I don't think these drivers are going to take more than a 64MB Flash ROM, which can't cost more than $1 wholesale. If every USB client chip had "driver Flash" in it, the whole cost couldn't go up much. And saving on the entire process of burning and including a CD would cut into that extra expense, while lowering support costs. USB is more expensive than RS-232, but has taken over because of those kinds of savings and marketable benefits.
The security issues are exactly the same with the driver embedded in the USB device as with a CD - the "autoplay" feature is an executable part of the OS, not the USB device. In fact, since it's embedded, there is less to go wrong, like sabotaged CDs.
What the world needs is devices that are truly plug and play, with SW installation and configuration by mere users a vanishing rarity.
Save the planet with diskless installation. The device doesn't come with a driver CD, instead when the picoLCD is first connected (self powered USB device) it convinently displays an URL where you can download the latest picoLCD driver!
Why doesn't every USB device come with its drivers embedded in the device itself, accessible out of the box over the basic USB driver that any OS should come with, which just retrieves the real device driver across the USB, installs it, and then uses it to access the real device? A good device would indeed install to the desktop a URL for updated drivers, and a really good one would even allow storing the updated drivers in the device's storage for installation at a later host, too. Drivers for each platform, whether Windows, Mac, Linux, or any other for which a driver is available.
Why do I have to ever see a driver, or install any SW, for these peripherals at all?
Most decent IT pros in production jobs can quickly learn new techniques and systems - that's their main skill. If you've got one of those kinds of teams (and everyone should, or the IT department is really a joke - though perhaps most are), then you probably want to fire its tops managers first, if the department isn't performing. Because those top managers probably got to the top by working some more or less specific way of doing IT, riding some vendor's marketing white papers, having one good idea once that saved the day. And they're usually older, less able for many reasons to change their "wetware". Plus, they make a lot of money after feathering their nest for a while, that gets saved to pay someone else to replace them. And they can take with them a lot of accumulated resentment from the production staff when they go, which might even have been most of what's wrong with the department.
Just make sure that their balance of pros and cons is in favor of benefit when you replace them, and not just with some new idiot. Make sure the new leader is really a leader, and can lead the team in learning the new way - and not just a way that's new, but a better one.
So what? I want to see him captured or killed already. Especially if that only happens at "the end", because then that's "the end". And even if he's just propaganda, it's now essential that the US win that propaganda war, too.
All open societies have ways for civilians to report crimes to the police. This one is just a lot better. If you do something in public, you should already expect that it can be recorded, as has been the case for generations, nearly a century.
BTW, "early Nazi Germany" wasn't notable for "citizen snitching", at least not more than any other authoritarian state (which includes many current democracies). You're talking about Soviet East Germany (like the rest of the Soviet Union). Which didn't use mobile civilian cameras, but rather was distinguished by formal government programs forcing about 1/3 of its citizens to actively spy all the time on the other 2/3, their neighbors.
Just because mandatory totalitarian spying is bad doesn't mean one of the techniques it uses, under the control of the public, within the public's rights is at all abusive. In fact, the benefits that the totalitarian spying was sold to the people under as propaganda are actually true in this case, without that nasty totalitarian that can pervert anything into evil.
No one ever makes false police reports now by voice, so though we're totally unprepared for that kind of abuse, it will never happen with pictures.
Because the cops can't just trace your callerID or IP# which sent the fake picture, and charge you with "making a false statement". Nah, they'll never figure that out.
I sure hope criminals never give up horse and carriage for those new automobiles the cops are starting to drive around in.
Now I want my car to have cameras on it all the time, recording 360 degrees. If anything happens, my car should send the clip from the last several seconds or minutes over to 911. With GPS if I allow it, and patch me through by voice to give my eyewitness testimony.
Then, when I follow the perp I videoed, the cops can back me up, and take over when they get wherever they're going.
911 should simply require that every submitted message come with a live person on a separate voice call, from the same callerID (the ones to 911 are ~100% reliable, in its parallel phone network). The caller should tell the 911 operator what the message means, and swear to back it up in testimony, for which the caller will later be called.
All the multimedia should go into a big library, from which it's called as evidence (like if the responding cops immediately deploy, with a picture of a license plate or an accused rapist). A separate squad of cops/researchers should go through the "anonymous" messages to see whether there is indeed anything submitted in there the cops can use anyway, even if the sender never shows up again. The incoming messages don't have to be in the critical path.
Unless they're attached to a witness. Then of course the cops should be able to check it out, just like any other eyewitness report they get.
