"There is no shortage of states to the left of the USA that provide higher quality of life by any reasonable measure except adding up everyone's income and dividing by the population count (which is a pretty useless measure, as would become clear to anyone who saw my $10 million/year and your mom's-basement libertarian $12,500/year and heard us claim to be, on average, the two richest guys in the bar)."
This time, in english, without personal attacks. I'd love to reply, but I do not understand what you're saying.
Many states to the left of the USA have higher quality of life.
"Quality of life" is a subjective term. Therefore my statement above contains inherent subjectivity. I freely admit this.
A common rebuttal to my statement above is that average income is higher in the USA.
However, the income gap in the USA is quite wide. Therefore the mean is a misleading indicator.
Does that help? There's actually a lot of interesting ground in the quality of life discussion, but I don't think I have the patience to do it all in single-clause sentences.
On a side note, I'm reading an interesting article from the University of Vienna which strengthens my arguments. Perhaps you should give it a read, and get back to me:
I skimmed it. I'm not here to defend the USSR and its lackey governments, or their hopeless economic system, nor have I claimed to be, so this seems to me like a 44-page strawman argument.
For instance, I frequent Chilies, and I love their food (from the choices to the results).
You love the results? Blocked arteries and a figure like a walrus?
Lastly, while capitalism achieves inequality (with some people rich, and some people poor), and socialism does create equality, it's not in the manner that you think. Socialism, after a run of many years, creates equality by MAKING EVERYONE POOR. The U.S.S.R (putting aside the political figures) may have been one of the most equal states to ever exist, but I doubt the people saw it as that.
The USSR was a totalitarian dictatorship that happened to use the word "socialism" a lot in its mission statement. Holding it up as the pinnacle of socialist achievement is like holding up the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (hint: that's the one in the north) as the pinnacle of democracy.
There is no shortage of states to the left of the USA that provide higher quality of life by any reasonable measure except adding up everyone's income and dividing by the population count (which is a pretty useless measure, as would become clear to anyone who saw my $10 million/year and your mom's-basement libertarian $12,500/year and heard us claim to be, on average, the two richest guys in the bar).
It would be nice for you to point out evidence of my delusion. If I am wrong, great! I'll learn something new. But simply calling names isn't very helpful.
Fully agreed, but you don't pay me enough to be helpful. I'm just here for my own amusement.
He did not pursue the middle-east links to OKC even though almost all eyewitnesses pointed out that middle-eastern men were with McVeigh on the day of the bombing.
I think that you're seriously deluded in general, but I will say that executing McVeigh was one of the biggest security mistakes in recent history. Let him percolate, there's a lot more to be learned. Whoever sped that up is either in on it or just really really dumb (I'll vote for the latter).
I guess their justification is it was a crime in progress, in a public place, so they didn't need a warrant.
I would have expected the alleged crime that DHS was going after was the importation of the toys. That was already over and done with by the time the gestapo showed up at the shop.
I assume you mean "cite" rather than "site". But I shall indulge you with cites of some sites.
For really conservative numbers on overseas civilians, check out this site, which suggests almost 4 million. Note that they are only counting Americans who have actually registered with the embassy, which I never do and I can't say that I've ever met anyone else who did either. I'd estimate the real number is about 5 times higher. But I'll go with what's printed there.
This article estimates the number of current overseas deployed military personnel at 200,000.
Even if you take issue with the individual numbers (and you're welcome to) you can see that the number of citizens is not even close.
As to whether they actually choose to vote absentee, that surely has something to do with how easy or hard it is to go through the process and get information...
Nice to know that "looking good to the rest of the world" isn't a priority for one of the candidates.
For the dumb one. Foreign policy is pretty central to the President's job, and having little or no sympathy out here makes it very difficult to do the job properly. As we've seen by the disastrous results thus far.
I'm not sure, but I would guess that the majority of absentee voters are military
As one of millions of non-military overseas absentee voters, I can confirm that you have guessed incorrectly.
Also, pretty much every overseas American I've ever met who was not in the military was a Democrat (or, if they'd never registered, they leaned much more closely with Democratic than Republican politics).
Maybe not all of them are Somali warlord-style libertarians?
Who the hell cares if the government enabled it, Verizon is spending the millions of dollars and putting in the time to make this possible.
I the hell care. It's largely public land. That's how it goes. I pay taxes for the maintenance of this land, and I don't want my tax money subsidizing Verizon if the result is not going to be advantageous to the public. If you don't like that, then invent a way for Verizon to roll out this product that doesn't depend on using my resources. I hear quantum computing is all the rage.
The government doesn't force the owners of the Empire State Building to lease out office space at a government-regulated rate.
Red herring. The Empire State Building doesn't have a monopoly on commercial real estate in Manhattan.
