And cut into AccuWeather's market share? Never going to happen. Just a few years ago, Congress almost passed some bill that would have prohibited the National Weather Service from releasing any information directly to the public via it's web site, because it created "unfair competition" with AccuWeather's offerings (AccuWeather basically just takes NWS data and resells it to news outlets in the form of a feed). (IIRC it was introduced by the late -- his career, anyway -- Sen. Santorum of Pennsylvania, but thinking that getting rid of him eliminated this sort of idiocy would be naive.)
There are far too many people with money who make their living being the middle men between government and the public, who would strenuously oppose anything that made it easier for people to get what their tax dollars have already paid for.
I'm not sure this is true. I don't think vulnerability was in all wireless drivers; that would just be too weird. There are hundreds of different WL chipsets and driver stacks; not all of them are written that crappily. A good many may be, but not all.
There was apparently a problem in Apple's drivers, as well as in a lot of other closed-source drivers. In fact, when those two guys did the "Hack a MacBook's Wireless in 30 Seconds" demo (of which I am a bit ashamed to admit I submitted the/. article for), they weren't even using Apple's wireless card or drivers, they were using a third-party one, and then just implicated Apple later.
If you read a few posts up in the thread you'll see that they have now found a pretty big hole in Broadcom's (assumedly Windows) drivers for wireless cards, where transmitting a specifically crafted SSID can result in kernel-mode code execution.
I think Apple got hit because it was a big target; since Microsoft doesn't specifically (to my knowledge) make WL drivers, and Apple being bigger than any single third-party WL-card vendor, when people found a vulnerability affecting many drivers and chipsets, they went for the one that would get them the most press coverage. While I can't condone this (since I think it involves fear-mongering and pandering to the knee-jerk Apple-haters), it's not hard to understand.
I have never been involved, even peripherally, in kernel development, so I thought some of LMH's comments on how security concerns are addressed there were interesting.
In particular, he remarks: "Another point, is actually that silent patches are much more popular in kernel development. Remote denial of service issues may be patched under rather fun terms like 'this may dereference a null pointer', 'foo is signed when it should be unsigned', etc. And some kernel interfaces are literally a royal pain to work with. Filesystem code itself is a rather complex part of the kernel as it deals in low-level with things we typically know 'abstracted' (ex. you copy files, you don't deal with inodes, blocks, etc)."
This seems rather contrary to the OSS development model in general, and if it's something that's happening a lot, it seems as though something's wrong, procedurally. Why is all this buggy code getting in, in the first place? While I'm aware that a lot of Linux people don't like BSD or its development methods, maybe there needs to be some sort of stricter review process for contributions.
If there was one place where transparency and accountability were most important, it seems like it would be in the Linux kernel, it being arguably one of the most important projects, or at least most visible, that the F/OSS movement has produced.
The official announcement summary for that exploit:
The Broadcom BCMWL5.SYS wireless device driver is vulnerable to a stack-based buffer overflow that can lead to arbitrary kernel-mode code execution. This particular vulnerability is caused by improper handling of 802.11 probe responses containing a long SSID field. The BCMWL5.SYS driver is bundled with new PCs from HP, Dell, Gateway, eMachines, and other computer manufacturers.
Emphasis was in the original. Source was Kernelfun.
Yeah, but building water wells in far-away villages doesn't open up a vast new market for computers, electronic components, and software; not to mention creating new economies of scale for products not headed for the Third World.
And besides, water wells are passe; giving some poor kid a laptop looks much more magnanimous -- it looks so much better in the nice glossy annual report under some facile slogan like "Caring for the world." The fact that he'll probably use it as a flashlight more than anything else can be easily ignored.
There are other reasons besides altruism why a whole lot of money got poured into OLPC...
Um, I don't think that such laws would pass muster, at least not in the U.S. And they shouldn't, because it takes away a buyer's right to resell their property for whatever the market will pay.
If I buy a PS3, or anything else, and then I realize that it has suddenly increased in value and want to sell, I ought to be able to sell it to someone. Provided that the sales transaction isn't coerced, or that I don't engage in any illegal activity in obtaining the good originally, or in reselling it, then I should be able to do this. If you make it illegal, you're effectively taking money out of my pocket: someone was willing to buy what I had at a price that would have made me a profit, but the sale wasn't allowed, even though both parties wanted to go through with it (it would have been a 'win-win') and there was no unlawful behavior.
If the government was going to pass a law prohibiting you from reselling software that you purchased, all of Slashdot would be screaming about it. This is the exact same issue, basically first sale doctrine, except it's with consoles (or tickets) instead of software.
First of all, I'm not convinced he actually said "Dell," at least not intentionally.
Let's face it, the man can hardly string words together in a sentence, at least when he's delivering pre-written speeches. (He's a lot better when he's speaking off-the-cuff in casual settings, but every time he has to give a major speech, I can't help but imagine some poor staffer who wrote the thing, sitting somewhere in a corner and crying as their work is butchered.) I don't think it's inconceivable at all that he basically stuttered and started to say "Dell-o-visions," stopped after the first syllable, and repeated the word with the right initial consonant sound. Heck, for all we know, he might call it a "Dellovision." It wouldn't surprise me.
Second, let's just say that he did somehow drop in a subtle, half-stuttered reference to Dell (although I think that's seriously taxing his speaking abilities). While I don't like the idea of him receiving bribes at all, if he plugged a major American electronics producer, so what? That's not any different from Bill C. talking about liking McDonalds food (and McDonalds actually has several American competitors who could rightfully be a bit miffed).
What other major American television manufacturer would you like him to mention, if he was for some reason going to name-drop? Oh, wait, there aren't any. All the other major brands are Japanese, or Chinese, or Korean, or Dutch. Dell is pretty much it. If he had a big 'ol Dell sitting on his desk in the oval office, would that really be any different from past presidents being photographed sitting in front of a big RCA microphone?
