I don't live in the US, but isn't that what the PATRIOT act is all about?
Not really. PATRIOT gives broad authority to law enforcement, but it's really on thin ice legally. It survives because most people were freaked out by 9/11 and assume that PATRIOT will only affect the terrorists and other bad guys. As long as it is enforced in such a way that the average person doesn't notice it, it won't meet much opposition.
With any law, there are three factors that govern it's practical usage:
1) How it was written 2) How it is interpreted 3) How it is implemented
If they only implement it in limited ways it won't piss enough people off to question how it was written or interpreted.
If the government decided to use that to justify a massive firewalling of the US, etc, it would get wiped out in a heart beat. Invariably it's already being abused in more limited ways, and those abuses will lead to it's not being renewed when it's built in sunset clause gets rid of it shortly.
Say what you will about the idiocy of congress in passing such a thing in the first place, they were at least smart enough to put a time limit on it. Furthermore, as PATRIOT related cases have slowly worked through the system, the judiciary has been limiting it severely. They've been allowing "terrorists" to have lawyers, etc.
It's design was for fault tolerance in the event of nuclear war. Censorship wasn't something DARPA cared anything about. It happens to be that the innate structure of the Internet, or lack there of, makes it hard to censor effectively. We got lucky on that one.
It's fictional. Fine. We all know it's fictional, and nobody's going to go there and go "oooo look, they're real". Yeah they do seem to be whoring it up a bit, but that's life on the modern Internet I guess.
The tragic thing though is to think about how much detail they have on how those lightsabers would theoretically work. I assume that those concepts all came from Lucas. And I think, maybe if he'd spent a little less time on figuring out how a lightsaber would work, and more time on figuring out how to write dialogue, the first two prequel movies would have been much better.
You're comparing residential cable Internet service to a business class wireless connection. So a few things to keep in mind:
1) Your comcast network has no SLA. If it goes down for a few days, oh well. With this package they are guaranteeing 99.9% uptime (roughly 9 hours downtime in a year)
2) Your comcast network has rules about what kind of things you can do with your network. There are no limitations on this.
3) It's WIRELESS. If you want to get on to the network from anywhere in the coverage area you can do it. If you have multiple sites you can easily share one network rather than having to pay for seperate T-1's to different locations.
You pay a premium for reliability and support. If you compare these prices to those of a T-1, it's really a good deal. Sure you can always get cheaper bandwidth for residential service, and when your company can't do business for a few days because your network went down, too bad. In the grand scheme of things $500/month is not a huge cost on a company's bottom line.
Exactly. In the end, somebody in China who really wants to get to that information can find a way to do it. What makes censorship possible in China though isn't the technology, but the people and policies that exist outside the technology. It's not the firewall that makes things difficult for you, but the guys who come bash your skull in if you try to get around the router.
I was in China about two years ago and there was a big crack down on Internet cafes. So what was happening was that people were routing around the censorship and the government came in to stop it. Without that ability and will to enforce the censorship by those means, it ceases to be.
Could the US, theoretically set up a bunch of firewalls and restrict what we do? Sure. But it wouldn't matter unless working around those firewalls lead to men with guns showing up at my home. Frankly, if our country was at that point, we have a lot bigger things to worry about than what websites I can get to.
The problem is that the concept of VR has run into the physical limitations of hardware. For example, you can play a game where you can look around and hold a gun like device and point it at people. But once you try to walk, duck, roll, etc, you run into the limits of the system quite quickly.
So while we can trick the eyes and the ears, we've still got some senses that are firmly grounded in this reality that keeps it from being totally effective. VR does have some practical applications in the medical and manufcaturing fields, but as it was envisioned for entertainment, it's not quite there.
If we can ever manage to figure out a way to connect a computer to all human sensory input, it won't really get much further. That could mean using some sort of body suit that can fake the sensations of movement, etc, or perhaps a direct interface into the brain.
