Isolation isn't really practical with cell phones etc That's a pretty silly statement. A cellphone is just a tiny little radio transceiver, only capable of hitting the nearest tower. Where do you think the signal goes once it reaches there? Hint, it's into the same telecommunications system that feeds into the undersea cables.
The only part of the infrastructure that cellphones provide an alternative or parallel to, are the lines running from the CO to your house. It doesn't save you if the problem is in one of the backbone segments.
Now, if you have a satellite phone (e.g. Iridium, Telstar), then you have a truly parallel network, at least until you get to the downlink station where it rejoins POTS. But I'm pretty sure such things are illegal in Iran, except for Western journalists and the elite. They're not something that regular folks have access to.
That said, if Iran wanted to cut off its own people, say for the purpose of doing something really nasty internally, they have easier ways to do it than cutting cables in the Med. I'm not buying that particular conspiracy theory. Neither does it seem like anything the U.S. would do, or derive much benefit from, particularly given the alternatives the U.S. has at its disposal (including the cable-tapping submarines that have been mentioned over and over in this thread so far).
The most likely possibilities to me are: (1) it was a terrorist act aimed at disrupting the most heavily Westernized parts of the Middle East, by a group with fairly limited resources, or (2) it was truly an accident or coincidence.
Well, by some of those definitions, Python 3 will be 'backwards-compatible' with Python 2, because it's apparently planned that the Python 3 interpreter will have a compatibility mode for 2.x syntax.
IMO, that doesn't really mean that the "languages" are backwards-compatible, it just means that the interpreter is. That's different, although I know it's confusing when one particular interpreter is the de facto standard for the language, and people talk about the language in terms of the interpreter that it's used with.
I'd argue that both Perl 6 and Python 3 are backwards-incompatible, but both have interpreters that will work with the older syntax. It's the interpreters, the implementation, that's compatible to a certain degree (and quite similarly in both cases).
In the case of Perl there's also automated conversion tools (planned?), and I don't know if such a thing is in the works for Python... but I don't think that the presence or absence of a conversion tool really has anything to do with the language's compatibility per se. I've seen converters for going from C to Java or even Cobol to Java; does that mean that Java is "backwards-compatible" to Cobol? Of course not.
If it isn't backwards compatible, it isn't Python, as far as I'm concerned. I'm sure not going to be re-writing a couple hundred megabytes of code. They can take their incompatible new snakelike thing and smoke it. Foregoing backwards compatibility is about as dim a move as I've ever seen anyone outside of Microsoft pull (MS dropping VB underneath Access comes to mind as a comparable clueless act, with exactly the same consequences — it isn't the same product and is useless to me.)
I don't think anyone is really suggesting that a lot of code be rewritten. Python 2.x isn't going anywhere, for exactly the reasons you bring up. Python 3.0 is going to be almost a completely new product, and I expect it'll only be used for new projects. I'm not really sure why anyone would want to convert their old code, if it works for you the way it is.
The reason for breaking compatibility is to maintain the Python philosophy of not having a lot of ways to accomplish the same thing. Without periodic pruning, eventually you'd just have Perl with indents.
From what I've read, you'll be able to choose the version/style you want, and the 2.x and 3.x series will live alongside each other (I don't know whether the 3.x interpreter will have a compatibility mode, or if you'll have to keep the 2.x version around as a separate program, though).
It was widely reported from a variety of whistleblowers at the turn of the millennium that the U.S. was preparing the U.S.S. Jimmy Carter to be able to tap underwater fibre-optic cables. See Bamford's Body of Secrets for exmaple.
That this operation was carried out on the submarine named after the president who did the most to reduce spying on civilian targets shows just how petty and spiteful the professional privacy violators in the NSA are.
What does that have to do with anything? You don't need a sophisticated submarine just to break the cables in half. All you need to do that is a ship with an anchor and an approximate idea of where the cables are located.
Tapping a cable is a subtle move, requiring a lot of technical expertise and work. Breaking one isn't.
The legal theories underlying the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the U.S. Constitution are pretty dramatically different.
I included a direct quote from the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, but here it is again, including the preamble:
Whereas Canada is founded upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law:
1. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.
The U.S. Constitution contains no such qualification, and is quite clearly designed to be the absolute law of the land at any particular time. (Cf. Article VI) The sole remedy in the Constitution for conflicts between society and the rights defined therein is via the amendment process; the Constitution does not give the Legislature any leeway to limit Constitutional freedoms, "reasonable" or not.
Now, of course that's theory -- in practice things do not work out to be quite that absolute; the Supreme Court has interpreted its own 'interpretative' powers broadly enough to abrogate certain speech rights, particularly in edge cases where speech is inextricably linked to action, or by defining certain speech as outside the bounds protected by the First Amendment. However, such cases have always been controversial, and more than a few jurists* have held the absolutist line despite what must have been strong social and political pressure to ban unpopular speech. They were able to do so because the Constitution quite clearly does not make room for exceptions -- were the Constitution to contain an obvious invitation for exceptions as the Charter does, I doubt they would have been able to maintain their opposition to censorship of unpopular or repugnant ideas.
If you need a practical demonstration of what I perceive to be the dangers of the Canadian approach, the "reasonable limits" clause is the linchpin of R. v. Keegstra, which legitimized 'hate speech' restrictions in Canada. The more recent example of Ezra Levant vs the CIC (carried out in 'human rights' tribunals instead of open court, which is an issue by itself) seem like the inevitable result.
To sum it up quite bluntly: the First Amendment and the U.S. Constitution as a whole, has managed to hold back would-be book-banners for 217 years, in an environment that is and historically has been more hostile and conservative than Canada. The Charter of Rights and Freedoms has existed (in its current form, anyway) for only 26 years, and it already has allowed more regulation of speech, in an environment that is widely considered to be far more socially liberal and open to new ideas than the U.S. That's not a particularly good track record.
Lest you or anyone else thing I'm mindlessly Canada-bashing, I'm not; there are lots of things that I think are done drastically better in Canada versus the U.S. (loser-pays-expenses in civil suits, for example). And on a more general level, I wasn't even arguing which system is necessarily better in any objective sense, outside of the OP's original question, which sought maximum freedom (for a web server, no less) as its only goal.
* Probably the most noted example would be Justices Brennan, Black, and Douglas' support of unconditional free-speech rights and rejection of the common-law 'obscenity' doctrine as unsupportable under the Constitution; Douglas somewhat famously concluding in Memoirs v. Massachusetts that "No interest of society justifies overriding the guarantees of free speech and press and establishing a regime of censorship." (Seemingly the exact opposite of the Charter's philosophy.) Unfortunately the Warren court -- which had been packed by social conservatives -- ignored this argument in Miller, but it was a 5-4 split and has been slowly chipped away at since. While
I don't understand this usage of the word "libertarian." In a truly libertarian system, the webhost would simply sell your personal info to the highest bidder. If everybody is free to do whatever they want, what right do you have to prevent them? Well, they would certainly be free to do that, but if their business was predicated on a guarantee of security, it wouldn't be a very rational thing to do. They'd protect you just as long as it was profitable to do so; until the revenue hit from the bad PR of selling you out was less than they'd be paid to sell you out.
This is essentially how most commercial webhosts in the U.S. operate as it is. They'll protect you if you're just irritating some guy whose only weapon is to write angry letters, but the second you tick off someone with a lot of lawyers and cash to burn, you're up the creek without a paddle.
