That's just the US, though. Off the top of my head; Europe has the Extremadura (sp?) project in Spain, the postal service in Poland, and Munich. South America has OSS projects going in Peru and Argentina. In Asia,there's a relatively large OSS effort going on in China.
So. Just because us North Americans haven't moved off the dime doesn't mean that the rest of the world is sitting still.:)
Nahhh. A better response would've been one that shared the same stuffy, self important old critic style that the original satirical post was shooting for. Granted, it missed. But not by much.:)
Actually, it's the tenth amendment that grants us a right to privacy:
"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people."
Well, that plus the Supreme Court decision mentioned further up in the thread.:)
I've been saying for 20 years that if I could find a half ton pickup or SUV with a manual tranny and a diesel I'd buy it immediately. Unfortunately, no one sells such a beast in the US. (sigh)
Besides the slow pacing, what was so bad about Mission to Mars? Disclaimer: I didn't see it in a theater, just on cable. Still, I thought that the story was perfectly acceptable, the dialog OK, and the rest of the movie was reasonably well made.
Believe me, if I was in his position I'd be pretty ticked at you, as your compromised machine was reponsible for abusing his network and it even looks like your box got banned from the network. You're even guilty of ban evasion!
Let me get this straight: A guy finds out that his machine has been compromised. He does the right thing and reports it to the admin who is responsible for maintaining the resource from where the attack was launched. He even goes out of his way to do so. And you would be ticked at him????? Seems to me that you're a tad lacking in the basic sysadmin skillset.
I checked that side. Total bullshit. Clearcutting is NOT done for newspapers. I also grew up in an area where pulp wood cutting is one of the biggest employers. I know what is needed; a mix of softwood and a little dense hardwood to get the pulp to hold together during the papermaking process. Where I'm from, the local paper company farms poplar (a fast growing, self regenerating deciduous that grows new saplings from a very dense root system) and black spruce (an evergreen with a much slower growth cycle and also requires planting). By far, the tree of choice is poplar. Very little acreage is devoted to spruce. Something like 75% of the land that the paper company owns is devoted to spruce. The rest is all poplar.
If the paper company really needed any "ancient growth" forests, believe me I'd know it. You can't hide logs that big. Instead, EVERYTHING that comes in at the local paper mill is between 16" to 8" in diameter. No first growth stuff.
So, don't emulate the US gun laws, emulate the Swiss! Tell me again, what's the rate of violent crime per person there? How does that compare to the rest of Europe?
Your professor is forgetting the fact that we don't operate in a vacuum. Our economy is inextricably entwined with well over a hundred national economies. When we experience inflation, the end result is that it becomes more expensive to purchase goods from countries with cleaner balance sheets. As the inflation worsens, it becomes ever more expensive to do so. At some point, you end up in a situation where you can no longer afford to import the goods that you want.
When those overseas goods become scarce, you would hope that the local economy will be able to pick up the slack and provide home grown alternatives. However, the U.S. will find it far more difficult to do that now as opposed to 100, 50, or even 20 years ago. Our current environment makes it much more difficult to start a small business because of at least all the of increased risks.
Legal; bankruptcy laws that are much tougher for the individual, patent law is completely melted.
Financial; money becomes more expensive, so seed money to get a company started is tougher to come by.
Infrastructural; many cities have basic facilities that are at capacity or overbooked with very little money being put into expansion. Road and rail systems between smaller cities have deteriorated in many places.
Political; Government (both parties) have become almost captive interests of the large corporations. When you consider that more than 50% of all new jobs (and virtually all new job types) come from small businesses, this is ludicrous on its face. Still, who has the big checkbook for campaign contributions?
On top of which, many, many people forget that there is only one true cause of inflation; the government spends more money than they take in in taxes. Everything else is just a side effect.
It's the biggest reason that I am so pissed at the Republicans. For decades they told us that they could balance the budget if only it weren't for those "damn tax and spend liberal" Democrats. So, they finally got complete control of the House, Senate, and the White House. What'd they do? Managed to completely destroy the first budget in well over 40 years (Eisenhower as president) that actually had positive cash flow two years in a row!
