The reason HTML enabled the Web to take off was it could be done by anybody. Then Advertising Age ran it's "We Must Conquer New Media" cover story, and all the creative directors got involved, and we ended up with this mishmash of html/css/javascript/java/flash on top of php/perl/.net on top of SQL &c. - which made everything bizarrely complex, while not really improving the look or accessibility-to-nondesigners of the Web. So then you get your wikis and blogs and so on which work because once again the "normal" people (who are often specialists in the sciences, politics, the arts and so on) can put up stuff again where the tools get out of the way and let them get on with the content.
If HTML evolves to the point it's done right again (as right as it was done in its very good and successful first year, but with what we've learned since) then we won't need wiki syntax, for instance. HTML should do that itself: let creative people who are not designers easily post stuff in most-accessible form. The whole move over the intervening years to make the Web the best medium for advertising hasn't worked well even for that. The most successful advertising venue is Google, whose success is based on stripping all that design nonsense out of its pages.
It's well-known that the Chinese government has an active computer warfare department. A botnet on this scale is way beyond anything needed for mere industrial blackmail. But if you wanted to bring down large chunks of some nation's Internet quickly, without the attack coming from an obvious (and blockable) source, this would be a great weapon. Let's say you wanted to disable the Internet in Taiwan, or South Korea, or Japan, or all three, just prior to military action. Or let's say you wanted to disrupt financial markets to be sure that your intentional crashing of the dollar had maximal effects.
The article presents the choice of either "institutions" or "genetic adaptation" being at the heart of it - yet the book reportedly argues more strongly that there is an evolutionary component than that the evolution is in the medium of genes. If we grant that behavior changed more than institutions did, and furthermore that there was a drift of behaviors evolved for upper-class niches into the lower classes as children of the upper class moved down in society, then we should consider media of behavior which are susceptible to something like evolution, yet which are not genes. One popular at/. is "memes." But memes seem too contagious for the explanation required here, since they don't explain the growing 1st World-3rd World gap, even though 1st World memes can be found in the strangest corners of the 3rd World.
Another explanation could be one that makes sense in our folk language, but gets zero contemporary respect in academia: spirits. This wouldn't be spirits of the ghost-in-machine sort, but spirits in the same way we still know what it means to talk of the spirit of a city, or a country, or a people; or the difference in spirit between two authors, or two musical performers, or two dancers. It is a truism, of course, to say that the Medieval upper class had "gentler spirits." But could that truism be... well... true? Are there aspects of human character, transmitted through culture and family, which fit the general folk concept of spirits? If there are, it could even turn out that they - like other environmental factors - affect gene expression, and thus alter the balance of the cerebral and hormonal systems in a way which could look superficially like - but not actually be - a rapid evolution in the fundamental genetics.
If so, then this book would really be about spirits of the upper class fanning out into positions in the rest of a class-based society. That could also account for the British success at colonial administration - that when you took middle class Brits and sent them abroad, they generally had the right attitudes to run things passably well.
There's another implication here: That the spirits of the upper class, when spread through the other classes, lift the whole society in terms of wealth. A society which ennobles everyone should come out far ahead of one which tries to make the mass of people take on the spirits of sheep, herded, unthinking, obedient, and scared of the Musl^H^H^H^Hwolves.
First of all, Congress has NO power to set prices for any reason -- none. No government should ever set price caps or minimums. Doing so creates high prices and restricted inventories (or none at all). Let the market set pricing.
Congress is involved because laws passed by Congress establish (1) that Net radio can be charged these fees, and (2) that over-the-air radio cannot be charged these fees. This isn't on the level of setting pricing, but on the level of whether there's to be any price at all. This is an entirely arbitrary area, and it does not unleash "the genius of the market" to just go and legislate whole new areas, formerly free, where now someone will have government sanction to charge fees. Privatizing formerly-free public resources does not inevitably improve the quality nor quantity of those resources, nor achieve any public good at all. There are exceptions, but in general leaving what's been free free allows for more ways to capitalize those free resources - by adding value to them - than does locking them up and putting the keys in some private party's pocket.
If that market is best which is most free, then the more that's free - the larger the commons - the better the market which can be achieved in that space. Using government to enforce private seizure of public space is perverse, and usually thuggery, not the invisible hand, but the visible fist.
A third system monitors the path of the vehicle to ensure it's traveling in a straight line and not weaving about the road, as is common with a drunken driver.
