all of which is used for many other purposes, folks are looking at and using that code routinely, and so holes in there are very likely to be discovered. The packages used would be the ones shipped by distros, and all packaging systems routinely digitally sign them.
someone has to either corrupt the standard package (by infiltrating pygame or some such) or come up with a very good reason why the library from the normal sources cannot be used.
You don't need to audit all the libraries etc... that you depend on, because those libraries get audited by others in the course of their normal usage.
the problem with voting software is that it is 100kloc of custom code, so no-one else is going to audit it. You want to minimize the custom code.
I think the idea here is that by using as much non-custom software as possible, and since packages from any reputable source will be digitally signed (debian packages, windows packages, etc...) and that the signatures are part of the voting machine verification process to which all are privy.
The installation will rely on software which is widely used and tested in other applications, and code to which access is controlled by the gatekeepers of those applications (as enforced by digital signatures)
The problem for the bad people is to:
1) become contributors to a key package.
2) make contributions of vulnerabilities in such a way that they are not spotted by the maintainers of the components.
3) ???
4) Profit!
This is a much, much, higher bar to getting a hack in, than just finding any issue in 100k lines of custom application code, as is present in current commercial implementations.
or.. they have to make use of vulnerabilities which are un-known (0-day) because anything else will be patched. still a lot higher bar than today.
The voting machine people should welcome their open source overlords, because once they become just widget makers, the bright lights will go look somewhere else!
and yes everyone should use UTC, and just the local jurisdictions should just set default hours of operation, by translating local 9-5 to UTC.
for me, ordinary hours would be 13h00-21h00
I work with people in four timezones, and I hate that I never really know when a meeting is. I hate dst, I hate all of it. UTC would make things much simpler.
oh, and the right way to write dates is the ISO way... yyyy-mm-dd
1. KDE is a reference client for the QT toolkit. I consider it a very good reference. KDE is basically a really heavy work out with a lot of critical developers. If you make them happy, chances are your API is pretty solid. 2. That the toolkit is used in a lot of other contexts (Qtopia phone environment, for example) 3. QT has been cross-platform since the beginning. It actually pre-dates KDE. KDE was built because they saw this cute ('scuse the pun) API and decided to build the desktop environment around it.
Compare this to TK. No-one has ever built an entire windowing environment around it. It is thought of as a scripting tool. It does not get the heavy use and thorough work out in testing that a toolkit used natively by one of the porting environments uses.
Don't even get me started on wxwindows. That environment wants so desperately to be cross platform that it utterly sucks on all of them.
If your implication is that because a toolkit is very heavily used in one environment it therefore must be crap for the other environments is nonsense.
I have used/had to deal tk (in tcl and perl), as well wxwindows in smaller projects, and they frankly suck compared to QT from api elegance perspective.
mod-parent up. QT is the native toolkit for KDE. IT isn't some artificial toolkit people only use for cross platform work, wxwindows or tk. It's a real native toolkit on Linux.
Heck, there's a windows port of KDE4.x in the works. I mean come on...
Open source is really about users taken responsibility and control for mission critical applications. Government is just a big user, like a big bank, an insurance company, or film production company. They have internal needs. All organizations need to look at their internal needs and skills and contribute effectively, where it is of direct benefit to them. When the benefit is big enough, they pay someone to work on a project directly, if not, they don't. Sometimes it is only part time, and the level of expertise is only for QA, patches, and the like. That's fine!
The major Apache contributors at the outset were all firms whose survival depended on having an effective web server. The business case for working on apache was compelling for all involved. Other contributions should be similarly compelling.
The flip side of yesterday's story on Quebec sole sourcing (avoiding all responsibility of any kind, and just following 'the market'), is national funding of software distributions (taking total responsibility to the point of re-inventing the wheel) Neither approach is going to work best in the long run. Large organizations funding what they need, is just the corporate analogy of individuals scratching their itch. blog post about that: http://csptrn.blogspot.com/2007/03/national-use-of-open-source.html
Logiciel Libre is Big in France.
In France, that's what they do, on a massive scale. Example: the French Fisc (like the US. Internal Revenue Service) replaced their almost all Oracle all the time solutions by making an RFP (Request for Proposal) with specific performance tests for a J2EE platform. All the biggies were invited (Oracle, IBM, BEA, etc...) but the fastest implementation was by a small local firm using open source tools.
The fisc saved a ton of money by doing a competitive procurement. The winning company is local, and developing expertise among people who pay taxes, and drive the economy.
