I won't comment on your other points but I take issue with the characterization of Card's Ender's Game as just another "young man coming of age during military service against an alien intelligence" book. I've read both Card's book and Heinlein's, and the fact that both of them share the same vague premise doesn't detract from either as a story.
I think that you need to separate a story -- which is what makes a novel good -- from its setting and premise. You can start off with the exact same setting, even the same situation, and two authors can develop it into two completely different stories, both of which are enjoyable in their own right and do not detract from each other. I think the Ender series and Starship Troopers are examples of this (obviously indicative of my personal preferences, but I'm sure everyone can find a similar situation).
Anyone who thinks that 'science fiction' as a genre is played out is taking a very narrow view and failing to understand that most writers strive to develop stories and build characters, not just scenarios and universes, and many (Card included) do not work exclusively in SF to begin with.
Personally I find the idea of someone wishing they had Windows laughable. I guess that's just what you're used to.
I have to use a Wintel PC at work and find it to be the computational equivalent of a straightjacket. Sure, by installing the correct software you can make it almost as capable as a basic Linux install, but why doesn't it just work that way out of the box? I was appalled, for instance, that there's no preinstalled SSH or SFTP client. Similarly, no rsync, no capability for command-line pipes, etc. Obviously no universally available free compiler.
And it's not just geeky stuff, either. I've yet to find a Windows browser that has a decent integrated spell-checker (Firefox with SpellBound is marginally acceptable, but even it doesn't work transparently as you type, like Mac OS X's Safari [or Konquerer] does). Maybe there's one out there that I haven't found yet (Opera?) but it seems ridiculous to have to look this hard for such an obvious and useful feature.
I'll stop before this turns into a complete rant, but my point is that Windows seems significantly more limited in terms of features than competiting OSes, and the only advantage it possesses, in my opinion, is a large base of software which it maintains by virtue of its virtual monopoly in the business-desktop market. I really feel like I've given it a fair shot, and it's a mediocre OS at the end of the day. It's a pity that mediocrity is all most people demand from their computers.
Huh? I'm not sure I understand your response. What the parent was saying was that people might not feel good about having their tax dollars go to funding the campaigns of parties that they disagree with -- which is a necessary consequence of a publically funded campaign strategy. He was using the American Nazi Party (which exists, in real life, today) as an example of an organization which would have to receive funding under such a system, which most people probably would have a problem with.
I think his point is a good one. It is, in fact, a deal-breaker with any plan to publically fund campaigns. Such a system would last right up until the right-leaning voters of the U.S. found out that some of their tax money was going to help the campaigns of pro-choice candidates, and left-leaning voters found out that some of their tax dollars were going to fund racist populist Holocaust-deniers. You'd manage to get one interesting result out of such a system: you'd instantly unite the most disparate portions of the political spectrum into one powerful force aimed at dismantling public campaign funding overnight.
It's just not a workable system given how strongly some people feel about politics in general and some political issues in particlar. Also, I think a lot of people (myself included) would take issue with public funds being used for campaigning in any respect, viewing that as simply being outside the intended scope of Government in this country.
I think a better route to go would just be to bar campaign contributions of any sort, in any amount, for any purpose or via any intermediary, by any for-profit corporation. The only entities which would be allowed to make campaign donations (or otherwise attempt to influence legislation or elections) would be natural persons, or non-profit political action organizations whose sole income comes from the donations of natural persons and meet strict criteria for fiscal transparency. No corporations, no unions, no foreign governments; no one, basically, with any profit interest in the outcome of the election other than living, breathing people.
If you did that I think you would clean up the political system in this country practically overnight (and probably change the landscape quite dramatically). It wouldn't be perfect, but it would beat the hell out of our current system and be vastly preferable to any sort of quasi-socialized publicly-funded system (which would fall apart as inherently unpalatable to Americans).
In particular, Level 3 Communications has not one but two Class A blocks, the 4.0.0.0 and 8.0.0.0 blocks; "Comcast IP Services" has another one.
There are some oddball Class A assignments on there too. Who would have guessed that Ford has one? The US Postal Service? The Defense Department has something like seven, not a huge surprise given when the assignments were made. Halliburton even has one.
Anyway, reading down the list you can see that the people who already have their own Class A blocks are unlikely to care too much about how quickly v6 gets rolled out, at least for their own use. But some of the newer big-time tech companies who aren't on that list might have more of an interest... Cisco, for instance, is not on there.
You're talking only about the default configuration of most NAT-enabled routers. It's possible to enable NAT and have the translation device forward incoming packets to a machine on the internal network, it's just not usually set up that way. You can easily do this though by selecting a particular internal machine to be in the router's "DMZ," after which it will be accesible to the public Internet without initiating a connection.
NAT is normally combined with stateful filtering, but it's not necessarily part of the bare minimum 'address translation.'
This was going to be my exact point as well but you beat me to it.:)
People think that NAT is superior because they're using it instead of a firewall (or as a firewall of sorts) by only forwarding certain port ranges.
There's nothing inherently more secure about NAT, it's just the way it's set up on most home routers. As a little experiment you can take a Windows box and put it in the "DMZ" of a normal home NAT box, which means that all ports and protocols get forwarded to it, just as if it was sitting on the public internet itself. It should end up getting owned by viruses and spyware just as quickly as if you plugged it into the modem, even though it's subject to NAT. The point being: the address translation isn't providing any security itself, its only because it's being applied selectively.
With IPv6, you could get the perceived security of NAT by actually using a firewall (either a hardware one or a software one), and you'd have the benefit of each device being issued a globally unique IP address.
It will be interesting (and perhaps this has already been all worked out, I haven't looked into it much) how they allocate the IPv6 addresses. It seems fairly clear now that the life of the v4 address space was definitely shortened -- although by how much is not clear -- because of the very large chunks of space that were handed out and never fully utilized. (Class A allocations; IIRC IBM had a massive one and I'm not sure ever used much of it, and I'm sure they're not the only one.) Of course this wasn't viewed as a problem at the time because there were so many more addresses than anyone imagined there would ever be devices.
