You're getting towards the foundation of the issue here; trademarks attempt to cover multiple layers of information and fail badly.
On one hand it's the original manufacturer/major contributor(s), and on the other it's brand applier/controller/minor contributor. It may be an issue in software, but it's, IMO, a far bigger issue in physical goods and the other way around, outsourced production and generics that get a trademark logo slapped on them when it's exactly the same product, from the same factory, as the one next to it that costs a third of the price.
So not only do I think derivatives should be able to use the trademark name as an origin notice; at a certain level of similarity they should be _required_ to label with the identity of the original product (/manufacturer/etc).
Most likely they already have, or at least will have, second level filters that would run simple semantic analysis and dump such content in a low-priority queue. Better than nothing, but it probably wont cause significantly more problems than the massive amounts of false positives they'd get anyway. And anyway, English keywords might trip up filters in China, but I'd bet you'd have to add Arabic keywords to get any interest.
If you really want to clog the system and/or make sure they'll never be able to listen to anything you yourself might want to hide, you'd be better off adding blocks of encrypted/dev/random to your communications. As such blocks would be impossible to successfully decrypt, while it would still be impossible to be certain they don't contain real data, they'd be stuck with either permanently whitelisting your communications or sticking it all in a huge undecryptable pile with no way to sort out what specific communications they could try to decrypt.
A keyword might take a few milliseconds to discard, an encrypted random block could clog them 'til their budget runs out.
It is, however, a solution to more effective use of oversized hard drives; minimizing wasted space has always been one of the selling points of SAN storage. For the purpose, any block level storage protocol capable of supporting diskless machines would work, of course.
Centralized repository of data != Distributed & redundant storage system.
That would depend on your configuration. Most SAN storage solutions are distributed and redundant. You might not spread slices around on every node; you could, but that would simply be impractical.
It's entirely up to you, of course. If you want to make better use of those over-sized hard drives, SAN is the only way to go. If you want a distributed filesystem to do the same thing, well, there are none.
Looks like we have different interpretations of what the original poster requested.
On one hand he asks for a specific solution: "I'm more interested in a truly distributed file system"
On the other he states the intended purpose: "for making better use of my home LAN full of PCs with those over-sized hard drives that could be being used efficiently."
As the posters suggested solution is infeasible but his stated purpose can be resolved I'd consider that a completely relevant suggestion.
I can't find solid arguments against adding something to the drinking water, provided it is proven that this addition makes it healthier.
Because something that makes x percent of the population healthier in one way may make y percent of the population less healthy in another. For example, Lithium might reduce suicide, but might also cause heart defects in newborn, kidney problems, weight issues, etc.
Apart from possible additives that can be verified as having no possible negative aspects at all it's simply better engineering to specifically target the group with the deficit. That way you get both the positive result for that group and avoid the dangers for anyone else.
As in, "take all the hard drives out of current machines
Mmm, no. As in quit installing on local disk, bite the bullet and build a SAN and stick decent size disks in one or two linux machines servicing your block device needs. It'd expect the gp'd have at least one or two machines of the current ones that are stable enough to act as servers for the rest.
Disparate sizes of disks isn't a problem as you share out lvm slices, and if you want maintenance ease and redundancy you mirror on the client side of the SAN, not on the server side.
a distributed filesystem using spare capacity
There is none, nor is there likely to be one in the near future. You can accomplish something towards that end with hacks like freenet, or, heck, you could even share the space as block iscsi storage and raid it on other nodes, but the combination of varying client types, varying client uptimes, varying client versions, etc, and any such system will become massively painful to maintain, would be a horror to program for or would have to have massive redundancy to deal with random data going unavailable at any time.
The (stable functional) distributed filesystems there are tend to be written for either large clusters of homogenous clients or are merely designed to redundantly serve from several servers. Neither is a good solution to that particular problem, and trust me, I looked (four years ago, before going with SAN). I haven't seen any major new developments since then. Well, except SSD disks, which, if I just wanted a quick solution, would probably be the way to go to minimize storage waste on new clients today.
To solve that problem I moved over centralized storage with diskless clients using iSCSI volumes and booting with PXE. With gigabit it works fine for daily use, it's much simpler to keep track of data and backups and no more wasted disk space in clients.
It's just not worth the time spent to cut and crimp your own lines anymore.
Compared with... filling in an internal requisition, having to justify the expense, waiting a week for order delivery, followed by resuming doing what you were doing when you needed the cable. If you can even recall what it was.
Seriously tho, it's usually not that bad as ethernet cable tends to be one of those shelf items, but in a corporate setting, the fact that the supplier is going to scam you isn't necessarily the only reason for making things yourself, and the time eaten by corporate procedure may be far longer than time wasted making things you could buy.
versus having smaller political groups being used as swing votes.
Swing votes are only effective when you have issues that other parties have little or no opinion on, as you need to trade any other influence for help on your issue. The actual effect on politics isn't as big as it's made out to be, for the most spectacular effect, the helping of one coalition or the other to form a government, it requires the sides to be equal of size and tippable either way. If that exerts more power than due, well, perhaps the ability to form a majority-guaranteed government carries too much power.
And if it's an issue that's so important that people are voting for that issue to the exclusion of all other political issues, then the established parties can easily deal with it by actually looking at why they're getting voters.
