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Income is taxable above some threshold. Stocks, whilst stocks, aren't taxed, and - if I understand correctly - when converted to cash are also taxable only after some point. I'm also not sure they're taxed at the same levels, either. I think stocks face capital gains tax, which is not the same as income tax. Overall, I think the paying of stocks, gifts and other not-immediately-taxable currency is a way of evading taxation. The recipient ends up with much more money than they would have had, if it had been paid directly.
(This is one of the things I dislike about fat cat executives. They have the means to shift the financial burden of maintaining the country onto the shoulders of those who already carry the productivity burden. Being rich is fine, being rich but getting someone else to pay your taxes is not.)
Supervision won't help - too easy to work round due to ignorance of technology and online slanguage, parents don't 100% pay attention, etc. Educating children might help, but it is a biological imperative that teens not only push the boundaries but be actively encouraged to do so within broader, well-defined limits. (Rebellion in teens should be used by the family to get the teen to question, to investigate, to pro-actively learn, to think.)
This is a problem, but I think that there is no solution. At least, not for the problem as stated. We can generalize into three distinct categories, although you can reasonably argue that there should be more than that, or fewer.
"Bullying" (regardless of medium) as the instrument of some other crime (eg: stealing, bodily harm, damage to property, "demands with menaces", etc)
"Bullying" (regardless of medium) as the means of gaining or sustanining psychological power over another (intimidating another into doing something, such as the suicide case)
"Bullying" (regardless of medium) with no purpose or intent beyond letting off steam (eg: cutting in when driving)
My argument is that in the first case, bullying is not really the crime to be focussing on. It is merely an aggravating factor, and should be regarded as such. Treating it as distinct would seem inappropriate as it ignores the dynamics of the whole thing.
Something similar is true for the third case. In the example, dangerous driving is the "crime", the bullying merely dictates the form and the magnitude of the offence. It's still an aggravating factor.
That leaves the middle one. So far, I'vee argued that bullying is not the primary problem, but is a factor that needs to be considered in relation to the primary problem. Is the same true here?
I think yes. I think that there would have been other ways the attackers could have achieved the same results, the method neither enabled the attack nor was it the deciding factor in the suicide. But if it is an aggravating factor, there must still be a crime to aggravate, or it has no function. Harassment is a crime, perhaps that could be used with bullying as the aggravating factor. That has more to do with overall rights and wrongs, not with the hows.
...on how you define "absolute". A one-time pad cannot be broken, even if you had a theoretically infinitely fast computer. (It would decrypt to every possible string of the same length with equal probability, with no means of telling which one was the one you wanted.) If you want to add extra security, then introduce a negotiated random offset into the pad and a negotiated random step-size.
Is that absolute security? Well, an outsider couldn't break the encryption. To do so requires the pad. There are no shortcuts. That's pretty absolute. And even with the pad, you need the offset and stepsize. I've been told of systems where these were mechanically random - the one-time pad tapes synchronized themselves remotely at a speed that was effectively non-deterministic, consuming a non-derministic amount of tape to do so, giving you the random offset and step size.
Ok, well is that perfect? Since not even the people with the machines could tell you in advance at what speed or at what point the synchronization would lock, that's pretty damn secure and could not possibly be known in advance. Thus, an attacker cannot have prior knowledge of the key being used. Nobody can, even if they have all of the physical components.
Yes yes yes, it's secure, but is it perfect? It all depends on what you mean by perfect:
It is "perfect" in the specific sense that a total outsider (ie: no prior knowledge) CANNOT decrypt the message, even in infinite time.
It is "perfect" in the specific sense that a third party with the tape but not the synchronization mechanism CANNOT decrypt the message, even in infinite time.
It is not "perfect" in the general sense, because if person A can decrypt the message with some information in their posession (A'), then person B can also decrypt the message with that same information (A').
If you have N people in a group, how many of that N must be honest in order to guarantee that information from A to C reaches C even if at least one traitor B exists in that group, where C is not a traitor? The answer is (N/2)+1.
Now, if (N/2)+1 out of N must be honest, can we improve on our encryption system? In order to get the pad to C, we could make a copy and break it down into random-sized fragments (that may or may not have holes), such that you need (N/2)+1 fragments out of the original N in order to rebuild the tape in the correct sequence. Even if everyone else was a traitor and cooperating with each other, they could not reconstruct the key.