I just wonder how we're going to resist the temptation to do the same thing again, now that we have another glut of address space. On one hand we don't want to end up with vacant blocks of addresses, but we don't want to be too niggardly about it either, or else individual static addresses won't ever 'trickle down' to end users and we'll be stuck with the same mess of NAT traversals and subnets that we have now.
I'm sure that this issue has been addressed (or will be addressed) but I'm just curious how the IANA will find the 'balance point' between assigning enough high-level blocks to make sure end users can get static global addresses, while not overassigning. Perhaps there should be some sort of a periodic review process for high-level address block assignments to see how fully utilized they are, and either assign an entity more addresses or reallocate underutilized resources.
Actually as I wrote that sentence I had Google in mind and thought that people would probably mention it, but I haven't investigated whether it interoperates with other Jabber network servers, or just uses the protocol. If it connects with other servers then then I might just have to retract my criticism and go sign up; however the limited information I've seen so far (and to be fair I haven't played with it myself yet) indicates that it uses the Jabber protocol but not the network. Which means it's really just a reinvention of the wheel as far as I'm concerned -- maybe a really nice reinvention, but still not inherently superior to the Big Three (which really should be the Big One and the Two Dwarves, but anyway).
Just in case my first comment sounded unduly negative I should point out that I'm a big fan of FOSS software in general; the problem with instant messaging is that the networks are only as useful as the other people who are on them, so really all the problems I mentioned are secondary to the primary obstacle facing Jabber: luring users away from AOL, MSN, and Yahoo.
Aside from the obvious problems with the fact that steel is a lot easier to produce and less expensive than carbon nanotubes right now, that "strength" he's talking about is tensile strength, not compressive or shear strength. (Ref.: here.) Just because something has a large amount of tensile strength doesn't mean you'd want to build a building out of it.
In fact I'm fairly certain that there are types of plastic (nylon maybe) which when woven together have more tensile strength per unit mass and volume than a comparable amount of steel, and I'm looking out my window right now and don't see any plastic-framed skyscraper buildings.
I always get a laugh at the people who are all afraid of "space weapons," as if there aren't a whole lot of weapons sitting underground in North Dakota right now that are more than capable of annihilating you where you sit.
The only real purpose of putting weapons in space would be to shoot other things which are in space. It's already pretty easy (for the U.S. and probably a bunch of other industrialized countries) to put a missile anywhere they want on the face of the Earth; putting them in space isn't going to change that situation any.
This is true. I don't know whether all cattle are RFID tagged, but I'm sure that they've all got some sort of tags. They need to, in order to identify which farm they came from, etc. It serves essentially the same purpose that skin brands used to.
The proposal here is to maintain the tagging all the way through the food production chain, so the cows are tagged, the sides of beef that come out of the slaughterhouse are tagged, the ground meat from the packing plant is tagged, the hamburger patties are tagged. And then you have a big database that keeps track of all the relationships and cross-references between said tags, so that you could take a case of hamburger patties, scan it and run it through the database, and come up with a list of the cows that went into making that case. Or at least the farm where the cows were produced, the slaughterhouse where they were killed, the packing plant where the meat was ground, etc.
The benefit is if there was say a mad cow disease scare on a particular farm, it would be easier for officials to track down all the meat that came from cows on that farm, or even a particular subset of cows in that farm. Likewise it would also be easy for cooks to verify that their meat didn't come from cows that were contaminated.
I think the real benefit here is about the ease of recall, and minimizing the expense of a recall (so that you don't have to destroy all the passed through a particular point during a wide range of dates, instead you can focus on a subset that might have been exposed to contamination).
So American food tastes disgusting to you. Congratulations. I'm sure a very large percentage of Americans would find the food from wherever you're from to be exactly as repulsive. It's called personal preferences.
And just as I wouldn't have any sympathy for the American who moved to Tibet and bitched about how foul yak's milk was and how hard it was to get a Hardee's Charbroiled Angus Beef burger, you'll excuse me if I have equally little sympathy for you. In fact less, since I'm quite sure that you can get whatever sort of food you require in this country, it will just cost you time and/or money to find and buy it.
I'm out of mod points at the moment but if I wasn't, I'd give you one.
My problem with the GP's post -- aside from it's factual claims which I cannot debate one way or the other -- is that it seems to boil down to 'some ingredients are bad for some people, therefore they should be banned.' Or something like that. In fact I'm not really clear on what he wants to do as a solution to the perceived "problem" of these allegedly toxic chemicals in the food.
I've cooked with MSG, and in certain dishes I really do think it adds flavor. If I was running a restaurant, maybe I would think twice about using it just because it has a bad reputation, but if I'm making asian food just for myself or my family, I wouldn't hesitate to use it if the recipe called for it.
Similarly, I think Olestra is a perfectly great invention. I eat Olean-fried potato chips from time to time and I've never had any of the dire "explosive diarrhea"-type consequences that some people apparently do. I'm not saying that other people don't, just that I don't suffer from this particular problem. And therefore given the choice of purchasing a bag of chips fried in Olean and one that's just fried in vegetable oil, I'll take the ones fried in Olean every time. The only downside of them to me is that they cost slightly more than the regular ones, but that's more than offset by the decreased fat and calories in them.
Similarly, I'm a big fan of diet sodas made with Nutrasweet and the other artificial sweeteners. I'm not against drinking water (I drink a lot of that, too) but I do enjoy soft drinks, and to be able to have a Diet Coke with zero calories as opposed to a regular one with several hundred is a big plus to me.
Basically, what the GP sees as poisons, I think are good and useful culinary inventions that allow me to enjoy more types of food more often or in greater quantities (or simply enjoy them more) than I otherwise could while still remaining healthy. If some people experience negative side effects as the result of certain ingredients, don't eat them! Nobody is going to come to your house and shove a bottle of Olestra down your throat. And I've never seen anything that was cooked in Olean or made with Nutrasweet that wasn't clearly marked as such (and generally priced accordingly).