Another useful initiative in France with OSS is http://adullact.org/ where people from a bunch of different local governments work together and fund and adopt common integrations of OSS technologies for specific vertical uses. Each local government reduces their costs by partially funding the common solution. Each gets a say in requirements and functionality delivered. None is stuck shouldering the whole burden.
It is not about creating new software projects. There are thousands of those, and almost all needs can be met by integration/consultation of existing software, because, frankly, not a lot of government needs are that complicated. People just have to have a mind set that they are responsible for the technological choices they make, and get educated about long term implications.
On a given government procurement, the traditional decision is 'buy vs. build' that is an obsolete decision, it is more like 'buy vs. assemble' or 'buy vs. contribute' or 'buy vs. cultivate (local talent)' today. The costs are looked at on over the duration of a procurement, not on a life cycle basis.
For example, if you take open office, and you say it will cost 4 years to make the transition, that's true. the requirement for the functionality is not going away, so in five years, assuming the transition was taken care of, when you have to renew your MS license, ooo is going to cost close to zilch. That's when they pay back starts.
Government needs to look at things rationally over the long term. the only thing on the side of the traditional vendors is perceived level of risk and market share. As the number of adopters increases, both of those aspects are declining.
Re:probably best to roll your own, & MS-WinSer
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What NAS To Buy?
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versioning, lots of options depending on what you mean:
fit-pc + Drobo... std PC + dedicated storage unit
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What NAS To Buy?
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best of both worlds...
http://www.fitpc.com/ -- bog standard via based i386 compatible server, install any distro you want on it using an external optical drive. fanless, high tolerance to temperature variations, consumes 4 watts. Has 2 USB ports.
http://www.drobo.com/ -- usb box that isn't RAID. Just throw in a random collection of drives and it will give you the most capacity you can reasonably ask for with no configuration. dead simple.
KDE 4 stream, there is a windows port in progress. Next major release of Amarok will be KDE 4 based, Amarok will run on windows. oh, well, here was an early trial from last December:
And my amarok works with my wife's Ipod-touch under Debian Lenny, just fine, thanks. The thing that doesn't is the ITunes store, but she just uses the Ipod with wireless, and Amarok backs it up for her. It works great.
'What if you're a windows person?' -- You must be new here. It is slashdot policy that such persons be referred to as 'unwashed masses', or if you prefer 'Joe six-pack'. Such persons are axiomatically defined as never posting on slashdot. You sir, are a typing contradiction.
So all American Oil companies should move North! Great! There's lots of Free office space in Montreal freed by lumber companies that have trouble selling into the US market... something about 50% tarriffs... Free market RULES!
another tick on the checklist for the axis of Evil. We're already responsible for all snow and cold winds that comes your way... Clearly we've got Weather of Mass Destruction.
Because even the US doesn't have infinite funds, so when they went begging for help with the shuttle, Canada said, just like Americans would: sure, we'll help, but we want the economic benefits at home. so we built the arm as our contribution to the shuttle program, and now dextre as our main contribution to the space station.
I call b.s. This isn't just a publicity problem, this is a real-politik problem.
This is about arctic sovereignty and billions in future tax revenue. This isn't a political issue. No political party has ever turned down the prospect of future tax base.
RADARSAT II, which the americans pointedly refused to launch, is what we use to patrol our artic waters. Giving the Americans, the keys, the plans, and the ability to just delay things to death is beyond stupid from a strategic perspective.
Forget that this is precious high technology that can, and has had spin-offs in the past. Forget that Canada produced the world's first digital telecommunications satellite. Forget all the jobs and knowledge that will gradually melt south of the border. forget it.
One of the main uses of RADARSAT for Canada is to replace aerial reconnaissance for Ice forecasting. they can, I imagine, spot submarines as well, since the Americans, supposedly our closest ally, refused to launch them. So they were launched on Russian vehicles.
We like our arctic, it is ours. We'd like the tax revenue from any oil that is pumped out of there. we'd like the revenue from a major shipping lane, so declaring it international waters is a problem for us. We can't afford to build nuclear submarines...
So it would be pretty @#%$@^%@ stupid to sell this company to a US arms manufacturer, which is, at the very least, clearly beholden to the US government for contracting.
there is no way to mod 'overrated, illiterate'? oh never mind... I just tried to correct it... the main thing I can't even guess at is 'finging' anybody have any idea? the post ought to read:
It is a safe bet that someone would get hurt; probably lots of someones. Regardless of your feelings about the war in Iraq some things are true:
1. War always requires some sort of damage beyond soldiers and military equipment or it never ends. One of the host societies must feel enough pain to give up the fight.