The first thing I learned in drivers ed, from a moonlighting hip musician who presumably knew a thing about driving influenced, is to always keep the eyes focused well-ahead on the road. It works. You weave when you make the mistake of looking at the road too-close ahead of the car. When you look far ahead instead, your steering will not weave no matter how tired or otherwise impaired you are. You're also more likely to see stuff in time to react to it. Speed traps for instance.
The American indians simply lacked the technology to have a significant impact on their environment until they got horses, at which point their population expanded and they routinely exhausted hunting grounds,
You're good at making things up. At the same time the Native Americans got horses they also got European diseases, which by current best estimates wiped out at least 50%, perhaps as much as 90%, of their pre-contact population. But before they got horses, they'd had widespread effects on their environment. For example the wonderful scenery at Yosemite that whites think of as "unspoiled" entirely depended on the fires Native Americans methodically set to clear off forest and produce the grasslands that game animals thrived on. They weren't destroying nature with those fires, but they were certainly maintaining nature in a different balance that it would have been without their efforts - a balance more fruitful for their own uses of nature. Then Muir convinced us that this was "virgin" wilderness, and we removed the natives.
The difference between Native American and white approaches to nature is that Native Americans tuned nature to be even more beautiful for human thriving, while the typical white approach is to "conquer" it. This attitude the whites brought from Europe, where the wilderness was largely identified with evils and dangers, rather than a thing of beauty to be appreciated for its potential to nurture us. That European attitude finally changed - in part because the American landscape changed us (see the New England Transcendentalists), and word got back to Europe from here; in part because the English Romantics discovered their own landscape, and then expanded from there to the world. But most of Europe viewed nature like the French, for whom it belonged best in geometric gardens, or the Germans, for whom the woods were fully of mythic monsters and deadly dangers.
That's assuming you could extract as much energy-dollars from a hot rock well as from an oil well (can't find any numbers on this, but it can't be much higher or the oil companies would be all over this
There are several things you're missing in this analysis. First, the technology is not fully there yet - that's what the MIT panel said would take $1 billion and 10-15 years to develop. Second, any given reservoir of oil has a set, fairly short, lifespan. The geo-thermal source has an effectively infinite life (in our scale). So a much longer-term payback from a geo-thermal well would be possible than from and oil well.
Beyond that, oil companies may have no interest in developing a resource that would devalue their existing oil wells, and their leases on the oil fields beneath them. Geo-thermal power would be the monopoly of no country, no region. It would be entirely disruptive of the power structure that the US has just spent hundreds of billions on in the Iraq debacle. It would probably bankrupt all existing car manufacturers, since electric-car competitors can be nimbler if small, and would need very little from currently patented automotive tech.
This power source would also create a public perception of abundance, which would lead to demands from the working and middle classes that we return to offering things like the free public university educations many states offered until several decades ago, and maybe even, finally, universal health care in America. Only the public perception of scarcity allows the rich to hoard the wealth as we presently do. The perception of an energy crisis supports the "right" attitude among the lower classes. The easiest way to maintain that perception is to actually maintain an energy crisis.
Ah, but NBC doesn't have to worry about hackers out for retaliation. What with their history of partnership with Microsoft (MSNBC) they must have the most secure computer systems on Earth.
We cannot educate theater managers to be judges and juries in what is acceptable. Theater managers cannot distinguish between good and bad stealing.
Indeed, theater managers are recruited from the pool of "special education" students who in turn ended up there because their teachers found it too much trouble to teach them how to read. (Movies, the stories that don't require reading!) Like, do you think the theater owners association could make a movie about the differences between "bad stealing" and "fair use" under copyright law?
And if you can't video tape a brief segment of a movie in order to make fair use of it, and the movie's not out in any form but film yet, then you've just had your fair use stolen - bad stealing. At some point, the illiterate jerks who can't read the Constitution should be required to either surrender all rights under law - including the right to have laws enforced in their favor - or leave the country.
Gradually the OS will just fade away into the background where it belongs and all the data types that people use will be standardised.
Alternately, everything will become customized OS. The point of relatively monolithic OSes is that otherwise, in our current state of programming and use practices, stuff just won't work. But the trends are clear: an increased ease at porting and interoperability. When customizations break things, they're bad. But when instead of ending up with stuff broken you end up with a more ideal tool for the particular user, they're wildly good.
Windows has a lot of basic OS, a few tools in the middle, and a lot of big applications. *nix has always had a whole lot more essentially modular stuff in the middle - generally taken to be part of the OS, but also able to function as application components. At present, that stuff is still largely command line; but there's nothing preventing it morphing a visual face. When that happens, you'll see more of the power of a highly-customizable OS come up into the application interfaces - and not in a way where you get lost; a path's clarity isn't inversely proportional to the richness of the ecology it cuts through - it can be the opposite.
