I'll just mutter something about the real world, Mars missions, explosions, English/metric, and not paying careful attention to data typing.
I've coerced data in both Pascal and Modula-2. It's not that you aren't supposed to do it. You aren't supposed to do it without careful thought and clearly explicit coding that it's exactly what you meant to do, and not an accident.
Perhaps Modula-2 was designed as a teaching language, but it also addressed shortcomings of the teaching language Pascal, in order that it could be a teaching language that was also useful. Nor do I buy your 'the intention being that it should only ever be capable of use as a teaching language,' line. How much real experience do you have designing and coding with Modula-2?
Incidentally, after Modula-2, Wirth went on to do Oberon and Oberon-2, and followers of those ticked ME off. I was trying to read my old binary data, but couldn't find the type coercion capability. I asked about it on Usenet, and was told that I shouldn't be using that old data any more - I should get all that old stuff rewritten in Oberon-2, so that all of the data access would just work. Yeah, right! I suspect the 96,200 hits for oberon-2 vs 702,000 hits for modula-2 reflects this, as well.
To be honest, I'm not terribly familiar with either. But from what I read, though Java is well entrenched, it seems to be approaching 'legacy' status, and is well-bashed these days. (The next remark will really open up a can of worms.) Compare Java with Cobol, in a strange sort of way.
Ain't it great to know that Modula-2 - and essentially ALL of the strongly typed and structure languages - have pretty much died out. I did piles of stuff in M2, including reading and parsing legacy binary files, re-entrant interrupt handlers in DOS, etc.
Don't forget the good old B-52. Half a century and those things are still flying. I suspect there's been a lot of learning since, "No Highway in the Sky."
The "existence" of the ODF plugin might really mean the exact opposite of what everyone would like it to be. In fact, it might mean the same thing as "Posix compatibility" or "Kerberos" did.
In other words, big migrations never happen overnight. Let's say that an executive has made a commitment to move his organization over to ODF. If Microsoft were to continue stiffing ODF acceptance, the first action would be to start rolling out and training an alternative tool, like OpenOffice. On the other hand, if Microsoft has announced an ODF plugin is coming, the first action is to stand pat, and wait for it. At this point, 3 things may happen: 1: Microsoft delivers an ODF plugin, and the migration moves onward. 2: The executive moves onward to a new position, and the ODF migration can be safely ignored and/or rescinded. 3: Things continue as-is until the deadline approaches and there's still no ODF plugin. At this point the business can either go into some sort of panic mode or make the first, perhaps of many, perhaps indefinite, ODF migration deadline postponements.
Note that all it takes is the promise of an ODF plugin to defer the whole "ODF threat". It's easy to add "schedule slips" and other such to slow the entire migration plan to a crawl, possibly even to increase its cost until everyone cries "Uncle" and decides that Office licenses until Doomsday are cheaper.
The problem here is in the term, "conservative government". You must realize that in the USA, that's actually an oxymoron.
What is our "conservative government" conserving? Certainly not conserving natural resources - nothing conservationist about them. Certainly not "sound fiscal policy" or keeping a balanced budget. Certainly not conservative, in the sense of tried-and-true, time tested policies and practices that work.
As far as I can see, todays "conservatives" are really conserving a few key things: Their wealth Their power Their authority and not much else.
I had an epiphany the other day, courtesy of Branjolina, of all people. They talked about famine and disease in Africa, and all the things that we could be doing with the money that we are spending on Iraq. At that point I realized... A big part of the reason we're in Iraq is to PREVENT money from being spent on those other things. The war in Iraq does many things that a myopic/incompetent policy-maker would like: It makes the current administration a "wartime government," with its attendent ease in elections and power grabs. It prevents government funds from being spent on "frivolous things" that a proper "conservative" government shouldn't be doing. It funnels government funds to "the right people" through contracts, weapons replacment, etc. How much of the $4e11 is really soldiers' pay, and how much is contracts? I'll be the lion's share is in the contracts. It helps make a boogie-man, giving authority figures someone to promote hatred toward, to help keep their power.
