Are you trying to be argumentative, or are you just not listening?
Not to be flamebaiting, but I feel the same about your posts. Even if you are just playing devil's advocate, you seem to ignore the possibilities for misuse.
Ignore the fallibility of the creators and the honesty of the administrators for just a second. Ask yourself IS this device wrong? I think not, period.
If we had a magical little scrying device which could pick ONLY terrorists out of thin air without invading the privacy of non-terrorists, it would be find. Something like this wouldn't be feasible as something to build with what we know today. The best we could do today is create a system that's modifiable to search for anything the controller wants, including extremely sensative non-threatening personal ( relationships, financial, etc ) and business ( financial, intellectual ideas, etc ) materials. It's completely impossible to ignore the ( possible abuses of the )maintainers of the system because they are the ones who control the system. Would a device that allows anyone to destroy someone else( for any reason ) be wrong? Most certainly.
This is generally my biggest problem. Finding a good place to meet girls... I'm not really the bar scene or clubbing type( I find getting wasted rather idiotic and clubbing boring and a meager attempt to try to be like everyone else. ) I manage a restaurant so I meet plenty of people there but I don't consider work to be the proper place to pickup women( be it other college aged employees or customers ) and I generally don't go to restaurants outside of work because that whole scene gets rather dull being in one 40-60 hours a week. I live in a medium sized rural town so there isn't anywhere to go/anything to do for 40 miles and since everyone has cars, you don't find people just hanging out somewhere( other than a bar or restaurant ). To further complicate things, my dad had a stroke last year so I've taken a leave of absense from work and school to take care of him until he's back on his feet again so it's pretty tough for me to get out... yet I still desire a relationship. I'm only 22 but I feel very much like my dad after my mom divorced him, utterly alone( not so much guy-friendship wise as we were always best of friends but in the female relationship way ) and helpless to do anything about it.
I guarentee the minute it becomes the least bit intrusive into the lives of citizens, congress will shit all over it.
You mean the people who are trying to limit the first and second ammendments? The people who steal my meager earnings because they think they know how to spend my money better than me? Congress cares about the citizens about as much as any major corporation.
Believe it or not, you still do elect your senators and representatives. Hell, you can even RUN for Congress if you want!!
Yep... You can run. But, if you don't have previous experience your opponent(s) will use that against you( even though the founders intended average people( ie, non career politicians ) to run government, we seem to only want experienced politicians. ) And of course, I can't run for Congress as I'm only 22, thus not old enough yet( because everyone under the age of 25( house ) or 30( senate ) obviously is too ignorant to run government( see how congress handles technology issues because they're all too old and out of touch to understand them )) Then there's that little matter of financing, where an average House run still costs over a million dollars, Senate runs are $5million + and Presidential over $40 million.
They had poison and low yield explosives. All which were relatively hard to obtain. Terrorism was a totally unknown concept then. The availability of massively destructive weapons was certainly a large part of it.
If someone were to dump a dead, rotting animal into a town's well, it would have the same effect as biological warfare of today. The bacteria inside would cause things like dysentery and worse. People did this sort of thing going all the way back to seige warfare during medieval Europe( and probably even farther back than that ) so it's by no means a new concept. On a wooden ship, a fire, even if ignited by low-grade gun powder, would quickly burn out of control, destroying the ship.
'm playing devil's advocate for Echelon, but only in a "perfect world" where the machine works exactly as described and there is no potential for abuse. Many people still say this is intrinsically wrong. I disagree. I don't have any problem with a computer (read Magic Black Box) which will only trap/acton content with plans to kill thousands of people.
