Harnessing the energy of the earth's spin would actually fall within the category of an exhaustible resource. I suspect it would last us for beyond our imagination, but it still doesn't solve the ultimate problem of living off old energy that's in the land. Windmills and hydroelectric systems harness the power of the earth's spin (as well as radiation from the sun and heat from the earth). They don't seem to be measurably slowing the earth down. Nonetheless your point is valid; if we are to tap energies produced by or dependent upon the rotation of celestial bodies we need to do the math and understand the upper limits of what's available. Probably, if we continue to increase our use of energy per human, we don't have more than a few hundred billion years stored up in the rotational energy of the earth itself. We might start causing tectonic effects within just a few million; I don't think we can know for sure yet but it deserves serious research.
I think he likely would have preferred something that is provably being replenished by energy resources coming in from space. For as long as we're earth-bound, that would be the sun. I believe he was referring to geothermal and hydroelectric power generation at the time (he did some interesting math on the availability of power from the water cycle) but naturally occuring fusion is certainly a good source of energy.
Thanks for the intelligent response, you should get a login.
Yeah, because drawing momentum out of the earth's rotation is a GREAT idea. Learn some math, and try again. The sun will wear out before we impact the earth's rotation enough to cause any harm.
Solar power is a good supplement/alternative to generators. Period. It's highly portable power. Trying to use it as our primary energy source is retarded. What about the chemical polution resulting from the production of that many solar panels? Not to mention the economics of production. How long in use to even get to neutral energy production vs. their production's consumption? What do we do with the ocean of broken panels in 50-100 years? Thermal impact? Why don't you just go look up the answers to your standard petro-shill FUD? It's all been dealt with to the point that you have to be purposefully ignorant if you don't know the answers to these questions.
While we're at it: we can convert our cars to run on baking soda and vinegar!(probably about equal energy returns to solar per dollar invested) Ah, showing off your math skills again.
Nuclear is a proven technology with enormous engergy returns but with it's hands tied in the US on fuel recycling technology by a "nonproliferation"(codeword for coal shill) law. Hey, that's funny, you are accusing somebody else of being a shill!
I will treat intelligent questions and commentary with respect. I don't see any here, sorry... "ocean of broken panels" my ass.
Nuclear power is very clean compared to any power source that burns fuel. If you are going to toss around inexact language like "is very clean" I don't think you can afford to be picky about what it means to "burn fuel".
As Nikky Telsa said in 1915, "No matter what we attempt to do, no matter to what fields we turn our efforts, we are dependent on power. We have to evolve means of obtaining energy from stores which are forever inexhaustible, to perfect methods which do not imply consumption and waste of any material whatever. If we use fuel to get our power, we are living on our capital and exhausting it rapidly. This method is barbarous and wantonly wasteful and will have to be stopped in the interest of coming generations."
If it uses up a limited resource, it's "burning fuel", at least metaphorically, and therefore lame. Screw that. Let's figure out how to tap into the vast power represented by the titanic spinning mass we live on, or the even more titanic mass that shines in our skies, instead of perpetuating the cycle of digging stuff up stuff until it we use it all up. Those experiments with dangling wires from the shuttle are a step in the right direction.
Has anyone signed a similar agreement that reaches beyond the end of employment and includes things not related to the business? It's only similar in that it reached beyond the end of my employment with the company, I guess, but I was once told I had to notify the Department of Defense if I left the country for two years after working on some military technology for a private firm. It was intimated to me that if I didn't sign, I should expect to be followed around by large men with dark glasses for at least two years.
I would never sign the contract you've described. Honestly, I'd rather flip burgers; I don't believe we should be encouraging these sorts of shenanigans.
Even better than that, the computers being sold as 'green PC' meaning thats the mfr's product name, and has nothing to do with being enviromentally conscious. Not only that, I heard that Alienware PC's are in fact, not made by aliens at all. Oh my god. Please don't tell me anything about the Keebler Elves, I don't think I could take it.
While most PV is currently constructed from wafer silicon, this is not a viable long-term strategy because it takes so much energy to make a wafer. To make real progress, PV needs to move to alternative technologies. Care to explain this statement to mere humans? It sounds like you are saying that there's no such thing as entropy, or that the sun is going to suddenly go out tomorrow.
There are enough existing solar panels to produce more solar panels with existing technologies forever, or at least until the sun burns out. There is no need to use any energy input other than the sun, and if there were, manufacturers could just use their first production runs to power subsequent runs. It's called up-front investment and it's not a new or untried business method.
I'll grant you that magically eliminating the investment required to build things would make those things cheaper in the mythical perfectly capitalist environment, but "real progress" (to use your term) is already being made.