Now, to prevent said traitors tampering with the key, each fragment needs to be securely digitally signed. This means that A must have a key that everyone else can test against (and therefore decrypt) but nobody else can derive. Both the intended target and all traitors will thus know which fragments are real, but a traitor will not be able to make a fictional fragment look real.
Is this perfect now? It depends so much on what you mean by perfect. It's now impractical to attack in transit, provided the algorithms themselves do not have weaknesses which push below the assumed security threshold. Provided both source and destination are themselves genuine, AND provided both source and destination have internal compartmentalization such that if/when attacked, the attacker will not be exposed to the encrypted message, the decrypted message or the decryption key, you have an admirable level of security.
But is it perfect? Define perfect. I would consider any system that is so secure that it would never form a part of the attack vector for the forseeable future to be - in any practical sense - perfect. No matter how much you added to it, it would make no difference to what anyone did or how anyone acted. It's perfect in that attackers would spend their resources attacking anything and everything else. Even if it were "perfect" in some abstract, theoretical sense, it would not add ANY additional security to the system. To me, that is perfect in the meaningful sense.
Freshmeat lists something like a dozen systems that will allow you to deliver data between two systems in a format-neutral way. Some are file libraries, some are full-blown client/server systems. There are probably ten times as many such methods out there in the world that aren't getting listed anywhere. Of those I do know about, these are not what you'd call hobbyist experiments. They're often funded by huge numbers of industral leaders, Governments, etc. Nor would I consider the use trivial - I see such software heavily used in high-end markets such as for MRIs, weather system mapping and other fairly heavy-duty scientific projects. Doesn't mean that you'd want to use NetCDF 4, PACT, the Storage Resource Broker, the Local Data Manager, OPeNDAP, TAO CORBA, Sun RPC, or any of the billion of other ways of ensuring type neutrality is preserved. But it does seem... odd... that researchers with little time and less budget would spend time and effort on developing non-XML answers unless XML simply isn't complete enough, consistant enough, and/or scalable enough.
From other comments here, I'd say the consistancy is a biggie, but I'm going to guess all three problems exist somewhere in the range of possibilities, or special-case solutions would never have got out the door.
You have a dream and that dream contains some specific sequence of actions and events that is shown up in your brain. Let's call those E. A specific sequence E will trigger some fairly general, abstractish responses in the brain at the level we're concerned with. Let's call those responses X. Then, that abstract X falls into a group of even more abstract concepts, which we traditionally ascribe a single word label in English. These abstract concepts I'll call Y. In each case of X or Y, there will be one stereotypical or archetypal example that can be used to represent in more concrete terms the whole of X or Y respectively. I'll give these stereotypical/archetypal forms the names E' and X' respectively.
So, for any given action/event E, for which we don't know the specifics, there will be a substitute action/event E' that can be used to replace it. We'll lose all the details and nuances, but it's good enough to get a feel for what is happening. But there's usually a very few overarching ideas, your X' values.
So long as you're hyper-aggressive about mapping E onto X (but allowing E' to figure in multiple X as E'), and are hyper-aggressive about mapping X into Y (but again allowing X' to figure in multiple Y as X'), then you would have a robot that sketched out a very abstract represenation of the dream, finishing on an overview of any core, central theme there may have been.
I don't know to say if that's what this robot does, but my guess is that it probably doesn't, and that it certainly doesn't use the kinds of signals filtering or signal resolution I'd consider worthwhile. A neat toy to have, a definitely neat direction to experiment with, but I'm guessing that they could make it ten times what it is now with a little extra coding, a little extra manpower, and a trivial budget for a University.
Let the research continue, but PLEASE eliminate the grosser errors in the methodology? Pretty please?
Dry ice bombs require some degree of circulation, I discovered, as a function of how expansive the plastic is. If you put dry ice and hot water into a small 2 Oz. container, seal the lid and place it gently down, it will do exactly nothing. Well, other than deform slightly. If you do exactly the same and throw the container into a bucket, the container will explode. If you hold the container in your hand, it will explode. It's painful and your hand is paralyzed for a while - running it under hot water can help a little, but be careful as you have no sense of touch or temperature. On the other hand, this wasn't nearly as dangerous as the time I took a World War II UXB home with me to look up and see what it was. The casing had a hole, so I shook it hard to dislodge the sand that had accumulated inside.
