If there's one thing that Reagan has taught us, is that truth always beats falsehoods.
In this case, it doesn't matter if they show Microsoft ads on TV 24/7, have Bill Gates clones in every boardroom of every corporation, the simple fact that Linux is cheaper, faster, better, and more secure than Windows will be born out and win.
Outsourcing is merely a product of freedom. If you want to stop outsourcing, make employees in the United States more competitive on the world market. We can do this by:
(1) Lowering or eliminating employer taxes. That's right, companies have the pay the government for the right to hire someont to work for them.
(2) Lowering or eliminating employee taxes. With lower taxes, employees will be willing to work for less.
(3) Reducing regulations surrounding employment. While employers are spending money scrambling to find ways to immunize themselves from RSI injury lawsuits, they are spending untold billions to consultants and for expensive products. This is one example of many thousands.
(4) Reducing the cost of living by reducing the cost of goods. The only way government can do this is by lowering taxes and by reducing regulations.
(5) Increase the value of our employees. Make reading a requirement for elementary school graduation. Make generally useful skills in the workplace (ethics, responsibility, hard-work, good attitude) requirements for high school graduation. Encourage studies in colleges, trade schools, and universities in math, science, engineering, and other profitable areas. Discourage the politicization of our college campuses and keep the focus on teaching and training. Make the cost of obtaining an education cheaper with less regulation and lower taxes.
When hiring someone in the United States is cheaper and more profitable than hiring someone in India, then we will stop outsourcing. President Bush is no more responsible for this phenomena than the Tooth Fairy is responsible for the bombs being dropped in Hiroshima.
With the funding of both manpower and pure intellect of the Ames research center, we are gaining a huge improvement to our resources as open source developers.
I won't expect a drastic increase due to this particular news anytime soon. These scientists and many scientists like them have been contributing before Bill Gates learned to crawl. I do expect more research centers to begin actively endorsing open source and moving away from proprietary licenses.
If all the major universities and research centers adopted an open source strategy, then all the corporate research centers would have to follow suite, or be cut off from their developments. If all the corporate research centers are doing open source, then all new software will be open source.
This is another step towards total world domination.
I think RMS is finally seeing his vision come true. Kudos to RMS! May Free Software live forever!
So what caused the ice ages and the warm periods? Mammoth farts?
Before you think I am pulling this out of the blue, read this: http://articles.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m15 90/is_8_58/ai_82554146
I think this proves that the earth goes through cycles.
I don't believe for a moment that me taking a bike to work rather than driving a car will have any predictable effect, or an effect in the right direction, whatever that is. I don't think we should be worrying about whether there is a superstorm that is going to be caused by too much farting.
Your reasoning is flawed. You are assuming that the guy who comes along and downloads it will be as intimate with not just the code but how to use it effectively as well.
Also, as the principle developer or author of the software, you have a certain "ownership" that no one else can have unless you abandon it. You can claim, "They don't know it half as well as I do. I wrote it. I've seen X iterations of it. I know what works and what doesn't. They are just now getting familiar with it." You have instant cred, and you won't have to prove your ability.
Okay, consider this. Someone owns a car worth roughly $3,000. He wants to sell it. Someone offers $3.000 for it, and it is sold. Who profits?
The answer is BOTH.
The guy who sold it obviously thought that $3,000 cash was more important to him than his car. So he made out good on the deal. If he didn't want $3,000 more than he wanted the car, he wouldn't have sold it.
The guy who bought it thought that the car was more valuable than his $3,000 cash. Otherwise, he wouldn't have bought it. So he made out good on the deal as well.
When you go to pay whatever you pay for a computer, you are getting something more valuable (the computer) than what you gave (the cash). The guy who sold it to you did the same. When Microsoft sells Windows XP to the retailer, they are giving away something less vauable to them than the cash they receive, and the retailer is getting something more valuable to them than the cash they gave out.
I think he did the only logical thing and purposely sabotaged the project. When he saw the abysmal state of XFree86 development compared to the rest of the free software community, and the exodus of mindshare to various other projects, he decided to sink the ship and get all those on board to a different project with a better community.
It has been known for some time that Area 51 was simply an aeronautical research base. All those funny lights and weird noises coming from the base were experimental aircraft that the military can't admit to.
For example, the F-115 (the angular black bomber) was actually designed and built in the 60's. However, we first heard about it in the 90's in Desert Storm. You may think that it is using cutting-edge technology, but the tech for the bomber is actually built on research in radar done in the 50's.