And they didn't just go a little bit into the red. They added 40% to the national debt in a single year! That should be the number one headline, day after day, month after month. That should be what the Democrats should be attacking the Republicans on. Why? Because it means we're headed back to interest rates that will at least equal what we saw in the '70s. Expect to see mortgages well over 15% in a few years. Probably sooner rather than later.
No, that's not the issue. The good old PSTN is public and insecure. The post (snail mail) is public and insecure.
Two very bad examples because they are both more secure than standard unencrypted network data.
* Eavesdropping on classic PSTN requires physical access to the line or switch. If you manage to find network access to a console port, it's possible to copy a data stream from one trunk port to another. You still need to get connected to it somehow.
* Snail mail conversations also require physical access. That access is difficult to come by for more than a handful of end stations without actually working in your country's postal service. Even then, you are still limited to your ability to sort through vast amounts of mail to find the handful of correspondence that you are actually interested in looking at. Governments can do this, but only by putting an incredible burden on the ability to just deliver the mail. On top of all that, all conversations are all wrapped in an envelope (with the obvious exception of postcards). That envelope helps to keep the contents of any conversation secure from all but the more sophisticated ability to snoop.
No, both examples that you use are far more secure by design and by their nature than simple data traffic. VOIP is simply just one more example of a much larger class of problem that has already been pretty much solved from a technical standpoint. We just need vendors and customers who understand and practice basic network security. (Yes, I think that means end to end encryption for starters.:) )
[blockquote]Xen who? It's not even on the radar here. Nothing against Xen, but it is years behind WS5 or ESX3.[/blockquote]
It's also aimed at a different definition of the problem, so their solution doesn't really look like those alternatives. It's really the only player in their particular space.
Boy, did you read THAT link the wrong way. Either that, or you've never had to swim in the morass of all regulations that all US banks operate under. Trust me, that particular document is the one that actually convinced my management that it was OK to use F/LOSS. Until it came out, they refused to even consider it because there was no guidance from the Feds.:)
It seems pretty obvious to me that the main reason these companies offer these services is to attract people to more of their services.
In marketspeak those are called "loss leaders". As in, we don't make money offering that, but we hope to make up for it with other products or services. So yes, the IM services probably do lose money.:)
Say you pay $50 a month for standard cable (I think that's a pretty middle of the road figure.) You'd pay TEN PERCENT of an entire month's television for one show? Suppose the show is available over the air, you'd pay $5 dollars for something that is free?
In short, yes. If you stop and think about it, people do it all the time now. That's why we insist upon having local channels available through cable and satellite, right?
I Tivo exactly 4 shows; Firefly, SG1, SGA, and BSG. When my Tivo fails to record for some reason one Friday night (generally due to someone not realizing it's recording and flipping the channel on me), I lose all 4. Now, I don't know if I'd be willing to pay $20 to get them all back, but I would certainly be willing to pay, say $10 to get Firefly and BSG.:)
This is the second time that I've seen this particular rant. I call BULLSHIT! My family's history shows this just isn't true, no matter how much some people would like to think it is.
My great-grandmother owned and ran a boarding house for miners in northern Minnesota for nearly 40 years. That was a 50 to 60 hour a day job. She also kept an eye on a series of young girls from the Old Country; giving them jobs as maids and helping them to meet and marry the better class of men on the Iron Range. The girls were her nieces, cousins, and daughters of friends of hers who stayed in Serbia. She got so good at it that many other families from other ethnic and cultural backgrounds came to her to act as matchmaker, too. Meanwhile, my grandfather worked 40-50 hours a week in the mines, then for the local school district as the general building supervisor/farmer.
They managed to put all 5 of their surviving kids through college. (4 died as infants or under 12. Not uncommon in the early 1900s. One of malnutrition in Serbia, one of polio, one of influenza, and one I'm not sure of.)
