I understand and agree that the WMD and Al Qaeda links were a bad way to represent the war.
My point was about the strategic attempt to put a tangible and specific fear in the minds of rulers in the region. The statement that, yes we can and will invade you and eliminate your regime, doesn't sound pleasant to civilians but is a powerful and necessary message. And you dont always convey that message fully by just carrying the big stick. The reason we want to convey that message is to give rulers in the region pause when deciding wether to grant access to Al Qaeda for a new training camp, or allowing safe passage, or looking the other way when funds are being laundered, or allowing vocal and obvious members of terrorist groups access to weapons and resources, etc. etc.
My point was the strategic impact of showing that we can and will act, which in that region is not the predominant view they have of our political will. I am not disagreeing that President Bush screwed the pooch on how he branded and executed it but the purpose isn't always in the way something is described.
Where Iraq falls into in a strategic sense rather than a tactical sense may be a good question for the medal debate.
If you talk with the some of the guys who may have done the war college or some of the more intelligent ring knockers they may bring up the strategic implications of the show of force on the region (in theory what was probably the attempt, not how well everything has been executed to date). People often use Libya as an example which the counter to that is that they were going that way anyways, but the desired effect was there.
The point is we can't invade every country that harbors terrorists but we can show them that they can be invaded and deposed. That the majority of the Iraqi regime has been eliminated would be the fear we would want to put in the minds of ruling parties in order to get them to think twice about supporting and maybe clamp down on terrorist activities in their country. Strategically if all we had done was invade Afghanistan it may not have had that effect on rulers in the middle-east region.
Anyways, some aspects of the Iraq war likely do have something to do with a strategic initiative for deterring state support of terrorism. The "war on terrorism" is actually more of an attempt at making fewer places hospitable to them and reducing their means of acquiring resources to carry out attacks.
Agreed and agreed. Having served under that administration during that time I can say it was rather upsetting to hear civilians make an endless line of excuses and exceptions for him when they would not have done the same for their husband, their boss at work, their friends, or the CO of a unit in the field.
That the person with the most power and responsibility in our country should be held to a lower standard then people serving and risking their lives or a even a measly CEO at some worthless company boggled my mind.
Yes they would, and we have to secure their existing infrastructure from those attacks (and it is not proving very easy in Iraq with the oil lines).
We would likely have to go to greater lengths to secure it but the cost would be offset by reduced costs in other areas. It is also intended to be a stop-gap for use until the domestic infrastructure is operational.
Having worked Bosnia and Kosovo, but not Afghan or Iraq, I can say that some theaters of operation may be more conducive to it then others but that doesn't mean it wouldn't be feasible and useful.
One question, being someone who compiles by hand any package exposed to the network, is what good does a binary diff do me there? I recognize that most people trust and rely on their distro's package manager, and I do as well for non-critical packages (no user has shell access to my machines so I can live with distro managed security updates there).
If a package manager allowed downloading just the effected source or binary files and not the whole package that may be a more flexible way of reducing bandwidth but not limiting choice of the user.
I agree, however, certain applications have reached a sort of commoditized maturity and dont really benefit from further additions.
Not to say that calendars couldn't improve. Sunbird could do things like allow for RSS feeds from public calendar sites such as a theoretical ticketmaster or local band, theater, sports team, etc.
You do a pub/sub thing and when you look at your calendar you can filter through events or ideas and see events that you may be interested in and when they are. Why browse 5-10 different web sites when are trying to schedule a cookout or meeting with clients?
In fact I have been thinking about adding publish/subscribe type features to some of my company's products.
offtopic slightly, but how did you fix that, my friend is having same problem cant figure it out..
Great solution
on
Port-A-Nuke
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
This is a great solution. Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq would have benefited greatly from this. These would help us get their critical infrastructure back up and running quickly and be a huge humanitarian benefit.
Add to this a good wireless communications hub that would provide voice and data and you can quickly restores some semblence of normal life to a post-war environment.
Now if they can get a water solution such as desalination or filtering then we would in great shape.
As dead-on as your post is I think it is difficult for the younger EU and US populations (excepting perhaps Poland and East Germany) to appreciate the fact that governments can get to those levels.
Our success and comfort has bred a lack of imagination and a great deal of complacence. They don't remember that when times got very bad in Germany the government did indeed become fascist, as it did in Russia, China, and others.
