You've never bought a new car I take it? The sticker price is about the same level of scam. The dealership is going to tack on tax (of course), documentation fee, licensing fess, and any other fee they think they can get away with. Granted, since a car purchase is still seen as negotiable, those fees are also negotiable (at least who pays them is) so it's a bit easier to deal with. However, what the phone companies are doing isn't all that new.
But hey, at least we are no longer paying a tax to support the Spanish American War.
Add another me too for Sharepoint.
From the initial question, I'd guess that just WSS3 will get the job done and it's free. One important piece of this though is: plan your deployment. Figure out what type of site structure you plan to use before you implement anything. Sharepoint can be a wonderful tool, but if you just jump into it and let it grow organically you will end up hating it and yourself. And trying to monkey around with the site structure after the fact can be trouble. Oh and, get familiar with ASP.NET master pages and what they do and how they work. You will be using them in WSS, and if you go into it without care you can trash your entire site fast.
Do you really think it's going to be that different? Right now "cloud computing" is in that wonderful conceptual stage where everything is puppy dogs and roses. Unfortunately, those puppy dogs will eventually grow up and chew up the furniture and shit everywhere; and the roses will die and the thorns are going to stick you when you try to fix them. Every technology which comes along is supposed to make things easier, better, more secure and do the dishes. None of it does. Sure, it may be better than what we have now, then again, maybe not.
You try, getting three different clients working against a database from the same vendor working properly. They all crave different versions of dotnet, java or whatnot and any new version of the client software demands countless hours of testing just about every possible combination of apps.
So, instead I get three different browsers, inside each of which I am supposed to run three different versions of a database client, and probably against a database I no longer have any real control of. Oh, and some jerk-off somewhere in the organization probably wants to run the whole thing on a different OS, because you will still need some sort of local OS to boot the damn thing. Congratulations, you've now added yet another layer of complexity to fail and troubleshoot. Thank you, no.
If anything, what you are after is virtualized applications, the previous puppy-dogs and roses technology. At the very least you, as the admin, still have control of the system end to end, and it really does decouple the applications from the instance of the OS. It still has it's own host of issues, such as, "I need.NET 2.0 with this app,.NET 3.0 with this app, and Will's API Really Good At Running Bob's Lines (WARGARBL) on this other app." which can make it fun. Of course, it is yet another layer of complexity to fail and troubleshoot, but at least I can look at the whole server-client setup.
Upgrades are pure nightmare. Couple this with locked down desktops, profiles that has to be managed and policies that needs hard testing before you alter a single setting.
If you're worried enough about security that you go through unit testing for every profile change, why in the world would you trust your data to an untrusted network? It's one thing to run an internal terminal server with thin clients, but that isn't what Google, Microsoft, et al. are after. They want to run the terminal server, file server, and everything else for you. And all of your work, data and information will be secured on the internet through an encrypted pipe. Sure, it'll probably keep out the third party attacks, right until someone at Microsoft or Google decides to fuck everyone. And, of course, the contract you will sign for their services will indemnify them against lawsuits. And they'll probably still foist onto you the job of creating your own profiles, which will still need just as much work to secure.
Getting rid of all those problems alone would be worth serious money for any company.
Yes it is, and it sounds like they are spending the money in the right place to make those problems go away. That spending is on you. If you care enough to do the work you have outlined above as an admin, and are still looking for ways to make it better, then you are earning your paycheck.
Really, how so? In the end, I doubt the US is really going to ever willingly give up control of the root servers. There just isn't a reason for the US Government to want to do so. By creating an alt root, another organization, be it the UN, EU, or whoever can gain control whether or not the US Government wants them too.
Of course, this assumes that ICANN's management of them either gets so bad, or the other version gets so good, that people are compelled to change. Though, one way this could happen is if the EU were to create its own DNS root servers and then mandate that all EU Zone member states require their ISP's to use them.
But yes, I do realize it's far easier to say, "you did a great job, now hand it over" than to compete.
I think he missed on the name. And, unlike me, he didn't take the time to JFGI before he shot his mouth off. He was trying to point at OpenNIC rather than OpenDNS.
The really funny thing about this whole DNS server argument is that it is a trivial technical problem to setup a DNS server. If the UN and/or any other organization was really so inclined they could have their own root DNS servers running in the time it takes me to drink my morning coffee (running well might take a bit longer). From there, they just have to convince ISP's to switch their pointers.
Since the impetus for the US DoC giving up control seems to be be from EU nations, I would suggest that the EU sets up its own DNS root servers, and convinces the ISPs within the EU economic zone to use these alternative root servers, with maybe a forwarder to or mirror of the US controlled root servers, just to make things a bit more seamless. At this point, the EU has all the control it wants, and the US has no choice in the matter.
Perhaps the funniest bit about your post is that the link to the article I'm citing was found in the "Related Articles" section of the article you pointed to. But, don't let reality stand in the way of a swipe!
You're partly right, the US doesn't own the internet. The US does, however, own the DNS servers which most people on the internet choose to rely on. Why does the US own them, well it was DARPA who went through the initial trouble to get the whole thing running and then it worked it's way over to the hands of the US Department of Commerce who contracted ICANN to run the whole thing.
Now, why should the USDOC hand them off? If other countries are really that worried about the US using them as some sort of club, it's actually pretty easy to setup alternative DNS servers. As a matter of fact, if you don't like ICANN's handling of DNS, you can always turn to an alt root. To be blunt, if the UN is really that hot to run DNS on the internet, there is nothing stopping them from setting up a set of UN alt roots and offering them to the world as an alternative to ICANN. The competition between ICANN and the UN would probably be good overall. But then, there I go with the boorish US, let the free market decide mantra.
Having the pleasure of watching my niece (turning 4 this year) interact with other children, I have to agree wholeheartedly. She is a little terror. If given half a chance, she will grab things from other children, and wouldn't share with others unless forced. I would love to blame the parents, but by everything I see her parents are on her constantly about sharing and have been since an early age. She isn't selfish by training, but by nature.
If anything, I think the GP had it exactly backwards: children are selfish by nature, it's not until they are taught to share and get along that they do so.
I can't help but feel that this is just a marketing ploy for the profession that will encourage more FDA approved "happy pills" and psychiatrists visits.
Encouraging people to fight back in this game is stupid. All you do is make people risk their lives needlessly. If they don't fight, everyone survives and the authorities can catch the criminals on safer ground. If you do fight, you risk having a gun fired in a crowded, pressurised cylinder 20,000 feet up.
I have to disagree with you here, the reason to fight back at this point was to make the risk/reward assumption of hijacking not worth the effort. When the people on the plane don't fight they are putting their lives and well being in the hands of people who have already shown a disregard for those people. And "everyone survives" is not true, granted the majority tend to, but this didn't stop the hijackers from killing people. Additionally, this demonstrates to potential hijackers that this is a viable method of extortion and encourages more hijackings.
By comparision, with the current "fight back" mentality, hijacking is much harder and not as useful as a tool for extortion. We have had plenty of stories of people doing stupid stuff on planes not accomplishing much because the passengers weren't going to be victims anymore.