I think you meant a so-called "personal firewall" when you said "software firewall". They are inherently weak and most are worthless.
I think you meant "a dedicated firewall host" when you said "hardware firewall". Most are inherently strong when properly used.
Don't forget to make sure you haven't stored a password to your firewall host on your PC. If possible, you should only log into the firewall host from its console, although that's not really doable on cheap linksys-type appliances. Always use https: and not http: connections if you are forced to use a web-based console, and make sure your browser isn't set to remember passwords. Always change the default password before connecting to any networks (use a loopback or a crossover cable to your PC if the device forces you to have a live ethernet port at bootup).
Your lesson #4, "Never assume that you are 100% safe" is excellent advice. Similar to "never discuss anything that might be considered illegal on the phone, even if you are just talking about some role-playing game".
For various reasons, I happen to like all three operating systems. I've never understood why liking one of them is supposed to make me hate one or both of the other two. I happen to dislike all three operating systems mentioned... and all the other ones besides. They all have serious flaws! I've never understood why disliking one or more of them is supposed to make me love some other one. Mac fanboizen and linux zealots are the worst; they almost invariably assume that anyone who is even slightly critical of their chosen OS must be a Windows fanatic and begin frothing at the mouth.
Someday we'll have a mo' betta operating system (I predict it will have no mouse, although there will be mouse-driven interfaces available in userland for the typing-impaired). But it probably won't happen in my lifetime. In the meantime linux is the best bang-for-buck solution for most (not all) problems I encounter.
Exactly and changing the "beep" depending on temperature was not "programming" but how temperature worked on resistors to the timing circuit. Sputnik was 100% analog. Analog programming is done by arranging for the appropriate components to be in the appropriate places in the circuit to produce the desired result. In my school days (when dinosaurs still roamed the earth) jumper wires and banana jacks were used to program analog computers to perform simple tasks.
Another lost art, like the secret of hose gartering that doesn't unravel, I suppose.
If they didn't do it on purpose, I guess it's questionable whether it can be called "programming". But if it was done knowingly, I'd say it's just as much a program as the ROM BIOSes were on the early IBM PCs... the old boot ROMs were fixed components that behaved in certain known ways under certain conditions, just like the thermally variable resistors in Sputnik did.
Hey, Comcast. If you take a few simple steps to prevent the propagation of worms and viruses on your network, you will reduce your total traffic volume by at least 50%. Do something clever (like hire a COMPETENT STAFF) and reduce traffic volume by 80% through elimination of all but the zero-day worms.
Then you will be able to provide your customers with enough bandwidth to satisfy the market demand, including bandwidth optimizing file sharing technologies like Bitorrent.
What's that you say? You can't comprehend what I'm describing? You think it can't possibly be simple to do this? Yeah, I know. We've had this conversation before. You need to HIRE SOMEONE CAPABLE of reading this and explaining it to you! Stop being so CHEAP and you'll make more money.
I realize that the world would suck if everyone followed this line of reasoning, but that does not make it any less valid. Luckily, a certain percentage of individuals enjoy(in the sense that they will do it consistently) grassroots efforts, so we can free-ride off them.
I've been running on the categorical imperative for a few decades, myself, so my view is a bit different. I attempt to achieve internal harmony through right action, rather than acting to accumulate wealth, and paradoxically enough this has led me to earn a reasonably high salary. Perhaps the need for reliably honest staff in important positions makes employers willing to put up with a few self-righteous pricks, in order to obtain predictable behaviour.
The real problem is that your taxes will only help society if everyone else pays taxes. If you pay taxes, you have to hope that everyone else will. If you don't pay taxes, you still have to hope everyone else pays taxes. But in the second case, you more pocket cash. Please re-read the mathematical argument, you'll see the "caring about others" term cancels out.
I am not much on maths, but I believe I see your point. Nonetheless; if we posit a tax policy that will not beggar the taxpayer, under the terms of the moral values I linked above, it behooves me to pay my taxes regardless of the actions of others because I will not be destroyed by these payments. Retention of funds is not a primary motivator for me; it's only a means to certain goals, such as self-sufficiency for myself and my family, and I have enough money to continue my progress towards my goals despite taxation. The chance of tax-funded road maintenance is worth more than the extra cash, in my terms.
When you try to quantify inexact benefits in the fashion that we are, subjective values and unexamined base axioms can prevent these equations from working for other people. For example; a Rastafarian cannot necessarily even conceptualize a term of "caring about others" - in his worldview, there are no others - I and I are one. A Buddhist might be similarly handicapped, because most forms of Buddhism teach that every individual is responsible for everything that exists - "caring for others" is not optional, it's like saying "water is wet" and just indicates that one understands the true nature of reality. Some Buddhists and Jains disdain money, and will give it away like St. Francis rather than contaminate their souls with it, so an equation that minimizes cash in pocket would be preferable to them - they prefer that any product of their labor be immediately released.
