I was able to suspend my disbelief at an "unbreakable code" not bothering any of the cryptologists.
What do you mean? Plenty of the cyptography systems currently in use are mathematically unbreakable - or at least, many experts haven't been able to find flaws. The only flaws known are related to specific implementations of random number generation, and are not inherent in the encryption algorithms themselves.
Re:Avoid this book
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Digital Fortress
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· Score: 3, Interesting
. ..For the gogernment to come out and publicly admit that it could, in fact, decrypt and read everything that was being sent via encrypted email.
Which is sort of stupid, because it can't. The NSA can, of course, read almost every single conventional email sent, because these aren't even slightly encrypted.
It's the people that do the important work of breaking a code, not the uber machine that just automates the process once the system's been broken.
Two points:
1) There are plenty of encryption schemes that are (as far as anyone has been able to prove) mathematically unbreakable. Which means that only brute force can decrypt a message. There are some difficulties presented by the problem of random number generation, but even so most of the encryption deployed today is ultra-secure. 56-bit DES is breakable, and the FBI and NSA would love for people to use that instead, but I don't think anyone trusts it any more.
1a) Much of the encryption software is open-source, so you can be certain their are no secret NSA backdoors.
2) Conventional 128-bit encryption could not be brute-forced in a reasonable amount of time even if every computer on the planet was testing keys 24/7. And if you really, really want to make sure that nobody breaks your encryption, just double the number of bits. May take you a few seconds longer, but it'll take the NSA a few eons longer.
I don't understand why people cling to the myth that the NSA can decrypt anything. All the talent and supercomputers in the world can't win against astronomically large numbers.
In the mean time my 1998 vintage Mesh/Alpha desktop system (no, it's not a server, it was sold via consumer magazines in the UK) is still running happily with 64 bit Linux... and that was hardly the first either, an honour that probably belongs to someone like Sun.
Actually, there were Alpha desktops long before that, and the Alpha chip was certainly around before Sun had any 64-bit machines. As were the 64-bit MIPS chips, which ran in desktop machines.
At any rate, it depends what you mean by "desktop", although your system sounds like it'd qualify. SGI machines make fantastic desktops (IRIX is very well-designed) and they're mostly 64-bit, but they also cost upwards of $10,000 (much upwards, quite often) when they came out. So they aren't consumer grade by any standard.
I think Apple's campaign has some truth to it in the sense that theirs is the first 64-bit desktop that normal people will actually buy and use. And it's definitely the first that's explicitly designed to do normal desktop computing stuff, as opposed to high-end graphics or engineering apps.
Don't forget the beta versions of both Windows XP and Windows 2003 Server 64bit versions, currently in beta. *Me waves his trial 64bit copy of Windows 2003 Server*
That brings up an interesting point. Who is actually buying these things to run Windows on them? The only application I can possibly imagine is if you had a really huge database and for some reason you wanted to run MSSQL Server. This is one of the main reasons people buy Suns or IBM Power machines, after all (except with different databases).
However, the other big market for 64-bit computing (and arguably, the more important one) is technical computing, and there Windows is (mercifully) virtually nonexistent. People wanting to do number-crunching use Unix, almost without exception. I'd imagine that cuts down on the number of Windows machines out there. On the other hand, Itanium isn't really proven in the HPC/scientific arena yet, and so maybe people are just buying it to run big web/database servers and because the name sounds cool.
So, the end question is, what applications (in the broadest sense) is Itanium currently being used for in production systems, and under what OSes? My expectation would be that the proportion running Linux is very high compared to Xeon systems, but I've observed that many of the type of people who say "Ooooh, Intel has a new 64-bit chip! Let's buy it!" are the same people who say "Microsoft is the industry standard! Let's convert everything to run on Windows!" Like, say, a former boss of mine.
Re:Could Diamond Age come a little bit faster,plea
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Diamond Age Coming Soon
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· Score: 2, Informative
I loved in college (I went to an Ivy League school, so it's worse there) how all the women are still idealistic and romantic and have ridiculously high standards, and being college-age are of course very loud and indiscreet. You get to overhear (or worse, take part in) some wonderful conversations that, if you're a complete nerd like me, will pretty much ruin your week.
One of my favorites was a girl (who I worked with at the time) who said that if *her* (hypothetical) boyfriend asked her to marry him, he'd better have at least a 2-carat ring for her or she'd break up with him immediately. Some women could have said this and it would have been taken as a joke, but not her. (I imagine every guy who read that email felt his testicles recede into his body cavity.)
