Since the first couple of posts ranking-wise are full of a lot of "yeah, well, at least we have high freedom of expression" and "yeah, well, at least we're not European" comments, it's pretty clear that those people haven't actually read the article, its methodology, or the explanation as to why the US ranked 17th. Turns out it's because we tend to imprison journalists who refuse to reveal sources, and we've been really aggressive in arresting anybody who crosses security lines post September 11th. Well, that's quite understandable, really. We do arrest journalists who refuse to reveal their sources, since there's a difference of opinion in the US between the journalist community and the legal community about when a journalist is obligated to reveal his sources.
Furthermore, I'd say that quite a few countries with what appears to be high levels of press freedom to me (such as the United Kingdom and Hong Kong) ended up scoring below the US in any case. This could be a situation where you really don't start to get that bad until you pass like 10 points (the lowest countries are in the 90s on their scale!), which wouldn't happen until level 30. So it doesn't look like it's that horribly anti-US biased, it just looks like it's tracking a number of things that we don't usually look at in terms of press-freedom.
If anything, the survey is a little flawed because it seems to treat an arrest of a journalist as an arrest of a journalist, regardless of reason. Imagine that I write for a newspaper (let's say it's a revolutionary Maoist newspaper). The fact that I work for that newspaper won't get me thrown in jail in the US. But let's say I go to cover an anti-capitalism parade, and get caught up in the rioting and start throwing molotov cocktails, and get arrested. That arrest is hardly equivalent to someone getting arrested just for writing in the Maoist newspaper to begin with. I suppose the trouble is that it's very difficult, in dealing with 140 countries, to say "that arrest was political" and "this arrest was because of a legitimate journalist stance" and "the other arrest was unrelated to journalist activities," so you have to just lump everything together under the question of "how likely do you feel you are to get arrested?" Well, a number of journalists in the US apparently feel like that's possible given our laws on revealing sources, so there you go.
One reason why you can't actually get it yet is that IIRC it relies almost exclusively on GPRS for transmission by design, and those are the only markets that T-Mobile/VS have actually deployed GPRS wide-scale. If and when other markets (like San Francisco? Hello?) get GPRS, you should be able to get it there. Of course that was a risky move since when they got started GSM was barely around in the US, much less GPRS, but there you go.
Okay, so take your statement one step further, that it's okay to register with the government. You're assuming that the government has to permit anyone to register that wants to register. When have you ever known THAT to be the case? Or that if in fact they do have to allow anyone to register, that your paperwork won't get lost for 25 years? The assumption that registration is okay ignores the possibility that it's actually an explicit (or implicit) approval of your ability to provide crypto. Because I can very easily see a scenario where if you're not willing to provide special Clipper Chips with Key Escrow, your registration will be disallowed or take forever to process.
But then again, what about the open source projects? Who's providing the crypto? Where are they? Does downloading a program hosted on a server in the US from a computer in South Africa make the server provider a company which had to register? What happens if they haven't? What if I'm just distributing source code? You see, even if you say "okay, well, we'll just screw over RSA but we'll all be fine in our Stallman Warm Fuzzy Blankets," you're ignoring the issues involved in registration laws.
Nope, what I'm saying here is in fact to agree with you. What I'm trying to say is that although there are some respects in which the Dutch are quite socially permissive, that doesn't mean that it's some complete do-whatever-you-want Libertarian-utopia, which is the common US perception of the Netherlands. So I'm actually agreeing with you because most Americans don't understand that while the Dutch permit some things, y'all actually have a very tough stance on "real" crime.
Not really. The UK Prime Minister was elected by virtue of being chosen as the parliamentary leader of the Labour party, which had a majority of the individual seats for which they stood won in the last general election by people who voted. Considering that:
Voter turnout in Britain keeps sinking;
The UK also has a First Past the Post system for individual constituencies;
There isn't universal enfranchisement for choosing party leaders (witness the farce that resulted in IDS' selection as Conservative Party leader)
You end up with a situation where it's entirely possible for a prime minister to be chosen by what is actually a quite small number of people, because each point above increases the chance that a non-majority will choose the Prime Minister.
If you mean to say that the selection of the Prime Minister in the last UK General Election happened as a result of the outcome of the last UK General Election with no judicial intervention (which would have made little sense anyway since there is no independant judiciary in the UK), then I suppose I'll agree with you.:-)
Considering the appalling voter turnout rate in the US, I'm not in fact entirely sure that the people have a particular will anymore. But acting under the assumption (however specious) that we actually have a representative democracy, I suppose I can respond to this.