I'm tired of hearing about video over the net. I'm really sick and tired of forces (corporate and governmental) trying to kill the fundamental end-to-end nature of the net, so that it can be made "safe" to send video over. I already have 2 ways to get video, over-the-air and cable, and for that matter, there are several satellite providers. Besides, so much of it isn't worth watching, anyway.
Which do you want... 1: An internet with end-to-end capability at "decent" bandwidths? 2: An internet with super-bandwidth that has become essentially client/server, where only a select few get to be servers and packet deliveries are governed by your ISPs desires.
Unfortunately, there's an elephant in the room with choice #1, which doesn't normally get mentioned. The end-to-end internet we have had so far fosters disruptive innovations. Overall that has been good for the economy, but we have to face one key fact. The Powers That Be don't like disruptive innovation, because one of those disruptions might threaten their comfort. They want nice, safe, incremental "innovation" that preserves their comfort, power, authority, and profit margin. Think for a moment, the end-to-end internet *should* be disrupting the business models for content distribution NOW, and it is. But instead of developing new business models, all efforts are focused on stopping the disruption.
It doesn't come up in public discourse, but I'm sure that stopping disruptive innovation is near the heart of the whole "net neutrality" debate.
The reasoning I heard was that opening the doors for the landing gear cannot be un-done.
Remember, this is 70's technology. At the time, they were more afraid of computer glitches than they were of pilot error. The systems in the shuttle can open the doors for the landing gear, but they can only be closed with ground equipment. (saves weight) Any sort of computer glitch affecting the landing gear doors, and they're stuck on-orbit with 3 big holes in the bottom of the craft and no way to close them. FWIU, the landing gear doors have been the only completely manually-operated part of the shuttle.
Decent reasoning, for the time. I suspect we're a little more comfortable with computer control, now.
What was the entire Eisenhower Interstate Highway system, but a government subsidy for vehicles with tires? Similarly, what are the road maintenance budgets at federal, state, and local level, if not a government subsidy? Look at the amount the US government puts into air traffic control, running airports, etc, and tell me air travel isn't subsidized. Heck, given that keeping tired vehicles on the road, one might make the argument that the Iraq war is one giant 'car subsidy'.
No, the difference with Amtrak is that it's explicit and visible. I don't know enough to comment on its relative subsidy level compared to the other forms of transportation, with their indirect subsidies.
It was called HSM, (Hierarchical Storage Management) it ran on IBM's MVS on mainframes, and it moved your less-used data to cheaper storage, in several stages. IIRC, the first stage was just compression on a different disk, the second stage was a tapes in a jukebox-type thing, and the third stage was tapes that an operator fetched and loaded. Somewhere way back there, data never used for 5 years fell off the end of the belt, but you got warned, first.
The day after vacation, when you kept getting the message, "DFHSM is recalling dataset xyz for user jkl" as it pulled all of your storage back online was a pain, and we all thought it would be neat to get rid of, as we migrated to workstations. But in retrospect, HSM was great, never having to worry about your data quantity. That's compared with having to root through $HOME every few months to take care of quota problems.
It's not the music or the DRM, it's the legislation!
I can not-buy-music, too. In fact, I generally do - I buy very little music, largely because of this set of issues. There's also a pragmatic/economic issue lumped in with it. If CD prices were halved, I'd likely buy more than twice as many. If they were cut in thirds, I'd likely buy more than 3 times as many. But as the price declined further, taste and storage would become the limiting factors, so from their perspective, it wouldn't make sense to lower my price to that point. All of this for something that costs $0.10 to duplicate, about as much to package, and has a list price in the $18 range. There's enormous room to play with the supply/demand curve, and they're not doing it. They just pout and cry about piracy.
That's where the real damage is - their pouting and crying is to legislators, expressed along with $$$. They're striving to preserve their current business and pricing models through legislation. Aside from subverting the free market, there's a complete ignorance of and disregard for consequences of this legislation.
Imagine if McDonalds had similar clout at the FDA. Simply voting with your feet wouldn't be sufficient.