The magic black box is still made by a person so it would have the faults imposed by the person( or people ) who created it. The box looks for what it's told to find. All it would take is for a single person with access to have some reason( political, economical, personal, whatever ) to modify what the black box looks for, thus compromising the integrity of the system. When considering security, freedoms, etc you must always examine it from a worst case scenario to see if it outweighs the benefits. In this case, I would have to say that the losses are far more important than the miniscule gains. Because there are other unchecked methods of communication and ways to beat the system( I can think of a dozen ways of sending unencrypted, plaintext emails to people anywhere in the world about any kind of terrorism and have them not be detected by Echelon ) which makes the system pretty irrelavent( eliminating the positives ) and simply leaving the negatives.
I, for one, don't have a problem with a DNA database as long as its only used for to match criminals to violent crimes (not abuse).
Until you speak against the government, they duplicate your DNA stored from your last blood test and frame you for a crime to remove your threat. Sure, it may seem unlikely but there's a very large potential for abuse.
We live in a very different age today. When the Constitution was promulgated, one man (or a small group) could not kill thousands. They had no nuclear bombs, no biological weapons, no chemical warfare, hi-yield explosives, automatic weapons, etc. The only way to kill vast numbers of people was to assemble an army. There was no need to read mail, if someone wanted to raise arms you'd know soon enough.
And back then, if one man wanted to sink a ship, he couldn't have lit a barrel of gun power( remember, they were wooden ships)? And one man couldn't start large fires in populated areas? What if one man decided to poison the town well? Or one man decided to taint a bunch of meat? A small group of men couldn't subvertly wander from town to town murdering people in the night or starting fires? What if they burned down crops just before winter?
Today, I can communicate securely and instantaneously with other like minded wackos in milliseconds without ever leaving my home. Conventional spying methods wouldn't even know I exist. Information is key. If there really is a way to safely analyze and trap this information before it does harm, we have an obligation to do so.
200 years ago people could meet at my house so we could discuss the sinking of some ships in the harbor without stirring the eyes of the government before hand as well. Should we have listening monitors everywhere, including our homes, in case someone may have a friend who lives near them who may want to conspire to blow something up? Should we not be constantly monitored just to weed out a very small amount of bad eggs? We'd better monitor board rooms "in case some corporation wants to put it's interests before the interests of our citizens" too... What happens if the listener is a friend/relative of a competitor? What if a family values politician shows some un-family like attribute( and the people watching don't like him/her )? What if someone who is conversing with someone else about being gay and is still in the closet, only to have it announced by the monitor?
The point being, when speech is monitored the possibilities for abuse far outweigh the probability of catching someone. Monitoring one or several forms of communication doesn't prevent another method of communication from being used... so it could go unnoticed. So, we have a low probability for catching someone, combined with the possibility to harm anyone for any reason the montior sees fit. Do you put enough trust in everyone else out there to not harm you? If not, why trust the monitor? If so, why have a monitor? The government and it's monitors all are operated by people who aren't necessarily any better than people who physically seek to harm you( just because they pass a security clearance doesn't mean it's completely impossible for them to want to harm someone ).
The difference is that cigarettes and a porno mags can be used outside the home, completely away from any type of adult supervision. To play a computer game, you need a computer, which, generally, is going to be in someone's home. If little billy buys a game, he's either going to have to play it at his house, his friend bobby's house, or school. If his parents don't want him to play it at home, he won't. If the school doesn't want it played at school, he can't. If bobby's parents don't mind bobby playing that kind of game, he might already have a shelf full that type game that billy's already played, even though billy didn't purchase it and billy's parents didn't know about it.
Point being, you have to watch what your child is doing in your house, but even if you patrol the house, most kids generally will have access to things you don't want them to. There's always going to be something or someone out there that will be tempting for them to do when you're not there even if there's laws against it and their only defense is for you to raise your child to know what's right and wrong and what's acceptable and to hope he does the right thing.
>Congress does NOT elect our chief executive. Even if the ENTIRE congress supported David Duke for Pres, the people are not that stupid (hopefully).
Actually, Congress does have the power to elect the President if no candidate gets at least 270 votes from the electoral college( more than 50% of the 538 votes ). Each state in the House gets one vote to elect someone from the top 3 candidates. If none of them win by majority, the top two then goes to the Senate for their decision. See the FEC rules for more info. The party in majority generally should have the advantage in this situation.
