This has been thought of before but NASA is a very very conservative organization that has been putting people "in the loop" as a matter of policy ever since the first astronauts won the argument about having a joy stick in the Mercury capsule.
Of course, when you consider the kind of bone headed things that have happened, like failing to convert between metric and english measurements, which caused us to lose one of the Mars orbiters, you can see why some think that it would be good if the software was smart enough to do some things for itself.
The longevity of the current rovers has allowed NASA to upload increasingly autonomous programming, giving NASA more experience and feedback on how the software works. This has made them more confident.
The unexpected longevity of these rovers has also created another problem for NASA. When you have to program everything in by hand and send it to Mars, it takes a LONG time to do anything. That might be fine for a mission that lasts only a few weeks, but these rovers might actually last an entire Martian year. Even discounting the time in hibernation waiting for springtime, that's a lot of people hours to keep things running.
The Olympics stopped being about amateur atheletics a long time ago. Now it's just about money. The committees that pick the locations take bribes, the atheletes use steriods, blood transfusions and any other method to get ahead, and it's all done in pursuit of more money for the broadcast rights. What passes for the Olympics now doesn't deserve the name.
If you want to have a proper Olympics you would have to prohibit endorsement contracts, broadcast the games for free all over the world, etc. It will never happen. The games have gotten so disgustingly commercial that I certainly won't be watching them this time around.
...with the people who made the decision that they didn't need to inspect the orbiter using satellites before having it return. If the extent of the damage had been properly evaluated, perhaps we'd still have seven brave talanted people and one very expensive piece of equipment.
It's good to know what caused the problems with the insulation in the first place, but unless there are procedures in place that insure that the orbiter is properly inspected if there are problems during launch we'll see this happen again. The shuttles are incredibly complicated machines that are quickly reaching the end of their design life because of procrastination on designing replacements. We need to make sure that we take that into consideration when evaluating problems in the future.
The problem here is how can any of us trust our data to an online application, especially if it's not open souce, after the bad behavior we've seen with so many supposedly "free" programs that turn out to be spyware?
It's just a shame that Microsoft doesn't let their people compete using their full talents and insists on using bully tactics.
I've met lots of bright people that work at Microsoft and I've no doubt that MS could make loads of money letting them do their thing. Instead any project that threatens the MS Office/Windows cash cow is put on the back burner indefinately.
This is one of the reasons that monopolies are so bad for the economy and even the people who work for them. Even the stockholders of Microsoft would be better off, IMHO, if the company was split into several different units, say Operating Systems, Applications, Games, Hardware, and Languages. The areas in which these seperate units would compete would just result in more innovation and better products.
Look at how much the Internet has slowed down since IE "won". The progress we all expected in multimedia and innovative interfaces has been slowed to a crawl.
I can only hope that some brave soul in the Justice department of the next administration will take his job seriously and work to break up monopolies instead of seeking some kind of accomodation with them. We'll all be better off for it.
Your opinions are suspect, however, and the validity of your information is uncertain. As I mentioned on a previous occasion, I wonder if you are a MS employee working to offer favorable comments about MS and unfavorable comments about FOOS. Who knows?
Not everyone who says something good about Microsoft if some kind of schill or plant. Microsoft is a big company. They do some things right, they do some things wrong. Personally, I believe that the harm they do greatly outweighs the good, but others are entitled to their own opinions without being insulted because they express them.
It seems to me that women are just more pragmatic about career choices. With all the news about computing jobs going overseas and jobs being cut right and left in the industry, maybe it's become apparent to women that other engineering fields are better choices.
I won't argue that computing has been portrayed as a boy's world and that it can be hostile to women, but then lots of other fields have been hostile and that didn't keep women from fighting their way in. Look at the medical field, law, and other engineering disciplines for examples.
Being good at computer science requires a significant commitment from most of us. There are some who are so good that they can breeze on by, but for most of us, it's a constant effort to stay current with the technology. Computer science is still probably one of the most self-taught of potential careers. In order to be successful you have to commit to the same hours as a new lawyer at a high priced law firm, but without nearly the same pay. It's not the best choice if you want a balanced life.
I would not be at all surprised if we see these numbers turn right back around when the economic situation for programmers gets better. Perhaps this is just a case of women being the wiser gender.