My grandfather was the first Serb in Minnesota to graduate from college. He was a full time teacher and principal, then a Red Cross senior instructor during WWII, then a principal again until illness laid him low around 1947.
My grandmother was a full time teacher during their entire marriage. She and my grandfather raised three kids who all graduated from college, even though they were hampered by being a single income family (with a very, very sick dad) for most of their high school and college years.
My mother was a full time RN and my father was a full time high school teacher. They raised three kids. All three of us went to college and got at least some certification. One of my sisters has a master's, one is close to getting her baccalaureate at the age of 42 with a 4.0 GPA, and then there's me. A geek who has a career as an ivory tower type enterprise architect working for one of the biggest banks in the country.
My second wife and I have 4 kids between us. All 4 kids live with us during the school year. I work full time, she works 25-30 hours/week two preteens and two teenagers. 3 of the 4 are B+ or better, and one is struggling, but maintaining a C-.
So. You have 4 consecutive generations of both parents working full time. Every single generation had two full time parents who also happened to work full time. Not one convict, not one welfare case, and not one deadbeat dad in 4 generations. I'm the unofficial family historian, so I've kept up with what's happening to the other branches of my family. The same holds true for all of them as well, and many if not most of them are either two full time parents. We do have a few single income, single parent families. Those kids are also doing quite well in school.
STOP ASSUMING THAT YOU CAN'T GIVE YOUR KIDS ALL THE LOVE AND DISCIPLINE THAT THEY NEED IF YOU WORK FULL TIME! It's simply NOT TRUE!
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That's just the US, though. Off the top of my head; Europe has the Extremadura (sp?) project in Spain, the postal service in Poland, and Munich. South America has OSS projects going in Peru and Argentina. In Asia,there's a relatively large OSS effort going on in China.
:)
So. Just because us North Americans haven't moved off the dime doesn't mean that the rest of the world is sitting still.
Then there's evidence of a Roman shipwreck off the coast of Massachusetts, the Phonecian coins found in Tennessee....
Nahhh. A better response would've been one that shared the same stuffy, self important old critic style that the original satirical post was shooting for. Granted, it missed. But not by much. :)
Wooosh!
Well, that plus the Supreme Court decision mentioned further up in the thread.
Man, I wish I had mod points. You hit the nail on the head and drove it right through the board. :)
Sorry, I confused it with that other Martian exploration movie that came out about the same time. The one with Val Kilmer and Tom Sizemore(?).
You're right MtM was pretty bad in some ways. Still, I have seen a lot that were worse. Ever see Dark Star? Now, THAT was a bad film!
I've been saying for 20 years that if I could find a half ton pickup or SUV with a manual tranny and a diesel I'd buy it immediately. Unfortunately, no one sells such a beast in the US. (sigh)
Off topic, but I just can't resist:
Besides the slow pacing, what was so bad about Mission to Mars? Disclaimer: I didn't see it in a theater, just on cable. Still, I thought that the story was perfectly acceptable, the dialog OK, and the rest of the movie was reasonably well made.
BOOTP, anyone?
Let me get this straight: A guy finds out that his machine has been compromised. He does the right thing and reports it to the admin who is responsible for maintaining the resource from where the attack was launched. He even goes out of his way to do so. And you would be ticked at him????? Seems to me that you're a tad lacking in the basic sysadmin skillset.
Check out the Baen Free Library. Read Eric Flint's cover article carefully. THEN tell me what the writers and publishers have to worry about.
Umm, the Liberty was NOT sunk:
h otos/damagephotos.html
http://www.usslibertyinquiry.com/evidence/damagep
Badly damaged, yes. 34 crewmen lost their lives, yes. But she was NOT sunk.
