BSD is one of those things that I've been interested in doing, especially early on. It is arguably more secure than Linux, is definitely older and potentially more secure.
So after using Linux for a year or so, I tried OpenBSD for a full month because of its much-touted security benefits before going back to Linux, and I've never looked back. Why?
1) At the time, getting stuff installed was more of a chore.
2) Although they had similar backgrounds and technologies, the differences were enough that it was almost a complete re-learn. RPM didn't work. Init was totally different. Commands such as ps, at, etc. had different options.
3) Didn't have support for multi-core systems. (at the time, I believe that's long under the bridge now)
Bottom line? I'd started to build a business that continues to this day using Linux as my architecture. In order to move over, I'd have to port over all my administration scripts, and much of my software to an environment that was just different enough to make me *think* I knew the answer when I didn't. Porting would have been somewhat expensive, and the case to make for the switch was marginal.
Linux isn't the best at everything, but it does pretty good at everything. Security is decent, reliability is decent, performance is excellent, hardware support is good-to-excellent, etc. all of these well within the range of "commercially viable". So, I stick with Linux, and my hosted software company has grown from a few clients to over 100 client organizations, some with hundreds of users. We've grown from 1 server to 9. Our uptimes are excellent, best in the business, our software is fast becoming an industry standard, and Linux has basically never disappointed us.
But don't get me wrong: I have immense respect for BSD, I live and die by SSH, which is foundational to our administration, backups, and cluster replication technology, and if I were starting over today, I would feel perfectly comfortable choosing *BSD.
Can we just have PDF left alone, to be the static display/print format? If Adobe really wants to do all this other crap, can they please invent a new format, and not try to force me to install the viewer for that app?
No, we can't.
Because it's an open format, if Adobe doesn't "innovate" on it and stay king-of-the-hill, they will lose market share to other products that will embed movies and such. Adobe has to continue to innovate or they risk losing their status as the big cheese, and they make lots of money with Acrobat professional.
Yeah, it sucks. I like PDFs to be... PDFs - print-ready documents. But as soon as there's a checkbox that says "embed videos into PDF documents" that somebody else has that Adobe Reader doesn't, Adobe is screwed, and they know that.
Of course, we won't talk about the checkbox that says "doesn't take a blue moon to load"...
I have a touchscreen phone that uses Windows Mobile. It's the HTC mogul and it's a damned sweet phone when you load it up with SkyFire browser. (IE mobile takes suck to whole new levels)
I browse and post on slashdot/digg/reddit/etc, watch movies on hulu, play mp3s and all that jazz but unlike the iPhone, it has a real keyboard that doesn't suck to type on. (touch screen keyboards blow HARD)
It's a pretty awesome phone. But dangit, it's still windows with all its suck. The interface is inconsistent, laggy, it runs out of memory when you run too many progs at a time, and it just crashes about 1x/week without warning. Oh, and there's no spider solitaire.
It's a great phone except for the windows part.
It was great irony this morning... using Outlook mobile, Exchange (Zimbra) and Office mobile, it refused to open a word document in an email because it might 'harm my system'. Something ironic about MS' product telling me that another of their products is dangerous to use?
I opened it w/my Linux laptop, Kmail, and Open Office just fine, thank you!
PS: I typed this post on said phone. Verizon is developing a touch screen phone? What am I using, then?
I've been 'into computing' since a '286/20 was described as 'lightning fast'. I've never, ever spent more than 100 dollars on a video card. I've always bought last-years' high flyer for 60-80 dollars and I've never hurt for lack of fun games to play at resolutions that I've ever noticed as a problem.
Last years' CPU on last years' mobo costs 100 dollars for the pair. HDD upgrades for sale at 60 dollars - who isn't happy with this? Your average computer lasts about 4 years, by buying 1 year late you get 3/4 the performance life at 1/4 the cost while staying within the range of the target platform for most of the latest games.
TL;DR: Many of the innovations and technologies we take for granted today came directly from publicly funded research. It's idiotic to treat government as if it were just an evil leach on society when it's clearly not, and is capable of helping us all become happier and wealthier if we're smart about it.
The U.S. Department of Education was created in 1980. Strange that education has declined since then. Strange that Bush's federally-funded No Child Left Behind initiative has done more to hurt education than virtually any other public or private education policy in history.
Yes, it was created then to address an already-evident decline in educational standards. It hasn't yet been turned around, and I won't discuss the idiotic "No Child Left Untested" law passed by Bush. But even with these problems, let me turn the problem around: Show me a wealthy, technologically advanced civilization that has not had the benefit of a well-funded public education system...
The idea that we have a responsibility to pay 428 billion dollars (CIA Factbook says 2008 GDP was 14.29 trillion) more per year in taxes for science when we can't even pay down our existing debt is insanity
If you don't mind me asking... where will we get the wealth to pay our debts if not by creating more wealth? And what class of professional creates more wealth than the engineers who use the knowledge obtained by scientists? This research and development is the cornerstone of wealth and socio-economic advancement. You can cut other projects, but do NOT short-change education and scientific research!
If politicians vote for science funding, it's because they think they can get pork for their constuents, and that pork is unlikely to be the kind of science funding you or I want to see.