Yes, the US has a vast number of people imprisoned for what are, IMHO, completely racist, culturally insensitive, and immoral laws. Yes, that rate is extremely high.
Do I think that stuff like citizencorps is a particularly good idea? Nope. Do I think it infringes on my civil liberties? Well, actually, no, unless the fact that Bob down the hall turns me in for buying a hardware cryptography device gives the police special powers. The fact that it might is what makes me nervous.
But I think that my point is that when it comes to limiting governmental interference in my privacy (not private life, by the way, considering the number of states where Sodomy is still a crime), and guaranteeing those limitations, we're doing pretty well.
But of course you've found some functional society with more rights and Freedom, so I'd be interested in hearing about that paradise.
Yeah, I don't think I made my point on that particularly well. I think what I was meaning to say is that in terms of freedom from government intrusion in your privacy, the US has it pretty paranoid-leaning. Partially it's a historical thing in the US, partly it's a cultural thing, but we have the most paranoid culture about government intruding on your privacy without your consent that I can imagine. That's what I was really trying to get at.
Although, I would point out that any nation without an actual constitution or any viable or realistic checks on its Prime Minister can hardly be considered to be a place where you can be guaranteed your rights (as anti-terrorism legistlation passed to try to deal with teh Northern Ireland conflict can attest to).
Something that I think people should bear in mind in the article is that the tradition of Freedom allowed in countries which are currently making moves to restrict cryptographic freedoms is much lower than in the US, either with the consent of the governed or without. For example, while the author points to places like Burma and Russia as Bad Places that have serious cryptography restrictions, it also points out that places like France, the UK, the Netherlands, and South Africa also are looking at them, and after all, they don't seem like they have horrible military regimes, so what gives?
Well, those countries don't have a history of providing their citizens with the almost absurd levels that the US does. In Britain, you don't have nearly the same rights that you do in the US, and while the Netherlands is a socially permissive country in many respects, it's also very tough on law and order for those things that it deems are social problems (just because in Amsterdam you can buy pot and sex doesn't mean you can kill someone in Utrecht). And South Africa has hardly had any history whatsoever of having solid personal freedoms. So while you can look at the problem pragmatically ("the US looked at the issues and realized that they're unworkable"), you can't just look at it from a US-civil-liberties perspective ("no one should be willing to give a government that much power").
The problem, as the author correctly identifies, is that anything along the lines of key recovery is completely unworkable in practice at all. While it might look nice sitting in a piece of legislation, it's impossible to enforce. Cryptography isn't something like a gun, that's physically manufactured, it's a bunch of mathematical equations (remember the whole RSA on a T-Shirt campaign?). You can't stop the providers of something based on mathematics, and you can't force everybody in teh world to start keeping track of other people's keys, or else they'll just start using "illegal" encryption.
And that's the real kicker: regardless of whether you want your citizens to have the power to encrypt things such that you can't have acccess to them, you can't stop them in any way. All you do by attempting is instantly incriminating a pretty significant portion of your population to access information that you can still get elsewhere (like keystroke loggers that the FBI uses to get passwords, or search warrants for hardware encryption devices, which are both pretty effective IMHO for key recovery purposes). You can't outlaw mathematics (the whole US issue highlighted that), so you really shouldn't try.
I saw a bit on local news once where somebody was wandering around with a card that wasn't theirs, and had a picture that wasn't them on it, and they were actually able to use it quite a few places. And then the TV crew would follow through after at those places that allowed the stolen cards (some of the time the fraudster gave excuses like "it's my mom's card", sometimes they just didn't bother) and interview them to find out why they accepted an obviously fraudulant transaction to go through. Pretty cool, actually, because it just goes to show that a lot of people really don't care about whether you're using a fraudulant card, because after all they're going to get paid (where "they" might be the person working the line, often times who's paid on commission, where that commission doesn't change if all the cases are fraud).
Of course, this was the US. I know that in the UK at one point they had a policy where if you caught someone using a card fraudulently you got a reward, and there some people are pretty strict about checking.
