Good will to a degree is okay, but it's not going to make the books balance or float your company. The odd person supporting you because of some random good will policy is insigificant in the larger economic health of a company. Its just a matter of numbers.
The bottom line truth is that the product is all that matters in the end. Look at the oil companies. Are they the most profitable business in the history of teh world because of good will, or beacuse of the fact that they are selling a highly segmented, highly demanded, hard to find product?
In the end Google will end up like all other companies of their size. Bottom line driven, fiercely competitive, and mediocre.
How many believe that their Senator actually represents anything but special interests?
This is interesting. The Senate and therefore senators actually were intended to, and in fact do, represent their state. Specifically, the state government. They are the representative of your state government in the federal government. This is why under the original Constitution Senators were appointed by their respective state legislatures.
The House of Representatives was intended to represent "you".
For the most part they do a good job of it, actually. They are very responsive to public pressure and sentiment.
Unfortunately extensive gerrymandering has so rigged the system that there is a small amount of turnover within the structure, reducing democratic influence.
Well, I won't gloat or anything, but I have two Windows servers that are both over 1000 days uptime. One recently passed 1200 days, actually.
This post has the details:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=195520&cid=160 21446
Interesting about your openvz issue- I get that same panic from time to time on a heavily used server.
I, like you, am also a practicing libertarian. As such, I'll give my divergent point of view.
Primarily the problem with the libertarian philosophy is two fold - first you can't trust people to leave each other alone, and two, in some cases exercising your own legitimate freedom lessens the freedoms of someone else. Therefore, taken to it's natural end the libertarian perspective leads to choas and an over valuation of the "alpha male".
Radio airwaves are a pefect example of this. If you, by exercising your perfectly natural rights to construct a transmitter do so you can very easily obscure or block the perfectly natural rights of two other people to communicate via said public airwaves. It becomes a race to see who can put the most power out over the largest band. In the end, you get just one large muddled mass of easily creatable frequences at huge power - noise. FM signals are not hard to generate. The equipment is old and cheap. And so is too much power. This is exactly why regulation of the airwaves is, despite it's anti-libertarian ethic - in the interests of greater freedom.
The same style argument can go for some other circumstances. Shared - public - resources require some sort of regulation that counts on more than mutal goodwill. Asking a person to do something not in his or her best interest is anti-libertarian in it's nature, and that's exactly what is sometimes required. In the end if comes down to force. The power to impose fines and to enforce payment, and the power to imprision.
This is very unfortunate.
But let's look at this way. I own some mercury. I own waterfront property on a lake. Therefore I can use the mercury to decorate my rocks on my waterfront property. It is my mercury, my rocks, and my waterfront property. Ergo, you stopping me from doing so is a violation of my freedom to utilize my capital as I see fit.
However, contamination of that lake with even just 2lbs of mercury will spoil most life in that lake for several seasons, and make the wather unhealthy to swim in. This will create a deficit of utility for the other land owners, and as such, their property will not longer be as valuable.
This is why libertarianism is not yet a viable option in my political situations. Myself and other libertarians have a lack of effective solutons to these "Shared resource" questions. At best a sharp fellow can suggest a sort of quasi-market based solution that involves credits you can buy and sell. In the end though, they are all artifical imprications strapped onto a marketplace that has failed to support an open, liberty-based solution.
Hardened usually means "externally" so. The Windows install is hardened, but the whole thing is shieled from the outside by a nicely done firewall. On the network side for windows IPSEC is reliable and has proven to be pretty well done. Few patches are released for it on Win2k3.
You confidence in a 3rd party app is disturbing.
As is your confidence in the users.
It's not like that app isn't updated and patched. It just doens't require a reboot or taking the box offline! Plus, it's a high quality piece of software.
As far as the users go, the only users getting to the box are doing so through the 3rd party app. The vector for risk are very small. There is very little surface space to attack the box.
I just volunteer now....but, let's think about "critical patches".
What makes then critical? MS says so, because they expose some flaw or insecurity in the product.
Well, if you are running a really hardened box, with no excess services, why does an insecurity in an unused service matter?
If I am not running any or many desktop sessions, why do I care about a GDI+ plus bug?
This box is unpatched - no patches from MS - from that original installation. But so what? The only ports exposed are from a 3rd party app that is itself secured and harnded. Traffic is firewalled by some nice equipment and the install of Windows was properly hardened. Each box lives in a little "DMZ" at a co-lo facility.
What's the risk vector you see to justify installing some patch that is "critical"?
I worked for a non-profit when Windows 2003 was released to manufacturing. They were donated two new dell servers and two boxed copies of Win2k3 Standard edition for the purpose of running two databases that previously were hosted on one box that was seriously overloaded. Decent servers on the high end at the time - hot swap power, hot swap drives, dual proc, etc. These boxes are Internet facing (not for database access, that requires an IPSEC connection at the firewall level) and hosted at a big name co-lo facility. The database is Oracle 9i.
I remember well the day that I hardened them and finished the deployment. It was May 1st, 2003, a Thursday I believe. Win2k3 had just become available the previous week. Oracle had released a big set of patches for 9i not long before.
