The odd thing about Buddhists is that the center of their practice isn't about following a moral code - oh, they've got various enumerated lists but their claim isn't "follow these directives or go to hell." Instead they're after what in Zen's called "natural mind." The claim is clearing the mind and senses to really perceive the world and other beings directly leads in itself to great compassion, from which acts flow which are superior to anything that can be attained by following any code - even the various codifications of behavior the Buddhists themselves have written down.
Now, the odd thing about this in the context of the present discussion is that this would be consonant with our having something of an inborn sensibility which is superior in itself to anything that our cultures can come up with. Indeed the original Taoists also claimed precisely that, with the further claim that it's our cultures that obscure this natural order "between heaven and earth." So the Buddhists and Taoists are coming from precisely the other direction than the Christians who claim that we need to impose religious belief in order to have morality. Their contrary claim is that we need to get beyond our cultures - including their religious formulations - to be at our truly best behavior.
That's also why Buddhists are most gracious to visitors from other cultures - they don't read visitors in terms of how our behavior conforms to their own local cultural code, but rather try to see us more directly.
There is a parallel formulation in the philosophy of one of the founders of the "Scottish Enlightenment," Frances Hutchinson, who held that "the original of our ideas of beauty and virtue" was something natural in us, which he called our "moral sense" - and explicitly described as being the conjunction of our other senses, when not clouded by culture - which is to say very much what the Buddhists claim. Hutchinson was the favorite philosopher of Thomas Jefferson. In that way, America was founded on an appreciation of human nature very close to the Buddhist and Taoist (which enjoyed a re-emergence in New England Transcendentalism, which in turn informed the ethics of our current environmentalism - flowing nicely together with Zen concepts of nature in the work of, for instance, Gary Snyder).
Cows don't digest corn well - not too surprising since it was never a part of their ancestors' natural diet. They digest it so poorly that they become prone to all sorts of intestinal diseases. The only way to feed cows corn and not have them sicken is to add large amounts of antibiotics to the feed to hold down the diseases that digesting corn makes them prone to. This leads to widespread antibiotic resistance that makes many diseases harder to treat in human beings.
As for human beings, the older among us can recall how much better food tasted when it was all sweetened with sugar rather than corn syrup. There are some pretty strong concerns about corn syrup not being so healthy for you either - although it's probably not as bad for us as corn is for cows.
Ethanol is a boondoggle, and I'll prefer any presidential candidate who stands firmly against subsidizing it. But corn too is subsidized - has been for decades - and that leads to it being used in other ways that are already seriously screwing things up. Plus, agriculture is not infinitely renewable, not the way we practice it. The US has lost something like half its agricultural topsoil, on average, over the last century or so. Long-term viability requires us to take more agricultural land out of production, rather than exploit our land more extensively for short-term gain. Over the long run, in many locations, agriculture is just another form of strip mining - at least until we develop technologies we don't currently have to replace millions of tons of topsoil that current practices have allowed to be washed away and otherwise depleted. Soil is more precious than oil.
There's no easy fix here. And corn shouldn't even be a candidate.
The problem with the "stable server" argument is that for any public-facing server stability has to be maintained not just in the relationship of daemons to kernel to hardware, but in the relationship of daemons to security and capabilities. Gone are the days when I could just set up Slackware on a client's machine and then leave it alone for a year or more, all the while with it happily running without reboot. The OS has to be kept current enough to rapidly update to meet the latest security threat to any outward-facing daemon, or any weakness in the kernel waiting for the next daemon vulnerability to leverage it. And the client expects to be regularly offered new features so that they keep looking smart to their customers.
That adds up to having to balance between the sort of stability that comes through not changing anything once it works, and the sort of stability that comes from staying close to the front end of the development curve. Old stuff may not rot from within, but it gets undermined and outdated.
Unfortunately that also happens on the level of distribution maintainers. I've been tracking Gentoo more than Debian lately, but it sounds like Debian's experiencing the same thing: Core organizational roles get taken by people who, unlike the project founders, love their little positions of power much more than they love the quality or brilliance of the project. And the most bureaucratic of them network together to consolidate their power over the chokepoints of the processes necessary to move the distro forward without just going out and forking it.
I have no idea whether anything can be done, once a distro reaches this stage, to save it. Nor do I think that the commercial distros are immune to similar problems - after all, the very worst example of an OS ruined by bureaucracy is Windows, and is Red Hat really that far behind it in this regard (he asks, not having looked at the latest Red Hat incarnation yet)?
Right. Doctors here in New England - and I assume across the country - have about half of their staff's time, and several hours a day of their own, spent in straightening things out between their own records and the systems of the insurers they need to collect from. Many are leaving practice because this is such a distracting, unrewarding diversion away from their core competency at delivering medical care. So every doctor's visit, you (and your insurer) have to pay for the staff the doctor has to hire to collect the fees from the insurer to - in substantial part - pay for the staff the doctor has to hire to collect the fees from the insurer to....
Meanwhile health insurers are under state regulation that allows them to essentially bill on a cost-plus basis - they're allowed to set fees at whatever level is required for profit. And for all the staff at the doctors' offices submitting stuff by fax and phone mostly, they staff themselves up on their end and are guaranteed a profit on it. That's why better than 1/4 of healthcare costs go to overhead at the insurance firms - which isn't even counting the overhead in the doctors' offices to keep all this going around.
A unified set of standards for computerized health care billing could reduce all this drastically, as well as the drag on our whole economy from the rapid escalation of costs. But since insurers are allowed, say, a 15% profit on the total volume of the cash they move, they have absolutely every incentive to fight something which would result in their laying off staff and shrinking the cost of their operations. They are perversely incentivized to bloat the system - and keep it away from computerized standards - for as many years as possible.