Possibly, but it should be my choice. As an example, if I want to play a game on a laptop on a plane, my only choice is to pack my CD drive with me to do it, even if all the program does is periodically ping the CD drive to make sure the CD is in the drive. Well, that may not seem like a problem, except that it wastes battery life, and more importantly keeps me from plugging in the second battery, so I have to play complete games to get multiple batteries of life going (usually by exiting and restarting the program, which seems okay until you're in the middle of an AoE II game and don't want to exit!
Also, I always play with the game sound turned off. I hate the music that comes with the games. Why can't I then use my CD drive for other things simultaneously on a game that doesn't have a real requirement for that kind of disk space?
I guess the bigger thing is that really, I want it to be my choice, because there are situations like this where I really just don't want to have to deal with having the CD in the drive.
Anandtech providing Matrox's results using an oscilloscope on the Parhelia-512 (the new board, dunno how this applies to existing ones), against ATI and NVidia here.
Top of the article here.
Sorry to get involved in a big video card flamefest (and have no fears of my continued involvement as I won't be viewing this thread again), but I happened to remember seeing something just like this. And sorry that this is coming out of the mouths of Matrox indirectly through Anandtech, but this is the one I remembered.
From what I understand of the Barco Specs, you get 1280x1024 in each of three channels, which leaves you with 3.9megapixels in total. I'm not sure how that compares with a conventional calculation of resolution for an LCD projector or anything, but the Barco people make a point of stating twice that it's 1280x1024 in each of three channels.
Regardless, I saw AOTC in both analog and DLP modes (at the same theatre on different days) and I definitely saw the difference in DLP, and thought the DLP came out much better, so even if it is just at 1280x1024 it's turning out really well in the theatre (which is really all that matters, I would presume).
Well, I've been using Visual SlickEdit (mentioned elsewhere in the thread) for a couple of years now as virtually my exclusive editor, and it runs on almost every platform I care about (Intel Linux, Windows, Sparc Solaris, FreeBSD, etc.). Its tagging goes way beyond what etags does, and has built-in reference analysis. Once you've built your tag database (which automatically updates when you edit a file in slickedit), you can choose to view references. You type in a tag (such as a method or variable name), it'll pop up a list of potentially matching tags (so if you have a lot of things named getName(), for example, it'll let you choose which one), and then it will display all code which references that tag. You can then double click on a code region to go straight to the file and area where that exists (although it shows you a few lines at a time normally). I think there's actually a keyboard shortcut to do that for a particular tag (just like you can automatically go to the declaration of a tag)
Although this seems like a convoluted feature, it's extremely useful for doing any kind of refactoring work where you want immediate feedback analysis. You get to see immediately where everything is used, and it's got other tools which help with that as well (like the class browser and the like). (It also has Visual Basic-style autocomplete, which I absolutely love, because on large projects I never remember exactly what everything's named).
Admittedly, you might not want to change editors just for this feature, but you might want to have it in your arsenal of tools for when you do need/want it.
Avocent makes some which run over IP, and Belkin makes a KVM expander which will run over dark Cat-5e (i.e. no switching stuff in the middle). We use it here, and it works just fine for us so that when we need console access to the servers we don't have to sit in the cold, noisy server room.
Probably not. The real competition for Palm isn't Linux heads, it's Research in Motion's BlackBerry service, which just provides that keyboard (no handwriting recognition). There are a lot of similarities between the RIM platform in terms of email service with what the 701 is providing. And look at the Treo from Handspring, which is going to provide the keyboard before it even provides the Graffiti writing area. Plus things like european cell phones have already started to incorporate better little mini-keyboards for doing emails and SMS messages (Nokia has a bizarre looking phone with an MP3 player and keyboard for doing SMS messages and emails).
I hate to burst your bubble, but in all likelihood the absolute last thing on Palm's mind for something like the 701 is the Zaurus, it's the things that are actually selling in volume and eating into Palm's sweet spot, like cell phones in Europe and RIM in the US. For their other products, they're probably more concerned about WinCE devices, which is where the Zaurus is also competing (for more powerful PDAs that are really almost corporate tools than organizers).
I do agree with you that the lack of storage for the keyboard will be tricky. I've seen people in business settings for years with the fold-away attachable notebook-sized keyboards for Palms, and they just have one more thing to carry to a meeting. Then again, if they just provided a simple cover for a combination of 701 and mini-keyboard, most people wouldn't care about a true "case".
Re:Maybe a dialup isn't the right access.
