It may not be "sporting" but bombing retreating combatants, however feckless they may seem, is not a war crime. Sudan, Yugoslavia, Waco, on the other hand...
It is because public education has very high adminstrative and regulatory overhead. Not enough of the money makes it to the classroom. Private schools generally have very lean management.
It is not "basic econ" that markets create growing inequality, it is a tautology. The poorest person always makes $0, or near to it. As everyone's income grows, inequality grows. You may agrue it is unhealthy for top incomes to grow fastest, as is the case now. I can tell you, however, I don't begrudge Bill Gates or Michael Dell, and cannot discern any effect their wealth, or the rate of its growth, has on mine.
Education is like wealth. Indeed today it is wealth. Except for the very rich, you will find a high correlation between education and income. So as eductaion improves, the distance between what the most educated can achieve, and what the least educated can achieve (a position, which, like abject poverty, is pinned to the bottom of the scale) will grow.
Neither of these measures captures what is really going on: the middle and upper-middle income people in the U.S. are doing better than ever. Even lower-middle-income people are gaining. Redistributionism and the politics of envy are more likely to hurt these than help these people becuase it disrupts the markets that created their wealth.
The same will hold true once educational choice exists.
True, but it's still an exploitable feature. The feature was designed to ensure only trusted and legal crypto providers could be installed. If the provider can be installed, then it can be trusted as far as Microsoft's vetting process can be trusted. The fact that another signer can sign without you knowing makes it possible to fool you into thinking that you are loading a kosher crypto provider when you are not.
The stated purpose is probably the original designed purpose, but that does not take away from the fact this is an exploitable feature.
Speakers, yes: Plug your headphones into your mic plug and yell into them. Cool.
Trouble is, the voltage won't be interpreted in any useful way by the DAC. This part does not work backwards. So unless you plug your headphones into the wrong plug, you are "safe."
The laser on the window hack works, too. I tried it when playing with using a piezoelectric crystal, a mirror, and a photocel to amplitude-modulate audio onto a laser beam for a high school project. Bouncing it off a window (old single-pane windows work best) gives you noisy but usable audio. You need a clear shot to and from the window, though, which was the hardest part, and you cannot start the path from below the window unless your receiver is way up high.
This is an interesting suggestion, but flawed. It follows the "good government" line of reasoning. If you apply enough of the right systems, government will perform well. Sounds good, and it's the right thing to do when you have no other course of action. But it does not address the fact that every serious fraud that occurred in the private sector in a publicly traded company occurred under the noses of auditors. That's why we have SEC filing rules, and an open market in equities. If a company smells bad, you can dump it before the auditors call in the FBI (which almost never happens).
This is why, above a certain level (that is probably about half what we have today, maybe less), no matter how good your systems, audits, reports, etc. are, you will get large amounts of inefficiency and corruption in government. You have to cut the total size of the problem down. You have to enable people to make choices themselves. And then you focus on optimizing what is left. In this case, if you have choice in education, there will be less of a public school bureaucracy to obfuscate things for you, and you will stand a much better chance of being listened to in the fora that enable input into publicly operated schools.
Yes, I have had a lit fag in my mouth and I'm still less of a pervert than the President.
Actually, that is exactly what I am getting at. I think people should be free to take the Dead White European Man SAT or the Autralian Aborigine SAT or the Touchy-Feely SAT and universities and employers should be free to pick which one they think best predicts performance. None will optimally predict performance, and I never claimed they would.
I am advocating freedom to choose: Freedom to choose your type of education (including the freedom to take your fair share of public support for education with you). Freedom to choose how you present your potential and your achievement. Freedom for people to interpret your choices.
I also, in an earlier post, made the point that tests don't have to be perfect in order to have predictive power. There are many interesting stories in test design. One of my favorites is about a test to select sewing machine operators. They tested dexterity, ability to concentrate, etc. and found that the strongest predictive test was putting the operators on a scale. Ones weighing more than 240# were best. This is obviously not a perfect test, and you will miss some great skinny sewing machine operators. But if you have a room with 200 sewing machines, your best bet is to fill it with fat people.
