You're confusing wars over drugs with wars over something else _financed_ by drugs.
And I suppose there can't be all that much history to it, to answer my own question, since prior to maybe the late 19th century there weren't any laws regulating drugs. Without laws, the only economic cost associated with drugs is what it takes to make them. It's not profitable without laws banning them and driving the price to multiples of thousands of dollars.
It's one thing to pass a law, it's another to enforce it. As we've seen in the recent Mastercard screwup, even when private organizations with enforcement mechanisms ban database activities it doesn't work very well.
It's probably a civil violation anyway, where a company pays a fine. You need big shot execs going to federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison for violating the laws for it to be of any value. "Fines" are just a way for companies to break the law and pass the cost off to someone else.
I've been reading more or less the same thing, on an emerging basis, since about the mid-90s. I think the gist was that the political goals of the IRA became increasingly unobtainable, and not just due to loyalists; as Ireland proper became more financially successful they began to see Northern Ireland as kind of an "East Germany" that was out of step with Ireland socially and economically, and didn't really want to assume all the problems associated with Northern Ireland.
The IRA itself "grew up" with members who were more versed in strongarm tactics and black marketeering than political struggle. They cared less about the political goals and more about organized crime style profiteering.
I think there's a great book to be written about the history of political/revolutionary movements and their involvement in crime and the underground economy. On one hand you have almost purely political movements like those of the first half of the 20th century that depended largely on Superpower largesse to finance them, on the other hand you have almost purely criminal organizations like cocaine cartels whose political ambitions seems solely linked to their criminal goals. And then there are those in-between groups that seem partially or completely motivated by politics but are heavily involved in criminal enterprises, like IRA.
I wonder what the first documentable linkage between drug trafficking and politics is -- US heroin running during Viet Nam? I know that heroin and hashish were big exports from the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon at one time (to whose profit? Syria? PLO? Other Lebanese factions?).
Is to make the banks financially liable for fraudulent transactions and limit their ability to nail merchants with chargebacks or hold consumers accountable and charge increasing fees. Fee increases should be approved by regulators the way that rate increases for utilities are approved -- require justification for the fee increases and limit them to specific costs so they can't be a general income source.
Credit cards are loopholes big enough to drive an oceanliner through because banks NEVER have to eat the liability associated with fraud and any liability they're stuck with they simply make back with profit in the form of higher fees.
I guarantee you that credit card security would be MUCH more secure if the financial liability for fraud and other misuse hit banks squarely in the profit margin. They would demand much tighter security in addition to financial compensation from credit card networks for fraud they had to cover. This would force Visa and MC to do something more creative (and expensive -- RSA SecureID built into your CC, anyone?).
I work for a small biz computer/network consulting business and there are dozens of companies like is in our area, and 90% of what we do is Microsoft. Add this in to the really big players that feed off of MS as well, and you have almost an economic segment unto itself.
It's hard to say "topple MS" when you have an economic entity almost as big (bigger?) than MS itself that makes money off of it.
A meta operating systems is a really good concept. It would be even better with a "meta computer" that was comprised of CPUs, memory and I/O devices that could be partitioned at some hardware level into different computers.
Today I need all 4 CPUs combined into a single quad processsor system running a dedicated VM for CAD. Tomorrow I want two dual processor systems, one runs a dedicated VM for rendering and the other runs 3 VMs for other miscellaneous tasks; all I have to do is use to the meta-OS to repartition my hardware. Ideally VMs can be moved between HW partitions and be dynamically resized in terms of CPU power.
I always wondered why someone didn't cobble together a FreeBSD "make buildworld" installer that would install some rudimentary base system, reboot, and then begin a cvsup and then buildworld process which would produce the final finished result, including building any desired ports from source as well.
There's a limit as to how much you might gain from this, I suppose, as well as the compiler's ability to support or keep up with all the latest and greatest tweaks for some new CPU. Plus it would be really, really time consuming and installs take too long as it is (generally, not FreeBSD specifically).
