Ok, management was replaced. Fine. Probably needed. But that doesn't tell me if the pipes were fixed or how the new management proposes to not have that kind of issue in the future. Nor does it tell me if the new management is proposing any kind of additional cleanup that may be needed in those protected lands (doesn't matter that it was a while back - Bhopal still suffers from uncleaned pollution and Florida has a gigantic oil sludge that will haunt it for a long time no matter how much it's officially declared gone).
In short, yeah, new sources of Rare Earths are great but the Earth is also fairly high on the Rare list and I'd rather not need a new source.
AFAICT, the peace process is the least of the issues involved here. UNESCO handles world heritage sites - y'know, like Pompeii which suffered two major collapses in the last week or so due to incompetent maintenance and a lack of funds. The money the Palestinians want is, according to them, going to go to a 5th century church (which is properly World Heritage) that is suffering from horrific maintenance issues and may well collapse without proper backing.
From the NERD perspective, 30% loss of money = 30% loss of World Heritage. That's a damn lot of history that had been, well, damned.
What happens between Israel and the Palestinians is, in historical terms and geographical terms, insignificant. Even if you consider the entire history of the entire region plus the rest of the Fertile Crescent, it is a pathetic 3,500 years and a trivial geographical space. It's NOTHING. The US' action has put into danger historical sites that are 70,000 years old - 20 TIMES as old as the entire recorded history for the Middle East - across an entire planet!
If you want to talk peace processes, then the Irish "Troubles" are recorded as having spanned 5,000 years and involved much of Europe and the US - twice the time the Middle East has even had issues and again many times the area. That was NOT solved by defunding the UN but WAS solved by all parties accepting that peaceful settlements were the way to go. The Basque issue, a mere 30 times older than modern Israel though younger than there have been conflicts in the region, was ALSO recently solved by an increase in mutual understanding and mutual efforts to end the futility cycle. Do you seriously think that either would have be settled today if there had been a blockade on assistance or tolerance of any kind? ESPECIALLY if that blockade had been on people completely unrelated to the parties involved?
(Would the IRA really have stopped shooting if Britain had decided to bomb the Colosseum in Rome in retaliation for the US sending a senator to Ireland? No? That's the practical upshot of what is taking place, so if the logic of such a move is inherently flawed then substituting in the current participants won't make the logic any better.)
Look, I fully understand Israel's insecurity and fears, and I respect that it has those for good reason, but nowhere in the history of humanity has anyone solved such issues by taking revenge on innocent third parties. I can't even recall any time in the history of humanity where anyone has solved such issued by taking revenge on those actually involved. If you want peace, you are going to have to do something that works. The definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing, expecting different results. Insanity won't help Israel be safer.
There's a full logging filesystem for Linux these days and there are countless patches for all the attribute and access schemes out there (plus the ones already in Linux, including those via the LSM), so it's just possible Microsoft is trying to catch up with Linux as well as Solaris.
This is one of those times where we are actually ahead of the game, not just in Linux but in many other F/L/OSS OS'. It would be good if we can actually STAY ahead of the curve rather than be overtaken.
The nature of files was also revisited in Plan 9/Inferno, and has been occasionally re-examined in countless other OS'. This isn't to contradict what you said, but rather to reinforce the point that Microsoft is very late in the game.
In those cases, yes it would be. It would be more of an addiction than a bridge, since everything else is being used that way and the pattern is set. In those cases, I haven't the foggiest what you could do other than, as you suggested, follow the Prime Directive. It seems... wrong to create a mess and not clean it up, but it's worse to create a mess and then compound it.
If you'd be interested in discussing this further, feel free to e-mail me as I've a feeling this thread'll drop off Slashdot sooner rather than later. I've been intrigued by this sort of question for some time - for example, could you use the internationalization of software to make rare/endangered languages in mainstream cultures (ie: those already Westernized, Internetted, etc) more relevant through actually being usable on a day-to-day basis? (Of the EU nations, France is perhaps the worst offender at failing to recognize other languages unique within its borders and purposely restricting or even prohibiting their use. The UK has improved and now protects some minority languages but is still endangering a good many others.)
If, and only if, this would actually be a useful approach, then I'm minded to actually start a small project along those lines. I've thought about it for a long time, but I've never been sure enough as to its value to put aside the time it would take. If it would hurt rather than help, I'd help more by surfing the web and doing nothing.
In Africa, where the phrase "beating tractors into ploughshares" became the common way to describe "aid" there, I don't believe it's quite as bad as, say, Australia or Hawaii, in terms of the sheer magnitude of self-destruction that has arisen as a result of externally-imposed destruction. But it's most unclear if even there a bridging approach along the lines I described would work.
