> Why should Steve listen to you, or anyone who advocates Mac cloning?
Way to miss the point. I could care less whether Steve listens or not, the clones are coming anyway. The guys who cloned the Apple ][ hardware didn't ask for permission. The TRS-80 clones didn't get Tandy's permission. Compaq certainly didn't have IBM's blessing.
When the price premium is high enough cloned hardware always appears. Economic laws eventually work their will. The barrier to entry on the Mac clone market was intentionally built as high as possible by placing much of the OS into ROMS which could be protected by copyright (remembering the Apple ][ clones) and Macs were a small niche product anyway, thus cloning was only a problem when Apple did it to themselves, and about as stupidly as possible. Macs are now PCs with only EFI, a very lame DRM scheme and a EULA preventing clones. EFI is a published standard and no barrier. The DRM is already well understood. Only the EULA remains and there is plenty of legal precedent that gives a cloner enough hope for victory to ensure a fight.
This is just reality calling Steve. Macs are PC clones now. Pretty, overpriced PC clones. Nobody as stopped cloned hardware before in the computing world for any length of time, Steve's reality distortion field has actually succeeded better than any realistic observer would have expected, but if this attempt fails more will follow.
Why? Follow the money. Macs carry anywhere between a 25% (the optimistic assertions from the Mac faithful) to 100% surcharge on the hardware compared to the prices for generic crap. That means there is enough margin for even good quality clones to undercut Apple's pricing. The big vendors have dominated the Windows PC world with their OEM pricing deals and at the same time would be terrified of tangling with Apple's legal goons. That leaves an opportunity for small offshore builders and where there is an opportunity for profit the Asian factories will sell products.
Yup, had that book on my shelf so long it is looking ratty, darned acidic paper. Lots to recommend in using his chart, if for no other reason that it has been aroudn so long and so many people are familiar with it. Downside is invoking Pournelle's name on slashdot tends to divert the existing conversation into a love/hate flamewar over Pournelle for not only his politics but his tech writings.
The major problem with Pournells's chart is it was written when the Socialists had successfully rewritten the history books to put both Fascism and Nazism as right wing diseases. If any doubt on that subject remained Jonah Goldberg's recent masterpiece of investigative history put them to rest. Both Fascism and Nazism are sub species of Communism/Socialism. (The full name was the tell for me and those paying attention, now everybody should be able to figure it out.) So the Nazi bubble should be replaced with Nationalism or Monarchy. Not sure what Fascism needs to be replaced with.
> It's certainly better than a mere right/left, but I have a hard time > fitting the 3 clowns left running in the 2 major political parties to > any kind of scheme. They all stand for more war, bigger government, > higher taxes and less freedom.
Not hard at all. Obama is a 4.5/4.5 if he is anything. Mrs. Clinton* is probably a 5/5 in her heart but is too savvy a political animal to ever admit to it, let alone act on those beliefs so she would be more dead center in the Welfare Liberals circle in practice.
McCain is harder to place since he lacks any sort of coherent political philosophy. McCain gets a notion and since he is for it it is Right and anyone opposed isn't a patriot. But he shows no signs of ever having sat down and worked out a consistent set of beliefs so it is almost impossible to predict which side he will take on a particular issue until he announces a position. But he is is a pretty consistent Statist so put him at 4 on that axis and dead center at 3 on the Rationalist axis.
* Bill Clinton is a 4/4 that governed as a pretty unpredictable figure, wandering around the political map as he triangulated to fit the focus groups. Bill does appear to have a consistent set of beliefs, he is just very willing to compromise them to win elections. Seems more interested in having power to get sex than to wield it.
Exactly, and this point was mentioned in the question thread and promptly ignored like every other time the subject comes up. Too many people are far too invested in the left/right model to allow for any change.
Instead of saying it all again, here links to the two posts I made on the topic:
So long as we cling to the broken model there isn't much hope for dialog. Lots of people have proposed various axes for a two dimensional model that work much better than the left/right one and a website could probably map out and deal woth at least two by just replacing the simple bar with a small square with a dot and be a vast improvement.
But it won't happen. Ponder that and see the real bias in the system, ensuring no meaningful dialog takes place and we stay distracted with petty bickering.
> Is it so hard to see that they're just dealing with the (luminiferous) (a)ether?!?
Oh course. History doesn't repeat exactly but it does tend to rhyme. Is it any wonder that science falls prey to the same human failings since it IS just another human activity?
Step Three: When you fail all of the sub parts of Step Two, reread Amendments Nine and Ten of the US Constituition. Anything not explicitly allowed is forbidden.
Thus the only valid question for your local congresscritter is that infamous line uttered by Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction, "English Motherfucker; Do you speak it?"
> I'm always amazed at the number of conservatives who believe that > more money always buys a better gun, but more money can't buy a better > teacher.
Simple, lets start with guns. There are LOTS of guns, built for every possible use and you can pick the one best suited to your intended use. There are lots of good reviews to allow you to make an informed decision.
Now lets contrast this with teachers. Testing teachers for quality control is forbidden. Parents disagree over what 'teaching' even should be, but the State prescribes one doctrine for all. If one disagrees with WHAT is being taught it is hard to see how buying more of it will change anything. If we can't quantify quality other than waiting thirten years to see how many children out of each batch gets destroyed it is hard to get a grip on quality control, thus throwing more money at a broken design is contra indicated.
