I agree that that is the point being made. Unfortunately the argument happens to be false.
houses in the US are not magically further apart than they are in Canada. We have rural areas, lots of them.
Rural areas do have telephone access, and telephone access line lengths are limited to a few kilometers from a bell central office, so rolling out DSL is not a matter of laying new cable.
The headend of a DSL link (a DSLAM) is now so common and so cheap, that that is all that gets installed anyways. It is just use in analog mode until folks pay for activation, and the line tuning.
Today, If you can have a phone, you can have DSL. It is not a technical problem. I do not know what the right reason is for slow US adoption of broadband, but it is not a technical problem. It is not a 'justifying corporate investment problem'. Those explanations just do not wash.
Canada isnt communism. We arent going to guarantee equality of results. If people get hooked on alcohol and drugs, all the money in the world is not going to help them. We do what we can, but this isnt some miraculous heaven on Earth, with angels at every street corner gently prying needles from addicts hands, with gentle consoling comfort.
I have been in bad neighborhoods in the US, in New Orleans,
in Dallas, and In the East end of Montreal. People in East end
Montreal are poor, but it bears no resemblance to the kind
of squalor I saw in the US. Look at the crime rates. Look
at the size of the bad neighborhoods, and there is just
no comparison.
I have not been to the worst areas in the US... Have you? I havent, because as the locals will tell you, they arent safe to visit. I will take your word for it that there is such a place
in Vancouver. In Quebec, I dont know of any such places, even though it is far poorer, on average, than BC.
As for taxes... You are living in a complete dreamworld.
Services cost money. You want services, and an environment
where you can feel safe, then it is going to cost you money.
Canadian spend far less than other industrialized countries
to provide services, we are actually doing really well.
You can follow the US model: cut taxes, and spend money you aren't allowed to raise. 500 trillion dollar annual federal deficit, On the US West Coast folks keep passing resolutions that eliminate methods for state and local governments to collect taxes. It is at the point where there is no way to pay for services. California is a complete financial basket case, Washington state has similar problems. This is similar effect
to folks that don't want any power plants in their state, and then complain that electricity is expensive.
People don't think hard enough about their choices. If you
choose to cut taxes, you will get less services. Sure, you need
to audit what is going on, and make value for money evaluations, and tune things as you go, but the basics are
there: no money, no services.
In comparison, the Canadian federal system and provices are running balanced budgets.
We have Sheila Fraser, and her counterparts in Provincial governments, independant
auditors who picks apart federal expenditures, and
whose only reason for being is to identify poor accounting
practices, and a press that will gleefully tear into any spending scandal they can find. It's just fantasy to think that we
can change a few decisions and cut taxes by any
reasonable amount without massive social unrest.
The vast majority of money in government at all levels
goes to providing services. The waste you hear about
is what makes it to the press, the vast majority of the
spending is done properly and conscientiously.
The real crime is that 30 years ago, in Trudeau's last reign,
the economy went south, and nobody paid attention, throughout the Mulroney years the deficit grew and now
it is this huge weight on the government.
http://www.budget.gc.ca/budget04/brief/briefe.htm
Look at expenditures. 156 Billion for programs, 36 for
just keeping the debt level. What could we do with
36 Billion dollars a year? One hell of a lot, but we can't
because a generation ago, people were idiots.
Deficit spending is a horrible drag that is going to break something eventually. People like to hear about 'tax cuts'
but what they should be doing is looking at what that
means: service cuts now, and if that hampers our ability
to pay down accumulated debt, then fewer services down
the road too for our children, and ourselves in our old age.
It is practically criminal to cut taxes, but politically necessary.
We're still idiots.
No, because youll destroy all the broadband infrastructure
during the invasion, and if anyone defends themselves,
some of your own, they you will have to go 500 trillion
in dept to rebuild the countries you invaded, and the
contracts will go to US companies who wil charge
200$/ month for broadband.
(p.s. last time Canada was at war with the US, we
burned down Washington D.C.)
explain the difference between providing funding,
and not collecting taxes. To me, the tax break is probably
a bigger incentive because it involves far less paper work
and haggling. If a tech company gets a 10 million dollar tax break, then that is probably equivalent to twice that mount if it were given in a grant.
In any event, there is more to it. Unlike the US, where the FCC has been apparently co-opted by telco and other
media interests, in Canada, the CRTC does a lot of regulation.
What Bell can charge is regulated. They have to ask for
cost increases, and they have to be justified. Other companies (third party ISPs) appear at the hearings and
argue Bells numbers, mostly downward, because they
want low wholesale prices. So you have third party ISPs
charging 30-50% less for broadband than Bell.
Agree with your point. One number wont accurately
describe a rational behind cost discrepancies. But the
whole argument about country size of density is bogus.
Reality is, the reason for the different rates of penetration
is different government priorities. In other countries,
citizens' access to information is considered of fundamental importance, and broadband is viewed as an enabler
of reducing government costs by encouraging internet
delivery, and spurring regional economic growth, by
making folks closer to their markets.
Even Canada can string up digital phone lines, unbelievable.
Heck Ill just go outside and feed the polar bears
before I get on my skidoo to go hang out at the hole
in the ice. Even Canada... that backward farming & lumber place where the cold breezes come from...
home of:
Telesat is a pioneer in satellite communications. Created in 1969, the Company made history with the launch of Anik A1 in 1972 the worlds first commercial domestic communications satellite placed in geostationary orbit. (http://www.telesat.ca)
Nortel -- pretty much world leaders in digital technology applied to telephony since it started. present in 150 countries.
(http://www.nortel.com/corporate/corptime/index.ht ml )
ATI, Matrox, Alias, Softimage, (this crowd knows who they are.)
Bombardier -- biggest railcar manufacturer in the world.