The point is, you have to align your tests with your goals. Not everyone's goals are the same, so a diversity of tests and freedom of choice in all aspects of eductaion and testing would be best.
So the cure is what? "Phat" is to "bad" as "gnarly" is to _____? At some point you have to say that everyone has an obligation to go out and get the culture they don't have, and get over the fact that a bunch of dead white men brought it to its pinnacle in their language and their culture.
If you don't accept that society is in place mainly for the prosperity and comfort of traditional families, then go ahead and reject the cultural standards. But bear in mind that there is no such thing as relative levels of achievement unless you have some particular goal in mind, like technological progress, increasing productivity and wealth, and liberal capitalism in a republic. You are free to reject the goal, at which point who cares what your SAT scores are. They are not relvant to your goals.
It is a bit like gays carping that the Catholic church does not treat them like straights. You have freedom of religion, so become a UU or an atheist. If becoming a good Australian aborigine was a valuable goal, then the aborigine SAT would be what one would study for. There is no reason why we cannot have an open market in measures of academic performance. Universities, employers, etc. could then choose based on their goals.
So what non-fudgable, non-fuzzy, objective measure would you agree to? Of course, any standardized test is a simplified view of educational achievement, but that does not make it invalid.
I bet one could design a handful of simple physical tests that would reliably identify the best atheletes, regardless that the tests capture only a tiny fraction of what their sports are about.
Educators, and modern educational theory, have little credibility in the face of obviously lower eductaional levels in kids today. Standardized tests are a way of holding educators' feet to the fire, and this is needed.
Lies, damn lies, and statistics. What makes you think that if five year plan statiistics could routinely and systematically be subverted that crime statstics could not similarly be a total fiction? I'm not saying things have not gone downhill in an alarming way in Russia. I am saying maybe it wasn't so great before things fell apart. Did the mafia appear out of nowhere? Did criminality just spring up? Were all these mobsters issued their guns when the Soviet Union dissolved? Or, perhaps, is a relatively more free press better able to report these things?
Crime, and corruption are, broadly speaking, a product of society. But I think you mean to say that crime is a result of heartless Republicans being unwilling to fork over enough money to various schemes for making people less resentful over their relative position in society. The approach of keeping violent people in prison until they are too old to engage in strongarm robbery and similar high-risk activity is just as much a societal solution as any other.
All of which goes toward saying that it would be better if police and incarceration resources were focused on violent crime, sex offenders, burglars, and robbers. There is a place for high-tech law enforcement, but that place is pretty small: The FBI hostage rescue team are best known for two massive screw-ups than for saving lives, even though they are probably overwhelmingly good people. 98% of SWAT team members are wannabes that will never use their training, which means there is no feedback on whether their training is any good. Similarly, just because a handful of mob prosecutions were aided by phone taps, it does not mean that pushbutton convenience tapping is anything other than an invitation for abuse.
A number of years ago, I wrote a "software" patent, and have read many such patents. When I was working on this stuff, you could not, in fact, patent software. You had to patent a system that uses the software, and craft your claims to read on as many possible varitions in structure and definition people might use to get around the patent. But all that is beside the point.
Have you heard the saying: "I could indict a ham sandwich?" The same could be said of patents. You file. The examiniers do a perfunctory (they would complain I'm being too harsh, but their comments were 90% nonsensical) search on existing patents. If the keywords match, they make you explain to them why these patents don't read on your patent. I didn't complain, because then they might assign some hardass examiner who knows something. I read piles of patents, thousands of pages of badly written sludge, and dutifully explained why none of it mattered. This goes on for several rounds.
Maybe you take a trip down to D.C. (actually the Patent Office, which you would think would be in one of those temple-like buildings on the Mall is in a non-descript office park across the river in Virginia) to explain your claims in person. Maybe this gets the patent to issue, maybe not.
There is very little critical examination regarding whether a patent should issue. So as long as your patent lawyer is good enough to kick you under the table any time you might utter the word "obviously" you will eventually get your patent.