>So what if put your drive on the secondary controller, and put my own on the primary, boot from it and then mount your disk?
Agreed... but if we're talking about a system sitting in a lab or a cubicle, someone is bound to say "uh, frank, what are you doing taking apart bob's computer." More protection is better than no protection even though all protection is defeatable( including encrypted fs )
>How secure is this? Anyone with physical access can change the root password.
First, disable booting from anything other than your hard drive in your BIOS( this can still be shorted by opening the case though ).
Then, you can setup lilo to require a password if you add any parameters to the image label...
ie, in my lilo.conf
boot=/dev/hda map=/boot/map install=/boot/boot.b #prompt -- make it so I have to hold shift to get the lilo prompt timeout=50 image=/boot/k2321 label=linux root=/dev/hda2 read-only #this is the password that protects linux single password=myspecialpassword #restricted means that if I add any parameters at # the prompt, I get prompted for the password restricted vga=0x030C
When I type linux single at the lilo prompt, it now asks for myspecialpassword before it'll continue
Another problem I see with a direct democracy is the issue of national security. What happens when we having something of extreme importance that can't be divulged to the public at large because they could give the information to the enemy( sympathists are always out there willing to help their cause, even if it means hurting everyone else in their country ). In order to protect interests of national security, the issues must be kept to a minimum number of people( see the encryption threads of a couple weeks ago ).
I have a friend who does computer security and networking stuff for the air force in DC. When he came home on leave last month, he was telling me stories of some of the goings on there... I guess one guy in particular tries breaking into their public systems but isn't good enough to do anything so let let him play until they get annoyed and disconnect him. He said he sees up to a dozen different IPs trying to crack various systems every day and a large number of the computers are running NT( he's their "UNIX specialist" and he just called me yesterday to try to get his mouse working on his home box in linux so we know what kinda people admin these boxes) so I see it as definately plausable someone could have found a method to grab the box and use it for their own needs. Whether or not the military can find out who it was that did it is another thing.
On a slightly different note, considering our "cyberwar" on Yugoslavia, I'm sure many other governments could be concerned and so are initiating counter attacks( ie, if they're going to get us, we might as well get them ).
So what happens when they record email addresses from logs? Most people don't have any kind of proxy setup and thus it'll show that joeloser@imracist.net visited the site. Do they then donate this information to the police( there's nothing stopping you from giving the police your logs if wou want to )? If a crime is committed do the police start going through the list to interrogate people even if it was a typo( I meant to go to bigger.com )?
Home use will amount to nothing if it doesn't have a nice GUI *WITHOUT* any need for the CLI at all. The Linux world's inability to address this issue will not give most people any reason to switch to Linux.
The linux community IS making inroads in this respect. From the rumors of corel's beginner friendly installation to tools like linuxconfig to xdm to the redhat xwindow package installation system to the file managers... Granted, it's going to be tough to completely eliminate the need for a command line but the CLI is still the most powerful way to do system maintainance amongst other things. It's not quite ready for primetime yet but given the current momentum not only in the marketing and buzz of linux but also in the development, I think we'll be there within a year from now. When we reach that point, it'll only serve to increase game and application development for linux which will attract more people...
I hope the amount of linux games and gaming systems continue to flourish. The more games linux has, the more attractive and legitimate the average user will see it. This will encourage more people to buy and support linux software which will fund future development of more games, device drivers, and other projects. Round out the personal apps in development with games and linux can be a legitimate contender to MS at home.
Let's not forget that D&D 3rd edition is scheduled to be released next summer/fall and will once again contain demons/devils, assassins, etc. The question is, will hasbro milk it for the money it'll generate( a new edition will generate millions ) or sanitize it because of their popularity and risk enraging the RPG consumers?