3rd largest aircraft manufacturer after airbus & boeing.
Not all of these are in the greatest of health at the moment,
and there are a lot of others that arent so easily recognizable
or easily described. but sheesh even Canada just rubs my pet seal the wrong way.
http://broadband.ic.gc.ca/pub/index.html?iin.lan g= en
Canadians believe in trying to smooth things out a bit so that people are on as level a playing field as possible, giving everybody a chance to succeed, and for development to be spread out across the country.
Americans (not all, probably not even most of the ones on slashdot, but such a large number that it is a real problem) have a myopic fanaticism about cutting their taxes (to the point where their government can no longer provide even basic services) and that awful neighbourhoods are somehow natural. The leading cause of personal bankrupcy in the US is getting sick.
Bad neighbourhoods happen because society doesnt give a shit. Canada doesnt have any real slums because we try to take care of everybody. Not to the extreme point of communism but trying to make sure people have a chance: free health care, low cost education, low cost broadband, reasonable social safety net.
The only people we do a pretty poor job with are aboriginal peoples, because they live so far out in the boonies that it is really hard to bring them a reasonable standard of living, when it takes a 12-hour plane ride to get them to the nearest hospital.
We try to level things out, were not fanatics about it, but we do our level best.
Hi point is that in the US, there is much wider sprawl. instead of having towns with 1000 residents in the middle of now where, there will be house after house, spread 1 km apart for hundreds of sq. km.
Dunno if the point is valid. I know people in rural quebec, about 120 Km. from a major city, they are in a village with a paper mill (two convenience stores, a church, no gas station) they are about 30 km. from a bigger town... oh what the heck... they are around here:
The little village with the mill is by the river, they are on a farm house about a kilometer west of town. they have broadband DSL, 3mbit down, 800 up, for around 22$ US a month. I dont think they are in any way unusual.
All valid email addresses with eight characters or less... letters+num+_+-+.+'' say 8**40... python says that
that is:
1329227995784915872903807060280344576L
addresses to check for each domain. Sending is cheap, but
it isn't that cheap. They desperately need lists. They trade
lists. There are probably spammers whose only trade is to build good lists, and sell them to other spammers who use them.
While straight-forward knock sequences are pretty hard
to figure out to begin with, somebody watching can see and
do a replay. Unfortunately, replays can easily be defeated...
knock patterns can be arbitrarily hard to figure out without
requiring a db. What about a combination of the first two bytes of the IP address (likely to remain constant) as well
as the time of day, acting as some sort of hashing function
to pick the exact knock sequence. You don't need a huge table, just a good algorithm, and a salt that would be varied to taste.
for a computer program to know what.gifs are invisible is a
similar problem to detecting spam, but harder. Legitimate.gif's with numbers in them are pretty common, you're going
to have a lot of chaff to wade through.
People can just pay for domains with bogus contact
data, using a stolen credit card or money order. Don't
spam with that domain, make that a registrar for other
domains. Think there might be some slimy registrars?
That if all the slimy registrar does is register a domain that is just semi-fictious registrar. The semi-ficitious registrar processes domain requests really quickly. The spammers create domains (at a probably higher than normal costs) with these registrars, and change them frequently.
One of the first things a hacker does when they take over
a machine is to patch it to make sure no other hacker can
take it away from him. There are continuous running battles
between botnet controllers for bots. Hackers do try to be
secure, they move on when they have to.
Your unsubscribe is executed on a bot (a captured machine) which the bad guys can look at, the after taking
precautions not to be observed, and harvest what they
want from it. The good guys, if they capture the machine will just get your address (if it isnt encrypted by the bad guys) and a machine that is acting funny (if they dont know how to knock to get into the bot-ware) Since logging cannot be trusted on a compromised machine, what they need is a non-compromised machine beside the compromised one (on the same segment) to watch the traffic go in and out... a honeypot. That is a lot of hard work.
The standard that defines fortran 95 is ISO/IEC 1539-1997... last four digits being the year it was actually approved. It beats Debian for release dates, but not by much.
The thing is, every six months, all the versions of all the software changes. You have to audit and review your config from a-to-z for all the changes in the individual components, every six months, to make sure that the configuration setup is still appropriate.
With Debian, youre using old software, but that old software you can install once, and then patch it, and you are fine.
Open source is COTS. the important part of the COTS
formula is that it be off-the-shelf, that is, easily
obtainable through myriad government regulations and
purchasing standards. download and go is the ultimate in cutting through red tape.
Many commercial off the shelf systems end up as
completely un-intergrable black boxes, that need
specialist care and feeding. Far better to use
Open source and have a fighting chance of integrating disparate applications together
(a better form of server consolidation.)
One of the main benefits of a smart card is one you have not mentioned. It should implement one-time passwords (rollover based on some shared secret). SecurID codes last about two minutes, and can only be used once, for example.
but this misses the point, the biggest problem with these systems isn't authentication, It isn't even technology. it is controlling who sees what. Saying that passport is wrong because it stores information on the client only begs the question. Who's server do you trust with all your information collected in a nice easily accessed format? Can you say multi-billion dollar liability? knew you could. Think folks would sue MS if there was a significant breakage or just criminal abuse? oh yeah...
Spammer sets up company a to sell book marks on the web. Doesn't spam, just gets a Passport account to do legitimate business Sells them cheap, and does a reasonable job of it. Sells information from the passport database into the spammer networks. They start doing a roaring business querying (um verifying) thousands of addresses. Could even claim that they were "related comanies" (part of the same "conglomerate") How do you stop something like that?
Now any mom&pop video store (the ones who ask for your Social Insurance number) will be able to have more information about you than the government. No freedom of information act, no voting mom&pop out, or rotation after five years. So we are depending on all the small businesses across the nation to be legitimate and well meaning.