Now consider the original published design goals for mandatory public education:
1. Create obedient drones to man the dehumanizing factories of the industrial revolution. (Leader types were to be the children of the wealthy who would continue attending the best private academies.)
2. Ensure every drone (child) was properly instructed in socialism, including their palce in the new order. i.e. They follow, and the annointed elite lead.
3. Remove children from the labor force, thus removing a major competitive pressure on the trade unions.
Even if the schools were operating with 100% efficency I'd be arguing for burning the lot to the ground and starting over. But the reality is even more horrible. No. Sending a child to government schools is child abuse and pissing away the entire Federal budget on the current schools could only, in a perfect world, bring them back to the dystopia I outlined above because that is their stated DESIGN GOAL.
When you are ready to join me in abolishing the current system and privitizing education we can talk about whether and how much the various levels of government should subsidize education.
> If you read on your taxes, you are supposed to declare your mail-order purchases.
Yup. And if Amazon had the smallest operation in the state of NY they would have to collect and pay NY taxes. But they don't so I'll be blown if I can see how the State of NY will be able to force a CA business to collect a NY tax, do all that bookkeeping and forward the money to NY. If they succeed it will destroy the last fig leaf of Federalism.
Work the problem backwards. On your initial pick there is a one in three chance you picked the car and a two in three you picked a goat. Then Monty opens a door. If your original pick was a goat the remaining door has the car. So there is still a one in three chance your original door has a car and a two in three chance the remaining door is the right one. The key is realizing the odds are still x in three and not 50-50. .
Not exactly. I have a Creative USB sound device hooked up to my Myth box I picked up several yeara ago. It has a switch on the side to disable the analog outputs. If the analog plugs are enabled everything gets the 48Hkz resample. Kill the analog outputs and it will send a proper optical output to my amp at either 44.1 or 48. Haven't tried 32k or 96k, the amp supports em but I didn't have anything handy to test with. Turned out not to really matter in my case since the PVR-350 only captures audio at 48k.
> In order to have evolution you need replication, it's as simple as that.
> Finally, we're not after complete and self-contained replication.
What do you call something that isn't capable of self contained replication? A virus. The replication stategy for a virus is very different than a full organism. It needs a host body, and the wider variety of hosts it can infect the better. Host being people. Hosts should be plentiful enough to encourage contagion. If I had a reprap there aren't two other people within 50 miles who I could replicate one for. That's an evolutionary dead end. And since as currently designed reproduction is about the extent of it's usefulness.......
The current requirements for a suitable host make replication difficult. A host needs the following:
1. To see a need for a rapid prototyper of rather limited capabilities. Or the host has to buy into the longterm vision of building a self replicating machine... that is a very longterm undertaking. I'm talking longer than HURD timescales.
2. Several fairly developed skills in rather widely different discplines.
3. Copious free time and nontrivial amounts of cash or existing stocks of components.
A design that could work on cutting back on any of those three limitations would be at an evolutionary advantage even if it is inducing the host to expend more resources on it's behalf.
The rate of evolution is tied to the number of units in use/under construction, right? Lots of the subsystems can be improved in the total lack of self replication. The software for example will improve the more people with programming skills can be convinced to install/use it. Better software running on more platforms, larger object libraries, etc will tend to induce more people to want a device. Simpler to produce designs or improvements to widen the range of objects which can be output will bring in more users. The more users the easier it is to get the raw input materials at better prices as economies of scale kick in. And making the mechanical parts for such a device with itself is such a compelling idea it will come as soon as the machines evolve far enough along.
Mechanical evolution doesn't have to mirror biology perfectly, we don't have to figure out whether the robot chicken or the robot egg comes first, just make better and better chickens until they get good enough to lay eggs.
> The design is meant to evolve. It won't do that until it replicates. > Therefore, the most critical thing to do is make it replicate.
> It is only when large numbers of people can get hold of the thing that > the design will evolve.
Seems like these two goals are working against each other currently. Putting large quantities of rapid prototypers into the field will bring about changes we can't imagine yet. And having one able to replicate itself will be huge. But reprap ain't there and ain't likely to get there anytime soon. Currently even once the thing works as intended, you are still looking at needing a ton of parts (motors, microcontrollers, metal bits, etc) and probably a man-week of labor to reproduce one. And because of it's construction limitations it has to produce less desirable low melting point plastics.
You are trying to create too much at once, like if RMS had set out to make GNU from scratch without using existing systems (SunOS for example) as scaffolding.
Yes making the custom plastic bits for itself is impressive, but I suspect a system could be designed to instead minimize the number of formed parts and use more sheets/bars/brackets off the shelves of existing hardware producers. Also, if a couple of the more difficult parts were mass manufactured (I'm thinking the injection head here) the reliability, output quality and materials selection could be dramatically improved. A manufactured electronics package would put building a prototyper in the reach of lot of people who would otherwise get stuck building circuit boards. Moving to a prefab arduino controller was a big step in the right direction there.
So if instead of setting a goal of a completely self reproducing machine, with anything short of that goal seen as failure, why not set as a short term goal designing an EASY TO DUPLICATE machine and working toward the goal of being able to make as many of it's parts as possible. Seven machines aren't going to change the world, Seven thousand and growing like crazy just might, even if those seven thousand couldn't completely reproduce more of their kind.... but could easily be built from plans off the Internet and a modest kit of hard to locate mechanical parts and the electronics package.
>..seem to suggest that it is much more valuable for them to have > the offenders leave rather than be customers.