I notice most posts are talking about the particulars of this type of vision correction or that, but I got something different out of the title. They're applying this to nearly 1/3 of the midshipman class members. That seems like a rather high rate of surgery. I can see the specific benefits for pilots, but this sounds like it's approaching across-the-board-for-imperfect-eyesight. I've also heard that C-section rates for childbirth are much higher in military hospitals than in civilian. It kind of smacks of a one-size-fits-all attitude, with a correct-with-surgery clause added.
Bashing the US government, especially NASA, is a favorite pastime on Slashdot. Periodically I have to stop in and that, having been in the corporate world for over 25 years, Government has no monopoly on stupidity - there's plenty of it roaming the halls of the private sector. Not that I'm saying government isn't stupid and inefficient, just that they're not the only ones.
I'll grant the similarities, but I still believe that there is a key difference. The Nuke was a new *kind* of weapon, a case where the difference in degree beyond conventional explosives was so great as to become that difference in kind. One could certainly argue today about that difference when compared to things like fuel bombs and daisycutters, but it was etched into our collective minds as different. Perhaps it's a bit arbitrary, but we didn't seem to make that same distinction with chemical and biological weapons, possibly because they weren't different enough. Both sides had enough experience with things like mustard gas, and apparently didn't think that their unused weapons were sufficiently different, or the "knockout punch." that the Nuke was. As you said, "fearing retaliation." The Nuke has come to mean, "retaliation is meaningless, because winning is meaningless."
I don't know. I wouldn't wish it on anyone, not even those currently counted as "enemies."
I just have this gut feel that had the Bomb not been proven so devastating on real people, the US and USSR would have duked it out at some point WITH nukes. The first would have been used, then the retaliatory one, (just one?) and could we have stopped at that? I believe it was "Failsafe" that portrayed a nuclear exchange that was able to be stopped at 2 bombs, 1 from each side. In the heat of the moment, could we really stop at that?
I also have a gut feel that someone somewhere in the chain of command normally just itches to make the first operation test of an unused weapon. I really don't think the collective world could have left nukes unused in their arsenals for 50+ years.
I will not deny that the loss of life was regrettable, nor that Japan was about to surrender. I know that the latter has been brought up, and that there were counter-arguments that they were going to keep on fighting until another million lives were lost, even though they knew they couldn't win.
But that's not the point...
There was this new super-weapon, the nuclear bomb. Though a "secret" it was most likely only secret from populations, but only details from governments. A fine new "smite thine enemies" device. How long do you really think the world's ruling minds could have avoided using such a thing? IMHO, it had to be used ONCE, in order to instill the proper fear in people, and make sure that as a species, we really never wanted to see it used again. Some say a demo blast, destroying an uninhabited island would have done the job. I disagree. Sadly, I think it was necessary to kill and maim people, to cause misery, to show just how BAD the nuclear bomb was, and instill the proper fear.
The key about Hiroshima was that for a few brief years, only one side had the Bomb, and there was no possiblity of a nuclear exchange. Imagine that Hiroshima hadn't happened, and that the first time the bomb had been used had been in a conflict, real or proxy, with a Bomb-equipped USSR. The pause after WWII gave everyone time to think and allowed the Cold War to stay cold.
By my logic, Hiroshima was regrettable, but historically necessary. Nagasaki, on the other hand...
Yes, because everything the government does or wants to do is dumb and foolish, and everything private enterprise wants to do, since they always do it in the name of capitalism, is smart and wise.
Remember all of those thriving proprietary online access businesses, like TheSource, GEnie, pre-Internet AOL, pre-Internet CompuServe, and Prodigy? Then the government stepped in and rammed this open-protocol nonsense thing called the Internet down everyone's throat. The golden days were gone for all of us, and AOL was the only one of the originals left standing, because they were able to adapt to the over-regulation and imposition of the Internet.
Now corporate America is out to rescue us from government interference, and bring us back to the good old days.