Now I'm in grad school, so there are actually girls getting married and showing off their shiny new rings, which is even more depressing. (Especially since on my salary I'd probably have to pawn my laptop to buy even a fake diamond.)
- My recollection is that DeBeers execs can't even come to the US because they're under indictment for breaking every antitrust law on the books. So their lobbying efforts might not be taken too seriously - although with our Congress, who knows?
- Vanillin is the active ingredient in vanilla beans. It's very easy to synthesize, and people can't tell the difference between food flavored with artificial vanillin and vanilla extract. Nonetheless, anything that uses synthetic vanillin must be labelled as having artificial ingredients, which turns a lot of people off. I'm almost certain this was due to lobbying efforts. Point is, the US government will regulate anything it feels like, including diamonds.
My mother was married in '78, and her ring has a big fat sapphire and a couple of much smaller diamonds. Much prettier than any of the engagement rings I've seen women my age (sigh) wear.
That many pixels in that little space is going to be difficult to use "native" when gaming. Add to that even a mobile 9700 will have trouble driving it at a reasonable frame rate with many modern games.
Right, it just doesn't make sense at all. I have a Gateway M500; most of the time I just run Linux and use it for programming and 3d scientific apps. It's just a GeForce 4 Go 420, but that's usually fine for the actual work I do. The screen is the same format as the 15" powerbook; took a little tweaking to work under Linux, but now it's fine.
On either Windows or Linux, UT 2003 is playable if you go down to 800x600 resolution. MOHAA is great at 1024x768, and would work at higher resolution if the screen supported it. In either case, I'm running it at reduced size and a different aspect ratio. I've set the BIOS not to expand the screen, which means the ratio is correct but there's a lot of black space. On the Dell, the highest it would possibly support is 1600x1200, leaving large bars on the sides. But many games won't actually go that high. So you could run MOHAA at 1280x1024 - even larger bars on both sides and top/bottom. What's the point?
I know plenty of people who could use a laptop like this; they're all protein crystallographers. I can't imagine a gamer who would buy one of these. For the same amount of money, you could buy both a real PC that was just as fast (or better) and a large monitor, and still have enough left over for a decent laptop with a GF FX Go or Radeon 9x00 and a more normal screen. Heck, a friend of mine just bought an Inspiron 5150 for well under $2000, and it's not much slower than this beast.
I believe thinking in such "us vs. them" or "Goode olde America vs. Communist bastards" is no good for some time.
I'm not an apologist for the defects of the USA, or for all the bad stuff we did during the Cold War. I'm not at all ashamed of being happy that the US won, though, and I'm sick of people trying to whitewash the history of Communism. I live in Berkeley, where some people are proud to call themselves Communist, and it turns my stomach. Millions upon millions dead, and they revel in it.
Since you mentioned Aral sea, shall I mention Exxon Valdes and Alaska?
The Valdes was an accident; there was colossal human error involved, but it's simply impossible to completely avoid oil spills in a petroleum-based economy (which is to say, any modern industrial nation). The desertification of the Aral came from decades of sustained abuse. And it's just the largest example, not necessarily the worst. The rest of Soviet industry is even more appalling, though seldom with such picturesque results. Go dig up some National Geographic issues from the past decade if you don't believe me - they have lots of good articles on the aftereffects of the Soviet Union.
Everyone knows that only Americans know how to build reliable space vehicles and only Americans deserve to get contracts for software engineering and everyone else in the world is just plain dumb.
To be fair, the Soviets accomplished large engineering projects because they just didn't give a fuck about quality control, economics, or long-term consequences. That's why they have large industrial cities in the far north of Siberia, the Aral sea is now a desert, their factories cause some of the worst pollution in the world, and their submarine crews are dropping dead of cancer. Besides, their space program has had far more than it's share of catastrophic failures, even if no single one of them compares to losing two shuttles. (If the Russians had a shuttle program, they'd have lost at least ten by now.)
The entire Communist industrial economy was built on lies and incompetence, and the only reason it seemed as powerful as it did last century is that the leaders were willing to sacrifice as many lives as needed to get the needed result.
so far, the only "successful" communist movements have indeed ended up being dictatorships
My sense is that Leninism (and perhaps Maoism as well) is explicitly based on the idea that you need to have a ruling elite. See the Wikipedia definition for a more thorough explanation, but it is based on having a strong communist party running things.
