So how will your auto-responders etc tell the difference between bad guys and good guys?
<clue>
Simple, the good guys don't send spam to millions of email accounts. </clue>
This isn't something one person could do. We'd have to organize a project on the scale of spamassassin to get installed on MTAs everywhere so you'd have an instant distributed retro attack to every spam mailing. Imagine that, they start their spam mailing at 0300EST and immediately their webserver starts to smoke. Of course, we'd also want to filter these emails to/dev/nul along with the output of the wget...
Actually, all languages grow and expand through usage. It's only when an agency is successful at controlling it and prohibiting new words and creative adaptations that a languages begins to die. People will say "virii" or "alot" or "email" if that helps them communicate. If you forbid it in one language, they'll say it in another.
The Cornyn-Feinstein bill also creates another federal felony, punishable by up to five years in prison, for using "an audiovisual recording device" in a movie theater to make a copy of a film and boosts civil penalties available to MPAA member companies when suing over prerelease movies placed on the Internet.
This is the first instance I can think of where this type of activity has crossd over from civil to criminal jurisdiction. The only possible good that can come out of this is that a conviction will require unanimous guilty verdict from a jury, whereas civil cases are decided by judicial fiat or a majority of the jury.
It also means that serious bootleg pirateers will be taking guns to the theatre along with their cameras with intentions of not being restrained in the event they are caught.
This sort of law will only catch the ignorant and incompetent. Most of them will be kids, from good homes, with parents who will have to pay the price for allowing their child to think and act independantly without draconian controls on their behavior. Bad parents, I guess.
Not that hackers would ever agree on anything, but in ten years, if not already, there is one unifying thing that hackers share in common and recognize. Something the non-hacker community doesn't get exposed to (anymore) and won't recognize. I am of course referring to the prompt:
**
**
**
**
**
** **
*********
Geez, I hope that renders the same on everyone else's browser-of-choice...
Can't wait until we can buy a $15 at-home test for aim-bot gene hacks.
On a more serious note, who cares? Aren't professional sports about accomplishing the most with the genes you have? Some people will have the Arnold gene for muscle mass. It hardly seems fair to tell athletes with it that they'll just have to try harder and still fail.
In 2001 they released a new bill design, and said "we want to stay one step ahead of the counterfeiters". Before that the bill had been unchanged for, what, 30 years? And now three years later, they're releasing a new bill? Its being kept hush-hush, but this is a clear sign that our currency is being successfully counterfitted.
Or that the Bureau of Engraving and Printing has a large marketing and printing budget that they don't want to give up.
Of course, the best idea will always be not to publish your email address and to guard it like a hawk. I get maybe 5 spam emails per day and that doesn't bother me at all.
Yea, that was me a couple years ago. But my main address got out in the wild and after that, the spam started growing exponentially. I get over a thousand per week now. The methods mutate and the RBLs only block some of them.
Give it time, you'll start pulling your hair out soon enough.
So, first of all, this would be a boon for the industry since it would weed out everyone they know would never, ever buy something over the phone. Far less wasted money in calling "Not Interesteds."
For the record, I put my two phone numbers on the DNC list. I hate telemarketers. I'd vote to have them soaked in flaming vats of lye if such an item appeared on the ballot.
Having said that, I will attempt to relate some marketingesque-speak that I overheard one day while trying to converse with a some people from that department:
It takes approximately twelve contacts before a person converts to a consumer.
According to this misreasoning, if they interrupt your dinner twelve times on the same subject, even though this may span several years, something about their message will stick in your head and you will convert. You will prefer their product. You will subscribe over the phone. You will respond better to the televised propaganda that Gain is better than Tide and might try it out.
I don't know exactly what they are going for, but I'm certain that they think they are after something broader than getting you to buy their product over the phone.
Of course, I've always been baffled by the people selling lightbulbs made by the blind. It's not like I see those in the store. And I'm always wondering what sort of quality control could they have?
Since you're serious, you should put on your thinking cap and figure it out. Assuming this is net worth and these people draw only a few million in cash per year out of their nest egg, here's some ideas to get you started. I'm assuming they actually want to continue working full time at their job rather than take the lottery-winner's fantasy road of never working again:
Buy free time by hiring professional servants to do all your mundane chores. Driving, laundry, cooking, cleaning, shopping, house/car maintenance, Windows/Linux patches, etc. Think about how many hours of your life you spend doing such "maintenance."
Start up some really interesting hobbies. I'd like to try out woodworking, but realize that aside from taking quite a bit of time, there are some expensive tools required to really do it right. Not to mention the shop space. Or you could take up rocketry and go for low Earth orbit. Or maybe you want to do some genome research or pursue some physics experiements in your spare time?