Uh... duh? That's just the way people work. Yes, we try to keep blatant abuses of money (such as Sarah Palin's famed "bridge-to-nowhere") to a minimum but pork is the POINT of a representational republic. The reason why you vote for NNN representative is so that the representative can represent you. And, if your rep won't represent you, why did you vote for him/her/it?
Want altruistic senators that only think of the greater good for mankind? Good luck with that. I'm more interested in pragmatic, slightly selfish senators that are smart enough to see that creating true wealth is a good thing, even if he/she/it is willing to make a bit of a sleazy deal to see that it gets done in his/her/its district.
The question you really should ask is: Do you want that pork to build more bombs and stuff that benefits nobody, or something that creates wealth and jobs that help us all pay our debts and continue to enjoy our high quality of life?
TL;DR: Can the federal government theroetically find useful areas in science and technology to spend money on, that will generate net returns? Almost certainly. Will they? Almost certainly not.
Is that a rechargeable battery in your laptop? For DECADES the only research in rechargeable batteries was for the space program, now it's fueling a massive industry that dwarfs the taxes originally spent on their research. What about the velcro on your shoes? Or the "breathable" Gore-tex in your jacket? The satellites that power the now-cheap, GPS units that are transforming industries from trucking to aviation to blogging? Perhaps you forgot about the solar panels that we are all hoping will lead us to a better world - all of these are products that help fuel entire industries, all developed for just one fairly small research segment of our government - NASA.
And don't tell me about how "bloated" NASA is - the United States spends more money on our military in a day than NASA gets for an entire year in funding. So far, I've just mentioned NASA. What about the Internet? It's driving dramatic social and financial change, allowing you and I (idiot, informed citizen, with differing opinions as to who is who) to exchange ide
Currently, their strategy is to create the same drug which is coming out of patent protection and can start being made by generics, tweak the formula slightly..../snip
While I have no doubt that this happens to some degree, do you have any evidence that this is even commonplace? I just bought drugs for my wife who's currently dealing with Shingles and 2/3 of the drugs prescribed weren't even as expensive as the deductible on our company's health-insurance plan.
This thread is stale, so nobody's gonna read this.... but running your O/S in a VM does nothing to help you in the area most likely to bite: driver/hardware issues.
Sure, you might run into application-level issues with an update, but this is rare, and so long as the O/S is "up", you can resolve that remotely anyway. But if you have a driver error on the hardware in your system, you may well end up with a system that won't come up and you can't fix without getting into your car, and checking updates in a VM will provide virtually NO protection in this scenario.
In my case, we have (almost) identical hardware throughout, so I can begin with the systems least likely to cause me grief if they didn't reboot, and when they check out, move on up the food chain to more important systems, and this is easily done since we always have a "hot" failover with equipment identical to our production environment. In this way, I can confirm that the hardware is basically supported before getting to stuff that "matters".
Seeing as the government does not make a damn thing, the only way they're getting that money is from taxes. Either by increasing our taxes now, or by increasing taxes on future generations.
I see idiocy like this is rampant in the USA.
They don't make a damn thing? You mean, like the roads that you drove on the way to work? Or the legal system that protects you? Or the police that jail the bad guy who didn't carjack you today on the way to work? Or the licensing policies for the radio station that you listened to on the way to work? What about the 13 years of education that you got so that you could LAND the job that you went to this morning? Or the excellent college system that you went to if you are a "white collar" worker?
In the United States, government is so pervasive and so good at enabling the creation of wealth that many members of the population don't bother to think about it, and rail on it like it's some parasite. "I don't need no damned gubbmint!" But the truth is that every single American benefits from almost half a MILLION dollars in embedded infrastructure: roads, schools, libraries, jails, courthouses, telephone/telecommunications, power etc.
Is it just ignorance that makes people treat their gift of such incredible wealth so poorly? It's really sad, too, because if we don't properly understand and support the true role of our government, we'll fail to keep it and then we all lose. And we *ARE* losing: education is chronically underfunded and new student test scores are abysmal, with the result being that we jail a higher percentage of our population than any other "first world" country.
Rather than develop a sane approach to the Internet as public infrastructure, we've instead relied on private enterprise to elevate our status from first to near last among industrialized nations in broadband penetration.
I admin several busy CentOS servers for my company. You don't probably want a fully web-based application:
1) what happens when some RPM goes awry to borken your server(s)? Yes, it's pretty rare, but it DOES happen. In my case, I WANT to do them one by one in asc order of importance so that if anything is borked, it's most likely to be my least important systems!
2) How secure is it? You are effectively granting root privs to a website - not always a good idea. (rarely, never)
Me? I have a web doohickey to let me know when updates are available. Cron job runs nightly to yum and a pattern match identifies whether or not updates are needed, to show on my homepage. So it doesn't DO the update, butit makes it ez to see has been done.
"Wolfie" Steve Wolfram HAS developed a rather successful software for mathematical modeling. You may have heard of it: "Mathematica". He also wrote a book called "A new kind of Science" which lays out some interesting ideas based on what are called "Cellular Automata" - basically a simple algorithm turned into a loop.
Certain, very simple algorithms appear to be rather respectable pseudo-random number generators, and he uses the fact that they are (repeatable) pseudo-random number generators to be a plus rather than a minus.
I'd like to see some challenging of his ideas, specifically, just how "random" is the output of these simple algorithms? Are they really as incompressible as they seem? It strikes me that there are only so many states possible in a narrow, N-bit wide field that he uses like a register, and thus this would severely limit the "randomness" in the result to being far less than claimed.
