Some engine / powertrain combinations get awful gas mileage. The Dodge Durango, in its base configuration, gets 8mpg I believe. In my humble opinion, people who buy a car that is that inefficient are dumb. Whats important is that the whole class of vehicles isn't like that - the buyer has a choice. Would you be as upset if you neighbor owned a BMW Z8 and got 14mpg in the city (and only a little more on the highway)?
Exactly the point I was making. There is no reason why every SUV could not be as efficient as the foreign imports. BMW have to achieve better milage because the market in Europe insists they do. There are not many Europeans lining up to buy US built SUVs that do 8 mpg...
I don't know what particular interpretation of "stronger" you're using (not sarcasm, I mean it). While I agree that monocoque can be made as safe in accidents as body-on-frame, I doubt its stronger so far as usefulness goes.
Tubes are stronger than beams. That is why the WTC was built as a tube.
You do have to be a bit careful about mounting points, but it is the same with a girder.
What engine changes are you talking about, btw? I'll grant you that some SUVs are powered by relatively old engine technology (pushrod vs. overhead cam), but most aren't.
I have owned 30 years old cars with overhead cams. The real issue is the design of the head. A lot of SUVs have an ungodly number of valves, but the engine design is typically 1950s. A lot of GM vehicles still us a Buick engine block that was designed just after WWII.
Adding valves to an old engine does little to improve efficiency. But having 4 of five valves per chamber allows a new engine designer a lot more flexibility and scope to get the best power out.
I will grant you that the internal combustion engine is an old design. The basics of it haven't changed since it was first invented. That doesn't mean, however, that it hasn't been continually improved.
The problem is that those improvements have only been applied to SUVs in a limited fashion. Some changes like fuel injection have been forced on the manufacturers by the need to achieve emissions standards. But they have not had the same incentive to reduce consumption.
Some of the difference is explained by poor aerodynomics and greater weight - but not that much. There are huge differences in consumption between SUVs. My neighbor gets 8mpg from her SUV. I get 22mpg from my high performance sports car with a larger engine that gives over twice the power. Even more ridiculous my 4 litre sports car with a top speed of 155mph (artificially limited to save the tires) has better measured gas milage than the average US car.
It is not a question of driving arround in a bad car, or a hybrid or anything like that. There is plenty of room for improvement.
The reason the car manufacturers do not change is simple, old plants. They build SUVs at the oldest and most outdated plants because they are the least demanding. Body on frame is cheap to manufacture - contrary to your claim monocoque build is considerably stronger for a given weight of material. That is why the luxury SUVs like the Range Rover have switched to it. Same goes for engines, the car makers like SUVs because it allows them to keep their obsolete powertrain manufacturing plants in operation. They can't make car engines there without new investment, but they can churn out obsolete engine designs to go in SUVs.
Blair is a CENTRIST politician who belongs to a party with a leftist tradition.
He is way, way to the left of Ted Kennedy. But yes, I'll agree he is a centrist. The problem is that in the US the whole political spectrum is far off to the right.
If by 'centrist' you mean pragmatic, non-ideological then OK I think you are making the same point as me.
The far-left is just as ideologically driven as the far-right.
Yes, but the far left is an even bigger joke than the Librarian Party. There are still some hard left ideologues in the Labour party but they have almost no influence. Even the Tories have given up claiming that Tony Benn or Dennis Skinner represent the true Labour party.
I am certainly NOT claiming that the left has not been ideological in the past. Quite the opposite. The lack of ideology on the left is precisely because of the electoral disasters that the ideology led to. It took twenty years for the left to recover from the 1970s. My fear is that it will take the Republican party at least as long to recover from Bush. There will be hard right ideologues driving for crusades against gays and huge tax cuts long after the big political issue has become the deficit and benefits to seniors. They will continue to push for hard right ideology long after the country has rejected it.
If you've been paying attention, there are more and more hybrid cars and SUVs hitting the market, some can get up to 60MPH, so what you are saying needs to happen is happening, it just takes time.
I would hope that a hybrid could do 60 mph, there is no reason why it should not do 90 which should be enough for anyone. I suspect you mean mpg.
There would be a lot more cars of that sort if the gas guzzler penalties applied to cars also applied to SUVs.
Oh, you lost me. You could have taken one of those, plus one of these: "The answer to every attempt at oil drilling is 'No!' The solution to every foreign policy problem, even those involving violent thugs who have no problems killing and torturing citizens and neighbors, is to talk and plead over decades," in order to sound as thoughtful as you began.
Not everything is about Bush. Get over it.
At this point the right is the ideologically driven party. The left is pragmatic. To give an example, Tony Blair is a left wing politician but he is certainly not driven by socialist ideology.
I could have said that the answer to every problem is not nationalization. Only I can't actually think of a single serious politician who makes that kind of claim.
What is interesting about the Bush administration is the way that absolutely every external circumstance is used to support the pre-existing policy. At first the justification for huge tax cuts for the rich was the forecast surplus - even though everyone who cared to loo knew that they were false. Then when the economy was no longer doing as well the justification for the same huge tax cut for the rich was the deficit. No serious economist have ever claimed that the best way to stimulate an ecoonomy is to eliminate inheritance taxes for estates over $2 million.