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SMTP-Friendly ISPs?
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· Score: 2
D'oh! I'm not really a networking fiend so I always screw that part up (how many bits you're supposed to list). I have 8 IP addresses available to me.:-)
Great post, BTW.
There are a couple of other things which are probably pretty important to mention on this here (when I say "you", I really mean the original poster):
HBA cost. FC Host Bus Adapters aren't cheap at all. In fact, they're very expensive indeed compared with any kind of ethernet adapter (about $1k for an intel HBA). You want to roll that out to every desktop? I don't.
Wiring Cost. I haven't seen any FC gear which runs over anything but high speed serial connectors (which don't operate over any great distance) and fibre (which can operate over very long distances). They're both very, VERY expensive compared to Cat5e, both in terms of cost per foot and termination cost. If you've ever had to pay to wire 200 or so ports throughout a building (for a small office), you'll understand how much this matters, and considering that fibre doesn't bend as well, you're in for a VERY expensive installation indeed.
Fabric complexity. This is somewhat related to switch port cost, but it really has to do with the complexity of managing a SAN, which isn't like ethernet at all (it's more of a circuit-based system like ATM than it is like Ethernet). Managing all those connections to get reasonable paths to the servers that they need to get to is pretty difficult, and if you aren't doing it in some kind of intelligent fabric configuration, managing 200 ports is going to suck mightily unless you just punt and go to FC/AL, which is really just a bus anyway, so you're sharing the bandwidth.
Something that I definitely think should be stressed is the metadata management issues that you're raising. Essentially, your computer expects to be accessing files on a server, not shared disk blocks on a shared disk. So unless you're running a FS which was specifically designed for separation of metadata management (which blocks correspond to which files), you're going to be in for a world of hurt (GFS is an open source [used to be anyway] distributed shared-disk file system, BTW). That type of communication doesn't come cheap, and where you're going to start seeing it is where you've got accesses to very large files (media applications), databases (if you're using something like oracle clustering, but if you are, I'm sure Oracle wants to put you in an ad or something), and backup (where there's very minimal metadata compared to the volume of data dealt with, and you've got a relatively slow backup target). So you're dealing with a different paradigm, which changes things entirely. If you want to run NFS over FC, you might want to use FC/IP, which I don't think I've ever met someone who's using.
I've read a lot of the comments on how people have no problems with doing this with a DSL service provider, and I'm one of those people as well. I've got all my DSL needs at home running through the dreaded PacBell systems (Enhanced service with a/3 subnet), and I run inbound AND outbound SMTP just fine (my home machine is the last possible SMTP relay for my company's mail systems). People can connect to my port 25, and I can connect to any port 25 I want. This seems to be common with high speed access, as I have multiple employees who have static IP-based DSL from different providers who use our office mail server as their MTA, or have dynamic IP based and run their own MTA at home and work through that.
Perhaps they're quite worried about spam with dialups, since they're so easy to setup that even giving a spammer a few hours of window will cause major problems for them. But since we've also had people using major dialups (like PacBell) who don't have a problem using the company's dialup to send email with an @OurCompany.com email address, I can't imagine that this should be a really major issue.
I know that many MTAs have an option to append a block piece of crap at the end of outgoing emails (or at least I think they do IIRC). Why not just use that functionality so that the information is only treated at the MTA level when it leaves your network?
Uhm, just a couple of questions before you start really thinking about how awful the providers are:
Do you know how ADSL works? I don't know all the details, but the A stands for Asymmetric, and there's probably some technical reason why one side is faster than the other (if I were to guess completely off the top of my head in slashdot style, I'd suggest it would be to maximize downstream bandwidth with cheaper hardware on both ends). In fact, even in places like London (when you can get it), your upstream can be faster (250kbps), but it's still half the downstream speed (which is only 500kbps there).
Do you know how market segmentation works? The principle is that you price packages such that you maximize revenue for all customers. Considering that the vast majority don't want to do any upstream traffic beyond P2P music traffic (my mom, a typical DSL customer in the bay area, just cares about getting to ebay and email of her granddaughter faster), the best way to maximize revenue is to reduce the price for those who want fewer frills (i.e. static IP address(es), > 1.5Mbps traffic, upstream bandwidth) to get more customers, and increase the price on the frills to sock it to the people who are willing to pay.
