But I firmly believe that until we approach every program as the "proof of a logical system" we will be burdened by the inexorable piles of poo that is the vast majority of the software written today.
Your software is only as good as your requirements. Even if you approach it as a "proof of a logical system", in general the requirements that we start with are crap(that is, we don't really know what the hell the application is supposed to do) which is which is why the end result ends up as crap.
Nonsense. You can provide a nice, safe, memory access with the right native classes or by modifying the JVM appropriately. Sun turned out a Java OS back in 1998.
Well, I learned to type long ago. I tend towards long, descriptive variable and method names because they cut the amount of time I spend trying to figure out WTF "i" is doing in this loop and I can search for them. This fits in well with the naming conventions in Java and is one of the reasons I like using it. Using an IDE such as Eclipse and method/member name completion speeds me up even faster. I've churned out 40K lines of Java by myself in the last year.
This "Is Java Cool?" stuff is amusing. When I was organizing a startup in 1998, putting the code together in Java was a major draw for engineers as there was a definite coolness factor then. I'm not sure what would have that kind of buzz today.
Depends on how the code was developed. For example, if you own the code (that is, all of the code was developed by you, or the copyrights were assigned to you) you have the option of releasing the code under GPL for people who are happy to use it under GPL (like J. Random Linux-hacker) and you can sell it, under a proprietary license, to people who don't want to release their code but want the functionality you're providing. MySQL is released this way, I believe.
They're throwing money from their (legal) monopoly on OS's and office suites into other markets to attempt to extend their monopoly (illegal). No, I'm not going to give them any kudos. If they would stop trying to put everybody else out of business the computing world would by a lot more fun.
They don't. Modern explosives (I'll include this stuff from WW II in that category), when working according to spec, don't explode unless you use a proper detonator. Staring at them wrong, hitting them with a hammer, etc. will not cause them to explode. However, leave them in a rusty ship for 60 years and you'd better not fart too loudly around them.
You just can't just have anyone wandering about nuclear plants, or onto planes while carrying bombs. Let's not even worry about the legalities, but let's think about the usefulness of your statement.
Nuclear power plants can and should restrict who enters. The list of people allowed in the plant is small and known. The list of people carrying bombs on airplanes is small and unknown. Therefore, checking ID's makes sense to keep people out of nuclear power plants and checking people's bags for bombs makes sense in keeping bombs off of airplanes. Since no one's ID says "I AM CARRYING A BOMB" checking their ID is worthless for the purpose of keeping bombs off but is useful for infringing on civil liberties by preventing people who disagree with the government from traveling, and even people who are part of the government from traveling (Senator Ted Kennedy was recently put on the no-fly list - read about it here.)
If you would care to explain how checking ID's will keep bombs off planes I'm sure it would be very illuminating for all of the readers.
Games need copy protection so developers can get paid to write them. I'm no fan of copy protection, but I am a fan of developers earning enough to feed their family while working on the next big release. I hate disc protection as much as the next guy, but if it's really such hard work to put a disc in your CD drive then maybe you need to lose some weight and take some exercise because you are clearly a lazy bastard.
Guess what - I pay them, not the other way around. If I don't like the copy protection system they want to foist on me, that's my right. I am not required to purchase anything and any game that shows up with this StarForce crap on it will not be on my purchase list.
It's your life to live. Your original post was talking about the difficulty you were having finding a job and I was co-miserating. Especially since by the time that episode occured all the I had left to finish on my degree were G.E.'s which I'm glad I took but have very little impact on my job abilities (unless I go on Jeopardy - I'll take Russian History for $1000, Alex). Tuition was quite a bit lower at the time as well. I was going to UCSD and I think tuition was around $400 a quarter.
At the time (I think this was around 1989) I recall it being worth about $15K-$20K at that company, as, if I recall correctly, I was making somewhere around $40K-$45K and our new hire was at $60K (yes, they did pay well for the time - we had a damn good staff. 15 engineers handled the whole OS and compiler suite (C & vectorizing Fortran) including device drivers).
