You know, you can use IMAP and set your MUA to cache all messages and attachments locally. Virtually every IMAP client I've ever used has had this option (okay, a few mobile phones excepted). Apple Mail and Thunderbird definitely do. If you use this, you get almost all the advantages of POP -- keeping local copies -- while also being able to easily use multiple clients without worrying about sync issues.
I have several computers connected to the same GMail mailbox via IMAP. One of them connects and caches everything (bodies and attachments), the others only download on command. This gives me a local backup of every message that comes in (via the cached copy of Gmail's "All Mail" folder) but gets all the benefits of IMAP otherwise.
What's preventing a service that does encryption/decryption on the client side? Other than the lack of desire from the providers I mean.
I think there are several issues, and lack of interest from providers is actually among the least of them. Lack of interest from users is probably the biggest issue. Many people just don't care that much about the privacy of their data -- they either honestly don't care who sees their stuff, or don't care enough to be willing to expend any effort or time preventing it. Adding a well-designed encryption feature to a backup service would add complexity and expense, and if people aren't willing to pay for that (i.e. they don't care), it's not going to get added.
Some enterprise backup systems do offer encryption (and also offer non-cloud-based backup, for companies that want to keep everything on-site) so it's not as though it's never been done. You just don't see it on the consumer level that often, because consumers don't care enough about privacy to pay for it.
Also, a well-designed encryption system -- where the data was effectively lost if the user misplaced or lost their decryption key -- would probably lead to a lot of customer-service problems. Inevitably, users would upload data, not make a backup of the key (or make a backup and then lose it, or not store it off-site, or whatever), and then get upset when they couldn't recover their data from the backup service that they paid for. I've dealt with this sort of thing personally before; many users just don't get encryption. They find it inconceivable that you, as the god-like administrator, can't just open up an encrypted file on command when they lose their password. (I've had people literally accuse me of plotting against them or being insubordinate for not opening their encrypted files for them.)
So given that it would add complexity to the implementation to do right, isn't something that people are likely to pay extra for, and is likely to cause a lot of problems and expense down the road, it's not surprising that most online backup services either don't offer encryption or don't turn it on by default if they do. It's easy for knowledgeable users to add encryption to files before uploading them; just letting them do that is a lot easier than trying to explain to Aunt Millie why her vacation photos are gone because she wrote down her password on a piece of paper that was lost in the fire that destroyed her computer.
This is a tractable problem if you use encryption and apply it to the files before they leave your system. Obviously you need to back up your encryption key via some other method, but that's not hard (USB keychain drives and solid-state memory cards are all good for this purpose, and can be easily stashed away in safe locations).
The real problem with these online-storage services is lack of transparency. You rarely get much insight into how they're operated, and even then you typically only have their own assurances that they're following whatever procedure they describe to you. E.g., they claim to have a great datacenter with all sorts of redundancy, and back everything up to tape twice a week... but you don't really know that for sure. They could just have a bunch of striped Maxtor hard drives stuffed into a machine in an office closet.
Backup "services" that don't actually manage their own storage operations are even worse; they may themselves not really even know, or have any insight into besides marketing literature, about the actual operations on the hardware end. They're just buying storage and transfer from something like Amazon S3 or Nirvanix and then reselling it. Although they have reason to make everything sound as secure as possible, they may not have any actual control over it. If the upstream provider goes out of business, or gets wiped out by a hurricane / flood / plague of locusts, you're S.O.L.
The security issue is, on the whole, one of the more straightforward problems to solve. The transparency of the actual storage-system operations seems harder.
So what I want to know is why is the government so inefficient that it can't provide public transportation services out of the tax revenue it collects and needs to resort to collecting fares?
Virtually all cities have fare-collecting public transport systems because that's the only way taxpayers are willing to pay for them.
