Actually I've been thinking for a while about doing some ceiling-projection stuff, because I get a stiff neck just watching TV in bed.
The projection itself is easy (put the projector behind the headboard of your bed, but just make sure you get a projector that has a good keystone adjust). It's finding a place to put the speakers so that the sound doesn't seem to be coming from the sides or behind that's harder. (Of course headphones would work.)
Behr Ultra Pure White on wallboard is apparently quite decent for a projection surface, although with very bright LCD projectors some people like going to a very light gray.
I think it would work best if you had a high ceiling, like 11-12 feet; 8 doesn't give you a lot of throw for the projector.
Re:Work on a laptop?
on
Lap Desks
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Depends on whether you have a real "laptop" or one of those 'luggable' "portable desktop replacements."
I have a 15" ThinkPad and it's definitely a find-a-table sort of deal. Although it has a nice keyboard and TrackPoint, it's so heavy that I'm constantly fighting to keep it from sliding away if it's on my lap, and it gets quite hot (and it has an exhaust vent that's easy to block if it's not on a table). My SO's Dell (some sort of monstrous thing, maybe a 17"?) is even worse. They both have a lot of sharp corners and hard edges.
But on the other end, I have a 12" iBook, an old G3 model, that works fine on my lap. It gets warm but not uncomfortably hot, the trackpad is positioned so that you can move back and forth from it to the keyboard without a lot of problems, it's light and doesn't slide much, and there's no hot-air exhaust to worry about blocking. It's not quite "curl up with a book" small and light, but it's pretty close. Also, even though it's 5 years old, the battery still runs for hours longer than the ThinkPad or the Dell.
I have no idea whether the current 12" Apple laptops are as "lappable" as my old one, but you could do worse than to pick up an old G3. It would probably run Ubuntu quite handily.
Anything bigger than 12", IMO, is too big for real 'laptop' use.
I'm fairly certain that IBM has a PL/1 compiler that will still run on its big iron systems, at least in compatibility mode.
You might run into issues between IBM's dialect of PL/1 and whatever dialect MULTICS is written in (there were at one point a bunch of incompatible versions), but compilers still exist.
Some of the big IBM machines can still run really crusty software in various binary-emulation modes; you might be able to dig up an ancient IBM PL/1 compiler and get it to run, if 'modern' compilers have lost backwards compatibility.
What I think is sad is that the hardware apparently wasn't preserved when the last system was taken down; I'd have thought there'd be lots of people at MIT, or computer-history groups, that would have taken it over and carefully carted it away in a fashion that would have at least preserved it for analysis, if not actual operation.
Well, if the licensing of the SDK is anything to go by it seems more like it's a case of Google vs. Free Software. Well, we always knew that there were going to be parts of the software stack that aren't going to be Free software. The FCC won't allow the parts that control the radio, for example, to be user-modifiable. So there have to be some big locked-down chunks, just because it's a cellphone.
If Google actually said that the "full stack" would be OSS, then shame on them. But it seems like they're going to be way more open than anyone else, and possibly as open as they can be while still getting FCC approval for the device.
At any rate, I find the whole project interesting but I'm not getting personally invested in it yet. I'll see what the license is like on the real thing before praising or condemning it.
In a closed loop, there is no difference between sucking on the return, and pumping material into the supply. Using the pump to assist draining as you describe would require one pump per server, as the coolant is preferentially going to come from the loops that are being backfilled by the pump itself, and not from the disconnected pipe.
In a totally closed loop, sure. But when you start dealing with leaks it matters. A system driven by suction will draw air in through any leaks; a pressurized system will force coolant out. So if you want to prevent leaks (accepting that you're always going to have imperfect seals somewhere), it would make sense to use suction on the return side of the lines going from the chill units to the servers themselves.
That means the system will tend to leak air in, rather than coolant out.
You could do it, it's just probably more expensive than forced-air cooling.
What you probably would want to do is have a closed system that's actually inside the computer. Fill it with some sort of nonconductive/noncorrosive coolant that won't destroy the machine if it leaks (e.g. 3M Fluorinert), then have a cooling block on the back, away from the electronics, where you plug in the chilled water lines. If you don't daisy-chain, and instead end-run the water intake/exhaust lines from every machine to a central pump, and more importantly than that, you have it driven by suction on the return side rather than positive pressure on the supply side, you could easily attach and detach machines without leaks. (Since in a datacenter a leak is probably more disastrous than a LoC to one server, suction is preferable to positive pressure.)