You're right that Socialists don't really believe in total control of the people, although there's very little economic freedom permitted in the purest form; countries like Sweden are often derided as "socialist" but it's not even remotely like a dictatorship. However, I think Communism and tyranny really are closely linked. Marx talks about remaking society from the ground up, abolishing religion and conventional families, stuff that just can't be done without use of force. Furthermore, the central tenet of Communism is that "capital" is immoral, hence accruing wealth is immoral, etc. How do you prevent people from doing what they please with their own money unless you have complete control (and power of life and death) over them?
There's a popular trend among lefties to minimize the destructive power of Communism, typically by claiming that the millions killed and countries ruined in the 20th century were simply the fault of individuals corrupting the system (or the good ol' imperialists of the USofA), not of the system itself, and that an ideal communist state can still exist. Diehards, of course, don't even bother apologizing for Stalin, and still revere psycopaths like Kim Jong Il. But there are quite a few liberals who honestly believe that Communism meant well, and are terrified that the Republicans might prohibit 3rd-trimester abortions but don't see anything wrong with a system that would cap all incomes below $40,000. (Actually, a lot of these people who I know would be the first up against the wall in a revolution.)
I should point out that I'm not actually a libertarian or a Republican, even if I sound like one here; people who complain about the US income tax being evil (not just too high, but evil) sound stupid. I have no problem surrendering a small degree of liberty, financial or otherwise, for some government services, as long as there are checks on the government. In a Communist state, you surrender all financial liberty to the government, which has no checks upon it. And a state that has the power to control every last bit of your finances has the power to invade your personal life as well.
This wasn't the police. The article states that the music industry group did the raiding. They were able to do this thanks to a law that allows copyright holders to obtain a search warrant without notifying the searchee in court. In effect, the MIPI (equivalent to the RIAA, I guess) was acting in place of the police, without a chance for Sharman to contest this in court, and I'm guessing this is a civil rather than criminal matter.
I've always thought Sharman Networks sounded like a pretty sleazy outfit, but this is ridiculous. I'm not aware of the US having a law like this.
Yes, but there's also a famous VAX chip that had printed on it in Russian "VAX - when you care enough to steal the very best". Apparently the DEC engineers had a sense of humor about international industrial espionage.
- The same complaint can be made about the resistance to GMOs. Many of the bioengineered crops being developed today have the potential to save millions of lives, but there are some environmentalists who would literally rather see the Third World starve than see it utilize genetically engineered corn. (Actually, they'd probably rather see our tax rates go up to 50% so we can feed the Third World - which simply prolongs the problem rather than fixing it.)
(Side point 1: some of the reading I've done indicates that there's also some anti-Americanism involved, since many of the GMOs come from the USA and are seen as a threat to European farmers. The US's ridiculous agricultural policies don't help. Side point 2: yes, there's some IP issues involved with biotech crops, but this is less of an obstacle to deployment.)
- Many of the environmentalists do not actually believe in a modern industrial society. This is true of many animal-rights or anti-globalization activists as well. Many of the people protesting globalization have started to advocate a return to subsistence farming, because that's all that the Third World will be left with if we stick to ultra-protectionist policies. Without our modern agricultural system, sophisticated medicine, and advanced economy, however, they'd all be so sick from random (curable) diseases and weak from malnutrition that they wouldn't have time to protest fashionable causes and trash Starbucks franchises.
I don't call myself an environmentalist, because it now comes with so many negative connotations, but working in the natural sciences and growing up in the western USA has given me good reason to support environmentally friendly policies. I would call myself a "conservationist", because I have no problem with sensible and sustainable exploitation of resources, but I don't want to see them plundered due to lack of regulations or desperation. I'd love to see us coexist perfectly with large amounts of undiluted Nature, and the only way that'll happen is with more technology, not less.
Governments tend to do things for purely politica reasons, and right now, in the world scheme of things, it's politically advantageous to adopt certain tenets of American Puritanism.
However, disapproval of child pornography is something that crosses party, cultural, and religious lines in America. There are many, many people here who would not fit your definition of "puritan" and yet are as disapproving of kiddie porn as any Texan evangelist.
There are a number of areas where I don't have any problem with America forcing its values on the world: women's rights, secular democratic government, individual liberties, and so forth. I won't be losing any sleep if Bush pushes various Muslim nations (e.g. Nigeria) to outlaw sharia. That our government and society is often very hypocritical in regards to many of these issues does not lessen the value of the principles involved.
I've spent considerable time dealing with IRIX (my favorite OS) in addition to Linux, and in the past I've also mucked around with Solaris as well. Both of them have their special quirks, pathologies, and proprietary utils, but they still seem more compatible than OS X, and I'm not even referring to X vs. Aqua. For instance, how do you configure networking on a Mac with no GUI? I think I figured this out once, but it was pretty bizarre and involved an XML file in a strange directory. And I didn't know how to change over to the new settings.
