While I also agree that tax spending should be minimized whenever possible, I disagree that tax dollars are not different from privately spent dollars.
The difference between a tax dollar and a privately spent dollar is that the privately spent dollar isn't being taken from somebody by force. If someone wants to spend their income on a Chinese-made DVD player, then it's their right to do that. However, they don't get a lot of say in where their tax dollars are spent, nor do they have a choice as to whether they pay into the system or not (unless they fancy going to jail or having their salary garnished).
So tax dollars should always be spent with more care, and have more restrictions placed on their use, than private dollars. The taxpayers have a right -- since it is their money, essentially -- to decide where they want them to be funneled; I am suggesting, as a taxpayer, that it would be good to encourage our representatives to keep that money inside our own economy.
This would be just like me deciding when I'm standing down at Home Depot, that I'm going to buy something made in the U.S., instead of something imported. Only because I don't have that much direct control over where my tax dollars go, I'm left to instead petition government indirectly (or posit that it would be a good idea if we collectively did) to have my tax dollars spent in a manner I see fit.
While it would always be better for the government to spend $0 than anything, if they're going to spend money, I would strongly prefer that it be spent in this country than outside it. When spent inside this country, it has the side effect -- besides just in procuring the good that's needed by the government -- of encouraging domestic business, as well as putting a portion of that money directly back into the public pot via taxes on corporate income, and taxes on the salaries of the employees they have, etc.
So if we look at the economic cost to the country of foreign versus domestic spending, when money is spent overseas, it's just gone; it's a net loss to the U.S. economy. When it's spent domestically, much of that money ends up remaining in the economy, and going to pay U.S. workers (who again, pay taxes) and is invested here.
Perhaps someone could do an economic analysis of the "economic cost" of spending money in the home market versus abroad. Given sufficient evidence, I could see having some sort of cutoff for spending here versus abroad: if the foreign-made good is some amount cheaper than the domestic one, then it's worth buying it overseas, if the re-circulative effect of domestic spending wouldn't be enough to offset the higher price. However, I'm not sure how you would compute that.
Again, I'm not arguing for spending for the sake of spending, or spending purely for the sake of job creation -- I think both of those paths are wrong, however seductive they may be in the short term. But if you are buying an item for $100 from someone who is just going to pocket the whole amount, or from someone for $110 who is immediately going to turn around and give you back 30% of the purchase price (in taxes, direct and indirect), then it makes sense to go with the latter option. The 'savings' of the cheaper initial price is illusionary and shortsighted.
The government has the responsibility to go with the option that is ultimately best for the economy as a whole; that may not necessarily be the option that's the lowest retail price.
The problem with TIFF is there are so many varieties of packing data inside of it, you can barely call it a single format. Heck, you can encapsulate JPEG data inside a TIFF file, and still call it a "TIFF file."
While it's easy to make a program that writes basic-flavor TIFFs as output, it's very difficult to write a program that opens the many extant varieties of TIFF files that you might find around -- and if you don't, then users are going to assume that your program is broken, when it won't open their file.
JPEG has achieved more popularity not only because of its smaller file sizes (which TIFF can replicate, through use of lossy compression, if you choose it) but because it's a homogeneous format. You don't run into nearly as many incompatibilities between flavors of JPEGs as you do with TIFFs.
Given that (IMO) most University IT departments are utterly clueless about supporting anything that they didn't both sell to you, and personally configure, you'd be best giving her whatever you are most comfortable supporting.
At least with Linux, you can set it up with a dynamic dns name, and pray that the University assigns client machines publicly addressable IPs (which isn't that bad a bet, lots of educational institutions have fairly big allocation blocks). That way you can SSH in and remote-administer.
Or you could write up a quick HELPME.sh script that creates an SSH connection to one of your machines at home (using a dyndns name if you don't have a static IP or real domain) so you can administer it. You could even tunnel the xserver connection through that if you're more of a GUI person than a CLI one.
Packing someone off with a brand-new OS that both they, you, and probably the IT staff, will be unfamiliar with, seems like a recipe for disaster.
I'm really not sure of this. The gap between console gaming and PC gaming is getting narrower, and there's really nothing but inertia stopping a console manufacturer from using a keyboard and mouse as input devices instead of a dual-analog type controller.
Consoles have networking and multiplayer and downloadable games, which used to all be hallmarks of the PC... they also have lower cost of ownership over time (less upgrades).
If the console manufacturers don't make it a pain in the ass to develop games (which has always been the bane of their existence in the past; more games come out for the PC than consoles for this reason, I suspect), then it just makes sense that would be the direction things go in.
Pretty much everything you can do with regards to games on a PC, you can do on the next generation of consoles. Windows may have the PC gaming market locked up, but that market may not be as big or as significant as they think it is.
Or perhaps this was some sort of rogue action by the "Foreign Correspondents Club"... that would be more believable.
Someone call the President, quickly. It's obvious that some form of extraterrestrial brain parasite has taken over portions of our government. If we don't launch a nuclear strike soon, this outbreak of rationality could spread beyond the ability of the lobbyists to contain it. It would be the end of the world as we know it.
I'm glad the Pentagon finally woke up to reality, where maybe it's not such a hot idea to pay some Indian contract programmers a few bucks an hour to write the firmware for your cruise missiles.
I'm not sure of the exact law, but I believe there is one which basically says, all U.S. defense procurement must come from domestic sources, unless it's some exceptional item that can only be purchased abroad. Maybe we need a law like that for government contracting and outsourcing. Unless there's a demonstratable reason for having to do it offshore, it shouldn't be.