You don't hear people with other kinds of food allergies asking for the items that they're allergic to be removed from all food: people just want their food's ingredients clearly marked. If there are foods out there which contain Olestra, or MSG, or Nutrasweet, or peanuts for that matter, and don't list them on the ingredients, then that is obviously a problem. But to say that the ingredients are a problem in and of themselves is ridiculous. Many people (I'd go so far as to say most) consume them without any problems, and especially in the case of Nutrasweet and Diet sodas, ask for them specifically in lieu of alternative products. (Also, consider diabetic people, to whom natural sugar might be effectively poisonous, but who can eat foods made with artificial sweeteners.) What right has anyone who may be allergic, to deny other people access to what they want to eat?
It seems to me that the idea of making food more 'traceable' back to its basic ingredients would be more helpful to people with food allergies, not less. But in general I just take great issue with anyone who seems to want to ban food ingredients because of personal problems they might have with them.
The only problem I had during my experiment with Jabber and using it to connect to the Big-Three services is that it's tough to find a very stable Jabber server that offers all the reflector services that you need. I found a list of servers that offered MSN, AIM, and Yahoo services, and there was only one in my area. Now perhaps the list I was looking at wasn't very good, but that's what I had: one option. It worked fine for a few days but then the server disappeared, never to be heard from again.
That's the problem with Jabber as I see it right now. It's a great protocol, but it's waiting for someone with some serious resources to step behind it in order to bring the user experience up to a level that is competitive with the competition. And that means redundant servers housed in datacenters, not a box in somebody's basement connected to their cable modem.
Apple's iChat is, as far as I am concerned, the standard against which other clients should be judged. It's only shortcoming -- and it's a major one -- is that it only handles AIM/ICQ and Jabber. No Yahoo, no MSN (unless you want to use them through a Jabber reflector, which is possible). But from a usability and UI standpoint I think it beats the pants off of Adium and Proteus. Plus things like file transfer and video chat actually work, unlike any other multi-protocol client I've had the dubious pleasure of ripping out my hair playing with.
I heard once that iChat has some sort of (undocumented) plug-in interface that could be used to add functionality to the program. Supposedly there is an internal Apple plugin which provides end-to-end encryption, which it's unfortunate that they don't release or build in to the program itself. I've never understood why Apple refuses to document the plugin interface and let people develop add-in modules to it that would add support for more protocols. (Conspiracy theory: Apple has some sort of an agreement with AOL not to do this, in return for getting access to the 'proprietary' version of the AIM protocol, instead of the one that open clients have to use.)
All very good points. In addition, there are also exceptions to both trespassing and breaking and entering in cases of emergency or extenuating circumstances (the example I've always heard is if there's a car wreck and you break into an empty house to use the telephone because somebody's bleeding to death -- obviously this example existed before cell phones were common).
I just wanted to add to your comment regarding the road. You're quite true, as long as the road is a public one. In the areas I was thinking of near where I used to live, a lot of the roads running into the backcountry aren't. They're paper company or logging roads and thus there's no public right-of-way on the sides. Sometimes they're marked as being private roads on maps, more often they're not (since the only decent map of Maine, by Delorme, is compiled from a hodgepodge of satellite and aerial photo data, and the written-in suggestions of readers).
Actually the good place to go 4-wheeling or to take a Jeep in my experience is power company high-tension wire right-of-ways. Normally they have a pretty rugged access road running along them from one tower to the next and they'll take you to some pretty neat places. I've driven onto them in full view of the police several times (where it's not posted and obviously often done) and never had a problem. YMMV by state though. And obviously if it's either posted against trespassing or muddy enough that you're going to damage the trail, stay off.
Re:The Feds Have Taken The First Step
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PCs Posted No Trespass
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It depends on the state. I think in most places a fence is enough to make an area off-limits. Generally you have to do something for it to be trespassing: enter a house, step over a fence, ignore a sign. If it's totally unmarked and you could have just blundered on, then you're in the clear. Where it varies, I believe, is in regards to motor vehicles. In some states you only get that benefit of "oops, I didn't know I was trespassing" if you're on foot, it doesn't apply to people in trucks or on a quad.
Where I used to live (Maine) the laws are pretty liberal about a person's "right to trespass," and you can in fact go 4x4ing, snowmobiling, hunting, etc., on any land that's not posted against it (or where a reasonable person ought to know you're not allowed, i.e. your neighbor's front lawn). This is a pretty big deal because a fairly large percentage of the state is privately owned by the paper companies, who don't actually do anything with it for 15 or 20 years at a time, then they come through and log and replant it and ignore it for another decade or so. Residents use the land as recreation space when it's otherwise fallow, and also have the side effect to the paper companies of keeping the roads clear.
The problem is when trespassers -- in particular, ATV riders during the spring "mud season" -- start destroying or damaging the property and the owners start posting it against trespassing. More or less the old 'tragedy of the commons' writ large. (The solution at least in some areas is to restrict motor vehicle access to all but approved organizations like ATV and snowmobile clubs, who maintain the roads or trails [and protect the property owner from accident liability] in return for access that would otherwise be denied.)
In your case regardless of the state laws, the kid is almost certainly in violation if you tell him not to drive on your property and he continues to do it, regardless of what kind of barriers you have up, as long as the property boundary is marked somehow.
Re:Not gonna change a goddamned thing.
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PCs Posted No Trespass
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Well the nice thing about this case, is that the judge didn't invent any new laws for this case. He just took a very old law, and applied it to the (IMO rather obvious) situation before him. As judges should.
Frankly, if we had more judges doing things like this, we probably wouldn't have to have nearly as many halfassed, more-harm-than-good, kneejerk reaction laws passed by politicians who are being hammered at by their constituents to "do something!"