Information wants to be free. That's not a rallying cry, but an observation of what happens to data. A secure network for this information hasn't been built by anyone. You need things like complete audit trails (distritbuted across multiple companies) and a "data police" to really watch what is going on. It will need to be many times the size of the anti-fraud units in credit card companies. Figuring out how to fund that is the economic problem to solve.
MS & everyone else underestimate the problem here, and think a good implementation will solve the problem. It can't. For now, the safest thing to do is to have thousands of separate db's secured from one another.
ahh.. great the client has his information safe. Now, Ebay wants to charge what credit card, to what name, and send it where. Where do they put that info? Passport only provided
Windows as a repository
I think the previous poster was referring to guarding the
data on the server side. There is no information on the client
anyways, so smart cards are completely irrelevant unless you intend that there be thousands of people with smart cards in shopping carts wheeling about the ebay warehouse, putting in the appropriate cards in the appropriate drives at the appropriate times.
Can you think of ANY product that meets this ideal?
No, but, for at least the basic functions, cars seemed to have
converged nicely in the last ten to fifteen years. Cars have the steering wheel in the same place, and one generally has to be in a prescribed seat to drive them. I cannot recall ever seeing the clutch or break pedals on the right of the accellerator. The speedometer seems to always be in roughly the same place, and even the other gauges, in the last few years have gotten closer to standardized. There are two alternate choices
for the shift lever, but gone are the days when it was above
the driver (citroen), or out of the dash (renault 4).
Companies still exercise plenty of product differentiation,
but not at the cost of rendering every vehicle annoyingly,
randomly, unique. With cars there is the safety issue, which
drives (sorry:-) a lot of these issues. The same things apply to CE in terms of increasing ease of use, they just are not that important.
They just work or not, and you are stuck.
I spent 200$ on an all-in-one for a relative.
It had a video screen to have programmable
labels on the buttons and a learn mode.
It didn't work with the VCR or TV. They were
too old, learn mode didn't help. I returned it,
and got a new VCR instead.
The cheap all-in-ones don't work either.
I have a VCR and DVD players
There is a complete lack of standardization
among CE devices. That is why there are error
prone "learn" modes, and lookup tables for all
the different brands. This is exactly the same
picture as when DOS games had to include drivers
for every brand of video card, an n-squared number of drivers results, all of them poor.
There is a complete lack of standardization among CE user interfaces. Try programming VCRS of ten brands, picture in picture modes, or setting the time. Why is there no similarity in the menu structures? How about my favourite: DVD menus. Talk about a utter misfeature, "play" varies in function depending on the disk in question, and all the options are artful pictograms, so there is no universal way to do anything with them. Quick. Pick a non-default language soundtrack on ten DVD's. You'll do it ten different ways, all with annoying delays for artful transitions, which are exceedingly clever the fist three times you see them, but just excrutiatingly tiresome thereafter. Being creative with user interfaces is a bad thing.
It is just bunkum to say that CE devices
work better. Things that are Universally lacking:
a standard which allows CE peripherals to
communicate capabilities to each other. Imagine
a "learn" button on a remote, that just sent
the "Learn" signal, to a VCR, and got back
an XML describing the capabilities of the
device, and what commands trigger what actions.
(assumes a standard set of commands.)
some kind of scripting support, so that complex commands like set time, or record on channel x for time y at time z can be automated.
That is, abstract out the user interface, because they
a standard which allows aggregation of
commands. like "set time on all devices". A good remote that understood the individual devices could probably take care of that though.
integration with home automation systems
so that you can dim the lights to watch a movie,
adjust the home theatre system's acoustics for "blockbuster" mode, etc...
a standard which allows all devices to agree
on a time source and allows for user override (the time signals on my TV suck, I don't know what time zone they are in, just picking the channel is not good enough.)
Sure, expensive systems can do all this, but they do it with brute force, by overcoming all the incompatibilities with a lot of complexity, or by going proprietary (use brand X.)
CE devices are at least a decade behind computers in standardization. As much more powerful computers are embedded in CE devices and the cost of standardization drops to nearly nil, we will see them adopt standards, like
Wifi, TCP/IP, HTTP, and some CE dialect of XML.
It cannot be a huge new effort because the profit margins are so slim, so it has to leverage what is already out there, when it becomes cost effective to do so. Unfortunately, none of the CE vendors have any reason to invest in such standards, such a thing would be a good selling point if it could be branded and get a critical mass of support for it to be valuable in consumers' eyes, but getting the critical mass is a big hurdle.
Tivo style processors are plenty powerful enough and probably already in today's HD TV's. In the next couple of years, the processing power will be cheap enough to support those standards.
Once that happens, UI's will be set by standards, shaped by client preferences, and not by random choices of individual hackers in hundreds of different companies. Stuff will be far more usable, and easier to program via computer too.
In the fifties, cigarettes were sold something that promoted health and outdoor living. These days drug companies are famous for doing 15 clinical trials, and submitting the three that came out positive to the FDA to get drugs approved. People would be shooting down an MS TCO study in seconds, but these results have not yet been questioed, because they match our own biases. You have to answer three questions before even beginning to consider their findings:
Who paid for these studies? Who paid for the studies ? and last, but not least Who paid for the studies ?
Is it still rational to believe that they were miracles? I don't see why not.
Occam's Razor is why not. Don't postulate invisible Pink Elephants when straightforward good luck is sufficient to explain a phenomenon. One is not permitted to believe in something unless it is the simplest explanation of the data. The existence of an invisible, omnisicient, omnipresent morally righteous deity is hardly the simplest explanation for "minor miracles," which are, at best, very few and quite parochial data points.