In case the above isn't recognized as sarcasm, I've been in corporate America long enough to know that the government has no monopoly on stupidity, and that no established business has any interest in "free market competition" unless it helps them enter a new market. IMHO, this is they very worst thing Microsoft has done, and it isn't even a direct action of theirs. Rather, they have injected the entire industry with a greater desire to own the whole pie, and get their revenue from a "taxation" model. In the case of the Internet, none of these corporations seem capable of understanding that freedom and non-ownership is one of the essential characteristics responsible for its success. As they try to own the whole pie and tax their revenue from it, they will kill it.
My prediction: If present trends continue, (and having heard Lester Throeau speak, I recognize the vulnerability of that clause) the Internet is as good as dead. The prime movers in current legislation are the media companies and those bullish on the taxation business model, and as they buy their legislation, they will strangle it.
Second prediction: The Internet will rise again. Before the general population caught on, the Internet was used as a channel for exchange between universities, laboratories, etc. As the current Internet gets morphed into non-existence, it will no longer be able to meet it's original goals. Therefore universities, laboratories, etc will begin purchasing bandwidth and rebuild an open network, perhaps with portions tunneled over the now-destroyed one. The remaining question is whether or not there will also arise any sort of general access to an open internet, or if it will remain sealed off for academic and business use.
I seem to remember some old stories about the NSA and the DES standard.
The NSA pushed for a few changes in the standard, without divulging the reasons. Some thought it was to insert a backdoor or vulnerability. Years later, after the outside world developed more crypto expertise, the found that the NSA had actually closed a vulnerability that nobody else even knew about. If the NSA had a backdoor into DES, it was with hardware that could brute-force it.
I would also consider things to be different for a home lan vs any sort of business network, especially any network with external access. This is just a home lan, though many parts of it are practically business-grade. At the moment, life is just too busy to keep it as maintained as I'd like. I'm careful to keep on top of Gentoo security releases, and try to not get too far behind, but don't feel that I have time to be properly aggressive about it.
I'm just saying that if you're going to put a box out there as a firewall, make SURE you keep it properly cared for. If you're not willing to spend the time and effort, don't do it. I've done it, and when I was, I spent the time and effort. But at this point in life, I don't have the time.
Nor did I just go buy the first/cheapest firewall appliance I came across - I spent a fair amount of research on it, bought a model that was not new to the market then, had an excellent security track record and pedigree, is still available now, and still gets firmware updates. (Mostly for features, which I don't generally bother with.)
First, it's not the mentioned Linksys. It's quite a bit older model that's still on the market and still gets firmware updates - usually for features, etc. (Those I mostly skip.)
Second, and this sort-of holds for the Linksys as well. The appliances have practically NO capabilities beyond what they were designed for. Obviously people have done a LOT with the Linksys, with OpenWRT and the like. But that's a far cry from what the old computer recycled as a firewall can do. In this case, less is better. By the way, I also have a Linksys WRT54G, but it's not my out-front firewall, and it does have the update for the "universal admin access" hole.
Third, when dedicating the old system to be a firewall, it's tempting to do a bit more or get more sophisticated, and that can be the road to trouble. Again, in this case less is more. I used to have a few open ports, but at the moment have none, though it would be good to get at my IMAP server from work, again.
Actually, I don't. A few years back, just before the summer of Code Red and friends, I stopped running my own router and bought an appliance.
I know I COULD run a router live and on the net, but I choose not to. I feel that to do it correctly would take more due diligence than I wish to spend. I still keep my systems patched and up-to-date, but these days I'm not sure it's sufficient to merely keep up with your distributor's updates, and certainly waiting a day or 2 until it's convenient is not acceptable. If it were my job that would be one thing, but since it's just my home lan, that's another thing entirely.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll just mutter something about the real world, Mars missions, explosions, English/metric, and not paying careful attention to data typing.
I've coerced data in both Pascal and Modula-2. It's not that you aren't supposed to do it. You aren't supposed to do it without careful thought and clearly explicit coding that it's exactly what you meant to do, and not an accident.