I don't see why the trolls still can't create a bunch accounts so they can negatively affect the meta-moderation. If they create accounts now and ignore them for a couple months, all those accounts will be eligible for meta-moderation since it simply requires the default positive karma and a non-recent account. If they have enough accounts, they can lower the karma of the moderators so the moderators can't moderate any longer.
>Okay, so they only work 9 months a year. But for those 9 months, it's very often 50-60 hour weeks. >Then you've got the inflexibility of the job itself. No vacation time (aside from when everyone else is on vacation), limited sick time, and few real freedoms during the day (can't skip out early for lunch, for example, limits on phone calls, and so on). >In NY, I believe you need at least a masters in education before you can take the teaching exam.
At my former school, teachers worked approximately 200 days a year( 180 school + conferences ) which means they get 165 days off a year. The starting salary is 30k yr + benefits for a half year's work. In NY you only need a teaching certificate, which simply requires taking the test( most people have 4 years of college ), you don't need a masters. As for the priveledges, I manage a restaurant and I'd love all weekends off( fact is, it's been since 1994 since I had a full weekend off ), summers off, all holidays off, paid medical, etc. I get 55 hour weeks, ignorant people who've never washed dishes and need to be taught, limited sicktime, no phone calls, can't leave early, etc and I get paid less than these teachers do( in addition to working on my comp eng degree ) for their half a year's worth of work.
>Your college days email (the part that you HAD to send, not the personal stuff that was optional) never left the Academic campus network you were logged onto.
What about when I was collaborating with people on other campuses or people in businesses for my work? How can you determine what's necessary to my acadamia research that I had to send and what's fluff? The tax proposed isn't just an email tax but rather a bit tax and since I transfer about 2.8 gigs down a month and about 100 megs up, I'd be looking at a $30/month tax on my transfers( vs my access cost of $19 )
>Obviously, the tax would be metered at access points to the 'net proper
My ISP frequently routes packets over other backbones and back to itself( say from NY pop to MCI backbone to San Jose pop ) so every time I send a packet out, I've got a 50/50 chance of being taxed whether it's sent to my network or net.
When I was in college, I had to work 65 hours a week just to pay tuition and make ends meet. I had to send a whole lot of email back in those days. Should today's students have to pay? What about the poorer folk that go to a public library for access or pay $20/mo for an account to help little billy with his school work but don't have much money? Do we start creating exemptions? How do you qualify the millions needing exemptions? Where do the exemptions end? If I make $1 a week after my bills are paid, should they take 6 cents so I can't buy a bottle of pop? Do we create internet welfare that subsidizes access( hardware, software, and ISP ) for people in the US/UK/et al that can't afford it? Do we also tax NNTP, IRC, ICQ, et al?
The bureaucratic tasks would be absolutely enormous and merely line the pockets of the "UN Internet Council" and the telecom/software/hardware companies rather than actually providing a good solution that the third world isn't ready for yet anyway.
I guess the good thing is that it would be impossible to realistically tax something like this unless it was purely on amount data sent( which would remove all those upgrades, etc software companies offer online ) and the US Constitution doesn't allow a foreign body to tax anything inside the US borders(technically Congress could tax and "donate" the proceeds to the UN. Not likely since we can't pay our membership dues )
Where I go to school ( Rochester Inst. of Tech ), there's a whole program devoted to chip/circuit fabrication: micro-electronic engineering. The first 2-3 years(of 5) are vitually all calc, physics and chemistry. We ( comp. eng ) get to share the same, nice, cool, air conditioned building with them:) Now I just can't wait to get back to finish my degree.
gates perform logical comparisons. If you want to multiply to numbers in binary, you would need to use logic. Let's multiply 2 numbers, x and y. We will call z the returned number and c the internal carry which starts out as 0
binary means we're dealing with 1's and 0's or means at least component one needs to be 1 to return 1 xor(exclusive or) means that one and only has to be 1 to return 1 (1 xor 1 returns 0) and means that both have to be 1 to return 1 not is simply the opposite
to multiply them, we need to have z = (x xor y) xor c. to find out if theres a carry, we need (x and y) or (x and c) or (y and c).