The solution to the energy crisis might be to drill in Alaska. However forcing the makers of SUVs to put fuel efficient engines in them seems a better solution. The oil in Alaska can only be drilled once and would only account for a years worth of gas burned by the inefficient SUVs. Building an efficient engine is not impossible, there are plenty of fuel efficient power plants. It is not the engine design, it is the engine manufacturing plants that the car makers refuse to modernise so they could built more modern designs.
As for starting wars in the Gulf, Bush is good at starting wars but he has yet to finish one or win one. The Taleban is back in control in significant parts of Afghanistan. The main Al Qaeda leaders are still at large. Invading Iraq is a damn poor way to catch Al Zawahiri and Bin Laden.
Talking to people is not always the answer, but this administratipon cannot even talk to longstanding allies such as France and Germany. With the exception of Blair (who is likely to be gone from office soon) they do not have a single ally they have not bought.
So perhaps you could enlighten...exactly how did the CEO of Halliburton give Enron the go-ahead to manipulate the power market in California?
Cheney told Lay that the administration would not step in to use their powers to cap prices in the California market and would not take action against the market manipulators.
It is a bit like an FBI chief telling the head of a Mafia family that they won't be policing certain border crossings in the next months.
"The GPL allows unlimited copies, the copyright law allows one. Therefore, the GPL is invalid. The copyright law, in giving consumers the right to make one backup of their software without any permission from the copyright holder, outlaws any contractual agreement that allows users to make more than one copy."
The flaw in the argument here is that the copyright law provides the consumer with the right to make one backup copy regardless of any other constraint the copyright owner might attempt to impose. That does not mean that the copyright owner is prohibited from allowing the end user to make additional copies.
The wording in question is 'shall allow'. That does not mean that the copyright owner is prohibited from being more liberal.
The term courts often use in connection with this type of sophistry is 'peverse'. Clearly the Congress had no intention of imposing a constraint of that nature on copyright owners. The SCO interpretation of the act is not an interpretation that would be made by an informed reader.
SCO is grasping at these straws because their whole legal strategy has a far bigger problem, failure to mitigate their damages.
A plaintif is always under an obligation to mitigate their damages. So if someone leaves a lighted match near to a wooden building and you see it and could easily put it out before it burns your house down you cannot allow the house to burn down and then sue for the loss of the house.
SCO is failling to mitigate its damages with their refusal to specify what portions of the Linux code infringes on SCO IP. It is very clear to all concerned that as soon as the relevant portions of code are specified they will be replaced very quickly. Furthermore SCO is not entitled to claim that the alleged code in Linux is a 'trade secret'. Clearly it is not a trade secret since it is published openly and has been for ten years or more. SCO cannot show that the Linux authors as a body were engaged in the improper disclosure of their trade secrets because the vast majority of them were never under a confidentiality agreement with SCO.
But it was a very small minority, even in the republicans. What happens in most parties, is that a small group will get power and then control. And the fear of the other party will allow the small group to control.
The Moral Majority were far less objectionalble than the current Republican crew.
I am not that worried that the Bushies will continue their corrupt rule, their approach to politics is self defeating. They have alienated their core constituency, the rivh with an abysmal economic policy. Who cares what the capital gains tax rate is when they have tanked the markets? They are headed for a Watergate sooner or later.
The real problem is what state they leave the country and the Republican party. I have seen this happen before on a smaller scale in the UK. Thatcher remoulded the Tory party as a party of ideology. It worked fine as long as the press were all singing the praises of the ideology, until the wheels fell off the cart.
The UK Tory party has become completely unelectable. The country simply does not believe that the Tory ideology has the answers.
BTW, if you think that all parties are like the above, then look at my party; the libertarians.
Can I borrow a microscope?
No I don't think many parties are like the Bushies. It is a very rare phenomena. But they could still destroy the Republican party.
The same for the british rail : it worked perfectly. deregulation came in and it went down in flames, late trains, dirty wagons, and dead peoples in accidents:
British Rail did not work 'perfectly' by any standard - with the possible exception of the privatized service.
The problem is not regulation, deregulation, privatization, nationalization or any of the surface reasons thrown about. The real problem is people who substitute ideology for thinking about a problem.
The free market is not the solution to every problem. Get over it.
The state is not the solution to every problem either. Get over it.
There are occasions when you have to use one strategy and occasions when you have to use another. Understanding that there are potential problems with a proposed change is essential if you are going to avoid them.
Instead what we get is politicians who use ideology as a substitute for thought. The solution to every domestic energy issue must be to drill oil wells in Alaska. The problem to every foreign policy problem must be to invade a country in the gulf with large oil reserves. The problem to every economic problem must be to give stupendous tax cuts where at least 80% but hopefully as much as is possible goes to the richest of the rich, and in particular rich Texas oil-men. One thing is certain, W. is not going to say a word about the NYC power cut until he can work out how it can be used to justify some policy to benefit Texas oil men.
The free market is one thing, if you could establish a free market in energy that would be a great solution. The problem is that it is not possible to do that, the market is illiquid, supply and demand are constrained in certain ways. But to the ideologue these problems simply cannot exist, they don't exist in the theory so they cannot exist. Its like a robot in a bad 1960s Sci-Fi serial. So the ideologue plows ahead with a broken scheme and creates an unmitigated mess.
That is exactly what happened with privatization of BR. There is no reason the UK rail network cannot be private, it was built entirely with private capital. But the Tory privatization plan based on the politics of sticking your head in the sand was never going to improve matters.
And I am sure the all the environmental regulations, buricratic red tape, permits, licenses, and construction union labor costs have nothing to do with why enough power plants are not being built.