If they have an established trademark, Apple can't sue them. The timing is probably so they can get a quick settlement out of Apple. Apple isn't going to want their release delayed by the courts. So they'll be inclined to quickly settle and be done with it rather than scuttle their whole product launch.
I won't be buying anything from Tiger in the future, that's for sure.
That "insult" of a salary you refer to is still more than people in other countries are making doing similar work.
I do live how the original post said that more women will have to get into CS. No they won't because the work will just be done overseas or using H1B's.
The user can accidently run things that (s/)he may be ignorant of, and unfortunatly have unforseen side effects.
This brings up a very good point about people who are new to computers. Most of the people that I've seen who have difficulty learning how to use a computer fear them. Actually, not the computer per se, but rather they fear that they are going to break it. If they try doing something they don't fully understand, they are afraid they will cause irreperable harm to the computer.
Strong priveledge seperation makes this a non-issue. As a regular user on linux, I would have a seriously difficult time causing serious harm to the box through anything I might do. I might screw up my data, or the appearance of things, but in the end, I cannot break the OS.
Under Windows, I can do all kinds of bad things. I've heard countless stories of people who are smart about how they use their computer coming home to find that it's useless becuase their kid downloaded a worm. It's one thing when the kid breaks their account, it's another when the whole operating system has to be re-installed from scratch.
When you run under Windows as an administrator, it doesn't actually let you do anything. For example, go into windows and bring up your process listing. Look for an item called SERVICES. Now, try to kill it. You'll get access denied.
Now, if you do some research, you can find that there's a seperate command line tool you can download and find a way to kill that process. So theoretically you do have the ability, but they hide it from you. By the way, if you do kill it, your OS will shut down and reboot.
Now, under Unix, root is almighty. If I run this command:
kill -9 1
I will cause my box to immediately stop dead because I've killed the root process. It doesn't stop to ask me if I really want to do that (dave). It just says, "okay, you're the boss" and does whatever I ask, good or bad.
As a result, the priveledge separation in Unix is much better. There are ways to temporarily become root to handle tasks. No need to log out of the system all together, you can use simple commands to change.
The effect of this is as much a mental thing as a technical thing. If you go through some process, albeit a simple one, to give yourself the almighty power on the box, you conciously made that step. Thus you are aware that you are doing something potentially riskier and are more likely to take caution to get it right. Then when you go back to being a regular user you can feel comfortable that you are protected from breaking the box.
Another thing worth mentioning is that under Unix you can grant limited root access to people. For example, let's say you needed to be able to restart my mail server, for whatever reason. I can grant you the ability to do just that without giving you the keys to the kingdom.
But the beauty of it is that, most of the time, you don't need to do that. A user can install software, and all that stuff, without needing admin access in most cases. The reason why most people run Windows as administrators is that it's hard to do anything without that ability.
We need proper, verifiable identification so that, after a bunch of bad guys come try to kill us, we'll know exactly who to attack. If they turn out to be Saudi Arabians working in conjunction with associates of the Afghan government, we'll know that we need to bomb Iraq...
If that's the case, then the radiation burst would only be sufficient to harm a portion of the planet. Anybody on the opposite side of the burst would have the entire planet to absorb it. Anybody inside of a relatively solid structure like a city building should also be relatively shieled if it's coming down from above. If you're anywhere else, yeah you might be screwed. But it's not the end of civilization. Very bad, but not game over.
Say, I'm curious, are you guys scripting this to post a new article every 5 minutes, or did you find some cheap outsourced labor to pound them out in real time?
No, the real problem is that real wage growth in this country has been stagnant for years except for one minor bump during the 90's boom.
If wages grow at near zero percent, and housing prices grow at 5%/year, and college tuition and medical care grow at even faster rates, then the math fails us at some point.
Initially, two income families provided a leg up. Most people I know that are two income families are that way because it's very difficult to get by on a single income. The lifestyle that one could afford to have on one income, with kids a few decades ago is far beyond what's possible today.