I'm not defending any name-dropping that might have occurred as a result of campaign contributions. (If I was making the law, any corporation would be barred from making political contributions or lobbying in any way to affect the political process. Contributions, advertising, and lobbying would be limited solely to real U.S. Citizens, and not-for-profit organizations who represent and take contributions only from real persons.) But I think you're wrong in inferring that he mentioned Dell in the first place, and even if he did plug Dell (and I say this as someone who dislikes Dell intensely, and hasn't ever bought one of their products) I'm still not sure that the plugging per se is totally out of line; only if it was paid for would be wrong, and then it would be the payment that's wrong in my mind.
Find me a Democrat who opposes gun control, supports a woman's right to choose, and opposes inheritance taxes (unless they have a reasonably high limit, like >$10M, and exclude real property, so as not to punish family farms or people who live in areas where property values have skyrocketed and want to keep their family home), and doesn't want to forcibly sign me up (or make me pay for) some hackneyed health-care initiative, and will aggressively work to stop the flow of illegal immigration (so that industries currently dependent on illegal labor are forced to either employ Americans at fair wages, or mechanize), and haven't sold themselves to corporate, union, or special interests, and I'd vote for them.
Unfortunately, combining that with my feelings on foreign policy (partition Iraq into separate sections for the Kurds, Sunni, and Shi'ia, and get the hell out of there), produces a candidate that basically doesn't exist. The closest I've seen are some of the quasi-Libertarian Republicans. Most of the time, I end up playing a balancing game -- which candidate is the least offensive on the issues that I think are going to be the biggest in the next few years? -- which is always depressing.
I'm definitely glad that the Democratic party has gotten its wake-up call, but the direction they're going in seems to be basically their old standards (tax the shit out of people who have foresight, generally treat the government as a form of "bad luck insurance"). Their fiscal policy at a national level is certainly more responsible -- in the balanced-budget sense -- than the neocons' has been over the past few years, but the way they plan on balancing that budget is unacceptable to me.
I hope that this election will be the wake-up call that the Republicans need, in order to purge the destructive influence of the neoconservatives and Evangelicals. Maybe someday, the Republican party of Barry Goldwater will come back.
Unfortunately, a whole lot of people have been writing code and assigning copyright over to Novell, which is now basically no better than writing and assigning copyright over to Microsoft...
In large sections of the country, although Republicans may be more socially conservative than Democrats, they're certainly not anywhere near the level of the rabid, religiously-motivated, hateful far-right (really authoritarian) bloc that seems to be most Democrats' stereotype of conservatives.
Given the bipolar political system, if you want a political party that supports lower taxation and doesn't believe in providing "bad luck insurance" by punishing people who plan ahead (say, by saving up money or property to give to their children rather than spending it) to pay for others' mistakes, you don't have a lot of choices.
The Republican party over the past few years has been almost completely hijacked by religious-right, and by ultra-hawks who have run up the deficit in order to fund the war. However, this doesn't mean that the Democrats are any more attractive than they have always been; basically offering only marginally more fiscal control, in order to fund welfare and other social programs. It's only because of the depths to which the Republican party has fallen, and sold out its core values, that the Democrats look fiscally responsible.
I would say that many Republicans that I have met in New England (and if you look at 'Yankee Republicans' in general) are not really that socially conservative on an absolute scale, and are torn between disliking the quasi-socialist fiscal policies of the Democrats (particularly New England Democrats), and the authoritarian social policies of Midwest and Southern Republicans. I suspect if you looked at stances on the issues, many Northeast Republicans (say, Olympia Snowe) would actually be very fiscally conservative Democrats, if they were in another part of the country, and vice versa.
It'll be interesting to see if a challenge is mounted to the VA gay-marriage ban, on U.S. Constitutional grounds; it seems as though it might violate the Equal Protection clause, at least as long as heterosexual people get certain tax benefits and exemptions as a result of being married.
Frankly, I would like to see them just eliminate all the "pro-family" marriage subsidies as a result of this. Let the homophobes keep marriage, just make it a totally religious, nonsecular distinction. Get rid of it from tax law, probate and inheritance law, and other aspects where it usually comes across. If people want those things, they can lobby their congresspeople for tax breaks for everyone, not just married people; write a will and medical-power-of-attorney to sort out the inheritance and medical decision-making issues, and have the "benefits" of marriage with whomever they want.
It's ridiculous that we still have the State sanctioning marriage and childbearing, as if we really need to be encouraging people to pump out more babies. If we need more workers, we can just import them from Mexico or India. Given the state of our educational system, they'll probably be more qualified anyway.
Just to put that revenue stream in perspective, if we assume that the stock market over the foreseeable future is going to return 8% per annum, then the present value of a $280M income stream is about $3.5B.
So if Microsoft really wanted to buy out RH, the "offer they can't refuse" from a financial perspective, would be their market cap, plus the present value of their future income stream (assuming they don't think the income stream is going to increase in the future), which would seem to be about $7B USD.
I'm not sure if this is true, and despite some Googling I can'f find any substantiation either way. There certainly are a lot of warnings from various people not to try and use active noise-reduction systems as "hearing protection," but I can't tell if that's just the manufacturers of same covering their asses from lawsuits, or if it comes from actual technical deficiencies in the systems.
I think the main problem with trying to use noise-cancellation as hearing protection, is that most systems only 'cancel' noise in a small part of the hearing spectrum, which is not where much of the damaging noise would be. IIRC, the most damaging sounds to your ears are high-pitched ones, and most noise cancellation systems filter out the lower sounds. Hearing protectors, like foam earplugs and circumaural earmuffs, actually filter out more high-pitched sounds than low-pitched ones (if you listen to someone talk, or to music, when wearing most passive suppression systems, it will sound "muffled" "bassy" or "thumpy".)