The next job was funny, as they had a rule at the time against hiring permanent employees since they were trying to sell the division off. So, everyone was being brought onboard as contractors at contracting wages. They knew me fairly well as before the meltdown at the previous company I had been porting their software to our box. I had just been over the week before raking them over the coals about all the bugs I'd found, so that wound up being my job interview. I'd heard through the grapevine that they were interested in hiring me, so when things went south I called them up. They huddled on their end, called me back, said yes and then when we started talking salary they said "Well, as we had discussed earlier, we wanted to offer you $45 an hour" (mind you, this is 1991). Strangely, we had not discussed salary before, of course I took it because it was a huge increase over what I was making. To this day, I think that they mixed me up with a buddy of mine who was being hired at the same time. He's a bit older and had more experience programming in general. He and I had been working at the previous company together and I had wound up teaching him a fair bit about Unix there, so I think it all worked out.
Then, when the division was finally acquired the new company wanted to swap all of us from contractors to being real employees and we all inisisted on salaries that were pretty close to our contracting wage (the HR meetings were funny: them - "We want to cut your wages in half." me - "What's in it for me?" them - "Well, you'll get benefits" me - "Um, yah, I'm buying health insurance for $150 a month, let's see, oh,that's a great deal, huh?"
Salaries are pretty random and based, more than anything, on what you were supposedly making at you last job. During the dot com boom things got ridiculous and there was a lot of salary compression as junior engineers started making in the $80K's but we just couldn't afford to push senior engineers up an equivalent amount. I think the end result has been a lot of junior engineers who used to make $80K and would probably have been happy making $50K but can't go down, wind up working at Starbucks making $15K and their job goes to India.
When I was in college I started working as an intern at a local computer manufacturer (this was in the mid-80's when there actually were many real manufacturers). They made a Unix based system, soup-to-nuts (that is, we had our own processor architecture, compilers, and version of BSD Unix). It was basically incredible OJT and I learned fast and before long they had started throwing real projects at me. At one point they asked me to drop out and go to work for them full-time. Things were going on in my life that required more cash than a part-time job would give me, but I figured that finishing my degree wasn't a bad thing, so I cut a deal where I would go full-time working and become a part-time student.
Shortly afterwards they hired a recent college grad. She was a pretty sharp gal, no doubt about it, but I would say we were pretty much on the same level and I had more experience than her. We got to be good friends and one day the question of salary came up and I discovered that she was making substantially more than I was. I went to my boss and said, "WTF?!" The answer - "You don't have a degree."
I was glad that I hadn't stopped out, stayed in school and got my degree. About the time I graduated the company went thru a near-death experience, everyone was laid off for about two weeks and I found a new job paying twice as much as I had been making. (After two weeks the company was resurrected and everyone went back to work except for Y.T and one other person)
I don't bear any animosity towards them for not paying me less for not having a degree, but I am still a little peeved that they tried to get me to drop out of school. Every time I've gone looking for a new job (or venture capital:-) ) since then, I'm glad that I finished my degree since I don't have to start interviews with a song and dance about why I didn't get my degree. Instead, when we talk about education, I say "Yup, been there, done that, let's talk about something more interesting".
Well, when you look at it, it is about the cost of a small corporate jet, appropriately scaled. Don't forget that that $20 million paid for the development costs, not just building White Knight & SS1.
I think for us to get to the homebuilt stage of personal space craft we're going to need a lot of ready off-the-shelf technology not to mention a LOT of people who have experience building these things to give good advice. Considering that most homebuilts are not even pressurized this may take a while.
On the bright side, a Gulfstream V (used) is running around $34 million dollars. There's not too many people who can afford that, but there are a few. I'd venture that a SS1/White Knight redux could be had for $10-$15 million. Also, I think that Rutan will have a ready market for joy rides in the $10K a seat range.
I want something I can get to orbit (at least) in AND someplace to go in orbit. Might have that in 10 years if we're lucky.
Well, it is a matter of pocket change for whom. The $20 million put into SS1 wouldn't even get a feasibilty study finished for NASA.
I'd say what the various competitors have managed to pull together has been absolutely amazing. Especially considering that most of them are fabricating the whole vehicle themselves. When Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic, the plane he used had been built to his specs by an established aircraft manufacturer.