This is as old as the ISP. The thumb rule is half your resources will get consumed by about 5% of the customers if you don't take measures. It isn't a hard decision folks, chase off that 5% over a few months and you will still have net subscriber growth while putting off the next major plant upgrade far enough the continual dropping equipment prices will work in your favor. Even better is to continually identify the hogs and chase em off to your competitors.
This cold hard reality will continue to exist so long as we insist on flat rate Internet. Sounds nice but all users are not equal. So long as they all pay the same the only way to win is to find ever more clever ways to chase off the ones that cost you more money than they pay without running afoul of regulators and class action suits.
> No, they have a monopoly and friendly government regulators.
Industries almost always end up with 'friendly government regulators.' Raise your objections to that truth all you want, they don't matter. Doesn't matter whether the regulators, current administration, general population, etc. is 'progressive' enough, etc. The industry being regulated has an intense interest and the general population doesn't. NO small band of activists can match the self interest of a powerful industry and there rarely much interest in regulating weak industries.
It is a basic limit of the power of government. It would be more productive to consider ways to constrain industries which do not suffer this defect. I won't speak the name of the most effective method, for it is a word of power and would cause much wailing in a crowd such as this.
> From Wikipedia: Advertising is a form of communication whose > purpose is to lie and deceive...
That wikimedia seems perfectly content to allow that sort of idiocy to stay while being anal retentive about the quality in less important areas is why Wikipedia will never be seen as a primary source of information. It's great if you want to know some pendantic trivia point about the Transformers, not so great if you want actual knowledge about the real world.
Special traits: Horrible speech impediment, plus a bad case of foot in mouth disease. Charisma is special. Anyone even slightly predisposed to agree with him will be affected by his CHR stat as written and will tend to blindly believe him due to the unnaturally high reaction rolls. However for anyone even slightly predisposed to disagree with him the normally favorable reaction rolls a 20 charisma would normally bestow get reversed to inspire unreasoning hatred and fear. Targets get to save vs. Int to see through the special CHR, if successful treat Chr as 15.
For purposes of military leadership treat as name level fighter despite actual level.
> If these are the ISPs (as opposed to the visited web sites) doing > the spying, then how are the advertising companies involved supposed > to deliver the content?
Because the visited web sites already aren't the ones delivering the advertising. You go to CNN.com and view a page. The ads come from an outside site. That site partners with your ISP. They toss a packet with the IP and perhaps other info (like browser info so the ISP can determine which PC behind the home NAT is making the request and map that to a 'user number or email identity') and returns it. The ad server examines the previous history for that identity and the page being requested and picks an appropriate ad. And it all happens behind the scenes in the page load delay. Frightened yet?
> I pay for a dedicated server (essentially colo but they provide > the hardware) from a company with a decent AUP. I put linux on > the server and run squid.....
And you are a fool with more money and tech knowledge than you have the brains to use wisely.
Exactly what are you hoping to accomplish by going to all of that bother? Your last mile ISP can't monitor you but the hosting company and THEIR ISP can so you have just shifted the point of attack.
And the government (which is what you are afraid of, right?) can't monitor either (the spooks can but anything they find can't be used against you in a court... they would just have to kill ya) without a warrant. And with a warrant they can monitor you wherever. Doing the kind of crap you are doing makes you a likely target for governmnet snooping. So don't come whining to me whne ya find a keylogger on your machine.... buried inside your keyboard controller chip.
> If they want to sniff all of my NAT-ed packets coming out, they're >going to discover that I'm a geek who has four Facebook sites, likes > art and hates it, plays....
Silly person, they are much smarter than that. Each of those PCs can be identified, see previous slashdot articles on the subject. Especially since each PC in a network serving a diverse family as you are describing will probably have obvious differences in OS and browser versions. Then there is detailed packet header inspection (DEEP INSPECTION, remember?) to seperate out OS subtle version differences, etc. And each PC/account will offerup different cookies to the same websites like Google.
NAT won't stop them. SSL won't stop them. Laws might. This sort of snooping isn't 'like' listening in on phone conversations. It IS listening in on conversations.
Didn't we already see this one? Intel (this time AMD also) develops radical new processor arch that will be insanely great once a quantum leap in developer tools is made to utilize it.
Itanic crashed, burned and sank against the rocks of the compiler tech not being able to keep up. I see it happening again.
Yes we will find ways to make a quad core system stay busy enough to sell em to corporate desktops and home users. Hell, you can assign one to the virus/crapware scanner. Waste another or two doing ever more Movie OS like 3D effects on the desktop. Most apps can (and will be ) be rewritten to keep a couple of threads busy, even if it is less efficient than the older single threaded version. But sixteen or more? We better get cracking on natural language voice recognition, direct brain interfaces or something to keep the chipmakers profitable because traditional desktop apps won't ever keep that many cores busy.
> The right have all sorts of rules that "regulate" individual responsibility
That is why it requires more than one dimension to map out political positions. In this cluster of comments a useful pair would be Government's role in the economy and another for government's role in defining and enforcing morality.
This would give, as the four extreme corners, four Hells:
1. Pure Libertarian. Minimal government control of both economy and morality beyond enforcing contracts and the zero agression principle. Might be a nice dream, except that nobody knows how to actually get there or how the million niggling details would work. Ayn Rand's Hell.
