Other commenters have followed this chain of logic: The F-22 has not been flown in combat -> The F-22 is useless -> The F-22 should not be funded.
You're essentially changing it to this: The F-22 has not been flown in combat -> The F-22 is an air-superiority fighter, and air-superiority fighters are useless -> The F-22 is useless -> The F-22 should not be funded.
I suppose it's an important distinction, but the conclusion is exactly the same in either case.
That being said, what we need is a new A-10. Something that can fly low and slow and dish out a lot of death.
Yeah, good luck there. Apparently systems like the A-10, despite being much less expensive and much more useful, aren't particularly sexy, so while there are billions available for pie-in-the-sky ideas like the F-22, you won't see a fraction of that for actual useful items.
They haven't flown a combat mission because none of the current conflicts involve air to air combat.
Shouldn't that tell you something about the opportunity cost of allocating defense money in this way? Is this really the best use of it? Are we just building impossibly-expensive future museum pieces?
The original intent was to purchase 750 of them: by no means a "small" number of planes, but it's also not a whole hell of a lot compared to the past. They then commenced to cut the desired purchase number throughout the 1990s all the way down to the current number of around 100, resulting in a higher per-unit cost: realistically, not a damn thing was saved by doing this, because repair parts will now cost more as well.
I find it hard to believe that more expensive replacement parts make up for the cost savings in declining to purchase over five hundred more aircraft. The parts may be expensive, but they can't possibly be that expensive.
As for those saying "this is old, outdated Cold War junk", realize that they only came into service in 2005 and they are more advanced than what the competition has.
The "Cold War junk" refers, I think, to the mentality that we're still in an arms race, only now there's just the one country running in it.
The project should never have gone forward once the Cold War ended, certainly not at the level of expense it did--the F-35, while also stunningly expensive, is far cheaper and easier to maintain. Why the F-22, then? The pathological terror that the US government has at the suggestion that it might not be able to force everyone else in the world to simultaneously acquiesce to its will leads to ridiculous projects like this--it's never powerful enough, never advanced enough, never expensive enough. No matter how much money you throw into its maw, the military-industrial complex only wants more.
As for never doing anything? They've only been in service since 2005, and we've managed to stay out of any major wars since then with the likes of China or Russia (ie those with more advanced aircraft), yes? Then I think they've served (part of) their purpose by dissuading hostile action. Nobody ever attacked Athens by sea or Sparta by land, for good reason.
I have a rock which dissuades tigers. No tigers around, right?
Somehow, the US managed to avoid wars with China and Russia even before the F-22 was introduced. (Perhaps the world-shattering assortment of nukes might also act as a deterrent.) You might as well claim that the M110, to pick a random recently-introduced weapons system, is all that stands between the US and global war.
I'm hoping we don't find ourselves in a situation where we were wishing it hadn't been canceled because that means we're in a much bigger mess than we currently are in Iraq/Af.
As PopeRatzo pointed out, that's not very likely. Given that we'll be spending at least as much money on a lot more F-35s, which are, according to the AF, superior to anything other than an F-22, it's really unlikely.
The train of thought you're following would prevent any weapons system from being cancelled, ever. It's sheer lunacy, and it completely ignores the opportunity costs of pursuing something like the F-22.
The problem is that the procurement process is impossibly broken. The military doesn't really want these things, but the Congressional budget process encourages Congressmen to lavish money on their hometown defense contractors in what would, in any other industry, be referred to as pork. We wind up with impossibly expensive, pointless weapon system that we can't even afford.
The problem is the military-industrial complex, same as it ever was.
And all of this doesn't even help maintain a globe-spanning empire of imperial domination and control. Shit, if we're not going to maintain a globe-spanning empire of imperial domination and control, the least we could do is make life at home somwwhat less Hobbesian. But no, of course we couldn't do that.
I suppose I hadn't thought to consider the abominable state of most ISPs these days. For my usage model (a ton of static data with occasional additions), it might work if I sync'd it locally before switching to remote traffic, but I suppose that, in the end, it really depends on how draconian your ISP is.