Basically, you're going to have to pick the least-bad option. The idea of 'data havens' where conventional meatspace law doesn't apply is sadly seeming more and more like a lost concept. It seemed possible during the early 90s, when government and the big corporate interests really hadn't caught on to 'the Internet,' but now that they have, it's going to become more and more regulated, just like every other area of human endeavor. It was fun while it lasted, I guess, and it'll make a neat story to tell our kids about, but the party's basically over.
Where you want to go depends on the specifics of what you're doing. Political speech, particularly political speech directed at other countries, is relatively well-protected both in the U.S. and the E.U. Although I'm pretty unhappy with the current security paranoia here in the U.S., I think it's unlikely that you'll get in trouble unless you actually start advocating 'direct action' (terrorism) or have a cozy relationship with people that do. In terms of formal legislative safeguards on political speech, the U.S. has a more absolute freedom-of-speech doctrine than many European countries and Canada.* Where you will run into trouble in the U.S. (viz political speech) is when you are saying things that can be construed not as speech but as 'action' or as appeals to action. Saying things that are highly politically unpopular in the U.S. may get you put under surveillance or monitoring, but probably won't land you in a lot of legal trouble or get you locked up. Bottom line: if you're looking to deny the Holocaust or write nasty-but-true things about just about anyone, the U.S. is the place to do it.
Where the E.U. becomes the superior venue is if you're doing things that would be a crime under certain U.S. intellectual-property laws drawn up by the megacorporations that essentially own large chunks of Congress. Hollywood is a double-edged sword: it likes freedom for political speech, but really hates freedom if it might negatively impact this quarter's bottom line. Thus while you can advocate genocide in the U.S., linking to copyrighted material may land you in prison. For that sort of thing, you're better off in Europe, probably as far north as you can get. (E.g., Sweden.) You're also probably better off in Europe if you're looking to do something that's edgy and involves sex; I'm not sure that the laws per se are a whole lot better, but overall attitudes may result in those laws not being used as aggressively to bludgeon you.
There are more minor specialty venues that you might want to consider if what you're doing involves money changing hands. Antigua in particular seems to be a popular choice for shady financial-transaction sites (cf. 1MDC) as well as gambling. Exactly how tolerant they'll be of (U.S) copyright-violating material, as a result of the recent trade decisions, remains to be seen. I wouldn't hold your breath for a Bittorrent Free Zone, though.
I admit to not knowing a whole lot about privacy laws in Asian countries but I get the impression that they're more restrictive than the U.S. in many cases. One datapoint: 2chan, the popular Japanese imageboard, is run out of the U.S. to shield it from Japanese authorities and law.
Really, I don't think there's any place you can go where you'll get 'total freedom,' except maybe Freenet (and it's really slow and impractical to use). You need to think hard about what type of content is going to be the most problematic, and then choose a hosting location that's going to be least hostile to it.
* To wit: Many European countries prohibit certain types of political speech under the guise of 'hate speech' laws and anti-Nazism/fascism policies. Although Canada isn't nearly as bad, their Bill of Rights-equivalent document, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, "guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society," a cave
If Germany can do it, do we really think it hasn't already been done in the states? Skype, is very popular and would be a logical means for governments to monitor conversations---especially when said program touts itself as being encrypted and secure. So the German revelations are likely a national security goof. More than that, while the Germans have to install this aftermarket snooping program, it wouldn't surprise me if Ebay provided a convenient backdoor in the code so that the U.S. government can do the same thing without going to all the trouble and expense (both of third-party software, and warrants).
How exactly Skype implements encryption has never been made public. Anyone using it for secure communications is a fool. The only person it's good against is some script kiddie on your LAN or in the coffee shop where you're using a hotspot. The only person calling it "secure" is Skype/Ebay, and since they haven't opened the code up for auditing by disinterested third parties (someone like, say, Bruce Schneier), it's really not guaranteed to be anything more than snake oil.
For all you know, every time you make a call, Skype could be forwarding the key to a central server and then sending them in bulk to the FBI. That's the price of using a closed-source security product where the vendor has an obvious interest in selling you out to the authorities.
I use OpenBSD for Internet-facing applications where I want security, e.g. the DMZ box on my home network that I want to be able to SSH into from the outside world. I really like OpenBSD conceptually, and happily send them my $60 or whatever it costs for a DVD with each major release, although I wish the pool of officially vetted software was bigger. (*cough* POSTFIX *cough*)
Because I use it for gateway/edge machines, I don't build the ports tree or use any software that's not part of the official system. This is pretty limiting and definitely not something you'd want to do if you were using it as a workstation. (OpenBSD has two kinds of software: officially-supported stuff, where somebody has combed through the code and generally locked it all down, and unsupported/unofficial 'ports,' which are installed slightly differently and haven't necessarily received the same level of attention.) There's definitely enough officially-supported OpenBSD software to run a basic server (mail/web/DNS) without going to ports, but you may not have the level of choice you're used to in, say, Debian Stable.
In fact although there are lots of people out there who run OpenBSD as a workstation OS, I'm not really sure why you'd want to (instead of one of the BSDs that's geared more towards that as a primary function). I could see the security benefits potentially coming into play if it was a laptop, and the code is very clean with an emphasis on technical 'correctness' (so it might be a good OS to run if you want to really understand what's going on inside your computer), but there are other options which are equally or more attractive for a pure desktop system. That's just my gut feeling; I'm sure there are other people who'd say differently and I certainly wouldn't argue with them.
Personally, I run either Mac OS X or Debian on my workstation/firewalled PCs. The Macs are mostly just out of inertia and the Debian machines are because I like apt-get. While there's no doubt in my mind that OpenBSD is the more technically correct, better designed, better documented, and less defect-prone system, it's not quite enough for me to switch over my day-to-day PCs. I am, I suppose, proof of my own assertion in my earlier comment.
The BSDs are pretty fascinating, and I think if I were starting with a clean slate today, without all the legacy applications and data and personal biases that I have, I'd probably look very seriously at one of the desktop BSD distros. Particularly if you're a student, there's something to be said for using a system that at least plays lip service to doing things 'right.'
One note regarding OpenBSD: if you do decide to play with it, you may want to avoid 4.2 and opt for 4.1 instead; 4.2 requires that you install X11 in order to run many packages that should not require X11 (server software), because of some dependency issues. This is supposed to be corrected in 4.3. Of course, if you're creating a workstation OS and plan to install X11 anyway, this is a moot point, but it's something to note if you're going to play with it on a server or headless box using the CLI first (which isn't a bad thing to do).
Well, if you consider the megafauna, European humans were probably only the last of a long line of troublemakers on that (as well as other) continents. Driving other species into extinction is something we seem to do fairly well, and have tens of thousands of years of practice at.
Interestingly though, I've read in several places now the theory that human agriculture may have been developed in direct response to our destruction of the animal herds that hunter-gatherer culture depended on. Civilization, such as it is, can be viewed in one light as a coping strategy when our much easier original lifestyle was no longer practicable.
The way such a scheme would pan out is that, almost instantly, nobody would sell you software unless you first signed a waiver of liability / hold-harmless agreement with respect to the software, and/or they gave you a list of known problems that was six feet long.