I think we're roughly in agreement on the majority of points. Non-interference is really the only serious quibbling point. I'd argue that we've interfered so much that many cultures are in serious danger of being totally destabilized. Merely leaving them alone won't be enough, but assimilation is even worse. There has to be some third option. Since most such cultures rely on the transmission of cultural knowledge and it is this transmission which is the most endangered by missionaries, industries and governments, it seems logical that providing a simulation of that same transmission would be stabilizing. Although I freely admit that I could be wrong. I'm not an anthropologist, I don't play one on TV and am assuming that such a fix would provide a foundation on which the society could work rather than be a drug that provided merely a hallucination of stability.
An example of lossage would be the Bo people, whose language and culture were largely exterminated by the national government and was then almost completely obliterated by the tsunami. It actually has now died out completely. The last surviving member with any knowledge of either language or culture has since died, with no attempt being made to preserve the heritage so that those descended from the Bo could choose to de-assimilate now or at a future time. That choice has now been permanently removed.
The two counter-examples I'm using are a bit of a cheat, I admit, since they're not as radically different as the Bo or an Amazonian tribe are from western society. They're the Manx and Cornish. Both had their traditional languages and cultures literally beaten and shamed out of them to the point of extinction, but both have made superb efforts and have recovered virtually everything because they both made sterling efforts around the time of extinction to preserve everything they could. Although a cheat, I would say these demonstrate that recovery is possible even at the threshold of extinction and even when that threshold has to be crossed for a while. Extinction need not be permanent, provided there's enough there that it doesn't matter if you're learning from a person or a tape.
And that is the key question. IS it ever possible to provide enough that it doesn't matter who/what you are learning from, in the general case? Obviously it is in specific cases, but if it is not in the general case then this strategy is a failure and bridging the gaps won't be possible. (And, yes, every gap would have to be bridged in its entirety to be able to synthetically revive an actual society and not merely RenFair it, so by "general case" I don't just mean every culture but also every aspect of every culture.)
Let's see - books don't survive well in the majority of climates on Earth. Where you've a nomadic or semi-nomadic people (the Irish Travelers would be included), books are simply too heavy to travel at all. A computer is thus a mini library, which makes it a bloody valuable tool.
Television in Africa is unlikely to have extensive coverage and is very unlikely to include core educational material as it is a profit-seeking sector for the most part and Open University-type work is not exactly profitable. A computer is thus a mini film archive, which makes it even more valuable.
The "general population" in the UK and US may not have made much use of computers before the Internet, but let's face it - they had both physical libraries and physical film archives. Why bother with virtual systems when you've the real thing? Further, computers back then weren't exactly powerful. 64K of RAM won't store many episodes of "Life on Earth", although it could probably store the entire informational content of the complete Mork and Mindy. In short, there were alternatives AND they were better.
In remote communities anywhere in the world, there are no alternatives and even if there were, they wouldn't work.
But this isn't a one-way street. 98% of history has been lost to us - languages, cultures, philosophies, literature, etc - because those who were interested had no means of recording the stuff. Of the societies that exist today, globally, the overwhelming majority are critically endangered. Even something as humble as children's diaries, collections of recipes and other "mundane" stuff, recorded in a medium that allows mass duplication on a trans-continental level, would help preservation efforts that were functional rather than destructive, would help prevent the mindless and savage destruction of other peoples way of life, and would allow far better understanding by average Joes that their average isn't everyone else's. And I've not even started on the scientific potential of having an actual database of records rather than mere lists of names of societies.
If it's everything, then it's also infinitely recursive as it has to include the fact that the publishing of the information is also information, which in turn is published.
The original OLPC sported a clockwork generator, as do emergency radios. If this prototype doesn't have that facility, then (a) it should, and (b) it's the fault of people who pestered OLPC to ditch the generator for mains power.
Agreed and whilst I can churn the numbers to show what a hypothetically competent system would cost, nobody can conjure up motivated staff or interested students. Those are either there or they aren't.
I'll agree that money is only half the equation. It needs to be wisely spent, or it's just a number. I'll also agree that you can't buy competence but you CAN buy incompetence, which is why there's a problem in areas where money actually does exist.
Having said that, let's take a look at the numbers. A top university will have somewhere between an 8:1 to 10:1 student:tutor ratio. That's about right, on a per-subject basis. However, 172 million students implies that you need a minimum of 17.2 million highly skilled instructors in EACH subject that is taught. Assuming 10 subjects, that implies 172 million teachers/lecturers. That's a lot of competent people. Assuming the Byzantine General's Problem applies to office politics, you need a minimum of 50% + 1 to not only be competent but also devoid of corruption. Good luck. Remember, the national population of the US is 360 million and we're already at 344 million of those. If "above average" isn't considered good enough, you're not going to find enough that are good enough.