Find somewhere you can host a duplicate hardware setup--maybe a friend's place, in exchange for hosting a copy of theirs at your home. Sync them regularly via rsync-over-ssh with --bwlimit so that nobody gets cranky about their web browsing working poorly. This'll protect you against hardware failure, though you might want to do something involving revision control, as noted, to guard against other problems.
Indeed, I have a bunch of photos from the British Museum. I remember rounding a corner and wondering what the huge crowd was all about, and realizing that, yes, that was indeed the Rosetta Stone.
It seems to only be art galleries that do this. I should have pointed that out.
Under UK law, slavish reproductions of two-dimensional art are copyrightable in and of themselves, even if the original art isn't copyrighted. If the museum created these photos, they can claim copyright on them. Such a claim wouldn't stand up in the United States, but it probably would there.
Huh. Well, the Foundation has apparently taken the stand that this is okay by them. This was done by a straw poll, no less. (Why not just put up a poll asking if users should be able to upload random pictures on the internet that don't have a clear copyright assignment on them? What a fucking joke.)
These sorts of claims probably aren't valid in the United States, which is why museums here don't usually prohibit photography--people can just scan their books or postcards. On the other hand, museums in the UK do prohibit photography, because this allows them to retain copyright over the images. The postcards and books that they sell are still owned by them, and prohibiting photography means that they're the only source for those images.
It's vital to their funding model, and they're just protecting their interests. Suddenly cutting off a major stream of revenue would be catastrophic. On the other hand, museums in the States manage to get by with different revenue models. It's not like it's impossible for them to continue existing, but I can understand why they'd fight to protect their model.
I'm using a relatively recent P4 running Ubuntu Jaunty (Tomboy 0.14.0). When typing, I can see the CPU usage spike, and every so often, the window becomes nonresponsive (though all the text appears when it comes back). When it's being unresponsive, I can see that the Tomboy process is chewing CPU.
The reports about Mono apps freezing for a few seconds seem to point to some common problem in the runtime. Good luck getting a developer to look at it, of course.
Oh, hell. Isn't anyone concerned that this is all for Tomboy, an app which is frequently so sluggish as to be completely unusable? Remind me why we're not all simply using Gnote?
The reason they don't do that is that the benefits are relatively small, if not negative (they lose kickbacks from the fraudsters), and the drawbacks are immense (willful copyright infringement carries a six-figure fine for each instance). This is why Project Gutenberg goes to such lengths to cover their butts, especially when dealing with Rule 6 (non-renewed American works first published between 1923 and 1963, inclusive).
Now, I've reported some of these books myself, but even when folks are pinging Google Books about speciifc items with clearly-discernable copyright statuses, they seem profoundly unconcerned with addressing the matter. So no, I don't think Google Books would be interested.
Ah, but Australia has seen a cease in the extension of its public domain; the clock is stopped at 1955 for the next decade and change. As a result, we have Project Gutenberg Canada, and its associated Distributed Proofreaders Canada. Anyone who died in 1938 or earlier is eligible for inclusion there, and they'll be celebrating Public Domain Day every January 1 for the foreseeable future--hopefully, it's much harder now to pass a damned extension than it was a decade ago.
Western governments don't make fist-shaking speeches that include discussions about their glorious nuclear programs and also about wiping another country and its people off the map.
Tell that to John "Bomb-bomb-bomb, bomb-bomb-Iran" McCain.
What astonishes me is that potheads asserting the harmlessness of weed all cheerfully (lol) ignore what's obvious to ANYONE ELSE WHO KNOWS THEM: pot has long-term personality effects. Disassociation and inability to focus are two fairly significant deleterious effects of Mary Jane. My understanding is that there are also long term physiological retention issues of THC staying in the human system for a period far longer than would theoretically be expected.
Speaking as someone who has known a few potheads, in my experience, the only people who've had lasting psychological effects--dullness, inattentiveness--are people who didn't only smoke weed. The people I knew who only smoked weed are just as sharp now, years later, as they were before they started smoking.
Anecdotes, of course, are not data. But as someone you're citing as a source, I want to tell you that you're wrong.
You know, if weed were legal, I'd probably smoke it. Or, since I hate smoking things, cook it into ridiculously chocolatey brownies. Not habitually, just occasionally, kind of like how I drink--infrequently, but not never. The primary reason I don't consume THC in any form is the ridiculous legal sanctions against it. Yes, it does deter me.
