OK. I've never tried Cannon, so perhaps you're right. But every printer I've ever tried has worked as well with Linux as with anything else...except that scanning has been a problem in the past, and is occasionally a problem when using the drivers from the "unstable" or "testing" trees.
N.B.: That *DOESN'T* mean I think that it's reasonable for them to be able to snoop on my e-mail, or anything I didn't intentionally make public. But for them to look at publicly posted information is quite reasonable, even if they are pretending to be someone else.
Why can't you print a photo from Linux? Don't you have a printer installed?
That's a really peculiar assertion. I can't imagine anyone having trouble printing a photo, provided that they: a) had a file of the photo (tiff, jpeg, png, etc. no problem) b) had a printer.
If they only had the photo, and not a file of it, they'd also need a scanner. Still no problem.
Perhaps if all you have is a proprietary Photoshop file you'd have problems. I've never tried that. (I don't have Photoshop. I had a copy for the Mac about 7 years ago, and didn't like it at all. I much prefer either The Gimp or Inkscape, depending on which kind of work I'm doing.. Deneba Canvas was nice, but it's not enough to keep me on a proprietary platform.)
If you think war has gotten less ugly, you must have your blinders on. Napalm. Artillery. Air strikes on civilian targets. Etc.
I won't claim that if they had had the capability earlier wars wouldn't have been as bad, but the only thing that comes close to modern warfare has to be either the massacres (including germ warfare) performed on Native Americans or the cavalry invasions by Attila and other Huns. (Even the Assyrians come in as less destructive.)
P.S.: Note the massive technical imbalance in the examples I offered. The key point is that modern armies have the same kind of massive imbalance over their *civilian* opponents.
But did she volunteer her time as a high official in his campaign? It *does* make a difference.
FWIW, I'm currently so deluged with various groups making (political) claims that I can't quickly verify, that I'm pretty much in overwhelm about the entire process. I have, however, noticed that with a reported 84% of the voters in favor of a public option (How did they derive that number?) Congress is having trouble deciding to vote for it. Really gives one faith in the system, and confidence that all one needs to do is express a reasoned opinion to be paid attention to.
Yeah, that sounded like what they would say about themselves.
You didn't address his assertion about who founded it...which sounds believable. And which, if true, casts doubt on a lot of their self-characterizations.
As for his "I couldn't find a thing about what they were actually about", I'm not sure that waffling is what you want me to think they're about, but if that's what you want, ok.
FWIW the PolitiFact site ( http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/ ) now says that Obama has kept 96 out of the over 500 campaign promises they track. They break it down into more detail, and I don't always agree with them as to what constitutes keeping a promise. If you're interested you might check it out.
You're right, the evidence isn't there. But it isn't available to show that he's wrong, either, and based on the maneuvering that's being done the commentators opinions seem a plausible interpretation. You can't offer any evidence that he's wrong, because they (the feds and their accomplices) have hidden the evidence. And since if he were wrong there's not much reason for them to have hidden it, he's probably right, even if he can't prove it.
Erlang is slow compared to Python. And it doesn't have much in the way of graphics support.
If you aren't using Erlang, and you segregate out all the timing dependencies carefully, then you've just eliminated most of the benefit of concurrency. Ideally you'd like to be able to execute most loops in parallel...but it's only really worth doing for loops that do a lot of calculation. So, with any normal language, you've got to refactor those loops into something that looks completely different. Etc.
Go looks like it might make this kind of thing plausible, but it's got a long way to go before it gets out of the test-bed. For one thing they've got to improve the documentation, which probably means writing a program that will run through a batch of code and document for each "class" which interfaces it implements. And it needs to be an end-user application with an initial database that includes all the system code. It's nice being able to add classes into the middle of the hierarchy like that, but it causes new stresses to be put on the documentation.
Of course we hate concurrency. That doesn't mean we don't need it.
Concurrency makes code nearly impossible to debug. We don't *like* Erlang. But without concurrency we can only execute in one hyperthread at a time, and that's slow.
