And that workstation cost vastly more than generic Windows boxes, which is why generic Windows boxes took over and Next's great ideas fizzled until they became OS X a decade later.
Actually, my NeXTstation cost roughly the same as a comparable 486 at the time. That was with an education discount, granted, but it wouldn't have been hugely more expensive even without that. As I recall, I got the machine and a laser printer for $3300. I think I could have gotten a comparable 486 for around $3100 -- but without the printer.
Part of Microsoft's genius is realizing that normal people can't or won't pay $10,000 for a computer.
You mean IBM's genius, right? Or, more accurately, Compaq's, since they started the clone wave. Microsoft had nothing to do with that; they just rode the wave -- and convinced everyone that there were going to produce some great software Real Soon Now, so that everyone would stick with them rather than looking into the much-superior alternatives.
Someone in the government makes a bad IT contracting decision and that somehow reflects on how a health system will be run?
If this were an isolated incident you'd have a point. But it's not.
If we're going to go to a government-run health care system, at least we should do it at the state level. Some of the states will screw it up badly, of course, but others will do it well, and (with one or two notable exceptions) the states have proven to be much more fiscally responsible.
Plus there's also the fact that the federal government has absolutely no constitutional authority to get involved in health care, not that we pay any attention to that old piece of paper these days.
I wasn't arguing that we'd have been better off if NeXT had ruled the world. I was arguing that we'd have been better off if Microsoft hadn't dominated it, teaching everyone to expect crappy software.
MS in its early days did a lot to help out the computer industry in some ways
I disagree.
I remember in 1991, I purchased a NeXTstation. It had a beautiful, usable GUI layered over a powerful multitasking Unix operating system, with development tools that were not rivaled on any platform until at least a decade later. Meanwhile, at work I used Windows for Workgroups 3.11, an ugly, unstable DOS shell. My employer considered NeXTs (and did buy a few), but based on Microsoft's promises for the upcoming OS/2 decided to stick with Windows.
Then there was the OS/2 debacle. IBM and MS were jointly building a great (for the time) OS, but MS bailed and then killed OS/2 with its promises of "Cairo". What they actually delivered was Windows 95, which was hugely better than WfW, but still fell far, far short of what OS/2 delivered, much less what Cairo promised. None of which held a candle to NeXTstep, of course.
Along the way, MS stomped lots of innovative products from other companies. Consider DR-DOS, Quarterdesk, Stacker, etc.. There were dozens of small companies doing interesting things that MS squashed or bought, and then shelved their work.
While at it, Microsoft produced essentially ZERO innovation of their own. Their modus operandi was to wait for others to do interesting things and then buy or copy them. That's fine, but they earned a reputation for playing hardball and forcing unfair, one-sided deals that left the actual innovators out in the cold. I know personally of several potential startups with innovative ideas who decided not to create their products because the potential founders were sure MS would just squash them before they could make a profit. I'm sure that story was repeated hundreds or thousands of times, and the net effect seriously retarded the progress of the software industry.
Contrast that with Google, or IBM, or any of the other large players. Heck, a common Silicon Valley *business plan* is to create a web startup, develop it to prove out the ideas, then sell out to Google and walk away millionaires (or billionaires). That encourages innovation, because Google makes fair offers for the companies it buys.
Above all, Microsoft has for years trained users to accept buggy, insecure, crash-prone software as the norm, and acceptable. They have gotten much better of late, and Microsoft's R&D department has produced some great stuff in the last few years, but it will take a long time before they can do enough good to compensate for all of the damage they did in the past. If ever.
Doh, I have to take it back Garmin now does 1:24K maps, but that's just since the beginning of this year if you were interested in areas outside of national parks.
Delorme also offers satellite and even aerial imagery to augment topographical maps. I've found the aerial imagery very helpful at times.
The executive has the ability to make law by signing of treaty with foreign powers
No, it doesn't. Treaties must be ratified by the Senate before they have any force of law. Under the original system (before the 17th amendment), senators were appointed by state legislatures, so effectively a majority of the states' representatives had to approve any treaty. In any case, it's the legislative branch that has the final say on all law being created.