I've been asking for this 911 feature right here in NYC for years.
I want to snap a picture (from the passenger seat, of course) of the homicidal maniac who just cut me off on the FDR Drive, including their license plate, send it to 911, then call, and tell the cops I'm following them from a safe distance until they arrive. Then the cops can arrest them and charge them with attempted murder. I'll be happy to show up in court to back up all the evidence.
The CIA and Pentagon already had Binladen in the sights of armed US attack drones in Afghanistan in 1998 at least once, but each argued the other (and the other's budget) was responsible for actually firing and killing him. The distraction of a blue dress waving in Congress drowned out the story, but it's still true 10 years later.
Just like Binladen is still at large 7 years later. 7 years after his attacks killed 3000 Americans, and plunged the country into this endless nightmare of failure catastrophe.
Most of which has been cranked up to the max by invading and occupying Iraq instead of capturing or killing Binladen and a few thousand of his henchmen in the Qaeda network. The past 7 years we've spent HUNDREDS OF $BILLIONS that we'll never get back in Iraq, the wrong war. And now we're hearing we've got killer drones in Iraq? Who the F cares?
Where the hell is Binladen already, goddamn it? Every one of you who wears a flag pin like a crucifix, who claims to pray for the soldiers and the country, who would trade even an inch of precious liberty for some of this fake security: where the hell is Binladen, and why the hell don't you care?
The difference between natural selection and unnatural selection ("designed") is that humans do the designing, not "plankton, bacteria,...". The economic entities that live and die are largely designed by that interlocking (by their Boards of Directors) group of a relatively very few people. Though their system does have plenty of bugs, which is what this story is about. Those bugs are the closer step to "natural selection". But that's no comfort, especially since the glitches are the rare interruption in the designed events.
The market doesn't "operate on its own". I don't know where you're getting that from, though it's quite the fad among techno "libertarians" to claim it (in generations past, all it took was reading enough Ayn Rand to be dangerous). I spent the 2nd half of the 1990s designing and deploying infosystems for banks, brokerages, insurance corps, and governments (municipal, provincial/state and federal), mostly in the financial districts of NYC and Toronto. I have advised the NYC City Council's tech committee for several years this decade. I am qualified to assure you that the economy, its transactions, its constraints, its directions, its barriers to entry, its players, its villains, are all highly designed. There's no room for "on its own". And though that doesn't mean that the bankers win every transaction, literally "at the end of the day" (CoB, the magic moment when transactions close in NYC at 4PM), the bankers win and everyone else loses, whenever there's an option. And there's always an option. Just ask Bear Stearns, or Fannie Mae / Freddie Mac, or any of a hundred other institutions you never heard of that got away with (often literal) murder in the past 10, 20, 30, 50, 100, 200 years.
The global economy does indeed change and evolve. Indeed within the context of a complex environment, economic, technological, political, social and otherwise. But its evolution is guided at every step, even if that guidance isn't "omnipotent".
Which is exactly why I'm complaining about this collapse of UAL due to a newspaper blip catching a bug. Because that system sacrifices the resilience of the mythical "free market" for more assured growth for its managers. And when something like this happens, it shows that the "security" that the managers offer for their fees and lion's share of the upside is also largely mythical. The emperor wears no clothes. There is indeed an emperor, not just the law of the jungle, and everyone bows to him as he parades past. But he's naked, at least on more days than any legitimate emperor should be.
That's not "evolution", it's accidental genocide. Not nearly the same, when you're the one working to stay fit enough to survive, but don't have the emperor gene.
the decision to pull the plug on Linux came down from the highest levels of the Chinese company's corporate headquarters.
China is a Communist country. The "highest levels" of any corporate HQ is the Communist Party. Is China's Communist government attacking Linux?
Maybe because Linux really practices "from each as per their ability, to each as per their needs", and leads the world in sharing property without respect to class. And is not only successful, but makes some people gloriously rich. Maybe China is just jealous of Linux?
The Moon gets 1.3KW per square meter, steadily across half its surface (with the very rare Lunar eclipse in the Earth's shadow for a few minutes). There's almost 2 * 10^14 square meters, or almost 2.5 billion gigawatts falling on the Moon.
Even with just a single square kilometer, that's about 1.3 gigawatts. Even if NASA uses the Lunar dust to form solar cells, as has been demonstrated (built by remote controlled robots), if those cells get only 0.1% efficiency, that's 1.3 megawatts.