I think the idea is that the owner is responsible for everything that happens to their car. Which makes a certain amount of sense considering that they cost tens of thousands of dollars and require a key to operate, meaning that the owner should know what's happening with them.
I think where this is more interesting are things like "managed" red light cameras. In Minneapolis, we're getting them soon, and the system is actually run by a third party. They review photos and send the incriminating ones to the police, who then review the photos and decide whether to issue a moving violation.
What I want to know is, who owns the pictures? Sure, the cops own the ones that they get from the company, but what about the others? Are they private property or is everything produced by the cameras public property?
Let's say I'm accused of some crime and my defense is I wasn't there, I was driving around. And I drove through a bunch of red light cameras (without necessarily running a red light). Can I get access to the photos?
I agree and disagree. Somebody made several decisions impacting the battery -- making it nonremovable, the target run life, the maximum size of the device. Whether the decisions were made by "marketing" or not doesn't really make the device's overall power engineering poor.
No, I think it's both bad advertising and engineering.
From an engineering standpoint, I think Apple could have added a few extra cubic millimeters to the battery size (and overall size) without sacrificing anything in the overall design. This way they would have delivered a real-world 8 hours of battery life, could have advertised it and those 3 people that start it up and listen without skipping or any UI interaction would have gotten 15 hours.
I just don't see how an iPod 2mm deeper, longer and wider and whose space was devoted to extra LiI battery would somehow have destroyed the design or usability of the iPod.
Overall I've been really disappointed with my 3G iPod's battery life and no longer even bother bringing it places where charging it isn't easy. On one trip I listened for about 30 minutes on the plane, 15 minutes in the airport and it died the next day after about another 30 minutes. Yes, I was careful to put it to sleep when done and it came out of the charger the morning of my flight. A whopping 75 minutes of use. I'd willing trade even an extra cubic centimeter of size increase to get realistic usage times out of it.
I was going to post exactly what you posted, but as I read your post I kind of wondered if anyone has done any extensive reading of the same bit of creative writing (prose, not poetry) written in multiple languages and can comment on just exactly how similar or dissimilar the writing can get.
I know from watching one too many Hong Kong action films that while their translations are bad, they can't deviate TOO much as they have to provide enough glue between the story and the action to make the movie work -- so you get stuff like "I must defend the honor of my sister and our family for the sake of our family's honor" -- it's not inaccurate, but an awkward wording.
I would think that a book could take certain liberties with a few highly specific idiomatic situations, but by and large wouldn't turn something like "To Kill A Mockingbird" into a legal dispute over a bird feeder.
Maltese Falcon has a more coherent plot, but Big Sleep has a more intricate plot (William Faulker, the novelist and this film's screenwriter, couldn't even keep it all straight) and the dialogue is often as good as it gets in films (cf. Bogart and Bacall's sexually suggestive horse racing conversation).
Both films involve mystery, the dark side of life & crime.
Dashiell Hammet or Raymond Chandler? John Huston (screenplay) or William Faulkner (screenplay)? You get Bogart with either one, Bacall with one, and Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre with the other.
EVERYONE can say something good and bad about their platforms.
My G4 suxx0red under OS X. Slow as hell and a lockup nuisance. My crap Dell GX-270 running XP Pro never did that -- I only rebooted when I needed to, and often put off patches simply because I had so much shit open it took me half an hour to quit all the applications.
My home machine (Asus P4P800E/P43.2/XP Pro) goes flakey with the network chipset and then reboots every two weeks. Nothing seems to help, not even Marvell's driver-of-the-week upgrade.
At my last job we were hardly the poster children for best security practices, but we made a small effort to not wreck the network.
1) Reasonable firewalling -- keep out most network-level worms, and block their spread via unauthorized SMTP sending
2) Desktop AV -- the helpless desk always installed this with not-frequent enough updates, but it had to have helped.
3) SMTP filtering for viruses -- you can stop a lot of malware there
4) Mostly keep the users from being Administrator-equivilent on their machines.
