All this discussion about "capitalism" versus "socialism" - as if worshiping the correct ideology could ward off the corrupt, who will take anything and everything, given the chance. It isn't the ism. There's no magic ism that make all your children beautiful and virtuous, and all of some competing ism's children ugly thieves. That mistake is the one Cheney's people made: that if we just give corrupt foreign lands democracy-ism they'll become virtuous paradises of freedom.
Not that the isms make no difference. But the difference is of style, not virtue. It's like the difference between rock-n-roll-ism and jazz-ism. Most rock-n-roll, and most jazz, is a faint and corrupted echo of the truly great exemplars. Virtue in a musician isn't a matter of which ism they've pursued, but of how they've pursued it. There are great jazz bands, and lousy ones; great rock bands, and lousy ones; great socialist countries (e.g. Sweden), and lousy ones (e.g. Burma); great capitalist countries (e.g. Taiwan), and lousy oness (e.g. Nigeria). Your taste in examples my differ; the point remains that its not what you do (socialist, capitalist, whatever), it's how you do it.
What would it take to establish a computer system that can be audited in a transparent way and that can store any document sent to it in a date-and-content-secured fashion? Yes, you'd have to establish for the courts that the record was unfalsifiable. But it ought to be possible to build something, based on write-once media and some method of severely locking down ntp timestamps, that could store anything that could be sent digitally, in a way that would to a high degree of certainty establish the date it was received.
With the most minimal fee per item stored, this would be a goldmine. The only difficult part is how to absolutely lock down the timestamping method.
somewhere down the line, these disparate industry groups (RIAA, MPAA, Computer software manufacturers, knitting alliance against theft of knitting patterns) were to amalgamate, effectively creating a super-group. This one group could then walk into any home, give one warrant, and search that person's life for any transgressions, and extract the money from them without mercy
What would it cost to file a patent on this business procedure? Streamlining IP law enforcement would in itself save society trillions of dollars that otherwise must be spent sending enforcers from each individual IP group into each citizen's home. The amount of money lost to the inefficiencies of enforcement effort duplication might be enough to pay off our national debt to China! By patenting this business procedure, and charging a mere percent or two on collections achieved by our licensees, it's not just our own children's prosperity we're assuring, but our nations's.
you don't necessarily realise that you have the condition
Have you known anyone with it? You might not realize at first why something is wrong, but you see that others are treating you as if it is. It doesn't just strike the elderly; there's an early-onset variety. You lose your job because you're losing track of details too often. Shopkeepers start to realize they can get away with shortchanging you. Your car keys become more lost at home, more often, and when you drive you get more lost, more often. When you do become convinced something serious is going wrong, the doctors tell you that it could, perhaps be Alzheimers. But they have no sure way of diagnosing it prior to an autopsy. Your health insurance company - if you didn't lose that with your job - contests your claim because your doctors can't produce a definite diagnosis. Maybe you're just depressed? Maybe you're just a malingerer? Keeping track of the details needed to contest their denials becomes almost impossibly complex for you. Some days, you start to forget to eat. Other days, you're almost your normal self. The amazing plasticity of the brain allows you to mimic normal function socially well enough that some friends don't really see anything wrong. But you've got an awful feeling there is.
If you want Alzheimers patients "to die earlier with dignity" then you'll have to start killing them, like witches, at the first sign. Because for most of them it's the first thing to seriously go wrong. And for most of them it develops very, very slowly, sliding down a slope where by the time you might wish they'd say "Kill me now, please," any such rational choice is finally behind them.
In 1980 I spent five weeks in Nepal, two in Kathmandu, three of them on the Jomsom trek, beyond the end of the roads. We met Tibetans in the city, and visited villages whose Buddhist practice was Tibetan on the trek. Many of these Tibetan refugees and Buddhist villagers were quite poor - as are many of the Hindus in Nepal, one of the poorest nations. But the Tibetans and Buddhists were, to a striking degree, happier and friendlier than most of the various Hindu people in Nepal we encountered. This is nothing against the Hindus - I've seen similar psychological effects of poverty in our own Appalachia - but rather a recognition that there's a strength in the Tibetan type of Buddhism that other cultures generally lack.
As for the monks having been relatively well off historically - yes, just as the monasteries were in old Europe. However, just like it had been in Europe, most every family could and would send one of its sons into the monkhood. So it does not map into Marxist analysis of hereditary class differences, as much as the Maoists would like to force it into that mold. It solved a problem in both Europe and Tibet - a farming family needed to have enough sons, and the best way to be sure of that was to have extra sons. But with too many sons the farm would become split up too small by inheritance to each of them. So sending the extras off to attend to religion rather than farming was good for both farms and the religious institutions.