So the OS, if this scenario happens, won't "get out of the way." It will be the way. Yet, it will be nearly as diverse as the people using it, while at the same time allowing them group coherencies that present systems largely block precisely through the constraints of monolithic applications. It will also walk dogs.
That's a curious question, but how do you count "each component." There's a CD/cassette/AM/FM stereo boombox down at the drug store for fifty bucks. Fifteen years ago all those "components" in one box cost over $200, and just a few years ago was still beyond $100. In a sense "CD/cassette/AM/FM stereo boombox" could be said to have become a single component. But then "sublaptop" soon will be in that category to. Unless you're limited by the cost of some rare and necessary mineral - if it's most all assembly costs - we should have these for $50 within a decade - not even inflation adjusted.
Had a bunch of robot spam going through a home-grown PHP comment form - all of it from Russia. So I got the the Russia CIDR list from here and added this:
$testip = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']; function ipCheck ($IP, $CIDR) {
list ($net, $mask) = split ("/", $CIDR);
$ip_net = ip2long ($net);
$ip_mask = ~((1 << (32 - $mask)) - 1);
$ip_ip = ip2long ($IP);
$ip_ip_net = $ip_ip & $ip_mask;
return ($ip_ip_net == $ip_net); } $CIDRs = file ("/path/to/ru.zone.file"); foreach ($CIDRs as $CIDR) {
if (ipCheck ($testip, $CIDR)) {
$act = "view";// switches to viewing old comments rather than posting new one
break;
} }
It's fast, and when comment spam shows up from other countries I don't care about, I'll block them too.
How does he jump from kids seeing pr0n to pr0n of kids?
He doesn't understand that the computer's not watching him. So then if "kids are being exploited online"... and as an occasional porn surfer I can testify that the kiddie porn is nowhere some curious kid is at all likely to find it, or adult is at all likely to stumble on by mistake - which is to say I've no idea where it is because obviously those who trade it are well aware they need to hide and keep their groups small. But I digress. In the senator's mind the computer must be directly exploiting kids by luring them to sites where dirty old men instruct the kid to disrobe in front of the computer, while they beam the kids performance out to all their dirty old friends. Or something.
In other words the senator has no friggin idea what being online is actually like. The worst that happens is some 13 year olds find a few videos of adults at orgies. I've overheard the neighbor kids talking about that as they walk down the street. It's a curiousity, but obviously doesn't mean a lot to them. It wouldn't bother me if that stuff was blocked from such kids, but it doesn't bother me that it's not. It was just in the news that porn site revenues have taken a steep drop in the last year. It seems that our culture's been so saturated with the stuff that people just aren't motivated to buy it like they used to. Maybe the senators figure if they can create a more restrictive environment again, it'll revive the porn industry.
After all, that's worked well with recreational drugs.
President Bush has declared himself dictator. He's had his people say that they are beyond any oversight by Congress, and that any attempt by Congress to prosecute them for contempt of Congress when they fail to testify or produce materials that Congress deems it requires for its Constitutionally-mandated oversight duties will be blocked when it's referred on to the Justice Department for enforcement. That's all a dictatorship is - authority in a single office and individual without check.
Okay, he hasn't said his dictatorship is for life yet. No need to do that until shortly before he's supposed to hand over power to the next president. Who knows, if by miracle a Republican is elected, maybe he'll go ahead and pass on the dictatorship. Will that make your military friends happy enough?
Even if Hillary steps into office after him, in a smooth transition, as things stand she'll be inheriting the dictatorial powers his people have seized for the office. Will your military friends be content to let her march them off to ill-conceived wars on the far side of nowhere, absent any power left to our Senators and Congresspersons to oversee or check her schemes?
No offense to the military, but if they're patriots, they're working out detailed plans to "accidentally" launch something in the very near future. Dictatorships are no more "declared" these days than wars are. Instead, we just slip into them like something comfortable.
I don't have a laptop. I have a Zaurus SL-C3100 clamshell for my pocket, and various homebuilt desktops/servers. That's just me. Let's back off a little and consider our longer term cultural experience. We have desktops because we have desks. Why do we have desks? Because we like to have a comfortable, focused place to do certain kinds of work. Back when all of that work was done by pen and paper, the paper could unfolded from a pocket and we could do much of the work anywhere. Or we could carry a (real) notebook or folder with many papers. But despite that great portability, most everyone who did much paper work recruited a desk for the procedure. Desks turn out to be one of our most successful inventions.