Construction and power production have been unionised for at least six decades. It does not seem that there has been a sudden change there.
There is quite a bit more regulation, but the main set of regulations that have affected capacity are the increased scrutiny of nuclear plants after the one at Three Mile Island came close to a melt-down. When idiots build a nuclear bomb upwind of Manhattan even a 1% chance that the station would go critical is too close to be acceptable.
The problem is that the nuclear industry lied repeatedly about its safety record. So now nobody can believe a word that is said by them.
I am actually prepared to support certain nuclear power designs. The heavy water system built by the Camadians and the MIT 'carbon ball' systems are both true failsafe systems. The light water and AGR systems built in the US, most of Europe and the USSR are all intrinsically unsafe, kept from catastrophic failure by a series of 'safety' systems. As the Challenger, Columbia and Chernobyl events showed, technologists are not as good at building risk free systems as they claim.
I have no problem with acknowledging W's, his cronies and Enron's illegal and unethical actions, but to try an blame others for that is just wrong.
I am sorry, but if you lend your support to a party that is led by such blatantaly corrupt people then you deserve to be condemned along with the ring leaders.
The US still prohibits 'members of a communist organization' from visiting the US, even though joining the communist party was compulsory in many countries if you wanted to get a job. If you lend your support to a party that persues corrupt policies you share a part of the blame.
It is not as if the Republican party has been hijacked by a small faction that the majority of the party opposes. At this point the faction has been allowed to take over the party as a whole.
it's all the Republicans' fault - for everything - even stuff that happened before they were in power. Californians share none of the blame here. They are helpless victims of the vast right-wing conspiracy.
The California energy crisis was caused by legislation that Republican Governor Pete Wilson promoted and signed.
In the case of the manipulation of the energy market by Enron and others it is a matter of record that there was a conspiracy. It is also a matter of record that the conspirators were the largest contributors to the Bush campaign. If you want to dispute these facts try Google, but I doubt you will even find NewsMax or Faux news trying to deny them.
So far right wing conspiracies involving Bush, Cheney, Tom Delay and other Republicans have prevented the votes being counted in the presidential election, they have helped Enron and others commit a major fraud against the people of California. Oh and only a few years after impeaching a Democratic President for lying about fucking an intern they are claimint that it is perfectly OK for a President to lie to the US people about the reasons for a war.
I don't know if that meets your definition of 'vast right-wing conspiracy', but it certainly there are certainly conspiracies and the majority seem to be perpetrated by a tiny number of senior Republicans.
What does Enron's and a few republicans manipulation of a system have to do with republicans as a whole? A bit of a jump, don't you think?
The principal beneficiary of "Kenny Boy" Lay's largesse was George W Bush. So it is hardly a case of a 'few Republicans' as if they were a random collection of folk who just happened to be Republicans. The Bush-Cheney campaign made extensive use of Enron company jets, in office they showered Enron with legislative favors.
The most important of those favors was allowing Enron in to the closed door meetings held by Cheney's Energy task force and the administration decision not to intervene to prevent Enron manipulating the California energy market.
Those favors continue today, California will be paying out over $12 billion in the years to come under long term contracts signed when the market manipulation was at its peak. The principal beneficiaries of those contracts are the parties responsible for the manipulation.
I just got reports from Rio de Janeiro, Paris and Casablanca and they are all unaffected. Baghdad is still out but that seems to be an independent cause.
No-one has been able to afford to bring new generators online recently. And probably not to upgrade/replace old less efficient equipment. And I'm sure most people haven't bought new ACs either because of the economy.
There is also the Enron factor. A couple of years back when Cheney gave Enron the green light to manipulate the California energy market California was making deals to buy any capacity it could
During the period the market was being manipulated the cover story was that it was California's fault for not allowing new plants to be built. Power plants have a major lead time so the only way to get generator sets for new power plants to be built in the West was for NYC to give up the generator sets for a bunch of gas turnbine systems planned to be deployed in the East.
Thank Bush, Cheney and their big friend 'Kenny boy' Lay for putting the interests of Enron before the national interest. First they screwed California and now NYC may well be getting hit by the unexpected results.
Can't this same thing be said about MACs? Apple designs them, builds them, and codes the OS for that said machine.
Depends on the vintage. During the Amelio era Apple had serious quality problems. When I was at the AI lab about 6 years ago the Apples in use would crash about twice a day but the way they were going down was completely unlike Windows which tend to crash when provoked - indicating a likely software cause. These machines would just freeze up at random.
Since Jobs has been on board Apple do seem to have a major commitment to build quality. The problems they have been having have tended to be caused by pushing the envelope too far rather than shoddy components.
I don't think that Microsoft will go into the same market as Dell. Building PCs is a very low margin business.
Good point. I don't know why IBM hasn't filed for a temporary injunction against the license termination.
They did.
The IBM countersuit goes into quite a bit of detail on the issue. They claim that their license is irrevocable and they list a series of issues in connection with it. They have obtained a statement from Novell that states that they are in compliance with the contract and that SCO does not have termination rights.
IBM seeks a variety of inhjunctions, in particular to prevent SCO purporting to claim that the license has been terminated.
which is still sad, especially for an os whose zealous followers claim it is derived from VMS...
VMS had a major advantage in that almost every device attached to the system was also manufactured by DEC. With Windows there are a gazillion vendors of every component you can imagine.