You are, of course, correct that the executive can nullify laws by refusing to enforce them, and the judiciary can nullify them by overturning them on grounds of unconstitutionality or conflict with higher law. And, finally, in many cases the people can nullify laws through jury nullification.
I think it was a five-disk array (plus the hot spare), when it failed. I'm up to seven disks now. I've also had very good luck with MD-RAID in the decade I've been using it, and even with my RAID-5 failure, I've never actually lost any data. Luckily, I was smart enough to just turn the machine off and go away and think about it for a week before taking any hasty action.
My individual arrays are quite small. I partition the disks into many pieces and set up many parallel arrays, then bind them together with LVM. That allows me to migrate the array piece by piece without ever making the file system unavailable -- tell LVM to migrate the data off one array (with pvmove), then take down and rebuild that array into its new form, then add it into the LVM volume group and move onto the next array.
I don't do full backups of my storage; there's too much. I do selective backups of important stuff, but the bulk of my data is about 400 movies ripped from DVDs. If I ever lost the array, I wouldn't exactly "lose" that data, because I could re-rip it all, but it would be a lot of work.
After that failure, I switched to RAID-6 (without a hot spare, so I didn't have to add any more disks) and instituted monthly MD array scans to exercise all disks. The latter is really important, I think, to uncover those problem disks before it becomes critical. I do and always have monitored SMART and done on-line SMART tests, but I've yet to have SMART tell me about an upcoming failure before the failure occurs.
No way on Earth I would work hard writing or creating something to have it passed around the Internet for free. I create for my own profit, not your entertainment. Once the Internet community stops (I know it isn't everyone but it is enough to be a major problem) stealing content created by artists for profit, we will finally be able to embrace the open standards we all truly want. Until then DRM will live one in some for or other.
You're free to make that choice. But:
(1) There are other strategies that may be more to your economic benefit. [...]
(2) History has shown that DRM doesn't work.
And don't forget:
(3) You'll be competing with millions of people who are willing to create something to have it passed around the Internet. Through all but the last tiny slice of history, pretty much all creative works were produced for the joy of creativity, and to share ideas and expressions with others.
In the 21st century, there are a *lot* of people in the world, and lots of them have time on their hands and some of them have creative talent. You could write a Drake-type equation calculating the intersection of people that have time, talent, resources and desire, and the resulting fraction would be small, but as Internet connectivity reaches the corners of the Earth, it's eventually going to be multiplied by several billion.
Sure, most of what all those amateurs create will be crap, but not all of it, not by a long shot. I think a significant portion of professional content creation may well get squeezed out by crowd sourcing. Not all, certainly, but I suspect that even those who want to do professional work will end up doing a lot for free, just to get known.
Free content is big, and just going to keep getting bigger. Those who recognize it and figure out how to work with it and profit by it will do well. Those who refuse had better plan on getting/keeping a day job.
My faithful old Linux home server runs two RAIDs, both in software: a RAID-1 for the OS (remember: the BIOS does not know about the RAID), and a RAID-5 for the data.
Beware of RAID-5, it's dangerous.
The problem is that reconstructing the array after a disk fails is a very intense operation that touches every sector of every disk. If another disk in the array has a latent failure, the reconstruction operation will trigger it, and when you lose two disks from the array, you're hosed.
This happened to me. I had a RAID 5 array with a hot spare, one drive failed and dropped out of the array, and the process of reconstructing onto the hot spare triggered another failure. Luckily, it was only a transient failure, and MD had e-mailed me reports that contained the order of the disks in the array before the second failure. By forcibly reconstructing the array (telling MD that it was "good" even though it wasn't) I was able to get the array running again in degraded mode. The second reconstruction attempt failed, but the third succeeded, at which point I removed the disk experiencing the transient failures from the array and reconstructed again onto a newly-purchased disk.
I have since switched from using RAID 5 plus a hot spare to RAID 6.
Well said. Also, you might consider the difficulty of delimiting what constitutes as "machine-readable."
This is a key point.
"Go to Google, search for 'foo bar', click the third result, then click the fourth link in the rightmost column" seems like it's not machine readable, but in reality it wouldn't be difficult at all to parse that sort of natural language automatically. So is that sentence a machine readable link? Maybe not now, but as soon as someone writes the relevant Firefox plugin it is.