I still check in on those boxes. One has 994 days of uptime, and the other has, as of last week, 1190 days. The longer running of the two - DAEDALUS - runs close to 75% load from 6am-6pm, 5 days a week.
The only other box I have running that beats that is a Netware 4.x box. But that barely counts as a usuable OS:)
This is really funny, trying to pin this on the Republicans when it's that "other" sponsored and signed into law the bill that makes this possible (the DMCA), has the largest group of Hollywood shills known to man (hello, California anyone?), and has a number of very happy to please lapdogs (former Senator Hollings, anyone)?
That's fine, but if they examine content and route based on it, they should lose their common carrier status.
That's the trade off. If you judge value based on the content, then you are responsible for the content as a trading partner.
Why should we have to pay more for our phone service/electricity/roads/etc, etc, etc just so you can afford yours? If you like living in the middle of nowhere so much then be prepared to pay for it.
Three reasons.
First, much or most of the non-office style work is done outside of cities. Most city dwellers don't want to work at a meat packing plant or live next to one. Most city dwellers don't want to work at a waste water treamenet plant, or live next to one. Most city dwellers do not want to live next to trash incinerator, oil refinery, pumping station, truck depot, concerete plant, or pig farm. Yet just about all city dwellers want sewer service, water, eletricty, delivery trucks, and all the stuff that can't be cheaply or "not in my back yard" done in the urban centers. I've lived next to a 4000 acre chicken farm before. I have a feeling that all the egg and chicken eating residents of NYC would be less than willing to give up central park to raise chickens on. So that's the first reason. Unless you want these things in the city, you have to be prepared to support less-than-urban areas.
Reason #2, is that these "red staters" grow the grain, raise the cattle, and do the argicultural work without which the country cannot literally survive. Look at where the food that we both consume and export is grown: the breadbasket. Again, this is not possible to achieve in an urban center. Urban centers are net importers of items like food and energy.
Reason #3 is that development trends are such that you can't really create new urban centers, and so, people are stuck living in the "middle of nowhere". New communities that do pop up are generally suburban; we aren't seeing a lot of new cities being built. If the rural population tried to move into the urban centers what you'd see is an even tight real estate market and yet another escalation of housing rates. This would just lead to even more sprawl.
Finally, I think you are overestimating the effect of the rural and surban subsidy, and understating the unreimbursed services provided by the rural population. The founding fathers recognized from day one this divide between the urban and rural citizen and this led directly to the split system of representation - the two per State senate and the population based House.
Yeah, I have to go ahead and disagree with you on your assesment.
Maybe auto-indexing would be generally good, but there are times when I as programmer can be 100% sure I want to avoid a full table scan that would not be optimized for by any automated process.
I have one table in database I work with that contains 190 columns and and about 1.5B rows.
I have a query I run once, maybe twice a year, that returns only a handful of rows but requires a WHERE on about 1/3 of the columns. When I do need to run the query I can't be waiting a few days for it: it's generally needed within 1 hr.
An automated process that analyzes table usage by previous queries would not optimize appropriately for this unless you started adding all kinds of hints to the process.
Maybe there is some value in an automated process but generally speaking any type of serious use is going to require some skilled tuning.
You bring up this age old mis-direction about the hijackers being Saudi. Technically true, but still, a mis-direction.
This is very often tied into a larger theme of bin Laden being Saudi, and ultimately, that our real enemy is Saudia Arabia, etc etc.
The hijackers were by and large outlaws, bandits, in Saudi Arabia. Like bin Laden, they were either wanted, or exiled, or both. The way you present it seems to pass off that it was Saudi Arabia sponsoring the attacks, which is patently false.
As to the larger theme, the House of Saud - the ruling family of the Kingdon - is definately not the problem - they are not our enemies. This is a tricky point - yes, they are despotic tryants with a tendancy for the suppression of life and liberty. Yes, they impose a religious theocracy.
However, the key here, is that like Pakistan, they are a government which is amiable to the US. And the alternative is far, far, far worse even unspeakable. The Kingdom is ruled by opposing forces - the largely secular ruling family and security forces posed against the clerics and their loyal militias. The Wahhabists in power have a firm grip over the masses, and they exert that control in a tit-for-tat with the ruling family. Pressure from the US or other sources would cause the weak ruling family to fall apart and be replaced or augmented by clerics that were so extreme that bin Laden refused many of their teachings.
When I hear people bashing on Saudia Arabia like they are our true enemy... it's more than a little scary. A nation like Saudi Arabia in the hands of capable dictator or clan could be more devasting than your average westerner can stomach. Imagine an Arab government with a $250B a year military budget, manufacturing capabilities, 20% of the worlds oil reserves, 30% of the worlds crude production capacity, and a totally pliant population. The Iran-Iraq war could well be seen as a pleasant walk in the park compared to the destruction that could result.
This isn't to excuse the House of Saud, but they have made significant positive steps, and they are clearly better than the alternative. A slight by the US on the world state could lead to a permanent destablisation of the country which would likely be totally castrosphic. Not even participating in the First Gulf War - just allowing planes and troops to be stationed in the Kingdom very nearly toppled the regime. The state security force worked full time to minimize the damage caused by that decision. Appearning to cozy, or compliant, or unwilling to offend the US and Europe could well tip the scales and motivate the clerics to sieze power.
