This isn't about watermarking everything; it's about watermarking content recorded using this "home gateway" device. If you record something with a camera you own (rather than recording it off the airwaves using your home gateway/media router), that's an entirely different deal -- so the home movie of your kids or the evidence of government malfeaseance is completely unimpacted.
I think the fear -- and I don't think it's a wholly irrational one -- is that once you get this watermarking technology built into STBs, then the *AAs are going to look around and see what methods are still lying around that can be used for piracy. (What, you thought they'd just declare victory and go home?)
The next logical place to go is consumer video recording equipment generally. The "analog hole," so to speak, whereby a person can just point their camcorder at the TV and get a (crappy) recording. Doing this isn't too hard; there's the issue of sync rates, sure, but it can be done.
Once you're manufacturing the watermarking chips in bulk, because they're already being put in everyone's cable boxes, it becomes a lot more likely that they'll just be put into every type of recording device, because the manufacturers will want to CMA, and the content producers will nudge them if they need additional motivation.
I could easily see this technology becoming one of those "hammers" where, to the one holding it, everything starts to look like a "nail" that just needs to be pounded. The solution to any kind of piracy will be 'watermark the recorder!' and there's no real end until anything that can create a digital file from any type of audio or visual source stamps a serial number onto it.
Markets may well breed monopolies, in some sectors anyway, but they're not all that stable when unprotected by legislation. The real problems start when a monopoly develops, and then that monopoly starts dumping money into the political process, distorting it, and producing laws that help entrench itself further.
Enough monopolies have fallen over the years to more flexible, innovative, nimble competitors, that it's clear that just being big won't save you. In fact, being big is more of an impediment than anything else -- think of Kodak, once a solid blue-chip stock, now a shadow of its former self because it miscalculated digital photography so badly. Or IBM's brush with death in the late 80s and early 90s. I could go on.
What's dangerous, though, is when big companies abuse the democratic process in some way, in order to buy protections for themselves. Realizing that they're not as innovative as the little guys, they try to protect their outdated business models by creating barriers to entry. This is what's really destructive, because it stops the normal cycle of turnover in the market, where companies too stodgy to move with the times fall to newer ones.
I'd argue that you can see this right now in the airline industry: the big U.S. airlines have pet legislators who make life difficult for upstarts (in some cases being pretty bald-faced about it, too), and continue to bail them out of trouble when they get too close to failure. (Meaning that they never get broken up and their assets aren't available for use by new entrants.) The net effect is bad for consumers.
That an industry might become dominated by a single or handful of firms isn't a problem in and of itself, because it's entirely possible that they're offering customers the best deals; the real problem is when firms start using means outside the market proper (like the government) to quash competition and protect themselves.
This allows greater yields and the chance that the Africans will friggin' live until next season. That is a hand-up, in my opinion.
I'm not really sure that it is. It allows the population there to expand, but not in any sort of sustainable way: it's completely dependent on supplies of the enhanced seeds.
It's the same problem you'd get if, instead of giving seeds, you just brought in lots and lots of already-processed food. You're not solving any problems, you're just putting it off for a while, and probably making things worse: by increasing the food supply, people will have more children that they can't feed, meaning that the entire population will become permanently dependent on imported food that they can't afford. It's an easy way to make sure that an entire nation or continent stays permanently in poverty and debt.
I'm not really blaming Monsanto: they're just making a buck (albeit in an arguably immoral way, but morality has never been a serious barrier to profit); the real problem rests with the people paying for the "aid" who are only thinking one season ahead, and not for longer-term, sustainable-without-continuous-input, solutions.
The best part about the Warfarin/Coumadin story is that they didn't start using it as a pharmaceutical until some guy tried to kill himself with it and didn't die.
From the WP article:
After an incident in 1951, where a naval enlisted man unsuccessfully attempted suicide with warfarin and recovered fully, studies began in the use of warfarin as a therapeutic anticoagulant.
I've always wondered how many other interesting things have been discovered as side-effects of people attempting to off themselves.
It's entirely possible that if Google or Apple was in the position Microsoft is in, I'd hate them just as much as I do MS. In fact, it's highly probable. But they're not, so it's a bit of an academic point. I wasn't a big fan of IBM back in the early 90s, when they were the dominant player, and every once in a while I find it odd when I read some pro-OSS, pro-IBM article, because there's a part of me that still thinks that ought to be a contradiction.
But to be honest, what really gets to me about Microsoft isn't their overly aggressive business practices, it's the fact that they're boring. They have more money, more resources, than God, and yet they seem to constantly fail to innovate. That's what's really painful. Maybe being on the top isn't conducive to innovation, and if Apple or anybody else were up there, they'd be just as stagnant and dependent on buying and copying ideas from elsewhere, but I think part of it is just a function of Microsoft's culture and its leadership. I mean, you could say virtually the same thing about Bill Gates personally -- the man has enough money to practically reshape the world, but he seems mostly content to sit in his gigantic house and run his pet charity, which on the whole isn't particularly creative or innovative. It's just like every other charity... just bigger. There's no vision there. Compare him to John D. Rockefeller, or any number of early-20th-century philanthropic industrialists, and the guy's just a total zero.