Almost inevitably if you tried to switch to fully tax-funded transportation, you'd encounter a lot of resistance from people who didn't feel like they were getting a good deal. I.e., they pay taxes but don't use the system, or the system doesn't run near where they live, or they use it less than average but pay more taxes than average, or any number of other reasons. Alienate large sections of the voting public like that, and you'll be wiped out in the very next election. Not a good recipe for success if you're trying to pull off a large-scale, long-term infrastructure development project.
As a compromise, most public transportation systems have some funding coming from taxes (generally based on the argument that the presence of the transportation system increases property values and thus justifies the tax), and some directly from the users of the system via fares.
Also, because historically many public transportation systems were private enterprises attempting to turn a profit from fare collection, people have come to expect fares when they step onto a bus or train. It wouldn't make much sense to eliminate that source of funding -- which people seem mostly okay with -- in favor of raising taxes, which people tend to really hate and frequently oppose vigorously.
You don't even need to own the plane; a chartered business jet would make one hell of a mess, particularly if it were loaded full of explosives.
But you don't see the TSA goons rectal-probing people who fly GenAv, because that's how people with money, and therefore power, travel. They stick to what's safe: harassing people whose "pull" within the system is limited to whining to their member of Congress and voting, neither of which have nearly the same effect as a large quantity of cash.
Greater than all those sins, I think, is one you can lay squarely on Lyndon Johnson's doorstep: raiding the Social Security 'Trust Fund' and moving it to the general fund where it could be piddled away. (Part of the Social Security Act of 1965.)
Not that Social Security was ever a great idea (well, almost; in its very original incarnation, it was supposed to be PAYGO and accounts were supposed to be individualized -- this was how FDR sold the program); it's a Ponzi scheme that's premised on never-ending economic and population growth, which is pretty obviously unsustainable in the long run no matter how you cut it.
But once the trust fund was broken into by Johnson, that's when it really started to go down the tubes. If SS monies aren't safe during economic upswings (like when it was raided -- when all the Boomers were paying into it), it can't possibly work. Since it's been made abundantly clear that Congress and the Federal government in general can't be trusted with a giant pot of money like that, there's simply no way to make it work long-term. Any safeguard that could be placed on the money could also be undone; there's no 'lockbox' or 'safe' that couldn't be broken into by a sufficiently well-motivated legislature. And the amount of money that would necessarily be in a retirement system would be more than sufficient motivation.
It's always amazed me that Lyndon Johnson never gets more nominations when people start asking about the "worst president". Up until our current Fearless Leader took office, Carter always seemed to get that spot -- and although Carter was a fool, the damage he caused was nowhere near as severe as Johnson's hackneyed attempts at social engineering from on high.
Right, so someone needs to develop a stable but extensible API for Linux kernel driver installation so that you don't have to recompile everything, or they have to open source their drivers, or create a mechanism to automatically compile a kernel module.
This assumes that it's better to encourage Linux adoption, even with proprietary drivers or binary blobs, than it is to encourage and nurture an open hardware/software ecosystem.
That's a defensible position but it's not a universally accepted one.
Frankly I think Linux would be giving up a lot of what makes it superior to Windows if it provided a way for manufacturers of crummy hardware a way to load binary-blob kernel modules. One of the best things about running Linux is not (generally) having to worry about upgrading the system and suddenly not being able to use some piece of hardware. If it works with Linux today, chances are it'll work with Linux tomorrow, and five years from now, and probably as long as the hardware is still around. This is in sharp contrast to pieces of hardware that are intimately tied to manufacturer-supplied blobs, which grow stale and eventually stop being updated when the manufacturer decides you should buy the latest version.
I would rather see Linux continue to grow at its current slow-but-steady rate, and drag the hardware universe along with it, than sacrifice doing things the right way in order to win some users over from Windows.
Finding hardware that works with Linux is admittedly sometimes a pain. But when you do find hardware that's compatible and has an OSS driver, you can rest easy knowing that it's not going to get EoLed in order to force you to upgrade. (It also helps that the hardware that's compatible with Linux tends to not include the real bottom-of-the-barrel, Winmodem-esque crap.)