Taken to its logical consequence, whether or not anything is "machine readable" boils down to the fundamental question of whether or not there are information processing tasks which humans can do and computers cannot. The consensus in the AI research community is "no". There are many tasks we don't yet know how to program computers to perform, but it's a matter of time and computational power. Ultimately, it's very likely that there is no such thing as a non machine-readable link.
On a more practical matter, captchas already prove that trying to create tasks that computers cannot perform but humans can is both hard and error-prone. Make it hard enough for the machines and you'll quickly find that most people can't do it either.
Where in the UCA (Utah Code Annotated) is that found? I have a copy on my machine, but couldn't find anything that would outlaw devices with a changeable MAC address. I'm not arguing that it isn't there, just asking because I'd like to read it myself.
it's clear that the cost of emission limits are far lower than the opportunity cost (that is, letting global warming happen.)
Is it clear?
The big problem with this whole discussion is that we don't know what the impact of global warming will be, really. The seas could rise a few meters, and that would be really expensive, but will that actually happen? And would it really be more expensive than greenhouse gas limitation? And would greenhouse gas control really prevent it (which goes back to the question of whether it's really all anthropogenic)? Or would it perhaps be less expensive to boost particulate emissions, which many think were masking greenhouse effects for decades? And what would the other costs of that be?
There is just so much we *don't* know here. One side of the argument says "Since we don't understand it, we must avoid it at all costs" while the other side says "Since we don't understand it, and can't predict the effects of any action, we shouldn't do anything until we do understand it."
IMO, the only thing that makes sense is to take small, moderate steps, which we have a scientific basis for believing provide the most benefit for the cost. That means the very first thing we need to do BEFORE anything else, is to establish a standard, scientifically-sound method of measuring the total environmental impact of production. Obviously it will have to evolve over time, but right now we have essentially no consistent way to even measure the effects of various choices so that we can choose the ones that provide the maximum benefit for the cost.
Given a good, standardized way to measure, then consumers could actually make informed decisions about whether or not a Prius is a better choice than a small diesel, or whether solar is cleaner than coal, or nuclear. Without that, we're just taking random swings in the dark. Actually, even with that, we'll still largely be in the dark because we won't know how closely our measurement system really tracks climate change factors, but that's why it'll have to evolve over time.
The US is HUGE and extremely diverse. Pick your climate, scenery, culture, government, etc., and you'll find it somewhere in the US.
That's an excellent point. The US has 50 states and numerous territories. Each of the 50 states has its own government and several of the territories do as well.
A point that would be even more compelling if we could manage to dial back the federal government and shift more (most?) of what it does to the states. This would allow greater freedom to choose the style of government that you want to live under.
It's a pipe dream, but I think we'd be much better off with a system that adhered more closely to the one defined by the US Constitution, with a limited federal government focused mostly on foreign relations and regulating interstate commerce (true interstate commerce, not anything that could potentially someday maybe affect interstate commerce, a little). Most of the federal agencies have no constitutional basis and I think we'd be much better served if those functions were provided by the states, so that we could "vote with our feet" as to which sort of government services we want to receive (and pay for).
The odd thing here is that they don't qualify for prosecution under the old anti-trust laws because they're not combining to fix prices or squelch competition from other businesses like them. They're working together to prop up a whole business model. The model includes competition between labels, so it's not a trust per the legal definition. They're perfectly willing to accept and compete with new entities (both labels and bands) that follow the same set of rules, but they -- jointly -- come down with both feet on anyone who offers an a different model.
How did all of your IPv6 nodes get the address of your DNS server to lookup IPv6 addresses? DHCP over IPv4?
I've done it both ways. It's not hard to advertise an IPv6 DNS server with radvd and run rdnssd on the client machines to see the advertisements and configure resolv.conf. No DHCPv4 required.
However, at present I'm using IPv4 for DNS. DNS works fine via either v4 or v6, and whichever protocol you're using to query the DNS server, you can ask for A or AAAA records, or both. They coexist quite nicely.
Thought so
Thought so what? I'm not sure why you think using a mixture of v4 and v6 eliminates benefits of v6.
