I use WRQ AtGuard. If you are stuck with Windoze then I can recommend it. Its privacy section blocks GIFs (based on URL), cookies, referrer, from and browser fields. You can set default and per-domain rules for these things. It also has a firewall feature to block inbound and outbound packets based on application, port number and remote address.
Cool features include an estimate of the time saved by not downloading banner ads, a switch to block popup windows in Java(script), and a switch to modify animated GIFs so they only play once.
When something comes up it hasn't seen before it pops up a dialog asking how to deal with it. This is the firewall software for your grandmother, or at least as close as it can be.
Altogether a nice package. BTW, I have no relationship with these people other than as a satisfied customer.
Seems to me that the IETF could build in technical safeguards which governments or private firms would not have a motive to include.
For example, imagine a router which would only tee traffic to another port if presented with a electronic signed by a judge and specifically naming the port(s) to be watched. Obviously this would imply a proper PKI for the judiciary, but hey, if they want our co-operation they'd better put their own house in order first.
Good point. I hadn't forgotten that server != desktop, although I had glossed over it.
I don't know offhand how much MS revenue comes from server sales, but its pretty significant. NT server costs a bundle just to install, and on top of that you have the client license charges for everyone who can log on. Eroding server market share hurts MS far more than eroding desktop share.
In addition Linux is now usable on the desktop, and its use on servers should create an acceptance of its use on corporate desktops as well. These people understand Total Cost of Ownership, and they are getting tired of writing huge cheques to MS every year and then watching their machines fall over every day.
Linux users account for approximately 0.08% of the hits to my website
Interesting. Do you have any trend information? I'd really like to see it.
According to the article Linux has 3.5% of the server market and is doubling every few months. This roughly agrees with my own research.
So in another 2 doublings or so, say about nine months, Linux will have 10% of the NT Server market. This is a psychologically important figure. At that point lots of press stories will be printed pointing out that Linux has now started making significant inroads into M$ revenues.
The thing that keeps M$ on top now is its reputation for invulnerability. Its certainly not its reputation for quality or value. But this is a very brittle thing. Once it cracks it will crumble and collapse.
So I predict that Linux will reach 10% market share next July or so, and that this will be seen as a major event. Once you hit 10%, 80% is only three more doublings away. So Linux should achieve market dominance some time around mid-2001, and Bill Gates will no longer be the richest man on Earth. Microsoft will probably be taken over some time in 2002.
"Earth" seems to me to be a classic example of this "post-cyberpunk" world. Technology is pervasive, and technological advances have led to many social changes. The Net is everywhere, and people who may not be able to eat tomorrow nevertheless have cheap handhelds. But there are no brain-computer interfaces and no gangs of 3LeeT street samurai.
The novel tells the stories of a number of characters, including a top scientist, a female shuttle pilot, an environmental activist and her rebelliously straight daughter, and four middle class kids who start by barely avoiding dropping out of Dan Quayle High School. The characters are well drawn, but they are really just the vehicle for an exploration of Earth in the mid twenty-first century.
In the afterword Brin discusses the cliches of cyberpunk and rejects them as plausible futures. Instead he has tried to take the same massively changed world that cyberpunk has, but leaven it with more rational extrapolation. The result is very convincing. Back in 94 I was trying to explain to management what the Internet was and what it could become. I told them that the best predictions I had found were "Islands In The Net" and "Earth".
A common thread running through Johan's questions is the assumption that target computers can be rated by "hardness" in the same way as a military base.
This assumption has limited validity. It is certainly true that some systems are constructed to be much harder to penetrate than others. However any system can be made insecure by improper installation or use. A classic example is the recent Linux box crack. The crack exploited an insecure CGI script instead of the underlying operating system.
This leads to a situation where attacks are single-use weapons with irregular effects. Think of the Federation encountering the Borg: a phaser works on the first borg, but not the second because the second one had learned what killed the first. Attacks on computers have this nature: you may be able to penetrate many computers at first, but when the attack becomes known the hole will be closed. If the defensive structure is good then this will happen fast and universally. This is what CERT is about.