Converting the seething hordes of Windows users isn't worth it, if it means bringing some of the worst of the Windows world over to Linux with them.
Not sure why it would; he wasn't doing anything wrong. That's the funny thing about DNS poisoning -- you can be following best-practices to the letter, but if your ISP is sloppy, you'll get hit by it just the same.
AT&T are the ones to blame, if blame needs to be assigned.
If the actual software implementation isn't open source and thus available for inspection, I'm not sure you can really say that it's not backdoored in the same way that Skype (probably) is.
Skype is worse because not only is it closed-source, but the protocol is secret, but even if the protocol was open, that still wouldn't make it trustworthy.
Implementation details are very important in judging the security of any piece of software, particularly where encryption is involved, because it's easy to do it badly and only create the appearance of security.
This is actually what I do on my work machine, which has to be Windows.:)
The way you can combine Windows-style directory paths with Unix-style ones always struck me as a clever hack.
While it's not as good as having a usable shell by default, installing Cygwin is always one of the first things I do whenever I get a fresh Windows machine. Totally essential, IMO.
PowerShell isn't included by default in the desktop versions of Win XP or Vista, at least not that I've ever used, which limits its usefulness if you wanted to send a bunch of commands to someone to copy/paste into their system.
As others note, it's also slow.
If you're going to install an additional shell you might as well install Cygwin and get real Bash (or csh, if that's what you prefer).
I only knew FoxConn as an assembler of other people's designs -- they build at least some of the iPods, for instance. I didn't even know they produced parts under their own branding, but it doesn't surprise me that it's crummy: that's not what they're good at, apparently.
If Windows had a functional command shell, it would probably get used quite a bit, too -- it's a fast, efficient way of interacting with the computer, and it provides an easy way to tell people exactly what to do (just cut and paste the following commands...).
But Windows' built-in shell is a piece of shit; it's simply painful to use. (PowerShell is better, but it's not part of most Windows installs.)
That everything has to be done through the GUI in Windows isn't a feature, it's a flaw.
That he killed his family, especially his children, is a tragedy.
That he killed himself, though? A fitting end to a wasted life. It's a pity he didn't do it earlier, but I'm still glad he did it, just to save society the money that would be required for his incarceration. Had he just stopped at killing himself, I'd have given him a small margin of respect for finally doing one thing right.
The guy was worse than just a waste; he was a net drain. Society is better with him dead.
Not everyone is a special, wonderful snowflake. The world is not a better place for everyone being in it. There are quite a few people around who've made it their life's purpose to steal and destroy, and their deaths are nothing that I'm going to mourn.
Using the phrase "god damn it" doesn't indicate a belief in either God or Hell. It's just a figure of speech, a well-understood way to indicate frustration or anger.
Similarly, if I were to say "oh, fuck this" while writing code, it doesn't really mean I want to go and have angry sex with it.
Curses aren't meant to be taken literally; they have a meaning that's far more than the sum of the individual words used in them.
IBM applies for more patents per year than any other corporation or institution, but that's not limited to software. I suspect that they probably do not generate the most software patents specifically (I would bet that's probably Microsoft).
They're typically always #1 overall but they're not that far ahead of MS and some other big companies, and a lot of their research is in hardware. I doubt they're still #1 if you remove it.
Think of it this way, if another attack on the scale of 9/11 to happen, would you want the government not passing any laws to catch the culprits or for them to be too scared of losing $$$ to do anything?
Yes, that's exactly what I would want. I'd want something -- anything -- out there to make them think things through before they get caught up in some "crisis" and pass a bunch of really stupid laws, like the PATRIOT act.
Just to use your 9/11 example, there was no reason for any of the Federal laws that followed. None, zero, zilch.
The government didn't need to do anything to "prevent another 9/11". 9/11 couldn't happen again -- stand up and look funny on a plane, and the other passengers will kill you. That's the solution to that particular problem, and it was a done deal before most of the US government figured out what the hell was going on.
