Send the compressed information via a temporary, read-only link to the Web-Connected system. Read-Only can be sneakernet with magnetic tape for the paranoid or an Ethernet cable with the Rx portion cut for the slightly less paranoid (yes you'd need custom software)
"Custom software"? More like a custom protocol stack! IP simply cannot work without both send and receive capability; without ARP, it wouldn't be able to even figure out the hardware address of an intended recipient. Is this data critical? You can forget about Quality of Service; TCP requires ACK packets to come back for every data packet sent. The only thing the receiving end can do is drop the data if the CRC doesn't check out... but there's no way of informing the sender of the need to retransmit!
Having a Tx-only setup is not feasible for any transmission of important data.
Remember... encryption is the backbone of network security.
A bit of a history lesson for you. Back in the day, the 7-tier OSI network model was formed. The gov't ordered all systems to use it, thinking that it would stear the private sector to do the same. Well, the private sector saw the 7 layers as a bunch of idealistic nonsense, and went for the practical physical->ip->tcp->app model instead. The gov't eventually wound up reversing their original order.
'IMAP stands for Internet Message Access Protocol. It is a method of accessing electronic mail or bulletin board messages that are kept on a (possibly shared) mail server. In other words, it permits a "client" email program to access remote message stores as if they were local.'
www.imap.org
Re:Not willing to go to jail to prove a point?
on
DMCA 2, Freedom 0
·
· Score: 2
"I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its unjustice is in reality expressing the highest respect for law."
- Martin Luther King, Jr., "Letter from a Birmingham Jail"
So the problem here is, ISP's are overscheduling their resources without much regard to technological innovations. Banks have long overspent your money; the government mandates a minimum reserve that banks have to keep in cash as a proportion to the amount of money they have on the books. If everyone were to walk into your bank and demand all their funds at once, the bank would go belly-up, since the majority of your money is in the hands of other people in the form of loans and investments.
Telecommunications companies have always been doing this. Do you live in a college dorm? Get everyone on your floor to pick up the phone at the same time and watch the system go south. They statistically determine the probability of a certain amount of resources being used at any given time, and they build the minimum infrastructure necessary to meet their predictions.
The problem with most ISP's is, they don't hire enough statisticians.
Planes stay in the air, bridges don't fall down, the water is safe to drink... I would think that there is a definite need for accredited software engineers for software systems that would pose a hazard to life or limb by their failure.
Planes stay in the air and bridges don't fall down, not because the engineers who built them were "accredited," but because if that were to happen, the engineering firm that built the plane or the bridge would be in breach of contract and would be sued into oblivion.
The role of government in a free market society is to enforce legally binding contracts, not to make a straw-horse licensing scheme to make us all feel warm and fuzzy about the people who manage our water and build our bridges. Believe me, if engineers were held accountable directly to the people for the quality of service they provided, they would provide a good service not for some sense of responsibility to the people around them, but because they would want to save their own hides. Let's use the strongest motives in the best possible way.
"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages."
That could then mean that licenses could be required to practice software development and that this could to regulation and other legal ramifications.
No, no, no, no, NO, NO, NO!!! Keep the government AWAY from it all, for pity's sake! We don't want legislation to dictate who can and cannot write software. In my county, my wife and I are not allowed to cut each others' hair in the privacy of our own home. Because beauticians got together some time ago and petitioned the government to make it illegal to cut hair without a "license." To get a license, you have to go to a qualified beauty school and then spend so many hours cutting hair in professional, and authorized, salons.
Of course, they then artificially limit the number of beauty schools that they allow to train for such licenses. The same thing happened in the medical profession. This sort of thing is routinely done by factional groups to pressure the government to create a stranglehold on the market, reducing supply and thus letting them charge more for their services.
In the long run, it only winds up hurting us all by driving the price up while not increasing the quality of the services we receive. Do you really think that having an "official license" makes doctors better than they would be otherwise? Are "certified" Microsoft Engineers any more qualified to work with Microsoft products than the rest of us?