Compounding this comfort is the fact that, as other posters have pointed out, most crime is done by "Yardies", black-on-black, or kept within the confines of their particular ghetto (the Ozarks in the US are mostly white yet share a lot of problems with black, hispanic, and indian ghettos).
The biggest problem is that liberty does require eternal vigilance and yet the sheer success of liberty breeds complacency.
Actually, there is more to crime and population numbers then what fraction of what is done by whom.
Population numbers do not have a linear impact on things like car accidents, crime, divorce rates, or anything else you care to measure. There is actually more of an exponential effect of increased population densities on both positive and negative social "network effects".
The fact that England is 1/5 the size of the US and has 1/50 the amount of gun crime cannot be explained by their gun ban any more then the 20% increase in crime can be explained by the gun ban.
How could you think such a thing? Insurance companies, just like every other large business things only about ways to save their customers money, not maximize their profits! You insensitive clod.;-)
Re:Balmer doesn't let us research it ourselves!
on
Ballmer on Linux
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
They are being issued lots of patents. they are attempting to build a large patent portfolio around longhorn. the patents very well could be invalid but the legal cost of fighting the sheer volume of them is the detrent MS is looking for.
Patent 1000 things about opening a file, 750 may be invalid, but sue people on all 1000 with your $40 billion fund and make SCO, RIAA, MPAA turn green with envy,
You are correct from a consumers point of view only in the context of th transaction.
The cost, however, is passed onto the consumer as the merchants have to charge premiums for fraud in an insecure system, as do the banks, and everyone else along the chain that has to support fraudulent transactions.
This is no small thing, the very large bank I worked at had to spend a great deal of money around this and online-billpay activity.
The credit card is an unfortunate half-breed trying to be somewhere between cash and a check. Historical reasons and trying to gain usage and market acceptance have pushed it into this rols perhaps, but where its at now is broken.
uuhhh.. sending physical mail costs you much more then email. You are paying with tax dollars and environmental impact or you are paying with effort of hitting the delete button.
I think a big problem is that people have started to term these things as rights rather then responsibilities.
It is the job of the elected officials to communicate, educate, and persuade their electorate just as much as it is the voters job to do the same.
Self-governence in a republic (we dont have a true democracy, nor does Australia) has to involve a lot of that, and email is an effective method of accomplishing the task.
We have to step back from a lot of our, justified, negative feelings about politics and remember that there is some actual governence and leadership that is mixed in with all of it. And those things require over-communication.
That is exactly what we are doing. Our expectation is that people will get value from us building, managing, and maintaining the infrastructure to support the service, spending the time to write the software and integrate it all, and make it easy for them to use. Since our costs are low using OS we charge less and we think its a valuable trade.
We hope anyways as we just got started.
The one thing I struggle with when dealing with other CEO's and business types is their mentality of a business has to have lock-in and has to strive for monopoly. I think by giving away my code that people who have more time then money can serve themselves and those who have money and less time will see value. When someone else moves into the market I am then competing on value, relationships, and my ability to innovate. This is how other business compete. Why the software industry has developed this idea that lock-in, IP, and monopoly is the only way to be successful is what I struggle with. Who knows, maybe I am missing something.
I dont think that is the only way. There was an article a while back on the different business models around OS and there were some good examples that were not advertising.
One way, which my company is doing it is by giving away source code of components that plug in to our services system. What you are really buying from us is infrastructure, management, and time.
We are expecting that many people will build their own systems but that is OK, we dont need to be a monopoly, we just have to offer value to customers such that the say its worth the money.
Agreed that the fault lies with the.. uhh.. packet monkeys..
But again as other people have said the implementation of their investigation is the sticky point.
Often these broad seizures are out of neccessity as the troops on the ground, so to speak, aren't able to differentiate and better to err on the side of caution. The other reason is that when dealing with a skilled criminal, evidence may be hidden on places other then the machine generating the packets.
Now an improved methodology would be to sieze the equipment, do block level copies of the hard drives, or remove the hard drives, and give them back to the owners if they weren't direct suspects. As an operation that could be fairly streamlined and automated and would not slow the investigation or cost that much.
I suspect a third reason for these types of seizures might also be a punitive measure. Its a way to punish and give others pause. This last reason may be why they dont do more intelligent seizures.
Agreed, and as a contrast the DoJ raided some kids houses to stop them from trading music. You get some good with some bad and no system is perfect but that doesn't mean you shouldn't demand better.
The good examples (which is the majority) of the FBI doing their job should only serve as examples of how they have strayed in other areas. Along with that is the understanding that we are setting higher standards for our federal agencies and should be given respect, resources, and support for meeting them.