And there's no evidence that anything the government has done will actually stop Al Quaeda or anyone else from devising some completely different scheme to kill a bunch of people -- every few months Bruce Schneier runs a contest to think of new ones, and there's no shortage just thought up by rank amateurs. All the additional airline security won't stop someone from just blowing themselves up in line, for instance.
The Constitution should never be allowed to be ignored, regardless of how bad the emergency seems. 9/11 was not a national emergency, it did not represent an existential threat, and in absolute terms it wasn't even a pinprick. Yet politicians would have us living in a police state over nothing were they allowed.
That's exactly the reason why I'd like to see any politician who advances unconstitutional laws punished. We need more clear, dispassionate, long-term thinking in the face of what might appear to be a crisis. Not emotional, reactive, thoughtless "emergency legislation" that only hurts us in the long run.
I would imagine that the rate of deflation of a gold-backed currency would be equal to the rate at which wealth is created, less the rate at which 'new' gold is extracted from the Earth.
E.g., if you have 3% growth and 1% increase in gold supply, you'll have 2% deflation. (In other words, at the end of the year, a unit of gold can purchase 2% more "stuff" than at the beginning.)
In a flat, zero-growth economy, you would have gradual inflation at the gold-extraction rate; similarly, if gold extraction were to stop, or if you were to use some other basis that was perfectly fixed, you would have deflation at the economic growth rate.
This assumes that economic expansion is desirable.
I think this is a terrible idea and it's one of the biggest things that's going to eventually bite us all in the ass. Continuous economic expansion -- and its associated continuous expansion of resource extraction and population -- isn't sustainable in the long term.
A fixed currency might not be a bad thing if it forced us to rethink continuous economic expansion as a steady-state solution.
E-Gold provided digital currency services at E-gold.com and Omnipay.com. Users did not have to provide their identities, and E-Gold continued to allow accounts to be opened without verification of user identity, despite knowing that "e-gold" was being used for criminal activity, including child exploitation, investment scams, credit card fraud and identity theft, the DOJ said.
It's not quite the full 'four horsemen of the infocalypse', but they did manage to get kiddy-fiddling in there, and everyone knows child porn is the new terrorism.
Just because a product is innovative doesn't mean it's any good....
You can come up with a completely novel way of solving a problem that's worse than every other way of solving it; that might be innovative, yet nothing you'd want to actually use. (Lots of academic developments fall into this category.)
Plus, I don't think anyone can argue that Microsoft hasn't displayed remarkable innovation in devising clever new ways to suppress competition, manipulate the market, and generally fleece the consumer for ridiculous amounts of cash. Evil can be innovative, too.
Re:One thing Google could do about incoming spam..
on
Spammers Choose GMail
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Yeah I've thought the same thing, too. It wouldn't be that hard to filter. You could just select a charset (like Latin-1) and if less than 90% of the characters in a given message aren't representable in your chosen charset, automatically kill it. That wouldn't require figuring out the actual human language it was written in; it's a pretty trivial automatic test.
Heavily-compressed audio is obnoxious when you're listening to it in a quiet environment, but most people listen to radio in their cars, where there's a huge amount of background noise and a relatively small loudness 'window' between the noise floor and the maximum desirable volume.
If radio stations didn't compress their audio, especially for classical music and other programming with lots of dynamic range, people would have to constantly adjust the volume.
What would be better would be if the radios had the compressors built into them, so listeners could change the amount of compression/expansion they want. People in very quiet luxury cars could keep it turned down, while people listening with the windows down at highway speeds could crank it up to keep the speakers working nonstop.
Unfortunately, automobiles are far from an optimal place to listen to high-quality music, but they're the place where most radio listening is done, and tailored towards.
It doesn't mean BluRay, HD-DVD, DVD-A or SACD quality audio. Just CD quality audio. Most terrestrial radio stations simulcast in "HD", you just need a receiver.