So that's what really gets me about Microsoft. It's not that they're evil; I could forgive them for that -- I respect evil. But they're mediocre and evil, and there's no excuse for that.
They almost certainly did, but what sways juries is testimony, generally explaining or about physical evidence, not the evidence itself. A bunch of files wouldn't do anything by themselves; a good expert can take the evidence and explain it in such a way that it's compelling to the jury.
The problem is that many of the mining companies don't last long enough to put the mountaintop back where it belongs; they remove the mountain, take out some or most of the coal, and then go bankrupt.
There's a lot of finger-pointing when this happens, usually wherein management will blame astronomically expensive union employees and contracts, and the union negotiators and employees will blame mismanagement. (I suspect the truth is a combination of both, as usual.)
But the end result is that the company will go bankrupt and the mountain will get left torn apart. The same thing happens with some strip and open-pit mining operations; I know of a few places (mostly Pennsylvania) where there are open pit mines sitting around that were supposed to have been filled in, but the companies disappeared when the mines petered out.
IMO, the solution here is to require that before the first shovelful of earth is dug, that the mining company secures a bond for the cost of the environmental cleanup and restoration. If they go bankrupt or fail to restore the area within a certain number of years, the government takes over, calls in the bond, and has someone do it for them. The beauty of this is that it doesn't create a giant "trust fund" sitting around somewhere, for sleazebag politicans to raid for their own pork-barrel purposes, and it ensures that mining companies who don't fulfill their obligations will be pushed out of the marketplace: if you blow it and a multi-billion-dollar bond gets called in, you can bet nobody is ever going to underwrite anything you do again.
I don't know if this sort of bonding is anything like current policy, but it seems like the simplest way, and one that avoids actually delving into why the mining companies fail, which is a can of worms better left sealed.
If you were able to produce energy from renewable sources at prices that were less than non-renewable sources, only a fool would keep using the non-renewables. Now, it might in fact happen, that once everyone had switched over to the new, cheaper, renewable energy source, energy consumption would actually increase, because with it being cheaper, suddenly things that weren't practical before, would be. That's all pretty straightforward capitalism-in-action.
The problem, is that nobody has ever found a renewable energy source that's cheaper than non-renewables, in anything other than very particular cases. (Obviously, if you're standing atop Niagara Falls, you'd be a fool to not use what's in front of you, but that's not something that people elsewhere can easily replicate.) So non-renewables are cheaper, and people use those instead.
What's more likely to happen, barring the discovery of some incredibly cheap renewable, is that people will continue to use non-renewable sources until they begin to dwindle, at which point the price will go up, at which point suddenly renewable sources will be competitive and will begin to become popular. However, because the overall price of a unit of energy has increased, some activities that were once possible, will no longer be practical, and will be terminated for cost reasons. (E.g., if the cost of commercial airfare goes up, people will stop flying places on vacation, etc.)
Blaming "capitalism" for these effects makes about as much sense to me as blaming Boyle's Law for a hurricane. What's going on here is nothing but a lot of psychology; individual people trying to do whatever produces the best outcome for themselves at particular instants. If you don't like the outcome, the solution isn't to rail against the models that predict it, it's to try and modify in some way the input conditions so as to make the desired outcome more likely.
Suppose that Google gives 10 shoulder-fired missile launchers and an arsenal of 200 missiles to the guerillas in Peru. In exchange, the Peruvian guerillas agree to kill 50 poachers and blow up 10 Korean fishing vessels.
Those would be some sort of impressive shoulder-fired missiles, to hit Korean fishing vessels from Peru...
Unless those Koreans are really going out of the way to get their fish, that is.
Are you, by any chance, available as a CGI script? Or perhaps a Firefox plugin? I could think of a lot of websites that need to be similarly de-bullshitted.
Researchers in the Information Assurance Research Group of NSA worked with Secure Computing Corporation (SCC) to develop a strong, flexible mandatory access control architecture based on Type Enforcement, a mechanism first developed for the LOCK system. NSA and SCC developed two Mach-based prototypes of the architecture: DTMach and DTOS (http://www.cs.utah.edu/flux/dtos/). NSA and SCC then worked with the University of Utah's Flux research group to transfer the architecture to the Fluke research operating system. During this transfer, the architecture was enhanced to provide better support for dynamic security policies. This enhanced architecture was named Flask (http://www.cs.utah.edu/flux/flask/). NSA has now integrated the Flask architecture into the Linux operating system to transfer the technology to a larger developer and user community.
Not sure I have a lot of sympathy for the SCC people; they got paid for what they delivered, and then the client decided to open it up.
It's not really clear what happened afterwards; it sounds like SCC might have threatened users of SELinux with their patents, or prepared to, but later on decided this was a Bad Move --- it's not clear whether the NSA had a hand in convincing them of this, or it was a result of negative publicity from the Linux community, or what, but they eventually put out a statement (PDF) to the effect that they wouldn't use their patents against users of the GPLed code.