In his book, he went too far - he even suggested that cellular automata explain all the phenomenon of the universe! - and for that, his other, useful ideas will tend to be dismissed, even if he IS right.
Me too, in February, when I moved. We had the dual-dish DVR with the super-duper-mega family plan hooked up to two NTSC TVs.
When we moved, we decided to put off signing up for cable until after our expenses stabilized, but since I have to work on the Internet, we got DSL set up with wifi immediately, 3.0 Mb. Simple, fast, cheap.
And without the TV to distract us, we quickly discovered hulu, Netflix-on-demand (we always had the Netflix plan, but didn't use it all that often) and casttv.com. Between all of them and the direct networks (fox.com/fod, cbs.com, etc) we've hardly missed our satellite at all.
In fact, it's actually BETTER in many ways because
1) with the DVR, you had to know in advance what you wanted to watch. You set the DVR to record your favorite shows, and then you get into the "comfy zone" where you don't ever watch anything really new because of the hassle of going through the schedule of 300 channels in order to find something that doesn't suck.
2) If you like a show that runs often, like law&order, (which my wife loves) you end up either: A) loading up the DVR with a bazillion episodes that you've already seen or B) only the "new" episodes, which are often re-runs from a year ago, anyway.
3) You do NOT get access to shows that you actually haven't seen but aren't on the airing schedule. If you discover a show that you like (EG: Heroes) in season 2 or 3, you don't ever get to go back and see the ones you missed. Online, you do.
4) If you had a lazy day, and wanted to watch a ton of TV, it's common to run out of shows that you like. So there you are, with half a 12-pack in the cooler at your feet, having watched all the Mythbusters and Galactica episodes, and you have to either watch stuff you already saw or be content with the saturday afternoon golf.
With the Internet television, you watch what you want, right now. You can (usually) see reruns from past seasons, you can watch entire seasons in series, and you never run out of new stuff to try. (Try Mi5 - it's like CSI only it's in Britain, and unlike CSI, it's actually GOOD television, with actual acting and plots that aren't as formulaic as a Nancy Drew mystery.
The problem I have is not so much the copyright extension - it's the ex post facto fashion that it's being done. Changes to copyright law should not change the terms of existing copyrights.
Copyrights were originally an arrangement to promote public works by letting the creators have a monoply of copy rights on their works for a period of time (20 years originally) before the works become public domain.
It's a good idea, because by ensuring that the creators can profit from their works, society is enrichened with more works in the public domain (after the copyrights expire)
Can you imagine a deal where you pay for a number of years before you own your car, but then the car company changes the deal just before your term is up so you have to pay for another 5 years before you get your car?
Changing terms for EXISTING copyrights is, in effect, a similar situation - the artist knew the deal going in, there is already a clear 'no ex post facto law' ban in the constitution, and by never changing the term of existing copyrights, you limit the incentive to extend them until the heat-death of the universe!
Yes but machines can't sue for damages. If you crash your car, no matter how 'smart' it is, it won't take you to court for driving drunk.
But what if the car had an intelligence directly derived from a real person, like the logical progression of an amputee to a full machine above?
That's the point of this discussion. If you develop software that so closely emulates the human mind that it (and anybody else talking to it) can't tell the difference, is it human? If the software is a direct descendant of a 'natural born' human, is it human? Can it sue? Can it get married?
(kinda makes the whole gay marriage thing pale, huh?)
It's a lot tougher do define what a human is than it may seem on the surface, and the difference between man and machine will, by definition become more and more blurred until there is no effective difference.
It's an idea that I've become familiar with esp. aftre reading 'The Singularity is Near' by Ray Kurzweil. As our technology advances, we'll find that our capabilies beyond our technolgy will diminish. Machines have long ago surpassed our running speed (cars/planes/trains) and our ability to farm/grow food (tractors) and our ability to hurl object (guns) and swim (boats) but we've always had the ability to out-think our machines.
Increasingly, this isn't true.
We've already shown that SPAM filters are good enough to be more accurate than the people who read the messages. Machines have long been better than people for math-related stuff, keeping track of stuff, and the like, but now we're getting close to the threshhold for image processing and character recognition. It's already true for voice recognition. Captcha is, therefore, doomed to fall eventually as we approach the singularity, and is already pretty weakened. The next question is, therefore simple: what does it mean to be human?
Remember Lt. Commander Data on Star Trek, trying to be human? It's quaint largely because he/it was a minority on he show, but in reality the machine will outnumber us by a wide margin - they already do!
So what does it mean to be human?
If you have a prosthetic leg, are you still human?
If the leg has a CPU in it, are you still human?
If the CPU is more powerful than your mind, are you still human?
If the chip is wired into your mind, are you still human?
If you use the CPU as though it were part of your mind, are you still human?
If you have transferred modt of your thinking to the CPU, are you still human?
If you transferred all your thinking to the CPU and rarely use your 'wet' brain, are you still human?
TFA is mostly referring to video games, but mentions the flow of journalism toward blogs. This is a shift that takes power away from the educated and gives it to the idiots.
Yeah, know, power to the people and all that. But really, just how much voice do we want to give to people who equate knowledge and understanding with being 'shifty' or untrustworthy, simply because the educated use words like 'pontificate' that they don't understand?