I'm just hoping that things won't sputter out after the X-Prize is finished. It's been 25 years since we landed a man on the moon. We were supposed to be visiting rotating space stations in Pan Am rocket planes 3 years ago!
It's a shame that no one else is in a serious position to compete (though Ansari claims they are) but it's pretty cool that Scaled is there. The prize was going to expire this year, so if they hadn't entered the running it wouldn't even be claimed.
Yah, but this stuff would be attached to buildings in a city mostly. I think the windows on the average skyscraper last more than 5 years without somebody throwing a rock through them (or even a jet plane)
Good point - however, most countries do not produce all of their energy with fossil fuels. Japan's electricity production is about 30% nuclear (the U.S. is running about 20%). Also, with something like this, you have to look at the marginal energy budget. Many buildings are already faced with glass which is an energy intensive material to make. The additional energy input needed to make these generate power is what needs to be compared against their output, not the total power to make the panels.
Just because you've convinced a 13 year old to have sex with you doesn't mean it's not abuse. 13 year olds are below the age of consent and cannot legally consent to sex.
You're misreading the study. They didn't say it wasn't abuse, they said that the kids went willingly. You can convince 13 year olds to do a lot of dumb things. We make a distinction between adults and minors because at 13 you often make REALLY STUPID DECISIONS (not that people don't make really stupid decisions at later ages but, in general, fewer people make really stupid decisions when older). This is why we call "convincing a 13 year old to have sex with me" STATUTORY RAPE and put people in prison for it.
I think it's great that the Navy is funding this. Now, where are the wire tap hooks? I always enjoy the way the government exempts itself from its own rules.
It's not everywhere yet. Been on an airplane lately? Been arrested for chewing on the subway? Welcome to anarcho-tyranny.
Violent crime is down - is that due to sweeping increases in police powers and curtailment of civil liberties or is it because of either (a) common sense policing or (b) demographic trends (young men commit most crimes - the number of young men is decreasing)?
It will depend on just how far reaching they expect these powers to be. Wiretapping is an accident of the original phone system. It wasn't designed to be tappable but due to its basic design it was. As we move away from the old circuit switched, centralized architecture, and start to add things like encryption, tapping no longer "falls out" from the design but instead has to be designed in.
Prior to the 1994 CALEA act there was no technological requirement for wire tapping. If a law enforcement agent showed up with a warrant, the phone company would help them set up a tap. However, there was no requirement that the technology being used by the provider support tapping. It just happened to.
VOIP, running on a packet switched network, doesn't automatically support wire tapping. The VOIP "carriers" only "carry" those calls that terminate to one of their points-of-presence connecting to the regular phone network. For calls which are VOIP end-to-end, they only see the setup but the actual data never touches anything they own. So, what are you going to mandate support the tapping? It's can't really be the network because there is no VOIP network. So, tapping is going to have to involve the end point hardware or software.
Now, the next question is: what is VOIP? If I write software that sends voice over the Internet is that now VOIP and do I have to include provisions for the government to listen in? What happens if I don't?
So, are we "increasing police powers?" My original comment was in response to a typical "anything the police want to do to protect us against terrorism is good" post. You raise the larger question of is it ok to extend existing powers.
I think that as long as it is a question of requiring access rather than trying to mandate technology I'm willing to listen to the arguments. However, I think that trying to mandate technology is a disaster and will lead to additional encroachments on a lot of basic rights. To sum up with a simple minded analogy - the police can get a warrant to search my premises. They can even get a warrant that allows them to search it secretly. Why should't we mandate that all locks be openable by a government master key?
It's been quoted to death, but you deserve to hear it again.
Benjamin Franklin: They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security
I would say that the "forces of security" are pretty much running free in Iraq. I'm sure they have no problems tapping whatever phone they like, surveilling who they please and Abu Ghraib showed that some use of torture was being done. This is not a state I would care to live in and neither would you in all likelihood.
However, this is not enough to stop domestic terrorism there, is it? People are still getting their heads chopped off on a regular basis. Hussein ran the place like a prison camp and was able to keep order. We've set up a wishy-washy police state and that doesn't work.
