It's fairly obvious that outside (or inside, from a cell-phone or laptop) would be a concern. For this to become practical, we'll obviously need a bit more research to find ways of electronically isolating the plane's controls from both the outside and the cabin. This doesn't seem like much of a technical challenge, of course, given that most commercial planes have a double metallic hull. But making the double hull into a good waveguide (or at least a Faraday cage), and sealing all the holes will take quite a bit of detail work.
In the long run, we might see one real benefit: Since the plane's controls are electronicaly isolated from the cabin and outside, there will no longer be any reason to restrict passengers' electronics. It's rather strange now that airlines would be permitted to fly planes that are subject to such electronic interference. But a totally wireless plane would probably be legally required to be immune to interference.
Of course, current wireless networks won't work all that well from 10km up. Cell phones do sorta work, but usually not for very long before you lose the connection. There's a threat that we might start using cell phones as wireless modems, which would work from a plane, but the phone companies are pretty good at locking that out.
On a flight a few days ago, I found that my cute little Garmin GPS gadget worked fine. I was able to follow the plane's track across the map, and identify a few small towns from the highway patterns, when the clouds cleared. (I'm in the NE US, where we've had a huge storm system covering the whole area for the past week or so. Very odd, except to the people who've been following the climate-change models, who just say "Yeah, we're gonna see a lot more of that.";-)
What I've found, from being involved in putting music online in a simple plain-text notation, is that the objections and restrictions always come from the agents, not from the composers themselves.
The reason is that composers seem to understand that if you want your stuff played, it has to be available to musicians. If they can't find it, they won't play it, and nobody will hear it.
I even have one clear example of a recent tune that, 10 years ago, was often played by one of the crowds that I hang out with. The agent for the composer contacted me and told me to remove it from my web site. Since then, my web site has become a routine resource for local musicians looking for tunes. They no longer find this tune, but they do find other unrestricted tunes that will work for the gig. So the tune isn't played here much any more. I'll start it if I think the others present know it, but younger members of the crowd don't know it. So this agent's "restriction" of the tune has effectively eliminated it from our repertoire.
I've seen comments implying that a lot of authors have a similar understanding. People have to read your stuff, or nobody will read your stuff. If your stuff is wrapped up tightly so that people have to jump through hoops to read it, well, there are lots of other more accessible things that they can read. Restrictions that block reader access work to drive readers away, and this really isn't good for business.
In the long term, this will probably work itself out, as it becomes obvious that DRM is mostly a way of shooting yourself in the foot. But along the way, a lot of good stuff will be lost because the "customers" can't easily learn enough about it to decide that they like it.
Yeah, me too. But I disagree that it's anything special with email.
I have a number of acquaintances whose discussions are generally rambling, because their approach is to pick out a few keywords in whatever I say, make up some hypothetical sentence containing those words, and respond to that sentence. So their response has little to do with the actual meaning of what I said, and the discussion is basically a chain of non-sequiturs.
You can hear or read this in just about any exchange involving politics or religion. These are topics where direct speech doesn't help, because people are usually not interested in what others are saying. The goal is to get your own ideas across, and a "discussion" is usually just each person picking out a few keywords from someone else's comments and using those keywords in a statement of your own beliefs.
OTOH, people who want to communicate can often do so more easily in print form. That allows one to go back and reread a sentence that in speech would be gone beyond retrieval. You can look for ambiguities, think about it, and make a reasoned response (or several responses in the case of ambiguities).
For accuracy and understanding, especially with technical topics, written text is usually preferable because of the time delays that encourage all parties to reread and think before replying.
Does anyone have a method of keeping everything in synch, because centralised and synchronised systems fall apart when dealing with 'real life' systems that are out of my hands.
Some years back, in the 80's, I was implementing a distributed package (that eventually turned into a distributed OS, but that's another story). I had basically the same problem, but with the computers. I didn't have privileged access on most of them, so running something like NTP to sync the system clocks wasn't an option.
It occurred to me that, for most purposes, the idea that you needed to sync the clocks was simply wrong. And a century ago both Heisenburg and Einstein explained to us why it isn't actually possible in our universe. But it's also not necessary; all you really need is for your software to correctly track the passage of time.
One day I spent a morning adding a timestamp field to most my inter-process messages. That way, every module would be able to say "Here's the data you requested, and BTW this is what time I think it is." The data structs for a link could then keep track of the time delays (positive or negative) between the endpoints of the link, and could adjust the time fields in calls like stat() accordingly.
It took only a few hours to get working. Well, that and a few hours now and then to add interesting tweaks to the code for tracking the transmission delays. This turns out to be pretty much what NTP does, of course. It uses the info to sync its systems' clocks.