Bull. At best, it's like a low-bitrate MP3. That's nowhere near "CD quality".
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You know, you can use IMAP and set your MUA to cache all messages and attachments locally. Virtually every IMAP client I've ever used has had this option (okay, a few mobile phones excepted). Apple Mail and Thunderbird definitely do. If you use this, you get almost all the advantages of POP -- keeping local copies -- while also being able to easily use multiple clients without worrying about sync issues.
I have several computers connected to the same GMail mailbox via IMAP. One of them connects and caches everything (bodies and attachments), the others only download on command. This gives me a local backup of every message that comes in (via the cached copy of Gmail's "All Mail" folder) but gets all the benefits of IMAP otherwise.
What's preventing a service that does encryption/decryption on the client side? Other than the lack of desire from the providers I mean.
I think there are several issues, and lack of interest from providers is actually among the least of them. Lack of interest from users is probably the biggest issue. Many people just don't care that much about the privacy of their data -- they either honestly don't care who sees their stuff, or don't care enough to be willing to expend any effort or time preventing it. Adding a well-designed encryption feature to a backup service would add complexity and expense, and if people aren't willing to pay for that (i.e. they don't care), it's not going to get added.
Some enterprise backup systems do offer encryption (and also offer non-cloud-based backup, for companies that want to keep everything on-site) so it's not as though it's never been done. You just don't see it on the consumer level that often, because consumers don't care enough about privacy to pay for it.
Also, a well-designed encryption system -- where the data was effectively lost if the user misplaced or lost their decryption key -- would probably lead to a lot of customer-service problems. Inevitably, users would upload data, not make a backup of the key (or make a backup and then lose it, or not store it off-site, or whatever), and then get upset when they couldn't recover their data from the backup service that they paid for. I've dealt with this sort of thing personally before; many users just don't get encryption. They find it inconceivable that you, as the god-like administrator, can't just open up an encrypted file on command when they lose their password. (I've had people literally accuse me of plotting against them or being insubordinate for not opening their encrypted files for them.)
So given that it would add complexity to the implementation to do right, isn't something that people are likely to pay extra for, and is likely to cause a lot of problems and expense down the road, it's not surprising that most online backup services either don't offer encryption or don't turn it on by default if they do. It's easy for knowledgeable users to add encryption to files before uploading them; just letting them do that is a lot easier than trying to explain to Aunt Millie why her vacation photos are gone because she wrote down her password on a piece of paper that was lost in the fire that destroyed her computer.
This is a tractable problem if you use encryption and apply it to the files before they leave your system. Obviously you need to back up your encryption key via some other method, but that's not hard (USB keychain drives and solid-state memory cards are all good for this purpose, and can be easily stashed away in safe locations).
The real problem with these online-storage services is lack of transparency. You rarely get much insight into how they're operated, and even then you typically only have their own assurances that they're following whatever procedure they describe to you. E.g., they claim to have a great datacenter with all sorts of redundancy, and back everything up to tape twice a week ... but you don't really know that for sure. They could just have a bunch of striped Maxtor hard drives stuffed into a machine in an office closet.
Backup "services" that don't actually manage their own storage operations are even worse; they may themselves not really even know, or have any insight into besides marketing literature, about the actual operations on the hardware end. They're just buying storage and transfer from something like Amazon S3 or Nirvanix and then reselling it. Although they have reason to make everything sound as secure as possible, they may not have any actual control over it. If the upstream provider goes out of business, or gets wiped out by a hurricane / flood / plague of locusts, you're S.O.L.
The security issue is, on the whole, one of the more straightforward problems to solve. The transparency of the actual storage-system operations seems harder.
So what I want to know is why is the government so inefficient that it can't provide public transportation services out of the tax revenue it collects and needs to resort to collecting fares?
Virtually all cities have fare-collecting public transport systems because that's the only way taxpayers are willing to pay for them.