You'd disconnect the supply from a machine using a quick-release valve; then wait a second for the suction on the return side to pull the water out of the machine's cooling block and start sucking air. Then you'd disconnect the return side. This obviously means that you'd need a way of separating the air out of the return side before it hits the pump, but that's not exactly a unique engineering problem.
It's all doable, but the problems are the expense and the standardization. There's a major chicken-and-egg problem with equipment: you don't want to build a datacenter that can't use commodity equipment, but hardware manufacturers don't want to build gear that can't go into a standard air-cooled rack. So even though datacenters may be the biggest purchasers of racked servers (I'm not sure of that but I suspect they are, at least of some types), and datacenters might be better served by some sort of cooling besides forced-air, everybody gets the lowest common denominator.
Well, I think that it's interconnected; there are certain smell receptors in a mouse that are hardwired to the "oh shit, run" response. They have disabled that in these mice, either by breaking the connection or disabling/removing the smell receptors more directly. The result is that the behavior is not present anymore.
That's really the interesting thing, here: they have found a genetic variation that produces a very definite, high-level behavioral change. That's pretty cool.
Although it's clear that many animals have a lot of behaviors that are 'instinctive' and must be carried genetically (which you can test by bringing an animal up in an environment that's devoid of other animals and monitoring it's behavior), it's not terribly clear exactly how they work and are transmitted. This might be one small step towards understanding a part of that.
I am with Linus on this one. For the life of me I can't understand what this sucking up to RMS is about. Linus himself does not think GPLv3 is a good thing. So why do people keep adopting it. Without Linus FOSS is tossed. Not following Linus is dangerous for the survival of FOSS. What are you getting on about?
Look, I know I'm going after a sacred cow around here, but if Linus had decided to do something else with his time instead of Linux, it wouldn't have been nearly as big a deal as you're making it out to be. He was the right person, at the right time, satisfying a very specific need, namely for a freely-licensed OS kernel. In the worst-case scenario, the whole thing would have been set back a year or two, waiting on the BSD kernel. More likely, I think somebody else from the MINIX community might have done it (who knows, maybe Andrew Tanenbaum might have done it himself, had he not gotten in a pissing match with Torvalds). We'll never really know, but the key point is that Linux was evolutionary; it was what was needed at the time, it was there first, and it gained traction as a result. (And at least early on, it wasn't all that great from a software engineering perspective; it was the license that distinguished it from technologically superior alternatives, not the other way around.)
But the fact that the demand for a free kernel existed at all is due to a whole lot of other people, and I'm not sure why you'd give Linus' opinion more weight than you'd give to the people who created the license that made Linux successful.
In a strange kind of way, this is Google versus Apache.
I really don't think it is. This is Google taking the Apache license and then fixing a major perceived weakness in it, at least within the context of their application (creating a single, uniform, mobile platform). And even then, they're not really restricting the software; they're just getting the people who are part of their trade group to agree not to stab each other in the back.
It's not Google "versus" anything or anyone, except perhaps maybe the closed-source phone manufacturers. Certainly not Apache.
It's not the 'year of the Linux desktop.' It's not this year, it won't be next year, and it won't be any year after that.
But that's okay. Linux -- and other Free OSes -- don't need a "year." They're gaining traction, slowly, and will continue to do so. The migration away from vendor lock-in on the part of the general public isn't something that's going to happen in a single year. It's going to happen over the course of decades.
The writing is mostly on the wall: the price of hardware has dropped and will continue to fall, and that makes it a lot harder to justify big bucks for an OS, while at the same time more people are satisfied with their current machines and don't want to upgrade, meaning you can't lower your price and make it up in volume. Less revenue means less to spend on top talent, and that means a crappier product. The public may be slow, but eventually it catches on when you try to push too many lemons. (And once it does, it can be brutal and unforgiving; just ask the big U.S. automakers.)