To get back on topic: This sounds an interesting project, but the manic side of me is saying that it's not neat enough. There have to be extra twists, although I don't care what those end up being.
IIRC, femtosecond pulse lasers usually get mentioned with all kinds of freakish things, like ultrablack materals. In this case, I suspect the problem will be finding any material afterwards for reasons other than stealth.
DNS servers have local records but look elsewhere for authoratitive records for other sites. Authoratitive records still have to come from somewhere, though. If you've more than a few static/public IP addresses, it makes sense to run your own DNS and put the local information into that. Until that information is cached elsewhere, queries placed onto the DNS network will eventually make it onto your DNS server to be resolved.
So far, so nothing much. However, it's the first response to queries that matters, not who responds. So if your DNS has false entries for other sites, and those entries get back before the real ones do, then the query will return the false results. Oh, I've made use of this feature in helpful ways. I had a problem with an associated group having an unstable DNS server. This made establishing connections unreliable, so I simply transferred the zone to my own DNS server, which (naturally) I'd set up rather better. Problem solved. Totally unassociated network, but DNS just doesn't give a damn.
A malicious person who had the means of poisoning caches or corrupting local entries can use this exact same property to return falsified records for other servers. Any server could be modified to claim to be such-and-such a machine. Makes no odds that it's on a different network, it only has to get the response to the target machine first. You've then got a way of carrying out phishing scams in which the hostname is genuinely fine but the machine that it points to could be anything and anywhere.
DNS has optional security and authentication mechanisms, but nobody uses them so they don't make a difference. Only one infiltrated DNS system would be enough to cause problems, but tens of thousands pushes the problem into the high risk arena.
OTOH that's not the whole story. The terms don't mean the same thing. eg. in the UK Christians, if they're anything, tend to be associated with what we call left wing policies* - social justice, feeding the poor, equality, welfare state, etc. In the US they're universally described as right wing, for, I presume, similar reasons.
Only those involve taking the money from the poor and putting it into expensive cars, women, etc. I forget the exact name of it - the Make Money Quick Gospel, or something like that - is popular in the US, where churches encourage members to (a) take as much from others as possible, and (b) give most of that to the Pastor. Scottish-style "fire and brimstone" sermons are surprisingly popular. Views that suggest that other religions may have a point (Prince Charles wanting to be "Defender of Faith", rather than "Defender of The Faith", the Archbishop's call for a better respect of Islamic law, etc) are hardly what you'd call popular in England, but I don't want to imagine what would happen if an American President said something similar in the Bible Belt.
Everyone who remembers as far back as A2206411411 knows perfectly well that this was The Swamp, that CmdrTaco has captured the island with the reset switch, and that you boost your rating by removing Fraggles with the Black and Decker chainsaw.
I'd need to see the study correlating cellphone usage in cars with visits to different fast-food restraunts before I became convinced that the tounge cancer was caused by the phone.
Well, "mere" is the old English word for lake or large body of water. A conduit is a transport system. So, net firms are therefore responsible for the pipes linking reservoirs together.
You're not required to read my replies - if you don't like them, block them. I'm not required to take you the least bit seriously, which is just as well as I get paid for my knowledge of history by experts and professionals in history. Do you get paid for being a troll?
OpenMOSIX revival attempts were badly derailed by folks who saw it as only a load-balancing solution that could (and should) never be used for HPC. I took - and take - the line that a good design solves many problems and have considered whether forking OpenMOSIX or developing an alternative would be the better way to go. Linux HPC has many, many tools but very little imagination, and that has poisoned it to a degree.
You can use one of many variants of scalable reliable multicast to deliver data to many places in a single transaction, you can use RDMA to directly transfer to/from memory without CPU intervention, you can use scatter/gather or virtual memory management to handle discontiguous data. But you can't do any two of those at the same time. Logically, these are wholly independent and shouldn't need to know or care what else is done, but semantically, that's not how they're written.
There are cluster-wide schedulers, grid schedulers, meta-schedulers, all open-source and all designed to allow a cluster or grid to unify activity, optimize the use of resources, take advantage of the fact that with more knowledge comes better utilization of time. How many Linux clusters make use of such tools?