I agree that you cant drop all law enforcement activity for one cause, I also agree that enforcing existing laws is better than passing more laws, what I disagree with is the preceived scope of it. It really is a job you pass on to the local cops.
I guess what I am saying is use the right resources for the right job. The federal government should be going after macro concerns and things that are important. Wasting my tax dollars going after script kiddies and wares brokers is bad enough, scope creep as far as mandate of jurisdiction is altogether worse.
One issue that none of these points adrress (and is the big hurdle in wireless devices) is power consumption. A CPU that is pegged is drwaing a lot of power and that usage also involves a whole lot of TxRx which is the big juicer.
Again you could desing the client software to throttle and limit all resources and possibly even be intelligent to know which ones to limit when (i.e. plugged into power jack, just limit CPU, etc.)
QoS and security issues are also a big deal. I have kicked around some of these ideas and some implications in the roaming, intermittent connection state are that you would want to employ some form of store and forward technique which might involve persistence on some of the hops, the n you have to deal with TTLs, encryption, redundency in trasnmitions, deconflicting or sequencing of received data, blah, blah, blah..
A lot of that stuff has been done before (IP, OSPF, TCP/UDP, SMTP, etc. etc.) so you have a rich set of ideas to use, but the highly variable nature of the transmition medium makes a lot of those more difficult.
I am mildly ashamed to admit that I coded a networking tool for the winblows platform once and got into a little of its internals. After seeing it you can see where it would be futile to ask for certain changes. The architecture is just too far away from the desired state.
That being said I dont understand why they dont embed that logic onto a chip for network adapters. Push it into hardware and make the OS abstract. Deal with IP packets and not care about the OS stack. Or make it a small plug adapter like those nifty little print servers the size of your hand?.
I am still amazed that this even warranted federal attention. Last I checked, I thought the FBI was short on resources and had more terrorist leads to chase then they could shake a stick at...
And did they pay this much attention to Enron and Tyco and obviously other large scale crimes?..
Whats with the political sex appeal and fear mongering of kids swapping stolen entertainment?
Call the local cops and treat it like any other petty crime...
Slashdot Mirror
I understand and agree that the WMD and Al Qaeda links were a bad way to represent the war.
My point was about the strategic attempt to put a tangible and specific fear in the minds of rulers in the region. The statement that, yes we can and will invade you and eliminate your regime, doesn't sound pleasant to civilians but is a powerful and necessary message. And you dont always convey that message fully by just carrying the big stick. The reason we want to convey that message is to give rulers in the region pause when deciding wether to grant access to Al Qaeda for a new training camp, or allowing safe passage, or looking the other way when funds are being laundered, or allowing vocal and obvious members of terrorist groups access to weapons and resources, etc. etc.
My point was the strategic impact of showing that we can and will act, which in that region is not the predominant view they have of our political will. I am not disagreeing that President Bush screwed the pooch on how he branded and executed it but the purpose isn't always in the way something is described.
Where Iraq falls into in a strategic sense rather than a tactical sense may be a good question for the medal debate.
If you talk with the some of the guys who may have done the war college or some of the more intelligent ring knockers they may bring up the strategic implications of the show of force on the region (in theory what was probably the attempt, not how well everything has been executed to date). People often use Libya as an example which the counter to that is that they were going that way anyways, but the desired effect was there.
The point is we can't invade every country that harbors terrorists but we can show them that they can be invaded and deposed. That the majority of the Iraqi regime has been eliminated would be the fear we would want to put in the minds of ruling parties in order to get them to think twice about supporting and maybe clamp down on terrorist activities in their country. Strategically if all we had done was invade Afghanistan it may not have had that effect on rulers in the middle-east region.
Anyways, some aspects of the Iraq war likely do have something to do with a strategic initiative for deterring state support of terrorism. The "war on terrorism" is actually more of an attempt at making fewer places hospitable to them and reducing their means of acquiring resources to carry out attacks.
Agreed and agreed. Having served under that administration during that time I can say it was rather upsetting to hear civilians make an endless line of excuses and exceptions for him when they would not have done the same for their husband, their boss at work, their friends, or the CO of a unit in the field.
That the person with the most power and responsibility in our country should be held to a lower standard then people serving and risking their lives or a even a measly CEO at some worthless company boggled my mind.
Yes they would, and we have to secure their existing infrastructure from those attacks (and it is not proving very easy in Iraq with the oil lines).