Anyways. That's my geo-political rant. I criticize Bush in the strongest terms possible for his anti-delluvian world view. It's absurd. But I expect more from people in intelligent discussions. Fomenting a popular uprising or economic or military activity against the Kingdom is definately not in America or the World's best interests.
If that's not what you were going for.. apologies.
Slavery and a lack of rights for women and minorities was against the Consitution.
This is just patently false.
1. Article IV Section II establishes slavery as a legal institution:
"No person held to service or labor in one state, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due. "
2. Article I Section II establishes the disparate value of free whites and "all other persons":
"Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several states which may be included within this union, according to their respective numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons."
The original Constitution emphatically does not provide for the equal rights of all citizens: it differienates between free and non free, recognizes forced labor and the ownership of forced laborers and generally does not do anything which you claim!
Free speech should be exactly what the Constitution says it is, and that we need additional regulations to protect it means that the Consitution is being shit on, and that makes me sad. I wish I could just blindly say I agree, but the Constitution is intentionally vague. Does reporting on your financing abridge your right to a free press? How about forcing food manufactuers to print a lable and put that on their product? How about requiring porn makers to label their stuff with a legal notice? Are these all equal abridgements of the 1st amendment?
If it really were so black and white I think you'd be sorry.
Except the school is a private school, and they can limit membersip on any criteria, for any reason or none at all, virtually without exception.
If they say no blogs, well, it's a restriction of speach, but not a legal infraction.
The system I designed was more propensed to audit more rich returns. That's just how it went. Poor and middle class folks send in practically automatic returns that have little or no room for error or "wiggle". There are few factors involved. When you get a dozen forms filled, and refilled, and amendmened, etc from one guy, well, suddenly determing if it's fishy or not is much more difficult. It'd be tempting to flag them all but that would be a big, big, big resource and legal problem. Not only that but as soon as that word got out, you'd have a new tax strategy enacted.
The type of shit people pull astounded me. People in the know devined vast sums of data about the system work. For example, at one time, you could file a simple form, an EZ form, and at the last minute, file an amended return. The amended return was never processed through the standard auditing checks because it was bolted on after the fact. People knew it, and we got huge qty's of them for a while.
I shudder to think of what would happen if all those little rules and exceptions were made public. I fully expect that the government would end up collecting zero tax dollars within 2 years.
Some will embrace his work, his message, without regard to inconsistency or inaccuracy, because they aren't interested in any doubt of their agreement with Moore's positions. Those two groups account for most Americans.
That's pretty much the state of politics. It's mostly the same as sports are in Europe - dramatic farcical devotion to one team for no apparent reason without regard for merit or substance.
But substantially because so many Americans have faith in movies rather than anything else.
That's also very true. How many people think things work like the movies, not like the real world? What's more scary is this influence outside of our borders. In many countries the only American influence brought to bear is cultural - movies, tv, music. What a great image. Every movie is packed full of casual sex, more casual graphic violence, torture, flippant homosexuality that embraces only the sexual aspect of a relationship, crime and vast criminal activity, corruption, and lavish decadence. Sure, good fun for all. But also instructive. If you believed the movies you'd think that outright corruption was the status quo in American government, when in fact, it's really not - it's far more subtle. Yet that's not what the movies show. Who wants to see a political thriller with a ten year plot of lobbyist dealings, PACs, traded funds, and other inane topics. People want to see bribes being left in parking lots.
I'm just glad he's on my side, and that I don't have to believe he's a saint to appreciate his conversions.
I doubt the number of converts he truly gets. He seems to be more interested in preaching to the converted than anything else. The road you travel with Moore is dangerous: history is heavy with the corpses of those stabbed in the back by political friends. Today Moore is on "your" side, but tomorrow, he may just as well as turn on you.
1. You are entitled to say no to a request to blow in the bag or take a blood test. That is protected under the Constitution.
2. You have no right to drive on public property; this is an administrative privelage granted on good behaviour. Hence, you can't sue when you fail your drivers test - driving is a privelage of passing the test.
3. In most jurisdictions you must have given the officer reasonable suspicion that you have comitted a crime. In court he will be asked to list what suspicion he had, and you can examine him to as whether it was reasonable.
4. It is REASONABLE to think that a person riding in car that reeks of beer may have consumed alcholol. Combine this with a traffic infraction and it is REASONABLE to suspect that the person may be impaired.
5. If a cop smells alcholol and has observed a traffic violation that suggests impairement then he can arrest you on suspicion of drunk driving without additional evidence. If he has a question in his mind he can generally test you with field sobriety techniques. Or not. That's up to him.
Those two bits of evidence are prima facie proof of DUI in most states - an observation of impared driving and the scent of alcholol on the breath.
What you are missing is that when a cop pulls you over for a traffic infraction, smells booze or whatever, you are already guilty in the legal sense. That's all that's required in most states. A BAC reading isn't even required.
In theory, you are correct. All publically funded code should be open.