I checked that side. Total bullshit. Clearcutting is NOT done for newspapers. I also grew up in an area where pulp wood cutting is one of the biggest employers. I know what is needed; a mix of softwood and a little dense hardwood to get the pulp to hold together during the papermaking process. Where I'm from, the local paper company farms poplar (a fast growing, self regenerating deciduous that grows new saplings from a very dense root system) and black spruce (an evergreen with a much slower growth cycle and also requires planting). By far, the tree of choice is poplar. Very little acreage is devoted to spruce. Something like 75% of the land that the paper company owns is devoted to spruce. The rest is all poplar.
/lying/ to you.
If the paper company really needed any "ancient growth" forests, believe me I'd know it. You can't hide logs that big. Instead, EVERYTHING that comes in at the local paper mill is between 16" to 8" in diameter. No first growth stuff.
Kleercut.net is
Whooosh!
:)
That was the sound of the orginal joke flying past your head a second time.
So, don't emulate the US gun laws, emulate the Swiss! Tell me again, what's the rate of violent crime per person there? How does that compare to the rest of Europe?
Your professor is forgetting the fact that we don't operate in a vacuum. Our economy is inextricably entwined with well over a hundred national economies. When we experience inflation, the end result is that it becomes more expensive to purchase goods from countries with cleaner balance sheets. As the inflation worsens, it becomes ever more expensive to do so. At some point, you end up in a situation where you can no longer afford to import the goods that you want.
When those overseas goods become scarce, you would hope that the local economy will be able to pick up the slack and provide home grown alternatives. However, the U.S. will find it far more difficult to do that now as opposed to 100, 50, or even 20 years ago. Our current environment makes it much more difficult to start a small business because of at least all the of increased risks.
Legal; bankruptcy laws that are much tougher for the individual, patent law is completely melted.
Financial; money becomes more expensive, so seed money to get a company started is tougher to come by.
Infrastructural; many cities have basic facilities that are at capacity or overbooked with very little money being put into expansion. Road and rail systems between smaller cities have deteriorated in many places.
Political; Government (both parties) have become almost captive interests of the large corporations. When you consider that more than 50% of all new jobs (and virtually all new job types) come from small businesses, this is ludicrous on its face. Still, who has the big checkbook for campaign contributions?
On top of which, many, many people forget that there is only one true cause of inflation; the government spends more money than they take in in taxes. Everything else is just a side effect.
It's the biggest reason that I am so pissed at the Republicans. For decades they told us that they could balance the budget if only it weren't for those "damn tax and spend liberal" Democrats. So, they finally got complete control of the House, Senate, and the White House. What'd they do? Managed to completely destroy the first budget in well over 40 years (Eisenhower as president) that actually had positive cash flow two years in a row!
And they didn't just go a little bit into the red. They added 40% to the national debt in a single year! That should be the number one headline, day after day, month after month. That should be what the Democrats should be attacking the Republicans on. Why? Because it means we're headed back to interest rates that will at least equal what we saw in the '70s. Expect to see mortgages well over 15% in a few years. Probably sooner rather than later.
Two very bad examples because they are both more secure than standard unencrypted network data.
* Eavesdropping on classic PSTN requires physical access to the line or switch. If you manage to find network access to a console port, it's possible to copy a data stream from one trunk port to another. You still need to get connected to it somehow.
* Snail mail conversations also require physical access. That access is difficult to come by for more than a handful of end stations without actually working in your country's postal service. Even then, you are still limited to your ability to sort through vast amounts of mail to find the handful of correspondence that you are actually interested in looking at. Governments can do this, but only by putting an incredible burden on the ability to just deliver the mail. On top of all that, all conversations are all wrapped in an envelope (with the obvious exception of postcards). That envelope helps to keep the contents of any conversation secure from all but the more sophisticated ability to snoop.
No, both examples that you use are far more secure by design and by their nature than simple data traffic. VOIP is simply just one more example of a much larger class of problem that has already been pretty much solved from a technical standpoint. We just need vendors and customers who understand and practice basic network security. (Yes, I think that means end to end encryption for starters.
[blockquote]Xen who? It's not even on the radar here. Nothing against Xen, but it is years behind WS5 or ESX3.[/blockquote]
It's also aimed at a different definition of the problem, so their solution doesn't really look like those alternatives. It's really the only player in their particular space.
