The shuttle's estimated annual cost is 2.98 billion according to nasa (for the year 2000). 1999 total budget outlays were 1.7 Trillion dollars according to government records. So in reality the shuttle program is roughly 1/10th of 1 percent of the entire federal budget. Now if you took the total budget of NASA for 2001 it comes to approximately 14 billion according to NASA.
If you take that number the budget is still a mere 4/5ths of 1 percent of the overall budget.
It's merely a drop in the bucket in the grand schem of things, and frankly we've gained a lot from having it. We've gained amazing advances in materials science, aeronautics, and life sciences. Also, where would be without Tang?!? So if you're gonna try to save money, how about finding something truely useless to cut.
Yeah I worked for a company that was doing template based HTML publishing starting back in 1995 or 1996. 1998? Wow, IBM might have the edge in failing hard disk drives, but maybe they should stop bothering with software patents:)
As a matter of fact my IBM Deskstar 75 GXP started making strange noises last week. I was able to fix it temporarily by using the win2k disk tools, but it came back yesterday. I download their diagnostic software and sure enough it came up as deffective. Fortunately my system is still very much under warranty and I have RMA# in hand.
That never happens to me. I get a call from a telemarketer, when I notice the slight pause before the person picks up, I hang up right away. I've never had them calling back with any more noticeable frequency.
How about just hanging up on every person who calls you? If it's important they'll call you back, even if they are a bit confused. Telemarketers never call back.
I'm definitely not a llama, but I was disclaiming being a lama, which are two very different things. But anyhow, to clarify my comments: I WAS BEING SARCASTIC:)
Have you ever used Emusic? You pay like $10/month and you get access to everything in their catalog. It's all MP3 so I could certainly distribute it all over creation, but why would I? If somebody else wants to hear the music they can get their own subscription. It's very easy for me to share a few songs with friends which gets them interested in the bands and gets them signing up for the service.
A thing I've noticed in my personal use of Emusic is that I've discovered music by a lot of obscure bands I never heard of that I like. I mean since I'm paying for it anyhow it's worth it to me to download a whole album by some band I've never heard of. I can just delete it when I don't want it. Why go buy the new album from some big name band for $15+ when I can download music for free?
Trying to impose pay-per-use technology on music is just going to turn people off to it. If you want proof of people's reaction to this, just look at DivX. People like to own things, and they hate having to deal with complex rights mangement architectures. The only way you could find a DRM that would be really appealing to people would be one that's transparent, but by it's nature it can't be transparent because it has to stop me from doing something forbidden by the publisher.
If The big RIAA labels opened up their collections to me and charged me like $15-20/month to download all I want, I'd be all over that. But if they had some goofy DRM technology on the music, I wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot pole.
Remember that Al Capone was put away for tax evasion, not murder, extortion, or any of a hundred other crime that he was responsible for directly or indirectly. If you make sure that it's very easy to become a criminal, then you can more easily pick them up, keep them off the street, and make sure they don't do anything bad.
I mean who of us doesn't break the occasional law? Maybe it's just speeding or making a copy of a friend's software or downloading an MP3 from Morpheus. They'd be happy to have an endless intermeshing of complex and confusing laws so that they can detain anybody before they become a "real threat".
What if tomorrow they outlawed uncertified, non-backdoored encryption standards. Then all of the terrorists who give two shits about our laws will still break them, but all of a sudden they can be arrested for these more minor infractions. This gives law enforcement a means to detain and prosecute them even if it isn't for the murder of thousands of people.
Sure, they'd also find all of these other people violating that law because we don't care to have the government being able to see everything at a moment's notice. But hey, what's the sacrifice of a couple crypto dissidents going to prison if we can make everybody safe.
Is the low price these days due to more efficient manufacturing or market saturation? If it's an efficiency thing then it might make sense to put the effort into doing solid state drives now. But if this a transient glut in the market, then by the time you have something that will do the job, memory may be prohibitively expensive.
Personally I'm thinking just packing my system full of memory would be the best solution. As others have mentioned, an OS with good disk caching built in can be as good if not better than a RAM disk. It might be useful to have some way to expand memory through a PCI slot but it seems like, for now, solid state storage just isn't worth it.
What did the soviets try to do as far as establishing a government in Afghanistan? Was it a puppet government or did they try to use existing sentiment to create a more friendly government? I don't know all the details here so I am curious, but that might be a difference that could effect our success.
As far as taking over the hills, the US doesn't seem to have an interest in occupying the country. So if they only took the cities, helped form a new government, and then helped said new government get the rest of the country under control, we might avoid that problem.