The Internet gives the educated unprecedented ability to collaborate and share knowledge, but also lets the idiots share 'knowledge' like ID, alien abduction accounts, and Obama-is-an-Terrorist conspiracy theories.
Suddenly, the idiots have been given a megaphone, and the result is nearly disastrous. Wonder how come Texas, Alabama, and Oklahoma school boards have all suddenly been considering the idiocy package often called 'Intelligent Design'? The only design here is the design of the idiots - people who wear ignorance with pride, as if it was proof of truth.
And giving power to idiots is a bad, bad idea. I'm hoping that the Internet will treat the idiots like damage and route around I but so far the results have been pretty dissappointing...
What is the "price"? Most people think of price in nominal terms, EG: so many Dollars/Pounds/Marks/Sheiks/Yen/Whatever.
But when the amount of money available on the marketplace fluctuates, then the "price" of commodities fluctuates.
Gold, as valued in dollars, has fluctuated in price internationally roughly as much as other internationally traded commodities such as oil and iron, indicating that it's not the price of gold that's fluctuating so much as the value of the money used to buy it. On the surface, this appears to indicate inflation, but at the same time, the actual amount of money that the average joe takes home is dropping, which appears to indicate deflation.
I must be special, too, because I log tons of probes. Hundreds, sometimes thousands a day.
That was my first thought, too. I got so sick of looking at the log entries for my faux SSH daemon (on port 22) that I quit logging it. Sure, it's fun for a while, 'till you realize that you aren't frustrating anybody, just occupying 0.02% of cpu time on a hacked bot.
Hundreds/thousands of "hack attempts" per day when you include obvious overrun attempts (8k of "xxxxx" in the apache logs) attempts at accessing Windows sharing (connections to ports 137-139) dictionary hacks on port 22, (none of my stuff allows passwords anyway, and don't work on port 22) and so on.
Sure, you can do things like reducing single-points-of-failure, beefing up security, but you can do this only to a point. At some point, you realize that society is, by nature, cooperative, and if you remove that basic assumption of cooperation, society will fail.
There aren't any exceptions to this. There are just too many possible things that can be destroyed by people who desire a society or civilization to perish.
You can salt fields. The Romans did this thousands of years ago, and the areas they ravaged are, to this day, incapable of meaningful agriculture.
You can poison drinking water. LSD is pretty easy to make cheaply, and a single pound of it thrown into a public water system would cause mass insanity.
This list is infinite: You can destroy power lines, you can cut fiber cables, you can make a bomb out of fertilizer and destroy a building or the Golden Gate Bridge or any of a quintillion other things that are both easily done and highly destructive.
A society is secure when its population are generally happy with it continuing. When a society reaches the point where enough of its population are disenfranchised with it, it will becomes incapable of maintaining the critical infrastructure necessary for a complex civilization. Adding security measures such as multiple points of failure quickly become reasons NOT to fix why anyone would want the civilization to perish in the first place - and thus actually make the civilization LESS secure.
And that's just the simple truth of it. So, if we want to be secure, we need to clear up the reasons why people would want our culture to fail. These include things like
A) Not torturing people.
B) Allowing other countries to be sovereign in their own affairs.
C) Not being overly greedy with our wealth. Exploitation is only good for the short term - it's a long-term destabilizing force and that's bad for everyone.
Really, I don't get it. You get people who swear by our Constitution yet somehow think that torturing is OK. Perhaps they should read the 4th and 5th ammendments? This issue is a deep, dark stain on the freedoms we are otherwise so quick to espouse.
Applied Science AKA "Engineering" exists to make life better. Air conditioning, blogging, better tasting beer. If not to make life just that little bit better, than for what?
Sure, there are starving people in XYZ country, but they are starving precisely because they are NOT using engineering to make their lives better! Sure, you could donate the cost of that better-tasting beer and feed the starving kid for a few days... but then what?
Feel free to donate to 3rd world countries (I do) but when you do, don't just throw money/food at them, donate your money towards programs that will improve their infrastructure. Things like education. (I personally sponsor to help aschool for kids in rural Haiti)
And don't hesitate to enjoy that good-tasting franken-beer!
The reality is that computers today "live longer" than they used to. Having a 9-10 year old computer was once unthinkable; it's now almost normal for just about any old Pentium 4 to still be in use today, and the Pentium 4 was apparently released in late 2000.
I put a new (but cheap!) AGP video card into an older P4 desktop computer (hint: PC-133 RAM!) that my son now uses to play Spore - one of the newer, hotter games around - it plays just great.
It's a trend - computers are "doing" for longer than they used to. They are in use for longer, and people hang on to them longer. They are less willing to buy the top-end because there's no reason to.
Slashdot Mirror
BSD is one of those things that I've been interested in doing, especially early on. It is arguably more secure than Linux, is definitely older and potentially more secure.
So after using Linux for a year or so, I tried OpenBSD for a full month because of its much-touted security benefits before going back to Linux, and I've never looked back. Why?
1) At the time, getting stuff installed was more of a chore.
2) Although they had similar backgrounds and technologies, the differences were enough that it was almost a complete re-learn. RPM didn't work. Init was totally different. Commands such as ps, at, etc. had different options.