Obviously that's not going to work too well, if only because you've now got nobody left to do anything else. (It's one reason I think you actually WANT a country to specialize in just education. It's too labour-intensive if it's going to be done right. Remember, to stay current a teacher has also to be doing research and reading literature, which is time-intensive. It's going to damage just how much staff optimization you can do if the staff is going to remain skilled and relevant.)
If you can't maximize education, you're left with optimizing it only as far as you practically can. That part can't be done arithmetically and it's beyond my ability to suggest where you'd even start. All I can say is that it'll involve de-standardizing and doing a lot of custom optimization on a per-class basis, just as compilation is best done in a mix-and-match style.
Ah yes. I can just see the US assigning full sovereign authority to the UN, which is what tearing down all the borders would ultimately imply. One world government, a new world order and all that. Half the country would be in flames and the other half would claim it should be entitled to be.
I don't dispute that borders are a problem, I certainly don't dispute that insular pockets take themselves far too seriously, but that's never going to work as a solution. Even if you didn't take it to the logical limits (Europe eliminated certain borders but not others, causing as many problems as it prevented), you're going to have all kinds of groups screaming blue murder over whatever borders you scrap claiming that you're usurping their rights and other groups whose borders aren't scrapped screaming blue murder claiming that they're being constrained unfairly. The only thing that's certain is that nobody will like it.
Getting back to the issue of SSL, border controls would be the only way that you could impose any kind of enforceable standards. In a global economy, the company doesn't need to care where its HQ is so it can always pick the area with the standards that make it the most money. The only way to circumvent offshoring is to say that companies that want to do business in your area have to meet your minimum standards no matter where they are. However, jurisdiction limits how you can do this.
So what happens if you have a voluntary system? Well, you get the current mess and no reporting of compromised root keys, which is definitely worse than what we have right now. (It's easy to say you have choice, but you can't exactly choose to buy books at Borders any more, Paypal is still about the only generic solution to eCommerce payments and I don't see a whole lot of book retailers that offer their own Kindle or Nook versions of their merchandise. In short, lock-in has become the norm and whilst it's the norm "choice" is nothing more than a prettily-painted illusion.)
But won't people steer clear of defective stuff? Well, Citibank didn't declare bankruptcy after it was revealed that you only needed to log into your own account in order to be able to have total access to absolutely everybody else's. Veterans still sign up to the VA, despite those laptop losses. Windows still exists, despite the notoriously fragile security. So, no. People knowingly buy lemons because defects only happen to other people.
The free market? Only works if you assume rational customers. See point above. Customers aren't rational. I'm not even sure I'd rate them as highly as irrational. The free market is correct as a starting point, but you need to add something to ensure integrity as nobody else is going to.
Apparently, it is "overrated" to point out that Knowledge Chartists were the founders of the Trade Union movement under the name "Mutual Improvement Societies" where they collectively founded libraries, schools for the children of employees, health insurance systems and worker advocacy groups. Yeesh!
As I mentioned in my prior post, you wouldn't look at The Democratic People's Republic of Korea to understand democracy, yet Americans in particular will point happily to Mafia-run "unions in name only" groups and claim that this is what unionism is. Even the Tea Party, as hopelessly ignorant as they are on most issues, has figured out that "in name only" means bugger all. If it ain't a Mutual Improvement Society, it AIN'T a union, whatever damn name they care to give it.
Unions were invented by the staff and students of Cambridge University. If you believe they have a lower intelligence and a lesser ability to critically think than the average, then you're on the wrong damn planet.
You are entirely correct - rot is never confined to the "bad apples" that you spot - and the spreadsheet only shows the "bad apples" that actually sent messages saying that they were bad. It says nothing about CAs who simply revoked individual certificates that they know were unauthorized when it was a master key that was compromised. And you know that's bound to have happened. The disparity between bogus certs and compromised CAs was too great. Even there, you know that not all bogus certs get revoked, so even those numbers (which are way too large) are underestimates. That means that name-and-shame will simply create false confidence in unknowing victims and will create a greater atmosphere of concealment amongst CAs.
(Every instance of name-and-shame that we know of has produced that result. Except for such programs involving red light districts, where it's been used as free advertising by the streetwalkers.)