Alternately, check out the Archive of Scientists' Transcendent Experiences. The failure to "prove" ESP may show the limits of current experimental design rather than the limits of what's real. There are many, many accounts - not just in that Archive - of experiences which are inconsistent with a world in which something like ESP isn't existent. See in particular noted psychologist Charles Tart's account, and that of Susan Blackmore - who has written one of our current textbooks on consciousness and the brain, as well as being a noted debunker of parapsychological research, yet who reports I think honestly (I know her slightly) a fairly amazing out-of-body experience.
the fact that the current administration is not the ones who actually control the funding process
Are you suggesting that the demonstrated bias by biologists against using the word "evolution" has no correlation with the political cultivation by this White House of those who don't believe in evolution? How is that? There are virtually no biologists who doubt evolution, so this isn't being done to please the scientists who sit on grant making panels. Rather it's to please the politicians and bureaucrats who appoint scientists to grant making panels. The White House appoints the panels, the panels make the grants, so the White House has substantial control of the grants.
Why would this demonstrated effectiveness by the White House in biasing the reports of biological science through its control of the grant making process not also extend to climatology? The population of scientists in the one field, I submit, does not differ in general worldview from that of the other field. What additional factor are you surmising that would overcome this in climatology, but not in biology?
As this study shows, biologists avoid using the word "evolution" in their research proposals and reports presumably because they do not want to alienate the current US government, which is a major source of grants. So scientists clearly can be influenced, at least in which words they use to report it if not in the underlying research, by the perceived biases of government bodies which fund them.
The prediction then would be that during the Bush administration we should have seen a marked decrease in mentions of "global warming" and "climate change" in grant applications and published research. But our self-proclaimed "suppressed scholar" is claiming something quite contradictory: Both that scientists say what their funders want (with the US government being the largest single funder of basic scientific research), and also that current scientists have a biased towards claims for "global warming" and "climate change," rather than favoring the bias of the current US government against these topics - which is at least as strong its bias against "evolution."
WTF? The only logical conclusion from the (somewhat justified) claim that scientists show favor towards their funders' biases is that global climate change is more of a threat than the current scientific consensus (at least among American scientists) portrays.
If you live in the northern US and are doing the responsible thing and turning your central heating down overnight, then getting up an hour earlier means you're turning the heat back up earlier. Why is this wasteful? Because on sunny days in March there's significant solar gain once the sun's up. In my house that can be enough that the heat doesn't even need to be turned on in the morning - unless we get up too early.
In the evening, both the house and the outside environment lose their heat relatively slowly. The darkest hour isn't literally just before the dawn, but the coldest hour is. It's much better to spend the coldest hour under the covers - from an energy use point of view - than to get up during it or right on its tail and turn the furnace up to compensate.
Of course, if the government just looks at electrical use, this may not show in areas that don't primarily use electric heat. The increase in oil and natural gas use though, from this idiocy, will be real and significant.
are the new Jews? Really? Doesn't it make some difference that the Islamists are actually engaged in varieties of evil such as the Nazis falsely accused the Jews of? Sometimes a people can deserve to be clamped down on - although of course never to the extent of the ovens. The trick for free societies to survive is to learn how to do that relatively fairly, and without compromising the freedoms and rights of sectors of the population whose culture is civilized enough not to tolerate suicide bombers and broad-scale terror attacks.
Those who think the Islamists are just bumbling fools weren't in NYC as I was on 9/11. Those who think all groups must be treated alike or else we're "like the Nazis" are going to end up being a prime cause of the sacrifice of the freedom of all of us. And that's the problem in Britain: To be "fair" about tracking the details of the lives of the dangerous part of the population, they're going ahead and doing the same thing to many millions of others who are no threat at all. This sort of "fairness" is itself deeply complicit in the rise of neofascism.
Apparently "ideology" stands for having a soul, while "real world perspective" stands for selling it down the river for a quick buck.
It's especially wacked because most youth don't have an ideology, at least not in its root meaning of having some Platonic Ideal of the world that they wish society would conform to. Fresher, younger eyes aren't comparing what they see in the world to some grandly worked out set of ideals so much as just taking a real look at it and using common sense and feeling to discern what's wonderful and what's ugly about it. It takes years of re-education in the "real world" to stop directly seeing what's good and bad in the real world and subscribe to some unreal ideology - such as the builders of our current military-industrial pyramid are squandering our resources and heritage to foist on the world.
It's decrepit old men behind most of the ideology on Earth. They foist someone younger on us as a false front occassionally - thus was the relatively-youthful Bush put forward rather than Cheney for the figure head; but they're well-aware that the lack of binding ideology in a younger person can be dangerous to them - thus the end of JFK.
As for authentic wooden furniture - there's a lot of money in that if you're comfortable selling custom pieces to the super rich - the same folks who still build houses that aren't essentially particle board wrapped in plastic.
We (those with technical abilities) can fully secure the Net - or a substantial subset of it. We could do it this year. But we won't, largely because we respect outlawry too much. Why? Because there are too many jackass laws. When governments stop persecuting people for free thought, for music, for sex (other than with children), for drugs, for spiritual practices and political involvements - then we can lock down the Net, knowing that our work isn't going to further greater evil than it prevents, won't be presenting governments with what they need to further destroy the true prosperity of individuals and societies.
And I say that as someone who firmly believes that governments are necessary and can (and sometimes do) do great good.