I don't know if it's true, but elsewhere in this thread, people have said that Diebold's voting machines aren't even of their own design; they're something they acquired from another company, and were originally designed for non-critical applications (American Idol, pick-your-favorite-cookie-brand in a supermarket, etc.), and thus are ridiculously unsuited for use in an actual political election.
That Diebold pushed for these machines to be used in elections (and worse, that the government allowed them) certainly makes them at least criminally negligent. Don't think that I'm in any way absolving them from that. But the motives that would lead them to try to put some chintzy piece of crap into an election is obvious. A real voting-machine would cost more money to manufacture, yet municipalities have a basically fixed budget for paying for these things (basically the cost of replacing their existing punchcard/lever/pen-and-paper system). By using crap machines, yet still charging the municipalities whatever they can possibly afford, Diebold makes much more money than if they made a good system. Also, it leaves them room in their profit margins to undercut a 'good' system, should anyone actually make one. As other people have pointed out, they do a fine job of engineering ATMs, because banks wouldn't put up with the crap they foist on the public. But since state and local governments have bent over and accepted shitty voting machines, they're not going to do any better. The economics of mediocrity are obvious.
If there is a political conspiracy in all of this Diebold stuff, it's in how Diebold got so many places to buy it's shoddy equipment and put it into use. (And for this, I have no doubt that they leveraged their 'contributions,' 'lobbyists,' and other forms of what we used to call bribery.) You don't need a political conspiracy to explain their motivations, you need only look right here.
Yeah. The source is free (at least the client component), but the service to hold your files on the web will cost $$$.
Seems like it shouldn't be hard, then, to reverse-engineer the code and figure out how to use somebody else's servers as the data repository. Unless he's planning on doing something sneaky/evil, like using encrypted binary lumps or something. Even then, if it's really that neat an idea, people will figure out a way to do it on their own servers.
Think:.Mac
Agreed; the whole thing reminds me of.Mac, both in terms of the business model (client is free -- in Apple's case it's included with every system -- but the server space is what you charge for) and some of the functions (document storage, integration with desktop applications, web services). Perhaps what he should be more interested in are the rumors I keep hearing about how Apple is going to pull the plug on.Mac any day now...dunno if it's true, but I heard the service was going to stop being for-profit and start being a free service coincident with the release of Leopard. Course, I can't find any substantiation of that now.
There seem to be a dearth of good (by which I mean, tightly integrated) end-user client programs for accessing remote volumes over the Internet from Windows clients; if all this project ever amounts to is making a nice interface for Windows users to manipulate files on a remote FTP/HTTP/SMB/NFS/whatever server, then it might be a nice thing to have. I wish him well, I guess.
Sounds suspiciously like WebDAV, only with less brain-damage than Microsoft's implementation of a client for it.
Personally I think WebDAV should get the "Internet's Most Unappreciated Technology Award", in terms of having a lot of promise but being seldom used. (Although Apple does drag it out every once in a while; I think the.Mac services use it.) It has a lot of potential.
I'll work with self-interest; at least self-interest is rational and predictable. Laziness coupled with stupidity is not.
I'd take self-interested amorality any day of the week, over arational stupidity. The self-interested person is easy to predict and work with; the idiot is just dangerous.
You probably won't find one, because without the conspiracy-theory angle, it's just not as good a story. Then it just becomes some boring discussion about touch-screen calibration; no mainstream press outlet is going to run that, and thus no journalist is going to write it.
The political climate right now basically guarantees a huge response to any story that involves Republicans stealing Democrats' votes. Thus, those are the stories that are going to get written.
Asking for election stories that don't get people riled up and angry, is like asking for news stories about a plane that didn't crash. It's a non-story, thus it never got written; but that doesn't mean it never happened. It's not a "liberal media" thing, it's just a "media" thing. TV news exists to make ratings, newspaper columns exist to sell papers, online articles exist to create page-views and sell ads. You could be a totally apolitical robot and you'd probably still write sensationalistic, bombastic, heavily biased news -- because that's what makes money.
I think people are looking for a conspiracy in all this, particularly a Republican conspiracy. Therefore if an equal number of errors happen from Democrat to Republican as Republican to Democrat, the ones that would be reported are the ones that make it seem most like a Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy.
That just makes for a better news story.
In the end it shouldn't really matter; if the machines aren't working, then they need to be replaced ASAP, whether they're causing erroneous votes for Reds or Blues or Greens or the Elmo For President party.
While I agree that people have a hard time knowing what to push I wouldn't blame the screens. If someone can't cobble together a reliable touch interface that doesn't need to be calibrated in the field, for a system will run only one application, they are either incompetent or purposely screwing up. The latter would be my guess.
I disagree. Never attribute to malice what you can attribute to idiocy, carelessness, ignorance, stupidity, incompetence, or laziness; particularly in combination with each other.
That the machines are just poorly-thought-out, poorly-engineered, poorly-constructed, poorly-maintained piles of shit, seems far more likely than such an obvious conspiracy.
I suspect that people cutting corners and generally being lazy or careless results in the deaths of more people every year than intentional, thoughtful acts of evil do. Probably a lot more.
There is a finite amount of evil in the world, but an infinite amount of stupidity.
I've found that podcasts have changed how I listen to the "radio" immensely.