Now, I'm an athiest (actually, many practicing Buddhists are too - although the Tibetans more tend to polytheism), so I don't on the whole favor massive social investment in religious institutions (however beautiful some of the buildings and art end up). But there's something in Tibetan Buddhist culture that clearly produces superior sanity in its common people. Perhaps that's related to the degree that Buddhism has since its founding specifically involved itself in psychological as well as religious questions.
Does this patent really presume to cover anything beyond "vacation"? Is it merely enough that (1) there's more than one response, and (2) they aren't just random? If so, I propose listserv as prior art. First version: 1984. Not sure when the ability of the software to automatically respond to email content (e.g. "subscribe") was added - but it was a long way back.
I live less than 20 miles from Gilsum, and about a mile from a (relatively) major regional ISP with good SDSL. I did my research before moving here. But the crisis isn't someone moving to Gilsum blindly. The crisis is that there are lots of ways that solid broadband access can give advantage to a business. Good broadband is a strong advantage for economic development. So rural areas need to find ways to develop it. It can be profitable, evidently, even for the providers. The highest DSL penetration in the country is claimed by VTel in Vermont. Meanwhile the State of Vermont is looking at ways to subsidize extending wireless access to the remotest valleys - with the Republican governor's strong support.
The crisis is that what's good for business and economic development on the whole is often not taken care of by the incumbent carriers, who have discovered ways to make more profits elsewhere without delivering particularly good or advanced services, just by squeezing customers they already have. It's not that they couldn't make real profits in rural areas, but that they'd have to do some actual work to earn them, rather than just live off the legacy of the networks they've already built.
Bull. Power users are their best source of word of mouth. Word of mouth is their best source of new customers, in any market - since even dialup is still a competitor. By contrast, pissing people off (1) takes staff time at Comcast, (2) creates bad worth of mouth, and bad blog reports. As an old retailer I know often says, if you make a customer happy, 10 of their friends will hear about it; if you make a customer angry, all of their friends will hear about it. Now that people blog, that number can run up into the thousands.
Let my subscription lapse years ago. But, remembering how there were a few articles that gave me solutions I'm still using in production, I tried to resubscribe a few months ago. After some weeks, they sent me the January issue - in May! That pissed me off, so I waited to see if it would be followed by February or June (I really wasn't trying to "subscribe" to back issues). All that came, 6 weeks later, was a letter saying "We've trusted you and continued sending you issues even though we have not received payment." Bullshit; they never sent a second issue. So I sent an e-mail to the addresses in their masthead explaining that I'd be glad to buy the subscription if they'd start with the current issue. No response at all. May they rot.
"If there is no reform they can continue to sell privacy to their users using proxy registrations, making profits that far exceed those they make on normal domain name registrations," said Mueller.
The registrars I've used charge nothing to substitute their own details for the registrants in the public WHOIS response. And their "profits far in excess"? On the $15-a-year fees, they're welcome to any profit they can take.
In Richard Florida's work we learn that investment in sports is worthless in terms of economic development. By contrast, investment in arts is worth quite a bit downstream. Now, Florida's focus is on comparing cities. But the lessons may extend to cable/satellite too. So if our cable/satellite is effectively investing $14/month/subscriber in ESPN (figure given by others in this discussion), that's equivalent to a city putting most of its civic budget into the new arena for the sports teams rather than into, say, a new playhouse and museum. This means that over time the virtual metropolis comprised of the subscribers to cable/satellite are economically less well off than if the investment had been weighted less to sports, more to the arts. And that means that an alternative without so much investment in sports in the mix would over time have wealthier subscribers, to whom it - and the advertisers using it - could potentially sell much more.
There are, at minimum, some companies which need massive amounts of computation, which needs to scale not just with their markets, but with their product development - where their edge largely consists in finding useful things to do with massive amounts of computation before their competition scoops them on whatever the next idea to take off will be.
Yes, in an arms race you often end up with in the silly spot of "But what do we need 10,000 nukes for." Well, what you need 'em for, if you want to be the only superpower on your globe, is to hopefully make the competition quit before they begin to seriously challenge you. Eh, bad analogy. The point is, in this "arms race" the "nukes" also contribute essentially to your products. And the people building your nukes had better be fully aware of the degree of your need, and competitive with the other armorers.