Although you have a very valid point about users being stupid if they allow spyware to be installed on their machine, I think everyone pretty much understands that some of what spyware does is wrong and ought to be unlawful: in particular making itself hard or impossible to remove, or once installed doing things other than what it says it was going to, do or installing other programs without your consent.
You don't need to have a law for every particular thing that a person can possibly do wrong to another; there are a certain number of general principles that I think most people in a civilized society can accept (or will accept, if you want to keep living here), and one of them is that you shouldn't make someone else's property less valuable to them without their consent. And that consent is no good if the defendant lied about what they were going to do to the property. To use your analogy, it's as if you let someone in your house thinking they were a plumber and here to fix your toilet, but instead they sat around in your living room and watched TV for a while so you couldn't use it, and refused to leave when you asked. Sure, you let them in, but only because they presented themselves under false pretenses.
But my biggest issue here is that spyware is a situation, at least in its more extreme forms, which is plainly obvious to the average person as something that ought to be illegal. Generally when you have a situation like that, you don't (and shouldn't) need to have a particular law for the case. Certainly there are ways in which computers and the virtual world of the internet differ so fundamentally from the physical world that the same laws shouldn't apply. But those cases are more rare than you might think, and in hesitating to apply the few thousand years of common law (and common sense) that we've acquired as a civilization from the past to computers we've allowed a lot of dishonest people to create a lot of aggravation and damage to others, doing things that would be illegal if they weren't being done through a computer. I'm glad that this judge, whoever he is, has wised up to this fact and is putting some of that established wisdom to work here.
I noticed the absence of the caps also, I assumed that it was because there aren't any transients in the supply to filter, since the regulator is practically attached to the battery by its leads, and the load doesn't have any high-frequency draws that would require the second cap downstream of the regulator. At least I'm hoping that's the case, it could also be that whoever did the first version didn't put any on, and everyone else has just copied that.:)
Interesting suggestion about the diodes. I don't think I've seen that method used in any of the versions around online. I wonder how it would work though as the battery drains and the input voltage decreases: with the regulator you at least have a little extra headroom (the LM7805 needs 7.5V to maintain 5V output, IIRC) so that you'll have a stable output voltage for a while as the battery runs down (from 9.5 or whatever it starts off at to 7.5). Maybe if you used a rechargable battery with a fairly flat discharge curve this wouldn't be as much of an issue, but I could see it being one with an alkaline.
But your point about the quiescent current is a good one. Perhaps the low tech solution would be to just install a small power switch between the battery and the regulator. When the Shuffle's internal battery is low, attach the charging contraption and turn it on; remove and turn it off after you've given the internal battery a quick charge.
Those LP29-series regulators are pretty impressive. I think I might have to order a few LP2954s. It's a slightly higher current (250mA) than the one you suggested but still with quiescent current of 120 uA. Comes in a TO-220 package and they'll sell samples directly to individuals.
One thing I must have missed in my summary of the MA article: it's necessary to tie both of the data pins in the USB cable to Gnd if you want the Shuffle to charge properly. Example with photos (in a honking big project box compared to the Shuffle) here.
You joke, but it wouldn't be very hard. Not that long ago I saw a hack (in Macaddict magazine, I believe) on how you could run an iPod Shuffle off of a 9V battery. Basically you just take a USB extension cable and cut it a few inches away from the female end, connect the 9V battery to a solid-state +5V voltage regulator (Radioshack) and connect that to the appropriate wires in the USB cable. Wrap with duct tape and enjoy.
If you could find a +5V regulator that would work with just 1V of overhead, you'd be in business -- just replace the 9V with four D-cells. Or heck, why screw around with flashlight batteries. Get yourself a sealed lead-acid brick and you're in business. All it needs is a shoulder strap.
it's the same reason people say 'case and point' and 'for all intensive purposes' and 'supposively'
Yes, because they are idiots.
Seriously, just because a bunch of people do something, doesn't make it acceptable or even defensible if you want to be taken seriously.
Any of the examples that you mentioned would be unacceptable for an 8th grader; any adult who uses them ought to be subject to whatever amount of public ridicule is required to keep them from doing it again.
It's worth pointing out that you can also send a GSM phone to any number of third-party "unlockers" who will remove the vendor/subsidy lock so that it can be used with any carrier's SIM card. (Or in the case of Nokia phones that just require a code to unlock, they'll sell you the code online.)
I don't think the phone companies have any recourse to prevent you from sending your phones to one of these places: the phone is your property, and once you're free of their contract you can take it wherever you want. It doesn't mean that the phone companies have to make it easy (hence the vendor lock) but I don't think they can prevent you from doing it either. Although I'm sure they might try via the DMCA or something, but I don't think they could be successful.
Anyway, the vendor lock is certainly annoying, but I'm willing to deal with it in order to get a phone at the reduced price that I did. For example I got a Motorola Razr V3 for free (after rebates, which must be sent in after your second month of service) with a one-year T-Mobile contract. Once that contract is due, if I'm not satisfied with T-Mobile I'll have the phone unlocked and switch to Cingular.
I could pretty easily argue that the only difference between any major pharma company (Merck, Pfizer, etc.) and whatever company turns out the generic headache pills that you can buy down at CVS, is that the big companies hold a significant number of patents on stuff. Of course, the reason they have these patents, in theory anyway, is because they do billions of dollars of R&D.
But anyway, my point is that there are a lot of business areas where companies may not 'just' have patents, but it's the patents that make them unique compared to other companies. Pharmaceutical companies especially, since the actual production lines, while not quite commoditized, aren't what sets one company up as more successful than another. So maybe they don't 'just' have patents, but everything else pales in importance compared to them.
I'm not clear on how exactly the pharmaceutical industry uses patents; I can't ever think of a case where there was a company which did nothing but hold on to them, as this NTG seems to be doing (maybe the big pharmas play their patents closer to the vest), but they are arguably more critical to profitability in that field than in hardware, since the cost of production itself is so low, the only way to recoup research costs is through the monopoly (and resulting price-fixing) offered by patents.
