TFA doesn't define the term or tell us exactly HOW to convert biomass to electricity. Ok, obviously you can burn the biomass and use the heat to generate electricity the traditional way, i.e. via steam and turbines... but how is that "bioelectricity"..? To me that's just a wood-fired power plant.
According to Wikipedia bioelectricity refers to the various electric fields and currents generated in living tissue. If we could somehow harvest that directly (Matrix-style) then we could talk about "using bioelectricity", but TTBOMK no techniques for doing that in a way that generates useful currents and/or voltages has been discovered "in the real world".
I don't have access to the on-line edition of "Science" which is apparently the source for this article... do they really talk about bioelectricity or is this just a case of some brainless science journalist being too clever?
Although, as some commenters have pointed out, everything in the world can be explained in terms of quantum mechanics, until now pretty much everything that is relevant to life on earth didn't seem to need quantum mechanics (QM)... it would work just as well with a chemistry based on a classical physics.
Yeah, we have proven that underneath all that it's really something else by splitting the atom, but aside from the social implications of the atom bomb, nuclear power, and a few more obscure technologies based on the radioactive decay, most of QM seemed to be ever so far removed from the reality of life even today. So to most people, including most natural scientists, the counter-intuitive weirdness of much of QM seemed both unreal and irrelevant.
But there are a few unexplained little problems in the natural sciences, such as the efficiency of photosynthesis... and some rather larger puzzles such as the nature of consciousness. If it turns out that purely quantum physical effects, i.e. ones that cannot be explained by any classical physics underlie something as basic to life as photosynthesis, then suddenly QM becomes highly real and relevant and we'll have to consider it as an option in anything difficult that we try to explain in the natural sciences.
I.e., maybe Roger Penrose was right and no classical computer can ever duplicate the human mind even with arbitrarily large computing power. (Penrose first wrote about this before Quantum computers were even conceived of).
And, even stranger, maybe plants can actually create elements by transmutation... there are scientifically plausible explanations for how this could work, but they've been relegated to fringe science because they require QM-effects and those don't play a role in Biology, right?
In short, if it is true that photosynthesis requires QM-effects, then we'll need to be looking at all of nature through a different, if not entirely new lens. And we may find that much of what we thought we knew well suddenly looks very different.
If you have trouble losing weight because the ecology in your intestine, then you could try changing the composition of that ecology. The is certainly possible, different species of bacteria will thrive on different types of food, so you could start by changing the balance of carbs/protein/fat in your diet drastically and that will certainly have some effect on your endo-ecology. At the same time take lots of probiotics... yoghurt, kefir, live sauerkraut, kombucha, EM, stuff like that. The probiotics are full of living bacteria of certain types which have been shown to help your system defend itself against certain harmful bacteria and probably do that by changing the balance of power in your endoecology as well. Figs and prunes are also interesting as they are known to help the growth of some beneficial bacteria.
This is going to be a trial and error thing... which bacteria thrive in your intestines is a combination of your genetics, which species of bacteria you were exposed to throughout your life, anti-biotics you have taken, and what you eat. And although your internal ecology certainly changes in response to what you put into your body, nobody yet knows who to change it in a specific or desirable way. We only recently begun having the tools to even begin to study such things scientifically (as TFA says), and even with those tools it's a difficult and probably huge topic that we've only began to scratch at.
But go ahead and experiment... you have a better chance at finding something that works for you by trial-and-error than waiting for science to tell you, which isn't going to happen in the foreseeable future. Just make some changes and give it about 6 weeks to observe and record how they affect you before making more changes.:j
I didn't *attack* the source, I merely pointed out who the source really was (NOT unl.edu). I also DID point to information that faults the argument, with references (the Wikipedia article on DDT which has lots of references). I didn't think it necessary or appropriate to copy bits of the Wikipedia article for lazy schmucks who don't want to read it themselves (or would rather not because it might shatter their cherished illusions).
Furthermore, while countering a reference with a reference, I also directly addressed the argument of the poster (rather than of his reference) that DDT was a "cure" for malaria. It isn't, for many reasons, of which I gave one: mosquitoes develop resistance to DDT.
But what I'd really like to know is, who are "you guys"..? What club did I just become a member of?
The article you linked to, "DDT, facts vs. fears", is a publication by the "American Council on Science and Health", which appears to be a typical corporate apologist front group. It has nothing whatsoever to do with UNL (University of Nebraska-Lincoln) despite being hosted at a poorly configured MacOS X server there.
If you want to know the real facts about DDT, the Wikipedia entry for it is excellent and rather more complete than the above article. The reality, as always, is more complex than iconoclasts on either side of any debate would have it. DDT is at best a part of any strategy against malaria... by itself it could only provide temporary relief (since mosquitoes become resistant to it) at high cost in human and environmental health.
Also DDT is NOT banned around the world. It was banned in the US, and with time many other countries either also banned it or simply discontinued its use, each for their own reasons. DDT is also cheap enough and easy enough to produce that all but the poorest of poor countries can make all they need themselves if they chose to use it.
I live in the tropics... during rainy season here everything gets moldy. How do people deal? As soon as we have a sunny day everyone puts everything that smells musky out in the sun for a few hours. Mold hates sunlight.
The direct hot tropical sun dries things out fast, which of course kills mold, but further, UV rays effectively sterilize fungal hyphae even some millimeters below the surface of textiles. After just a few hours of direct sunlight the mold is gone, there's not even a trace of moldy smell left, and it won't come back until the humidity stays high enough for long enough for spores (which are omnipresent) to develop into new fungi.
So, open everything up and put it out in the sun... since you probably live in the temperate North and it's Fall there now, the sun might not be strong enough (both in terms of drying power and UV) but it's a good first step. Then dry it out some more with hot air (blowdryer into a makeshift tunnel from trash-bags?), then rinse everything with alcohol (as close to 100% as possible, whether ethanol or isopropyl) and dry out some more.
There are various ways in which even self-signed certs can protect your communications effectively even against MIM (man in the middle) attacks....
0) You simply might not be worried about MIM attacks. For example, on certain communications your threat model might be only about an attacker who is passively sniffing your wireless traffic. This is a real threat model... with airsnort against unencrypted HTTP over a wireless link my kid sister can steal my webmail password, and I'm really more worried about that than about major govenments spying because the latter presumably have many other means of reading my email if they really want to.
1) Assuming that there was no MIM on your initial communication, you now have a cert... a MIM on subsequent communications will raise an alarm. Often (obviously not always) this is a reasonable assumption, as to capture initial communications the attacker may have to maintain his MIM infrastructure for a long time, and cost is proportional to time (and increases much faster than linearly, because MIM infrastructures tend to be hard to hide for longer time periods.)
2) You exchange self-signed certs out of band. If you know me and I personally hand you a disk with my self-signed cert, there is no risk of MIM.