There is no way commodity intel boxes are going to match the reliability of the DEC hardware built to run VMS. The build quality is just not the same - apart from the junk like the Multia that DEC built when it was on its way under.
One of my pet peves about reviews of the latest video hardware is that the quality of the drivers seems to receive only scant attention. I have video cards by nvidia and ATI, the performance of the two cards is indistinguishable but I have had far more hassle with the ATI drivers.
Eolas isn't doing that to ward off IE. Doyle has a history of claiming title to things he didn't invent, and this is one of them.
During the court proceedings Microsoft was prevented from producing the copious evidence that the patent was invalid.
I have an interest here as I was one of the people who actually invented what Doyle is claiming.
Doyle does not care diddly about open source, he went after Microsoft to make a buck. He was sending out threatening letters before Netscape was started when all the web browsers were open source and many were public domain.
For one, realtime blacklist have been outsmarted and bent against their purpose by brighter spammers with an evil sense of irony, but some techniques do work, and given his track record I'd be inclined to give this guy a chance to show what he's up to.
I am failry sure that at least one of the blacklists will turn out to be run by a spammer.
The spammer could turn off listings for his own spam sources when it suited him. He could also blacklist his competitor's machines.
>>The message sender only gets five or ten messages created for each spam sent.
Go back and read the article. It's about http requests, not sending mail.
Oh, I totally get the fact you are sending out http requests. The fact the message is HTTP rather than SMTP is not relevant as far as I am concerned. The original HTTP spec used the term messages for requests and responses. I really can't remember what we did in the RFC.
The amplifier effect is just the same, for each message in there could be five messages out. The main advantage to the spammer though is laundering the IP address so that their web site hits appear to come from 10,000 distinct views rather than the same view.
I don't know where you get this idea. I know plenty of filter hackers who get results so much better than me that I'm kind of embarrassed.
Getting that sort of result on their own mail is one thing, getting that result on a representative corpus of user emails is a very different matter.
Geek mail is much easier to spam filter than naive user's mail. They tend to be far more aggressive in the features they use. They are also the targets of the spammers, geeks being a minority. So the vocabulary chosen by spammers tends to be much closer.
My real concern is not whether a filter is 99.8 or 95% efficient at detecting spam, its the false positive rate that is the problem. 1% false positives is a big problem, even 0.5% is a serious problem. The other big problem is the sheer cost of CPU cycles. Imagine a room the size of a football field filled with 100 equipment racks. Processing the legitimate mail only requires one of those racks, the rest are for dealling with spam. Each processing step adds cost. Bayesian filtering is only one part of the solution.
I agree about going after the spammers, but litigation and law enforcement are far more likely to be effective than hackback.
What we need to do in addition is to change the mail protocols so that we can know that a message that purports to come from a particular source is authentic. At least 50% of the spam sent claims a false sender address. The tricks that spam senders use to hide from litigation are a very robust spamdicator that almost never gives a false positive.
And now thanks to links posted to Slashdot, Paul Graham is being DDoS'd =)
Which illustrates the problems that you get when people who have little or no security experience try to do security.
The problem with hackback schemes of all types is that they always end up having unexpected effects. The basic problem is that when people design a hackback scheme they never consider what happens when someone sets out to abuse it. They assume that the only change to the environment is their hackback scheme.
A few months ago Paul though Bayesean filtering was the one true solution. The only problem was that people who have spent years working on the techniques he described never achieved results anywhere close to the ones he claims.
Paul Graham's scheme is not as damaging as some others because the amplifier effect is limited. The message sender only gets five or ten messages created for each spam sent. But even that could make a profitable scheme for someone trying to get their site promoted in a 'most visited list'. If they have pay per view adverts they can rake in quite a few bucks - as much as a cent for every spam sent. Far from discouraging spam this scheme would create a new incentive.
BTW the guy who said 'there is no fake spam' is right depending on the definition you use. If you use the definition 'unwanted email sent indiscriminately' then he is pretty much right. If on the other hand you define spam as 'that which our filters decide is spam'... (I kid you not, folk do try to get that type of definition accepted). The exception would be satires like 'make penis fast'.
There are similar problems with the folks running blacklists, they think that they understand everything there is about spam but don't realize that the systems they set up can be and will be gamed. Every partisan political mailing list of every stripe that has a significant number of readers gets blacklisted from time to time as people sign up for the list in order to be able to report it as spamming.
Try to explain to either group that there is a problem and they get majorly defensive. You get accused of wanting to help the spammers, etc. etc. When people start getting defensive like that in response to fair questions you are in big trouble.
The way to deal with spam is to treat it as a security problem. We deal with security problems using access control - authentication and authorization. We need to start with robust authentication mechanisms that hold ISPs responsible for the messages sent from their domain. These need to be accompanied by robust authorization mechanisms that allow recipients to judge whether the sender is honest.
``"by clicking on this link you agree to let us call your house" kind of things (where the link containers a token for identification purposes). Having a filter auto-follow links could be really dangerous then''
This was anticipated in the Web Specs which since 1992 have clearly said that clicking on a GET link creates no form of binding contract.
In any case any contract formed in that manner would be a contract of adhesion and invalid.
If it were otherwise Google would be entering into all sorts of contracts with its web crawler.
Linux isn't about socialism, it's capitalism in it's finest form.
In which case socialism is capitalism in its finest form.