From what I've heard of AIX, it's pretty freaky compared to most other Unixes as well; that's why everyone I've talked to who had to deal with it didn't like it. I suspect the reason so many old-school Unix people (the ones I know, at least) like OS X is that they've never had to deal with messy internals the way they would in the big iron OSes, so they haven't really experienced the things that make OS X distinctive.
- Elrond is not such a fucking tightass in the books.
- The Elves do not show up at Helm's Deep. I've seen the commentary, and I still disagree.
- Aragorn and the cliff (see other poster).
- Both Eowyn and Faramir are major characters, more so in the movies than in the books. This is great! However, their eventual relationship is only hinted at, so quickly that anyone who hasn't read the books will miss it. This is very important to resolving the Aragorn/Eowyn problem, which is also emphasized in the movies. (I'm hoping this makes the extended version.)
- What happens to Saruman? The Scouring of the Shire is my favorite part of the books, but I didn't really miss it in the movies. However, something needs to tie up that story line. They could have left the part where Wormtongue stabs him, just in a different context.
- The Ents go to war of their own accord. Why change this?
There are others, but these were the parts that bugged me the most. With the exception of Saruman and Eowyn/Faramir, none of them really detract from the movies' quality.
I liked MIB, but what makes it fun is the interplay between Smith and Jones. The plot as a whole is pretty dorky, and so is Smith, but he works very well when played off against the straight man. (And I'll watch Tommy Lee almost anywhere.)
It's too bad Wild, Wild West did not work despite a similar pairing. (And I think Kevin Kline is a better actor than Jones.)
Let's face it, the way Douglas Adams wrote that character, I pictured a white english guy.
I didn't. I pictured Arthur as a white English guy, and Ford as a really irritating Southern California hipster, race unimportant. Like some obnoxious American tourist who barges into an English pub thinking he's the shit and talking too loud. (I'm an American, by the way.) I think body language and style are far more important here than race.
I'm still trying to wrap my brain around that one.
Thinking back to "The Italian Job" remix, it could be interesting...
I liked him in that movie, but that doesn't count for much - however, he's been well reviewed in other stuff as well. He was in a play on Broadway at one point, and the NY Times liked him a lot.
If I remember the books properly, Ford is basically uber-cool, slick, a total bad motherfucker but kind of loopy and obnoxious at the same time. I can definitely see Mos Def in that part. He's pretty close to my previous mental image (I never thought of Ford as being any particular race; he's Betelgeusean, anyway). Other actors I can see doing this might be Vince Vaughan, or in an ideal world maybe Nicholas Cage.
It's been too long since you were in high school. It's been a while for me, too, but I knew more than a handful of people who were both talented, malicious, and immature enough to pull this kind of stunt, with no ulterior motives. I'm rooting for SCO's demise and, ideally, Darl in jail, but I don't have any illusions about the mental stability of some geeks. This should not reflect on the professionalism of the FOSS community, but it does say something about geeks in general.
The work is there for all to use. That's much important than who did it. To me, demanding attribution is karma whoring, little else. I understand that it is natural, though. It's just like animals that show off their pretty colors to get a mate.
What incentive do I have to do it, then? Frankly, knowing that people are benefitting from my code isn't enough to make me want to spend time writing it, unless I'm getting something else in return. Since I am a (employed) scientist, not a professional programmer, I'm happy to earn recognition simply by authorship credit rather than by money. Alternately, if I was some anonymous cog in Microsoft, I'd be getting plenty of money. But I won't accept neither, and I suspect very few programmers will.
Hell, even the BSD licenses require that the copyright notice be maintained; all of the programmers I'm aware of who release code under this type of license are very concerned with getting proper recognition for it. Without copyright, even the BSD licenses wouldn't be enforceable.
My point is, there's a reason almost nobody releases code immediately into the public domain. It's an all-around bad deal for programmers.
Ah...IP...The geeks Vietnam. Until we can understand that the world won't end if we abolish the concept, we will remain in this quagmire(sp) for a long time to come.
Right, so, if we abolish IP, what's to prevent Microsoft from taking all sorts of open-source software, throwing it into Windows, and continuing to make money off Windows (sure, no more copyrights, but they'll find a way!)? We can redistribute Windows all we want, but we'll never see the code.
Sorry, but IP laws are the only thing that allows the GPL to be enforced. Personally, I don't want to make money off software - I'd rather have people just use it - but I'd be pretty fucking pissed if someone took my work and passed it off as their own, because I didn't have copyright protection for it.