Microsoft will do what it can to wring the last drops out of the Windows/Office monopoly, but they're busy diversifying as quickly as they can out into other areas. They're too big to just keel over and die overnight, but they'll probably have to pull an IBM: preserve their brand and reinvent themselves as a different company.
I'm optimistic that when the history of the late 20th and early 21st century is written, it will be remembered as a sort of digital Wild West, a lawless time, when proprietary non-standards roamed and fortunes could be made and lost overnight. But that's all going to come to an end, and when it does, the advantages of open standards -- and, to a slightly lesser extent, open source and Free software -- will be pretty clear. The forces driving that transition, however, are slow and grinding. They're not the sort of thing that lend themselves to a "year of," except arbitrarily and in retrospect.
It has a serial port, so if you want to use dialup, you can always attach a real modem. Those are well supported on Linux, far moreso than internals. So if someone wants dialup, you have a pretty easy solution to give them. I can't imagine that a modem costs more than $25-30 these days anyway. (That's assuming you can't find one for free; people give them away all the time on Freecycle.)
But anyway, I think this is a moot point; most people who bought the machines probably knew exactly what they were buying. It'll only be when the enthusiast market gets saturated that you're going to see these machines trickling down to the "retractable cupholder" crowd.
That's one possibility. A guy over on the "No Ideas But In Things" blog suggested that it's for the bridge to send a 'heads up' down to the engine room, to tell them that the engine isn't doing what's been ordered previously.
I noticed the boxed-comment thing a few days ago. I think it's a bug in the JavaScript/CSS in the new commenting system. I tend to always get it around the first comment on a page, generally, although sometimes it's further down. It's not a terrible usability issue but it took me a while to figure out that it doesn't (apparently) have any significance.
(This is all with FF 2.0.0.4 on Mac OS 10.4.10 using the subscriber server.)
Internal, external, whatever. Irrespective of the application I format any drive before use, additionally I would be spooked by an already formatted drive (don't they ship blank?) -nB Most internal and OEM/whitebox drives ship blank, but some externals are pre-formatted, and are even sold with software on the drive as a "value added." Maxtor, for instance, puts some Windows backup stuff on there. I think most of the other drive manufacturers do similar stuff. The software from Maxtor/Seagate/WD is probably pretty benign, but once you teach users that it's safe to accept software from 'strangers,' suddenly that el-cheapo external HD that came with some free software on it doesn't seem the least bit odd...
It wouldn't surprise me if there are manufacturers out there producing hdds that have separate partitions on them for the bundled software that are very hard to delete if you don't know what you're doing (similar to what those Windows-only USB sticks do).
That's fine if it's your opinion, but thankfully it does not seem to have been shared by many of the Supreme Court justices in the last half-century.
Your very literal use of the word "papers" is, IMO, sillier than the expansionist view you seem to abhor. Plus, the Constitution says nothing about said papers being under your direct personal control; you have a right to be secure in the knowledge that the government will not intrude on them, even if they are in, say, a bank's safe deposit box. That's no different from electronic "papers" stored on a remote server.
And while the town constable could perhaps peek over your shoulder if you were reading documents in a pub, he certainly could not conceal himself in your house or other private place (or peep through a window), in order to do so: the key difference between your home and a pub being the implicit assumption of privacy.
Furthermore, there is nothing to suggest that "persons, houses, papers, and effects" was meant to be an exclusive list; it reads to me as though it was specifically mean to be broad: that list encompasses practically everything of a possibly private nature that an 18th century man might possess. There is no reason to assume that the intent was limited only to "physical searches or seizures," when that was the only type of search or seizure that existed at the time of writing. The document was as broad as possible at the time it was written; you do a disservice to it with your pedantry.
Although it's true that the Ninth Amendment is sort of the red-headed stepchild of the Bill of Rights, it was invoked specifically by Justice Goldberg in his concurring opinion in the landmark case Griswold vs Connecticut, which basically established the unenumerated 'right to privacy' in the United States:
To hold that a right so basic and fundamental and so deep-rooted in our society as the right of privacy in marriage may be infringed because that right is not guaranteed in so many words by the first eight amendments to the Constitution is to ignore the Ninth Amendment and to give it no effect whatsoever. Moreover, a judicial construction that this fundamental right is not protected by the Constitution because it is not mentioned in explicit terms by one of the first eight amendments or elsewhere in the Constitution would violate the Ninth Amendment, which specifically states that "[t]he enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people...."