As for having guns fired in a crowded pressurized cylinder at 20,000 feet, I don't see that as that as particularly scary. First and foremost, this myth of lawful gun owners firing willy-nilly and shooting bystanders just doesn't happen. It's a bullshit canard used by anti-gun activists. The data just doesn't support it. Seriously, go try and find stories of lawful permit holders shooting bystanders while stopping a crime in progress. I'll wait.
Second, a bullet hole in a passenger plane at 20,000 feet (or higher even) is not really a cause for concern. Despite what Hollywood tells you, the plane will not fall out of the air, it will not explosively decompress, in fact it's decompression will be rather slow. At worst, the pilot will get a light on his console telling him that there is a loss of pressure, he will put his mask on, descend below 10,000 feet, declare an emergency and land at the nearest airfield which will handle his aircraft. And the passengers might have to put their masks on too. Even a dozen bullet holes are not going to cause a problem. Here, read about Aloha Flight 243 and consider for a moment that the aircraft involved lost the entirety of it's roof, actually did suffer explosive decompression, and the pilot still landed the airplane. The only loss of life was one flight attendant who was standing in the wrong place at the wrong time.
As a free citizen, you are the first response to a crime as it happens. You have the choice to get involved and stop it, or you can sit by and encourage criminals by making it seem like they won't face resistance. That choice has been around a lot longer than the last 8 years. It's sad that the US Government seems to prefer encouraging criminals, but we the citizens need to realize that it's not helping anyone to stand idly by and let criminals take over our society. And the government is certainly doing us no favors by trying to take away from us the tools to do so.
I'll have to see if I can dig up a subbed version of that movie. Though, given the popularity of the cop out for revenge story in the US, I have a feeling that the US has a similar, scary, view of how criminals should be dealt with. While I am an advocate of citizens being involved in stopping crime while it is happening, vigilantism and cops who cross the line between investigating crimes or apprehending criminals and meting out punishment, scare me.
South America has a lot to complain since Monroe doctrine.
Yes, yes it does. The original stated idea of the Monroe Doctrine was well enough, prevent further expansion of European Colonies in the Americas. Of course, the fact that it was done so that the US could eventually seek it's manifest destiny and expand to encompass all of the North American continent, and probably the South American Continent as well, has led to innumerable problems. Add to that our current War on (some) Drugs and the problems it has created for everyone, and it's no wonder that the US is generally hated throughout Central and South America.
I'd like to say that we're trying to change things here, but I don't think that it's really true. There are some of us who would like to become a bit less involved in world affairs, as we should not be acting like some World Police Force. International cooperation is all fine and good, but we've been far too involved in the affairs of other countries. Unfortunately, with the rise of Evangelicalism and the self righteous attitude which comes along with it, the US seems to be on track to be even more interventionist in the future.
I agree with you for the most part. I'm a little concerned with the idea that not attacking hijackers by default was a bad idea.
Until recently, hijackers did not hijack in order to blow up buildings and commit suicide. Hijackers in the 1980s were very much looking to make a point. You *could* die or be wounded in a hijacking, but for the most part, you would live through it. They might be willing to die for their cause, but it wasn't a foregone conclusion.
This seems to be a shirking of the responsibilities of a free citizen. It's important to keep in mind that The Authorities cannot possibly protect everyone, it's just a flat physical impossibility. There will never be a cop everywhere at once. Even with a surveillance state the best that will happen is that there will be evidence of a crime after the fact. And this seems to be something we have lost in our country, the understanding that the police are a reactionary force, they do not prevent crime, the do not stop crime, unless by serendipity. The police exist to investigate crimes after they have happened, collect evidence and hand it off to the State to seek redress for the aggrieved.
The only people whom you can guarantee will be at the scene of a crime, when it happens, are the criminal, and the victim (theft by stealth not withstanding). This means that, as a free citizen, the victim is the first responder. It is up to the citizen to protect himself and his society. Certainly, there is a value judgment to be made, if the criminal has the drop on you, give up your wallet; dieing doesn't help anyone. On the other hand, if you have a reasonable chance of stopping the crime in progress, or it's a crime in which you or others are going to die anyway, you should be fighting. Moreover, we have fallen into the bystander mentality, we love to stand around in groups and watch crimes happen, but not get involved; because, we might get hurt. That needs to stop, the only people that is empowering are the criminals.
Should people have fought on planes before? Absolutely, I don't care how well trained a couple of hijackers are, against several hundred people, from all sides, they will lose. Flight 93 was doomed, in part, by the "be a victim" mentality. The people started fighting far too late, the hijackers were already in control of the aircraft. Were the scenario to go more along the lines of the hijackers starting trouble, and the people on the plane immediately giving them a beat-down (or maybe even shooting them) the plane would be far less likely to crash as the pilots will always be in control of the aircraft.
I've recently read 'The Quiet American' [wikipedia.org], which further investigates this. As I read it, it seems that Graham Greene thought that Americans can't imagine how other people could want something different from what they have, and how could they think different from what they, Americans, think. I don't know if it's true, but it's a very interesting POV.
Don't believe everything you read. I'll agree that this probably pegs plenty of Americans correctly enough, but I think there is still a large contingent of us which really just don't care what other people think or want. This probably comes off as either arrogance or ignorance or both, but I doubt that there are a lot of Americans running around bemoaning that others aren't like us. Unfortunately, the type of people who do make a big deal out of it are usually the narcissistic types who are going to be loudest about it.
Myself for example, I realize that people in other countries think and act differently, and then I quit navel gazing and go about living my own life. Sure, I run across it every now and again, but it's not something which enters my consciousness all that much, nor does it bother me. Sure, I find it odd, but I suspect that they have just been shaped to think the way they do by the experiences they have had in life, just like me. And that is, perhaps, one thing which maybe should come from your reading, the pot is just as black as the kettle. Sure, I don't really understand how you think, or why you think that way. I can't, I haven't had your life experiences. But, I doubt you truly understand how I think or why I think the way I do; you haven't had my life experiences. The best we can do is try to explain our point of view to each other, using something as imperfect as language, and accept that each other is not insane, just different.
As far as I know, Apache doesn't have anything like WebDAV directly, there might be all kinds of third party applications which create a similar service, but then they probably have their own host of issues.
To be honest, this falls well within the "meh" category of problems. If you have WebDAV running, either you chose to turn it on for very specific reasons, and hopefully made an informed decision before you did so; or, you are running a decade old version of IIS on a decade old operating system and never changed the defaults.
An absolutist take on the needs of the many outweigh the need of the few is a minefield of sticky moral problems. At some point, we need to say that the individual's needs are important enough that the many can go screw itself. In this case, the fact that an individual is going to be killed warrants some expenditure of resources, even if it means that a few more people might face the same situation at a later date.
As an example, by harvesting your organs we could probably save the lives of four or five people who need transplants of various bits, and improve the lives of a few who could use healthy organs to improve their quality of life. So it comes down to your life versus the lives of four people, plus an improvement in the quality of one or two other lives. Hey, needs of the many...
I doubt that FF/ABP are reporting your use of ABP; however, figuring it out would be pretty easy with good logs.