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I was able to suspend my disbelief at an "unbreakable code" not bothering any of the cryptologists.
What do you mean? Plenty of the cyptography systems currently in use are mathematically unbreakable - or at least, many experts haven't been able to find flaws. The only flaws known are related to specific implementations of random number generation, and are not inherent in the encryption algorithms themselves.
. . .For the gogernment to come out and publicly admit that it could, in fact, decrypt and read everything that was being sent via encrypted email.
Which is sort of stupid, because it can't. The NSA can, of course, read almost every single conventional email sent, because these aren't even slightly encrypted.
It's the people that do the important work of breaking a code, not the uber machine that just automates the process once the system's been broken.
Two points:
1) There are plenty of encryption schemes that are (as far as anyone has been able to prove) mathematically unbreakable. Which means that only brute force can decrypt a message. There are some difficulties presented by the problem of random number generation, but even so most of the encryption deployed today is ultra-secure. 56-bit DES is breakable, and the FBI and NSA would love for people to use that instead, but I don't think anyone trusts it any more.
1a) Much of the encryption software is open-source, so you can be certain their are no secret NSA backdoors.
2) Conventional 128-bit encryption could not be brute-forced in a reasonable amount of time even if every computer on the planet was testing keys 24/7. And if you really, really want to make sure that nobody breaks your encryption, just double the number of bits. May take you a few seconds longer, but it'll take the NSA a few eons longer.
I don't understand why people cling to the myth that the NSA can decrypt anything. All the talent and supercomputers in the world can't win against astronomically large numbers.
In the mean time my 1998 vintage Mesh/Alpha desktop system (no, it's not a server, it was sold via consumer magazines in the UK) is still running happily with 64 bit Linux... and that was hardly the first either, an honour that probably belongs to someone like Sun.
Actually, there were Alpha desktops long before that, and the Alpha chip was certainly around before Sun had any 64-bit machines. As were the 64-bit MIPS chips, which ran in desktop machines.
At any rate, it depends what you mean by "desktop", although your system sounds like it'd qualify. SGI machines make fantastic desktops (IRIX is very well-designed) and they're mostly 64-bit, but they also cost upwards of $10,000 (much upwards, quite often) when they came out. So they aren't consumer grade by any standard.
I think Apple's campaign has some truth to it in the sense that theirs is the first 64-bit desktop that normal people will actually buy and use. And it's definitely the first that's explicitly designed to do normal desktop computing stuff, as opposed to high-end graphics or engineering apps.
Don't forget the beta versions of both Windows XP and Windows 2003 Server 64bit versions, currently in beta. *Me waves his trial 64bit copy of Windows 2003 Server*
That brings up an interesting point. Who is actually buying these things to run Windows on them? The only application I can possibly imagine is if you had a really huge database and for some reason you wanted to run MSSQL Server. This is one of the main reasons people buy Suns or IBM Power machines, after all (except with different databases).
However, the other big market for 64-bit computing (and arguably, the more important one) is technical computing, and there Windows is (mercifully) virtually nonexistent. People wanting to do number-crunching use Unix, almost without exception. I'd imagine that cuts down on the number of Windows machines out there. On the other hand, Itanium isn't really proven in the HPC/scientific arena yet, and so maybe people are just buying it to run big web/database servers and because the name sounds cool.
So, the end question is, what applications (in the broadest sense) is Itanium currently being used for in production systems, and under what OSes? My expectation would be that the proportion running Linux is very high compared to Xeon systems, but I've observed that many of the type of people who say "Ooooh, Intel has a new 64-bit chip! Let's buy it!" are the same people who say "Microsoft is the industry standard! Let's convert everything to run on Windows!" Like, say, a former boss of mine.
I loved in college (I went to an Ivy League school, so it's worse there) how all the women are still idealistic and romantic and have ridiculously high standards, and being college-age are of course very loud and indiscreet. You get to overhear (or worse, take part in) some wonderful conversations that, if you're a complete nerd like me, will pretty much ruin your week.
One of my favorites was a girl (who I worked with at the time) who said that if *her* (hypothetical) boyfriend asked her to marry him, he'd better have at least a 2-carat ring for her or she'd break up with him immediately. Some women could have said this and it would have been taken as a joke, but not her. (I imagine every guy who read that email felt his testicles recede into his body cavity.)
Now I'm in grad school, so there are actually girls getting married and showing off their shiny new rings, which is even more depressing. (Especially since on my salary I'd probably have to pawn my laptop to buy even a fake diamond.)