It makes you wonder: If they could build the F-115 in the 60's, what kind of craft are they building today? Pulse jets, hovering craft, craft that accelerate at greater than several G, craft that can fly into low orbit and back again, maybe craft that can project images on radar or visual or both.
The military pours billions of dollars into its research each year, and employs the brightest minds in America and abroad. They've been doing this since World War II. Their capabilities are left to the imagination.
About why they won't admit to any of this new tech: Basically, World War II was caused by new advances in battleship and tank technology. Germany thought that they had an invincible battleship, and that their tanks and cannons were vastly superior to anything else in the world. Thus, they believed that they could roll over Europe. Advances in technology tend to give the developers a euphoria of power, expecially when the owner of said tech is a crazed dictator or socialist czar.
The US military is careful to release just enough information to the public to convince everyone else that they don't stand a chance against us.
Basically, this is a simply classic way to "embrace and extend" Microsoft's Caller ID. Before the flag day, SPF will work the way it is now. After the flag day, which will probably occur later rather than sooner, SPF will have all the functionality of Caller ID. The idea of allowing both XML and text descriptors is simply brilliant. Microsoft wanted to force everyone to use XML, but now you have a choice. I believe most (like 99.9%) will use the text descriptors, both because it is easier and because it is sufficient for 99.9% of the cases.
The net result is Microsoft can't claim ownership anymore. Caller ID will be a footnote in the history of email authentication.
The proposed drilling at ANWR was a fraction of what we could possibly do. We chose the most productive spot in the smallest area of land in the most remote area.
The Republicans went to the public, "Can we drill just this eensy-weensy bit?" The public said no.
I'll admit that ANWR by itself is not going to produce enough for America. Right now, those 1 million barrels would be enough to significantly reduce the price of oil. (1 million barrels are 5% of our consumption.) At least it would open up the floodgates, giving people hope that maybe we can begin domestic production again.
Alaska is huge. California and Texas are huge. ANWR was going to be the first of many expeditions up in the arctic. Did you know that engineers and scientists who find oil aren't even allowed to look in certain areas? We don't even know what we have in our own backyard. There is oil we don't even know about yet, ripe for the picking. I have a friend who discovered accessible oil in his property in Utah, of all places. How much? Who knows! They're not allowed to find out.
I remember that we were predicted to run out of oil in 1970, but that hasn't happened. The amount of known oil in the world far exceeds anything we have known about in the past. With each new discovery, the amount of oil estimations get bumped up, and the date that we'll run out is extended for several decades.
There are some truly exciting discoveries in the oil business as well. There are some scientists trying to understand where oil really comes from and they are looking at various bacteria they are discovering in pristine wells. They are also watching as once-empty oil fields fill up again.
We have the technology to make safe, efficient, and clean nuclear plants in the United States. We haven't had an accident. Even Three Mile Island, oft-quoted as a disaster, completely contained the malfunction and it is safe to tour the site today as it was right after the incident.
The only problem with Nuclear power is that the plants take years to build. There is no hope that after investing hundreds of millions of dollars to build a plant that politics will shut it down once it starts up. In effect, no investor will approach it.
The United States needs to start a campaign to educate its citizenry about the benefits and real drawbacks to the nuclear power industry. We need to teach in our schools the facts of nuclear power from where we obtain the raw materials, how they are processed, how much waste is produced, and how efficient it is. If we laid out the facts, including how long the isotopes will last and where we will store them, then maybe we can get some serious private investment and some serious growth in the industry. Perhaps we can totally replace our coal and natural gas burning plants with nuclear ones. Maybe we can retrofit our commercial ships with the safe reactors that our submarines and battleships have.
The bottom line is that there is so much misunderstanding about radiation, nuclear isotopes, and the like. The restrictions placed on background radiation on the Yucca Mountain was more severe than the restrictions placed on granite statues in the capitol building. A smart researcher brought his geiger counter with him and demonstrated that some of the statues we adore are actually more radioactive than the Yucca Mountain would be allowed to be!
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,21015,00.htm l
I for one am still hoping our 1950's utopian dream about nuclear power will be realized.
The oil supply is not diminishing. I have seen "serious" academic studies quoting the fact that domestic production of oil decreasing is due to diminishing supply. Nothing is farther from the truth! The reason why domestic production is slipping is because of regulations, particularly the environmental kind. Take ANWR, for instance. The oil industry sees a huge cache of oil in one of the remotest and uninhabited spot of American soil - the arctic tundra. However, we aren't able to access it because people are worried we might injure some poor fox or caribou.