Hard to unravel what the real story was at this point, or how much credit should go to SCC versus the NSA for cracking heads and getting the patent threat removed, but the ultimate outcome was certainly a positive one. But at any rate, since the NSA folks were the ones who ported it to Linux from the research OS, and turned it from an academic curiosity into something with practical applications, I'd say they deserve the lion's share.
ISO seems to be more efficient at ramrodding through standards we don't want (OOXML) rather than getting out the ones we are desperately waiting for.:p
I think their speed is clearly proportional to the amount of grease that's applied to the inner workings of the system....
To test whether something can come from nothing, we must have _nothing_ (not just vacuum), thus negating ourselves, thus negating the experiment. It is equally impossible to disprove the "something from nothing" postulate.
We're starting to veer off into areas that are going to quickly resemble a bad Michael Crichton novel, but the question wasn't "can something come from nothing," but "where did the universe [by which we mean, this one, that we're in now] come from," which aren't the same.
The reason the latter isn't prima facie impossible is that (perhaps) you could at some point find multiple universes, and observe or otherwise gain intelligence about the birth of our universe from another one. That may well be impossible under any conception of the universe or multiverse as we currently understand it, but the photo-electric effect would probably have seemed pretty impossible to Isaac Newton, too. Having to turn everything we know about how everything works completely upside-down is a tractable requirement and problem; empirically determining whether God exists is not.
They are pretty clear in their FAQ that SELinux was produced essentially as an internal product / demo, and they just thought other people might find it a useful starting place for securing Linux. They're not actively marketing it as a product, or even evangelizing it.
A more succinct defense than I would probably have been able to come up with myself. Thank you.
I think what's causing confusion is that there are some questions which are absolutely not empirically testable, by definition, regardless of what scientific equipment you might ever be able to point at the task. The question of whether there is a God is one of these. There's just no way to do it; there's no test you can perform which would invalidate God, because you can always back God up slightly and find a place for Him.
There are other questions, the great majority of questions, which may be or even probably are empirically testable, somehow, we just can't perform (or even conceive of) the test methodology right now. "What happened before the big bang" is one of these. I've no idea how you would actually test it, but there's no particular reason why you couldn't in the same way that the God-question is by definition untestable. It's just really, really hard, and would probably require some sort of fundamental redefinition of how we conceive the universe(s). But not absolutely impossible from the get-go.
To separate questions into these categories doesn't require any faith in human capabilities at all. I'm not arguing that we will ever perform any of these tests -- we could all be wiped out by an asteroid, superflu, or nuclear war, and that would be the end of us (in fact, I suspect that it's probably more likely that we'll be extinct as a species before we have the capability of answering such fundamental questions) -- but that wouldn't invalidate the fact that there are some questions which cannot be tested, ever, by anyone.
Something I suggest to Christians to try to fathom their beliefs is that perhaps God exists outside of time and space and that God could have created the universe with an infinitely deep past; ie there is no reason for a Christian to believe that the universe is any specific age or that 'creation' happened at a specific time.
Some Christians readily soak this up while others just stare blankly before quoting some irrelevent bible verse. Its a useful calibration.
The difference is that there are Christians who are not textual Biblicists; the folks who get all wound up about dinosaur fossils and the Big Bang, and about science in general, are only those who draw their entire belief system from the words written in (usually a particular translation of) the Bible. Since the Bible is not even internally consistent, this leads to a lot of problems in their philosophy, as well as certain ridiculous assertions about the age of the world, etc.
Christians who take a less literal approach, which includes most of the modern major Christian sects, don't run into as many problems with science impinging on their faith, because they're not tied quite so tightly to one single tome. Catholics have literally tons of philosophy, written by various saints, popes, &c., to fall back on when the Bible seems to contradict either itself, or reality as determined empirically: they don't have to muddle it out themselves.
Because when it gets down to the highly theoretical stuff like this that no one will ever truly be able to prove, its not much different than religion.
You would be right, if and only if Hawking was talking about things that couldn't ever be proven one way or another. At that point, he wouldn't be doing any sort of physics anymore, he'd be somewhere off in that grey area where it borders philosophy and religion. (I call this area "Wankersville", but that's just me.)
However, there's a difference between something that cannot ever be proved, full stop, and something that can't be proved or disproved right now, due to the limitations of our understanding and our equipment.
There was a time, as recently as a hundred years ago, when debates about whether light was a particle or a wave would have seemed like wanking. However, they were not -- because we now have an (well, at least a partial) answer to that question, it's just that the theoreticians exceeded the reach of the experimentalists for a few centuries. Debates such as those, which get answered eventually by experimental evidence, are wholly different from debates which can never be settled (and, IMO, are a pointless waste of time that humanity should just move the hell along from).
It's pretty clear that Hawking realizes that what he's postulating can't be proven or disproven right now, but he's not putting it out there as an article of faith, either; he's saying that at some point in the future, between now and the heat death of the Universe, we'll probably be able to test it experimentally. That's a lot different than religion.