If you have a 32 bit multiplier, the fastest way to process is to make 32 of these feed each other( which takes up room ). Everything a computer does is based on logic analysis and is broken down into stuff like this. Some things are built on top of others so you don't have to have a unique circuit for each thing( consider programming is assembly is one step at a time where in C you convey a bunch of assembly at one time ).
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Not to be flamebaiting, but I feel the same about your posts. Even if you are just playing devil's advocate, you seem to ignore the possibilities for misuse.
Ignore the fallibility of the creators and the honesty of the administrators for just a second. Ask yourself IS this device wrong? I think not, period.
If we had a magical little scrying device which could pick ONLY terrorists out of thin air without invading the privacy of non-terrorists, it would be find. Something like this wouldn't be feasible as something to build with what we know today. The best we could do today is create a system that's modifiable to search for anything the controller wants, including extremely sensative non-threatening personal ( relationships, financial, etc ) and business ( financial, intellectual ideas, etc ) materials. It's completely impossible to ignore the ( possible abuses of the )maintainers of the system because they are the ones who control the system. Would a device that allows anyone to destroy someone else( for any reason ) be wrong? Most certainly.
--
You mean the people who are trying to limit the first and second ammendments? The people who steal my meager earnings because they think they know how to spend my money better than me? Congress cares about the citizens about as much as any major corporation.
Believe it or not, you still do elect your senators and representatives. Hell, you can even RUN for Congress if you want!!
Yep... You can run. But, if you don't have previous experience your opponent(s) will use that against you( even though the founders intended average people( ie, non career politicians ) to run government, we seem to only want experienced politicians. ) And of course, I can't run for Congress as I'm only 22, thus not old enough yet( because everyone under the age of 25( house ) or 30( senate ) obviously is too ignorant to run government( see how congress handles technology issues because they're all too old and out of touch to understand them )) Then there's that little matter of financing, where an average House run still costs over a million dollars, Senate runs are $5million + and Presidential over $40 million.
--
If someone were to dump a dead, rotting animal into a town's well, it would have the same effect as biological warfare of today. The bacteria inside would cause things like dysentery and worse. People did this sort of thing going all the way back to seige warfare during medieval Europe( and probably even farther back than that ) so it's by no means a new concept. On a wooden ship, a fire, even if ignited by low-grade gun powder, would quickly burn out of control, destroying the ship.
'm playing devil's advocate for Echelon, but only in a "perfect world" where the machine works exactly as described and there is no potential for abuse. Many people still say this is intrinsically wrong. I disagree. I don't have any problem with a computer (read Magic Black Box) which will only trap/acton content with plans to kill thousands of people.
The magic black box is still made by a person so it would have the faults imposed by the person( or people ) who created it. The box looks for what it's told to find. All it would take is for a single person with access to have some reason( political, economical, personal, whatever ) to modify what the black box looks for, thus compromising the integrity of the system. When considering security, freedoms, etc you must always examine it from a worst case scenario to see if it outweighs the benefits. In this case, I would have to say that the losses are far more important than the miniscule gains. Because there are other unchecked methods of communication and ways to beat the system( I can think of a dozen ways of sending unencrypted, plaintext emails to people anywhere in the world about any kind of terrorism and have them not be detected by Echelon ) which makes the system pretty irrelavent( eliminating the positives ) and simply leaving the negatives.
--
Until you speak against the government, they duplicate your DNA stored from your last blood test and frame you for a crime to remove your threat. Sure, it may seem unlikely but there's a very large potential for abuse.
We live in a very different age today. When the Constitution was promulgated, one man (or a small group) could not kill thousands. They had no nuclear bombs, no biological weapons, no chemical warfare, hi-yield explosives, automatic weapons, etc. The only way to kill vast numbers of people was to assemble an army. There was no need to read mail, if someone wanted to raise arms you'd know soon enough.