Now if you throw in delays for IP connections, handling sockets that might or might not be there, etc..... now you're getting to a place where most applications are better off avoiding. Yeah, there are toolkits and frameworks to make dealing with it plausible, and to ensure that someone else is responsible for the errors. That still adds time delays of uncertain duration whenever you link. And that means that the errors are ones that you have to figure out from scratch, and may even be in a language that you've never coded in. This is a mess that's best avoided when possible.
FWIW, I looked into getting insurance for my glasses after I retired. It was cheaper to buy them with cash.
This *IS* the way it ought to work. The whole idea of health insurance for chronic problems is absurd. A different solution is needed. Health insurance is only appropriate for things that are unlikely to either happen or recur. That's the only place where insurance is a reasonable model. There need to be ways (or a way) to cover then expectable health problems, but insurance is a wildly inappropriate or overly expensive answer.
And note well, current things that call themselves "health insurance" try to duck out of paying if you have an "unexpected and expensive health crisis". They'll gladly take your money as long as this problem doesn't show up, but when it does, they try to absent themselves. Or they interpose so much paperwork that a single individual can't reasonably cope. I broke my right thumb one Friday evening, and could not get "pre-approval" to get a doctor to treat it until the following Monday...and then I had to fill out a mountain of paper work with the hand that I write with broken. Now ask me how I feel about "health insurance". There have been other instances. And I have one of the better plans.
After I retired I priced insurance coverage for both dental and glasses. Neither was worth paying for. The dental insurance specifically excluded any major problem, and the yearly cost was more than I've had to pay the dentist. (That second part is reasonable, but the first is absurd! It's a con job pure and simple.) The optometric insurance was the same, except that for major problems you are referred to your main health insurance, which is reasonable.
The only reason the current health insurance exists is because employers get a tax write-off when they supply health insurance to their workers. That's the ONLY justification. It's a tax scam with subsidiary benefits to the workers.
Mostly they are probably paid for by insurance, so there is little attention paid to cost by consumers.
In the case of hearing aids this isn't all that true. The people who most commonly need hearing aids are older, and likely to be retired. Many of then are NOT covered by insurance. But if you're powerful, or were sufficiently powerful, you ARE likely to have a health insurance that covers it. So there's no push to correct this among the people who have the power to cause it to be corrected.
If a heart stent goes wrong (when?), you're probably not in any condition to sue.
More seriously, Stents aren't that cheap, but they tend to be covered by insurance. And stents are EXPECTED to have a relatively short half-life. When they fill up with cholesterol, etc., the person typically blamed is the patient. (You didn't watch your diet|weight|whatever carefully enough.) There's always some lifestyle choice that one can blame this on. And the fact that 90% of people can't keep weight off isn't given *it's* proper weight. Blaming the victim is a long-standing tradition that makes other people feel better, so even those who believe it's a bad thing to do keep getting caught up in it.
I wasn't assuming a direct collision, but a glancing collision that was sufficient to allow them to exchange momentum. Otherwise I'd have put the odds at a lot higher than a trillion to one. (I hadn't even considered the possibility, certainly not enough to calculate the energies. In fact I still haven't, not even as an estimate. But I'm not sure you're wrong, even though this might happen, say, 3/2 lightyears away. Especially if, since we're only interested in interactions that lead to capture, it was retrograde. OTOH, anything that causes a shower of large comets has a reasonable probability of wiping out 90% of all families of life on earth. [It's happened once before, so the odds aren't impossible.] I was envisioning an interaction that sent the brown dwarf into interstellar space, and sent the incoming star into the inner solar system [inside pluto's orbit] at a reduced speed.)
True, what I'm proposing isn't a perfect solution. That's probably impossible. But every time you boot you can rely on the eprom code, and it could check the signatures on every program before it ran the code. (System stuff only. Custom programs must be accepted without this kind of check.)
That's still not quite perfect, but getting close. It also makes updating a real hassle. We're getting close to the point where it's a better choice to buy a new computer. (OK, if you're a tech it would be easy enough to facilitate swapping the eprom...but that opens a different vulnerability, albeit one that requires physical access.)