I backpacked/rode-trains across Europe (London to Budapest and back) a while ago, and I didn't bring a laptop with me. Granted, they have lighter ones today than when I went, but I still don't think it's that justifiable.
An iPod might be a better bet, particularly if you got one of those adapters that let you download files from a digital camera card directly to its hard drive for storage. But all the other things that you could want to do with a laptop, you can probably do at an internet cafe for a few cents a minute. Email (just remember to change your password frequently -- you don't know who's logging your keys), advance bookings for the next stage of your trip, research, etc.
IMO, it'll probably be harder to find someplace where you can charge your laptop and find connectivity, than to just find an internet cafe and plunk down a few Euros to use one of their computers. Particularly in less affluent cities, these places are everywhere (very popular with migrant workers -- many of them have very cheap long distance via VOIP, too).
Bringing a camera, of whatever sort you prefer, is a definite must. (I brought a film camera, but like I said, it was a while ago, I might do it differently today. Although with film, I just bought new film as I moved around, and just stored the exposed rolls, double-bagged in heavy Ziplocks, in the bottom of my backpack.) The iPod might be nice, although I think I'd skip it if it was me; just another thing to worry about charging and getting stolen. Definitely no laptop. If you want entertainment, bring a big softcover book, and then when you finish it, trade it at a used-book shop (many hostels, particularly the nicer ones, have a 'leave a book, take a book' shelf somewhere, if you ask). And of course, the tour book (Rough Guide, Lonely Planet, Fodors, etc.) of your choice.
The one thing I might bring, if I were doing it today, would be a GSM cellphone handset, and then pick up a cheap prepaid SIM when I got to Europe. Payphones over there seem to be a dying breed, and most of them in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland don't take coins. In order to use them, you have to buy little prepaid cards, which you then stick into the pay-phone. Absolutely obnoxious, and really no advantage to using them versus just buying a prepaid long-distance card (the one where you dial a freephone number and then enter the number you want), even for local calls. I spent a whole lot of time during my trip, wandering around villages trying to find payphones, or a shop where I could buy one of those cards (try doing that on a Sunday in Bavaria), in order to call the next hostel on my itinerary and make sure that we had a bed for the night. A cellphone would be worth its weight, just to avoid that hassle. Minimally used, it probably wouldn't need recharging except for once every few weeks, either.
I suspect that the payphone situation in Asia is probably even more dire than in Europe, and that getting a GSM SIM would be even easier and cheaper, so that's definitely the route I'd go.
I'd say that Linux-based webservers have withstood at least the same (or worse) adversaries and attacks that are plaguing Windows systems, and fared a whole lot better.
Although there are probably more home PCs than servers, the servers are much bigger targets. Until very recently, it wasn't that common to find a home PC that was sitting on a really fat pipe 24/7. Servers, practically by definition, have loads of bandwidth available. If you think that somebody's crappy Windows box getting turned into a spam zombie on their home DSL line is bad, imagine what it would be like to turn a significant fraction of a colo farm into zombies: you wouldn't just have a botnet, you'd practically have a supercomputer.
As anyone who's ever set up a machine running sshd on the default port, facing the internet, malicious persons are constantly looking for machines other than Windows ones to compromise. I get hundreds of attempts per day on my home server (which do nothing, except to get the originating IP added to hosts.deny) and I'm sure a commercial server that wasn't properly secured would get owned pretty quickly.
But the fact that the same malicious users who assumedly send out Windows trojans have to resort of brute-forcing the passwords on my SSH gateway, says something about the security models of each. To draw a physical-world analogy, they're actually picking the locks of the Windows machines; with my Linux box, they're merely rattling the knob and seeing if I've been dumb enough to leave it basically unlocked.
Now, it's true that a desktop/server comparison isn't totally fair: it's hard to trojan a server, because you don't have people sitting at its console, downloading and executing email attachments and other garbage. However, even on a Linux desktop, you'd have a harder time dropping a trojan, because it's harder to disguise an executable as a document and get a user to run it. (On most Linux systems, files are saved with the execute bit unset, so that someone would really have to try in order to "execute" that PPT file instead of opening it.)
Is it possible that there could be buffer overflows and arbitrary code-execution bugs in Linux software? Sure --- it's not immune, by any means. But particularly on externally-facing services, like sshd/apache/imapd/etc., the code is in use by and vetted by so many people, that I suspect the number of serious, exploitable bugs is fairly low, and they get fixed pretty quickly. With Microsoft, you just don't know. First, you have to wait for somebody to find a vulnerability, usually through some form of trial-and-error, because they don't have the code to review, and then you have to hope that they notify Microsoft instead of selling it to the Russian mafia, and then you have to wait for Microsoft to find a convenient time in their schedule to fix it (using whatever method they find expedient, which may or may not create other holes elsewhere; remember, you don't know what they're actually doing) and then release an update.
There are definitely Linux apps that have not had to withstand much in the way of scrutiny or life in a hostile environment, and that I wouldn't bet on the security of. But much of the underlying OS, and many of the most heavily-used applications, have a decades-long track record as some of the biggest targets on the Internet.