These experimental reactors are generating up to 12 kilowatts. A 0.1% efficient Lunar solar cell would generate that much on 300x300 meters, which can be found anywhere on the Moon. It's not like anyone else is using it. If we launch our cheap 20% silicon cells premade on Earth, 12KW would take under 10 square meters.
Launching heavy, dangerous machines like a nuclear reactor (several times, one for each application) is a ridiculously wasteful way to get power for Lunar devices. Compared to the solar alternatives, it's obvious that the "design requirements" are targeting something other than effective power for Lunar machines.
That other requirement is Star Wars "missile defense". NASA is just getting into the business of regularly developing and launching nukes into space. Some will probably wind up powering science and exploration on the Moon. But many others will probably power spy and military machines on the Moon and in orbit.
NASA is one of the most inspiring US government programs, at home and the world over, for good reason. It's an excellent investment by Americans in our technology industries, having helped birth the microcomputer, all kinds of biological science, materials science, the fuelcell, and boosted solar cells themselves. We should not ruin that programme by reducing it to yet another boondoggle subsidy to the nuke industry and the defense contractors. Especially not when they're lying to insert their subsidies into the public budget like this.
Instead, let's boost our peaceful solar tech industry. Let's even build a fullscale Lunar solar base that beams energy down to a network of US satellites and base stations that get us out of these dangerous nonrenewable energy sources like nukes and oil. That kind of "peace dividend" will let us reduce our military liabilities that those other failed energy systems keep necessary.
We've got to make a break right now. And we're returning to the Moon just in time to do it right. Let's not ruin our greatest achievements by dragging them down to the levels of our greatest failures.
This system is very much designed. It's defined by a small group of huge banks, foreign debt buyers, large "market maker" brokers, and the entites that are more than just one of those at a time. It's governed by loads of regulations, mostly installed to squash competition and protect banks. All trading in corporations about which any sudden bad news is believable, because most bad news is suppressed, but everyone can tell that bad news is rampant. All of which news spin is of course designed, by a consensus rather than a conspiracy.
Yes, our economy is "evolving". Everything evolves, even despite mighty efforts to design in the face of vaster natural trends. But the way our economy is designed right now, and has been for many years, is so dependent on unsupportable debt that's finally running out, on extracting resources (and dumping waste into "unused" places) that are finally running out, and on naive gullibility from every quarter except the bankers, we're looking like the one essential part of evolution: extinction.
America's extremely weak now, as measured by capital, because our outstanding debts total more than the entire planet (including us) produces in more than a year. Debt owed in substantial amounts to some of our fiercest enemies, China and OPEC, which are in turn extremely strong. All economic indications are that the US is not fit to survive in this environment, and is merely on life support while our predators switch diets. That might be an accident. But it's a fatal one.
When a blip at a local Florida newspaper can combine with a trivial bug to destroy a major American airline in a morning, the economy and the "reporting" that the economy depends on is revealed to be a giant joke.
This episode was remarkable because it was huge, fast, and concentrated in a single high profile corporation. But how much of this broken system's smaller problems go "unnoticed"? Unnoticed as problems, at least, but showing up in all kinds of market valuations and economic decisions based on them that are all built on a landscape of errors, omissions and misunderestimations?
How can you trust an economy that makes mistakes like that? Anyone smart would find any alternative that's less crazy and put their money into it.
But then Linux programs won't work on that hybrid, because they mostly call the Linux kernel (for even filesystem access, network access, etc). The point isn't just to get some OS to work on the PPC. The point is to get the required apps to work on the PPC, which requires an OS. There's a lot more, and a lot more up-to-date, apps for Linux than for NetBSD.
I used NetBSD for years until I switched to Linux, because Linux has the apps. NetBSD was (and largely still is) a better OS in terms of performance, full functionality, internal engineering, and portability (and of course it "runs everywhere"). But those don't matter if the apps don't run on it.
To be specific, I want to run Ubuntu on my PS3, which has a Cell that runs apps on its PPC core. If Ubuntu doesn't get more PPC developers, the Linux kernel won't continue to run on PS3. Ubuntu's desktop is the best for PS3, because it's simple and includes all kinds of SW that uses the PS3 HW, especially the Blu-Ray player and other multimedia. Plus Ubuntu is used more than other distros on PCs that are used to do things that PS3 has better HW for. So NetBSD on PS3 doesn't cut it, even though that might be a better platform for writing new apps. And the same is true for lots of other PPC platforms, including embedded ones supporting multimedia GUIs.