Every time you visit a website, your request for their content is logged, usually on a per item basis. At the same time, your browser sends to the webserver a string identifying it (Your User Agent). So, the server knows you are running Firefox, and content can be tailored to your browser, so that things look right on your browser. If this scares you, you might look into User Agent Switcher.
Now, assuming that your browser requested the content of a page, but didn't request the ads which are supposed to come with it, one can assume that you are running AdBlock or something similar. Sure, it's not 100% accurate, but its good enough for a rough guess of usage.
I honestly have no clue if there are applications out there already to do this type of analysis (I would be surprised if there weren't) but it seems like a fairly trivial problem to solve with good enough accuracy.
The US spends approximately 3.4% of its GDP on public primary and secondary education
I've heard numbers like this a few times, and was just wondering where it comes from. At the risk of doing a [citation needed] type post, would you mind providing a link to where you are getting this number? I'll buy that it might be the US Federal Government input into education funding, but that is very misleading. Most of the US Education spending is done at the State level.
Since I was willing to JFGI, it seems your claim is either out of date or downright wrong. The wikipedia page on Government Spending puts the Percent GDP spent on Education at 6%. Their citation comes from usgovernmentspending.com which, puts total government spending in 2006 on education at $786.8 Billion, or about 5.88% of the 2006 GDP (13.06 Trillion, number from Google). That site claims to have aggregated the data from the US Federal GPO report and US Census data. Quite frankly, I'm not willing to chase the numbers back that far and am willing to accept the aggregator's claim, unless a problem can be demonstrated.
In short, the idea that US spending on education is lacking is a myth. Yes, Federal spending on education is lacking, that is because education is not a Federal function, its a State function.
The US also has one of the worst student to teacher ratios in the world, averaging out to 16, but in lower income schools averaging over 35.
Ok, I found the first number you mentioned in the PDF you linked to presented as:
In 1999, the United States had the second-lowest student/teacher
ratio of the countries presented in primary education - 16 students
per teacher. [http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2003/2003026.pdf page 28 (44 according to Adobe reader)]
That's a good thing. The lower the student to teacher ratio, the fewer students each teacher has to deal with and the more time which they can devote to each student. As for the lower income number, you're gonna have to give me a page number, I went through the PDF trying to find it and came up empty.
In all, I'm not trying to say we couldn't do more as a country, but it bugs the hell out of me to hear people claim that we are failing our students, when it seems like we are putting quite a bit of money into the system already. While I do think that the No Child Left Behind act may have missed the mark, we do need to start finding ways of getting useful metrics out of the education system. At just shy of 6% of our GDP, and close to 17% of our total government expenditures (assuming the Wikipedia numbers), we're putting a lot of money into it, and yet we're being asked for more every year. It's time for the system to start providing some sort of methodology to review and measure performance, so that we can make better decisions on how money is spent and if we actually need to spend more. Maybe we do, maybe if we just provided a little more money, everything would magically work right. But it's time we had some good numbers to support that.
Every little incident?' Where does it say that we have to report 'every little incident?'
I mean, what's it going to be next? Abolishing the police in case they abuse their powers and become the Stasi?
This initiative is quite clearly aimed at fighting crime, not spying on left wing groups in case they say something the government disagrees with.
As I said, I will agree that the initial goal is good, but it is not a question of what it is supposed to be used for, but a question of what it will be used for. Government programs like this have a history of being abused. People don't remember the Stasi, the KGB, and other such groups because they were great works of fiction. Tell me, what guarantees can be provided that this will not happen? That this will not be used as a method of creating a massive informer network on undesirables?
I think there may also be a difference in the way we view this based on culture. I am guessing from your that you are from the UK. I don't mean this other than to try and sort out where our differences in opinion come from. For me (in the US) this type of program smacks of McCarthyism. It immediately conjures to mind the types of witch hunts which were conducted to root out Communism in the US. Given the US Governments recent history, I more concerned about the US Government holding people indefinitely, without charges, than I am the off chance that I will die in a terrorist attack. Quite frankly, the odds of me being killed in a terror attack are so small compared to the chance that I will be killed in an car accident that I'm willing to stick with the status quo. I know that I may sound like the odd man out, but the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York didn't change much for me. Yes, it confirmed that there are people in the world who hate me and would kill me just for being an American and supporting the US Government, so what?
Terrorism, and the War on Terror are just the latest red herrings to get people to give up their rights and ignore what their governments are doing. We don't need to become a society of informers, we do not need a surveillance society. In fact, that is the last thing we need. Free speech doesn't work when people begin to self-censor out of fear of reprisal. Without free speech, free thought cannot survive. It is far better to accept that a free society has inherent risks. There are people who will abuse those freedoms to commit crimes, possibly terrible ones. That is not a reason to set about destroying the roots of that freedom. It simply means that we must each keep our eyes open to possible threats and respond to them at the time they happen, not sit idly by while those crimes are committed and hope that some magical force will arrive and save us. They won't, they can't.
It is physically impossible for the police to be everywhere at once. They are a reactive force, and can only to react to a crime in progress either by that crime taking so long to commit that the police have plenty of time to show up, or by serendipity. The real first responders are the people who are on site when the crime happens. If they are unable or unwilling to do anything, the criminal is likely to be successful, with the hope that the police manage to catch them after the fact. Sure, at that point a video might be useful, but some basic police work at the crime scene should be able to find that much.
Again, I just don't see this type of tool as ultimately useful beyond creating a society of informers and as a further way to weed out undesirables.
As for your vigilante solution of getting people to carry weapons and take the law into their own hands, goodness knows where you're getting that straw man / slippery slope from. I'd be inclined to suspect that you're only kidding, but given some of the bizarre posts I've seen on here over the years from Americans concerning guns, I'm not sure what to think. (I refer to the serious support I got for a sarcastic proposal I made to
Despite my glib response, I agree that it could be useful. However, the worry is that it will go from a useful tool to a way to ferret out "undesirables". Once people become used to the idea that they can and should report on every little incident, it only takes a few incremental changes in the law and social mores before we go from a free society with an open reporting tool, to an oppressive one.
Yes, I realize that I am essentially invoking a slippery slope; I'm not saying that it must happen, only that it is a possibility. And that possibility is worrying. Part of the reason it is worrying is the history behind such pushes to have the whole society work as informers. The Stasi was not some mythical, made up group, it was a very concerted effort to oppress a populous at large. The KGB are not fictional, they are quite real and also relied on a nation of informers. In the US, McCarthyism demonstrated that even the US is not immune to this type of problem. Anytime we start talking about becoming a nation of informers, we need to look critically at why we are doing it, and if it is really a good idea.
Personally, I'd be much more comfortable with a push to convince people to get involved with taking care of their society. As in your example a couple levels up: Don't sit there and video tape someone getting the crap beaten out of them. Pull out your legally carried.45 and politely ask the thugs to leave off. If they seem resistant to the idea give them two warning shots to the chest and ask again.
required to stop listening even when they have an approved wiretap when it becomes apparent that the conversation isn't material to the matter at hand.