Ah, but what if patent applications were posted on the Internet, and smart/.'ers could comment on the egregious ones? That would take a radical change in the patent process. Right now, patents in process are secret. That way, if the patent doesn't issue, the inventor can protect his invention with other means, secrecy among them.
This is only the beginning. Can you enforce the patent? Can you afford to? Is the infringer a deep pockets target that can be bullied into licensing your patent, so you can then go on to publicize that license and scare some smaller fish into paying up?
Do you have just one patent? Several? Enough that even a rich company would think twice about trying to litigate them all away? Can you afford to defend them? Is the market window going to close before litigation is complete? This is a game big companys know how to play, and except for some macroeconomic friction is the form of higher lawyer bill than would be optimal, it works.
Nota bene: Nothing about this has anything to with whether the patent should issue by any measure of sensible consideration. As long as your field is obscure enough to fly under the radar of the better examiners, you can patent that ham sandwich. A lot of garbage slips through, more than could possibly get cleaned up in litigation. So you have this ugly overhang of a lot of patent violations out there waiting to ambush worthy efforts like open source software, where litigation is absolutely the worst forum for resolving the issues. And if you put the pickles and mustard under the ham, you owe me a small per-sandwich fee, slightly more for hoagy rolls.
Well, if his opinion is that of a simpleton, and inflammatory at the same time, what you'll get is a cascade of flames.
Unpopular? I agree, if someone really wanted to construct a positive case for orders of magnitude more surveillence, let them have at it. But "obviously wrongheaded" is something else. The top of this thread is the lamest among several lame comments that encourage people to blindly trust government authority when the evidence in today's headlines fairly screams the opposite. There is, at least, some need to cite a reason.
It is apalling how many (almost all anonymous cowards, which in this case, is apt) are posting messages to the effect: "Nothing to worry about. Go to sleep, Teletubbies, go to sleeeeep." Is slashdot getting spammed in some kind of propoganda experiment? Or do people really think that automating surveillence on a massive scale is OK?
There is a big difference between having to go to an exchange or a wiring cabinet to attach a recording device and having someone's conversations delivered at the push of a button. I think we need to limit this stuff to methods where it takes a lot of reources, so it will only be used when it is really needed. This is a much more practical, self-enforcing limit to abuse than a bunch of poor schleps trying to sue to get their lives back when some dope bureaucrat screws them up. And it does happen rather more than "once a century." There are some recent news stories about whether burning a bunch of women and children was as good an idea as it seemed to be at the time. All kinds of laws, regs, rules, procedures, not to mention that doormat we call the Constitution got shredded to fuel the fire. Fat lot of good any current lawsuit is going to do for those people. I would be amazed if anyone actually does time for Waco.
I'm not saying cops are jackbooted thugs. I am saying that a couple of jackbooted thugs, combined with sloppy procedure, scared whistleblowers, CYA careerists, cops with bad training, and some corruption, are a greater danger to the average joe than terrorists or drug runners.
The kind of retail level crime most people actually fear is little affected by this stuff. Guiliani proved in NYC that stopping muggings and break-ins makes a lot more difference to quality of life than the kinds of rare and sometimes entirely theoretical threats high tech surveillence is effective against.
Anyone care to defend the FCC in light of examples of real abuses?
Yes, but, would you want to? Any need to? It sounds less robust to spread state all over creation. If you don't have to remember an IP address, you don't have to worry when a virus comes along and roaches your hard disk, and the static IP you long-ago forgot where it was written down.
Actually, J++ and the WFCs is a lot better than C++ and AFCs. J++ does manage to extend the ideas of easy instantiation and GC to all the pain-in-the-rear aspects of COM and makes COM coding worlds better. The VC++ packages that try to do "references" in C++ are too easily subverted to make C++ coding more reliable. In other words, Microsoft succeeded in porting a lot of Java productivity to Windows COM coding. It ain't perfect (Read the Java COM mail list to see that one does not escape the bad things in COM entirely), but it is the best way to write Windows code out there. Hmmm, if Sun wins, maybe I'll have to try Delphi.