3) Didn't have support for multi-core systems. (at the time, I believe that's long under the bridge now)
Bottom line? I'd started to build a business that continues to this day using Linux as my architecture. In order to move over, I'd have to port over all my administration scripts, and much of my software to an environment that was just different enough to make me *think* I knew the answer when I didn't. Porting would have been somewhat expensive, and the case to make for the switch was marginal.
Linux isn't the best at everything, but it does pretty good at everything. Security is decent, reliability is decent, performance is excellent, hardware support is good-to-excellent, etc. all of these well within the range of "commercially viable". So, I stick with Linux, and my hosted software company has grown from a few clients to over 100 client organizations, some with hundreds of users. We've grown from 1 server to 9. Our uptimes are excellent, best in the business, our software is fast becoming an industry standard, and Linux has basically never disappointed us.
But don't get me wrong: I have immense respect for BSD, I live and die by SSH, which is foundational to our administration, backups, and cluster replication technology, and if I were starting over today, I would feel perfectly comfortable choosing *BSD.
Long live BSD!
On a side note - I didn't write it to be funny, I wrote it to make a point.
Sometimes the best way to make a point, though, is to be funny about it. Witness Stephen Colbert.
The media can do what they will with this non-story.
I'm safe - I don't believe in that e-vo-lution crap, so this new disease could not have evolved from swine! It's all just pig nonsense.
I'm going back to prepare a round of raw bacon sushi!
Can we just have PDF left alone, to be the static display/print format? If Adobe really wants to do all this other crap, can they please invent a new format, and not try to force me to install the viewer for that app?
No, we can't.
Because it's an open format, if Adobe doesn't "innovate" on it and stay king-of-the-hill, they will lose market share to other products that will embed movies and such. Adobe has to continue to innovate or they risk losing their status as the big cheese, and they make lots of money with Acrobat professional.
Yeah, it sucks. I like PDFs to be... PDFs - print-ready documents. But as soon as there's a checkbox that says "embed videos into PDF documents" that somebody else has that Adobe Reader doesn't, Adobe is screwed, and they know that.
Of course, we won't talk about the checkbox that says "doesn't take a blue moon to load"...
I have a touchscreen phone that uses Windows Mobile. It's the HTC mogul and it's a damned sweet phone when you load it up with SkyFire browser. (IE mobile takes suck to whole new levels)
I browse and post on slashdot/digg/reddit/etc, watch movies on hulu, play mp3s and all that jazz but unlike the iPhone, it has a real keyboard that doesn't suck to type on. (touch screen keyboards blow HARD)
It's a pretty awesome phone. But dangit, it's still windows with all its suck. The interface is inconsistent, laggy, it runs out of memory when you run too many progs at a time, and it just crashes about 1x/week without warning. Oh, and there's no spider solitaire.
It's a great phone except for the windows part.
It was great irony this morning... using Outlook mobile, Exchange (Zimbra) and Office mobile, it refused to open a word document in an email because it might 'harm my system'. Something ironic about MS' product telling me that another of their products is dangerous to use?
I opened it w/my Linux laptop, Kmail, and Open Office just fine, thank you!
PS: I typed this post on said phone. Verizon is developing a touch screen phone? What am I using, then?
I've been 'into computing' since a '286/20 was described as 'lightning fast'. I've never, ever spent more than 100 dollars on a video card. I've always bought last-years' high flyer for 60-80 dollars and I've never hurt for lack of fun games to play at resolutions that I've ever noticed as a problem.
Last years' CPU on last years' mobo costs 100 dollars for the pair. HDD upgrades for sale at 60 dollars - who isn't happy with this? Your average computer lasts about 4 years, by buying 1 year late you get 3/4 the performance life at 1/4 the cost while staying within the range of the target platform for most of the latest games.
Why is this even a question?
Man oh man, you are naive as hell.
TL;DR: Many of the innovations and technologies we take for granted today came directly from publicly funded research. It's idiotic to treat government as if it were just an evil leach on society when it's clearly not, and is capable of helping us all become happier and wealthier if we're smart about it.
The U.S. Department of Education was created in 1980. Strange that education has declined since then. Strange that Bush's federally-funded No Child Left Behind initiative has done more to hurt education than virtually any other public or private education policy in history.
Yes, it was created then to address an already-evident decline in educational standards. It hasn't yet been turned around, and I won't discuss the idiotic "No Child Left Untested" law passed by Bush. But even with these problems, let me turn the problem around: Show me a wealthy, technologically advanced civilization that has not had the benefit of a well-funded public education system...
The idea that we have a responsibility to pay 428 billion dollars (CIA Factbook says 2008 GDP was 14.29 trillion) more per year in taxes for science when we can't even pay down our existing debt is insanity
If you don't mind me asking... where will we get the wealth to pay our debts if not by creating more wealth? And what class of professional creates more wealth than the engineers who use the knowledge obtained by scientists? This research and development is the cornerstone of wealth and socio-economic advancement. You can cut other projects, but do NOT short-change education and scientific research!
If politicians vote for science funding, it's because they think they can get pork for their constuents, and that pork is unlikely to be the kind of science funding you or I want to see.
Uh... duh? That's just the way people work. Yes, we try to keep blatant abuses of money (such as Sarah Palin's famed "bridge-to-nowhere") to a minimum but pork is the POINT of a representational republic. The reason why you vote for NNN representative is so that the representative can represent you. And, if your rep won't represent you, why did you vote for him/her/it?