First off, Google would move... where? They're intimately tied to US infrastructure.
Second, all public corporations partially fund themselves by issuing stock, and most in large part pay their executives in stock options. Corporate stock is worth significantly more if the incorporation is in America and the stock is traded on one of the major American exchanges. Why? In large part because American regulation of corporations is - although flawed - considered to be better than the regulation of corporations anywhere else. And the same goes for American regulation of stock markets. Much of that has to do with the laws requiring openness about a corporation's finances.
That's right. It's worth a lot to have your corporation be American because in an essential way we enforce open source in regards to a public corporation's books. America's advantage isn't in being more free, but in being better regulated.
And any American corporation that wants to move elsewhere loses that very lucrative advantage. So where is it unfair for America to tax them on the advantage that being American conveys to those corporations?
We know from the last few years experience that AMD can, for limited periods of time, pull ahead of Intel. That initially surprised a bunch of people whose conventional wisdom was that AMD would always merely follow, and its stock doubled. Then Intel pulled ahead again, and AMD's stock fell all the back and some. But before that reversal, AMD (1) gained significant market entry (e.g. Dell) so that in the event it pulls ahead of Intel again, it can more immediately capitalize on that lead, (2) bought a major graphics chip maker, which can potentially give it more ways to pull ahead. But that was expensive, so:
At this point AMD might want to take on a significant minority investor from private equity. That would ease its short-term debt. From the investor's point of view, all that is necessary to make a huge profit is for AMD to pull ahead of Intel again - however briefly - which could easily double the value of AMD's stock again. But the greater upside is if AMD can innovate its way to a longer-term lead over Intel. If that were to happen AMD's value could increase by an order of magnitude.
Also, if you're private equity, you probably feel you're smarter than God, so that if AMD were compelled by your investment to listen carefully to your strategic ideas, the upside potentials would become much better bets.
Of course, there's a substantial chance of losing it all too. But over the last 40 years the GDP per capita in the US has doubled, while the median income per capita has held within a few percent of steady. That basically means that the there's twice the wealth - more than that considering population growth, but twice as much for each person on average. But each person doesn't have that. It's the super rich who have it, and they're the players in the private equity game. They can afford to gamble big, because they have so much they can take huge losses on any particular bet and still come out far ahead of the rest of us.
A Gentoo developer refused your patch, except for Gentoo? Go Gentoo! Man is that corrupt.
I mostly use Gentoo - I've done well with it running servers almost from its conception. But the Gentoo developers and maintainers, on the whole, are developing increasingly obnoxious attitudes towards their users - which makes no sense at all considering Gentoo users on average have higher skill and knowledge levels than the users of the other popular distros. A few years ago bug reports were handled as well in Gentoo as anywhere; these days, not so much.
There may be a social problem to be solved. In the early days of any major open project, there's good will and enthusiasm to go around. But as the social networks supporting the project age and expand, they get grumpy and immune to criticism. Part of this, with something like Gentoo, is that the most capable people were in at the beginning but have wandered off, and now the developers/maintainers just don't have the same level of ability, so tend to cover their deficiencies by blaming the users. Is the trick to somehow make aging projects fun again so that the best people are attracted back in? How would you do this without seeming to under-appreciate the less-able cruft who need to be swept out of the way to make room for the able? - tough when they're volunteers.
Here's the threat. The Business Software Alliance already can come in and audit companies for bootleg copies of Microsoft software. If they've forced their way in to do an audit anyway, and they find "unauthorized copies" of Microsoft-claimed "IP" - which is to say, Linux running - then in the future they can try to levy the same penalties against you as they currently do for running more copies of Office than you can produce licenses for.
From our perspective, this absolutely has to be stopped. But the BSA already has the legal authority to get in the door in many cases, and once they're looking at your systems for Microsoft wares, they'd better be checking the Linux boxes for Word running under Wine anyway - so checking them for Linux is a minor afterthought.
The odd thing is, over the past few years, from story to story, the moderation of global-climate-change-pertinent stories has tilted both ways, often from day to day. There have been instances where the majority of high-rated posts were made by skeptics and deniers (not necessarily the same), and instances where the majority have been made by the deeply concerned and alarmist true believers (also not necessarily the same). These stories tend to attract a swarm of commentators armed with the latest talking points from the various camps, and then it's the luck of the draw on who gets to moderate them that day.
But considering the ratio among scientists is heavily towards the "global warming is happening and a serious threat" position, and that Slashdot is about as science-friendly a population as can be found outside of hard-core science sites, it's curious that denial/skepticism does just about as well as affirmation/concern here, on average over time. We may have seen a gain on the affirmation/concern side of the balance in recent months - the data just keeps piling up - but we're still a long way short of the majority consensus in the climatological community.
It just seems odd that when most of us are techies, enjoying the fruits of science, that something like half of us have such a deep distrust of a major branch of science. Maybe it's a reflection of the background fact that people generally don't trust each other. But the brilliance of science is in large part in mechanisms that enable better trust, what with the enforcement of independent verifiability of data and the requirement that results in different fields coherently converge.
If as the MPAA says there were never any Web links to the blog, then how did the author of the software stumble upon it? No Web links equals no search engine listings equals effective invisibility to the outside world.
What's your sample to say what "oh environmentalists" are concerned with? Consider Portland, OR, where environmentalists put in zoning to pack housing into the center of town and prohibit it from sprawling farther out. (True, the anti-environmentalists lately threw a wrench into that with a misleading statewide referendum.) Or on the other side of the country, environmentalists in Vermont are also encouraging more housing in and close to traditional town centers rather than sprawling across the countryside. What is your sample set of "environmentalists" who prefer that we'd all live in suburbs in giant houses? I'd suggest that whoever you can find fitting that description just flies a flag of convenience - the evil often cloak themselves in the names of the good.