For the latter, that's perfectly rational market behavior, and I suspect that even if Congress, FTC, FCC, DoJ, et. al. cared at all, they'd think it was a good thing because it helps bring broadband to more people rather than fewer, because they can make up the money on the more, simpler users with the fewer higher revenue customers. The same reason why gas and electric bills are usually tiered: maximize the benefit to society as a whole by charging those people who are most willing and able to pay for more/better service more.
And don't think this is limited to ISPs at all. Next time you buy a car, wonder why those options exist, or why functionally equivalent cars are made by different divisions of the same company (like the old Dodge/Plymouth/Chrysler ones that even looked the same): market segmentation. Should that be illegal as well?
I suspect from your background that this is actually tongue in cheek. If so, sorry. Just couldn't let the chance for a good old slashdot discussion about things we all know very little about go to waste.
I use slickedit on a regular basis. And we use P4 at our shop (i.e. not one of the "default" source control systems). If you go to Tools->VersionControl->Setup you can actually specify all the commands with keyword replacement to put in any other command-line based source control system. So you can integrate with CVS using it if you just type in a few commands. So in that case Visual SlickEdit does do CVS.
Visual SlickEdit also allows you to pick all your fonts (great for me who loves lucida sans in 9 point).
I've seen badly formatted code with Visual SlickEdit, but it's probably programmer error. If you know how to set up your autoformatting stuff (just how it does open and close braces when it does it automatically, and yes, you can turn it off) then you can get it to happen just how you like it. It doesn't look exactly like emacs-default, but I personally hate most of hte emacs-defaults, so there you go.
One thing that I haven't seen yet is the tags support. While in ctags you have to do something (like hit a key) to see a tag, in visual slickedit you just over over a keyword and it shows you in another pane all the references or the source of any local or class or global variable. And of course it does the drop-down listbox for all the member variables and methods and suchlike. That's the feature that really got me hooked on it, and I find it difficult to live without it at this point.
I got hooked on RPN when I started working with a lot of very large expressions with a lot of parenthesis. Originally I did them on a TI and typed in all the parenthesis, which took forever and always screwed me up at the end. And then I learned how to do it with RPN.
Essentially, every time you go into a parenthesis, that's the equivalent of another level in the stack. Every time you come out of a parenthesis, you collapse the stack with the most recent operator. If nothing else, you can very easily tell where you are at any point in time by the depth of your stack. Admittedly, having to go from postfix (on paper) to RPN (in your head/calculator) takes up some brain cycles, but once I got into the stack mentality when it came to parenthesis, it was actually FASTER to work with RPN because you know that the stack will always keep things straight, and you'll never have to do interem calculations.
Just repeat to yourself: Parenthesis Depth == Stack Depth.
How is this any different than the current Windows scenario? While I agree with you that some times you just have to cut the cord and say "no applications which haven't been recompiled will work with this release of the FOO platform," users expect that their old applications will continue to work. And when it doesn't, they get really upset with you. It's been happening for years now, ever since there started to be a separation between software and hardware (way back in the day).
For windows users, they expect that only in rare cases will their old applications no longer work when they upgrade their computers. This has been something that Microsoft has done very well. The only thing is that they largely hide this functionality from you by making sure that you can't tell that there are full compatibility libraries for like 6 previous versions of windows installed on your machine when you install Windows Me. No, it doesn't always work perfectly, but most well-written applications will work properly in an upgraded version of windows. The difference with a Linux environment is that you can tell what library packages you have installed.
I think it's a reasonable tradeoff by having compatibility libraries. For those people who don't need all those compatibility libraries, you simply don't install them. But when you do need one or two, you have them available to you.
I know that Perforce has ported their clients to several versions of MacOS, including MacOS X. Aside from any compatibility issues with filenames (which you'll have to deal with no matter what system you use) it should work, though I don't have direct experience with it.
At my last employer, some of the graphics people were using Macintoshes with Perforce with no problems.
Slashdot Mirror
Furthermore, I'd say that quite a few countries with what appears to be high levels of press freedom to me (such as the United Kingdom and Hong Kong) ended up scoring below the US in any case. This could be a situation where you really don't start to get that bad until you pass like 10 points (the lowest countries are in the 90s on their scale!), which wouldn't happen until level 30. So it doesn't look like it's that horribly anti-US biased, it just looks like it's tracking a number of things that we don't usually look at in terms of press-freedom.