The market is full of buggy software because nobody wants, apparently, to pay for really good software. You could get it, if you wanted to pay for it. You could get a webserver that came with some sort of bond-backed guarantee that it didn't have any common types of bugs (you probably can't guarantee no design flaws, but you could guarantee against certain types of technical defects). It would probably cost a staggering amount of money, though. Like nobody-but-the-DoD kind of staggering. (In fact, even the DoD doesn't pay for that level of quality assurance. They're big into the CMMI and other structured methodologies, but there's less of an emphasis on mathematical proofs of bug-free code than perhaps some Slashdotters would like to imagine.)
I hate mediocrity as much as anyone, but that's what people want. If people wanted reliable software, we'd all be using OpenBSD on our desktops and using mainframes for servers. People use Windows (and lots of other mediocre software), despite it being an utter piece of shit, because it works just well enough to get the job done. That's all they're interested in paying for.
What I'd like to see is a legal and social change to stop making "the computer did it" an acceptable excuse for anything. If you choose to employ crummy consumer-oriented software and use it for business, and your consumer-grade system craps itself, tough. Guess you should have spent the money up front for something better. The fact that crummy software exists isn't the problem; the problem is that people continually cut corners and use crummy software in totally inappropriate places (like to manage critical infrastructure, for financial systems, etc.). I think the problem needs to be approached from the demand side, not the supply/development side.
A 6,000 car that gets 15MPG and a 6,000 car that gets 30MPG both do the same damage, and they should pay for road reconstruction equally, on a per-mile basis. That's 6,000 pound car...
Wow, what a terrible idea. If I understand this right, you're talking about a plan that uses the taxing power to remove some of the marginal benefit of operating a fuel-efficient vehicle. Only if you assume that you can only have one tax to cover both the problems as a result of burning gasoline/diesel, and the damage cars do to the road. Those are two very different problems, and we should tax people based on how much of each activity they actually do.
I support a tax on gas and diesel that's actually driven by the damage that those fuels do, and the associated costs. That could include everything from MTBE contamination cleanup to global warming to the war in Iraq. The price that rings up on the pump should include all of those 'hidden costs' so that people can make a sound choice about how much of it to use. If you drive a real gas-guzzler, you should be paying through the nose.
But the damage actually done to the roads is a separate issue. Your car's gas mileage doesn't have anything to do with how much wear and tear it creates: that's purely a function of axle loading and the amount of driving you do. A 6,000 car that gets 15MPG and a 6,000 car that gets 30MPG both do the same damage, and they should pay for road reconstruction equally, on a per-mile basis.
Frankly, to be fair, regular passenger vehicles should pay virtually no road-maintenance tax, because most of the damage done to the highways (requiring resurfacing) is a result of semi-trailer trucks. Right now, every time you buy gas, you're subsidizing the nearly-free use of the highway network by trucks, in order to have artificially cheap prices on stuff you buy in a store. This is stupid: it hides information from consumers that they need to make correct purchasing decisions. Tax the trucks, let them pass the costs on to the shippers, who build it in to the cost of goods, which is then reflected in higher prices for goods hauled great distances. Then consumers can be the judge of whether they want to pay for all that road wear or not. Also, using a axle-pound-mile basis rather than pound-mile would encourage the use of trailers with more axles (like ones used in Europe and Great Britain), which do less damage to the roads and save money in the long term.
Congested roads are a third, again separate, issue. Here we should be taxing the people using the congested road at a flat per-vehicle fee, since it doesn't really matter whether they're driving a Civic or a Suburban: the road is still clogged either way. Unlike the road-wear taxes which would be used exclusively for maintenance, the congestion fees would be used exclusively for the creation of new infrastructure and transportation alternatives.
There is no good, "one size fits all" tax. Taxes by their nature affect markets and thus how people act. By using taxes to ensure that the price of goods reflects their actual cost to society, we let people make their own decisions as to what something is worth to them, at a particular time and place.
If the boss says be in for 9am, then you have to be in for 9am and the cost of getting in by 9am is going to only be felt by the employee who has no choice. Only in a very limited sense. If one employer is particularly inflexible and requires its employees to be in the office at 9AM, no matter what, even though it means their employees have to spend 3 hours commuting and paying $15 a day in congestion charges or something, they're not going to be a very attractive place to work. Treat your employees like shit, and eventually you'll have shit for employees.
More concretely: if an employer requires their employees to spend $15 (or whatever) a day in congestion charges because of an inflexible schedule, that acts like an instant bonus to any company who has a flexible schedule. All you as an employee have to do to get yourself a pay raise is switch companies. People aren't stupid -- they build costs like this into housing and employment decisions all the time.
Obviously this assumes a reasonably tight labor market; trying to maintain that through sound policy is a legitimate function of government. In a slack labor market, employees get shafted almost regardless of whatever else is going on -- getting stuck paying a congestion charge because you're unable to change jobs is pretty close to the bottom of the 'things that suck' list. (The wages you lose in a slack market due to your very weak bargaining position are at the top.)
I don't get this it's so obviously more sensible to tax the fuel than the mileage because fuel consumption varies proportionally with mileage and also proportionally with engine size and efficiency. That only works if most of the vehicles are using the same fuel. Looking forwards, it's not at all clear that most cars on the roads will necessarily run on gasoline. You have electric vehicles, alternate-fuel vehicles, etc. They're not going to let all of them go untaxed.
While taxing gasoline is good in the sense that it increases the cost of gas, which makes more-efficient cars more attractive than they otherwise would be, that's really irrelevant to the road-use taxation issue. What we should be taxing is wear and tear to the roads. Just because your car gets 50MPG instead of 30 doesn't mean it does 40% less damage to the road it travels over.
Personally I think we should tax cars for their road use based on mileage * axle load. The more weight you have per axle, the more damage you do to the road. (In fact, the damage isn't linear, so a better calculation might be [mileage * (axle load)^C], where C is some empirically-derived constant that relates road damage to increasing weight.) Heavy cars and trucks should cost a lot more, for the same mileage, than lightweight cars, because they're the ones that make all the resurfacing necessary.
If we want to encourage fuel economy, we can tax gasoline or force efficiency standards more directly. We should get the funding for road repair from sources that are proportional to use made and damage done to the roads. In fact, I think it's a really bad idea to use gasoline taxes for anything except pollution remediation (i.e. combating the negative externalities associated with gasoline combustion), because it creates a disconnect between the funding source and the use of the revenue.
Optimally, what I'd like to see is:
- Taxes on hydrocarbon motor fuels that go into a fund which is used only for the remediation of externalities associated with their use (smog, MTBE contamination, global warming, etc.) - Taxes on 'road wear' (measured in axle-pound-miles or some similar unit, for all vehicles regardless of power source) used to maintain current infrastructure - Congestion surcharges and tolls*, at flat per-vehicle rates, used to fund the construction of new infrastructure
As long as you make sure that the price of various goods (gasoline, car usage, plastic widgets at WalMart) includes their externalized costs, I don't see much of a problem in letting the market find the optimal solution on an individual basis.
* And I only support tolls when they're actually being used to pay off a construction project; not as a general revenue source. E.g., building a road, and then putting a tollbooth on it and using the tolls to pay back the cost of construction plus bond interest seems like a good idea; leaving that toll booth there indefinitely (if the toll rate is higher than what's required for maintenance) is bad. Assuming it's a public road, of course.
You don't need copyright, you just need contracts law. You could just refuse to sell your book to anyone who didn't sign a non-reproduction agreement. If someone bought the book and then reproduced it anyway, you'd have more than enough cause to go after them for breach of contract. It wouldn't take much to do this; shrinkwrap with a clearly-displayed notice is legally binding in many jurisdictions.