Two points:
- My recollection is that DeBeers execs can't even come to the US because they're under indictment for breaking every antitrust law on the books. So their lobbying efforts might not be taken too seriously - although with our Congress, who knows?
- Vanillin is the active ingredient in vanilla beans. It's very easy to synthesize, and people can't tell the difference between food flavored with artificial vanillin and vanilla extract. Nonetheless, anything that uses synthetic vanillin must be labelled as having artificial ingredients, which turns a lot of people off. I'm almost certain this was due to lobbying efforts. Point is, the US government will regulate anything it feels like, including diamonds.
My mother was married in '78, and her ring has a big fat sapphire and a couple of much smaller diamonds. Much prettier than any of the engagement rings I've seen women my age (sigh) wear.
That many pixels in that little space is going to be difficult to use "native" when gaming. Add to that even a mobile 9700 will have trouble driving it at a reasonable frame rate with many modern games.
Right, it just doesn't make sense at all. I have a Gateway M500; most of the time I just run Linux and use it for programming and 3d scientific apps. It's just a GeForce 4 Go 420, but that's usually fine for the actual work I do. The screen is the same format as the 15" powerbook; took a little tweaking to work under Linux, but now it's fine.
On either Windows or Linux, UT 2003 is playable if you go down to 800x600 resolution. MOHAA is great at 1024x768, and would work at higher resolution if the screen supported it. In either case, I'm running it at reduced size and a different aspect ratio. I've set the BIOS not to expand the screen, which means the ratio is correct but there's a lot of black space. On the Dell, the highest it would possibly support is 1600x1200, leaving large bars on the sides. But many games won't actually go that high. So you could run MOHAA at 1280x1024 - even larger bars on both sides and top/bottom. What's the point?
I know plenty of people who could use a laptop like this; they're all protein crystallographers. I can't imagine a gamer who would buy one of these. For the same amount of money, you could buy both a real PC that was just as fast (or better) and a large monitor, and still have enough left over for a decent laptop with a GF FX Go or Radeon 9x00 and a more normal screen. Heck, a friend of mine just bought an Inspiron 5150 for well under $2000, and it's not much slower than this beast.
I believe thinking in such "us vs. them" or "Goode olde America vs. Communist bastards" is no good for some time.
I'm not an apologist for the defects of the USA, or for all the bad stuff we did during the Cold War. I'm not at all ashamed of being happy that the US won, though, and I'm sick of people trying to whitewash the history of Communism. I live in Berkeley, where some people are proud to call themselves Communist, and it turns my stomach. Millions upon millions dead, and they revel in it.
Since you mentioned Aral sea, shall I mention Exxon Valdes and Alaska?
The Valdes was an accident; there was colossal human error involved, but it's simply impossible to completely avoid oil spills in a petroleum-based economy (which is to say, any modern industrial nation). The desertification of the Aral came from decades of sustained abuse. And it's just the largest example, not necessarily the worst. The rest of Soviet industry is even more appalling, though seldom with such picturesque results. Go dig up some National Geographic issues from the past decade if you don't believe me - they have lots of good articles on the aftereffects of the Soviet Union.
Everyone knows that only Americans know how to build reliable space vehicles and only Americans deserve to get contracts for software engineering and everyone else in the world is just plain dumb.
To be fair, the Soviets accomplished large engineering projects because they just didn't give a fuck about quality control, economics, or long-term consequences. That's why they have large industrial cities in the far north of Siberia, the Aral sea is now a desert, their factories cause some of the worst pollution in the world, and their submarine crews are dropping dead of cancer. Besides, their space program has had far more than it's share of catastrophic failures, even if no single one of them compares to losing two shuttles. (If the Russians had a shuttle program, they'd have lost at least ten by now.)
The entire Communist industrial economy was built on lies and incompetence, and the only reason it seemed as powerful as it did last century is that the leaders were willing to sacrifice as many lives as needed to get the needed result.
so far, the only "successful" communist movements have indeed ended up being dictatorships
My sense is that Leninism (and perhaps Maoism as well) is explicitly based on the idea that you need to have a ruling elite. See the Wikipedia definition for a more thorough explanation, but it is based on having a strong communist party running things.
You're right that Socialists don't really believe in total control of the people, although there's very little economic freedom permitted in the purest form; countries like Sweden are often derided as "socialist" but it's not even remotely like a dictatorship. However, I think Communism and tyranny really are closely linked. Marx talks about remaking society from the ground up, abolishing religion and conventional families, stuff that just can't be done without use of force. Furthermore, the central tenet of Communism is that "capital" is immoral, hence accruing wealth is immoral, etc. How do you prevent people from doing what they please with their own money unless you have complete control (and power of life and death) over them?