So, exactly what benefit have you achieved by configuring IPv6 on your network? It is still useless without IPv4. And if you need IPv4, you are still bound by IPv4's limitations.
What benefit have *I* gained? It was an interesting experiment, and I do now have fixed, publicly-routable IP addresses for all of the machines in my house, even though my ISP gives me a single, dynamic (though rarely-changing) IP. I've made use of that a few times while traveling, to SSH directly into machines at home. It's a minor convenience, since I can always SSH to my public IPv4 address, and then SSH from there into specific machines. It's nice to avoid the extra step, though.
And you're wrong about being bound by IPv4's limitations. I'm not. IPv6 works just fine through the tunnel. What I am bound by, though, is the limited adoption of IPv6. For example, there are bittorrent trackers that operate on IPv6, so I can run a BT client on a machine behind my firewall without having to set up port forwarding -- but only other peers on IPv6 can connect to me. If and when the set of available peers goes from "geeks who mess with IPv6 tunneling" to "people with Comcast", then that will instantly become very useful.
Although few web sites, etc., are available via IPv6 as of yet, I do notice another interesting advantage -- speed. There is a small but noticeable improvement in latency going through the tunnel. I don't know if it has to do with avoiding NAT overhead, or something to do with the routes or what, but it's noticeably faster. Or maybe TCP over IPv6 is different and has faster handshake/startup times? Dunno. I'm puzzled by that difference, and don't know if it will still hold when I get IPv6 from my ISP (which is Comcast), but I'm hopeful.
No need to redact that. It's a link-local, non-routable address, not usable by any machine not directly connected to your LAN. You don't have IPv6 service.
Do they make enough painkillers to deal with the headaches this'll cause?
What headaches are those? Have you dealt with IPv6 at all? It's very easy to work with, and co-exists perfectly well with IPv4. I set up IPv6 in my house with a tunnel and it was amazing how smooth it was. I set up the IPv6 tunnel and addresses on my router (that was a little tricky -- but no more than any other router configuration), started up radvd, which periodically broadcasts an announcement about what the local IPv6 router is, and instantly every machine on the network -- Linux, Mac and Windows -- had an IPv6 address in addition to their private IPv4 address (10.x.x.x). Of course, the typical home user couldn't do any of that stuff, but they don't have to if the v6 service comes directly from their ISP.
What's more, I was surprised to note that as soon as all my computers had v6 adresses, they started using them! IPv6 DNS is in place, and all decent applications do an IPv6 name lookup in parallel with the IPv4, and if they get an IPv6 answer, they connect via v6. I know Firefox does because I have a Firefox add-on that shows the IP of the web server in the status bar, and sometimes I come across sites for which it shows a v6 address.
About the only part of the infrastructure that really isn't ready, as far as I can tell, is everyone's home routers. Those ubiquitous Linksys boxes mostly don't support v6 unless you put third-party firmware on them (which I did, but most people obviously wouldn't do). But I'm sure the next generation or two of home routers will come with IPv6 support enabled and it will Just Work. Oh, and they'll also be configured by default to reject externally-originated connections, so that Joe Sixpack will still have the same level of firewalling he has with NAT -- but with lower overhead and fewer limitations. Until those routers are widely available, v6 and v4 can coexist quite nicely.
I predict that this will be relatively painless for Comcast's techs, and completely transparent to their customers.
This working paper is distributed for purposes of comment and
discussion only. It may not be reproduced without permission of the copyright holder.
:-)
That's really not contradictory, though. The article argues for weak copyright, not no copyright. Under reasonable copyright terms -- say, 14 year terms, one optional 14-year extension; registration required; no anti-circumvention laws; reasonable exceptions for Fair Use; no similar plot or character protection; no criminal penalties, infringement is tort only -- the authors of the paper could demand and get basically the same protection for this paper that they have now.
The form of copyright law I describe would strike most of the media industry as not just "weak", but horrifyingly, laughingly inadequate. Still, it would be enough to give these authors the protection that first page demands.
Slashdot Mirror
And that workstation cost vastly more than generic Windows boxes, which is why generic Windows boxes took over and Next's great ideas fizzled until they became OS X a decade later.