Read up on E.U. politics sometimes.
Most of the worst EU stuff comes from the Council or Commision, neither of which is directly elected. The local politicians love using the EU as a policy laundering mechanism; if you have a nasty idea you want implemented, play a bit in the council and you get help with your nastiness in exchange for helping someone elses nastiness pass. Then you just go home and say 'me? no, no, it's the EU _making_ us.'.
FPTP tends to produce a two-party system, but these parties have a strong incentive to cluster around where the true compromise position is likely to be
You mean a strong incentive to cluster around where the money is likely to be.
The really outstanding part of FPTP is it's really cheap to buy the appropriate representation; it's not like a purchased candidate is going to be replaced with an unpurchased one. You can afford them all.
Political compromise positions in two party systems do not have to fall anywhere near the voters actual compromise positions; fptp politics, even beside the ease of exerting pressure, simply cannot accurately represent a multidimensional political landscape.
The system can sometimes be unfair, especially to people with more unusual views
Oh, please. With the high level of disenfranchisement, the majority position of the US congress is achieved at vote representing somewhere between 20-25 percent of eligible voters. That itself is equivalent with the level of support some far left socialist or libertarians get in some countries with proportional representation.
However it is because their views are unlikely to form part of the consensus position
Their views on what? There are certainly many issues where libertarians would join some republicans in forming a consensus on economics. And they'd form a consensus with some democrats on other issues. Adding more dimensions does not mean you get a consensus further from the voters, it means it gets harder for politicians to ignore their voters and quid-pro-quo bargain away issues as they like, as there are other options to vote for.
I don't think it's much different than a judge being a member of an organization lobbying for tougher murder penalties
More like a judge being a member of an organization lobbying for tougher murder penalties for amateurs presiding over a trial where the injured party is the hit man association who claims amateur murderers cost the hit man industry huge amounts of money...
His judgment should come from interpreting the law.
The same judge approved the wildly scandalous raid on an ISP a few years ago where it turned out the Swedish RIAA equivalent Antipiratbyran had infiltrated the ISP and placed their own server with 'pirated' material in the server room. (And yes, Henrik Ponten was involved in that case too).
Add to that the policeman leading the investigation getting a 6 month job at Warner before the investigation was even closed and he'd handed over the final papers to the prosecutor. The same policeman also failed to appear in court during the trial (Heh, cant have any appearance of impropriety that the defence might point out...)
The whole case has, without any doubt, been bought and paid for from the beginning to the end, and no surprise really. Had the MAFIAA not had the entire trial phase under control they wouldn't have tried to get it to trial; they really do not want to lose this one.
What part of your solution would stop everyone from filesharing everything, and hence getting everything for free?
Basically, practicality, convenience and value.
First, file sharing is impractical for anything but the most widely desired stuff; compared to a vendor offering a huge library with at-your-will encoded tracks, like for example, the Russian music sites, or even compared to current legitimate sites like emusic, it's better value to pay a reasonable amount and get what you want compared to hunting across file sharing sites for it. Time is money. (heck, personally I'm paying five times what I used to pay for music with my emusic subscription simply because it's allowing me to find lots of new music sitting on my behind, compared to the 2-4 cd's per year I bought before)
Second, even with future options, any serious services, whether file sharing or otherwise will, to offer any reasonable amount of quality and added value, have to generate some revenue somehow. If they're generating revenue, through commercials or actual payments, they'd have to pay. Pirate bay would be emgaged in tax avoidance, and easily dealt with.
Third, the wide range of innovative services that would be available would also generate massive revenue; for example, today it's entirely possible to rip and encode your cell phone signal from anything you'd like. How many do you know that actually do that, as compared to those getting them from all sorts of weird places scamming them out of money? You can make all sorts of mix cd's and play lists and other things, yet people listen to commercial radio and pay for Party-Songs 138.
For most people, the convenience of not having to do things, find things, get things, learn things, etc, on their own is simply worth quite a lot. Not infinite, but quite a lot, and when there are basically any number of innovative ways that services could be offered related to creative material, many of those will generate value for the consumer compared to them doing everything themselves, and as soon as there's a payment involved, the creators get paid.
In the end, to take the example of music, even at least smaller labels could quite easily survive as anything from taste consultants, artist finders, event music designers, promoters, live event managers, etc, except they'd get directly paid for the services they provide instead, and depending on whether their part in the food chain involves helping and getting paid by artists, or selling services that used artists, money would exchange hands and be appropriately distributed.
Really, this has been rehashed so many times by now that if you truly haven't seen any of the many possible solutions you haven't been looking.
Basically it's a fairly easy question to solve as long as you simply frame the question appropriately and realize it's just yet another benefit no different than any other such system. From a macro economic point of view copyright is roughly equivalent to an arbitrary sales tax on specific items, with an efficiency rate of about 5% of the collected funds going towards the stated (as opposed to actual, of course) purpose of copyright.
To replace that with a better system would be trivial. The quickest and easiest way, most closely resembling a vastly more efficient version of the current system, would be to simply implement it as what it actually is; a sales tax on creative goods, but with the proceeds going directly to the intended recipients, ie, artists and creators.