This is something that has deteriorated over time. I won't say the original cert system was perfect (there were flaws you could drive a 40 tonne truck through) but Grade I certification required significant documentation proving identity plus some form of actual (ie: non-written) contact. That was not a bad idea, the problem was they also offered Grade III certification (a note saying "it woz me" on a napkin) or even grade IV (the request sufficed as proof it woz you) and corporations naturally gravitated towards the cheaper options which you can fly an Airbus 400 through with enough space for 40 tonne trucks on either side.
The problem was that you still had to trust the CA and this is a major frailty in the CA system. Being assured that the applicant is who they say they are is a major thing - Verisign issued hackers with a signed Microsoft key at one point, because they were asked to in a fax, and DNS registrars are notorious for complying with bogus transfer requests - but it isn't everything. If the CA is compromised, then you have major problems even if all the officially distributed keys are legit.
Obviously, a Grade I cert system helps to some extent as requiring a thorough screening of applications means you aren't doing live cert distribution which in turn means the master key need not be on any online computer whatsoever. If the master key is behind a sneakernetwall, then hackers will have a harder time signing anything with it. (A sneakernetwall differs from an airwall in the level of competence of those moving stuff from one machine to another.) Obviously, given that eCommerce security holes repeatedly demonstrate corporations can't even put sensitive data behind a meager firewall and the VA is forever losing unencrypted laptops, there's a big difference between "need not" and "is not".
A way to side-step the issue - to a degree only - would be to require that keys be counter-signed by at least one other CA. It is less likely that two CAs have been cracked by the same person, after all. Or, well, it would be if it weren't for the fact that it probably WAS the same person who broke into all four CAs and there's been an alleged confession that the person did break into two. That person would have been able to counter-sign a key with another CA's master key and since these were the cheapo kind of CAs that probably would indeed keep the master key on an online computer even if they needn't or legally shouldn't, a "Web of CA Trust" is not enough to be 0.45 bullet-proof but is probably 0.22 bullet-proof. The current system apparently falls over if you show it a picture of a bullet.
IPv6 may help, since violations of strict hierarchical addressing are not only commonplace in IPv4 but actually a necessity due to the limitations of the addressing scheme. In IPv6, routing relies heavily on sub-domains having IP addresses with a prefix equal to the prefix of the domain plus two byte identifier unique within that domain. This means you can identify where things are. Yes, there are privacy issues for personal machines and that's been a major complaint against IPv6, but it means that you've a lot more confidence that a server is in roughly the right place. If you then add DNSSEC or any of the other DNS locking schemes out there, OR mandate an IPSec mode using certificates in a way that would offer equal guarantees that the server is who it says it is, it would help but you're starting to get into the diminishing returns then.
Of course, this might be the wrong approach entirely. This is trying to find a technical solution to what is ultimately a social problem. Social solutions are usually far better for such things. One social solution would be to regulate cross-border traffic such that eCommerce vendors (CAs included) that wish to conduct cross-border traffic (whether into the country or between boundaries within it) have to publicly declare all actual security breaches and may be held 100% liable for any loss due to unreported breaches. That's definitely not going to sit well with those
That is an assumption that holds true of a few pseudo-unions (things which are called "unions" but aren't, the same way that many dictatorships have "democratic" in the name) but which simply doesn't hold true of unionism in the historical context. Historical unions don't depend on membership and historically it was unions that fought to keep incompetents OUT of jobs, forcing employers to hire people who were skilled at the job.
True, historic unionism is highly progressive and helped boost profits for the businesses (it turns out that cheap labour produces poorer-quality products and has higher accident/disability rates, inflating net costs in the long-term) and boost the members (since members weren't so subject to office politics and therefore were more likely to be promoted according to merit).
Unions evolved from intellectuals meeting at coffeehouses in Britain discussing why their places of employment didn't work. To me, that is what a union is - a place where sane, rational discussion takes place to get things sane and rational. If there are "regulations" and "red tape", it's not a union. Just because money pits like to call themselves that doesn't make them that, just as ITT calling itself a college doesn't mean you'd get an education there.
(Tea is Britain's national drink because an anti-intellectual movement resulted in the banning of coffeehouses. So the intellectuals just changed what they drank.)
If we'd put the money into Amtrak rather than the TSA, the trains would not only run on time but at 115MPH (like the rest of the world) rather than 55MPH. And, no, 115 doesn't require maglev. Even British Rail does 115 with tracks that probably haven't been maintained since the 1940s and which "don't work" in the "wrong type of snow" or when there are "leaves on the line".
Slashdot Mirror
Nanu Nanu.