A lot of the families that are working those two jobs are doing it for their kids. They are trying to make sure the kids can go to a good school (either private, or living in a nice neighborhood where the public schools are good). They are trying to pay for their kids college tuition.
Sure, some people choose to work for more selfish materialistic reasons and don't put the time into their children, but I think that's the exception to the rule. I think most families would rather be able to have more time with their kids, but it's not realistically possible.
All these politicians rail on GTA and the like as the bain of our children's existence. That because they go and play these violent and explicit games, they grow up and become mass murderers. This is, BS.
The real problem is when both parents have to work, often times more than one job, just to afford a place to live. This means they have little time to spend with their kids and do crazy things like see what kind of games their kids are playing.
If these politicians want to fix REAL problems, then start working on that one. Oh wait, they don't know how to fix the real problem so they'll make up some fake ones.
They did not say that this student was a criminal or what they were doing was criminal. What they said was that, until P2P networks are ruled to be legal by the courts, they would not allow them on campus. That isn't saying that a P2P network is illegal, or that the student's use of it is illegal. It is simply saying that, barring a court ruling that affirms their legality, they aren't going to permit them at all.
Furthermore, there can be no libel or slander here because this is a private communication between the school and the student. Slander or libel is saying or printing something that is knowingly false about the student for others to see. It's a matter of damaging somebody's reputation. If the school and the student are the only ones privee to the communication, how can their reputation be damaged.
It seems from everything I'm seeing that the PSP and the DS aren't really in the same league with eachother. The DS was taking the notion of a game boy and evolving it slightly. The PSP is taking the notion of a PS2 and making it portable. The PSP ain't cheap, but it's a serious gaming powerhouse where as the DS is merely okay with a few gimmicks tossed in.
I think Sony rightly figured out that if they can get all these folks to drop $200-250 on a console, they could get them to drop that kind of money on a portable if the portable was good enough. A reasonable person could buy a PSP as their game playing device of choice instead of a PS2.
Ultimately, the *real* solution to mitigating the problem of taxes' regressive nature against the poor is to cut taxes as much as possible and eliminate as many govn't services as possible, leaving more of the the money in the pockets of private individuals, not politicians...
Our tax rates are much lower than Norway and Sweden but yet the number of children living in poverty there is WAAAY lower. By your logic they should have more children in poverty, non? So what's your explanation? The evidence clearly shows that there is a direct corelation between government transfer of wealth to the poor and decreased rates of poverty. So where does Reganomics stand on this one?
Actually I find that it's changed my perspective on the value of software. That is, I'm willing to pay for software, but I need to be convinced that it's worth paying for.
For example, I bought a real copy of Trillian when it first came out for Windows because I thought it was good software worth buying. If I was doing photo editing on a professional basis, I'd probably pay out the money for Photoshop rather than using Gimp. Gimp is sufficient for my needs though.
The problem is that a vast amount of legislation is incorporated into our tax code. You know how ever time the Republicans want to offer something as a tax credit rather than as a new pay out? That's just another few gallons of quagmire for our tax code.
Let's say that tomorrow we had a flat tax. What would happen to:
* Deductions for children * Deductions for interest on home loans * Deductions for business expenses
There are thousands of little deductions that have been put in there over time for purely political reasons. Tossing it out would have some pretty harsh ramifications. The effective price of homes and hybrid cars would go up. The effective price of having children would go up.
A flat tax is a simple solution to a complex problem which means, in the end, it doesn't really work.
Slashdot Mirror
That was my point:
It's not the firewall that makes things difficult for you, but the guys who come bash your skull in if you try to get around the router.
The technology supports "routing around censorship". It's the chance that some thug will find out and break your head that's the problem.
I don't live in the US, but isn't that what the PATRIOT act is all about?