The curious question here is to what degree IBM and Sun have embraced not just their own alliances with the FOSS world, but accepted the underlying business philosophy of plenty. The more computers can do, the more the sales of computers and services. The more the software is simply available, ubiquitous even, the more uses will be found for computers, faster. The more the software can be recombined, the more synergies between computers and business methods will be developed. The richer the possible permutations, the larger the number of them which will find successful niches, and the more the hardware and services that will be sold to support those niches.
IBM and Sun compete, but it's not a zero-sum game. The larger contest is between the economics of plenty and the economics of scarcity. If plenty wins, the markets grow much faster than when scarcity wins, and there's more than enough room for a number of players to do very well indeed. If scarcity wins - and Microsoft and Apple are both playing scarcity tactics, trying to hoard strengths rather than share them - the overall economy stays relatively smaller, and the game moves closer to zero-sum. These are interesting times.
Yeah, at the moment. I remember when WordStar was "good enough," then when WordPerfect was. What did Word for Windows bring? It brought the easiest way to have most of our staff quickly producing business letters and memos in proportional type. If you were a law office, you still wanted WordPerfect as a more powerful tool, but for standard office stuff, Word was your tool. That only happened because it was the first out that ran well on Windows. It allowed a whole lot of junior execs to get their job done without assistants to pretty up the correspondence. It was a no-brain purchase.
Where are we now? We're at a place where standard office printers have gone from fixed-space type (the WordPerfect on DOS era), to proportional type (the Word era), to full-color, fully illustrated, brochure-like output. That means that your junior executives have to either have assistants again, or shop their stuff out to expensive graphics shops. And for anything that really needs to be well laid out, those more expert hands are going to be translating the Word documents into... tada... Adobe products.
So if Adobe produces an office suite, its first advantage will be that it can move its content into higher-end Adobe products with much more ease than going from Microsoft-formatted intermediate steps. Its second advantage will be that it can inherit already-proven features of the higher-end Adobe products, so that some of those junior execs can now do their own brochures, just as they have learned to do memos and letters. Plus, you have easier translation of their work to the Web. The number of jobs that currently exist just to hand-tune the bad results of trying to automatically pour Word into Web pages must number in the tens or hundreds of thousands. And they aren't adding anything to the worth of the business's output that better software couldn't do without them.
It sounds like a compromise based on using a flaw in an ftp daemon to exploit a kernel flaw to escalate privileges. The question I'd have is which ftp daemon were they running? FTP - even the old, unencrypted kind - IMHO can be run with tight security if you choose a daemon that can run in chroot with virtual-account privilege separation for each user. A few daemons do that, and do it well, most don't. So was this a known-problematic ftp daemon that Ubuntu's Loco servers were running, or a fresh exploit against one of the better daemons?
As for the suggestions that sftp is better, OpenSSH's version of sftp requires a shell account for each user - something good ftp daemon's don't. There are shells like scponly that are pretty good at chrooting each user's shell account - but not necessarily perfect. There are a lot more administrative steps in setting that up than for an ftp account, which if not quite done right can compromise security. FTP's maturity - again with the right daemon - can be a security advantage, over all.
Where, and what the turbulence pattern will be there, and how much heat will be directed right to that small spot of bare metal skin. Then there's the question of whether they have good enough computer models to predict that to any accuracy; or whether minute changes in angle-of-approach and so forth render the chances essentially random. Since they have a patch kit, they'll be fools not to use it - unless the patch could itself deform into a funnel channeling the fire of re-entry to that spot.
you would not be opposed to such ports if there were no security threat posed by them?
This falls in the larger category of granting power to others. Given someone you can absolutely trust, both in their intent and the quality of their execution, we might grant them absolute power. This tempts us most when we believe they'll use the power for our good.
There are three lines of argument against this:
Our trust in intent may be misplaced: While this may be true, it's often not an effective argument in a democracy where a majority may trust foolishly.
The successor argument: If the power is assigned to an office, can we trust the successor to that office (aka: "Would you trust Hillary with these powers?").
Our trust in perfect execution may be misplaced: Among the many subparts to this: The mechanisms of power accumulated might be hijacked by others who are not even in proper succession.
The strongest, broadest line of argument against absolute power is the last. The King may be nearly divine, but the Sheriff of Nottingham uses the derived power corruptly. Compare your favorite president while J. Edgar Hoover ran the FBI with Hoover's use of FBI files to blackmail politicians - virtue at the top never goes all the way down - often not far down at all. When criminals themselves can subvert or outright take over the mechanisms of power (as in Chicago and New York at various times past; even Giuliani's father was a mob soldier, and rumors persist in NYC's Italian neighborhoods about the son's allegiances), that's a serious danger.