The problem is that politicans and lawmakers do not think like computer people. I've written code used in state government to process and manage tax returns. It's not pretty. This is some nasty, nasty stuff.
Disclaimer: Yes, I did a good job. It was modular, it was rules-based, it was flexible and robust and fast and based on open platforms. I am proud of what I did with what I was given, but really, it's a disaster.
But none of that matters.
If you saw the code, you could craft a tax return that, would without technical doubt, would never be audited. Not once, not never, not ever. You could in essense write your own refund check, and it would never be caught. Right now, I am sure I could craft such a state tax return and be off in Ceyelles.
Some systems are self-defeating when open. The day I releas the code every tax lawyer in the state would be trolling slashdot looking for geeks to reverse engineer the perfect tax return.
And there is no defense against the problem short of scrapping everything and starting over. Lawmakers insist on doing crazy things that no computer scientist or normal person would think of.
For example: How many days in a non-leap year? 365, right? Don't over think it.
Well, not if you are the state BMV/DMV. If you register car on December 12, how many days is that registration valid for? No, not 365. In fact, it's good until the last day of the same month in the next year UNLESS that number of days exceeds 15 calendar days longer than said next year. If that is the case then your registration is good until the first day of the same month of the next year inclusive of the first day. This is an effort to make easy to detect color coded stickers that cops can use to give you tickets when you forget to register. That's why if you take a poll and ask "how long is the registration on your car good for?" nearly everyone would be subtely wrong.
I can't give specifics about the revenue service, but suffice it to say, this is the least of the rules involved in processing, managing, and flagging for audit, and then auditing, a tax return.
Even with the actual rules specified as external conf files the system is so flawed that it is perfectly beatable with the source code.
The problem is made worse when August rolls around the lawmakers are negotiating changes for the next fiscal year that starts in OCTOBER. You have 8 weeks to develop, test, certify, and simulate 800 tax code changes affecting everything from external file formats, database schemas, and printed forms. To be honest, there is no clean way to beat that rush, and failure is not an option. You can't just go to the capitol and say "that will be ready in 2007". They make a nice phone call "are you geared up for changes?", and the answer is always put into your mouth, "of course".
So, the real answer is, most often, it's not feasible. Most government systems are based around complex laws involving multiple legislatures, court decisions, executive orders, federal effects, and various exceptions crafted from decades or centuries of deal making. Exposing the exact code behind the systems would reveal how without fail you can avoid, bend, and skirt the system.
In effect, open sourcing many of these systems would give the elite technical people in the community an unfair advantage over their non-technical fellow citizens.
The problem with Moore's brand of subtlety is that it falls apart under examination, and his efforts to be witty end up undermining larger more relevant points.
I am not a fan of guns, or anti-gun control lobbyists, but Moore's tricks of craft in "Bowling" along with his unsupported racial element left me less inclined, rather than more inclined, to support his view.
For example, the cartoon was cute, but he provides nothing but a cartoon to back up his claims about gun violence being the result of whites being afraid of blacks.
He spliced two ads together to form a composite, and then added an inaccurate subtitle about Willie Horton.
The ultimate irony is, of course, that Horton's crime was committed by knife, not gun.
There are for sure good points to be made, but in an attempt to be sublte he was deceptive, and it seriously damages his message.
It's illegal if you have a monopoly. That's the general idea.
If I am Jim's OS Company, I can go to Dell and offer to license my OS to them on a "per PC" basis - whether it's installed or not. That's not illegal for me, because I do not have a monopoly.
Now, MS's agreement with the DOJ expires soon. It will be hard to prove them a monopoly given the current market.
In some places there are much, much more just off the top:
1. Federal Income Tax - 25%
2. State Income Tax - 5%
3. County Income Tax - 1.5%
4. City Income Tax - 1.5%
5. Medicare - 2.9%
6. Medicaid (depending on your state) - (sometimes half #5) 1.45%
7. FICA/SS - 6.2%
So if you are making between 40 and 60 thousand, this is pretty typical = %43.55
This is only what you see.
Your employer pays another 6.2% + 1.45% for Fica/Medicare, plus FUTA (Federal Unemployment Tax Act) contribution, some type of state unemployment tax, as well as other local taxes or "fees".
It really does add up to a lot!
Income tax is only the biggest line item, all the other stuff really piles up as well!
I've known many, many, many people who swear by Linux's reliability and uptime.
When I look at their load usage, it's alway like
"0.01, 0.01, 0.02" or some such low usage box.
Chances are, if they are running SAP, that box is loaded. Or overloaded.
And then, things can sometimes get more dicey. A device driver that works okay under low-load is fine, but then when the commands are stacking up it barfs. Or some hardware that's been only marginally fast enough is exposed as underperforming (especailly hard drives and FSB). Performance degrades quicker than expected very often, and resources can easily become exhausted.
I love Linux, but often people who swear by it have never seen the pain of a truly heavily loaded Linux box. It's much better now that a lot of sweat has gone into the scheduler.
Slashdot Mirror
ohh come now.
Good will to a degree is okay, but it's not going to make the books balance or float your company. The odd person supporting you because of some random good will policy is insigificant in the larger economic health of a company. Its just a matter of numbers.