No word yet on whether Verizon will block ports (25, 80, etc) for incoming or outgoing traffic; with 2MB upload, I hope to basically run a small data center in my basement.
First of all you can use any service you want listening on any port you want. Data in your/etc/services file are only default ports, not mandatory ones. For example, you might run smtp server on port 80 and http on port 25 and they would complete the tcp three-way handshake just fine. If you have ever seen a web url in the form of proto://host:port then you know what am I talking about.
Yeah, that's going to be one awesome data center. "Uh, yeah, we do web hosting. Only thing is that every URL will have an extra port number in it. But that's really high-tech; your visitors will think you're super-cool. And the mail service, um, well, people can't actually send mail to us directly because it's on a nonstandard port, but if you pay extra to another data center they can forward it to this one."
Your cell phone is still registered your residence - besides you can just give them a neighbor's phone #.
Oh, can you? From the FAQ on Verizon's site:
Q. My neighbor has Verizon Fios Internet Service, but my phone line doesn't qualify. Why?
A. Verizon Fios Internet Service availability is determined based on your individual address, not by your telephone number. Therefore, changing telephone numbers or your neighbor's telephone number(s) cannot guarantee your address is eligible for FiosSM Internet Service.
Could anyone please tell me what I'm supposed to do with something like 30Mbps/5Mbps if i'm not allowed to serve some?
I think they want you to watch a lot of teevee over it. They're finally putting enough bandwidth to launch credible competition against the cable companies. They just haven't ironed all the wrinkles out of their video-on-demand setup yet, so this way they can start getting at least a trickle of revenue from a very expensive fiber deployment.
If they are laying it, it is their right to use it however they want. If Earthlink wants to run fibre, they can... If Verizon is spending millions of dollars to run fibre everywhere, don't you think they should be compensated fairly for it?
They are laying it on public land with forced easements. Very different from building something on land they own. The fiber is there because the public (i.e., the government) enabled it.
It seems even Maureen O'Gara thinks the article was not true
Har har har.
Further up in the comments:
William Gates commented on 23 October 2004:
Thanks for the Pro-SCO article Maureen. I'll be sending you another $20,000 soon. Keep up the good work.
Darl McBride commented on 23 October 2004:
Everything Maureen has said is exactly true. I can't believe that we haven't used this in our case! Keep up the good work! We could really use some advice.
I cant imagine how one of the biggest cities on the planet could have clean water as you suggest? I mean obviously they have treatment plants and all, but I've never been to a big polluted city and drinken decent tap water.
I think you're letting your preconceptions cloud your perceptions. There's no reason I can think of why a big city would have worse water than a small town, unless you are talking about people wandering over to the nearest river and fetching their drinking water with a pail. Most of the worst water contamination comes from agricultural and industrial activities that are mainly found in rural and suburban areas, and exacerbated by flat terrain.
Big cities often have much more stringent water quality requirements, more active watchdog groups, and the resources (if only through economies of scale) to apply much more elaborate and effective technology to the problem.
In the case of New York, water is piped from mountains upstate into the city, so in a way you're not really drinking water from NYC at all.
By the way, construction started in 1970 on the legendary Water Tunnel Number Three, a 50-year project (scheduled for completion in 2020 though the first section is in use already) to dig a 6-meter-diameter, 100km-long tunnel that starts over 200 meters below New York City and ends up in the mountains to the north. It's one of the most ambitious civil engineering projects in American history and well worth googling if you're interested in such things.
Sorry, I have no source to name. However I worked for many years in a major university's IT department and as part of that, made the aquaintance of folks in the same roles at other universities. It's just the sense I have from my first-hand knowledge and discussions with peers. In any case, my snarky yet resilient point survives even if there is only one university that doesn't do it.
Even in the worst case scenario, when the decryption key was made public by some other state, the situation couldn't get worse than without any encryption at all.
Completely disagree. The encryption key would be disclosed to unauthorized third parties within days of its being exchanged with foreign officials. Then, any additional decisions that were based on its having been secure would be invalid, any related expenditures would have been wasted, and the people responsible for speccing the system would be dragged before Congress to have brickbats lobbed at them by outraged technophobes. Clearly the choice as made was wiser for all concerned.
A wiser choice still would have been not to use RFID; something like the contact on a smartcard would make ten times more sense for this application.
Personally I don't see this lasting very long. The number of exploits that pranksters will come up with will astound even the jaded know-it-alls here at Slashdot. The passports will be updated and replaced at no charge to the unfortunate people who happened to receive the RFID ones during the brief window of their availability.
I wonder if it would make a person more liable to getting mugged as American Passports are certainly worth selling.
My girlfriend's US passport was stolen from her bag on the subway in Mexico City. We got off the train at the next stop, and while we were standing on the platform taking inventory, someone at the top of the stairs tossed it down and it landed at our feet.