Try not to get brainwashed by the legacy of McCarthy. Socialism is to communism what republicanism is to fascism. Tony Blair, Bush's great aly (heck, his only aly that hasn't been bought) heads a socialist party. If as you claim Blair is planning to errect gulags across the UK then maybe people in the US should be a bit more worried about the intentions of his aly Bush and KKKomandant Ashcroft.
Socialism isn't evil, it is obsolete. Like any hundred plus year old ideology the assumptions it rests on are no longer operative. Capital is no longer scarce. At the time that Robert Owen took over the New Lanarkshire Mills practically the entire population of the UK lived in poverty by modern standards. Owen was by far the most successful capitalist of his day, he appears in US textbooks as 'the father of the factory system'. In UK textbooks he is also mentioned as the father of socialism.
The problems we face today are completely different to those of Owen's day. Today 'common ownership' has been achieved, its called your 401K or your pension plan, not 100% of the country participate but its close enough. The problem today is corporate looters who pay themselves vast salaries with our money and do business in corrupt ways (Enron, Harken, Haliburton)
The idea in itself is interesting, but in that case, I'd just open a pr0n site and use steganography in the pics.
That would be far more risky. Any pull protocol has an intrinsic risk of traffic analysis.
Authoritarian governments like Singapore use traffic analysis to monitor and suppress dissent. In Singapore every telephone call is logged and the authorities perform traffic analysis to identify groups of dissenters.
It is not that difficult to perform traffic analysis on the Internet and even with IPSEC this would not change. The only protocol that has any degree of traffic analysis resistance is NNTP
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly the point I was making. There is no reason why every SUV could not be as efficient as the foreign imports. BMW have to achieve better milage because the market in Europe insists they do. There are not many Europeans lining up to buy US built SUVs that do 8 mpg...
I don't know what particular interpretation of "stronger" you're using (not sarcasm, I mean it). While I agree that monocoque can be made as safe in accidents as body-on-frame, I doubt its stronger so far as usefulness goes.
Tubes are stronger than beams. That is why the WTC was built as a tube.
You do have to be a bit careful about mounting points, but it is the same with a girder.
What engine changes are you talking about, btw? I'll grant you that some SUVs are powered by relatively old engine technology (pushrod vs. overhead cam), but most aren't.
I have owned 30 years old cars with overhead cams. The real issue is the design of the head. A lot of SUVs have an ungodly number of valves, but the engine design is typically 1950s. A lot of GM vehicles still us a Buick engine block that was designed just after WWII.
Adding valves to an old engine does little to improve efficiency. But having 4 of five valves per chamber allows a new engine designer a lot more flexibility and scope to get the best power out.
The problem is that those improvements have only been applied to SUVs in a limited fashion. Some changes like fuel injection have been forced on the manufacturers by the need to achieve emissions standards. But they have not had the same incentive to reduce consumption.
Some of the difference is explained by poor aerodynomics and greater weight - but not that much. There are huge differences in consumption between SUVs. My neighbor gets 8mpg from her SUV. I get 22mpg from my high performance sports car with a larger engine that gives over twice the power. Even more ridiculous my 4 litre sports car with a top speed of 155mph (artificially limited to save the tires) has better measured gas milage than the average US car.
It is not a question of driving arround in a bad car, or a hybrid or anything like that. There is plenty of room for improvement.
The reason the car manufacturers do not change is simple, old plants. They build SUVs at the oldest and most outdated plants because they are the least demanding. Body on frame is cheap to manufacture - contrary to your claim monocoque build is considerably stronger for a given weight of material. That is why the luxury SUVs like the Range Rover have switched to it. Same goes for engines, the car makers like SUVs because it allows them to keep their obsolete powertrain manufacturing plants in operation. They can't make car engines there without new investment, but they can churn out obsolete engine designs to go in SUVs.
He is way, way to the left of Ted Kennedy. But yes, I'll agree he is a centrist. The problem is that in the US the whole political spectrum is far off to the right.
If by 'centrist' you mean pragmatic, non-ideological then OK I think you are making the same point as me.
The far-left is just as ideologically driven as the far-right.
Yes, but the far left is an even bigger joke than the Librarian Party. There are still some hard left ideologues in the Labour party but they have almost no influence. Even the Tories have given up claiming that Tony Benn or Dennis Skinner represent the true Labour party.
I am certainly NOT claiming that the left has not been ideological in the past. Quite the opposite. The lack of ideology on the left is precisely because of the electoral disasters that the ideology led to. It took twenty years for the left to recover from the 1970s. My fear is that it will take the Republican party at least as long to recover from Bush. There will be hard right ideologues driving for crusades against gays and huge tax cuts long after the big political issue has become the deficit and benefits to seniors. They will continue to push for hard right ideology long after the country has rejected it.
If you've been paying attention, there are more and more hybrid cars and SUVs hitting the market, some can get up to 60MPH, so what you are saying needs to happen is happening, it just takes time.
I would hope that a hybrid could do 60 mph, there is no reason why it should not do 90 which should be enough for anyone. I suspect you mean mpg.
There would be a lot more cars of that sort if the gas guzzler penalties applied to cars also applied to SUVs.
Not everything is about Bush. Get over it.
At this point the right is the ideologically driven party. The left is pragmatic. To give an example, Tony Blair is a left wing politician but he is certainly not driven by socialist ideology.
I could have said that the answer to every problem is not nationalization. Only I can't actually think of a single serious politician who makes that kind of claim.