Sun wants to control what Java is, and is not. This is in fundamental contrast to open source, community-based development. The funny thing is, Linux and its constellation of applications have not become fragmented. Nor have open source implementations of Internet protocols gone non-standard, nor have many other potential bad things happened.
So Sun does not need to control Java in order to maintain the usefulness of Java. Sun needs to control Java to prevent the weight of the Windows developer community taking Java places Sun does not like.
Linux has survived, and thrived, with competing views on windowing interfaces and other major areas of functionality. So could Java. Web browsers operate quite well in a less-than-perfectly standrad HTML world.
Also, Timur has is backward: Microsoft has always produced a JVM that runs Java very very well, with no incompatibilities across a huge number of applets and apps. Sun has attempted to build a theory based on copyright that says that Microsoft cannot, in fact, make a VJ++ with Windows-specific language extensions. In effect, they are saying that developers cannot decide for themselves how (not whether, but how) to write OS-specific Java code. Sun is not, and has not, assured that all VMs work alike. It has always been "write once, test everywhere."
Suns wants unprecedented control over a computer language. This is not a matter of denying some logo or certification (as with Ada). Sun is trying to force a licensee to adhere to a changing set of rules, and then constructing those rules specifically to harm the licensees business. Interesting if they can pull it off, but dangerous, because Microsoft can turn around and apply the same theories to its licensing agreements.
The measure of who is right here is that, I'd bet, Microsoft would love it if Java were open source. They would contribute their changes (which are entirely optional from the coder's perspective, and can shut off completely) to an open source Java. But I still do not here the stampede of/.'ers stepping up to defend Microsoft here.
Actually cities get huge amounts of outright cash subsidy from state and federal government that do not require any theories about how GM bought off the Congress to get the interstates built to determine. Suburbanites are justifiably miffed to be supporting often corrupt and highly inefficient city governments.
Outside of elite schools, city schools also generally stink, and often cost more per student (at often inflated attendance figures) to run than the best and most opulent suburban and small-town schools.
My town has only about 5000 people in it, and is run by town meeting. Not much goes on here so the folks have time to ride herd on the schools and the town and make it run right.
Cities might not like competition from places with such inherent advantages, but if they did not face such competition, they would be even more corrupt and inefficient.
Having just bought a McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader (1879 edition) I can tell you there is nothing my daughter gets from a top-rated public school that can touch this. We should all be so lucky as to have the standards of 70 or 100 years ago restored to our schools.
Just go ahead and trust your kids' education to what modern public schools say is sufficient. My daughter will need people who can be easily manipulated (by playing to their inflated need for ego stroking, developed through self esteem training) to be flunkies and gofers.
Yesterday's schools may have turned out people who could operate a lathe. Today's students need training in order to work at the Gap. This is not progress.
I was fortunate enough to take a graduate level linguistics course taught by Chomsky when I was an undergrad. It was like learning cosmology from God. However, before you go saying he's a heavyweight social critic, try to read one of his books on politics. Ugh! Einstein sucked at politics, too. Linus Pauling believed vitamin C was a cure-all. Bill Gates thinks he can run a TV network. Lesson: Stick to what you are good at if you ever get famous - it's less embarrassing.
2. Yup, you gotta carry the DVD ROM disk to the other endpoint and you gotta have some way to know the other endpoint hasn't been coerced or turned. A problem for spies, but OK for most commercial use. It also gets unwieldy for large groups, especially if the same info has to be securely transmitted to many people. Too hard to keep track of that many key disks. But if your object is to connect two people securely, it's no biggie.
3. A DVD ROM is about 6GB, full rate speech on the telephone network is 64Kbps or: 8KBs, 480KB/min (roughly half a meg, let's say), so that's 30MB/hour, and over 30 hours of speech encoded with one DVD's worth of OTP key. Compress the speech 8:1, and you get 240 hours per disk! You talk that much and people might begin to suspect a conspiracy.