This isn't a slam on Linux. It's not the fault of Linux that nobody uses utilities that exist for it. Particularly as nobody seems to use those utilities anywhere else, either. HPC potentials lie decades ahead of HPC realities and the gap is getting wider, not narrower. Not because people are developing possibilities so fast, but because the realities are changing so slowly.
Rove, et al, have worked so desperately hard to create an illusion of guilt hiding in innocence that it is almost impossible for them to have been as guilty as they have made themselves look. It's a wonderful paradox. Like a small child who pretends it was the invisible man, the pretense magnifies any real guilt as well as an electron tunneling microscope and the pretense adds to that guilt. This is not political, in that most people do the same thing. It's just that humanity has had a few hundred thousand years to develop better methods of dealing with things.
Maggie is believed to have sold peerages just as much as Blair ever did, and certainly made as many (or more) political appointees in order to have a House of Lords that was more manipulable. Nonetheless, the basic concept is sound (two Houses maintained by independent methods and drawn from independent pools, to avoid degeneracy in any one pool poisoning the other) and has generally been better than systems in which the Houses are not much more than a single entity distinguished only by label.
Actually, there might be something to be said for dividing the peerage system and House of Lords into two distinct Houses, such that one represented the economically powerful - the latterday Barons - and the other represented the intellectually powerful - a "purist" meritocratic House.
Another thing I like is that Lords and the Royal Family have no vote in elections. At least, they're not supposed to have one. They pay taxes and have representation, but their representation is in the form of the second House, not in the makeup of the first. In the same way that the Commons aren't supposed to have influence over who is in the Lords, the Lords aren't supposed to have influence over who is in the Commons. Along those same lines, the Lords cannot "impeach" anyone in the House of Commons, or vice versa.
It's not a flawless system, it has evolved through thousands of years of experimentation and theorizing, but it has evolved into something very close to what is likely to be the best intermediate/compromise form of democratic Governance, as described by Plato.
Plato imagined a democracy might avoid degenerating into what is dictatorship by anything other than name by a two-fold approach. He rationalized that although democracy is a powerful tool, people are easily manipulated and can be swayed into folly by a good enough talker, that this was a fixable problem - you just needed good enough education and good enough dissemination of information - but that this would take time. You needed an imperfect, temporary workaround where you had a hybrid democracy/meritocracy, where (in principle) the flaws in each of these systems is negated - or at least held in check - by the strengths of the other. Once the population is strong enough and smart enough, then you don't need the workaround.
The English system is a thousand miles from Plato's idealized intermediate system, but if it works better than solutions even further away, we should learn what we can from it, not junk it as "old-fashioned".
Responsive to change? No, responsive to big industry. They came to power through merit (well, in theory - practice is another matter) rather than through elections, so they were indeed representative, but representative of (a) a different demographic, and (b) in principle much harder to corrupt, so an excellent method of counter-balancing the wild excesses of extremist Governments.
The Law Lords are from the House of Lords and thus a subset of the House of Lords. Distinguishing one from the other is absurd in the extreme, as anyone in the House of Lords could be appointed a Law Lord, although it was generally someone knowlegeable in the Law. This is why the two bodies have the same name. They are the same, in the sense that one is a subset of the other.
The British courts also ruled that a schizophrenic that thought himself the reincarnation of King Arthur saner than the Conservative Home Office. The courts tend to be less political and a lot saner than the politicos. The House of Lords was another organiztion that opposed such nonsense, which is why the Conservatives gutted it and Labour disembowled what was left. It's hard to buy out a group that need no money and own most of the land. It's hard to get them to be entirely sane, but so long as they're educated, it's a useful group to have as a transient mechanism until society has matured and that group's function is to bring society into maturation. The problem society has to face is that it isn't maturing. If it was, it wouldn't be repeating history. Athens and Wu went bankrupt from wars and got invaded in turn. Alexander the Great and Ghengis Khan found their delusions of power run out through their fingers in their later years, and their deaths caused catastrophic collapses of what could meaningfully be called epic proportions. The systems are probably fine, but a car is fine... if you've the maturity to drive one.