While I agree with the premise, I'm not sure this is as workable in a program which is collecting IP addresses and URLs as it is for a human being listening in. It is quite possible to be visiting an IP address which is hosting both normal and illicit sites at the same time. And URLs can be very deceiving; remember what whitehouse.com was for the longest time? What logical algorithm do you use to say, "this is involved, this is not". Unfortunately, the technology isn't really there. While the premise of limited scope is good, I think we have to let the warrant be for all URL's and IP addresses visited within a certain time frame, by a particular person.
Well, there's always the Judicial Branch, but your point is well taken.
The scary thing about this is that the same people who are now being labeled extremists, are the very same people who were attacking the Judicial Branch a couple years ago. I swear if I hear someone mutter, "judicial activism" or "legislating from the bench" one more time, I'm going to beat them with a wet, rolled up copy of the Federalist Papers. While the idea of Judicial Review is still somewhat controversial, they really are the last legal bulwark against unconstitutional laws.
The Fourth Estate is a sad joke and has been for sometime.
Amen, our news organizations have abandoned journalism for sensationalism. And the reason is simple, it makes more money. There is a small piece of me that holds out the hope that the internet and the ease of publishing information will help this a bit; but, the rest of me realizes that the cost, both in money and time, of doing good investigative journalism is way to high for the average person. I'm afraid that we're caught between the horns of the bull. One one hand people aren't willing to pay for good journalism, and aren't really willing to spend the time reading and digesting it either; on the other hand, no one is watching the government and it is growing into an even larger monster.
I think this is all part of the reason Linux isn't being adopted en masse. The ad is right, Linux is about having the freedom to do whatever you want to do with your computer, and having a whole boatload of choices, some good, some bad, on how to do what you want to do. The problem is that, for many non-technical users, they don't want that.
The GP post is a good example of this, his girlfriend doesn't care that she can setup four different kinds of DVR's, three different windowing managers, two types of shell, and a partridge in a pear tree. She just wants to stick her DVD in the slot and have it play. For her, this isn't a hard thing to do. It works in Windows; it works on her $50 Walmart brand DVD player; why doesn't it work on this magical Operating System of unicorn farts and pixie pee?
And yes, the reason that it doesn't work is that the DVD format is locked up behind laws. And that in order to circumvent those laws she is going to have to jump through a bunch of hoops. This isn't going to factor in positively into her decision to use Linux.
Sure, the freedom of Linux is wonderful, for those people who are willing to deal with the other side of that coin, responsibility. With Linux, you are free to do whatever you want to do; the problem is that you are probably going to be the person who has to do it. And unless someone else has either already blazed a path and made it easy on you, you are probably looking at a rough time. Even then, you may still be in for a rough time of it.
I don't mean any of this as a knock on Linux, it's great for a server OS replacement. On the desktop though, until we see a very easy, very plug and play, version; I don't see it going anywhere. Sure, everyone tells you they want choice. They don't. They want a couple, probably no more than three, cookie cutter, drop in and go, fire and forget, type solutions. They don't want to learn about filesystems, they don't care what a kernel is and what it does, they don't even really care what a driver is, nor why it shouldn't be running in kernel mode. And god help the poor fool who tells them that they should go get the source.
Er, do you even know how email works? With the Post Office there is a central authority through whom all mail moves. Charging delivery fees is easy because that central authority can simply refuse to deliver if the fee is not paid. Email does not work this way.
If I send you an email, my server contacts your server directly, yes it passes over the ISP's wires, and they may be able to figure out that it's an email, but this is far from certain. At best, they could monitor and charge for all traffic on port 25. Even this plan has holes in it which you could fly a planet through.
The first problem is that people won't want to start paying for email. Assuming we get around that by telling them tough shit, live with it; work will start immediately on work arounds. Let's face it, there are a lot of smart people out there who are willing to break such a system, just to save a few bucks. So, I give it about two days before someone releases a communications system which circumvents port 25 monitoring.
To show how simple such a workaround would be: On an email server, I have a web server running as well. When someone wants to send me an email, they connect to the webserver and receive a ticket. That ticket has a port number and a random password. Once a ticket has been claimed once, the webserver generates a new one. Once the sender has a ticket they connect to the receiving server on the specified port send the specified password and then send their email. Voila, port 25 monitoring circumvented. While I'm sure that this scheme has lots of problems, I doubt that they are insurmountable and this was just the circumvention method I thought up in a few minutes, there will be thousands of people far smarter than me with days and days to come up with something better.
The second problem is the ever popular asshat who will fuck with people just because he can. If the charge is applied based on traffic on port 25, I won't even give it a day before we see the first virus in the wild which just spews out data on port 25. Hell, it would almost be funny to see a virus which tries to steal one's identity and then phones home on port 25, just for that extra little, "fuck you."
Sorry, but charging for email is a stillborn solution. It's unworkable. It requires either a major overhaul of how email works (for example, some sort of email distribution centralization, which I am sure various police states would love) or that we put legislation in place to kill innovation.
How is a scientist calling theological matters voodoo and different then preacher calling evolution BS?
Well, let's see, the theory of evolution has been tested and revised, tested and revised and tested and revised for a good while now. The scientists are willing to accept that they might be wrong and that they may need to re-work their theory based on new evidence.
The preacher is basing his claims on a several thousand year old book written by bronze age people who were doing well to not die of dysentery. Their understanding of the world was necessarily limited. When new evidence comes up which would invalidate part of that book, the preacher does one of two things:
1) Sticks his fingers in his ears and says, "la la la la".
2) Admits that the book is probably just metaphor and allegory, and that there really is no intersection between science and religion.
The problem is that, in the US, way too many religious nut-balls do number 1, and cannot conceive that their bronze age writer might not have had the picture exactly right. The folks who do number 2 are not a problem.
Both science and religion/faith/whatever serve a purpose in peoples lives. Why be so hostile.
Why be so hostile, good question. There should not be a problem with both existing peacefully side by side. The problem is that the religious nut-balls are trying to force their religion into science classes. Creationism, ID, whatever you what to call it, does not belong in a science class. Yet, here we are again with the nut-balls trying to force it in.
How is having confidence in an unproven scientific theory any different that having faith in god?
Let's see, on one side you have mountains of physical evidence and actual testable hypotheses on the other you have the ravings of half-starved people wandering around in a desert eating who knows what and hoping to find enlightenment. Sure, it's the same thing. Unproven does not mean untested, it does not mean that there is no evidence for it, it just means that we cannot say with absolute 100% certainty that "this is how it happened". It means that, we may have a few of the details out of place. But, with all of the research and testing which has gone into it, it's a hell of a lot closer to accurate than the ramblings of some bronze age idiot dying of thirst in a desert.
How is the scientific any different than a religious ritual?
Oh, I don't know, it might have something to do with the whole rigorous testing of theories and validating them based on actual physical evidence. Compared to made up mumbo-jumbo which is done because some person said so and then wrote it down.
Hell, if that's all it takes to create new rituals I have a new religious ritual for ya, Suck my Dick Sundays: Every Sunday you are to suck my dick. It is the right thing to do because God said so. And we know he said so because I wrote it down. So, see you next Sunday.
Slashdot Mirror
You've never bought a new car I take it? The sticker price is about the same level of scam. The dealership is going to tack on tax (of course), documentation fee, licensing fess, and any other fee they think they can get away with. Granted, since a car purchase is still seen as negotiable, those fees are also negotiable (at least who pays them is) so it's a bit easier to deal with. However, what the phone companies are doing isn't all that new.