Much has been made here of the "script kiddy" phenomenon. This does not seem a realistic concern for real national infrastructure or military issues. Sure there are plenty of insecure systems around, but the attacks the script kiddies use are generally known and they can be locked out.
This means that against a well-defended target you are going to have to devise fresh attacks. This is not a trivial exercise. Its easier if you can get hold of the source code, but either way expect to have to fund a team of good techies sitting down with sample systems looking at how to take them down. The result will not be an armoury so much as a mixed bag of ad-hoc tricks, each of which will have a very narrow window of use. Also you can't stockpile these attacks because at any time someone else could discover the same crack, use it, and get you locked out.
Even a successful cyber attack will be little use on its own. It would have to be co-ordinated with other actions. At this point it gets hairy. The effects of your actions when you actually try to take down or penetrate a system are difficult to predict. Maybe it will work, or maybe the defenders are on to you and will be duly warned. And the mixed bag of tricks will be hard to integrate into the rest of the strategy.
All this points to the need for a proper defensive posture. This makes the entire infrastructure much more robust. Use operating systems and applications which are known to be reasonably secure. Keep up with CERT bulletins and other sources of information. If a computer is worth guarding physically then it is worth guarding "informationally", and for critical assets this might well extend to a continuous human auditor looking for discrepancies and odd patterns, just as a human guard is used to check people in and out of a base instead of relying on barbed wire and key cards.
Finally, it is important not to let these threats get out of proportion. If I was a terrorist and wanted to bring down the national power grid I'd go for a few pounds of plastic attached to strategic pylons and transformers. Much more certain, and much longer lasting effects (aside, why did the IRA never realise this?). A defence system is only as strong as its weakest point, and that point is rarely a computer.
The acquisition of knowledge is drudgery. The syenthsis of fact into insight is creativity. All the creativity in the world will not help you, however, if you are writing and operating system and you don't know that the interrupt enable flag is cleared on entry to an interrupt service routine and must be set on exit.
The thing about being a mapper is that once the map of the processor is established, details like the state of the interrupt enable flag become obvious. You don't have to learn them, you just deduce them from the map.
I recall an incident where my wife was revising for an exam. She had written half a dozen equations down and was trying to learn them. I glanced at the sheet and said "Why bother learning all those? You only need these two simple ones and you can derive the rest". It summed up the difference very clearly.
In fairness to NASA, bear in mind the following poinsts: People's lives depended on doing this stuff right. Ad-hockery in safety contexts has caused quite a lot of accidents in the past. Hence requiring the technicians to follow the procedure was the Right Thing. It probably did work out cheaper for NASA to employ these technicians to count around hundreds of little holes all the time than to verify the safety of the change (what type of paint? would it react with the fuel?) and reprint all the procedure manuals to accomodate it. A much bigger problem with the mindset was the quote "a 4kHz oscillation is in our database". This turned out to mean "we have a major vibration problem with the engine, but the management don't want to know about it". Paul.
I obviously don't have time to read it all in one sitting, but it looks very promising from skimming through it
I just have read it all the way through (it took about 4 hours), and it really is as good as it looks.
The biggest thing I got from this is a word to describe myself. I am a Mapper (so are you, probably).
One note, for anyone who makes it to the brief discussion of the Prisoner's Dilemma at the end. Go and read The Origins of Virtue by Matt Ridley. It covers this situation and the more general problem of co-operation in an egotistical world. It starts at the level of chromosomes (there is such a thing as a parasite chromosome) and goes up the levels to society, subcultures and the whole world. Its definitely the work of a Mapper.
In the Terry Pratchett book "Men at Arms" Cuddy the dwarf designs a cooling helmet for Detritus the troll. Pratchett's trolls are made of silicon, and have superconducting brains. Hence a warm troll is a stupid troll, and a cold troll is a very intelligent troll.
I had a look at the "True Ideals of Socialism" link. Interesting. Its the best summary of anarchist thought I've seen so far, and worth reading.
However I can't agree with it. Most of the text (I've sampled it, but not read it completely yet) is an explanation of why Capitalism=slavery, basically because your boss is able to tell you what to do on pain of sacking, and your only choice is to find a different boss.