One can believe that a morally righteous omnipotent God intended all the suffering of humans on the earth, such as various genocides (Armenia, Ukraine, jews, Rwanda, Yugoslavia, Sudan), Famines (Ukraine (probably a famine engendered by genocidal intent.), China in the fifties, Ethiopia, etc...), and all the wars. An alternative hypothesis is that there is no being in charge, and that all of those events are the actions of humans and nature. It is reasonable to include all the activities and events and figure out whether, on average, whether the number of "minor miracles" really outweighs the number of minor anti-miracles, such as senseless violence, and wanton destruction (whether by man or by nature's ferocity) that happens on Earth. In Science, one looks for consilience, a preponderance of facts, not picking one or two that support a particular point of view, while ignoring evidence which does not support it.
some of these are compatible with the Bible to a large degree You don't examine any of the other religions' literature but feel justified in an unsupported assertion that they all are compatible. If you truly believe what you say, then will you pray to Hindu Gods (since they are "compatible.") If you claim compatibility, it is up to you to reconcile Sharia law with the Bible: ie. for violence, which is it: an eye for an eye (old testament), turn the other cheek (new), or cutting off the sinning appendage (Sharia). A minor point is the need to resolve factual contradictions in the inerrant work you cite, from
Most Hindus tend to lead a pretty good lifestyle by Christian norms, up to praying to a different god or gods. Explain it sociologically if you want.
If Hindus are good, in spite of not believing in a single god, or really any of christianity's fundamentals, then why is being christian or belief in God important, useful or appropriate? Most Japanese are Shinto or Buddhist, with no real belief in a supernatural being at all. The evidence is pretty strong that Japanese generally lead "a good life style."
Your assertion points to the fact that all people, regardless of culture adhere to a number of basic rules of "human nature." Human nature is behaviour which naturally emerges as evolutionarily stable strategies.
I imagine this is what you mean by "explain it sociologically."
This is much simpler than postulating purple people eaters, or something far more far fetched, like an omniscient bearded fellow to tell us right from wrong.
Then you select the bits of the bible you like, and the ones you don't. How can you expect to be convincing? If there is one thing fundamentalists have right, it is that they take the bible as the word of God, and therefore inerrant. It surpasses understanding that some who are religious feel that they can select which parts of their maker's teachings to believe. If the deity is all that is pretended, then it is pretty unlikely that a random human will be able to reliably identify the true bits, and never believe any of the wrong ones. It smacks of great hubris.
"Evolution is a theory"... yeah, like Einstein's theory of Relativity. If you do not believe in that "theory" then please disbelieve in lasers, computers, and GPS, because their functions all hinge on this Einstein's "theory". Use of that word is just tradition. Schools teach it as fact, because it is fact, as factual as Ein
You can make arguments like this against any cosmology. If there is no God, then what was the first event?
Be a grown up. Admit you don't know. Science does not tell us. I can with equal validity assure you that the first event was the Easter Bunny laying a cosmic egg which then underwent the big bang (but I can't prove it because the big bang messed up the evidence.) If you don't like it, I can tell you about the big turtle at the bottom of the pile of turtles that holds the flat earth out of the sea being the one that started it all. I've got a sacred book scrawled on a pack of chewing gum which came to me via dictation from on high while in a trance as I stared at the neon sign of a Dairy Queen.
If you abandon evidence as the precondition for belief, then we cannot differentiate between the hundreds of creation myths from the peoples of the earth and all their belief systems. The maturity of the scientific world view is to recognize the limits of what we know, and accept them as such. Science is unique in that it doesn't claim to have all the answers it exhibits complete humility before nature, and asks only to know what can be revealed by patient questions. A god of the gaps, that retreats at each advance of science, is scarcely a credible beast.
What caused it? Why is there time? And space? Physics will never explain these.
God did it ok... if that explains it for you...
It does nothing for me. Let's take the question apart. What do you mean by "why?"
When we ask why an avalanche happenned, I think I am going to be happy with an answer which talks about heavy snow, warm temperatures, and a loud mouth in the valley. That "why" is answering a physical mechanism. Saying God did it, does not provide me with much guidance as to how to predict or avoid getting avalanched on in the future. Science provides a pragmatic and useful answer. (100% solution: only go in the summer.)
Sometimes when we ask why, we are trying to discern the intent of an entity. Why did the lioness attack the antelope? We could say that God had decided that the antelope's time on the earth was at an end. On the other hand, we could look at the lion's actions over a period, and determine that the lion was running low on calories and required sustenance to continue living and protecting her cubs. I find the latter answer more satisfying.
So if you are asking the first sort of why question, which goes to mechanism. Then Science will provide the answers. If you are asking about intent, then you are turning the question on its head, because only a being could have intent. So asking why presupposes that there is a god in the first place, and is perfectly circular..
If you are going to quote the bible, then I will ask you to reconcile it with the Bhagavad Gita, the writings of Buddhism (Tibetan or otherwise), Taoism, Shinto, The Koran, the Torah, and all our knowledge of at least the Norse, Roman, Greek and Egyptian Pantheons for a start. There are more Wiccans, Moonies, and Jedi knights living today than there were christians living when the bible was written. If you begin quoting stories, then you have to take all the stories there are, not just a couple that are culturally closer to you. Saying "but God only wrote this book" (as opposed to the other folks who claim the same for their sacred writings) is not convincing. Science has a ready reconciliation mechanism avialable: Show us evidence, reproducible results, and predictive hypotheses. If you throw out that requirement, and decide to start believing stories, then there have to be good, solid reasons for why we need to literally believe Cain And Abel, but not The Three Little Pigs, or the seven labours of (the demigod) Hercules, the Trojan war, or the Merchant of Venice, though I adore them all.
Religious folk seem to think they can cherry pick from the entire heritage of the earth to only refer to western civilisation, to pick only the bible as sac
If a robot can use any implements made for humans, then the system is a lot more robust:
It can use any tools a human can use. Saving on development of robo centric tools.