So the real reason I would be concerned about using active cancellation systems in a high-noise environment, is that they might block out the 'annoying' parts of the noise, but leave in high-SPL, high-frequency components that are still damaging, but easier to ignore. Because the human mind acclimates to sounds, even loud, damaging ones, with relative ease, you could think that you are protecting your hearing with an active system, but still get damage from the sounds your brain is ignoring.
Just to be safe, I would not want to use an active cancellation system, in any environment where the ambient SPL was already over safe levels. I think that their use is more appropriate in situations where the SPL is safe, yet annoying (on aircraft, possibly in a quiet server room, office near HVAC, etc.), or when you have already reduced the ambient SPL to a safe level using a passive system that is known to work. For example, many avionics headsets include active noise cancellation (I've used Bose ones in a helicopter, and played with the noise cancellation), in combination with fairly heavy passive dampening. The passive dampening alone reduces the sound to a safe level, the active suppression pushes it down below what most people find intrusive, so you can get that relaxing near-silence.
As far as hearing protection goes, if you're going to be wearing them for any length of time, you owe it to yourself to get ones made by David Clark.
I don't work for them, I'm just a very satisfied customer and user of their products. Second-generation user of their products, actually; I have a set of DC hearing protectors that used to be my father's, that are getting on 40 years old now.
Their list of products are here. I have the model 10A, although if you have big ears that stick out, you probably want the 19A. Allegedly the model 27 is "deluxe," although I don't know in what way they're different. The 10A model is the one they've been making since basically the Earth stopped cooling, and I don't think you'd have a problem getting parts for them in the future.
If you want to spend some money, you can get basically the exact same product as the 10A hearing protectors, but made into headphones. These aren't active noise-cancelling, they're just passive noise-reduction, but they're probably the best you're ever going to find. Equipped with microphones, they're very popular for use in helicopters (watch in some movies and about 50% of the time you'll see DC headsets being used in helis). They have a lot of room inside, if your 'buds don't stick out too much I doubt you'd have a problem with this. Although it might be a reason to get the 19A model.
The 10A model has a noise reduction of 23dB, and unlike earplugs, they don't make your breathing echo in your head quite so much. If you got ones with speakers inside (headphones) it would mean you could play music, without having to jack the volume up to dangerous levels. Alternately, if you didn't want to spend the money on DC's headphones you could just wear earbuds and then put the passive protectors on over it.
The really nice thing about DC 'sets, is that they're designed to be worn for long periods. Unlike some cheaper ear protectors that just use a spring-metal band connected to the top of the ear cups (pretty much every set of hardware store or cheap shooting protectors are made like this), resulting in more pressure on your head at the top of the cups than at the bottom, the DC ones are designed so that the pressure of the cups is distributed evenly, so you don't get sore. Also, they adjust using set screws instead of just using friction, so you can adjust them to your head and lock them there; they won't slip around. They have nice replaceable foam ear rings, as well. (When the ones in mine started to break down, I wrote to them and they sent me a set of replacement ones free.)
I use my DC 10As for pistol shooting mostly, and they're hands-down the most comfortable ear protection I've ever worn. (And if you really need a lot of noise reduction, you can combine them with foam plugs for something like 46dB of noise reduction; that's enough to safely do high-power rifle indoors -- you'll feel the pressure in your eyes more than in your ears like that.)
You do get a lot of funny looks wearing them around, but if you're a geek and don't mind looking like a helicopter pilot, I don't think you'll find a better set of passive hearing protectors.
We don't have those in the states. At least not that I'm aware of.
Although a judge can, I believe, force you to donate money to a charity (this is infrequent but I've heard of it happening a few times, usually when they want to eliminate someone's 'ill gotten' gains but can't really give it back to whoever it was taken from, generally stock-market stuff); that would be closest that I think you could get.
The U.S. legal system was designed so that, theoretically at least, the "system" wouldn't benefit in any way from the number of cases that it sees, or how they're adjudicated. This is so you don't get into the Spanish Inquisition-like situation where if the court "does not burn, they do not eat."
Fines, etc. that people are required to pay to the State, go back into the General Fund at the city/state/federal level, and the expenses of the courts, including court-appointed attorneys, are paid out of same by the legislature. Having the courts be self-funding in any way risks creating a juggernaut.
Linux can't be buried in the same way that a proprietary piece of software can, granted, but I think that Microsoft thinks that it can be buried -- or at least made irrelevant -- through use of software patents.
Basically, you engage in Novell-like patent cross-licensing deals with all the major Linux manufacturers, and push them towards one distribution ("MSLinux"). You drop hints about possible liability if anyone uses non-licensed distributions, discouraging their adoption and funding. Plus, you create a lot of proprietary, MSLinux-only 'compatibility extensions' that let it work with Windows. In the end, once "MSLinux" has captured a significant portion of the market, you cut of its air supply and let it die. This leaves people with little choice but to migrate to Windows, since the other Linux distributions are either perceived to be dangerous (due to patent landmines) or have simply been neglected and underfunded for so long, that they can no longer compete.
It's not a total endgame against Linux, but it's a pretty significant move. The GPL prohibits Linux from ever being killed completely (particularly outside the U.S.); but if you get enough software patents, it might be basically impossible to use in any significant, competitive way, without opening oneself up to legal problems.
The real unknown variable in all this is where IBM stands. They're obviously pro-Linux, but their support is generally indirect. You don't see them buying or operating their own Linux flavor or distribution outright. I wonder if Microsoft started buying up the competition, and the field started to narrow, would IBM jump in and pick up one of the players?
IIRC, the Linux desktop that IBM was going to deploy companywide (which would have been significant in itself, they have something like 300k employees) was a RHEL derivative. I wonder if they have some relationship with RH that would make them a likely buyout, or at least patent cross-licensing target?