And while I consider myself to have very libertarian values, I don't have any issues with paying taxes to programs I don't support. But I do want any tax system to pass basic mathematical muster.
Which again is where philosophy comes into play - I truly hate paying for things that I consider evil or unsustainable. I'd gladly pay double my current taxes if I could allocate the funds where I chose - for instance, I'd never fund foreign military adventuring or corporate welfare payouts, but I'd happily fund defense, space exploration, science research, education, and pretty much any form of shared infrastructure maintenance. Many people share this view, although perhaps not the majority... I'd have to cut back quite a bit on my lifestyle if my taxes were doubled.
Despite all my blathering, I think you are right to expect a value equation for taxation that works from your worldview. I do not believe that any mathematical equation can be universally applicable to all the taxpayers, though. Remember, mathematical proofs are "proved" by logic and reason because any representational notation that can accurately describe the real world is necessarily inconsistent. Therefore, it seems to me that any rationale for tax
While I agree, keep in mind that if there was such a potential for a grassroots effort, it would almost certainly been done by somebody else. Whoa, there's a slippery slope for ya!
In RE: your earlier insights - have you considered educating the public to understand the benefits of taxation rather than educating them as to the perils of noncompliance?
The current US government - and indeed most libertarian and conservative factions with any power at all - is heavily oriented towards punishment and the avoidance of punishment as the prime motivator for all human activities. This reminds me of the arguments between Universalists and the other Christian cults of the 19th century... in brief, mainstream Christians stated that moral behaviour can not result from any belief system that does not include divine retribution for immorality. The Universalists proved by example that this was not so, and this was mostly ignored by the Christian mainstream (who continue to support child-abusing priesthoods who preach divine punishment to this day) because the people shouting at them from pulpits every Sunday weren't Universalists. Empirical proof boots naught if nobody looks at it!
If it were proved to people that paying taxes would benefit everyone directly, they'd happily pay them for the most part; true sociopaths are rare. Of course, since currently most governments do as much harm as good, they are not supplying any convincing proofs to the populace. Parents grieving for children who died to prop up the price of Texas oil are unlikely to be thankful for the educational opportunities provided by the land-grant university system, for one example.
The premise of the current crop of populist conservative and libertarian movements in the USA is that "all government is invasive and inherently bad for you" which is not really helpful. How can you fix something if you deny there is any value in it to start with?
Intellectual property laws are created to restrict the rights of individuals for the benefit of society as a whole. No, IP laws only benefit the owners of IP to the detriment of the rest of society. These statements are not contradictory. I spoke of what IP laws were created to do, and you are now talking about what current laws actually do.
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries" (Constitution of the United States, Section 8, paragraph 8) pretty clearly states the intentions of IP law. It's for the benefit of society and only indirectly benefits individuals, and thus is thoroughly socialist... just like public schools, sewers, roads, universal access to legal representation, and so on.
Like capitalism, socialism is a very useful thing when properly restricted and implemented. I attended public school and I am now privately employed, so I have little grounds to criticize either system - they've both worked well for me.
You do realise that so-called "intellectual property" is a concept based on the SOCIALIST value system, and that rugged individualists and laissez-faire capitalists believe people should be able to build and sell whatever they can dream up regardless of whether somebody else already invented it?
It's quite amusing to see someone using "socialist" as a dirty word and then equating intellectual property "rights" with real property rights in the same post. Intellectual property laws are created to restrict the rights of individuals for the benefit of society as a whole. Consider the difference between such legislation and what used to be called natural laws, such as the laws that recognize the rights of individuals to self-defense, private property, and free speech.
I've used at least a dozen operating systems (I'm old, and in the trade) and I always considered Linux a great server and a fairly crappy desktop. I rushed out to get a MacOSX mini and was somewhat dissapointed... multitasking, yes, great, but still the same tired Apple paradigms. Dragging a picture of a cow to a picture of a trash can really doesn't seem like an advanced deletion method to me.
So, last year I tried Ubuntu on my laptop, and I've been running it ever since. Blows the doors off Apple in the price/performance metric, and I'm a computer professional so I don't mind that it doesn't always treat me like I can't read or type.
Anyway, I then moved my elderly father (who has owned many macs and prefers them greatly to Microsoft systems) over to Ubuntu LTS. He loves it and has no desire to go back to the mac!