Buy Security. I'm not a millionaire, but still worry about theives breaking into my house. I worry about my kids getting abducted or just getting in trouble. I'd have personal bodyguards for my kids and a 24 hour dedicated security team monitoring my house, not to mention all the equipment. Yes sirree.
Variety. Waterfront home, mountain home, tropical beach home for the winter? Don't forget full time security and maintenance staff for each as outlined above. Multiple cars, motorcycles, maybe a plane or two. Mechanics to maintain all the above. Garages to keep it all in. Boats? Jet Skis? Dirt Bikes? Season Pass Box Seats to various events, opera, sports, concerts, whatever you might want to do when the mood strikes?
Quality. Why drive an economy SUV when you could be driving a top of the line model with bulletproof glass, Satellite uplink, video conferencing, run-flat tires, etc. This is the Toyota vs. Mercedes argument. If you like driving a sports car, would you prefer do drive an Celica or an SL500? The same goes for your stereo, refridgerator, television, food, clothing and other consumables. There is a huge difference between shopping at KMart and buying Polo. And I've found that when I pay more for quality, the stuff lasts longer, performs better, is more reliable, etc.
Invest for retirement. Don't know about you, but I'd feel more comfortable if I could afford to shovel away 20-50% of my income for future days when I couldn't count on the cash flow, or just may want to quit my current job.
People with this kind of money still eat, sleep, work, repeat like everyone else. But they use the money to buy some upgrades. When I made $36K per year I had all the same crap that I do now. I did all the same things and thought that if I could double my income I'd be sitting tight and solid for my future. Well guess what, I doubled my income and still have the same crap (but higher quality) or more variety.
I still wish I could double my income to setup for retirement better. Yea, I could go back to living in that rat hole apartment in the bad part of town and drive a crappier car that would be less safe for my children. Then I would have more free cash to setup for retirement, but I don't want to live that way. I earned my way out of that quality of life to this better one. And I can see myself earning my way out of this level up to the next one. And if I had several million per year, I would be spending most of it on quality of life issues and socking away just enough to continue that style of living until I'm dead.
Shall we also fine those who spread the common cold? Or how about the more serious detractor from American productivity: Influenza.
I'm sure we can think of other virii and such that are communicable, that people can take pro-active measures against, and yet still continue to plague society today. These virii are far more insidious than SoBig or other W32 worms. They don't just disrupt productivity and affect markets, they kill people!! So can we also arrange for a fee-schedule for those found carrying these and spreading them to others? I propose a fee-schedule below, you'll note some of the penalties are self-enforcing:
Surely nonesense, because this is a genie that would not go back in the bottle if it was true
A genie known to only a few people is rather easy to put back in the bottle if you act quickly to eliminate or control those people and the evidence. This was the point of the movie "Chain Reaction" and many other conspiracy theories.
It may be harmless for the energy conglomerates to permit and monitor University research into alternative energy science. But you can bet they monitor cold fusion closely and hope to catch it before it becomes as common and end-user accessible as electricity generation is today.
What I find amusing is that as a species, we've always spoken derisively about the explorers and inventors right up until they are proven correct in their conquests. We pshaw'd stars, planets, Round Earth Theory, electricity, flight, 55mph, the speed of sound, Earth Orbit, Fission, Fusion, Black Holes, Strings, Quantum Computers, AI, FTL, Immortality, and probably every other significant accomplishment of human history, past and future.
Yet despite a pretty solid track record of overcoming obstacles, we continue to scoff and ridicule those that pursue the cutting edge sciences hoping to unlock the next great discovery. We already know fusion is possible, given time, hot-fusion will likely iterate through a series of scale-downs and temperature controls to make it virtually indistinguishable from cold-fusion. Who can say today whether someone won't jump technology ahead a few iterations at once?
The next step would be, imagine this, that parents would actually be responsible for their childs actions!!
And this is a good idea how?
This is no different than making game companies responsible for the actions of their customers. I hate to tell you, but parents are guides to their children, not pet-owners. Parents each provide some random DNA and the result is a new lifeform that may behave very differently than either parent.
As a guide, parents can coach, teach, discipline, etc. but at some point the child is going to strike out on their own and act indepentantly regardless of parental consequences or guidance. This point of independance rarely coincides with the age of majority prescribed by your local government.
Making parents legally and financially responsible for a child's actions sounds like a great way to bankrupt entire families for the actions of one bad apple. Do we stop at parents or can we also go after the statistically much wealthier grandparents?