Almost inevitably if you tried to switch to fully tax-funded transportation, you'd encounter a lot of resistance from people who didn't feel like they were getting a good deal. I.e., they pay taxes but don't use the system, or the system doesn't run near where they live, or they use it less than average but pay more taxes than average, or any number of other reasons. Alienate large sections of the voting public like that, and you'll be wiped out in the very next election. Not a good recipe for success if you're trying to pull off a large-scale, long-term infrastructure development project.
As a compromise, most public transportation systems have some funding coming from taxes (generally based on the argument that the presence of the transportation system increases property values and thus justifies the tax), and some directly from the users of the system via fares.
Also, because historically many public transportation systems were private enterprises attempting to turn a profit from fare collection, people have come to expect fares when they step onto a bus or train. It wouldn't make much sense to eliminate that source of funding -- which people seem mostly okay with -- in favor of raising taxes, which people tend to really hate and frequently oppose vigorously.
You don't even need to own the plane; a chartered business jet would make one hell of a mess, particularly if it were loaded full of explosives.
But you don't see the TSA goons rectal-probing people who fly GenAv, because that's how people with money, and therefore power, travel. They stick to what's safe: harassing people whose "pull" within the system is limited to whining to their member of Congress and voting, neither of which have nearly the same effect as a large quantity of cash.
Greater than all those sins, I think, is one you can lay squarely on Lyndon Johnson's doorstep: raiding the Social Security 'Trust Fund' and moving it to the general fund where it could be piddled away. (Part of the Social Security Act of 1965.)
Not that Social Security was ever a great idea (well, almost; in its very original incarnation, it was supposed to be PAYGO and accounts were supposed to be individualized -- this was how FDR sold the program); it's a Ponzi scheme that's premised on never-ending economic and population growth, which is pretty obviously unsustainable in the long run no matter how you cut it.
But once the trust fund was broken into by Johnson, that's when it really started to go down the tubes. If SS monies aren't safe during economic upswings (like when it was raided -- when all the Boomers were paying into it), it can't possibly work. Since it's been made abundantly clear that Congress and the Federal government in general can't be trusted with a giant pot of money like that, there's simply no way to make it work long-term. Any safeguard that could be placed on the money could also be undone; there's no 'lockbox' or 'safe' that couldn't be broken into by a sufficiently well-motivated legislature. And the amount of money that would necessarily be in a retirement system would be more than sufficient motivation.
It's always amazed me that Lyndon Johnson never gets more nominations when people start asking about the "worst president". Up until our current Fearless Leader took office, Carter always seemed to get that spot -- and although Carter was a fool, the damage he caused was nowhere near as severe as Johnson's hackneyed attempts at social engineering from on high.
Does it basically come down to people paying to not have to stand in line with the rest of humanity at the airport?
Yes.
It's precisely the same idea as the "jump the line" passes available at Disney and most other big theme parks. Waiting in line is for plebeians.
Right, so someone needs to develop a stable but extensible API for Linux kernel driver installation so that you don't have to recompile everything, or they have to open source their drivers, or create a mechanism to automatically compile a kernel module.
This assumes that it's better to encourage Linux adoption, even with proprietary drivers or binary blobs, than it is to encourage and nurture an open hardware/software ecosystem.
That's a defensible position but it's not a universally accepted one.
Frankly I think Linux would be giving up a lot of what makes it superior to Windows if it provided a way for manufacturers of crummy hardware a way to load binary-blob kernel modules. One of the best things about running Linux is not (generally) having to worry about upgrading the system and suddenly not being able to use some piece of hardware. If it works with Linux today, chances are it'll work with Linux tomorrow, and five years from now, and probably as long as the hardware is still around. This is in sharp contrast to pieces of hardware that are intimately tied to manufacturer-supplied blobs, which grow stale and eventually stop being updated when the manufacturer decides you should buy the latest version.
I would rather see Linux continue to grow at its current slow-but-steady rate, and drag the hardware universe along with it, than sacrifice doing things the right way in order to win some users over from Windows.