Bad and good beauticians and doctors can be singled out by this little phenomenon called reputation. We don't need a piece of "official" government legislation to be mandated on all who want to enter the market in some lame attempt to make things better than they would be without the artificial intervention (do a search for "Adam Smith and invisible hand").
Let anyone who wants to write software professionally, whether or not they have a degree, license, or whatever, and let the buyer beware. Let each entity build a reputation, and the market will pick the best man for the job.
Now, I'm not blaming the sorters (completely). They are payed minimum wage to do a horribly boring job. I do blame FooBar Inc for not paying these people right or not doing more checks to see how things are running.
You're still blaming the wrong person. It's we (the consumers) who are to blame. We're at fault because we want cheap shipping at the cost of an occasional blunder. We just prefer to take our chances and hope it's not our package that gets ravashed. Maybe we don't fully understand what the risks are taking, and then when our luck runs out, we whine and complain. If UPS is such an aweful shipping company, why are they still in business?
Beware of Cheap Firewire Drives
on
Firewire and Linux?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I have a friend who is a videographer. He purchased two different cheap firewire drives from two different vendors. Both of them failed within a month... not a physical failure of the drive, but a logical failure (MacOS couldn't mount the drives any more, but just offered to initialize the drives). He lost many hours of work from some clips he was working on. Upon his request, I have since cracked open both drives, removed the EIDE drives, and installed them in his box as internal units.
These agencies, these super-governments (for lack of a better term) don't answer to people, they answer to governments. This removes the person further from the government imposing laws on him or her.
And the problem is? The people will throw out the Constitution in a heartbeat, if the winds of popular political opinion so blow in that direction. When individuals are given too much direct authority in a government, then the government becomes very short-sighted (example: increase government size to compensate for a recession). We need a few (read: a few) layers in-between the people and the legislatures to preserve some notion of political virtue.
As I take a careful look at this new community being formed, what I see forming is a globalized, fluid, largely anonymous culture. Then I look at my local neighborhood and my city. I see people who know each other by their faces and their first names. There is a feeling of trust among everyone here. Joe, who runs an electronics shop down the street, knows that Renee is not going to try to take advantage of him or steal from him. First of all, she has a sense of responsibility toward Joe as one of her neighbors. Second, there are several rings of authority around her that keep her from wanting to do something wrong. If she gets caught shoplifting, what the government will do to her is the last thing on her mind. She will first feel responsible toward her parents and her close friends and relatives. She will then worry about what the people she goes to church with every Sunday will think of her. She would be concerned about her employer finding out "through the grapevine" that she shoplifted.
This sense of community helps foster individual restraint in the face of self-interest. While everyone would like to take everything they can get their hands on, they have a sharp sense of responsibility toward those around them... and many feel such a responsibility towards God. In economic terms, this keep the "transaction cost" down.
On the Internet, this community is virtually nonexistent. People can distance themselves from the world around them and become immersed in a sea of IP addresses. For some, a sense of responsibility leaves also, and they take the opportunity to take advantage of nameless, faceless people around the world. They don't know these people, and so their natural human inclination to deal virtuously with these people declines. And for many, the only potential repurcusion of their actions would be from the law (the government is a weak authority figure in the minds of the people... and I think that the government should be the *last* entity we should be worried about when we do something wrong!)
The result? Again, in economic terms, transaction costs go up. Without trust in the virtue of those around us, we need to hire middlemen to keep us all in line. PayPal finds itself in such a situation... so don't be surprised when you find PayPal's service substandard (and more costly) to that of your local community bank.
College math professors used to shrug at the prospect of students bringing calculators into exams. They have an attitude of, "If you don't know the material, your calculator won't help you on my exams."
I showed one of my professors the Computer Algebra System on my HP49g earlier this semester. Not only did it symbolically solve an integral that would have otherwise required a mastery of integration by parts to solve on paper, but it also showed all the intermediate steps that could be copied down on paper. It caused him a small paradigm shift.