Actually, my NeXTstation cost roughly the same as a comparable 486 at the time. That was with an education discount, granted, but it wouldn't have been hugely more expensive even without that. As I recall, I got the machine and a laser printer for $3300. I think I could have gotten a comparable 486 for around $3100 -- but without the printer.
Part of Microsoft's genius is realizing that normal people can't or won't pay $10,000 for a computer.
You mean IBM's genius, right? Or, more accurately, Compaq's, since they started the clone wave. Microsoft had nothing to do with that; they just rode the wave -- and convinced everyone that there were going to produce some great software Real Soon Now, so that everyone would stick with them rather than looking into the much-superior alternatives.
Someone in the government makes a bad IT contracting decision and that somehow reflects on how a health system will be run?
If this were an isolated incident you'd have a point. But it's not.
If we're going to go to a government-run health care system, at least we should do it at the state level. Some of the states will screw it up badly, of course, but others will do it well, and (with one or two notable exceptions) the states have proven to be much more fiscally responsible.
Plus there's also the fact that the federal government has absolutely no constitutional authority to get involved in health care, not that we pay any attention to that old piece of paper these days.
I wasn't arguing that we'd have been better off if NeXT had ruled the world. I was arguing that we'd have been better off if Microsoft hadn't dominated it, teaching everyone to expect crappy software.
MS in its early days did a lot to help out the computer industry in some ways
I disagree.
I remember in 1991, I purchased a NeXTstation. It had a beautiful, usable GUI layered over a powerful multitasking Unix operating system, with development tools that were not rivaled on any platform until at least a decade later. Meanwhile, at work I used Windows for Workgroups 3.11, an ugly, unstable DOS shell. My employer considered NeXTs (and did buy a few), but based on Microsoft's promises for the upcoming OS/2 decided to stick with Windows.
Then there was the OS/2 debacle. IBM and MS were jointly building a great (for the time) OS, but MS bailed and then killed OS/2 with its promises of "Cairo". What they actually delivered was Windows 95, which was hugely better than WfW, but still fell far, far short of what OS/2 delivered, much less what Cairo promised. None of which held a candle to NeXTstep, of course.
Along the way, MS stomped lots of innovative products from other companies. Consider DR-DOS, Quarterdesk, Stacker, etc.. There were dozens of small companies doing interesting things that MS squashed or bought, and then shelved their work.
While at it, Microsoft produced essentially ZERO innovation of their own. Their modus operandi was to wait for others to do interesting things and then buy or copy them. That's fine, but they earned a reputation for playing hardball and forcing unfair, one-sided deals that left the actual innovators out in the cold. I know personally of several potential startups with innovative ideas who decided not to create their products because the potential founders were sure MS would just squash them before they could make a profit. I'm sure that story was repeated hundreds or thousands of times, and the net effect seriously retarded the progress of the software industry.
Contrast that with Google, or IBM, or any of the other large players. Heck, a common Silicon Valley *business plan* is to create a web startup, develop it to prove out the ideas, then sell out to Google and walk away millionaires (or billionaires). That encourages innovation, because Google makes fair offers for the companies it buys.
Above all, Microsoft has for years trained users to accept buggy, insecure, crash-prone software as the norm, and acceptable. They have gotten much better of late, and Microsoft's R&D department has produced some great stuff in the last few years, but it will take a long time before they can do enough good to compensate for all of the damage they did in the past. If ever.
Doh, I have to take it back Garmin now does 1:24K maps, but that's just since the beginning of this year if you were interested in areas outside of national parks.
Delorme also offers satellite and even aerial imagery to augment topographical maps. I've found the aerial imagery very helpful at times.
The executive has the ability to make law by signing of treaty with foreign powers
No, it doesn't. Treaties must be ratified by the Senate before they have any force of law. Under the original system (before the 17th amendment), senators were appointed by state legislatures, so effectively a majority of the states' representatives had to approve any treaty. In any case, it's the legislative branch that has the final say on all law being created.
You are, of course, correct that the executive can nullify laws by refusing to enforce them, and the judiciary can nullify them by overturning them on grounds of unconstitutionality or conflict with higher law. And, finally, in many cases the people can nullify laws through jury nullification.