2. We have put extraordinary effort into not harming civilian populations, we have done a good job in the historical sense of finging wars but lots of innocent people have still been hurt. Lots of non-militarily valuable property has been destroyed.
3. According to the article summary, we have already demonstrated an inability to produce robots that can correctly identify targets and non-targets.
There are some who look at Iraq and Vietnam and wonder if our insistence on 2 is at least partly to blame for our (I wont say failures, if we are being intelectually honest, it's not fair), less then total success. So a war fought entirely by proxy with robots (If they worked) might be a very long one. I would image it would only end when it was economically or environmentally (those are really not separate) possible to keep building robots. That would be in many ways worse for the human populations then if we just died on the battle field. Finally we don't know for sure the robots wont work properly but I am not optimistic given fact number three. Hell we are talking about governments here both US and European alike that can't manage to execute their own elections acording to their own rules; electronically or otherwise.
Exactly! MetPX is a tcp/ip only switch. It implement WMO manual 386 tcp/ip sockets, as well as file exchanges over ftp & sftp. It was written to accomplish a transition away from proprietary mainframe stuff exchanging X.25 with the GTS. It also does AFTN (Aviation Fixed Telecommunications Network) over tcp/ip, in contrast to traditional X.25. It is used for the Canadian gateway between GTS and AFTN in Canada, as well as the GTS node itself.
Many think of the GTS as an X.25 network, but X.25 is going away. All of the commercial switch vendors, as well as MetPX, support WMO sockets at a minimum. File based exchanges are the new frontier. This software is such a niche application, that there isn't a lot of ''community'' that will be interested. It's kind of a vertical market thing. So it hasn't exactly taken the world by storm.
The article mentions the Global Telecommunications System (GTS) It would be cool to know how they get their GTS data, probably use a satellite downlink. There is a GPL GTS switch that's developed for Debian:
you speak from the point of view of a user who has never been involved in administration. For example, handling white lists are great if you, as a person, decide never to receive email from anyone you don't already know, or you define you idiosyncratic protocol for letting people mail you. That may be a good model for you, but as an admin, I need to make a decision for several thousand people, including folks who have to respond to feedback on web sites, and support sales. In that case, refusing email from anyone you don't know is problematic. For ISP's, the problem is magnified 100 fold. For these people, idiosyncratic protocols aren't good enough, because when you use them for thousands of recipients, the protocols themselves become prime targets for the spammer engineers.
The fact is that spam filtering is an arms race where the spammers have tremendous economic incentive to innovate, and for everyone else it is just a cost. The only way we can compete is by spreading out the costs among many, many people either, usually by contracting out the service to specialists. Spam filtering is inherently hard. People think it ought to be easy, but if there are motivated humans on the other end of an arms race, solutions are never going to be easy or simple. I run a corporate spam filter, and I have had complaints in the past where people insisted that we should not filter their mail. When we upgrade our filtering system a year and a half ago, we made sure that we provided an 'opt_out' option. The number of takers lasting more than a day with this option so far? zero out of several thousand mailboxes. OTOH, having that option has saved me days and weeks of argument with people who simply have no idea what the environment for receiving email is really like. We simply provide the option, and their clue index rises exponentially in a few hours.
During working hours, we see around 92% of incoming mail as spam, outside working hours, such as Christmas day, we have seen as high as 99%. I've had to deploy a three tiered architecture to handle a million incoming emails a day, and scan them all only to deliver the 10-15,000 legitimate ones for the users.
Now your argument is that receiving email is free. If that were true, I would not to have a full-time employee semi-dedicated to this filtering task, maintain an array of servers (which are heavily loaded, I might add) to receive 10,000 emails a day. Receiving 10,000 emails could be done with an eeepc, from the computer power point of view.
SPAM is not a mere inconvenience to users, it makes email reception between 50 and 100 times more expensive. Granted, the starting number is pretty small, but when you aggregate it out, to large numbers of users, and you are trying to measure costs, the facts are the facts.
Spammers aren't giving me a dime for this. This isn't an ad on the street somewhere where they are paying rent. This is like putting up a sign that blocks my driveway, and putting up a fence around my entire house, and plastering it with 20 foot high ads. This is like me paying for phone service, and having it ring off the hook all day and all night, and paying staff 24x7 to answer the phone and politely refuse the sales offers, in order to catch the 100:1 chance of a legitimate phone call. I say politely, because we don't want to upset that 100th caller in case of an understandable mistake, and it impossible to guarantee that we won't make any, given the volume of noise.