You don't need to retrofit cars because most cars are only on the road for 5 to 10 years, and the car makers just love it if those who can buy cars can be attracted to the latest model. You need to retrofit coal power plants, because they can keep going with the same old equipment for decades and decades, but the owners of the plants are politically powerful enough to avoid doing the upgrades, and plant component makers are already selling everything they can produce for new coal plants in China - without having to invest much in upgrading the technology, since half the plants going up in China don't even bother with the minimal permitting requirements they pretend to have in place there.
So drivers and car makers both want to replace the fleet as often as they can; and coal plant builders and operators want no upgrades at all. We've got to just shut down coal.
Vermont has just signed on to this project. The biggest effect on most of us: Beer now has sales tax; that's part of this interstate standard. What does this accomplish? You cannot legally ship anything with alcohol into Vermont to a retail customer (unlike some states where you can buy wine that way), and none of Vermont's small brewers are trying to mail order beer out of Vermont. Would you want your beer delivered by UPS?
Those of us on the eastern side of Vermont already drive to New Hampshire to buy other stuff that's taxed at home. Now, since this new law to protect the taxability of future internet beer sales, we're getting our beer there too. Smart move, legislature.
"Why is east Antarctica getting colder?" It makes no sense at all if carbon dioxide is driving global warming.
One of the co-authors of that study is a friend of mine. He's bemused by how the press has gotten the data's implications entirely wrong. An average increase in global temperatures results - according to all models - in some local average decreases. The overall patterns change.
Consider the question some must be asking, "Why is there record snow in Mexico, New York now if our winters are warming?" It's because the Great Lakes are warmer than usual because of the unusually warm December and January, so there's more evaporation now that cold winds are finally blowing across, and that becomes snow. Global warming means as a planetary average it snows less (because it's more often rain instead). But locally it may be that Mexico, New York is in for a string of nasty winters.
It's similar effects we're seeing in Antarctica, where local regions have more snow buildup, or more cold, even though on the large scale major ice shelves are breaking off for the first time in tens of thousands of years.
In defense of having telnet initially enabled: It's the most basic way in if you're booting headless. Maybe you have to install the system quick and there's a problem with its video. So you boot it, telnet in from a local connection (not on a larger network), configure whatnot including your sshd, then shut down telnet and away you go.
If you don't have the sense to check for and shut down standard external services that you don't need, especially those that have weak security by nature, before putting a Solaris box on a larger network, you really shouldn't be running it anyway.
Having the default means in be ssh rather than telnet wouldn't be much safer, since there have been ssh exploits in the past too (and without further protection it's vulnerable to dictionary attacks). SSH is only reasonably safe if always kept updated (and with something in front of it to block those dictionary attacks). Would the sysadmin too negligent to turn off telnet be thorough at keeping SSH updated?
A default way into headless machines is too valuable to be without, but there's risk in all current methods.
Environmental groups fund research because their mission is to steward the environment, and they require accurate data to do that. The interest of ExxonMobil, however, isn't in acquiring accurate climate data. Their mission isn't impacted directly by climate change. Rather it is only impacted if they are politically required to modify their behavior to mitigate climate change.
The environmental groups would be perfectly happy to learn that climate change wasn't a problem, if the research showed that. Why? Because they have a number of other active priorities too. There are issues of species and habitat loss which have nothing to do with climate change - and which were sufficient to motivate donations to the environmental groups before there was any hint of climate change. There are also issues of various sorts of pollution which are unconnected to climate change. The environmental groups are overwhelmed with good causes, and if they can get themselves out from under a few of them, they will still have more than they can handle, and still have vast fund-raising appeal. They have no vested interest in global climate change being as serious an issue as science says it is; they are following the science, not leading it. But since they do need to follow the science, they fund it. ExxonMobil by contrast has a strong interest in discrediting the science. Consider:
The letters were sent by Kenneth Green, a visiting scholar at AEI, who confirmed that the organisation had approached scientists, economists and policy analysts to write articles for an independent review that would highlight the strengths and weaknesses of the IPCC report.
"Right now, the whole debate is polarised," he said. "One group says that anyone with any doubts whatsoever are deniers and the other group is saying that anyone who wants to take action is alarmist. We don't think that approach has a lot of utility for intelligent policy."
This is deliberately-misleading propaganda. He's implying that there are two equal groups. There aren't: Within science, 99+% of credentialed professionals agree there's a major problem, thus the new international report. Yet the AEI, by commissioning statements of doubt, wants to achieve some sort of 50/50 compromise between doubt and belief. That's to say, they want to deny the near-certainty of 99+% of the scientists qualified to make judgments in the field, and return the issue in the popular mind to the "he said, she said" status that ExxonMobil has so successfully promulgated in the media, science-ignorant as the communications majors who do most of the reporting are.
Any lawyer who can perfect a way to make the music destroyers (do any of us doubt that the large record companies have systematically destroyed the musical arts over the last few decades?) pay a steep price for their collusion in a case like this will find plenty of courts in which to apply that method for just as long as those firms persist in their thuggery.