I think it was a five-disk array (plus the hot spare), when it failed. I'm up to seven disks now. I've also had very good luck with MD-RAID in the decade I've been using it, and even with my RAID-5 failure, I've never actually lost any data. Luckily, I was smart enough to just turn the machine off and go away and think about it for a week before taking any hasty action.
My individual arrays are quite small. I partition the disks into many pieces and set up many parallel arrays, then bind them together with LVM. That allows me to migrate the array piece by piece without ever making the file system unavailable -- tell LVM to migrate the data off one array (with pvmove), then take down and rebuild that array into its new form, then add it into the LVM volume group and move onto the next array.
I don't do full backups of my storage; there's too much. I do selective backups of important stuff, but the bulk of my data is about 400 movies ripped from DVDs. If I ever lost the array, I wouldn't exactly "lose" that data, because I could re-rip it all, but it would be a lot of work.
After that failure, I switched to RAID-6 (without a hot spare, so I didn't have to add any more disks) and instituted monthly MD array scans to exercise all disks. The latter is really important, I think, to uncover those problem disks before it becomes critical. I do and always have monitored SMART and done on-line SMART tests, but I've yet to have SMART tell me about an upcoming failure before the failure occurs.
You're free to make that choice. But:
(1) There are other strategies that may be more to your economic benefit. [...]
(2) History has shown that DRM doesn't work.
And don't forget:
(3) You'll be competing with millions of people who are willing to create something to have it passed around the Internet. Through all but the last tiny slice of history, pretty much all creative works were produced for the joy of creativity, and to share ideas and expressions with others.
In the 21st century, there are a *lot* of people in the world, and lots of them have time on their hands and some of them have creative talent. You could write a Drake-type equation calculating the intersection of people that have time, talent, resources and desire, and the resulting fraction would be small, but as Internet connectivity reaches the corners of the Earth, it's eventually going to be multiplied by several billion.
Sure, most of what all those amateurs create will be crap, but not all of it, not by a long shot. I think a significant portion of professional content creation may well get squeezed out by crowd sourcing. Not all, certainly, but I suspect that even those who want to do professional work will end up doing a lot for free, just to get known.
Free content is big, and just going to keep getting bigger. Those who recognize it and figure out how to work with it and profit by it will do well. Those who refuse had better plan on getting/keeping a day job.
My faithful old Linux home server runs two RAIDs, both in software: a RAID-1 for the OS (remember: the BIOS does not know about the RAID), and a RAID-5 for the data.
Beware of RAID-5, it's dangerous.
The problem is that reconstructing the array after a disk fails is a very intense operation that touches every sector of every disk. If another disk in the array has a latent failure, the reconstruction operation will trigger it, and when you lose two disks from the array, you're hosed.
This happened to me. I had a RAID 5 array with a hot spare, one drive failed and dropped out of the array, and the process of reconstructing onto the hot spare triggered another failure. Luckily, it was only a transient failure, and MD had e-mailed me reports that contained the order of the disks in the array before the second failure. By forcibly reconstructing the array (telling MD that it was "good" even though it wasn't) I was able to get the array running again in degraded mode. The second reconstruction attempt failed, but the third succeeded, at which point I removed the disk experiencing the transient failures from the array and reconstructed again onto a newly-purchased disk.
I have since switched from using RAID 5 plus a hot spare to RAID 6.
I also carry my wallet and cellular phone, a programmable calculator, as well as a passport and handgun (with extra clips) at all times in the house.
Being prepared is good, but that's overkill. Leave the passport in a drawer near the back door.
Well said. Also, you might consider the difficulty of delimiting what constitutes as "machine-readable."
This is a key point.
"Go to Google, search for 'foo bar', click the third result, then click the fourth link in the rightmost column" seems like it's not machine readable, but in reality it wouldn't be difficult at all to parse that sort of natural language automatically. So is that sentence a machine readable link? Maybe not now, but as soon as someone writes the relevant Firefox plugin it is.
Taken to its logical consequence, whether or not anything is "machine readable" boils down to the fundamental question of whether or not there are information processing tasks which humans can do and computers cannot. The consensus in the AI research community is "no". There are many tasks we don't yet know how to program computers to perform, but it's a matter of time and computational power. Ultimately, it's very likely that there is no such thing as a non machine-readable link.