Another reason gas prices have spiked recently is due to California regulation of the refining industry. Recently some new regulation went into effect that basically shut down a large segment of the industry. They can't get permission to build new refineries, and the neighboring states won't allow it either, so that whole section of the country is seeing huge gas price increases, all of it manufactured.
All that we need to do to fix this energy "crisis" is to open up the regulations so that we can have a significant supply of our oil coming from domestic sources. Then, we need to relax the burdens on the refineries to lower the cost of refining and reopen existing refineries.
There will be two added benefits. With domestic production outpacing foreign production, we won't be so interested in maintaining a stable Middle East in the short term. In other words, we will tolerate social uprisings in Saudi Arabia, perhaps a civil war or worse, rather than cowtowing to every possible disruption in the supply. Also, loosening the regulation on gasoline will immediately lower the prices of it, allowing poor people to once again attend to their jobs and perhaps work themselves out of poverty.
We don't need to violate our ethics to advance scientifically. Bush was right to wave the red flag and say there are certain limits we don't want to approach.
You can see it on the streets. "Damn I hate these popups." "Use Mozilla."
As long as we keep telling everyone that there is an alternative superior to IE, they will begin using it. Eventually, people will have to build websites for Mozilla, and then we will be back to the IE/Netscape wars. Except this time, nothing new will be coming from Microsoft for several years.
I strongly suggest we build our websites with XHTML and CSS and ignore IE. We can put a message on our sites "We have detected that you are using IE. We require a standards based browser. Please download Mozilla, Firebird, or Opera."
Cars are popular because they are useful
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Alternatives to Cars?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I think too often environmentalists overlook the absolute utility of having a car.
It's big, but its comfortable. It is easy to drive in all types of weather. (Try biking in snow.) It is available whenever you need it. It is actually pretty cheap if you want it to be. They are well-understood devices that are easy to maintain (you can rotate the tires, change the oil, and do all sorts of stuff yourself with just a few tools.) You can carry luggage or more passengers with ease.
People have wanted a car (abbreviations for carriage) ever since they got tired of riding horses. They've built first chariots and later buggies and finally enclosed carriages. When the motor was invented, they got rid of the messy and unhygienic horses and replaced it with the much cleaner and more powerful engine.
I think people tend to emphasize the downsides of owning a car without realizing the benefits. With a car, anywhere in the United States is accessible in hours. You are free to go anywhere you like whenever you like without having to ask for permission or wait for a bus to show up. You enjoy comfort in cold, hot, wet, or snowy weather.
What are the downsides for this freedom? A bit of pollution, a higher price tag than most other things you own, and the risk of getting into a collision.
As for me, until a better solution that is more versatile and useful comes out, I'll be holding on to my cars.
I think systems like these are perfectly legitimate. For one thing, the terrorist quotient (TQ from here on) isn't evidence of terrorism; it is an indication of possible terrorism.
The police or FBI should investigate people who have patterns of behavior that are similar to known terrorists. They should gather real data to either confirm or deny the possibility. Then what they find should be fed back into the system.
Having a high TQ is only enough to make someone suspect. Having a low TQ is not enough to clear someone. As long as police and FBI realize this, the system will work fine and do exactly what it is intended to do.
If you're wondering how they calculate TQ, they examine country of origin (terrorists tend to come from a few countries), age, length of stay (terrorists will return occasionally to known terrorist locations), location of residence (terrorists may live close together), income source (terrorists will get large sums of money suddenly), and behavior.
For instance, a guy from Saudi Arabia who is 35 and visited Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and Iran, and who inexplicably received several hundred thousand dollars, and who ordered several tons of fertilizer when they live near downtown New York where they work as a taxi driver, and who rented a large truck would score high.
A geek who was born in Canada and only visited the Far East and/or Europe, who has a steady income from his job as a (insert IT job here) and who bought a large supply of fertilizer (along with farming supplies and tools) and lives in a rural location in Montana would not have a high TQ.
The system won't be perfect as it won't detect every single terrorist and may render a few obvious false positives. But it will identify a large enough number that it will give the police and FBI a start.
In America, the cops fear the citizenry. They are very careful when making an arrest, and if they can avoid it, they won't. Have you heard of the SWAT team that got the wrong address? They lost several of their men to an innocent civilian armed with a shotgun. I think they'll check their addresses and warrants more carefully next time.
That's called freedom from oppression. That's a check and balance against the government.