That would be interesting; Novell and Microsoft and their patents on one side, and Red Hat and IBM on another, with the biggest repository of patents in the U.S. That would be an interesting showdown.
If you knew what went into probably 90% of the products you use daily, you wouldn't want to have anything to do with them. It's obvious that Diebold's voting machines were the Grade D blood sausages of their lineup; made with the shoddiest possible materials in order to extract the maximum possible profits from an unwitting buyer. Their ATMs, I suspect, are a little better; it might not contain all the ears and noses that get tossed into their real cheap crap, but they still might be lax if Freddie on the meat saw sneezes all over it.
Open source voting, and to a larger extent open source software, are like the organic food of the IT world. Nobody's guaranteeing that the end product will taste good, but at least you know what's gone into it. Or if you want to put it another way, it's a sausage factory that anybody can walk into and check out.
Well God knows how Comcast will decide to butcher their pricing to extort more money out of you, but the way it should work is that every computer would get its own IP address. Basically IPv6 gives you so many, that having a publicly routable IP address shouldn't be something you pay extra for anymore. Comcast might try for a time, and try to create some sort of artificial scarcity, but in the long run I don't think this is going to be possible.
So yes, all the machines would have routable IP addresses. Where you now have a NAT, you would probably want to set up some sort of intelligent, stateful firewall, unless you trust your clients to behave themselves and be secure. Given the increasing volume of spam/botnet attacks/bruteforceing, you'll probably want to spend the time you saved on a DHCP server, setting up a really nice firewall.
Also, since IPv6 gets rid of NAT, and NAT and SIP are like oil and water, deploying VoIP would be greatly simplified. That small-office rollout you did, in the Land Of IPv6, would almost certainly contain an internet telephony component. It would just be too simple to not do. You could have multiple phone lines behind the network gateway (whereas now, you can really only have one without a lot of complicated trickery), and if an employee brought in their phone and wanted to use it on the wireless LAN, it's not a huge issue; they can roam using their assigned IP address, even.
All in all, the advantage to somebody like you, is that instead of "managing non-publicly-routable" addresses, if you're sitting at the end of a consumer internet connection, you shouldn't be managing ANY addresses. You should be able to have everything from your TV set to your telephone to your toaster, grab them from Comcast's DHCP server (or whatever they call the IPv6 equivalent). Without the shortage of addresses, there's no need for an end user to have to do IP address administration of any kind. That should all be transparent to the user, and I think where Microsoft is going with this DNS-name-per-computer, is part of that.
People have sex with sheep and horses, for the love of god... does this mean that the dude and the sheep "decided to make love and not war on the ancient plains of Oregon?"
No, it just means somebody fucked a sheep.
Likewise, if it was basically human-size and had a vagina, do you really have to have a PhD to realize that it's almost unthinkable that they didn't fuck?
Good quality pictures, the sort of thing you see in the galleries of highly rated photos on www.photo.net, come from RAW photos that are processed in Photoshop, Photoshop, Photoshop, etc to bring out the best of the shot.
As long as we're talking about spending money and damning ourselves to the fires of closed-source hell, Apple's Aperture is an excellent RAW workflow-management and library tool. (Well, it damn well better be for $300.) It doesn't replace Photoshop, and it doesn't really try. But what it does replace are the various converters that you need to use, in order to convert from RAW into TIFF or PSD before you can process in Photoshop. It also does all the tedious file management and sorting tasks for you. Its batch processing and metadata manipulation are slick, too.
If you shoot a lot of RAW stuff (enough so that file management is beginning to be a drag) Aperture is the best way I've seen to manage it all. It lets you sort and organize stuff, it handles preserving the originals for you, so that you can't ever mess one up by mistake; it lets you create 100s of "versions" of a photo without duplicating it, and it offers one-click editing in Photoshop. You click on an image, you edit in Photoshop, you save and quit PS, and it's saved in there as another 'version' of the photo in Aperture.
Plus, if you want it to, it can 'reference' files you already have stored in your other organizational schemes, so you can play with it without committing. That to me was a nice touch. And once you get using it, it'll do a one-touch backup and sync of your work (they expect that you'll do this to a removable hard disk), including pulling all the referenced files onto the backup for you.
After managing a lot of photos using tons of hierarchial folders and binders of DVDs for offline storage, Aperture is pretty slick. If you have a Mac (or are open to buying a Mac) and haven't ever looked at it, or haven't looked at it since it went to the 1.5 version, it's worth checking out.
So if someone told you that T&M for printing of a 500-page (just guessing here) report was $495.00, you would tell them... what?
a. "That's ridiculous; there's no way that printing that book cost $1 a page!" b. "That's ridiculous! I'm calling the Fraud, Waste, and Abuse Hotline, and going to make sure your books get audited!" c. "Ah, yes... thank you. I take all my DHS reports bound in human flesh. Exxxxcellent."
This electronic copy of the Massachusetts State Building Code is presented as a courtesy to the public for information only and should never be used to design or construct/reconstruct buildings and strutures//To assure that one is always working with a current State Building Code (including amendments to same) one should always obtain a copy of the Building Code via the Statehouse Bookstore (617)727-2834 and ask Bookstore personnel for all emergency amendments to the Building Code as well.
They're engaging in some serious ass-covering; if you were going to build a house, they expect you to pony up for the dead-tree edition.
How is that any different from getting a grant to write a book?
Sounds like a damn fine reason not to give people grants to write books then, unless they want to do so as U.S. Government employees, and allow the book to be a product of the United States Government (with their name on it, of course), and therefore in the Public Domain.
If public money is being used to fund the creation of something, the end product of that creation ought to be freely available to the public.
Do you think people would be quite so keen on funding the Smithsonian Institutions, if they charged admission fees? Probably not. I don't have any problem with the Smithsonian being publicly funded, in fact I think it's great; but making things halfway-publicly funded is just crappy, and generally gets the taxpayer less "bang for their buck" than if they just went all-in on half the number of projects, but funded them completely and 'owned' the results for the public, therefore making them free for anyone to enjoy.