5) Run some anti-spyware application. Halfway effective and admittedly a problem until MS Antispyware came out, which seems quite good.
6) Software Update Services. You don't get burned too bad if you stay patched.
None of this makes Windows "secure", but it avoids most problems. And in many cases switching a lot of organizations to all Macs "solves" the security/malware problem, but it creates a new set of problems for dealing with the rest of the world which is mostly Windows based.
The article and person referenced make it sound like there's nothing that can be done. I think even sloppy, half-efforts can be really successful.
How often do we see stories about new storage tech on Slashdot? At least once a quarter, and I don't think any have made it to market, with the exception of BluRay and for some thin definitions of "to market".
More pedantically, the consequence of fragmentation is inversely proportionate to the latency and bandwidth of the device.
low latency, high bandwidth means little consequence to fragmentation.
I would think fragmentation would still be a bit of a bummer for even flash drives. You are wasting cycles searching through fragmented memory, even if it is fewer than with platter-based disks.
Star Trek got tired because the situations were just too perfect and lacked human flaws. I could buy it with the original series, as there seemed to be a measure of military discipline and order.
TNG lacked that but everything was "perfect" -- where were the love triangles? The drug addicitions? The racism? The violence? Holosuite addiction? All of the dark aspects of humanity that add color to it even as we strive to eliminate them.
Maybe it was just my former industry, advertising, but there was a shitload of travel that took place, and a LOT of it was to NYC, Chicago, & LA. Perhaps some of the former glory of advertising vs. other industries.
I guess it depends on what work you do; pure management tends to do more BSing around and less real work, as well as expecting grander accomodations. Worker bees are expected to work and occasionally sleep, thus the crappier hotels.
I was definitely a worker bee, but the hotel policy was pretty liberal. I even bitched a hotel onto the corporations list that was more expensive than normal simply because the preferred one was so damn far away.
The food per diem was nuts, too. I'd not even bother expensing donuts and coffee for breakfast and a burger for lunch so I could -- and did -- blow $100 on dinner. Since I quit, I guess gone are the days of oysters, drinks, and a full rack of lamb dinner (oh, and throw in a few t-shirts on my tab).
Only in a big city can you reasonably expect to be able to speak our act out on a subject contrary to public opinion and have zero effects on your personal or professional life.
Talk to people who grew up in small towns or very close knit communities -- sometimes wearing the wrong *clothes* was enough to subject you to non-judicial punishment. Certainly opinions diametrically opposed to whatever the popular opinion is will cause you to lose friends and get stares.
Unjust and unfair? Probably, but that's what living with other carbon-based organisms is generally like.
Your point is well taken -- Gates doesn't and hasn't worked in a modern office like a normal employee, how can he possibly know what it would be like or what would be worthwhile? Between his army of yes-men, personal assistants and other hangers on he knows what real life is like about as well I know what it's like to live in Sudan.
If you're traveling to 3rd-tier cities to grind out 10 meetings in 1.5 days in shitty conference rooms with a Snickers-and-Motel-6 per diem and a travel policy that makes you fly through Detroit to get from Boise to Santa Fe with an 8 hour layover, then video conferencing is a godsend that you'd sell your kids and pimp out your wife for, even if you do it just once a quarter.
But if you're traveling to have one 30 minute meeting in only tier 1 cities with a $150 a day food per diem, "recommended" hotel lists that would make Paris Hilton jealous, and a travel policy that amounts to "keep 1st class to a minimum and enjoy those frequent flyer miles", then doing it once a week isn't really all that bad afterall, and video conferencing kind of cramps your jet set style.
And ironically it's often the people who aren't flying who insist on the face-face. Having the vendor come to town is like having your rich uncle come to town -- free dinners at top-line places, tons of drinking and probably a little wenching, too. No travel, no bennies, so they "insist", and everybody benefits.
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You're confusing wars over drugs with wars over something else _financed_ by drugs.
And I suppose there can't be all that much history to it, to answer my own question, since prior to maybe the late 19th century there weren't any laws regulating drugs. Without laws, the only economic cost associated with drugs is what it takes to make them. It's not profitable without laws banning them and driving the price to multiples of thousands of dollars.