In the UK, cops believe they are higher or more powerful than the people. In the US, the cops understand their role as a servant.
You declare that only your machines are allowed to send email for your domain with SPF records. If his machine decides to send spam in your name, it will be marked as "SPF rejected" because you say his machines cannot send mail on your behalf.
Actually, people are wary of PostgreSQL because of its BSD license. If Red Hat makes significant contributions, some other company can take the contribution and incorporate it into their own proprietary version of PostgreSQL without contributing their changes back.
PostgreSQL is a rather strange project in that it is license agnostic. Ask about licensing on the lists and the core contributors say, "No one cares as long as you don't try to screw us." The general feeling is that people behave like it is GPL in that everyone works on the core product and no one is seriously trying to make a competitive proprietary one.
(1) How do you change the public key? If you publish a new one, which private key do you sign email with while DNS propogates the change? Choose wrong and your email will get rejected. Or do you have to stop sending email until the propogation is complete?
(2) Replay attack. A spammer can get his email signed with your domain key by sending it through your service once. Then he can send that same message to billions of "subscribers" from his own servers. That message will be signed with your key, and it will be apparently authorized by you.
(3) Encryption export laws. How are we going to send domain-key signed email to North Korea? How is North Korea going to send signed email?
(4) Legitimate "From:" renaming. Mailing lists send emails from their servers using a false From: name. When joe@foo.com sends an email to mailing-list@bar.com, john@baz.com expects to get an email "From: joe@foo.com". However, bar.com doesn't have the foo.com private domain key, so it can't sign the message, and so the mesage will be classified as a forgery, even though it is not.
I'm sorry, but 99.99% of legitimate mail is not forwarded anymore. The remaining.01% have other, better options available. If I want mail addressed to me@foo.com to go to me@bar.com, then the relaying server can simply resend the message, modifying the headers appropriately. I can also go to foo.com and download via IMAP or POP my email into their account at bar.com. Fetchmail and similar programs have existed for several decades to handle this.
If I want to setup a mailing list using procmail, I need to get a life and use real mailing list software that does sender validation and membership management.
Domain Keys principle weakness is in a replay attack. Here's how to do it.
A spammer sends a single email from his Yahoo! account to himself. He takes the sent message, encrypted with domain key, and then sends this message billions of times to servers across the planet. Since the message is encrypted with Yahoo!'s domain key, it is apparently authorized by Yahoo!.
Domain Keys without SPF won't work, because SPF says which servers are allowed to send email, while domain keys just says an email was signed by a particular key. If Yahoo! had SPF records as well as domain key records, the spammer would have to infiltrate a valid Yahoo! mail server to send the mail.
PostgreSQL has been known to support well over a terabyte recently. We're looking at PostgresSQL 7.5 now, which may have PITR, two-phase commit (the foundation of replication and other features), Win32 compatibility, and several other things.
I'll admit it doesn't have the replication, PITR, clustering and other features that Oracle has that enterprise users need, and even if we do get them in 7.5, it won't nearly be the quality that Oracle has, but it can handle as much data as you can fit on a disk effortlessly.
Give it a few more years, and PostgreSQL will have everything Oracle will have (the useful bits at least), plus it will be just as or more reliable. PostgreSQL is looking at dominating the database market eventually. If Linux is any example of what is possible, expect some serious action in PostgreSQL.
I think this year you are going to see more serious enterprise features being developed by interested 3rd party corporations for PostgreSQL. It has a strong foundation, and it is quite easy to build on. I know. I've studied the source. Expect serious replication as the killer feature this year.
Whenever the government makes a new rule about what a free people are allowed to do, it costs businesses and consumers real time and money.
Take for instance the tax code. A small part of the taxes we really pay ends up in the pockets of tax professionals and publishers. The tax professionals help us make sense of the rules the publishers have to publish and propagate.
Why can't the federal government set a few priorities (outlined clearly in the constitution), get those priorities done, and leave the rest of us alone? Why do we need a Big Brother to tell our phone companies how to behave? I am sure the phone companies know a lot more about the telecom industry and their consumers than any group of overpaid and underworked bureacrats will ever hope to know.
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If there's one thing that Reagan has taught us, is that truth always beats falsehoods.
In this case, it doesn't matter if they show Microsoft ads on TV 24/7, have Bill Gates clones in every boardroom of every corporation, the simple fact that Linux is cheaper, faster, better, and more secure than Windows will be born out and win.