And back then, if one man wanted to sink a ship, he couldn't have lit a barrel of gun power( remember, they were wooden ships)? And one man couldn't start large fires in populated areas? What if one man decided to poison the town well? Or one man decided to taint a bunch of meat? A small group of men couldn't subvertly wander from town to town murdering people in the night or starting fires? What if they burned down crops just before winter?
Today, I can communicate securely and instantaneously with other like minded wackos in milliseconds without ever leaving my home. Conventional spying methods wouldn't even know I exist. Information is key. If there really is a way to safely analyze and trap this information before it does harm, we have an obligation to do so.
200 years ago people could meet at my house so we could discuss the sinking of some ships in the harbor without stirring the eyes of the government before hand as well. Should we have listening monitors everywhere, including our homes, in case someone may have a friend who lives near them who may want to conspire to blow something up? Should we not be constantly monitored just to weed out a very small amount of bad eggs? We'd better monitor board rooms "in case some corporation wants to put it's interests before the interests of our citizens" too... What happens if the listener is a friend/relative of a competitor? What if a family values politician shows some un-family like attribute( and the people watching don't like him/her )? What if someone who is conversing with someone else about being gay and is still in the closet, only to have it announced by the monitor?
The point being, when speech is monitored the possibilities for abuse far outweigh the probability of catching someone. Monitoring one or several forms of communication doesn't prevent another method of communication from being used... so it could go unnoticed. So, we have a low probability for catching someone, combined with the possibility to harm anyone for any reason the montior sees fit. Do you put enough trust in everyone else out there to not harm you? If not, why trust the monitor? If so, why have a monitor? The government and it's monitors all are operated by people who aren't necessarily any better than people who physically seek to harm you( just because they pass a security clearance doesn't mean it's completely impossible for them to want to harm someone ).
The difference is that cigarettes and a porno mags can be used outside the home, completely away from any type of adult supervision. To play a computer game, you need a computer, which, generally, is going to be in someone's home. If little billy buys a game, he's either going to have to play it at his house, his friend bobby's house, or school. If his parents don't want him to play it at home, he won't. If the school doesn't want it played at school, he can't. If bobby's parents don't mind bobby playing that kind of game, he might already have a shelf full that type game that billy's already played, even though billy didn't purchase it and billy's parents didn't know about it.
Point being, you have to watch what your child is doing in your house, but even if you patrol the house, most kids generally will have access to things you don't want them to. There's always going to be something or someone out there that will be tempting for them to do when you're not there even if there's laws against it and their only defense is for you to raise your child to know what's right and wrong and what's acceptable and to hope he does the right thing.
Actually, Congress does have the power to elect the President if no candidate gets at least 270 votes from the electoral college( more than 50% of the 538 votes ). Each state in the House gets one vote to elect someone from the top 3 candidates. If none of them win by majority, the top two then goes to the Senate for their decision. See the FEC rules for more info. The party in majority generally should have the advantage in this situation.
>So what if put your drive on the secondary controller, and put my own on the primary, boot from it and then mount your disk?
Agreed... but if we're talking about a system sitting in a lab or a cubicle, someone is bound to say "uh, frank, what are you doing taking apart bob's computer." More protection is better than no protection even though all protection is defeatable( including encrypted fs )
>How secure is this? Anyone with physical access can change the root password.
First, disable booting from anything other than your hard drive in your BIOS( this can still be shorted by opening the case though ).