The Republican Party's current strength is in an alliance between big corporate power and big "born again" power. That's where the stereotypes of "rich and selfish" and "dumb hicks out in the boonies" both get attached. While the stereotypes are crass, they do point to the two main pillars of party support. These two very-different groups are united mostly in their desire to attain control - something neither of them could succeed at on their own. They are also united in their desire to undermine science where it threatens their control - whether that's the science of climate change or the science of evolution. But really most CEO types and most evangelical types would have very little to say to each other if they ever showed up at the same social occasion outside of a GOP convention. It's the ultimate marriage of convenience. Hopefully there will be a divorce soon.
Slashdot Mirror
The odd thing about Buddhists is that the center of their practice isn't about following a moral code - oh, they've got various enumerated lists but their claim isn't "follow these directives or go to hell." Instead they're after what in Zen's called "natural mind." The claim is clearing the mind and senses to really perceive the world and other beings directly leads in itself to great compassion, from which acts flow which are superior to anything that can be attained by following any code - even the various codifications of behavior the Buddhists themselves have written down.
Now, the odd thing about this in the context of the present discussion is that this would be consonant with our having something of an inborn sensibility which is superior in itself to anything that our cultures can come up with. Indeed the original Taoists also claimed precisely that, with the further claim that it's our cultures that obscure this natural order "between heaven and earth." So the Buddhists and Taoists are coming from precisely the other direction than the Christians who claim that we need to impose religious belief in order to have morality. Their contrary claim is that we need to get beyond our cultures - including their religious formulations - to be at our truly best behavior.
That's also why Buddhists are most gracious to visitors from other cultures - they don't read visitors in terms of how our behavior conforms to their own local cultural code, but rather try to see us more directly.
There is a parallel formulation in the philosophy of one of the founders of the "Scottish Enlightenment," Frances Hutchinson, who held that "the original of our ideas of beauty and virtue" was something natural in us, which he called our "moral sense" - and explicitly described as being the conjunction of our other senses, when not clouded by culture - which is to say very much what the Buddhists claim. Hutchinson was the favorite philosopher of Thomas Jefferson. In that way, America was founded on an appreciation of human nature very close to the Buddhist and Taoist (which enjoyed a re-emergence in New England Transcendentalism, which in turn informed the ethics of our current environmentalism - flowing nicely together with Zen concepts of nature in the work of, for instance, Gary Snyder).
Cows don't digest corn well - not too surprising since it was never a part of their ancestors' natural diet. They digest it so poorly that they become prone to all sorts of intestinal diseases. The only way to feed cows corn and not have them sicken is to add large amounts of antibiotics to the feed to hold down the diseases that digesting corn makes them prone to. This leads to widespread antibiotic resistance that makes many diseases harder to treat in human beings.
As for human beings, the older among us can recall how much better food tasted when it was all sweetened with sugar rather than corn syrup. There are some pretty strong concerns about corn syrup not being so healthy for you either - although it's probably not as bad for us as corn is for cows.
Ethanol is a boondoggle, and I'll prefer any presidential candidate who stands firmly against subsidizing it. But corn too is subsidized - has been for decades - and that leads to it being used in other ways that are already seriously screwing things up. Plus, agriculture is not infinitely renewable, not the way we practice it. The US has lost something like half its agricultural topsoil, on average, over the last century or so. Long-term viability requires us to take more agricultural land out of production, rather than exploit our land more extensively for short-term gain. Over the long run, in many locations, agriculture is just another form of strip mining - at least until we develop technologies we don't currently have to replace millions of tons of topsoil that current practices have allowed to be washed away and otherwise depleted. Soil is more precious than oil.
There's no easy fix here. And corn shouldn't even be a candidate.
The problem with the "stable server" argument is that for any public-facing server stability has to be maintained not just in the relationship of daemons to kernel to hardware, but in the relationship of daemons to security and capabilities. Gone are the days when I could just set up Slackware on a client's machine and then leave it alone for a year or more, all the while with it happily running without reboot. The OS has to be kept current enough to rapidly update to meet the latest security threat to any outward-facing daemon, or any weakness in the kernel waiting for the next daemon vulnerability to leverage it. And the client expects to be regularly offered new features so that they keep looking smart to their customers.
That adds up to having to balance between the sort of stability that comes through not changing anything once it works, and the sort of stability that comes from staying close to the front end of the development curve. Old stuff may not rot from within, but it gets undermined and outdated.
Unfortunately that also happens on the level of distribution maintainers. I've been tracking Gentoo more than Debian lately, but it sounds like Debian's experiencing the same thing: Core organizational roles get taken by people who, unlike the project founders, love their little positions of power much more than they love the quality or brilliance of the project. And the most bureaucratic of them network together to consolidate their power over the chokepoints of the processes necessary to move the distro forward without just going out and forking it.
I have no idea whether anything can be done, once a distro reaches this stage, to save it. Nor do I think that the commercial distros are immune to similar problems - after all, the very worst example of an OS ruined by bureaucracy is Windows, and is Red Hat really that far behind it in this regard (he asks, not having looked at the latest Red Hat incarnation yet)?
the inability to interface between systems
Right. Doctors here in New England - and I assume across the country - have about half of their staff's time, and several hours a day of their own, spent in straightening things out between their own records and the systems of the insurers they need to collect from. Many are leaving practice because this is such a distracting, unrewarding diversion away from their core competency at delivering medical care. So every doctor's visit, you (and your insurer) have to pay for the staff the doctor has to hire to collect the fees from the insurer to - in substantial part - pay for the staff the doctor has to hire to collect the fees from the insurer to....