In determining which rights are fundamental, judges are not left at large to decide cases in light of their personal and private notions. Rather, they must look to the "traditions and [collective] conscience of our people" to determine whether a principle is "so rooted [there]...as to be ranked as fundamental."
This opinion was shared by Justices Brennan and Warren, as well. (And I would argue that it turned out to be far more significant than the Court's opinion written by Douglas, which mostly railed about the sanctity and social virtues of marriage and really didn't get into privacy generally.) Although Griswold took on only the rather narrow issue of contraception, and even that only between married couples, the reasoning therein was later applied to other realms.
So although the Ninth does get mentioned far more seldom than it should, its existence is critical and quite central to the current privacy debate. It has not been completely ignored.
If you're interested in reading a layman's introduction to the 'right to privacy' as it has developed through several major USSC cases, I might humbly suggest my own "Right to Privacy Primer" (text version) which I wrote a while back and recently updated.
Another question: We place our trust in Google every time we use its services, but why do we place more trust in a profit-maximizing enterprise than in our own government? Because profit-maximizing enterprises act in utterly predictable ways. This is totally straightforward, compared to Government, which is opaque and most of the time seems to have no single goal or purpose in mind at all. (I would argue that it acts according to whatever is to the greatest advantage of the people or groups with the most 'pull' at any given time, but determining who is really in control at any particular time is difficult, if not impossible, except sometimes in retrospect.)
Also, many people -- probably the majority of voters -- are involved in business and understand profit. Few people are actively involved in politics, and only a very small elite are involved deeply enough to really be comfortable with its machinations at high levels.
Morality isn't universal. (Well, "morality" may be, but any single morality is not.)
What's considered morally right in one place isn't necessarily right in another. What's "bribery" by one person's standards might be a show of respect by another's. In some places and cultures, bribery functions as a sort of 'sliding-scale bureaucratic user's fee' and may not even accompany corruption in a recognizable sense.
Your statement and its accompanying self-righteous indignation ignore that there are models of interpersonal and business relations besides the Western one, and aside from its popularity, there's really no way to say that one is objectively better than any other.
I don't really think that setting up eg a root server is such a complicated and expensive thing to do, compared to that. Or is iit?
It's not. You could probably do it this weekend if you really wanted to, and there are unofficial servers around. The trick isn't setting one up, it's getting people to actually use it, particularly if you start deviating from IANA. It's not a technical question so much as a "why would you want to" one -- and most technical people understand that there's nothing really to be gained from splitting the net root, and a lot to be lost.
Politicians, particularly those from countries that see the Internet as a threat and an annoyance, who just want to take a cheap shot at the U.S., ignore these realities in their bickering.
Since the parent was referring to the concept that OTHER countries don't want THEIR traffic monitored by the U.S., your response indicates that you must be an idiot. The countries that are bitching are less concerned with the U.S. reading their traffic, than their own inability to effectively monitor and censor the net. Seriously, get a clue and look at the countries involved.
Plus, administrative control has nothing to do with the deployment of infrastructure. You could give administrative control over to France and the exact same amount of traffic would still flow through the U.S. tomorrow. If countries want less traffic flowing through the U.S., all they have to do is build more links that get the packets from source to destination more directly.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, well. Should have known.
Actually I've been thinking for a while about doing some ceiling-projection stuff, because I get a stiff neck just watching TV in bed.
The projection itself is easy (put the projector behind the headboard of your bed, but just make sure you get a projector that has a good keystone adjust). It's finding a place to put the speakers so that the sound doesn't seem to be coming from the sides or behind that's harder. (Of course headphones would work.)
Behr Ultra Pure White on wallboard is apparently quite decent for a projection surface, although with very bright LCD projectors some people like going to a very light gray.
I think it would work best if you had a high ceiling, like 11-12 feet; 8 doesn't give you a lot of throw for the projector.
Depends on whether you have a real "laptop" or one of those 'luggable' "portable desktop replacements."