I'd prefer keeping people responsible for their OWN actions and negligence, thank you.
Bottom line here is that you get what you pay for.
No. The bottom line is that after the wasteful spending, cost overruns, not-invented-here episodes, overstaffing, over analyzing, ISO 900x+-triple-ought compliance meetings and multiple committees-on-how-to-proceed... No one wants to pass along the bad news that the real work still isn't getting done.
When things are running efficiently and people are working productively, it's really easy to report bad news about needing more time/money/people/whatnot. It's very easy because you know that any investigation will come to the same conclusions. Nothing to fear, nothing to hide.
But when there's a lot of waste and managers are very afraid of an investigation revealing how much they suck, then there is a strong tendancy to gamble and hope the bad news will never surface.
"You get what you pay for" only applies in a competative market.
There is good and bad everywhere. Take a group of 100 people, chosen by any criteria you want, and you will find good and bad people within that 100. But that doesn't mean that all 100 are bad.
Perhaps not all 100 are bad, but if you put out free food, you get not only the song birds and the deer, but racoons, squirrels, rats, wolves and all the undesireables of nature. If we create a safe refuge for those in need, we will get many more who are simply interested in the "free" part.
Do you believe any government can run a program that discerns which are deserving and which are merely lazy? Or would you propose that we should support all comers, the incapable and misfortunate as well as the parasitic and self-destructive?
I would prefer to take such responsibility back from our government and see charity dispensed at the community level. Those who provide the resources are most interested in seeing they are dispensed appropriately and not wasted on the driftwood of society.
This is how it used to be, back when there was a distinction between "the homeless" and the "vagrants" we're supposed to percieve as homeless today.
bottom line: electricity is a necessity. like water, or the police service. it is a completely inelastic commodity and privatizing it is only encouraging the new power overlord (since there is, really, only one major power provider... a monopoly) to charge the maximum the market will bear and damn the consequences.
The real problem with so-called deregulated utilities is that they are all a single monopoly from the consumer's point of view.
When your utility fails, you are screwed. Short of getting in your car and driving to where the utility is working, you are at the mercy of the utility . This is not deregulation; this is monopoly.
When your utility hikes the rates, you are screwed. You cannot just flip the switch over to the other utility's lines and start paying less. This is not deregulation; this is monopoly.
For utilities to become truly deregulated, all levels of government need to relinquish their grip on their citizens and allow companies to negotiate contracts directly with you and I. Presently, power, phones, water, sewer, garbage, cable... these utilities are selected by your city or county in a one-size-fits-all contract. The winning company has to follow the government's rules for the courtesy of raking you over the coals. Competition is over once the selection has been made. This is not deregulation...
If you look at what cellphones have done to the telecom industry, you can see how only when consumer choice enters the equation do companies get on the "more for less" bandwagon. Until customers can choose between power company A and power company B from their current home, we're going to have no end of problems brought about by waste, corruption, greed and the lack of customer service or concern you would expect from a monopoly.
With the northern ice cap gone, the Earth's overall albedo will be lower, hence the planet absorbs more heat from the sun, the temperature goes up, Antarctica starts to melt, the Ross ice shelf slips down into the sea, then sea level DOES rise, then with the southern polar cap gone, the albedo falls even further... I think you see where this is going.
All of which... HAS HAPPENED BEFORE!
Even if global warming were to happen at an accelerated pace, we're talking geologic-time here. Hundreds of years at the earliest.
Do you think Humankind is like the dinosaurs and will simply die-off because the plankton go away? Do you envision that we are incapable of modifying our agriculture to adapt? Do you feel that we are at the mercy of our own behavior, but incable of solving the problems that might result?
By definition, if mankind is moving the climate, them mankind can move the climate.
There isn't anything here to worry about. Perhaps we'll need to react to it someday, but for now I'm enjoying the nice summers fully expecting them to fade away in a few more years as the climate swings back to cold again like it was in the 70s. I miss skiing...
I can BET that once those tags are out kids will figure out how to fool them. The simplest thing comes to mind right away.... Because the system tracks TAGS and not KIDS, young ones figure out a good scheme: give the tag to a "keeper" for few classes and then skip school. Once you come back, pick up the tag from the keeper and go home without attending school, all while the parents think their loved one is learning.
Sure and the ruse goes on for weeks and the kid thinks they're soooo smart and have their parents fooled. Then mom gets a call from the principal asking why little-billy hasn't been attending home-economics for the last few weeks and the game is up. Mom does a surprise visit to school to check on billy and finds out that while his TAG is in home-economics, billy is not.