On a more practical matter, captchas already prove that trying to create tasks that computers cannot perform but humans can is both hard and error-prone. Make it hard enough for the machines and you'll quickly find that most people can't do it either.
Where in the UCA (Utah Code Annotated) is that found? I have a copy on my machine, but couldn't find anything that would outlaw devices with a changeable MAC address. I'm not arguing that it isn't there, just asking because I'd like to read it myself.
The kicker of all this electronic voting is that is easy. It really is, it's a damn simple problem to solve. Even online voting.
It is if you don't understand it. Like most things.
it's clear that the cost of emission limits are far lower than the opportunity cost (that is, letting global warming happen.)
Is it clear?
The big problem with this whole discussion is that we don't know what the impact of global warming will be, really. The seas could rise a few meters, and that would be really expensive, but will that actually happen? And would it really be more expensive than greenhouse gas limitation? And would greenhouse gas control really prevent it (which goes back to the question of whether it's really all anthropogenic)? Or would it perhaps be less expensive to boost particulate emissions, which many think were masking greenhouse effects for decades? And what would the other costs of that be?
There is just so much we *don't* know here. One side of the argument says "Since we don't understand it, we must avoid it at all costs" while the other side says "Since we don't understand it, and can't predict the effects of any action, we shouldn't do anything until we do understand it."
IMO, the only thing that makes sense is to take small, moderate steps, which we have a scientific basis for believing provide the most benefit for the cost. That means the very first thing we need to do BEFORE anything else, is to establish a standard, scientifically-sound method of measuring the total environmental impact of production. Obviously it will have to evolve over time, but right now we have essentially no consistent way to even measure the effects of various choices so that we can choose the ones that provide the maximum benefit for the cost.
Given a good, standardized way to measure, then consumers could actually make informed decisions about whether or not a Prius is a better choice than a small diesel, or whether solar is cleaner than coal, or nuclear. Without that, we're just taking random swings in the dark. Actually, even with that, we'll still largely be in the dark because we won't know how closely our measurement system really tracks climate change factors, but that's why it'll have to evolve over time.
That's an excellent point. The US has 50 states and numerous territories. Each of the 50 states has its own government and several of the territories do as well.
A point that would be even more compelling if we could manage to dial back the federal government and shift more (most?) of what it does to the states. This would allow greater freedom to choose the style of government that you want to live under.
It's a pipe dream, but I think we'd be much better off with a system that adhered more closely to the one defined by the US Constitution, with a limited federal government focused mostly on foreign relations and regulating interstate commerce (true interstate commerce, not anything that could potentially someday maybe affect interstate commerce, a little). Most of the federal agencies have no constitutional basis and I think we'd be much better served if those functions were provided by the states, so that we could "vote with our feet" as to which sort of government services we want to receive (and pay for).
The province is not for everyone though. We have very strong libertarian tendencies.
Interesting. What are the firearms laws like?
They're not fighting overseas. They'd have to come here, to count, but then they'd be terrorists.
However, when the record companies/publishers start to work together (e.g. in the RIAA), then they ARE working like a monopoly
Actually, they're a trust.
The odd thing here is that they don't qualify for prosecution under the old anti-trust laws because they're not combining to fix prices or squelch competition from other businesses like them. They're working together to prop up a whole business model. The model includes competition between labels, so it's not a trust per the legal definition. They're perfectly willing to accept and compete with new entities (both labels and bands) that follow the same set of rules, but they -- jointly -- come down with both feet on anyone who offers an a different model.
What the hell happened to that former colony ours that fought for freedom and began a war of independence over unfair taxation?
We convinced ourselves that fighting for freedom is something young men do overseas.
How did all of your IPv6 nodes get the address of your DNS server to lookup IPv6 addresses? DHCP over IPv4?
I've done it both ways. It's not hard to advertise an IPv6 DNS server with radvd and run rdnssd on the client machines to see the advertisements and configure resolv.conf. No DHCPv4 required.
However, at present I'm using IPv4 for DNS. DNS works fine via either v4 or v6, and whichever protocol you're using to query the DNS server, you can ask for A or AAAA records, or both. They coexist quite nicely.
Thought so
Thought so what? I'm not sure why you think using a mixture of v4 and v6 eliminates benefits of v6.