So if you've got the desk, why not park a desktop machine there? What's not to like about a large screen at the right height, and individually chosen keyboard and mouse or whatever, already set up just how you like them when you do deskwork? Is it really more convenient to bend over a laptop, then have to plug it into power and printer and whatnot, not to mention ending up with something that when you carry it around in the larger world risks having its entire contents stolen or destroyed? Laptop-only life makes sense in two categories; either you don't do anything important on it, or your entire career is on the road so the bulk of your work can't be located to a single physical desk anyhow.
For everyone else, you have your desktop for your main work, and your notebook for when you're traveling - just as it's been for centuries, every since "desktop" and "notebook" had as referents real things having nothing to do with computers.
The claim for necessity for this action seems to be that
There are people in America with significant assets aligned against peaceful resolution in Iraq
Normal legal process wouldn't enable our government to seize those assets before they could be spent on something like bombs or transport of weaponry to insurgents in Iraq
Therefore the government needs extraordinary means to seize those assets and prevent the bombs from being bought/shipped
What's this fantasy based on? The sort of people it posits certainly exist in large numbers - in Saudi Arabia, where half the insurgents in Iraq come from. And some of those Saudis are in the US from time to time - some of them to visit their friends in the White House. Could this executive order hint that Bush is about to turn on his best friends? Bush? Loyal-to-friends-no-matter-what Bush? It may be an act of treason that Bush has not seized Saudi assets in the US which are controlled by members of the royal family who also fund the terrorists who keeping Iraq destabilized. Is Bush finally desperate enough to turn on his friends?
Can more variation in Africa really prove anything beyond... more variation in Africa? Consider: There are more tribal cultures, more languages, more language families, more diverse environmental niches. When you look at a globe rather than our typical equatorial-land-cheating map projections, Africa is a huge place. But does the existence of more variations on a theme in a particular space prove that it was the location of the original of the theme?
An opposite argument is possible. Let's say you had butterflies everyplace but Africa, with each (sub)species displaying designs that worked best for camouflage/mate selection/whatever in its home territory. Over time many of these (sub)species reach Africa. Because it's a large, ecologically diverse space, a considerable number of them find successful niches. The subsequent conclusion that the range of different butterfly designs in Africa proves their ultimate origin there would be exactly wrong in this scenario.
My brother in law has Comcast because he's in their executive ranks. A year ago on his home computer there was constant Microsoft LAN messaging popup spam - on a machine that Comcast had provided and configured for him. He just accepted it as normal, but I quietly turned that feature off.
I'm all for ISPs not blocking ports - but allowing messaging through that's only supposed to be for LANs?
Is there such a thing as a generic test for keyloggers? Perhaps some way to profile a known-clean system and then spot the difference in some aspect of performance if a keylogger is subsequently inserted? If the keylogger is rootkit-like it may be hard to spot in the small space of memory it would require. But wouldn't it usually introduce some slight delay in the speed of keyboard input getting to the intended program? Is there any way to test for that without the test program itself getting the same slightly-delayed input, with no way to measure when the key actually made contact? Can keyboard input be simulated in a way that would send it through any installed keylogger, and so reveal it?
Alternately, the keylogger is most likely storing the logged keys either in clear or in isomorphic form to the input. So if you inserted your own keylogger into the system, what would it take to scan memory (and drives?) for matches on samples of what your own keylogger captures? Keyloggers aren't going to want to be burdened with heavy encryption to avoid this scanning, since that would add enough system load to make them more spottable by other means. Obviously you'd have to mask out the legitimate memory locations of, say, your word processor the input's going to - which would miss a keylogger patched into your word processor.
Is anyone working on a way to harden systems against this whole category? (Yeah, key-logging dongles are yet another thing. Software insertion is the question I'm addressing.)
If you're buying a used phone, get a new battery right away. Phone batteries fade off rapidly after a couple of years, in how long they'll hold a charge.
For a new phone, Tracfone sells simple, modern models cheap. You have to prebuy a block of minutes, which end up costing 40 cents if within a few counties of home, and 80 cents beyond that - but there are no other charges. The difference between Tracfone and Virgin is that Virgin's home network is Sprint, and if you're not in range of a Sprint tower it won't work (or so I'm told). The Tracfones don't care whose network they're on.
when record-making equipment was expensive, they used that
Not the case. Back in the early days record-making equipment was quite cheap. There were myriad small, local labels across the country, tied to local music scenes. This continued through the mid-50s, when the business started to consolidate due to better national promotion and distribution of former local stars like Elvis Presley, including payola to the formerly-locally-oriented radio stations to induce them to favor the nationally-marketed stars. Radio in the early era had been based largely on live broadcasts, since the fidelity was better (and live music has other virtues), out of the major cities and big regional stations (shows like the King Biscuit Flour Hour down in the Delta).