You certainly don't need copyright in order to sell intellectual property, just a way of enforcing mutually agreed-to contracts.
The Northeast and Mid-Atlantic is full of them; it's not purely a East Coast phenomenon, but it's definitely more prevalent here. There are a few of them in Texas and the Midwest, I think. Definitely not as many, though.
It's going to increase though, because there's a lot of infrastructure out there in dire need of maintenance, and people really hate taxes. Nobody wants to pay for crap they don't use. As the technology makes it more and more feasible, I think we're going to move towards a 'use-tax' system pretty quickly.
I was listening to CSPAN Radio the other day and they had a speech by somebody (head of the Federal Highway Dept, I think), talking about the future of transportation funding. He was pretty set on the idea of a miles-driven based tax rather than a gas tax. The idea is you either have an RFID transponder in your car, or maybe they just go low-tech and check your odometer reading, but that's what you're taxed off of. Obviously this is a privacy nightmare but I don't see it disappearing. It's an easy sell to the public because you can say you're "cutting" all sorts of taxes. (Particularly because the plan calls for doubling or tripling the gasoline tax before moving to a mileage-based tax. Carrot, meet stick.)
In Virginia, transportation money is one of the biggest issues. Here you have a state where one rather small part (the northern suburbs, around DC) are in desperate need of money for infrastructure, but the rest of the state doesn't really give a flying fuck about it. And why should they? If you don't come to Northern Virginia, it's pretty hard to see how you benefit from a few billion dollars in improvements on I-66. The state government has fooled around with alternative funding sources (the recently repealed extra-special tax on speeding tickets), but in the medium- and long-term I don't see any alternative to tolls and congestion pricing.
There's no point in expanding the roads without implementing congestion pricing -- if you just widen the highways, it just encourages more people to use the roads at the same time. Very quickly, the volume just increases until you hit the failure point again. You can't just keep building roads and hope to keep ahead of the demand. You need to encourage people to use the roads at different times, carpool, work from home, etc. Maintaining the infrastructure we have while charging the people who actually use it for the construction/upkeep (and all the negative externalities associated with their use, which congestion pricing tries to do) seems eminently fair.
Carpools? I won't join a carpool. If I wanted to be around other people while commuting, I'd take the bus. I don't get nearly enough time alone, and my 20 minute drive to work is one of the times I have alone with my thoughts (such as they are). Why should I give that up? Hey, that's fine. You obviously put a high value on being alone in your car in the morning. No problem.
But a lot of people don't, and for them, carpooling makes a lot of sense. I like being alone and on my own schedule in the morning too, but I have a pretty good idea of how long it'd take me to start carpooling. About $5 a day and I'd start riding with somebody else. Below that, it's not worth the hassle. Above that, it would be. That's my 'point of pain,' but everyone is bound to be different.
The solution is just to ratchet up the pricing until the number of vehicles on the road drops to a level that's not too much for the road (i.e. without turning into a parking lot). Some people, who really value driving alone and have money to burn, will always be able to drive alone. But most people will bail and use public transportation or carpool long before that.
Finally I will only need to be connected to one IM network. _My own_. Up to now you had to pretty much put up with either MSN logging your conversations or AOL logging them.
One of the great things about Google turning on server 2 server for GTalk is that it is now possible to run your own IM server (as you might run your own mail server) and network interconnection just works.
And then you still have AOL, MSN, or Google logging your chats, if you're talking to someone on one of their networks. If you're the only person using your chat server, it's really like just using a very complicated client program.
E.g., if you're "joe@homenetwork.net" and you run a XMPP server at messaging.homenetwork.net, but all the people you talk to are on Google or AOL, every message you send goes from your client, through messaging.homenetwork.net, and then over to Google's or AOL's servers (where presumably they log them), before going to the destination.
Unless you can convince your friends to use your chat server (messaging.homenetwork.net) rather than AOL's/Google's, you're not getting any additional privacy.
Frankly, I think privacy isn't really the goal we should be aiming for with this. If you want privacy, get OTR encryption (the easiest way is just to use Adium on the Mac), and then it doesn't matter quite so much whose servers the messages are passing through. The switch from OSCAR to XMPP is all about interoperability.
I'm using a Griffin iMate right now, and I don't think the response is in any way noticeably slower than a typical USB keyboard. I type about 70-90WPM and have never had lag problems. I'm not a heavy FPSer, but I've played my share of Quake and UT with it, and can't really fault it (I am quite dreadful at virtually all games, but that's not really my equipment's problem).
I use the iMate with an Apple Extended Keyboard II (which itself has been in daily use since 1994 or so); I got the iMate in 2001 or thereabouts when the ADB-USB adapter I was using previously -- a Keyspan? -- refused to work with OS X and the manufacturer decided not to update it.
The only problem I've had with the AEKII/iMate combo has started in the last week or so, and it's the random inserting of characters into the keystream when I'm typing rapidly. I can't figure out if it's the keyboard, cable, or iMate that's on the fritz.
But at any rate, there is nothing inherent in ADB that means the response time will be low. It's possible for an ADB controller to actually poll a connected device at a greater rate than typical PS/2 keyboards (17ms, IIRC). Griffin makes a optional control panel that lets you play with the poll rate, so you can crank it up to whatever the device you're using supports; I think it will go down to 10ms. Of course you're potentially stacking it onto the USB bus' latency, but we're talking about a handful of milliseconds here. I don't think that's "quite low" response time.
First, it seems like the place where most families would spend the least amount of time.
Huh? The kitchen is generally considered (when doing renovations, etc.) to be one of the rooms where people spend most of their waking time in a house. In many modern houses the kitchens are built specifically to serve as large, multipurpose 'family spaces' rather than as small, specialized food-prep areas.
As I kid, I and my siblings did most of my homework at the kitchen counter while one of my parents made dinner. It was nice; everyone knew what everyone else was working on, it was a good time to talk about your day, you could get help if you needed it, etc. Given that kids probably have to use computers much more extensively now than I did (meaning, more than 'not at all'), it would make sense to put a computer there. The alternative -- sticking it (and the kid who has to use it) somewhere else in the house strikes me as a bit sad, honestly, or at least as a wasted opportunity for family interaction.
I may just be out of touch with the times, though; I've no idea how many families actually sit down and have dinner with each other these days, or even cook, for that matter.
Ethanol is a good way to extend our comfortable behavior with little downside. Except it's not, really. If it was, I'd be a much bigger fan. But it's really just a red herring; a way of pulling the wool over the public's eyes, continuing to empower the oil companies, while also pumping some taxpayer dollars into the agribusiness and farm lobbies.
I've only looked at corn ethanol in much detail, but that stuff requires MORE oil to produce, per unit of burnable energy (that you can actually pump into your car), than gasoline does. It gets fertilized with oil, harvested with tractors that run on oil, transported with oil... by the time it gets to your tank, it would have been better just to use the stupid oil to begin with. At least the oil companies have an incentive, when they crack petroleum to make gasoline directly, to do it efficiently. When you're going oil->fertilizer->corn->ethanol->gasohol, with tons of subsidies along the way, the efficiency motive gets lost. It's not even carbon neutral -- it just makes you think it's carbon-neutral (and might let you *call* it that, depending on who's doing the accounting).