Slashdot Mirror
And cut into AccuWeather's market share? Never going to happen. Just a few years ago, Congress almost passed some bill that would have prohibited the National Weather Service from releasing any information directly to the public via it's web site, because it created "unfair competition" with AccuWeather's offerings (AccuWeather basically just takes NWS data and resells it to news outlets in the form of a feed). (IIRC it was introduced by the late -- his career, anyway -- Sen. Santorum of Pennsylvania, but thinking that getting rid of him eliminated this sort of idiocy would be naive.)
There are far too many people with money who make their living being the middle men between government and the public, who would strenuously oppose anything that made it easier for people to get what their tax dollars have already paid for.
I'm not sure this is true. I don't think vulnerability was in all wireless drivers; that would just be too weird. There are hundreds of different WL chipsets and driver stacks; not all of them are written that crappily. A good many may be, but not all.
/. article for), they weren't even using Apple's wireless card or drivers, they were using a third-party one, and then just implicated Apple later.
There was apparently a problem in Apple's drivers, as well as in a lot of other closed-source drivers. In fact, when those two guys did the "Hack a MacBook's Wireless in 30 Seconds" demo (of which I am a bit ashamed to admit I submitted the
If you read a few posts up in the thread you'll see that they have now found a pretty big hole in Broadcom's (assumedly Windows) drivers for wireless cards, where transmitting a specifically crafted SSID can result in kernel-mode code execution.
I think Apple got hit because it was a big target; since Microsoft doesn't specifically (to my knowledge) make WL drivers, and Apple being bigger than any single third-party WL-card vendor, when people found a vulnerability affecting many drivers and chipsets, they went for the one that would get them the most press coverage. While I can't condone this (since I think it involves fear-mongering and pandering to the knee-jerk Apple-haters), it's not hard to understand.
I have never been involved, even peripherally, in kernel development, so I thought some of LMH's comments on how security concerns are addressed there were interesting.
In particular, he remarks: "Another point, is actually that silent patches are much more popular in kernel development. Remote denial of service issues may be patched under rather fun terms like 'this may dereference a null pointer', 'foo is signed when it should be unsigned', etc. And some kernel interfaces are literally a royal pain to work with. Filesystem code itself is a rather complex part of the kernel as it deals in low-level with things we typically know 'abstracted' (ex. you copy files, you don't deal with inodes, blocks, etc)."
This seems rather contrary to the OSS development model in general, and if it's something that's happening a lot, it seems as though something's wrong, procedurally. Why is all this buggy code getting in, in the first place? While I'm aware that a lot of Linux people don't like BSD or its development methods, maybe there needs to be some sort of stricter review process for contributions.
If there was one place where transparency and accountability were most important, it seems like it would be in the Linux kernel, it being arguably one of the most important projects, or at least most visible, that the F/OSS movement has produced.
Yeah, but building water wells in far-away villages doesn't open up a vast new market for computers, electronic components, and software; not to mention creating new economies of scale for products not headed for the Third World.
And besides, water wells are passe; giving some poor kid a laptop looks much more magnanimous -- it looks so much better in the nice glossy annual report under some facile slogan like "Caring for the world." The fact that he'll probably use it as a flashlight more than anything else can be easily ignored.
There are other reasons besides altruism why a whole lot of money got poured into OLPC...
Um, I don't think that such laws would pass muster, at least not in the U.S. And they shouldn't, because it takes away a buyer's right to resell their property for whatever the market will pay.
If I buy a PS3, or anything else, and then I realize that it has suddenly increased in value and want to sell, I ought to be able to sell it to someone. Provided that the sales transaction isn't coerced, or that I don't engage in any illegal activity in obtaining the good originally, or in reselling it, then I should be able to do this. If you make it illegal, you're effectively taking money out of my pocket: someone was willing to buy what I had at a price that would have made me a profit, but the sale wasn't allowed, even though both parties wanted to go through with it (it would have been a 'win-win') and there was no unlawful behavior.
If the government was going to pass a law prohibiting you from reselling software that you purchased, all of Slashdot would be screaming about it. This is the exact same issue, basically first sale doctrine, except it's with consoles (or tickets) instead of software.
First of all, I'm not convinced he actually said "Dell," at least not intentionally.
Let's face it, the man can hardly string words together in a sentence, at least when he's delivering pre-written speeches. (He's a lot better when he's speaking off-the-cuff in casual settings, but every time he has to give a major speech, I can't help but imagine some poor staffer who wrote the thing, sitting somewhere in a corner and crying as their work is butchered.) I don't think it's inconceivable at all that he basically stuttered and started to say "Dell-o-visions," stopped after the first syllable, and repeated the word with the right initial consonant sound. Heck, for all we know, he might call it a "Dellovision." It wouldn't surprise me.
Second, let's just say that he did somehow drop in a subtle, half-stuttered reference to Dell (although I think that's seriously taxing his speaking abilities). While I don't like the idea of him receiving bribes at all, if he plugged a major American electronics producer, so what? That's not any different from Bill C. talking about liking McDonalds food (and McDonalds actually has several American competitors who could rightfully be a bit miffed).
What other major American television manufacturer would you like him to mention, if he was for some reason going to name-drop? Oh, wait, there aren't any. All the other major brands are Japanese, or Chinese, or Korean, or Dutch. Dell is pretty much it. If he had a big 'ol Dell sitting on his desk in the oval office, would that really be any different from past presidents being photographed sitting in front of a big RCA microphone?