I'm sure OSX is better for some people, but for my purposes it can't compare to Ubuntu. For one thing, I don't have to waste time deleting stuff like iTunes, GarageBand, etc. etc. etc. that I'm apparently too old and uncool to ever need. For another, it's truly open source, so I can modify anything I don't like about the way it is engineered (not that I've ever had to do that, though).
I'll probably get modded flamebait again for daring to question the primacy of the One True Desktop, but I'm just reporting my own experience.
Contemporary forced subjugation and kidnapping children into slavery by muslims for example That's a really good example.
Look at this quote I just pulled: The Arab slave trade from East Africa is one of the oldest slave trades, predating the European transatlantic slave trade by hundreds of years. What a classic piece of Leopoldian propaganda! Logically, feet existed before boats, and boats existed before ships; so, obviously, local slave trading occurred before long distance slave trading, and Mediterranean slave trading occurred before transatlantic slave trading. The only reason to make the quoted statement is to demonize Arabs... although actually, members of every race on the planet have indubitably been guilty of slave trading from time immemorial, and the most notable atrocities in Africa were mostly performed by Africans subjugated by Europeans, with little or no involvement by Arabs at all.
These days, in wikipeda political posturing and religious propaganda frequently replaces fact, and the person who is the most insane usually wins, because sane people eventually STOP banging their heads against walls. And that, in a nutshell, explains everything about Wikipedia's current decline - the insane people and the paid shills are driving out the (relatively) normal folks that used to provide all the input.
... and in the meantime I can really recommend Sawmill which I finde quite loveable as a log processor. What a letdown. I thought that link was going to lead me to something entirely different. So much for the semantic web, eh?
Yer right about netware, but the POSIX acl fiasco is both better and worse than you've described. POSIX acls are a formal standard adopted and supported by several major vendors, but unfortunately the standard is weak and their implementations are not totally interoperable. Try copying files from HPUX to an ACL-equipped linux or FreeBSD box with any tool other than star and see if it works - sure didn't last time I tried. ACLs in windows are a weak copy of Novell's system with the added burden of the registry and the incomprehensible gibberish it contains. You can use very recent versions of samba on a few types of ACL equipped servers (at this time, only FreeBSD and HP-UX that I'm aware of) to slop stuff back and forth from windows ACLs to POSIX acls, but you have to have everything set up just right at the directory/PAM/NSS/pGina level which is certainly not trivial. People are doing it, but it can be broken very easily by vendor security patches and similar routine events.
POSIX-style ACLs are a nightmare to administrate on any kind of a large scale anyway. We had the equivalent capabilities in VMS more than a decade ago and sysadmins that liked them would accumulate nightmarishly unmaintainable complexity in just a few years. You can do that in Novell, too, but with the more sophisticated file attribute and permissions system most admins won't even be tempted to do so.
1) eDirectory - Done. Has been multiplatform for years. Continues to be the single best meta directory repository on the market. There is not a single environment of any decent size that can get away with one directory to service all the business requirements, but eDirectory continues to be the best option for consolidating the directory data using Novell's Identity Manager suite of drivers and tools. OpenLDAP connects all my operating systems and servers just fine, thanks. It is more difficult to implement because it requires more knowledge and skill, but we happen to have that already on site. Once it's up and running, it is as stable as NDS (and the underlying linux servers are more stable than post NW3, pre-linux Novell servers) and it's easier and quicker to modify (command lines instead of slow guis and java apps) and backup (just dump LDIFs every night). I have automagic replication and propagation working across dozens of servers on multiple sites, and total integration of windows and unix user accounts - just like NDS provides, only I'm doing it for less cost.
2) zenWorks - Pretty much anyone who has used it considers it the premiere tool for managing Windows clients. Only in the next release will they not require Netware for some of the components. The middle tier design and agent-based client make it a pleasure to work with compared to the fat Novell Client days. I use perl injected dynamically at login time through samba. Again, this requires skill instead of money. Nuff said, I think.
3) Management tools - someone else already said it, but Novell cannot seem to stay focused (and enforce discipline on their own development teams) to provide a consistent management tool. They have gone from NWAdmin to ConsoleOne to iManager - except you still pretty much need each of them depending on what you are going to manage. You're right, and anyway GUIs are too slow. Also, a GUI only offers you menu selection - while a CLI offers you the ability to create totally new solutions when you encounter a totally new problem or opportunity. CLIs are better for fast typists, and my wrists still haven't recovered from having to use Novell's abominable SAA Server configuration interface years ago.