Ok, management was replaced. Fine. Probably needed. But that doesn't tell me if the pipes were fixed or how the new management proposes to not have that kind of issue in the future. Nor does it tell me if the new management is proposing any kind of additional cleanup that may be needed in those protected lands (doesn't matter that it was a while back - Bhopal still suffers from uncleaned pollution and Florida has a gigantic oil sludge that will haunt it for a long time no matter how much it's officially declared gone).
In short, yeah, new sources of Rare Earths are great but the Earth is also fairly high on the Rare list and I'd rather not need a new source.
AFAICT, the peace process is the least of the issues involved here. UNESCO handles world heritage sites - y'know, like Pompeii which suffered two major collapses in the last week or so due to incompetent maintenance and a lack of funds. The money the Palestinians want is, according to them, going to go to a 5th century church (which is properly World Heritage) that is suffering from horrific maintenance issues and may well collapse without proper backing.
From the NERD perspective, 30% loss of money = 30% loss of World Heritage. That's a damn lot of history that had been, well, damned.
What happens between Israel and the Palestinians is, in historical terms and geographical terms, insignificant. Even if you consider the entire history of the entire region plus the rest of the Fertile Crescent, it is a pathetic 3,500 years and a trivial geographical space. It's NOTHING. The US' action has put into danger historical sites that are 70,000 years old - 20 TIMES as old as the entire recorded history for the Middle East - across an entire planet!
If you want to talk peace processes, then the Irish "Troubles" are recorded as having spanned 5,000 years and involved much of Europe and the US - twice the time the Middle East has even had issues and again many times the area. That was NOT solved by defunding the UN but WAS solved by all parties accepting that peaceful settlements were the way to go. The Basque issue, a mere 30 times older than modern Israel though younger than there have been conflicts in the region, was ALSO recently solved by an increase in mutual understanding and mutual efforts to end the futility cycle. Do you seriously think that either would have be settled today if there had been a blockade on assistance or tolerance of any kind? ESPECIALLY if that blockade had been on people completely unrelated to the parties involved?
(Would the IRA really have stopped shooting if Britain had decided to bomb the Colosseum in Rome in retaliation for the US sending a senator to Ireland? No? That's the practical upshot of what is taking place, so if the logic of such a move is inherently flawed then substituting in the current participants won't make the logic any better.)
Look, I fully understand Israel's insecurity and fears, and I respect that it has those for good reason, but nowhere in the history of humanity has anyone solved such issues by taking revenge on innocent third parties. I can't even recall any time in the history of humanity where anyone has solved such issued by taking revenge on those actually involved. If you want peace, you are going to have to do something that works. The definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing, expecting different results. Insanity won't help Israel be safer.
I see your Shamir and raise you one Byzantine General.
There's a full logging filesystem for Linux these days and there are countless patches for all the attribute and access schemes out there (plus the ones already in Linux, including those via the LSM), so it's just possible Microsoft is trying to catch up with Linux as well as Solaris.
This is one of those times where we are actually ahead of the game, not just in Linux but in many other F/L/OSS OS'. It would be good if we can actually STAY ahead of the curve rather than be overtaken.
So you're saying their point was academic?
The nature of files was also revisited in Plan 9/Inferno, and has been occasionally re-examined in countless other OS'. This isn't to contradict what you said, but rather to reinforce the point that Microsoft is very late in the game.
CP/M? TOPS-20? Hard to tell.
In those cases, yes it would be. It would be more of an addiction than a bridge, since everything else is being used that way and the pattern is set. In those cases, I haven't the foggiest what you could do other than, as you suggested, follow the Prime Directive. It seems... wrong to create a mess and not clean it up, but it's worse to create a mess and then compound it.
If you'd be interested in discussing this further, feel free to e-mail me as I've a feeling this thread'll drop off Slashdot sooner rather than later. I've been intrigued by this sort of question for some time - for example, could you use the internationalization of software to make rare/endangered languages in mainstream cultures (ie: those already Westernized, Internetted, etc) more relevant through actually being usable on a day-to-day basis? (Of the EU nations, France is perhaps the worst offender at failing to recognize other languages unique within its borders and purposely restricting or even prohibiting their use. The UK has improved and now protects some minority languages but is still endangering a good many others.)
If, and only if, this would actually be a useful approach, then I'm minded to actually start a small project along those lines. I've thought about it for a long time, but I've never been sure enough as to its value to put aside the time it would take. If it would hurt rather than help, I'd help more by surfing the web and doing nothing.
In Africa, where the phrase "beating tractors into ploughshares" became the common way to describe "aid" there, I don't believe it's quite as bad as, say, Australia or Hawaii, in terms of the sheer magnitude of self-destruction that has arisen as a result of externally-imposed destruction. But it's most unclear if even there a bridging approach along the lines I described would work.