If the gizmo fails, a human can be temporarily substituted to do the job.
One reason they are looking at this is to automate caregiving in old age homes (Japanese are getting older) Need a robot that can make the bed, clean the floors, perhaps help granny get out of her chair. If you are going to get picked up by a robot, my guess is that you will be happier if it at least looks human, rather than a dishwasher with arms.
It can go wherever a human goes, upstairs & ladders, etc... mechanisms for wheeling upstairs exist, but it is fraught with difficulties owing to the variations in stairs the robot is likely to encounter.
Got me, I thought there was more to it than that, but if a web proxy works, fair enough.
SUS... Will that patch your adobe stuff, photo shop, viewers, etc... and things like palm software, or is it thou shalt use MS or pay the penalty of performing integration on your own ?
That any idiot can set up a web server on windows does not mean that the job has been done in a secure, maintainable fashion. If you're maintaining the web server and making changes from time to time, how do you know what changes were made, and when. With http.conf, it's pretty easy to keep old versions of the file, or even use a trivial source code control tool, to version it. and then you can compare old versions. Any idiot can do that on linux.
An admin can ssh into a web server remotely. With Windows you need the GUI set up, more complexity, more bandwidth, more potential holes.
Security? Go to Windowsupdate.com once a month and install all the patches. I wish I had as straight forward a solution for my Linux boxes.
Once a month? I hope you are not doing that on an outward facing web server.
Install Debian stable, and put in a cron job, can run every day if you like that has: apt-get update apt-get -y upgrade in it. or run synaptic if you want to watch progress bars. Either way, you can also install apt-proxy, so that your patches are cached locally, and only xferred once on the net. Try doing that simply with MS.
Slashdot Mirror
the argument happens to be false.
houses in the US are not magically further apart than they are in Canada. We have rural areas, lots of them.
Rural areas do have telephone access, and telephone access line lengths are limited to a few kilometers from a bell central office, so rolling out DSL is not a matter of laying new cable.
The headend of a DSL link (a DSLAM) is now so common
and so cheap, that that is all that gets installed anyways. It is just use in analog mode until folks pay for activation, and
the line tuning.
Today, If you can have a phone, you can have DSL.
It is not a technical problem. I do not know what the right reason is for slow US adoption of broadband, but it is not a technical problem. It is not a 'justifying corporate investment problem'. Those explanations just do not wash.
I have been in bad neighborhoods in the US, in New Orleans, in Dallas, and In the East end of Montreal. People in East end Montreal are poor, but it bears no resemblance to the kind of squalor I saw in the US. Look at the crime rates. Look at the size of the bad neighborhoods, and there is just no comparison.
I have not been to the worst areas in the US... Have you? I havent, because as the locals will tell you, they arent safe to visit. I will take your word for it that there is such a place in Vancouver. In Quebec, I dont know of any such places, even though it is far poorer, on average, than BC.
As for taxes... You are living in a complete dreamworld. Services cost money. You want services, and an environment where you can feel safe, then it is going to cost you money. Canadian spend far less than other industrialized countries to provide services, we are actually doing really well.
You can follow the US model: cut taxes, and spend money you aren't allowed to raise. 500 trillion dollar annual federal deficit, On the US West Coast folks keep passing resolutions that eliminate methods for state and local governments to collect taxes. It is at the point where there is no way to pay for services. California is a complete financial basket case, Washington state has similar problems. This is similar effect to folks that don't want any power plants in their state, and then complain that electricity is expensive.
People don't think hard enough about their choices. If you choose to cut taxes, you will get less services. Sure, you need to audit what is going on, and make value for money evaluations, and tune things as you go, but the basics are there: no money, no services.
In comparison, the Canadian federal system and provices are running balanced budgets.
http://www.finfacts.com/biz10/taxpercentagegdp.htm
We have Sheila Fraser, and her counterparts in Provincial governments, independant auditors who picks apart federal expenditures, and whose only reason for being is to identify poor accounting practices, and a press that will gleefully tear into any spending scandal they can find. It's just fantasy to think that we can change a few decisions and cut taxes by any reasonable amount without massive social unrest.
The vast majority of money in government at all levels goes to providing services. The waste you hear about is what makes it to the press, the vast majority of the spending is done properly and conscientiously.
The real crime is that 30 years ago, in Trudeau's last reign, the economy went south, and nobody paid attention, throughout the Mulroney years the deficit grew and now it is this huge weight on the government.
http://www.budget.gc.ca/budget04/brief/briefe.htm
Look at expenditures. 156 Billion for programs, 36 for just keeping the debt level. What could we do with 36 Billion dollars a year? One hell of a lot, but we can't because a generation ago, people were idiots. Deficit spending is a horrible drag that is going to break something eventually. People like to hear about 'tax cuts' but what they should be doing is looking at what that means: service cuts now, and if that hampers our ability to pay down accumulated debt, then fewer services down the road too for our children, and ourselves in our old age. It is practically criminal to cut taxes, but politically necessary. We're still idiots.
(p.s. last time Canada was at war with the US, we burned down Washington D.C.)
In any event, there is more to it. Unlike the US, where the FCC has been apparently co-opted by telco and other media interests, in Canada, the CRTC does a lot of regulation. What Bell can charge is regulated. They have to ask for cost increases, and they have to be justified. Other companies (third party ISPs) appear at the hearings and argue Bells numbers, mostly downward, because they want low wholesale prices. So you have third party ISPs charging 30-50% less for broadband than Bell.