Maybe switchgrass is a little better than corn, but I have some serious reservations, and this study doesn't dispel them (considered how deep in the pockets of ADM and the oil companies the government is). Show me a large-scale ethanol process, sunlight-to-tank, that doesn't take petroleum as an input and then I'll be much more impressed. So far I haven't seen one that seems practical.
I hear a lot about people moving jobs frequently, but where I am people generally stick around like they are glued to their chairs. Do you like moving around? Just curious. I won't put words in the OP's mouth but I've worked in the (DC-based) consulting industry and it's pretty... mercenary. You work for a company for a few years, maybe get a few promotions, go up a few titles, but a lot of people do their real advancement by bouncing between companies. It really only works in a growth industry with a tight labor market and a lot of competition for qualified people.
It leads to an interesting culture at some consultancies, but in some ways it's not negative, though. You don't want to burn bridges when there's a good chance you'll run into somebody again; people's reputations tend to follow them from project to project and company to company. A lot of people work to keep up contacts since you never know when somebody from a past engagement may be able to help you out. Everybody has 401k's and IRAs; no pension plans to lock you into one company.
The one good piece of advice I got (aside from 'never have more stuff in your desk than fits into a single file box') was never to leave in the middle of a project, when leaving will result in that project failing: it's a good way to get effectively blackballed, since nobody wants someone who might leave them in the lurch. But I've told bosses I'm leaving at the end of a project and had everyone take it professionally -- it's just par for the course.
What's interesting for me is that right now, I'm considering moving out of consulting into traditional software development, into a company with a very high retention rate and a much more long-term focus. It's interesting and frankly scarier than consulting, since it feels like much more commitment. However, the consulting lifestyle is pretty grueling. I can definitely see the appeal of both ways -- it's more a matter of personal taste and where you are in your life than anything else.
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The only part of the infrastructure that cellphones provide an alternative or parallel to, are the lines running from the CO to your house. It doesn't save you if the problem is in one of the backbone segments.
Now, if you have a satellite phone (e.g. Iridium, Telstar), then you have a truly parallel network, at least until you get to the downlink station where it rejoins POTS. But I'm pretty sure such things are illegal in Iran, except for Western journalists and the elite. They're not something that regular folks have access to.
That said, if Iran wanted to cut off its own people, say for the purpose of doing something really nasty internally, they have easier ways to do it than cutting cables in the Med. I'm not buying that particular conspiracy theory. Neither does it seem like anything the U.S. would do, or derive much benefit from, particularly given the alternatives the U.S. has at its disposal (including the cable-tapping submarines that have been mentioned over and over in this thread so far).
The most likely possibilities to me are: (1) it was a terrorist act aimed at disrupting the most heavily Westernized parts of the Middle East, by a group with fairly limited resources, or (2) it was truly an accident or coincidence.
Well, by some of those definitions, Python 3 will be 'backwards-compatible' with Python 2, because it's apparently planned that the Python 3 interpreter will have a compatibility mode for 2.x syntax.
... but I don't think that the presence or absence of a conversion tool really has anything to do with the language's compatibility per se. I've seen converters for going from C to Java or even Cobol to Java; does that mean that Java is "backwards-compatible" to Cobol? Of course not.
IMO, that doesn't really mean that the "languages" are backwards-compatible, it just means that the interpreter is. That's different, although I know it's confusing when one particular interpreter is the de facto standard for the language, and people talk about the language in terms of the interpreter that it's used with.
I'd argue that both Perl 6 and Python 3 are backwards-incompatible, but both have interpreters that will work with the older syntax. It's the interpreters, the implementation, that's compatible to a certain degree (and quite similarly in both cases).
In the case of Perl there's also automated conversion tools (planned?), and I don't know if such a thing is in the works for Python
I don't think anyone is really suggesting that a lot of code be rewritten. Python 2.x isn't going anywhere, for exactly the reasons you bring up. Python 3.0 is going to be almost a completely new product, and I expect it'll only be used for new projects. I'm not really sure why anyone would want to convert their old code, if it works for you the way it is.If it isn't backwards compatible, it isn't Python, as far as I'm concerned. I'm sure not going to be re-writing a couple hundred megabytes of code. They can take their incompatible new snakelike thing and smoke it. Foregoing backwards compatibility is about as dim a move as I've ever seen anyone outside of Microsoft pull (MS dropping VB underneath Access comes to mind as a comparable clueless act, with exactly the same consequences — it isn't the same product and is useless to me.)
The reason for breaking compatibility is to maintain the Python philosophy of not having a lot of ways to accomplish the same thing. Without periodic pruning, eventually you'd just have Perl with indents.
From what I've read, you'll be able to choose the version/style you want, and the 2.x and 3.x series will live alongside each other (I don't know whether the 3.x interpreter will have a compatibility mode, or if you'll have to keep the 2.x version around as a separate program, though).
It was widely reported from a variety of whistleblowers at the turn of the millennium that the U.S. was preparing the U.S.S. Jimmy Carter to be able to tap underwater fibre-optic cables. See Bamford's Body of Secrets for exmaple.
That this operation was carried out on the submarine named after the president who did the most to reduce spying on civilian targets shows just how petty and spiteful the professional privacy violators in the NSA are.
What does that have to do with anything? You don't need a sophisticated submarine just to break the cables in half. All you need to do that is a ship with an anchor and an approximate idea of where the cables are located.Tapping a cable is a subtle move, requiring a lot of technical expertise and work. Breaking one isn't.
I included a direct quote from the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, but here it is again, including the preamble:
The U.S. Constitution contains no such qualification, and is quite clearly designed to be the absolute law of the land at any particular time. (Cf. Article VI) The sole remedy in the Constitution for conflicts between society and the rights defined therein is via the amendment process; the Constitution does not give the Legislature any leeway to limit Constitutional freedoms, "reasonable" or not.
Now, of course that's theory -- in practice things do not work out to be quite that absolute; the Supreme Court has interpreted its own 'interpretative' powers broadly enough to abrogate certain speech rights, particularly in edge cases where speech is inextricably linked to action, or by defining certain speech as outside the bounds protected by the First Amendment. However, such cases have always been controversial, and more than a few jurists* have held the absolutist line despite what must have been strong social and political pressure to ban unpopular speech. They were able to do so because the Constitution quite clearly does not make room for exceptions -- were the Constitution to contain an obvious invitation for exceptions as the Charter does, I doubt they would have been able to maintain their opposition to censorship of unpopular or repugnant ideas.
If you need a practical demonstration of what I perceive to be the dangers of the Canadian approach, the "reasonable limits" clause is the linchpin of R. v. Keegstra , which legitimized 'hate speech' restrictions in Canada. The more recent example of Ezra Levant vs the CIC (carried out in 'human rights' tribunals instead of open court, which is an issue by itself) seem like the inevitable result.
To sum it up quite bluntly: the First Amendment and the U.S. Constitution as a whole, has managed to hold back would-be book-banners for 217 years, in an environment that is and historically has been more hostile and conservative than Canada. The Charter of Rights and Freedoms has existed (in its current form, anyway) for only 26 years, and it already has allowed more regulation of speech, in an environment that is widely considered to be far more socially liberal and open to new ideas than the U.S. That's not a particularly good track record.