There's a popular trend among lefties to minimize the destructive power of Communism, typically by claiming that the millions killed and countries ruined in the 20th century were simply the fault of individuals corrupting the system (or the good ol' imperialists of the USofA), not of the system itself, and that an ideal communist state can still exist. Diehards, of course, don't even bother apologizing for Stalin, and still revere psycopaths like Kim Jong Il. But there are quite a few liberals who honestly believe that Communism meant well, and are terrified that the Republicans might prohibit 3rd-trimester abortions but don't see anything wrong with a system that would cap all incomes below $40,000. (Actually, a lot of these people who I know would be the first up against the wall in a revolution.)
I should point out that I'm not actually a libertarian or a Republican, even if I sound like one here; people who complain about the US income tax being evil (not just too high, but evil) sound stupid. I have no problem surrendering a small degree of liberty, financial or otherwise, for some government services, as long as there are checks on the government. In a Communist state, you surrender all financial liberty to the government, which has no checks upon it. And a state that has the power to control every last bit of your finances has the power to invade your personal life as well.
RTFA. They're like the RIAA, and Australia has a law that lets them do this. Boggles the mind, doesn't it?
This wasn't the police. The article states that the music industry group did the raiding. They were able to do this thanks to a law that allows copyright holders to obtain a search warrant without notifying the searchee in court. In effect, the MIPI (equivalent to the RIAA, I guess) was acting in place of the police, without a chance for Sharman to contest this in court, and I'm guessing this is a civil rather than criminal matter.
I've always thought Sharman Networks sounded like a pretty sleazy outfit, but this is ridiculous. I'm not aware of the US having a law like this.
Yes, but there's also a famous VAX chip that had printed on it in Russian "VAX - when you care enough to steal the very best". Apparently the DEC engineers had a sense of humor about international industrial espionage.
Two points:
- The same complaint can be made about the resistance to GMOs. Many of the bioengineered crops being developed today have the potential to save millions of lives, but there are some environmentalists who would literally rather see the Third World starve than see it utilize genetically engineered corn. (Actually, they'd probably rather see our tax rates go up to 50% so we can feed the Third World - which simply prolongs the problem rather than fixing it.)
(Side point 1: some of the reading I've done indicates that there's also some anti-Americanism involved, since many of the GMOs come from the USA and are seen as a threat to European farmers. The US's ridiculous agricultural policies don't help. Side point 2: yes, there's some IP issues involved with biotech crops, but this is less of an obstacle to deployment.)
- Many of the environmentalists do not actually believe in a modern industrial society. This is true of many animal-rights or anti-globalization activists as well. Many of the people protesting globalization have started to advocate a return to subsistence farming, because that's all that the Third World will be left with if we stick to ultra-protectionist policies. Without our modern agricultural system, sophisticated medicine, and advanced economy, however, they'd all be so sick from random (curable) diseases and weak from malnutrition that they wouldn't have time to protest fashionable causes and trash Starbucks franchises.
I don't call myself an environmentalist, because it now comes with so many negative connotations, but working in the natural sciences and growing up in the western USA has given me good reason to support environmentally friendly policies. I would call myself a "conservationist", because I have no problem with sensible and sustainable exploitation of resources, but I don't want to see them plundered due to lack of regulations or desperation. I'd love to see us coexist perfectly with large amounts of undiluted Nature, and the only way that'll happen is with more technology, not less.
Governments tend to do things for purely politica reasons, and right now, in the world scheme of things, it's politically advantageous to adopt certain tenets of American Puritanism.
However, disapproval of child pornography is something that crosses party, cultural, and religious lines in America. There are many, many people here who would not fit your definition of "puritan" and yet are as disapproving of kiddie porn as any Texan evangelist.
There are a number of areas where I don't have any problem with America forcing its values on the world: women's rights, secular democratic government, individual liberties, and so forth. I won't be losing any sleep if Bush pushes various Muslim nations (e.g. Nigeria) to outlaw sharia. That our government and society is often very hypocritical in regards to many of these issues does not lessen the value of the principles involved.
I've spent considerable time dealing with IRIX (my favorite OS) in addition to Linux, and in the past I've also mucked around with Solaris as well. Both of them have their special quirks, pathologies, and proprietary utils, but they still seem more compatible than OS X, and I'm not even referring to X vs. Aqua. For instance, how do you configure networking on a Mac with no GUI? I think I figured this out once, but it was pretty bizarre and involved an XML file in a strange directory. And I didn't know how to change over to the new settings.