I'm not defending any name-dropping that might have occurred as a result of campaign contributions. (If I was making the law, any corporation would be barred from making political contributions or lobbying in any way to affect the political process. Contributions, advertising, and lobbying would be limited solely to real U.S. Citizens, and not-for-profit organizations who represent and take contributions only from real persons.) But I think you're wrong in inferring that he mentioned Dell in the first place, and even if he did plug Dell (and I say this as someone who dislikes Dell intensely, and hasn't ever bought one of their products) I'm still not sure that the plugging per se is totally out of line; only if it was paid for would be wrong, and then it would be the payment that's wrong in my mind.
Find me a Democrat who opposes gun control, supports a woman's right to choose, and opposes inheritance taxes (unless they have a reasonably high limit, like >$10M, and exclude real property, so as not to punish family farms or people who live in areas where property values have skyrocketed and want to keep their family home), and doesn't want to forcibly sign me up (or make me pay for) some hackneyed health-care initiative, and will aggressively work to stop the flow of illegal immigration (so that industries currently dependent on illegal labor are forced to either employ Americans at fair wages, or mechanize), and haven't sold themselves to corporate, union, or special interests, and I'd vote for them.
Unfortunately, combining that with my feelings on foreign policy (partition Iraq into separate sections for the Kurds, Sunni, and Shi'ia, and get the hell out of there), produces a candidate that basically doesn't exist. The closest I've seen are some of the quasi-Libertarian Republicans. Most of the time, I end up playing a balancing game -- which candidate is the least offensive on the issues that I think are going to be the biggest in the next few years? -- which is always depressing.
I'm definitely glad that the Democratic party has gotten its wake-up call, but the direction they're going in seems to be basically their old standards (tax the shit out of people who have foresight, generally treat the government as a form of "bad luck insurance"). Their fiscal policy at a national level is certainly more responsible -- in the balanced-budget sense -- than the neocons' has been over the past few years, but the way they plan on balancing that budget is unacceptable to me.
I hope that this election will be the wake-up call that the Republicans need, in order to purge the destructive influence of the neoconservatives and Evangelicals. Maybe someday, the Republican party of Barry Goldwater will come back.
So ... who's going to provide a link to where we can all download said handbooks?
Allegedly, the Mujahadeen Poisons Handbook is somewhere on Hamas' "official web page" but damned if I know what that is. Probably in Arabic anyway.
According to the very entertaining "Allies Against Online Terrorism" blog, it was at one point mirrored on a Yahoo site, but was removed.
So who's going to step up and mirror them, if we should all have a copy, eh?
Unfortunately, a whole lot of people have been writing code and assigning copyright over to Novell, which is now basically no better than writing and assigning copyright over to Microsoft...
Then you need to get out more.
In large sections of the country, although Republicans may be more socially conservative than Democrats, they're certainly not anywhere near the level of the rabid, religiously-motivated, hateful far-right (really authoritarian) bloc that seems to be most Democrats' stereotype of conservatives.
Given the bipolar political system, if you want a political party that supports lower taxation and doesn't believe in providing "bad luck insurance" by punishing people who plan ahead (say, by saving up money or property to give to their children rather than spending it) to pay for others' mistakes, you don't have a lot of choices.
The Republican party over the past few years has been almost completely hijacked by religious-right, and by ultra-hawks who have run up the deficit in order to fund the war. However, this doesn't mean that the Democrats are any more attractive than they have always been; basically offering only marginally more fiscal control, in order to fund welfare and other social programs. It's only because of the depths to which the Republican party has fallen, and sold out its core values, that the Democrats look fiscally responsible.
I would say that many Republicans that I have met in New England (and if you look at 'Yankee Republicans' in general) are not really that socially conservative on an absolute scale, and are torn between disliking the quasi-socialist fiscal policies of the Democrats (particularly New England Democrats), and the authoritarian social policies of Midwest and Southern Republicans. I suspect if you looked at stances on the issues, many Northeast Republicans (say, Olympia Snowe) would actually be very fiscally conservative Democrats, if they were in another part of the country, and vice versa.
It'll be interesting to see if a challenge is mounted to the VA gay-marriage ban, on U.S. Constitutional grounds; it seems as though it might violate the Equal Protection clause, at least as long as heterosexual people get certain tax benefits and exemptions as a result of being married.
Frankly, I would like to see them just eliminate all the "pro-family" marriage subsidies as a result of this. Let the homophobes keep marriage, just make it a totally religious, nonsecular distinction. Get rid of it from tax law, probate and inheritance law, and other aspects where it usually comes across. If people want those things, they can lobby their congresspeople for tax breaks for everyone, not just married people; write a will and medical-power-of-attorney to sort out the inheritance and medical decision-making issues, and have the "benefits" of marriage with whomever they want.
It's ridiculous that we still have the State sanctioning marriage and childbearing, as if we really need to be encouraging people to pump out more babies. If we need more workers, we can just import them from Mexico or India. Given the state of our educational system, they'll probably be more qualified anyway.
Just to put that revenue stream in perspective, if we assume that the stock market over the foreseeable future is going to return 8% per annum, then the present value of a $280M income stream is about $3.5B.
So if Microsoft really wanted to buy out RH, the "offer they can't refuse" from a financial perspective, would be their market cap, plus the present value of their future income stream (assuming they don't think the income stream is going to increase in the future), which would seem to be about $7B USD.
Everybody has a price.
I'm not sure if this is true, and despite some Googling I can'f find any substantiation either way. There certainly are a lot of warnings from various people not to try and use active noise-reduction systems as "hearing protection," but I can't tell if that's just the manufacturers of same covering their asses from lawsuits, or if it comes from actual technical deficiencies in the systems.
I think the main problem with trying to use noise-cancellation as hearing protection, is that most systems only 'cancel' noise in a small part of the hearing spectrum, which is not where much of the damaging noise would be. IIRC, the most damaging sounds to your ears are high-pitched ones, and most noise cancellation systems filter out the lower sounds. Hearing protectors, like foam earplugs and circumaural earmuffs, actually filter out more high-pitched sounds than low-pitched ones (if you listen to someone talk, or to music, when wearing most passive suppression systems, it will sound "muffled" "bassy" or "thumpy".)