I think we're roughly in agreement on the majority of points. Non-interference is really the only serious quibbling point. I'd argue that we've interfered so much that many cultures are in serious danger of being totally destabilized. Merely leaving them alone won't be enough, but assimilation is even worse. There has to be some third option. Since most such cultures rely on the transmission of cultural knowledge and it is this transmission which is the most endangered by missionaries, industries and governments, it seems logical that providing a simulation of that same transmission would be stabilizing. Although I freely admit that I could be wrong. I'm not an anthropologist, I don't play one on TV and am assuming that such a fix would provide a foundation on which the society could work rather than be a drug that provided merely a hallucination of stability.
An example of lossage would be the Bo people, whose language and culture were largely exterminated by the national government and was then almost completely obliterated by the tsunami. It actually has now died out completely. The last surviving member with any knowledge of either language or culture has since died, with no attempt being made to preserve the heritage so that those descended from the Bo could choose to de-assimilate now or at a future time. That choice has now been permanently removed.
The two counter-examples I'm using are a bit of a cheat, I admit, since they're not as radically different as the Bo or an Amazonian tribe are from western society. They're the Manx and Cornish. Both had their traditional languages and cultures literally beaten and shamed out of them to the point of extinction, but both have made superb efforts and have recovered virtually everything because they both made sterling efforts around the time of extinction to preserve everything they could. Although a cheat, I would say these demonstrate that recovery is possible even at the threshold of extinction and even when that threshold has to be crossed for a while. Extinction need not be permanent, provided there's enough there that it doesn't matter if you're learning from a person or a tape.
And that is the key question. IS it ever possible to provide enough that it doesn't matter who/what you are learning from, in the general case? Obviously it is in specific cases, but if it is not in the general case then this strategy is a failure and bridging the gaps won't be possible. (And, yes, every gap would have to be bridged in its entirety to be able to synthetically revive an actual society and not merely RenFair it, so by "general case" I don't just mean every culture but also every aspect of every culture.)
Let's see - books don't survive well in the majority of climates on Earth. Where you've a nomadic or semi-nomadic people (the Irish Travelers would be included), books are simply too heavy to travel at all. A computer is thus a mini library, which makes it a bloody valuable tool.
Television in Africa is unlikely to have extensive coverage and is very unlikely to include core educational material as it is a profit-seeking sector for the most part and Open University-type work is not exactly profitable. A computer is thus a mini film archive, which makes it even more valuable.
The "general population" in the UK and US may not have made much use of computers before the Internet, but let's face it - they had both physical libraries and physical film archives. Why bother with virtual systems when you've the real thing? Further, computers back then weren't exactly powerful. 64K of RAM won't store many episodes of "Life on Earth", although it could probably store the entire informational content of the complete Mork and Mindy. In short, there were alternatives AND they were better.
In remote communities anywhere in the world, there are no alternatives and even if there were, they wouldn't work.
But this isn't a one-way street. 98% of history has been lost to us - languages, cultures, philosophies, literature, etc - because those who were interested had no means of recording the stuff. Of the societies that exist today, globally, the overwhelming majority are critically endangered. Even something as humble as children's diaries, collections of recipes and other "mundane" stuff, recorded in a medium that allows mass duplication on a trans-continental level, would help preservation efforts that were functional rather than destructive, would help prevent the mindless and savage destruction of other peoples way of life, and would allow far better understanding by average Joes that their average isn't everyone else's. And I've not even started on the scientific potential of having an actual database of records rather than mere lists of names of societies.
If it's everything, then it's also infinitely recursive as it has to include the fact that the publishing of the information is also information, which in turn is published.
It was one of the episodes in the 1960s series The Prisoner, too.
The original OLPC sported a clockwork generator, as do emergency radios. If this prototype doesn't have that facility, then (a) it should, and (b) it's the fault of people who pestered OLPC to ditch the generator for mains power.
Actually, I can think of two living spokesmen who'd be better. It would have been four, but John and George are dead.
Agreed and whilst I can churn the numbers to show what a hypothetically competent system would cost, nobody can conjure up motivated staff or interested students. Those are either there or they aren't.
I'll agree that money is only half the equation. It needs to be wisely spent, or it's just a number. I'll also agree that you can't buy competence but you CAN buy incompetence, which is why there's a problem in areas where money actually does exist.