Billy is now soooooo busted and his parents have learned that Billy is not the responsible little boy they thought he was, despite all his assurances. Privileges disappear and Billy has to work his ass off to make up for lost grace with the folks.
Monitoring kids is not about Big Brother or just putting a hammer down on them, it's about monitoring their development into adults. It's about determining if your children are ready for life's next set of challenges, like car keys or extended curfews, or making their own decisions regarding money or friends.
It's not to be confused with Big Brother snooping because it is individually applied, not one size fits all. Most importantly, kids eventually grow up, leave home and can throw off the leash. There is no light at the end of the tunnel with Big Brother spying on us.
I would really like to have this sort of system for my children just so I know where they are. Not, "what are they doing" snooping, but in a, "I haven't seen billy in a while, I wonder if he's okay? Oh, he's on I-5 heading south, better call the police now" way of caring. Our kids blow through their curfew frequently. It would be nice to know whether to head South, North, East or West when we go out looking for them, or whose house to call. I can see this sort of thing actually increasing freedom of movement for children because the act of "reporting in" which they do so poorly, would be automatically taken care of by technology.
And when they circumvent it, you know they're ready for one of those, "importance of trust" talks.
Re:Why are they running Windows then?
on
Can .NET Really Scale?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
When I first started testing SQL Server using the default install "point, click and go" I was shocked to find that the performance for our application sucked.
A quick lesson in optimization from the local DBA taught me how to tune it to use 80% of the physical RAM, keep log files on separate physical drives (and buss if possible) than the data file. If you can isolate log/data/os, so much the better. So I did that and performance immediately improved 3000% or more. I'm sure there are several other tune-ups I've forgotten and hundreds I never learned.
Even so, IIS throughput for static and ASP apps (pre-.NET) was difficult to get above 200 and 100 concurrent connections respectively several years ago. Performance tuning is all about test, analysis, tinker... unless this guy knows where his bottlenecks are, there's not much anyone can suggest to help.
And if he knows where the bottlenecks are, then he wouldn't be asking this question.
The sad thing is that without analyzing the bottlenecks, people go buy faster CPUs where RAM was needed, or multi-proc systems with 15K RPM drives when moving to GigE would have done three times as much.
Then there is the application itself. What is it trying to do? What can be cached? What is unnecessary? Can lookups be bundled together? I've seen Verity servers dragged down to 1TPS through crazy business requirements and poor development understanding. There is no such thing as a inherently fast platform. And no replacement for careful, analysis-based perforformance testing.
If everyone's DNA was on file it would be hell on crime. The technology is coming where they just run a vacuum all around a crime scene and the computer will match up everyone who shed a skin flake there.
Except perhaps for the criminals who had actually taken precautions to not leave evidence.
With such an accurate means to determine guilt by physical association, police would be left to draw together whatever evidence, no matter how circumstantial, to convict the DNA-owner with the most motive or least solid alibi.
Even today, police regularly screw up investigations and convict the wrong person. Introduce a silver bullet to crime work and careful theives will get off scot-free as some other unlucky (or well chosen) sap gets nailed because DNA doesn't lie.
...Kwikset is suing everyone who bought paperclips and thin blade flathead screwdrivers in the last fifty years.
Realizing that their locks can be circumvented with a modicum of patience and the above mentioned tools, Kiwkset raided sales records at local home and office supply chains to locate citizens who had purchased paperclips and screwdrivers. Citing that no one who purchased the two items in the same month could possibly be up to any good, Kwikset sent out cease and desist letters to approximately 40,000 citizens demanding that they turn over the screwdrivers and paperclips to local authorities.
How do you expect space to be explored by an organization that rewards failure with more money and greets success with disinterest and reduction in funding?
When NASA is going good, the public is ho-hum because the public doesn't get a shot at space when it's controlled by a quasi military, government run organization.
If this were done in the business sector, the motto would always be "faster, cheaper, safer" and tourism would start at $MILLIONS only to fall into the affordable range as they worked the kinks out. Eventually, we'd have $100 per seat price wars for orbital day trips.
Why? Because companies that failed, crashed and burned due to mismanagement, poor engineering, or bureaucratic paralysis would die off opening up more space for those with stronger offerings.
That's why NASA is a non-starter. There is no accountability.
What is this 8 kilobits a second joke? Even if they can compress the video to that extent, I doubt any usable information would be retained. But, since I know that you can compress it that much, how do they plan on getting the data back to their central processing station? The infrastructure isn't there.
You are merely describing problems to be solved. Once the political elite get the funding tap opened, billions of dollars will flow to contractors, agencies, consultants, etc. with the goal of solving these. Speed issues will eventually be addressed by moore's law. Infrastructure merely takes time. I'm sure they won't let their inaccuracies or loose data get in the way of a few public convictions and displays of the systems power/usefulness.