Then, you can setup lilo to require a password if you add any parameters to the image label...
ie, in my lilo.conf
boot=/dev/hda
map=/boot/map
install=/boot/boot.b
#prompt -- make it so I have to hold shift to get the lilo prompt
timeout=50
image=/boot/k2321
label=linux
root=/dev/hda2
read-only
#this is the password that protects linux single
password=myspecialpassword
#restricted means that if I add any parameters at
# the prompt, I get prompted for the password
restricted
vga=0x030C
When I type linux single at the lilo prompt, it now asks for myspecialpassword before it'll continue
Another problem I see with a direct democracy is the issue of national security. What happens when we having something of extreme importance that can't be divulged to the public at large because they could give the information to the enemy( sympathists are always out there willing to help their cause, even if it means hurting everyone else in their country ). In order to protect interests of national security, the issues must be kept to a minimum number of people( see the encryption threads of a couple weeks ago ).
I have a friend who does computer security and networking stuff for the air force in DC. When he came home on leave last month, he was telling me stories of some of the goings on there... I guess one guy in particular tries breaking into their public systems but isn't good enough to do anything so let let him play until they get annoyed and disconnect him. He said he sees up to a dozen different IPs trying to crack various systems every day and a large number of the computers are running NT( he's their "UNIX specialist" and he just called me yesterday to try to get his mouse working on his home box in linux so we know what kinda people admin these boxes) so I see it as definately plausable someone could have found a method to grab the box and use it for their own needs. Whether or not the military can find out who it was that did it is another thing.
On a slightly different note, considering our "cyberwar" on Yugoslavia, I'm sure many other governments could be concerned and so are initiating counter attacks( ie, if they're going to get us, we might as well get them ).
So what happens when they record email addresses from logs? Most people don't have any kind of proxy setup and thus it'll show that joeloser@imracist.net visited the site. Do they then donate this information to the police( there's nothing stopping you from giving the police your logs if wou want to )? If a crime is committed do the police start going through the list to interrogate people even if it was a typo( I meant to go to bigger.com )?
I think I'll file a patent for "a process of filing patents."
I just put my DiSH unit on the history channel. :)
Got a black screen. Damn slashdot effect...
Home use will amount to nothing if it doesn't have a nice GUI *WITHOUT* any need for the CLI at all.
The Linux world's inability to address this issue will not give most people any reason to switch to Linux.
The linux community IS making inroads in this respect. From the rumors of corel's beginner friendly installation to tools like linuxconfig to xdm to the redhat xwindow package installation system to the file managers... Granted, it's going to be tough to completely eliminate the need for a command line but the CLI is still the most powerful way to do system maintainance amongst other things. It's not quite ready for primetime yet but given the current momentum not only in the marketing and buzz of linux but also in the development, I think we'll be there within a year from now. When we reach that point, it'll only serve to increase game and application development for linux which will attract more people...
I hope the amount of linux games and gaming systems continue to flourish. The more games linux has, the more attractive and legitimate the average user will see it. This will encourage more people to buy and support linux software which will fund future development of more games, device drivers, and other projects. Round out the personal apps in development with games and linux can be a legitimate contender to MS at home.
Let's not forget that D&D 3rd edition is scheduled to be released next summer/fall and will once again contain demons/devils, assassins, etc. The question is, will hasbro milk it for the money it'll generate( a new edition will generate millions ) or sanitize it because of their popularity and risk enraging the RPG consumers?
I don't see why the trolls still can't create a bunch accounts so they can negatively affect the meta-moderation. If they create accounts now and ignore them for a couple months, all those accounts will be eligible for meta-moderation since it simply requires the default positive karma and a non-recent account. If they have enough accounts, they can lower the karma of the moderators so the moderators can't moderate any longer.
>Okay, so they only work 9 months a year. But for those 9 months, it's very often 50-60 hour weeks.
>Then you've got the inflexibility of the job itself. No vacation time (aside from when everyone else is on vacation), limited sick time, and few real freedoms during the day (can't skip out early for lunch, for example, limits on phone calls, and so on).
>In NY, I believe you need at least a masters in education before you can take the teaching exam.