Outsourcing is merely a product of freedom. If you want to stop outsourcing, make employees in the United States more competitive on the world market. We can do this by:
(1) Lowering or eliminating employer taxes. That's right, companies have the pay the government for the right to hire someont to work for them.
(2) Lowering or eliminating employee taxes. With lower taxes, employees will be willing to work for less.
(3) Reducing regulations surrounding employment. While employers are spending money scrambling to find ways to immunize themselves from RSI injury lawsuits, they are spending untold billions to consultants and for expensive products. This is one example of many thousands.
(4) Reducing the cost of living by reducing the cost of goods. The only way government can do this is by lowering taxes and by reducing regulations.
(5) Increase the value of our employees. Make reading a requirement for elementary school graduation. Make generally useful skills in the workplace (ethics, responsibility, hard-work, good attitude) requirements for high school graduation. Encourage studies in colleges, trade schools, and universities in math, science, engineering, and other profitable areas. Discourage the politicization of our college campuses and keep the focus on teaching and training. Make the cost of obtaining an education cheaper with less regulation and lower taxes.
When hiring someone in the United States is cheaper and more profitable than hiring someone in India, then we will stop outsourcing. President Bush is no more responsible for this phenomena than the Tooth Fairy is responsible for the bombs being dropped in Hiroshima.
In short, instead of complaining, compete!
With the funding of both manpower and pure intellect of the Ames research center, we are gaining a huge improvement to our resources as open source developers.
I won't expect a drastic increase due to this particular news anytime soon. These scientists and many scientists like them have been contributing before Bill Gates learned to crawl. I do expect more research centers to begin actively endorsing open source and moving away from proprietary licenses.
If all the major universities and research centers adopted an open source strategy, then all the corporate research centers would have to follow suite, or be cut off from their developments. If all the corporate research centers are doing open source, then all new software will be open source.
This is another step towards total world domination.
I think RMS is finally seeing his vision come true. Kudos to RMS! May Free Software live forever!
So what caused the ice ages and the warm periods? Mammoth farts?
5 90/is_8_58/ai_82554146
Before you think I am pulling this out of the blue, read this: http://articles.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1
I think this proves that the earth goes through cycles.
I don't believe for a moment that me taking a bike to work rather than driving a car will have any predictable effect, or an effect in the right direction, whatever that is. I don't think we should be worrying about whether there is a superstorm that is going to be caused by too much farting.
Your reasoning is flawed. You are assuming that the guy who comes along and downloads it will be as intimate with not just the code but how to use it effectively as well.
Also, as the principle developer or author of the software, you have a certain "ownership" that no one else can have unless you abandon it. You can claim, "They don't know it half as well as I do. I wrote it. I've seen X iterations of it. I know what works and what doesn't. They are just now getting familiar with it." You have instant cred, and you won't have to prove your ability.
Nobody has a "right" to profit.
Okay, consider this. Someone owns a car worth roughly $3,000. He wants to sell it. Someone offers $3.000 for it, and it is sold. Who profits?
The answer is BOTH.
The guy who sold it obviously thought that $3,000 cash was more important to him than his car. So he made out good on the deal. If he didn't want $3,000 more than he wanted the car, he wouldn't have sold it.
The guy who bought it thought that the car was more valuable than his $3,000 cash. Otherwise, he wouldn't have bought it. So he made out good on the deal as well.
When you go to pay whatever you pay for a computer, you are getting something more valuable (the computer) than what you gave (the cash). The guy who sold it to you did the same. When Microsoft sells Windows XP to the retailer, they are giving away something less vauable to them than the cash they receive, and the retailer is getting something more valuable to them than the cash they gave out.
So in the end, everyone profits in free trade.
I think he did the only logical thing and purposely sabotaged the project. When he saw the abysmal state of XFree86 development compared to the rest of the free software community, and the exodus of mindshare to various other projects, he decided to sink the ship and get all those on board to a different project with a better community.
It has been known for some time that Area 51 was simply an aeronautical research base. All those funny lights and weird noises coming from the base were experimental aircraft that the military can't admit to.
For example, the F-115 (the angular black bomber) was actually designed and built in the 60's. However, we first heard about it in the 90's in Desert Storm. You may think that it is using cutting-edge technology, but the tech for the bomber is actually built on research in radar done in the 50's.
It makes you wonder: If they could build the F-115 in the 60's, what kind of craft are they building today? Pulse jets, hovering craft, craft that accelerate at greater than several G, craft that can fly into low orbit and back again, maybe craft that can project images on radar or visual or both.