It's one thing to pass a law, it's another to enforce it. As we've seen in the recent Mastercard screwup, even when private organizations with enforcement mechanisms ban database activities it doesn't work very well.
It's probably a civil violation anyway, where a company pays a fine. You need big shot execs going to federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison for violating the laws for it to be of any value. "Fines" are just a way for companies to break the law and pass the cost off to someone else.
I've been reading more or less the same thing, on an emerging basis, since about the mid-90s. I think the gist was that the political goals of the IRA became increasingly unobtainable, and not just due to loyalists; as Ireland proper became more financially successful they began to see Northern Ireland as kind of an "East Germany" that was out of step with Ireland socially and economically, and didn't really want to assume all the problems associated with Northern Ireland.
The IRA itself "grew up" with members who were more versed in strongarm tactics and black marketeering than political struggle. They cared less about the political goals and more about organized crime style profiteering.
I think there's a great book to be written about the history of political/revolutionary movements and their involvement in crime and the underground economy. On one hand you have almost purely political movements like those of the first half of the 20th century that depended largely on Superpower largesse to finance them, on the other hand you have almost purely criminal organizations like cocaine cartels whose political ambitions seems solely linked to their criminal goals. And then there are those in-between groups that seem partially or completely motivated by politics but are heavily involved in criminal enterprises, like IRA.
I wonder what the first documentable linkage between drug trafficking and politics is -- US heroin running during Viet Nam? I know that heroin and hashish were big exports from the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon at one time (to whose profit? Syria? PLO? Other Lebanese factions?).
Is to make the banks financially liable for fraudulent transactions and limit their ability to nail merchants with chargebacks or hold consumers accountable and charge increasing fees. Fee increases should be approved by regulators the way that rate increases for utilities are approved -- require justification for the fee increases and limit them to specific costs so they can't be a general income source.
Credit cards are loopholes big enough to drive an oceanliner through because banks NEVER have to eat the liability associated with fraud and any liability they're stuck with they simply make back with profit in the form of higher fees.
I guarantee you that credit card security would be MUCH more secure if the financial liability for fraud and other misuse hit banks squarely in the profit margin. They would demand much tighter security in addition to financial compensation from credit card networks for fraud they had to cover. This would force Visa and MC to do something more creative (and expensive -- RSA SecureID built into your CC, anyone?).
MS isn't a company, it's a part of the economy.
I work for a small biz computer/network consulting business and there are dozens of companies like is in our area, and 90% of what we do is Microsoft. Add this in to the really big players that feed off of MS as well, and you have almost an economic segment unto itself.
It's hard to say "topple MS" when you have an economic entity almost as big (bigger?) than MS itself that makes money off of it.
Didn't somebody make a hardware (own CPU) Firewall on a PCI card at one time?
I guess ideally what you'd like a system on a PCI card with 4x NICs.
A meta operating systems is a really good concept. It would be even better with a "meta computer" that was comprised of CPUs, memory and I/O devices that could be partitioned at some hardware level into different computers.
Today I need all 4 CPUs combined into a single quad processsor system running a dedicated VM for CAD. Tomorrow I want two dual processor systems, one runs a dedicated VM for rendering and the other runs 3 VMs for other miscellaneous tasks; all I have to do is use to the meta-OS to repartition my hardware. Ideally VMs can be moved between HW partitions and be dynamically resized in terms of CPU power.
I always wondered why someone didn't cobble together a FreeBSD "make buildworld" installer that would install some rudimentary base system, reboot, and then begin a cvsup and then buildworld process which would produce the final finished result, including building any desired ports from source as well.
There's a limit as to how much you might gain from this, I suppose, as well as the compiler's ability to support or keep up with all the latest and greatest tweaks for some new CPU. Plus it would be really, really time consuming and installs take too long as it is (generally, not FreeBSD specifically).