3) You can verify self-signed certs out of band, i.e. I send you self-signed cert, you call me on phone and ask "is cert with fingerprint blah-blah really from you?". Less secure than above, but now the MIM has to install himself both in the primary comm channel and in the verification comm channel to succeed.
So as you can see, to claim that self-signed certs provide no advantage over communications in the clear "at all" is an overstatement. As with all security mechanisms it depends entirely on your threat model and on how you use them.:j
Actually, the chairperson of Mozilla's board of directors and formly CEO of Mozilla Corporation, Mitchell Baker, *is* a lawyer. I know Mitchell and I can attest that in spite of being a lawyer she's a decent human being, but, there you go.
Just because the form PAGE is not HTTPS doesn't mean the form PUT isn't HTTPS, i.e. a form that doesn't show the little lock icon might still be perfectly secure, but without looking at the page source you won't know about it.
And, ironically, vice versa. I.e. you can have a HTTPS form that actually uses unencrypted HTTP to submit its' data. Your browser is supposed to warn you when you submit an HTTP ("insecure") form and when you go from HTTPS to HTTP within the same site, but after the first couple of times almost everybody turns that warning off.
How's that for security comedy?
(Duped because I neglected to sign in the first time)
One hundred drives, drawing 10W or more each (older drives were a bit more power-hungry, nowadays they're a bit under 10W) makes for 1000W. At $0.10/kWh that's $876/year. Add the power consumption of the other hardware you'll need to attach them to, and you'll surely be over $1000/year in energy costs, not to mention the purchase cost of said hardware.
You said 100 drives ranging 20-300GB... that doesn't tell us much about the total capacity, but let's say it's 10TB. A terabyte disk costs less than $200 these days, a 4-port SATA PCI card can be had for $40, so with two of those and the 2 SATA ports on any cheap mobo you have a system that'll serve up your 10TB for $2000, two years of just the energy cost of your 100 disc system.
And that's not counting the headache of building your 100 disk array, the maintenance cost, and the reduced capacity due to inevitable failures with such a large number of older discs.
In short, although a cool project in theory, in practice it's not worth it today. A few years ago it would have been, but the price of storage has just dropped too steeply in the last couple of years.
I work with a group that "recycles" old machines in a developing country to provide access to young people who couldn't afford it otherwise, and even here, with free (donated) hardware it's hard to beat the falling price/performance curve of computer hardware these days. Although we could use your discs... discs (and memory) are shortest in supply. If you want to donate them to us, drop me a line.:j
Wireless links with plain old 802.11 have been done over FAR longer distances (over 10km is common and I've seen links over 40km) with simple directional antennas. What's much more important than distance is line-of-sight. Basically if you can see the other antenna without a telescope, you can connect to it. However, there must NOT be any trees in between, even if you can see the other antenna in the gaps of the foliage. Trees are very good radio-wave shields. (Actually, water is the shield, but like all living things, trees are full of water.)
If you do not have line of sight from the ground, try the roof. If you still don't your next option would be to build a mast. You can make a mast up to 10 or 12m cheaply by telescoping several pieces of steel pipe and bracing the whole thing with 3 steel cables. I have a 9m mast like this that I built for about $100.
Make sure to get a router with antennas that you can disconnect and replace (not all have those, but many do). Then connect a directional antenna... for 500m you don't need anything fancy, the cheapest directional antenna you can buy or a home-made "cantenna" will do just fine.
Same for the other end of the connection... if you don't want to put a router on both ends, make sure your wifi card has an antenna connector. Or you can use a USB wifi adapter with a "stub" antenna, and stick that little stub directly into a "cantenna" type can (you'll need to calculate the position of the hole for the antenna... there are calculators for this on the net, google "cantenna calculator"). That will turn a little $25 USB dongle into a directional Wifi powerhouse, using nothing but a can with hole drilled in the right place! I've gotten a strong connection over 1km between two of those and I'm sure it could have gone much further but we didn't try because 1km was enough.
For your short distance of 500m, given line of sight, you may even be able to get away with a directional antenna only on one end, and the regular omni antenna on the other. I.e. if you have window-to-window sight, you may be able to put an unmodified router on the windowsill of one house and a usb-dongle-cantenna on a windowsill of the other and have your link.
I so do understand the point about the need for "heresy" and the suspiciousness of "universal agreement" amongst scientist. And I fully agree with it. Which is why I didn't argue with it.
The only thing I am arguing with is part of Dyson's essay, the part where he states his belief that "the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated". Just because the mainstream dogma about how global warming works and what our role in it is is probably wrong, doesn't mean that the environment isn't being dangerously destabilized by humans. In my post I wasn't trying to provide evidence for that either way, but I was trying to dispell Dyson's IMHO rather shallow argument as to why "the warming is not global".
And don't tell me Dyson's argument cannot possibly be shallow because he's smarter than all of us... that's precisely the kind of thinking that leads to the dogma Dyson speaking out against.
At least some of Dyson's argument is based on outdated information, and theories about mechanisms that are at best even less understood than relationship between CO2 and climate. For example he talks about the interglacial periods lasting 10K out of every 100K years of the present ice age. That's way oversimplified at best and probably complete nonsense according to the latest data and hypthesis (see the Wikipedia article on "ice-age" for more info).
As for the carbon absorbing capacities of soil... it is an interesting point, and one that quite a few people are looking at. But it works AGAINST, not for Dyson's argument that the dangers of global warming are overblown. Why? Because humans have been negatively affecting the soil (through fundamentally unsustainable agricultural practices) on rather large scales for far longer than we've been burning fossil fuels, and it that could provide a large part of the explanation for why there has been significant warming since before the present petroleum age. Not only that, but we are continuing to accelerate the destruction of soil, most recently with the wonderful idea of replacing some percentage of our fossil fuel needs with biofuels!
How are we negatively affecting the carbon absorbing capacity of soil? By reducing it's biodiversity with monocultures, killing soil microorganisms with agro-toxins, replacing the natural nutrient cycles with chemical fertilizers, leaving huge amounts of overused land to the forces of erosion, etc., etc. In short most of our agricultural practices amount to something like "strip-mining" of one of our most important natural resources, the soil itself.
Here is my heresy: the switch to more biofuels is likely to result in an acceleration of this agricultural strip-mining and thus may reduce the global capacity of the soil carbon-sink to more than offset the reduction in greenhouse gas output.