Want altruistic senators that only think of the greater good for mankind? Good luck with that. I'm more interested in pragmatic, slightly selfish senators that are smart enough to see that creating true wealth is a good thing, even if he/she/it is willing to make a bit of a sleazy deal to see that it gets done in his/her/its district.
The question you really should ask is: Do you want that pork to build more bombs and stuff that benefits nobody, or something that creates wealth and jobs that help us all pay our debts and continue to enjoy our high quality of life?
TL;DR: Can the federal government theroetically find useful areas in science and technology to spend money on, that will generate net returns? Almost certainly. Will they? Almost certainly not.
Is that a rechargeable battery in your laptop? For DECADES the only research in rechargeable batteries was for the space program, now it's fueling a massive industry that dwarfs the taxes originally spent on their research. What about the velcro on your shoes? Or the "breathable" Gore-tex in your jacket? The satellites that power the now-cheap, GPS units that are transforming industries from trucking to aviation to blogging? Perhaps you forgot about the solar panels that we are all hoping will lead us to a better world - all of these are products that help fuel entire industries, all developed for just one fairly small research segment of our government - NASA.
And don't tell me about how "bloated" NASA is - the United States spends more money on our military in a day than NASA gets for an entire year in funding. So far, I've just mentioned NASA. What about the Internet? It's driving dramatic social and financial change, allowing you and I (idiot, informed citizen, with differing opinions as to who is who) to exchange ide
Currently, their strategy is to create the same drug which is coming out of patent protection and can start being made by generics, tweak the formula slightly.... /snip
While I have no doubt that this happens to some degree, do you have any evidence that this is even commonplace? I just bought drugs for my wife who's currently dealing with Shingles and 2/3 of the drugs prescribed weren't even as expensive as the deductible on our company's health-insurance plan.
This thread is stale, so nobody's gonna read this.... but running your O/S in a VM does nothing to help you in the area most likely to bite: driver/hardware issues.
Sure, you might run into application-level issues with an update, but this is rare, and so long as the O/S is "up", you can resolve that remotely anyway. But if you have a driver error on the hardware in your system, you may well end up with a system that won't come up and you can't fix without getting into your car, and checking updates in a VM will provide virtually NO protection in this scenario.
In my case, we have (almost) identical hardware throughout, so I can begin with the systems least likely to cause me grief if they didn't reboot, and when they check out, move on up the food chain to more important systems, and this is easily done since we always have a "hot" failover with equipment identical to our production environment. In this way, I can confirm that the hardware is basically supported before getting to stuff that "matters".
Seeing as the government does not make a damn thing, the only way they're getting that money is from taxes. Either by increasing our taxes now, or by increasing taxes on future generations.
I see idiocy like this is rampant in the USA.
They don't make a damn thing? You mean, like the roads that you drove on the way to work? Or the legal system that protects you? Or the police that jail the bad guy who didn't carjack you today on the way to work? Or the licensing policies for the radio station that you listened to on the way to work? What about the 13 years of education that you got so that you could LAND the job that you went to this morning? Or the excellent college system that you went to if you are a "white collar" worker?
In the United States, government is so pervasive and so good at enabling the creation of wealth that many members of the population don't bother to think about it, and rail on it like it's some parasite. "I don't need no damned gubbmint!" But the truth is that every single American benefits from almost half a MILLION dollars in embedded infrastructure: roads, schools, libraries, jails, courthouses, telephone/telecommunications, power etc.
Is it just ignorance that makes people treat their gift of such incredible wealth so poorly? It's really sad, too, because if we don't properly understand and support the true role of our government, we'll fail to keep it and then we all lose. And we *ARE* losing: education is chronically underfunded and new student test scores are abysmal, with the result being that we jail a higher percentage of our population than any other "first world" country.
Rather than develop a sane approach to the Internet as public infrastructure, we've instead relied on private enterprise to elevate our status from first to near last among industrialized nations in broadband penetration.
Welcome to life without effective govt!
I admin several busy CentOS servers for my company. You don't probably want a fully web-based application:
1) what happens when some RPM goes awry to borken your server(s)? Yes, it's pretty rare, but it DOES happen. In my case, I WANT to do them one by one in asc order of importance so that if anything is borked, it's most likely to be my least important systems!
2) How secure is it? You are effectively granting root privs to a website - not always a good idea. (rarely, never)
Me? I have a web doohickey to let me know when updates are available. Cron job runs nightly to yum and a pattern match identifies whether or not updates are needed, to show on my homepage. So it doesn't DO the update, butit makes it ez to see has been done.
"Wolfie" Steve Wolfram HAS developed a rather successful software for mathematical modeling. You may have heard of it: "Mathematica". He also wrote a book called "A new kind of Science" which lays out some interesting ideas based on what are called "Cellular Automata" - basically a simple algorithm turned into a loop.
Certain, very simple algorithms appear to be rather respectable pseudo-random number generators, and he uses the fact that they are (repeatable) pseudo-random number generators to be a plus rather than a minus.
I'd like to see some challenging of his ideas, specifically, just how "random" is the output of these simple algorithms? Are they really as incompressible as they seem? It strikes me that there are only so many states possible in a narrow, N-bit wide field that he uses like a register, and thus this would severely limit the "randomness" in the result to being far less than claimed.