Perhaps Modula-2 was designed as a teaching language, but it also addressed shortcomings of the teaching language Pascal, in order that it could be a teaching language that was also useful. Nor do I buy your 'the intention being that it should only ever be capable of use as a teaching language,' line. How much real experience do you have designing and coding with Modula-2?
Incidentally, after Modula-2, Wirth went on to do Oberon and Oberon-2, and followers of those ticked ME off. I was trying to read my old binary data, but couldn't find the type coercion capability. I asked about it on Usenet, and was told that I shouldn't be using that old data any more - I should get all that old stuff rewritten in Oberon-2, so that all of the data access would just work. Yeah, right! I suspect the 96,200 hits for oberon-2 vs 702,000 hits for modula-2 reflects this, as well.
To be honest, I'm not terribly familiar with either. But from what I read, though Java is well entrenched, it seems to be approaching 'legacy' status, and is well-bashed these days. (The next remark will really open up a can of worms.) Compare Java with Cobol, in a strange sort of way.
Ain't it great to know that Modula-2 - and essentially ALL of the strongly typed and structure languages - have pretty much died out. I did piles of stuff in M2, including reading and parsing legacy binary files, re-entrant interrupt handlers in DOS, etc.
Don't forget the good old B-52. Half a century and those things are still flying. I suspect there's been a lot of learning since, "No Highway in the Sky."
"The World at the End of Time" by Frederik Pohl
Includes suspended animation, sentient stars, deep (near-C) relativity, and yes... freezer burn.
The "existence" of the ODF plugin might really mean the exact opposite of what everyone would like it to be. In fact, it might mean the same thing as "Posix compatibility" or "Kerberos" did.
In other words, big migrations never happen overnight. Let's say that an executive has made a commitment to move his organization over to ODF. If Microsoft were to continue stiffing ODF acceptance, the first action would be to start rolling out and training an alternative tool, like OpenOffice. On the other hand, if Microsoft has announced an ODF plugin is coming, the first action is to stand pat, and wait for it. At this point, 3 things may happen:
1: Microsoft delivers an ODF plugin, and the migration moves onward.
2: The executive moves onward to a new position, and the ODF migration can be safely ignored and/or rescinded.
3: Things continue as-is until the deadline approaches and there's still no ODF plugin. At this point the business can either go into some sort of panic mode or make the first, perhaps of many, perhaps indefinite, ODF migration deadline postponements.
Note that all it takes is the promise of an ODF plugin to defer the whole "ODF threat". It's easy to add "schedule slips" and other such to slow the entire migration plan to a crawl, possibly even to increase its cost until everyone cries "Uncle" and decides that Office licenses until Doomsday are cheaper.
The problem here is in the term, "conservative government". You must realize that in the USA, that's actually an oxymoron.
What is our "conservative government" conserving?
Certainly not conserving natural resources - nothing conservationist about them.
Certainly not "sound fiscal policy" or keeping a balanced budget.
Certainly not conservative, in the sense of tried-and-true, time tested policies and practices that work.
As far as I can see, todays "conservatives" are really conserving a few key things:
Their wealth
Their power
Their authority
and not much else.
I had an epiphany the other day, courtesy of Branjolina, of all people.
They talked about famine and disease in Africa, and all the things that we could be doing with the money that we are spending on Iraq. At that point I realized... A big part of the reason we're in Iraq is to PREVENT money from being spent on those other things. The war in Iraq does many things that a myopic/incompetent policy-maker would like:
It makes the current administration a "wartime government," with its attendent ease in elections and power grabs.
It prevents government funds from being spent on "frivolous things" that a proper "conservative" government shouldn't be doing.
It funnels government funds to "the right people" through contracts, weapons replacment, etc. How much of the $4e11 is really soldiers' pay, and how much is contracts? I'll be the lion's share is in the contracts.
It helps make a boogie-man, giving authority figures someone to promote hatred toward, to help keep their power.