If anything, the survey is a little flawed because it seems to treat an arrest of a journalist as an arrest of a journalist, regardless of reason. Imagine that I write for a newspaper (let's say it's a revolutionary Maoist newspaper). The fact that I work for that newspaper won't get me thrown in jail in the US. But let's say I go to cover an anti-capitalism parade, and get caught up in the rioting and start throwing molotov cocktails, and get arrested. That arrest is hardly equivalent to someone getting arrested just for writing in the Maoist newspaper to begin with. I suppose the trouble is that it's very difficult, in dealing with 140 countries, to say "that arrest was political" and "this arrest was because of a legitimate journalist stance" and "the other arrest was unrelated to journalist activities," so you have to just lump everything together under the question of "how likely do you feel you are to get arrested?" Well, a number of journalists in the US apparently feel like that's possible given our laws on revealing sources, so there you go.
One reason why you can't actually get it yet is that IIRC it relies almost exclusively on GPRS for transmission by design, and those are the only markets that T-Mobile/VS have actually deployed GPRS wide-scale. If and when other markets (like San Francisco? Hello?) get GPRS, you should be able to get it there. Of course that was a risky move since when they got started GSM was barely around in the US, much less GPRS, but there you go.
But then again, what about the open source projects? Who's providing the crypto? Where are they? Does downloading a program hosted on a server in the US from a computer in South Africa make the server provider a company which had to register? What happens if they haven't? What if I'm just distributing source code? You see, even if you say "okay, well, we'll just screw over RSA but we'll all be fine in our Stallman Warm Fuzzy Blankets," you're ignoring the issues involved in registration laws.
Nope, what I'm saying here is in fact to agree with you. What I'm trying to say is that although there are some respects in which the Dutch are quite socially permissive, that doesn't mean that it's some complete do-whatever-you-want Libertarian-utopia, which is the common US perception of the Netherlands. So I'm actually agreeing with you because most Americans don't understand that while the Dutch permit some things, y'all actually have a very tough stance on "real" crime.
- Voter turnout in Britain keeps sinking;
- The UK also has a First Past the Post system for individual constituencies;
- There isn't universal enfranchisement for choosing party leaders (witness the farce that resulted in IDS' selection as Conservative Party leader)
You end up with a situation where it's entirely possible for a prime minister to be chosen by what is actually a quite small number of people, because each point above increases the chance that a non-majority will choose the Prime Minister.If you mean to say that the selection of the Prime Minister in the last UK General Election happened as a result of the outcome of the last UK General Election with no judicial intervention (which would have made little sense anyway since there is no independant judiciary in the UK), then I suppose I'll agree with you. :-)
Yes, the US has a vast number of people imprisoned for what are, IMHO, completely racist, culturally insensitive, and immoral laws. Yes, that rate is extremely high.
Do I think that stuff like citizencorps is a particularly good idea? Nope. Do I think it infringes on my civil liberties? Well, actually, no, unless the fact that Bob down the hall turns me in for buying a hardware cryptography device gives the police special powers. The fact that it might is what makes me nervous.
But I think that my point is that when it comes to limiting governmental interference in my privacy (not private life, by the way, considering the number of states where Sodomy is still a crime), and guaranteeing those limitations, we're doing pretty well.
But of course you've found some functional society with more rights and Freedom, so I'd be interested in hearing about that paradise.
Although, I would point out that any nation without an actual constitution or any viable or realistic checks on its Prime Minister can hardly be considered to be a place where you can be guaranteed your rights (as anti-terrorism legistlation passed to try to deal with teh Northern Ireland conflict can attest to).
Well, those countries don't have a history of providing their citizens with the almost absurd levels that the US does. In Britain, you don't have nearly the same rights that you do in the US, and while the Netherlands is a socially permissive country in many respects, it's also very tough on law and order for those things that it deems are social problems (just because in Amsterdam you can buy pot and sex doesn't mean you can kill someone in Utrecht). And South Africa has hardly had any history whatsoever of having solid personal freedoms. So while you can look at the problem pragmatically ("the US looked at the issues and realized that they're unworkable"), you can't just look at it from a US-civil-liberties perspective ("no one should be willing to give a government that much power").