The bottom line truth is that the product is all that matters in the end. Look at the oil companies. Are they the most profitable business in the history of teh world because of good will, or beacuse of the fact that they are selling a highly segmented, highly demanded, hard to find product?
In the end Google will end up like all other companies of their size. Bottom line driven, fiercely competitive, and mediocre.
How many believe that their Senator actually represents anything but special interests? This is interesting. The Senate and therefore senators actually were intended to, and in fact do, represent their state. Specifically, the state government. They are the representative of your state government in the federal government. This is why under the original Constitution Senators were appointed by their respective state legislatures. The House of Representatives was intended to represent "you". For the most part they do a good job of it, actually. They are very responsive to public pressure and sentiment. Unfortunately extensive gerrymandering has so rigged the system that there is a small amount of turnover within the structure, reducing democratic influence.
Well, I won't gloat or anything, but I have two Windows servers that are both over 1000 days uptime. One recently passed 1200 days, actually. This post has the details: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=195520&cid=160 21446
Interesting about your openvz issue- I get that same panic from time to time on a heavily used server.
I, like you, am also a practicing libertarian. As such, I'll give my divergent point of view.
Primarily the problem with the libertarian philosophy is two fold - first you can't trust people to leave each other alone, and two, in some cases exercising your own legitimate freedom lessens the freedoms of someone else. Therefore, taken to it's natural end the libertarian perspective leads to choas and an over valuation of the "alpha male".
Radio airwaves are a pefect example of this. If you, by exercising your perfectly natural rights to construct a transmitter do so you can very easily obscure or block the perfectly natural rights of two other people to communicate via said public airwaves. It becomes a race to see who can put the most power out over the largest band. In the end, you get just one large muddled mass of easily creatable frequences at huge power - noise. FM signals are not hard to generate. The equipment is old and cheap. And so is too much power. This is exactly why regulation of the airwaves is, despite it's anti-libertarian ethic - in the interests of greater freedom.
The same style argument can go for some other circumstances. Shared - public - resources require some sort of regulation that counts on more than mutal goodwill. Asking a person to do something not in his or her best interest is anti-libertarian in it's nature, and that's exactly what is sometimes required. In the end if comes down to force. The power to impose fines and to enforce payment, and the power to imprision.
This is very unfortunate.
But let's look at this way. I own some mercury. I own waterfront property on a lake. Therefore I can use the mercury to decorate my rocks on my waterfront property. It is my mercury, my rocks, and my waterfront property. Ergo, you stopping me from doing so is a violation of my freedom to utilize my capital as I see fit.
However, contamination of that lake with even just 2lbs of mercury will spoil most life in that lake for several seasons, and make the wather unhealthy to swim in. This will create a deficit of utility for the other land owners, and as such, their property will not longer be as valuable.
This is why libertarianism is not yet a viable option in my political situations. Myself and other libertarians have a lack of effective solutons to these "Shared resource" questions. At best a sharp fellow can suggest a sort of quasi-market based solution that involves credits you can buy and sell. In the end though, they are all artifical imprications strapped onto a marketplace that has failed to support an open, liberty-based solution.
Hardened usually means "externally" so. The Windows install is hardened, but the whole thing is shieled from the outside by a nicely done firewall. On the network side for windows IPSEC is reliable and has proven to be pretty well done. Few patches are released for it on Win2k3. You confidence in a 3rd party app is disturbing. As is your confidence in the users. It's not like that app isn't updated and patched. It just doens't require a reboot or taking the box offline! Plus, it's a high quality piece of software. As far as the users go, the only users getting to the box are doing so through the 3rd party app. The vector for risk are very small. There is very little surface space to attack the box.
It's fine, but the only ports exposed are for Oracle access. It's got a bad ass firewall in front of it, and it's DMZ'd from the rest of the co-lo.
I just volunteer now.. ..but, let's think about "critical patches".
What makes then critical? MS says so, because they expose some flaw or insecurity in the product.
Well, if you are running a really hardened box, with no excess services, why does an insecurity in an unused service matter?
If I am not running any or many desktop sessions, why do I care about a GDI+ plus bug?
This box is unpatched - no patches from MS - from that original installation. But so what? The only ports exposed are from a 3rd party app that is itself secured and harnded. Traffic is firewalled by some nice equipment and the install of Windows was properly hardened. Each box lives in a little "DMZ" at a co-lo facility.
What's the risk vector you see to justify installing some patch that is "critical"?
Well, not to rain on your parade, BUT:
:)
I worked for a non-profit when Windows 2003 was released to manufacturing. They were donated two new dell servers and two boxed copies of Win2k3 Standard edition for the purpose of running two databases that previously were hosted on one box that was seriously overloaded. Decent servers on the high end at the time - hot swap power, hot swap drives, dual proc, etc. These boxes are Internet facing (not for database access, that requires an IPSEC connection at the firewall level) and hosted at a big name co-lo facility. The database is Oracle 9i.
I remember well the day that I hardened them and finished the deployment. It was May 1st, 2003, a Thursday I believe. Win2k3 had just become available the previous week. Oracle had released a big set of patches for 9i not long before.