But you can use it to adjust other clocks' values to your own. That way, you can just let those remote systems' clocks run at their own value, and continuously adjust their timestamps to match your own clock. You can do this without any privileges.
The main problem was that my network included VMS and DOS boxes, and their clocks weren't available to my library at better than second resolution. Most of the boxes ran unix, and by then you could get millisecond precision from most unix kernels, microsecond from a few. I had to warn people that things like my distributed make would work fine with VMS and DOS files, but for some of our apps, they should make sure that they only used unix systems because they needed the higher-precision clocks.
What was annoying was that some of the VMS and DOS kernels did have more precise clocks, but nobody would tell a unix hacker how to get at them. This may have been because the machine's owners didn't know (and couldn't be bothered).
Anyway, if you understand that you usually don't really need to sync the machine's clocks, the task is a lot easier than it looks. You can fix many clock problems at user level, without admin privileges.
How can we trust everyone on our node to not browse our packets?... Most of our traffic still is unencrypted...
We can't, of course, but you implicitly answered the question yourself: Encrypt everything. It's as simple as that. And nothing else works. A packet can always be read by every machine that sees it. On a wireless network, that means every machine within range. All you can do is make the packet's contents incomprehensible via encryption.
Of course, you can't encrypt the packet headers; if you do, the packet is undeliverable. This inherently makes you liable to the sort of monitoring that is currently worrying the US media with the news of the government's access to phone-call records. This can be handled with "anonymizer" relay services, but that does require a trusted third (fourth, fifth,...) party.
How hard would it be to design devices that would set themselves up in a self-managed mesh network which requires no centre?
Such a network existed at MIT 25 years ago, in the form of the ChaosNet, a home-grown "mesh" network in today's terminology. Others have done it, too. The Negroponte gang are planning to do it with their "$100 laptop".
It's easy to understand why the commercial folks would prefer a centrally-controlled, heirarchical network. And note that the non-heirarchical system seem to be non-commercial.
OTOH, heirarchical systems are full of single points of failure. At any time, there is usually only one path between two points, so every part of the network is a SPoF.
The mystery is why customers put up with such an unreliable network, when we know ways of making it more reliable (often for less cost).
So, what will next week bring? All our phones are tapped?
Do you really think this is something new?
Story: Back in the 70's, I was a grad student at the U of Wisconsin, and lived in an apartment upstairs from a fellow who was very active in local radical politics. He never paid his phone bill, and it occasionally got shut off for short periods. A few such times he borrowed my phone until his service was restored.
One week, there was a phone-workers strike, and there were announcements that until the strike ended, no repairs would be done except to "emergency" phones such as police and medical lines.
On Friday afternoon, my phone stopped working, so I called (from another phone) to report it. They were very nice about it, but told me it couldn't be repaired until the strike ended.
Bright and early Saturday morning some phone company workers showed up, tested my phone line, and fixed the problem. I asked them why they were there during the strike, and they said "Dunno; we just had this address on our list."
I told this story to everyone I knew, and it got me no end of points on campus. Pretty much everyone just grinned. It was obvious to the meanest intelligence what had happened.
Anyone who assumes that their phone won't be tapped without notice is simply naive. The same applies to your internet connection. That's the way it's been for decades. Anything else you may read or hear is just posing, propaganda to impress the rubes.
IBM doesn't make or sell laptops anymore. They sold that off to Lenovo.
True, though they do have a "special relationship". But the IBM logo doesn't go along with the sale, so it probably won't help Lenovo all that much.
If you look at ibm.com (which redirects you to www.ibm.com/us/ if you're in the US), you'll see that they do refer you to Lenovo on the main page. If you poke around in the "Shop for" column, you'll find it a bit tricky to actually order a system from IBM with linux installed. It's possible, but they clearly treat it as a secondary system that few users will want. They steer you toward Windows first, AIX second, and linux if you really want it.
Anyway, it'll be interesting to see what if any effect the IBM support of linux actually has, with respect to AIX as well as Windows. In a rational market, we'd have customers comparing the features (including reliability data) of the various offerings, and making the choice that's best for their situation. But, of course, this isn't how real-world people usually behave. That's why we have such large marketing budgets (and web sites designed to "encourage" customers to make a certain decision).
If linux is to be a replacement for windows, for the inexperienced. It needs to be installed by manufactures.
Very true, and this is much of the explanation of why this is a losing battle.
Suppose I am the owner of a copyright/patent/trademark for something you'd like to use. If I refuse to grant a license to have my app preinstalled on system X, it is my legal right, and there's nothing you can do about it. In particular, if Microsoft gives me a good deal to have it preinstalled on Windows and nowhere else, and I sign their agreement (because of their bigger installed base), this is my legal right, and there's nothing you can do about it. If you want it, you'll have to buy it and install it yourself.