Not really. PATRIOT gives broad authority to law enforcement, but it's really on thin ice legally. It survives because most people were freaked out by 9/11 and assume that PATRIOT will only affect the terrorists and other bad guys. As long as it is enforced in such a way that the average person doesn't notice it, it won't meet much opposition.
With any law, there are three factors that govern it's practical usage:
1) How it was written
2) How it is interpreted
3) How it is implemented
If they only implement it in limited ways it won't piss enough people off to question how it was written or interpreted.
If the government decided to use that to justify a massive firewalling of the US, etc, it would get wiped out in a heart beat. Invariably it's already being abused in more limited ways, and those abuses will lead to it's not being renewed when it's built in sunset clause gets rid of it shortly.
Say what you will about the idiocy of congress in passing such a thing in the first place, they were at least smart enough to put a time limit on it. Furthermore, as PATRIOT related cases have slowly worked through the system, the judiciary has been limiting it severely. They've been allowing "terrorists" to have lawyers, etc.
by it's design..
It's design was for fault tolerance in the event of nuclear war. Censorship wasn't something DARPA cared anything about. It happens to be that the innate structure of the Internet, or lack there of, makes it hard to censor effectively. We got lucky on that one.
It's fictional. Fine. We all know it's fictional, and nobody's going to go there and go "oooo look, they're real". Yeah they do seem to be whoring it up a bit, but that's life on the modern Internet I guess.
The tragic thing though is to think about how much detail they have on how those lightsabers would theoretically work. I assume that those concepts all came from Lucas. And I think, maybe if he'd spent a little less time on figuring out how a lightsaber would work, and more time on figuring out how to write dialogue, the first two prequel movies would have been much better.
You're comparing residential cable Internet service to a business class wireless connection. So a few things to keep in mind:
1) Your comcast network has no SLA. If it goes down for a few days, oh well. With this package they are guaranteeing 99.9% uptime (roughly 9 hours downtime in a year)
2) Your comcast network has rules about what kind of things you can do with your network. There are no limitations on this.
3) It's WIRELESS. If you want to get on to the network from anywhere in the coverage area you can do it. If you have multiple sites you can easily share one network rather than having to pay for seperate T-1's to different locations.
You pay a premium for reliability and support. If you compare these prices to those of a T-1, it's really a good deal. Sure you can always get cheaper bandwidth for residential service, and when your company can't do business for a few days because your network went down, too bad. In the grand scheme of things $500/month is not a huge cost on a company's bottom line.
Exactly. In the end, somebody in China who really wants to get to that information can find a way to do it. What makes censorship possible in China though isn't the technology, but the people and policies that exist outside the technology. It's not the firewall that makes things difficult for you, but the guys who come bash your skull in if you try to get around the router.
I was in China about two years ago and there was a big crack down on Internet cafes. So what was happening was that people were routing around the censorship and the government came in to stop it. Without that ability and will to enforce the censorship by those means, it ceases to be.
Could the US, theoretically set up a bunch of firewalls and restrict what we do? Sure. But it wouldn't matter unless working around those firewalls lead to men with guns showing up at my home. Frankly, if our country was at that point, we have a lot bigger things to worry about than what websites I can get to.
The problem is that the concept of VR has run into the physical limitations of hardware. For example, you can play a game where you can look around and hold a gun like device and point it at people. But once you try to walk, duck, roll, etc, you run into the limits of the system quite quickly.
So while we can trick the eyes and the ears, we've still got some senses that are firmly grounded in this reality that keeps it from being totally effective. VR does have some practical applications in the medical and manufcaturing fields, but as it was envisioned for entertainment, it's not quite there.
If we can ever manage to figure out a way to connect a computer to all human sensory input, it won't really get much further. That could mean using some sort of body suit that can fake the sensations of movement, etc, or perhaps a direct interface into the brain.