Probably not *quite* zero. Pretty nearly, though. The Oort cloud isn't much of a resisting medium, but we don't know everything that's out there. There *could* be something massive enough to slow the star and dark enough that we haven't seen it. That's not the way to bet, though, even at odds of a million to one.
And then you've got to assume that the incoming star hits this dark brown dwarf. (Nothing much lighter would work.)
Say there's perhaps one chance in a trillion. (it's a rough estimate...and I wouldn't want to justify it, but it's my guess of a ballpark figure.)
I sort-of agree, but you've got to do things in the right order. First step should be an almost closed life-support system. That still needs a *lot* of work. Some things can be done in parallel, but at the moment that looks like the rate limiting step. (And besides, advances in robotics and waldos might eliminate a lot of the problems. E.g., a good space-suit might not need direct connections to arms, fingers, etc. if that could be managed via wi-fi or some such.)
To me it appears that the rate limiting steps are: 1) almost closed life-support. (Presume that energy inputs in the form of electricity are allowed, but material inputs are strictly limited.) 2) how should solar storms be handled? 3 feet of lead+3 feet of paraffin would probably work, but that's a bit of a heavy shield. 3) mining carbonaceous chondrites for air and water replacements. (I said the life support was almost closed. That means you need supplements to actually close it.) 4) solving long-term life without gravity. (This is probably a biological problem, though a large spinning construction would also work. At least as a stop-gap.) 5) NOW one can talk about a long-term colony. That means that at this point one can start fine-tuning the sociology to create a stable or quasi-stable civilization existing in the environment of space.
So at the moment there's not much the average person can do. Supporting space-based research is good. Supporting robotics is good. Supporting space-enthusiast societies is good. But expecting any particular result in the next decade is unwise.
N.B.: The energetics of space colonies aren't properly dealt with by science fictions stories...ANY of them. Asteroids have orbits that are skew to each other (often not by a lot, but it doesn't take a lot to make transport between them unreasonably expensive). Even so, if you notice, Larry Niven presumed that the space ships used by the belters used hydrogen fusion jets. That's probably not energetic enough, but he was vague enough about how much fuel was used that "perhaps". He did presume that the ships could accelerate at several Gs for extended periods of time.
More practical is a civilization based around exchange of messages with little exchange of physical media. That doesn't require technologies like hydrogen fusion powered torches (rockets).
N.B.: The further out you get from the sun, the more skew the orbits of the satellites (planets, asteroids, etc.) are. So the more energy intensive it is to get from one to another. It would often be cheaper to get into high earth orbit than to match to something with a widely skew orbit.
P.S.: This argument doesn't really apply to trojan points. Things orbiting in trojan points should have easy transitions from one to another. But that's a small fraction of the asteroids.
At one point the Army switched from MSWind to Mac servers for their network facing stuff. Then they dared anyone to penetrate it. Nobody did, at least during the first month.
N.B.: OSX *can* be as secure as Linux, though possibly not as secure as one of the BSDs (OpenBSD?). I don't know that this is the default configuration. I've never set up a Mac for a sensitive position. OTOH, I've got a Mac attached to the net through a NAT firewall, and haven't worried about viruses for around 9 years now. It's a 10.4 (started out as 10.1) and has shown no signs of infection. (The disk is quite most of the time. It goes to sleep when nobody's using it. There isn't excessive network traffic, etc.)
What is needed is to put the basic OS into EPROM...and to have a switch so that the program of the EPROM can only be altered when the switch is set...and it can't boot normally with the switch set, so you've GOT to reset it.
OTOH, currently the threats aren't high enough to justify that level of security on most systems. They aren't currently even high enough to require booting from a write-once CD/DVD. (Note that you'd only want the essentials of the OS to reside on the CD/DVD. You *DO* want to be able to update most packages without a lot of hassle.)
Still, I feel that the MSWind threat level is high enough to justify switching systems on that basis alone. OTOH, I'm not unbiased as I switched to Linux long ago. (I switched because I read the EULA...and I **MUCH** prefer the GPL.)