Weigh the problems against the benefits: it's so simple, real time speech encoding and decoding is no problem at all, even for multiple channels. This is where high key length public key falls down: it is too computationally expensive for multi-channel real-time voice. The required hardware is so simple that you can go to great lengths to assure yourself there are no exploitable features in the hardware. Use a DVD RAM and your hardware can be programmed to erase the disk as it is used up to idiot-proof the system. And the code is so small it can be trivially exported in printed form.
In 1980 (yeah, carbon date this, buddy), I was working at a UN boondoggle in Austria called the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis. There I saw two very interesting minicomputers, one was a Czechoslovakian copy of a PDP-11, and the other was an original Hungarian design called a TPA-70. This charming machine had a volume and tone control on the front panel. I cannot remember if it was an AM radio receiver or a 1-bit hack making the sound, but I think it was AM noise from the memory. I still have the manuals somewhere in a box in an attic...
One of the good things, maybe the only one, to come out of Iridium, is assembly-line snap-together (no joke!) satellites. There is no reason satellites have to be very clean, it's not like space bacteria are going to grow on them. I would not be surprised, therefore, that a satellite was sitting in a fairly normal lab space. I think Teledesic hired Moto to build their birds.
Despite the popular opinion on/. not all laws are bad.
Show me one really good law enacted since Congress ratified the amendment to repeal Prohibition. Seriously. Maybe the Freedom of Information Act. Other than that, what? The problem is that Congress spends way too little time repealing laws. And the abidication of lawmaking to regulators has left us with an uncontrolled soource of new laws.
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It may not be "sporting" but bombing retreating combatants, however feckless they may seem, is not a war crime. Sudan, Yugoslavia, Waco, on the other hand...
It is because public education has very high adminstrative and regulatory overhead. Not enough of the money makes it to the classroom. Private schools generally have very lean management.
Education is like wealth. Indeed today it is wealth. Except for the very rich, you will find a high correlation between education and income. So as eductaion improves, the distance between what the most educated can achieve, and what the least educated can achieve (a position, which, like abject poverty, is pinned to the bottom of the scale) will grow.
Neither of these measures captures what is really going on: the middle and upper-middle income people in the U.S. are doing better than ever. Even lower-middle-income people are gaining. Redistributionism and the politics of envy are more likely to hurt these than help these people becuase it disrupts the markets that created their wealth.
The same will hold true once educational choice exists.
The stated purpose is probably the original designed purpose, but that does not take away from the fact this is an exploitable feature.
Trouble is, the voltage won't be interpreted in any useful way by the DAC. This part does not work backwards. So unless you plug your headphones into the wrong plug, you are "safe."
The laser on the window hack works, too. I tried it when playing with using a piezoelectric crystal, a mirror, and a photocel to amplitude-modulate audio onto a laser beam for a high school project. Bouncing it off a window (old single-pane windows work best) gives you noisy but usable audio. You need a clear shot to and from the window, though, which was the hardest part, and you cannot start the path from below the window unless your receiver is way up high.
I don't recall my Dad slowing down in the Nixon years. The EPA, on the other hand, we should'a impeached him! Oh. Never mind.
This is why, above a certain level (that is probably about half what we have today, maybe less), no matter how good your systems, audits, reports, etc. are, you will get large amounts of inefficiency and corruption in government. You have to cut the total size of the problem down. You have to enable people to make choices themselves. And then you focus on optimizing what is left. In this case, if you have choice in education, there will be less of a public school bureaucracy to obfuscate things for you, and you will stand a much better chance of being listened to in the fora that enable input into publicly operated schools.
Actually, that is exactly what I am getting at. I think people should be free to take the Dead White European Man SAT or the Autralian Aborigine SAT or the Touchy-Feely SAT and universities and employers should be free to pick which one they think best predicts performance. None will optimally predict performance, and I never claimed they would.
I am advocating freedom to choose: Freedom to choose your type of education (including the freedom to take your fair share of public support for education with you). Freedom to choose how you present your potential and your achievement. Freedom for people to interpret your choices.