If they have an established trademark, Apple can't sue them. The timing is probably so they can get a quick settlement out of Apple. Apple isn't going to want their release delayed by the courts. So they'll be inclined to quickly settle and be done with it rather than scuttle their whole product launch.
I won't be buying anything from Tiger in the future, that's for sure.
That "insult" of a salary you refer to is still more than people in other countries are making doing similar work.
I do live how the original post said that more women will have to get into CS. No they won't because the work will just be done overseas or using H1B's.
It's the global economy, have fun!
The user can accidently run things that (s/)he may be ignorant of, and unfortunatly have unforseen side effects.
This brings up a very good point about people who are new to computers. Most of the people that I've seen who have difficulty learning how to use a computer fear them. Actually, not the computer per se, but rather they fear that they are going to break it. If they try doing something they don't fully understand, they are afraid they will cause irreperable harm to the computer.
Strong priveledge seperation makes this a non-issue. As a regular user on linux, I would have a seriously difficult time causing serious harm to the box through anything I might do. I might screw up my data, or the appearance of things, but in the end, I cannot break the OS.
Under Windows, I can do all kinds of bad things. I've heard countless stories of people who are smart about how they use their computer coming home to find that it's useless becuase their kid downloaded a worm. It's one thing when the kid breaks their account, it's another when the whole operating system has to be re-installed from scratch.
When you run under Windows as an administrator, it doesn't actually let you do anything. For example, go into windows and bring up your process listing. Look for an item called SERVICES. Now, try to kill it. You'll get access denied.
Now, if you do some research, you can find that there's a seperate command line tool you can download and find a way to kill that process. So theoretically you do have the ability, but they hide it from you. By the way, if you do kill it, your OS will shut down and reboot.
Now, under Unix, root is almighty. If I run this command:
kill -9 1
I will cause my box to immediately stop dead because I've killed the root process. It doesn't stop to ask me if I really want to do that (dave). It just says, "okay, you're the boss" and does whatever I ask, good or bad.
As a result, the priveledge separation in Unix is much better. There are ways to temporarily become root to handle tasks. No need to log out of the system all together, you can use simple commands to change.
The effect of this is as much a mental thing as a technical thing. If you go through some process, albeit a simple one, to give yourself the almighty power on the box, you conciously made that step. Thus you are aware that you are doing something potentially riskier and are more likely to take caution to get it right. Then when you go back to being a regular user you can feel comfortable that you are protected from breaking the box.
Another thing worth mentioning is that under Unix you can grant limited root access to people. For example, let's say you needed to be able to restart my mail server, for whatever reason. I can grant you the ability to do just that without giving you the keys to the kingdom.
But the beauty of it is that, most of the time, you don't need to do that. A user can install software, and all that stuff, without needing admin access in most cases. The reason why most people run Windows as administrators is that it's hard to do anything without that ability.
You mean the shopping basket that always tells me that most of the updates I want have to be downloaded and installed seperately? :)
We need proper, verifiable identification so that, after a bunch of bad guys come try to kill us, we'll know exactly who to attack. If they turn out to be Saudi Arabians working in conjunction with associates of the Afghan government, we'll know that we need to bomb Iraq...
You see?
If that's the case, then the radiation burst would only be sufficient to harm a portion of the planet. Anybody on the opposite side of the burst would have the entire planet to absorb it. Anybody inside of a relatively solid structure like a city building should also be relatively shieled if it's coming down from above. If you're anywhere else, yeah you might be screwed. But it's not the end of civilization. Very bad, but not game over.
Did anybody look at the headline for this and immediately think that Sun was being run by Dark Helmet?
Say, I'm curious, are you guys scripting this to post a new article every 5 minutes, or did you find some cheap outsourced labor to pound them out in real time?
The april fool's jokes burn!!! The goggles do nothing!!!
No, the real problem is that real wage growth in this country has been stagnant for years except for one minor bump during the 90's boom.