In short, where Dyson hand-waves the greenhouse gas problem away by saying a little change in agricultural practices could easily fix it, the reality is that our deeply entrenched agricultural practices are probably a big part of the problem, and changing them enough to fix that may be harder than going off fossil fuels cold turkey. Just imagine! *sarcasm on*... Sure, we'll just have a Kyoto-style international conference where we'll all decide to switch immediately to organic sustainable agriculture. Never mind that food output will drop for decade or a few while we adjust to the new methods. Yes, a few hundred million people may starve to death, but surely those are fewer than would die in the long run if we let global warming continue. *sarcasm off*
But the bottom line is this: looked at in a bit more critical detail, none of Dyson's arguments actually convince that the threat of human-caused rapid global climate change is "exaggerated". Au contraire.
This whole situation reminds me a lot of devfs. The developer of devfs (Richard Gooch) was maybe a bit of an outsider with good ideas and strong opinions that sometimes clashed with those of kernel developers that were more insiders or closer to Linus. The story is a little different in that devfs had actually made it into the mainline kernel, but then later was replaced by udev (the first draft of which was by Greg KH in a day or so... again very much like Ingo's whipping up the first draft of CFS).
Then as now with CK, eventually Richard stopped doing linux kernel work altogether. I thought it was a sad loss of a talented kernel hacker, and I had been a devfs user, but I must say that in retrospect I do think udev is a better solution. It is simpler, has less impact on the rest of the kernel, but has proven itself to solve all the problems devfs tried to solve that actually mattered.
What's the moral of the story? That both sides are right... on the one hand, there's something sad here, because at least several times in linux history an outsider had to fight for innovation and in the end was pushed away even as his innovation was grudgingly adopted by reinventing it. On the other hand the actual results do seem to indicate that linux is NOT resistant to change, and maybe that the better, more maintainable solution tends to win out.
There's also another thing to keep in mind... it is a pattern in this history of technology that the first attempt to solve a problem is rarely the one that becomes dominant. Both Con Kolivas and Richard Gooch should be recognized for the innovators that they are... and if they were wise they should also not begrudge the fact that it wasn't their exact solution which eventually got adopted by the mainstream. I know this is difficult... they both put a/lot/ of energy into their work. But that energy was not lost to the rest of us, as without the experience of their groundbreaking we would not have gotten the solutions we eventually did. Even if Greg KH's udev and Ingo's CFS share no appreciable amount of code or algorithms with devfs and SD, if they are honorable, I'm sure they would admit that they could not have so quickly whipped up their solutions without the example and inspiration of RG and CK's work.
Finally, I would like to add that although the way I see all this, it has little if anything to do with Linus's personality, nevertheless I think Linus could have handled these cases better./Maybe/ instead of losing them in the long run we could have gotten some more innovation from talented developers like RG and CK. The problem, I think, wasn't the decision adopt CFS instead of SD. Rather, regardless of whether or not is true, the problem is Linus's public judgement that CK is not a "responsive maintainer". I didn't follow the CK or the lkml lists in that time frame enough to know if he is right... but a really good leader would not have made such a judgement public even if hed believed it, and instead would have worked to find a way to keep such talented persons contributing.
This is a great example of the worst of slashdot (which isn't saying much)... just about everything in this article as it appears on the main page is wrong, word for word.
Category: YRO... why? What does this have to do with "rights"?
Title: "Sniffer on Steroids". Nothing steroidal about it... according to the authors of the software it is a buggy piece of shit whipped up quickly to demonstrate a very/specific/ type of traffic analysis for a talk.
"Looks for traffic using 25 protocols". Uh no, it doesn't use the protocols, it analyzes them.
List of protocols and applications... misses the point entirely as nothing explicitly as any other sniffer can also "capture" all those protocols. The point is that this program looks for and explicitly points to information within those protocol that you probably didn't realize was "seeping" out with those protocols. Mind you, you could still find all that same information with ANY OTHER SNIFFER... there is nothing technologically new about this sniffer. Rather, the authors have made a list of things that "seep" out with various applications and protocols that most people haven't thought of, and have written a simple ordinary sniffer that explicitly includes this list.
"Anyone with a wireless card will be able to run it"... uhm, yeah, anyone with a WINDOWS machine and the right kind of wireless card. Doh.
The insurance industry hires a lot of mathematicians and even most of their executives are mathematicians, but you need to take the actuary exam. How well you do at is a large factor in determining what kind of starting position/salary you can get. So take a look at what those exams are like (I don't know any more than what I just wrote).
First off, use Linux. If your OS isn't reasonably secure, all bets are off, and Windows is just too difficult to keep secure for a casual user. With a good linux distro you're much better off so long as you keep it updated.
Secondly use encrypted filesystems for data you want to keep private. I can recomend encfs for Linux http://arg0.net/wiki/encfs... it's easy to use and can be installed with yum in Fedora. It uses file-level encryption which makes possible incremental backups which retain the encryption.
If you want protection from being forced by a court to give up your key, take a look at http://www.truecrypt.org/ . This is a filesystem that lets you keep multiple levels of data encrypted with different keys, and if you give up one key noone can know that there's more data hidden with another key.
For web browsing use Tor, http://tor.eff.or/. Tor is still under development and may not be secure against a focused attack on you specifically, but at least your ISP won't be able to easily spy on you and your IPSs logs (which as we know are being mass-analyzed by the NSA) won't show anything about your activity. Also tor is/very/ easy to install and use, especially with Firefox and the FF tor extension. Also you can use it in combination with privoxy http://www.privoxy.org/ for some protection against malicious cookies and other tricks used by the sites you access.
Plus, here's a good trick for ensuring that your web browser cache, history, etc., can't be easily searched by someone who gets access to your computer... put them on an encrypted filesystem, as follows. Make a script that mounts an encrypted filesystem (asking for the passphrase), sets your HOME env var to the newly mounted fs, then starts Firefox (which now places its cache there because that's HOME), and unmounts the encrypted fs after Firefox exits. You should do this even if your entire home dir is also on an encrypted fs, because your normal home dir is likely to stay mounted for longer periods of time, so this way you separate the risk levels. And it's easy. An additional little-known trick for this: set the LOGNAME env var to something other than your username to let you run a second copy of Firefox on the same X display (so you can have an "insecure" and a "secure" one running at the same time).
Of course use GnuPG for secure email. The Thunderbird Enigmail extension makes it painless.
You should also give money to the EFF and run a Tor server if you can, to help maintain our ability to have some privacy.
Finally, if you are a hardcore libertarian and/or think we should have a truly free Internet, experiment with FreeNet http://freenetproject.org/ and consider donating to its development. This project ran into some dead ends with scalability but the developers have taken a fresh approach and the new 0.7 dev version looks like it might be the start of something that could get big. They have a full-time programmer working on it paid by donations (and he's so dedicated to the ideal that his salary is the bare minimum he needs to live), so consider donating. (Btw., I'm not a libertarian in the political sense, but I think we need a strong counter-balance to the marching forces of fascism, so I donate to the Freenet project.)