A quick calculation of the numbers would yield something like this; with free replication of creative materials the competitive cost of printing and delivering a high-quality CD to a store would fall somewhere around $1. Final sales point adds another $1, and to ensure the creators get what they get today we'd need a levy of about 50% on top of that, ie, $3 final sales price to customer. Add various other factors such as the vastly increased sales from a massive lowering of prices and you'd probably get double or triple the funds to the actual artists and creators. It's also a model that can easily be implemented on pretty much any profit generating scheme based on copyright, from web sales to automatic printing kiosks to cable tv.
That's an exceedingly simplified version of course, a more complete analysis of issues would have to go into everything from derived and combined works to appropriate payment levels (whether implemented like copyright or as a sales tax system it's a benefit scheme. It's not supposed to make anyone rich or fund marketing and parties, it's supposed to maximize social utility and allow as many creators to maximize their creative output as possible).
But in the end it's not a hard question to solve. It's just hard if your basic intention is to have a system intended to make publishers rich, while still screwing the creators as deeply as possible as it's hard to explain and defend a 95% fund leakage even in government unless you hide it outside any visible and publicly reviewed budget.
And I have seen network cards that handle regular CAT5 at speeds over 100Mb/s with 1000baseTX interfaces.
I got a leftover cable spool from a friend and didn't really check it when I laid it in for my 100mbit network. I switched to gigabit, and a year or two after that I looked at the spool and noticed it was CAT5; the only time I'd ever had any trouble with it was with a bad crimp or two that hadn't been exposed on 100mbit.
CAT5e should be good for 100 meters of GigE; that Cat5 can handle GigE over the more common shorter distances isn't really that strange. Upgrade any long distance cable and ignore the rest unless there's a problem.
Now, for 10GBaseT or 40GBaseT it'll be time to look things over, Cat6a through Cat7a provide performance for 500-1000MHz compared to the 100MHz of the Cat5 offerings.
Most high-power Linux developers have tended to put their money where their mouth is in previous similar situations. Despite the environment, I doubt they'd have trouble finding new jobs.
RedHat fork that can compete with the RedHat brand isn't likely.
The value of the Redhat brand is largely tied to its independence and long term reliability and predictability on strategic issues. Most possible buyers of Redhat do not have the same track record of free software dedication (a company like Oracle would be dead in days if they had to compete with their own version of CentOS for their various products; they certainly don't seem to endear themselves to their customers).
For most buyers of the company the brand would basically cease to exist, so any fork would have little to compete against, apart from the various other vendors, of which Ubuntu would probably be the major gainer.
why use Solaris only as a stopgap until linux meets your criteria?
Linux basically is there already. Any holdouts not accepting Linux as a HA enterprise platform tend to be of the kind mostly reading fairly old recycled marketing materials.
Solaris is nice enough, but Solaris/SPARC is nowhere near the top absolute performance anymore, nor even a player on the price/performance spectrum. And Solaris/x86 has been treated like the bastard stepchild for so long that most seem to take it about as seriously as Sun used to. Better to go with the flow and run one of the tested and widely deployed Linux variants.
The smartest thing Oracle could do is continue supporting linux but ditch or downsize their development team for their linux distro
I wouldn't disagree with that one, but I'd suggest they'd apply it to Solaris as well. Oracle doesn't have the cost structure or expertise to compete in highly competitive environments; I don't see that many who'd buy Oracle products if they could obtain the exact same product for free or supported by someone else.
Apart from the cost to Ellisons ego, it'd probably be cheaper for Oracle to ship a preconfigured Redhat with Redhat support than to try to provide the same service in house.
Even better, don't only encrypt things you want encrypted. Add encrypted true random data to any mails you send, to web pages, etc. As the encrypted random data will be largely indistinguishable from actual content but impossible to decrypt it'll clog any listeners decryption capabilities, forcing them to either white list you or be stuck with a huge pile of largely undecipherable junk which may or may not contain something they might want to attempt to decrypt.
The desire of our dear leaders to expand surveillance to everyone everywhere and take the authoritarian road is, perhaps, unstoppable, but fortunately it also creates a huge funnel collecting sand for the machinery.
I'm not sure TPB's top 100 is a good list to track distribution of independent and net-savvy bands either way; if they're distributing freely via their own site, or have their works easily available through sites like e-music, it'll quickly skew the statistics. For many unsigned bands or their fans, there may simply not be any need to involve TPB.
The statistics on last.fm are a bit more interesting then, and the post-Radiohead net release charts were amusing, as they were rather, eh, dominated by Radiohead.
In the end tho, marketing is still efficient, and channel control even more so. As long as the big labels retain the financial muscle to heavily influence most mainstream media outlets, they'll dominate the top lists.
Hopefully they'll lose that muscle through a combination of factors. On one end from the loss of ROI on overmarketing as p2p copying undermines it, and on the other as the importance of media outlets becomes fractured into personalized and socialized networks driven by the taste of at least a few more individuals.
Unfortunately it's going to take a while for the labels die. And until their control begins to slip the game will remain rigged..
verify that the person on the other end of the phone is who they say they are.
Of course, like all other biometrics it's worthless for that, as there's nothing preventing someone else from presenting a device that would emulate the same biometric. Biometrics are inherently not secret and thus cannot be used to authenticate an identity.
This one at least gets spread a bit less than DNA or fingerprints; you don't leave it on anything you touch, but if it's really so easily measured that you could use a phone for it it'd be trivial to replicate.