The concern I have is that the political elite seem to be getting the picture: They know it's not easy to catch a theif. Terrorists and drug kingpins know how to avoid the cameras, use "encryption" by not speaking about stuff on the phone, and generally clean up the evidence on themselves. Catching the criminals is a PITA. Where is Osama? Where is Saddam? You'd think we'd have their heads on display by now. But if you watch the various true crime shows, you find that a majority of police work comes down to the lucky break.
Evidence helps convict, but it doesn't catch the criminal.
So what's my point? Glad you asked.
TIA or whatever you want to call it allows the government to start convicting citizens for all the petty crimes they commit. Citizens are not criminals. They don't live paranoid lives and take different routes home every day. They don't assume their house is bugged and might smoke a joint in the kitchen once in a while. They do speed, drive aggressively, skip church, play hookey, etc. So it's very easy to catch citizens and demonstrate to the world what a great job our criminal justice apparatus is doing preventing all these petty criminals from growing up into hardened terrorist sympathizers.
Look at the war on drugs for example. Why can't we just catch the 30 or 40 major drug importers and put a stop to the flow of drugs into the country? This stuff isn't coming in to the USA via little pouches inside the intestines of mules, that's small change. The drugs on our streets are coming in via boat, plane and truck. They're coming in by the ton. Stop that traffic and you'd stop 90% of the drug use in the country. So what's the problem? It's too hard to catch these guys because they are getting very good at covering their tracks despite the $BILLIONS of dollars the DEA has to stop them.
Much easier to bust Joe Citizen for wanting to buy some or getting caught with some in his car during a routine papers inpection, a-la traffic stop.
Slashdot Mirror
So how will your auto-responders etc tell the difference between bad guys and good guys?
/dev/nul along with the output of the wget...
<clue>
Simple, the good guys don't send spam to millions of email accounts.
</clue>
This isn't something one person could do. We'd have to organize a project on the scale of spamassassin to get installed on MTAs everywhere so you'd have an instant distributed retro attack to every spam mailing. Imagine that, they start their spam mailing at 0300EST and immediately their webserver starts to smoke. Of course, we'd also want to filter these emails to
Actually, all languages grow and expand through usage. It's only when an agency is successful at controlling it and prohibiting new words and creative adaptations that a languages begins to die. People will say "virii" or "alot" or "email" if that helps them communicate. If you forbid it in one language, they'll say it in another.
It also means that serious bootleg pirateers will be taking guns to the theatre along with their cameras with intentions of not being restrained in the event they are caught.
This sort of law will only catch the ignorant and incompetent. Most of them will be kids, from good homes, with parents who will have to pay the price for allowing their child to think and act independantly without draconian controls on their behavior. Bad parents, I guess.
Never again. Hardware raid all the time :-)
Riiiiight, because that hardware RAID doesn't have any of that untrustworthy software in it. No bugs there. Move along.
Can't wait until we can buy a $15 at-home test for aim-bot gene hacks.
On a more serious note, who cares? Aren't professional sports about accomplishing the most with the genes you have? Some people will have the Arnold gene for muscle mass. It hardly seems fair to tell athletes with it that they'll just have to try harder and still fail.
Or that the Bureau of Engraving and Printing has a large marketing and printing budget that they don't want to give up.
I heard the record for the closest approach of an asteroid was already set billions of years ago.
Yes, I know the one you're thinking of. It got within 6500km of the Earth's center of mass. Actually, I think there have been quite a few that close.
Of course, the best idea will always be not to publish your email address and to guard it like a hawk. I get maybe 5 spam emails per day and that doesn't bother me at all.
Yea, that was me a couple years ago. But my main address got out in the wild and after that, the spam started growing exponentially. I get over a thousand per week now. The methods mutate and the RBLs only block some of them.
Give it time, you'll start pulling your hair out soon enough.
For the record, I put my two phone numbers on the DNC list. I hate telemarketers. I'd vote to have them soaked in flaming vats of lye if such an item appeared on the ballot.
Having said that, I will attempt to relate some marketingesque-speak that I overheard one day while trying to converse with a some people from that department:
According to this misreasoning, if they interrupt your dinner twelve times on the same subject, even though this may span several years, something about their message will stick in your head and you will convert. You will prefer their product. You will subscribe over the phone. You will respond better to the televised propaganda that Gain is better than Tide and might try it out.
I don't know exactly what they are going for, but I'm certain that they think they are after something broader than getting you to buy their product over the phone.