'Course, I don't think I'd run around trying to seduce white women and listening to jazz, as Anslinger feared, but I do think I'd consume it then, when I don't now. But then, we'd also have a much less intrusive police state, far fewer prisoners and a much better place to live. If only those things were valued as highly as a few paranoid people like me not smoking a joint every once in a while.
I'd rather be an armed sheep than an unarmed one. One of the wolves is going with me, maybe both. The wolves know this.
Which is why there's absolutely no such thing as endemic gangsterism in Russia, and no one lives in fear of the Mafia. After all, you could just shoot back!
A well armed society is a polite society. There is a reason why Chivalry is measured by knights and manners.
conclusion: RTMPE is definitely not a copyright protection mechanism. all the information needed to obtain the content is publicly available.
Sadly, I don't think the former doesn't follow from the latter--you don't need to be a good or even plausible system to be considered a copyright protection mechanism.
By the way--thank you for doing this work. It's usually pretty thankless, and it has the potential to piss off armies of lawyers. Thank you.
I, also, was confused. This is the issue, as I understand it after reading some of the links.
Copyright holders want to be able to paste something resembling their previous business model onto the internet. The urge is understandable, but it's not really a plausible goal--consider the hoops that had to be jumped to get books on the Kindle--so we see attempts to enforce the business model with laws rather than code.
More concretely, if you're just sending a regular old HTTP request to get some flash video, it's vulnerable to a trivial replay attack--just resend your request from your downloader. Adding cookies makes the replay attack only slightly less trivial. So, Adobe engineered their own (presumably obfuscated; I haven't looked) protocol, RTMP. It was reverse-engineered. Adobe then released an encrypted variant of RTMP, RTMPE.
RTMPE was, of course, reverse-engineered, but because it used cryptography, it's apparently covered under the DMCA, and so Adobe can sue people who explain how to get around it.
The fundamental problem is that data is being sent to an untrusted player on an uncontrolled host. Without something like Trusted Computing, it's impossible to completely prevent users from doing what they want with data that you send to them--which is why this is a DRM issue.
In short, it's the same DRM story. Companies try to use bound-to-fail technologies to prevent users from doing what they want with data on their own machines--usually, this means copying it--and when this inevitably fails, they start suing people. We're at the "suing people" stage.
It sounds like you want some form of mandatory access control. The most popular ones are SELinux and AppArmor, but there are other approaches, each one claiming that the others are horrible. There are also considerably simpler setups like cuppabilities, which are written into the app itself, rather than being imposed in a system-wide manner.
I think Dan Bernstein wrote something about how to drop as many privileges as possible from a userspace program, but I'm blanking on where it was, or how useful it is to normal folks.
Slashdot Mirror
Other commenters have followed this chain of logic: The F-22 has not been flown in combat -> The F-22 is useless -> The F-22 should not be funded.
You're essentially changing it to this: The F-22 has not been flown in combat -> The F-22 is an air-superiority fighter, and air-superiority fighters are useless -> The F-22 is useless -> The F-22 should not be funded.
I suppose it's an important distinction, but the conclusion is exactly the same in either case.
Yeah, good luck there. Apparently systems like the A-10, despite being much less expensive and much more useful, aren't particularly sexy, so while there are billions available for pie-in-the-sky ideas like the F-22, you won't see a fraction of that for actual useful items.
Shouldn't that tell you something about the opportunity cost of allocating defense money in this way? Is this really the best use of it? Are we just building impossibly-expensive future museum pieces?
I find it hard to believe that more expensive replacement parts make up for the cost savings in declining to purchase over five hundred more aircraft. The parts may be expensive, but they can't possibly be that expensive.
The "Cold War junk" refers, I think, to the mentality that we're still in an arms race, only now there's just the one country running in it.
The project should never have gone forward once the Cold War ended, certainly not at the level of expense it did--the F-35, while also stunningly expensive, is far cheaper and easier to maintain. Why the F-22, then? The pathological terror that the US government has at the suggestion that it might not be able to force everyone else in the world to simultaneously acquiesce to its will leads to ridiculous projects like this--it's never powerful enough, never advanced enough, never expensive enough. No matter how much money you throw into its maw, the military-industrial complex only wants more.