Thanks for your vote of confidence... but my post is still only at Score:3 while all sorts of trivial banter is at Score:5. I guess my post is just too deep for the typical/. moderator.;-)
Btw, it isn't just the wife's name that's the problem with passwords... even if all your sudoers are top-notch sysadmins and sincerely try to have strong passwords, they probably don't (and shouldn't have to) have the discipline with their personal account passwords that they should and might have with a root password. For example, they might have used their personal password at an Internet cafe, or on a computer infected with some pw-grabbing virus, or any any of a zillion other insecure contexts.
rvim is useless. It's not enough to prevent shell-out... that's why I said that was a trivial example. You also have to restrict what files can be edited; for example if I can edit any file that will later get executed or included in a script run as a root I can give myself a root shell... I just add a line that sets the suid bit on an exe I have stashed away somewhere. You could add such a line to i.e. one of the sysconfig/network-scripts/. Since almost all unix system administration involves editing such files, again sudo is useless for general system administration.
The moment you use sudo for more than granting some highly specific operator-level priviledges, such as say starting a backup job, your root security is guaranteed to be weakened by it. And even if you think you/are/ very careful, unless you are a real unix security expert you're probably overlooking something.
The main problem with sudo is that it weakens security.
It seems that this is surprising to a lot of people because nobody has mentioned this, and people have mentioned that you should never allow remote root logins, yadda, yadda.
Actually there is no problem with remote root logins via ssh and public key authentication... just don't use/allow passwords. I'm continually amazed by how few people understand this, especially considering that practically everyone and their dog already uses ssh for everything anyway (except they use it as though it was telnet... doh!). Ssh is the best thing that ever happened to Unix security, but 99% of people, including sysadmins it appears, use only 1% of its power because they do not understand public key authentication. But I digress...
Passwords are almost always security's weakest link, unless you have truly exceptional password discipline (i.e. chose a good (long, random) pw, have a different one for every account, use it only in safe contexts, never, ever, ever share it even with your twin-sister-wife-best-friend, never write it down, etc). The problem with sudo, from a security standpoint, is that it adds the weakness of every sudoer's password to the root account. Think about this... the INSECURITY of your root account is increased by the sum of all the weaknesses and password in-displine of all your sudoers.
Let me say this again... with sudo your root account's password security is worse than the worst of the passwords of all the sudoers, it accumulates all the weaknesses, all the indiscretions of all your sudoers.
And don't give me any crap about limiting what commands a sudoer can invoke... with sudo any command/program that isn't specifically written to be a/secure/ SUID program is a conduit to root. To give you only the trivial example, you can't do much sysadmin with editing some root-only files, and most editors have a shell-out function. The moment you give anyone usuful sysadmin capabilities using sudo you've made their password a root password.
To their credit most of the people who wrote here that they like sudo like it for the convenience of logging priviledged actions. This is certainly a good practice. Just understand that it is a PRACTICE, not a security feature... if someone wants to get around it, they trivially can. If you want to log for security you have to do it in the kernel and most Unix kernels have such features nowadays.
So, if you want convenient logging of your own actions, go ahead and use sudo. If you want to/improve/ security, keep it away with a 10-foot pole, minimize the use and impact of all passwords, and use Ssh.
Btw., some ssh implementations can do everything you/think/ you're doing with sudo, such as limiting access to commands to certain users, logging actions, etc. Ssh is the swiss army knife of unix security... it can also be misused, but if you learn how to use it correctly and to its full extend you can stop using passwords and/dramatically/ improve your system security.
We don't need no steenking DRM because......we don't need your steenking content!
It's all garbage anyway. Mass produced vapid pop music and Hollywood movies? No thanks.
There will be plenty of QUALITY content producers who know that they don't need DRM to get fairly compensated. Their numbers are growing just like the numbers of content consumers who absolutely reject DRM are growing.:j
RMS's position is harmful to his cause, maybe for the first time in his history of Free Software advocacy.
I haven't even read other comments yet as I'm writing this, but I'm sure that most other commenters would agree with the first part of that sentence, but rather fewer with the second.;-)
Everybody knows that RMS's public posititions on Free Software tend to be uncompromising to say the least... and while I personally have often thought a more compromising position might be more productive especially in the short term, for his stated long-term goal of making/all/ software (or at least all software most people ever want or need) Free (with a capital F), his rigid philosophical stance was needed to counter-act the inevitably creeping process of cooption and re-commercialization by the "Industry". Thus if one accepts that his goals are desireable or at least valid, one can't really say that his rigidity was ever harmful to these goals... at worst it represented an opinion/someone/ needed to hold to maintain progress in the right direction.
However, in this case I believe he is wrong. I order to achieve RMS's goals of ubiquitous Free software, one has to address the underlying economic assumptions made by society. The problem is that the dominant "neoclassical" view of economics is also very rigid and exclusive... it holds that its idealized "Free Market" is the best and only way to conduct economic congress, and Free Softare does not fit. This economic view is held by essentially all those in power or in control of the economic resources in our global civilization, and successfully sold to the mass of humans that compose this civilization.
What needs to happen before Free Software and many other urgently needed economic alternatives can fully succeed is that the noeclassical market's grip on the global economy needs to losen. For this to happen it is important to first show that viable alternatives exist, and can be to the benefit of our civilzation! That the rigid view of the Free Market is wrong and that we/can/ do better.
The Creative Commons has done the remarkable job of helping all alternatives to succeed better without much more of a philosophical position than to say "alternatives are needed and exist". This is to the benefit of the whole spectrum of opinion and a detriment only to the dominant exclusivist one which needs to be toppled.
Yes, it does (very slightly) weaken the Free Software Movement's "GPL Brand", which derives some strength from it's position as the opposit extreme of the dominant one by labeling the all alternatives generically (all are "CC license with X provisions"). But this harm is minimal because the CC and the FSF operate in on different types of information, and aside from occasionally saying "just use the GPL", RMS has not really made any effort to address the clearly at least somewhat different needs of non-software media. In any case, any dilution of the FSF's position would come fairly and as part of a democratizing process.
So, surely RMS must admit that the overall benefit of the CC's well executed efforts massively outweighs any harm it does to his own cause.
Yes, we are. And what's more... we are paying for these pipes in order to get to Google and Yahoo and Vonage, and without those we'd have zero reason to give our money to AT&T. Ok, Google, etc. are standing in for content providers in general... I know that so long as there is internet porn people will be willing to pay for broadband, but that's all content. Also it's not true that the content providers don't pay... they also need Internet connectivity, and as those of us who've tried running commercial websites know that doesn't come cheap.
So what the Telcos really want is for everybody to pay... and then for them all to pay again. Who wants a free ride here?
But that's to be expected... they are corporations and as such have only one objective and that's to maximize their profits (excuse me, shareholder value). And since the government has let them rebuild their monopolies they seem to have the means to do that. Or do they?