I have a 15" ThinkPad and it's definitely a find-a-table sort of deal. Although it has a nice keyboard and TrackPoint, it's so heavy that I'm constantly fighting to keep it from sliding away if it's on my lap, and it gets quite hot (and it has an exhaust vent that's easy to block if it's not on a table). My SO's Dell (some sort of monstrous thing, maybe a 17"?) is even worse. They both have a lot of sharp corners and hard edges.
But on the other end, I have a 12" iBook, an old G3 model, that works fine on my lap. It gets warm but not uncomfortably hot, the trackpad is positioned so that you can move back and forth from it to the keyboard without a lot of problems, it's light and doesn't slide much, and there's no hot-air exhaust to worry about blocking. It's not quite "curl up with a book" small and light, but it's pretty close. Also, even though it's 5 years old, the battery still runs for hours longer than the ThinkPad or the Dell.
I have no idea whether the current 12" Apple laptops are as "lappable" as my old one, but you could do worse than to pick up an old G3. It would probably run Ubuntu quite handily.
Anything bigger than 12", IMO, is too big for real 'laptop' use.
Finally, a keyboard designed for Emacs!
I'm fairly certain that IBM has a PL/1 compiler that will still run on its big iron systems, at least in compatibility mode.
You might run into issues between IBM's dialect of PL/1 and whatever dialect MULTICS is written in (there were at one point a bunch of incompatible versions), but compilers still exist.
Some of the big IBM machines can still run really crusty software in various binary-emulation modes; you might be able to dig up an ancient IBM PL/1 compiler and get it to run, if 'modern' compilers have lost backwards compatibility.
What I think is sad is that the hardware apparently wasn't preserved when the last system was taken down; I'd have thought there'd be lots of people at MIT, or computer-history groups, that would have taken it over and carefully carted it away in a fashion that would have at least preserved it for analysis, if not actual operation.
If Google actually said that the "full stack" would be OSS, then shame on them. But it seems like they're going to be way more open than anyone else, and possibly as open as they can be while still getting FCC approval for the device.
At any rate, I find the whole project interesting but I'm not getting personally invested in it yet. I'll see what the license is like on the real thing before praising or condemning it.
In a closed loop, there is no difference between sucking on the return, and pumping material into the supply. Using the pump to assist draining as you describe would require one pump per server, as the coolant is preferentially going to come from the loops that are being backfilled by the pump itself, and not from the disconnected pipe.
In a totally closed loop, sure. But when you start dealing with leaks it matters. A system driven by suction will draw air in through any leaks; a pressurized system will force coolant out. So if you want to prevent leaks (accepting that you're always going to have imperfect seals somewhere), it would make sense to use suction on the return side of the lines going from the chill units to the servers themselves.
That means the system will tend to leak air in, rather than coolant out.
You could do it, it's just probably more expensive than forced-air cooling.
What you probably would want to do is have a closed system that's actually inside the computer. Fill it with some sort of nonconductive/noncorrosive coolant that won't destroy the machine if it leaks (e.g. 3M Fluorinert), then have a cooling block on the back, away from the electronics, where you plug in the chilled water lines. If you don't daisy-chain, and instead end-run the water intake/exhaust lines from every machine to a central pump, and more importantly than that, you have it driven by suction on the return side rather than positive pressure on the supply side, you could easily attach and detach machines without leaks. (Since in a datacenter a leak is probably more disastrous than a LoC to one server, suction is preferable to positive pressure.)
You'd disconnect the supply from a machine using a quick-release valve; then wait a second for the suction on the return side to pull the water out of the machine's cooling block and start sucking air. Then you'd disconnect the return side. This obviously means that you'd need a way of separating the air out of the return side before it hits the pump, but that's not exactly a unique engineering problem.
It's all doable, but the problems are the expense and the standardization. There's a major chicken-and-egg problem with equipment: you don't want to build a datacenter that can't use commodity equipment, but hardware manufacturers don't want to build gear that can't go into a standard air-cooled rack. So even though datacenters may be the biggest purchasers of racked servers (I'm not sure of that but I suspect they are, at least of some types), and datacenters might be better served by some sort of cooling besides forced-air, everybody gets the lowest common denominator.
Well, I think that it's interconnected; there are certain smell receptors in a mouse that are hardwired to the "oh shit, run" response. They have disabled that in these mice, either by breaking the connection or disabling/removing the smell receptors more directly. The result is that the behavior is not present anymore.