Boy, did you read THAT link the wrong way. Either that, or you've never had to swim in the morass of all regulations that all US banks operate under. Trust me, that particular document is the one that actually convinced my management that it was OK to use F/LOSS. Until it came out, they refused to even consider it because there was no guidance from the Feds. :)
I highly recommend that you read '1984'. The reference would become obvious. :)
In marketspeak those are called "loss leaders". As in, we don't make money offering that, but we hope to make up for it with other products or services. So yes, the IM services probably do lose money.
In short, yes. If you stop and think about it, people do it all the time now. That's why we insist upon having local channels available through cable and satellite, right?
I Tivo exactly 4 shows; Firefly, SG1, SGA, and BSG. When my Tivo fails to record for some reason one Friday night (generally due to someone not realizing it's recording and flipping the channel on me), I lose all 4. Now, I don't know if I'd be willing to pay $20 to get them all back, but I would certainly be willing to pay, say $10 to get Firefly and BSG.
This is the second time that I've seen this particular rant. I call BULLSHIT! My family's history shows this just isn't true, no matter how much some people would like to think it is.
My great-grandmother owned and ran a boarding house for miners in northern Minnesota for nearly 40 years. That was a 50 to 60 hour a day job. She also kept an eye on a series of young girls from the Old Country; giving them jobs as maids and helping them to meet and marry the better class of men on the Iron Range. The girls were her nieces, cousins, and daughters of friends of hers who stayed in Serbia. She got so good at it that many other families from other ethnic and cultural backgrounds came to her to act as matchmaker, too. Meanwhile, my grandfather worked 40-50 hours a week in the mines, then for the local school district as the general building supervisor/farmer.
They managed to put all 5 of their surviving kids through college. (4 died as infants or under 12. Not uncommon in the early 1900s. One of malnutrition in Serbia, one of polio, one of influenza, and one I'm not sure of.)
My grandfather was the first Serb in Minnesota to graduate from college. He was a full time teacher and principal, then a Red Cross senior instructor during WWII, then a principal again until illness laid him low around 1947.
My grandmother was a full time teacher during their entire marriage. She and my grandfather raised three kids who all graduated from college, even though they were hampered by being a single income family (with a very, very sick dad) for most of their high school and college years.
My mother was a full time RN and my father was a full time high school teacher. They raised three kids. All three of us went to college and got at least some certification. One of my sisters has a master's, one is close to getting her baccalaureate at the age of 42 with a 4.0 GPA, and then there's me. A geek who has a career as an ivory tower type enterprise architect working for one of the biggest banks in the country.
My second wife and I have 4 kids between us. All 4 kids live with us during the school year. I work full time, she works 25-30 hours/week two preteens and two teenagers. 3 of the 4 are B+ or better, and one is struggling, but maintaining a C-.
So. You have 4 consecutive generations of both parents working full time. Every single generation had two full time parents who also happened to work full time. Not one convict, not one welfare case, and not one deadbeat dad in 4 generations. I'm the unofficial family historian, so I've kept up with what's happening to the other branches of my family. The same holds true for all of them as well, and many if not most of them are either two full time parents. We do have a few single income, single parent families. Those kids are also doing quite well in school.
STOP ASSUMING THAT YOU CAN'T GIVE YOUR KIDS ALL THE LOVE AND DISCIPLINE THAT THEY NEED IF YOU WORK FULL TIME! It's simply NOT TRUE!
Don't forget "Outland" starring Sean Connery. A sci-fi remake of the classic 1952 western "High Noon" starring Gary Cooper. Released in 1981.
;)
:)
Or "Battle Beyond the Stars" starring Richard Thomas, John Sayle, George Peppard, and others. That came out in 1980.
While we're at it, let's not forget silly pirate movie remakes like "The Ice Pirates" (1984) starring Robert Urich and Mary Crosby.
Cowboy Bebop is a latecomer!