Google for one isn't waiting for them. It's been mentioned in the news several times in the last year that Google has been buying dark fiber. So Ed is wrong... they (or some of them)/do/ have fiber out there.
I'm not worried. Yes, the Telcos have nearly rebuilt their monopoly. But it's a far weaker monopoly than it ever was in the past. There is just too much fiber in the ground, and too many alternatives out there... if someone squeezes too hard, the market WILL work. The Internet will not be hijacked by a few big corporations; it's against the interests of too many other big corporations for that to happen.:j
You're right that we probably won't run out of oil... but supply is no longer meeting demand and it'll never again catch up, which is what Hubbert's Peak is all about. There's a lot of oil left in the ground, but developing it keeps getting more expensive and the rate of development can't keep pace with the demand. The result is that prices are going to keep going higher/until/ we are sufficiently far along in the process of "switch[ing] to something else". And that process has barely started and thus is going to take quite a while. In the meantime we can't meet the energy requirements for continued growth, which is a formula for conflict and collapse.
As to your "we've always managed in the past" argument, I'd suggest you read Jared Diamond's new book "Collapse". In it he shows that we've/not/ always managed in the past... sometimes we have and sometimes we haven't, some societies turned at the brink and some did in fact collapse.
Today's political structures don't make me hopeful for our being able to manage even the oil crisis, but the reality is many times worse because we don't just have that one crisis... we have many. Energy, climate change, resource (and especially fresh water) shortages, bubbles in the financial structures, growing wealth disparities and an ecological footprint that's already exceeded the carrying capacity of the Earth. And all those crises have started to reach critical stages. Right now still very few people see it, but even over the next few months they will get more and more ominous and obvious. Fasten your seatbelts, civilization is about to go for the ride of its history.
Slashdot Mirror
TFA doesn't define the term or tell us exactly HOW to convert biomass to electricity. Ok, obviously you can burn the biomass and use the heat to generate electricity the traditional way, i.e. via steam and turbines... but how is that "bioelectricity"..? To me that's just a wood-fired power plant.
According to Wikipedia bioelectricity refers to the various electric fields and currents generated in living tissue. If we could somehow harvest that directly (Matrix-style) then we could talk about "using bioelectricity", but TTBOMK no techniques for doing that in a way that generates useful currents and/or voltages has been discovered "in the real world".
I don't have access to the on-line edition of "Science" which is apparently the source for this article... do they really talk about bioelectricity or is this just a case of some brainless science journalist being too clever?
Although, as some commenters have pointed out, everything in the world can be explained in terms of quantum mechanics, until now pretty much everything that is relevant to life on earth didn't seem to need quantum mechanics (QM)... it would work just as well with a chemistry based on a classical physics.
Yeah, we have proven that underneath all that it's really something else by splitting the atom, but aside from the social implications of the atom bomb, nuclear power, and a few more obscure technologies based on the radioactive decay, most of QM seemed to be ever so far removed from the reality of life even today. So to most people, including most natural scientists, the counter-intuitive weirdness of much of QM seemed both unreal and irrelevant.
But there are a few unexplained little problems in the natural sciences, such as the efficiency of photosynthesis... and some rather larger puzzles such as the nature of consciousness. If it turns out that purely quantum physical effects, i.e. ones that cannot be explained by any classical physics underlie something as basic to life as photosynthesis, then suddenly QM becomes highly real and relevant and we'll have to consider it as an option in anything difficult that we try to explain in the natural sciences.
I.e., maybe Roger Penrose was right and no classical computer can ever duplicate the human mind even with arbitrarily large computing power. (Penrose first wrote about this before Quantum computers were even conceived of).
And, even stranger, maybe plants can actually create elements by transmutation... there are scientifically plausible explanations for how this could work, but they've been relegated to fringe science because they require QM-effects and those don't play a role in Biology, right?
In short, if it is true that photosynthesis requires QM-effects, then we'll need to be looking at all of nature through a different, if not entirely new lens. And we may find that much of what we thought we knew well suddenly looks very different.
If you have trouble losing weight because the ecology in your intestine, then you could try changing the composition of that ecology. The is certainly possible, different species of bacteria will thrive on different types of food, so you could start by changing the balance of carbs/protein/fat in your diet drastically and that will certainly have some effect on your endo-ecology. At the same time take lots of probiotics... yoghurt, kefir, live sauerkraut, kombucha, EM, stuff like that. The probiotics are full of living bacteria of certain types which have been shown to help your system defend itself against certain harmful bacteria and probably do that by changing the balance of power in your endoecology as well. Figs and prunes are also interesting as they are known to help the growth of some beneficial bacteria.
This is going to be a trial and error thing... which bacteria thrive in your intestines is a combination of your genetics, which species of bacteria you were exposed to throughout your life, anti-biotics you have taken, and what you eat. And although your internal ecology certainly changes in response to what you put into your body, nobody yet knows who to change it in a specific or desirable way. We only recently begun having the tools to even begin to study such things scientifically (as TFA says), and even with those tools it's a difficult and probably huge topic that we've only began to scratch at.
But go ahead and experiment... you have a better chance at finding something that works for you by trial-and-error than waiting for science to tell you, which isn't going to happen in the foreseeable future. Just make some changes and give it about 6 weeks to observe and record how they affect you before making more changes. :j
I didn't *attack* the source, I merely pointed out who the source really was (NOT unl.edu). I also DID point to information that faults the argument, with references (the Wikipedia article on DDT which has lots of references). I didn't think it necessary or appropriate to copy bits of the Wikipedia article for lazy schmucks who don't want to read it themselves (or would rather not because it might shatter their cherished illusions).
Furthermore, while countering a reference with a reference, I also directly addressed the argument of the poster (rather than of his reference) that DDT was a "cure" for malaria. It isn't, for many reasons, of which I gave one: mosquitoes develop resistance to DDT.
But what I'd really like to know is, who are "you guys"..? What club did I just become a member of?
The article you linked to, "DDT, facts vs. fears", is a publication by the "American Council on Science and Health", which appears to be a typical corporate apologist front group. It has nothing whatsoever to do with UNL (University of Nebraska-Lincoln) despite being hosted at a poorly configured MacOS X server there.
If you want to know the real facts about DDT, the Wikipedia entry for it is excellent and rather more complete than the above article. The reality, as always, is more complex than iconoclasts on either side of any debate would have it. DDT is at best a part of any strategy against malaria... by itself it could only provide temporary relief (since mosquitoes become resistant to it) at high cost in human and environmental health.
Also DDT is NOT banned around the world. It was banned in the US, and with time many other countries either also banned it or simply discontinued its use, each for their own reasons. DDT is also cheap enough and easy enough to produce that all but the poorest of poor countries can make all they need themselves if they chose to use it.