But hey, at least we are no longer paying a tax to support the Spanish American War.
Add another me too for Sharepoint.
From the initial question, I'd guess that just WSS3 will get the job done and it's free. One important piece of this though is: plan your deployment. Figure out what type of site structure you plan to use before you implement anything. Sharepoint can be a wonderful tool, but if you just jump into it and let it grow organically you will end up hating it and yourself. And trying to monkey around with the site structure after the fact can be trouble. Oh and, get familiar with ASP.NET master pages and what they do and how they work. You will be using them in WSS, and if you go into it without care you can trash your entire site fast.
Do you really think it's going to be that different? Right now "cloud computing" is in that wonderful conceptual stage where everything is puppy dogs and roses. Unfortunately, those puppy dogs will eventually grow up and chew up the furniture and shit everywhere; and the roses will die and the thorns are going to stick you when you try to fix them. Every technology which comes along is supposed to make things easier, better, more secure and do the dishes. None of it does. Sure, it may be better than what we have now, then again, maybe not.
.NET 2.0 with this app, .NET 3.0 with this app, and Will's API Really Good At Running Bob's Lines (WARGARBL) on this other app." which can make it fun. Of course, it is yet another layer of complexity to fail and troubleshoot, but at least I can look at the whole server-client setup.
You try, getting three different clients working against a database from the same vendor working properly. They all crave different versions of dotnet, java or whatnot and any new version of the client software demands countless hours of testing just about every possible combination of apps.
So, instead I get three different browsers, inside each of which I am supposed to run three different versions of a database client, and probably against a database I no longer have any real control of. Oh, and some jerk-off somewhere in the organization probably wants to run the whole thing on a different OS, because you will still need some sort of local OS to boot the damn thing. Congratulations, you've now added yet another layer of complexity to fail and troubleshoot. Thank you, no.
If anything, what you are after is virtualized applications, the previous puppy-dogs and roses technology. At the very least you, as the admin, still have control of the system end to end, and it really does decouple the applications from the instance of the OS. It still has it's own host of issues, such as, "I need
Upgrades are pure nightmare. Couple this with locked down desktops, profiles that has to be managed and policies that needs hard testing before you alter a single setting.
If you're worried enough about security that you go through unit testing for every profile change, why in the world would you trust your data to an untrusted network? It's one thing to run an internal terminal server with thin clients, but that isn't what Google, Microsoft, et al. are after. They want to run the terminal server, file server, and everything else for you. And all of your work, data and information will be secured on the internet through an encrypted pipe. Sure, it'll probably keep out the third party attacks, right until someone at Microsoft or Google decides to fuck everyone. And, of course, the contract you will sign for their services will indemnify them against lawsuits. And they'll probably still foist onto you the job of creating your own profiles, which will still need just as much work to secure.
Getting rid of all those problems alone would be worth serious money for any company.
Yes it is, and it sounds like they are spending the money in the right place to make those problems go away. That spending is on you. If you care enough to do the work you have outlined above as an admin, and are still looking for ways to make it better, then you are earning your paycheck.
With an alt root everyone would be worse off.
Really, how so? In the end, I doubt the US is really going to ever willingly give up control of the root servers. There just isn't a reason for the US Government to want to do so. By creating an alt root, another organization, be it the UN, EU, or whoever can gain control whether or not the US Government wants them too.
Of course, this assumes that ICANN's management of them either gets so bad, or the other version gets so good, that people are compelled to change. Though, one way this could happen is if the EU were to create its own DNS root servers and then mandate that all EU Zone member states require their ISP's to use them.
But yes, I do realize it's far easier to say, "you did a great job, now hand it over" than to compete.
I think he missed on the name. And, unlike me, he didn't take the time to JFGI before he shot his mouth off. He was trying to point at OpenNIC rather than OpenDNS.
The really funny thing about this whole DNS server argument is that it is a trivial technical problem to setup a DNS server. If the UN and/or any other organization was really so inclined they could have their own root DNS servers running in the time it takes me to drink my morning coffee (running well might take a bit longer). From there, they just have to convince ISP's to switch their pointers.
Since the impetus for the US DoC giving up control seems to be be from EU nations, I would suggest that the EU sets up its own DNS root servers, and convinces the ISPs within the EU economic zone to use these alternative root servers, with maybe a forwarder to or mirror of the US controlled root servers, just to make things a bit more seamless. At this point, the EU has all the control it wants, and the US has no choice in the matter.
Funny thing about the US court system, it tends to self correct: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/01/21/kentucky_land_grab_reversed
Perhaps the funniest bit about your post is that the link to the article I'm citing was found in the "Related Articles" section of the article you pointed to. But, don't let reality stand in the way of a swipe!
You're partly right, the US doesn't own the internet. The US does, however, own the DNS servers which most people on the internet choose to rely on. Why does the US own them, well it was DARPA who went through the initial trouble to get the whole thing running and then it worked it's way over to the hands of the US Department of Commerce who contracted ICANN to run the whole thing.
Now, why should the USDOC hand them off? If other countries are really that worried about the US using them as some sort of club, it's actually pretty easy to setup alternative DNS servers. As a matter of fact, if you don't like ICANN's handling of DNS, you can always turn to an alt root. To be blunt, if the UN is really that hot to run DNS on the internet, there is nothing stopping them from setting up a set of UN alt roots and offering them to the world as an alternative to ICANN. The competition between ICANN and the UN would probably be good overall. But then, there I go with the boorish US, let the free market decide mantra.
Having the pleasure of watching my niece (turning 4 this year) interact with other children, I have to agree wholeheartedly. She is a little terror. If given half a chance, she will grab things from other children, and wouldn't share with others unless forced. I would love to blame the parents, but by everything I see her parents are on her constantly about sharing and have been since an early age. She isn't selfish by training, but by nature.
If anything, I think the GP had it exactly backwards: children are selfish by nature, it's not until they are taught to share and get along that they do so.
I can't help but feel that this is just a marketing ploy for the profession that will encourage more FDA approved "happy pills" and psychiatrists visits.
I think I've read this book before...Ah yes, A Brave New World.
Encouraging people to fight back in this game is stupid. All you do is make people risk their lives needlessly. If they don't fight, everyone survives and the authorities can catch the criminals on safer ground. If you do fight, you risk having a gun fired in a crowded, pressurised cylinder 20,000 feet up.
I have to disagree with you here, the reason to fight back at this point was to make the risk/reward assumption of hijacking not worth the effort. When the people on the plane don't fight they are putting their lives and well being in the hands of people who have already shown a disregard for those people. And "everyone survives" is not true, granted the majority tend to, but this didn't stop the hijackers from killing people. Additionally, this demonstrates to potential hijackers that this is a viable method of extortion and encourages more hijackings.
By comparision, with the current "fight back" mentality, hijacking is much harder and not as useful as a tool for extortion. We have had plenty of stories of people doing stupid stuff on planes not accomplishing much because the passengers weren't going to be victims anymore.