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I won't comment on your other points but I take issue with the characterization of Card's Ender's Game as just another "young man coming of age during military service against an alien intelligence" book. I've read both Card's book and Heinlein's, and the fact that both of them share the same vague premise doesn't detract from either as a story.
I think that you need to separate a story -- which is what makes a novel good -- from its setting and premise. You can start off with the exact same setting, even the same situation, and two authors can develop it into two completely different stories, both of which are enjoyable in their own right and do not detract from each other. I think the Ender series and Starship Troopers are examples of this (obviously indicative of my personal preferences, but I'm sure everyone can find a similar situation).
Anyone who thinks that 'science fiction' as a genre is played out is taking a very narrow view and failing to understand that most writers strive to develop stories and build characters, not just scenarios and universes, and many (Card included) do not work exclusively in SF to begin with.
Personally I find the idea of someone wishing they had Windows laughable. I guess that's just what you're used to.
I have to use a Wintel PC at work and find it to be the computational equivalent of a straightjacket. Sure, by installing the correct software you can make it almost as capable as a basic Linux install, but why doesn't it just work that way out of the box? I was appalled, for instance, that there's no preinstalled SSH or SFTP client. Similarly, no rsync, no capability for command-line pipes, etc. Obviously no universally available free compiler.
And it's not just geeky stuff, either. I've yet to find a Windows browser that has a decent integrated spell-checker (Firefox with SpellBound is marginally acceptable, but even it doesn't work transparently as you type, like Mac OS X's Safari [or Konquerer] does). Maybe there's one out there that I haven't found yet (Opera?) but it seems ridiculous to have to look this hard for such an obvious and useful feature.
I'll stop before this turns into a complete rant, but my point is that Windows seems significantly more limited in terms of features than competiting OSes, and the only advantage it possesses, in my opinion, is a large base of software which it maintains by virtue of its virtual monopoly in the business-desktop market. I really feel like I've given it a fair shot, and it's a mediocre OS at the end of the day. It's a pity that mediocrity is all most people demand from their computers.
Huh? I'm not sure I understand your response. What the parent was saying was that people might not feel good about having their tax dollars go to funding the campaigns of parties that they disagree with -- which is a necessary consequence of a publically funded campaign strategy. He was using the American Nazi Party (which exists, in real life, today) as an example of an organization which would have to receive funding under such a system, which most people probably would have a problem with.
I think his point is a good one. It is, in fact, a deal-breaker with any plan to publically fund campaigns. Such a system would last right up until the right-leaning voters of the U.S. found out that some of their tax money was going to help the campaigns of pro-choice candidates, and left-leaning voters found out that some of their tax dollars were going to fund racist populist Holocaust-deniers. You'd manage to get one interesting result out of such a system: you'd instantly unite the most disparate portions of the political spectrum into one powerful force aimed at dismantling public campaign funding overnight.
It's just not a workable system given how strongly some people feel about politics in general and some political issues in particlar. Also, I think a lot of people (myself included) would take issue with public funds being used for campaigning in any respect, viewing that as simply being outside the intended scope of Government in this country.
I think a better route to go would just be to bar campaign contributions of any sort, in any amount, for any purpose or via any intermediary, by any for-profit corporation. The only entities which would be allowed to make campaign donations (or otherwise attempt to influence legislation or elections) would be natural persons, or non-profit political action organizations whose sole income comes from the donations of natural persons and meet strict criteria for fiscal transparency. No corporations, no unions, no foreign governments; no one, basically, with any profit interest in the outcome of the election other than living, breathing people.
If you did that I think you would clean up the political system in this country practically overnight (and probably change the landscape quite dramatically). It wouldn't be perfect, but it would beat the hell out of our current system and be vastly preferable to any sort of quasi-socialized publicly-funded system (which would fall apart as inherently unpalatable to Americans).
Does this mean I'll get to use up the stash of survival rations and ammunition that I bought for Y2K?
Well if you look at the List of Class A address allocations you'll see some possibilities of people who might not be interested.
... Cisco, for instance, is not on there.
In particular, Level 3 Communications has not one but two Class A blocks, the 4.0.0.0 and 8.0.0.0 blocks; "Comcast IP Services" has another one.
There are some oddball Class A assignments on there too. Who would have guessed that Ford has one? The US Postal Service? The Defense Department has something like seven, not a huge surprise given when the assignments were made. Halliburton even has one.
Anyway, reading down the list you can see that the people who already have their own Class A blocks are unlikely to care too much about how quickly v6 gets rolled out, at least for their own use. But some of the newer big-time tech companies who aren't on that list might have more of an interest
You're talking only about the default configuration of most NAT-enabled routers. It's possible to enable NAT and have the translation device forward incoming packets to a machine on the internal network, it's just not usually set up that way. You can easily do this though by selecting a particular internal machine to be in the router's "DMZ," after which it will be accesible to the public Internet without initiating a connection.
NAT is normally combined with stateful filtering, but it's not necessarily part of the bare minimum 'address translation.'
This was going to be my exact point as well but you beat me to it. :)
People think that NAT is superior because they're using it instead of a firewall (or as a firewall of sorts) by only forwarding certain port ranges.
There's nothing inherently more secure about NAT, it's just the way it's set up on most home routers. As a little experiment you can take a Windows box and put it in the "DMZ" of a normal home NAT box, which means that all ports and protocols get forwarded to it, just as if it was sitting on the public internet itself. It should end up getting owned by viruses and spyware just as quickly as if you plugged it into the modem, even though it's subject to NAT. The point being: the address translation isn't providing any security itself, its only because it's being applied selectively.
With IPv6, you could get the perceived security of NAT by actually using a firewall (either a hardware one or a software one), and you'd have the benefit of each device being issued a globally unique IP address.