That's really the interesting thing, here: they have found a genetic variation that produces a very definite, high-level behavioral change. That's pretty cool.
Although it's clear that many animals have a lot of behaviors that are 'instinctive' and must be carried genetically (which you can test by bringing an animal up in an environment that's devoid of other animals and monitoring it's behavior), it's not terribly clear exactly how they work and are transmitted. This might be one small step towards understanding a part of that.
Without Linus FOSS is tossed. Not following Linus is dangerous for the survival of FOSS. What are you getting on about?
Look, I know I'm going after a sacred cow around here, but if Linus had decided to do something else with his time instead of Linux, it wouldn't have been nearly as big a deal as you're making it out to be. He was the right person, at the right time, satisfying a very specific need, namely for a freely-licensed OS kernel. In the worst-case scenario, the whole thing would have been set back a year or two, waiting on the BSD kernel. More likely, I think somebody else from the MINIX community might have done it (who knows, maybe Andrew Tanenbaum might have done it himself, had he not gotten in a pissing match with Torvalds). We'll never really know, but the key point is that Linux was evolutionary; it was what was needed at the time, it was there first, and it gained traction as a result. (And at least early on, it wasn't all that great from a software engineering perspective; it was the license that distinguished it from technologically superior alternatives, not the other way around.)
But the fact that the demand for a free kernel existed at all is due to a whole lot of other people, and I'm not sure why you'd give Linus' opinion more weight than you'd give to the people who created the license that made Linux successful.
In a strange kind of way, this is Google versus Apache.
I really don't think it is. This is Google taking the Apache license and then fixing a major perceived weakness in it, at least within the context of their application (creating a single, uniform, mobile platform). And even then, they're not really restricting the software; they're just getting the people who are part of their trade group to agree not to stab each other in the back.
It's not Google "versus" anything or anyone, except perhaps maybe the closed-source phone manufacturers. Certainly not Apache.
It's not the 'year of the Linux desktop.' It's not this year, it won't be next year, and it won't be any year after that.
But that's okay. Linux -- and other Free OSes -- don't need a "year." They're gaining traction, slowly, and will continue to do so. The migration away from vendor lock-in on the part of the general public isn't something that's going to happen in a single year. It's going to happen over the course of decades.
The writing is mostly on the wall: the price of hardware has dropped and will continue to fall, and that makes it a lot harder to justify big bucks for an OS, while at the same time more people are satisfied with their current machines and don't want to upgrade, meaning you can't lower your price and make it up in volume. Less revenue means less to spend on top talent, and that means a crappier product. The public may be slow, but eventually it catches on when you try to push too many lemons. (And once it does, it can be brutal and unforgiving; just ask the big U.S. automakers.)
Microsoft will do what it can to wring the last drops out of the Windows/Office monopoly, but they're busy diversifying as quickly as they can out into other areas. They're too big to just keel over and die overnight, but they'll probably have to pull an IBM: preserve their brand and reinvent themselves as a different company.
I'm optimistic that when the history of the late 20th and early 21st century is written, it will be remembered as a sort of digital Wild West, a lawless time, when proprietary non-standards roamed and fortunes could be made and lost overnight. But that's all going to come to an end, and when it does, the advantages of open standards -- and, to a slightly lesser extent, open source and Free software -- will be pretty clear. The forces driving that transition, however, are slow and grinding. They're not the sort of thing that lend themselves to a "year of," except arbitrarily and in retrospect.
It has a serial port, so if you want to use dialup, you can always attach a real modem. Those are well supported on Linux, far moreso than internals. So if someone wants dialup, you have a pretty easy solution to give them. I can't imagine that a modem costs more than $25-30 these days anyway. (That's assuming you can't find one for free; people give them away all the time on Freecycle.)
But anyway, I think this is a moot point; most people who bought the machines probably knew exactly what they were buying. It'll only be when the enthusiast market gets saturated that you're going to see these machines trickling down to the "retractable cupholder" crowd.
Maybe they own stock in some U.S. defense contractors?
That's one possibility. A guy over on the "No Ideas But In Things" blog suggested that it's for the bridge to send a 'heads up' down to the engine room, to tell them that the engine isn't doing what's been ordered previously.