2. Free markets but strong Puritan controls on morality. Moral Najority Hell.
3. Modern Democrats/Progressives. Or at least as they are pushing towards. Government control over every aspect of life. Political Correctness ascendent. Government goes beyond regulating transfats, smoking, etc. to nationalized health care, banking, etc. Government even regulates political speech beyond the current McCain/Fiengold limits. (The current Progressive State isn't enforcing the religious based morality the fundies would like but it is rigidly enforcing A moral code.) Hillary's Nanny State Hell.
4. Hippies. Heavy Industrial policy, ruinious taxes, massive welfare state. But socially "free love, no perversion too extreme." Keep the government outta my bedroom dude! Smelly Hippy Hell.
> They are useful, though massively abstract concepts
No, the one dimensional politcal 'line' theory of politics is one of the most damaging ideas ever. And since it would require a massive mental leap to believe something so damaging came about by accident..... Just one more way the MSM keeps most voters clueless.
Seriously, even a two dimensional chart (many people have proposed various traits for the two axes, many work) does much better to seperate out some of the factions which get compressed together unnaturally on a line. On what is normally termed the 'left' you have to ram together fascists, national socialists, socialists, communists, progressives, modern welfare liberalism, anarchists, hippies and about half of the Libertarians. Doesn't capture the very real philosophical differences. Heck, there ARE real differences between russian communism and chinese communism, the difference between a typical American Democrat and Chairman Mao is non-trivial. Good luck capturing any of that with small variations in where you place all of them on 'tbe Left.' And over on the other end you have old school Country Club Republican bluebloods, hardcore capitalists, religious fundies, Federalists, Madision style Anti-Federalists, Classical Liberals, a bunch of Libertarians lending their unique splash of color, classic cons, crunchy cons, neocons, etc. all supposedly represented by subtle gradations of 'Right.'
And any site trying to compare and contrast political views and biases by using the broken left/right model will only be making political discourse harder.
> Correction: The divisive split between "Right" and "Far Right" is one of the things that most > cripples democracy in the USA, today.
You are correct that it is a problem. But I think that longterm it is good. Currently we are in the process of making a major choice between two competing and utterly incompatible philosophies. So it is proper that we have a major thowdown fight over such an important question.
> I think it's insane to think that just because people use encryption that it's grounds for a warrant.
As a practical matter, here in the real world that actually exists, if you spot a bunch of encrypted traffic between end points (i.e. not to-from server farms or corp networks) you can bet yer ass it is something illegal. No need to give me the arguments, I know em. But here, today, almost nobody is encrypting Internet traffic except cypherpunks and criminals. You will see legit encrypted traffic to large ecommerce websites and VPN action. That is about it. Even the bittorrent pirates are cleartext.
> If it's like that then I guess we can't use off the record with gaim anymore, and I guess we can't use > SSL anymore, or SSH for that matter.
Not saying that. Just that as a practical matter those uses get lost in the noise. Widespread crypto would be a big win from a civil liberties standpoint, but it ain't current reality and it probably ain't happening anytime soon.
> Also, try using PGP with Thunderbird, Enigmail works just fine, and there's also Firefox extensions.
And your point is? What I mean by 'virtually transparent' is when you install the MUA it prompts "install an existing keyring or generate a keypair?" then signs every outgoing mail and attaches the public key (or better a pointer to it on a keyserver) and collects keys from inbound mail automagically. And anytime it has a key on file it sends an encrypted mail. The end user doesn't do anything, it "just works."
> If it's truly a terrorist type situation, I'm sure the NSA has the computing resources to crack > all the standard encryption algorithms.
Maybe they do, maybe they don't. The Intelligence agencies haven't exactly been covering themselves in glory the last couple of decades. What is certain is that such a secret wouldn't be squandered on something as trivial as stopping a terrorist, even a 9/11 scale operation. See the lengths taken to keep the Ultra secret for details.
> My impression was that it would only appear as encrypted traffic.
Exactly. Large regular encrypted traffoc between a set of 'end points' on the Internet. That will stick out like the proverbial turd in a punchbowl to anyone with a clue. Legit encrypted traffic will be intermittent to big web servers or VPN links into large corporate networks. With just a little traffic analysis the suspicious stuff will pop out easily.
Map a few dozen cable/dsl links doing bulk encrypted traffic amongst themselves and the only thing that would keeps that from, by itself, being grounds for a warrant is the knowledge the ACLU/EFF would raise holy hell. Seriously, 95%+ probability that said traffic is some sort of illegal activity. So instead the Feds will just spend a little more effort and taxpayer dollars to learn more about that group of users and bust em the old fashioned way.
Yes it would be a better world if we could convince vast portions of the computer using public to encrypt web and email traffic by default but the powers that be ain't going to permit it. Ask yourself why no email client makes crypto virtually transparent, even Free ones.
Slashdot Mirror
> Why should Steve listen to you, or anyone who advocates Mac cloning?
Way to miss the point. I could care less whether Steve listens or not, the clones are coming anyway. The guys who cloned the Apple ][ hardware didn't ask for permission. The TRS-80 clones didn't get Tandy's permission. Compaq certainly didn't have IBM's blessing.
When the price premium is high enough cloned hardware always appears. Economic laws eventually work their will. The barrier to entry on the Mac clone market was intentionally built as high as possible by placing much of the OS into ROMS which could be protected by copyright (remembering the Apple ][ clones) and Macs were a small niche product anyway, thus cloning was only a problem when Apple did it to themselves, and about as stupidly as possible. Macs are now PCs with only EFI, a very lame DRM scheme and a EULA preventing clones. EFI is a published standard and no barrier. The DRM is already well understood. Only the EULA remains and there is plenty of legal precedent that gives a cloner enough hope for victory to ensure a fight.