Still, I'm sure the biometrics crowd are just working their way up to suggesting colonic maps. To a certain mindset it seems like flashy sci-fi stuff must equal actual security, especially if they can't think of a way to subvert it offhand.
In the end, the old card number plus PIN code is much more secure than every expensive piece of flashy technology, simply because getting the PIN code out of a person is still harder than getting their DNA, fingerprint, facial features or inner ear shape. The very ease of presenting the information that makes biometrics so tempting is exactly what makes them unusable for authentication (which, of course, is why we'll eventually get to the colonic map, which at least requires shoving stuff up where you'll notice it. Until identity theft becomes popular among proctologists. Or until someone realizes they can tap into the sensors or copy the info from a database).
Because while most biometrics provide a specific identity with at least some kind of reliability, they do not prove that the person wanting to get authenticated as being that identity actually _is_ that identity.
See, you may be the only person in the world whose ear makes that specific click pattern. But anyone in the world can carry a device that makes that exact click pattern as well.
Same with fingerprints or DNA; it's your DNA, it most often can't be confused with anyone elses DNA, but you leave it everywhere and anyone can present it for inspection. Same with fingerprints. They describe you, but they're not a secret only you know.
PIN codes and passwords are better for authentication, as hopefully you don't leave them around on everything you touch. They can also be varied between different systems, so if one is compromised it doesn't mean they're all compromised. When someone copies your biometrics they know it'll be the same everywhere, you can't revoke it you can't change it, and to anyone who thinks identity and authentication is the same thing, the person carrying your means of identification will essentially be you.
then to deliver the same IOPS you need 2-3x more sata disks.
Which also gives you 6-9x more storage space. Storage space, which, unless you have a very performance oriented load, you'd have to buy anyway. Combining appropriate access patterns with each other and you can get both high-IOPS disk and low-IOPS disk out of the same pile, while if you get the expensive disks you're locked into those disks being used only for expensive high-IOPS use, and you still have to buy the cheap disks for storage, ie, over the whole storage need you don't save any power or space.
There are, of course, exceptions. If your load is heavily IOPS oriented so you don't actually need the space from the 3x spindles anyway, then you're certainly better off using faster disks. But like I said, I hear many more complaints about enterprise storage being expensive than it being slow, and when concepts like storage de-duplication are bandied about it's certainly an indication that storage costs are far out of a reasonable range.
Ah, my bad, I should have contrasted that with having a few decent workplaces and using VPN and/or USB sticks to move things between them. And a palmtop/netbook for the portable needs.
And yes, I know that for some cases they actually make sense; yours sounds like one of them. Still, I find myself surrounded with a lot of people who don't actually seem to use it that way. At best they lug it around as a portable presentation unit and the only reason they take it home is that it might get stolen if they leave it at the office. Compared to having a serious multihead desktop with fast disk and decent amounts of memory, it just seems like a bad compromise for the limited advantage they gain.
I remember when we used to haul CRTs for lan parties and hook up everything there...
Hehe, I remember when there were actual 'portable computers' with CRT's _in_ them. IBM had a model with an itty-bitty 7 inch or something yellow and black screen in it. Even then people wanted to lug it around between workplaces, and it weighed something like 60 pounds all on it's own.
Still, it didn't take them long to give up and use floppies instead.
Lots of them. But of course, they tend to lend the money to the government.
See, unlike companies like Tesla, the government has big sticks it can beat the citizens with if they fail to cough up the dough needed to pay the loans back. Therefore, while everyone knows that Tesla won't be able to pay the loan back at a risk/reward rate sufficient to merit rates they can afford, the banks lend it to the guys with the sticks.
Hence, Tesla needs to ask the guys who don't need to be responsible with their lending for the funds they want, ie, the government.
you see lots of Joe sixpacks getting LCD HDTV's today
To be fair, you saw a lot of Joe sixpacks getting LCD HDTV's a few years ago too. On credit, of course.
It takes time, those early adopters, that can afford them
Nah, not if you borrow the money. Then you can have it now.
pave the way for Joe and Sall Sixpack later down the road.
Well, at least they pave the way for someone else to pay later down the road.
there seems to be an almost inherit distaste for anyone with any type of wealth in this country these days.
Hmm, Freudian slip with wealth and inheritance, eh?:)
As it's turned out that quite a lot of the wealth has been obtained through borderline fraud and quite a lot of the rest has been merely loans that they're now whining about having to pay back and want everyone else to help them out with, I don't find it exceptionally odd that the flaunting of wealth has gone a bit out of style.
After all, how can people tell if it's their tax money you're flaunting or something you've actually earned? Did the wealthy get wealthy by trying so hard, or did the wealthy get, and remain, wealthy by conning the suckers who were trying so hard?
Really, $50K is a lot of money to pay for a car. Take a long, hard, look at the Tata Nano. That's the price point for 'affordable' that we're looking at for the future if the West is going to remain competitive. $2K as an entry point into the market. For, as you say, 'cutting edge', in price aspect at least.
Personally I welcome our new cheap car producing overlords. I've never been particularly impressed by the glitz used to part fools from their money today.
Slashdot Mirror
You're getting towards the foundation of the issue here; trademarks attempt to cover multiple layers of information and fail badly.