I have a rock which dissuades tigers. No tigers around, right?
Somehow, the US managed to avoid wars with China and Russia even before the F-22 was introduced. (Perhaps the world-shattering assortment of nukes might also act as a deterrent.) You might as well claim that the M110, to pick a random recently-introduced weapons system, is all that stands between the US and global war.
As PopeRatzo pointed out, that's not very likely. Given that we'll be spending at least as much money on a lot more F-35s, which are, according to the AF, superior to anything other than an F-22, it's really unlikely.
The train of thought you're following would prevent any weapons system from being cancelled, ever. It's sheer lunacy, and it completely ignores the opportunity costs of pursuing something like the F-22.
The problem is that the procurement process is impossibly broken. The military doesn't really want these things, but the Congressional budget process encourages Congressmen to lavish money on their hometown defense contractors in what would, in any other industry, be referred to as pork. We wind up with impossibly expensive, pointless weapon system that we can't even afford.
The problem is the military-industrial complex, same as it ever was.
And all of this doesn't even help maintain a globe-spanning empire of imperial domination and control. Shit, if we're not going to maintain a globe-spanning empire of imperial domination and control, the least we could do is make life at home somwwhat less Hobbesian. But no, of course we couldn't do that.
I remember thinking that "The Future of Reading" was a silly, over-the-top bit of polemic. Well, here's hoping that those folks paid attention to Randall Munroe... or, I suppose, infringe local copyright law by downloading a copy from a jurisdiction where it's in the public domain.
I suppose I hadn't thought to consider the abominable state of most ISPs these days. For my usage model (a ton of static data with occasional additions), it might work if I sync'd it locally before switching to remote traffic, but I suppose that, in the end, it really depends on how draconian your ISP is.
Find somewhere you can host a duplicate hardware setup--maybe a friend's place, in exchange for hosting a copy of theirs at your home. Sync them regularly via rsync-over-ssh with --bwlimit so that nobody gets cranky about their web browsing working poorly. This'll protect you against hardware failure, though you might want to do something involving revision control, as noted, to guard against other problems.
Indeed, I have a bunch of photos from the British Museum. I remember rounding a corner and wondering what the huge crowd was all about, and realizing that, yes, that was indeed the Rosetta Stone.
It seems to only be art galleries that do this. I should have pointed that out.
Under UK law, slavish reproductions of two-dimensional art are copyrightable in and of themselves, even if the original art isn't copyrighted. If the museum created these photos, they can claim copyright on them. Such a claim wouldn't stand up in the United States, but it probably would there.
Huh. Well, the Foundation has apparently taken the stand that this is okay by them. This was done by a straw poll , no less. (Why not just put up a poll asking if users should be able to upload random pictures on the internet that don't have a clear copyright assignment on them? What a fucking joke.)
These sorts of claims probably aren't valid in the United States, which is why museums here don't usually prohibit photography--people can just scan their books or postcards. On the other hand, museums in the UK do prohibit photography, because this allows them to retain copyright over the images. The postcards and books that they sell are still owned by them, and prohibiting photography means that they're the only source for those images.
It's vital to their funding model, and they're just protecting their interests. Suddenly cutting off a major stream of revenue would be catastrophic. On the other hand, museums in the States manage to get by with different revenue models. It's not like it's impossible for them to continue existing, but I can understand why they'd fight to protect their model.
I'm using a relatively recent P4 running Ubuntu Jaunty (Tomboy 0.14.0). When typing, I can see the CPU usage spike, and every so often, the window becomes nonresponsive (though all the text appears when it comes back). When it's being unresponsive, I can see that the Tomboy process is chewing CPU.
The reports about Mono apps freezing for a few seconds seem to point to some common problem in the runtime. Good luck getting a developer to look at it, of course.
Oh, hell. Isn't anyone concerned that this is all for Tomboy, an app which is frequently so sluggish as to be completely unusable? Remind me why we're not all simply using Gnote?
The reason they don't do that is that the benefits are relatively small, if not negative (they lose kickbacks from the fraudsters), and the drawbacks are immense (willful copyright infringement carries a six-figure fine for each instance). This is why Project Gutenberg goes to such lengths to cover their butts, especially when dealing with Rule 6 (non-renewed American works first published between 1923 and 1963, inclusive).