First, this ignores the possibility of becoming self-employed. The section I read mentions this, but dismisses it because only 10% of people are self employed. However the author fails to explain how this low proportion prevents it being a legitimate choice. Indeed, I could become self employed tomorrow if I wanted, and I know people who have done so. I choose not to do so for a number of reasons which I won't go into here.
Secondly, the threat of withdrawal of labour is a major one. In this country in the 70s the unions effectively appropriated the means of production from the capitalists by exactly this means. The result was a major economic downturn in my country which was only reversed when Mrs Thatcher put the capitalists back in charge. And today any sensible organisation worries about high staff turnover. New workers are surprisingly expensive, and getting more so. Even a Macdonalds burger-flipper needs to be recruited and trained.
Thirdly, the author seems to ignore (unless I failed to notice it) the possibility that anyone has of gaining control of the "means of production" themselves. It is actually fairly easy to set up your own business with your own employees, or for a group of people to form exactly the kind of workers federation that the article proposes. Come up with a sensible plan and the capitalists happily lend you control of the means of production. Prove it effective and you get to keep control. On the other hand if you fail to make best use of the resources you are consuming then control will be taken off you and given to someone who can do better.
Then we go onto the proposed alternative, in which democratic federations of workers own the "means of production".
Considering this system from the point of view of the individual, I can't see any difference. Unless I want to be self-employed (with the same tradeoffs as today) I have to join one of these federations. Once in, I have to do what the currently appointed "managers" tell me to do. As an individual my vote will count for little, and if I am female a member of a minority then there is no reason to suppose that the other members of the collective will be any less bigoted towards me than a capitalist manager.
The motivation in that case, of course, isn't keeping genetic purity as much as keeping the farmers from taking some of the seed from a year's crop and just planting it next year, instead of buying more seed from the corporation.
Who cares what the motivation is? The thing about capitalism is that, basically, it works. Every other system of economics tries to appeal to altruism as the reason for doing the right thing. Capitalism appeals to greed to do approximately the right thing most of the time. This works a lot more reliably.
Coming back to the point, the GM companies have basically demonstrated that they can either produce "mule" seeds which won't reproduce or they can produce seeds which can copy themselves, at some risk of "contaminating" the local environment (whatever that means). Which would you prefer?
Liberate yourself from toil. This has been the continuing siren song of consumer technology through the twentieth century. Unfortunately, in its own terms, the dream is always self-defeating.
This is demonstrably false.
Recently a BBC TV series has been showing a family who "went back in time" 100 years, living in a house with only the facilities that would have been there 100 years ago. Gas lights instead of electricity, no washing machine, hot water only for special occasions, and so on.
They hated it. Washday was exactly that: an entire day. Cooking an evening meal for the family took most of the afternoon.
Sure, our lives seem to get more and more hectic. (Who said "Life is so complex that some parts must be imaginanary"?). But that is a matter of individual choice, not driving technology. It is very simple to opt for a less hectic job, or just not work as hard at your current one and forgo pay rises and promotions.
I run Windows NT and 98 (for various good and valuable reasons), and I use AtGuard to do this. It blocks cookies, referer, from and browser fields on a site-by-site basis, and also acts as a firewall and ad-blocker. Oh, and it can re-write animated gifs to stop after one iteration.
of everybody were right? Has everyone forgotten the treatment that every 'different' person got after those killings?
Of course not. The Geek Crackdown was completely unjustified. My point was not that the other subcultures were right, it was that we were as wrong as they were. But most importantly, we all got it wrong for the same reason: the Columbine Massacre is a mirror.
There is a childrens story in which a mirror is brought into a village which has never seen one before. Everyone thinks it is a portrait and gives their opinion of the subject, not realising that they are in fact talking about themselves. That is exactly what happened here.
This is fascinating. The human brain is the best machine ever created for spotting patterns in noisy data. The downside of this is that if you hand it random noise it finds its own patterns. Columbine is a classic example.