Ironically, it was NPR's podcasts that really did it; I never was particularly interested in the amateur ones, although maybe I just never found the right things to listen to. But I now have iTunes subscribed to "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me" and the "Most E-Mailed Stories"; the former is weekly and the latter daily updates. (If only they had Car Talk available via iTunes as a free automatic Podcast, my life would be complete...) Every morning I just grab my iPod on the way out the door, plug it into my car's audio system, and hit play. It's like radio, but it's on my schedule. If I don't want to listen to the news that morning, I can throw on something lighter, or just listen to music. If I need to make or take a phone call, I can pause it and come back later.
A few years ago, I would have agreed with you that radio was essential; I use my car's CD player only occasionally, and listened to radio constantly. However, I could easily see podcasts replacing radio; it's the broadcast-TV equivalent of a TiVo. Everybody gets exactly the programming they want, on their schedule.
All the mediums that work on radio -- comedy, news (admittedly not in real time), music, variety shows -- all work in podcasts. As soon as people can get the licensing and copyright problems worked out, I think there's a market for music podcasts produced by DJs. As people acquire larger and larger music libraries, having playlists picked out and being exposed to new music becomes more important and valued. I think there's room for DJs to actually be creative again, instead of just being robotic talking heads; they have to be creative, and find ways to add value, because if people just want to listen to music they don't have to listen to a DJ anymore.
I see XM and Sirius as transitional formats. They're subscription-based, but they don't let you really pick what you're subscribing to. Subscriber-supported podcasts, on the other hand, would give people who are interested in content what they want, without having to pay for stuff they don't. And it doesn't even have to rely on advertising to work. I think the market is only going to grow; eventually the portable MP3 player will itself become redundant, and people's car stereos will just download the tracks automatically using WiFi or cellular connections. It's not that farfetched; the technology to do it today exists, it's mostly the cost and complexity that's keeping it away from most people.
The FCC can easily force stations to relocate; they just refuse to renew an operating license on a particular frequency.
I'm not going to go through the entire FM band, but based on my first few tries, there are a number of frequencies that only have a few stations operating on them nationwide.
87.9 MHz, for instance, is only used (according to radio-locator.com) by two licensed stations: KAWZ in Nevada and KSFH in Mountain View, CA. The latter is a high school. Running a Google search turns up a few more stations (one pirate station in San Francisco, apparently), and WBAR from Barnard College. I don't think it would be a major national sacrifice to move them to some other channel in their respective broadcasting areas. So that would be the likely candidate for a national standard low-power frequency.
Most of the other frequencies in the FM band have less than 200 stations on them in the U.S. and Canada combined; some down around 100 and some as high as 200+. While moving 100 or 150 stations wouldn't be trivial, if it was done over a period of a few years it wouldn't be terrible either. I don't think it's nearly as impossible a feat as you're making it out to be, and it's something that we need to do in order to mitigate interference and prevent a bigger problem in the future as more of these FM transmitters become available, and integrated into more portable devices.
The major issue would just be getting the FCC to do anything, since it's basically bought and owned by the major broadcasting companies and organizations.
In order to save money, you need to do one of two things: one way is you donate enough to push yourself down into a lower income-tax bracket, thereby lowering the tax rate on all of your salary income. This can be big savings, but only if you happen to be right near the edge of a tax bracket cutoff.
The other way you can get some tax advantage is if you donate more than the "standard deduction." If you file and don't itemize donations, you still don't pay taxes on all of your income; the government subtracts out an amount that they figure is about 'average' for a person's charitable contributions in a year. I have no idea if it varies with age or any other demographic information (I suspect not). If you donate more money in a year than the standard deduction, then it's worth it to itemize; if you don't, then it's not worth doing. Only donations made in excess of the standard deduction are really worth counting -- which is why your $800 didn't appear to save you that much. Most of it was probably used just getting you up to the 'standard deduction' level.
Generally, you won't make money by giving it away; a $100 donation (in excess of the standard deduction) will at most mean that you don't pay taxes on that much income, so if you're in a 30% tax bracket, that's $30... so it means that the net cost to you of the $100 donation was $70. You still end up with less money at the end of the year than if you hadn't made the donation, so it's not an investment. But it does mean that under some circumstances, charitable donations are "cheaper" than regular expenses, by the amount of your income tax rate.
However, I've found that some people have an exaggerated idea of the importance of charitable contributions for tax purposes. Unless you're very aggressive about keeping records and doing your taxes, most young single people with a few hundred bucks in donations are better off taking the standard deduction. (At least I've always been.)
Still, $300 is a big contribution for a lot of people, and I don't think that the OLPC-donation people were very good about explaining to people how the donation could be structured for the lowest cost to them.
There's nothing wrong with what you're doing. Unfortunately, your setup is not an option for a whole lot of people, who have cars manufactured in the large span of time where cassette decks weren't included, and neither were direct line-inputs for MP3 players. This basically covers a whole lot of mid-90s to present cars.
When I was looking for a car, I bought an older model year specifically because it had a cassette deck in its factory head unit (in addition to a CD) while the new model had dropped the cassette. I don't own any tapes anymore, but it's a good way to interface audio components into the system without doing any modifications to the vehicle.
FM radio modulators are going to be a part of life for the foreseeable future; people aren't going to go out and buy new cars or replace their head units with ones that have line-in jacks, to listen to their MP3 player. A radio transmitter is the quick-and-dirty, and therefore popular, solution.
As I've said elsewhere, if there was a designated low-power frequency for these things, then there wouldn't be an "arms race" of people trying to illegally ratchet up their transmitter power in order to use it on top of fixed (licensed) stations. You still might get interference between one person's car and another, but that's not nearly as big an issue as fixed/mobile interference, or people getting powerful transmitters because they don't want to have to hassle with changing the frequency when they drive around, or having distant fixed stations break through or fuzz their signal.