Unless you can bribe enough congressmen to get a bill passed outlawing such anti-market practices, you don't stand a chance to get a packaged system with everything you want from any company except one licensed by Microsoft.
OK, if IBM decides to get serious about marketing linux-based systems, you have a chance. But take a look at their sales web site, and try to find out how to order your linux-based laptop from them. That'll tell you how likely this is.
No company other than IBM has the marketing clout to do anything about this. In particular, they don't have enough influence with Congress or any legislature in any other country to outlaw such anti-competitive practices.
A cable company can supply 200 or so channels on a single wire, and each of those channels is constantly carrying a TV show whether you're watching it or not. They know how to do this, but they don't know how to supply a single show on the single channel that carries your internet feed. If you want to watch a video on your internet channel, they can't supply it to you unless you pay them more money; that money somehow makes the internet channel capable of carrying the show.
Something doesn't quite add up here. Can someone explain to a dummy like me why the internet channel can't carry a show that each of the other 200 channels carries routinely? And can you also explain why giving them more money suddenly makes that channel able to carry the show?
It seems that the obvious thing to do would be to switch the internet service (or maybe just the one show) to one of those other more capable channels that I'm not watching at the moment. Since I'm already paying for the other channels whether I watch them or not, this oughta work.;-)
[I] was told that they couldn't comment on whether they'd received such a request but that they would not turn over such records without a search warrant.
So do you know a way of testing to determine whether they were telling you the truth?
I'd guess that most corporate reps would answer this way automatically. They might even believe it, having been told by others that this was the policy. But all it really takes is a few people in some back room passing on the information. Even the top management might not know about it.
the Democrats support the "Bush == Nazi" types in their midst
Really? Name one Democrat running for federal office who has made the comparison. Its fucking true, but I don't know anyone who'd say it publicly.
Actually, I've seen a number of somewhat reasonable and knowledgeable discussions of the topic. The general conclusion is that "Bush == Nazi" or "Bush == Hitler" is in fact not very accurate. If you compare actual policies, approaches, etc., you'll find that Bush is a lot like Mussolini, but not very much like Hitler.
Thus, one point frequently made in such discussions is that in the 2000 campaign, Bush several times made the comment that he wanted to be "America's CEO". This is not a Nazi slogan; it's a Fascist slogan. This is generally understood by people who have studied these two ideologies, and don't just treat them as insult terms with no meaning.
Most people today have no idea what the Nazi and Fascist ideologies were, of course, so for the most point this is just historical nitpicking. We should be lamenting this situation, because ignorance of these important historical ideologies is what allows them to rear their ugly heads repeatedly. We'd be much better off if Nazism and Fascism were taught in the schools, so that people would recognize their variants in the modern world. For that matter, the world in general didn't learn anything at all from the experiments with Communism, and doesn't recognize its precursors where they appear.
"Those who are ignorant of history are condemned to repeat it."
(My favorite bit of WW-II history is the studies showing that the Italian and German train systems had rather poor on-time statistics.;-)
At least 32,000 civilians have been proven beyond all doubt to have died due to that "something done" in Iraq. What is fair retaliation I wonder? Or are their lives worth less than ours?
If you check with American media reports, it's clear how lives are valued. Most reports give the number of American casualties, but don't mention Iraqi casualties. So American lives have value; Iraqi lives are valued at zero.
Note also that the US government strongly disputes all claims of Iraqi deaths, and doesn't keep such records itself. And medical people have frequently reported US interference with attempts to collect such data. This makes it quite clear what their values are.
I seem to remember getting a mail from the government telling me I need to get RIFD in my arm next time I renew my license.
Note that for several years now, all tires sold in the US have contained RFID chips.
As for your arm, a discovery of a friend of mine might be informative: She had a "suspicious" mammogram, so they did a biopsy. Happily, it turned out to be something harmless, just some calcium deposits. But a while after that, she saw the MRI that they did, and it showed a small, opaque object at the spot. She was told that it was a harmless "inert" marker that many hospitals now leave behind at such sites to tell later doctors what had been done there.
We don't know that it's an RFID; the medical people didn't say exactly what it was. But the fact that they did it without asking, and won't tell her what it is, is indicative of the way things are going.
If you have any "invasive" medical work done, chances are that an ID chip of some sort will now be inserted. You won't be asked or told about this. It will just be done, and the medical records that you can see may or may not indicate its existence.
If you think your medical records aren't available to government investigators, you're hopelessly naive.
We we told this, too, by Verizon (who owns the phone monopoly in this neighborhood). But a year or so back I contacted speakeasy, and they said "Yes, we can do it there." We did a bit of checking, and switched our internet from the cable company (who blocked ports 25 and 80) to speakeasy (who doesn't block anything) DSL. It works fine, over the lines owned by Verizon. We get a couple of static IP addresses, no blocking, for the same price that Verizon sells limited DSL in other neighborhoods.