We would likely have to go to greater lengths to secure it but the cost would be offset by reduced costs in other areas. It is also intended to be a stop-gap for use until the domestic infrastructure is operational.
Having worked Bosnia and Kosovo, but not Afghan or Iraq, I can say that some theaters of operation may be more conducive to it then others but that doesn't mean it wouldn't be feasible and useful.
This is on a RedHat 9 desktop, excuse my ignorance of desktop stuff, is that the same solution?
Actually this would be a good debate.
One question, being someone who compiles by hand any package exposed to the network, is what good does a binary diff do me there? I recognize that most people trust and rely on their distro's package manager, and I do as well for non-critical packages (no user has shell access to my machines so I can live with distro managed security updates there).
If a package manager allowed downloading just the effected source or binary files and not the whole package that may be a more flexible way of reducing bandwidth but not limiting choice of the user.
I agree, however, certain applications have reached a sort of commoditized maturity and dont really benefit from further additions.
Not to say that calendars couldn't improve. Sunbird could do things like allow for RSS feeds from public calendar sites such as a theoretical ticketmaster or local band, theater, sports team, etc.
You do a pub/sub thing and when you look at your calendar you can filter through events or ideas and see events that you may be interested in and when they are. Why browse 5-10 different web sites when are trying to schedule a cookout or meeting with clients?
In fact I have been thinking about adding publish/subscribe type features to some of my company's products.
offtopic slightly, but how did you fix that, my friend is having same problem cant figure it out..
This is a great solution. Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq would have benefited greatly from this. These would help us get their critical infrastructure back up and running quickly and be a huge humanitarian benefit.
Add to this a good wireless communications hub that would provide voice and data and you can quickly restores some semblence of normal life to a post-war environment.
Now if they can get a water solution such as desalination or filtering then we would in great shape.
As dead-on as your post is I think it is difficult for the younger EU and US populations (excepting perhaps Poland and East Germany) to appreciate the fact that governments can get to those levels. Our success and comfort has bred a lack of imagination and a great deal of complacence. They don't remember that when times got very bad in Germany the government did indeed become fascist, as it did in Russia, China, and others. Compounding this comfort is the fact that, as other posters have pointed out, most crime is done by "Yardies", black-on-black, or kept within the confines of their particular ghetto (the Ozarks in the US are mostly white yet share a lot of problems with black, hispanic, and indian ghettos). The biggest problem is that liberty does require eternal vigilance and yet the sheer success of liberty breeds complacency.
Actually, there is more to crime and population numbers then what fraction of what is done by whom.
Population numbers do not have a linear impact on things like car accidents, crime, divorce rates, or anything else you care to measure. There is actually more of an exponential effect of increased population densities on both positive and negative social "network effects".
The fact that England is 1/5 the size of the US and has 1/50 the amount of gun crime cannot be explained by their gun ban any more then the 20% increase in crime can be explained by the gun ban.
How could you think such a thing? Insurance companies, just like every other large business things only about ways to save their customers money, not maximize their profits! You insensitive clod. ;-)
They are being issued lots of patents. they are attempting to build a large patent portfolio around longhorn. the patents very well could be invalid but the legal cost of fighting the sheer volume of them is the detrent MS is looking for.
Patent 1000 things about opening a file, 750 may be invalid, but sue people on all 1000 with your $40 billion fund and make SCO, RIAA, MPAA turn green with envy,
You are correct from a consumers point of view only in the context of th transaction.
The cost, however, is passed onto the consumer as the merchants have to charge premiums for fraud in an insecure system, as do the banks, and everyone else along the chain that has to support fraudulent transactions.
This is no small thing, the very large bank I worked at had to spend a great deal of money around this and online-billpay activity.
The credit card is an unfortunate half-breed trying to be somewhere between cash and a check. Historical reasons and trying to gain usage and market acceptance have pushed it into this rols perhaps, but where its at now is broken.
Sorry, you called me out on my laziness ;-) It took a bit to find it, it was posted on slashdot a while back, here is the article:
IT Managers Journal
uuhhh.. sending physical mail costs you much more then email. You are paying with tax dollars and environmental impact or you are paying with effort of hitting the delete button.
I think a big problem is that people have started to term these things as rights rather then responsibilities.
It is the job of the elected officials to communicate, educate, and persuade their electorate just as much as it is the voters job to do the same.
Self-governence in a republic (we dont have a true democracy, nor does Australia) has to involve a lot of that, and email is an effective method of accomplishing the task.