I live in the tropics... during rainy season here everything gets moldy. How do people deal? As soon as we have a sunny day everyone puts everything that smells musky out in the sun for a few hours. Mold hates sunlight.
The direct hot tropical sun dries things out fast, which of course kills mold, but further, UV rays effectively sterilize fungal hyphae even some millimeters below the surface of textiles. After just a few hours of direct sunlight the mold is gone, there's not even a trace of moldy smell left, and it won't come back until the humidity stays high enough for long enough for spores (which are omnipresent) to develop into new fungi.
So, open everything up and put it out in the sun... since you probably live in the temperate North and it's Fall there now, the sun might not be strong enough (both in terms of drying power and UV) but it's a good first step. Then dry it out some more with hot air (blowdryer into a makeshift tunnel from trash-bags?), then rinse everything with alcohol (as close to 100% as possible, whether ethanol or isopropyl) and dry out some more.
There are various ways in which even self-signed certs can protect your communications effectively even against MIM (man in the middle) attacks....
0) You simply might not be worried about MIM attacks. For example, on certain communications your threat model might be only about an attacker who is passively sniffing your wireless traffic. This is a real threat model... with airsnort against unencrypted HTTP over a wireless link my kid sister can steal my webmail password, and I'm really more worried about that than about major govenments spying because the latter presumably have many other means of reading my email if they really want to.
1) Assuming that there was no MIM on your initial communication, you now have a cert... a MIM on subsequent communications will raise an alarm. Often (obviously not always) this is a reasonable assumption, as to capture initial communications the attacker may have to maintain his MIM infrastructure for a long time, and cost is proportional to time (and increases much faster than linearly, because MIM infrastructures tend to be hard to hide for longer time periods.)
2) You exchange self-signed certs out of band. If you know me and I personally hand you a disk with my self-signed cert, there is no risk of MIM.
3) You can verify self-signed certs out of band, i.e. I send you self-signed cert, you call me on phone and ask "is cert with fingerprint blah-blah really from you?". Less secure than above, but now the MIM has to install himself both in the primary comm channel and in the verification comm channel to succeed.
So as you can see, to claim that self-signed certs provide no advantage over communications in the clear "at all" is an overstatement. As with all security mechanisms it depends entirely on your threat model and on how you use them. :j
Actually, the chairperson of Mozilla's board of directors and formly CEO of Mozilla Corporation, Mitchell Baker, *is* a lawyer. I know Mitchell and I can attest that in spite of being a lawyer she's a decent human being, but, there you go.
Just because the form PAGE is not HTTPS doesn't mean the form PUT isn't HTTPS, i.e. a form that doesn't show the little lock icon might still be perfectly secure, but without looking at the page source you won't know about it.
And, ironically, vice versa. I.e. you can have a HTTPS form that actually uses unencrypted HTTP to submit its' data. Your browser is supposed to warn you when you submit an HTTP ("insecure") form and when you go from HTTPS to HTTP within the same site, but after the first couple of times almost everybody turns that warning off.
How's that for security comedy?
(Duped because I neglected to sign in the first time)
One hundred drives, drawing 10W or more each (older drives were a bit more power-hungry, nowadays they're a bit under 10W) makes for 1000W. At $0.10/kWh that's $876/year. Add the power consumption of the other hardware you'll need to attach them to, and you'll surely be over $1000/year in energy costs, not to mention the purchase cost of said hardware.
:j
You said 100 drives ranging 20-300GB... that doesn't tell us much about the total capacity, but let's say it's 10TB. A terabyte disk costs less than $200 these days, a 4-port SATA PCI card can be had for $40, so with two of those and the 2 SATA ports on any cheap mobo you have a system that'll serve up your 10TB for $2000, two years of just the energy cost of your 100 disc system.
And that's not counting the headache of building your 100 disk array, the maintenance cost, and the reduced capacity due to inevitable failures with such a large number of older discs.
In short, although a cool project in theory, in practice it's not worth it today. A few years ago it would have been, but the price of storage has just dropped too steeply in the last couple of years.
I work with a group that "recycles" old machines in a developing country to provide access to young people who couldn't afford it otherwise, and even here, with free (donated) hardware it's hard to beat the falling price/performance curve of computer hardware these days. Although we could use your discs... discs (and memory) are shortest in supply. If you want to donate them to us, drop me a line.
Wireless links with plain old 802.11 have been done over FAR longer distances (over 10km is common and I've seen links over 40km) with simple directional antennas. What's much more important than distance is line-of-sight. Basically if you can see the other antenna without a telescope, you can connect to it. However, there must NOT be any trees in between, even if you can see the other antenna in the gaps of the foliage. Trees are very good radio-wave shields. (Actually, water is the shield, but like all living things, trees are full of water.)
:j
If you do not have line of sight from the ground, try the roof. If you still don't your next option would be to build a mast. You can make a mast up to 10 or 12m cheaply by telescoping several pieces of steel pipe and bracing the whole thing with 3 steel cables. I have a 9m mast like this that I built for about $100.
Make sure to get a router with antennas that you can disconnect and replace (not all have those, but many do). Then connect a directional antenna... for 500m you don't need anything fancy, the cheapest directional antenna you can buy or a home-made "cantenna" will do just fine.
Same for the other end of the connection... if you don't want to put a router on both ends, make sure your wifi card has an antenna connector. Or you can use a USB wifi adapter with a "stub" antenna, and stick that little stub directly into a "cantenna" type can (you'll need to calculate the position of the hole for the antenna... there are calculators for this on the net, google "cantenna calculator"). That will turn a little $25 USB dongle into a directional Wifi powerhouse, using nothing but a can with hole drilled in the right place! I've gotten a strong connection over 1km between two of those and I'm sure it could have gone much further but we didn't try because 1km was enough.
For your short distance of 500m, given line of sight, you may even be able to get away with a directional antenna only on one end, and the regular omni antenna on the other. I.e. if you have window-to-window sight, you may be able to put an unmodified router on the windowsill of one house and a usb-dongle-cantenna on a windowsill of the other and have your link.
Good luck!
I so do understand the point about the need for "heresy" and the suspiciousness of "universal agreement" amongst scientist. And I fully agree with it. Which is why I didn't argue with it.
:j
The only thing I am arguing with is part of Dyson's essay, the part where he states his belief that "the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated". Just because the mainstream dogma about how global warming works and what our role in it is is probably wrong, doesn't mean that the environment isn't being dangerously destabilized by humans. In my post I wasn't trying to provide evidence for that either way, but I was trying to dispell Dyson's IMHO rather shallow argument as to why "the warming is not global".
And don't tell me Dyson's argument cannot possibly be shallow because he's smarter than all of us... that's precisely the kind of thinking that leads to the dogma Dyson speaking out against.