Trying to convince everyone that "Absolute power's bad even in the hands of good leaders" is a tough sell to many; convincing us all that "Absolute power's bad because even the best leaders can't keep it in their hands, and bad people always find a way to get ahold of it" gets to the same ends, and may be the more effective means.
Regarding the citation of studies that seem to show that high-bitrate mp3's can't be told from uncompressed stuff: Asking people to judge is the wrong methodology. We're aware of a whole lot more stuff - both unconsciously and, interestingly, consciously (see Ned Block's current article in Behavioral and Brain Sciences) - than we can name or enumerate. Good music often works its effects through those channels. It sneaks up on us. Except when it's compressed, it often doesn't sneak up.
I sometimes spend hours listening to Sirius, which is compressed but not too badly, through a good stereo. (The compression artifacts on Sirius are much less than on XM, btw.) It's satisfying in a sort of surface way - but the depth and viscerality of the experience isn't there the way it is spinning vinyl, or the minority of CDs that are well-engineered.
For comparison, we've all noticed how live music can just be better (when the PA's well run anyway) than even a good recording through a high end hi-fi. Well, it's not just the crowd and the visual spectacle. It's better even with your eyes closed. And that's because all those subtle harmonic interactions - stuff you can't name even if you're a good musician yourself - are there far more richly in the live venue. Well, as a CD is to a live venue, so an mp3 is to a CD. The surface of the music is still there; you can enjoy clever lyrics or a good beat or hook to a real degree; but the magic is drained out of it.
While Communist Party officials already have a big dating advantage, think of it now! They can scan the items of interest and get full details on children, employment, ethnicity.... Truly, for the modern Chinese Communist Party functionary, it's a wonderful life!
HiTF a publicly traded company can be considered a monopoly I would like to know.
Many publicly traded companies have been considered monopolies. Whether a company is publicly traded, privately held, or government owned is orthogonal to whether it's considered a monopoly. All that's required to be a monopoly is to have effective control of the largest part of the market for a particular good or service.
Is it your theory that the stockholders would be motivated to have the company they own give up its monopoly advantage?
The original copper was being put in place in the mid 1800's along with the railways.
The longest stretches of telegraph line were put alongside the railroads, sure. But much of the mileage of telegraph lines was within and between cities in the East, where the property was not Native American-owned at the time of the wiring. Aside from which, the phone copper was a completely separate build-out, almost entirely through land not Native American-owned at the time.
Up until the 80's the majority of old folks had their money tied up in phone stocks and government savings bonds.
Citation? Most old folks had their money in pension funds, which in turn broadly invested across the markets.
(Utilities were always considered a safe sector for investment - but largely consisted of electrical utilities which were exactly the same sort of local monopolies the AT&T breakup created for phone service. Investment in government bonds is exactly how we get our money back from the Chinese; and the government of course uses that money, it's not out of circulation.)
Out of the box, many Linux systems are insecure with open ports and unpatched vulnerabilities.
That box must have a lot of dust on it, and an early 13-floppy Slackware distro inside.
Before making a claim like that, the writer should come up with at least three examples, from current versions of major distros.
Reminds me of a local woman who said "We must have a town-wide neighborhood watch, because there's a child sexual predator on every block." In the several years since she raised that hysteria, there's been exactly one serious case in town: one of her best friends had his extensive child porn collection found by the police. He hired the state's most expensive lawyers and got off with probation. She's still his best friend.
Back to the topic. The article mentions telnet. Is there a single current distro that comes with telnetd enabled? Let's help the sloppy author. Has anyone here installed any current distro and found "open ports and unpatched vulnerabilities"?
Microsoft has large done that through FUD - especially doubt. So let's emulate Microsoft's track record of casting doubt on the competition:
You might be happy with Microsoft today. But if your firm is based on Microsoft products, and your competition is based on Free, Open Source Software, which firm will have the advantage five years from now? The Microsoft customer with all their eggs in one basket? Or the FOSS customer with eggs in baskets provided by IBM, Sun, Oracle, Novell, Red Hat, Canonical... and the hundreds, even thousands of smaller, focused FOSS firms bringing their innovations to market today and tomorrow?
Hypothesis 1 Proportionally large changes in proportions of climate-involved gases in the atmosphere are having effects on climate. As these changes may threaten the continuation of our advanced civilization, we should closely study all available evidence and model the effects to the best of our abilities.