This is just reality calling Steve. Macs are PC clones now. Pretty, overpriced PC clones. Nobody as stopped cloned hardware before in the computing world for any length of time, Steve's reality distortion field has actually succeeded better than any realistic observer would have expected, but if this attempt fails more will follow.
Why? Follow the money. Macs carry anywhere between a 25% (the optimistic assertions from the Mac faithful) to 100% surcharge on the hardware compared to the prices for generic crap. That means there is enough margin for even good quality clones to undercut Apple's pricing. The big vendors have dominated the Windows PC world with their OEM pricing deals and at the same time would be terrified of tangling with Apple's legal goons. That leaves an opportunity for small offshore builders and where there is an opportunity for profit the Asian factories will sell products.
Yup, had that book on my shelf so long it is looking ratty, darned acidic paper. Lots to recommend in using his chart, if for no other reason that it has been aroudn so long and so many people are familiar with it. Downside is invoking Pournelle's name on slashdot tends to divert the existing conversation into a love/hate flamewar over Pournelle for not only his politics but his tech writings.
The major problem with Pournells's chart is it was written when the Socialists had successfully rewritten the history books to put both Fascism and Nazism as right wing diseases. If any doubt on that subject remained Jonah Goldberg's recent masterpiece of investigative history put them to rest. Both Fascism and Nazism are sub species of Communism/Socialism. (The full name was the tell for me and those paying attention, now everybody should be able to figure it out.) So the Nazi bubble should be replaced with Nationalism or Monarchy. Not sure what Fascism needs to be replaced with.
> It's certainly better than a mere right/left, but I have a hard time
> fitting the 3 clowns left running in the 2 major political parties to
> any kind of scheme. They all stand for more war, bigger government,
> higher taxes and less freedom.
Not hard at all. Obama is a 4.5/4.5 if he is anything. Mrs. Clinton* is probably a 5/5 in her heart but is too savvy a political animal to ever admit to it, let alone act on those beliefs so she would be more dead center in the Welfare Liberals circle in practice.
McCain is harder to place since he lacks any sort of coherent political philosophy. McCain gets a notion and since he is for it it is Right and anyone opposed isn't a patriot. But he shows no signs of ever having sat down and worked out a consistent set of beliefs so it is almost impossible to predict which side he will take on a particular issue until he announces a position. But he is is a pretty consistent Statist so put him at 4 on that axis and dead center at 3 on the Rationalist axis.
* Bill Clinton is a 4/4 that governed as a pretty unpredictable figure, wandering around the political map as he triangulated to fit the focus groups. Bill does appear to have a consistent set of beliefs, he is just very willing to compromise them to win elections. Seems more interested in having power to get sex than to wield it.
> Politics isn't a simple 1D scale..
Exactly, and this point was mentioned in the question thread and promptly ignored like every other time the subject comes up. Too many people are far too invested in the left/right model to allow for any change.
Instead of saying it all again, here links to the two posts I made on the topic:
Post 1
Post 2
So long as we cling to the broken model there isn't much hope for dialog. Lots of people have proposed various axes for a two dimensional model that work much better than the left/right one and a website could probably map out and deal woth at least two by just replacing the simple bar with a small square with a dot and be a vast improvement.
But it won't happen. Ponder that and see the real bias in the system, ensuring no meaningful dialog takes place and we stay distracted with petty bickering.
> Is it so hard to see that they're just dealing with the (luminiferous) (a)ether?!?
Oh course. History doesn't repeat exactly but it does tend to rhyme. Is it any wonder that science falls prey to the same human failings since it IS just another human activity?
> What Constitutional issues?
The ones that forbid 90% of what the Federal Government is currently doing. It's quite simple actually and you might be up to the task.
Step One: Obtain a copy of the US Constituition (Hint: Google is your friend) and read it.
Step Two: Locate and quote the section that authorizes the Federal Government to do any/all of the following:
Step Two-A: Establish government schools, or to fund them
Step Two-B: Require children to attend government schools
Step Two-C: Establish nationwide testing requirements
Step Three: When you fail all of the sub parts of Step Two, reread Amendments Nine and Ten of the US Constituition. Anything not explicitly allowed is forbidden.
Thus the only valid question for your local congresscritter is that infamous line uttered by Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction, "English Motherfucker; Do you speak it?"
> I'm always amazed at the number of conservatives who believe that
> more money always buys a better gun, but more money can't buy a better
> teacher.
Simple, lets start with guns. There are LOTS of guns, built for every possible use and you can pick the one best suited to your intended use. There are lots of good reviews to allow you to make an informed decision.
Now lets contrast this with teachers. Testing teachers for quality control is forbidden. Parents disagree over what 'teaching' even should be, but the State prescribes one doctrine for all. If one disagrees with WHAT is being taught it is hard to see how buying more of it will change anything. If we can't quantify quality other than waiting thirten years to see how many children out of each batch gets destroyed it is hard to get a grip on quality control, thus throwing more money at a broken design is contra indicated.
Now consider the original published design goals for mandatory public education:
1. Create obedient drones to man the dehumanizing factories of the industrial revolution. (Leader types were to be the children of the wealthy who would continue attending the best private academies.)