As for the carbon absorbing capacities of soil... it is an interesting point, and one that quite a few people are looking at. But it works AGAINST, not for Dyson's argument that the dangers of global warming are overblown. Why? Because humans have been negatively affecting the soil (through fundamentally unsustainable agricultural practices) on rather large scales for far longer than we've been burning fossil fuels, and it that could provide a large part of the explanation for why there has been significant warming since before the present petroleum age. Not only that, but we are continuing to accelerate the destruction of soil, most recently with the wonderful idea of replacing some percentage of our fossil fuel needs with biofuels!
How are we negatively affecting the carbon absorbing capacity of soil? By reducing it's biodiversity with monocultures, killing soil microorganisms with agro-toxins, replacing the natural nutrient cycles with chemical fertilizers, leaving huge amounts of overused land to the forces of erosion, etc., etc. In short most of our agricultural practices amount to something like "strip-mining" of one of our most important natural resources, the soil itself.
Here is my heresy: the switch to more biofuels is likely to result in an acceleration of this agricultural strip-mining and thus may reduce the global capacity of the soil carbon-sink to more than offset the reduction in greenhouse gas output.
In short, where Dyson hand-waves the greenhouse gas problem away by saying a little change in agricultural practices could easily fix it, the reality is that our deeply entrenched agricultural practices are probably a big part of the problem, and changing them enough to fix that may be harder than going off fossil fuels cold turkey. Just imagine! *sarcasm on*... Sure, we'll just have a Kyoto-style international conference where we'll all decide to switch immediately to organic sustainable agriculture. Never mind that food output will drop for decade or a few while we adjust to the new methods. Yes, a few hundred million people may starve to death, but surely those are fewer than would die in the long run if we let global warming continue. *sarcasm off*
But the bottom line is this: looked at in a bit more critical detail, none of Dyson's arguments actually convince that the threat of human-caused rapid global climate change is "exaggerated". Au contraire.
This whole situation reminds me a lot of devfs. The developer of devfs (Richard Gooch) was maybe a bit of an outsider with good ideas and strong opinions that sometimes clashed with those of kernel developers that were more insiders or closer to Linus. The story is a little different in that devfs had actually made it into the mainline kernel, but then later was replaced by udev (the first draft of which was by Greg KH in a day or so... again very much like Ingo's whipping up the first draft of CFS).
/lot/ of energy into their work. But that energy was not lost to the rest of us, as without the experience of their groundbreaking we would not have gotten the solutions we eventually did. Even if Greg KH's udev and Ingo's CFS share no appreciable amount of code or algorithms with devfs and SD, if they are honorable, I'm sure they would admit that they could not have so quickly whipped up their solutions without the example and inspiration of RG and CK's work.
/Maybe/ instead of losing them in the long run we could have gotten some more innovation from talented developers like RG and CK. The problem, I think, wasn't the decision adopt CFS instead of SD. Rather, regardless of whether or not is true, the problem is Linus's public judgement that CK is not a "responsive maintainer". I didn't follow the CK or the lkml lists in that time frame enough to know if he is right... but a really good leader would not have made such a judgement public even if hed believed it, and instead would have worked to find a way to keep such talented persons contributing.
Then as now with CK, eventually Richard stopped doing linux kernel work altogether. I thought it was a sad loss of a talented kernel hacker, and I had been a devfs user, but I must say that in retrospect I do think udev is a better solution. It is simpler, has less impact on the rest of the kernel, but has proven itself to solve all the problems devfs tried to solve that actually mattered.
What's the moral of the story? That both sides are right... on the one hand, there's something sad here, because at least several times in linux history an outsider had to fight for innovation and in the end was pushed away even as his innovation was grudgingly adopted by reinventing it. On the other hand the actual results do seem to indicate that linux is NOT resistant to change, and maybe that the better, more maintainable solution tends to win out.
There's also another thing to keep in mind... it is a pattern in this history of technology that the first attempt to solve a problem is rarely the one that becomes dominant. Both Con Kolivas and Richard Gooch should be recognized for the innovators that they are... and if they were wise they should also not begrudge the fact that it wasn't their exact solution which eventually got adopted by the mainstream. I know this is difficult... they both put a
Finally, I would like to add that although the way I see all this, it has little if anything to do with Linus's personality, nevertheless I think Linus could have handled these cases better.
Even for slashdot, that's pretty bad, eh?
> BSD code is free code to be used in software.
:j
> GPL code is code to be used in free software.
Excellent! Beautiful! The fundamental difference between
the two licenses has never been put more succinctly.
Secondly use encrypted filesystems for data you want to keep private. I can recomend encfs for Linux http://arg0.net/wiki/encfs... it's easy to use and can be installed with yum in Fedora. It uses file-level encryption which makes possible incremental backups which retain the encryption.
If you want protection from being forced by a court to give up your key, take a look at http://www.truecrypt.org/ . This is a filesystem that lets you keep multiple levels of data encrypted with different keys, and if you give up one key noone can know that there's more data hidden with another key.
For web browsing use Tor, http://tor.eff.or/. Tor is still under development and may not be secure against a focused attack on you specifically, but at least your ISP won't be able to easily spy on you and your IPSs logs (which as we know are being mass-analyzed by the NSA) won't show anything about your activity. Also tor is
Plus, here's a good trick for ensuring that your web browser cache, history, etc., can't be easily searched by someone who gets access to your computer... put them on an encrypted filesystem, as follows. Make a script that mounts an encrypted filesystem (asking for the passphrase), sets your HOME env var to the newly mounted fs, then starts Firefox (which now places its cache there because that's HOME), and unmounts the encrypted fs after Firefox exits. You should do this even if your entire home dir is also on an encrypted fs, because your normal home dir is likely to stay mounted for longer periods of time, so this way you separate the risk levels. And it's easy. An additional little-known trick for this: set the LOGNAME env var to something other than your username to let you run a second copy of Firefox on the same X display (so you can have an "insecure" and a "secure" one running at the same time).
Of course use GnuPG for secure email. The Thunderbird Enigmail extension makes it painless.
You should also give money to the EFF and run a Tor server if you can, to help maintain our ability to have some privacy.
Finally, if you are a hardcore libertarian and/or think we should have a truly free Internet, experiment with FreeNet http://freenetproject.org/ and consider donating to its development. This project ran into some dead ends with scalability but the developers have taken a fresh approach and the new 0.7 dev version looks like it might be the start of something that could get big. They have a full-time programmer working on it paid by donations (and he's so dedicated to the ideal that his salary is the bare minimum he needs to live), so consider donating. (Btw., I'm not a libertarian in the political sense, but I think we need a strong counter-balance to the marching forces of fascism, so I donate to the Freenet project.)