Now if you are trying to argue someone else forcing you to pay 50 fold more to providing a service is OK, then you are wrong. If you are saying we should attack the means that they use, such as computer intrusion, fine, I agree that that should be prosecuted as well, but it doesn't change the fact that those are merely means, and other means can be found.
Regardless of the means used, transferring costs to thousands or millions of other people to support your ad campaigns is at the very least highly immoral. There is also the fact that o
That would make the photoshop bigots happy because the GUI would be the way they expect, and the functional improvements would make their way into gimp, warming the cockles of the gnu obsessed.
win-win
Re:Oh thank god - vsftpd v sftpd vs. vs ftpd.
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Chroot in OpenSSH
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I really love how vsftpd works.
This is a "Very Secure FTP Daemon" I would love for it to be configured exactly the same, but the transport protocol would be Sech-file-xfer draft protocol (SFTP)
vssftpd ?
how about just a protocol option in the config of vsftpd...
These sorts of numbers are completely bogus. You can study swallows, but the lessons will only apply to flying vehicles about the same size as swallows. You can't rationally compare a swallow to an A4 skyhawk any more than it makes sense to study ants to learn about Elephants. Both pairs of objects move in similar ways, but when you change the scale, the square cube law applies... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square-cube_law
Your first point, that no-one ever needs to get a birth certificate, is wrong. I'm Canadian, and a few years ago when applying for a passport, I found that my birth certificate with a nice waxed seal from the town clerk where I was born in Canada a few kilometers and from where I have lived for all the intervening decades, was no longer legal. Had to get a new one, by going across town and paying something like 60$. Something about being too easy to falsify, not computerized, old record keeping systems. Not my fault at all, and affects the entire population of my province, afaict.
Your second point about social insurance numbers (SIN). It is illegal for the federal government to ask for your social insurance number for anything except taxes and income (such as employment insurance.) Your bank is only allowed to use it for the purpose of preparing tax forms. If they make a database with the SIN as an index, they can be prosecuted, it's illegal. Same goes for your employer. It's illegal to have a database with the SIN as a key.
Statistics canada? Cannot ask for your SIN. You want to apply for grant to insulate your home, that would be Industry Canada, they aren't allow to ask you for your SIN, and besides, it would be much use because the tax people aren't allowed to share any information they have indexed by your SIN. So they would still have to ask for your full name, distinguishing birthmarks, address and confirmation of your income to see if you qualify anyways.
No city government has any legal justification for knowing your SIN. No video rental store is allowed to ask you for your sin, although many do. You are not required to give them your SIN, and it is illegal for them to withhold services if you don't. Provincial governments have the same restrictions as the federal one. So while the tax men know it, If you apply for a grant for the arts. they do ask you for your SIN, but it is illegal to use it as a key in a database, and it is illegal for the various departments to share what they know.
If you are arrested, the police are not allowed to use your SIN, except to investigate your income and tax records. They cannot use it as an index in any database. That would be illegal. Notice that the passport office doesn't ask for your SIN, but they want to know that you have valid ID, and a SIN card is OK. They cannot use the SIN in their database either. that would be... you guessed it, illegal.
It was the express intent of the people who made these laws to prevent the construction of a key to all information in all the government about a person. It has succeeded, so you have to tell every single department all this other information about yourself and provide multiple pieces of ID. The inconveniences of the grandfather post are the natural result of the intentional policy, and not at all a delusion.
Slashdot Mirror
all of which is used for many other purposes, folks are looking at and using that code routinely, and so holes in there are very likely to be discovered. The packages used would be the ones shipped by distros, and all packaging systems routinely digitally sign them.
someone has to either corrupt the standard package (by infiltrating pygame or some such) or come up with a very good reason why the library from the normal sources cannot be used.
You don't need to audit all the libraries etc... that you depend on, because those libraries get audited by others in the course of their normal usage.
the problem with voting software is that it is 100kloc of custom code, so no-one else is going to audit it. You want to minimize the custom code.
I think the idea here is that by using as much non-custom software as possible, and since packages from any reputable source will be digitally signed (debian packages, windows packages, etc...) and that the signatures are part of the voting machine verification process to which all are privy.
The installation will rely on software which is widely used and tested in other applications, and code to which access is controlled by the gatekeepers of those applications (as enforced by digital signatures)
The problem for the bad people is to:
1) become contributors to a key package.