Increasing police powers in a mostly free state tends to lead to what Jerry Pournelle has taken to calling "Anarcho-tyranny". What is Anarcho-Tyranny? Well, basically the police have the power and the right to make any ordinary, law abiding citizen's life hell (witness the number of run-ins with the TSA of late) but not enough power or will to stomp down hard enough to eliminate terrorism, crime, etc. The police apparatus increasingly spends its time enforcing draconian and silly rules (don't take any pictures of that bridge son - http://www.brownequalsterrorist.com/artiststatemen t/) while failing in actually stopping real crime and terrorism.
The police have more than enough resources and powers to fight terrorism. The lead up to 9/11 did not involve a valiant group of law enforcement agents fighting against evil, ACLU controlled judges putting legal barriers in their way. No, it involved interdepartmental politics, head office vs branch office nonsense, head in the sand denial and would not have been prevented with more wire-tapping.
He knows an interesting set of people, considering that C didn't come up once. Is Linus Torvalds a great hacker? Apparently not because if he was he would have coded the kernel in Perl!!
Shared wireless bandwidth doesn't sound that appealing. I just upgraded my home DSL service here in Tokyo to 24Mbps (over copper). Yahoo BB is offering 45Mbps over copper. And, you can get fiber at 100Mbps (http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/en/tepco.html) from TEPCO (the electrical utility).
I suspect that one of the reasons this is available here is the incredible density you find in Tokyo. I'm about 3 blocks away from the local CO. Rural areas probably are not getting these speeds
Of course, the key question is what's upstream from you - right now I'm only pulling down 800Kbps across several BitTorrent downloads so your mileage will definitely vary.
In other words, hardware compatibility is a non-issue in making software which will last and which will remain useful. Well, that's assuming that you never need to make a change to the software. If you haven't got all of the tools AND expertise to use the tools you're going to have big trouble when you need to modify it.
I wonder if that particular program had any Y2K dependencies and if so, what they did to fix them.
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Well, it sounds like what AT&T is trying to do is come up with products and services that make it alluring for you.
But I firmly believe that until we approach every program as the "proof of a logical system" we will be burdened by the inexorable piles of poo that is the vast majority of the software written today.
Your software is only as good as your requirements. Even if you approach it as a "proof of a logical system", in general the requirements that we start with are crap(that is, we don't really know what the hell the application is supposed to do) which is which is why the end result ends up as crap.
Nonsense. You can provide a nice, safe, memory access with the right native classes or by modifying the JVM appropriately. Sun turned out a Java OS back in 1998.
Well, I learned to type long ago. I tend towards long, descriptive variable and method names because they cut the amount of time I spend trying to figure out WTF "i" is doing in this loop and I can search for them. This fits in well with the naming conventions in Java and is one of the reasons I like using it. Using an IDE such as Eclipse and method/member name completion speeds me up even faster. I've churned out 40K lines of Java by myself in the last year.
This "Is Java Cool?" stuff is amusing. When I was organizing a startup in 1998, putting the code together in Java was a major draw for engineers as there was a definite coolness factor then. I'm not sure what would have that kind of buzz today.
Depends on how the code was developed. For example, if you own the code (that is, all of the code was developed by you, or the copyrights were assigned to you) you have the option of releasing the code under GPL for people who are happy to use it under GPL (like J. Random Linux-hacker) and you can sell it, under a proprietary license, to people who don't want to release their code but want the functionality you're providing. MySQL is released this way, I believe.
They're throwing money from their (legal) monopoly on OS's and office suites into other markets to attempt to extend their monopoly (illegal). No, I'm not going to give them any kudos. If they would stop trying to put everybody else out of business the computing world would by a lot more fun.
They don't. Modern explosives (I'll include this stuff from WW II in that category), when working according to spec, don't explode unless you use a proper detonator. Staring at them wrong, hitting them with a hammer, etc. will not cause them to explode. However, leave them in a rusty ship for 60 years and you'd better not fart too loudly around them.
And he looks like a monkey too!
You just can't just have anyone wandering about nuclear plants, or onto planes while carrying bombs.