And I can guarantee that for a non-technical user Linux is as easy to use as MSWind. I give my wife technical support. (OTOH, she does complain about the absence of many programs that others uses. Sibelius in particular this month. But the OS doesn't cause her any particular problem. [I have her on Ubuntu.])
If "lockdown" means disconnecting the machines from all network access, then you've got a point. If it means something else...??? what DOES it mean? I doubt that it means anything effective.
Are you sure? I decided a decade ago that I was better off without PayPal. I haven't regretted the decision...except, occasionally, when some site that I'd like to support only accepts support through PayPal. Then I go, "O, Well", sigh, and move on.
PayPal was a great idea, but I've been hearing things about them for over a decade that say "You're probably better off not dealing with these creeps."
One source of the problem is that it takes time to do a replacement. And during that replacement either you run a doubled system for awhile, or you put up with LOTS of interruptions of service that last for unpredictable amounts of time.
Yes, when you're through with the process, your system is a lot better and less expensive. But the intermediate stage is more expensive, and can last for an unpredictable amount of time. (Yeah, predictions are always insisted upon. But that's a CYA move. Everyone either knows, or should know, that they are basically unpredictable.)
The obvious best answer is to run a doubled system while the new one is being put into place. Now justify this to the budget committee.
P.S.: The essential unpredictableness of the time to fix a system being developed is one reason most software projects fail. The normal answer is you take your best guess as to how long a part of the project will take, and double it. This often isn't enough, and doubling everywhere will make the project too expensive to do, so...
Something predicted by theory, but never seen before, has now been seen.
Current practical significance: None, unless you are a quantum mechanic.
Current theoretical significance: Chalk up another one that our theory got pretty much right. Now we need to check the detailed predictions against what we measured.
This was all there to be read in the Register article, but the story was being presented in a humorous way. (But not, I think, demeaning. The article did poke a bit of fun as the way quarks are named...but the names are rather silly, even if there are reasonable historical reasons.)
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OK. I've never tried Cannon, so perhaps you're right. But every printer I've ever tried has worked as well with Linux as with anything else...except that scanning has been a problem in the past, and is occasionally a problem when using the drivers from the "unstable" or "testing" trees.
Actually, this seems reasonable.
N.B.: That *DOESN'T* mean I think that it's reasonable for them to be able to snoop on my e-mail, or anything I didn't intentionally make public. But for them to look at publicly posted information is quite reasonable, even if they are pretending to be someone else.
Why can't you print a photo from Linux? Don't you have a printer installed?
That's a really peculiar assertion. I can't imagine anyone having trouble printing a photo, provided that they:
a) had a file of the photo (tiff, jpeg, png, etc. no problem)
b) had a printer.
If they only had the photo, and not a file of it, they'd also need a scanner. Still no problem.
Perhaps if all you have is a proprietary Photoshop file you'd have problems. I've never tried that. (I don't have Photoshop. I had a copy for the Mac about 7 years ago, and didn't like it at all. I much prefer either The Gimp or Inkscape, depending on which kind of work I'm doing.. Deneba Canvas was nice, but it's not enough to keep me on a proprietary platform.)
Unlikely. I think that Google is incorporated and has it's home office in the US. I suppose they *might* start looking for alternatives, though.
If you think war has gotten less ugly, you must have your blinders on. Napalm. Artillery. Air strikes on civilian targets. Etc.
I won't claim that if they had had the capability earlier wars wouldn't have been as bad, but the only thing that comes close to modern warfare has to be either the massacres (including germ warfare) performed on Native Americans or the cavalry invasions by Attila and other Huns.
(Even the Assyrians come in as less destructive.)
P.S.: Note the massive technical imbalance in the examples I offered. The key point is that modern armies have the same kind of massive imbalance over their *civilian* opponents.
But did she volunteer her time as a high official in his campaign? It *does* make a difference.
FWIW, I'm currently so deluged with various groups making (political) claims that I can't quickly verify, that I'm pretty much in overwhelm about the entire process. I have, however, noticed that with a reported 84% of the voters in favor of a public option (How did they derive that number?) Congress is having trouble deciding to vote for it. Really gives one faith in the system, and confidence that all one needs to do is express a reasoned opinion to be paid attention to.