In a day and age where handheld PC's can have wireless network cards, one has to wonder how accepting university professors are going to be of these new technologies. All you need is a page scanner to feed the book through and a PDF reader in the handheld, and a student could potentially have access to the entire text for the class while taking the test with his "calculator."
... after chasing thru voicemail who when told I had a Linux system told me that she could not EVER fix my problem.
I make it a habit to keep around at least one old system with Windows in these kinds of cases. When the network goes down, tech support drones will typically run you through a script before they are convinced that it's their fault. It's easier and faster to just play along with them rather than argue with them or confuse/frighten them.
You have to realize that there is a phyche that one must work with when calling tech support folks, and the sooner you figure out how to play their game, the better results you will get.
About a year ago, I was curious about this whole Napster thing. At the computer lab, I installed Napster on my account. About a month later, I tried to log in, and was denied access. When I talked to the sysadmin the next day, he told me that my account was disabled because they scanned all the user directories and disabled all accounts that had files named "Napster." I guess I won't install Napster (or other similar programs) anymore. Or write any reports on P2P applications and call them "Napster.rtf."
I suppose scanning people's home directories and disabling people's accounts who install software might work just as well...
The computer lab in the main library at my school has a group of 10 Mac's in the back of the room. About 6 months ago, something broke on the network and the Mac's stopped printing. There is still a sign tacked on the wall that says that people who use the Mac's can't print. This shows that apathy that the lab admins have toward the Mac systems.
About half the time, there is a line of people who would rather wait 20 minutes to get on a PC rather than walk to the back of the room and get on one of the unused Mac systems (it was like this before the printing broke too). This is evidence of the fear that the students have toward the Mac systems. Hey, I don't mind... it just means that I never have to wait; I never have to print anyway (I submit all the work for my Comp. Eng. classes online).
This violates one of the 5 essential characteristic of any governmental legislation: that of prospectivity. If this were to be the case, we would no longer live in a country where Rule by Law prevailed, but rather in a tyrannical state where we are ruled by Will. Let us pray this never happens.
I find it disturbing that the government is increasingly trying to step in and do what private entities can do much better (and cheaper for that matter). If there is a public demand for voluntary ID cards, why hasn't some corporation stepped in and started offering them?
Is Visa or Mastercard a government institution? No! But there was a public demand for their services, they recognized this demand, so they supplied the credit card system, which is now distributed and used internationally. Imagine how the credit card system would be if the government funded it.
So, Oracle: I suggest you just offer the service, and leave the government out of it. If people want a reliable, efficient, and effective national ID card based on your product, get together with some other database companies, establish a standard, and start competing!
Wonderful idea! Except for the 1500-meter limit on 10-BASET Ethernet... the minimum packet size for Ethernet must be long enough to guarantee that a collision would occur while the source is still transmitting. The minimum packet size for 10Mbps communications was set such that the signal can travel at most 1500 meters before the source stopped transmitting. If the source detects a transmitted signal from the other end *after* it is done with its transmission, it assumes that there was no collision. And this is how we lose packets.
For such a long distance, you would have to use some other protocol that guarantees no packet collisions.
Amen. We have to understand that the founding fathers of our nation understood the dangers of a pure democracry. With such a form of government, the ruling majority can actually take on characteristics of a tyrannical "rule of will." Or, in other words, "Tyranny by Majority." There is a reason that elected officials have terms of tenure. Members of the Senate are elected every 6 years, and so they can sit back and carefully consider issues in a virtuous manner without being overly influenced by every whim of the public opinion of the day. Thus members of the Senate give a more virtual representation of the pople.
The House of Representatives carries with it 2 years between elections, which puts the other part of our bi-cameral system closer to the public; they give more of an attorneyship representation of the people. It turns out that this system of checks and balances works exceptionally well in creating legislation that keeps us somewhere between tyranny and anarchy.