2) make contributions of vulnerabilities in such a way that they are not spotted by the maintainers of the components.
3) ???
4) Profit!
This is a much, much, higher bar to getting a hack in, than just finding any issue in 100k lines of custom application code, as is present in current commercial implementations.
or.. they have to make use of vulnerabilities which are un-known (0-day) because anything else will be patched. still a lot higher bar than today.
The voting machine people should welcome their
open source overlords, because once they become just widget makers, the bright lights will go look somewhere else!
UTC is 24h00 based...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Universal_Time
there is no am/pm in UTC.
and yes everyone should use UTC, and just the local jurisdictions should just set default hours of operation, by translating local 9-5 to UTC.
for me, ordinary hours would be 13h00-21h00
I work with people in four timezones, and I hate that I never really know when a meeting is. I hate dst, I hate all of it. UTC would make things much simpler.
oh, and the right way to write dates is the ISO way... yyyy-mm-dd
The point is:
1. KDE is a reference client for the QT toolkit. I consider it a very good reference. KDE is basically a really heavy work out with a lot of critical developers. If you make them happy, chances are your API is pretty solid.
2. That the toolkit is used in a lot of other contexts (Qtopia phone environment, for example)
3. QT has been cross-platform since the beginning. It actually pre-dates KDE. KDE was built because they saw this cute ('scuse the pun) API and decided to build the desktop environment around it.
Compare this to TK. No-one has ever built an entire windowing environment around it. It is thought of as a scripting tool. It does not get the heavy use and thorough work out in testing that a toolkit used natively by one of the porting environments uses.
Don't even get me started on wxwindows. That environment wants so desperately to be cross platform that it utterly sucks on all of them.
If your implication is that because a toolkit is very heavily used in one environment it therefore must be crap for the other environments is nonsense.
I have used/had to deal tk (in tcl and perl), as well wxwindows in smaller projects, and they frankly suck compared to QT from api elegance perspective.
mod-parent up. QT is the native toolkit for KDE.
IT isn't some artificial toolkit people only use for cross platform work, wxwindows or tk. It's a real native toolkit on Linux.
Heck, there's a windows port of KDE4.x in the works.
I mean come on...
Open source is really about users taken responsibility and control for mission critical applications. Government is just a big user, like a big bank, an insurance company, or film production company. They have internal needs. All organizations need to look at their internal needs and skills and contribute effectively, where it is of direct benefit to them. When the benefit is big enough, they pay someone to work on a project directly, if not, they don't. Sometimes it is only part time, and the level of expertise is only for QA, patches, and the like. That's fine!
The major Apache contributors at the outset were all firms whose survival depended on having an effective web server. The business case for working on apache was compelling for all involved. Other contributions should be similarly compelling.
The flip side of yesterday's story on Quebec sole sourcing (avoiding all responsibility of any kind, and just following 'the market'), is national funding of software distributions (taking total responsibility to the point of re-inventing the wheel) Neither approach is going to work best in the long run. Large organizations funding what they need, is just the corporate analogy of individuals scratching their itch.
blog post about that: http://csptrn.blogspot.com/2007/03/national-use-of-open-source.html
Logiciel Libre is Big in France.
In France, that's what they do, on a massive scale. Example: the French Fisc (like the US. Internal Revenue Service) replaced their almost all Oracle all the time solutions by making an RFP (Request for Proposal) with specific performance tests for a J2EE platform. All the biggies were invited (Oracle, IBM, BEA, etc...) but the fastest implementation was by a small local firm using open source tools.
reference:
http://www.cllap.qc.ca/2006/modules/wfdownloads/singlefile.php?lid=48 duh... it's in French...
They don't care if you can't read it, their in it for their own good.
The fisc saved a ton of money by doing a competitive procurement. The winning company is local, and developing expertise among people who pay taxes, and drive the economy.
Another useful initiative in France with OSS is
http://adullact.org/ where people from a bunch of different local governments work together and fund and adopt common integrations of OSS technologies for specific vertical uses. Each local government reduces their costs by partially funding the common solution. Each gets a say in requirements and functionality delivered. None is stuck shouldering the whole burden.
It is not about creating new software projects. There are thousands of those, and almost all needs can be met by integration/consultation of existing software, because, frankly, not a lot of government needs are that complicated. People just have to have a mind set that they are responsible for the technological choices they make, and get educated about long term implications.