Finding hardware that works with Linux is admittedly sometimes a pain. But when you do find hardware that's compatible and has an OSS driver, you can rest easy knowing that it's not going to get EoLed in order to force you to upgrade. (It also helps that the hardware that's compatible with Linux tends to not include the real bottom-of-the-barrel, Winmodem-esque crap.)
Converting the seething hordes of Windows users isn't worth it, if it means bringing some of the worst of the Windows world over to Linux with them.
Not sure why it would; he wasn't doing anything wrong. That's the funny thing about DNS poisoning -- you can be following best-practices to the letter, but if your ISP is sloppy, you'll get hit by it just the same.
AT&T are the ones to blame, if blame needs to be assigned.
If the actual software implementation isn't open source and thus available for inspection, I'm not sure you can really say that it's not backdoored in the same way that Skype (probably) is.
Skype is worse because not only is it closed-source, but the protocol is secret, but even if the protocol was open, that still wouldn't make it trustworthy.
Implementation details are very important in judging the security of any piece of software, particularly where encryption is involved, because it's easy to do it badly and only create the appearance of security.
This is actually what I do on my work machine, which has to be Windows. :)
The way you can combine Windows-style directory paths with Unix-style ones always struck me as a clever hack.
While it's not as good as having a usable shell by default, installing Cygwin is always one of the first things I do whenever I get a fresh Windows machine. Totally essential, IMO.
PowerShell isn't included by default in the desktop versions of Win XP or Vista, at least not that I've ever used, which limits its usefulness if you wanted to send a bunch of commands to someone to copy/paste into their system.
As others note, it's also slow.
If you're going to install an additional shell you might as well install Cygwin and get real Bash (or csh, if that's what you prefer).
I only knew FoxConn as an assembler of other people's designs -- they build at least some of the iPods, for instance. I didn't even know they produced parts under their own branding, but it doesn't surprise me that it's crummy: that's not what they're good at, apparently.
If Windows had a functional command shell, it would probably get used quite a bit, too -- it's a fast, efficient way of interacting with the computer, and it provides an easy way to tell people exactly what to do (just cut and paste the following commands...).
But Windows' built-in shell is a piece of shit; it's simply painful to use. (PowerShell is better, but it's not part of most Windows installs.)
That everything has to be done through the GUI in Windows isn't a feature, it's a flaw.
I disagree.
That he killed his family, especially his children, is a tragedy.
That he killed himself, though? A fitting end to a wasted life. It's a pity he didn't do it earlier, but I'm still glad he did it, just to save society the money that would be required for his incarceration. Had he just stopped at killing himself, I'd have given him a small margin of respect for finally doing one thing right.
The guy was worse than just a waste; he was a net drain. Society is better with him dead.
Not everyone is a special, wonderful snowflake. The world is not a better place for everyone being in it. There are quite a few people around who've made it their life's purpose to steal and destroy, and their deaths are nothing that I'm going to mourn.
Using the phrase "god damn it" doesn't indicate a belief in either God or Hell. It's just a figure of speech, a well-understood way to indicate frustration or anger.
Similarly, if I were to say "oh, fuck this" while writing code, it doesn't really mean I want to go and have angry sex with it.
Curses aren't meant to be taken literally; they have a meaning that's far more than the sum of the individual words used in them.
IBM applies for more patents per year than any other corporation or institution, but that's not limited to software. I suspect that they probably do not generate the most software patents specifically (I would bet that's probably Microsoft).
They're typically always #1 overall but they're not that far ahead of MS and some other big companies, and a lot of their research is in hardware. I doubt they're still #1 if you remove it.
Think of it this way, if another attack on the scale of 9/11 to happen, would you want the government not passing any laws to catch the culprits or for them to be too scared of losing $$$ to do anything?
Yes, that's exactly what I would want. I'd want something -- anything -- out there to make them think things through before they get caught up in some "crisis" and pass a bunch of really stupid laws, like the PATRIOT act.