2. Ensure every drone (child) was properly instructed in socialism, including their palce in the new order. i.e. They follow, and the annointed elite lead.
3. Remove children from the labor force, thus removing a major competitive pressure on the trade unions.
Even if the schools were operating with 100% efficency I'd be arguing for burning the lot to the ground and starting over. But the reality is even more horrible. No. Sending a child to government schools is child abuse and pissing away the entire Federal budget on the current schools could only, in a perfect world, bring them back to the dystopia I outlined above because that is their stated DESIGN GOAL.
When you are ready to join me in abolishing the current system and privitizing education we can talk about whether and how much the various levels of government should subsidize education.
> If you read on your taxes, you are supposed to declare your mail-order purchases.
Yup. And if Amazon had the smallest operation in the state of NY they would have to collect and pay NY taxes. But they don't so I'll be blown if I can see how the State of NY will be able to force a CA business to collect a NY tax, do all that bookkeeping and forward the money to NY. If they succeed it will destroy the last fig leaf of Federalism.
> What am I missing?
Work the problem backwards. On your initial pick there is a one in three chance you picked the car and a two in three you picked a goat. Then Monty opens a door. If your original pick was a goat the remaining door has the car. So there is still a one in three chance your original door has a car and a two in three chance the remaining door is the right one. The key is realizing the odds are still x in three and not 50-50.
.
> Yahoo is pluckings now.
Yup, Yahoo! is now officially dead and the buzzards are just fighting to see who gets to rip off the more choice hunks of meat from the bones.
Sad, but everybody should have seen this coming for at least five years so it is hard to be shocked or anything.
Not exactly. I have a Creative USB sound device hooked up to my Myth box I picked up several yeara ago. It has a switch on the side to disable the analog outputs. If the analog plugs are enabled everything gets the 48Hkz resample. Kill the analog outputs and it will send a proper optical output to my amp at either 44.1 or 48. Haven't tried 32k or 96k, the amp supports em but I didn't have anything handy to test with. Turned out not to really matter in my case since the PVR-350 only captures audio at 48k.
Sounds like my idea didn't get communicated well.
> In order to have evolution you need replication, it's as simple as that.
> Finally, we're not after complete and self-contained replication.
What do you call something that isn't capable of self contained replication? A virus. The replication stategy for a virus is very different than a full organism. It needs a host body, and the wider variety of hosts it can infect the better. Host being people. Hosts should be plentiful enough to encourage contagion. If I had a reprap there aren't two other people within 50 miles who I could replicate one for. That's an evolutionary dead end. And since as currently designed reproduction is about the extent of it's usefulness.......
The current requirements for a suitable host make replication difficult. A host needs the following:
1. To see a need for a rapid prototyper of rather limited capabilities. Or the host has to buy into the longterm vision of building a self replicating machine... that is a very longterm undertaking. I'm talking longer than HURD timescales.
2. Several fairly developed skills in rather widely different discplines.
3. Copious free time and nontrivial amounts of cash or existing stocks of components.
A design that could work on cutting back on any of those three limitations would be at an evolutionary advantage even if it is inducing the host to expend more resources on it's behalf.
The rate of evolution is tied to the number of units in use/under construction, right? Lots of the subsystems can be improved in the total lack of self replication. The software for example will improve the more people with programming skills can be convinced to install/use it. Better software running on more platforms, larger object libraries, etc will tend to induce more people to want a device. Simpler to produce designs or improvements to widen the range of objects which can be output will bring in more users. The more users the easier it is to get the raw input materials at better prices as economies of scale kick in. And making the mechanical parts for such a device with itself is such a compelling idea it will come as soon as the machines evolve far enough along.
Mechanical evolution doesn't have to mirror biology perfectly, we don't have to figure out whether the robot chicken or the robot egg comes first, just make better and better chickens until they get good enough to lay eggs.
> The design is meant to evolve. It won't do that until it replicates.
> Therefore, the most critical thing to do is make it replicate.
> It is only when large numbers of people can get hold of the thing that
> the design will evolve.
Seems like these two goals are working against each other currently. Putting large quantities of rapid prototypers into the field will bring about changes we can't imagine yet. And having one able to replicate itself will be huge. But reprap ain't there and ain't likely to get there anytime soon. Currently even once the thing works as intended, you are still looking at needing a ton of parts (motors, microcontrollers, metal bits, etc) and probably a man-week of labor to reproduce one. And because of it's construction limitations it has to produce less desirable low melting point plastics.
You are trying to create too much at once, like if RMS had set out to make GNU from scratch without using existing systems (SunOS for example) as scaffolding.
Yes making the custom plastic bits for itself is impressive, but I suspect a system could be designed to instead minimize the number of formed parts and use more sheets/bars/brackets off the shelves of existing hardware producers. Also, if a couple of the more difficult parts were mass manufactured (I'm thinking the injection head here) the reliability, output quality and materials selection could be dramatically improved. A manufactured electronics package would put building a prototyper in the reach of lot of people who would otherwise get stuck building circuit boards. Moving to a prefab arduino controller was a big step in the right direction there.
So if instead of setting a goal of a completely self reproducing machine, with anything short of that goal seen as failure, why not set as a short term goal designing an EASY TO DUPLICATE machine and working toward the goal of being able to make as many of it's parts as possible. Seven machines aren't going to change the world, Seven thousand and growing like crazy just might, even if those seven thousand couldn't completely reproduce more of their kind.... but could easily be built from plans off the Internet and a modest kit of hard to locate mechanical parts and the electronics package.