So the real reason I would be concerned about using active cancellation systems in a high-noise environment, is that they might block out the 'annoying' parts of the noise, but leave in high-SPL, high-frequency components that are still damaging, but easier to ignore. Because the human mind acclimates to sounds, even loud, damaging ones, with relative ease, you could think that you are protecting your hearing with an active system, but still get damage from the sounds your brain is ignoring.
Just to be safe, I would not want to use an active cancellation system, in any environment where the ambient SPL was already over safe levels. I think that their use is more appropriate in situations where the SPL is safe, yet annoying (on aircraft, possibly in a quiet server room, office near HVAC, etc.), or when you have already reduced the ambient SPL to a safe level using a passive system that is known to work. For example, many avionics headsets include active noise cancellation (I've used Bose ones in a helicopter, and played with the noise cancellation), in combination with fairly heavy passive dampening. The passive dampening alone reduces the sound to a safe level, the active suppression pushes it down below what most people find intrusive, so you can get that relaxing near-silence.
As far as hearing protection goes, if you're going to be wearing them for any length of time, you owe it to yourself to get ones made by David Clark.
I don't work for them, I'm just a very satisfied customer and user of their products. Second-generation user of their products, actually; I have a set of DC hearing protectors that used to be my father's, that are getting on 40 years old now.
Their list of products are here. I have the model 10A, although if you have big ears that stick out, you probably want the 19A. Allegedly the model 27 is "deluxe," although I don't know in what way they're different. The 10A model is the one they've been making since basically the Earth stopped cooling, and I don't think you'd have a problem getting parts for them in the future.
If you want to spend some money, you can get basically the exact same product as the 10A hearing protectors, but made into headphones. These aren't active noise-cancelling, they're just passive noise-reduction, but they're probably the best you're ever going to find. Equipped with microphones, they're very popular for use in helicopters (watch in some movies and about 50% of the time you'll see DC headsets being used in helis). They have a lot of room inside, if your 'buds don't stick out too much I doubt you'd have a problem with this. Although it might be a reason to get the 19A model.
The 10A model has a noise reduction of 23dB, and unlike earplugs, they don't make your breathing echo in your head quite so much. If you got ones with speakers inside (headphones) it would mean you could play music, without having to jack the volume up to dangerous levels. Alternately, if you didn't want to spend the money on DC's headphones you could just wear earbuds and then put the passive protectors on over it.
The really nice thing about DC 'sets, is that they're designed to be worn for long periods. Unlike some cheaper ear protectors that just use a spring-metal band connected to the top of the ear cups (pretty much every set of hardware store or cheap shooting protectors are made like this), resulting in more pressure on your head at the top of the cups than at the bottom, the DC ones are designed so that the pressure of the cups is distributed evenly, so you don't get sore. Also, they adjust using set screws instead of just using friction, so you can adjust them to your head and lock them there; they won't slip around. They have nice replaceable foam ear rings, as well. (When the ones in mine started to break down, I wrote to them and they sent me a set of replacement ones free.)
I use my DC 10As for pistol shooting mostly, and they're hands-down the most comfortable ear protection I've ever worn. (And if you really need a lot of noise reduction, you can combine them with foam plugs for something like 46dB of noise reduction; that's enough to safely do high-power rifle indoors -- you'll feel the pressure in your eyes more than in your ears like that.)
You do get a lot of funny looks wearing them around, but if you're a geek and don't mind looking like a helicopter pilot, I don't think you'll find a better set of passive hearing protectors.
We don't have those in the states. At least not that I'm aware of.
Although a judge can, I believe, force you to donate money to a charity (this is infrequent but I've heard of it happening a few times, usually when they want to eliminate someone's 'ill gotten' gains but can't really give it back to whoever it was taken from, generally stock-market stuff); that would be closest that I think you could get.
The U.S. legal system was designed so that, theoretically at least, the "system" wouldn't benefit in any way from the number of cases that it sees, or how they're adjudicated. This is so you don't get into the Spanish Inquisition-like situation where if the court "does not burn, they do not eat."
Fines, etc. that people are required to pay to the State, go back into the General Fund at the city/state/federal level, and the expenses of the courts, including court-appointed attorneys, are paid out of same by the legislature. Having the courts be self-funding in any way risks creating a juggernaut.
Linux can't be buried in the same way that a proprietary piece of software can, granted, but I think that Microsoft thinks that it can be buried -- or at least made irrelevant -- through use of software patents.
Basically, you engage in Novell-like patent cross-licensing deals with all the major Linux manufacturers, and push them towards one distribution ("MSLinux"). You drop hints about possible liability if anyone uses non-licensed distributions, discouraging their adoption and funding. Plus, you create a lot of proprietary, MSLinux-only 'compatibility extensions' that let it work with Windows. In the end, once "MSLinux" has captured a significant portion of the market, you cut of its air supply and let it die. This leaves people with little choice but to migrate to Windows, since the other Linux distributions are either perceived to be dangerous (due to patent landmines) or have simply been neglected and underfunded for so long, that they can no longer compete.
It's not a total endgame against Linux, but it's a pretty significant move. The GPL prohibits Linux from ever being killed completely (particularly outside the U.S.); but if you get enough software patents, it might be basically impossible to use in any significant, competitive way, without opening oneself up to legal problems.
The real unknown variable in all this is where IBM stands. They're obviously pro-Linux, but their support is generally indirect. You don't see them buying or operating their own Linux flavor or distribution outright. I wonder if Microsoft started buying up the competition, and the field started to narrow, would IBM jump in and pick up one of the players?
IIRC, the Linux desktop that IBM was going to deploy companywide (which would have been significant in itself, they have something like 300k employees) was a RHEL derivative. I wonder if they have some relationship with RH that would make them a likely buyout, or at least patent cross-licensing target?