Agree with your point. One number wont accurately describe a rational behind cost discrepancies. But the whole argument about country size of density is bogus. Reality is, the reason for the different rates of penetration is different government priorities. In other countries, citizens' access to information is considered of fundamental importance, and broadband is viewed as an enabler of reducing government costs by encouraging internet delivery, and spurring regional economic growth, by making folks closer to their markets.
home of:
-
Telesat is a pioneer in satellite communications. Created in 1969, the Company made history with the launch of Anik A1 in 1972 the worlds first commercial domestic communications satellite placed in geostationary orbit. (http://www.telesat.ca)
- Nortel -- pretty much world leaders in digital technology applied to telephony since it started. present in 150 countries.
(http://www.nortel.com/corporate/corptime/index.h
t ml )
- ATI, Matrox, Alias, Softimage, (this crowd knows who they are.)
- Bombardier -- biggest railcar manufacturer in the world.
3rd largest aircraft manufacturer after airbus & boeing.
Not all of these are in the greatest of health at the moment, and there are a lot of others that arent so easily recognizable or easily described. but sheesh even Canada just rubs my pet seal the wrong way.http://broadband.ic.gc.ca/pub/index.html?iin.la
Canadians believe in trying to smooth things out
a bit so that people are on as level a playing field
as possible, giving everybody a chance to succeed,
and for development to be spread out across
the country.
Americans (not all, probably not even most of the ones
on slashdot, but such a large number that it is a real problem) have a myopic fanaticism about cutting their taxes (to the point where their government can no longer provide even
basic services) and that awful neighbourhoods
are somehow natural. The leading cause
of personal bankrupcy in the US is getting sick.
Bad neighbourhoods happen because society
doesnt give a shit. Canada doesnt have any real slums
because we try to take care of everybody. Not
to the extreme point of communism but trying
to make sure people have a chance: free health care,
low cost education, low cost broadband, reasonable
social safety net.
The only people we do a pretty poor job with are
aboriginal peoples, because they live so far out
in the boonies that it is really hard to bring them
a reasonable standard of living, when it takes a 12-hour
plane ride to get them to the nearest hospital.
We try to level things out, were not fanatics about it,
but we do our level best.
CA*net4s equivalent in the US is Abilene.
Hi point is that in the US, there is much wider sprawl.
instead of having towns with 1000 residents in the
middle of now where, there will be house after house,
spread 1 km apart for hundreds of sq. km.
Dunno if the point is valid. I know people in rural
quebec, about 120 Km. from a major city, they are
in a village with a paper mill (two convenience stores,
a church, no gas station) they are about 30 km.
from a bigger town... oh what the heck... they are around here:
http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=45.950575,-73.49
The little village with the mill is by the river, they are on
a farm house about a kilometer west of town. they have
broadband DSL, 3mbit down, 800 up, for around 22$ US a month. I dont think they are in any way unusual.
While straight-forward knock sequences are pretty hard to figure out to begin with, somebody watching can see and do a replay. Unfortunately, replays can easily be defeated... knock patterns can be arbitrarily hard to figure out without requiring a db. What about a combination of the first two bytes of the IP address (likely to remain constant) as well as the time of day, acting as some sort of hashing function to pick the exact knock sequence. You don't need a huge table, just a good algorithm, and a salt that would be varied to taste.
for a computer program to know what .gifs are invisible is a
similar problem to detecting spam, but harder. Legitimate .gif's with numbers in them are pretty common, you're going
to have a lot of chaff to wade through.
People can just pay for domains with bogus contact data, using a stolen credit card or money order. Don't spam with that domain, make that a registrar for other domains. Think there might be some slimy registrars? That if all the slimy registrar does is register a domain that is just semi-fictious registrar. The semi-ficitious registrar processes domain requests really quickly. The spammers create domains (at a probably higher than normal costs) with these registrars, and change them frequently.
One of the first things a hacker does when they take over a machine is to patch it to make sure no other hacker can take it away from him. There are continuous running battles between botnet controllers for bots. Hackers do try to be secure, they move on when they have to.
Your unsubscribe is executed on a bot (a captured machine) which the bad guys can look at, the after taking precautions not to be observed, and harvest what they want from it. The good guys, if they capture the machine will just get your address (if it isnt encrypted by the bad guys) and a machine that is acting funny (if they dont know how to knock to get into the bot-ware) Since logging cannot be trusted on a compromised machine, what they need is a non-compromised machine beside the compromised one (on the same segment) to watch the traffic go in and out... a honeypot. That is a lot of hard work.
The standard that defines fortran 95 is ISO/IEC 1539-1997... last four digits being the year it was actually approved. It beats Debian for release dates, but not by much.
The thing is, every six months, all the versions of all the software changes. You have to audit and review your config from a-to-z for all the changes in the individual components, every six months, to make sure that the configuration setup is still appropriate.
With Debian, youre using old software, but that old software you can install once, and then patch it, and you are fine.
Open source is COTS. the important part of the COTS formula is that it be off-the-shelf, that is, easily obtainable through myriad government regulations and purchasing standards. download and go is the ultimate in cutting through red tape. Many commercial off the shelf systems end up as completely un-intergrable black boxes, that need specialist care and feeding. Far better to use Open source and have a fighting chance of integrating disparate applications together (a better form of server consolidation.)
One of the main benefits of a smart card is
one you have not mentioned. It should implement
one-time passwords (rollover based on some
shared secret). SecurID codes last about two
minutes, and can only be used once, for example.
but this misses the point, the biggest
problem with these systems isn't authentication,
It isn't even technology. it is controlling who sees what. Saying that passport is wrong because it stores information
on the client only begs the question. Who's server do you trust with all your information collected in a nice easily accessed format? Can you say multi-billion dollar liability? knew you could. Think folks would sue MS if there was a
significant breakage or just criminal abuse? oh yeah...