Hypothesis 2 Massive numbers of scientists who study climate have a secret agenda to bring down industrial civilization, and will fudge any and all data in order to convince the population to end industrial civilization before the sky falls in on us from the shaking of industry's engines.
Note the parallelism Both hypotheses see a threat to civilization. According to the first, the threat is that the effects on climate from our activities may get away from us. According to the second, the threat is that if we listen to scientists and act prudently, they will concertedly lie to us to achieve the neo-Luddite political result in which we renounce most of our technological and economic means.
Note the absurdity According to the 2nd hypothesis, scientists - who have been essential in developing our technologies - have now massively subscribed to the sort of anti-technology ideologies that are found in the fringes of some English departments. This is a matter which is easily amenable to sociological research. It would be trivial, really, to go out and, using solid, proven techniques, interview a broad sample of environmental scientists on their personal views of and affections towards technology. It is central to the deniers' case that scientists, as a block, hold anti-technological views. Yet anecdotally, every professional scientist I know (some in climatology) loves technology. Is the only reason that the deniers fail to conduct the basic sociological research to prove their hypothesis that they know from their own anecdotal experience that it would fail to support them?
Are they doing something worse than fudging the data: failing to collect it in an obvious place, because they know it would prove them massively wrong?
car makers market to the folks who consider automobiles to be a status sort of thing instead of a piece of machinery
Machinery has many dimensions of appreciation beyond operating costs and 0-60 specs. There's the feel of it, which very much is about the quality of the machine, but is more visceral than rational. After all, when in motion we're evolved to be substantially visceral animals. It is an extension of our own feeling of health and fitness to have a car that feels well-tuned and fit for the road.
Health and fitness are closely linked to status, of course. Evolutionary theory has loads of speculation about, say, a fine head of hair on a woman demonstrating her health, or her figure showing her fitness. But for what a car looks like - well, BMWs are fairly nondescript. It's what people drive who don't want to be seen in a Benz or a Caddy, but still want that visceral buzz.
So, aside from the cool concept of it, and aside from operating costs or 0-60, how does it feel to be on your own rolling in the hydrogen zone in a BMW, Mr. Jones?
except to indicate or to protect the medical units and establishments
The point of that use is to mark those units and establishments clearly so that bombs and guns won't be trained on them, in accord with other provisions of the Convention. So in context, the use of the cross on a small box of gauze bandages by J&J is not going to create a false impression that there's a hospital inside that shouldn't be targeted.
On the other hand, if they're putting the J&J emblem on trucks, that would directly violate the Convention.
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All this discussion about "capitalism" versus "socialism" - as if worshiping the correct ideology could ward off the corrupt, who will take anything and everything, given the chance. It isn't the ism. There's no magic ism that make all your children beautiful and virtuous, and all of some competing ism's children ugly thieves. That mistake is the one Cheney's people made: that if we just give corrupt foreign lands democracy-ism they'll become virtuous paradises of freedom.
Not that the isms make no difference. But the difference is of style, not virtue. It's like the difference between rock-n-roll-ism and jazz-ism. Most rock-n-roll, and most jazz, is a faint and corrupted echo of the truly great exemplars. Virtue in a musician isn't a matter of which ism they've pursued, but of how they've pursued it. There are great jazz bands, and lousy ones; great rock bands, and lousy ones; great socialist countries (e.g. Sweden), and lousy ones (e.g. Burma); great capitalist countries (e.g. Taiwan), and lousy oness (e.g. Nigeria). Your taste in examples my differ; the point remains that its not what you do (socialist, capitalist, whatever), it's how you do it.
What would it take to establish a computer system that can be audited in a transparent way and that can store any document sent to it in a date-and-content-secured fashion? Yes, you'd have to establish for the courts that the record was unfalsifiable. But it ought to be possible to build something, based on write-once media and some method of severely locking down ntp timestamps, that could store anything that could be sent digitally, in a way that would to a high degree of certainty establish the date it was received.
With the most minimal fee per item stored, this would be a goldmine. The only difficult part is how to absolutely lock down the timestamping method.
If you want Alzheimers patients "to die earlier with dignity" then you'll have to start killing them, like witches, at the first sign. Because for most of them it's the first thing to seriously go wrong. And for most of them it develops very, very slowly, sliding down a slope where by the time you might wish they'd say "Kill me now, please," any such rational choice is finally behind them.