Well, that's what DMs are for. A good DM would balance such a curse, if it were really going to ruin the game, by perhaps allowing the ring to be retrieved with minimal damage, encased in something preventing its use for wishing, along with the dragons in hot pursuit of the cursing cleric. Maybe give the accursed (or an NPC) access to a single wish to pull it all off, and maybe let the cursing cleric use a wish to save their life.
That's why magic is no match for a good DM, who transcends omnipotence. And how roleplaying and dungeonmastery trumps the dice and the rules.
Or a crappy game with a lame DM can just let players wreak havoc, while also being a PITA and boring.
This obviously raises some questions about creationism,
What questions? Like whether Creationists are really babbling on about some aliens creating life on Earth as some kind of "live action videogame" or something?
Or some ridiculous question about whether having a fabulous chemistry set makes someone a god, and science that dumb people understand equal to a bona fide "miracle"?
Casting Geas/Quest
on
Quests
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· Score: 2, Informative
Level: Brd 6, Clr 6, Sor/Wiz 6 Casting Time: 10 minutes Target: One living creature Saving Throw: None
This spell functions similarly to lesser geas, except that it affects a creature of any HD and allows no saving throw.
Instead of taking penalties to ability scores (as with lesser geas), the subject takes 3d6 points of damage each day it does not attempt to follow the geas/quest. Additionally, each day it must make a Fortitude saving throw or become sickened. These effects end 24 hours after the creature attempts to resume the geas/ quest.
A remove curse spell ends a geas/quest spell only if its caster level is at least two higher than your caster level. Break enchantment does not end a geas/quest, but limited wish, miracle, and wish do.
Bards, sorcerers, and wizards usually refer to this spell as geas, while clerics call the same spell quest.
Level: Brd 3, Sor/Wiz 4 Components: V Casting Time: 1 round Range: Close (25 ft. + 5 ft./2 levels) Target: One living creature with 7 HD or less Duration: One day/level or until discharged (D) Saving Throw: Will negates Spell Resistance: Yes
A lesser geas places a magical command on a creature to carry out some service or to refrain from some action or course of activity, as desired by you. The creature must have 7 or fewer Hit Dice and be able to understand you. While a geas cannot compel a creature to kill itself or perform acts that would result in certain death, it can cause almost any other course of activity.
The geased creature must follow the given instructions until the geas is completed, no matter how long it takes.
If the instructions involve some open-ended task that the recipient cannot complete through his own actions the spell remains in effect for a maximum of one day per caster level. A clever recipient can subvert some instructions:
If the subject is prevented from obeying the lesser geas for 24 hours, it takes a -2 penalty to each of its ability scores. Each day, another -2 penalty accumulates, up to a total of -8. No ability score can be reduced to less than 1 by this effect. The ability score penalties are removed 24 hours after the subject resumes obeying the lesser geas.
A lesser geas (and all ability score penalties) can be ended by break enchantment, limited wish, remove curse, miracle, or wish. Dispel magic does not affect a lesser geas.
Well, it's pretty clear that if a takedown notice cannot be delivered to an accused infringer despite taking the required steps to do so (eg. because the accused infringer is anonymous), then the process can proceed to the next step instead. There's no need to either hold up the process or to force identification. The first notice should be sent because it can eliminate a lot of the trouble and undue pressure on the publisher that won't work on a lot of targets if it can be stopped there first.
Canonical, the corporation that owns the Ubuntu distro (ie, Red Hat Inc's and Microsoft's direct competitor), has dropped official support of PowerPC from its work. Which means that PPC architecture versions of Ubuntu are falling behind, even to the point where the kernel in the latest releases cannot boot on PPC machines. PPC isn't just old Macs and powerful dedicated workstations. It's also the main core in many supercomputers, lots of embedded CPU devices, and the Sony PS3. Those machines need more active work to keep Ubuntu working on them.
But PPC is still supported as part of the Ubuntu project as a community effort, which is what Open Source is all about. If you've got some spare cycles, or even better some independently developed PPC code, to help Ubuntu keep running on the PowerPC architecture, please join the people supporting the community distro.
Google should be developing a resistance to invalid censorship attempts like these meritless DMCA takedown notices. It should be much harder to trick Google into even temporary suspension. Soon enough, Google should learn that the burden of proof is on the censor, and leave content untouched until the attempting censor proves their case on facts and logic, not screeches and innuendo.
And Google's lesson should be the model for the rest who have to compete in the environment so influenced by Google in it.