One other comment, I think that while the Amercian public has grown to see war as a realistic video game with minimal casualties, their has been an effort to make it clear that this isn't the way this one is going to work. It will be very interesting to see how public sentiment will play out when bodies start piling up, but I think the people in charge have a firm grasp of the limits of technology in this war. Certainly it can provide an edge, but, as history has shown, remote bombing campaigns don't win wars. I think they know this from previous experience in Iraq, Kosovo, and the poorly thought out cruise missile attack on Afghanistan.
First of all I think that many of our soldiers are willing to die for our country. Those who might not have been a couple months ago are probably more likely to be willing to make that sacrifice given thousands dead in New York. Now, is it quite the level of sacrifice one might see from a religious zealot? Probably not, but is that a bad thing?
Self-sacrifice is all well and good, but if it isn't done it a well thought out manner it can be counterproductive. A dead guy with a weapon isn't of much use to you, so if he makes that sacrifice it had better be for a good reason. Zealotry can cloud ones judgement where as somebody genuninely afraid for his life will think twice about the sacrifices (and perhaps in the end provide strategic advantage in that).
One other thing to consider, I don't think all the Taliban are quite the religious zealots that we might otherwise think. Surely some of them are, and a large number of them are probably in the firm belief that they are right, but not everybody is the kind of person who can commit suicide for the cause. Only time will tell but I suspect that a large amount of resistance will cease to be if it's clear to the people of Afghanistan that we want them to be better off in the long run. People with food on their plates, and a roof over their head are much less prone to zealotry and if we help them get there, their loyalties aren't going to be to the Taliban.
One thing that seems to get glazed over an awful lot is that during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the rebel groups were being backed by the United States and others. In this war they are completely cut off from outside assistance. Nobody is dumb enough to do something like that right now and risk us making them an enemy.
Another thing to note is that the Soviets had very different goals when they went into Afghanistan. They wanted to take over the country. The US is interested in eliminating a threat, which means taking out terrorists and those who sponsored them. We want to get in and get out as fast as possible, and ideally want some other group to come to power in afghanistan who doesn't hate us quite so much. We are trying to play various internal afghanistan factions against eachother, and making a point of not being a common enemy for them to unite against.
To analyze this war against the backdrop of Soviet Afghanistan or Vietnam seems to belittle the truely different nature of this conflict. This doesn't mean it will be easy, and certainly with some policy mistakes we could turn it into such a conflict. But the goals here and the enviornment under which we are attempting to achieve them is very different from these historical precedents.
Okay so the government and the general population has been very concerned about the possibility of biological or chemical attacks in the near future. Then suddenly, at a REALLY convenient time, they managed to unlock the genetic code of Bubonic Plauge. A couple possibile conspiracies come out of this:
1) They have announced this discovery as a means of alleviating some concern in the public over bio-warfare. See, we can beat bio-terrorism, don't worry, go out and keep buying things.
2) They have announced this discovery as a means of disrupting already in the works terrorist plans. Oh damn, our neat little apocalyptic bio-weapon may be completely useless. Time to go back to blowing up buildings I guess.
One would probably be the more likely of these two choices given that the time to develop something useful from the reverse-engineered genetic material would be quite a long time.
Why on god's earth do I want to watch a movie on my cellphone? Convergence, as with all things, is best in moderation. The irony of this is that we'll have people watching movies on cellphones and talking on cellphones in movies. Then after the movie is over they'll get in their car and watch TV and talk on their phone WHILE they are driving.
Theory: it was recently demonstrated that multi-tasking causes the human brain to be less efficicent. An increasing tendancy to do more than one thing at a time will lead to an overall reduction in the productivity of humanity. Because the time we spend will be less productive we will have to spend more time partially working in order for us to achieve the same output. This will lead to more multi-tasking. Wash, Rinse, Repeat...
Divx didn't fail because DVD enthusiasts made it look bad, it failed because ultimately consumers didn't want to watch movies in the way that the Divx backers had envisioned. The miscalculation was that consumers would be okay with the notion of something they buy but don't actually own. This concept was confusing, complex, privacy invading, and pointless.
The reason I make this point is that I think this is an inappropriate comparison to what we are looking at with this new potential law. Here we see the possibility of a choice being made for consumers by politicians and their lobbyist backers. Trying to explain this stuff to the average consumer is difficult because it is somewhat abstract. They will say that the media producers have the right to make money from what is rightfully theirs and it's okay for the government to support that with legislation. When they have no choice but to pay per view, they'll go with the only choice they have and likely not think twice about it. Perhaps I'm just too ravingly cynical but I don't think an appeal to the people is going to be terribly effective here.