As for having guns fired in a crowded pressurized cylinder at 20,000 feet, I don't see that as that as particularly scary. First and foremost, this myth of lawful gun owners firing willy-nilly and shooting bystanders just doesn't happen. It's a bullshit canard used by anti-gun activists. The data just doesn't support it. Seriously, go try and find stories of lawful permit holders shooting bystanders while stopping a crime in progress. I'll wait.
Second, a bullet hole in a passenger plane at 20,000 feet (or higher even) is not really a cause for concern. Despite what Hollywood tells you, the plane will not fall out of the air, it will not explosively decompress, in fact it's decompression will be rather slow. At worst, the pilot will get a light on his console telling him that there is a loss of pressure, he will put his mask on, descend below 10,000 feet, declare an emergency and land at the nearest airfield which will handle his aircraft. And the passengers might have to put their masks on too. Even a dozen bullet holes are not going to cause a problem. Here, read about Aloha Flight 243 and consider for a moment that the aircraft involved lost the entirety of it's roof, actually did suffer explosive decompression, and the pilot still landed the airplane. The only loss of life was one flight attendant who was standing in the wrong place at the wrong time.
As a free citizen, you are the first response to a crime as it happens. You have the choice to get involved and stop it, or you can sit by and encourage criminals by making it seem like they won't face resistance. That choice has been around a lot longer than the last 8 years. It's sad that the US Government seems to prefer encouraging criminals, but we the citizens need to realize that it's not helping anyone to stand idly by and let criminals take over our society. And the government is certainly doing us no favors by trying to take away from us the tools to do so.
I'll have to see if I can dig up a subbed version of that movie. Though, given the popularity of the cop out for revenge story in the US, I have a feeling that the US has a similar, scary, view of how criminals should be dealt with. While I am an advocate of citizens being involved in stopping crime while it is happening, vigilantism and cops who cross the line between investigating crimes or apprehending criminals and meting out punishment, scare me.
South America has a lot to complain since Monroe doctrine.
Yes, yes it does. The original stated idea of the Monroe Doctrine was well enough, prevent further expansion of European Colonies in the Americas. Of course, the fact that it was done so that the US could eventually seek it's manifest destiny and expand to encompass all of the North American continent, and probably the South American Continent as well, has led to innumerable problems. Add to that our current War on (some) Drugs and the problems it has created for everyone, and it's no wonder that the US is generally hated throughout Central and South America.
I'd like to say that we're trying to change things here, but I don't think that it's really true. There are some of us who would like to become a bit less involved in world affairs, as we should not be acting like some World Police Force. International cooperation is all fine and good, but we've been far too involved in the affairs of other countries. Unfortunately, with the rise of Evangelicalism and the self righteous attitude which comes along with it, the US seems to be on track to be even more interventionist in the future.
I agree with you for the most part. I'm a little concerned with the idea that not attacking hijackers by default was a bad idea.
Until recently, hijackers did not hijack in order to blow up buildings and commit suicide. Hijackers in the 1980s were very much looking to make a point. You *could* die or be wounded in a hijacking, but for the most part, you would live through it. They might be willing to die for their cause, but it wasn't a foregone conclusion.
This seems to be a shirking of the responsibilities of a free citizen. It's important to keep in mind that The Authorities cannot possibly protect everyone, it's just a flat physical impossibility. There will never be a cop everywhere at once. Even with a surveillance state the best that will happen is that there will be evidence of a crime after the fact. And this seems to be something we have lost in our country, the understanding that the police are a reactionary force, they do not prevent crime, the do not stop crime, unless by serendipity. The police exist to investigate crimes after they have happened, collect evidence and hand it off to the State to seek redress for the aggrieved.
The only people whom you can guarantee will be at the scene of a crime, when it happens, are the criminal, and the victim (theft by stealth not withstanding). This means that, as a free citizen, the victim is the first responder. It is up to the citizen to protect himself and his society. Certainly, there is a value judgment to be made, if the criminal has the drop on you, give up your wallet; dieing doesn't help anyone. On the other hand, if you have a reasonable chance of stopping the crime in progress, or it's a crime in which you or others are going to die anyway, you should be fighting. Moreover, we have fallen into the bystander mentality, we love to stand around in groups and watch crimes happen, but not get involved; because, we might get hurt. That needs to stop, the only people that is empowering are the criminals.
Should people have fought on planes before? Absolutely, I don't care how well trained a couple of hijackers are, against several hundred people, from all sides, they will lose. Flight 93 was doomed, in part, by the "be a victim" mentality. The people started fighting far too late, the hijackers were already in control of the aircraft. Were the scenario to go more along the lines of the hijackers starting trouble, and the people on the plane immediately giving them a beat-down (or maybe even shooting them) the plane would be far less likely to crash as the pilots will always be in control of the aircraft.
I've recently read 'The Quiet American' [wikipedia.org], which further investigates this. As I read it, it seems that Graham Greene thought that Americans can't imagine how other people could want something different from what they have, and how could they think different from what they, Americans, think. I don't know if it's true, but it's a very interesting POV.
Don't believe everything you read. I'll agree that this probably pegs plenty of Americans correctly enough, but I think there is still a large contingent of us which really just don't care what other people think or want. This probably comes off as either arrogance or ignorance or both, but I doubt that there are a lot of Americans running around bemoaning that others aren't like us. Unfortunately, the type of people who do make a big deal out of it are usually the narcissistic types who are going to be loudest about it.
Myself for example, I realize that people in other countries think and act differently, and then I quit navel gazing and go about living my own life. Sure, I run across it every now and again, but it's not something which enters my consciousness all that much, nor does it bother me. Sure, I find it odd, but I suspect that they have just been shaped to think the way they do by the experiences they have had in life, just like me. And that is, perhaps, one thing which maybe should come from your reading, the pot is just as black as the kettle. Sure, I don't really understand how you think, or why you think that way. I can't, I haven't had your life experiences. But, I doubt you truly understand how I think or why I think the way I do; you haven't had my life experiences. The best we can do is try to explain our point of view to each other, using something as imperfect as language, and accept that each other is not insane, just different.
As far as I know, Apache doesn't have anything like WebDAV directly, there might be all kinds of third party applications which create a similar service, but then they probably have their own host of issues.
To be honest, this falls well within the "meh" category of problems. If you have WebDAV running, either you chose to turn it on for very specific reasons, and hopefully made an informed decision before you did so; or, you are running a decade old version of IIS on a decade old operating system and never changed the defaults.
An absolutist take on the needs of the many outweigh the need of the few is a minefield of sticky moral problems. At some point, we need to say that the individual's needs are important enough that the many can go screw itself. In this case, the fact that an individual is going to be killed warrants some expenditure of resources, even if it means that a few more people might face the same situation at a later date.
As an example, by harvesting your organs we could probably save the lives of four or five people who need transplants of various bits, and improve the lives of a few who could use healthy organs to improve their quality of life. So it comes down to your life versus the lives of four people, plus an improvement in the quality of one or two other lives. Hey, needs of the many...
I doubt that FF/ABP are reporting your use of ABP; however, figuring it out would be pretty easy with good logs.