I'm tired of hearing about video over the net. I'm really sick and tired of forces (corporate and governmental) trying to kill the fundamental end-to-end nature of the net, so that it can be made "safe" to send video over. I already have 2 ways to get video, over-the-air and cable, and for that matter, there are several satellite providers. Besides, so much of it isn't worth watching, anyway.
Which do you want...
1: An internet with end-to-end capability at "decent" bandwidths?
2: An internet with super-bandwidth that has become essentially client/server, where only a select few get to be servers and packet deliveries are governed by your ISPs desires.
Unfortunately, there's an elephant in the room with choice #1, which doesn't normally get mentioned. The end-to-end internet we have had so far fosters disruptive innovations. Overall that has been good for the economy, but we have to face one key fact. The Powers That Be don't like disruptive innovation, because one of those disruptions might threaten their comfort. They want nice, safe, incremental "innovation" that preserves their comfort, power, authority, and profit margin. Think for a moment, the end-to-end internet *should* be disrupting the business models for content distribution NOW, and it is. But instead of developing new business models, all efforts are focused on stopping the disruption.
It doesn't come up in public discourse, but I'm sure that stopping disruptive innovation is near the heart of the whole "net neutrality" debate.
The reasoning I heard was that opening the doors for the landing gear cannot be un-done.
Remember, this is 70's technology. At the time, they were more afraid of computer glitches than they were of pilot error. The systems in the shuttle can open the doors for the landing gear, but they can only be closed with ground equipment. (saves weight) Any sort of computer glitch affecting the landing gear doors, and they're stuck on-orbit with 3 big holes in the bottom of the craft and no way to close them. FWIU, the landing gear doors have been the only completely manually-operated part of the shuttle.
Decent reasoning, for the time. I suspect we're a little more comfortable with computer control, now.
What was the entire Eisenhower Interstate Highway system, but a government subsidy for vehicles with tires? Similarly, what are the road maintenance budgets at federal, state, and local level, if not a government subsidy?
Look at the amount the US government puts into air traffic control, running airports, etc, and tell me air travel isn't subsidized.
Heck, given that keeping tired vehicles on the road, one might make the argument that the Iraq war is one giant 'car subsidy'.
No, the difference with Amtrak is that it's explicit and visible. I don't know enough to comment on its relative subsidy level compared to the other forms of transportation, with their indirect subsidies.
It was called HSM, (Hierarchical Storage Management) it ran on IBM's MVS on mainframes, and it moved your less-used data to cheaper storage, in several stages. IIRC, the first stage was just compression on a different disk, the second stage was a tapes in a jukebox-type thing, and the third stage was tapes that an operator fetched and loaded. Somewhere way back there, data never used for 5 years fell off the end of the belt, but you got warned, first.
The day after vacation, when you kept getting the message, "DFHSM is recalling dataset xyz for user jkl" as it pulled all of your storage back online was a pain, and we all thought it would be neat to get rid of, as we migrated to workstations. But in retrospect, HSM was great, never having to worry about your data quantity. That's compared with having to root through $HOME every few months to take care of quota problems.
It's not the music or the DRM, it's the legislation!
I can not-buy-music, too. In fact, I generally do - I buy very little music, largely because of this set of issues. There's also a pragmatic/economic issue lumped in with it. If CD prices were halved, I'd likely buy more than twice as many. If they were cut in thirds, I'd likely buy more than 3 times as many. But as the price declined further, taste and storage would become the limiting factors, so from their perspective, it wouldn't make sense to lower my price to that point. All of this for something that costs $0.10 to duplicate, about as much to package, and has a list price in the $18 range. There's enormous room to play with the supply/demand curve, and they're not doing it. They just pout and cry about piracy.
That's where the real damage is - their pouting and crying is to legislators, expressed along with $$$. They're striving to preserve their current business and pricing models through legislation. Aside from subverting the free market, there's a complete ignorance of and disregard for consequences of this legislation.
Imagine if McDonalds had similar clout at the FDA. Simply voting with your feet wouldn't be sufficient.