There's a lot of irrationality in this market.
There is a good chance that eventually Verizon will bribe Conress to permit them to lock out companies like speakeasy, but for the moment there are companies that will sell you the service that Verizon won't. Something like this might be possible where yu live, too.
reliability is a serious culture within the power community
Five-nines reliability is a big deal in the telco world too,...
Well, maybe; for some definition of "reliable". But in my experience, every phone line I've ever had (over some 4 decades) has been plagued by periods lasting from minutes to hourse when the line wasn't usable due to noise, distortion, lengthy dropouts, whatever. I'm sure the phone company considered the line 100% working during these times. But it has always been common for one party to say "Hang up and I'll call you back; maybe we'll get a good line next time."
From the start, I expected telco internet to be flakey and full of dropped packets, and my expectation has pretty much been fulfilled everywhere I've had to use their "service".
Having another competitor around could make a real improvement in the service. Here in the US, outside of big cities most people have only one internet provider. Take it or leave it. So if the power company got into the act, it would double the number of suppliers. And since they do have a culture of reliability, it would probably radically improve internet service.
How true. They have even created a number of web sites on the topic, such as this great tits field-guide reference page, complete with a nice image of a great tit.
Unfortunately, great-tits.org disappeared a year of so back. But others have taken its place to tell us all we want to know about tits in the UK.
It's also an illustration of one of the common laments of satirists: Writing satire is difficult, because the people that you're trying to mock satirize keep doing things far more outrageous than anything you've thought up.
(And for those who make a distinction, the same thing is often said about writing parody.;-)
I mean just look at the people with flags on their houses. Try finding a single other country worldwide where people feel compelled to do something odd like that.
I've been in a number of countries where nearly every house displays a flag. In my experience, the absence of flags in the US is the oddity. I just went out on my front porch and looked up and down the street; I didn't see a single flag. A couple of odd banners, but no US flags. And this is a stereotypical suburb of a large US city.
OTOH, a while ago I spent about a month in Finland (the country that gave us linux;-), and there nearly every household displays a flag or a long, streaming banner with the flag's colors. Actually, a lot of houses along the west coast have a banner with Swedish colors, but nobody considers that unpatriotic, since Finland is officially both Swedish and Finnish. Some houses have a banner with a blend of both color schemes, to display their loyalty to both ethnic groups.
I've also been in Mexico and Canada on numerous occasions, and I've seen many more flags there than anywhere in the US.
If anything, Americans tend to consider the display of the flag as somewhat crass, and a bit of an embarrassment. But they tolerate and forgive the people who do it.
I don't own a flag, myself. I don't see any reason to own one. It would add nothing to my life, and might lead some people to think I'm one of those right-wing extremists.
It would appear that particular aspect of the document is missing.
Yup; they didn't use our current fashion in language when they wrote that text. And some of them were lawyers anyway, so why would anyone expect them to use a simple word when a lengthy phrase was available?
For another example, try grepping for "slave" or "slavery". You won't find either in the original Constitution (only in an ammendment from 80+ years later). But the Constitution clearly assented to slavery when it included that ratio between the value of a free man's vote and the vote of others.
Similarly, the Constitution explicitly outlaws unwarranted search and seizure. This is probably about as close to "privacy" as a lawyer could manage. If this doesn't guarantee privacy, what does it mean?
And a minor nit: The command should be
grep -i "privacy" constitution.txt
The gratuitous introduction of the spurious "cat" command is solely a waste of cpu time. It's a sign of newbiehood and/or cluelessness. You lost several geek points there.
(And the quotes aren't needed either, though they mostly waste your own time. But the -i is definitely needed; take a look at the bizarre capitalization in the Constitution and try to make sense of it.;-)
In a better world corporations would not be able to shield the evil people in them from personal responsiblity for their actions but...
But, historically speaking, that's exactly why corporations were invented. They came into existence primarily as a tool for insulating the corporation's officers from prosecution. That way, a corporation could do things that would be illegal for a person to do, and courts would have to punish the corporation, not the people who actually carried out the corporation's wishes.
One of the clearest symptoms of this is the British practice of putting "Ltd." after a corporation's name. This stands for "limited liability", i.e., the corporation's charter gives it a legal limit on how much a court can fine it for illegal actions.
Slashdot Mirror
It's fairly obvious that outside (or inside, from a cell-phone or laptop) would be a concern. For this to become practical, we'll obviously need a bit more research to find ways of electronically isolating the plane's controls from both the outside and the cabin. This doesn't seem like much of a technical challenge, of course, given that most commercial planes have a double metallic hull. But making the double hull into a good waveguide (or at least a Faraday cage), and sealing all the holes will take quite a bit of detail work.