Meanwhile health insurers are under state regulation that allows them to essentially bill on a cost-plus basis - they're allowed to set fees at whatever level is required for profit. And for all the staff at the doctors' offices submitting stuff by fax and phone mostly, they staff themselves up on their end and are guaranteed a profit on it. That's why better than 1/4 of healthcare costs go to overhead at the insurance firms - which isn't even counting the overhead in the doctors' offices to keep all this going around.
A unified set of standards for computerized health care billing could reduce all this drastically, as well as the drag on our whole economy from the rapid escalation of costs. But since insurers are allowed, say, a 15% profit on the total volume of the cash they move, they have absolutely every incentive to fight something which would result in their laying off staff and shrinking the cost of their operations. They are perversely incentivized to bloat the system - and keep it away from computerized standards - for as many years as possible.
Alternately, check out the Archive of Scientists' Transcendent Experiences. The failure to "prove" ESP may show the limits of current experimental design rather than the limits of what's real. There are many, many accounts - not just in that Archive - of experiences which are inconsistent with a world in which something like ESP isn't existent. See in particular noted psychologist Charles Tart's account, and that of Susan Blackmore - who has written one of our current textbooks on consciousness and the brain, as well as being a noted debunker of parapsychological research, yet who reports I think honestly (I know her slightly) a fairly amazing out-of-body experience.
the fact that the current administration is not the ones who actually control the funding process
Are you suggesting that the demonstrated bias by biologists against using the word "evolution" has no correlation with the political cultivation by this White House of those who don't believe in evolution? How is that? There are virtually no biologists who doubt evolution, so this isn't being done to please the scientists who sit on grant making panels. Rather it's to please the politicians and bureaucrats who appoint scientists to grant making panels. The White House appoints the panels, the panels make the grants, so the White House has substantial control of the grants.
Why would this demonstrated effectiveness by the White House in biasing the reports of biological science through its control of the grant making process not also extend to climatology? The population of scientists in the one field, I submit, does not differ in general worldview from that of the other field. What additional factor are you surmising that would overcome this in climatology, but not in biology?
As this study shows, biologists avoid using the word "evolution" in their research proposals and reports presumably because they do not want to alienate the current US government, which is a major source of grants. So scientists clearly can be influenced, at least in which words they use to report it if not in the underlying research, by the perceived biases of government bodies which fund them.
The prediction then would be that during the Bush administration we should have seen a marked decrease in mentions of "global warming" and "climate change" in grant applications and published research. But our self-proclaimed "suppressed scholar" is claiming something quite contradictory: Both that scientists say what their funders want (with the US government being the largest single funder of basic scientific research), and also that current scientists have a biased towards claims for "global warming" and "climate change," rather than favoring the bias of the current US government against these topics - which is at least as strong its bias against "evolution."
WTF? The only logical conclusion from the (somewhat justified) claim that scientists show favor towards their funders' biases is that global climate change is more of a threat than the current scientific consensus (at least among American scientists) portrays.
Here's the real loss:
If you live in the northern US and are doing the responsible thing and turning your central heating down overnight, then getting up an hour earlier means you're turning the heat back up earlier. Why is this wasteful? Because on sunny days in March there's significant solar gain once the sun's up. In my house that can be enough that the heat doesn't even need to be turned on in the morning - unless we get up too early.
In the evening, both the house and the outside environment lose their heat relatively slowly. The darkest hour isn't literally just before the dawn, but the coldest hour is. It's much better to spend the coldest hour under the covers - from an energy use point of view - than to get up during it or right on its tail and turn the furnace up to compensate.
Of course, if the government just looks at electrical use, this may not show in areas that don't primarily use electric heat. The increase in oil and natural gas use though, from this idiocy, will be real and significant.
are the new Jews? Really? Doesn't it make some difference that the Islamists are actually engaged in varieties of evil such as the Nazis falsely accused the Jews of? Sometimes a people can deserve to be clamped down on - although of course never to the extent of the ovens. The trick for free societies to survive is to learn how to do that relatively fairly, and without compromising the freedoms and rights of sectors of the population whose culture is civilized enough not to tolerate suicide bombers and broad-scale terror attacks.
Those who think the Islamists are just bumbling fools weren't in NYC as I was on 9/11. Those who think all groups must be treated alike or else we're "like the Nazis" are going to end up being a prime cause of the sacrifice of the freedom of all of us. And that's the problem in Britain: To be "fair" about tracking the details of the lives of the dangerous part of the population, they're going ahead and doing the same thing to many millions of others who are no threat at all. This sort of "fairness" is itself deeply complicit in the rise of neofascism.
Apparently "ideology" stands for having a soul, while "real world perspective" stands for selling it down the river for a quick buck.
It's especially wacked because most youth don't have an ideology, at least not in its root meaning of having some Platonic Ideal of the world that they wish society would conform to. Fresher, younger eyes aren't comparing what they see in the world to some grandly worked out set of ideals so much as just taking a real look at it and using common sense and feeling to discern what's wonderful and what's ugly about it. It takes years of re-education in the "real world" to stop directly seeing what's good and bad in the real world and subscribe to some unreal ideology - such as the builders of our current military-industrial pyramid are squandering our resources and heritage to foist on the world.
It's decrepit old men behind most of the ideology on Earth. They foist someone younger on us as a false front occassionally - thus was the relatively-youthful Bush put forward rather than Cheney for the figure head; but they're well-aware that the lack of binding ideology in a younger person can be dangerous to them - thus the end of JFK.
As for authentic wooden furniture - there's a lot of money in that if you're comfortable selling custom pieces to the super rich - the same folks who still build houses that aren't essentially particle board wrapped in plastic.