I notice most posts are talking about the particulars of this type of vision correction or that, but I got something different out of the title. They're applying this to nearly 1/3 of the midshipman class members. That seems like a rather high rate of surgery. I can see the specific benefits for pilots, but this sounds like it's approaching across-the-board-for-imperfect-eyesight. I've also heard that C-section rates for childbirth are much higher in military hospitals than in civilian. It kind of smacks of a one-size-fits-all attitude, with a correct-with-surgery clause added.
Looks about par for the course.
Half the people are cursing NASA for flying the shuttle too soon.
Half the people are cursing NASA for taking so long to fly the shuttle.
The only concenses is that nobody likes NASA, and anybody and everybody could do it better, including Homer Simpson.
Bashing the US government, especially NASA, is a favorite pastime on Slashdot. Periodically I have to stop in and that, having been in the corporate world for over 25 years, Government has no monopoly on stupidity - there's plenty of it roaming the halls of the private sector. Not that I'm saying government isn't stupid and inefficient, just that they're not the only ones.
Thank you for adding ammo to the argument.
I'll grant the similarities, but I still believe that there is a key difference. The Nuke was a new *kind* of weapon, a case where the difference in degree beyond conventional explosives was so great as to become that difference in kind. One could certainly argue today about that difference when compared to things like fuel bombs and daisycutters, but it was etched into our collective minds as different. Perhaps it's a bit arbitrary, but we didn't seem to make that same distinction with chemical and biological weapons, possibly because they weren't different enough. Both sides had enough experience with things like mustard gas, and apparently didn't think that their unused weapons were sufficiently different, or the "knockout punch." that the Nuke was. As you said, "fearing retaliation." The Nuke has come to mean, "retaliation is meaningless, because winning is meaningless."
I don't know. I wouldn't wish it on anyone, not even those currently counted as "enemies."
I just have this gut feel that had the Bomb not been proven so devastating on real people, the US and USSR would have duked it out at some point WITH nukes. The first would have been used, then the retaliatory one, (just one?) and could we have stopped at that? I believe it was "Failsafe" that portrayed a nuclear exchange that was able to be stopped at 2 bombs, 1 from each side. In the heat of the moment, could we really stop at that?
I also have a gut feel that someone somewhere in the chain of command normally just itches to make the first operation test of an unused weapon. I really don't think the collective world could have left nukes unused in their arsenals for 50+ years.
A different view of Hiroshima...
I will not deny that the loss of life was regrettable, nor that Japan was about to surrender. I know that the latter has been brought up, and that there were counter-arguments that they were going to keep on fighting until another million lives were lost, even though they knew they couldn't win.
But that's not the point...
There was this new super-weapon, the nuclear bomb. Though a "secret" it was most likely only secret from populations, but only details from governments. A fine new "smite thine enemies" device. How long do you really think the world's ruling minds could have avoided using such a thing? IMHO, it had to be used ONCE, in order to instill the proper fear in people, and make sure that as a species, we really never wanted to see it used again. Some say a demo blast, destroying an uninhabited island would have done the job. I disagree. Sadly, I think it was necessary to kill and maim people, to cause misery, to show just how BAD the nuclear bomb was, and instill the proper fear.
The key about Hiroshima was that for a few brief years, only one side had the Bomb, and there was no possiblity of a nuclear exchange. Imagine that Hiroshima hadn't happened, and that the first time the bomb had been used had been in a conflict, real or proxy, with a Bomb-equipped USSR. The pause after WWII gave everyone time to think and allowed the Cold War to stay cold.
By my logic, Hiroshima was regrettable, but historically necessary. Nagasaki, on the other hand...
You might also check out Gregory Benford's Galactic Center series.
There is also a 2 book series by Greg Bear, "The Forge of God" and "Anvil of Stars".
Yes, because everything the government does or wants to do is dumb and foolish, and everything private enterprise wants to do, since they always do it in the name of capitalism, is smart and wise.
Remember all of those thriving proprietary online access businesses, like TheSource, GEnie, pre-Internet AOL, pre-Internet CompuServe, and Prodigy? Then the government stepped in and rammed this open-protocol nonsense thing called the Internet down everyone's throat. The golden days were gone for all of us, and AOL was the only one of the originals left standing, because they were able to adapt to the over-regulation and imposition of the Internet.