;-)
In the long run, we might see one real benefit: Since the plane's controls are electronicaly isolated from the cabin and outside, there will no longer be any reason to restrict passengers' electronics. It's rather strange now that airlines would be permitted to fly planes that are subject to such electronic interference. But a totally wireless plane would probably be legally required to be immune to interference.
Of course, current wireless networks won't work all that well from 10km up. Cell phones do sorta work, but usually not for very long before you lose the connection. There's a threat that we might start using cell phones as wireless modems, which would work from a plane, but the phone companies are pretty good at locking that out.
On a flight a few days ago, I found that my cute little Garmin GPS gadget worked fine. I was able to follow the plane's track across the map, and identify a few small towns from the highway patterns, when the clouds cleared. (I'm in the NE US, where we've had a huge storm system covering the whole area for the past week or so. Very odd, except to the people who've been following the climate-change models, who just say "Yeah, we're gonna see a lot more of that."
What I've found, from being involved in putting music online in a simple plain-text notation, is that the objections and restrictions always come from the agents, not from the composers themselves.
The reason is that composers seem to understand that if you want your stuff played, it has to be available to musicians. If they can't find it, they won't play it, and nobody will hear it.
I even have one clear example of a recent tune that, 10 years ago, was often played by one of the crowds that I hang out with. The agent for the composer contacted me and told me to remove it from my web site. Since then, my web site has become a routine resource for local musicians looking for tunes. They no longer find this tune, but they do find other unrestricted tunes that will work for the gig. So the tune isn't played here much any more. I'll start it if I think the others present know it, but younger members of the crowd don't know it. So this agent's "restriction" of the tune has effectively eliminated it from our repertoire.
I've seen comments implying that a lot of authors have a similar understanding. People have to read your stuff, or nobody will read your stuff. If your stuff is wrapped up tightly so that people have to jump through hoops to read it, well, there are lots of other more accessible things that they can read. Restrictions that block reader access work to drive readers away, and this really isn't good for business.
In the long term, this will probably work itself out, as it becomes obvious that DRM is mostly a way of shooting yourself in the foot. But along the way, a lot of good stuff will be lost because the "customers" can't easily learn enough about it to decide that they like it.
While I agree with most points in the summary ...
Yeah, me too. But I disagree that it's anything special with email.
I have a number of acquaintances whose discussions are generally rambling, because their approach is to pick out a few keywords in whatever I say, make up some hypothetical sentence containing those words, and respond to that sentence. So their response has little to do with the actual meaning of what I said, and the discussion is basically a chain of non-sequiturs.
You can hear or read this in just about any exchange involving politics or religion. These are topics where direct speech doesn't help, because people are usually not interested in what others are saying. The goal is to get your own ideas across, and a "discussion" is usually just each person picking out a few keywords from someone else's comments and using those keywords in a statement of your own beliefs.
OTOH, people who want to communicate can often do so more easily in print form. That allows one to go back and reread a sentence that in speech would be gone beyond retrieval. You can look for ambiguities, think about it, and make a reasoned response (or several responses in the case of ambiguities).
For accuracy and understanding, especially with technical topics, written text is usually preferable because of the time delays that encourage all parties to reread and think before replying.
Does anyone have a method of keeping everything in synch, because centralised and synchronised systems fall apart when dealing with 'real life' systems that are out of my hands.
Some years back, in the 80's, I was implementing a distributed package (that eventually turned into a distributed OS, but that's another story). I had basically the same problem, but with the computers. I didn't have privileged access on most of them, so running something like NTP to sync the system clocks wasn't an option.
It occurred to me that, for most purposes, the idea that you needed to sync the clocks was simply wrong. And a century ago both Heisenburg and Einstein explained to us why it isn't actually possible in our universe. But it's also not necessary; all you really need is for your software to correctly track the passage of time.
One day I spent a morning adding a timestamp field to most my inter-process messages. That way, every module would be able to say "Here's the data you requested, and BTW this is what time I think it is." The data structs for a link could then keep track of the time delays (positive or negative) between the endpoints of the link, and could adjust the time fields in calls like stat() accordingly.
It took only a few hours to get working. Well, that and a few hours now and then to add interesting tweaks to the code for tracking the transmission delays. This turns out to be pretty much what NTP does, of course. It uses the info to sync its systems' clocks.
But you can use it to adjust other clocks' values to your own. That way, you can just let those remote systems' clocks run at their own value, and continuously adjust their timestamps to match your own clock. You can do this without any privileges.
The main problem was that my network included VMS and DOS boxes, and their clocks weren't available to my library at better than second resolution. Most of the boxes ran unix, and by then you could get millisecond precision from most unix kernels, microsecond from a few. I had to warn people that things like my distributed make would work fine with VMS and DOS files, but for some of our apps, they should make sure that they only used unix systems because they needed the higher-precision clocks.