I think the idea is that the owner is responsible for everything that happens to their car. Which makes a certain amount of sense considering that they cost tens of thousands of dollars and require a key to operate, meaning that the owner should know what's happening with them.
I think where this is more interesting are things like "managed" red light cameras. In Minneapolis, we're getting them soon, and the system is actually run by a third party. They review photos and send the incriminating ones to the police, who then review the photos and decide whether to issue a moving violation.
What I want to know is, who owns the pictures? Sure, the cops own the ones that they get from the company, but what about the others? Are they private property or is everything produced by the cameras public property?
Let's say I'm accused of some crime and my defense is I wasn't there, I was driving around. And I drove through a bunch of red light cameras (without necessarily running a red light). Can I get access to the photos?
I agree and disagree. Somebody made several decisions impacting the battery -- making it nonremovable, the target run life, the maximum size of the device. Whether the decisions were made by "marketing" or not doesn't really make the device's overall power engineering poor.
No, I think it's both bad advertising and engineering.
From an engineering standpoint, I think Apple could have added a few extra cubic millimeters to the battery size (and overall size) without sacrificing anything in the overall design. This way they would have delivered a real-world 8 hours of battery life, could have advertised it and those 3 people that start it up and listen without skipping or any UI interaction would have gotten 15 hours.
I just don't see how an iPod 2mm deeper, longer and wider and whose space was devoted to extra LiI battery would somehow have destroyed the design or usability of the iPod.
Overall I've been really disappointed with my 3G iPod's battery life and no longer even bother bringing it places where charging it isn't easy. On one trip I listened for about 30 minutes on the plane, 15 minutes in the airport and it died the next day after about another 30 minutes. Yes, I was careful to put it to sleep when done and it came out of the charger the morning of my flight. A whopping 75 minutes of use. I'd willing trade even an extra cubic centimeter of size increase to get realistic usage times out of it.
I was going to post exactly what you posted, but as I read your post I kind of wondered if anyone has done any extensive reading of the same bit of creative writing (prose, not poetry) written in multiple languages and can comment on just exactly how similar or dissimilar the writing can get.
I know from watching one too many Hong Kong action films that while their translations are bad, they can't deviate TOO much as they have to provide enough glue between the story and the action to make the movie work -- so you get stuff like "I must defend the honor of my sister and our family for the sake of our family's honor" -- it's not inaccurate, but an awkward wording.
I would think that a book could take certain liberties with a few highly specific idiomatic situations, but by and large wouldn't turn something like "To Kill A Mockingbird" into a legal dispute over a bird feeder.
We used sexcapade in college in the mid-80s, it's been around for a while.
The only one missing from your list is automagic.
I disagree with their big "noir" choice.
Maltese Falcon has a more coherent plot, but Big Sleep has a more intricate plot (William Faulker, the novelist and this film's screenwriter, couldn't even keep it all straight) and the dialogue is often as good as it gets in films (cf. Bogart and Bacall's sexually suggestive horse racing conversation).
Both films involve mystery, the dark side of life & crime.
Dashiell Hammet or Raymond Chandler? John Huston (screenplay) or William Faulkner (screenplay)? You get Bogart with either one, Bacall with one, and Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre with the other.
EVERYONE can say something good and bad about their platforms.
My G4 suxx0red under OS X. Slow as hell and a lockup nuisance. My crap Dell GX-270 running XP Pro never did that -- I only rebooted when I needed to, and often put off patches simply because I had so much shit open it took me half an hour to quit all the applications.
My home machine (Asus P4P800E/P43.2/XP Pro) goes flakey with the network chipset and then reboots every two weeks. Nothing seems to help, not even Marvell's driver-of-the-week upgrade.
At my last job we were hardly the poster children for best security practices, but we made a small effort to not wreck the network.
1) Reasonable firewalling -- keep out most network-level worms, and block their spread via unauthorized SMTP sending
2) Desktop AV -- the helpless desk always installed this with not-frequent enough updates, but it had to have helped.
3) SMTP filtering for viruses -- you can stop a lot of malware there
4) Mostly keep the users from being Administrator-equivilent on their machines.