I for one vote to uphold the Constitution and keep the U.S. a republic.
My friend has a pair of the 45GB 75XPs, and at least one of them has "issues". Every so often (now that the drive is full) the kernel will spit out: ad4s1g: hard error reading fsbn 76293856 of 26874736-26874751 (ad4s1 bn 76293856; cn 8073 tn 63 sn 37) followed by: ad4: DMA problem fallback to PIO mode
I second that. I have this exact same drive, and I started getting similar I/O errors just a couple of days ago. I reformatted the partition and put ReiserFS on there, and it seems to now have any problems now, but I'm considering getting a couple more Maxtor drives and setting up a RAID-5, just in case...
MandrakeSoft is proud to announce Mandrake Linux 8.1 as the newest alternative to Microsoft Windows and Macintosh operating systems.
Wow. It's hard to find two operating systems as different as MacOS (pre-X, like the versions that videographers would use) and Linux. Pushing Mandrake as a "alternative to Microsoft Windows" or "Macinstosh" may be a little premature at this stage.
I think it would be more accurate to call Mandrake an alternative to RedHat, Debian, SuSE, etc. But not MacOS or Windows. Not until I can install fonts by simply copying them into a directory. Not until my TV-out works on my Matrox g450. Not until my wife can open up the PowerPoint files that her professor has on the class web site.
When we jump the gun like this, and people (I'm talking people like my parents, not my fellow engineering students) try installing it themselves (as an alternative), people in general will get a bad taste in their mouths when they perceive that they have less functionality from their computers than they had before.
Our old friend Einstein once pointed out that we should make things as simple as possible, but no simpler.
As a society, we will have order. People demand it. Whether the controlling force for that order comes from within ourselves or from the restraining influence of a government is largely up to us.
As long as there are people in the society who are unable to restrain themselves from harming others (members of the society), then the society must take steps to protect itself.
Slashdot Mirror
Send the compressed information via a temporary, read-only link to the Web-Connected system. Read-Only can be sneakernet with magnetic tape for the paranoid or an Ethernet cable with the Rx portion cut for the slightly less paranoid (yes you'd need custom software)
"Custom software"? More like a custom protocol stack! IP simply cannot work without both send and receive capability; without ARP, it wouldn't be able to even figure out the hardware address of an intended recipient. Is this data critical? You can forget about Quality of Service; TCP requires ACK packets to come back for every data packet sent. The only thing the receiving end can do is drop the data if the CRC doesn't check out... but there's no way of informing the sender of the need to retransmit!
Having a Tx-only setup is not feasible for any transmission of important data.
Remember... encryption is the backbone of network security.
A bit of a history lesson for you. Back in the day, the 7-tier OSI network model was formed. The gov't ordered all systems to use it, thinking that it would stear the private sector to do the same. Well, the private sector saw the 7 layers as a bunch of idealistic nonsense, and went for the practical physical->ip->tcp->app model instead. The gov't eventually wound up reversing their original order.
'IMAP stands for Internet Message Access Protocol. It is a method of accessing electronic mail or bulletin board messages that are kept on a (possibly shared) mail server. In other words, it permits a "client" email program to access remote message stores as if they were local.'
www.imap.org
"I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its unjustice is in reality expressing the highest respect for law."
- Martin Luther King, Jr., "Letter from a Birmingham Jail"
So the problem here is, ISP's are overscheduling their resources without much regard to technological innovations. Banks have long overspent your money; the government mandates a minimum reserve that banks have to keep in cash as a proportion to the amount of money they have on the books. If everyone were to walk into your bank and demand all their funds at once, the bank would go belly-up, since the majority of your money is in the hands of other people in the form of loans and investments.
Telecommunications companies have always been doing this. Do you live in a college dorm? Get everyone on your floor to pick up the phone at the same time and watch the system go south. They statistically determine the probability of a certain amount of resources being used at any given time, and they build the minimum infrastructure necessary to meet their predictions.
The problem with most ISP's is, they don't hire enough statisticians.