Given that the uppermost layers of the atmosphere are superheated and are almost certainly spraying off into space, you wouldn't need to be in what could conventionally be considered the atmosphere in order to be in the presence of atmospheric gasses. The second consideration is that there ARE a lot of charged particles in space. The solar winds, for a start. Those will indeed have a "smell", but I doubt it's detectable by humans. Then there's probably enough hard radiation in space (and secondary radiation from the suit) to ionise the oxygen to some degree. I think a serious study is worthwhile and meaningful, but there are a lot of possibilities.
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(This is one of the things I dislike about fat cat executives. They have the means to shift the financial burden of maintaining the country onto the shoulders of those who already carry the productivity burden. Being rich is fine, being rich but getting someone else to pay your taxes is not.)
This is a problem, but I think that there is no solution. At least, not for the problem as stated. We can generalize into three distinct categories, although you can reasonably argue that there should be more than that, or fewer.
My argument is that in the first case, bullying is not really the crime to be focussing on. It is merely an aggravating factor, and should be regarded as such. Treating it as distinct would seem inappropriate as it ignores the dynamics of the whole thing.
Something similar is true for the third case. In the example, dangerous driving is the "crime", the bullying merely dictates the form and the magnitude of the offence. It's still an aggravating factor.
That leaves the middle one. So far, I'vee argued that bullying is not the primary problem, but is a factor that needs to be considered in relation to the primary problem. Is the same true here?
I think yes. I think that there would have been other ways the attackers could have achieved the same results, the method neither enabled the attack nor was it the deciding factor in the suicide. But if it is an aggravating factor, there must still be a crime to aggravate, or it has no function. Harassment is a crime, perhaps that could be used with bullying as the aggravating factor. That has more to do with overall rights and wrongs, not with the hows.
Is that absolute security? Well, an outsider couldn't break the encryption. To do so requires the pad. There are no shortcuts. That's pretty absolute. And even with the pad, you need the offset and stepsize. I've been told of systems where these were mechanically random - the one-time pad tapes synchronized themselves remotely at a speed that was effectively non-deterministic, consuming a non-derministic amount of tape to do so, giving you the random offset and step size.
Ok, well is that perfect? Since not even the people with the machines could tell you in advance at what speed or at what point the synchronization would lock, that's pretty damn secure and could not possibly be known in advance. Thus, an attacker cannot have prior knowledge of the key being used. Nobody can, even if they have all of the physical components.
Yes yes yes, it's secure, but is it perfect? It all depends on what you mean by perfect:
It is not "perfect" in the general sense, because if person A can decrypt the message with some information in their posession (A'), then person B can also decrypt the message with that same information (A').
If you have N people in a group, how many of that N must be honest in order to guarantee that information from A to C reaches C even if at least one traitor B exists in that group, where C is not a traitor? The answer is (N/2)+1.
Now, if (N/2)+1 out of N must be honest, can we improve on our encryption system? In order to get the pad to C, we could make a copy and break it down into random-sized fragments (that may or may not have holes), such that you need (N/2)+1 fragments out of the original N in order to rebuild the tape in the correct sequence. Even if everyone else was a traitor and cooperating with each other, they could not reconstruct the key.
Now, to prevent said traitors tampering with the key, each fragment needs to be securely digitally signed. This means that A must have a key that everyone else can test against (and therefore decrypt) but nobody else can derive. Both the intended target and all traitors will thus know which fragments are real, but a traitor will not be able to make a fictional fragment look real.
Is this perfect now? It depends so much on what you mean by perfect. It's now impractical to attack in transit, provided the algorithms themselves do not have weaknesses which push below the assumed security threshold. Provided both source and destination are themselves genuine, AND provided both source and destination have internal compartmentalization such that if/when attacked, the attacker will not be exposed to the encrypted message, the decrypted message or the decryption key, you have an admirable level of security.
But is it perfect? Define perfect. I would consider any system that is so secure that it would never form a part of the attack vector for the forseeable future to be - in any practical sense - perfect. No matter how much you added to it, it would make no difference to what anyone did or how anyone acted. It's perfect in that attackers would spend their resources attacking anything and everything else. Even if it were "perfect" in some abstract, theoretical sense, it would not add ANY additional security to the system. To me, that is perfect in the meaningful sense.
That's ok, though, because they're mostly scanned by search engines and school supervisors, which doesn't count as reading.
From other comments here, I'd say the consistancy is a biggie, but I'm going to guess all three problems exist somewhere in the range of possibilities, or special-case solutions would never have got out the door.