If wages grow at near zero percent, and housing prices grow at 5%/year, and college tuition and medical care grow at even faster rates, then the math fails us at some point.
Initially, two income families provided a leg up. Most people I know that are two income families are that way because it's very difficult to get by on a single income. The lifestyle that one could afford to have on one income, with kids a few decades ago is far beyond what's possible today.
A lot of the families that are working those two jobs are doing it for their kids. They are trying to make sure the kids can go to a good school (either private, or living in a nice neighborhood where the public schools are good). They are trying to pay for their kids college tuition.
Sure, some people choose to work for more selfish materialistic reasons and don't put the time into their children, but I think that's the exception to the rule. I think most families would rather be able to have more time with their kids, but it's not realistically possible.
All these politicians rail on GTA and the like as the bain of our children's existence. That because they go and play these violent and explicit games, they grow up and become mass murderers. This is, BS.
The real problem is when both parents have to work, often times more than one job, just to afford a place to live. This means they have little time to spend with their kids and do crazy things like see what kind of games their kids are playing.
If these politicians want to fix REAL problems, then start working on that one. Oh wait, they don't know how to fix the real problem so they'll make up some fake ones.
They did not say that this student was a criminal or what they were doing was criminal. What they said was that, until P2P networks are ruled to be legal by the courts, they would not allow them on campus. That isn't saying that a P2P network is illegal, or that the student's use of it is illegal. It is simply saying that, barring a court ruling that affirms their legality, they aren't going to permit them at all.
Furthermore, there can be no libel or slander here because this is a private communication between the school and the student. Slander or libel is saying or printing something that is knowingly false about the student for others to see. It's a matter of damaging somebody's reputation. If the school and the student are the only ones privee to the communication, how can their reputation be damaged.
It seems from everything I'm seeing that the PSP and the DS aren't really in the same league with eachother. The DS was taking the notion of a game boy and evolving it slightly. The PSP is taking the notion of a PS2 and making it portable. The PSP ain't cheap, but it's a serious gaming powerhouse where as the DS is merely okay with a few gimmicks tossed in.
I think Sony rightly figured out that if they can get all these folks to drop $200-250 on a console, they could get them to drop that kind of money on a portable if the portable was good enough. A reasonable person could buy a PSP as their game playing device of choice instead of a PS2.
The only things people can comment on his how they can't understand what the author is trying to say.
"his how"... Oh the irony...
Ultimately, the *real* solution to mitigating the problem of taxes' regressive nature against the poor is to cut taxes as much as possible and eliminate as many govn't services as possible, leaving more of the the money in the pockets of private individuals, not politicians...
Our tax rates are much lower than Norway and Sweden but yet the number of children living in poverty there is WAAAY lower. By your logic they should have more children in poverty, non? So what's your explanation? The evidence clearly shows that there is a direct corelation between government transfer of wealth to the poor and decreased rates of poverty. So where does Reganomics stand on this one?
Actually I find that it's changed my perspective on the value of software. That is, I'm willing to pay for software, but I need to be convinced that it's worth paying for.
For example, I bought a real copy of Trillian when it first came out for Windows because I thought it was good software worth buying. If I was doing photo editing on a professional basis, I'd probably pay out the money for Photoshop rather than using Gimp. Gimp is sufficient for my needs though.
Well alright then, get right on that.
The problem is that a vast amount of legislation is incorporated into our tax code. You know how ever time the Republicans want to offer something as a tax credit rather than as a new pay out? That's just another few gallons of quagmire for our tax code.
Let's say that tomorrow we had a flat tax. What would happen to:
* Deductions for children
* Deductions for interest on home loans
* Deductions for business expenses
There are thousands of little deductions that have been put in there over time for purely political reasons. Tossing it out would have some pretty harsh ramifications. The effective price of homes and hybrid cars would go up. The effective price of having children would go up.
A flat tax is a simple solution to a complex problem which means, in the end, it doesn't really work.