Planes stay in the air, bridges don't fall down, the water is safe to drink ... I would think that there is a definite need for accredited software engineers for software systems that would pose a hazard to life or limb by their failure.
Planes stay in the air and bridges don't fall down, not because the engineers who built them were "accredited," but because if that were to happen, the engineering firm that built the plane or the bridge would be in breach of contract and would be sued into oblivion.
The role of government in a free market society is to enforce legally binding contracts, not to make a straw-horse licensing scheme to make us all feel warm and fuzzy about the people who manage our water and build our bridges. Believe me, if engineers were held accountable directly to the people for the quality of service they provided, they would provide a good service not for some sense of responsibility to the people around them, but because they would want to save their own hides. Let's use the strongest motives in the best possible way.
"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages."
- Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
That could then mean that licenses could be required to practice software development and that this could to regulation and other legal ramifications.
No, no, no, no, NO, NO, NO!!! Keep the government AWAY from it all, for pity's sake! We don't want legislation to dictate who can and cannot write software. In my county, my wife and I are not allowed to cut each others' hair in the privacy of our own home. Because beauticians got together some time ago and petitioned the government to make it illegal to cut hair without a "license." To get a license, you have to go to a qualified beauty school and then spend so many hours cutting hair in professional, and authorized, salons.
Of course, they then artificially limit the number of beauty schools that they allow to train for such licenses. The same thing happened in the medical profession. This sort of thing is routinely done by factional groups to pressure the government to create a stranglehold on the market, reducing supply and thus letting them charge more for their services.
In the long run, it only winds up hurting us all by driving the price up while not increasing the quality of the services we receive. Do you really think that having an "official license" makes doctors better than they would be otherwise? Are "certified" Microsoft Engineers any more qualified to work with Microsoft products than the rest of us?
Bad and good beauticians and doctors can be singled out by this little phenomenon called reputation. We don't need a piece of "official" government legislation to be mandated on all who want to enter the market in some lame attempt to make things better than they would be without the artificial intervention (do a search for "Adam Smith and invisible hand").
Let anyone who wants to write software professionally, whether or not they have a degree, license, or whatever, and let the buyer beware. Let each entity build a reputation, and the market will pick the best man for the job.
There is no constitutional amendment for "privacy"
You're correct; the there is no constitutional amendment of this sort. Because it is a right provided in the constitution itself.
even java still has null pointer exceptions at runtime and it is regarded as very safe
Speaking of which... how can you have a null pointer exception in a language that doesn't have pointers?
Now, I'm not blaming the sorters (completely). They are payed minimum wage to do a horribly boring job. I do blame FooBar Inc for not paying these people right or not doing more checks to see how things are running.
You're still blaming the wrong person. It's we (the consumers) who are to blame. We're at fault because we want cheap shipping at the cost of an occasional blunder. We just prefer to take our chances and hope it's not our package that gets ravashed. Maybe we don't fully understand what the risks are taking, and then when our luck runs out, we whine and complain. If UPS is such an aweful shipping company, why are they still in business?
I have a friend who is a videographer. He purchased two different cheap firewire drives from two different vendors. Both of them failed within a month... not a physical failure of the drive, but a logical failure (MacOS couldn't mount the drives any more, but just offered to initialize the drives). He lost many hours of work from some clips he was working on. Upon his request, I have since cracked open both drives, removed the EIDE drives, and installed them in his box as internal units.
These agencies, these super-governments (for lack of a better term) don't answer to people, they answer to governments. This removes the person further from the government imposing laws on him or her.
And the problem is? The people will throw out the Constitution in a heartbeat, if the winds of popular political opinion so blow in that direction. When individuals are given too much direct authority in a government, then the government becomes very short-sighted (example: increase government size to compensate for a recession). We need a few (read: a few) layers in-between the people and the legislatures to preserve some notion of political virtue.
