce the marginal cost of duplicating information, the Desktop Fabricator does the same for physical things.
There are a LOT of people making a LOT of money on scarce things, who won't want them to become plentiful. In truth the entrenched TPTB don't want an Economy of Abundance, because they make their money and garner their power based on control of scarce resources.
Besides, she can't lift it because she's petrified.
Nor would the Senate let her in, because she's naked.
My point, exactly. Even Slashdot logic could get sold to bureaucrats and legislators.
My post wasn't making any sort of value judgement. I was just extrapolating one way I could see things going, whether I like it or not.
I'd prefer to stay deregulated, but can't really see that happening. Too much of the economy is dependent on the Internet to allow spam, virii, DDOS, and the like to keep chipping away at it. One solution would be better control at the edge, but even that would be dangerous, because it turns the rest of us into second-class netizens.
I suspect some sort of dialog about how to keep the Internet safe without excess regulation is in order, because otherwise it's just a matter of time until we get regulation shoved down our throats. The only thing I can say about such regulation is that it will be crafted by non-expert legislators, guided by corporations.
I believe the same, that the free market needs some external nurturing in order to survive. Otherwise companies like Microsoft will drive it into monopolistic lock-up. For the moment, I wasn't trying to debate that point.
I was merely suggesting that from the Libertarian point of view, the Government would get out of the way and allow commercial-zapping electronics to sink or swim in the marketplace.
Plus I genuinely want to know the Libertarian view on copyrights, patents, and IP in general.
Ah, but one of my Senators is in the Subject line, so I know in advance that it's no good writing to him about this. I've done so several times, though to his credit, I get answers back.
Actually I need to get on the stick about my next letter to Senator Leahy. I plan to write how BOTH sides are wrong in the copyright debates, not just the filesharers. I further plan to include "Courtney Love Does the Math" as well as similar articles I can readily find. I also plan to look up the Slashdot article about RIAA not paying royalties to artists from earlier this year. (Then settling for smaller amounts, where they were caught.) I'd like to make a brief case about how the RIAA is NOT protecting artists, but running a business even LESS efficient than the Pentagon. How else do you take $.25 hardware costs, (Need a royalty number, when the artist isn't cut out, entirely.) and then cry about NOT making a profit at $15.95?
I don't want to kill a tree on this, but if anyone has helpful links I can print, I'm interested.
Not, it's not.
Presumably, as a limiting example, Libertarians would have NO government interference in the free market. It cuts both ways. In this case, if the free market decides that there is a place for commercial-skipping playback, and people are willing to pay for it, then there WILL be commercial-skipping playback devices on the market.
What is the Libertarian position on copyright and patent law?
The real issues are interference and interoperation. The FCC has long been accepted as being in charge of layer 1 - the physical stuff. But in another way of thinking, one could consider DDOS attacks to be analogous to RFI. I'm not saying it's a perfect analogy, but it's certainly one that could be sold to a bureaucrat, maybe even to a legislator. So by this reasoning, the FCC may be trying to extend their authority into layer 2 and even layer 3, in order to meet their real requirements of interference and interoperation.
Now think about how they implement their authority over layer 1. There are things like FCC Type Acceptance, FCC Classes, and FCC Certification. You know that modem that operates over controlled wires, or that transmitter that operates over controlled frequencies... You can't TOUCH them without a LICENSE. So far, so good. If you touch it, you may change its operation, and make it cause interference. The device's FCC Type Acceptance is to guarantee that it will interoperate correctly. Your FCC License is supposed to guarantee that you know how to touch the device without breaking its FCC compliance.
Now extend that to layer 2. That means the FCC owns your ARP, and the bottom of your TCP stack. No more compiling from source without an FCC License, in fact you'd probably need signed modules. For that matter, you'd need a layer of the OS that guarantees that you can't load anything other than FCC certified modules for layer 2 - unless you've got an FCC License.
Now extend that to layer 3.... and the FCC owns the rest of your stack. And the part of the OS that checks its FCC signature and loads it.
This sounds terribly heavy-handed, but the Internet has become enough of a mess that the general public might well accept it. I see several major issues here:
1: Do the FCC and Congress realize what it *really* means to regulate PC communication. Do they understand that it also means requiring DRM Operating Systems to guarantee that an FCC Type Accepted stack is loaded.
2: What will licensing look like? How expensive will it be, and will it be truly knowledge based, or more interface based. (like MSCE) Will there be some sort of "Amateur Internet" equivalent to "Amateur Radio" and what will its requirements and capabilities be.
3: Will the Corporate Linux presence really care about ANY of this, because they'll just license their developers.
4: Finally, to they even understand that NONE of this MATTERS, because you don't stop DDOS or spam at layers 1, 2, or 3, anyway. To really stop DDOS and spam, you need to FCC certify *every single executable* that can connect to the stack, and that includes networked games.
4a: In reality, this probably means inserting the layer 3.5 shim, that *attempts* to police network connections, and prevents direct communication to layer 3. Of COURSE we all know how well that would work in practice, that it would preserve performance, as well as stop DDOS and spam.
As for anti-regulatory philosophies of Republican administrations, I don't buy it having any bearing here. In practice, I see two pieces of anti-regulatory agenda, owning weapons and making money. Allowing FCC increased domain over PCs does not directly affect either of those, so it could well happen. In fact, including FCC certification probably improves corporate control/profitability, so that's a plus.
I didn't even bother trying to put Gentoo on my Cyrix P150+ with 64MB. I'm slowly migrating those functions (+ new stuff) over to the Celeron machine, and then the old server will either be retired or turned into a tarpit.
>What makes it worse still is that this was done on a PIII-667.
I'll see your PIII-667, and I'll raise you my K6-3-400 and Celeron-333. (Mendocino - it has an L2.)
Compile time is only bad if you wait around and watch it. Otherwise just "nohup emerge -uD world &>20041115.lst &" and carry on with whatever you've been doing. Only hitch - leaving the system on for 48 hours solid so it can build OpenOffice. Normally I shut it down at night.
You've initiated another genre of Slashdot obnoxious messages:
Netcraft says Gentoo is dying!
Right.
As long as they keep away from your money, you won't mind if they:
* Monitor the books you buy at the store or check out at the library.
* Declare US citizens "enemy combatants" and cart them off to Guantanamo Bay for indefinite detention without the right of judicial review. (You could be next, some night.)
* Make sure you don't buy any of that evil "sex parahpenalia" for use with your wife in your own home. (Yes, this has happened.)
* Limit your right to restitution from negligent business practices by corporations. (What's the acceptable death rate from this product - higher when there's a lawsuit cap, that's for sure.)
Yep, making and keeping money is much more important than any of those other things. (And that's just a few-minute list, I'm sure others could add.) Sometimes I think the line is blurred between true conservatism and pious greed. (OK, I know you may not be guilty of this last one, but IMHO plenty of others are.)
My brother used to say that out West they used to be so conservative that they looked liberal. Back 20 years ago, people used to mind their own business, and expected you to mind yours. They didn't want you to legislate their private lives, and expected the same from you. Those days are gone.
The problem is with the debris raining on our heads. I'm sure any significant battle at geosync would have blasts sufficient to de-orbit big chunks of metal. Plus if they're in geosync, they're going to take an "interest" in what's going on, below. I don't think I like that, either.