What we saw after Columbine turns out to have been the high-speed creation of a collection of Urban Legends. What seems to happen is that the same story gets filtered through a series of minds as it is transmitted from one person to the next. Each mind forgets some "irrelevant" details and infers some new "facts", because that is how memory works (a number of psychology experiments show how easy it is to induce people to remember things that never were, especially details). In other words you are dealing with an iterated function in a kind of "story space". What comes out of this process is not the original data but a kind of attractor in this space. It is what people feel is the "right" story to have happened.
So, what kinds of stories come out: Well we get a bunch of them, reflecting the concerns of different groups.
The Christian Right get a new Martyr.
Middle America gets a tale about the dangers of [X], for various values of X. Gays, D&D games, violent video games, goths.
Slashdotters get a tale about the Revenge of the Geeks. This last one is the most interesting. We all thought that we were so clever, spotting the real cause of the Columbine Massacre, while all the Media, Middle Americans and Christian Right had missed it. But exactly the same group dynamic was at work. The Christian Right saw teenagers driven to evil by bad music, bad films and bad games. Meanwhile we (yes, that includes me) saw teenagers driven to madness by the social exclusion and everyday violence we suffered at school. The Christian Right argued for more restrictions on films and games, while we argued for more restrictions on jocks and teachers.
This is pretty humbling. Every so often something comes up to remind us that we are not so superior after all.
At present no MS apps run on Linux because MS does not want to cannibalise its OS market. People are tied into Office, and Office ties them into Windows.
But if MS is broken up then MS Applications Inc. will no longer be beholden to MS Operating Systems Inc. It will seek to make the biggest profit it can, and if there is profit in porting MS Office to Linux then they will do it.
Act as a personal firewall, screening incoming and outgoing packets and connections. Strange to relate, there are script kiddies out there who will try to hack your home PC.
Block HTTP cookies, referer, browser and email ("From") headers on a site-by-site basis,
Block adverts (and also tell you how much bandwidth you have saved thereby)
Fix animated GIFs to play once only instead of repeating
I really like it. The firewall is probably the coolest feature: you can block, permit and log any connection or packet based on remote address, local port number and local executable name.
BTW, I have no connection with them other than as a satisfied customer.
What does the name IRS mean? Internal Revenue Service, right?
I think you are confusing laundering with tax avoidance/evasion. The two are completely different things.
If you do some research into off-shore banking, you will find certain countries don't tax foreign income.
The general principle is that income is taxed in the place that it is earned. If you earn money abroad and bring it back to the UK then the UK government won't ask for tax on it: they assume it was taxed where you earned it. But if you merely try shunting money through foreign bank accounts then I think you will find the IRS still wants it's cut. To avoid paying tax you have to go and work somewhere that doesn't tax income. Such places exist, but unless you are a multimillionaire you will probably find that by the time you have paid for armed guards, personal health care and all the other bits and pieces of a civilised life, you would have found it cheaper to stay where you were.
Money laundering is, and always has been, difficult. The basic problem is explaining how you can afford the big house and two porsches. The only realistic way is to create a legitimate business and then hide the amount of subsidy you put into it. But even that is non-trivial because the tax-men want to look at the books in some detail, partly to make sure you are not ripping them off, and partly to cross-check what your books say against your suppliers and customers books in case they are dodging tax.
The only way to avoid this is to run a retail operation and then slide the black money into the takings, preferably while creating till rolls to account for it. But this is labour-intensive, and as soon as you bring employees into the conspiracy you create a serious security risk.
On the other hand a really detailed audit is rare. The main art in money laundering is to look sufficiently legitimate that the authorities have no particular reason to start digging. Its camouflage, not armour.
The UK has actually had a fairly "virtual" university since (IIRC) 1965. Its called The Open University. Students study lectures on TV and meet for tutorials at local study centers once every month or two.
My wife has one degree from the OU, and is currently studying for a Masters.
The problem for schools and universities is that they have a number of conflicting goals:
Show their students the wonders of the Universe and the joy of knowledge.
Send their students out with a piece of paper that will get them a good job.
Attract new students to replace the ones who are leaving.
Convince employers and relevant other authorities that they are doing an effective job
The problem is that all these goals are incompatible, and hence the universities have to do a balancing act between them.