> ..seem to suggest that it is much more valuable for them to have
> the offenders leave rather than be customers.
This is as old as the ISP. The thumb rule is half your resources will get consumed by about 5% of the customers if you don't take measures. It isn't a hard decision folks, chase off that 5% over a few months and you will still have net subscriber growth while putting off the next major plant upgrade far enough the continual dropping equipment prices will work in your favor. Even better is to continually identify the hogs and chase em off to your competitors.
This cold hard reality will continue to exist so long as we insist on flat rate Internet. Sounds nice but all users are not equal. So long as they all pay the same the only way to win is to find ever more clever ways to chase off the ones that cost you more money than they pay without running afoul of regulators and class action suits.
> No, they have a monopoly and friendly government regulators.
Industries almost always end up with 'friendly government regulators.' Raise your objections to that truth all you want, they don't matter. Doesn't matter whether the regulators, current administration, general population, etc. is 'progressive' enough, etc. The industry being regulated has an intense interest and the general population doesn't. NO small band of activists can match the self interest of a powerful industry and there rarely much interest in regulating weak industries.
It is a basic limit of the power of government. It would be more productive to consider ways to constrain industries which do not suffer this defect. I won't speak the name of the most effective method, for it is a word of power and would cause much wailing in a crowd such as this.
> From Wikipedia: Advertising is a form of communication whose
> purpose is to lie and deceive...
That wikimedia seems perfectly content to allow that sort of idiocy to stay while being anal retentive about the quality in less important areas is why Wikipedia will never be seen as a primary source of information. It's great if you want to know some pendantic trivia point about the Transformers, not so great if you want actual knowledge about the real world.
> AFAIK, his INT score shouldn't be higher than 9.
Oh come now, he can't be the evil genuis who destroyed the Republic AND a blithering idiot. Here is how I'd write up his character sheet:
Str: 14 (He does exercise,jog, etc)
Int: 17 (Kinda low for an evil genius, but...)
Wis: 9
Dex: 11 (Average)
Con: 11 (Again, average)
Chr: 20* (Special, see below)
Class: Politician 20th level, merchant/businessman 5th., Fighter (pilot) 3rd.
Special traits: Horrible speech impediment, plus a bad case of foot in mouth disease. Charisma is special. Anyone even slightly predisposed to agree with him will be affected by his CHR stat as written and will tend to blindly believe him due to the unnaturally high reaction rolls. However for anyone even slightly predisposed to disagree with him the normally favorable reaction rolls a 20 charisma would normally bestow get reversed to inspire unreasoning hatred and fear. Targets get to save vs. Int to see through the special CHR, if successful treat Chr as 15.
For purposes of military leadership treat as name level fighter despite actual level.
> If these are the ISPs (as opposed to the visited web sites) doing
> the spying, then how are the advertising companies involved supposed
> to deliver the content?
Because the visited web sites already aren't the ones delivering the advertising. You go to CNN.com and view a page. The ads come from an outside site. That site partners with your ISP. They toss a packet with the IP and perhaps other info (like browser info so the ISP can determine which PC behind the home NAT is making the request and map that to a 'user number or email identity') and returns it. The ad server examines the previous history for that identity and the page being requested and picks an appropriate ad. And it all happens behind the scenes in the page load delay. Frightened yet?
> I pay for a dedicated server (essentially colo but they provide
> the hardware) from a company with a decent AUP. I put linux on
> the server and run squid.....
And you are a fool with more money and tech knowledge than you have the brains to use wisely.
Exactly what are you hoping to accomplish by going to all of that bother? Your last mile ISP can't monitor you but the hosting company and THEIR ISP can so you have just shifted the point of attack.
And the government (which is what you are afraid of, right?) can't monitor either (the spooks can but anything they find can't be used against you in a court... they would just have to kill ya) without a warrant. And with a warrant they can monitor you wherever. Doing the kind of crap you are doing makes you a likely target for governmnet snooping. So don't come whining to me whne ya find a keylogger on your machine.... buried inside your keyboard controller chip.
> If they want to sniff all of my NAT-ed packets coming out, they're
>going to discover that I'm a geek who has four Facebook sites, likes
> art and hates it, plays....
Silly person, they are much smarter than that. Each of those PCs can be identified, see previous slashdot articles on the subject. Especially since each PC in a network serving a diverse family as you are describing will probably have obvious differences in OS and browser versions. Then there is detailed packet header inspection (DEEP INSPECTION, remember?) to seperate out OS subtle version differences, etc. And each PC/account will offerup different cookies to the same websites like Google.
NAT won't stop them. SSL won't stop them. Laws might. This sort of snooping isn't 'like' listening in on phone conversations. It IS listening in on conversations.
Didn't we already see this one? Intel (this time AMD also) develops radical new processor arch that will be insanely great once a quantum leap in developer tools is made to utilize it.
Itanic crashed, burned and sank against the rocks of the compiler tech not being able to keep up. I see it happening again.
Yes we will find ways to make a quad core system stay busy enough to sell em to corporate desktops and home users. Hell, you can assign one to the virus/crapware scanner. Waste another or two doing ever more Movie OS like 3D effects on the desktop. Most apps can (and will be ) be rewritten to keep a couple of threads busy, even if it is less efficient than the older single threaded version. But sixteen or more? We better get cracking on natural language voice recognition, direct brain interfaces or something to keep the chipmakers profitable because traditional desktop apps won't ever keep that many cores busy.