Now, I've reported some of these books myself, but even when folks are pinging Google Books about speciifc items with clearly-discernable copyright statuses, they seem profoundly unconcerned with addressing the matter. So no, I don't think Google Books would be interested.
Eric "I now expect to remain continuously armed for the duration of the Iranian crisis" Raymond is already paranoid enough, thanks.
Ah, but Australia has seen a cease in the extension of its public domain; the clock is stopped at 1955 for the next decade and change. As a result, we have Project Gutenberg Canada, and its associated Distributed Proofreaders Canada. Anyone who died in 1938 or earlier is eligible for inclusion there, and they'll be celebrating Public Domain Day every January 1 for the foreseeable future--hopefully, it's much harder now to pass a damned extension than it was a decade ago.
Tell that to John "Bomb-bomb-bomb, bomb-bomb-Iran" McCain.
Speaking as someone who has known a few potheads, in my experience, the only people who've had lasting psychological effects--dullness, inattentiveness--are people who didn't only smoke weed. The people I knew who only smoked weed are just as sharp now, years later, as they were before they started smoking.
Anecdotes, of course, are not data. But as someone you're citing as a source, I want to tell you that you're wrong.
You know, if weed were legal, I'd probably smoke it. Or, since I hate smoking things, cook it into ridiculously chocolatey brownies. Not habitually, just occasionally, kind of like how I drink--infrequently, but not never. The primary reason I don't consume THC in any form is the ridiculous legal sanctions against it. Yes, it does deter me.
'Course, I don't think I'd run around trying to seduce white women and listening to jazz, as Anslinger feared, but I do think I'd consume it then, when I don't now. But then, we'd also have a much less intrusive police state, far fewer prisoners and a much better place to live. If only those things were valued as highly as a few paranoid people like me not smoking a joint every once in a while.
Which is why there's absolutely no such thing as endemic gangsterism in Russia, and no one lives in fear of the Mafia. After all, you could just shoot back!
Yes, very polite.
When I saw the words "sheep" and "wolves", I was certain that the word "sheepdogs" would inevitably follow. Dodged a bullet, there. Whew.
Sadly, I don't think the former doesn't follow from the latter--you don't need to be a good or even plausible system to be considered a copyright protection mechanism.
By the way--thank you for doing this work. It's usually pretty thankless, and it has the potential to piss off armies of lawyers. Thank you.
I, also, was confused. This is the issue, as I understand it after reading some of the links.
Copyright holders want to be able to paste something resembling their previous business model onto the internet. The urge is understandable, but it's not really a plausible goal--consider the hoops that had to be jumped to get books on the Kindle--so we see attempts to enforce the business model with laws rather than code.
More concretely, if you're just sending a regular old HTTP request to get some flash video, it's vulnerable to a trivial replay attack--just resend your request from your downloader. Adding cookies makes the replay attack only slightly less trivial. So, Adobe engineered their own (presumably obfuscated; I haven't looked) protocol, RTMP. It was reverse-engineered. Adobe then released an encrypted variant of RTMP, RTMPE.
RTMPE was, of course, reverse-engineered, but because it used cryptography, it's apparently covered under the DMCA, and so Adobe can sue people who explain how to get around it.
The fundamental problem is that data is being sent to an untrusted player on an uncontrolled host. Without something like Trusted Computing, it's impossible to completely prevent users from doing what they want with data that you send to them--which is why this is a DRM issue.
In short, it's the same DRM story. Companies try to use bound-to-fail technologies to prevent users from doing what they want with data on their own machines--usually, this means copying it--and when this inevitably fails, they start suing people. We're at the "suing people" stage.
It sounds like you want some form of mandatory access control. The most popular ones are SELinux and AppArmor, but there are other approaches, each one claiming that the others are horrible. There are also considerably simpler setups like cuppabilities, which are written into the app itself, rather than being imposed in a system-wide manner.
I think Dan Bernstein wrote something about how to drop as many privileges as possible from a userspace program, but I'm blanking on where it was, or how useful it is to normal folks.