I also, in an earlier post, made the point that tests don't have to be perfect in order to have predictive power. There are many interesting stories in test design. One of my favorites is about a test to select sewing machine operators. They tested dexterity, ability to concentrate, etc. and found that the strongest predictive test was putting the operators on a scale. Ones weighing more than 240# were best. This is obviously not a perfect test, and you will miss some great skinny sewing machine operators. But if you have a room with 200 sewing machines, your best bet is to fill it with fat people.
The point is, you have to align your tests with your goals. Not everyone's goals are the same, so a diversity of tests and freedom of choice in all aspects of eductaion and testing would be best.
If you don't accept that society is in place mainly for the prosperity and comfort of traditional families, then go ahead and reject the cultural standards. But bear in mind that there is no such thing as relative levels of achievement unless you have some particular goal in mind, like technological progress, increasing productivity and wealth, and liberal capitalism in a republic. You are free to reject the goal, at which point who cares what your SAT scores are. They are not relvant to your goals.
It is a bit like gays carping that the Catholic church does not treat them like straights. You have freedom of religion, so become a UU or an atheist. If becoming a good Australian aborigine was a valuable goal, then the aborigine SAT would be what one would study for. There is no reason why we cannot have an open market in measures of academic performance. Universities, employers, etc. could then choose based on their goals.
I bet one could design a handful of simple physical tests that would reliably identify the best atheletes, regardless that the tests capture only a tiny fraction of what their sports are about.
Educators, and modern educational theory, have little credibility in the face of obviously lower eductaional levels in kids today. Standardized tests are a way of holding educators' feet to the fire, and this is needed.
Crime, and corruption are, broadly speaking, a product of society. But I think you mean to say that crime is a result of heartless Republicans being unwilling to fork over enough money to various schemes for making people less resentful over their relative position in society. The approach of keeping violent people in prison until they are too old to engage in strongarm robbery and similar high-risk activity is just as much a societal solution as any other.
All of which goes toward saying that it would be better if police and incarceration resources were focused on violent crime, sex offenders, burglars, and robbers. There is a place for high-tech law enforcement, but that place is pretty small: The FBI hostage rescue team are best known for two massive screw-ups than for saving lives, even though they are probably overwhelmingly good people. 98% of SWAT team members are wannabes that will never use their training, which means there is no feedback on whether their training is any good. Similarly, just because a handful of mob prosecutions were aided by phone taps, it does not mean that pushbutton convenience tapping is anything other than an invitation for abuse.
Have you heard the saying: "I could indict a ham sandwich?" The same could be said of patents. You file. The examiniers do a perfunctory (they would complain I'm being too harsh, but their comments were 90% nonsensical) search on existing patents. If the keywords match, they make you explain to them why these patents don't read on your patent. I didn't complain, because then they might assign some hardass examiner who knows something. I read piles of patents, thousands of pages of badly written sludge, and dutifully explained why none of it mattered. This goes on for several rounds.
Maybe you take a trip down to D.C. (actually the Patent Office, which you would think would be in one of those temple-like buildings on the Mall is in a non-descript office park across the river in Virginia) to explain your claims in person. Maybe this gets the patent to issue, maybe not.
There is very little critical examination regarding whether a patent should issue. So as long as your patent lawyer is good enough to kick you under the table any time you might utter the word "obviously" you will eventually get your patent.
Ah, but what if patent applications were posted on the Internet, and smart /.'ers could comment on the egregious ones? That would take a radical change in the patent process. Right now, patents in process are secret. That way, if the patent doesn't issue, the inventor can protect his invention with other means, secrecy among them.
This is only the beginning. Can you enforce the patent? Can you afford to? Is the infringer a deep pockets target that can be bullied into licensing your patent, so you can then go on to publicize that license and scare some smaller fish into paying up?
Do you have just one patent? Several? Enough that even a rich company would think twice about trying to litigate them all away? Can you afford to defend them? Is the market window going to close before litigation is complete? This is a game big companys know how to play, and except for some macroeconomic friction is the form of higher lawyer bill than would be optimal, it works.