On a given government procurement, the traditional decision is 'buy vs. build' that is an obsolete decision, it is more like 'buy vs. assemble' or 'buy vs. contribute' or 'buy vs. cultivate (local talent)' today. The costs are looked at on over the duration of a procurement, not on a life cycle basis.
For example, if you take open office, and you say it will cost 4 years to make the transition, that's true. the requirement for the functionality is not going away, so in five years, assuming the transition was taken care of, when you have to renew your MS license, ooo is going to cost close to zilch. That's when they pay back starts.
Government needs to look at things rationally over the long term. the only thing on the side of the traditional vendors is perceived level of risk and market share. As the number of adopters increases, both of those aspects are declining.
versioning, lots of options depending on what you mean:
-- straight linux OS level snapshots...
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/snapshots_backup.html
-- source code management systems ... can be applied to entire file systems: git, subversion, tla, bzr, etc...
-- maintaining parallel copies: http://www.linuxtoday.com/infrastructure/2008063000526OSHL
surely lots of others too...
best of both worlds...
http://www.fitpc.com/ -- bog standard via based i386 compatible server, install any distro you want on it using an external optical drive. fanless, high tolerance to temperature variations, consumes 4 watts. Has 2 USB ports.
http://www.drobo.com/ -- usb box that isn't RAID. Just throw in a random collection of drives and it will give you the most capacity you can reasonably ask for with no configuration. dead simple.
KDE 4 stream, there is a windows port in progress. Next major release of Amarok will be KDE 4 based, Amarok will run on windows. oh, well, here was an early trial from last December:
http://amarok.kde.org/blog/archives/536-Amarok-2-now-with-100-more-audio-playing-on-Windows.html
And my amarok works with my wife's Ipod-touch under Debian Lenny, just fine, thanks. The thing that doesn't is the ITunes store, but she just uses the Ipod with wireless, and Amarok backs it up for her. It works great.
'What if you're a windows person?' -- You must be new here. It is slashdot policy that such persons be referred to as 'unwashed masses', or if you prefer 'Joe six-pack'. Such persons are axiomatically defined as never posting on slashdot. You sir, are a typing contradiction.
for distances over 15km. to work...
http://www.twike.com/
still get your exercise, but still get to work.
picked the acronym first, but it still makes good sense:
...
Vermont Advanced Network for Telecommunications Access & Governance for Everyone
obviously...
Commercial partners/lessors would subscribe
to the advertiser supported version, Ad-VANTAGE.
On the other hand, if it's a name for a non-profit kind of network operator, you may just want to
pick a local revolutionary war hero.
Molly Pitcher networks !
Ethan Allen
Green Mountain Boys
or geographical... Green Mountain Neighbourhood
You're absolutely right, consistency is marvelous!
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/02/AR2005080200404.html
So all American Oil companies should move North!
Great! There's lots of Free office space in
Montreal freed by lumber companies that have
trouble selling into the US market... something
about 50% tarriffs... Free market RULES!
another tick on the checklist for the axis of Evil.
We're already responsible for all snow and cold winds that comes your way... Clearly we've got Weather of Mass Destruction.
Because even the US doesn't have infinite funds, so when they went begging for help with the shuttle, Canada said, just like Americans would: sure, we'll help, but we want the economic benefits at home. so we built the arm as our contribution to the shuttle program, and now dextre as our main contribution to the space station.
I call b.s. This isn't just a publicity problem, this is a real-politik problem.
This is about arctic sovereignty and billions in future tax revenue. This isn't a political issue. No political party has ever turned down the prospect of future tax base.
RADARSAT II, which the americans pointedly refused to launch, is what we use to patrol our artic waters. Giving the Americans, the keys, the plans, and the ability to just delay things to death is beyond stupid from a strategic perspective.
Forget that this is precious high technology that can, and has had spin-offs in the past.
Forget that Canada produced the world's first digital telecommunications satellite. Forget all the jobs and knowledge that will gradually melt south of the border. forget it.
It's much more basic than that. There is a long-time border dispute with the americans, we think the waters between arctic islands are Canadian waters, the US claims they aren't. The Americans have nuclear submarines, we don't. Now with the ice melting, http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/news/story.html?id=8df15e06-e40d-42da-b42e-61c0d0713260
there is a navigable channel shaping up that could take weeks off the time to ship from asia to europe. and there's oil up there, http://cernigsnewshog.blogspot.com/2006/01/arctic-circle-canadas-not-kidding.html
too.
One of the main uses of RADARSAT for Canada is to replace aerial reconnaissance for Ice forecasting. they can, I imagine, spot submarines as well, since the Americans, supposedly our closest ally, refused to launch them. So they were launched on Russian vehicles.