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This isn't about watermarking everything; it's about watermarking content recorded using this "home gateway" device. If you record something with a camera you own (rather than recording it off the airwaves using your home gateway/media router), that's an entirely different deal -- so the home movie of your kids or the evidence of government malfeaseance is completely unimpacted.
I think the fear -- and I don't think it's a wholly irrational one -- is that once you get this watermarking technology built into STBs, then the *AAs are going to look around and see what methods are still lying around that can be used for piracy. (What, you thought they'd just declare victory and go home?)
The next logical place to go is consumer video recording equipment generally. The "analog hole," so to speak, whereby a person can just point their camcorder at the TV and get a (crappy) recording. Doing this isn't too hard; there's the issue of sync rates, sure, but it can be done.
Once you're manufacturing the watermarking chips in bulk, because they're already being put in everyone's cable boxes, it becomes a lot more likely that they'll just be put into every type of recording device, because the manufacturers will want to CMA, and the content producers will nudge them if they need additional motivation.
I could easily see this technology becoming one of those "hammers" where, to the one holding it, everything starts to look like a "nail" that just needs to be pounded. The solution to any kind of piracy will be 'watermark the recorder!' and there's no real end until anything that can create a digital file from any type of audio or visual source stamps a serial number onto it.
Rare is the artist who will dance for your amusement while starving to death.
Actually, they dance for your amusement much more cheaply that way.
They tried to, but the schnitzel producers' guild claimed prior art.
Markets may well breed monopolies, in some sectors anyway, but they're not all that stable when unprotected by legislation. The real problems start when a monopoly develops, and then that monopoly starts dumping money into the political process, distorting it, and producing laws that help entrench itself further.
Enough monopolies have fallen over the years to more flexible, innovative, nimble competitors, that it's clear that just being big won't save you. In fact, being big is more of an impediment than anything else -- think of Kodak, once a solid blue-chip stock, now a shadow of its former self because it miscalculated digital photography so badly. Or IBM's brush with death in the late 80s and early 90s. I could go on.
What's dangerous, though, is when big companies abuse the democratic process in some way, in order to buy protections for themselves. Realizing that they're not as innovative as the little guys, they try to protect their outdated business models by creating barriers to entry. This is what's really destructive, because it stops the normal cycle of turnover in the market, where companies too stodgy to move with the times fall to newer ones.
I'd argue that you can see this right now in the airline industry: the big U.S. airlines have pet legislators who make life difficult for upstarts (in some cases being pretty bald-faced about it, too), and continue to bail them out of trouble when they get too close to failure. (Meaning that they never get broken up and their assets aren't available for use by new entrants.) The net effect is bad for consumers.
That an industry might become dominated by a single or handful of firms isn't a problem in and of itself, because it's entirely possible that they're offering customers the best deals; the real problem is when firms start using means outside the market proper (like the government) to quash competition and protect themselves.
This allows greater yields and the chance that the Africans will friggin' live until next season. That is a hand-up, in my opinion.
I'm not really sure that it is. It allows the population there to expand, but not in any sort of sustainable way: it's completely dependent on supplies of the enhanced seeds.
It's the same problem you'd get if, instead of giving seeds, you just brought in lots and lots of already-processed food. You're not solving any problems, you're just putting it off for a while, and probably making things worse: by increasing the food supply, people will have more children that they can't feed, meaning that the entire population will become permanently dependent on imported food that they can't afford. It's an easy way to make sure that an entire nation or continent stays permanently in poverty and debt.
I'm not really blaming Monsanto: they're just making a buck (albeit in an arguably immoral way, but morality has never been a serious barrier to profit); the real problem rests with the people paying for the "aid" who are only thinking one season ahead, and not for longer-term, sustainable-without-continuous-input, solutions.
From the WP article:I've always wondered how many other interesting things have been discovered as side-effects of people attempting to off themselves.
Did you really create a new account just to post that troll? Or are you planning on starting a career in it?
It's entirely possible that if Google or Apple was in the position Microsoft is in, I'd hate them just as much as I do MS. In fact, it's highly probable. But they're not, so it's a bit of an academic point. I wasn't a big fan of IBM back in the early 90s, when they were the dominant player, and every once in a while I find it odd when I read some pro-OSS, pro-IBM article, because there's a part of me that still thinks that ought to be a contradiction.
... just bigger. There's no vision there. Compare him to John D. Rockefeller, or any number of early-20th-century philanthropic industrialists, and the guy's just a total zero.
But to be honest, what really gets to me about Microsoft isn't their overly aggressive business practices, it's the fact that they're boring. They have more money, more resources, than God, and yet they seem to constantly fail to innovate. That's what's really painful. Maybe being on the top isn't conducive to innovation, and if Apple or anybody else were up there, they'd be just as stagnant and dependent on buying and copying ideas from elsewhere, but I think part of it is just a function of Microsoft's culture and its leadership. I mean, you could say virtually the same thing about Bill Gates personally -- the man has enough money to practically reshape the world, but he seems mostly content to sit in his gigantic house and run his pet charity, which on the whole isn't particularly creative or innovative. It's just like every other charity
So that's what really gets me about Microsoft. It's not that they're evil; I could forgive them for that -- I respect evil. But they're mediocre and evil, and there's no excuse for that.