Let's not even worry about the legalities, but let's think about the usefulness of your statement.
Nuclear power plants can and should restrict who enters. The list of people allowed in the plant is small and known. The list of people carrying bombs on airplanes is small and unknown. Therefore, checking ID's makes sense to keep people out of nuclear power plants and checking people's bags for bombs makes sense in keeping bombs off of airplanes. Since no one's ID says "I AM CARRYING A BOMB" checking their ID is worthless for the purpose of keeping bombs off but is useful for infringing on civil liberties by preventing people who disagree with the government from traveling, and even people who are part of the government from traveling (Senator Ted Kennedy was recently put on the no-fly list - read about it here.)
If you would care to explain how checking ID's will keep bombs off planes I'm sure it would be very illuminating for all of the readers.
Games need copy protection so developers can get paid to write them. I'm no fan of copy protection, but I am a fan of developers earning enough to feed their family while working on the next big release. I hate disc protection as much as the next guy, but if it's really such hard work to put a disc in your CD drive then maybe you need to lose some weight and take some exercise because you are clearly a lazy bastard.
Guess what - I pay them, not the other way around. If I don't like the copy protection system they want to foist on me, that's my right. I am not required to purchase anything and any game that shows up with this StarForce crap on it will not be on my purchase list.
It's your life to live. Your original post was talking about the difficulty you were having finding a job and I was co-miserating. Especially since by the time that episode occured all the I had left to finish on my degree were G.E.'s which I'm glad I took but have very little impact on my job abilities (unless I go on Jeopardy - I'll take Russian History for $1000, Alex). Tuition was quite a bit lower at the time as well. I was going to UCSD and I think tuition was around $400 a quarter.
,that's a great deal, huh?"
At the time (I think this was around 1989) I recall it being worth about $15K-$20K at that company, as, if I recall correctly, I was making somewhere around $40K-$45K and our new hire was at $60K (yes, they did pay well for the time - we had a damn good staff. 15 engineers handled the whole OS and compiler suite (C & vectorizing Fortran) including device drivers).
The next job was funny, as they had a rule at the time against hiring permanent employees since they were trying to sell the division off. So, everyone was being brought onboard as contractors at contracting wages. They knew me fairly well as before the meltdown at the previous company I had been porting their software to our box. I had just been over the week before raking them over the coals about all the bugs I'd found, so that wound up being my job interview. I'd heard through the grapevine that they were interested in hiring me, so when things went south I called them up. They huddled on their end, called me back, said yes and then when we started talking salary they said "Well, as we had discussed earlier, we wanted to offer you $45 an hour" (mind you, this is 1991). Strangely, we had not discussed salary before, of course I took it because it was a huge increase over what I was making. To this day, I think that they mixed me up with a buddy of mine who was being hired at the same time. He's a bit older and had more experience programming in general. He and I had been working at the previous company together and I had wound up teaching him a fair bit about Unix there, so I think it all worked out.
Then, when the division was finally acquired the new company wanted to swap all of us from contractors to being real employees and we all inisisted on salaries that were pretty close to our contracting wage (the HR meetings were funny: them - "We want to cut your wages in half." me - "What's in it for me?" them - "Well, you'll get benefits" me - "Um, yah, I'm buying health insurance for $150 a month, let's see, oh
Salaries are pretty random and based, more than anything, on what you were supposedly making at you last job. During the dot com boom things got ridiculous and there was a lot of salary compression as junior engineers started making in the $80K's but we just couldn't afford to push senior engineers up an equivalent amount. I think the end result has been a lot of junior engineers who used to make $80K and would probably have been happy making $50K but can't go down, wind up working at Starbucks making $15K and their job goes to India.
When I was in college I started working as an intern at a local computer manufacturer (this was in the mid-80's when there actually were many real manufacturers). They made a Unix based system, soup-to-nuts (that is, we had our own processor architecture, compilers, and version of BSD Unix). It was basically incredible OJT and I learned fast and before long they had started throwing real projects at me. At one point they asked me to drop out and go to work for them full-time. Things were going on in my life that required more cash than a part-time job would give me, but I figured that finishing my degree wasn't a bad thing, so I cut a deal where I would go full-time working and become a part-time student.