I noticed the boxed-comment thing a few days ago. I think it's a bug in the JavaScript/CSS in the new commenting system. I tend to always get it around the first comment on a page, generally, although sometimes it's further down. It's not a terrible usability issue but it took me a while to figure out that it doesn't (apparently) have any significance.
(This is all with FF 2.0.0.4 on Mac OS 10.4.10 using the subscriber server.)
I'm a big fan of this particular control, mostly because of the "Engine Working Wrong" setting. I often wish I had that on my PC...
Wait, you meant a good purpose...in that case, no, there isn't any.
-nB Most internal and OEM/whitebox drives ship blank, but some externals are pre-formatted, and are even sold with software on the drive as a "value added." Maxtor, for instance, puts some Windows backup stuff on there. I think most of the other drive manufacturers do similar stuff. The software from Maxtor/Seagate/WD is probably pretty benign, but once you teach users that it's safe to accept software from 'strangers,' suddenly that el-cheapo external HD that came with some free software on it doesn't seem the least bit odd...
It wouldn't surprise me if there are manufacturers out there producing hdds that have separate partitions on them for the bundled software that are very hard to delete if you don't know what you're doing (similar to what those Windows-only USB sticks do).
That's fine if it's your opinion, but thankfully it does not seem to have been shared by many of the Supreme Court justices in the last half-century.
Your very literal use of the word "papers" is, IMO, sillier than the expansionist view you seem to abhor. Plus, the Constitution says nothing about said papers being under your direct personal control; you have a right to be secure in the knowledge that the government will not intrude on them, even if they are in, say, a bank's safe deposit box. That's no different from electronic "papers" stored on a remote server.
And while the town constable could perhaps peek over your shoulder if you were reading documents in a pub, he certainly could not conceal himself in your house or other private place (or peep through a window), in order to do so: the key difference between your home and a pub being the implicit assumption of privacy.
Furthermore, there is nothing to suggest that "persons, houses, papers, and effects" was meant to be an exclusive list; it reads to me as though it was specifically mean to be broad: that list encompasses practically everything of a possibly private nature that an 18th century man might possess. There is no reason to assume that the intent was limited only to "physical searches or seizures," when that was the only type of search or seizure that existed at the time of writing. The document was as broad as possible at the time it was written; you do a disservice to it with your pedantry.
So although the Ninth does get mentioned far more seldom than it should, its existence is critical and quite central to the current privacy debate. It has not been completely ignored.
If you're interested in reading a layman's introduction to the 'right to privacy' as it has developed through several major USSC cases, I might humbly suggest my own "Right to Privacy Primer" (text version) which I wrote a while back and recently updated.
Also, many people -- probably the majority of voters -- are involved in business and understand profit. Few people are actively involved in politics, and only a very small elite are involved deeply enough to really be comfortable with its machinations at high levels.
Morality isn't universal. (Well, "morality" may be, but any single morality is not.)
What's considered morally right in one place isn't necessarily right in another. What's "bribery" by one person's standards might be a show of respect by another's. In some places and cultures, bribery functions as a sort of 'sliding-scale bureaucratic user's fee' and may not even accompany corruption in a recognizable sense.
Your statement and its accompanying self-righteous indignation ignore that there are models of interpersonal and business relations besides the Western one, and aside from its popularity, there's really no way to say that one is objectively better than any other.
I don't really think that setting up eg a root server is such a complicated and expensive thing to do, compared to that. Or is iit?
It's not. You could probably do it this weekend if you really wanted to, and there are unofficial servers around. The trick isn't setting one up, it's getting people to actually use it, particularly if you start deviating from IANA. It's not a technical question so much as a "why would you want to" one -- and most technical people understand that there's nothing really to be gained from splitting the net root, and a lot to be lost.
Politicians, particularly those from countries that see the Internet as a threat and an annoyance, who just want to take a cheap shot at the U.S., ignore these realities in their bickering.
Plus, administrative control has nothing to do with the deployment of infrastructure. You could give administrative control over to France and the exact same amount of traffic would still flow through the U.S. tomorrow. If countries want less traffic flowing through the U.S., all they have to do is build more links that get the packets from source to destination more directly.