I've got a solution to propose: why doesn't the FCC just designate a "national ultra-low-power frequency"? It seems like we need one; everyone has their iPods and XM Radios and other things that they want to play into their car stereo, and it's a real PITA to find an open channel. Plus, if you drive more than 50 miles, you have to retune it, because the "open frequency" in NYC is in use in Philly.
We need to take a single, or maybe a handful, of FM frequencies (probably at the low end of the band) and designate them for low-power portable operations -- usable only by transmitters below 200mW (or whatever the cutoff is for unlicensed FM transmitters now).
That would simplify people's lives who use portable audio equipment, because they wouldn't have to hunt for unused frequencies, and it would also make electronics designers lives easier (you'd just need a selector switch to choose between a few of the low-power-designated channels, or maybe not even that), and it would keep the unlicensed broadcasts from interfering with existing fixed service. It would pretty much be good for everybody.
It seems like this is just common sense; these sort of micro-FM-transmitters aren't going to go away anytime soon; in fact there are more of them being made every day. So the interference problem is only going to get worse if we don't do something.
Does anyone have a program that can crawl through a spam mailbox and pull out the IPs of the originating machines, based on the headers?
Obviously you'd have the problem of forged headers, but usually you can find an IP if you trace the headers back to the first "trusted" network (a major ISP or backbone server) and see who they received the message from. That's probably either your spam source or your open relay.
Then you could just dump the IPs into the ORDB for checking automatically, and put the zombie-machine IPs into a rolling 24-hour blacklist or something.
this could be a good thing because it is going to force OS programmers to create systems that are much harder to tamper with
Could you do me a favor? Could you google "William Henry Gates III" and let me know what comes up? I'm curious what fast-food establishment he works at in your universe. Don't worry about who he is.
Not to mention Citrix, whose whole function is to bring desktop-like functionality to remote-delivered applications. It looks like (to a very casual user) a locally-running application, and sees your locally connected printers and hard drive, but is actually residing on a remote system somewhere.
It has a lot of problems (not least of which is the way that Microsoft requires you to buy software licenses), but it's quite popular in business.
You've basically described what BlueFrog used to do. IMO, they were the most effective counter-spammers; so effective that some spammer DDOSed them to death. (And not just them; their DNS provider, LiveJournal, and the anti-DDoS service they tried to use to survive the attack). Based just on the response they got alone, I'd say they must have been hurting somebody.
If you missed the story and don't want to read all the old Slashdot articles from a few months ago, there's a big article about it in this month's Wired.
And what if they do so despite there being market offers for the same, for whatever reason (e.g. they do not trust the declared quality of service offered by market providers to be sufficient)?
That's not an entirely consistent statement. If what they want is available on the open, competitive market, then they should take that; however if they're not satisfied with the quality of what's available, then they're basically asking for something that's not available on the market anymore. Quality of service and reputation are rather essential qualities -- if people "do not trust" them, then they're demanding a different (probably more expensive) product.
If people want good electric service, and there's only one company available delivering it and they do a really shitty job, then the people can petition their government to encourage the creation of an alternative utility. This is allowable because what the people want -- reliable electrical service -- isn't being delivered by the market. "Reliable electric service" and "shitty electric service" are two separate products.
Now I wouldn't take this to be a carte blanche for the local government to start its own power company; as I said earlier, at least initially, new challenges should always be approached with a light hand. The first steps to take would be ones that encourage competition and investment by other private power companies; if that doesn't work, then you can always escalate the public-sector involvement.
Now there's a point where a leader has to tell the people what's possible and what's not. "A chicken in every pot" just isn't practical; no matter how you mess around with the market, you can't create Utopia. So expectations always need to be realistic and attainable. Distilling realistic and attainable goals, and communicating what's reasonable and what's not back to the electorate, is the job of politicians (or ought to be, anyway). And people need to be educated that that government isn't the solution to all of their problems; in most cases, if the market is not delivering something, it's because people aren't willing to pay enough for it. Hiding that cost in tax dollars (and possibly forcing its purchase on people who aren't interested) is rarely a good solution.
As for a government providing more than a minimum structure; it's not necessarily unjust as long as the government is basically just and representative. (The standards for that are a whole different discussion, but here we'll just take it on premise.) At the same time, just because the government might have a mandate to do something, doesn't mean that doing it is a good idea. People can be wrong, and can make bad decisions even collectively. If people start demanding that their government interfere in the market too frequently or too much, then they're probably going to hurt themselves in the long run, by damaging that market. In the example of electric power above, if the government injects itself too forcefully, then it might drive the private industry out and then people would be left with only one provider of power -- the government -- which will probably be terribly inefficient and, over time, cost them more than a competitive market would have. (Historically, centrally planned economies have sucked.) So they've just shot themselves in the foot with their meddling.
If the marketplace is a playing field, and government's job normally is to keep it level and flat, what I'm basically describing are situations where it's permissible for government to shim one corner of it a little bit, in order to produce certain desired objectives. However, if you tilt the playing field too much, then people just won't play there anymore, and you'll be stuck with a barren dirt patch, with nobody to play with besides yourself. And that's no fun. (Well...let's not go there.)
Bringing this all back to the question of internet access, if people in an area decide that they really want internet access, and it's clear that the unaided market is not going to del
Slashdot Mirror
While I also agree that tax spending should be minimized whenever possible, I disagree that tax dollars are not different from privately spent dollars.