We (those with technical abilities) can fully secure the Net - or a substantial subset of it. We could do it this year. But we won't, largely because we respect outlawry too much. Why? Because there are too many jackass laws. When governments stop persecuting people for free thought, for music, for sex (other than with children), for drugs, for spiritual practices and political involvements - then we can lock down the Net, knowing that our work isn't going to further greater evil than it prevents, won't be presenting governments with what they need to further destroy the true prosperity of individuals and societies.
And I say that as someone who firmly believes that governments are necessary and can (and sometimes do) do great good.
First off, Google would move ... where? They're intimately tied to US infrastructure.
Second, all public corporations partially fund themselves by issuing stock, and most in large part pay their executives in stock options. Corporate stock is worth significantly more if the incorporation is in America and the stock is traded on one of the major American exchanges. Why? In large part because American regulation of corporations is - although flawed - considered to be better than the regulation of corporations anywhere else. And the same goes for American regulation of stock markets. Much of that has to do with the laws requiring openness about a corporation's finances.
That's right. It's worth a lot to have your corporation be American because in an essential way we enforce open source in regards to a public corporation's books. America's advantage isn't in being more free, but in being better regulated.
And any American corporation that wants to move elsewhere loses that very lucrative advantage. So where is it unfair for America to tax them on the advantage that being American conveys to those corporations?
We know from the last few years experience that AMD can, for limited periods of time, pull ahead of Intel. That initially surprised a bunch of people whose conventional wisdom was that AMD would always merely follow, and its stock doubled. Then Intel pulled ahead again, and AMD's stock fell all the back and some. But before that reversal, AMD (1) gained significant market entry (e.g. Dell) so that in the event it pulls ahead of Intel again, it can more immediately capitalize on that lead, (2) bought a major graphics chip maker, which can potentially give it more ways to pull ahead. But that was expensive, so:
At this point AMD might want to take on a significant minority investor from private equity. That would ease its short-term debt. From the investor's point of view, all that is necessary to make a huge profit is for AMD to pull ahead of Intel again - however briefly - which could easily double the value of AMD's stock again. But the greater upside is if AMD can innovate its way to a longer-term lead over Intel. If that were to happen AMD's value could increase by an order of magnitude.
Also, if you're private equity, you probably feel you're smarter than God, so that if AMD were compelled by your investment to listen carefully to your strategic ideas, the upside potentials would become much better bets.
Of course, there's a substantial chance of losing it all too. But over the last 40 years the GDP per capita in the US has doubled, while the median income per capita has held within a few percent of steady. That basically means that the there's twice the wealth - more than that considering population growth, but twice as much for each person on average. But each person doesn't have that. It's the super rich who have it, and they're the players in the private equity game. They can afford to gamble big, because they have so much they can take huge losses on any particular bet and still come out far ahead of the rest of us.
A Gentoo developer refused your patch, except for Gentoo? Go Gentoo! Man is that corrupt.
I mostly use Gentoo - I've done well with it running servers almost from its conception. But the Gentoo developers and maintainers, on the whole, are developing increasingly obnoxious attitudes towards their users - which makes no sense at all considering Gentoo users on average have higher skill and knowledge levels than the users of the other popular distros. A few years ago bug reports were handled as well in Gentoo as anywhere; these days, not so much.
There may be a social problem to be solved. In the early days of any major open project, there's good will and enthusiasm to go around. But as the social networks supporting the project age and expand, they get grumpy and immune to criticism. Part of this, with something like Gentoo, is that the most capable people were in at the beginning but have wandered off, and now the developers/maintainers just don't have the same level of ability, so tend to cover their deficiencies by blaming the users. Is the trick to somehow make aging projects fun again so that the best people are attracted back in? How would you do this without seeming to under-appreciate the less-able cruft who need to be swept out of the way to make room for the able? - tough when they're volunteers.
Here's the threat. The Business Software Alliance already can come in and audit companies for bootleg copies of Microsoft software. If they've forced their way in to do an audit anyway, and they find "unauthorized copies" of Microsoft-claimed "IP" - which is to say, Linux running - then in the future they can try to levy the same penalties against you as they currently do for running more copies of Office than you can produce licenses for.
From our perspective, this absolutely has to be stopped. But the BSA already has the legal authority to get in the door in many cases, and once they're looking at your systems for Microsoft wares, they'd better be checking the Linux boxes for Word running under Wine anyway - so checking them for Linux is a minor afterthought.
The odd thing is, over the past few years, from story to story, the moderation of global-climate-change-pertinent stories has tilted both ways, often from day to day. There have been instances where the majority of high-rated posts were made by skeptics and deniers (not necessarily the same), and instances where the majority have been made by the deeply concerned and alarmist true believers (also not necessarily the same). These stories tend to attract a swarm of commentators armed with the latest talking points from the various camps, and then it's the luck of the draw on who gets to moderate them that day.
But considering the ratio among scientists is heavily towards the "global warming is happening and a serious threat" position, and that Slashdot is about as science-friendly a population as can be found outside of hard-core science sites, it's curious that denial/skepticism does just about as well as affirmation/concern here, on average over time. We may have seen a gain on the affirmation/concern side of the balance in recent months - the data just keeps piling up - but we're still a long way short of the majority consensus in the climatological community.
It just seems odd that when most of us are techies, enjoying the fruits of science, that something like half of us have such a deep distrust of a major branch of science. Maybe it's a reflection of the background fact that people generally don't trust each other. But the brilliance of science is in large part in mechanisms that enable better trust, what with the enforcement of independent verifiability of data and the requirement that results in different fields coherently converge.