Yeah, that sounded like what they would say about themselves.
You didn't address his assertion about who founded it...which sounds believable. And which, if true, casts doubt on a lot of their self-characterizations.
As for his "I couldn't find a thing about what they were actually about", I'm not sure that waffling is what you want me to think they're about, but if that's what you want, ok.
FWIW the PolitiFact site ( http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/ ) now says that Obama has kept 96 out of the over 500 campaign promises they track. They break it down into more detail, and I don't always agree with them as to what constitutes keeping a promise. If you're interested you might check it out.
You're right, the evidence isn't there. But it isn't available to show that he's wrong, either, and based on the maneuvering that's being done the commentators opinions seem a plausible interpretation. You can't offer any evidence that he's wrong, because they (the feds and their accomplices) have hidden the evidence. And since if he were wrong there's not much reason for them to have hidden it, he's probably right, even if he can't prove it.
Erlang is slow compared to Python. And it doesn't have much in the way of graphics support.
If you aren't using Erlang, and you segregate out all the timing dependencies carefully, then you've just eliminated most of the benefit of concurrency. Ideally you'd like to be able to execute most loops in parallel...but it's only really worth doing for loops that do a lot of calculation. So, with any normal language, you've got to refactor those loops into something that looks completely different. Etc.
Go looks like it might make this kind of thing plausible, but it's got a long way to go before it gets out of the test-bed. For one thing they've got to improve the documentation, which probably means writing a program that will run through a batch of code and document for each "class" which interfaces it implements. And it needs to be an end-user application with an initial database that includes all the system code. It's nice being able to add classes into the middle of the hierarchy like that, but it causes new stresses to be put on the documentation.
Of course we hate concurrency. That doesn't mean we don't need it.
Concurrency makes code nearly impossible to debug. We don't *like* Erlang. But without concurrency we can only execute in one hyperthread at a time, and that's slow.
Now if you throw in delays for IP connections, handling sockets that might or might not be there, etc. .... now you're getting to a place where most applications are better off avoiding. Yeah, there are toolkits and frameworks to make dealing with it plausible, and to ensure that someone else is responsible for the errors. That still adds time delays of uncertain duration whenever you link. And that means that the errors are ones that you have to figure out from scratch, and may even be in a language that you've never coded in. This is a mess that's best avoided when possible.
FWIW, I looked into getting insurance for my glasses after I retired. It was cheaper to buy them with cash.
This *IS* the way it ought to work. The whole idea of health insurance for chronic problems is absurd. A different solution is needed. Health insurance is only appropriate for things that are unlikely to either happen or recur. That's the only place where insurance is a reasonable model. There need to be ways (or a way) to cover then expectable health problems, but insurance is a wildly inappropriate or overly expensive answer.
And note well, current things that call themselves "health insurance" try to duck out of paying if you have an "unexpected and expensive health crisis". They'll gladly take your money as long as this problem doesn't show up, but when it does, they try to absent themselves. Or they interpose so much paperwork that a single individual can't reasonably cope. I broke my right thumb one Friday evening, and could not get "pre-approval" to get a doctor to treat it until the following Monday...and then I had to fill out a mountain of paper work with the hand that I write with broken. Now ask me how I feel about "health insurance". There have been other instances. And I have one of the better plans.
After I retired I priced insurance coverage for both dental and glasses. Neither was worth paying for. The dental insurance specifically excluded any major problem, and the yearly cost was more than I've had to pay the dentist. (That second part is reasonable, but the first is absurd! It's a con job pure and simple.) The optometric insurance was the same, except that for major problems you are referred to your main health insurance, which is reasonable.
The only reason the current health insurance exists is because employers get a tax write-off when they supply health insurance to their workers. That's the ONLY justification. It's a tax scam with subsidiary benefits to the workers.
What label should I look under?
Mostly they are probably paid for by insurance, so there is little attention paid to cost by consumers.