It will be interesting (and perhaps this has already been all worked out, I haven't looked into it much) how they allocate the IPv6 addresses. It seems fairly clear now that the life of the v4 address space was definitely shortened -- although by how much is not clear -- because of the very large chunks of space that were handed out and never fully utilized. (Class A allocations; IIRC IBM had a massive one and I'm not sure ever used much of it, and I'm sure they're not the only one.) Of course this wasn't viewed as a problem at the time because there were so many more addresses than anyone imagined there would ever be devices.
I just wonder how we're going to resist the temptation to do the same thing again, now that we have another glut of address space. On one hand we don't want to end up with vacant blocks of addresses, but we don't want to be too niggardly about it either, or else individual static addresses won't ever 'trickle down' to end users and we'll be stuck with the same mess of NAT traversals and subnets that we have now.
I'm sure that this issue has been addressed (or will be addressed) but I'm just curious how the IANA will find the 'balance point' between assigning enough high-level blocks to make sure end users can get static global addresses, while not overassigning. Perhaps there should be some sort of a periodic review process for high-level address block assignments to see how fully utilized they are, and either assign an entity more addresses or reallocate underutilized resources.
Actually as I wrote that sentence I had Google in mind and thought that people would probably mention it, but I haven't investigated whether it interoperates with other Jabber network servers, or just uses the protocol. If it connects with other servers then then I might just have to retract my criticism and go sign up; however the limited information I've seen so far (and to be fair I haven't played with it myself yet) indicates that it uses the Jabber protocol but not the network. Which means it's really just a reinvention of the wheel as far as I'm concerned -- maybe a really nice reinvention, but still not inherently superior to the Big Three (which really should be the Big One and the Two Dwarves, but anyway).
Just in case my first comment sounded unduly negative I should point out that I'm a big fan of FOSS software in general; the problem with instant messaging is that the networks are only as useful as the other people who are on them, so really all the problems I mentioned are secondary to the primary obstacle facing Jabber: luring users away from AOL, MSN, and Yahoo.
Aside from the obvious problems with the fact that steel is a lot easier to produce and less expensive than carbon nanotubes right now, that "strength" he's talking about is tensile strength, not compressive or shear strength. (Ref.: here.) Just because something has a large amount of tensile strength doesn't mean you'd want to build a building out of it.
In fact I'm fairly certain that there are types of plastic (nylon maybe) which when woven together have more tensile strength per unit mass and volume than a comparable amount of steel, and I'm looking out my window right now and don't see any plastic-framed skyscraper buildings.
Exactly.
I always get a laugh at the people who are all afraid of "space weapons," as if there aren't a whole lot of weapons sitting underground in North Dakota right now that are more than capable of annihilating you where you sit.
The only real purpose of putting weapons in space would be to shoot other things which are in space. It's already pretty easy (for the U.S. and probably a bunch of other industrialized countries) to put a missile anywhere they want on the face of the Earth; putting them in space isn't going to change that situation any.
This is true. I don't know whether all cattle are RFID tagged, but I'm sure that they've all got some sort of tags. They need to, in order to identify which farm they came from, etc. It serves essentially the same purpose that skin brands used to.
The proposal here is to maintain the tagging all the way through the food production chain, so the cows are tagged, the sides of beef that come out of the slaughterhouse are tagged, the ground meat from the packing plant is tagged, the hamburger patties are tagged. And then you have a big database that keeps track of all the relationships and cross-references between said tags, so that you could take a case of hamburger patties, scan it and run it through the database, and come up with a list of the cows that went into making that case. Or at least the farm where the cows were produced, the slaughterhouse where they were killed, the packing plant where the meat was ground, etc.
The benefit is if there was say a mad cow disease scare on a particular farm, it would be easier for officials to track down all the meat that came from cows on that farm, or even a particular subset of cows in that farm. Likewise it would also be easy for cooks to verify that their meat didn't come from cows that were contaminated.
I think the real benefit here is about the ease of recall, and minimizing the expense of a recall (so that you don't have to destroy all the passed through a particular point during a wide range of dates, instead you can focus on a subset that might have been exposed to contamination).
Your point being ... ?
So American food tastes disgusting to you. Congratulations. I'm sure a very large percentage of Americans would find the food from wherever you're from to be exactly as repulsive. It's called personal preferences.
And just as I wouldn't have any sympathy for the American who moved to Tibet and bitched about how foul yak's milk was and how hard it was to get a Hardee's Charbroiled Angus Beef burger, you'll excuse me if I have equally little sympathy for you. In fact less, since I'm quite sure that you can get whatever sort of food you require in this country, it will just cost you time and/or money to find and buy it.
I'm out of mod points at the moment but if I wasn't, I'd give you one.
My problem with the GP's post -- aside from it's factual claims which I cannot debate one way or the other -- is that it seems to boil down to 'some ingredients are bad for some people, therefore they should be banned.' Or something like that. In fact I'm not really clear on what he wants to do as a solution to the perceived "problem" of these allegedly toxic chemicals in the food.
I've cooked with MSG, and in certain dishes I really do think it adds flavor. If I was running a restaurant, maybe I would think twice about using it just because it has a bad reputation, but if I'm making asian food just for myself or my family, I wouldn't hesitate to use it if the recipe called for it.
Similarly, I think Olestra is a perfectly great invention. I eat Olean-fried potato chips from time to time and I've never had any of the dire "explosive diarrhea"-type consequences that some people apparently do. I'm not saying that other people don't, just that I don't suffer from this particular problem. And therefore given the choice of purchasing a bag of chips fried in Olean and one that's just fried in vegetable oil, I'll take the ones fried in Olean every time. The only downside of them to me is that they cost slightly more than the regular ones, but that's more than offset by the decreased fat and calories in them.
Similarly, I'm a big fan of diet sodas made with Nutrasweet and the other artificial sweeteners. I'm not against drinking water (I drink a lot of that, too) but I do enjoy soft drinks, and to be able to have a Diet Coke with zero calories as opposed to a regular one with several hundred is a big plus to me.