The military pours billions of dollars into its research each year, and employs the brightest minds in America and abroad. They've been doing this since World War II. Their capabilities are left to the imagination.
About why they won't admit to any of this new tech: Basically, World War II was caused by new advances in battleship and tank technology. Germany thought that they had an invincible battleship, and that their tanks and cannons were vastly superior to anything else in the world. Thus, they believed that they could roll over Europe. Advances in technology tend to give the developers a euphoria of power, expecially when the owner of said tech is a crazed dictator or socialist czar.
The US military is careful to release just enough information to the public to convince everyone else that they don't stand a chance against us.
...in a comment I made here.
Basically, this is a simply classic way to "embrace and extend" Microsoft's Caller ID. Before the flag day, SPF will work the way it is now. After the flag day, which will probably occur later rather than sooner, SPF will have all the functionality of Caller ID. The idea of allowing both XML and text descriptors is simply brilliant. Microsoft wanted to force everyone to use XML, but now you have a choice. I believe most (like 99.9%) will use the text descriptors, both because it is easier and because it is sufficient for 99.9% of the cases.
The net result is Microsoft can't claim ownership anymore. Caller ID will be a footnote in the history of email authentication.
The proposed drilling at ANWR was a fraction of what we could possibly do. We chose the most productive spot in the smallest area of land in the most remote area.
The Republicans went to the public, "Can we drill just this eensy-weensy bit?" The public said no.
I'll admit that ANWR by itself is not going to produce enough for America. Right now, those 1 million barrels would be enough to significantly reduce the price of oil. (1 million barrels are 5% of our consumption.) At least it would open up the floodgates, giving people hope that maybe we can begin domestic production again.
Alaska is huge. California and Texas are huge. ANWR was going to be the first of many expeditions up in the arctic. Did you know that engineers and scientists who find oil aren't even allowed to look in certain areas? We don't even know what we have in our own backyard. There is oil we don't even know about yet, ripe for the picking. I have a friend who discovered accessible oil in his property in Utah, of all places. How much? Who knows! They're not allowed to find out.
I remember that we were predicted to run out of oil in 1970, but that hasn't happened. The amount of known oil in the world far exceeds anything we have known about in the past. With each new discovery, the amount of oil estimations get bumped up, and the date that we'll run out is extended for several decades.
There are some truly exciting discoveries in the oil business as well. There are some scientists trying to understand where oil really comes from and they are looking at various bacteria they are discovering in pristine wells. They are also watching as once-empty oil fields fill up again.
We have the technology to make safe, efficient, and clean nuclear plants in the United States. We haven't had an accident. Even Three Mile Island, oft-quoted as a disaster, completely contained the malfunction and it is safe to tour the site today as it was right after the incident.
m l
The only problem with Nuclear power is that the plants take years to build. There is no hope that after investing hundreds of millions of dollars to build a plant that politics will shut it down once it starts up. In effect, no investor will approach it.
The United States needs to start a campaign to educate its citizenry about the benefits and real drawbacks to the nuclear power industry. We need to teach in our schools the facts of nuclear power from where we obtain the raw materials, how they are processed, how much waste is produced, and how efficient it is. If we laid out the facts, including how long the isotopes will last and where we will store them, then maybe we can get some serious private investment and some serious growth in the industry. Perhaps we can totally replace our coal and natural gas burning plants with nuclear ones. Maybe we can retrofit our commercial ships with the safe reactors that our submarines and battleships have.
The bottom line is that there is so much misunderstanding about radiation, nuclear isotopes, and the like. The restrictions placed on background radiation on the Yucca Mountain was more severe than the restrictions placed on granite statues in the capitol building. A smart researcher brought his geiger counter with him and demonstrated that some of the statues we adore are actually more radioactive than the Yucca Mountain would be allowed to be!
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,21015,00.ht
I for one am still hoping our 1950's utopian dream about nuclear power will be realized.
The oil supply is not diminishing. I have seen "serious" academic studies quoting the fact that domestic production of oil decreasing is due to diminishing supply. Nothing is farther from the truth! The reason why domestic production is slipping is because of regulations, particularly the environmental kind. Take ANWR, for instance. The oil industry sees a huge cache of oil in one of the remotest and uninhabited spot of American soil - the arctic tundra. However, we aren't able to access it because people are worried we might injure some poor fox or caribou.