So, exactly what benefit have you achieved by configuring IPv6 on your network? It is still useless without IPv4. And if you need IPv4, you are still bound by IPv4's limitations.
What benefit have *I* gained? It was an interesting experiment, and I do now have fixed, publicly-routable IP addresses for all of the machines in my house, even though my ISP gives me a single, dynamic (though rarely-changing) IP. I've made use of that a few times while traveling, to SSH directly into machines at home. It's a minor convenience, since I can always SSH to my public IPv4 address, and then SSH from there into specific machines. It's nice to avoid the extra step, though.
And you're wrong about being bound by IPv4's limitations. I'm not. IPv6 works just fine through the tunnel. What I am bound by, though, is the limited adoption of IPv6. For example, there are bittorrent trackers that operate on IPv6, so I can run a BT client on a machine behind my firewall without having to set up port forwarding -- but only other peers on IPv6 can connect to me. If and when the set of available peers goes from "geeks who mess with IPv6 tunneling" to "people with Comcast", then that will instantly become very useful.
Although few web sites, etc., are available via IPv6 as of yet, I do notice another interesting advantage -- speed. There is a small but noticeable improvement in latency going through the tunnel. I don't know if it has to do with avoiding NAT overhead, or something to do with the routes or what, but it's noticeably faster. Or maybe TCP over IPv6 is different and has faster handshake/startup times? Dunno. I'm puzzled by that difference, and don't know if it will still hold when I get IPv6 from my ISP (which is Comcast), but I'm hopeful.
::1 is shorter
And cooler.
inet6 addr: fe80::***:****:****:****/64 Scope:Link
No need to redact that. It's a link-local, non-routable address, not usable by any machine not directly connected to your LAN. You don't have IPv6 service.
Do they make enough painkillers to deal with the headaches this'll cause?
What headaches are those? Have you dealt with IPv6 at all? It's very easy to work with, and co-exists perfectly well with IPv4. I set up IPv6 in my house with a tunnel and it was amazing how smooth it was. I set up the IPv6 tunnel and addresses on my router (that was a little tricky -- but no more than any other router configuration), started up radvd, which periodically broadcasts an announcement about what the local IPv6 router is, and instantly every machine on the network -- Linux, Mac and Windows -- had an IPv6 address in addition to their private IPv4 address (10.x.x.x). Of course, the typical home user couldn't do any of that stuff, but they don't have to if the v6 service comes directly from their ISP.
What's more, I was surprised to note that as soon as all my computers had v6 adresses, they started using them! IPv6 DNS is in place, and all decent applications do an IPv6 name lookup in parallel with the IPv4, and if they get an IPv6 answer, they connect via v6. I know Firefox does because I have a Firefox add-on that shows the IP of the web server in the status bar, and sometimes I come across sites for which it shows a v6 address.
About the only part of the infrastructure that really isn't ready, as far as I can tell, is everyone's home routers. Those ubiquitous Linksys boxes mostly don't support v6 unless you put third-party firmware on them (which I did, but most people obviously wouldn't do). But I'm sure the next generation or two of home routers will come with IPv6 support enabled and it will Just Work. Oh, and they'll also be configured by default to reject externally-originated connections, so that Joe Sixpack will still have the same level of firewalling he has with NAT -- but with lower overhead and fewer limitations. Until those routers are widely available, v6 and v4 can coexist quite nicely.
I predict that this will be relatively painless for Comcast's techs, and completely transparent to their customers.
From the first page of the of the paper
This working paper is distributed for purposes of comment and discussion only. It may not be reproduced without permission of the copyright holder.
:-)
That's really not contradictory, though. The article argues for weak copyright, not no copyright. Under reasonable copyright terms -- say, 14 year terms, one optional 14-year extension; registration required; no anti-circumvention laws; reasonable exceptions for Fair Use; no similar plot or character protection; no criminal penalties, infringement is tort only -- the authors of the paper could demand and get basically the same protection for this paper that they have now.
The form of copyright law I describe would strike most of the media industry as not just "weak", but horrifyingly, laughingly inadequate. Still, it would be enough to give these authors the protection that first page demands.
Sounds like a great way to truly educate.