Nota bene: Nothing about this has anything to with whether the patent should issue by any measure of sensible consideration. As long as your field is obscure enough to fly under the radar of the better examiners, you can patent that ham sandwich. A lot of garbage slips through, more than could possibly get cleaned up in litigation. So you have this ugly overhang of a lot of patent violations out there waiting to ambush worthy efforts like open source software, where litigation is absolutely the worst forum for resolving the issues. And if you put the pickles and mustard under the ham, you owe me a small per-sandwich fee, slightly more for hoagy rolls.
Unpopular? I agree, if someone really wanted to construct a positive case for orders of magnitude more surveillence, let them have at it. But "obviously wrongheaded" is something else. The top of this thread is the lamest among several lame comments that encourage people to blindly trust government authority when the evidence in today's headlines fairly screams the opposite. There is, at least, some need to cite a reason.
There is a big difference between having to go to an exchange or a wiring cabinet to attach a recording device and having someone's conversations delivered at the push of a button. I think we need to limit this stuff to methods where it takes a lot of reources, so it will only be used when it is really needed. This is a much more practical, self-enforcing limit to abuse than a bunch of poor schleps trying to sue to get their lives back when some dope bureaucrat screws them up. And it does happen rather more than "once a century." There are some recent news stories about whether burning a bunch of women and children was as good an idea as it seemed to be at the time. All kinds of laws, regs, rules, procedures, not to mention that doormat we call the Constitution got shredded to fuel the fire. Fat lot of good any current lawsuit is going to do for those people. I would be amazed if anyone actually does time for Waco.
I'm not saying cops are jackbooted thugs. I am saying that a couple of jackbooted thugs, combined with sloppy procedure, scared whistleblowers, CYA careerists, cops with bad training, and some corruption, are a greater danger to the average joe than terrorists or drug runners.
The kind of retail level crime most people actually fear is little affected by this stuff. Guiliani proved in NYC that stopping muggings and break-ins makes a lot more difference to quality of life than the kinds of rare and sometimes entirely theoretical threats high tech surveillence is effective against.
Anyone care to defend the FCC in light of examples of real abuses?
Yes, but, would you want to? Any need to? It sounds less robust to spread state all over creation. If you don't have to remember an IP address, you don't have to worry when a virus comes along and roaches your hard disk, and the static IP you long-ago forgot where it was written down.
Actually, J++ and the WFCs is a lot better than C++ and AFCs. J++ does manage to extend the ideas of easy instantiation and GC to all the pain-in-the-rear aspects of COM and makes COM coding worlds better. The VC++ packages that try to do "references" in C++ are too easily subverted to make C++ coding more reliable. In other words, Microsoft succeeded in porting a lot of Java productivity to Windows COM coding. It ain't perfect (Read the Java COM mail list to see that one does not escape the bad things in COM entirely), but it is the best way to write Windows code out there. Hmmm, if Sun wins, maybe I'll have to try Delphi.
Sun wants to control what Java is, and is not. This is in fundamental contrast to open source, community-based development. The funny thing is, Linux and its constellation of applications have not become fragmented. Nor have open source implementations of Internet protocols gone non-standard, nor have many other potential bad things happened.
So Sun does not need to control Java in order to maintain the usefulness of Java. Sun needs to control Java to prevent the weight of the Windows developer community taking Java places Sun does not like.
Linux has survived, and thrived, with competing views on windowing interfaces and other major areas of functionality. So could Java. Web browsers operate quite well in a less-than-perfectly standrad HTML world.
Also, Timur has is backward: Microsoft has always produced a JVM that runs Java very very well, with no incompatibilities across a huge number of applets and apps. Sun has attempted to build a theory based on copyright that says that Microsoft cannot, in fact, make a VJ++ with Windows-specific language extensions. In effect, they are saying that developers cannot decide for themselves how (not whether, but how) to write OS-specific Java code. Sun is not, and has not, assured that all VMs work alike. It has always been "write once, test everywhere."