As for the monks having been relatively well off historically - yes, just as the monasteries were in old Europe. However, just like it had been in Europe, most every family could and would send one of its sons into the monkhood. So it does not map into Marxist analysis of hereditary class differences, as much as the Maoists would like to force it into that mold. It solved a problem in both Europe and Tibet - a farming family needed to have enough sons, and the best way to be sure of that was to have extra sons. But with too many sons the farm would become split up too small by inheritance to each of them. So sending the extras off to attend to religion rather than farming was good for both farms and the religious institutions.
Now, I'm an athiest (actually, many practicing Buddhists are too - although the Tibetans more tend to polytheism), so I don't on the whole favor massive social investment in religious institutions (however beautiful some of the buildings and art end up). But there's something in Tibetan Buddhist culture that clearly produces superior sanity in its common people. Perhaps that's related to the degree that Buddhism has since its founding specifically involved itself in psychological as well as religious questions.
Does this patent really presume to cover anything beyond "vacation"? Is it merely enough that (1) there's more than one response, and (2) they aren't just random? If so, I propose listserv as prior art. First version: 1984. Not sure when the ability of the software to automatically respond to email content (e.g. "subscribe") was added - but it was a long way back.
I live less than 20 miles from Gilsum, and about a mile from a (relatively) major regional ISP with good SDSL. I did my research before moving here. But the crisis isn't someone moving to Gilsum blindly. The crisis is that there are lots of ways that solid broadband access can give advantage to a business. Good broadband is a strong advantage for economic development. So rural areas need to find ways to develop it. It can be profitable, evidently, even for the providers. The highest DSL penetration in the country is claimed by VTel in Vermont. Meanwhile the State of Vermont is looking at ways to subsidize extending wireless access to the remotest valleys - with the Republican governor's strong support.
The crisis is that what's good for business and economic development on the whole is often not taken care of by the incumbent carriers, who have discovered ways to make more profits elsewhere without delivering particularly good or advanced services, just by squeezing customers they already have. It's not that they couldn't make real profits in rural areas, but that they'd have to do some actual work to earn them, rather than just live off the legacy of the networks they've already built.
Let my subscription lapse years ago. But, remembering how there were a few articles that gave me solutions I'm still using in production, I tried to resubscribe a few months ago. After some weeks, they sent me the January issue - in May! That pissed me off, so I waited to see if it would be followed by February or June (I really wasn't trying to "subscribe" to back issues). All that came, 6 weeks later, was a letter saying "We've trusted you and continued sending you issues even though we have not received payment." Bullshit; they never sent a second issue. So I sent an e-mail to the addresses in their masthead explaining that I'd be glad to buy the subscription if they'd start with the current issue. No response at all. May they rot.
Why do people like Mueller always lie?
In Richard Florida's work we learn that investment in sports is worthless in terms of economic development. By contrast, investment in arts is worth quite a bit downstream. Now, Florida's focus is on comparing cities. But the lessons may extend to cable/satellite too. So if our cable/satellite is effectively investing $14/month/subscriber in ESPN (figure given by others in this discussion), that's equivalent to a city putting most of its civic budget into the new arena for the sports teams rather than into, say, a new playhouse and museum. This means that over time the virtual metropolis comprised of the subscribers to cable/satellite are economically less well off than if the investment had been weighted less to sports, more to the arts. And that means that an alternative without so much investment in sports in the mix would over time have wealthier subscribers, to whom it - and the advertisers using it - could potentially sell much more.
There are, at minimum, some companies which need massive amounts of computation, which needs to scale not just with their markets, but with their product development - where their edge largely consists in finding useful things to do with massive amounts of computation before their competition scoops them on whatever the next idea to take off will be.
Yes, in an arms race you often end up with in the silly spot of "But what do we need 10,000 nukes for." Well, what you need 'em for, if you want to be the only superpower on your globe, is to hopefully make the competition quit before they begin to seriously challenge you. Eh, bad analogy. The point is, in this "arms race" the "nukes" also contribute essentially to your products. And the people building your nukes had better be fully aware of the degree of your need, and competitive with the other armorers.
Sun, first in fusion.
The curious question here is to what degree IBM and Sun have embraced not just their own alliances with the FOSS world, but accepted the underlying business philosophy of plenty. The more computers can do, the more the sales of computers and services. The more the software is simply available, ubiquitous even, the more uses will be found for computers, faster. The more the software can be recombined, the more synergies between computers and business methods will be developed. The richer the possible permutations, the larger the number of them which will find successful niches, and the more the hardware and services that will be sold to support those niches.