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20071025164751AAOF6Ur
http://www.studentsonice.com/blog/?p=79
We like our arctic, it is ours. We'd like the tax revenue from any oil that is pumped out of there. we'd like the revenue from a major shipping lane, so declaring it international waters is a problem for us. We can't afford to build nuclear submarines...
So it would be pretty @#%$@^%@ stupid to sell this company to a US arms manufacturer, which is, at the very least, clearly beholden to the US government for contracting.
there is no way to mod 'overrated, illiterate'? oh never mind... I just tried to correct it... the main thing I can't even guess at is 'finging' anybody have any idea?
the post ought to read:
It is a safe bet that someone would get hurt; probably lots of someones. Regardless of your feelings about the war in Iraq some things are true:
1. War always requires some sort of damage beyond soldiers and military equipment or it never ends. One of the host societies must feel enough pain to give up the fight.
2. We have put extraordinary effort into not harming civilian populations, we have done a good job in the historical sense of finging wars but lots of innocent people have still been hurt. Lots of non-militarily valuable property has been destroyed.
3. According to the article summary, we have already demonstrated an inability to produce robots that can correctly identify targets and non-targets.
There are some who look at Iraq and Vietnam and wonder if our insistence on 2 is at least partly to blame for our (I wont say failures, if we are being intelectually honest, it's not fair), less then total success. So a war fought entirely by proxy with robots (If they worked) might be a very long one. I would image it would only end when it was economically or environmentally (those are really not separate) possible to keep building robots. That would be in many ways worse for the human populations then if we just died on the battle field. Finally we don't know for sure the robots wont work properly but I am not optimistic given fact number three. Hell we are talking about governments here both US and European alike that can't manage to execute their own elections acording to their own rules; electronically or otherwise.
Why do think we could build a robot army again?
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Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Exactly! MetPX is a tcp/ip only switch. It implement WMO manual 386 tcp/ip sockets, as well as file exchanges over ftp & sftp. It was written to accomplish a transition away from proprietary mainframe stuff exchanging X.25 with the GTS. It also does AFTN (Aviation Fixed Telecommunications Network) over tcp/ip, in contrast to traditional X.25. It is used for the Canadian gateway between GTS and AFTN in Canada, as well as the GTS node itself.
Many think of the GTS as an X.25 network, but X.25 is going away. All of the commercial
switch vendors, as well as MetPX, support WMO sockets at a minimum. File based exchanges are
the new frontier. This software is such a niche application, that there isn't a lot of ''community'' that will be interested. It's kind of a vertical market thing. So it hasn't exactly taken the world by storm.
The article mentions the Global Telecommunications System (GTS) It would be cool to know
how they get their GTS data, probably use a satellite downlink. There is a GPL GTS switch that's developed for Debian:
http://metpx.sourceforge.net/
Read this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DomainKeys
you speak from the point of view of a user who has never been involved in administration.
For example, handling white lists are great if you, as a person, decide never to receive email from anyone you don't already know, or you define you idiosyncratic protocol for letting people mail you. That may be a good model for you, but as an admin, I need to make a decision for several thousand people, including folks who have to respond to feedback on web sites, and support sales. In that case, refusing email from anyone you don't know is problematic. For ISP's, the problem is magnified 100 fold. For these people, idiosyncratic protocols aren't good enough, because when you use them for thousands of recipients, the protocols themselves become prime targets for the spammer engineers.
The fact is that spam filtering is an arms race where the spammers have tremendous economic incentive to innovate, and for everyone else it is just a cost. The only way we can compete is by spreading out the costs among many, many people either, usually by contracting out the service to specialists. Spam filtering is inherently hard. People think it ought to be easy, but if there are motivated humans on the other end of an arms race, solutions are never going to be easy or simple. I run a corporate spam filter, and I have had complaints in the past where people insisted that we should not filter their mail. When we upgrade our filtering system a year and a half ago, we made sure that we provided an 'opt_out' option. The number of takers lasting more than a day with this option so far? zero out of several thousand mailboxes. OTOH, having that option has saved me days and weeks of argument with people who simply have no idea what the environment for receiving email is really like. We simply provide the option, and their clue index rises exponentially in a few hours.
During working hours, we see around 92% of incoming mail as spam, outside working hours, such as Christmas day, we have seen as high as 99%. I've had to deploy a three tiered architecture to handle a million incoming emails a day, and scan them all only to deliver the 10-15,000 legitimate ones for the users.