My passport has a machine-readable stripe, but I don't think I've ever seen anyone actually swipe it through a reader.
The only explanation I can offer for that is that perhaps you haven't crossed any borders.
Pretty much everywhere swipes the passports these days, from Mexico to Cambodia - especially at airports. The only border I've crossed recently where the info was hand-entered was a somewhat obscure land entry from Turkey into Iraq.
The target of a proposed solution usually it is driven by a defined utility: to speed up a procedure or whatever. But in this case, do will really speed up or improve something? What about passport authentication? For sure can not be 100% automated, as soon as RF ID chips can be, at least, cloned (from the sophisticated data retrieval via millitary X-Ray uC inspection or via amateur hacking, or whatever).
The idea is that the document contains biometric information (photo, fingerprint, hand geometry, iris scan, whatever) that is also cryptographically signed.
In some cases (fingerprint, etc.) this can be validated automatically using detection equipment at the turnstile. In others (photo) it may require manual attention but that will still be a whole lot quicker than it is now.
Or, more likely, it will be singing a unique ID # that would allow anyone with access to the government's database (not "anyone who's curious") to get that information.
Nope, read the article. It's the stuff from the front page of your passport, in plaintext, with cryptographic signature.
They decided it would be unmanageable to try to keep the data confidential through shared keys or private databases with that many governments involved, and I think they're right. However, the proper conclusion from this should have been to abandon the project and do something else. Instead, they decided to just broadcast the information to anyone who cares to listen.
Slashdot Mirror
Many states to the left of the USA have higher quality of life.
"Quality of life" is a subjective term. Therefore my statement above contains inherent subjectivity. I freely admit this.
A common rebuttal to my statement above is that average income is higher in the USA.
However, the income gap in the USA is quite wide. Therefore the mean is a misleading indicator.
Does that help? There's actually a lot of interesting ground in the quality of life discussion, but I don't think I have the patience to do it all in single-clause sentences.
I skimmed it. I'm not here to defend the USSR and its lackey governments, or their hopeless economic system, nor have I claimed to be, so this seems to me like a 44-page strawman argument.
You love the results? Blocked arteries and a figure like a walrus?
The USSR was a totalitarian dictatorship that happened to use the word "socialism" a lot in its mission statement. Holding it up as the pinnacle of socialist achievement is like holding up the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (hint: that's the one in the north) as the pinnacle of democracy.
There is no shortage of states to the left of the USA that provide higher quality of life by any reasonable measure except adding up everyone's income and dividing by the population count (which is a pretty useless measure, as would become clear to anyone who saw my $10 million/year and your mom's-basement libertarian $12,500/year and heard us claim to be, on average, the two richest guys in the bar).
Fully agreed, but you don't pay me enough to be helpful. I'm just here for my own amusement.
I think that you're seriously deluded in general, but I will say that executing McVeigh was one of the biggest security mistakes in recent history. Let him percolate, there's a lot more to be learned. Whoever sped that up is either in on it or just really really dumb (I'll vote for the latter).
I would have expected the alleged crime that DHS was going after was the importation of the toys. That was already over and done with by the time the gestapo showed up at the shop.
I assume you mean "cite" rather than "site". But I shall indulge you with cites of some sites.
For really conservative numbers on overseas civilians, check out this site, which suggests almost 4 million. Note that they are only counting Americans who have actually registered with the embassy, which I never do and I can't say that I've ever met anyone else who did either. I'd estimate the real number is about 5 times higher. But I'll go with what's printed there.
This article estimates the number of current overseas deployed military personnel at 200,000.
Even if you take issue with the individual numbers (and you're welcome to) you can see that the number of citizens is not even close.
As to whether they actually choose to vote absentee, that surely has something to do with how easy or hard it is to go through the process and get information...
Well, that's China, not the UK. Or did you not read the article?
P.S. it's also blocked from here (in southeast Asia) but I accept that the US population here is very low.
For the dumb one. Foreign policy is pretty central to the President's job, and having little or no sympathy out here makes it very difficult to do the job properly. As we've seen by the disastrous results thus far.
As one of millions of non-military overseas absentee voters, I can confirm that you have guessed incorrectly.
Also, pretty much every overseas American I've ever met who was not in the military was a Democrat (or, if they'd never registered, they leaned much more closely with Democratic than Republican politics).
But of course there's always this: http://www.georgewbush.com.nyud.net:8090/. And when that stops working, 'ssh -D' - no chance they're stopping that.
Maybe not all of them are Somali warlord-style libertarians?
I the hell care. It's largely public land. That's how it goes. I pay taxes for the maintenance of this land, and I don't want my tax money subsidizing Verizon if the result is not going to be advantageous to the public. If you don't like that, then invent a way for Verizon to roll out this product that doesn't depend on using my resources. I hear quantum computing is all the rage.