Lest you or anyone else thing I'm mindlessly Canada-bashing, I'm not; there are lots of things that I think are done drastically better in Canada versus the U.S. (loser-pays-expenses in civil suits, for example). And on a more general level, I wasn't even arguing which system is necessarily better in any objective sense, outside of the OP's original question, which sought maximum freedom (for a web server, no less) as its only goal.
* Probably the most noted example would be Justices Brennan, Black, and Douglas' support of unconditional free-speech rights and rejection of the common-law 'obscenity' doctrine as unsupportable under the Constitution; Douglas somewhat famously concluding in Memoirs v. Massachusetts that "No interest of society justifies overriding the guarantees of free speech and press and establishing a regime of censorship." (Seemingly the exact opposite of the Charter's philosophy.) Unfortunately the Warren court -- which had been packed by social conservatives -- ignored this argument in Miller, but it was a 5-4 split and has been slowly chipped away at since. While
This is essentially how most commercial webhosts in the U.S. operate as it is. They'll protect you if you're just irritating some guy whose only weapon is to write angry letters, but the second you tick off someone with a lot of lawyers and cash to burn, you're up the creek without a paddle.
Bluntly put, but not untrue.
Basically, you're going to have to pick the least-bad option. The idea of 'data havens' where conventional meatspace law doesn't apply is sadly seeming more and more like a lost concept. It seemed possible during the early 90s, when government and the big corporate interests really hadn't caught on to 'the Internet,' but now that they have, it's going to become more and more regulated, just like every other area of human endeavor. It was fun while it lasted, I guess, and it'll make a neat story to tell our kids about, but the party's basically over.
Where you want to go depends on the specifics of what you're doing. Political speech, particularly political speech directed at other countries, is relatively well-protected both in the U.S. and the E.U. Although I'm pretty unhappy with the current security paranoia here in the U.S., I think it's unlikely that you'll get in trouble unless you actually start advocating 'direct action' (terrorism) or have a cozy relationship with people that do. In terms of formal legislative safeguards on political speech, the U.S. has a more absolute freedom-of-speech doctrine than many European countries and Canada.* Where you will run into trouble in the U.S. (viz political speech) is when you are saying things that can be construed not as speech but as 'action' or as appeals to action. Saying things that are highly politically unpopular in the U.S. may get you put under surveillance or monitoring, but probably won't land you in a lot of legal trouble or get you locked up. Bottom line: if you're looking to deny the Holocaust or write nasty-but-true things about just about anyone, the U.S. is the place to do it.
Where the E.U. becomes the superior venue is if you're doing things that would be a crime under certain U.S. intellectual-property laws drawn up by the megacorporations that essentially own large chunks of Congress. Hollywood is a double-edged sword: it likes freedom for political speech, but really hates freedom if it might negatively impact this quarter's bottom line. Thus while you can advocate genocide in the U.S., linking to copyrighted material may land you in prison. For that sort of thing, you're better off in Europe, probably as far north as you can get. (E.g., Sweden.) You're also probably better off in Europe if you're looking to do something that's edgy and involves sex; I'm not sure that the laws per se are a whole lot better, but overall attitudes may result in those laws not being used as aggressively to bludgeon you.
There are more minor specialty venues that you might want to consider if what you're doing involves money changing hands. Antigua in particular seems to be a popular choice for shady financial-transaction sites (cf. 1MDC) as well as gambling. Exactly how tolerant they'll be of (U.S) copyright-violating material, as a result of the recent trade decisions, remains to be seen. I wouldn't hold your breath for a Bittorrent Free Zone, though.
I admit to not knowing a whole lot about privacy laws in Asian countries but I get the impression that they're more restrictive than the U.S. in many cases. One datapoint: 2chan, the popular Japanese imageboard, is run out of the U.S. to shield it from Japanese authorities and law.
Really, I don't think there's any place you can go where you'll get 'total freedom,' except maybe Freenet (and it's really slow and impractical to use). You need to think hard about what type of content is going to be the most problematic, and then choose a hosting location that's going to be least hostile to it.
* To wit: Many European countries prohibit certain types of political speech under the guise of 'hate speech' laws and anti-Nazism/fascism policies. Although Canada isn't nearly as bad, their Bill of Rights-equivalent document, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, "guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society," a cave
Skype, is very popular and would be a logical means for governments to monitor
conversations---especially when said program touts itself as being encrypted and
secure. So the German revelations are likely a national security goof. More than that, while the Germans have to install this aftermarket snooping program, it wouldn't surprise me if Ebay provided a convenient backdoor in the code so that the U.S. government can do the same thing without going to all the trouble and expense (both of third-party software, and warrants).
How exactly Skype implements encryption has never been made public. Anyone using it for secure communications is a fool. The only person it's good against is some script kiddie on your LAN or in the coffee shop where you're using a hotspot. The only person calling it "secure" is Skype/Ebay, and since they haven't opened the code up for auditing by disinterested third parties (someone like, say, Bruce Schneier), it's really not guaranteed to be anything more than snake oil.
For all you know, every time you make a call, Skype could be forwarding the key to a central server and then sending them in bulk to the FBI. That's the price of using a closed-source security product where the vendor has an obvious interest in selling you out to the authorities.
I use OpenBSD for Internet-facing applications where I want security, e.g. the DMZ box on my home network that I want to be able to SSH into from the outside world. I really like OpenBSD conceptually, and happily send them my $60 or whatever it costs for a DVD with each major release, although I wish the pool of officially vetted software was bigger. (*cough* POSTFIX *cough*)
Because I use it for gateway/edge machines, I don't build the ports tree or use any software that's not part of the official system. This is pretty limiting and definitely not something you'd want to do if you were using it as a workstation. (OpenBSD has two kinds of software: officially-supported stuff, where somebody has combed through the code and generally locked it all down, and unsupported/unofficial 'ports,' which are installed slightly differently and haven't necessarily received the same level of attention.) There's definitely enough officially-supported OpenBSD software to run a basic server (mail/web/DNS) without going to ports, but you may not have the level of choice you're used to in, say, Debian Stable.
In fact although there are lots of people out there who run OpenBSD as a workstation OS, I'm not really sure why you'd want to (instead of one of the BSDs that's geared more towards that as a primary function). I could see the security benefits potentially coming into play if it was a laptop, and the code is very clean with an emphasis on technical 'correctness' (so it might be a good OS to run if you want to really understand what's going on inside your computer), but there are other options which are equally or more attractive for a pure desktop system. That's just my gut feeling; I'm sure there are other people who'd say differently and I certainly wouldn't argue with them.
Personally, I run either Mac OS X or Debian on my workstation/firewalled PCs. The Macs are mostly just out of inertia and the Debian machines are because I like apt-get. While there's no doubt in my mind that OpenBSD is the more technically correct, better designed, better documented, and less defect-prone system, it's not quite enough for me to switch over my day-to-day PCs. I am, I suppose, proof of my own assertion in my earlier comment.
The BSDs are pretty fascinating, and I think if I were starting with a clean slate today, without all the legacy applications and data and personal biases that I have, I'd probably look very seriously at one of the desktop BSD distros. Particularly if you're a student, there's something to be said for using a system that at least plays lip service to doing things 'right.'
One note regarding OpenBSD: if you do decide to play with it, you may want to avoid 4.2 and opt for 4.1 instead; 4.2 requires that you install X11 in order to run many packages that should not require X11 (server software), because of some dependency issues. This is supposed to be corrected in 4.3. Of course, if you're creating a workstation OS and plan to install X11 anyway, this is a moot point, but it's something to note if you're going to play with it on a server or headless box using the CLI first (which isn't a bad thing to do).