> The right have all sorts of rules that "regulate" individual responsibility
That is why it requires more than one dimension to map out political positions. In this cluster of comments a useful pair would be Government's role in the economy and another for government's role in defining and enforcing morality.
This would give, as the four extreme corners, four Hells:
1. Pure Libertarian. Minimal government control of both economy and morality beyond enforcing contracts and the zero agression principle. Might be a nice dream, except that nobody knows how to actually get there or how the million niggling details would work. Ayn Rand's Hell.
2. Free markets but strong Puritan controls on morality. Moral Najority Hell.
3. Modern Democrats/Progressives. Or at least as they are pushing towards. Government control over every aspect of life. Political Correctness ascendent. Government goes beyond regulating transfats, smoking, etc. to nationalized health care, banking, etc. Government even regulates political speech beyond the current McCain/Fiengold limits. (The current Progressive State isn't enforcing the religious based morality the fundies would like but it is rigidly enforcing A moral code.) Hillary's Nanny State Hell.
4. Hippies. Heavy Industrial policy, ruinious taxes, massive welfare state. But socially "free love, no perversion too extreme." Keep the government outta my bedroom dude! Smelly Hippy Hell.
> They are useful, though massively abstract concepts
No, the one dimensional politcal 'line' theory of politics is one of the most damaging ideas ever. And since it would require a massive mental leap to believe something so damaging came about by accident..... Just one more way the MSM keeps most voters clueless.
Seriously, even a two dimensional chart (many people have proposed various traits for the two axes, many work) does much better to seperate out some of the factions which get compressed together unnaturally on a line. On what is normally termed the 'left' you have to ram together fascists, national socialists, socialists, communists, progressives, modern welfare liberalism, anarchists, hippies and about half of the Libertarians. Doesn't capture the very real philosophical differences. Heck, there ARE real differences between russian communism and chinese communism, the difference between a typical American Democrat and Chairman Mao is non-trivial. Good luck capturing any of that with small variations in where you place all of them on 'tbe Left.' And over on the other end you have old school Country Club Republican bluebloods, hardcore capitalists, religious fundies, Federalists, Madision style Anti-Federalists, Classical Liberals, a bunch of Libertarians lending their unique splash of color, classic cons, crunchy cons, neocons, etc. all supposedly represented by subtle gradations of 'Right.'
And any site trying to compare and contrast political views and biases by using the broken left/right model will only be making political discourse harder.
> Correction: The divisive split between "Right" and "Far Right" is one of the things that most
> cripples democracy in the USA, today.
You are correct that it is a problem. But I think that longterm it is good. Currently we are in the process of making a major choice between two competing and utterly incompatible philosophies. So it is proper that we have a major thowdown fight over such an important question.
> I think it's insane to think that just because people use encryption that it's grounds for a warrant.
As a practical matter, here in the real world that actually exists, if you spot a bunch of encrypted traffic between end points (i.e. not to-from server farms or corp networks) you can bet yer ass it is something illegal. No need to give me the arguments, I know em. But here, today, almost nobody is encrypting Internet traffic except cypherpunks and criminals. You will see legit encrypted traffic to large ecommerce websites and VPN action. That is about it. Even the bittorrent pirates are cleartext.
> If it's like that then I guess we can't use off the record with gaim anymore, and I guess we can't use
> SSL anymore, or SSH for that matter.
Not saying that. Just that as a practical matter those uses get lost in the noise. Widespread crypto would be a big win from a civil liberties standpoint, but it ain't current reality and it probably ain't happening anytime soon.
> Also, try using PGP with Thunderbird, Enigmail works just fine, and there's also Firefox extensions.
And your point is? What I mean by 'virtually transparent' is when you install the MUA it prompts "install an existing keyring or generate a keypair?" then signs every outgoing mail and attaches the public key (or better a pointer to it on a keyserver) and collects keys from inbound mail automagically. And anytime it has a key on file it sends an encrypted mail. The end user doesn't do anything, it "just works."
> If it's truly a terrorist type situation, I'm sure the NSA has the computing resources to crack
> all the standard encryption algorithms.
Maybe they do, maybe they don't. The Intelligence agencies haven't exactly been covering themselves in glory the last couple of decades. What is certain is that such a secret wouldn't be squandered on something as trivial as stopping a terrorist, even a 9/11 scale operation. See the lengths taken to keep the Ultra secret for details.
> My impression was that it would only appear as encrypted traffic.
Exactly. Large regular encrypted traffoc between a set of 'end points' on the Internet. That will stick out like the proverbial turd in a punchbowl to anyone with a clue. Legit encrypted traffic will be intermittent to big web servers or VPN links into large corporate networks. With just a little traffic analysis the suspicious stuff will pop out easily.
Map a few dozen cable/dsl links doing bulk encrypted traffic amongst themselves and the only thing that would keeps that from, by itself, being grounds for a warrant is the knowledge the ACLU/EFF would raise holy hell. Seriously, 95%+ probability that said traffic is some sort of illegal activity. So instead the Feds will just spend a little more effort and taxpayer dollars to learn more about that group of users and bust em the old fashioned way.
Yes it would be a better world if we could convince vast portions of the computer using public to encrypt web and email traffic by default but the powers that be ain't going to permit it. Ask yourself why no email client makes crypto virtually transparent, even Free ones.