On one hand it's the original manufacturer/major contributor(s), and on the other it's brand applier/controller/minor contributor. It may be an issue in software, but it's, IMO, a far bigger issue in physical goods and the other way around, outsourced production and generics that get a trademark logo slapped on them when it's exactly the same product, from the same factory, as the one next to it that costs a third of the price.
So not only do I think derivatives should be able to use the trademark name as an origin notice; at a certain level of similarity they should be _required_ to label with the identity of the original product (/manufacturer/etc).
Most likely they already have, or at least will have, second level filters that would run simple semantic analysis and dump such content in a low-priority queue. Better than nothing, but it probably wont cause significantly more problems than the massive amounts of false positives they'd get anyway. And anyway, English keywords might trip up filters in China, but I'd bet you'd have to add Arabic keywords to get any interest.
If you really want to clog the system and/or make sure they'll never be able to listen to anything you yourself might want to hide, you'd be better off adding blocks of encrypted /dev/random to your communications. As such blocks would be impossible to successfully decrypt, while it would still be impossible to be certain they don't contain real data, they'd be stuck with either permanently whitelisting your communications or sticking it all in a huge undecryptable pile with no way to sort out what specific communications they could try to decrypt.
A keyword might take a few milliseconds to discard, an encrypted random block could clog them 'til their budget runs out.
iSCSI isn't a distributed filesystem.
It is, however, a solution to more effective use of oversized hard drives; minimizing wasted space has always been one of the selling points of SAN storage. For the purpose, any block level storage protocol capable of supporting diskless machines would work, of course.
Centralized repository of data != Distributed & redundant storage system.
That would depend on your configuration. Most SAN storage solutions are distributed and redundant. You might not spread slices around on every node; you could, but that would simply be impractical.
It's entirely up to you, of course. If you want to make better use of those over-sized hard drives, SAN is the only way to go. If you want a distributed filesystem to do the same thing, well, there are none.
that what original poster requested
Looks like we have different interpretations of what the original poster requested.
On one hand he asks for a specific solution: "I'm more interested in a truly distributed file system"
On the other he states the intended purpose: "for making better use of my home LAN full of PCs with those over-sized hard drives that could be being used efficiently."
As the posters suggested solution is infeasible but his stated purpose can be resolved I'd consider that a completely relevant suggestion.
I can't find solid arguments against adding something to the drinking water, provided it is proven that this addition makes it healthier.
Because something that makes x percent of the population healthier in one way may make y percent of the population less healthy in another. For example, Lithium might reduce suicide, but might also cause heart defects in newborn, kidney problems, weight issues, etc.
Apart from possible additives that can be verified as having no possible negative aspects at all it's simply better engineering to specifically target the group with the deficit. That way you get both the positive result for that group and avoid the dangers for anyone else.
As in, "take all the hard drives out of current machines
Mmm, no. As in quit installing on local disk, bite the bullet and build a SAN and stick decent size disks in one or two linux machines servicing your block device needs. It'd expect the gp'd have at least one or two machines of the current ones that are stable enough to act as servers for the rest.
Disparate sizes of disks isn't a problem as you share out lvm slices, and if you want maintenance ease and redundancy you mirror on the client side of the SAN, not on the server side.
a distributed filesystem using spare capacity
There is none, nor is there likely to be one in the near future. You can accomplish something towards that end with hacks like freenet, or, heck, you could even share the space as block iscsi storage and raid it on other nodes, but the combination of varying client types, varying client uptimes, varying client versions, etc, and any such system will become massively painful to maintain, would be a horror to program for or would have to have massive redundancy to deal with random data going unavailable at any time.
The (stable functional) distributed filesystems there are tend to be written for either large clusters of homogenous clients or are merely designed to redundantly serve from several servers. Neither is a good solution to that particular problem, and trust me, I looked (four years ago, before going with SAN). I haven't seen any major new developments since then. Well, except SSD disks, which, if I just wanted a quick solution, would probably be the way to go to minimize storage waste on new clients today.
To solve that problem I moved over centralized storage with diskless clients using iSCSI volumes and booting with PXE. With gigabit it works fine for daily use, it's much simpler to keep track of data and backups and no more wasted disk space in clients.
And, yes, it's very stable.
It wasn't a natural disaster, wasn't an accident, wasn't even a war. It was a big...
The term you're looking for is blowback.
It's just not worth the time spent to cut and crimp your own lines anymore.
Compared with... filling in an internal requisition, having to justify the expense, waiting a week for order delivery, followed by resuming doing what you were doing when you needed the cable. If you can even recall what it was.
Seriously tho, it's usually not that bad as ethernet cable tends to be one of those shelf items, but in a corporate setting, the fact that the supplier is going to scam you isn't necessarily the only reason for making things yourself, and the time eaten by corporate procedure may be far longer than time wasted making things you could buy.
versus having smaller political groups being used as swing votes.
Swing votes are only effective when you have issues that other parties have little or no opinion on, as you need to trade any other influence for help on your issue. The actual effect on politics isn't as big as it's made out to be, for the most spectacular effect, the helping of one coalition or the other to form a government, it requires the sides to be equal of size and tippable either way. If that exerts more power than due, well, perhaps the ability to form a majority-guaranteed government carries too much power.
And if it's an issue that's so important that people are voting for that issue to the exclusion of all other political issues, then the established parties can easily deal with it by actually looking at why they're getting voters.