Well, if you consider the megafauna, European humans were probably only the last of a long line of troublemakers on that (as well as other) continents. Driving other species into extinction is something we seem to do fairly well, and have tens of thousands of years of practice at.
Interestingly though, I've read in several places now the theory that human agriculture may have been developed in direct response to our destruction of the animal herds that hunter-gatherer culture depended on. Civilization, such as it is, can be viewed in one light as a coping strategy when our much easier original lifestyle was no longer practicable.
The way such a scheme would pan out is that, almost instantly, nobody would sell you software unless you first signed a waiver of liability / hold-harmless agreement with respect to the software, and/or they gave you a list of known problems that was six feet long.
The market is full of buggy software because nobody wants, apparently, to pay for really good software. You could get it, if you wanted to pay for it. You could get a webserver that came with some sort of bond-backed guarantee that it didn't have any common types of bugs (you probably can't guarantee no design flaws, but you could guarantee against certain types of technical defects). It would probably cost a staggering amount of money, though. Like nobody-but-the-DoD kind of staggering. (In fact, even the DoD doesn't pay for that level of quality assurance. They're big into the CMMI and other structured methodologies, but there's less of an emphasis on mathematical proofs of bug-free code than perhaps some Slashdotters would like to imagine.)
I hate mediocrity as much as anyone, but that's what people want. If people wanted reliable software, we'd all be using OpenBSD on our desktops and using mainframes for servers. People use Windows (and lots of other mediocre software), despite it being an utter piece of shit, because it works just well enough to get the job done. That's all they're interested in paying for.
What I'd like to see is a legal and social change to stop making "the computer did it" an acceptable excuse for anything. If you choose to employ crummy consumer-oriented software and use it for business, and your consumer-grade system craps itself, tough. Guess you should have spent the money up front for something better. The fact that crummy software exists isn't the problem; the problem is that people continually cut corners and use crummy software in totally inappropriate places (like to manage critical infrastructure, for financial systems, etc.). I think the problem needs to be approached from the demand side, not the supply/development side.
I support a tax on gas and diesel that's actually driven by the damage that those fuels do, and the associated costs. That could include everything from MTBE contamination cleanup to global warming to the war in Iraq. The price that rings up on the pump should include all of those 'hidden costs' so that people can make a sound choice about how much of it to use. If you drive a real gas-guzzler, you should be paying through the nose.
But the damage actually done to the roads is a separate issue. Your car's gas mileage doesn't have anything to do with how much wear and tear it creates: that's purely a function of axle loading and the amount of driving you do. A 6,000 car that gets 15MPG and a 6,000 car that gets 30MPG both do the same damage, and they should pay for road reconstruction equally, on a per-mile basis.
Frankly, to be fair, regular passenger vehicles should pay virtually no road-maintenance tax, because most of the damage done to the highways (requiring resurfacing) is a result of semi-trailer trucks. Right now, every time you buy gas, you're subsidizing the nearly-free use of the highway network by trucks, in order to have artificially cheap prices on stuff you buy in a store. This is stupid: it hides information from consumers that they need to make correct purchasing decisions. Tax the trucks, let them pass the costs on to the shippers, who build it in to the cost of goods, which is then reflected in higher prices for goods hauled great distances. Then consumers can be the judge of whether they want to pay for all that road wear or not. Also, using a axle-pound-mile basis rather than pound-mile would encourage the use of trailers with more axles (like ones used in Europe and Great Britain), which do less damage to the roads and save money in the long term.
Congested roads are a third, again separate, issue. Here we should be taxing the people using the congested road at a flat per-vehicle fee, since it doesn't really matter whether they're driving a Civic or a Suburban: the road is still clogged either way. Unlike the road-wear taxes which would be used exclusively for maintenance, the congestion fees would be used exclusively for the creation of new infrastructure and transportation alternatives.
There is no good, "one size fits all" tax. Taxes by their nature affect markets and thus how people act. By using taxes to ensure that the price of goods reflects their actual cost to society, we let people make their own decisions as to what something is worth to them, at a particular time and place.
More concretely: if an employer requires their employees to spend $15 (or whatever) a day in congestion charges because of an inflexible schedule, that acts like an instant bonus to any company who has a flexible schedule. All you as an employee have to do to get yourself a pay raise is switch companies. People aren't stupid -- they build costs like this into housing and employment decisions all the time.
Obviously this assumes a reasonably tight labor market; trying to maintain that through sound policy is a legitimate function of government. In a slack labor market, employees get shafted almost regardless of whatever else is going on -- getting stuck paying a congestion charge because you're unable to change jobs is pretty close to the bottom of the 'things that suck' list. (The wages you lose in a slack market due to your very weak bargaining position are at the top.)
While taxing gasoline is good in the sense that it increases the cost of gas, which makes more-efficient cars more attractive than they otherwise would be, that's really irrelevant to the road-use taxation issue. What we should be taxing is wear and tear to the roads. Just because your car gets 50MPG instead of 30 doesn't mean it does 40% less damage to the road it travels over.
Personally I think we should tax cars for their road use based on mileage * axle load. The more weight you have per axle, the more damage you do to the road. (In fact, the damage isn't linear, so a better calculation might be [mileage * (axle load)^C], where C is some empirically-derived constant that relates road damage to increasing weight.) Heavy cars and trucks should cost a lot more, for the same mileage, than lightweight cars, because they're the ones that make all the resurfacing necessary.
If we want to encourage fuel economy, we can tax gasoline or force efficiency standards more directly. We should get the funding for road repair from sources that are proportional to use made and damage done to the roads. In fact, I think it's a really bad idea to use gasoline taxes for anything except pollution remediation (i.e. combating the negative externalities associated with gasoline combustion), because it creates a disconnect between the funding source and the use of the revenue.
Optimally, what I'd like to see is:
- Taxes on hydrocarbon motor fuels that go into a fund which is used only for the remediation of externalities associated with their use (smog, MTBE contamination, global warming, etc.)
- Taxes on 'road wear' (measured in axle-pound-miles or some similar unit, for all vehicles regardless of power source) used to maintain current infrastructure
- Congestion surcharges and tolls*, at flat per-vehicle rates, used to fund the construction of new infrastructure
As long as you make sure that the price of various goods (gasoline, car usage, plastic widgets at WalMart) includes their externalized costs, I don't see much of a problem in letting the market find the optimal solution on an individual basis.
* And I only support tolls when they're actually being used to pay off a construction project; not as a general revenue source. E.g., building a road, and then putting a tollbooth on it and using the tolls to pay back the cost of construction plus bond interest seems like a good idea; leaving that toll booth there indefinitely (if the toll rate is higher than what's required for maintenance) is bad. Assuming it's a public road, of course.
You don't need copyright, you just need contracts law. You could just refuse to sell your book to anyone who didn't sign a non-reproduction agreement. If someone bought the book and then reproduced it anyway, you'd have more than enough cause to go after them for breach of contract. It wouldn't take much to do this; shrinkwrap with a clearly-displayed notice is legally binding in many jurisdictions.
You certainly don't need copyright in order to sell intellectual property, just a way of enforcing mutually agreed-to contracts.
The Northeast and Mid-Atlantic is full of them; it's not purely a East Coast phenomenon, but it's definitely more prevalent here. There are a few of them in Texas and the Midwest, I think. Definitely not as many, though.