We have to step back from a lot of our, justified, negative feelings about politics and remember that there is some actual governence and leadership that is mixed in with all of it. And those things require over-communication.
That is exactly what we are doing. Our expectation is that people will get value from us building, managing, and maintaining the infrastructure to support the service, spending the time to write the software and integrate it all, and make it easy for them to use. Since our costs are low using OS we charge less and we think its a valuable trade.
We hope anyways as we just got started.
The one thing I struggle with when dealing with other CEO's and business types is their mentality of a business has to have lock-in and has to strive for monopoly. I think by giving away my code that people who have more time then money can serve themselves and those who have money and less time will see value. When someone else moves into the market I am then competing on value, relationships, and my ability to innovate. This is how other business compete. Why the software industry has developed this idea that lock-in, IP, and monopoly is the only way to be successful is what I struggle with. Who knows, maybe I am missing something.
I dont think that is the only way. There was an article a while back on the different business models around OS and there were some good examples that were not advertising.
One way, which my company is doing it is by giving away source code of components that plug in to our services system. What you are really buying from us is infrastructure, management, and time.
We are expecting that many people will build their own systems but that is OK, we dont need to be a monopoly, we just have to offer value to customers such that the say its worth the money.
Agreed that the fault lies with the .. uhh.. packet monkeys..
But again as other people have said the implementation of their investigation is the sticky point.
Often these broad seizures are out of neccessity as the troops on the ground, so to speak, aren't able to differentiate and better to err on the side of caution. The other reason is that when dealing with a skilled criminal, evidence may be hidden on places other then the machine generating the packets.
Now an improved methodology would be to sieze the equipment, do block level copies of the hard drives, or remove the hard drives, and give them back to the owners if they weren't direct suspects. As an operation that could be fairly streamlined and automated and would not slow the investigation or cost that much.
I suspect a third reason for these types of seizures might also be a punitive measure. Its a way to punish and give others pause. This last reason may be why they dont do more intelligent seizures.
Agreed, and as a contrast the DoJ raided some kids houses to stop them from trading music. You get some good with some bad and no system is perfect but that doesn't mean you shouldn't demand better.
The good examples (which is the majority) of the FBI doing their job should only serve as examples of how they have strayed in other areas. Along with that is the understanding that we are setting higher standards for our federal agencies and should be given respect, resources, and support for meeting them.
I agree that you cant drop all law enforcement activity for one cause, I also agree that enforcing existing laws is better than passing more laws, what I disagree with is the preceived scope of it. It really is a job you pass on to the local cops.
I guess what I am saying is use the right resources for the right job. The federal government should be going after macro concerns and things that are important. Wasting my tax dollars going after script kiddies and wares brokers is bad enough, scope creep as far as mandate of jurisdiction is altogether worse.
One issue that none of these points adrress (and is the big hurdle in wireless devices) is power consumption. A CPU that is pegged is drwaing a lot of power and that usage also involves a whole lot of TxRx which is the big juicer.
Again you could desing the client software to throttle and limit all resources and possibly even be intelligent to know which ones to limit when (i.e. plugged into power jack, just limit CPU, etc.)
QoS and security issues are also a big deal. I have kicked around some of these ideas and some implications in the roaming, intermittent connection state are that you would want to employ some form of store and forward technique which might involve persistence on some of the hops, the n you have to deal with TTLs, encryption, redundency in trasnmitions, deconflicting or sequencing of received data, blah, blah, blah..
A lot of that stuff has been done before (IP, OSPF, TCP/UDP, SMTP, etc. etc.) so you have a rich set of ideas to use, but the highly variable nature of the transmition medium makes a lot of those more difficult.
I am mildly ashamed to admit that I coded a networking tool for the winblows platform once and got into a little of its internals. After seeing it you can see where it would be futile to ask for certain changes. The architecture is just too far away from the desired state.
That being said I dont understand why they dont embed that logic onto a chip for network adapters. Push it into hardware and make the OS abstract. Deal with IP packets and not care about the OS stack. Or make it a small plug adapter like those nifty little print servers the size of your hand?.
I am still amazed that this even warranted federal attention. Last I checked, I thought the FBI was short on resources and had more terrorist leads to chase then they could shake a stick at...
And did they pay this much attention to Enron and Tyco and obviously other large scale crimes?..
Whats with the political sex appeal and fear mongering of kids swapping stolen entertainment?
Call the local cops and treat it like any other petty crime...