As recording studio technology developed from the late 50s onward, studio time became expensive, leading to the current system where artists get signed to labels which then lend them money for their time in the studio to record. It usually turns out that the seemingly generous offers get totally absorbed by studio costs, and the musicians get nothing. That's not too different from back in the early days, when musicians got a small fee per song recorded, and nothing at all no matter how many records sold. Musicians made most all their money from live performance - just like today.
What the record industry is trying to control here is the ability of small, independent musicians to gain any audience at all - the kind of musicians the commercial radio stations and even satellite radio will never play. They're trying to assure that real art doesn't distract from their marketing of sex and violence dressed up as music. Any politician concerned with the state of our mass culture should recognize that the degeneracy is largely a corporate product. So anything that decreases the power of these corporations by allowing more real art to flourish in spaces they can't control is key to restoring health to popular (and less-popular) culture.
Politicians - bewailing the media while furthering its monopoly. In terms of the longer-term success of our nation, this is worse than Iraq - indeed without this, Iraq could never have been sold.
You didn't read the whole article. The drugs were initially tested for the property of blocking the transfer of genes for multiple drug resistance. But they were surprised to find that it specifically killed those bacteria which had already received the upgrade package. Multiple drug resistance is evidently a specific trick - not multiple resistances to multiple drugs, but a single resistance mechanism that blocks nearly all drugs, and that can be passed from one species of bacteria to others. These newly-tested but available drugs kill any bacteria which have adopted that mechanism.
I have nothing to hide if every member and employee of the government is entirely faithful to the laws and to reasonable ethical norms, and would never abuse the powers of justice for political ends. Given the recent thorough abuse of the Department of Justice for political ends, coupled with my reasonable belief that high members of our current government most likely are literally guilty of treason, and will be without restraint in avoiding just consequences for their treasons... yeah, I have nothing to hide. There's no reason they would accuse anyone politically like me of "siding with the terrorists" now, is there?
Slashdot Mirror
The reason HTML enabled the Web to take off was it could be done by anybody. Then Advertising Age ran it's "We Must Conquer New Media" cover story, and all the creative directors got involved, and we ended up with this mishmash of html/css/javascript/java/flash on top of php/perl/.net on top of SQL &c. - which made everything bizarrely complex, while not really improving the look or accessibility-to-nondesigners of the Web. So then you get your wikis and blogs and so on which work because once again the "normal" people (who are often specialists in the sciences, politics, the arts and so on) can put up stuff again where the tools get out of the way and let them get on with the content.
If HTML evolves to the point it's done right again (as right as it was done in its very good and successful first year, but with what we've learned since) then we won't need wiki syntax, for instance. HTML should do that itself: let creative people who are not designers easily post stuff in most-accessible form. The whole move over the intervening years to make the Web the best medium for advertising hasn't worked well even for that. The most successful advertising venue is Google, whose success is based on stripping all that design nonsense out of its pages.
There was a mutt version maybe a decade back that lost some e-mails on me from its flat files. But ever since then it's rock solid.
It's well-known that the Chinese government has an active computer warfare department. A botnet on this scale is way beyond anything needed for mere industrial blackmail. But if you wanted to bring down large chunks of some nation's Internet quickly, without the attack coming from an obvious (and blockable) source, this would be a great weapon. Let's say you wanted to disable the Internet in Taiwan, or South Korea, or Japan, or all three, just prior to military action. Or let's say you wanted to disrupt financial markets to be sure that your intentional crashing of the dollar had maximal effects.
The article presents the choice of either "institutions" or "genetic adaptation" being at the heart of it - yet the book reportedly argues more strongly that there is an evolutionary component than that the evolution is in the medium of genes. If we grant that behavior changed more than institutions did, and furthermore that there was a drift of behaviors evolved for upper-class niches into the lower classes as children of the upper class moved down in society, then we should consider media of behavior which are susceptible to something like evolution, yet which are not genes. One popular at /. is "memes." But memes seem too contagious for the explanation required here, since they don't explain the growing 1st World-3rd World gap, even though 1st World memes can be found in the strangest corners of the 3rd World.