The difference between a tax dollar and a privately spent dollar is that the privately spent dollar isn't being taken from somebody by force. If someone wants to spend their income on a Chinese-made DVD player, then it's their right to do that. However, they don't get a lot of say in where their tax dollars are spent, nor do they have a choice as to whether they pay into the system or not (unless they fancy going to jail or having their salary garnished).
So tax dollars should always be spent with more care, and have more restrictions placed on their use, than private dollars. The taxpayers have a right -- since it is their money, essentially -- to decide where they want them to be funneled; I am suggesting, as a taxpayer, that it would be good to encourage our representatives to keep that money inside our own economy.
This would be just like me deciding when I'm standing down at Home Depot, that I'm going to buy something made in the U.S., instead of something imported. Only because I don't have that much direct control over where my tax dollars go, I'm left to instead petition government indirectly (or posit that it would be a good idea if we collectively did) to have my tax dollars spent in a manner I see fit.
While it would always be better for the government to spend $0 than anything, if they're going to spend money, I would strongly prefer that it be spent in this country than outside it. When spent inside this country, it has the side effect -- besides just in procuring the good that's needed by the government -- of encouraging domestic business, as well as putting a portion of that money directly back into the public pot via taxes on corporate income, and taxes on the salaries of the employees they have, etc.
So if we look at the economic cost to the country of foreign versus domestic spending, when money is spent overseas, it's just gone; it's a net loss to the U.S. economy. When it's spent domestically, much of that money ends up remaining in the economy, and going to pay U.S. workers (who again, pay taxes) and is invested here.
Perhaps someone could do an economic analysis of the "economic cost" of spending money in the home market versus abroad. Given sufficient evidence, I could see having some sort of cutoff for spending here versus abroad: if the foreign-made good is some amount cheaper than the domestic one, then it's worth buying it overseas, if the re-circulative effect of domestic spending wouldn't be enough to offset the higher price. However, I'm not sure how you would compute that.
Again, I'm not arguing for spending for the sake of spending, or spending purely for the sake of job creation -- I think both of those paths are wrong, however seductive they may be in the short term. But if you are buying an item for $100 from someone who is just going to pocket the whole amount, or from someone for $110 who is immediately going to turn around and give you back 30% of the purchase price (in taxes, direct and indirect), then it makes sense to go with the latter option. The 'savings' of the cheaper initial price is illusionary and shortsighted.
The government has the responsibility to go with the option that is ultimately best for the economy as a whole; that may not necessarily be the option that's the lowest retail price.
The problem with TIFF is there are so many varieties of packing data inside of it, you can barely call it a single format. Heck, you can encapsulate JPEG data inside a TIFF file, and still call it a "TIFF file."
While it's easy to make a program that writes basic-flavor TIFFs as output, it's very difficult to write a program that opens the many extant varieties of TIFF files that you might find around -- and if you don't, then users are going to assume that your program is broken, when it won't open their file.
JPEG has achieved more popularity not only because of its smaller file sizes (which TIFF can replicate, through use of lossy compression, if you choose it) but because it's a homogeneous format. You don't run into nearly as many incompatibilities between flavors of JPEGs as you do with TIFFs.
Given that (IMO) most University IT departments are utterly clueless about supporting anything that they didn't both sell to you, and personally configure, you'd be best giving her whatever you are most comfortable supporting.
At least with Linux, you can set it up with a dynamic dns name, and pray that the University assigns client machines publicly addressable IPs (which isn't that bad a bet, lots of educational institutions have fairly big allocation blocks). That way you can SSH in and remote-administer.
Or you could write up a quick HELPME.sh script that creates an SSH connection to one of your machines at home (using a dyndns name if you don't have a static IP or real domain) so you can administer it. You could even tunnel the xserver connection through that if you're more of a GUI person than a CLI one.
Packing someone off with a brand-new OS that both they, you, and probably the IT staff, will be unfamiliar with, seems like a recipe for disaster.
I'm really not sure of this. The gap between console gaming and PC gaming is getting narrower, and there's really nothing but inertia stopping a console manufacturer from using a keyboard and mouse as input devices instead of a dual-analog type controller.
... they also have lower cost of ownership over time (less upgrades).
Consoles have networking and multiplayer and downloadable games, which used to all be hallmarks of the PC
If the console manufacturers don't make it a pain in the ass to develop games (which has always been the bane of their existence in the past; more games come out for the PC than consoles for this reason, I suspect), then it just makes sense that would be the direction things go in.
Pretty much everything you can do with regards to games on a PC, you can do on the next generation of consoles. Windows may have the PC gaming market locked up, but that market may not be as big or as significant as they think it is.
Yeah, plus I've seen the toilet seats in the Pentagon, and they're not that cool.
Now, if it were the Japanese Defense Attache's office, then it would be totally believable.
Wait ... you mean the FCC? The Federal Communications Commission? And not the "Farm Credit Corporation," the "Florida Christian College," or "Families with Children from China"?
... that would be more believable.
Or perhaps this was some sort of rogue action by the "Foreign Correspondents Club"
Someone call the President, quickly. It's obvious that some form of extraterrestrial brain parasite has taken over portions of our government. If we don't launch a nuclear strike soon, this outbreak of rationality could spread beyond the ability of the lobbyists to contain it. It would be the end of the world as we know it.
I'm glad the Pentagon finally woke up to reality, where maybe it's not such a hot idea to pay some Indian contract programmers a few bucks an hour to write the firmware for your cruise missiles.
I'm not sure of the exact law, but I believe there is one which basically says, all U.S. defense procurement must come from domestic sources, unless it's some exceptional item that can only be purchased abroad. Maybe we need a law like that for government contracting and outsourcing. Unless there's a demonstratable reason for having to do it offshore, it shouldn't be.