They almost certainly did, but what sways juries is testimony, generally explaining or about physical evidence, not the evidence itself. A bunch of files wouldn't do anything by themselves; a good expert can take the evidence and explain it in such a way that it's compelling to the jury.
The problem is that many of the mining companies don't last long enough to put the mountaintop back where it belongs; they remove the mountain, take out some or most of the coal, and then go bankrupt.
There's a lot of finger-pointing when this happens, usually wherein management will blame astronomically expensive union employees and contracts, and the union negotiators and employees will blame mismanagement. (I suspect the truth is a combination of both, as usual.)
But the end result is that the company will go bankrupt and the mountain will get left torn apart. The same thing happens with some strip and open-pit mining operations; I know of a few places (mostly Pennsylvania) where there are open pit mines sitting around that were supposed to have been filled in, but the companies disappeared when the mines petered out.
IMO, the solution here is to require that before the first shovelful of earth is dug, that the mining company secures a bond for the cost of the environmental cleanup and restoration. If they go bankrupt or fail to restore the area within a certain number of years, the government takes over, calls in the bond, and has someone do it for them. The beauty of this is that it doesn't create a giant "trust fund" sitting around somewhere, for sleazebag politicans to raid for their own pork-barrel purposes, and it ensures that mining companies who don't fulfill their obligations will be pushed out of the marketplace: if you blow it and a multi-billion-dollar bond gets called in, you can bet nobody is ever going to underwrite anything you do again.
I don't know if this sort of bonding is anything like current policy, but it seems like the simplest way, and one that avoids actually delving into why the mining companies fail, which is a can of worms better left sealed.
This doesn't exactly make sense.
If you were able to produce energy from renewable sources at prices that were less than non-renewable sources, only a fool would keep using the non-renewables. Now, it might in fact happen, that once everyone had switched over to the new, cheaper, renewable energy source, energy consumption would actually increase, because with it being cheaper, suddenly things that weren't practical before, would be. That's all pretty straightforward capitalism-in-action.
The problem, is that nobody has ever found a renewable energy source that's cheaper than non-renewables, in anything other than very particular cases. (Obviously, if you're standing atop Niagara Falls, you'd be a fool to not use what's in front of you, but that's not something that people elsewhere can easily replicate.) So non-renewables are cheaper, and people use those instead.
What's more likely to happen, barring the discovery of some incredibly cheap renewable, is that people will continue to use non-renewable sources until they begin to dwindle, at which point the price will go up, at which point suddenly renewable sources will be competitive and will begin to become popular. However, because the overall price of a unit of energy has increased, some activities that were once possible, will no longer be practical, and will be terminated for cost reasons. (E.g., if the cost of commercial airfare goes up, people will stop flying places on vacation, etc.)
Blaming "capitalism" for these effects makes about as much sense to me as blaming Boyle's Law for a hurricane. What's going on here is nothing but a lot of psychology; individual people trying to do whatever produces the best outcome for themselves at particular instants. If you don't like the outcome, the solution isn't to rail against the models that predict it, it's to try and modify in some way the input conditions so as to make the desired outcome more likely.
Suppose that Google gives 10 shoulder-fired missile launchers and an arsenal of 200 missiles to the guerillas in Peru. In exchange, the Peruvian guerillas agree to kill 50 poachers and blow up 10 Korean fishing vessels.
Those would be some sort of impressive shoulder-fired missiles, to hit Korean fishing vessels from Peru...
Unless those Koreans are really going out of the way to get their fish, that is.
Are you, by any chance, available as a CGI script? Or perhaps a Firefox plugin? I could think of a lot of websites that need to be similarly de-bullshitted.
If it goes anything like the other "War On $FOO" that we've attempted, I'm all for it. It'll be free files for everybody!
From SELinux FAQ #11:Not sure I have a lot of sympathy for the SCC people; they got paid for what they delivered, and then the client decided to open it up.
It's not really clear what happened afterwards; it sounds like SCC might have threatened users of SELinux with their patents, or prepared to, but later on decided this was a Bad Move --- it's not clear whether the NSA had a hand in convincing them of this, or it was a result of negative publicity from the Linux community, or what, but they eventually put out a statement (PDF) to the effect that they wouldn't use their patents against users of the GPLed code.
Hard to unravel what the real story was at this point, or how much credit should go to SCC versus the NSA for cracking heads and getting the patent threat removed, but the ultimate outcome was certainly a positive one. But at any rate, since the NSA folks were the ones who ported it to Linux from the research OS, and turned it from an academic curiosity into something with practical applications, I'd say they deserve the lion's share.
The Universal Character Set has, as of Unicode 5.0, some 98,000+ graphemes, so I think we'll be good for a little while.