What was annoying was that some of the VMS and DOS kernels did have more precise clocks, but nobody would tell a unix hacker how to get at them. This may have been because the machine's owners didn't know (and couldn't be bothered).
Anyway, if you understand that you usually don't really need to sync the machine's clocks, the task is a lot easier than it looks. You can fix many clock problems at user level, without admin privileges.
How can we trust everyone on our node to not browse our packets?... Most of our traffic still is unencrypted ...
...) party.
We can't, of course, but you implicitly answered the question yourself: Encrypt everything. It's as simple as that. And nothing else works. A packet can always be read by every machine that sees it. On a wireless network, that means every machine within range. All you can do is make the packet's contents incomprehensible via encryption.
Of course, you can't encrypt the packet headers; if you do, the packet is undeliverable. This inherently makes you liable to the sort of monitoring that is currently worrying the US media with the news of the government's access to phone-call records. This can be handled with "anonymizer" relay services, but that does require a trusted third (fourth, fifth,
How hard would it be to design devices that would set themselves up in a self-managed mesh network which requires no centre?
Such a network existed at MIT 25 years ago, in the form of the ChaosNet, a home-grown "mesh" network in today's terminology. Others have done it, too. The Negroponte gang are planning to do it with their "$100 laptop".
It's easy to understand why the commercial folks would prefer a centrally-controlled, heirarchical network. And note that the non-heirarchical system seem to be non-commercial.
OTOH, heirarchical systems are full of single points of failure. At any time, there is usually only one path between two points, so every part of the network is a SPoF.
The mystery is why customers put up with such an unreliable network, when we know ways of making it more reliable (often for less cost).
Imagine the sound and fury from Fox and the neocons if this was being done by President Hilary Clinton. They'd be screaming for impeachment, ...
Nah; that's only for sex acts (and not telling reporters all about it).
No politician would ever be prosecuted for merely violating the Constitution.
128000 google hits.
My, the references must be replicating rapidly. It's only two hours later, and the count is "about 139,000".
So, what will next week bring? All our phones are tapped?
Do you really think this is something new?
Story: Back in the 70's, I was a grad student at the U of Wisconsin, and lived in an apartment upstairs from a fellow who was very active in local radical politics. He never paid his phone bill, and it occasionally got shut off for short periods. A few such times he borrowed my phone until his service was restored.
One week, there was a phone-workers strike, and there were announcements that until the strike ended, no repairs would be done except to "emergency" phones such as police and medical lines.
On Friday afternoon, my phone stopped working, so I called (from another phone) to report it. They were very nice about it, but told me it couldn't be repaired until the strike ended.
Bright and early Saturday morning some phone company workers showed up, tested my phone line, and fixed the problem. I asked them why they were there during the strike, and they said "Dunno; we just had this address on our list."
I told this story to everyone I knew, and it got me no end of points on campus. Pretty much everyone just grinned. It was obvious to the meanest intelligence what had happened.
Anyone who assumes that their phone won't be tapped without notice is simply naive. The same applies to your internet connection. That's the way it's been for decades. Anything else you may read or hear is just posing, propaganda to impress the rubes.
IBM doesn't make or sell laptops anymore. They sold that off to Lenovo.
True, though they do have a "special relationship". But the IBM logo doesn't go along with the sale, so it probably won't help Lenovo all that much.
If you look at ibm.com (which redirects you to www.ibm.com/us/ if you're in the US), you'll see that they do refer you to Lenovo on the main page. If you poke around in the "Shop for" column, you'll find it a bit tricky to actually order a system from IBM with linux installed. It's possible, but they clearly treat it as a secondary system that few users will want. They steer you toward Windows first, AIX second, and linux if you really want it.
Anyway, it'll be interesting to see what if any effect the IBM support of linux actually has, with respect to AIX as well as Windows. In a rational market, we'd have customers comparing the features (including reliability data) of the various offerings, and making the choice that's best for their situation. But, of course, this isn't how real-world people usually behave. That's why we have such large marketing budgets (and web sites designed to "encourage" customers to make a certain decision).
If linux is to be a replacement for windows, for the inexperienced. It needs to be installed by manufactures.
Very true, and this is much of the explanation of why this is a losing battle.
Suppose I am the owner of a copyright/patent/trademark for something you'd like to use. If I refuse to grant a license to have my app preinstalled on system X, it is my legal right, and there's nothing you can do about it. In particular, if Microsoft gives me a good deal to have it preinstalled on Windows and nowhere else, and I sign their agreement (because of their bigger installed base), this is my legal right, and there's nothing you can do about it. If you want it, you'll have to buy it and install it yourself.