If he cut and past the code into there he had to know that the licenses are completely incompatbile if he did include the copyright. He didn't include the copyright and hoped nobody would notice.
The only right way to solve this is have somebody re-do that part of the kernel or work with the original developer to ask him to license that code to the Linux Kernel effort as GPL. Hell he might have been willing to do that if somebody hadn't gone out and stolen it outright.
Yes, Apache is based of the NCSA webserver and was derived primarily from a base of patches to that original server. It's name was derived from the original incarnation being referred to as a "patchy webserver". Or so the lore goes:).
So it's quite possible that IIS is based in some part on the original NCSA server but not certain.
Remember, Apache is released under a BSD style license. Therefor it would require little effort for them to re-write IIS since they could just use the code base from apache:)
Why do you think it's harder to create a *nix worm? I mean the basic principles of worm propagation work under any platform if there are any security holes. Certainly *nix does occasionally suffer from security vulnerabilites, if perhaps less than Windows. Look at the ramen worm that was going around recently. I STILL get scans on my box for that vulnerability. Certainly the scale is less dramatic because of the fewer *nix systems out there, but it's not like writing a worm for unix is somehow more difficult than for windows.
The biggest problem with this is what happens to thsoe backdoor keys the government has. I mean first of all, how can we be assured that they can only use the keys with a court order? Furthermore, even if there's a way to assure that, is there any ruling that indicates that's even a requirement. I mean it seems that the fourth amendment might prevent unauthorized access but until a court rules it's hard to say. They could pass a law giving back doors and then alter say that they can access them without court supervision (and the court may or may not support that)
The other problem is that if the government does start accessing things without a court order, how would you know? You could probably develop a crypto system that would leave obvious evidence if it has been accessed through a backdoor, but the government wouldn't want that because it might interfere with an investigation.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, under my current set up I pay:
$89/month for 1.5/384 DSL
$30/month or so for phone service
$5-10/month for long distance service
So for $100/month I could get:
8Mb/1Mb data
local calling
500 minutes long distance included (and rest being at like 7-10 cents/minute)
For a power user it was definitely a deal because you get more bandwidth and a consolidated bill.
5% of the federal budget????
The shuttle's estimated annual cost is 2.98 billion according to nasa (for the year 2000). 1999 total budget outlays were 1.7 Trillion dollars according to government records. So in reality the shuttle program is roughly 1/10th of 1 percent of the entire federal budget. Now if you took the total budget of NASA for 2001 it comes to approximately 14 billion according to NASA.
If you take that number the budget is still a mere 4/5ths of 1 percent of the overall budget.
It's merely a drop in the bucket in the grand schem of things, and frankly we've gained a lot from having it. We've gained amazing advances in materials science, aeronautics, and life sciences. Also, where would be without Tang?!? So if you're gonna try to save money, how about finding something truely useless to cut.
Why is Microsoft interfering with my right to innovate in the realm of e-mail?
Yeah I worked for a company that was doing template based HTML publishing starting back in 1995 or 1996. 1998? Wow, IBM might have the edge in failing hard disk drives, but maybe they should stop bothering with software patents :)
doh...
:)
I meant:
ipchains -A input -s [RIAA ADDRESS] -j DENY
unfortunately I put the RIAA ADDRESS inside the wrong kind of brackets. duh
ipchains -A input -s -j DENY
As a matter of fact my IBM Deskstar 75 GXP started making strange noises last week. I was able to fix it temporarily by using the win2k disk tools, but it came back yesterday. I download their diagnostic software and sure enough it came up as deffective. Fortunately my system is still very much under warranty and I have RMA# in hand.
That never happens to me. I get a call from a telemarketer, when I notice the slight pause before the person picks up, I hang up right away. I've never had them calling back with any more noticeable frequency.
How about just hanging up on every person who calls you? If it's important they'll call you back, even if they are a bit confused. Telemarketers never call back.
Advantages:
1) FREE
2) Causes confusion (always a plus)
I'm definitely not a llama, but I was disclaiming being a lama, which are two very different things. But anyhow, to clarify my comments: I WAS BEING SARCASTIC :)
I wasn't aware of that. So how does one become a record label? I mean conceivably couldn't you sign yourself? :)
Have you ever used Emusic? You pay like $10/month and you get access to everything in their catalog. It's all MP3 so I could certainly distribute it all over creation, but why would I? If somebody else wants to hear the music they can get their own subscription. It's very easy for me to share a few songs with friends which gets them interested in the bands and gets them signing up for the service.