Read up on E.U. politics sometimes.
Most of the worst EU stuff comes from the Council or Commision, neither of which is directly elected. The local politicians love using the EU as a policy laundering mechanism; if you have a nasty idea you want implemented, play a bit in the council and you get help with your nastiness in exchange for helping someone elses nastiness pass. Then you just go home and say 'me? no, no, it's the EU _making_ us.'.
FPTP tends to produce a two-party system, but these parties have a strong incentive to cluster around where the true compromise position is likely to be
You mean a strong incentive to cluster around where the money is likely to be.
The really outstanding part of FPTP is it's really cheap to buy the appropriate representation; it's not like a purchased candidate is going to be replaced with an unpurchased one. You can afford them all.
Political compromise positions in two party systems do not have to fall anywhere near the voters actual compromise positions; fptp politics, even beside the ease of exerting pressure, simply cannot accurately represent a multidimensional political landscape.
The system can sometimes be unfair, especially to people with more unusual views
Oh, please. With the high level of disenfranchisement, the majority position of the US congress is achieved at vote representing somewhere between 20-25 percent of eligible voters. That itself is equivalent with the level of support some far left socialist or libertarians get in some countries with proportional representation.
However it is because their views are unlikely to form part of the consensus position
Their views on what? There are certainly many issues where libertarians would join some republicans in forming a consensus on economics. And they'd form a consensus with some democrats on other issues. Adding more dimensions does not mean you get a consensus further from the voters, it means it gets harder for politicians to ignore their voters and quid-pro-quo bargain away issues as they like, as there are other options to vote for.
I don't think it's much different than a judge being a member of an organization lobbying for tougher murder penalties
More like a judge being a member of an organization lobbying for tougher murder penalties for amateurs presiding over a trial where the injured party is the hit man association who claims amateur murderers cost the hit man industry huge amounts of money...
His judgment should come from interpreting the law.
The same judge approved the wildly scandalous raid on an ISP a few years ago where it turned out the Swedish RIAA equivalent Antipiratbyran had infiltrated the ISP and placed their own server with 'pirated' material in the server room. (And yes, Henrik Ponten was involved in that case too).
Add to that the policeman leading the investigation getting a 6 month job at Warner before the investigation was even closed and he'd handed over the final papers to the prosecutor. The same policeman also failed to appear in court during the trial (Heh, cant have any appearance of impropriety that the defence might point out...)
The whole case has, without any doubt, been bought and paid for from the beginning to the end, and no surprise really. Had the MAFIAA not had the entire trial phase under control they wouldn't have tried to get it to trial; they really do not want to lose this one.
What part of your solution would stop everyone from filesharing everything, and hence getting everything for free?
Basically, practicality, convenience and value.
First, file sharing is impractical for anything but the most widely desired stuff; compared to a vendor offering a huge library with at-your-will encoded tracks, like for example, the Russian music sites, or even compared to current legitimate sites like emusic, it's better value to pay a reasonable amount and get what you want compared to hunting across file sharing sites for it. Time is money. (heck, personally I'm paying five times what I used to pay for music with my emusic subscription simply because it's allowing me to find lots of new music sitting on my behind, compared to the 2-4 cd's per year I bought before)
Second, even with future options, any serious services, whether file sharing or otherwise will, to offer any reasonable amount of quality and added value, have to generate some revenue somehow. If they're generating revenue, through commercials or actual payments, they'd have to pay. Pirate bay would be emgaged in tax avoidance, and easily dealt with.
Third, the wide range of innovative services that would be available would also generate massive revenue; for example, today it's entirely possible to rip and encode your cell phone signal from anything you'd like. How many do you know that actually do that, as compared to those getting them from all sorts of weird places scamming them out of money? You can make all sorts of mix cd's and play lists and other things, yet people listen to commercial radio and pay for Party-Songs 138.
For most people, the convenience of not having to do things, find things, get things, learn things, etc, on their own is simply worth quite a lot. Not infinite, but quite a lot, and when there are basically any number of innovative ways that services could be offered related to creative material, many of those will generate value for the consumer compared to them doing everything themselves, and as soon as there's a payment involved, the creators get paid.
In the end, to take the example of music, even at least smaller labels could quite easily survive as anything from taste consultants, artist finders, event music designers, promoters, live event managers, etc, except they'd get directly paid for the services they provide instead, and depending on whether their part in the food chain involves helping and getting paid by artists, or selling services that used artists, money would exchange hands and be appropriately distributed.
Really, this has been rehashed so many times by now that if you truly haven't seen any of the many possible solutions you haven't been looking.
Basically it's a fairly easy question to solve as long as you simply frame the question appropriately and realize it's just yet another benefit no different than any other such system. From a macro economic point of view copyright is roughly equivalent to an arbitrary sales tax on specific items, with an efficiency rate of about 5% of the collected funds going towards the stated (as opposed to actual, of course) purpose of copyright.
To replace that with a better system would be trivial. The quickest and easiest way, most closely resembling a vastly more efficient version of the current system, would be to simply implement it as what it actually is; a sales tax on creative goods, but with the proceeds going directly to the intended recipients, ie, artists and creators.