:-) ) since then, I'm glad that I finished my degree since I don't have to start interviews with a song and dance about why I didn't get my degree. Instead, when we talk about education, I say "Yup, been there, done that, let's talk about something more interesting".
Shortly afterwards they hired a recent college grad. She was a pretty sharp gal, no doubt about it, but I would say we were pretty much on the same level and I had more experience than her. We got to be good friends and one day the question of salary came up and I discovered that she was making substantially more than I was. I went to my boss and said, "WTF?!" The answer - "You don't have a degree."
I was glad that I hadn't stopped out, stayed in school and got my degree. About the time I graduated the company went thru a near-death experience, everyone was laid off for about two weeks and I found a new job paying twice as much as I had been making. (After two weeks the company was resurrected and everyone went back to work except for Y.T and one other person)
I don't bear any animosity towards them for not paying me less for not having a degree, but I am still a little peeved that they tried to get me to drop out of school. Every time I've gone looking for a new job (or venture capital
Well, when you look at it, it is about the cost of a small corporate jet, appropriately scaled. Don't forget that that $20 million paid for the development costs, not just building White Knight & SS1.
I think for us to get to the homebuilt stage of personal space craft we're going to need a lot of ready off-the-shelf technology not to mention a LOT of people who have experience building these things to give good advice. Considering that most homebuilts are not even pressurized this may take a while.
On the bright side, a Gulfstream V (used) is running around $34 million dollars. There's not too many people who can afford that, but there are a few. I'd venture that a SS1/White Knight redux could be had for $10-$15 million. Also, I think that Rutan will have a ready market for joy rides in the $10K a seat range.
I want something I can get to orbit (at least) in AND someplace to go in orbit. Might have that in 10 years if we're lucky.
Well, it is a matter of pocket change for whom. The $20 million put into SS1 wouldn't even get a feasibilty study finished for NASA.
I'd say what the various competitors have managed to pull together has been absolutely amazing. Especially considering that most of them are fabricating the whole vehicle themselves. When Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic, the plane he used had been built to his specs by an established aircraft manufacturer.
I'm just hoping that things won't sputter out after the X-Prize is finished. It's been 25 years since we landed a man on the moon. We were supposed to be visiting rotating space stations in Pan Am rocket planes 3 years ago!
It's a shame that no one else is in a serious position to compete (though Ansari claims they are) but it's pretty cool that Scaled is there. The prize was going to expire this year, so if they hadn't entered the running it wouldn't even be claimed.
Yah, but this stuff would be attached to buildings in a city mostly. I think the windows on the average skyscraper last more than 5 years without somebody throwing a rock through them (or even a jet plane)
Good point - however, most countries do not produce all of their energy with fossil fuels. Japan's electricity production is about 30% nuclear (the U.S. is running about 20%). Also, with something like this, you have to look at the marginal energy budget. Many buildings are already faced with glass which is an energy intensive material to make. The additional energy input needed to make these generate power is what needs to be compared against their output, not the total power to make the panels.
Just because you've convinced a 13 year old to have sex with you doesn't mean it's not abuse. 13 year olds are below the age of consent and cannot legally consent to sex.
You're misreading the study. They didn't say it wasn't abuse, they said that the kids went willingly. You can convince 13 year olds to do a lot of dumb things. We make a distinction between adults and minors because at 13 you often make REALLY STUPID DECISIONS (not that people don't make really stupid decisions at later ages but, in general, fewer people make really stupid decisions when older). This is why we call "convincing a 13 year old to have sex with me" STATUTORY RAPE and put people in prison for it.
I think it's great that the Navy is funding this. Now, where are the wire tap hooks? I always enjoy the way the government exempts itself from its own rules.
It's not everywhere yet. Been on an airplane lately? Been arrested for chewing on the subway? Welcome to anarcho-tyranny.
Violent crime is down - is that due to sweeping increases in police powers and curtailment of civil liberties or is it because of either (a) common sense policing or (b) demographic trends (young men commit most crimes - the number of young men is decreasing)?