FWIW, the DMCA should be amended to require takedown notices to first notify the accused infringer, and include the counternotice procedure and framework, before even notifying a 3rd party like Google (or any other independent publisher of other people's content). That reform would go a long way to making the DMCA less a club with which to intimidate without merit, and closer to some kind of protection of "progress in science and the useful arts" that is any copyright action's only legitimate basis.
The NSA has been demonstrated this year to be spying on all AT&T traffic. The rest of what's leaked about that secret spying programme indicates AT&T is not at all unique. So you are in fact wrong: they are spying on all of us.
And even if they were spying like that on only a small percentage of us in violation of our rights, that was also true throughout the Soviet Union, and we fought for a half century to stop them from taking over and doing that to us.
The Constitution isn't a statistical filter. Each of us is a whole person, with rights. When even a few of us have our rights systematically violated by our government, that government is violating the Constitution that is its only legitimate source of power, and therefore that government is illegitimate.
After all that we've seen of the past 8 years of vast government abuses and incompetence, especially in security, the only people who think "nothing to see here, move along, the government is here to help, you're safe" are people working mightily to lie to themselves. Don't believe it will work on me.
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I don't think these drivers are going to take more than a 64MB Flash ROM, which can't cost more than $1 wholesale. If every USB client chip had "driver Flash" in it, the whole cost couldn't go up much. And saving on the entire process of burning and including a CD would cut into that extra expense, while lowering support costs. USB is more expensive than RS-232, but has taken over because of those kinds of savings and marketable benefits.
The security issues are exactly the same with the driver embedded in the USB device as with a CD - the "autoplay" feature is an executable part of the OS, not the USB device. In fact, since it's embedded, there is less to go wrong, like sabotaged CDs.
What the world needs is devices that are truly plug and play, with SW installation and configuration by mere users a vanishing rarity.
Why doesn't every USB device come with its drivers embedded in the device itself, accessible out of the box over the basic USB driver that any OS should come with, which just retrieves the real device driver across the USB, installs it, and then uses it to access the real device? A good device would indeed install to the desktop a URL for updated drivers, and a really good one would even allow storing the updated drivers in the device's storage for installation at a later host, too. Drivers for each platform, whether Windows, Mac, Linux, or any other for which a driver is available.
Why do I have to ever see a driver, or install any SW, for these peripherals at all?
Most decent IT pros in production jobs can quickly learn new techniques and systems - that's their main skill. If you've got one of those kinds of teams (and everyone should, or the IT department is really a joke - though perhaps most are), then you probably want to fire its tops managers first, if the department isn't performing. Because those top managers probably got to the top by working some more or less specific way of doing IT, riding some vendor's marketing white papers, having one good idea once that saved the day. And they're usually older, less able for many reasons to change their "wetware". Plus, they make a lot of money after feathering their nest for a while, that gets saved to pay someone else to replace them. And they can take with them a lot of accumulated resentment from the production staff when they go, which might even have been most of what's wrong with the department.
Just make sure that their balance of pros and cons is in favor of benefit when you replace them, and not just with some new idiot. Make sure the new leader is really a leader, and can lead the team in learning the new way - and not just a way that's new, but a better one.
So what? I want to see him captured or killed already. Especially if that only happens at "the end", because then that's "the end". And even if he's just propaganda, it's now essential that the US win that propaganda war, too.
All open societies have ways for civilians to report crimes to the police. This one is just a lot better. If you do something in public, you should already expect that it can be recorded, as has been the case for generations, nearly a century.
BTW, "early Nazi Germany" wasn't notable for "citizen snitching", at least not more than any other authoritarian state (which includes many current democracies). You're talking about Soviet East Germany (like the rest of the Soviet Union). Which didn't use mobile civilian cameras, but rather was distinguished by formal government programs forcing about 1/3 of its citizens to actively spy all the time on the other 2/3, their neighbors.
Just because mandatory totalitarian spying is bad doesn't mean one of the techniques it uses, under the control of the public, within the public's rights is at all abusive. In fact, the benefits that the totalitarian spying was sold to the people under as propaganda are actually true in this case, without that nasty totalitarian that can pervert anything into evil.
No one ever makes false police reports now by voice, so though we're totally unprepared for that kind of abuse, it will never happen with pictures.
Because the cops can't just trace your callerID or IP# which sent the fake picture, and charge you with "making a false statement". Nah, they'll never figure that out.
I sure hope criminals never give up horse and carriage for those new automobiles the cops are starting to drive around in.