Red herring. The Empire State Building doesn't have a monopoly on commercial real estate in Manhattan.
Yeah, that's going to be one awesome data center. "Uh, yeah, we do web hosting. Only thing is that every URL will have an extra port number in it. But that's really high-tech; your visitors will think you're super-cool. And the mail service, um, well, people can't actually send mail to us directly because it's on a nonstandard port, but if you pay extra to another data center they can forward it to this one."
Oh, can you? From the FAQ on Verizon's site:
I think they want you to watch a lot of teevee over it. They're finally putting enough bandwidth to launch credible competition against the cable companies. They just haven't ironed all the wrinkles out of their video-on-demand setup yet, so this way they can start getting at least a trickle of revenue from a very expensive fiber deployment.
They are laying it on public land with forced easements. Very different from building something on land they own. The fiber is there because the public (i.e., the government) enabled it.
Ever fly business class? You pay 4 times as much for 50% more room.
And when will they finally go the way of gum and nuts?
Har har har.
Further up in the comments:
William Gates commented on 23 October 2004:
Thanks for the Pro-SCO article Maureen. I'll be sending you another $20,000 soon. Keep up the good work.
Darl McBride commented on 23 October 2004:
Everything Maureen has said is exactly true. I can't believe that we haven't used this in our case! Keep up the good work! We could really use some advice.
I think you're letting your preconceptions cloud your perceptions. There's no reason I can think of why a big city would have worse water than a small town, unless you are talking about people wandering over to the nearest river and fetching their drinking water with a pail. Most of the worst water contamination comes from agricultural and industrial activities that are mainly found in rural and suburban areas, and exacerbated by flat terrain.
Big cities often have much more stringent water quality requirements, more active watchdog groups, and the resources (if only through economies of scale) to apply much more elaborate and effective technology to the problem.
In the case of New York, water is piped from mountains upstate into the city, so in a way you're not really drinking water from NYC at all.
By the way, construction started in 1970 on the legendary Water Tunnel Number Three, a 50-year project (scheduled for completion in 2020 though the first section is in use already) to dig a 6-meter-diameter, 100km-long tunnel that starts over 200 meters below New York City and ends up in the mountains to the north. It's one of the most ambitious civil engineering projects in American history and well worth googling if you're interested in such things.
Sorry, I have no source to name. However I worked for many years in a major university's IT department and as part of that, made the aquaintance of folks in the same roles at other universities. It's just the sense I have from my first-hand knowledge and discussions with peers. In any case, my snarky yet resilient point survives even if there is only one university that doesn't do it.
Sure, let me know how it goes next time you try to cross from France to the UK, or Germany to Poland without a passport.
Americans and other rich-country people don't carry all that much cash when they travel; they use plastic. I rarely have more than US$40 on me.
It's travelers from poor countries with poor banking infrastructure who have to bring $5000 in US cash with them on their family vacation.
Completely disagree. The encryption key would be disclosed to unauthorized third parties within days of its being exchanged with foreign officials. Then, any additional decisions that were based on its having been secure would be invalid, any related expenditures would have been wasted, and the people responsible for speccing the system would be dragged before Congress to have brickbats lobbed at them by outraged technophobes. Clearly the choice as made was wiser for all concerned.
A wiser choice still would have been not to use RFID; something like the contact on a smartcard would make ten times more sense for this application.
Personally I don't see this lasting very long. The number of exploits that pranksters will come up with will astound even the jaded know-it-alls here at Slashdot. The passports will be updated and replaced at no charge to the unfortunate people who happened to receive the RFID ones during the brief window of their availability.
My girlfriend's US passport was stolen from her bag on the subway in Mexico City. We got off the train at the next stop, and while we were standing on the platform taking inventory, someone at the top of the stairs tossed it down and it landed at our feet.
The only explanation I can offer for that is that perhaps you haven't crossed any borders.
Pretty much everywhere swipes the passports these days, from Mexico to Cambodia - especially at airports. The only border I've crossed recently where the info was hand-entered was a somewhat obscure land entry from Turkey into Iraq.
The idea is that the document contains biometric information (photo, fingerprint, hand geometry, iris scan, whatever) that is also cryptographically signed.
In some cases (fingerprint, etc.) this can be validated automatically using detection equipment at the turnstile. In others (photo) it may require manual attention but that will still be a whole lot quicker than it is now.
Nope, read the article. It's the stuff from the front page of your passport, in plaintext, with cryptographic signature.
They decided it would be unmanageable to try to keep the data confidential through shared keys or private databases with that many governments involved, and I think they're right. However, the proper conclusion from this should have been to abandon the project and do something else. Instead, they decided to just broadcast the information to anyone who cares to listen.