... well ... true? Are there aspects of human character, transmitted through culture and family, which fit the general folk concept of spirits? If there are, it could even turn out that they - like other environmental factors - affect gene expression, and thus alter the balance of the cerebral and hormonal systems in a way which could look superficially like - but not actually be - a rapid evolution in the fundamental genetics.
Another explanation could be one that makes sense in our folk language, but gets zero contemporary respect in academia: spirits. This wouldn't be spirits of the ghost-in-machine sort, but spirits in the same way we still know what it means to talk of the spirit of a city, or a country, or a people; or the difference in spirit between two authors, or two musical performers, or two dancers. It is a truism, of course, to say that the Medieval upper class had "gentler spirits." But could that truism be
If so, then this book would really be about spirits of the upper class fanning out into positions in the rest of a class-based society. That could also account for the British success at colonial administration - that when you took middle class Brits and sent them abroad, they generally had the right attitudes to run things passably well.
There's another implication here: That the spirits of the upper class, when spread through the other classes, lift the whole society in terms of wealth. A society which ennobles everyone should come out far ahead of one which tries to make the mass of people take on the spirits of sheep, herded, unthinking, obedient, and scared of the Musl^H^H^H^Hwolves.
If that market is best which is most free, then the more that's free - the larger the commons - the better the market which can be achieved in that space. Using government to enforce private seizure of public space is perverse, and usually thuggery, not the invisible hand, but the visible fist.
The difference between Native American and white approaches to nature is that Native Americans tuned nature to be even more beautiful for human thriving, while the typical white approach is to "conquer" it. This attitude the whites brought from Europe, where the wilderness was largely identified with evils and dangers, rather than a thing of beauty to be appreciated for its potential to nurture us. That European attitude finally changed - in part because the American landscape changed us (see the New England Transcendentalists), and word got back to Europe from here; in part because the English Romantics discovered their own landscape, and then expanded from there to the world. But most of Europe viewed nature like the French, for whom it belonged best in geometric gardens, or the Germans, for whom the woods were fully of mythic monsters and deadly dangers.
Beyond that, oil companies may have no interest in developing a resource that would devalue their existing oil wells, and their leases on the oil fields beneath them. Geo-thermal power would be the monopoly of no country, no region. It would be entirely disruptive of the power structure that the US has just spent hundreds of billions on in the Iraq debacle. It would probably bankrupt all existing car manufacturers, since electric-car competitors can be nimbler if small, and would need very little from currently patented automotive tech.
This power source would also create a public perception of abundance, which would lead to demands from the working and middle classes that we return to offering things like the free public university educations many states offered until several decades ago, and maybe even, finally, universal health care in America. Only the public perception of scarcity allows the rich to hoard the wealth as we presently do. The perception of an energy crisis supports the "right" attitude among the lower classes. The easiest way to maintain that perception is to actually maintain an energy crisis.
Ah, but NBC doesn't have to worry about hackers out for retaliation. What with their history of partnership with Microsoft (MSNBC) they must have the most secure computer systems on Earth.
And if you can't video tape a brief segment of a movie in order to make fair use of it, and the movie's not out in any form but film yet, then you've just had your fair use stolen - bad stealing. At some point, the illiterate jerks who can't read the Constitution should be required to either surrender all rights under law - including the right to have laws enforced in their favor - or leave the country.
Windows has a lot of basic OS, a few tools in the middle, and a lot of big applications. *nix has always had a whole lot more essentially modular stuff in the middle - generally taken to be part of the OS, but also able to function as application components. At present, that stuff is still largely command line; but there's nothing preventing it morphing a visual face. When that happens, you'll see more of the power of a highly-customizable OS come up into the application interfaces - and not in a way where you get lost; a path's clarity isn't inversely proportional to the richness of the ecology it cuts through - it can be the opposite.
So the OS, if this scenario happens, won't "get out of the way." It will be the way. Yet, it will be nearly as diverse as the people using it, while at the same time allowing them group coherencies that present systems largely block precisely through the constraints of monolithic applications. It will also walk dogs.
That's a curious question, but how do you count "each component." There's a CD/cassette/AM/FM stereo boombox down at the drug store for fifty bucks. Fifteen years ago all those "components" in one box cost over $200, and just a few years ago was still beyond $100. In a sense "CD/cassette/AM/FM stereo boombox" could be said to have become a single component. But then "sublaptop" soon will be in that category to. Unless you're limited by the cost of some rare and necessary mineral - if it's most all assembly costs - we should have these for $50 within a decade - not even inflation adjusted.