That would be interesting; Novell and Microsoft and their patents on one side, and Red Hat and IBM on another, with the biggest repository of patents in the U.S. That would be an interesting showdown.
It's called the "sausage factory" effect.
If you knew what went into probably 90% of the products you use daily, you wouldn't want to have anything to do with them. It's obvious that Diebold's voting machines were the Grade D blood sausages of their lineup; made with the shoddiest possible materials in order to extract the maximum possible profits from an unwitting buyer. Their ATMs, I suspect, are a little better; it might not contain all the ears and noses that get tossed into their real cheap crap, but they still might be lax if Freddie on the meat saw sneezes all over it.
Open source voting, and to a larger extent open source software, are like the organic food of the IT world. Nobody's guaranteeing that the end product will taste good, but at least you know what's gone into it. Or if you want to put it another way, it's a sausage factory that anybody can walk into and check out.
You know, I think you might be one of those creepy people that they're discussing further up in the thread ... ;)
Well God knows how Comcast will decide to butcher their pricing to extort more money out of you, but the way it should work is that every computer would get its own IP address. Basically IPv6 gives you so many, that having a publicly routable IP address shouldn't be something you pay extra for anymore. Comcast might try for a time, and try to create some sort of artificial scarcity, but in the long run I don't think this is going to be possible.
So yes, all the machines would have routable IP addresses. Where you now have a NAT, you would probably want to set up some sort of intelligent, stateful firewall, unless you trust your clients to behave themselves and be secure. Given the increasing volume of spam/botnet attacks/bruteforceing, you'll probably want to spend the time you saved on a DHCP server, setting up a really nice firewall.
Also, since IPv6 gets rid of NAT, and NAT and SIP are like oil and water, deploying VoIP would be greatly simplified. That small-office rollout you did, in the Land Of IPv6, would almost certainly contain an internet telephony component. It would just be too simple to not do. You could have multiple phone lines behind the network gateway (whereas now, you can really only have one without a lot of complicated trickery), and if an employee brought in their phone and wanted to use it on the wireless LAN, it's not a huge issue; they can roam using their assigned IP address, even.
All in all, the advantage to somebody like you, is that instead of "managing non-publicly-routable" addresses, if you're sitting at the end of a consumer internet connection, you shouldn't be managing ANY addresses. You should be able to have everything from your TV set to your telephone to your toaster, grab them from Comcast's DHCP server (or whatever they call the IPv6 equivalent). Without the shortage of addresses, there's no need for an end user to have to do IP address administration of any kind. That should all be transparent to the user, and I think where Microsoft is going with this DNS-name-per-computer, is part of that.
Seriously.
... does this mean that the dude and the sheep "decided to make love and not war on the ancient plains of Oregon?"
People have sex with sheep and horses, for the love of god
No, it just means somebody fucked a sheep.
Likewise, if it was basically human-size and had a vagina, do you really have to have a PhD to realize that it's almost unthinkable that they didn't fuck?
Good quality pictures, the sort of thing you see in the galleries of highly rated photos on www.photo.net, come from RAW photos that are processed in Photoshop, Photoshop, Photoshop, etc to bring out the best of the shot.
As long as we're talking about spending money and damning ourselves to the fires of closed-source hell, Apple's Aperture is an excellent RAW workflow-management and library tool. (Well, it damn well better be for $300.) It doesn't replace Photoshop, and it doesn't really try. But what it does replace are the various converters that you need to use, in order to convert from RAW into TIFF or PSD before you can process in Photoshop. It also does all the tedious file management and sorting tasks for you. Its batch processing and metadata manipulation are slick, too.
If you shoot a lot of RAW stuff (enough so that file management is beginning to be a drag) Aperture is the best way I've seen to manage it all. It lets you sort and organize stuff, it handles preserving the originals for you, so that you can't ever mess one up by mistake; it lets you create 100s of "versions" of a photo without duplicating it, and it offers one-click editing in Photoshop. You click on an image, you edit in Photoshop, you save and quit PS, and it's saved in there as another 'version' of the photo in Aperture.
Plus, if you want it to, it can 'reference' files you already have stored in your other organizational schemes, so you can play with it without committing. That to me was a nice touch. And once you get using it, it'll do a one-touch backup and sync of your work (they expect that you'll do this to a removable hard disk), including pulling all the referenced files onto the backup for you.
After managing a lot of photos using tons of hierarchial folders and binders of DVDs for offline storage, Aperture is pretty slick. If you have a Mac (or are open to buying a Mac) and haven't ever looked at it, or haven't looked at it since it went to the 1.5 version, it's worth checking out.
So if someone told you that T&M for printing of a 500-page (just guessing here) report was $495.00, you would tell them ... what?
... thank you. I take all my DHS reports bound in human flesh. Exxxxcellent."
a. "That's ridiculous; there's no way that printing that book cost $1 a page!"
b. "That's ridiculous! I'm calling the Fraud, Waste, and Abuse Hotline, and going to make sure your books get audited!"
c. "Ah, yes
There are no wrong answers.
How is that any different from getting a grant to write a book?
Sounds like a damn fine reason not to give people grants to write books then, unless they want to do so as U.S. Government employees, and allow the book to be a product of the United States Government (with their name on it, of course), and therefore in the Public Domain.
If public money is being used to fund the creation of something, the end product of that creation ought to be freely available to the public.
Do you think people would be quite so keen on funding the Smithsonian Institutions, if they charged admission fees? Probably not. I don't have any problem with the Smithsonian being publicly funded, in fact I think it's great; but making things halfway-publicly funded is just crappy, and generally gets the taxpayer less "bang for their buck" than if they just went all-in on half the number of projects, but funded them completely and 'owned' the results for the public, therefore making them free for anyone to enjoy.