A thing I've noticed in my personal use of Emusic is that I've discovered music by a lot of obscure bands I never heard of that I like. I mean since I'm paying for it anyhow it's worth it to me to download a whole album by some band I've never heard of. I can just delete it when I don't want it. Why go buy the new album from some big name band for $15+ when I can download music for free?
Trying to impose pay-per-use technology on music is just going to turn people off to it. If you want proof of people's reaction to this, just look at DivX. People like to own things, and they hate having to deal with complex rights mangement architectures. The only way you could find a DRM that would be really appealing to people would be one that's transparent, but by it's nature it can't be transparent because it has to stop me from doing something forbidden by the publisher.
If The big RIAA labels opened up their collections to me and charged me like $15-20/month to download all I want, I'd be all over that. But if they had some goofy DRM technology on the music, I wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot pole.
Remember that Al Capone was put away for tax evasion, not murder, extortion, or any of a hundred other crime that he was responsible for directly or indirectly. If you make sure that it's very easy to become a criminal, then you can more easily pick them up, keep them off the street, and make sure they don't do anything bad.
I mean who of us doesn't break the occasional law? Maybe it's just speeding or making a copy of a friend's software or downloading an MP3 from Morpheus. They'd be happy to have an endless intermeshing of complex and confusing laws so that they can detain anybody before they become a "real threat".
What if tomorrow they outlawed uncertified, non-backdoored encryption standards. Then all of the terrorists who give two shits about our laws will still break them, but all of a sudden they can be arrested for these more minor infractions. This gives law enforcement a means to detain and prosecute them even if it isn't for the murder of thousands of people.
Sure, they'd also find all of these other people violating that law because we don't care to have the government being able to see everything at a moment's notice. But hey, what's the sacrifice of a couple crypto dissidents going to prison if we can make everybody safe.
*sigh*
Is the low price these days due to more efficient manufacturing or market saturation? If it's an efficiency thing then it might make sense to put the effort into doing solid state drives now. But if this a transient glut in the market, then by the time you have something that will do the job, memory may be prohibitively expensive.
Personally I'm thinking just packing my system full of memory would be the best solution. As others have mentioned, an OS with good disk caching built in can be as good if not better than a RAM disk. It might be useful to have some way to expand memory through a PCI slot but it seems like, for now, solid state storage just isn't worth it.
What did the soviets try to do as far as establishing a government in Afghanistan? Was it a puppet government or did they try to use existing sentiment to create a more friendly government? I don't know all the details here so I am curious, but that might be a difference that could effect our success.
As far as taking over the hills, the US doesn't seem to have an interest in occupying the country. So if they only took the cities, helped form a new government, and then helped said new government get the rest of the country under control, we might avoid that problem.
One other comment, I think that while the Amercian public has grown to see war as a realistic video game with minimal casualties, their has been an effort to make it clear that this isn't the way this one is going to work. It will be very interesting to see how public sentiment will play out when bodies start piling up, but I think the people in charge have a firm grasp of the limits of technology in this war. Certainly it can provide an edge, but, as history has shown, remote bombing campaigns don't win wars. I think they know this from previous experience in Iraq, Kosovo, and the poorly thought out cruise missile attack on Afghanistan.
First of all I think that many of our soldiers are willing to die for our country. Those who might not have been a couple months ago are probably more likely to be willing to make that sacrifice given thousands dead in New York. Now, is it quite the level of sacrifice one might see from a religious zealot? Probably not, but is that a bad thing?
Self-sacrifice is all well and good, but if it isn't done it a well thought out manner it can be counterproductive. A dead guy with a weapon isn't of much use to you, so if he makes that sacrifice it had better be for a good reason. Zealotry can cloud ones judgement where as somebody genuninely afraid for his life will think twice about the sacrifices (and perhaps in the end provide strategic advantage in that).
One other thing to consider, I don't think all the Taliban are quite the religious zealots that we might otherwise think. Surely some of them are, and a large number of them are probably in the firm belief that they are right, but not everybody is the kind of person who can commit suicide for the cause. Only time will tell but I suspect that a large amount of resistance will cease to be if it's clear to the people of Afghanistan that we want them to be better off in the long run. People with food on their plates, and a roof over their head are much less prone to zealotry and if we help them get there, their loyalties aren't going to be to the Taliban.
One thing that seems to get glazed over an awful lot is that during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the rebel groups were being backed by the United States and others. In this war they are completely cut off from outside assistance. Nobody is dumb enough to do something like that right now and risk us making them an enemy.