It will depend on just how far reaching they expect these powers to be. Wiretapping is an accident of the original phone system. It wasn't designed to be tappable but due to its basic design it was. As we move away from the old circuit switched, centralized architecture, and start to add things like encryption, tapping no longer "falls out" from the design but instead has to be designed in.
Prior to the 1994 CALEA act there was no technological requirement for wire tapping. If a law enforcement agent showed up with a warrant, the phone company would help them set up a tap. However, there was no requirement that the technology being used by the provider support tapping. It just happened to.
VOIP, running on a packet switched network, doesn't automatically support wire tapping. The VOIP "carriers" only "carry" those calls that terminate to one of their points-of-presence connecting to the regular phone network. For calls which are VOIP end-to-end, they only see the setup but the actual data never touches anything they own. So, what are you going to mandate support the tapping? It's can't really be the network because there is no VOIP network. So, tapping is going to have to involve the end point hardware or software.
Now, the next question is: what is VOIP? If I write software that sends voice over the Internet is that now VOIP and do I have to include provisions for the government to listen in? What happens if I don't?
So, are we "increasing police powers?" My original comment was in response to a typical "anything the police want to do to protect us against terrorism is good" post. You raise the larger question of is it ok to extend existing powers.
I think that as long as it is a question of requiring access rather than trying to mandate technology I'm willing to listen to the arguments. However, I think that trying to mandate technology is a disaster and will lead to additional encroachments on a lot of basic rights. To sum up with a simple minded analogy - the police can get a warrant to search my premises. They can even get a warrant that allows them to search it secretly. Why should't we mandate that all locks be openable by a government master key?
It's been quoted to death, but you deserve to hear it again.
n t/) while failing in actually stopping real crime and terrorism.
Benjamin Franklin: They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security
I would say that the "forces of security" are pretty much running free in Iraq. I'm sure they have no problems tapping whatever phone they like, surveilling who they please and Abu Ghraib showed that some use of torture was being done. This is not a state I would care to live in and neither would you in all likelihood.
However, this is not enough to stop domestic terrorism there, is it? People are still getting their heads chopped off on a regular basis. Hussein ran the place like a prison camp and was able to keep order. We've set up a wishy-washy police state and that doesn't work.
Increasing police powers in a mostly free state tends to lead to what Jerry Pournelle has taken to calling "Anarcho-tyranny". What is Anarcho-Tyranny? Well, basically the police have the power and the right to make any ordinary, law abiding citizen's life hell (witness the number of run-ins with the TSA of late) but not enough power or will to stomp down hard enough to eliminate terrorism, crime, etc. The police apparatus increasingly spends its time enforcing draconian and silly rules (don't take any pictures of that bridge son - http://www.brownequalsterrorist.com/artiststateme
The police have more than enough resources and powers to fight terrorism. The lead up to 9/11 did not involve a valiant group of law enforcement agents fighting against evil, ACLU controlled judges putting legal barriers in their way. No, it involved interdepartmental politics, head office vs branch office nonsense, head in the sand denial and would not have been prevented with more wire-tapping.
He knows an interesting set of people, considering that C didn't come up once. Is Linus Torvalds a great hacker? Apparently not because if he was he would have coded the kernel in Perl!!
Shared wireless bandwidth doesn't sound that appealing. I just upgraded my home DSL service here in Tokyo to 24Mbps (over copper). Yahoo BB is offering 45Mbps over copper. And, you can get fiber at 100Mbps (http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/en/tepco.html) from TEPCO (the electrical utility).
I suspect that one of the reasons this is available here is the incredible density you find in Tokyo. I'm about 3 blocks away from the local CO. Rural areas probably are not getting these speeds
Of course, the key question is what's upstream from you - right now I'm only pulling down 800Kbps across several BitTorrent downloads so your mileage will definitely vary.
In other words, hardware compatibility is a non-issue in making software which will last and which will remain useful.
Well, that's assuming that you never need to make a change to the software. If you haven't got all of the tools AND expertise to use the tools you're going to have big trouble when you need to modify it.
I wonder if that particular program had any Y2K dependencies and if so, what they did to fix them.