Another reason gas prices have spiked recently is due to California regulation of the refining industry. Recently some new regulation went into effect that basically shut down a large segment of the industry. They can't get permission to build new refineries, and the neighboring states won't allow it either, so that whole section of the country is seeing huge gas price increases, all of it manufactured.
All that we need to do to fix this energy "crisis" is to open up the regulations so that we can have a significant supply of our oil coming from domestic sources. Then, we need to relax the burdens on the refineries to lower the cost of refining and reopen existing refineries.
There will be two added benefits. With domestic production outpacing foreign production, we won't be so interested in maintaining a stable Middle East in the short term. In other words, we will tolerate social uprisings in Saudi Arabia, perhaps a civil war or worse, rather than cowtowing to every possible disruption in the supply. Also, loosening the regulation on gasoline will immediately lower the prices of it, allowing poor people to once again attend to their jobs and perhaps work themselves out of poverty.
We don't need to violate our ethics to advance scientifically. Bush was right to wave the red flag and say there are certain limits we don't want to approach.
You can see it on the streets. "Damn I hate these popups." "Use Mozilla."
As long as we keep telling everyone that there is an alternative superior to IE, they will begin using it. Eventually, people will have to build websites for Mozilla, and then we will be back to the IE/Netscape wars. Except this time, nothing new will be coming from Microsoft for several years.
I strongly suggest we build our websites with XHTML and CSS and ignore IE. We can put a message on our sites "We have detected that you are using IE. We require a standards based browser. Please download Mozilla, Firebird, or Opera."
According to recent posts by Meng Weng Wong (author of SPF) to the spf-discuss list, the "new SPF" will incorporate features of Caller ID.
s tb ox.com/200405/0198.html
In general:
* The RFC 2822 FROM header will be duplicated in the RFC 2821 header. Mail servers will say:
MAIL FROM: <original@original.com> RFROM: <me@me.com>
* SPF rules (which were basically the same as Caller ID's) can specified in either text or XML.
* A new DNS record type for SPF will be used rather than TXT.
But don't take my word for it. Go read the posts here:
http://archives.listbox.com/spf-discuss%40v2.li
I think too often environmentalists overlook the absolute utility of having a car.
It's big, but its comfortable. It is easy to drive in all types of weather. (Try biking in snow.) It is available whenever you need it. It is actually pretty cheap if you want it to be. They are well-understood devices that are easy to maintain (you can rotate the tires, change the oil, and do all sorts of stuff yourself with just a few tools.) You can carry luggage or more passengers with ease.
People have wanted a car (abbreviations for carriage) ever since they got tired of riding horses. They've built first chariots and later buggies and finally enclosed carriages. When the motor was invented, they got rid of the messy and unhygienic horses and replaced it with the much cleaner and more powerful engine.
I think people tend to emphasize the downsides of owning a car without realizing the benefits. With a car, anywhere in the United States is accessible in hours. You are free to go anywhere you like whenever you like without having to ask for permission or wait for a bus to show up. You enjoy comfort in cold, hot, wet, or snowy weather.
What are the downsides for this freedom? A bit of pollution, a higher price tag than most other things you own, and the risk of getting into a collision.
As for me, until a better solution that is more versatile and useful comes out, I'll be holding on to my cars.
I think systems like these are perfectly legitimate. For one thing, the terrorist quotient (TQ from here on) isn't evidence of terrorism; it is an indication of possible terrorism.
The police or FBI should investigate people who have patterns of behavior that are similar to known terrorists. They should gather real data to either confirm or deny the possibility. Then what they find should be fed back into the system.
Having a high TQ is only enough to make someone suspect. Having a low TQ is not enough to clear someone. As long as police and FBI realize this, the system will work fine and do exactly what it is intended to do.
If you're wondering how they calculate TQ, they examine country of origin (terrorists tend to come from a few countries), age, length of stay (terrorists will return occasionally to known terrorist locations), location of residence (terrorists may live close together), income source (terrorists will get large sums of money suddenly), and behavior.
For instance, a guy from Saudi Arabia who is 35 and visited Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and Iran, and who inexplicably received several hundred thousand dollars, and who ordered several tons of fertilizer when they live near downtown New York where they work as a taxi driver, and who rented a large truck would score high.
A geek who was born in Canada and only visited the Far East and/or Europe, who has a steady income from his job as a (insert IT job here) and who bought a large supply of fertilizer (along with farming supplies and tools) and lives in a rural location in Montana would not have a high TQ.
The system won't be perfect as it won't detect every single terrorist and may render a few obvious false positives. But it will identify a large enough number that it will give the police and FBI a start.