Basically, what the GP sees as poisons, I think are good and useful culinary inventions that allow me to enjoy more types of food more often or in greater quantities (or simply enjoy them more) than I otherwise could while still remaining healthy. If some people experience negative side effects as the result of certain ingredients, don't eat them! Nobody is going to come to your house and shove a bottle of Olestra down your throat. And I've never seen anything that was cooked in Olean or made with Nutrasweet that wasn't clearly marked as such (and generally priced accordingly).
You don't hear people with other kinds of food allergies asking for the items that they're allergic to be removed from all food: people just want their food's ingredients clearly marked. If there are foods out there which contain Olestra, or MSG, or Nutrasweet, or peanuts for that matter, and don't list them on the ingredients, then that is obviously a problem. But to say that the ingredients are a problem in and of themselves is ridiculous. Many people (I'd go so far as to say most) consume them without any problems, and especially in the case of Nutrasweet and Diet sodas, ask for them specifically in lieu of alternative products. (Also, consider diabetic people, to whom natural sugar might be effectively poisonous, but who can eat foods made with artificial sweeteners.) What right has anyone who may be allergic, to deny other people access to what they want to eat?
It seems to me that the idea of making food more 'traceable' back to its basic ingredients would be more helpful to people with food allergies, not less. But in general I just take great issue with anyone who seems to want to ban food ingredients because of personal problems they might have with them.
The only problem I had during my experiment with Jabber and using it to connect to the Big-Three services is that it's tough to find a very stable Jabber server that offers all the reflector services that you need. I found a list of servers that offered MSN, AIM, and Yahoo services, and there was only one in my area. Now perhaps the list I was looking at wasn't very good, but that's what I had: one option. It worked fine for a few days but then the server disappeared, never to be heard from again.
That's the problem with Jabber as I see it right now. It's a great protocol, but it's waiting for someone with some serious resources to step behind it in order to bring the user experience up to a level that is competitive with the competition. And that means redundant servers housed in datacenters, not a box in somebody's basement connected to their cable modem.
Apple's iChat is, as far as I am concerned, the standard against which other clients should be judged. It's only shortcoming -- and it's a major one -- is that it only handles AIM/ICQ and Jabber. No Yahoo, no MSN (unless you want to use them through a Jabber reflector, which is possible). But from a usability and UI standpoint I think it beats the pants off of Adium and Proteus. Plus things like file transfer and video chat actually work, unlike any other multi-protocol client I've had the dubious pleasure of ripping out my hair playing with.
I heard once that iChat has some sort of (undocumented) plug-in interface that could be used to add functionality to the program. Supposedly there is an internal Apple plugin which provides end-to-end encryption, which it's unfortunate that they don't release or build in to the program itself. I've never understood why Apple refuses to document the plugin interface and let people develop add-in modules to it that would add support for more protocols. (Conspiracy theory: Apple has some sort of an agreement with AOL not to do this, in return for getting access to the 'proprietary' version of the AIM protocol, instead of the one that open clients have to use.)
All very good points. In addition, there are also exceptions to both trespassing and breaking and entering in cases of emergency or extenuating circumstances (the example I've always heard is if there's a car wreck and you break into an empty house to use the telephone because somebody's bleeding to death -- obviously this example existed before cell phones were common).
I just wanted to add to your comment regarding the road. You're quite true, as long as the road is a public one. In the areas I was thinking of near where I used to live, a lot of the roads running into the backcountry aren't. They're paper company or logging roads and thus there's no public right-of-way on the sides. Sometimes they're marked as being private roads on maps, more often they're not (since the only decent map of Maine, by Delorme, is compiled from a hodgepodge of satellite and aerial photo data, and the written-in suggestions of readers).
Actually the good place to go 4-wheeling or to take a Jeep in my experience is power company high-tension wire right-of-ways. Normally they have a pretty rugged access road running along them from one tower to the next and they'll take you to some pretty neat places. I've driven onto them in full view of the police several times (where it's not posted and obviously often done) and never had a problem. YMMV by state though. And obviously if it's either posted against trespassing or muddy enough that you're going to damage the trail, stay off.
It depends on the state. I think in most places a fence is enough to make an area off-limits. Generally you have to do something for it to be trespassing: enter a house, step over a fence, ignore a sign. If it's totally unmarked and you could have just blundered on, then you're in the clear. Where it varies, I believe, is in regards to motor vehicles. In some states you only get that benefit of "oops, I didn't know I was trespassing" if you're on foot, it doesn't apply to people in trucks or on a quad.
Where I used to live (Maine) the laws are pretty liberal about a person's "right to trespass," and you can in fact go 4x4ing, snowmobiling, hunting, etc., on any land that's not posted against it (or where a reasonable person ought to know you're not allowed, i.e. your neighbor's front lawn). This is a pretty big deal because a fairly large percentage of the state is privately owned by the paper companies, who don't actually do anything with it for 15 or 20 years at a time, then they come through and log and replant it and ignore it for another decade or so. Residents use the land as recreation space when it's otherwise fallow, and also have the side effect to the paper companies of keeping the roads clear.
The problem is when trespassers -- in particular, ATV riders during the spring "mud season" -- start destroying or damaging the property and the owners start posting it against trespassing. More or less the old 'tragedy of the commons' writ large. (The solution at least in some areas is to restrict motor vehicle access to all but approved organizations like ATV and snowmobile clubs, who maintain the roads or trails [and protect the property owner from accident liability] in return for access that would otherwise be denied.)
In your case regardless of the state laws, the kid is almost certainly in violation if you tell him not to drive on your property and he continues to do it, regardless of what kind of barriers you have up, as long as the property boundary is marked somehow.
Well the nice thing about this case, is that the judge didn't invent any new laws for this case. He just took a very old law, and applied it to the (IMO rather obvious) situation before him. As judges should.
Frankly, if we had more judges doing things like this, we probably wouldn't have to have nearly as many halfassed, more-harm-than-good, kneejerk reaction laws passed by politicians who are being hammered at by their constituents to "do something!"