He doesn't understand that the computer's not watching him. So then if "kids are being exploited online"
In other words the senator has no friggin idea what being online is actually like. The worst that happens is some 13 year olds find a few videos of adults at orgies. I've overheard the neighbor kids talking about that as they walk down the street. It's a curiousity, but obviously doesn't mean a lot to them. It wouldn't bother me if that stuff was blocked from such kids, but it doesn't bother me that it's not. It was just in the news that porn site revenues have taken a steep drop in the last year. It seems that our culture's been so saturated with the stuff that people just aren't motivated to buy it like they used to. Maybe the senators figure if they can create a more restrictive environment again, it'll revive the porn industry.
After all, that's worked well with recreational drugs.
President Bush has declared himself dictator. He's had his people say that they are beyond any oversight by Congress, and that any attempt by Congress to prosecute them for contempt of Congress when they fail to testify or produce materials that Congress deems it requires for its Constitutionally-mandated oversight duties will be blocked when it's referred on to the Justice Department for enforcement. That's all a dictatorship is - authority in a single office and individual without check.
Okay, he hasn't said his dictatorship is for life yet. No need to do that until shortly before he's supposed to hand over power to the next president. Who knows, if by miracle a Republican is elected, maybe he'll go ahead and pass on the dictatorship. Will that make your military friends happy enough?
Even if Hillary steps into office after him, in a smooth transition, as things stand she'll be inheriting the dictatorial powers his people have seized for the office. Will your military friends be content to let her march them off to ill-conceived wars on the far side of nowhere, absent any power left to our Senators and Congresspersons to oversee or check her schemes?
No offense to the military, but if they're patriots, they're working out detailed plans to "accidentally" launch something in the very near future. Dictatorships are no more "declared" these days than wars are. Instead, we just slip into them like something comfortable.
I don't have a laptop. I have a Zaurus SL-C3100 clamshell for my pocket, and various homebuilt desktops/servers. That's just me. Let's back off a little and consider our longer term cultural experience. We have desktops because we have desks. Why do we have desks? Because we like to have a comfortable, focused place to do certain kinds of work. Back when all of that work was done by pen and paper, the paper could unfolded from a pocket and we could do much of the work anywhere. Or we could carry a (real) notebook or folder with many papers. But despite that great portability, most everyone who did much paper work recruited a desk for the procedure. Desks turn out to be one of our most successful inventions.
So if you've got the desk, why not park a desktop machine there? What's not to like about a large screen at the right height, and individually chosen keyboard and mouse or whatever, already set up just how you like them when you do deskwork? Is it really more convenient to bend over a laptop, then have to plug it into power and printer and whatnot, not to mention ending up with something that when you carry it around in the larger world risks having its entire contents stolen or destroyed? Laptop-only life makes sense in two categories; either you don't do anything important on it, or your entire career is on the road so the bulk of your work can't be located to a single physical desk anyhow.
For everyone else, you have your desktop for your main work, and your notebook for when you're traveling - just as it's been for centuries, every since "desktop" and "notebook" had as referents real things having nothing to do with computers.
- There are people in America with significant assets aligned against peaceful resolution in Iraq
- Normal legal process wouldn't enable our government to seize those assets before they could be spent on something like bombs or transport of weaponry to insurgents in Iraq
- Therefore the government needs extraordinary means to seize those assets and prevent the bombs from being bought/shipped
What's this fantasy based on? The sort of people it posits certainly exist in large numbers - in Saudi Arabia, where half the insurgents in Iraq come from. And some of those Saudis are in the US from time to time - some of them to visit their friends in the White House. Could this executive order hint that Bush is about to turn on his best friends? Bush? Loyal-to-friends-no-matter-what Bush? It may be an act of treason that Bush has not seized Saudi assets in the US which are controlled by members of the royal family who also fund the terrorists who keeping Iraq destabilized. Is Bush finally desperate enough to turn on his friends?Can more variation in Africa really prove anything beyond ... more variation in Africa? Consider: There are more tribal cultures, more languages, more language families, more diverse environmental niches. When you look at a globe rather than our typical equatorial-land-cheating map projections, Africa is a huge place. But does the existence of more variations on a theme in a particular space prove that it was the location of the original of the theme?
An opposite argument is possible. Let's say you had butterflies everyplace but Africa, with each (sub)species displaying designs that worked best for camouflage/mate selection/whatever in its home territory. Over time many of these (sub)species reach Africa. Because it's a large, ecologically diverse space, a considerable number of them find successful niches. The subsequent conclusion that the range of different butterfly designs in Africa proves their ultimate origin there would be exactly wrong in this scenario.