In his book, he went too far - he even suggested that cellular automata explain all the phenomenon of the universe! - and for that, his other, useful ideas will tend to be dismissed, even if he IS right.
What role will cellular automata play in this, and will this also define the basic nature of universal mechanics?
Me too, in February, when I moved. We had the dual-dish DVR with the super-duper-mega family plan hooked up to two NTSC TVs.
When we moved, we decided to put off signing up for cable until after our expenses stabilized, but since I have to work on the Internet, we got DSL set up with wifi immediately, 3.0 Mb. Simple, fast, cheap.
And without the TV to distract us, we quickly discovered hulu, Netflix-on-demand (we always had the Netflix plan, but didn't use it all that often) and casttv.com. Between all of them and the direct networks (fox.com/fod, cbs.com, etc) we've hardly missed our satellite at all.
In fact, it's actually BETTER in many ways because
1) with the DVR, you had to know in advance what you wanted to watch. You set the DVR to record your favorite shows, and then you get into the "comfy zone" where you don't ever watch anything really new because of the hassle of going through the schedule of 300 channels in order to find something that doesn't suck.
2) If you like a show that runs often, like law&order, (which my wife loves) you end up either: A) loading up the DVR with a bazillion episodes that you've already seen or B) only the "new" episodes, which are often re-runs from a year ago, anyway.
3) You do NOT get access to shows that you actually haven't seen but aren't on the airing schedule. If you discover a show that you like (EG: Heroes) in season 2 or 3, you don't ever get to go back and see the ones you missed. Online, you do.
4) If you had a lazy day, and wanted to watch a ton of TV, it's common to run out of shows that you like. So there you are, with half a 12-pack in the cooler at your feet, having watched all the Mythbusters and Galactica episodes, and you have to either watch stuff you already saw or be content with the saturday afternoon golf.
With the Internet television, you watch what you want, right now. You can (usually) see reruns from past seasons, you can watch entire seasons in series, and you never run out of new stuff to try. (Try Mi5 - it's like CSI only it's in Britain, and unlike CSI, it's actually GOOD television, with actual acting and plots that aren't as formulaic as a Nancy Drew mystery.
Try it - it's better than you thought!
The problem I have is not so much the copyright extension - it's the ex post facto fashion that it's being done. Changes to copyright law should not change the terms of existing copyrights.
Copyrights were originally an arrangement to promote public works by letting the creators have a monoply of copy rights on their works for a period of time (20 years originally) before the works become public domain.
It's a good idea, because by ensuring that the creators can profit from their works, society is enrichened with more works in the public domain (after the copyrights expire)
Can you imagine a deal where you pay for a number of years before you own your car, but then the car company changes the deal just before your term is up so you have to pay for another 5 years before you get your car?
Changing terms for EXISTING copyrights is, in effect, a similar situation - the artist knew the deal going in, there is already a clear 'no ex post facto law' ban in the constitution, and by never changing the term of existing copyrights, you limit the incentive to extend them until the heat-death of the universe!
Yes but machines can't sue for damages. If you crash your car, no matter how 'smart' it is, it won't take you to court for driving drunk.
But what if the car had an intelligence directly derived from a real person, like the logical progression of an amputee to a full machine above?
That's the point of this discussion. If you develop software that so closely emulates the human mind that it (and anybody else talking to it) can't tell the difference, is it human? If the software is a direct descendant of a 'natural born' human, is it human? Can it sue? Can it get married?
(kinda makes the whole gay marriage thing pale, huh?)
It's a lot tougher do define what a human is than it may seem on the surface, and the difference between man and machine will, by definition become more and more blurred until there is no effective difference.
It's an idea that I've become familiar with esp. aftre reading 'The Singularity is Near' by Ray Kurzweil. As our technology advances, we'll find that our capabilies beyond our technolgy will diminish. Machines have long ago surpassed our running speed (cars/planes/trains) and our ability to farm/grow food (tractors) and our ability to hurl object (guns) and swim (boats) but we've always had the ability to out-think our machines.
Increasingly, this isn't true.
We've already shown that SPAM filters are good enough to be more accurate than the people who read the messages. Machines have long been better than people for math-related stuff, keeping track of stuff, and the like, but now we're getting close to the threshhold for image processing and character recognition. It's already true for voice recognition. Captcha is, therefore, doomed to fall eventually as we approach the singularity, and is already pretty weakened. The next question is, therefore simple: what does it mean to be human?
Remember Lt. Commander Data on Star Trek, trying to be human? It's quaint largely because he/it was a minority on he show, but in reality the machine will outnumber us by a wide margin - they already do!
So what does it mean to be human?
If you have a prosthetic leg, are you still human?
If the leg has a CPU in it, are you still human?
If the CPU is more powerful than your mind, are you still human?
If the chip is wired into your mind, are you still human?
If you use the CPU as though it were part of your mind, are you still human?
If you have transferred modt of your thinking to the CPU, are you still human?
If you transferred all your thinking to the CPU and rarely use your 'wet' brain, are you still human?
If you find th
TFA is mostly referring to video games, but mentions the flow of journalism toward blogs. This is a shift that takes power away from the educated and gives it to the idiots.
Yeah, know, power to the people and all that. But really, just how much voice do we want to give to people who equate knowledge and understanding with being 'shifty' or untrustworthy, simply because the educated use words like 'pontificate' that they don't understand?