In the case of hearing aids this isn't all that true. The people who most commonly need hearing aids are older, and likely to be retired. Many of then are NOT covered by insurance. But if you're powerful, or were sufficiently powerful, you ARE likely to have a health insurance that covers it. So there's no push to correct this among the people who have the power to cause it to be corrected.
If a heart stent goes wrong (when?), you're probably not in any condition to sue.
More seriously, Stents aren't that cheap, but they tend to be covered by insurance. And stents are EXPECTED to have a relatively short half-life. When they fill up with cholesterol, etc., the person typically blamed is the patient. (You didn't watch your diet|weight|whatever carefully enough.) There's always some lifestyle choice that one can blame this on. And the fact that 90% of people can't keep weight off isn't given *it's* proper weight. Blaming the victim is a long-standing tradition that makes other people feel better, so even those who believe it's a bad thing to do keep getting caught up in it.
I wasn't assuming a direct collision, but a glancing collision that was sufficient to allow them to exchange momentum. Otherwise I'd have put the odds at a lot higher than a trillion to one. (I hadn't even considered the possibility, certainly not enough to calculate the energies. In fact I still haven't, not even as an estimate. But I'm not sure you're wrong, even though this might happen, say, 3/2 lightyears away. Especially if, since we're only interested in interactions that lead to capture, it was retrograde. OTOH, anything that causes a shower of large comets has a reasonable probability of wiping out 90% of all families of life on earth. [It's happened once before, so the odds aren't impossible.] I was envisioning an interaction that sent the brown dwarf into interstellar space, and sent the incoming star into the inner solar system [inside pluto's orbit] at a reduced speed.)
True, what I'm proposing isn't a perfect solution. That's probably impossible. But every time you boot you can rely on the eprom code, and it could check the signatures on every program before it ran the code. (System stuff only. Custom programs must be accepted without this kind of check.)
That's still not quite perfect, but getting close. It also makes updating a real hassle. We're getting close to the point where it's a better choice to buy a new computer. (OK, if you're a tech it would be easy enough to facilitate swapping the eprom...but that opens a different vulnerability, albeit one that requires physical access.)
Probably not *quite* zero. Pretty nearly, though. The Oort cloud isn't much of a resisting medium, but we don't know everything that's out there. There *could* be something massive enough to slow the star and dark enough that we haven't seen it. That's not the way to bet, though, even at odds of a million to one.
And then you've got to assume that the incoming star hits this dark brown dwarf. (Nothing much lighter would work.)
Say there's perhaps one chance in a trillion. (it's a rough estimate...and I wouldn't want to justify it, but it's my guess of a ballpark figure.)
I sort-of agree, but you've got to do things in the right order. First step should be an almost closed life-support system. That still needs a *lot* of work. Some things can be done in parallel, but at the moment that looks like the rate limiting step. (And besides, advances in robotics and waldos might eliminate a lot of the problems. E.g., a good space-suit might not need direct connections to arms, fingers, etc. if that could be managed via wi-fi or some such.)
To me it appears that the rate limiting steps are:
1) almost closed life-support. (Presume that energy inputs in the form of electricity are allowed, but material inputs are strictly limited.)
2) how should solar storms be handled? 3 feet of lead+3 feet of paraffin would probably work, but that's a bit of a heavy shield.
3) mining carbonaceous chondrites for air and water replacements. (I said the life support was almost closed. That means you need supplements to actually close it.)
4) solving long-term life without gravity. (This is probably a biological problem, though a large spinning construction would also work. At least as a stop-gap.)
5) NOW one can talk about a long-term colony. That means that at this point one can start fine-tuning the sociology to create a stable or quasi-stable civilization existing in the environment of space.
So at the moment there's not much the average person can do. Supporting space-based research is good. Supporting robotics is good. Supporting space-enthusiast societies is good. But expecting any particular result in the next decade is unwise.
N.B.: The energetics of space colonies aren't properly dealt with by science fictions stories...ANY of them. Asteroids have orbits that are skew to each other (often not by a lot, but it doesn't take a lot to make transport between them unreasonably expensive). Even so, if you notice, Larry Niven presumed that the space ships used by the belters used hydrogen fusion jets. That's probably not energetic enough, but he was vague enough about how much fuel was used that "perhaps". He did presume that the ships could accelerate at several Gs for extended periods of time.