ISO seems to be more efficient at ramrodding through standards we don't want (OOXML) rather than getting out the ones we are desperately waiting for. :p
I think their speed is clearly proportional to the amount of grease that's applied to the inner workings of the system....
You're right, it's a bit of a tautology, isn't it.
:)
Although when I first read Andromeda Strain, I thought it was good. But I was young, and foolish.
To test whether something can come from nothing, we must have _nothing_ (not just vacuum), thus negating ourselves, thus negating the experiment. It is equally impossible to disprove the "something from nothing" postulate.
We're starting to veer off into areas that are going to quickly resemble a bad Michael Crichton novel, but the question wasn't "can something come from nothing," but "where did the universe [by which we mean, this one, that we're in now] come from," which aren't the same.
The reason the latter isn't prima facie impossible is that (perhaps) you could at some point find multiple universes, and observe or otherwise gain intelligence about the birth of our universe from another one. That may well be impossible under any conception of the universe or multiverse as we currently understand it, but the photo-electric effect would probably have seemed pretty impossible to Isaac Newton, too. Having to turn everything we know about how everything works completely upside-down is a tractable requirement and problem; empirically determining whether God exists is not.
Why is the Government selling Linux?
They don't; they give away the source code and it's been migrated into other distributions.
SELinux was started by the NSA, and they have a page about it here:
http://www.nsa.gov/selinux/
They are pretty clear in their FAQ that SELinux was produced essentially as an internal product / demo, and they just thought other people might find it a useful starting place for securing Linux. They're not actively marketing it as a product, or even evangelizing it.
A more succinct defense than I would probably have been able to come up with myself. Thank you.
I think what's causing confusion is that there are some questions which are absolutely not empirically testable, by definition, regardless of what scientific equipment you might ever be able to point at the task. The question of whether there is a God is one of these. There's just no way to do it; there's no test you can perform which would invalidate God, because you can always back God up slightly and find a place for Him.
There are other questions, the great majority of questions, which may be or even probably are empirically testable, somehow, we just can't perform (or even conceive of) the test methodology right now. "What happened before the big bang" is one of these. I've no idea how you would actually test it, but there's no particular reason why you couldn't in the same way that the God-question is by definition untestable. It's just really, really hard, and would probably require some sort of fundamental redefinition of how we conceive the universe(s). But not absolutely impossible from the get-go.
To separate questions into these categories doesn't require any faith in human capabilities at all. I'm not arguing that we will ever perform any of these tests -- we could all be wiped out by an asteroid, superflu, or nuclear war, and that would be the end of us (in fact, I suspect that it's probably more likely that we'll be extinct as a species before we have the capability of answering such fundamental questions) -- but that wouldn't invalidate the fact that there are some questions which cannot be tested, ever, by anyone.
Something I suggest to Christians to try to fathom their beliefs is that perhaps God exists outside of time and space and that God could have created the universe with an infinitely deep past; ie there is no reason for a Christian to believe that the universe is any specific age or that 'creation' happened at a specific time.
Some Christians readily soak this up while others just stare blankly before quoting some irrelevent bible verse. Its a useful calibration.
The difference is that there are Christians who are not textual Biblicists; the folks who get all wound up about dinosaur fossils and the Big Bang, and about science in general, are only those who draw their entire belief system from the words written in (usually a particular translation of) the Bible. Since the Bible is not even internally consistent, this leads to a lot of problems in their philosophy, as well as certain ridiculous assertions about the age of the world, etc.
Christians who take a less literal approach, which includes most of the modern major Christian sects, don't run into as many problems with science impinging on their faith, because they're not tied quite so tightly to one single tome. Catholics have literally tons of philosophy, written by various saints, popes, &c., to fall back on when the Bible seems to contradict either itself, or reality as determined empirically: they don't have to muddle it out themselves.
Because when it gets down to the highly theoretical stuff like this that no one will ever truly be able to prove, its not much different than religion.
You would be right, if and only if Hawking was talking about things that couldn't ever be proven one way or another. At that point, he wouldn't be doing any sort of physics anymore, he'd be somewhere off in that grey area where it borders philosophy and religion. (I call this area "Wankersville", but that's just me.)
However, there's a difference between something that cannot ever be proved, full stop, and something that can't be proved or disproved right now, due to the limitations of our understanding and our equipment.
There was a time, as recently as a hundred years ago, when debates about whether light was a particle or a wave would have seemed like wanking. However, they were not -- because we now have an (well, at least a partial) answer to that question, it's just that the theoreticians exceeded the reach of the experimentalists for a few centuries. Debates such as those, which get answered eventually by experimental evidence, are wholly different from debates which can never be settled (and, IMO, are a pointless waste of time that humanity should just move the hell along from).
It's pretty clear that Hawking realizes that what he's postulating can't be proven or disproven right now, but he's not putting it out there as an article of faith, either; he's saying that at some point in the future, between now and the heat death of the Universe, we'll probably be able to test it experimentally. That's a lot different than religion.
I'm with you.