So, for any given action/event E, for which we don't know the specifics, there will be a substitute action/event E' that can be used to replace it. We'll lose all the details and nuances, but it's good enough to get a feel for what is happening. But there's usually a very few overarching ideas, your X' values.
So long as you're hyper-aggressive about mapping E onto X (but allowing E' to figure in multiple X as E'), and are hyper-aggressive about mapping X into Y (but again allowing X' to figure in multiple Y as X'), then you would have a robot that sketched out a very abstract represenation of the dream, finishing on an overview of any core, central theme there may have been.
I don't know to say if that's what this robot does, but my guess is that it probably doesn't, and that it certainly doesn't use the kinds of signals filtering or signal resolution I'd consider worthwhile. A neat toy to have, a definitely neat direction to experiment with, but I'm guessing that they could make it ten times what it is now with a little extra coding, a little extra manpower, and a trivial budget for a University.
Let the research continue, but PLEASE eliminate the grosser errors in the methodology? Pretty please?
To get back on topic: This sounds an interesting project, but the manic side of me is saying that it's not neat enough. There have to be extra twists, although I don't care what those end up being.
IIRC, femtosecond pulse lasers usually get mentioned with all kinds of freakish things, like ultrablack materals. In this case, I suspect the problem will be finding any material afterwards for reasons other than stealth.
Unless the aircraft is opened, the judge should rule him dead and alive at the same time.
Ok, I agree with you. Consider strings substituted accordingly.
So far, so nothing much. However, it's the first response to queries that matters, not who responds. So if your DNS has false entries for other sites, and those entries get back before the real ones do, then the query will return the false results. Oh, I've made use of this feature in helpful ways. I had a problem with an associated group having an unstable DNS server. This made establishing connections unreliable, so I simply transferred the zone to my own DNS server, which (naturally) I'd set up rather better. Problem solved. Totally unassociated network, but DNS just doesn't give a damn.
A malicious person who had the means of poisoning caches or corrupting local entries can use this exact same property to return falsified records for other servers. Any server could be modified to claim to be such-and-such a machine. Makes no odds that it's on a different network, it only has to get the response to the target machine first. You've then got a way of carrying out phishing scams in which the hostname is genuinely fine but the machine that it points to could be anything and anywhere.
DNS has optional security and authentication mechanisms, but nobody uses them so they don't make a difference. Only one infiltrated DNS system would be enough to cause problems, but tens of thousands pushes the problem into the high risk arena.
Only those involve taking the money from the poor and putting it into expensive cars, women, etc. I forget the exact name of it - the Make Money Quick Gospel, or something like that - is popular in the US, where churches encourage members to (a) take as much from others as possible, and (b) give most of that to the Pastor. Scottish-style "fire and brimstone" sermons are surprisingly popular. Views that suggest that other religions may have a point (Prince Charles wanting to be "Defender of Faith", rather than "Defender of The Faith", the Archbishop's call for a better respect of Islamic law, etc) are hardly what you'd call popular in England, but I don't want to imagine what would happen if an American President said something similar in the Bible Belt.
Everyone who remembers as far back as A2206411411 knows perfectly well that this was The Swamp, that CmdrTaco has captured the island with the reset switch, and that you boost your rating by removing Fraggles with the Black and Decker chainsaw.
I'd need to see the study correlating cellphone usage in cars with visits to different fast-food restraunts before I became convinced that the tounge cancer was caused by the phone.
Well, "mere" is the old English word for lake or large body of water. A conduit is a transport system. So, net firms are therefore responsible for the pipes linking reservoirs together.
You're not required to read my replies - if you don't like them, block them. I'm not required to take you the least bit seriously, which is just as well as I get paid for my knowledge of history by experts and professionals in history. Do you get paid for being a troll?
According to my Rolemaster manuals, if it's a greater Lich and it's posessed by a greater Demon (ie: switches to *BSD), it becomes a Black Reaver.
You can use one of many variants of scalable reliable multicast to deliver data to many places in a single transaction, you can use RDMA to directly transfer to/from memory without CPU intervention, you can use scatter/gather or virtual memory management to handle discontiguous data. But you can't do any two of those at the same time. Logically, these are wholly independent and shouldn't need to know or care what else is done, but semantically, that's not how they're written.