Of course, I've always been baffled by the people selling lightbulbs made by the blind. It's not like I see those in the store. And I'm always wondering what sort of quality control could they have?
Since you're serious, you should put on your thinking cap and figure it out. Assuming this is net worth and these people draw only a few million in cash per year out of their nest egg, here's some ideas to get you started. I'm assuming they actually want to continue working full time at their job rather than take the lottery-winner's fantasy road of never working again:
People with this kind of money still eat, sleep, work, repeat like everyone else. But they use the money to buy some upgrades. When I made $36K per year I had all the same crap that I do now. I did all the same things and thought that if I could double my income I'd be sitting tight and solid for my future. Well guess what, I doubled my income and still have the same crap (but higher quality) or more variety.
I still wish I could double my income to setup for retirement better. Yea, I could go back to living in that rat hole apartment in the bad part of town and drive a crappier car that would be less safe for my children. Then I would have more free cash to setup for retirement, but I don't want to live that way. I earned my way out of that quality of life to this better one. And I can see myself earning my way out of this level up to the next one. And if I had several million per year, I would be spending most of it on quality of life issues and socking away just enough to continue that style of living until I'm dead.
I'm sure we can think of other virii and such that are communicable, that people can take pro-active measures against, and yet still continue to plague society today. These virii are far more insidious than SoBig or other W32 worms. They don't just disrupt productivity and affect markets, they kill people!! So can we also arrange for a fee-schedule for those found carrying these and spreading them to others? I propose a fee-schedule below, you'll note some of the penalties are self-enforcing:
Surely nonesense, because this is a genie that would not go back in the bottle if it was true
A genie known to only a few people is rather easy to put back in the bottle if you act quickly to eliminate or control those people and the evidence. This was the point of the movie "Chain Reaction" and many other conspiracy theories.
It may be harmless for the energy conglomerates to permit and monitor University research into alternative energy science. But you can bet they monitor cold fusion closely and hope to catch it before it becomes as common and end-user accessible as electricity generation is today.
What I find amusing is that as a species, we've always spoken derisively about the explorers and inventors right up until they are proven correct in their conquests. We pshaw'd stars, planets, Round Earth Theory, electricity, flight, 55mph, the speed of sound, Earth Orbit, Fission, Fusion, Black Holes, Strings, Quantum Computers, AI, FTL, Immortality, and probably every other significant accomplishment of human history, past and future.
Yet despite a pretty solid track record of overcoming obstacles, we continue to scoff and ridicule those that pursue the cutting edge sciences hoping to unlock the next great discovery. We already know fusion is possible, given time, hot-fusion will likely iterate through a series of scale-downs and temperature controls to make it virtually indistinguishable from cold-fusion. Who can say today whether someone won't jump technology ahead a few iterations at once?
The next step would be, imagine this, that parents would actually be responsible for their childs actions!!
And this is a good idea how?
This is no different than making game companies responsible for the actions of their customers. I hate to tell you, but parents are guides to their children, not pet-owners. Parents each provide some random DNA and the result is a new lifeform that may behave very differently than either parent.
As a guide, parents can coach, teach, discipline, etc. but at some point the child is going to strike out on their own and act indepentantly regardless of parental consequences or guidance. This point of independance rarely coincides with the age of majority prescribed by your local government.
Making parents legally and financially responsible for a child's actions sounds like a great way to bankrupt entire families for the actions of one bad apple. Do we stop at parents or can we also go after the statistically much wealthier grandparents?
I'd prefer keeping people responsible for their OWN actions and negligence, thank you.
Bottom line here is that you get what you pay for.
No. The bottom line is that after the wasteful spending, cost overruns, not-invented-here episodes, overstaffing, over analyzing, ISO 900x+-triple-ought compliance meetings and multiple committees-on-how-to-proceed... No one wants to pass along the bad news that the real work still isn't getting done.
When things are running efficiently and people are working productively, it's really easy to report bad news about needing more time/money/people/whatnot. It's very easy because you know that any investigation will come to the same conclusions. Nothing to fear, nothing to hide.
But when there's a lot of waste and managers are very afraid of an investigation revealing how much they suck, then there is a strong tendancy to gamble and hope the bad news will never surface.
"You get what you pay for" only applies in a competative market.
Perhaps not all 100 are bad, but if you put out free food, you get not only the song birds and the deer, but racoons, squirrels, rats, wolves and all the undesireables of nature. If we create a safe refuge for those in need, we will get many more who are simply interested in the "free" part.
Do you believe any government can run a program that discerns which are deserving and which are merely lazy? Or would you propose that we should support all comers, the incapable and misfortunate as well as the parasitic and self-destructive?