Every time you visit a website, your request for their content is logged, usually on a per item basis. At the same time, your browser sends to the webserver a string identifying it (Your User Agent). So, the server knows you are running Firefox, and content can be tailored to your browser, so that things look right on your browser. If this scares you, you might look into User Agent Switcher.
Now, assuming that your browser requested the content of a page, but didn't request the ads which are supposed to come with it, one can assume that you are running AdBlock or something similar. Sure, it's not 100% accurate, but its good enough for a rough guess of usage.
I honestly have no clue if there are applications out there already to do this type of analysis (I would be surprised if there weren't) but it seems like a fairly trivial problem to solve with good enough accuracy.
The US spends approximately 3.4% of its GDP on public primary and secondary education
I've heard numbers like this a few times, and was just wondering where it comes from. At the risk of doing a [citation needed] type post, would you mind providing a link to where you are getting this number? I'll buy that it might be the US Federal Government input into education funding, but that is very misleading. Most of the US Education spending is done at the State level.
Since I was willing to JFGI, it seems your claim is either out of date or downright wrong. The wikipedia page on Government Spending puts the Percent GDP spent on Education at 6%. Their citation comes from usgovernmentspending.com which, puts total government spending in 2006 on education at $786.8 Billion, or about 5.88% of the 2006 GDP (13.06 Trillion, number from Google). That site claims to have aggregated the data from the US Federal GPO report and US Census data. Quite frankly, I'm not willing to chase the numbers back that far and am willing to accept the aggregator's claim, unless a problem can be demonstrated.
In short, the idea that US spending on education is lacking is a myth. Yes, Federal spending on education is lacking, that is because education is not a Federal function, its a State function.
The US also has one of the worst student to teacher ratios in the world, averaging out to 16, but in lower income schools averaging over 35.
Ok, I found the first number you mentioned in the PDF you linked to presented as:
In 1999, the United States had the second-lowest student/teacher ratio of the countries presented in primary education - 16 students per teacher. [http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2003/2003026.pdf page 28 (44 according to Adobe reader)]
That's a good thing. The lower the student to teacher ratio, the fewer students each teacher has to deal with and the more time which they can devote to each student. As for the lower income number, you're gonna have to give me a page number, I went through the PDF trying to find it and came up empty.
In all, I'm not trying to say we couldn't do more as a country, but it bugs the hell out of me to hear people claim that we are failing our students, when it seems like we are putting quite a bit of money into the system already. While I do think that the No Child Left Behind act may have missed the mark, we do need to start finding ways of getting useful metrics out of the education system. At just shy of 6% of our GDP, and close to 17% of our total government expenditures (assuming the Wikipedia numbers), we're putting a lot of money into it, and yet we're being asked for more every year. It's time for the system to start providing some sort of methodology to review and measure performance, so that we can make better decisions on how money is spent and if we actually need to spend more. Maybe we do, maybe if we just provided a little more money, everything would magically work right. But it's time we had some good numbers to support that.
Do you really want to see a 3d money shot? Maybe have some misters in the theater too, so you can really get into it.
Every little incident?' Where does it say that we have to report 'every little incident?'
I mean, what's it going to be next? Abolishing the police in case they abuse their powers and become the Stasi?
This initiative is quite clearly aimed at fighting crime, not spying on left wing groups in case they say something the government disagrees with.
As I said, I will agree that the initial goal is good, but it is not a question of what it is supposed to be used for, but a question of what it will be used for. Government programs like this have a history of being abused. People don't remember the Stasi, the KGB, and other such groups because they were great works of fiction. Tell me, what guarantees can be provided that this will not happen? That this will not be used as a method of creating a massive informer network on undesirables?
I think there may also be a difference in the way we view this based on culture. I am guessing from your that you are from the UK. I don't mean this other than to try and sort out where our differences in opinion come from. For me (in the US) this type of program smacks of McCarthyism. It immediately conjures to mind the types of witch hunts which were conducted to root out Communism in the US. Given the US Governments recent history, I more concerned about the US Government holding people indefinitely, without charges, than I am the off chance that I will die in a terrorist attack. Quite frankly, the odds of me being killed in a terror attack are so small compared to the chance that I will be killed in an car accident that I'm willing to stick with the status quo. I know that I may sound like the odd man out, but the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York didn't change much for me. Yes, it confirmed that there are people in the world who hate me and would kill me just for being an American and supporting the US Government, so what?
Terrorism, and the War on Terror are just the latest red herrings to get people to give up their rights and ignore what their governments are doing. We don't need to become a society of informers, we do not need a surveillance society. In fact, that is the last thing we need. Free speech doesn't work when people begin to self-censor out of fear of reprisal. Without free speech, free thought cannot survive. It is far better to accept that a free society has inherent risks. There are people who will abuse those freedoms to commit crimes, possibly terrible ones. That is not a reason to set about destroying the roots of that freedom. It simply means that we must each keep our eyes open to possible threats and respond to them at the time they happen, not sit idly by while those crimes are committed and hope that some magical force will arrive and save us. They won't, they can't.
It is physically impossible for the police to be everywhere at once. They are a reactive force, and can only to react to a crime in progress either by that crime taking so long to commit that the police have plenty of time to show up, or by serendipity. The real first responders are the people who are on site when the crime happens. If they are unable or unwilling to do anything, the criminal is likely to be successful, with the hope that the police manage to catch them after the fact. Sure, at that point a video might be useful, but some basic police work at the crime scene should be able to find that much.
Again, I just don't see this type of tool as ultimately useful beyond creating a society of informers and as a further way to weed out undesirables.
As for your vigilante solution of getting people to carry weapons and take the law into their own hands, goodness knows where you're getting that straw man / slippery slope from. I'd be inclined to suspect that you're only kidding, but given some of the bizarre posts I've seen on here over the years from Americans concerning guns, I'm not sure what to think. (I refer to the serious support I got for a sarcastic proposal I made to
Despite my glib response, I agree that it could be useful. However, the worry is that it will go from a useful tool to a way to ferret out "undesirables". Once people become used to the idea that they can and should report on every little incident, it only takes a few incremental changes in the law and social mores before we go from a free society with an open reporting tool, to an oppressive one.
.45 and politely ask the thugs to leave off. If they seem resistant to the idea give them two warning shots to the chest and ask again.
Yes, I realize that I am essentially invoking a slippery slope; I'm not saying that it must happen, only that it is a possibility. And that possibility is worrying. Part of the reason it is worrying is the history behind such pushes to have the whole society work as informers. The Stasi was not some mythical, made up group, it was a very concerted effort to oppress a populous at large. The KGB are not fictional, they are quite real and also relied on a nation of informers. In the US, McCarthyism demonstrated that even the US is not immune to this type of problem. Anytime we start talking about becoming a nation of informers, we need to look critically at why we are doing it, and if it is really a good idea.
Personally, I'd be much more comfortable with a push to convince people to get involved with taking care of their society. As in your example a couple levels up: Don't sit there and video tape someone getting the crap beaten out of them. Pull out your legally carried
The Ministerium fur Staatssicherheit nods approvingly.
required to stop listening even when they have an approved wiretap when it becomes apparent that the conversation isn't material to the matter at hand.