Now corporate America is out to rescue us from government interference, and bring us back to the good old days.
In case the above isn't recognized as sarcasm, I've been in corporate America long enough to know that the government has no monopoly on stupidity, and that no established business has any interest in "free market competition" unless it helps them enter a new market. IMHO, this is they very worst thing Microsoft has done, and it isn't even a direct action of theirs. Rather, they have injected the entire industry with a greater desire to own the whole pie, and get their revenue from a "taxation" model. In the case of the Internet, none of these corporations seem capable of understanding that freedom and non-ownership is one of the essential characteristics responsible for its success. As they try to own the whole pie and tax their revenue from it, they will kill it.
My prediction: If present trends continue, (and having heard Lester Throeau speak, I recognize the vulnerability of that clause) the Internet is as good as dead. The prime movers in current legislation are the media companies and those bullish on the taxation business model, and as they buy their legislation, they will strangle it.
Second prediction: The Internet will rise again. Before the general population caught on, the Internet was used as a channel for exchange between universities, laboratories, etc. As the current Internet gets morphed into non-existence, it will no longer be able to meet it's original goals. Therefore universities, laboratories, etc will begin purchasing bandwidth and rebuild an open network, perhaps with portions tunneled over the now-destroyed one. The remaining question is whether or not there will also arise any sort of general access to an open internet, or if it will remain sealed off for academic and business use.
I seem to remember some old stories about the NSA and the DES standard.
The NSA pushed for a few changes in the standard, without divulging the reasons. Some thought it was to insert a backdoor or vulnerability. Years later, after the outside world developed more crypto expertise, the found that the NSA had actually closed a vulnerability that nobody else even knew about. If the NSA had a backdoor into DES, it was with hardware that could brute-force it.
I would also consider things to be different for a home lan vs any sort of business network, especially any network with external access. This is just a home lan, though many parts of it are practically business-grade. At the moment, life is just too busy to keep it as maintained as I'd like. I'm careful to keep on top of Gentoo security releases, and try to not get too far behind, but don't feel that I have time to be properly aggressive about it.
No, not a troll.
I'm just saying that if you're going to put a box out there as a firewall, make SURE you keep it properly cared for. If you're not willing to spend the time and effort, don't do it. I've done it, and when I was, I spent the time and effort. But at this point in life, I don't have the time.
Nor did I just go buy the first/cheapest firewall appliance I came across - I spent a fair amount of research on it, bought a model that was not new to the market then, had an excellent security track record and pedigree, is still available now, and still gets firmware updates. (Mostly for features, which I don't generally bother with.)
There are several aspects to this.
First, it's not the mentioned Linksys. It's quite a bit older model that's still on the market and still gets firmware updates - usually for features, etc. (Those I mostly skip.)
Second, and this sort-of holds for the Linksys as well. The appliances have practically NO capabilities beyond what they were designed for. Obviously people have done a LOT with the Linksys, with OpenWRT and the like. But that's a far cry from what the old computer recycled as a firewall can do. In this case, less is better. By the way, I also have a Linksys WRT54G, but it's not my out-front firewall, and it does have the update for the "universal admin access" hole.
Third, when dedicating the old system to be a firewall, it's tempting to do a bit more or get more sophisticated, and that can be the road to trouble. Again, in this case less is more. I used to have a few open ports, but at the moment have none, though it would be good to get at my IMAP server from work, again.
Actually, I don't. A few years back, just before the summer of Code Red and friends, I stopped running my own router and bought an appliance.
I know I COULD run a router live and on the net, but I choose not to. I feel that to do it correctly would take more due diligence than I wish to spend. I still keep my systems patched and up-to-date, but these days I'm not sure it's sufficient to merely keep up with your distributor's updates, and certainly waiting a day or 2 until it's convenient is not acceptable. If it were my job that would be one thing, but since it's just my home lan, that's another thing entirely.