Spammer sets up company a to sell book marks on the web. Doesn't spam, just gets a Passport account to do legitimate business Sells them cheap, and does a reasonable job of it. Sells information from the passport database into the
spammer networks. They start doing a roaring
business querying (um verifying) thousands of addresses. Could even claim that they
were "related comanies" (part of the same "conglomerate") How do you stop something like
that?
Now any mom&pop video store (the ones who ask
for your Social Insurance number) will be able
to have more information about you than the government. No freedom of information act, no voting mom&pop out, or rotation after five years. So we are depending on all the small
businesses across the nation to be legitimate
and well meaning.
Information wants to be free. That's not a
rallying cry, but an observation of what happens to data. A secure network for this information hasn't been built by anyone. You need things like complete audit trails (distritbuted across
multiple companies) and a "data police" to really watch what is going on. It will need to be many times the size of the anti-fraud units in credit card companies. Figuring out how to
fund that is the economic problem to solve.
MS & everyone else underestimate the problem
here, and think a good implementation will solve
the problem. It can't. For now, the safest thing to do is to have thousands of separate
db's secured from one another.
I think the previous poster was referring to guarding the data on the server side. There is no information on the client anyways, so smart cards are completely irrelevant unless you intend that there be thousands of people with smart cards in shopping carts wheeling about the ebay warehouse, putting in the appropriate cards in the appropriate drives at the appropriate times.
A way around that problem would be to use two sets
of gyros, one in the mouse, one in the PC, and use deltas.
No, but, for at least the basic functions, cars seemed to have converged nicely in the last ten to fifteen years. Cars have the steering wheel in the same place, and one generally has to be in a prescribed seat to drive them. I cannot recall ever seeing the clutch or break pedals on the right of the accellerator. The speedometer seems to always be in roughly the same place, and even the other gauges, in the last few years have gotten closer to standardized. There are two alternate choices for the shift lever, but gone are the days when it was above the driver (citroen), or out of the dash (renault 4).
Companies still exercise plenty of product differentiation, but not at the cost of rendering every vehicle annoyingly, randomly, unique. With cars there is the safety issue, which drives (sorry :-) a lot of these issues. The same things apply to CE in terms of increasing ease of use, they just are not that important.
The cheap all-in-ones don't work either. I have a VCR and DVD players There is a complete lack of standardization among CE devices. That is why there are error prone "learn" modes, and lookup tables for all the different brands. This is exactly the same picture as when DOS games had to include drivers for every brand of video card, an n-squared number of drivers results, all of them poor.
There is a complete lack of standardization among CE user interfaces. Try programming VCRS of ten brands, picture in picture modes, or setting the time. Why is there no similarity in the menu structures? How about my favourite: DVD menus. Talk about a utter misfeature, "play" varies in function depending on the disk in question, and all the options are artful pictograms, so there is no universal way to do anything with them. Quick. Pick a non-default language soundtrack on ten DVD's. You'll do it ten different ways, all with annoying delays for artful transitions, which are exceedingly clever the fist three times you see them, but just excrutiatingly tiresome thereafter. Being creative with user interfaces is a bad thing.
It is just bunkum to say that CE devices work better. Things that are Universally lacking:
Sure, expensive systems can do all this, but they do it with brute force, by overcoming all the incompatibilities with a lot of complexity, or by going proprietary (use brand X.)
CE devices are at least a decade behind computers in standardization. As much more powerful computers are embedded in CE devices and the cost of standardization drops to nearly nil, we will see them adopt standards, like Wifi, TCP/IP, HTTP, and some CE dialect of XML. It cannot be a huge new effort because the profit margins are so slim, so it has to leverage what is already out there, when it becomes cost effective to do so. Unfortunately, none of the CE vendors have any reason to invest in such standards, such a thing would be a good selling point if it could be branded and get a critical mass of support for it to be valuable in consumers' eyes, but getting the critical mass is a big hurdle.
Tivo style processors are plenty powerful enough and probably already in today's HD TV's. In the next couple of years, the processing power will be cheap enough to support those standards.
Once that happens, UI's will be set by standards, shaped by client preferences, and not by random choices of individual hackers in hundreds of different companies. Stuff will be far more usable, and easier to program via computer too.
In the fifties, cigarettes were sold something that promoted health and outdoor living. These days drug companies are famous for doing 15 clinical trials, and submitting the three that came out positive to the FDA to get drugs approved. People would be shooting down an MS TCO study in seconds, but these results have not yet been questioed, because they match our own biases. You have to answer three questions before even beginning to consider their findings:
Who paid for these studies?
Who paid for the studies ? and last, but not least
Who paid for the studies ?
One can believe that a morally righteous omnipotent God intended all the suffering of humans on the earth, such as various genocides (Armenia, Ukraine, jews, Rwanda, Yugoslavia, Sudan), Famines (Ukraine (probably a famine engendered by genocidal intent.), China in the fifties, Ethiopia, etc...), and all the wars. An alternative hypothesis is that there is no being in charge, and that all of those events are the actions of humans and nature. It is reasonable to include all the activities and events and figure out whether, on average, whether the number of "minor miracles" really outweighs the number of minor anti-miracles, such as senseless violence, and wanton destruction (whether by man or by nature's ferocity) that happens on Earth. In Science, one looks for consilience, a preponderance of facts, not picking one or two that support a particular point of view, while ignoring evidence which does not support it. some of these are compatible with the Bible to a large degree You don't examine any of the other religions' literature but feel justified in an unsupported assertion that they all are compatible. If you truly believe what you say, then will you pray to Hindu Gods (since they are "compatible.") If you claim compatibility, it is up to you to reconcile Sharia law with the Bible: ie. for violence, which is it: an eye for an eye (old testament), turn the other cheek (new), or cutting off the sinning appendage (Sharia). A minor point is the need to resolve factual contradictions in the inerrant work you cite, from
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/jim_meritt/ bible-contradictions.html
Most Hindus tend to lead a pretty good lifestyle by Christian norms, up to praying to a different god or gods. Explain it sociologically if you want.