I backpacked/rode-trains across Europe (London to Budapest and back) a while ago, and I didn't bring a laptop with me. Granted, they have lighter ones today than when I went, but I still don't think it's that justifiable.
An iPod might be a better bet, particularly if you got one of those adapters that let you download files from a digital camera card directly to its hard drive for storage. But all the other things that you could want to do with a laptop, you can probably do at an internet cafe for a few cents a minute. Email (just remember to change your password frequently -- you don't know who's logging your keys), advance bookings for the next stage of your trip, research, etc.
IMO, it'll probably be harder to find someplace where you can charge your laptop and find connectivity, than to just find an internet cafe and plunk down a few Euros to use one of their computers. Particularly in less affluent cities, these places are everywhere (very popular with migrant workers -- many of them have very cheap long distance via VOIP, too).
Bringing a camera, of whatever sort you prefer, is a definite must. (I brought a film camera, but like I said, it was a while ago, I might do it differently today. Although with film, I just bought new film as I moved around, and just stored the exposed rolls, double-bagged in heavy Ziplocks, in the bottom of my backpack.) The iPod might be nice, although I think I'd skip it if it was me; just another thing to worry about charging and getting stolen. Definitely no laptop. If you want entertainment, bring a big softcover book, and then when you finish it, trade it at a used-book shop (many hostels, particularly the nicer ones, have a 'leave a book, take a book' shelf somewhere, if you ask). And of course, the tour book (Rough Guide, Lonely Planet, Fodors, etc.) of your choice.
The one thing I might bring, if I were doing it today, would be a GSM cellphone handset, and then pick up a cheap prepaid SIM when I got to Europe. Payphones over there seem to be a dying breed, and most of them in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland don't take coins. In order to use them, you have to buy little prepaid cards, which you then stick into the pay-phone. Absolutely obnoxious, and really no advantage to using them versus just buying a prepaid long-distance card (the one where you dial a freephone number and then enter the number you want), even for local calls. I spent a whole lot of time during my trip, wandering around villages trying to find payphones, or a shop where I could buy one of those cards (try doing that on a Sunday in Bavaria), in order to call the next hostel on my itinerary and make sure that we had a bed for the night. A cellphone would be worth its weight, just to avoid that hassle. Minimally used, it probably wouldn't need recharging except for once every few weeks, either.
I suspect that the payphone situation in Asia is probably even more dire than in Europe, and that getting a GSM SIM would be even easier and cheaper, so that's definitely the route I'd go.
I'd say that Linux-based webservers have withstood at least the same (or worse) adversaries and attacks that are plaguing Windows systems, and fared a whole lot better.
Although there are probably more home PCs than servers, the servers are much bigger targets. Until very recently, it wasn't that common to find a home PC that was sitting on a really fat pipe 24/7. Servers, practically by definition, have loads of bandwidth available. If you think that somebody's crappy Windows box getting turned into a spam zombie on their home DSL line is bad, imagine what it would be like to turn a significant fraction of a colo farm into zombies: you wouldn't just have a botnet, you'd practically have a supercomputer.
As anyone who's ever set up a machine running sshd on the default port, facing the internet, malicious persons are constantly looking for machines other than Windows ones to compromise. I get hundreds of attempts per day on my home server (which do nothing, except to get the originating IP added to hosts.deny) and I'm sure a commercial server that wasn't properly secured would get owned pretty quickly.
But the fact that the same malicious users who assumedly send out Windows trojans have to resort of brute-forcing the passwords on my SSH gateway, says something about the security models of each. To draw a physical-world analogy, they're actually picking the locks of the Windows machines; with my Linux box, they're merely rattling the knob and seeing if I've been dumb enough to leave it basically unlocked.
Now, it's true that a desktop/server comparison isn't totally fair: it's hard to trojan a server, because you don't have people sitting at its console, downloading and executing email attachments and other garbage. However, even on a Linux desktop, you'd have a harder time dropping a trojan, because it's harder to disguise an executable as a document and get a user to run it. (On most Linux systems, files are saved with the execute bit unset, so that someone would really have to try in order to "execute" that PPT file instead of opening it.)
Is it possible that there could be buffer overflows and arbitrary code-execution bugs in Linux software? Sure --- it's not immune, by any means. But particularly on externally-facing services, like sshd/apache/imapd/etc., the code is in use by and vetted by so many people, that I suspect the number of serious, exploitable bugs is fairly low, and they get fixed pretty quickly. With Microsoft, you just don't know. First, you have to wait for somebody to find a vulnerability, usually through some form of trial-and-error, because they don't have the code to review, and then you have to hope that they notify Microsoft instead of selling it to the Russian mafia, and then you have to wait for Microsoft to find a convenient time in their schedule to fix it (using whatever method they find expedient, which may or may not create other holes elsewhere; remember, you don't know what they're actually doing) and then release an update.
There are definitely Linux apps that have not had to withstand much in the way of scrutiny or life in a hostile environment, and that I wouldn't bet on the security of. But much of the underlying OS, and many of the most heavily-used applications, have a decades-long track record as some of the biggest targets on the Internet.