For instance, every computer scientist in the world knows that C++ is a lousy first language to teach a computer programmer. Smalltalk, Lisp, Eiffel, Python: the list of better alternatives is endless. But high school students want a good job, so they do market research. What is the programming language most in demand by employers? C++. So they demand to be taught C++ by the universities, and the universities respond to the demand.
Somewhere in the system there has to be quality control, otherwise everybody goes in for a race to the bottom. How do you find out what kind of a job the university is doing? You look at what the students have to know to graduate. To find that out, you look at the curriculum and examination papers. Other important criteria, such as an enquiring approach the world, cannot be measured and so don't count.
In "What Do You Care What Other People Think", Richard Feynman told a story about a sabatical in (IIRC) Brazil to teach in a university there. He found that the students just learned by rote memorisation, never asked questions, and completely failed to understand what they were being taught.
Overall I think that this guy has some important points to make, but if he doesn't pay attention to the need to produce a standardised product then he isn't going to get anywhere.
And you do need standardisation in education. If you are planning to hire a graduate you need to know what you are getting. A degree certificate tells you that.
However ISTR a report on comp.risks about people who use their Palmpilots a lot. It seems that after a while they "forget" how to write with pen and paper. The brain gets confused uses the Graphiti symbols written all in one place, instead of the English ones written along a line.
Being the wierd sort who enjoys playing games with his brain, I'm looking forwards to experiencing this.
This is just another M$ Astroturf campaign. They got their fingers burned trying to do it underground, so now they think that by pumping money into a "grass-roots" organisation they can get away with it.
The US media may be computer illiterate, but this is their bread and butter. I can hear the interview now:
Stuffed Shirt: The FIN believes that [MS pitch].
Interviewer: But isn't the FIN entirely funded by Microsoft? Aren't you just spouting Microsoft's official line?
Slashdot Mirror
Cool features include an estimate of the time saved by not downloading banner ads, a switch to block popup windows in Java(script), and a switch to modify animated GIFs so they only play once.
When something comes up it hasn't seen before it pops up a dialog asking how to deal with it. This is the firewall software for your grandmother, or at least as close as it can be.
Altogether a nice package. BTW, I have no relationship with these people other than as a satisfied customer.
Paul.
For example, imagine a router which would only tee traffic to another port if presented with a electronic signed by a judge and specifically naming the port(s) to be watched. Obviously this would imply a proper PKI for the judiciary, but hey, if they want our co-operation they'd better put their own house in order first.
Paul.
I don't know offhand how much MS revenue comes from server sales, but its pretty significant. NT server costs a bundle just to install, and on top of that you have the client license charges for everyone who can log on. Eroding server market share hurts MS far more than eroding desktop share.
In addition Linux is now usable on the desktop, and its use on servers should create an acceptance of its use on corporate desktops as well. These people understand Total Cost of Ownership, and they are getting tired of writing huge cheques to MS every year and then watching their machines fall over every day.
Linux users account for approximately 0.08% of the hits to my website
Interesting. Do you have any trend information? I'd really like to see it.
Paul.
So in another 2 doublings or so, say about nine months, Linux will have 10% of the NT Server market. This is a psychologically important figure. At that point lots of press stories will be printed pointing out that Linux has now started making significant inroads into M$ revenues.
The thing that keeps M$ on top now is its reputation for invulnerability. Its certainly not its reputation for quality or value. But this is a very brittle thing. Once it cracks it will crumble and collapse.
So I predict that Linux will reach 10% market share next July or so, and that this will be seen as a major event. Once you hit 10%, 80% is only three more doublings away. So Linux should achieve market dominance some time around mid-2001, and Bill Gates will no longer be the richest man on Earth. Microsoft will probably be taken over some time in 2002.
Paul.
The novel tells the stories of a number of characters, including a top scientist, a female shuttle pilot, an environmental activist and her rebelliously straight daughter, and four middle class kids who start by barely avoiding dropping out of Dan Quayle High School. The characters are well drawn, but they are really just the vehicle for an exploration of Earth in the mid twenty-first century.