Oh, that's easy: greed.
I don't know if it's true, but elsewhere in this thread, people have said that Diebold's voting machines aren't even of their own design; they're something they acquired from another company, and were originally designed for non-critical applications (American Idol, pick-your-favorite-cookie-brand in a supermarket, etc.), and thus are ridiculously unsuited for use in an actual political election.
That Diebold pushed for these machines to be used in elections (and worse, that the government allowed them) certainly makes them at least criminally negligent. Don't think that I'm in any way absolving them from that. But the motives that would lead them to try to put some chintzy piece of crap into an election is obvious. A real voting-machine would cost more money to manufacture, yet municipalities have a basically fixed budget for paying for these things (basically the cost of replacing their existing punchcard/lever/pen-and-paper system). By using crap machines, yet still charging the municipalities whatever they can possibly afford, Diebold makes much more money than if they made a good system. Also, it leaves them room in their profit margins to undercut a 'good' system, should anyone actually make one. As other people have pointed out, they do a fine job of engineering ATMs, because banks wouldn't put up with the crap they foist on the public. But since state and local governments have bent over and accepted shitty voting machines, they're not going to do any better. The economics of mediocrity are obvious.
If there is a political conspiracy in all of this Diebold stuff, it's in how Diebold got so many places to buy it's shoddy equipment and put it into use. (And for this, I have no doubt that they leveraged their 'contributions,' 'lobbyists,' and other forms of what we used to call bribery.) You don't need a political conspiracy to explain their motivations, you need only look right here.
Yeah. The source is free (at least the client component), but the service to hold your files on the web will cost $$$.
.Mac
.Mac, both in terms of the business model (client is free -- in Apple's case it's included with every system -- but the server space is what you charge for) and some of the functions (document storage, integration with desktop applications, web services). Perhaps what he should be more interested in are the rumors I keep hearing about how Apple is going to pull the plug on .Mac any day now...dunno if it's true, but I heard the service was going to stop being for-profit and start being a free service coincident with the release of Leopard. Course, I can't find any substantiation of that now.
Seems like it shouldn't be hard, then, to reverse-engineer the code and figure out how to use somebody else's servers as the data repository. Unless he's planning on doing something sneaky/evil, like using encrypted binary lumps or something. Even then, if it's really that neat an idea, people will figure out a way to do it on their own servers.
Think:
Agreed; the whole thing reminds me of
There seem to be a dearth of good (by which I mean, tightly integrated) end-user client programs for accessing remote volumes over the Internet from Windows clients; if all this project ever amounts to is making a nice interface for Windows users to manipulate files on a remote FTP/HTTP/SMB/NFS/whatever server, then it might be a nice thing to have. I wish him well, I guess.
And why are some web devlopers so obsessed with the OS model?
Because deep down, all web developers want to be OS programmers?
Sounds suspiciously like WebDAV, only with less brain-damage than Microsoft's implementation of a client for it.
.Mac services use it.) It has a lot of potential.
Personally I think WebDAV should get the "Internet's Most Unappreciated Technology Award", in terms of having a lot of promise but being seldom used. (Although Apple does drag it out every once in a while; I think the
I'll work with self-interest; at least self-interest is rational and predictable. Laziness coupled with stupidity is not.
I'd take self-interested amorality any day of the week, over arational stupidity. The self-interested person is easy to predict and work with; the idiot is just dangerous.
You probably won't find one, because without the conspiracy-theory angle, it's just not as good a story. Then it just becomes some boring discussion about touch-screen calibration; no mainstream press outlet is going to run that, and thus no journalist is going to write it.
The political climate right now basically guarantees a huge response to any story that involves Republicans stealing Democrats' votes. Thus, those are the stories that are going to get written.
Asking for election stories that don't get people riled up and angry, is like asking for news stories about a plane that didn't crash. It's a non-story, thus it never got written; but that doesn't mean it never happened. It's not a "liberal media" thing, it's just a "media" thing. TV news exists to make ratings, newspaper columns exist to sell papers, online articles exist to create page-views and sell ads. You could be a totally apolitical robot and you'd probably still write sensationalistic, bombastic, heavily biased news -- because that's what makes money.
I think people are looking for a conspiracy in all this, particularly a Republican conspiracy. Therefore if an equal number of errors happen from Democrat to Republican as Republican to Democrat, the ones that would be reported are the ones that make it seem most like a Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy.
That just makes for a better news story.
In the end it shouldn't really matter; if the machines aren't working, then they need to be replaced ASAP, whether they're causing erroneous votes for Reds or Blues or Greens or the Elmo For President party.
While I agree that people have a hard time knowing what to push I wouldn't blame the screens. If someone can't cobble together a reliable touch interface that doesn't need to be calibrated in the field, for a system will run only one application, they are either incompetent or purposely screwing up. The latter would be my guess.
I disagree. Never attribute to malice what you can attribute to idiocy, carelessness, ignorance, stupidity, incompetence, or laziness; particularly in combination with each other.
That the machines are just poorly-thought-out, poorly-engineered, poorly-constructed, poorly-maintained piles of shit, seems far more likely than such an obvious conspiracy.
I suspect that people cutting corners and generally being lazy or careless results in the deaths of more people every year than intentional, thoughtful acts of evil do. Probably a lot more.
There is a finite amount of evil in the world, but an infinite amount of stupidity.
If 'radio is dead' where are you going to get...
I've found that podcasts have changed how I listen to the "radio" immensely.