From what I've heard of AIX, it's pretty freaky compared to most other Unixes as well; that's why everyone I've talked to who had to deal with it didn't like it. I suspect the reason so many old-school Unix people (the ones I know, at least) like OS X is that they've never had to deal with messy internals the way they would in the big iron OSes, so they haven't really experienced the things that make OS X distinctive.
Yes, a few (but I loved the movies overall):
- Elrond is not such a fucking tightass in the books.
- The Elves do not show up at Helm's Deep. I've seen the commentary, and I still disagree.
- Aragorn and the cliff (see other poster).
- Both Eowyn and Faramir are major characters, more so in the movies than in the books. This is great! However, their eventual relationship is only hinted at, so quickly that anyone who hasn't read the books will miss it. This is very important to resolving the Aragorn/Eowyn problem, which is also emphasized in the movies. (I'm hoping this makes the extended version.)
- What happens to Saruman? The Scouring of the Shire is my favorite part of the books, but I didn't really miss it in the movies. However, something needs to tie up that story line. They could have left the part where Wormtongue stabs him, just in a different context.
- The Ents go to war of their own accord. Why change this?
There are others, but these were the parts that bugged me the most. With the exception of Saruman and Eowyn/Faramir, none of them really detract from the movies' quality.
I liked MIB, but what makes it fun is the interplay between Smith and Jones. The plot as a whole is pretty dorky, and so is Smith, but he works very well when played off against the straight man. (And I'll watch Tommy Lee almost anywhere.)
It's too bad Wild, Wild West did not work despite a similar pairing. (And I think Kevin Kline is a better actor than Jones.)
Let's face it, the way Douglas Adams wrote that character, I pictured a white english guy.
I didn't. I pictured Arthur as a white English guy, and Ford as a really irritating Southern California hipster, race unimportant. Like some obnoxious American tourist who barges into an English pub thinking he's the shit and talking too loud. (I'm an American, by the way.) I think body language and style are far more important here than race.
I'm still trying to wrap my brain around that one.
Thinking back to "The Italian Job" remix, it could be interesting...
I liked him in that movie, but that doesn't count for much - however, he's been well reviewed in other stuff as well. He was in a play on Broadway at one point, and the NY Times liked him a lot.
If I remember the books properly, Ford is basically uber-cool, slick, a total bad motherfucker but kind of loopy and obnoxious at the same time. I can definitely see Mos Def in that part. He's pretty close to my previous mental image (I never thought of Ford as being any particular race; he's Betelgeusean, anyway). Other actors I can see doing this might be Vince Vaughan, or in an ideal world maybe Nicholas Cage.
It's been too long since you were in high school. It's been a while for me, too, but I knew more than a handful of people who were both talented, malicious, and immature enough to pull this kind of stunt, with no ulterior motives. I'm rooting for SCO's demise and, ideally, Darl in jail, but I don't have any illusions about the mental stability of some geeks. This should not reflect on the professionalism of the FOSS community, but it does say something about geeks in general.
The work is there for all to use. That's much important than who did it. To me, demanding attribution is karma whoring, little else. I understand that it is natural, though. It's just like animals that show off their pretty colors to get a mate.
What incentive do I have to do it, then? Frankly, knowing that people are benefitting from my code isn't enough to make me want to spend time writing it, unless I'm getting something else in return. Since I am a (employed) scientist, not a professional programmer, I'm happy to earn recognition simply by authorship credit rather than by money. Alternately, if I was some anonymous cog in Microsoft, I'd be getting plenty of money. But I won't accept neither, and I suspect very few programmers will.
Hell, even the BSD licenses require that the copyright notice be maintained; all of the programmers I'm aware of who release code under this type of license are very concerned with getting proper recognition for it. Without copyright, even the BSD licenses wouldn't be enforceable.
My point is, there's a reason almost nobody releases code immediately into the public domain. It's an all-around bad deal for programmers.
Ah...IP...The geeks Vietnam. Until we can understand that the world won't end if we abolish the concept, we will remain in this quagmire(sp) for a long time to come.
Right, so, if we abolish IP, what's to prevent Microsoft from taking all sorts of open-source software, throwing it into Windows, and continuing to make money off Windows (sure, no more copyrights, but they'll find a way!)? We can redistribute Windows all we want, but we'll never see the code.
Sorry, but IP laws are the only thing that allows the GPL to be enforced. Personally, I don't want to make money off software - I'd rather have people just use it - but I'd be pretty fucking pissed if someone took my work and passed it off as their own, because I didn't have copyright protection for it.