The problem, as the author correctly identifies, is that anything along the lines of key recovery is completely unworkable in practice at all. While it might look nice sitting in a piece of legislation, it's impossible to enforce. Cryptography isn't something like a gun, that's physically manufactured, it's a bunch of mathematical equations (remember the whole RSA on a T-Shirt campaign?). You can't stop the providers of something based on mathematics, and you can't force everybody in teh world to start keeping track of other people's keys, or else they'll just start using "illegal" encryption.
And that's the real kicker: regardless of whether you want your citizens to have the power to encrypt things such that you can't have acccess to them, you can't stop them in any way. All you do by attempting is instantly incriminating a pretty significant portion of your population to access information that you can still get elsewhere (like keystroke loggers that the FBI uses to get passwords, or search warrants for hardware encryption devices, which are both pretty effective IMHO for key recovery purposes). You can't outlaw mathematics (the whole US issue highlighted that), so you really shouldn't try.
I saw a bit on local news once where somebody was wandering around with a card that wasn't theirs, and had a picture that wasn't them on it, and they were actually able to use it quite a few places. And then the TV crew would follow through after at those places that allowed the stolen cards (some of the time the fraudster gave excuses like "it's my mom's card", sometimes they just didn't bother) and interview them to find out why they accepted an obviously fraudulant transaction to go through. Pretty cool, actually, because it just goes to show that a lot of people really don't care about whether you're using a fraudulant card, because after all they're going to get paid (where "they" might be the person working the line, often times who's paid on commission, where that commission doesn't change if all the cases are fraud).
Of course, this was the US. I know that in the UK at one point they had a policy where if you caught someone using a card fraudulently you got a reward, and there some people are pretty strict about checking.
Possibly, but it should be my choice. As an example, if I want to play a game on a laptop on a plane, my only choice is to pack my CD drive with me to do it, even if all the program does is periodically ping the CD drive to make sure the CD is in the drive. Well, that may not seem like a problem, except that it wastes battery life, and more importantly keeps me from plugging in the second battery, so I have to play complete games to get multiple batteries of life going (usually by exiting and restarting the program, which seems okay until you're in the middle of an AoE II game and don't want to exit!
Also, I always play with the game sound turned off. I hate the music that comes with the games. Why can't I then use my CD drive for other things simultaneously on a game that doesn't have a real requirement for that kind of disk space?
I guess the bigger thing is that really, I want it to be my choice, because there are situations like this where I really just don't want to have to deal with having the CD in the drive.
Sorry to get involved in a big video card flamefest (and have no fears of my continued involvement as I won't be viewing this thread again), but I happened to remember seeing something just like this. And sorry that this is coming out of the mouths of Matrox indirectly through Anandtech, but this is the one I remembered.
Regardless, I saw AOTC in both analog and DLP modes (at the same theatre on different days) and I definitely saw the difference in DLP, and thought the DLP came out much better, so even if it is just at 1280x1024 it's turning out really well in the theatre (which is really all that matters, I would presume).
Although this seems like a convoluted feature, it's extremely useful for doing any kind of refactoring work where you want immediate feedback analysis. You get to see immediately where everything is used, and it's got other tools which help with that as well (like the class browser and the like). (It also has Visual Basic-style autocomplete, which I absolutely love, because on large projects I never remember exactly what everything's named).
Admittedly, you might not want to change editors just for this feature, but you might want to have it in your arsenal of tools for when you do need/want it.
Avocent makes some which run over IP, and Belkin makes a KVM expander which will run over dark Cat-5e (i.e. no switching stuff in the middle). We use it here, and it works just fine for us so that when we need console access to the servers we don't have to sit in the cold, noisy server room.
I hate to burst your bubble, but in all likelihood the absolute last thing on Palm's mind for something like the 701 is the Zaurus, it's the things that are actually selling in volume and eating into Palm's sweet spot, like cell phones in Europe and RIM in the US. For their other products, they're probably more concerned about WinCE devices, which is where the Zaurus is also competing (for more powerful PDAs that are really almost corporate tools than organizers).
I do agree with you that the lack of storage for the keyboard will be tricky. I've seen people in business settings for years with the fold-away attachable notebook-sized keyboards for Palms, and they just have one more thing to carry to a meeting. Then again, if they just provided a simple cover for a combination of 701 and mini-keyboard, most people wouldn't care about a true "case".