Although you have a very valid point about users being stupid if they allow spyware to be installed on their machine, I think everyone pretty much understands that some of what spyware does is wrong and ought to be unlawful: in particular making itself hard or impossible to remove, or once installed doing things other than what it says it was going to, do or installing other programs without your consent.
You don't need to have a law for every particular thing that a person can possibly do wrong to another; there are a certain number of general principles that I think most people in a civilized society can accept (or will accept, if you want to keep living here), and one of them is that you shouldn't make someone else's property less valuable to them without their consent. And that consent is no good if the defendant lied about what they were going to do to the property. To use your analogy, it's as if you let someone in your house thinking they were a plumber and here to fix your toilet, but instead they sat around in your living room and watched TV for a while so you couldn't use it, and refused to leave when you asked. Sure, you let them in, but only because they presented themselves under false pretenses.
But my biggest issue here is that spyware is a situation, at least in its more extreme forms, which is plainly obvious to the average person as something that ought to be illegal. Generally when you have a situation like that, you don't (and shouldn't) need to have a particular law for the case. Certainly there are ways in which computers and the virtual world of the internet differ so fundamentally from the physical world that the same laws shouldn't apply. But those cases are more rare than you might think, and in hesitating to apply the few thousand years of common law (and common sense) that we've acquired as a civilization from the past to computers we've allowed a lot of dishonest people to create a lot of aggravation and damage to others, doing things that would be illegal if they weren't being done through a computer. I'm glad that this judge, whoever he is, has wised up to this fact and is putting some of that established wisdom to work here.
I noticed the absence of the caps also, I assumed that it was because there aren't any transients in the supply to filter, since the regulator is practically attached to the battery by its leads, and the load doesn't have any high-frequency draws that would require the second cap downstream of the regulator. At least I'm hoping that's the case, it could also be that whoever did the first version didn't put any on, and everyone else has just copied that. :)
Interesting suggestion about the diodes. I don't think I've seen that method used in any of the versions around online. I wonder how it would work though as the battery drains and the input voltage decreases: with the regulator you at least have a little extra headroom (the LM7805 needs 7.5V to maintain 5V output, IIRC) so that you'll have a stable output voltage for a while as the battery runs down (from 9.5 or whatever it starts off at to 7.5). Maybe if you used a rechargable battery with a fairly flat discharge curve this wouldn't be as much of an issue, but I could see it being one with an alkaline.
But your point about the quiescent current is a good one. Perhaps the low tech solution would be to just install a small power switch between the battery and the regulator. When the Shuffle's internal battery is low, attach the charging contraption and turn it on; remove and turn it off after you've given the internal battery a quick charge.
Those LP29-series regulators are pretty impressive. I think I might have to order a few LP2954s. It's a slightly higher current (250mA) than the one you suggested but still with quiescent current of 120 uA. Comes in a TO-220 package and they'll sell samples directly to individuals.
One thing I must have missed in my summary of the MA article: it's necessary to tie both of the data pins in the USB cable to Gnd if you want the Shuffle to charge properly. Example with photos (in a honking big project box compared to the Shuffle) here.
You joke, but it wouldn't be very hard. Not that long ago I saw a hack (in Macaddict magazine, I believe) on how you could run an iPod Shuffle off of a 9V battery. Basically you just take a USB extension cable and cut it a few inches away from the female end, connect the 9V battery to a solid-state +5V voltage regulator (Radioshack) and connect that to the appropriate wires in the USB cable. Wrap with duct tape and enjoy.
If you could find a +5V regulator that would work with just 1V of overhead, you'd be in business -- just replace the 9V with four D-cells. Or heck, why screw around with flashlight batteries. Get yourself a sealed lead-acid brick and you're in business. All it needs is a shoulder strap.
Yes, because they are idiots.
Seriously, just because a bunch of people do something, doesn't make it acceptable or even defensible if you want to be taken seriously.
Any of the examples that you mentioned would be unacceptable for an 8th grader; any adult who uses them ought to be subject to whatever amount of public ridicule is required to keep them from doing it again.
We'll have to name it "GIMP Isn't a Messaging Protocol" to prevent confusion. :)
It's worth pointing out that you can also send a GSM phone to any number of third-party "unlockers" who will remove the vendor/subsidy lock so that it can be used with any carrier's SIM card. (Or in the case of Nokia phones that just require a code to unlock, they'll sell you the code online.)
I don't think the phone companies have any recourse to prevent you from sending your phones to one of these places: the phone is your property, and once you're free of their contract you can take it wherever you want. It doesn't mean that the phone companies have to make it easy (hence the vendor lock) but I don't think they can prevent you from doing it either. Although I'm sure they might try via the DMCA or something, but I don't think they could be successful.
Anyway, the vendor lock is certainly annoying, but I'm willing to deal with it in order to get a phone at the reduced price that I did. For example I got a Motorola Razr V3 for free (after rebates, which must be sent in after your second month of service) with a one-year T-Mobile contract. Once that contract is due, if I'm not satisfied with T-Mobile I'll have the phone unlocked and switch to Cingular.
I could pretty easily argue that the only difference between any major pharma company (Merck, Pfizer, etc.) and whatever company turns out the generic headache pills that you can buy down at CVS, is that the big companies hold a significant number of patents on stuff. Of course, the reason they have these patents, in theory anyway, is because they do billions of dollars of R&D.
But anyway, my point is that there are a lot of business areas where companies may not 'just' have patents, but it's the patents that make them unique compared to other companies. Pharmaceutical companies especially, since the actual production lines, while not quite commoditized, aren't what sets one company up as more successful than another. So maybe they don't 'just' have patents, but everything else pales in importance compared to them.
I'm not clear on how exactly the pharmaceutical industry uses patents; I can't ever think of a case where there was a company which did nothing but hold on to them, as this NTG seems to be doing (maybe the big pharmas play their patents closer to the vest), but they are arguably more critical to profitability in that field than in hardware, since the cost of production itself is so low, the only way to recoup research costs is through the monopoly (and resulting price-fixing) offered by patents.