A quick calculation of the numbers would yield something like this; with free replication of creative materials the competitive cost of printing and delivering a high-quality CD to a store would fall somewhere around $1. Final sales point adds another $1, and to ensure the creators get what they get today we'd need a levy of about 50% on top of that, ie, $3 final sales price to customer. Add various other factors such as the vastly increased sales from a massive lowering of prices and you'd probably get double or triple the funds to the actual artists and creators. It's also a model that can easily be implemented on pretty much any profit generating scheme based on copyright, from web sales to automatic printing kiosks to cable tv.
That's an exceedingly simplified version of course, a more complete analysis of issues would have to go into everything from derived and combined works to appropriate payment levels (whether implemented like copyright or as a sales tax system it's a benefit scheme. It's not supposed to make anyone rich or fund marketing and parties, it's supposed to maximize social utility and allow as many creators to maximize their creative output as possible).
But in the end it's not a hard question to solve. It's just hard if your basic intention is to have a system intended to make publishers rich, while still screwing the creators as deeply as possible as it's hard to explain and defend a 95% fund leakage even in government unless you hide it outside any visible and publicly reviewed budget.
And I have seen network cards that handle regular CAT5 at speeds over 100Mb/s with 1000baseTX interfaces.
I got a leftover cable spool from a friend and didn't really check it when I laid it in for my 100mbit network. I switched to gigabit, and a year or two after that I looked at the spool and noticed it was CAT5; the only time I'd ever had any trouble with it was with a bad crimp or two that hadn't been exposed on 100mbit.
CAT5e should be good for 100 meters of GigE; that Cat5 can handle GigE over the more common shorter distances isn't really that strange. Upgrade any long distance cable and ignore the rest unless there's a problem.
Now, for 10GBaseT or 40GBaseT it'll be time to look things over, Cat6a through Cat7a provide performance for 500-1000MHz compared to the 100MHz of the Cat5 offerings.
the developers won't be jumping ship
Most high-power Linux developers have tended to put their money where their mouth is in previous similar situations. Despite the environment, I doubt they'd have trouble finding new jobs.
RedHat fork that can compete with the RedHat brand isn't likely.
The value of the Redhat brand is largely tied to its independence and long term reliability and predictability on strategic issues. Most possible buyers of Redhat do not have the same track record of free software dedication (a company like Oracle would be dead in days if they had to compete with their own version of CentOS for their various products; they certainly don't seem to endear themselves to their customers).
For most buyers of the company the brand would basically cease to exist, so any fork would have little to compete against, apart from the various other vendors, of which Ubuntu would probably be the major gainer.
why use Solaris only as a stopgap until linux meets your criteria?
Linux basically is there already. Any holdouts not accepting Linux as a HA enterprise platform tend to be of the kind mostly reading fairly old recycled marketing materials.
Solaris is nice enough, but Solaris/SPARC is nowhere near the top absolute performance anymore, nor even a player on the price/performance spectrum. And Solaris/x86 has been treated like the bastard stepchild for so long that most seem to take it about as seriously as Sun used to. Better to go with the flow and run one of the tested and widely deployed Linux variants.
The smartest thing Oracle could do is continue supporting linux but ditch or downsize their development team for their linux distro
I wouldn't disagree with that one, but I'd suggest they'd apply it to Solaris as well. Oracle doesn't have the cost structure or expertise to compete in highly competitive environments; I don't see that many who'd buy Oracle products if they could obtain the exact same product for free or supported by someone else.
Apart from the cost to Ellisons ego, it'd probably be cheaper for Oracle to ship a preconfigured Redhat with Redhat support than to try to provide the same service in house.
Even better, don't only encrypt things you want encrypted. Add encrypted true random data to any mails you send, to web pages, etc. As the encrypted random data will be largely indistinguishable from actual content but impossible to decrypt it'll clog any listeners decryption capabilities, forcing them to either white list you or be stuck with a huge pile of largely undecipherable junk which may or may not contain something they might want to attempt to decrypt.
The desire of our dear leaders to expand surveillance to everyone everywhere and take the authoritarian road is, perhaps, unstoppable, but fortunately it also creates a huge funnel collecting sand for the machinery.
TPB may not list them in the top 100
I'm not sure TPB's top 100 is a good list to track distribution of independent and net-savvy bands either way; if they're distributing freely via their own site, or have their works easily available through sites like e-music, it'll quickly skew the statistics. For many unsigned bands or their fans, there may simply not be any need to involve TPB.
The statistics on last.fm are a bit more interesting then, and the post-Radiohead net release charts were amusing, as they were rather, eh, dominated by Radiohead.
In the end tho, marketing is still efficient, and channel control even more so. As long as the big labels retain the financial muscle to heavily influence most mainstream media outlets, they'll dominate the top lists.
Hopefully they'll lose that muscle through a combination of factors. On one end from the loss of ROI on overmarketing as p2p copying undermines it, and on the other as the importance of media outlets becomes fractured into personalized and socialized networks driven by the taste of at least a few more individuals.
Unfortunately it's going to take a while for the labels die. And until their control begins to slip the game will remain rigged..
verify that the person on the other end of the phone is who they say they are.
Of course, like all other biometrics it's worthless for that, as there's nothing preventing someone else from presenting a device that would emulate the same biometric. Biometrics are inherently not secret and thus cannot be used to authenticate an identity.