I would prefer to take such responsibility back from our government and see charity dispensed at the community level. Those who provide the resources are most interested in seeing they are dispensed appropriately and not wasted on the driftwood of society.
This is how it used to be, back when there was a distinction between "the homeless" and the "vagrants" we're supposed to percieve as homeless today.
Politics.
The real problem with so-called deregulated utilities is that they are all a single monopoly from the consumer's point of view.
When your utility fails, you are screwed. Short of getting in your car and driving to where the utility is working, you are at the mercy of the utility . This is not deregulation; this is monopoly.
When your utility hikes the rates, you are screwed. You cannot just flip the switch over to the other utility's lines and start paying less. This is not deregulation; this is monopoly.
For utilities to become truly deregulated, all levels of government need to relinquish their grip on their citizens and allow companies to negotiate contracts directly with you and I. Presently, power, phones, water, sewer, garbage, cable... these utilities are selected by your city or county in a one-size-fits-all contract. The winning company has to follow the government's rules for the courtesy of raking you over the coals. Competition is over once the selection has been made. This is not deregulation...
If you look at what cellphones have done to the telecom industry, you can see how only when consumer choice enters the equation do companies get on the "more for less" bandwagon. Until customers can choose between power company A and power company B from their current home, we're going to have no end of problems brought about by waste, corruption, greed and the lack of customer service or concern you would expect from a monopoly.
All of which... HAS HAPPENED BEFORE!
Even if global warming were to happen at an accelerated pace, we're talking geologic-time here. Hundreds of years at the earliest.
Do you think Humankind is like the dinosaurs and will simply die-off because the plankton go away? Do you envision that we are incapable of modifying our agriculture to adapt? Do you feel that we are at the mercy of our own behavior, but incable of solving the problems that might result?
By definition, if mankind is moving the climate, them mankind can move the climate.
There isn't anything here to worry about. Perhaps we'll need to react to it someday, but for now I'm enjoying the nice summers fully expecting them to fade away in a few more years as the climate swings back to cold again like it was in the 70s. I miss skiing...
I can BET that once those tags are out kids will figure out how to fool them. The simplest thing comes to mind right away.... Because the system tracks TAGS and not KIDS, young ones figure out a good scheme: give the tag to a "keeper" for few classes and then skip school. Once you come back, pick up the tag from the keeper and go home without attending school, all while the parents think their loved one is learning.
Sure and the ruse goes on for weeks and the kid thinks they're soooo smart and have their parents fooled. Then mom gets a call from the principal asking why little-billy hasn't been attending home-economics for the last few weeks and the game is up. Mom does a surprise visit to school to check on billy and finds out that while his TAG is in home-economics, billy is not.
Billy is now soooooo busted and his parents have learned that Billy is not the responsible little boy they thought he was, despite all his assurances. Privileges disappear and Billy has to work his ass off to make up for lost grace with the folks.
Monitoring kids is not about Big Brother or just putting a hammer down on them, it's about monitoring their development into adults. It's about determining if your children are ready for life's next set of challenges, like car keys or extended curfews, or making their own decisions regarding money or friends.
It's not to be confused with Big Brother snooping because it is individually applied, not one size fits all. Most importantly, kids eventually grow up, leave home and can throw off the leash. There is no light at the end of the tunnel with Big Brother spying on us.
I would really like to have this sort of system for my children just so I know where they are. Not, "what are they doing" snooping, but in a, "I haven't seen billy in a while, I wonder if he's okay? Oh, he's on I-5 heading south, better call the police now" way of caring. Our kids blow through their curfew frequently. It would be nice to know whether to head South, North, East or West when we go out looking for them, or whose house to call. I can see this sort of thing actually increasing freedom of movement for children because the act of "reporting in" which they do so poorly, would be automatically taken care of by technology.
And when they circumvent it, you know they're ready for one of those, "importance of trust" talks.
When I first started testing SQL Server using the default install "point, click and go" I was shocked to find that the performance for our application sucked.
A quick lesson in optimization from the local DBA taught me how to tune it to use 80% of the physical RAM, keep log files on separate physical drives (and buss if possible) than the data file. If you can isolate log/data/os, so much the better. So I did that and performance immediately improved 3000% or more. I'm sure there are several other tune-ups I've forgotten and hundreds I never learned.
Even so, IIS throughput for static and ASP apps (pre-.NET) was difficult to get above 200 and 100 concurrent connections respectively several years ago. Performance tuning is all about test, analysis, tinker... unless this guy knows where his bottlenecks are, there's not much anyone can suggest to help.