4) File permissions - The NSS file system is pretty damn good, has been ported and made available on Linux for a few years now. It still provides the leading access controls / inherited rights / filtered rights that other file systems should be ashamed of for not offering. And here it is. The true great advantage of Novell. I have no slick reply for this; the paucity of the ancient unix filesystem environment is too obvious to be denied (but the BSD heads will do so anyway).
For sure, Novell is just as if not more screwed up than any other company. They have squandered many opportunities to reestablish themselves as a significant technology player, but they are hardly on the verge of going out of business. They are profitable and still growing as a company. Product lines die out and Netware has been dying out for years, but they are considerably more than Netware. I wish them well, personally. Their products add some variety to a marketplace that is dominated by repeated emulation of obsolete paradigms. Plus, they are paying the salaries of some top-notch FOSS people (like Miguel and his merry gnomes, for example) and we all benefit from that.
You won't find any of my servers/boundaries responding to a ping on any address at any port for any reason. Send a TCP packet, and all of them will look at it, stroke their chins for a few microseconds, and decide whether to forward them or simply move on. Are you sure that's all they are stroking? Just kidding. It seems a bit unnecessary to shut down your site's ability to help others test connectivity to you. You really aren't doing anything but crippling harmless diagnostics; it's very easy to make your network safe to ping.
A ping test is perhaps one of the silliest, as you cite by a more accurate observation of key SOA servers over a period of time. But, you see, there's no single trustworthy authority that has root access to all the nameservers. Think about how DNS works, and how the hints file interacts with local and intermediate caches, and you will see that your idea is not really any more workable than a ping test. It's too impossible to co-ordinate. I cache at three levels for good solid reasons not having anything to do with "fear of a bad ping". On the other hand I assume pings are friendly and only monitor them for performance and bandwidth reasons, and I have not yet been hacked despite many years of pen tests by outside agencies we've hired.
That said, I like Novell.com's bravery, as they always respond to a ping. It's how I know that my DNS infrastructure is working. It's a randomly successful find (I have no affiliation with them), rather it always works, when it works. Aha! You admit that your fears are impacting your ability to serve the community - in a way that you admit is valuable! This admission is the first step to great power! OK, just kidding again.
Configure your firewalls to respond to all inward-bound pings for your entire address space. This will not consume any significant resources, and will not inform any skeery crackers of anything (in fact it's a better way to fool them than blocking ping, since they will not need to resort to stealthier scans that require more resources to detect or block). Log who pings you to the router console and leave a dumb terminal running on it, or pump it into a secure internal web page. Treat ping flooding like any other kind of packet flooding - you can't really make it impossible to DDOS you simply by blocking specific ICMP types anyway. Don't forget to implement packet source ingress and egress filtering, obviously.
Google, yahoo, and Novell all respond to ping. It's a service they kindly provide to the rest of us, a service we should all provide to make the Internet's tubes easier to see through. You aren't going to get hurt by a ping unless you have no idea how to set up a network... in which case dropping ping packets won't save you.
Don't make researchers have to develop new ways to punch through firewalls, let's all just use good ol' friendly, simple, and useful pings.
I believe there is a loophole in this, where it is the individual who is in possession of the data not a health provider (i.e. The end user sets up this vault not the health provider). This releases the 'vault' from complying with HIPAA because of SEC. 1172. (a) APPLICABILITY. I have heard this from more than one company trying to accomplish the same thing. This scheme would be covered for several reasons; most importantly because the vault owner would need a HIPAA mandated BA (business agreement) in order to traffic data with HIPAA regulated entities such as hospitals, doctors, and insurance companies.
The companies you've been hearing from are barking up the wrong tree. If they do find a way to subvert the intent of the law the Secretary of Health and Human Services will simply issue a statement invalidating whatever loophole they thought they had. The legislation is set up that way, so that it can be effectively amended without the hassles of representative government.
While I enjoy Penn & Teller's "Bullshit" as much as the next guy, you need to recognize that they are entertainers, and they purposely slant their productions to maximize entertainment value. Anyone who trusts their shows enough to have it color their opinions on political or economic issues is making the same mistake as people who get their ideas about science from "Mythbusters". I like both shows, but really they are no more trustworthy than TV wrestling.
It seems to me that Randi, despite being overhyped and rather entertaining, is more than just a sideshow; he's actually willing to rigorously apply the scientific method and he allows his detractors the opportunity to try to prove their claims.
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Thanks for the intelligent response, you should get a login.
I will treat intelligent questions and commentary with respect. I don't see any here, sorry... "ocean of broken panels" my ass.
I'm glad to see somebody got the point!