Ironically, it was NPR's podcasts that really did it; I never was particularly interested in the amateur ones, although maybe I just never found the right things to listen to. But I now have iTunes subscribed to "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me" and the "Most E-Mailed Stories"; the former is weekly and the latter daily updates. (If only they had Car Talk available via iTunes as a free automatic Podcast, my life would be complete...) Every morning I just grab my iPod on the way out the door, plug it into my car's audio system, and hit play. It's like radio, but it's on my schedule. If I don't want to listen to the news that morning, I can throw on something lighter, or just listen to music. If I need to make or take a phone call, I can pause it and come back later.
A few years ago, I would have agreed with you that radio was essential; I use my car's CD player only occasionally, and listened to radio constantly. However, I could easily see podcasts replacing radio; it's the broadcast-TV equivalent of a TiVo. Everybody gets exactly the programming they want, on their schedule.
All the mediums that work on radio -- comedy, news (admittedly not in real time), music, variety shows -- all work in podcasts. As soon as people can get the licensing and copyright problems worked out, I think there's a market for music podcasts produced by DJs. As people acquire larger and larger music libraries, having playlists picked out and being exposed to new music becomes more important and valued. I think there's room for DJs to actually be creative again, instead of just being robotic talking heads; they have to be creative, and find ways to add value, because if people just want to listen to music they don't have to listen to a DJ anymore.
I see XM and Sirius as transitional formats. They're subscription-based, but they don't let you really pick what you're subscribing to. Subscriber-supported podcasts, on the other hand, would give people who are interested in content what they want, without having to pay for stuff they don't. And it doesn't even have to rely on advertising to work. I think the market is only going to grow; eventually the portable MP3 player will itself become redundant, and people's car stereos will just download the tracks automatically using WiFi or cellular connections. It's not that farfetched; the technology to do it today exists, it's mostly the cost and complexity that's keeping it away from most people.
The FCC can easily force stations to relocate; they just refuse to renew an operating license on a particular frequency.
I'm not going to go through the entire FM band, but based on my first few tries, there are a number of frequencies that only have a few stations operating on them nationwide.
87.9 MHz, for instance, is only used (according to radio-locator.com) by two licensed stations: KAWZ in Nevada and KSFH in Mountain View, CA. The latter is a high school. Running a Google search turns up a few more stations (one pirate station in San Francisco, apparently), and WBAR from Barnard College. I don't think it would be a major national sacrifice to move them to some other channel in their respective broadcasting areas. So that would be the likely candidate for a national standard low-power frequency.
Most of the other frequencies in the FM band have less than 200 stations on them in the U.S. and Canada combined; some down around 100 and some as high as 200+. While moving 100 or 150 stations wouldn't be trivial, if it was done over a period of a few years it wouldn't be terrible either. I don't think it's nearly as impossible a feat as you're making it out to be, and it's something that we need to do in order to mitigate interference and prevent a bigger problem in the future as more of these FM transmitters become available, and integrated into more portable devices.
The major issue would just be getting the FCC to do anything, since it's basically bought and owned by the major broadcasting companies and organizations.
In order to save money, you need to do one of two things: one way is you donate enough to push yourself down into a lower income-tax bracket, thereby lowering the tax rate on all of your salary income. This can be big savings, but only if you happen to be right near the edge of a tax bracket cutoff.
... so it means that the net cost to you of the $100 donation was $70. You still end up with less money at the end of the year than if you hadn't made the donation, so it's not an investment. But it does mean that under some circumstances, charitable donations are "cheaper" than regular expenses, by the amount of your income tax rate.
The other way you can get some tax advantage is if you donate more than the "standard deduction." If you file and don't itemize donations, you still don't pay taxes on all of your income; the government subtracts out an amount that they figure is about 'average' for a person's charitable contributions in a year. I have no idea if it varies with age or any other demographic information (I suspect not). If you donate more money in a year than the standard deduction, then it's worth it to itemize; if you don't, then it's not worth doing. Only donations made in excess of the standard deduction are really worth counting -- which is why your $800 didn't appear to save you that much. Most of it was probably used just getting you up to the 'standard deduction' level.
Generally, you won't make money by giving it away; a $100 donation (in excess of the standard deduction) will at most mean that you don't pay taxes on that much income, so if you're in a 30% tax bracket, that's $30
However, I've found that some people have an exaggerated idea of the importance of charitable contributions for tax purposes. Unless you're very aggressive about keeping records and doing your taxes, most young single people with a few hundred bucks in donations are better off taking the standard deduction. (At least I've always been.)
Still, $300 is a big contribution for a lot of people, and I don't think that the OLPC-donation people were very good about explaining to people how the donation could be structured for the lowest cost to them.
There's nothing wrong with what you're doing. Unfortunately, your setup is not an option for a whole lot of people, who have cars manufactured in the large span of time where cassette decks weren't included, and neither were direct line-inputs for MP3 players. This basically covers a whole lot of mid-90s to present cars.
When I was looking for a car, I bought an older model year specifically because it had a cassette deck in its factory head unit (in addition to a CD) while the new model had dropped the cassette. I don't own any tapes anymore, but it's a good way to interface audio components into the system without doing any modifications to the vehicle.
FM radio modulators are going to be a part of life for the foreseeable future; people aren't going to go out and buy new cars or replace their head units with ones that have line-in jacks, to listen to their MP3 player. A radio transmitter is the quick-and-dirty, and therefore popular, solution.