And that, children, is why swamped 911 voice calls were such a total failure starting 30 years ago that we abandoned them after a few months.
Now I want my car to have cameras on it all the time, recording 360 degrees. If anything happens, my car should send the clip from the last several seconds or minutes over to 911. With GPS if I allow it, and patch me through by voice to give my eyewitness testimony.
Then, when I follow the perp I videoed, the cops can back me up, and take over when they get wherever they're going.
I'm the TRAFFIC AVENGER, HAHAHAHAHA!!!
911 should simply require that every submitted message come with a live person on a separate voice call, from the same callerID (the ones to 911 are ~100% reliable, in its parallel phone network). The caller should tell the 911 operator what the message means, and swear to back it up in testimony, for which the caller will later be called.
All the multimedia should go into a big library, from which it's called as evidence (like if the responding cops immediately deploy, with a picture of a license plate or an accused rapist). A separate squad of cops/researchers should go through the "anonymous" messages to see whether there is indeed anything submitted in there the cops can use anyway, even if the sender never shows up again. The incoming messages don't have to be in the critical path.
Unless they're attached to a witness. Then of course the cops should be able to check it out, just like any other eyewitness report they get.
I've been asking for this 911 feature right here in NYC for years.
I want to snap a picture (from the passenger seat, of course) of the homicidal maniac who just cut me off on the FDR Drive, including their license plate, send it to 911, then call, and tell the cops I'm following them from a safe distance until they arrive. Then the cops can arrest them and charge them with attempted murder. I'll be happy to show up in court to back up all the evidence.
The CIA and Pentagon already had Binladen in the sights of armed US attack drones in Afghanistan in 1998 at least once, but each argued the other (and the other's budget) was responsible for actually firing and killing him. The distraction of a blue dress waving in Congress drowned out the story, but it's still true 10 years later.
Just like Binladen is still at large 7 years later. 7 years after his attacks killed 3000 Americans, and plunged the country into this endless nightmare of failure catastrophe.
Most of which has been cranked up to the max by invading and occupying Iraq instead of capturing or killing Binladen and a few thousand of his henchmen in the Qaeda network. The past 7 years we've spent HUNDREDS OF $BILLIONS that we'll never get back in Iraq, the wrong war. And now we're hearing we've got killer drones in Iraq? Who the F cares?
Where the hell is Binladen already, goddamn it? Every one of you who wears a flag pin like a crucifix, who claims to pray for the soldiers and the country, who would trade even an inch of precious liberty for some of this fake security: where the hell is Binladen, and why the hell don't you care?
The difference between natural selection and unnatural selection ("designed") is that humans do the designing, not "plankton, bacteria, ...". The economic entities that live and die are largely designed by that interlocking (by their Boards of Directors) group of a relatively very few people. Though their system does have plenty of bugs, which is what this story is about. Those bugs are the closer step to "natural selection". But that's no comfort, especially since the glitches are the rare interruption in the designed events.
The market doesn't "operate on its own". I don't know where you're getting that from, though it's quite the fad among techno "libertarians" to claim it (in generations past, all it took was reading enough Ayn Rand to be dangerous). I spent the 2nd half of the 1990s designing and deploying infosystems for banks, brokerages, insurance corps, and governments (municipal, provincial/state and federal), mostly in the financial districts of NYC and Toronto. I have advised the NYC City Council's tech committee for several years this decade. I am qualified to assure you that the economy, its transactions, its constraints, its directions, its barriers to entry, its players, its villains, are all highly designed. There's no room for "on its own". And though that doesn't mean that the bankers win every transaction, literally "at the end of the day" (CoB, the magic moment when transactions close in NYC at 4PM), the bankers win and everyone else loses, whenever there's an option. And there's always an option. Just ask Bear Stearns, or Fannie Mae / Freddie Mac, or any of a hundred other institutions you never heard of that got away with (often literal) murder in the past 10, 20, 30, 50, 100, 200 years.
The global economy does indeed change and evolve. Indeed within the context of a complex environment, economic, technological, political, social and otherwise. But its evolution is guided at every step, even if that guidance isn't "omnipotent".
Which is exactly why I'm complaining about this collapse of UAL due to a newspaper blip catching a bug. Because that system sacrifices the resilience of the mythical "free market" for more assured growth for its managers. And when something like this happens, it shows that the "security" that the managers offer for their fees and lion's share of the upside is also largely mythical. The emperor wears no clothes. There is indeed an emperor, not just the law of the jungle, and everyone bows to him as he parades past. But he's naked, at least on more days than any legitimate emperor should be.