As Nikky Telsa said in 1915, "No matter what we attempt to do, no matter to what fields we turn our efforts, we are dependent on power. We have to evolve means of obtaining energy from stores which are forever inexhaustible, to perfect methods which do not imply consumption and waste of any material whatever. If we use fuel to get our power, we are living on our capital and exhausting it rapidly. This method is barbarous and wantonly wasteful and will have to be stopped in the interest of coming generations."
If it uses up a limited resource, it's "burning fuel", at least metaphorically, and therefore lame. Screw that. Let's figure out how to tap into the vast power represented by the titanic spinning mass we live on, or the even more titanic mass that shines in our skies, instead of perpetuating the cycle of digging stuff up stuff until it we use it all up. Those experiments with dangling wires from the shuttle are a step in the right direction.
I would never sign the contract you've described. Honestly, I'd rather flip burgers; I don't believe we should be encouraging these sorts of shenanigans.
There are enough existing solar panels to produce more solar panels with existing technologies forever, or at least until the sun burns out. There is no need to use any energy input other than the sun, and if there were, manufacturers could just use their first production runs to power subsequent runs. It's called up-front investment and it's not a new or untried business method.
I'll grant you that magically eliminating the investment required to build things would make those things cheaper in the mythical perfectly capitalist environment, but "real progress" (to use your term) is already being made.
I think you meant a so-called "personal firewall" when you said "software firewall". They are inherently weak and most are worthless.
I think you meant "a dedicated firewall host" when you said "hardware firewall". Most are inherently strong when properly used.
Don't forget to make sure you haven't stored a password to your firewall host on your PC. If possible, you should only log into the firewall host from its console, although that's not really doable on cheap linksys-type appliances. Always use https: and not http: connections if you are forced to use a web-based console, and make sure your browser isn't set to remember passwords. Always change the default password before connecting to any networks (use a loopback or a crossover cable to your PC if the device forces you to have a live ethernet port at bootup).
Your lesson #4, "Never assume that you are 100% safe" is excellent advice. Similar to "never discuss anything that might be considered illegal on the phone, even if you are just talking about some role-playing game".
Someday we'll have a mo' betta operating system (I predict it will have no mouse, although there will be mouse-driven interfaces available in userland for the typing-impaired). But it probably won't happen in my lifetime. In the meantime linux is the best bang-for-buck solution for most (not all) problems I encounter.
I think you may have found the first worthwhile application for RFID.
Somebody call Starkist!!
Another lost art, like the secret of hose gartering that doesn't unravel, I suppose.
If they didn't do it on purpose, I guess it's questionable whether it can be called "programming". But if it was done knowingly, I'd say it's just as much a program as the ROM BIOSes were on the early IBM PCs... the old boot ROMs were fixed components that behaved in certain known ways under certain conditions, just like the thermally variable resistors in Sputnik did.
Hey, Comcast. If you take a few simple steps to prevent the propagation of worms and viruses on your network, you will reduce your total traffic volume by at least 50%. Do something clever (like hire a COMPETENT STAFF) and reduce traffic volume by 80% through elimination of all but the zero-day worms.
Then you will be able to provide your customers with enough bandwidth to satisfy the market demand, including bandwidth optimizing file sharing technologies like Bitorrent.
What's that you say? You can't comprehend what I'm describing? You think it can't possibly be simple to do this? Yeah, I know. We've had this conversation before. You need to HIRE SOMEONE CAPABLE of reading this and explaining it to you! Stop being so CHEAP and you'll make more money.
San Mehat mixed the "Sounds of Slashdot" CD... I've never been able to duplicate it on any OS. There's a Debian install on track1.
I realize that the world would suck if everyone followed this line of reasoning, but that does not make it any less valid. Luckily, a certain percentage of individuals enjoy(in the sense that they will do it consistently) grassroots efforts, so we can free-ride off them.
I've been running on the categorical imperative for a few decades, myself, so my view is a bit different. I attempt to achieve internal harmony through right action, rather than acting to accumulate wealth, and paradoxically enough this has led me to earn a reasonably high salary. Perhaps the need for reliably honest staff in important positions makes employers willing to put up with a few self-righteous pricks, in order to obtain predictable behaviour.
The real problem is that your taxes will only help society if everyone else pays taxes. If you pay taxes, you have to hope that everyone else will. If you don't pay taxes, you still have to hope everyone else pays taxes. But in the second case, you more pocket cash. Please re-read the mathematical argument, you'll see the "caring about others" term cancels out.
I am not much on maths, but I believe I see your point. Nonetheless; if we posit a tax policy that will not beggar the taxpayer, under the terms of the moral values I linked above, it behooves me to pay my taxes regardless of the actions of others because I will not be destroyed by these payments. Retention of funds is not a primary motivator for me; it's only a means to certain goals, such as self-sufficiency for myself and my family, and I have enough money to continue my progress towards my goals despite taxation. The chance of tax-funded road maintenance is worth more than the extra cash, in my terms.