Btw, it isn't just the wife's name that's the problem with passwords... even if all your sudoers are top-notch sysadmins and sincerely try to have strong passwords, they probably don't (and shouldn't have to) have the discipline with their personal account passwords that they should and might have with a root password. For example, they might have used their personal password at an Internet cafe, or on a computer infected with some pw-grabbing virus, or any any of a zillion other insecure contexts.
The moment you use sudo for more than granting some highly specific operator-level priviledges, such as say starting a backup job, your root security is guaranteed to be weakened by it. And even if you think you
It seems that this is surprising to a lot of people because nobody has mentioned this, and people have mentioned that you should never allow remote root logins, yadda, yadda.
Actually there is no problem with remote root logins via ssh and public key authentication... just don't use/allow passwords. I'm continually amazed by how few people understand this, especially considering that practically everyone and their dog already uses ssh for everything anyway (except they use it as though it was telnet... doh!). Ssh is the best thing that ever happened to Unix security, but 99% of people, including sysadmins it appears, use only 1% of its power because they do not understand public key authentication. But I digress...
Passwords are almost always security's weakest link, unless you have truly exceptional password discipline (i.e. chose a good (long, random) pw, have a different one for every account, use it only in safe contexts, never, ever, ever share it even with your twin-sister-wife-best-friend, never write it down, etc). The problem with sudo, from a security standpoint, is that it adds the weakness of every sudoer's password to the root account. Think about this... the INSECURITY of your root account is increased by the sum of all the weaknesses and password in-displine of all your sudoers.
Let me say this again... with sudo your root account's password security is worse than the worst of the passwords of all the sudoers, it accumulates all the weaknesses, all the indiscretions of all your sudoers.
And don't give me any crap about limiting what commands a sudoer can invoke... with sudo any command/program that isn't specifically written to be a
To their credit most of the people who wrote here that they like sudo like it for the convenience of logging priviledged actions. This is certainly a good practice. Just understand that it is a PRACTICE, not a security feature... if someone wants to get around it, they trivially can. If you want to log for security you have to do it in the kernel and most Unix kernels have such features nowadays.
So, if you want convenient logging of your own actions, go ahead and use sudo. If you want to
Btw., some ssh implementations can do everything you
We don't need no steenking DRM because... ...we don't need your steenking content!
:j
It's all garbage anyway. Mass produced vapid pop music and Hollywood movies?
No thanks.
There will be plenty of QUALITY content producers who know that they
don't need DRM to get fairly compensated. Their numbers are growing
just like the numbers of content consumers who absolutely reject
DRM are growing.
RMS's position is harmful to his cause, maybe for the first time in his history of Free Software advocacy.
;-)
/all/ software (or at least all software most people ever want or need) Free (with a capital F), his rigid philosophical stance was needed to counter-act the inevitably creeping process of cooption and re-commercialization by the "Industry". Thus if one accepts that his goals are desireable or at least valid, one can't really say that his rigidity was ever harmful to these goals... at worst it represented an opinion /someone/ needed to hold to maintain progress in the right direction.
/can/ do better.
I haven't even read other comments yet as I'm writing this, but I'm sure that most other commenters would agree with the first part of that sentence, but rather fewer with the second.
Everybody knows that RMS's public posititions on Free Software tend to be uncompromising to say the least... and while I personally have often thought a more compromising position might be more productive especially in the short term, for his stated long-term goal of making
However, in this case I believe he is wrong. I order to achieve RMS's goals of ubiquitous Free software, one has to address the underlying economic assumptions made by society. The problem is that the dominant "neoclassical" view of economics is also very rigid and exclusive... it holds that its idealized "Free Market" is the best and only way to conduct economic congress, and Free Softare does not fit. This economic view is held by essentially all those in power or in control of the economic resources in our global civilization, and successfully sold to the mass of humans that compose this civilization.
What needs to happen before Free Software and many other urgently needed economic alternatives can fully succeed is that the noeclassical market's grip on the global economy needs to losen. For this to happen it is important to first show that viable alternatives exist, and can be to the benefit of our civilzation! That the rigid view of the Free Market is wrong and that we
The Creative Commons has done the remarkable job of helping all alternatives to succeed better without much more of a philosophical position than to say "alternatives are needed and exist". This is to the benefit of the whole spectrum of opinion and a detriment only to the dominant exclusivist one which needs to be toppled.
Yes, it does (very slightly) weaken the Free Software Movement's "GPL Brand", which derives some strength from it's position as the opposit extreme of the dominant one by labeling the all alternatives generically (all are "CC license with X provisions"). But this harm is minimal because the CC and the FSF operate in on different types of information, and aside from occasionally saying "just use the GPL", RMS has not really made any effort to address the clearly at least somewhat different needs of non-software media. In any case, any dilution of the FSF's position would come fairly and as part of a democratizing process.
So, surely RMS must admit that the overall benefit of the CC's well executed efforts massively outweighs any harm it does to his own cause.
: Jürgen Botz
Yes, we are. And what's more... we are paying for these pipes in order to get to Google and Yahoo and Vonage, and without those we'd have zero reason to give our money to AT&T. Ok, Google, etc. are standing in for content providers in general... I know that so long as there is internet porn people will be willing to pay for broadband, but that's all content. Also it's not true that the content providers don't pay... they also need Internet connectivity, and as those of us who've tried running commercial websites know that doesn't come cheap.
/do/ have fiber out there.
:j
So what the Telcos really want is for everybody to pay... and then for them all to pay again. Who wants a free ride here?
But that's to be expected... they are corporations and as such have only one objective and that's to maximize their profits (excuse me, shareholder value). And since the government has let them rebuild their monopolies they seem to have the means to do that. Or do they?
Google for one isn't waiting for them. It's been mentioned in the news several times in the last year that Google has been buying dark fiber. So Ed is wrong... they (or some of them)
I'm not worried. Yes, the Telcos have nearly rebuilt their monopoly. But it's a far weaker monopoly than it ever was in the past. There is just too much fiber in the ground, and too many alternatives out there... if someone squeezes too hard, the market WILL work. The Internet will not be hijacked by a few big corporations; it's against the interests of too many other big corporations for that to happen.
As to your "we've always managed in the past" argument, I'd suggest you read Jared Diamond's new book "Collapse". In it he shows that we've
Today's political structures don't make me hopeful for our being able to manage even the oil crisis, but the reality is many times worse because we don't just have that one crisis... we have many. Energy, climate change, resource (and especially fresh water) shortages, bubbles in the financial structures, growing wealth disparities and an ecological footprint that's already exceeded the carrying capacity of the Earth. And all those crises have started to reach critical stages. Right now still very few people see it, but even over the next few months they will get more and more ominous and obvious. Fasten your seatbelts, civilization is about to go for the ride of its history.