That's not "evolution", it's accidental genocide. Not nearly the same, when you're the one working to stay fit enough to survive, but don't have the emperor gene.
China is a Communist country. The "highest levels" of any corporate HQ is the Communist Party. Is China's Communist government attacking Linux?
Maybe because Linux really practices "from each as per their ability, to each as per their needs", and leads the world in sharing property without respect to class. And is not only successful, but makes some people gloriously rich. Maybe China is just jealous of Linux?
The Moon gets 1.3KW per square meter, steadily across half its surface (with the very rare Lunar eclipse in the Earth's shadow for a few minutes). There's almost 2 * 10^14 square meters, or almost 2.5 billion gigawatts falling on the Moon.
Even with just a single square kilometer, that's about 1.3 gigawatts. Even if NASA uses the Lunar dust to form solar cells, as has been demonstrated (built by remote controlled robots), if those cells get only 0.1% efficiency, that's 1.3 megawatts.
These experimental reactors are generating up to 12 kilowatts. A 0.1% efficient Lunar solar cell would generate that much on 300x300 meters, which can be found anywhere on the Moon. It's not like anyone else is using it. If we launch our cheap 20% silicon cells premade on Earth, 12KW would take under 10 square meters.
Launching heavy, dangerous machines like a nuclear reactor (several times, one for each application) is a ridiculously wasteful way to get power for Lunar devices. Compared to the solar alternatives, it's obvious that the "design requirements" are targeting something other than effective power for Lunar machines.
That other requirement is Star Wars "missile defense". NASA is just getting into the business of regularly developing and launching nukes into space. Some will probably wind up powering science and exploration on the Moon. But many others will probably power spy and military machines on the Moon and in orbit.
NASA is one of the most inspiring US government programs, at home and the world over, for good reason. It's an excellent investment by Americans in our technology industries, having helped birth the microcomputer, all kinds of biological science, materials science, the fuelcell, and boosted solar cells themselves. We should not ruin that programme by reducing it to yet another boondoggle subsidy to the nuke industry and the defense contractors. Especially not when they're lying to insert their subsidies into the public budget like this.
Instead, let's boost our peaceful solar tech industry. Let's even build a fullscale Lunar solar base that beams energy down to a network of US satellites and base stations that get us out of these dangerous nonrenewable energy sources like nukes and oil. That kind of "peace dividend" will let us reduce our military liabilities that those other failed energy systems keep necessary.
We've got to make a break right now. And we're returning to the Moon just in time to do it right. Let's not ruin our greatest achievements by dragging them down to the levels of our greatest failures.
This system is very much designed. It's defined by a small group of huge banks, foreign debt buyers, large "market maker" brokers, and the entites that are more than just one of those at a time. It's governed by loads of regulations, mostly installed to squash competition and protect banks. All trading in corporations about which any sudden bad news is believable, because most bad news is suppressed, but everyone can tell that bad news is rampant. All of which news spin is of course designed, by a consensus rather than a conspiracy.
Yes, our economy is "evolving". Everything evolves, even despite mighty efforts to design in the face of vaster natural trends. But the way our economy is designed right now, and has been for many years, is so dependent on unsupportable debt that's finally running out, on extracting resources (and dumping waste into "unused" places) that are finally running out, and on naive gullibility from every quarter except the bankers, we're looking like the one essential part of evolution: extinction.
America's extremely weak now, as measured by capital, because our outstanding debts total more than the entire planet (including us) produces in more than a year. Debt owed in substantial amounts to some of our fiercest enemies, China and OPEC, which are in turn extremely strong. All economic indications are that the US is not fit to survive in this environment, and is merely on life support while our predators switch diets. That might be an accident. But it's a fatal one.
When a blip at a local Florida newspaper can combine with a trivial bug to destroy a major American airline in a morning, the economy and the "reporting" that the economy depends on is revealed to be a giant joke.
This episode was remarkable because it was huge, fast, and concentrated in a single high profile corporation. But how much of this broken system's smaller problems go "unnoticed"? Unnoticed as problems, at least, but showing up in all kinds of market valuations and economic decisions based on them that are all built on a landscape of errors, omissions and misunderestimations?
How can you trust an economy that makes mistakes like that? Anyone smart would find any alternative that's less crazy and put their money into it.
But then Linux programs won't work on that hybrid, because they mostly call the Linux kernel (for even filesystem access, network access, etc). The point isn't just to get some OS to work on the PPC. The point is to get the required apps to work on the PPC, which requires an OS. There's a lot more, and a lot more up-to-date, apps for Linux than for NetBSD.