Suns wants unprecedented control over a computer language. This is not a matter of denying some logo or certification (as with Ada). Sun is trying to force a licensee to adhere to a changing set of rules, and then constructing those rules specifically to harm the licensees business. Interesting if they can pull it off, but dangerous, because Microsoft can turn around and apply the same theories to its licensing agreements.
The measure of who is right here is that, I'd bet, Microsoft would love it if Java were open source. They would contribute their changes (which are entirely optional from the coder's perspective, and can shut off completely) to an open source Java. But I still do not here the stampede of /.'ers stepping up to defend Microsoft here.
Outside of elite schools, city schools also generally stink, and often cost more per student (at often inflated attendance figures) to run than the best and most opulent suburban and small-town schools.
My town has only about 5000 people in it, and is run by town meeting. Not much goes on here so the folks have time to ride herd on the schools and the town and make it run right.
Cities might not like competition from places with such inherent advantages, but if they did not face such competition, they would be even more corrupt and inefficient.
Just go ahead and trust your kids' education to what modern public schools say is sufficient. My daughter will need people who can be easily manipulated (by playing to their inflated need for ego stroking, developed through self esteem training) to be flunkies and gofers.
Yesterday's schools may have turned out people who could operate a lathe. Today's students need training in order to work at the Gap. This is not progress.
I was fortunate enough to take a graduate level linguistics course taught by Chomsky when I was an undergrad. It was like learning cosmology from God. However, before you go saying he's a heavyweight social critic, try to read one of his books on politics. Ugh! Einstein sucked at politics, too. Linus Pauling believed vitamin C was a cure-all. Bill Gates thinks he can run a TV network. Lesson: Stick to what you are good at if you ever get famous - it's less embarrassing.
2. Yup, you gotta carry the DVD ROM disk to the other endpoint and you gotta have some way to know the other endpoint hasn't been coerced or turned. A problem for spies, but OK for most commercial use. It also gets unwieldy for large groups, especially if the same info has to be securely transmitted to many people. Too hard to keep track of that many key disks. But if your object is to connect two people securely, it's no biggie.
3. A DVD ROM is about 6GB, full rate speech on the telephone network is 64Kbps or: 8KBs, 480KB/min (roughly half a meg, let's say), so that's 30MB/hour, and over 30 hours of speech encoded with one DVD's worth of OTP key. Compress the speech 8:1, and you get 240 hours per disk! You talk that much and people might begin to suspect a conspiracy.
Weigh the problems against the benefits: it's so simple, real time speech encoding and decoding is no problem at all, even for multiple channels. This is where high key length public key falls down: it is too computationally expensive for multi-channel real-time voice. The required hardware is so simple that you can go to great lengths to assure yourself there are no exploitable features in the hardware. Use a DVD RAM and your hardware can be programmed to erase the disk as it is used up to idiot-proof the system. And the code is so small it can be trivially exported in printed form.
In 1980 (yeah, carbon date this, buddy), I was working at a UN boondoggle in Austria called the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis. There I saw two very interesting minicomputers, one was a Czechoslovakian copy of a PDP-11, and the other was an original Hungarian design called a TPA-70. This charming machine had a volume and tone control on the front panel. I cannot remember if it was an AM radio receiver or a 1-bit hack making the sound, but I think it was AM noise from the memory. I still have the manuals somewhere in a box in an attic...
One of the good things, maybe the only one, to come out of Iridium, is assembly-line snap-together (no joke!) satellites. There is no reason satellites have to be very clean, it's not like space bacteria are going to grow on them. I would not be surprised, therefore, that a satellite was sitting in a fairly normal lab space. I think Teledesic hired Moto to build their birds.
Whoops! Congress passes amendments. (With a supermajority??) States ratify them.
Show me one really good law enacted since Congress ratified the amendment to repeal Prohibition. Seriously. Maybe the Freedom of Information Act. Other than that, what? The problem is that Congress spends way too little time repealing laws. And the abidication of lawmaking to regulators has left us with an uncontrolled soource of new laws.