5) Run some anti-spyware application. Halfway effective and admittedly a problem until MS Antispyware came out, which seems quite good.
6) Software Update Services. You don't get burned too bad if you stay patched.
None of this makes Windows "secure", but it avoids most problems. And in many cases switching a lot of organizations to all Macs "solves" the security/malware problem, but it creates a new set of problems for dealing with the rest of the world which is mostly Windows based.
The article and person referenced make it sound like there's nothing that can be done. I think even sloppy, half-efforts can be really successful.
How often do we see stories about new storage tech on Slashdot? At least once a quarter, and I don't think any have made it to market, with the exception of BluRay and for some thin definitions of "to market".
More pedantically, the consequence of fragmentation is inversely proportionate to the latency and bandwidth of the device.
low latency, high bandwidth means little consequence to fragmentation.
I would think fragmentation would still be a bit of a bummer for even flash drives. You are wasting cycles searching through fragmented memory, even if it is fewer than with platter-based disks.
Star Trek got tired because the situations were just too perfect and lacked human flaws. I could buy it with the original series, as there seemed to be a measure of military discipline and order.
TNG lacked that but everything was "perfect" -- where were the love triangles? The drug addicitions? The racism? The violence? Holosuite addiction? All of the dark aspects of humanity that add color to it even as we strive to eliminate them.
Maybe it was just my former industry, advertising, but there was a shitload of travel that took place, and a LOT of it was to NYC, Chicago, & LA. Perhaps some of the former glory of advertising vs. other industries.
I guess it depends on what work you do; pure management tends to do more BSing around and less real work, as well as expecting grander accomodations. Worker bees are expected to work and occasionally sleep, thus the crappier hotels.
I was definitely a worker bee, but the hotel policy was pretty liberal. I even bitched a hotel onto the corporations list that was more expensive than normal simply because the preferred one was so damn far away.
The food per diem was nuts, too. I'd not even bother expensing donuts and coffee for breakfast and a burger for lunch so I could -- and did -- blow $100 on dinner. Since I quit, I guess gone are the days of oysters, drinks, and a full rack of lamb dinner (oh, and throw in a few t-shirts on my tab).
Only in a big city can you reasonably expect to be able to speak our act out on a subject contrary to public opinion and have zero effects on your personal or professional life.
Talk to people who grew up in small towns or very close knit communities -- sometimes wearing the wrong *clothes* was enough to subject you to non-judicial punishment. Certainly opinions diametrically opposed to whatever the popular opinion is will cause you to lose friends and get stares.
Unjust and unfair? Probably, but that's what living with other carbon-based organisms is generally like.
Your point is well taken -- Gates doesn't and hasn't worked in a modern office like a normal employee, how can he possibly know what it would be like or what would be worthwhile? Between his army of yes-men, personal assistants and other hangers on he knows what real life is like about as well I know what it's like to live in Sudan.
It depends on the nature of your travel.
If you're traveling to 3rd-tier cities to grind out 10 meetings in 1.5 days in shitty conference rooms with a Snickers-and-Motel-6 per diem and a travel policy that makes you fly through Detroit to get from Boise to Santa Fe with an 8 hour layover, then video conferencing is a godsend that you'd sell your kids and pimp out your wife for, even if you do it just once a quarter.
But if you're traveling to have one 30 minute meeting in only tier 1 cities with a $150 a day food per diem, "recommended" hotel lists that would make Paris Hilton jealous, and a travel policy that amounts to "keep 1st class to a minimum and enjoy those frequent flyer miles", then doing it once a week isn't really all that bad afterall, and video conferencing kind of cramps your jet set style.
And ironically it's often the people who aren't flying who insist on the face-face. Having the vendor come to town is like having your rich uncle come to town -- free dinners at top-line places, tons of drinking and probably a little wenching, too. No travel, no bennies, so they "insist", and everybody benefits.
This critical error was caused by a device driver. Please contact your hardware vendor for device driver updates.