The Internet gives the educated unprecedented ability to collaborate and share knowledge, but also lets the idiots share 'knowledge' like ID, alien abduction accounts, and Obama-is-an-Terrorist conspiracy theories.
Suddenly, the idiots have been given a megaphone, and the result is nearly disastrous. Wonder how come Texas, Alabama, and Oklahoma school boards have all suddenly been considering the idiocy package often called 'Intelligent Design'? The only design here is the design of the idiots - people who wear ignorance with pride, as if it was proof of truth.
And giving power to idiots is a bad, bad idea. I'm hoping that the Internet will treat the idiots like damage and route around I but so far the results have been pretty dissappointing...
What is the "price"? Most people think of price in nominal terms, EG: so many Dollars/Pounds/Marks/Sheiks/Yen/Whatever.
But when the amount of money available on the marketplace fluctuates, then the "price" of commodities fluctuates.
Gold, as valued in dollars, has fluctuated in price internationally roughly as much as other internationally traded commodities such as oil and iron, indicating that it's not the price of gold that's fluctuating so much as the value of the money used to buy it. On the surface, this appears to indicate inflation, but at the same time, the actual amount of money that the average joe takes home is dropping, which appears to indicate deflation.
Of course, the marketplace is all over the map, with all indications that we're seeing stagflation, which is really bad.
I must be special, too, because I log tons of probes. Hundreds, sometimes thousands a day.
That was my first thought, too. I got so sick of looking at the log entries for my faux SSH daemon (on port 22) that I quit logging it. Sure, it's fun for a while, 'till you realize that you aren't frustrating anybody, just occupying 0.02% of cpu time on a hacked bot.
Hundreds/thousands of "hack attempts" per day when you include obvious overrun attempts (8k of "xxxxx" in the apache logs) attempts at accessing Windows sharing (connections to ports 137-139) dictionary hacks on port 22, (none of my stuff allows passwords anyway, and don't work on port 22) and so on.
Yawn. Welcome to the wild, wooly Intarnets!
Explain hydroponics to people who are truly impoverished. It's an absurd idea.
Let's see, the tanks, plus the fertilizer, the lights, the pumps, the gravelite mixture, that comes to how many hundred thousand dollars per acre?
To people whose net worth is less than $100. Right.
Come back when you get a clue.
It seems that a lot of security articles are lean on providing the details about helping yourself to a more secure system.
If your system was more secure, you wouldn't need security experts to secure it.
Sure, you can do things like reducing single-points-of-failure, beefing up security, but you can do this only to a point. At some point, you realize that society is, by nature, cooperative, and if you remove that basic assumption of cooperation, society will fail.
There aren't any exceptions to this. There are just too many possible things that can be destroyed by people who desire a society or civilization to perish.
You can salt fields. The Romans did this thousands of years ago, and the areas they ravaged are, to this day, incapable of meaningful agriculture.
You can poison drinking water. LSD is pretty easy to make cheaply, and a single pound of it thrown into a public water system would cause mass insanity.
This list is infinite: You can destroy power lines, you can cut fiber cables, you can make a bomb out of fertilizer and destroy a building or the Golden Gate Bridge or any of a quintillion other things that are both easily done and highly destructive.
A society is secure when its population are generally happy with it continuing. When a society reaches the point where enough of its population are disenfranchised with it, it will becomes incapable of maintaining the critical infrastructure necessary for a complex civilization. Adding security measures such as multiple points of failure quickly become reasons NOT to fix why anyone would want the civilization to perish in the first place - and thus actually make the civilization LESS secure.
And that's just the simple truth of it. So, if we want to be secure, we need to clear up the reasons why people would want our culture to fail. These include things like
A) Not torturing people.
B) Allowing other countries to be sovereign in their own affairs.
C) Not being overly greedy with our wealth. Exploitation is only good for the short term - it's a long-term destabilizing force and that's bad for everyone.
Really, I don't get it. You get people who swear by our Constitution yet somehow think that torturing is OK. Perhaps they should read the 4th and 5th ammendments? This issue is a deep, dark stain on the freedoms we are otherwise so quick to espouse.
Applied Science AKA "Engineering" exists to make life better. Air conditioning, blogging, better tasting beer. If not to make life just that little bit better, than for what?
Sure, there are starving people in XYZ country, but they are starving precisely because they are NOT using engineering to make their lives better! Sure, you could donate the cost of that better-tasting beer and feed the starving kid for a few days... but then what?
Feel free to donate to 3rd world countries (I do) but when you do, don't just throw money/food at them, donate your money towards programs that will improve their infrastructure. Things like education. (I personally sponsor to help aschool for kids in rural Haiti)
And don't hesitate to enjoy that good-tasting franken-beer!
The reality is that computers today "live longer" than they used to. Having a 9-10 year old computer was once unthinkable; it's now almost normal for just about any old Pentium 4 to still be in use today, and the Pentium 4 was apparently released in late 2000.
I put a new (but cheap!) AGP video card into an older P4 desktop computer (hint: PC-133 RAM!) that my son now uses to play Spore - one of the newer, hotter games around - it plays just great.
It's a trend - computers are "doing" for longer than they used to. They are in use for longer, and people hang on to them longer. They are less willing to buy the top-end because there's no reason to.