I still check in on those boxes. One has 994 days of uptime, and the other has, as of last week, 1190 days. The longer running of the two - DAEDALUS - runs close to 75% load from 6am-6pm, 5 days a week.
The only other box I have running that beats that is a Netware 4.x box. But that barely counts as a usuable OS
Statisticians also will tell you that you can measure the skew, and then account for it appropriately, and therefore overcome the selection bias.
It's all part of the mix.
This is really funny, trying to pin this on the Republicans when it's that "other" sponsored and signed into law the bill that makes this possible (the DMCA), has the largest group of Hollywood shills known to man (hello, California anyone?), and has a number of very happy to please lapdogs (former Senator Hollings, anyone)?
You need to get real.
That's fine, but if they examine content and route based on it, they should lose their common carrier status. That's the trade off. If you judge value based on the content, then you are responsible for the content as a trading partner.
Why should we have to pay more for our phone service/electricity/roads/etc, etc, etc just so you can afford yours? If you like living in the middle of nowhere so much then be prepared to pay for it.
Three reasons.
First, much or most of the non-office style work is done outside of cities. Most city dwellers don't want to work at a meat packing plant or live next to one. Most city dwellers don't want to work at a waste water treamenet plant, or live next to one. Most city dwellers do not want to live next to trash incinerator, oil refinery, pumping station, truck depot, concerete plant, or pig farm. Yet just about all city dwellers want sewer service, water, eletricty, delivery trucks, and all the stuff that can't be cheaply or "not in my back yard" done in the urban centers. I've lived next to a 4000 acre chicken farm before. I have a feeling that all the egg and chicken eating residents of NYC would be less than willing to give up central park to raise chickens on. So that's the first reason. Unless you want these things in the city, you have to be prepared to support less-than-urban areas.
Reason #2, is that these "red staters" grow the grain, raise the cattle, and do the argicultural work without which the country cannot literally survive. Look at where the food that we both consume and export is grown: the breadbasket. Again, this is not possible to achieve in an urban center. Urban centers are net importers of items like food and energy.
Reason #3 is that development trends are such that you can't really create new urban centers, and so, people are stuck living in the "middle of nowhere". New communities that do pop up are generally suburban; we aren't seeing a lot of new cities being built. If the rural population tried to move into the urban centers what you'd see is an even tight real estate market and yet another escalation of housing rates. This would just lead to even more sprawl.
Finally, I think you are overestimating the effect of the rural and surban subsidy, and understating the unreimbursed services provided by the rural population. The founding fathers recognized from day one this divide between the urban and rural citizen and this led directly to the split system of representation - the two per State senate and the population based House.
Yeah, I have to go ahead and disagree with you on your assesment. Maybe auto-indexing would be generally good, but there are times when I as programmer can be 100% sure I want to avoid a full table scan that would not be optimized for by any automated process. I have one table in database I work with that contains 190 columns and and about 1.5B rows. I have a query I run once, maybe twice a year, that returns only a handful of rows but requires a WHERE on about 1/3 of the columns. When I do need to run the query I can't be waiting a few days for it: it's generally needed within 1 hr. An automated process that analyzes table usage by previous queries would not optimize appropriately for this unless you started adding all kinds of hints to the process. Maybe there is some value in an automated process but generally speaking any type of serious use is going to require some skilled tuning.
One quibble:
You bring up this age old mis-direction about the hijackers being Saudi. Technically true, but still, a mis-direction.
This is very often tied into a larger theme of bin Laden being Saudi, and ultimately, that our real enemy is Saudia Arabia, etc etc.
The hijackers were by and large outlaws, bandits, in Saudi Arabia. Like bin Laden, they were either wanted, or exiled, or both. The way you present it seems to pass off that it was Saudi Arabia sponsoring the attacks, which is patently false.
As to the larger theme, the House of Saud - the ruling family of the Kingdon - is definately not the problem - they are not our enemies. This is a tricky point - yes, they are despotic tryants with a tendancy for the suppression of life and liberty. Yes, they impose a religious theocracy.
However, the key here, is that like Pakistan, they are a government which is amiable to the US. And the alternative is far, far, far worse even unspeakable. The Kingdom is ruled by opposing forces - the largely secular ruling family and security forces posed against the clerics and their loyal militias. The Wahhabists in power have a firm grip over the masses, and they exert that control in a tit-for-tat with the ruling family. Pressure from the US or other sources would cause the weak ruling family to fall apart and be replaced or augmented by clerics that were so extreme that bin Laden refused many of their teachings.
When I hear people bashing on Saudia Arabia like they are our true enemy... it's more than a little scary. A nation like Saudi Arabia in the hands of capable dictator or clan could be more devasting than your average westerner can stomach. Imagine an Arab government with a $250B a year military budget, manufacturing capabilities, 20% of the worlds oil reserves, 30% of the worlds crude production capacity, and a totally pliant population. The Iran-Iraq war could well be seen as a pleasant walk in the park compared to the destruction that could result.