And if he knows where the bottlenecks are, then he wouldn't be asking this question.
The sad thing is that without analyzing the bottlenecks, people go buy faster CPUs where RAM was needed, or multi-proc systems with 15K RPM drives when moving to GigE would have done three times as much.
Then there is the application itself. What is it trying to do? What can be cached? What is unnecessary? Can lookups be bundled together? I've seen Verity servers dragged down to 1TPS through crazy business requirements and poor development understanding. There is no such thing as a inherently fast platform. And no replacement for careful, analysis-based perforformance testing.
If everyone's DNA was on file it would be hell on crime. The technology is coming where they just run a vacuum all around a crime scene and the computer will match up everyone who shed a skin flake there.
Except perhaps for the criminals who had actually taken precautions to not leave evidence.
With such an accurate means to determine guilt by physical association, police would be left to draw together whatever evidence, no matter how circumstantial, to convict the DNA-owner with the most motive or least solid alibi.
Even today, police regularly screw up investigations and convict the wrong person. Introduce a silver bullet to crime work and careful theives will get off scot-free as some other unlucky (or well chosen) sap gets nailed because DNA doesn't lie.
...Kwikset is suing everyone who bought paperclips and thin blade flathead screwdrivers in the last fifty years.
Realizing that their locks can be circumvented with a modicum of patience and the above mentioned tools, Kiwkset raided sales records at local home and office supply chains to locate citizens who had purchased paperclips and screwdrivers. Citing that no one who purchased the two items in the same month could possibly be up to any good, Kwikset sent out cease and desist letters to approximately 40,000 citizens demanding that they turn over the screwdrivers and paperclips to local authorities.
space travel is beyond current day NASA...
How about, space travel is beyond government??
How do you expect space to be explored by an organization that rewards failure with more money and greets success with disinterest and reduction in funding?
When NASA is going good, the public is ho-hum because the public doesn't get a shot at space when it's controlled by a quasi military, government run organization.
If this were done in the business sector, the motto would always be "faster, cheaper, safer" and tourism would start at $MILLIONS only to fall into the affordable range as they worked the kinks out. Eventually, we'd have $100 per seat price wars for orbital day trips.
Why? Because companies that failed, crashed and burned due to mismanagement, poor engineering, or bureaucratic paralysis would die off opening up more space for those with stronger offerings.
That's why NASA is a non-starter. There is no accountability.
What is this 8 kilobits a second joke? Even if they can compress the video to that extent, I doubt any usable information would be retained. But, since I know that you can compress it that much, how do they plan on getting the data back to their central processing station? The infrastructure isn't there.
You are merely describing problems to be solved. Once the political elite get the funding tap opened, billions of dollars will flow to contractors, agencies, consultants, etc. with the goal of solving these. Speed issues will eventually be addressed by moore's law. Infrastructure merely takes time. I'm sure they won't let their inaccuracies or loose data get in the way of a few public convictions and displays of the systems power/usefulness.
The concern I have is that the political elite seem to be getting the picture: They know it's not easy to catch a theif. Terrorists and drug kingpins know how to avoid the cameras, use "encryption" by not speaking about stuff on the phone, and generally clean up the evidence on themselves. Catching the criminals is a PITA. Where is Osama? Where is Saddam? You'd think we'd have their heads on display by now. But if you watch the various true crime shows, you find that a majority of police work comes down to the lucky break.
Evidence helps convict, but it doesn't catch the criminal.
So what's my point? Glad you asked.
TIA or whatever you want to call it allows the government to start convicting citizens for all the petty crimes they commit. Citizens are not criminals. They don't live paranoid lives and take different routes home every day. They don't assume their house is bugged and might smoke a joint in the kitchen once in a while. They do speed, drive aggressively, skip church, play hookey, etc. So it's very easy to catch citizens and demonstrate to the world what a great job our criminal justice apparatus is doing preventing all these petty criminals from growing up into hardened terrorist sympathizers.
Look at the war on drugs for example. Why can't we just catch the 30 or 40 major drug importers and put a stop to the flow of drugs into the country? This stuff isn't coming in to the USA via little pouches inside the intestines of mules, that's small change. The drugs on our streets are coming in via boat, plane and truck. They're coming in by the ton. Stop that traffic and you'd stop 90% of the drug use in the country. So what's the problem? It's too hard to catch these guys because they are getting very good at covering their tracks despite the $BILLIONS of dollars the DEA has to stop them.
Much easier to bust Joe Citizen for wanting to buy some or getting caught with some in his car during a routine papers inpection, a-la traffic stop.