If Hindus are good, in spite of not believing in a single god, or really any of christianity's fundamentals, then why is being christian or belief in God important, useful or appropriate? Most Japanese are Shinto or Buddhist, with no real belief in a supernatural being at all. The evidence is pretty strong that Japanese generally lead "a good life style."
Your assertion points to the fact that all people, regardless of culture adhere to a number of basic rules of "human nature." Human nature is behaviour which naturally emerges as evolutionarily stable strategies. I imagine this is what you mean by "explain it sociologically." This is much simpler than postulating purple people eaters, or something far more far fetched, like an omniscient bearded fellow to tell us right from wrong.
Then you select the bits of the bible you like, and the ones you don't. How can you expect to be convincing? If there is one thing fundamentalists have right, it is that they take the bible as the word of God, and therefore inerrant. It surpasses understanding that some who are religious feel that they can select which parts of their maker's teachings to believe. If the deity is all that is pretended, then it is pretty unlikely that a random human will be able to reliably identify the true bits, and never believe any of the wrong ones. It smacks of great hubris.
"Evolution is a theory"... yeah, like Einstein's theory of Relativity. If you do not believe in that "theory" then please disbelieve in lasers, computers, and GPS, because their functions all hinge on this Einstein's "theory". Use of that word is just tradition. Schools teach it as fact, because it is fact, as factual as Ein
Be a grown up. Admit you don't know. Science does not tell us. I can with equal validity assure you that the first event was the Easter Bunny laying a cosmic egg which then underwent the big bang (but I can't prove it because the big bang messed up the evidence.) If you don't like it, I can tell you about the big turtle at the bottom of the pile of turtles that holds the flat earth out of the sea being the one that started it all. I've got a sacred book scrawled on a pack of chewing gum which came to me via dictation from on high while in a trance as I stared at the neon sign of a Dairy Queen.
If you abandon evidence as the precondition for belief, then we cannot differentiate between the hundreds of creation myths from the peoples of the earth and all their belief systems. The maturity of the scientific world view is to recognize the limits of what we know, and accept them as such. Science is unique in that it doesn't claim to have all the answers it exhibits complete humility before nature, and asks only to know what can be revealed by patient questions. A god of the gaps, that retreats at each advance of science, is scarcely a credible beast.
What caused it? Why is there time? And space? Physics will never explain these.
God did it ok... if that explains it for you... It does nothing for me. Let's take the question apart. What do you mean by "why?"
When we ask why an avalanche happenned, I think I am going to be happy with an answer which talks about heavy snow, warm temperatures, and a loud mouth in the valley. That "why" is answering a physical mechanism. Saying God did it, does not provide me with much guidance as to how to predict or avoid getting avalanched on in the future. Science provides a pragmatic and useful answer. (100% solution: only go in the summer.)
Sometimes when we ask why, we are trying to discern the intent of an entity. Why did the lioness attack the antelope? We could say that God had decided that the antelope's time on the earth was at an end. On the other hand, we could look at the lion's actions over a period, and determine that the lion was running low on calories and required sustenance to continue living and protecting her cubs. I find the latter answer more satisfying.
So if you are asking the first sort of why question, which goes to mechanism. Then Science will provide the answers. If you are asking about intent, then you are turning the question on its head, because only a being could have intent. So asking why presupposes that there is a god in the first place, and is perfectly circular. .
If you are going to quote the bible, then I will ask you to reconcile it with the Bhagavad Gita, the writings of Buddhism (Tibetan or otherwise), Taoism, Shinto, The Koran, the Torah, and all our knowledge of at least the Norse, Roman, Greek and Egyptian Pantheons for a start. There are more Wiccans, Moonies, and Jedi knights living today than there were christians living when the bible was written. If you begin quoting stories, then you have to take all the stories there are, not just a couple that are culturally closer to you. Saying "but God only wrote this book" (as opposed to the other folks who claim the same for their sacred writings) is not convincing. Science has a ready reconciliation mechanism avialable: Show us evidence, reproducible results, and predictive hypotheses. If you throw out that requirement, and decide to start believing stories, then there have to be good, solid reasons for why we need to literally believe Cain And Abel, but not The Three Little Pigs, or the seven labours of (the demigod) Hercules, the Trojan war, or the Merchant of Venice, though I adore them all.
Religious folk seem to think they can cherry pick from the entire heritage of the earth to only refer to western civilisation, to pick only the bible as sac
the system is a lot more robust:
Got me, I thought there was more to it than
that, but if a web proxy works, fair enough.
SUS...
Will that patch your adobe stuff, photo shop, viewers, etc... and things like palm software, or is it thou shalt use MS or pay the penalty of performing integration on your own ?
That any idiot can set up a web server on windows does not mean that the job has been done in a secure, maintainable fashion. If you're maintaining the web server and making changes from time to time, how do you know what changes were made, and when. With http.conf, it's pretty easy to keep old versions of the file, or even use a trivial source code control tool, to version it. and then you can compare old versions. Any idiot can do that on linux.
An admin can ssh into a web server remotely.
With Windows you need the GUI set up, more complexity, more bandwidth, more potential holes.
Security? Go to Windowsupdate.com once a month and install all the patches. I wish I had as straight forward a solution for my Linux boxes.
Once a month? I hope you are not doing that on an outward facing web server.
Install Debian stable, and put in a cron
job, can run every day if you like that has:
apt-get update
apt-get -y upgrade
in it. or run synaptic if you want to watch progress bars. Either way, you can also install apt-proxy, so that your patches are cached locally, and only xferred once on the net. Try doing that simply with MS.