As I take a careful look at this new community being formed, what I see forming is a globalized, fluid, largely anonymous culture. Then I look at my local neighborhood and my city. I see people who know each other by their faces and their first names. There is a feeling of trust among everyone here. Joe, who runs an electronics shop down the street, knows that Renee is not going to try to take advantage of him or steal from him. First of all, she has a sense of responsibility toward Joe as one of her neighbors. Second, there are several rings of authority around her that keep her from wanting to do something wrong. If she gets caught shoplifting, what the government will do to her is the last thing on her mind. She will first feel responsible toward her parents and her close friends and relatives. She will then worry about what the people she goes to church with every Sunday will think of her. She would be concerned about her employer finding out "through the grapevine" that she shoplifted.
... and many feel such a responsibility towards God. In economic terms, this keep the "transaction cost" down.
... and I think that the government should be the *last* entity we should be worried about when we do something wrong!)
... so don't be surprised when you find PayPal's service substandard (and more costly) to that of your local community bank.
This sense of community helps foster individual restraint in the face of self-interest. While everyone would like to take everything they can get their hands on, they have a sharp sense of responsibility toward those around them
On the Internet, this community is virtually nonexistent. People can distance themselves from the world around them and become immersed in a sea of IP addresses. For some, a sense of responsibility leaves also, and they take the opportunity to take advantage of nameless, faceless people around the world. They don't know these people, and so their natural human inclination to deal virtuously with these people declines. And for many, the only potential repurcusion of their actions would be from the law (the government is a weak authority figure in the minds of the people
The result? Again, in economic terms, transaction costs go up. Without trust in the virtue of those around us, we need to hire middlemen to keep us all in line. PayPal finds itself in such a situation
College math professors used to shrug at the prospect of students bringing calculators into exams. They have an attitude of, "If you don't know the material, your calculator won't help you on my exams."
I showed one of my professors the Computer Algebra System on my HP49g earlier this semester. Not only did it symbolically solve an integral that would have otherwise required a mastery of integration by parts to solve on paper, but it also showed all the intermediate steps that could be copied down on paper. It caused him a small paradigm shift.
In a day and age where handheld PC's can have wireless network cards, one has to wonder how accepting university professors are going to be of these new technologies. All you need is a page scanner to feed the book through and a PDF reader in the handheld, and a student could potentially have access to the entire text for the class while taking the test with his "calculator."
... after chasing thru voicemail who when told I had a Linux system told me that she could not EVER fix my problem.
I make it a habit to keep around at least one old system with Windows in these kinds of cases. When the network goes down, tech support drones will typically run you through a script before they are convinced that it's their fault. It's easier and faster to just play along with them rather than argue with them or confuse/frighten them.
You have to realize that there is a phyche that one must work with when calling tech support folks, and the sooner you figure out how to play their game, the better results you will get.
About a year ago, I was curious about this whole Napster thing. At the computer lab, I installed Napster on my account. About a month later, I tried to log in, and was denied access. When I talked to the sysadmin the next day, he told me that my account was disabled because they scanned all the user directories and disabled all accounts that had files named "Napster." I guess I won't install Napster (or other similar programs) anymore. Or write any reports on P2P applications and call them "Napster.rtf."
I suppose scanning people's home directories and disabling people's accounts who install software might work just as well...
The computer lab in the main library at my school has a group of 10 Mac's in the back of the room. About 6 months ago, something broke on the network and the Mac's stopped printing. There is still a sign tacked on the wall that says that people who use the Mac's can't print. This shows that apathy that the lab admins have toward the Mac systems.
... it just means that I never have to wait; I never have to print anyway (I submit all the work for my Comp. Eng. classes online).
About half the time, there is a line of people who would rather wait 20 minutes to get on a PC rather than walk to the back of the room and get on one of the unused Mac systems (it was like this before the printing broke too). This is evidence of the fear that the students have toward the Mac systems. Hey, I don't mind
This violates one of the 5 essential characteristic of any governmental legislation: that of prospectivity. If this were to be the case, we would no longer live in a country where Rule by Law prevailed, but rather in a tyrannical state where we are ruled by Will. Let us pray this never happens.