This one at least gets spread a bit less than DNA or fingerprints; you don't leave it on anything you touch, but if it's really so easily measured that you could use a phone for it it'd be trivial to replicate.
Still, I'm sure the biometrics crowd are just working their way up to suggesting colonic maps. To a certain mindset it seems like flashy sci-fi stuff must equal actual security, especially if they can't think of a way to subvert it offhand.
In the end, the old card number plus PIN code is much more secure than every expensive piece of flashy technology, simply because getting the PIN code out of a person is still harder than getting their DNA, fingerprint, facial features or inner ear shape. The very ease of presenting the information that makes biometrics so tempting is exactly what makes them unusable for authentication (which, of course, is why we'll eventually get to the colonic map, which at least requires shoving stuff up where you'll notice it. Until identity theft becomes popular among proctologists. Or until someone realizes they can tap into the sensors or copy the info from a database).
Because while most biometrics provide a specific identity with at least some kind of reliability, they do not prove that the person wanting to get authenticated as being that identity actually _is_ that identity.
See, you may be the only person in the world whose ear makes that specific click pattern. But anyone in the world can carry a device that makes that exact click pattern as well.
Same with fingerprints or DNA; it's your DNA, it most often can't be confused with anyone elses DNA, but you leave it everywhere and anyone can present it for inspection. Same with fingerprints. They describe you, but they're not a secret only you know.
PIN codes and passwords are better for authentication, as hopefully you don't leave them around on everything you touch. They can also be varied between different systems, so if one is compromised it doesn't mean they're all compromised. When someone copies your biometrics they know it'll be the same everywhere, you can't revoke it you can't change it, and to anyone who thinks identity and authentication is the same thing, the person carrying your means of identification will essentially be you.
then to deliver the same IOPS you need 2-3x more sata disks.
Which also gives you 6-9x more storage space. Storage space, which, unless you have a very performance oriented load, you'd have to buy anyway. Combining appropriate access patterns with each other and you can get both high-IOPS disk and low-IOPS disk out of the same pile, while if you get the expensive disks you're locked into those disks being used only for expensive high-IOPS use, and you still have to buy the cheap disks for storage, ie, over the whole storage need you don't save any power or space.
There are, of course, exceptions. If your load is heavily IOPS oriented so you don't actually need the space from the 3x spindles anyway, then you're certainly better off using faster disks. But like I said, I hear many more complaints about enterprise storage being expensive than it being slow, and when concepts like storage de-duplication are bandied about it's certainly an indication that storage costs are far out of a reasonable range.
and then state the explicit reason they do
Ah, my bad, I should have contrasted that with having a few decent workplaces and using VPN and/or USB sticks to move things between them. And a palmtop/netbook for the portable needs.
And yes, I know that for some cases they actually make sense; yours sounds like one of them. Still, I find myself surrounded with a lot of people who don't actually seem to use it that way. At best they lug it around as a portable presentation unit and the only reason they take it home is that it might get stolen if they leave it at the office. Compared to having a serious multihead desktop with fast disk and decent amounts of memory, it just seems like a bad compromise for the limited advantage they gain.
I remember when we used to haul CRTs for lan parties and hook up everything there...
Hehe, I remember when there were actual 'portable computers' with CRT's _in_ them. IBM had a model with an itty-bitty 7 inch or something yellow and black screen in it. Even then people wanted to lug it around between workplaces, and it weighed something like 60 pounds all on it's own.
Still, it didn't take them long to give up and use floppies instead.
Lots of them. But of course, they tend to lend the money to the government.
See, unlike companies like Tesla, the government has big sticks it can beat the citizens with if they fail to cough up the dough needed to pay the loans back. Therefore, while everyone knows that Tesla won't be able to pay the loan back at a risk/reward rate sufficient to merit rates they can afford, the banks lend it to the guys with the sticks.
Hence, Tesla needs to ask the guys who don't need to be responsible with their lending for the funds they want, ie, the government.
you see lots of Joe sixpacks getting LCD HDTV's today
To be fair, you saw a lot of Joe sixpacks getting LCD HDTV's a few years ago too. On credit, of course.
It takes time, those early adopters, that can afford them
Nah, not if you borrow the money. Then you can have it now.
pave the way for Joe and Sall Sixpack later down the road.
Well, at least they pave the way for someone else to pay later down the road.
there seems to be an almost inherit distaste for anyone with any type of wealth in this country these days.
Hmm, Freudian slip with wealth and inheritance, eh? :)
As it's turned out that quite a lot of the wealth has been obtained through borderline fraud and quite a lot of the rest has been merely loans that they're now whining about having to pay back and want everyone else to help them out with, I don't find it exceptionally odd that the flaunting of wealth has gone a bit out of style.
After all, how can people tell if it's their tax money you're flaunting or something you've actually earned? Did the wealthy get wealthy by trying so hard, or did the wealthy get, and remain, wealthy by conning the suckers who were trying so hard?
Really, $50K is a lot of money to pay for a car. Take a long, hard, look at the Tata Nano. That's the price point for 'affordable' that we're looking at for the future if the West is going to remain competitive. $2K as an entry point into the market. For, as you say, 'cutting edge', in price aspect at least.
Personally I welcome our new cheap car producing overlords. I've never been particularly impressed by the glitz used to part fools from their money today.