At my former school, teachers worked approximately 200 days a year( 180 school + conferences ) which means they get 165 days off a year. The starting salary is 30k yr + benefits for a half year's work. In NY you only need a teaching certificate, which simply requires taking the test( most people have 4 years of college ), you don't need a masters. As for the priveledges, I manage a restaurant and I'd love all weekends off( fact is, it's been since 1994 since I had a full weekend off ), summers off, all holidays off, paid medical, etc. I get 55 hour weeks, ignorant people who've never washed dishes and need to be taught, limited sicktime, no phone calls, can't leave early, etc and I get paid less than these teachers do( in addition to working on my comp eng degree ) for their half a year's worth of work.
>Your college days email (the part that you HAD to send, not the personal stuff that was optional) never left the Academic campus network you were logged onto.
What about when I was collaborating with people on other campuses or people in businesses for my work? How can you determine what's necessary to my acadamia research that I had to send and what's fluff? The tax proposed isn't just an email tax but rather a bit tax and since I transfer about 2.8 gigs down a month and about 100 megs up, I'd be looking at a $30/month tax on my transfers( vs my access cost of $19 )
>Obviously, the tax would be metered at access points to the 'net proper
My ISP frequently routes packets over other backbones and back to itself( say from NY pop to MCI backbone to San Jose pop ) so every time I send a packet out, I've got a 50/50 chance of being taxed whether it's sent to my network or net.
When I was in college, I had to work 65 hours a week just to pay tuition and make ends meet. I had to send a whole lot of email back in those days. Should today's students have to pay? What about the poorer folk that go to a public library for access or pay $20/mo for an account to help little billy with his school work but don't have much money? Do we start creating exemptions? How do you qualify the millions needing exemptions? Where do the exemptions end? If I make $1 a week after my bills are paid, should they take 6 cents so I can't buy a bottle of pop? Do we create internet welfare that subsidizes access( hardware, software, and ISP ) for people in the US/UK/et al that can't afford it? Do we also tax NNTP, IRC, ICQ, et al?
The bureaucratic tasks would be absolutely enormous and merely line the pockets of the "UN Internet Council" and the telecom/software/hardware companies rather than actually providing a good solution that the third world isn't ready for yet anyway.
I guess the good thing is that it would be impossible to realistically tax something like this unless it was purely on amount data sent( which would remove all those upgrades, etc software companies offer online ) and the US Constitution doesn't allow a foreign body to tax anything inside the US borders(technically Congress could tax and "donate" the proceeds to the UN. Not likely since we can't pay our membership dues )
Where I go to school ( Rochester Inst. of Tech ), there's a whole program devoted to chip/circuit fabrication: micro-electronic engineering. The first 2-3 years(of 5) are vitually all calc, physics and chemistry. We ( comp. eng ) get to share the same, nice, cool, air conditioned building with them :) Now I just can't wait to get back to finish my degree.
I'm an idiot. The logic I posted is for an adder not a multiplier( which is far to complex for a simple explanation of what a logic gate does ).
gates perform logical comparisons. If you want to multiply to numbers in binary, you would need to use logic. Let's multiply 2 numbers, x and y. We will call z the returned number and c the internal carry which starts out as 0
binary means we're dealing with 1's and 0's
or means at least component one needs to be 1 to return 1
xor(exclusive or) means that one and only has to be 1 to return 1 (1 xor 1 returns 0)
and means that both have to be 1 to return 1
not is simply the opposite
to multiply them, we need to have z = (x xor y) xor c.
to find out if theres a carry, we need (x and y) or (x and c) or (y and c).
If you have a 32 bit multiplier, the fastest way to process is to make 32 of these feed each other( which takes up room ). Everything a computer does is based on logic analysis and is broken down into stuff like this. Some things are built on top of others so you don't have to have a unique circuit for each thing( consider programming is assembly is one step at a time where in C you convey a bunch of assembly at one time ).
The applications of this in miniturization of microchip technnology should be pretty interesting. Imagine thumbnail size motherboard
Oh. First post?