Having said that, let's take a look at the numbers. A top university will have somewhere between an 8:1 to 10:1 student:tutor ratio. That's about right, on a per-subject basis. However, 172 million students implies that you need a minimum of 17.2 million highly skilled instructors in EACH subject that is taught. Assuming 10 subjects, that implies 172 million teachers/lecturers. That's a lot of competent people. Assuming the Byzantine General's Problem applies to office politics, you need a minimum of 50% + 1 to not only be competent but also devoid of corruption. Good luck. Remember, the national population of the US is 360 million and we're already at 344 million of those. If "above average" isn't considered good enough, you're not going to find enough that are good enough.
Obviously that's not going to work too well, if only because you've now got nobody left to do anything else. (It's one reason I think you actually WANT a country to specialize in just education. It's too labour-intensive if it's going to be done right. Remember, to stay current a teacher has also to be doing research and reading literature, which is time-intensive. It's going to damage just how much staff optimization you can do if the staff is going to remain skilled and relevant.)
If you can't maximize education, you're left with optimizing it only as far as you practically can. That part can't be done arithmetically and it's beyond my ability to suggest where you'd even start. All I can say is that it'll involve de-standardizing and doing a lot of custom optimization on a per-class basis, just as compilation is best done in a mix-and-match style.
Ah yes. I can just see the US assigning full sovereign authority to the UN, which is what tearing down all the borders would ultimately imply. One world government, a new world order and all that. Half the country would be in flames and the other half would claim it should be entitled to be.
I don't dispute that borders are a problem, I certainly don't dispute that insular pockets take themselves far too seriously, but that's never going to work as a solution. Even if you didn't take it to the logical limits (Europe eliminated certain borders but not others, causing as many problems as it prevented), you're going to have all kinds of groups screaming blue murder over whatever borders you scrap claiming that you're usurping their rights and other groups whose borders aren't scrapped screaming blue murder claiming that they're being constrained unfairly. The only thing that's certain is that nobody will like it.
Getting back to the issue of SSL, border controls would be the only way that you could impose any kind of enforceable standards. In a global economy, the company doesn't need to care where its HQ is so it can always pick the area with the standards that make it the most money. The only way to circumvent offshoring is to say that companies that want to do business in your area have to meet your minimum standards no matter where they are. However, jurisdiction limits how you can do this.
So what happens if you have a voluntary system? Well, you get the current mess and no reporting of compromised root keys, which is definitely worse than what we have right now. (It's easy to say you have choice, but you can't exactly choose to buy books at Borders any more, Paypal is still about the only generic solution to eCommerce payments and I don't see a whole lot of book retailers that offer their own Kindle or Nook versions of their merchandise. In short, lock-in has become the norm and whilst it's the norm "choice" is nothing more than a prettily-painted illusion.)
But won't people steer clear of defective stuff? Well, Citibank didn't declare bankruptcy after it was revealed that you only needed to log into your own account in order to be able to have total access to absolutely everybody else's. Veterans still sign up to the VA, despite those laptop losses. Windows still exists, despite the notoriously fragile security. So, no. People knowingly buy lemons because defects only happen to other people.
The free market? Only works if you assume rational customers. See point above. Customers aren't rational. I'm not even sure I'd rate them as highly as irrational. The free market is correct as a starting point, but you need to add something to ensure integrity as nobody else is going to.
Apparently, it is "overrated" to point out that Knowledge Chartists were the founders of the Trade Union movement under the name "Mutual Improvement Societies" where they collectively founded libraries, schools for the children of employees, health insurance systems and worker advocacy groups. Yeesh!
As I mentioned in my prior post, you wouldn't look at The Democratic People's Republic of Korea to understand democracy, yet Americans in particular will point happily to Mafia-run "unions in name only" groups and claim that this is what unionism is. Even the Tea Party, as hopelessly ignorant as they are on most issues, has figured out that "in name only" means bugger all. If it ain't a Mutual Improvement Society, it AIN'T a union, whatever damn name they care to give it.
Unions were invented by the staff and students of Cambridge University. If you believe they have a lower intelligence and a lesser ability to critically think than the average, then you're on the wrong damn planet.
You are entirely correct - rot is never confined to the "bad apples" that you spot - and the spreadsheet only shows the "bad apples" that actually sent messages saying that they were bad. It says nothing about CAs who simply revoked individual certificates that they know were unauthorized when it was a master key that was compromised. And you know that's bound to have happened. The disparity between bogus certs and compromised CAs was too great. Even there, you know that not all bogus certs get revoked, so even those numbers (which are way too large) are underestimates. That means that name-and-shame will simply create false confidence in unknowing victims and will create a greater atmosphere of concealment amongst CAs.
(Every instance of name-and-shame that we know of has produced that result. Except for such programs involving red light districts, where it's been used as free advertising by the streetwalkers.)