IBM and Sun compete, but it's not a zero-sum game. The larger contest is between the economics of plenty and the economics of scarcity. If plenty wins, the markets grow much faster than when scarcity wins, and there's more than enough room for a number of players to do very well indeed. If scarcity wins - and Microsoft and Apple are both playing scarcity tactics, trying to hoard strengths rather than share them - the overall economy stays relatively smaller, and the game moves closer to zero-sum. These are interesting times.
Where are we now? We're at a place where standard office printers have gone from fixed-space type (the WordPerfect on DOS era), to proportional type (the Word era), to full-color, fully illustrated, brochure-like output. That means that your junior executives have to either have assistants again, or shop their stuff out to expensive graphics shops. And for anything that really needs to be well laid out, those more expert hands are going to be translating the Word documents into
So if Adobe produces an office suite, its first advantage will be that it can move its content into higher-end Adobe products with much more ease than going from Microsoft-formatted intermediate steps. Its second advantage will be that it can inherit already-proven features of the higher-end Adobe products, so that some of those junior execs can now do their own brochures, just as they have learned to do memos and letters. Plus, you have easier translation of their work to the Web. The number of jobs that currently exist just to hand-tune the bad results of trying to automatically pour Word into Web pages must number in the tens or hundreds of thousands. And they aren't adding anything to the worth of the business's output that better software couldn't do without them.
It sounds like a compromise based on using a flaw in an ftp daemon to exploit a kernel flaw to escalate privileges. The question I'd have is which ftp daemon were they running? FTP - even the old, unencrypted kind - IMHO can be run with tight security if you choose a daemon that can run in chroot with virtual-account privilege separation for each user. A few daemons do that, and do it well, most don't. So was this a known-problematic ftp daemon that Ubuntu's Loco servers were running, or a fresh exploit against one of the better daemons?
As for the suggestions that sftp is better, OpenSSH's version of sftp requires a shell account for each user - something good ftp daemon's don't. There are shells like scponly that are pretty good at chrooting each user's shell account - but not necessarily perfect. There are a lot more administrative steps in setting that up than for an ftp account, which if not quite done right can compromise security. FTP's maturity - again with the right daemon - can be a security advantage, over all.
Where, and what the turbulence pattern will be there, and how much heat will be directed right to that small spot of bare metal skin. Then there's the question of whether they have good enough computer models to predict that to any accuracy; or whether minute changes in angle-of-approach and so forth render the chances essentially random. Since they have a patch kit, they'll be fools not to use it - unless the patch could itself deform into a funnel channeling the fire of re-entry to that spot.
There are three lines of argument against this:
- Our trust in intent may be misplaced: While this may be true, it's often not an effective argument in a democracy where a majority may trust foolishly.
- The successor argument: If the power is assigned to an office, can we trust the successor to that office (aka: "Would you trust Hillary with these powers?").
- Our trust in perfect execution may be misplaced: Among the many subparts to this: The mechanisms of power accumulated might be hijacked by others who are not even in proper succession.
The strongest, broadest line of argument against absolute power is the last. The King may be nearly divine, but the Sheriff of Nottingham uses the derived power corruptly. Compare your favorite president while J. Edgar Hoover ran the FBI with Hoover's use of FBI files to blackmail politicians - virtue at the top never goes all the way down - often not far down at all. When criminals themselves can subvert or outright take over the mechanisms of power (as in Chicago and New York at various times past; even Giuliani's father was a mob soldier, and rumors persist in NYC's Italian neighborhoods about the son's allegiances), that's a serious danger.Trying to convince everyone that "Absolute power's bad even in the hands of good leaders" is a tough sell to many; convincing us all that "Absolute power's bad because even the best leaders can't keep it in their hands, and bad people always find a way to get ahold of it" gets to the same ends, and may be the more effective means.
Regarding the citation of studies that seem to show that high-bitrate mp3's can't be told from uncompressed stuff: Asking people to judge is the wrong methodology. We're aware of a whole lot more stuff - both unconsciously and, interestingly, consciously (see Ned Block's current article in Behavioral and Brain Sciences) - than we can name or enumerate. Good music often works its effects through those channels. It sneaks up on us. Except when it's compressed, it often doesn't sneak up.
I sometimes spend hours listening to Sirius, which is compressed but not too badly, through a good stereo. (The compression artifacts on Sirius are much less than on XM, btw.) It's satisfying in a sort of surface way - but the depth and viscerality of the experience isn't there the way it is spinning vinyl, or the minority of CDs that are well-engineered.