D'oh! I'm not really a networking fiend so I always screw that part up (how many bits you're supposed to list). I have 8 IP addresses available to me. :-)
There are a couple of other things which are probably pretty important to mention on this here (when I say "you", I really mean the original poster):
Something that I definitely think should be stressed is the metadata management issues that you're raising. Essentially, your computer expects to be accessing files on a server, not shared disk blocks on a shared disk. So unless you're running a FS which was specifically designed for separation of metadata management (which blocks correspond to which files), you're going to be in for a world of hurt (GFS is an open source [used to be anyway] distributed shared-disk file system, BTW). That type of communication doesn't come cheap, and where you're going to start seeing it is where you've got accesses to very large files (media applications), databases (if you're using something like oracle clustering, but if you are, I'm sure Oracle wants to put you in an ad or something), and backup (where there's very minimal metadata compared to the volume of data dealt with, and you've got a relatively slow backup target). So you're dealing with a different paradigm, which changes things entirely. If you want to run NFS over FC, you might want to use FC/IP, which I don't think I've ever met someone who's using.
Perhaps they're quite worried about spam with dialups, since they're so easy to setup that even giving a spammer a few hours of window will cause major problems for them. But since we've also had people using major dialups (like PacBell) who don't have a problem using the company's dialup to send email with an @OurCompany.com email address, I can't imagine that this should be a really major issue.
I know that many MTAs have an option to append a block piece of crap at the end of outgoing emails (or at least I think they do IIRC). Why not just use that functionality so that the information is only treated at the MTA level when it leaves your network?
For the latter, that's perfectly rational market behavior, and I suspect that even if Congress, FTC, FCC, DoJ, et. al. cared at all, they'd think it was a good thing because it helps bring broadband to more people rather than fewer, because they can make up the money on the more, simpler users with the fewer higher revenue customers. The same reason why gas and electric bills are usually tiered: maximize the benefit to society as a whole by charging those people who are most willing and able to pay for more/better service more.
And don't think this is limited to ISPs at all. Next time you buy a car, wonder why those options exist, or why functionally equivalent cars are made by different divisions of the same company (like the old Dodge/Plymouth/Chrysler ones that even looked the same): market segmentation. Should that be illegal as well?
I suspect from your background that this is actually tongue in cheek. If so, sorry. Just couldn't let the chance for a good old slashdot discussion about things we all know very little about go to waste.
Visual SlickEdit also allows you to pick all your fonts (great for me who loves lucida sans in 9 point).
I've seen badly formatted code with Visual SlickEdit, but it's probably programmer error. If you know how to set up your autoformatting stuff (just how it does open and close braces when it does it automatically, and yes, you can turn it off) then you can get it to happen just how you like it. It doesn't look exactly like emacs-default, but I personally hate most of hte emacs-defaults, so there you go.
One thing that I haven't seen yet is the tags support. While in ctags you have to do something (like hit a key) to see a tag, in visual slickedit you just over over a keyword and it shows you in another pane all the references or the source of any local or class or global variable. And of course it does the drop-down listbox for all the member variables and methods and suchlike. That's the feature that really got me hooked on it, and I find it difficult to live without it at this point.
Essentially, every time you go into a parenthesis, that's the equivalent of another level in the stack. Every time you come out of a parenthesis, you collapse the stack with the most recent operator. If nothing else, you can very easily tell where you are at any point in time by the depth of your stack. Admittedly, having to go from postfix (on paper) to RPN (in your head/calculator) takes up some brain cycles, but once I got into the stack mentality when it came to parenthesis, it was actually FASTER to work with RPN because you know that the stack will always keep things straight, and you'll never have to do interem calculations.
Just repeat to yourself: Parenthesis Depth == Stack Depth.
it's available at http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1006-200-7589931.html? tag=mn_hd.
For windows users, they expect that only in rare cases will their old applications no longer work when they upgrade their computers. This has been something that Microsoft has done very well. The only thing is that they largely hide this functionality from you by making sure that you can't tell that there are full compatibility libraries for like 6 previous versions of windows installed on your machine when you install Windows Me. No, it doesn't always work perfectly, but most well-written applications will work properly in an upgraded version of windows. The difference with a Linux environment is that you can tell what library packages you have installed.
I think it's a reasonable tradeoff by having compatibility libraries. For those people who don't need all those compatibility libraries, you simply don't install them. But when you do need one or two, you have them available to you.
At my last employer, some of the graphics people were using Macintoshes with Perforce with no problems.