What is interesting about the Bush administration is the way that absolutely every external circumstance is used to support the pre-existing policy. At first the justification for huge tax cuts for the rich was the forecast surplus - even though everyone who cared to loo knew that they were false. Then when the economy was no longer doing as well the justification for the same huge tax cut for the rich was the deficit. No serious economist have ever claimed that the best way to stimulate an ecoonomy is to eliminate inheritance taxes for estates over $2 million.
The solution to the energy crisis might be to drill in Alaska. However forcing the makers of SUVs to put fuel efficient engines in them seems a better solution. The oil in Alaska can only be drilled once and would only account for a years worth of gas burned by the inefficient SUVs. Building an efficient engine is not impossible, there are plenty of fuel efficient power plants. It is not the engine design, it is the engine manufacturing plants that the car makers refuse to modernise so they could built more modern designs.
As for starting wars in the Gulf, Bush is good at starting wars but he has yet to finish one or win one. The Taleban is back in control in significant parts of Afghanistan. The main Al Qaeda leaders are still at large. Invading Iraq is a damn poor way to catch Al Zawahiri and Bin Laden.
Talking to people is not always the answer, but this administratipon cannot even talk to longstanding allies such as France and Germany. With the exception of Blair (who is likely to be gone from office soon) they do not have a single ally they have not bought.
Cheney told Lay that the administration would not step in to use their powers to cap prices in the California market and would not take action against the market manipulators.
It is a bit like an FBI chief telling the head of a Mafia family that they won't be policing certain border crossings in the next months.
The flaw in the argument here is that the copyright law provides the consumer with the right to make one backup copy regardless of any other constraint the copyright owner might attempt to impose. That does not mean that the copyright owner is prohibited from allowing the end user to make additional copies.
The wording in question is 'shall allow'. That does not mean that the copyright owner is prohibited from being more liberal.
The term courts often use in connection with this type of sophistry is 'peverse'. Clearly the Congress had no intention of imposing a constraint of that nature on copyright owners. The SCO interpretation of the act is not an interpretation that would be made by an informed reader.
SCO is grasping at these straws because their whole legal strategy has a far bigger problem, failure to mitigate their damages.
A plaintif is always under an obligation to mitigate their damages. So if someone leaves a lighted match near to a wooden building and you see it and could easily put it out before it burns your house down you cannot allow the house to burn down and then sue for the loss of the house.
SCO is failling to mitigate its damages with their refusal to specify what portions of the Linux code infringes on SCO IP. It is very clear to all concerned that as soon as the relevant portions of code are specified they will be replaced very quickly. Furthermore SCO is not entitled to claim that the alleged code in Linux is a 'trade secret'. Clearly it is not a trade secret since it is published openly and has been for ten years or more. SCO cannot show that the Linux authors as a body were engaged in the improper disclosure of their trade secrets because the vast majority of them were never under a confidentiality agreement with SCO.
The Moral Majority were far less objectionalble than the current Republican crew.
I am not that worried that the Bushies will continue their corrupt rule, their approach to politics is self defeating. They have alienated their core constituency, the rivh with an abysmal economic policy. Who cares what the capital gains tax rate is when they have tanked the markets? They are headed for a Watergate sooner or later.
The real problem is what state they leave the country and the Republican party. I have seen this happen before on a smaller scale in the UK. Thatcher remoulded the Tory party as a party of ideology. It worked fine as long as the press were all singing the praises of the ideology, until the wheels fell off the cart.
The UK Tory party has become completely unelectable. The country simply does not believe that the Tory ideology has the answers.
BTW, if you think that all parties are like the above, then look at my party; the libertarians.
Can I borrow a microscope?
No I don't think many parties are like the Bushies. It is a very rare phenomena. But they could still destroy the Republican party.
Bill O'Reilly himself replies to my post!
I am honored to have my post replied to by a 'journalist' of your 'stature'.
British Rail did not work 'perfectly' by any standard - with the possible exception of the privatized service.
The problem is not regulation, deregulation, privatization, nationalization or any of the surface reasons thrown about. The real problem is people who substitute ideology for thinking about a problem.
The free market is not the solution to every problem. Get over it.
The state is not the solution to every problem either. Get over it.
There are occasions when you have to use one strategy and occasions when you have to use another. Understanding that there are potential problems with a proposed change is essential if you are going to avoid them.
Instead what we get is politicians who use ideology as a substitute for thought. The solution to every domestic energy issue must be to drill oil wells in Alaska. The problem to every foreign policy problem must be to invade a country in the gulf with large oil reserves. The problem to every economic problem must be to give stupendous tax cuts where at least 80% but hopefully as much as is possible goes to the richest of the rich, and in particular rich Texas oil-men. One thing is certain, W. is not going to say a word about the NYC power cut until he can work out how it can be used to justify some policy to benefit Texas oil men.
The free market is one thing, if you could establish a free market in energy that would be a great solution. The problem is that it is not possible to do that, the market is illiquid, supply and demand are constrained in certain ways. But to the ideologue these problems simply cannot exist, they don't exist in the theory so they cannot exist. Its like a robot in a bad 1960s Sci-Fi serial. So the ideologue plows ahead with a broken scheme and creates an unmitigated mess.
That is exactly what happened with privatization of BR. There is no reason the UK rail network cannot be private, it was built entirely with private capital. But the Tory privatization plan based on the politics of sticking your head in the sand was never going to improve matters.
Construction and power production have been unionised for at least six decades. It does not seem that there has been a sudden change there.