It's going to increase though, because there's a lot of infrastructure out there in dire need of maintenance, and people really hate taxes. Nobody wants to pay for crap they don't use. As the technology makes it more and more feasible, I think we're going to move towards a 'use-tax' system pretty quickly.
I was listening to CSPAN Radio the other day and they had a speech by somebody (head of the Federal Highway Dept, I think), talking about the future of transportation funding. He was pretty set on the idea of a miles-driven based tax rather than a gas tax. The idea is you either have an RFID transponder in your car, or maybe they just go low-tech and check your odometer reading, but that's what you're taxed off of. Obviously this is a privacy nightmare but I don't see it disappearing. It's an easy sell to the public because you can say you're "cutting" all sorts of taxes. (Particularly because the plan calls for doubling or tripling the gasoline tax before moving to a mileage-based tax. Carrot, meet stick.)
In Virginia, transportation money is one of the biggest issues. Here you have a state where one rather small part (the northern suburbs, around DC) are in desperate need of money for infrastructure, but the rest of the state doesn't really give a flying fuck about it. And why should they? If you don't come to Northern Virginia, it's pretty hard to see how you benefit from a few billion dollars in improvements on I-66. The state government has fooled around with alternative funding sources (the recently repealed extra-special tax on speeding tickets), but in the medium- and long-term I don't see any alternative to tolls and congestion pricing.
There's no point in expanding the roads without implementing congestion pricing -- if you just widen the highways, it just encourages more people to use the roads at the same time. Very quickly, the volume just increases until you hit the failure point again. You can't just keep building roads and hope to keep ahead of the demand. You need to encourage people to use the roads at different times, carpool, work from home, etc. Maintaining the infrastructure we have while charging the people who actually use it for the construction/upkeep (and all the negative externalities associated with their use, which congestion pricing tries to do) seems eminently fair.
But a lot of people don't, and for them, carpooling makes a lot of sense. I like being alone and on my own schedule in the morning too, but I have a pretty good idea of how long it'd take me to start carpooling. About $5 a day and I'd start riding with somebody else. Below that, it's not worth the hassle. Above that, it would be. That's my 'point of pain,' but everyone is bound to be different.
The solution is just to ratchet up the pricing until the number of vehicles on the road drops to a level that's not too much for the road (i.e. without turning into a parking lot). Some people, who really value driving alone and have money to burn, will always be able to drive alone. But most people will bail and use public transportation or carpool long before that.
And then you still have AOL, MSN, or Google logging your chats, if you're talking to someone on one of their networks. If you're the only person using your chat server, it's really like just using a very complicated client program.
E.g., if you're "joe@homenetwork.net" and you run a XMPP server at messaging.homenetwork.net, but all the people you talk to are on Google or AOL, every message you send goes from your client, through messaging.homenetwork.net, and then over to Google's or AOL's servers (where presumably they log them), before going to the destination.
Unless you can convince your friends to use your chat server (messaging.homenetwork.net) rather than AOL's/Google's, you're not getting any additional privacy.
Frankly, I think privacy isn't really the goal we should be aiming for with this. If you want privacy, get OTR encryption (the easiest way is just to use Adium on the Mac), and then it doesn't matter quite so much whose servers the messages are passing through. The switch from OSCAR to XMPP is all about interoperability.
Well, first, you need to mine some copper ore...
I'm using a Griffin iMate right now, and I don't think the response is in any way noticeably slower than a typical USB keyboard. I type about 70-90WPM and have never had lag problems. I'm not a heavy FPSer, but I've played my share of Quake and UT with it, and can't really fault it (I am quite dreadful at virtually all games, but that's not really my equipment's problem).
I use the iMate with an Apple Extended Keyboard II (which itself has been in daily use since 1994 or so); I got the iMate in 2001 or thereabouts when the ADB-USB adapter I was using previously -- a Keyspan? -- refused to work with OS X and the manufacturer decided not to update it.
The only problem I've had with the AEKII/iMate combo has started in the last week or so, and it's the random inserting of characters into the keystream when I'm typing rapidly. I can't figure out if it's the keyboard, cable, or iMate that's on the fritz.
But at any rate, there is nothing inherent in ADB that means the response time will be low. It's possible for an ADB controller to actually poll a connected device at a greater rate than typical PS/2 keyboards (17ms, IIRC). Griffin makes a optional control panel that lets you play with the poll rate, so you can crank it up to whatever the device you're using supports; I think it will go down to 10ms. Of course you're potentially stacking it onto the USB bus' latency, but we're talking about a handful of milliseconds here. I don't think that's "quite low" response time.
First, it seems like the place where most families would spend the least amount of time.
Huh? The kitchen is generally considered (when doing renovations, etc.) to be one of the rooms where people spend most of their waking time in a house. In many modern houses the kitchens are built specifically to serve as large, multipurpose 'family spaces' rather than as small, specialized food-prep areas.
As I kid, I and my siblings did most of my homework at the kitchen counter while one of my parents made dinner. It was nice; everyone knew what everyone else was working on, it was a good time to talk about your day, you could get help if you needed it, etc. Given that kids probably have to use computers much more extensively now than I did (meaning, more than 'not at all'), it would make sense to put a computer there. The alternative -- sticking it (and the kid who has to use it) somewhere else in the house strikes me as a bit sad, honestly, or at least as a wasted opportunity for family interaction.
I may just be out of touch with the times, though; I've no idea how many families actually sit down and have dinner with each other these days, or even cook, for that matter.
It's not funny. It's not even creative. It's a dumb, script-kiddie-esque attack, nothing more.
I didn't have much of an opinion on Gizmodo either way prior to this, but it's pretty clear they're a bunch of puerile dumbasses now.
Maybe next year they'll crawl around and yank the power cord out during somebody's presentation; that would be just as 'funny.'
I've only looked at corn ethanol in much detail, but that stuff requires MORE oil to produce, per unit of burnable energy (that you can actually pump into your car), than gasoline does. It gets fertilized with oil, harvested with tractors that run on oil, transported with oil
Maybe switchgrass is a little better than corn, but I have some serious reservations, and this study doesn't dispel them (considered how deep in the pockets of ADM and the oil companies the government is). Show me a large-scale ethanol process, sunlight-to-tank, that doesn't take petroleum as an input and then I'll be much more impressed. So far I haven't seen one that seems practical.
It leads to an interesting culture at some consultancies, but in some ways it's not negative, though. You don't want to burn bridges when there's a good chance you'll run into somebody again; people's reputations tend to follow them from project to project and company to company. A lot of people work to keep up contacts since you never know when somebody from a past engagement may be able to help you out. Everybody has 401k's and IRAs; no pension plans to lock you into one company.
The one good piece of advice I got (aside from 'never have more stuff in your desk than fits into a single file box') was never to leave in the middle of a project, when leaving will result in that project failing: it's a good way to get effectively blackballed, since nobody wants someone who might leave them in the lurch. But I've told bosses I'm leaving at the end of a project and had everyone take it professionally -- it's just par for the course.
What's interesting for me is that right now, I'm considering moving out of consulting into traditional software development, into a company with a very high retention rate and a much more long-term focus. It's interesting and frankly scarier than consulting, since it feels like much more commitment. However, the consulting lifestyle is pretty grueling. I can definitely see the appeal of both ways -- it's more a matter of personal taste and where you are in your life than anything else.