In the afterword Brin discusses the cliches of cyberpunk and rejects them as plausible futures. Instead he has tried to take the same massively changed world that cyberpunk has, but leaven it with more rational extrapolation. The result is very convincing. Back in 94 I was trying to explain to management what the Internet was and what it could become. I told them that the best predictions I had found were "Islands In The Net" and "Earth".
Paul.
This assumption has limited validity. It is certainly true that some systems are constructed to be much harder to penetrate than others. However any system can be made insecure by improper installation or use. A classic example is the recent Linux box crack. The crack exploited an insecure CGI script instead of the underlying operating system.
This leads to a situation where attacks are single-use weapons with irregular effects. Think of the Federation encountering the Borg: a phaser works on the first borg, but not the second because the second one had learned what killed the first. Attacks on computers have this nature: you may be able to penetrate many computers at first, but when the attack becomes known the hole will be closed. If the defensive structure is good then this will happen fast and universally. This is what CERT is about.
Much has been made here of the "script kiddy" phenomenon. This does not seem a realistic concern for real national infrastructure or military issues. Sure there are plenty of insecure systems around, but the attacks the script kiddies use are generally known and they can be locked out.
This means that against a well-defended target you are going to have to devise fresh attacks. This is not a trivial exercise. Its easier if you can get hold of the source code, but either way expect to have to fund a team of good techies sitting down with sample systems looking at how to take them down. The result will not be an armoury so much as a mixed bag of ad-hoc tricks, each of which will have a very narrow window of use. Also you can't stockpile these attacks because at any time someone else could discover the same crack, use it, and get you locked out.
Even a successful cyber attack will be little use on its own. It would have to be co-ordinated with other actions. At this point it gets hairy. The effects of your actions when you actually try to take down or penetrate a system are difficult to predict. Maybe it will work, or maybe the defenders are on to you and will be duly warned. And the mixed bag of tricks will be hard to integrate into the rest of the strategy.
All this points to the need for a proper defensive posture. This makes the entire infrastructure much more robust. Use operating systems and applications which are known to be reasonably secure. Keep up with CERT bulletins and other sources of information. If a computer is worth guarding physically then it is worth guarding "informationally", and for critical assets this might well extend to a continuous human auditor looking for discrepancies and odd patterns, just as a human guard is used to check people in and out of a base instead of relying on barbed wire and key cards.
Finally, it is important not to let these threats get out of proportion. If I was a terrorist and wanted to bring down the national power grid I'd go for a few pounds of plastic attached to strategic pylons and transformers. Much more certain, and much longer lasting effects (aside, why did the IRA never realise this?). A defence system is only as strong as its weakest point, and that point is rarely a computer.
Paul.
The thing about being a mapper is that once the map of the processor is established, details like the state of the interrupt enable flag become obvious. You don't have to learn them, you just deduce them from the map.
I recall an incident where my wife was revising for an exam. She had written half a dozen equations down and was trying to learn them. I glanced at the sheet and said "Why bother learning all those? You only need these two simple ones and you can derive the rest". It summed up the difference very clearly.
Paul.
In fairness to NASA, bear in mind the following poinsts: People's lives depended on doing this stuff right. Ad-hockery in safety contexts has caused quite a lot of accidents in the past. Hence requiring the technicians to follow the procedure was the Right Thing. It probably did work out cheaper for NASA to employ these technicians to count around hundreds of little holes all the time than to verify the safety of the change (what type of paint? would it react with the fuel?) and reprint all the procedure manuals to accomodate it. A much bigger problem with the mindset was the quote "a 4kHz oscillation is in our database". This turned out to mean "we have a major vibration problem with the engine, but the management don't want to know about it". Paul.
I just have read it all the way through (it took about 4 hours), and it really is as good as it looks.
The biggest thing I got from this is a word to describe myself. I am a Mapper (so are you, probably).
One note, for anyone who makes it to the brief discussion of the Prisoner's Dilemma at the end. Go and read The Origins of Virtue by Matt Ridley. It covers this situation and the more general problem of co-operation in an egotistical world. It starts at the level of chromosomes (there is such a thing as a parasite chromosome) and goes up the levels to society, subcultures and the whole world. Its definitely the work of a Mapper.