When you try to quantify inexact benefits in the fashion that we are, subjective values and unexamined base axioms can prevent these equations from working for other people. For example; a Rastafarian cannot necessarily even conceptualize a term of "caring about others" - in his worldview, there are no others - I and I are one. A Buddhist might be similarly handicapped, because most forms of Buddhism teach that every individual is responsible for everything that exists - "caring for others" is not optional, it's like saying "water is wet" and just indicates that one understands the true nature of reality. Some Buddhists and Jains disdain money, and will give it away like St. Francis rather than contaminate their souls with it, so an equation that minimizes cash in pocket would be preferable to them - they prefer that any product of their labor be immediately released.
And while I consider myself to have very libertarian values, I don't have any issues with paying taxes to programs I don't support. But I do want any tax system to pass basic mathematical muster.
Which again is where philosophy comes into play - I truly hate paying for things that I consider evil or unsustainable. I'd gladly pay double my current taxes if I could allocate the funds where I chose - for instance, I'd never fund foreign military adventuring or corporate welfare payouts, but I'd happily fund defense, space exploration, science research, education, and pretty much any form of shared infrastructure maintenance. Many people share this view, although perhaps not the majority... I'd have to cut back quite a bit on my lifestyle if my taxes were doubled.
Despite all my blathering, I think you are right to expect a value equation for taxation that works from your worldview. I do not believe that any mathematical equation can be universally applicable to all the taxpayers, though. Remember, mathematical proofs are "proved" by logic and reason because any representational notation that can accurately describe the real world is necessarily inconsistent. Therefore, it seems to me that any rationale for tax
In RE: your earlier insights - have you considered educating the public to understand the benefits of taxation rather than educating them as to the perils of noncompliance?
The current US government - and indeed most libertarian and conservative factions with any power at all - is heavily oriented towards punishment and the avoidance of punishment as the prime motivator for all human activities. This reminds me of the arguments between Universalists and the other Christian cults of the 19th century... in brief, mainstream Christians stated that moral behaviour can not result from any belief system that does not include divine retribution for immorality. The Universalists proved by example that this was not so, and this was mostly ignored by the Christian mainstream (who continue to support child-abusing priesthoods who preach divine punishment to this day) because the people shouting at them from pulpits every Sunday weren't Universalists. Empirical proof boots naught if nobody looks at it!
If it were proved to people that paying taxes would benefit everyone directly, they'd happily pay them for the most part; true sociopaths are rare. Of course, since currently most governments do as much harm as good, they are not supplying any convincing proofs to the populace. Parents grieving for children who died to prop up the price of Texas oil are unlikely to be thankful for the educational opportunities provided by the land-grant university system, for one example.
The premise of the current crop of populist conservative and libertarian movements in the USA is that "all government is invasive and inherently bad for you" which is not really helpful. How can you fix something if you deny there is any value in it to start with?
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries" (Constitution of the United States, Section 8, paragraph 8) pretty clearly states the intentions of IP law. It's for the benefit of society and only indirectly benefits individuals, and thus is thoroughly socialist... just like public schools, sewers, roads, universal access to legal representation, and so on.
Like capitalism, socialism is a very useful thing when properly restricted and implemented. I attended public school and I am now privately employed, so I have little grounds to criticize either system - they've both worked well for me.
You do realise that so-called "intellectual property" is a concept based on the SOCIALIST value system, and that rugged individualists and laissez-faire capitalists believe people should be able to build and sell whatever they can dream up regardless of whether somebody else already invented it?
It's quite amusing to see someone using "socialist" as a dirty word and then equating intellectual property "rights" with real property rights in the same post. Intellectual property laws are created to restrict the rights of individuals for the benefit of society as a whole. Consider the difference between such legislation and what used to be called natural laws, such as the laws that recognize the rights of individuals to self-defense, private property, and free speech.
I've used at least a dozen operating systems (I'm old, and in the trade) and I always considered Linux a great server and a fairly crappy desktop. I rushed out to get a MacOSX mini and was somewhat dissapointed... multitasking, yes, great, but still the same tired Apple paradigms. Dragging a picture of a cow to a picture of a trash can really doesn't seem like an advanced deletion method to me.
So, last year I tried Ubuntu on my laptop, and I've been running it ever since. Blows the doors off Apple in the price/performance metric, and I'm a computer professional so I don't mind that it doesn't always treat me like I can't read or type.