If as the MPAA says there were never any Web links to the blog, then how did the author of the software stumble upon it? No Web links equals no search engine listings equals effective invisibility to the outside world.
What's your sample to say what "oh environmentalists" are concerned with? Consider Portland, OR, where environmentalists put in zoning to pack housing into the center of town and prohibit it from sprawling farther out. (True, the anti-environmentalists lately threw a wrench into that with a misleading statewide referendum.) Or on the other side of the country, environmentalists in Vermont are also encouraging more housing in and close to traditional town centers rather than sprawling across the countryside. What is your sample set of "environmentalists" who prefer that we'd all live in suburbs in giant houses? I'd suggest that whoever you can find fitting that description just flies a flag of convenience - the evil often cloak themselves in the names of the good.
You don't need to retrofit cars because most cars are only on the road for 5 to 10 years, and the car makers just love it if those who can buy cars can be attracted to the latest model. You need to retrofit coal power plants, because they can keep going with the same old equipment for decades and decades, but the owners of the plants are politically powerful enough to avoid doing the upgrades, and plant component makers are already selling everything they can produce for new coal plants in China - without having to invest much in upgrading the technology, since half the plants going up in China don't even bother with the minimal permitting requirements they pretend to have in place there.
So drivers and car makers both want to replace the fleet as often as they can; and coal plant builders and operators want no upgrades at all. We've got to just shut down coal.
Vermont has just signed on to this project. The biggest effect on most of us: Beer now has sales tax; that's part of this interstate standard. What does this accomplish? You cannot legally ship anything with alcohol into Vermont to a retail customer (unlike some states where you can buy wine that way), and none of Vermont's small brewers are trying to mail order beer out of Vermont. Would you want your beer delivered by UPS?
Those of us on the eastern side of Vermont already drive to New Hampshire to buy other stuff that's taxed at home. Now, since this new law to protect the taxability of future internet beer sales, we're getting our beer there too. Smart move, legislature.
One of the co-authors of that study is a friend of mine. He's bemused by how the press has gotten the data's implications entirely wrong. An average increase in global temperatures results - according to all models - in some local average decreases. The overall patterns change.
Consider the question some must be asking, "Why is there record snow in Mexico, New York now if our winters are warming?" It's because the Great Lakes are warmer than usual because of the unusually warm December and January, so there's more evaporation now that cold winds are finally blowing across, and that becomes snow. Global warming means as a planetary average it snows less (because it's more often rain instead). But locally it may be that Mexico, New York is in for a string of nasty winters.
It's similar effects we're seeing in Antarctica, where local regions have more snow buildup, or more cold, even though on the large scale major ice shelves are breaking off for the first time in tens of thousands of years.
In defense of having telnet initially enabled: It's the most basic way in if you're booting headless. Maybe you have to install the system quick and there's a problem with its video. So you boot it, telnet in from a local connection (not on a larger network), configure whatnot including your sshd, then shut down telnet and away you go.
If you don't have the sense to check for and shut down standard external services that you don't need, especially those that have weak security by nature, before putting a Solaris box on a larger network, you really shouldn't be running it anyway.
Having the default means in be ssh rather than telnet wouldn't be much safer, since there have been ssh exploits in the past too (and without further protection it's vulnerable to dictionary attacks). SSH is only reasonably safe if always kept updated (and with something in front of it to block those dictionary attacks). Would the sysadmin too negligent to turn off telnet be thorough at keeping SSH updated?
A default way into headless machines is too valuable to be without, but there's risk in all current methods.
The environmental groups would be perfectly happy to learn that climate change wasn't a problem, if the research showed that. Why? Because they have a number of other active priorities too. There are issues of species and habitat loss which have nothing to do with climate change - and which were sufficient to motivate donations to the environmental groups before there was any hint of climate change. There are also issues of various sorts of pollution which are unconnected to climate change. The environmental groups are overwhelmed with good causes, and if they can get themselves out from under a few of them, they will still have more than they can handle, and still have vast fund-raising appeal. They have no vested interest in global climate change being as serious an issue as science says it is; they are following the science, not leading it. But since they do need to follow the science, they fund it. ExxonMobil by contrast has a strong interest in discrediting the science. Consider: This is deliberately-misleading propaganda. He's implying that there are two equal groups. There aren't: Within science, 99+% of credentialed professionals agree there's a major problem, thus the new international report. Yet the AEI, by commissioning statements of doubt, wants to achieve some sort of 50/50 compromise between doubt and belief. That's to say, they want to deny the near-certainty of 99+% of the scientists qualified to make judgments in the field, and return the issue in the popular mind to the "he said, she said" status that ExxonMobil has so successfully promulgated in the media, science-ignorant as the communications majors who do most of the reporting are.
Any lawyer who can perfect a way to make the music destroyers (do any of us doubt that the large record companies have systematically destroyed the musical arts over the last few decades?) pay a steep price for their collusion in a case like this will find plenty of courts in which to apply that method for just as long as those firms persist in their thuggery.
The Republican Party's current strength is in an alliance between big corporate power and big "born again" power. That's where the stereotypes of "rich and selfish" and "dumb hicks out in the boonies" both get attached. While the stereotypes are crass, they do point to the two main pillars of party support. These two very-different groups are united mostly in their desire to attain control - something neither of them could succeed at on their own. They are also united in their desire to undermine science where it threatens their control - whether that's the science of climate change or the science of evolution. But really most CEO types and most evangelical types would have very little to say to each other if they ever showed up at the same social occasion outside of a GOP convention. It's the ultimate marriage of convenience. Hopefully there will be a divorce soon.