Paul.
(And this is not a troll).
Paul.
Possibilities include voice input (urgh) or some kind of Grafiti-like language on a small pad.
Decent displays look a lot easier than decent input devices.
Paul.
However I can't agree with it. Most of the text (I've sampled it, but not read it completely yet) is an explanation of why Capitalism=slavery, basically because your boss is able to tell you what to do on pain of sacking, and your only choice is to find a different boss.
First, this ignores the possibility of becoming self-employed. The section I read mentions this, but dismisses it because only 10% of people are self employed. However the author fails to explain how this low proportion prevents it being a legitimate choice. Indeed, I could become self employed tomorrow if I wanted, and I know people who have done so. I choose not to do so for a number of reasons which I won't go into here.
Secondly, the threat of withdrawal of labour is a major one. In this country in the 70s the unions effectively appropriated the means of production from the capitalists by exactly this means. The result was a major economic downturn in my country which was only reversed when Mrs Thatcher put the capitalists back in charge. And today any sensible organisation worries about high staff turnover. New workers are surprisingly expensive, and getting more so. Even a Macdonalds burger-flipper needs to be recruited and trained.
Thirdly, the author seems to ignore (unless I failed to notice it) the possibility that anyone has of gaining control of the "means of production" themselves. It is actually fairly easy to set up your own business with your own employees, or for a group of people to form exactly the kind of workers federation that the article proposes. Come up with a sensible plan and the capitalists happily lend you control of the means of production. Prove it effective and you get to keep control. On the other hand if you fail to make best use of the resources you are consuming then control will be taken off you and given to someone who can do better.
Then we go onto the proposed alternative, in which democratic federations of workers own the "means of production".
Considering this system from the point of view of the individual, I can't see any difference. Unless I want to be self-employed (with the same tradeoffs as today) I have to join one of these federations. Once in, I have to do what the currently appointed "managers" tell me to do. As an individual my vote will count for little, and if I am female a member of a minority then there is no reason to suppose that the other members of the collective will be any less bigoted towards me than a capitalist manager.
Paul.
Who cares what the motivation is? The thing about capitalism is that, basically, it works. Every other system of economics tries to appeal to altruism as the reason for doing the right thing. Capitalism appeals to greed to do approximately the right thing most of the time. This works a lot more reliably.
Coming back to the point, the GM companies have basically demonstrated that they can either produce "mule" seeds which won't reproduce or they can produce seeds which can copy themselves, at some risk of "contaminating" the local environment (whatever that means). Which would you prefer?
Paul.
This is demonstrably false.
Recently a BBC TV series has been showing a family who "went back in time" 100 years, living in a house with only the facilities that would have been there 100 years ago. Gas lights instead of electricity, no washing machine, hot water only for special occasions, and so on.
They hated it. Washday was exactly that: an entire day. Cooking an evening meal for the family took most of the afternoon.
Sure, our lives seem to get more and more hectic. (Who said "Life is so complex that some parts must be imaginanary"?). But that is a matter of individual choice, not driving technology. It is very simple to opt for a less hectic job, or just not work as hard at your current one and forgo pay rises and promotions.
Paul.
Paul.
Has everyone forgotten the treatment that every 'different' person got after those killings?
Of course not. The Geek Crackdown was completely unjustified. My point was not that the other subcultures were right, it was that we were as wrong as they were. But most importantly, we all got it wrong for the same reason: the Columbine Massacre is a mirror.
There is a childrens story in which a mirror is brought into a village which has never seen one before. Everyone thinks it is a portrait and gives their opinion of the subject, not realising that they are in fact talking about themselves. That is exactly what happened here.
Paul.
What we saw after Columbine turns out to have been the high-speed creation of a collection of Urban Legends. What seems to happen is that the same story gets filtered through a series of minds as it is transmitted from one person to the next. Each mind forgets some "irrelevant" details and infers some new "facts", because that is how memory works (a number of psychology experiments show how easy it is to induce people to remember things that never were, especially details). In other words you are dealing with an iterated function in a kind of "story space". What comes out of this process is not the original data but a kind of attractor in this space. It is what people feel is the "right" story to have happened.