There is quite a bit more regulation, but the main set of regulations that have affected capacity are the increased scrutiny of nuclear plants after the one at Three Mile Island came close to a melt-down. When idiots build a nuclear bomb upwind of Manhattan even a 1% chance that the station would go critical is too close to be acceptable.
The problem is that the nuclear industry lied repeatedly about its safety record. So now nobody can believe a word that is said by them.
I am actually prepared to support certain nuclear power designs. The heavy water system built by the Camadians and the MIT 'carbon ball' systems are both true failsafe systems. The light water and AGR systems built in the US, most of Europe and the USSR are all intrinsically unsafe, kept from catastrophic failure by a series of 'safety' systems. As the Challenger, Columbia and Chernobyl events showed, technologists are not as good at building risk free systems as they claim.
I am sorry, but if you lend your support to a party that is led by such blatantaly corrupt people then you deserve to be condemned along with the ring leaders.
The US still prohibits 'members of a communist organization' from visiting the US, even though joining the communist party was compulsory in many countries if you wanted to get a job. If you lend your support to a party that persues corrupt policies you share a part of the blame.
It is not as if the Republican party has been hijacked by a small faction that the majority of the party opposes. At this point the faction has been allowed to take over the party as a whole.
The California energy crisis was caused by legislation that Republican Governor Pete Wilson promoted and signed.
In the case of the manipulation of the energy market by Enron and others it is a matter of record that there was a conspiracy. It is also a matter of record that the conspirators were the largest contributors to the Bush campaign. If you want to dispute these facts try Google, but I doubt you will even find NewsMax or Faux news trying to deny them.
So far right wing conspiracies involving Bush, Cheney, Tom Delay and other Republicans have prevented the votes being counted in the presidential election, they have helped Enron and others commit a major fraud against the people of California. Oh and only a few years after impeaching a Democratic President for lying about fucking an intern they are claimint that it is perfectly OK for a President to lie to the US people about the reasons for a war.
I don't know if that meets your definition of 'vast right-wing conspiracy', but it certainly there are certainly conspiracies and the majority seem to be perpetrated by a tiny number of senior Republicans.
The principal beneficiary of "Kenny Boy" Lay's largesse was George W Bush. So it is hardly a case of a 'few Republicans' as if they were a random collection of folk who just happened to be Republicans. The Bush-Cheney campaign made extensive use of Enron company jets, in office they showered Enron with legislative favors.
The most important of those favors was allowing Enron in to the closed door meetings held by Cheney's Energy task force and the administration decision not to intervene to prevent Enron manipulating the California energy market.
Those favors continue today, California will be paying out over $12 billion in the years to come under long term contracts signed when the market manipulation was at its peak. The principal beneficiaries of those contracts are the parties responsible for the manipulation.
I just got reports from Rio de Janeiro, Paris and Casablanca and they are all unaffected. Baghdad is still out but that seems to be an independent cause.
There is also the Enron factor. A couple of years back when Cheney gave Enron the green light to manipulate the California energy market California was making deals to buy any capacity it could
During the period the market was being manipulated the cover story was that it was California's fault for not allowing new plants to be built. Power plants have a major lead time so the only way to get generator sets for new power plants to be built in the West was for NYC to give up the generator sets for a bunch of gas turnbine systems planned to be deployed in the East.
Thank Bush, Cheney and their big friend 'Kenny boy' Lay for putting the interests of Enron before the national interest. First they screwed California and now NYC may well be getting hit by the unexpected results.
Depends on the vintage. During the Amelio era Apple had serious quality problems. When I was at the AI lab about 6 years ago the Apples in use would crash about twice a day but the way they were going down was completely unlike Windows which tend to crash when provoked - indicating a likely software cause. These machines would just freeze up at random.
Since Jobs has been on board Apple do seem to have a major commitment to build quality. The problems they have been having have tended to be caused by pushing the envelope too far rather than shoddy components.
I don't think that Microsoft will go into the same market as Dell. Building PCs is a very low margin business.
They did.
The IBM countersuit goes into quite a bit of detail on the issue. They claim that their license is irrevocable and they list a series of issues in connection with it. They have obtained a statement from Novell that states that they are in compliance with the contract and that SCO does not have termination rights.
IBM seeks a variety of inhjunctions, in particular to prevent SCO purporting to claim that the license has been terminated.
In other news SCO announced that they have appointed Bill O'Reilly as their VP of frivolous littigation/
which is still sad, especially for an os whose zealous followers claim it is derived from VMS...
VMS had a major advantage in that almost every device attached to the system was also manufactured by DEC. With Windows there are a gazillion vendors of every component you can imagine.
There is no way commodity intel boxes are going to match the reliability of the DEC hardware built to run VMS. The build quality is just not the same - apart from the junk like the Multia that DEC built when it was on its way under.
One of my pet peves about reviews of the latest video hardware is that the quality of the drivers seems to receive only scant attention. I have video cards by nvidia and ATI, the performance of the two cards is indistinguishable but I have had far more hassle with the ATI drivers.
During the court proceedings Microsoft was prevented from producing the copious evidence that the patent was invalid.
I have an interest here as I was one of the people who actually invented what Doyle is claiming.
Doyle does not care diddly about open source, he went after Microsoft to make a buck. He was sending out threatening letters before Netscape was started when all the web browsers were open source and many were public domain.
I am failry sure that at least one of the blacklists will turn out to be run by a spammer.