This is something that has deteriorated over time. I won't say the original cert system was perfect (there were flaws you could drive a 40 tonne truck through) but Grade I certification required significant documentation proving identity plus some form of actual (ie: non-written) contact. That was not a bad idea, the problem was they also offered Grade III certification (a note saying "it woz me" on a napkin) or even grade IV (the request sufficed as proof it woz you) and corporations naturally gravitated towards the cheaper options which you can fly an Airbus 400 through with enough space for 40 tonne trucks on either side.
The problem was that you still had to trust the CA and this is a major frailty in the CA system. Being assured that the applicant is who they say they are is a major thing - Verisign issued hackers with a signed Microsoft key at one point, because they were asked to in a fax, and DNS registrars are notorious for complying with bogus transfer requests - but it isn't everything. If the CA is compromised, then you have major problems even if all the officially distributed keys are legit.
Obviously, a Grade I cert system helps to some extent as requiring a thorough screening of applications means you aren't doing live cert distribution which in turn means the master key need not be on any online computer whatsoever. If the master key is behind a sneakernetwall, then hackers will have a harder time signing anything with it. (A sneakernetwall differs from an airwall in the level of competence of those moving stuff from one machine to another.) Obviously, given that eCommerce security holes repeatedly demonstrate corporations can't even put sensitive data behind a meager firewall and the VA is forever losing unencrypted laptops, there's a big difference between "need not" and "is not".
A way to side-step the issue - to a degree only - would be to require that keys be counter-signed by at least one other CA. It is less likely that two CAs have been cracked by the same person, after all. Or, well, it would be if it weren't for the fact that it probably WAS the same person who broke into all four CAs and there's been an alleged confession that the person did break into two. That person would have been able to counter-sign a key with another CA's master key and since these were the cheapo kind of CAs that probably would indeed keep the master key on an online computer even if they needn't or legally shouldn't, a "Web of CA Trust" is not enough to be 0.45 bullet-proof but is probably 0.22 bullet-proof. The current system apparently falls over if you show it a picture of a bullet.
IPv6 may help, since violations of strict hierarchical addressing are not only commonplace in IPv4 but actually a necessity due to the limitations of the addressing scheme. In IPv6, routing relies heavily on sub-domains having IP addresses with a prefix equal to the prefix of the domain plus two byte identifier unique within that domain. This means you can identify where things are. Yes, there are privacy issues for personal machines and that's been a major complaint against IPv6, but it means that you've a lot more confidence that a server is in roughly the right place. If you then add DNSSEC or any of the other DNS locking schemes out there, OR mandate an IPSec mode using certificates in a way that would offer equal guarantees that the server is who it says it is, it would help but you're starting to get into the diminishing returns then.
Of course, this might be the wrong approach entirely. This is trying to find a technical solution to what is ultimately a social problem. Social solutions are usually far better for such things. One social solution would be to regulate cross-border traffic such that eCommerce vendors (CAs included) that wish to conduct cross-border traffic (whether into the country or between boundaries within it) have to publicly declare all actual security breaches and may be held 100% liable for any loss due to unreported breaches. That's definitely not going to sit well with those
That is an assumption that holds true of a few pseudo-unions (things which are called "unions" but aren't, the same way that many dictatorships have "democratic" in the name) but which simply doesn't hold true of unionism in the historical context. Historical unions don't depend on membership and historically it was unions that fought to keep incompetents OUT of jobs, forcing employers to hire people who were skilled at the job.
True, historic unionism is highly progressive and helped boost profits for the businesses (it turns out that cheap labour produces poorer-quality products and has higher accident/disability rates, inflating net costs in the long-term) and boost the members (since members weren't so subject to office politics and therefore were more likely to be promoted according to merit).
Unions evolved from intellectuals meeting at coffeehouses in Britain discussing why their places of employment didn't work. To me, that is what a union is - a place where sane, rational discussion takes place to get things sane and rational. If there are "regulations" and "red tape", it's not a union. Just because money pits like to call themselves that doesn't make them that, just as ITT calling itself a college doesn't mean you'd get an education there.
(Tea is Britain's national drink because an anti-intellectual movement resulted in the banning of coffeehouses. So the intellectuals just changed what they drank.)
If we'd put the money into Amtrak rather than the TSA, the trains would not only run on time but at 115MPH (like the rest of the world) rather than 55MPH. And, no, 115 doesn't require maglev. Even British Rail does 115 with tracks that probably haven't been maintained since the 1940s and which "don't work" in the "wrong type of snow" or when there are "leaves on the line".