So, what kinds of stories come out: Well we get a bunch of them, reflecting the concerns of different groups.
This is pretty humbling. Every so often something comes up to remind us that we are not so superior after all.
Paul.
But if MS is broken up then MS Applications Inc. will no longer be beholden to MS Operating Systems Inc. It will seek to make the biggest profit it can, and if there is profit in porting MS Office to Linux then they will do it.
Paul.
- Act as a personal firewall, screening incoming and outgoing packets and connections. Strange to relate, there are script kiddies out there who will try to hack your home PC.
- Block HTTP cookies, referer, browser and email ("From") headers on a site-by-site basis,
- Block adverts (and also tell you how much bandwidth you have saved thereby)
- Fix animated GIFs to play once only instead of repeating
I really like it. The firewall is probably the coolest feature: you can block, permit and log any connection or packet based on remote address, local port number and local executable name.BTW, I have no connection with them other than as a satisfied customer.
Paul.
I think you are confusing laundering with tax avoidance/evasion. The two are completely different things.
If you do some research into off-shore banking, you will find certain countries don't tax foreign income.
The general principle is that income is taxed in the place that it is earned. If you earn money abroad and bring it back to the UK then the UK government won't ask for tax on it: they assume it was taxed where you earned it. But if you merely try shunting money through foreign bank accounts then I think you will find the IRS still wants it's cut. To avoid paying tax you have to go and work somewhere that doesn't tax income. Such places exist, but unless you are a multimillionaire you will probably find that by the time you have paid for armed guards, personal health care and all the other bits and pieces of a civilised life, you would have found it cheaper to stay where you were.
Paul.
The only way to avoid this is to run a retail operation and then slide the black money into the takings, preferably while creating till rolls to account for it. But this is labour-intensive, and as soon as you bring employees into the conspiracy you create a serious security risk.
On the other hand a really detailed audit is rare. The main art in money laundering is to look sufficiently legitimate that the authorities have no particular reason to start digging. Its camouflage, not armour.
Paul.
My wife has one degree from the OU, and is currently studying for a Masters.
Paul.
- Show their students the wonders of the Universe and the joy of knowledge.
- Send their students out with a piece of paper that will get them a good job.
- Attract new students to replace the ones who are leaving.
- Convince employers and relevant other authorities that they are doing an effective job
The problem is that all these goals are incompatible, and hence the universities have to do a balancing act between them.For instance, every computer scientist in the world knows that C++ is a lousy first language to teach a computer programmer. Smalltalk, Lisp, Eiffel, Python: the list of better alternatives is endless. But high school students want a good job, so they do market research. What is the programming language most in demand by employers? C++. So they demand to be taught C++ by the universities, and the universities respond to the demand.
Somewhere in the system there has to be quality control, otherwise everybody goes in for a race to the bottom. How do you find out what kind of a job the university is doing? You look at what the students have to know to graduate. To find that out, you look at the curriculum and examination papers. Other important criteria, such as an enquiring approach the world, cannot be measured and so don't count.
In "What Do You Care What Other People Think", Richard Feynman told a story about a sabatical in (IIRC) Brazil to teach in a university there. He found that the students just learned by rote memorisation, never asked questions, and completely failed to understand what they were being taught.
Overall I think that this guy has some important points to make, but if he doesn't pay attention to the need to produce a standardised product then he isn't going to get anywhere.
And you do need standardisation in education. If you are planning to hire a graduate you need to know what you are getting. A degree certificate tells you that.
Paul.
However ISTR a report on comp.risks about people who use their Palmpilots a lot. It seems that after a while they "forget" how to write with pen and paper. The brain gets confused uses the Graphiti symbols written all in one place, instead of the English ones written along a line.
Being the wierd sort who enjoys playing games with his brain, I'm looking forwards to experiencing this.
Paul.
The US media may be computer illiterate, but this is their bread and butter. I can hear the interview now:
Stuffed Shirt: The FIN believes that [MS pitch].
Interviewer: But isn't the FIN entirely funded by Microsoft? Aren't you just spouting Microsoft's official line?
Paul.