Now your argument is that receiving email is free. If that were true, I would not to have a full-time employee semi-dedicated to this filtering task, maintain an array of servers (which are heavily loaded, I might add) to receive 10,000 emails a day. Receiving 10,000 emails could be done with an eeepc, from the computer power point of view.
SPAM is not a mere inconvenience to users, it makes email reception between 50 and 100 times more expensive. Granted, the starting number is pretty small, but when you aggregate it out, to large numbers of users, and you are trying to measure costs, the facts are the facts.
Spammers aren't giving me a dime for this. This isn't an ad on the street somewhere where they are paying rent. This is like putting up a sign that blocks my driveway, and putting up a fence around my entire house, and plastering it with 20 foot high ads. This is like me paying for phone service, and having it ring off the hook all day and all night, and paying staff 24x7 to answer the phone and politely refuse the sales offers, in order to catch the 100:1 chance of a legitimate phone call. I say politely, because we don't want to upset that 100th caller in case of an understandable mistake, and it impossible to guarantee that we won't make any, given the volume of noise.
Now if you are trying to argue someone else forcing you to pay 50 fold more to providing a service is OK, then you are wrong. If you are saying we should attack the means that they use, such as computer intrusion, fine, I agree that that should be prosecuted as well, but it doesn't change the fact that those are merely means, and other means can be found.
Regardless of the means used, transferring costs to thousands or millions of other people to support your ad campaigns is at the very least highly immoral. There is also the fact that o
Actually, the coolest thing would be to fund gimpshop!
http://www.gimpshop.com/
That would make the photoshop bigots happy because the GUI would be the way they expect,
and the functional improvements would make their way into gimp, warming the cockles of the gnu obsessed.
win-win
I really love how vsftpd works.
This is a "Very Secure FTP Daemon" I would love for it to be configured exactly the same, but
the transport protocol would be Sech-file-xfer draft protocol (SFTP)
vssftpd ?
how about just a protocol option in the config of vsftpd...
These sorts of numbers are completely bogus. You can study swallows, but the lessons will
only apply to flying vehicles about the same size as swallows. You can't rationally compare
a swallow to an A4 skyhawk any more than it makes sense to study ants to learn about Elephants.
Both pairs of objects move in similar ways, but when you change the scale, the square cube law applies
You are fact-challenged bucko!
Your first point, that no-one ever needs to get a birth certificate, is wrong.
I'm Canadian, and a few years ago when applying for a passport, I found that my birth certificate with a nice waxed seal from the town clerk where I was born in Canada a few kilometers and from where I have lived for all the intervening decades, was no longer legal. Had to get a new one, by going across town and paying something like 60$.
Something about being too easy to falsify, not computerized, old record keeping systems. Not my fault at all, and affects the entire population of my province, afaict.
Your second point about social insurance numbers (SIN). It is illegal for the federal government to ask for your social insurance number for anything except taxes and income (such as employment insurance.) Your bank is only allowed to use it for the purpose of preparing tax forms. If they make a database with the SIN as an index, they can be prosecuted, it's illegal. Same goes for your employer. It's illegal to have a database with the SIN as a key.
Statistics canada? Cannot ask for your SIN. You want to apply for grant to insulate your home, that would be Industry Canada, they aren't allow to ask you for your SIN, and besides, it would be much use because the tax people aren't allowed to share any information they have indexed by your SIN. So they would still have to ask for your full name, distinguishing birthmarks, address and confirmation of your income to see if you qualify anyways.
No city government has any legal justification for knowing your SIN. No video rental store is allowed to ask you for your sin, although many do. You are not required to give them your SIN, and it is illegal for them to withhold services if you don't.
Provincial governments have the same restrictions as the federal one. So while the tax men know it, If you apply for a grant for the arts. they do ask you for your SIN, but it is illegal to use it as a key in a database, and it is illegal for the various departments to share what they know.
If you are arrested, the police are not allowed to use your SIN, except to investigate your income and tax records. They cannot use it as an index in any database. That would be illegal. Notice that the passport office doesn't ask for your SIN, but they want to know that you have valid ID, and a SIN card is OK. They cannot use the SIN in their database either. that would be... you guessed it, illegal.
It was the express intent of the people who made these laws to prevent the construction of a key to all information in all the government about a person. It has succeeded, so you have to tell every single department all this other information about yourself and provide multiple pieces of ID. The inconveniences of the grandfather post are the natural result of the intentional policy, and not at all a delusion.