In America, the cops fear the citizenry. They are very careful when making an arrest, and if they can avoid it, they won't. Have you heard of the SWAT team that got the wrong address? They lost several of their men to an innocent civilian armed with a shotgun. I think they'll check their addresses and warrants more carefully next time.
That's called freedom from oppression. That's a check and balance against the government.
In the UK, cops believe they are higher or more powerful than the people. In the US, the cops understand their role as a servant.
You declare that only your machines are allowed to send email for your domain with SPF records. If his machine decides to send spam in your name, it will be marked as "SPF rejected" because you say his machines cannot send mail on your behalf.
Actually, people are wary of PostgreSQL because of its BSD license. If Red Hat makes significant contributions, some other company can take the contribution and incorporate it into their own proprietary version of PostgreSQL without contributing their changes back.
PostgreSQL is a rather strange project in that it is license agnostic. Ask about licensing on the lists and the core contributors say, "No one cares as long as you don't try to screw us." The general feeling is that people behave like it is GPL in that everyone works on the core product and no one is seriously trying to make a competitive proprietary one.
Problems with Domain Keys:
(1) How do you change the public key? If you publish a new one, which private key do you sign email with while DNS propogates the change? Choose wrong and your email will get rejected. Or do you have to stop sending email until the propogation is complete?
(2) Replay attack. A spammer can get his email signed with your domain key by sending it through your service once. Then he can send that same message to billions of "subscribers" from his own servers. That message will be signed with your key, and it will be apparently authorized by you.
(3) Encryption export laws. How are we going to send domain-key signed email to North Korea? How is North Korea going to send signed email?
(4) Legitimate "From:" renaming. Mailing lists send emails from their servers using a false From: name. When joe@foo.com sends an email to mailing-list@bar.com, john@baz.com expects to get an email "From: joe@foo.com". However, bar.com doesn't have the foo.com private domain key, so it can't sign the message, and so the mesage will be classified as a forgery, even though it is not.
I'm sorry, but 99.99% of legitimate mail is not forwarded anymore. The remaining .01% have other, better options available. If I want mail addressed to me@foo.com to go to me@bar.com, then the relaying server can simply resend the message, modifying the headers appropriately. I can also go to foo.com and download via IMAP or POP my email into their account at bar.com. Fetchmail and similar programs have existed for several decades to handle this.
If I want to setup a mailing list using procmail, I need to get a life and use real mailing list software that does sender validation and membership management.
Domain Keys principle weakness is in a replay attack. Here's how to do it.
A spammer sends a single email from his Yahoo! account to himself. He takes the sent message, encrypted with domain key, and then sends this message billions of times to servers across the planet. Since the message is encrypted with Yahoo!'s domain key, it is apparently authorized by Yahoo!.
Domain Keys without SPF won't work, because SPF says which servers are allowed to send email, while domain keys just says an email was signed by a particular key. If Yahoo! had SPF records as well as domain key records, the spammer would have to infiltrate a valid Yahoo! mail server to send the mail.
PostgreSQL has been known to support well over a terabyte recently. We're looking at PostgresSQL 7.5 now, which may have PITR, two-phase commit (the foundation of replication and other features), Win32 compatibility, and several other things.
I'll admit it doesn't have the replication, PITR, clustering and other features that Oracle has that enterprise users need, and even if we do get them in 7.5, it won't nearly be the quality that Oracle has, but it can handle as much data as you can fit on a disk effortlessly.
Give it a few more years, and PostgreSQL will have everything Oracle will have (the useful bits at least), plus it will be just as or more reliable. PostgreSQL is looking at dominating the database market eventually. If Linux is any example of what is possible, expect some serious action in PostgreSQL.
I think this year you are going to see more serious enterprise features being developed by interested 3rd party corporations for PostgreSQL. It has a strong foundation, and it is quite easy to build on. I know. I've studied the source. Expect serious replication as the killer feature this year.
Whenever the government makes a new rule about what a free people are allowed to do, it costs businesses and consumers real time and money.
Take for instance the tax code. A small part of the taxes we really pay ends up in the pockets of tax professionals and publishers. The tax professionals help us make sense of the rules the publishers have to publish and propagate.
Why can't the federal government set a few priorities (outlined clearly in the constitution), get those priorities done, and leave the rest of us alone? Why do we need a Big Brother to tell our phone companies how to behave? I am sure the phone companies know a lot more about the telecom industry and their consumers than any group of overpaid and underworked bureacrats will ever hope to know.