There are cluster-wide schedulers, grid schedulers, meta-schedulers, all open-source and all designed to allow a cluster or grid to unify activity, optimize the use of resources, take advantage of the fact that with more knowledge comes better utilization of time. How many Linux clusters make use of such tools?
This isn't a slam on Linux. It's not the fault of Linux that nobody uses utilities that exist for it. Particularly as nobody seems to use those utilities anywhere else, either. HPC potentials lie decades ahead of HPC realities and the gap is getting wider, not narrower. Not because people are developing possibilities so fast, but because the realities are changing so slowly.
Rove, et al, have worked so desperately hard to create an illusion of guilt hiding in innocence that it is almost impossible for them to have been as guilty as they have made themselves look. It's a wonderful paradox. Like a small child who pretends it was the invisible man, the pretense magnifies any real guilt as well as an electron tunneling microscope and the pretense adds to that guilt. This is not political, in that most people do the same thing. It's just that humanity has had a few hundred thousand years to develop better methods of dealing with things.
Actually, there might be something to be said for dividing the peerage system and House of Lords into two distinct Houses, such that one represented the economically powerful - the latterday Barons - and the other represented the intellectually powerful - a "purist" meritocratic House.
Another thing I like is that Lords and the Royal Family have no vote in elections. At least, they're not supposed to have one. They pay taxes and have representation, but their representation is in the form of the second House, not in the makeup of the first. In the same way that the Commons aren't supposed to have influence over who is in the Lords, the Lords aren't supposed to have influence over who is in the Commons. Along those same lines, the Lords cannot "impeach" anyone in the House of Commons, or vice versa.
It's not a flawless system, it has evolved through thousands of years of experimentation and theorizing, but it has evolved into something very close to what is likely to be the best intermediate/compromise form of democratic Governance, as described by Plato.
Plato imagined a democracy might avoid degenerating into what is dictatorship by anything other than name by a two-fold approach. He rationalized that although democracy is a powerful tool, people are easily manipulated and can be swayed into folly by a good enough talker, that this was a fixable problem - you just needed good enough education and good enough dissemination of information - but that this would take time. You needed an imperfect, temporary workaround where you had a hybrid democracy/meritocracy, where (in principle) the flaws in each of these systems is negated - or at least held in check - by the strengths of the other. Once the population is strong enough and smart enough, then you don't need the workaround.
The English system is a thousand miles from Plato's idealized intermediate system, but if it works better than solutions even further away, we should learn what we can from it, not junk it as "old-fashioned".
The Law Lords are from the House of Lords and thus a subset of the House of Lords. Distinguishing one from the other is absurd in the extreme, as anyone in the House of Lords could be appointed a Law Lord, although it was generally someone knowlegeable in the Law. This is why the two bodies have the same name. They are the same, in the sense that one is a subset of the other.
The British courts also ruled that a schizophrenic that thought himself the reincarnation of King Arthur saner than the Conservative Home Office. The courts tend to be less political and a lot saner than the politicos. The House of Lords was another organiztion that opposed such nonsense, which is why the Conservatives gutted it and Labour disembowled what was left. It's hard to buy out a group that need no money and own most of the land. It's hard to get them to be entirely sane, but so long as they're educated, it's a useful group to have as a transient mechanism until society has matured and that group's function is to bring society into maturation. The problem society has to face is that it isn't maturing. If it was, it wouldn't be repeating history. Athens and Wu went bankrupt from wars and got invaded in turn. Alexander the Great and Ghengis Khan found their delusions of power run out through their fingers in their later years, and their deaths caused catastrophic collapses of what could meaningfully be called epic proportions. The systems are probably fine, but a car is fine... if you've the maturity to drive one.
Given that the uppermost layers of the atmosphere are superheated and are almost certainly spraying off into space, you wouldn't need to be in what could conventionally be considered the atmosphere in order to be in the presence of atmospheric gasses. The second consideration is that there ARE a lot of charged particles in space. The solar winds, for a start. Those will indeed have a "smell", but I doubt it's detectable by humans. Then there's probably enough hard radiation in space (and secondary radiation from the suit) to ionise the oxygen to some degree. I think a serious study is worthwhile and meaningful, but there are a lot of possibilities.
...the Webb telescope is launched friday '13th, will it go around killing galaxies instead?