The spammer could turn off listings for his own spam sources when it suited him. He could also blacklist his competitor's machines.
Go back and read the article. It's about http requests, not sending mail.
Oh, I totally get the fact you are sending out http requests. The fact the message is HTTP rather than SMTP is not relevant as far as I am concerned. The original HTTP spec used the term messages for requests and responses. I really can't remember what we did in the RFC.
The amplifier effect is just the same, for each message in there could be five messages out. The main advantage to the spammer though is laundering the IP address so that their web site hits appear to come from 10,000 distinct views rather than the same view.
I don't know where you get this idea. I know plenty of filter hackers who get results so much better than me that I'm kind of embarrassed.
Getting that sort of result on their own mail is one thing, getting that result on a representative corpus of user emails is a very different matter.
Geek mail is much easier to spam filter than naive user's mail. They tend to be far more aggressive in the features they use. They are also the targets of the spammers, geeks being a minority. So the vocabulary chosen by spammers tends to be much closer.
My real concern is not whether a filter is 99.8 or 95% efficient at detecting spam, its the false positive rate that is the problem. 1% false positives is a big problem, even 0.5% is a serious problem. The other big problem is the sheer cost of CPU cycles. Imagine a room the size of a football field filled with 100 equipment racks. Processing the legitimate mail only requires one of those racks, the rest are for dealling with spam. Each processing step adds cost. Bayesian filtering is only one part of the solution.
I agree about going after the spammers, but litigation and law enforcement are far more likely to be effective than hackback.
What we need to do in addition is to change the mail protocols so that we can know that a message that purports to come from a particular source is authentic. At least 50% of the spam sent claims a false sender address. The tricks that spam senders use to hide from litigation are a very robust spamdicator that almost never gives a false positive.
Which illustrates the problems that you get when people who have little or no security experience try to do security.
The problem with hackback schemes of all types is that they always end up having unexpected effects. The basic problem is that when people design a hackback scheme they never consider what happens when someone sets out to abuse it. They assume that the only change to the environment is their hackback scheme.
A few months ago Paul though Bayesean filtering was the one true solution. The only problem was that people who have spent years working on the techniques he described never achieved results anywhere close to the ones he claims.
Paul Graham's scheme is not as damaging as some others because the amplifier effect is limited. The message sender only gets five or ten messages created for each spam sent. But even that could make a profitable scheme for someone trying to get their site promoted in a 'most visited list'. If they have pay per view adverts they can rake in quite a few bucks - as much as a cent for every spam sent. Far from discouraging spam this scheme would create a new incentive.
BTW the guy who said 'there is no fake spam' is right depending on the definition you use. If you use the definition 'unwanted email sent indiscriminately' then he is pretty much right. If on the other hand you define spam as 'that which our filters decide is spam'... (I kid you not, folk do try to get that type of definition accepted). The exception would be satires like 'make penis fast'.
There are similar problems with the folks running blacklists, they think that they understand everything there is about spam but don't realize that the systems they set up can be and will be gamed. Every partisan political mailing list of every stripe that has a significant number of readers gets blacklisted from time to time as people sign up for the list in order to be able to report it as spamming.
Try to explain to either group that there is a problem and they get majorly defensive. You get accused of wanting to help the spammers, etc. etc. When people start getting defensive like that in response to fair questions you are in big trouble.
The way to deal with spam is to treat it as a security problem. We deal with security problems using access control - authentication and authorization. We need to start with robust authentication mechanisms that hold ISPs responsible for the messages sent from their domain. These need to be accompanied by robust authorization mechanisms that allow recipients to judge whether the sender is honest.
This was anticipated in the Web Specs which since 1992 have clearly said that clicking on a GET link creates no form of binding contract.
In any case any contract formed in that manner would be a contract of adhesion and invalid.
If it were otherwise Google would be entering into all sorts of contracts with its web crawler.
In which case socialism is capitalism in its finest form.
Try not to get brainwashed by the legacy of McCarthy. Socialism is to communism what republicanism is to fascism. Tony Blair, Bush's great aly (heck, his only aly that hasn't been bought) heads a socialist party. If as you claim Blair is planning to errect gulags across the UK then maybe people in the US should be a bit more worried about the intentions of his aly Bush and KKKomandant Ashcroft.
Socialism isn't evil, it is obsolete. Like any hundred plus year old ideology the assumptions it rests on are no longer operative. Capital is no longer scarce. At the time that Robert Owen took over the New Lanarkshire Mills practically the entire population of the UK lived in poverty by modern standards. Owen was by far the most successful capitalist of his day, he appears in US textbooks as 'the father of the factory system'. In UK textbooks he is also mentioned as the father of socialism.
The problems we face today are completely different to those of Owen's day. Today 'common ownership' has been achieved, its called your 401K or your pension plan, not 100% of the country participate but its close enough. The problem today is corporate looters who pay themselves vast salaries with our money and do business in corrupt ways (Enron, Harken, Haliburton)
Oh and lying about the reasons for going to war.
That would be far more risky. Any pull protocol has an intrinsic risk of traffic analysis.
Authoritarian governments like Singapore use traffic analysis to monitor and suppress dissent. In Singapore every telephone call is logged and the authorities perform traffic analysis to identify groups of dissenters.
It is not that difficult to perform traffic analysis on the Internet and even with IPSEC this would not change. The only protocol that has any degree of traffic analysis resistance is NNTP