Unless you can bribe enough congressmen to get a bill passed outlawing such anti-market practices, you don't stand a chance to get a packaged system with everything you want from any company except one licensed by Microsoft.
OK, if IBM decides to get serious about marketing linux-based systems, you have a chance. But take a look at their sales web site, and try to find out how to order your linux-based laptop from them. That'll tell you how likely this is.
No company other than IBM has the marketing clout to do anything about this. In particular, they don't have enough influence with Congress or any legislature in any other country to outlaw such anti-competitive practices.
profit with no product nor service nor any other material trapping.
Most often it's called "politics".
A cable company can supply 200 or so channels on a single wire, and each of those channels is constantly carrying a TV show whether you're watching it or not. They know how to do this, but they don't know how to supply a single show on the single channel that carries your internet feed. If you want to watch a video on your internet channel, they can't supply it to you unless you pay them more money; that money somehow makes the internet channel capable of carrying the show.
;-)
Something doesn't quite add up here. Can someone explain to a dummy like me why the internet channel can't carry a show that each of the other 200 channels carries routinely? And can you also explain why giving them more money suddenly makes that channel able to carry the show?
It seems that the obvious thing to do would be to switch the internet service (or maybe just the one show) to one of those other more capable channels that I'm not watching at the moment. Since I'm already paying for the other channels whether I watch them or not, this oughta work.
[I] was told that they couldn't comment on whether they'd received such a request but that they would not turn over such records without a search warrant.
So do you know a way of testing to determine whether they were telling you the truth?
I'd guess that most corporate reps would answer this way automatically. They might even believe it, having been told by others that this was the policy. But all it really takes is a few people in some back room passing on the information. Even the top management might not know about it.
the Democrats support the "Bush == Nazi" types in their midst
;-)
Really? Name one Democrat running for federal office who has made the comparison. Its fucking true, but I don't know anyone who'd say it publicly.
Actually, I've seen a number of somewhat reasonable and knowledgeable discussions of the topic. The general conclusion is that "Bush == Nazi" or "Bush == Hitler" is in fact not very accurate. If you compare actual policies, approaches, etc., you'll find that Bush is a lot like Mussolini, but not very much like Hitler.
Thus, one point frequently made in such discussions is that in the 2000 campaign, Bush several times made the comment that he wanted to be "America's CEO". This is not a Nazi slogan; it's a Fascist slogan. This is generally understood by people who have studied these two ideologies, and don't just treat them as insult terms with no meaning.
Most people today have no idea what the Nazi and Fascist ideologies were, of course, so for the most point this is just historical nitpicking. We should be lamenting this situation, because ignorance of these important historical ideologies is what allows them to rear their ugly heads repeatedly. We'd be much better off if Nazism and Fascism were taught in the schools, so that people would recognize their variants in the modern world. For that matter, the world in general didn't learn anything at all from the experiments with Communism, and doesn't recognize its precursors where they appear.
"Those who are ignorant of history are condemned to repeat it."
(My favorite bit of WW-II history is the studies showing that the Italian and German train systems had rather poor on-time statistics.
At least 32,000 civilians have been proven beyond all doubt to have died due to that "something done" in Iraq. What is fair retaliation I wonder? Or are their lives worth less than ours?
If you check with American media reports, it's clear how lives are valued. Most reports give the number of American casualties, but don't mention Iraqi casualties. So American lives have value; Iraqi lives are valued at zero.
Note also that the US government strongly disputes all claims of Iraqi deaths, and doesn't keep such records itself. And medical people have frequently reported US interference with attempts to collect such data. This makes it quite clear what their values are.
I seem to remember getting a mail from the government telling me I need to get RIFD in my arm next time I renew my license.
Note that for several years now, all tires sold in the US have contained RFID chips.
As for your arm, a discovery of a friend of mine might be informative: She had a "suspicious" mammogram, so they did a biopsy. Happily, it turned out to be something harmless, just some calcium deposits. But a while after that, she saw the MRI that they did, and it showed a small, opaque object at the spot. She was told that it was a harmless "inert" marker that many hospitals now leave behind at such sites to tell later doctors what had been done there.
We don't know that it's an RFID; the medical people didn't say exactly what it was. But the fact that they did it without asking, and won't tell her what it is, is indicative of the way things are going.
If you have any "invasive" medical work done, chances are that an ID chip of some sort will now be inserted. You won't be asked or told about this. It will just be done, and the medical records that you can see may or may not indicate its existence.
If you think your medical records aren't available to government investigators, you're hopelessly naive.
DSL is not an option in my neighborhood, ...