For comparison, we've all noticed how live music can just be better (when the PA's well run anyway) than even a good recording through a high end hi-fi. Well, it's not just the crowd and the visual spectacle. It's better even with your eyes closed. And that's because all those subtle harmonic interactions - stuff you can't name even if you're a good musician yourself - are there far more richly in the live venue. Well, as a CD is to a live venue, so an mp3 is to a CD. The surface of the music is still there; you can enjoy clever lyrics or a good beat or hook to a real degree; but the magic is drained out of it.
While Communist Party officials already have a big dating advantage, think of it now! They can scan the items of interest and get full details on children, employment, ethnicity.... Truly, for the modern Chinese Communist Party functionary, it's a wonderful life!
Is it your theory that the stockholders would be motivated to have the company they own give up its monopoly advantage?The longest stretches of telegraph line were put alongside the railroads, sure. But much of the mileage of telegraph lines was within and between cities in the East, where the property was not Native American-owned at the time of the wiring. Aside from which, the phone copper was a completely separate build-out, almost entirely through land not Native American-owned at the time.Citation? Most old folks had their money in pension funds, which in turn broadly invested across the markets.
(Utilities were always considered a safe sector for investment - but largely consisted of electrical utilities which were exactly the same sort of local monopolies the AT&T breakup created for phone service. Investment in government bonds is exactly how we get our money back from the Chinese; and the government of course uses that money, it's not out of circulation.)
Before making a claim like that, the writer should come up with at least three examples, from current versions of major distros.
Reminds me of a local woman who said "We must have a town-wide neighborhood watch, because there's a child sexual predator on every block." In the several years since she raised that hysteria, there's been exactly one serious case in town: one of her best friends had his extensive child porn collection found by the police. He hired the state's most expensive lawyers and got off with probation. She's still his best friend.
Back to the topic. The article mentions telnet. Is there a single current distro that comes with telnetd enabled? Let's help the sloppy author. Has anyone here installed any current distro and found "open ports and unpatched vulnerabilities"?
You might be happy with Microsoft today. But if your firm is based on Microsoft products, and your competition is based on Free, Open Source Software, which firm will have the advantage five years from now? The Microsoft customer with all their eggs in one basket? Or the FOSS customer with eggs in baskets provided by IBM, Sun, Oracle, Novell, Red Hat, Canonical
Microsoft
Hypothesis 1
Proportionally large changes in proportions of climate-involved gases in the atmosphere are having effects on climate. As these changes may threaten the continuation of our advanced civilization, we should closely study all available evidence and model the effects to the best of our abilities.
Hypothesis 2
Massive numbers of scientists who study climate have a secret agenda to bring down industrial civilization, and will fudge any and all data in order to convince the population to end industrial civilization before the sky falls in on us from the shaking of industry's engines.
Note the parallelism
Both hypotheses see a threat to civilization. According to the first, the threat is that the effects on climate from our activities may get away from us. According to the second, the threat is that if we listen to scientists and act prudently, they will concertedly lie to us to achieve the neo-Luddite political result in which we renounce most of our technological and economic means.
Note the absurdity
According to the 2nd hypothesis, scientists - who have been essential in developing our technologies - have now massively subscribed to the sort of anti-technology ideologies that are found in the fringes of some English departments. This is a matter which is easily amenable to sociological research. It would be trivial, really, to go out and, using solid, proven techniques, interview a broad sample of environmental scientists on their personal views of and affections towards technology. It is central to the deniers' case that scientists, as a block, hold anti-technological views. Yet anecdotally, every professional scientist I know (some in climatology) loves technology. Is the only reason that the deniers fail to conduct the basic sociological research to prove their hypothesis that they know from their own anecdotal experience that it would fail to support them?
Are they doing something worse than fudging the data: failing to collect it in an obvious place, because they know it would prove them massively wrong?
Health and fitness are closely linked to status, of course. Evolutionary theory has loads of speculation about, say, a fine head of hair on a woman demonstrating her health, or her figure showing her fitness. But for what a car looks like - well, BMWs are fairly nondescript. It's what people drive who don't want to be seen in a Benz or a Caddy, but still want that visceral buzz.
So, aside from the cool concept of it, and aside from operating costs or 0-60, how does it feel to be on your own rolling in the hydrogen zone in a BMW, Mr. Jones?
On the other hand, if they're putting the J&J emblem on trucks, that would directly violate the Convention.