Just to use your 9/11 example, there was no reason for any of the Federal laws that followed. None, zero, zilch.
The government didn't need to do anything to "prevent another 9/11". 9/11 couldn't happen again -- stand up and look funny on a plane, and the other passengers will kill you. That's the solution to that particular problem, and it was a done deal before most of the US government figured out what the hell was going on.
And there's no evidence that anything the government has done will actually stop Al Quaeda or anyone else from devising some completely different scheme to kill a bunch of people -- every few months Bruce Schneier runs a contest to think of new ones, and there's no shortage just thought up by rank amateurs. All the additional airline security won't stop someone from just blowing themselves up in line, for instance.
The Constitution should never be allowed to be ignored, regardless of how bad the emergency seems. 9/11 was not a national emergency, it did not represent an existential threat, and in absolute terms it wasn't even a pinprick. Yet politicians would have us living in a police state over nothing were they allowed.
That's exactly the reason why I'd like to see any politician who advances unconstitutional laws punished. We need more clear, dispassionate, long-term thinking in the face of what might appear to be a crisis. Not emotional, reactive, thoughtless "emergency legislation" that only hurts us in the long run.
I would imagine that the rate of deflation of a gold-backed currency would be equal to the rate at which wealth is created, less the rate at which 'new' gold is extracted from the Earth.
E.g., if you have 3% growth and 1% increase in gold supply, you'll have 2% deflation. (In other words, at the end of the year, a unit of gold can purchase 2% more "stuff" than at the beginning.)
In a flat, zero-growth economy, you would have gradual inflation at the gold-extraction rate; similarly, if gold extraction were to stop, or if you were to use some other basis that was perfectly fixed, you would have deflation at the economic growth rate.
This assumes that economic expansion is desirable.
I think this is a terrible idea and it's one of the biggest things that's going to eventually bite us all in the ass. Continuous economic expansion -- and its associated continuous expansion of resource extraction and population -- isn't sustainable in the long term.
A fixed currency might not be a bad thing if it forced us to rethink continuous economic expansion as a steady-state solution.
They did.
It's not quite the full 'four horsemen of the infocalypse', but they did manage to get kiddy-fiddling in there, and everyone knows child porn is the new terrorism.
Sure. Microsoft is occasionally innovative.
Just because a product is innovative doesn't mean it's any good ....
You can come up with a completely novel way of solving a problem that's worse than every other way of solving it; that might be innovative, yet nothing you'd want to actually use. (Lots of academic developments fall into this category.)
Plus, I don't think anyone can argue that Microsoft hasn't displayed remarkable innovation in devising clever new ways to suppress competition, manipulate the market, and generally fleece the consumer for ridiculous amounts of cash. Evil can be innovative, too.
Yeah I've thought the same thing, too. It wouldn't be that hard to filter. You could just select a charset (like Latin-1) and if less than 90% of the characters in a given message aren't representable in your chosen charset, automatically kill it. That wouldn't require figuring out the actual human language it was written in; it's a pretty trivial automatic test.
Heavily-compressed audio is obnoxious when you're listening to it in a quiet environment, but most people listen to radio in their cars, where there's a huge amount of background noise and a relatively small loudness 'window' between the noise floor and the maximum desirable volume.
If radio stations didn't compress their audio, especially for classical music and other programming with lots of dynamic range, people would have to constantly adjust the volume.
What would be better would be if the radios had the compressors built into them, so listeners could change the amount of compression/expansion they want. People in very quiet luxury cars could keep it turned down, while people listening with the windows down at highway speeds could crank it up to keep the speakers working nonstop.
Unfortunately, automobiles are far from an optimal place to listen to high-quality music, but they're the place where most radio listening is done, and tailored towards.
It doesn't mean BluRay, HD-DVD, DVD-A or SACD quality audio. Just CD quality audio. Most terrestrial radio stations simulcast in "HD", you just need a receiver.
Bull. At best, it's like a low-bitrate MP3. That's nowhere near "CD quality".