I used NetBSD for years until I switched to Linux, because Linux has the apps. NetBSD was (and largely still is) a better OS in terms of performance, full functionality, internal engineering, and portability (and of course it "runs everywhere"). But those don't matter if the apps don't run on it.
To be specific, I want to run Ubuntu on my PS3, which has a Cell that runs apps on its PPC core. If Ubuntu doesn't get more PPC developers, the Linux kernel won't continue to run on PS3. Ubuntu's desktop is the best for PS3, because it's simple and includes all kinds of SW that uses the PS3 HW, especially the Blu-Ray player and other multimedia. Plus Ubuntu is used more than other distros on PCs that are used to do things that PS3 has better HW for. So NetBSD on PS3 doesn't cut it, even though that might be a better platform for writing new apps. And the same is true for lots of other PPC platforms, including embedded ones supporting multimedia GUIs.
Well, that's what DMs are for. A good DM would balance such a curse, if it were really going to ruin the game, by perhaps allowing the ring to be retrieved with minimal damage, encased in something preventing its use for wishing, along with the dragons in hot pursuit of the cursing cleric. Maybe give the accursed (or an NPC) access to a single wish to pull it all off, and maybe let the cursing cleric use a wish to save their life.
That's why magic is no match for a good DM, who transcends omnipotence. And how roleplaying and dungeonmastery trumps the dice and the rules.
Or a crappy game with a lame DM can just let players wreak havoc, while also being a PITA and boring.
What questions? Like whether Creationists are really babbling on about some aliens creating life on Earth as some kind of "live action videogame" or something?
Or some ridiculous question about whether having a fabulous chemistry set makes someone a god, and science that dumb people understand equal to a bona fide "miracle"?
Well, it's pretty clear that if a takedown notice cannot be delivered to an accused infringer despite taking the required steps to do so (eg. because the accused infringer is anonymous), then the process can proceed to the next step instead. There's no need to either hold up the process or to force identification. The first notice should be sent because it can eliminate a lot of the trouble and undue pressure on the publisher that won't work on a lot of targets if it can be stopped there first.
I think that you just said exactly what I said.
Canonical, the corporation that owns the Ubuntu distro (ie, Red Hat Inc's and Microsoft's direct competitor), has dropped official support of PowerPC from its work. Which means that PPC architecture versions of Ubuntu are falling behind, even to the point where the kernel in the latest releases cannot boot on PPC machines. PPC isn't just old Macs and powerful dedicated workstations. It's also the main core in many supercomputers, lots of embedded CPU devices, and the Sony PS3. Those machines need more active work to keep Ubuntu working on them.
But PPC is still supported as part of the Ubuntu project as a community effort, which is what Open Source is all about. If you've got some spare cycles, or even better some independently developed PPC code, to help Ubuntu keep running on the PowerPC architecture, please join the people supporting the community distro.
Google should be developing a resistance to invalid censorship attempts like these meritless DMCA takedown notices. It should be much harder to trick Google into even temporary suspension. Soon enough, Google should learn that the burden of proof is on the censor, and leave content untouched until the attempting censor proves their case on facts and logic, not screeches and innuendo.
And Google's lesson should be the model for the rest who have to compete in the environment so influenced by Google in it.
FWIW, the DMCA should be amended to require takedown notices to first notify the accused infringer, and include the counternotice procedure and framework, before even notifying a 3rd party like Google (or any other independent publisher of other people's content). That reform would go a long way to making the DMCA less a club with which to intimidate without merit, and closer to some kind of protection of "progress in science and the useful arts" that is any copyright action's only legitimate basis.
The NSA has been demonstrated this year to be spying on all AT&T traffic. The rest of what's leaked about that secret spying programme indicates AT&T is not at all unique. So you are in fact wrong: they are spying on all of us.
And even if they were spying like that on only a small percentage of us in violation of our rights, that was also true throughout the Soviet Union, and we fought for a half century to stop them from taking over and doing that to us.
The Constitution isn't a statistical filter. Each of us is a whole person, with rights. When even a few of us have our rights systematically violated by our government, that government is violating the Constitution that is its only legitimate source of power, and therefore that government is illegitimate.
After all that we've seen of the past 8 years of vast government abuses and incompetence, especially in security, the only people who think "nothing to see here, move along, the government is here to help, you're safe" are people working mightily to lie to themselves. Don't believe it will work on me.