This isn't to excuse the House of Saud, but they have made significant positive steps, and they are clearly better than the alternative. A slight by the US on the world state could lead to a permanent destablisation of the country which would likely be totally castrosphic. Not even participating in the First Gulf War - just allowing planes and troops to be stationed in the Kingdom very nearly toppled the regime. The state security force worked full time to minimize the damage caused by that decision. Appearning to cozy, or compliant, or unwilling to offend the US and Europe could well tip the scales and motivate the clerics to sieze power.
Anyways. That's my geo-political rant. I criticize Bush in the strongest terms possible for his anti-delluvian world view. It's absurd. But I expect more from people in intelligent discussions. Fomenting a popular uprising or economic or military activity against the Kingdom is definately not in America or the World's best interests.
If that's not what you were going for.. apologies.
I've got to call BS on your comments:
Slavery and a lack of rights for women and minorities was against the Consitution.
This is just patently false.
1. Article IV Section II establishes slavery as a legal institution:
"No person held to service or labor in one state, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due. "
2. Article I Section II establishes the disparate value of free whites and "all other persons":
"Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several states which may be included within this union, according to their respective numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons."
The original Constitution emphatically does not provide for the equal rights of all citizens: it differienates between free and non free, recognizes forced labor and the ownership of forced laborers and generally does not do anything which you claim!
Free speech should be exactly what the Constitution says it is, and that we need additional regulations to protect it means that the Consitution is being shit on, and that makes me sad.
I wish I could just blindly say I agree, but the Constitution is intentionally vague. Does reporting on your financing abridge your right to a free press? How about forcing food manufactuers to print a lable and put that on their product? How about requiring porn makers to label their stuff with a legal notice? Are these all equal abridgements of the 1st amendment?
If it really were so black and white I think you'd be sorry.
Except the school is a private school, and they can limit membersip on any criteria, for any reason or none at all, virtually without exception. If they say no blogs, well, it's a restriction of speach, but not a legal infraction.
The system I designed was more propensed to audit more rich returns. That's just how it went. Poor and middle class folks send in practically automatic returns that have little or no room for error or "wiggle". There are few factors involved. When you get a dozen forms filled, and refilled, and amendmened, etc from one guy, well, suddenly determing if it's fishy or not is much more difficult. It'd be tempting to flag them all but that would be a big, big, big resource and legal problem. Not only that but as soon as that word got out, you'd have a new tax strategy enacted. The type of shit people pull astounded me. People in the know devined vast sums of data about the system work. For example, at one time, you could file a simple form, an EZ form, and at the last minute, file an amended return. The amended return was never processed through the standard auditing checks because it was bolted on after the fact. People knew it, and we got huge qty's of them for a while. I shudder to think of what would happen if all those little rules and exceptions were made public. I fully expect that the government would end up collecting zero tax dollars within 2 years.
Some will embrace his work, his message, without regard to inconsistency or inaccuracy, because they aren't interested in any doubt of their agreement with Moore's positions. Those two groups account for most Americans. That's pretty much the state of politics. It's mostly the same as sports are in Europe - dramatic farcical devotion to one team for no apparent reason without regard for merit or substance. But substantially because so many Americans have faith in movies rather than anything else. That's also very true. How many people think things work like the movies, not like the real world? What's more scary is this influence outside of our borders. In many countries the only American influence brought to bear is cultural - movies, tv, music. What a great image. Every movie is packed full of casual sex, more casual graphic violence, torture, flippant homosexuality that embraces only the sexual aspect of a relationship, crime and vast criminal activity, corruption, and lavish decadence. Sure, good fun for all. But also instructive. If you believed the movies you'd think that outright corruption was the status quo in American government, when in fact, it's really not - it's far more subtle. Yet that's not what the movies show. Who wants to see a political thriller with a ten year plot of lobbyist dealings, PACs, traded funds, and other inane topics. People want to see bribes being left in parking lots. I'm just glad he's on my side, and that I don't have to believe he's a saint to appreciate his conversions. I doubt the number of converts he truly gets. He seems to be more interested in preaching to the converted than anything else. The road you travel with Moore is dangerous: history is heavy with the corpses of those stabbed in the back by political friends. Today Moore is on "your" side, but tomorrow, he may just as well as turn on you.
1. You are entitled to say no to a request to blow in the bag or take a blood test. That is protected under the Constitution.
2. You have no right to drive on public property; this is an administrative privelage granted on good behaviour. Hence, you can't sue when you fail your drivers test - driving is a privelage of passing the test.
3. In most jurisdictions you must have given the officer reasonable suspicion that you have comitted a crime. In court he will be asked to list what suspicion he had, and you can examine him to as whether it was reasonable.
4. It is REASONABLE to think that a person riding in car that reeks of beer may have consumed alcholol. Combine this with a traffic infraction and it is REASONABLE to suspect that the person may be impaired.
5. If a cop smells alcholol and has observed a traffic violation that suggests impairement then he can arrest you on suspicion of drunk driving without additional evidence. If he has a question in his mind he can generally test you with field sobriety techniques. Or not. That's up to him.
Those two bits of evidence are prima facie proof of DUI in most states - an observation of impared driving and the scent of alcholol on the breath.
What you are missing is that when a cop pulls you over for a traffic infraction, smells booze or whatever, you are already guilty in the legal sense. That's all that's required in most states. A BAC reading isn't even required.