Another thing to note is that the Soviets had very different goals when they went into Afghanistan. They wanted to take over the country. The US is interested in eliminating a threat, which means taking out terrorists and those who sponsored them. We want to get in and get out as fast as possible, and ideally want some other group to come to power in afghanistan who doesn't hate us quite so much. We are trying to play various internal afghanistan factions against eachother, and making a point of not being a common enemy for them to unite against.
To analyze this war against the backdrop of Soviet Afghanistan or Vietnam seems to belittle the truely different nature of this conflict. This doesn't mean it will be easy, and certainly with some policy mistakes we could turn it into such a conflict. But the goals here and the enviornment under which we are attempting to achieve them is very different from these historical precedents.
Okay so the government and the general population has been very concerned about the possibility of biological or chemical attacks in the near future. Then suddenly, at a REALLY convenient time, they managed to unlock the genetic code of Bubonic Plauge. A couple possibile conspiracies come out of this:
1) They have announced this discovery as a means of alleviating some concern in the public over bio-warfare. See, we can beat bio-terrorism, don't worry, go out and keep buying things.
2) They have announced this discovery as a means of disrupting already in the works terrorist plans. Oh damn, our neat little apocalyptic bio-weapon may be completely useless. Time to go back to blowing up buildings I guess.
One would probably be the more likely of these two choices given that the time to develop something useful from the reverse-engineered genetic material would be quite a long time.
Why on god's earth do I want to watch a movie on my cellphone? Convergence, as with all things, is best in moderation. The irony of this is that we'll have people watching movies on cellphones and talking on cellphones in movies. Then after the movie is over they'll get in their car and watch TV and talk on their phone WHILE they are driving.
Theory: it was recently demonstrated that multi-tasking causes the human brain to be less efficicent. An increasing tendancy to do more than one thing at a time will lead to an overall reduction in the productivity of humanity. Because the time we spend will be less productive we will have to spend more time partially working in order for us to achieve the same output. This will lead to more multi-tasking. Wash, Rinse, Repeat...
Divx didn't fail because DVD enthusiasts made it look bad, it failed because ultimately consumers didn't want to watch movies in the way that the Divx backers had envisioned. The miscalculation was that consumers would be okay with the notion of something they buy but don't actually own. This concept was confusing, complex, privacy invading, and pointless.
The reason I make this point is that I think this is an inappropriate comparison to what we are looking at with this new potential law. Here we see the possibility of a choice being made for consumers by politicians and their lobbyist backers. Trying to explain this stuff to the average consumer is difficult because it is somewhat abstract. They will say that the media producers have the right to make money from what is rightfully theirs and it's okay for the government to support that with legislation. When they have no choice but to pay per view, they'll go with the only choice they have and likely not think twice about it. Perhaps I'm just too ravingly cynical but I don't think an appeal to the people is going to be terribly effective here.
If he cut and past the code into there he had to know that the licenses are completely incompatbile if he did include the copyright. He didn't include the copyright and hoped nobody would notice.
The only right way to solve this is have somebody re-do that part of the kernel or work with the original developer to ask him to license that code to the Linux Kernel effort as GPL. Hell he might have been willing to do that if somebody hadn't gone out and stolen it outright.
Yes, Apache is based of the NCSA webserver and was derived primarily from a base of patches to that original server. It's name was derived from the original incarnation being referred to as a "patchy webserver". Or so the lore goes :).
So it's quite possible that IIS is based in some part on the original NCSA server but not certain.
Remember, Apache is released under a BSD style license. Therefor it would require little effort for them to re-write IIS since they could just use the code base from apache :)
Why do you think it's harder to create a *nix worm? I mean the basic principles of worm propagation work under any platform if there are any security holes. Certainly *nix does occasionally suffer from security vulnerabilites, if perhaps less than Windows. Look at the ramen worm that was going around recently. I STILL get scans on my box for that vulnerability. Certainly the scale is less dramatic because of the fewer *nix systems out there, but it's not like writing a worm for unix is somehow more difficult than for windows.
The biggest problem with this is what happens to thsoe backdoor keys the government has. I mean first of all, how can we be assured that they can only use the keys with a court order? Furthermore, even if there's a way to assure that, is there any ruling that indicates that's even a requirement. I mean it seems that the fourth amendment might prevent unauthorized access but until a court rules it's hard to say. They could pass a law giving back doors and then alter say that they can access them without court supervision (and the court may or may not support that)
The other problem is that if the government does start accessing things without a court order, how would you know? You could probably develop a crypto system that would leave obvious evidence if it has been accessed through a backdoor, but the government wouldn't want that because it might interfere with an investigation.