More practical is a civilization based around exchange of messages with little exchange of physical media. That doesn't require technologies like hydrogen fusion powered torches (rockets).
N.B.: The further out you get from the sun, the more skew the orbits of the satellites (planets, asteroids, etc.) are. So the more energy intensive it is to get from one to another. It would often be cheaper to get into high earth orbit than to match to something with a widely skew orbit.
P.S.: This argument doesn't really apply to trojan points. Things orbiting in trojan points should have easy transitions from one to another. But that's a small fraction of the asteroids.
At one point the Army switched from MSWind to Mac servers for their network facing stuff. Then they dared anyone to penetrate it. Nobody did, at least during the first month.
N.B.: OSX *can* be as secure as Linux, though possibly not as secure as one of the BSDs (OpenBSD?). I don't know that this is the default configuration. I've never set up a Mac for a sensitive position. OTOH, I've got a Mac attached to the net through a NAT firewall, and haven't worried about viruses for around 9 years now. It's a 10.4 (started out as 10.1) and has shown no signs of infection. (The disk is quite most of the time. It goes to sleep when nobody's using it. There isn't excessive network traffic, etc.)
Layered is fine, but incomplete.
What is needed is to put the basic OS into EPROM...and to have a switch so that the program of the EPROM can only be altered when the switch is set...and it can't boot normally with the switch set, so you've GOT to reset it.
OTOH, currently the threats aren't high enough to justify that level of security on most systems. They aren't currently even high enough to require booting from a write-once CD/DVD. (Note that you'd only want the essentials of the OS to reside on the CD/DVD. You *DO* want to be able to update most packages without a lot of hassle.)
Still, I feel that the MSWind threat level is high enough to justify switching systems on that basis alone. OTOH, I'm not unbiased as I switched to Linux long ago. (I switched because I read the EULA...and I **MUCH** prefer the GPL.)
And I can guarantee that for a non-technical user Linux is as easy to use as MSWind. I give my wife technical support. (OTOH, she does complain about the absence of many programs that others uses. Sibelius in particular this month. But the OS doesn't cause her any particular problem. [I have her on Ubuntu.])
If "lockdown" means disconnecting the machines from all network access, then you've got a point. If it means something else...??? what DOES it mean? I doubt that it means anything effective.
Are you sure? I decided a decade ago that I was better off without PayPal. I haven't regretted the decision...except, occasionally, when some site that I'd like to support only accepts support through PayPal. Then I go, "O, Well", sigh, and move on.
PayPal was a great idea, but I've been hearing things about them for over a decade that say "You're probably better off not dealing with these creeps."
I *think* that was BCD.
EBCDIC is Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code.
One source of the problem is that it takes time to do a replacement. And during that replacement either you run a doubled system for awhile, or you put up with LOTS of interruptions of service that last for unpredictable amounts of time.
Yes, when you're through with the process, your system is a lot better and less expensive. But the intermediate stage is more expensive, and can last for an unpredictable amount of time. (Yeah, predictions are always insisted upon. But that's a CYA move. Everyone either knows, or should know, that they are basically unpredictable.)
The obvious best answer is to run a doubled system while the new one is being put into place. Now justify this to the budget committee.
P.S.: The essential unpredictableness of the time to fix a system being developed is one reason most software projects fail. The normal answer is you take your best guess as to how long a part of the project will take, and double it. This often isn't enough, and doubling everywhere will make the project too expensive to do, so...
Something predicted by theory, but never seen before, has now been seen.
Current practical significance: None, unless you are a quantum mechanic.
Current theoretical significance: Chalk up another one that our theory got pretty much right. Now we need to check the detailed predictions against what we measured.
This was all there to be read in the Register article, but the story was being presented in a humorous way. (But not, I think, demeaning. The article did poke a bit of fun as the way quarks are named...but the names are rather silly, even if there are reasonable historical reasons.)