We we told this, too, by Verizon (who owns the phone monopoly in this neighborhood). But a year or so back I contacted speakeasy, and they said "Yes, we can do it there." We did a bit of checking, and switched our internet from the cable company (who blocked ports 25 and 80) to speakeasy (who doesn't block anything) DSL. It works fine, over the lines owned by Verizon. We get a couple of static IP addresses, no blocking, for the same price that Verizon sells limited DSL in other neighborhoods.
There's a lot of irrationality in this market.
There is a good chance that eventually Verizon will bribe Conress to permit them to lock out companies like speakeasy, but for the moment there are companies that will sell you the service that Verizon won't. Something like this might be possible where yu live, too.
reliability is a serious culture within the power community
...
Five-nines reliability is a big deal in the telco world too,
Well, maybe; for some definition of "reliable". But in my experience, every phone line I've ever had (over some 4 decades) has been plagued by periods lasting from minutes to hourse when the line wasn't usable due to noise, distortion, lengthy dropouts, whatever. I'm sure the phone company considered the line 100% working during these times. But it has always been common for one party to say "Hang up and I'll call you back; maybe we'll get a good line next time."
From the start, I expected telco internet to be flakey and full of dropped packets, and my expectation has pretty much been fulfilled everywhere I've had to use their "service".
Having another competitor around could make a real improvement in the service. Here in the US, outside of big cities most people have only one internet provider. Take it or leave it. So if the power company got into the act, it would double the number of suppliers. And since they do have a culture of reliability, it would probably radically improve internet service.
British appear to be tit men, ...
How true. They have even created a number of web sites on the topic, such as this great tits field-guide reference page, complete with a nice image of a great tit.
Unfortunately, great-tits.org disappeared a year of so back. But others have taken its place to tell us all we want to know about tits in the UK.
It's also an illustration of one of the common laments of satirists: Writing satire is difficult, because the people that you're trying to mock satirize keep doing things far more outrageous than anything you've thought up.
;-)
(And for those who make a distinction, the same thing is often said about writing parody.
I mean just look at the people with flags on their houses. Try finding a single other country worldwide where people feel compelled to do something odd like that.
;-), and there nearly every household displays a flag or a long, streaming banner with the flag's colors. Actually, a lot of houses along the west coast have a banner with Swedish colors, but nobody considers that unpatriotic, since Finland is officially both Swedish and Finnish. Some houses have a banner with a blend of both color schemes, to display their loyalty to both ethnic groups.
I've been in a number of countries where nearly every house displays a flag. In my experience, the absence of flags in the US is the oddity. I just went out on my front porch and looked up and down the street; I didn't see a single flag. A couple of odd banners, but no US flags. And this is a stereotypical suburb of a large US city.
OTOH, a while ago I spent about a month in Finland (the country that gave us linux
I've also been in Mexico and Canada on numerous occasions, and I've seen many more flags there than anywhere in the US.
If anything, Americans tend to consider the display of the flag as somewhat crass, and a bit of an embarrassment. But they tolerate and forgive the people who do it.
I don't own a flag, myself. I don't see any reason to own one. It would add nothing to my life, and might lead some people to think I'm one of those right-wing extremists.
cat constitution.txt | grep -i "privacy"
;-)
It would appear that particular aspect of the document is missing.
Yup; they didn't use our current fashion in language when they wrote that text. And some of them were lawyers anyway, so why would anyone expect them to use a simple word when a lengthy phrase was available?
For another example, try grepping for "slave" or "slavery". You won't find either in the original Constitution (only in an ammendment from 80+ years later). But the Constitution clearly assented to slavery when it included that ratio between the value of a free man's vote and the vote of others.
Similarly, the Constitution explicitly outlaws unwarranted search and seizure. This is probably about as close to "privacy" as a lawyer could manage. If this doesn't guarantee privacy, what does it mean?
And a minor nit: The command should be
grep -i "privacy" constitution.txt
The gratuitous introduction of the spurious "cat" command is solely a waste of cpu time. It's a sign of newbiehood and/or cluelessness. You lost several geek points there.
(And the quotes aren't needed either, though they mostly waste your own time. But the -i is definitely needed; take a look at the bizarre capitalization in the Constitution and try to make sense of it.
In a better world corporations would not be able to shield the evil people in them from personal responsiblity for their actions but ...
But, historically speaking, that's exactly why corporations were invented. They came into existence primarily as a tool for insulating the corporation's officers from prosecution. That way, a corporation could do things that would be illegal for a person to do, and courts would have to punish the corporation, not the people who actually carried out the corporation's wishes.
One of the clearest symptoms of this is the British practice of putting "Ltd." after a corporation's name. This stands for "limited liability", i.e., the corporation's charter gives it a legal limit on how much a court can fine it for illegal actions.
This is unlikely to ever change.
I read /. with images turned off, my colors/text overriding the page's, and my own CSS file, you insensitive clod!
;-)
(And I don't even subscribe. Guess I'm totally out of the running.