My brother in law has Comcast because he's in their executive ranks. A year ago on his home computer there was constant Microsoft LAN messaging popup spam - on a machine that Comcast had provided and configured for him. He just accepted it as normal, but I quietly turned that feature off.
I'm all for ISPs not blocking ports - but allowing messaging through that's only supposed to be for LANs?
Is there such a thing as a generic test for keyloggers? Perhaps some way to profile a known-clean system and then spot the difference in some aspect of performance if a keylogger is subsequently inserted? If the keylogger is rootkit-like it may be hard to spot in the small space of memory it would require. But wouldn't it usually introduce some slight delay in the speed of keyboard input getting to the intended program? Is there any way to test for that without the test program itself getting the same slightly-delayed input, with no way to measure when the key actually made contact? Can keyboard input be simulated in a way that would send it through any installed keylogger, and so reveal it?
Alternately, the keylogger is most likely storing the logged keys either in clear or in isomorphic form to the input. So if you inserted your own keylogger into the system, what would it take to scan memory (and drives?) for matches on samples of what your own keylogger captures? Keyloggers aren't going to want to be burdened with heavy encryption to avoid this scanning, since that would add enough system load to make them more spottable by other means. Obviously you'd have to mask out the legitimate memory locations of, say, your word processor the input's going to - which would miss a keylogger patched into your word processor.
Is anyone working on a way to harden systems against this whole category? (Yeah, key-logging dongles are yet another thing. Software insertion is the question I'm addressing.)
If you're buying a used phone, get a new battery right away. Phone batteries fade off rapidly after a couple of years, in how long they'll hold a charge.
For a new phone, Tracfone sells simple, modern models cheap. You have to prebuy a block of minutes, which end up costing 40 cents if within a few counties of home, and 80 cents beyond that - but there are no other charges. The difference between Tracfone and Virgin is that Virgin's home network is Sprint, and if you're not in range of a Sprint tower it won't work (or so I'm told). The Tracfones don't care whose network they're on.
Not the case. Back in the early days record-making equipment was quite cheap. There were myriad small, local labels across the country, tied to local music scenes. This continued through the mid-50s, when the business started to consolidate due to better national promotion and distribution of former local stars like Elvis Presley, including payola to the formerly-locally-oriented radio stations to induce them to favor the nationally-marketed stars. Radio in the early era had been based largely on live broadcasts, since the fidelity was better (and live music has other virtues), out of the major cities and big regional stations (shows like the King Biscuit Flour Hour down in the Delta).
As recording studio technology developed from the late 50s onward, studio time became expensive, leading to the current system where artists get signed to labels which then lend them money for their time in the studio to record. It usually turns out that the seemingly generous offers get totally absorbed by studio costs, and the musicians get nothing. That's not too different from back in the early days, when musicians got a small fee per song recorded, and nothing at all no matter how many records sold. Musicians made most all their money from live performance - just like today.
What the record industry is trying to control here is the ability of small, independent musicians to gain any audience at all - the kind of musicians the commercial radio stations and even satellite radio will never play. They're trying to assure that real art doesn't distract from their marketing of sex and violence dressed up as music. Any politician concerned with the state of our mass culture should recognize that the degeneracy is largely a corporate product. So anything that decreases the power of these corporations by allowing more real art to flourish in spaces they can't control is key to restoring health to popular (and less-popular) culture.
Politicians - bewailing the media while furthering its monopoly. In terms of the longer-term success of our nation, this is worse than Iraq - indeed without this, Iraq could never have been sold.
You didn't read the whole article. The drugs were initially tested for the property of blocking the transfer of genes for multiple drug resistance. But they were surprised to find that it specifically killed those bacteria which had already received the upgrade package. Multiple drug resistance is evidently a specific trick - not multiple resistances to multiple drugs, but a single resistance mechanism that blocks nearly all drugs, and that can be passed from one species of bacteria to others. These newly-tested but available drugs kill any bacteria which have adopted that mechanism.
I have nothing to hide if every member and employee of the government is entirely faithful to the laws and to reasonable ethical norms, and would never abuse the powers of justice for political ends. Given the recent thorough abuse of the Department of Justice for political ends, coupled with my reasonable belief that high members of our current government most likely are literally guilty of treason, and will be without restraint in avoiding just consequences for their treasons ... yeah, I have nothing to hide. There's no reason they would accuse anyone politically like me of "siding with the terrorists" now, is there?