While I agree with the premise, I'm not sure this is as workable in a program which is collecting IP addresses and URLs as it is for a human being listening in. It is quite possible to be visiting an IP address which is hosting both normal and illicit sites at the same time. And URLs can be very deceiving; remember what whitehouse.com was for the longest time? What logical algorithm do you use to say, "this is involved, this is not". Unfortunately, the technology isn't really there. While the premise of limited scope is good, I think we have to let the warrant be for all URL's and IP addresses visited within a certain time frame, by a particular person.
Well, there's always the Judicial Branch, but your point is well taken.
The scary thing about this is that the same people who are now being labeled extremists, are the very same people who were attacking the Judicial Branch a couple years ago. I swear if I hear someone mutter, "judicial activism" or "legislating from the bench" one more time, I'm going to beat them with a wet, rolled up copy of the Federalist Papers. While the idea of Judicial Review is still somewhat controversial, they really are the last legal bulwark against unconstitutional laws.
The Fourth Estate is a sad joke and has been for sometime.
Amen, our news organizations have abandoned journalism for sensationalism. And the reason is simple, it makes more money. There is a small piece of me that holds out the hope that the internet and the ease of publishing information will help this a bit; but, the rest of me realizes that the cost, both in money and time, of doing good investigative journalism is way to high for the average person. I'm afraid that we're caught between the horns of the bull. One one hand people aren't willing to pay for good journalism, and aren't really willing to spend the time reading and digesting it either; on the other hand, no one is watching the government and it is growing into an even larger monster.
I think this is all part of the reason Linux isn't being adopted en masse. The ad is right, Linux is about having the freedom to do whatever you want to do with your computer, and having a whole boatload of choices, some good, some bad, on how to do what you want to do. The problem is that, for many non-technical users, they don't want that.
The GP post is a good example of this, his girlfriend doesn't care that she can setup four different kinds of DVR's, three different windowing managers, two types of shell, and a partridge in a pear tree. She just wants to stick her DVD in the slot and have it play. For her, this isn't a hard thing to do. It works in Windows; it works on her $50 Walmart brand DVD player; why doesn't it work on this magical Operating System of unicorn farts and pixie pee?
And yes, the reason that it doesn't work is that the DVD format is locked up behind laws. And that in order to circumvent those laws she is going to have to jump through a bunch of hoops. This isn't going to factor in positively into her decision to use Linux.
Sure, the freedom of Linux is wonderful, for those people who are willing to deal with the other side of that coin, responsibility. With Linux, you are free to do whatever you want to do; the problem is that you are probably going to be the person who has to do it. And unless someone else has either already blazed a path and made it easy on you, you are probably looking at a rough time. Even then, you may still be in for a rough time of it.
I don't mean any of this as a knock on Linux, it's great for a server OS replacement. On the desktop though, until we see a very easy, very plug and play, version; I don't see it going anywhere. Sure, everyone tells you they want choice. They don't. They want a couple, probably no more than three, cookie cutter, drop in and go, fire and forget, type solutions. They don't want to learn about filesystems, they don't care what a kernel is and what it does, they don't even really care what a driver is, nor why it shouldn't be running in kernel mode. And god help the poor fool who tells them that they should go get the source.
Er, do you even know how email works? With the Post Office there is a central authority through whom all mail moves. Charging delivery fees is easy because that central authority can simply refuse to deliver if the fee is not paid. Email does not work this way.
If I send you an email, my server contacts your server directly, yes it passes over the ISP's wires, and they may be able to figure out that it's an email, but this is far from certain. At best, they could monitor and charge for all traffic on port 25. Even this plan has holes in it which you could fly a planet through.
The first problem is that people won't want to start paying for email. Assuming we get around that by telling them tough shit, live with it; work will start immediately on work arounds. Let's face it, there are a lot of smart people out there who are willing to break such a system, just to save a few bucks. So, I give it about two days before someone releases a communications system which circumvents port 25 monitoring.
To show how simple such a workaround would be: On an email server, I have a web server running as well. When someone wants to send me an email, they connect to the webserver and receive a ticket. That ticket has a port number and a random password. Once a ticket has been claimed once, the webserver generates a new one. Once the sender has a ticket they connect to the receiving server on the specified port send the specified password and then send their email. Voila, port 25 monitoring circumvented. While I'm sure that this scheme has lots of problems, I doubt that they are insurmountable and this was just the circumvention method I thought up in a few minutes, there will be thousands of people far smarter than me with days and days to come up with something better.
The second problem is the ever popular asshat who will fuck with people just because he can. If the charge is applied based on traffic on port 25, I won't even give it a day before we see the first virus in the wild which just spews out data on port 25. Hell, it would almost be funny to see a virus which tries to steal one's identity and then phones home on port 25, just for that extra little, "fuck you."
Sorry, but charging for email is a stillborn solution. It's unworkable. It requires either a major overhaul of how email works (for example, some sort of email distribution centralization, which I am sure various police states would love) or that we put legislation in place to kill innovation.
How is a scientist calling theological matters voodoo and different then preacher calling evolution BS?
Well, let's see, the theory of evolution has been tested and revised, tested and revised and tested and revised for a good while now. The scientists are willing to accept that they might be wrong and that they may need to re-work their theory based on new evidence.
The preacher is basing his claims on a several thousand year old book written by bronze age people who were doing well to not die of dysentery. Their understanding of the world was necessarily limited. When new evidence comes up which would invalidate part of that book, the preacher does one of two things:
1) Sticks his fingers in his ears and says, "la la la la".
2) Admits that the book is probably just metaphor and allegory, and that there really is no intersection between science and religion.
The problem is that, in the US, way too many religious nut-balls do number 1, and cannot conceive that their bronze age writer might not have had the picture exactly right. The folks who do number 2 are not a problem.
Both science and religion/faith/whatever serve a purpose in peoples lives. Why be so hostile.
Why be so hostile, good question. There should not be a problem with both existing peacefully side by side. The problem is that the religious nut-balls are trying to force their religion into science classes. Creationism, ID, whatever you what to call it, does not belong in a science class. Yet, here we are again with the nut-balls trying to force it in.
How is having confidence in an unproven scientific theory any different that having faith in god?
Let's see, on one side you have mountains of physical evidence and actual testable hypotheses on the other you have the ravings of half-starved people wandering around in a desert eating who knows what and hoping to find enlightenment. Sure, it's the same thing. Unproven does not mean untested, it does not mean that there is no evidence for it, it just means that we cannot say with absolute 100% certainty that "this is how it happened". It means that, we may have a few of the details out of place. But, with all of the research and testing which has gone into it, it's a hell of a lot closer to accurate than the ramblings of some bronze age idiot dying of thirst in a desert.
How is the scientific any different than a religious ritual?
Oh, I don't know, it might have something to do with the whole rigorous testing of theories and validating them based on actual physical evidence. Compared to made up mumbo-jumbo which is done because some person said so and then wrote it down.
Hell, if that's all it takes to create new rituals I have a new religious ritual for ya, Suck my Dick Sundays: Every Sunday you are to suck my dick. It is the right thing to do because God said so. And we know he said so because I wrote it down. So, see you next Sunday.