I find it disturbing that the government is increasingly trying to step in and do what private entities can do much better (and cheaper for that matter). If there is a public demand for voluntary ID cards, why hasn't some corporation stepped in and started offering them?
Is Visa or Mastercard a government institution? No! But there was a public demand for their services, they recognized this demand, so they supplied the credit card system, which is now distributed and used internationally. Imagine how the credit card system would be if the government funded it.
So, Oracle: I suggest you just offer the service, and leave the government out of it. If people want a reliable, efficient, and effective national ID card based on your product, get together with some other database companies, establish a standard, and start competing!
Wonderful idea! Except for the 1500-meter limit on 10-BASET Ethernet... the minimum packet size for Ethernet must be long enough to guarantee that a collision would occur while the source is still transmitting. The minimum packet size for 10Mbps communications was set such that the signal can travel at most 1500 meters before the source stopped transmitting. If the source detects a transmitted signal from the other end *after* it is done with its transmission, it assumes that there was no collision. And this is how we lose packets.
For such a long distance, you would have to use some other protocol that guarantees no packet collisions.
I meant to type "threat." It's this strange curse, I guess. No matter how hard I try, typo's always seem to slip through...
Amen. We have to understand that the founding fathers of our nation understood the dangers of a pure democracry. With such a form of government, the ruling majority can actually take on characteristics of a tyrannical "rule of will." Or, in other words, "Tyranny by Majority." There is a reason that elected officials have terms of tenure. Members of the Senate are elected every 6 years, and so they can sit back and carefully consider issues in a virtuous manner without being overly influenced by every whim of the public opinion of the day. Thus members of the Senate give a more virtual representation of the pople.
The House of Representatives carries with it 2 years between elections, which puts the other part of our bi-cameral system closer to the public; they give more of an attorneyship representation of the people. It turns out that this system of checks and balances works exceptionally well in creating legislation that keeps us somewhere between tyranny and anarchy.
I for one vote to uphold the Constitution and keep the U.S. a republic.
My friend has a pair of the 45GB 75XPs, and at least one of them has "issues". Every so often (now that the drive is full) the kernel will spit out: ad4s1g: hard error reading fsbn 76293856 of 26874736-26874751 (ad4s1 bn 76293856; cn 8073 tn 63 sn 37) followed by: ad4: DMA problem fallback to PIO mode
I second that. I have this exact same drive, and I started getting similar I/O errors just a couple of days ago. I reformatted the partition and put ReiserFS on there, and it seems to now have any problems now, but I'm considering getting a couple more Maxtor drives and setting up a RAID-5, just in case...
In the release notes, we read:
MandrakeSoft is proud to announce Mandrake Linux 8.1 as the newest alternative to Microsoft Windows and Macintosh operating systems.
Wow. It's hard to find two operating systems as different as MacOS (pre-X, like the versions that videographers would use) and Linux. Pushing Mandrake as a "alternative to Microsoft Windows" or "Macinstosh" may be a little premature at this stage.
I think it would be more accurate to call Mandrake an alternative to RedHat, Debian, SuSE, etc. But not MacOS or Windows. Not until I can install fonts by simply copying them into a directory. Not until my TV-out works on my Matrox g450. Not until my wife can open up the PowerPoint files that her professor has on the class web site.
When we jump the gun like this, and people (I'm talking people like my parents, not my fellow engineering students) try installing it themselves (as an alternative), people in general will get a bad taste in their mouths when they perceive that they have less functionality from their computers than they had before.
Our old friend Einstein once pointed out that we should make things as simple as possible, but no simpler.
As a society, we will have order. People demand it. Whether the controlling force for that order comes from within ourselves or from the restraining influence of a government is largely up to us.
As long as there are people in the society who are unable to restrain themselves from harming others (members of the society), then the society must take steps to protect itself.