Anyway, I then moved my elderly father (who has owned many macs and prefers them greatly to Microsoft systems) over to Ubuntu LTS. He loves it and has no desire to go back to the mac!
I'm sure OSX is better for some people, but for my purposes it can't compare to Ubuntu. For one thing, I don't have to waste time deleting stuff like iTunes, GarageBand, etc. etc. etc. that I'm apparently too old and uncool to ever need. For another, it's truly open source, so I can modify anything I don't like about the way it is engineered (not that I've ever had to do that, though).
I'll probably get modded flamebait again for daring to question the primacy of the One True Desktop, but I'm just reporting my own experience.
Look at this quote I just pulled: The Arab slave trade from East Africa is one of the oldest slave trades, predating the European transatlantic slave trade by hundreds of years. What a classic piece of Leopoldian propaganda! Logically, feet existed before boats, and boats existed before ships; so, obviously, local slave trading occurred before long distance slave trading, and Mediterranean slave trading occurred before transatlantic slave trading. The only reason to make the quoted statement is to demonize Arabs... although actually, members of every race on the planet have indubitably been guilty of slave trading from time immemorial, and the most notable atrocities in Africa were mostly performed by Africans subjugated by Europeans, with little or no involvement by Arabs at all.
These days, in wikipeda political posturing and religious propaganda frequently replaces fact, and the person who is the most insane usually wins, because sane people eventually STOP banging their heads against walls. And that, in a nutshell, explains everything about Wikipedia's current decline - the insane people and the paid shills are driving out the (relatively) normal folks that used to provide all the input.
... and in the meantime I can really recommend Sawmill which I finde quite loveable as a log processor. What a letdown. I thought that link was going to lead me to something entirely different. So much for the semantic web, eh?Yer right about netware, but the POSIX acl fiasco is both better and worse than you've described. POSIX acls are a formal standard adopted and supported by several major vendors, but unfortunately the standard is weak and their implementations are not totally interoperable. Try copying files from HPUX to an ACL-equipped linux or FreeBSD box with any tool other than star and see if it works - sure didn't last time I tried. ACLs in windows are a weak copy of Novell's system with the added burden of the registry and the incomprehensible gibberish it contains. You can use very recent versions of samba on a few types of ACL equipped servers (at this time, only FreeBSD and HP-UX that I'm aware of) to slop stuff back and forth from windows ACLs to POSIX acls, but you have to have everything set up just right at the directory/PAM/NSS/pGina level which is certainly not trivial. People are doing it, but it can be broken very easily by vendor security patches and similar routine events.
POSIX-style ACLs are a nightmare to administrate on any kind of a large scale anyway. We had the equivalent capabilities in VMS more than a decade ago and sysadmins that liked them would accumulate nightmarishly unmaintainable complexity in just a few years. You can do that in Novell, too, but with the more sophisticated file attribute and permissions system most admins won't even be tempted to do so.
Configure your firewalls to respond to all inward-bound pings for your entire address space. This will not consume any significant resources, and will not inform any skeery crackers of anything (in fact it's a better way to fool them than blocking ping, since they will not need to resort to stealthier scans that require more resources to detect or block). Log who pings you to the router console and leave a dumb terminal running on it, or pump it into a secure internal web page. Treat ping flooding like any other kind of packet flooding - you can't really make it impossible to DDOS you simply by blocking specific ICMP types anyway. Don't forget to implement packet source ingress and egress filtering, obviously.
Google, yahoo, and Novell all respond to ping. It's a service they kindly provide to the rest of us, a service we should all provide to make the Internet's tubes easier to see through. You aren't going to get hurt by a ping unless you have no idea how to set up a network... in which case dropping ping packets won't save you.
Don't make researchers have to develop new ways to punch through firewalls, let's all just use good ol' friendly, simple, and useful pings.
The companies you've been hearing from are barking up the wrong tree. If they do find a way to subvert the intent of the law the Secretary of Health and Human Services will simply issue a statement invalidating whatever loophole they thought they had. The legislation is set up that way, so that it can be effectively amended without the hassles of representative government.
While I enjoy Penn & Teller's "Bullshit" as much as the next guy, you need to recognize that they are entertainers, and they purposely slant their productions to maximize entertainment value. Anyone who trusts their shows enough to have it color their opinions on political or economic issues is making the same mistake as people who get their ideas about science from "Mythbusters". I like both shows, but really they are no more trustworthy than TV wrestling.
It seems to me that Randi, despite being overhyped and rather entertaining, is more than just a sideshow; he's actually willing to rigorously apply the scientific method and he allows his detractors the opportunity to try to prove their claims.