As I've said elsewhere, if there was a designated low-power frequency for these things, then there wouldn't be an "arms race" of people trying to illegally ratchet up their transmitter power in order to use it on top of fixed (licensed) stations. You still might get interference between one person's car and another, but that's not nearly as big an issue as fixed/mobile interference, or people getting powerful transmitters because they don't want to have to hassle with changing the frequency when they drive around, or having distant fixed stations break through or fuzz their signal.
I've got a solution to propose: why doesn't the FCC just designate a "national ultra-low-power frequency"? It seems like we need one; everyone has their iPods and XM Radios and other things that they want to play into their car stereo, and it's a real PITA to find an open channel. Plus, if you drive more than 50 miles, you have to retune it, because the "open frequency" in NYC is in use in Philly.
We need to take a single, or maybe a handful, of FM frequencies (probably at the low end of the band) and designate them for low-power portable operations -- usable only by transmitters below 200mW (or whatever the cutoff is for unlicensed FM transmitters now).
That would simplify people's lives who use portable audio equipment, because they wouldn't have to hunt for unused frequencies, and it would also make electronics designers lives easier (you'd just need a selector switch to choose between a few of the low-power-designated channels, or maybe not even that), and it would keep the unlicensed broadcasts from interfering with existing fixed service. It would pretty much be good for everybody.
It seems like this is just common sense; these sort of micro-FM-transmitters aren't going to go away anytime soon; in fact there are more of them being made every day. So the interference problem is only going to get worse if we don't do something.
Does anyone have a program that can crawl through a spam mailbox and pull out the IPs of the originating machines, based on the headers?
Obviously you'd have the problem of forged headers, but usually you can find an IP if you trace the headers back to the first "trusted" network (a major ISP or backbone server) and see who they received the message from. That's probably either your spam source or your open relay.
Then you could just dump the IPs into the ORDB for checking automatically, and put the zombie-machine IPs into a rolling 24-hour blacklist or something.
this could be a good thing because it is going to force OS programmers to create systems that are much harder to tamper with
Could you do me a favor? Could you google "William Henry Gates III" and let me know what comes up? I'm curious what fast-food establishment he works at in your universe. Don't worry about who he is.
You're not going to believe what he does here.
Not to mention Citrix, whose whole function is to bring desktop-like functionality to remote-delivered applications. It looks like (to a very casual user) a locally-running application, and sees your locally connected printers and hard drive, but is actually residing on a remote system somewhere.
It has a lot of problems (not least of which is the way that Microsoft requires you to buy software licenses), but it's quite popular in business.
You've basically described what BlueFrog used to do. IMO, they were the most effective counter-spammers; so effective that some spammer DDOSed them to death. (And not just them; their DNS provider, LiveJournal, and the anti-DDoS service they tried to use to survive the attack). Based just on the response they got alone, I'd say they must have been hurting somebody.
If you missed the story and don't want to read all the old Slashdot articles from a few months ago, there's a big article about it in this month's Wired.
And what if they do so despite there being market offers for the same, for whatever reason (e.g. they do not trust the declared quality of service offered by market providers to be sufficient)?
That's not an entirely consistent statement. If what they want is available on the open, competitive market, then they should take that; however if they're not satisfied with the quality of what's available, then they're basically asking for something that's not available on the market anymore. Quality of service and reputation are rather essential qualities -- if people "do not trust" them, then they're demanding a different (probably more expensive) product.
If people want good electric service, and there's only one company available delivering it and they do a really shitty job, then the people can petition their government to encourage the creation of an alternative utility. This is allowable because what the people want -- reliable electrical service -- isn't being delivered by the market. "Reliable electric service" and "shitty electric service" are two separate products.
Now I wouldn't take this to be a carte blanche for the local government to start its own power company; as I said earlier, at least initially, new challenges should always be approached with a light hand. The first steps to take would be ones that encourage competition and investment by other private power companies; if that doesn't work, then you can always escalate the public-sector involvement.
Now there's a point where a leader has to tell the people what's possible and what's not. "A chicken in every pot" just isn't practical; no matter how you mess around with the market, you can't create Utopia. So expectations always need to be realistic and attainable. Distilling realistic and attainable goals, and communicating what's reasonable and what's not back to the electorate, is the job of politicians (or ought to be, anyway). And people need to be educated that that government isn't the solution to all of their problems; in most cases, if the market is not delivering something, it's because people aren't willing to pay enough for it. Hiding that cost in tax dollars (and possibly forcing its purchase on people who aren't interested) is rarely a good solution.
As for a government providing more than a minimum structure; it's not necessarily unjust as long as the government is basically just and representative. (The standards for that are a whole different discussion, but here we'll just take it on premise.) At the same time, just because the government might have a mandate to do something, doesn't mean that doing it is a good idea. People can be wrong, and can make bad decisions even collectively. If people start demanding that their government interfere in the market too frequently or too much, then they're probably going to hurt themselves in the long run, by damaging that market. In the example of electric power above, if the government injects itself too forcefully, then it might drive the private industry out and then people would be left with only one provider of power -- the government -- which will probably be terribly inefficient and, over time, cost them more than a competitive market would have. (Historically, centrally planned economies have sucked.) So they've just shot themselves in the foot with their meddling.
If the marketplace is a playing field, and government's job normally is to keep it level and flat, what I'm basically describing are situations where it's permissible for government to shim one corner of it a little bit, in order to produce certain desired objectives. However, if you tilt the playing field too much, then people just won't play there anymore, and you'll be stuck with a barren dirt patch, with nobody to play with besides yourself. And that's no fun. (Well...let's not go there.)
Bringing this all back to the question of internet access, if people in an area decide that they really want internet access, and it's clear that the unaided market is not going to del