The BAC can only prove your innocence.
In theory, you are correct. All publically funded code should be open. The problem is that politicans and lawmakers do not think like computer people. I've written code used in state government to process and manage tax returns. It's not pretty. This is some nasty, nasty stuff. Disclaimer: Yes, I did a good job. It was modular, it was rules-based, it was flexible and robust and fast and based on open platforms. I am proud of what I did with what I was given, but really, it's a disaster. But none of that matters. If you saw the code, you could craft a tax return that, would without technical doubt, would never be audited. Not once, not never, not ever. You could in essense write your own refund check, and it would never be caught. Right now, I am sure I could craft such a state tax return and be off in Ceyelles. Some systems are self-defeating when open. The day I releas the code every tax lawyer in the state would be trolling slashdot looking for geeks to reverse engineer the perfect tax return. And there is no defense against the problem short of scrapping everything and starting over. Lawmakers insist on doing crazy things that no computer scientist or normal person would think of. For example: How many days in a non-leap year? 365, right? Don't over think it. Well, not if you are the state BMV/DMV. If you register car on December 12, how many days is that registration valid for? No, not 365. In fact, it's good until the last day of the same month in the next year UNLESS that number of days exceeds 15 calendar days longer than said next year. If that is the case then your registration is good until the first day of the same month of the next year inclusive of the first day. This is an effort to make easy to detect color coded stickers that cops can use to give you tickets when you forget to register. That's why if you take a poll and ask "how long is the registration on your car good for?" nearly everyone would be subtely wrong. I can't give specifics about the revenue service, but suffice it to say, this is the least of the rules involved in processing, managing, and flagging for audit, and then auditing, a tax return. Even with the actual rules specified as external conf files the system is so flawed that it is perfectly beatable with the source code. The problem is made worse when August rolls around the lawmakers are negotiating changes for the next fiscal year that starts in OCTOBER. You have 8 weeks to develop, test, certify, and simulate 800 tax code changes affecting everything from external file formats, database schemas, and printed forms. To be honest, there is no clean way to beat that rush, and failure is not an option. You can't just go to the capitol and say "that will be ready in 2007". They make a nice phone call "are you geared up for changes?", and the answer is always put into your mouth, "of course". So, the real answer is, most often, it's not feasible. Most government systems are based around complex laws involving multiple legislatures, court decisions, executive orders, federal effects, and various exceptions crafted from decades or centuries of deal making. Exposing the exact code behind the systems would reveal how without fail you can avoid, bend, and skirt the system. In effect, open sourcing many of these systems would give the elite technical people in the community an unfair advantage over their non-technical fellow citizens.
The problem with Moore's brand of subtlety is that it falls apart under examination, and his efforts to be witty end up undermining larger more relevant points.
I am not a fan of guns, or anti-gun control lobbyists, but Moore's tricks of craft in "Bowling" along with his unsupported racial element left me less inclined, rather than more inclined, to support his view.
For example, the cartoon was cute, but he provides nothing but a cartoon to back up his claims about gun violence being the result of whites being afraid of blacks.
He spliced two ads together to form a composite, and then added an inaccurate subtitle about Willie Horton.
The ultimate irony is, of course, that Horton's crime was committed by knife, not gun.
There are for sure good points to be made, but in an attempt to be sublte he was deceptive, and it seriously damages his message.
They ran on credit. You can do that for a while, but not for ever.
Close.
It's illegal if you have a monopoly. That's the general idea.
If I am Jim's OS Company, I can go to Dell and offer to license my OS to them on a "per PC" basis - whether it's installed or not. That's not illegal for me, because I do not have a monopoly.
Now, MS's agreement with the DOJ expires soon. It will be hard to prove them a monopoly given the current market.
In some places there are much, much more just off the top: 1. Federal Income Tax - 25% 2. State Income Tax - 5% 3. County Income Tax - 1.5% 4. City Income Tax - 1.5% 5. Medicare - 2.9% 6. Medicaid (depending on your state) - (sometimes half #5) 1.45% 7. FICA/SS - 6.2% So if you are making between 40 and 60 thousand, this is pretty typical = %43.55 This is only what you see. Your employer pays another 6.2% + 1.45% for Fica/Medicare, plus FUTA (Federal Unemployment Tax Act) contribution, some type of state unemployment tax, as well as other local taxes or "fees". It really does add up to a lot! Income tax is only the biggest line item, all the other stuff really piles up as well!
I've known many, many, many people who swear by Linux's reliability and uptime. When I look at their load usage, it's alway like "0.01, 0.01, 0.02" or some such low usage box. Chances are, if they are running SAP, that box is loaded. Or overloaded. And then, things can sometimes get more dicey. A device driver that works okay under low-load is fine, but then when the commands are stacking up it barfs. Or some hardware that's been only marginally fast enough is exposed as underperforming (especailly hard drives and FSB). Performance degrades quicker than expected very often, and resources can easily become exhausted. I love Linux, but often people who swear by it have never seen the pain of a truly heavily loaded Linux box. It's much better now that a lot of sweat has gone into the scheduler.