You say that you want to supply IE at a minimum, and that is understandable since there are many websites that don't work properly with Mozilla and other browsers because those sites don't follow standards. The only place you will find IE is on Microsoft Windows. This is a fundemental part of the Microsoft stragegy.
If you still want to consider an OS like Linux, you'll need to find one that can run IE under some kind of emulation. I don't know if that is possible.
You may also be at a disadvantage when it comes to NetNanny type programs, if you intend to use them to limit Internet access. Hopefully someone else here can supply more information about that.
I would suggest you place the actual boxen in a locked enclosure that prevents access to the floppy drive, CD/DVD drives and USB drives, since most modern machines will allow you to boot from any of these devices and thus gain complete control over the computer. A BIOS password might let you limit booting to a floppy so that you can expose CDs and USB ports
It occurs to me that this problem has probably been faced before by other libraries or organizations with similar needs, so you may be able to find some kind of open source project that is dealing with such problems.
Good luck. Know that your efforts are appreciated.
If IBM really doesn't intend to use it's patents against Linux, IBM should take the necessary legal steps to make it impossible for it to do so, such as giving a non-revokable perpetual license to Linux to use the specified patents. If IBM is serious than this will only cost them some lawyer time to draw up the necessary papers. It will also protect them from someone else saying "Well, they didn't object to Linux using their patent, so it shouldn't apply to me either.
IBM might currently be one of the good guys, but it wasn't so long ago that IBM was the big computer company we all loved to hate. Management and business models change. When they do, as we've seen with SCO, companies past promises get thrown out the window.
Here's hoping that IBM makes good on this promise and sets a real example for other companies to follow.
This is a wonderful idea if you want to make it nearly impossible for small groups or individuals to develop and maintain Linux distributions. Has Linus now joined Microsoft in it's contempt for the small developer?
The great advantage Linux has had over Windows and several other operating systems is it's stability. Now that stability is going to be placed in the hands of those maintaining the distributions rather than those who have made Linux into what it is today. Instead of being assured that every even-numbered kernel is solid, anyone using Linux will have to pay careful attention to reviews from each distribution to figure out which ones are really stable and which ones aren't.
I'm a great fan of Linux and of Linus Torvalds, but I feel this is a huge mistake and I hope that either I'm convinced that my fears are unfounded or that this decision is reversed quickly.
That's the purpose of separation of powers. If the legislature passes an immoral or unconstitutional law, it is the duty of the executive to not enforce it, and of the judiciary to not convict under it and/or overturn it.
The purpose of the legislature is to pass the laws. The executive branch MUST enforce them. Most people do not know that Reagan originally refused to enforse a law passed by congress and came close to being impeached. It was handled very quietly. The Executive branch does not have the ability to enforce selectively. The Judiciary is supposed to rule on the constitutionality of law. This is based on the Constitution itself and the body of cases that have been decided by the Supreme and lower courts since the founding of the nation. The Supreme Court can't throw out a "bad" law unless it violates the constitution. The only way to get rid of bad laws that are not unconstitutional is to get congress to repeal those laws. The only way that will happen is if people petition their representatives in such numbers that the representatives fear they might lose an election over it.
Here's the important point. We are responsible for the bad laws like the DMCA because we voted the jokers in who think that the checks from the RIAA are more important than our votes. They think that way because they know that most of us don't vote and of those who do, most vote the party line rather than voting based on the record of the representative. Most of our congressional representatives can take for granted that they will be automatically re-elected. We have the government we deserve.
If you want better laws, vote, call your representative, run for office yourself, get involved, educate your kids about how our system "works." Do something other than bitch.
I seems to me that if power companies want to use power lines for data transmission they should find some way to shield them. Perhaps this is too expensive. If so, run fiber or coax.
Perhaps as power lines are replaced or upgraded they could be replace with shielded lines suitable for data transmission use. I suspect that it would be cheaper just to run addtitional fiber when doing the replacement, but perhaps not.
You know, part of the reason that doctors have problems with malpractice insurance is because you can't really fix a life that has been destroyed. The "real damages" can't be accurately measured. It's more than the salary lost when you can't work anymore. How to you measure the loss of quality of life?
The fact is that the medical profession is very protective of doctors, not of patients. One doctor in Tampa who made the mistake of cutting off the wrong foot of one patient was still found practicing six months later when he did exactly the same thing on another patient. Both times he blamed the nurses.
If a doctor gets in trouble in one place, he can always move to another state and start all over again.
If you want to see lower insurance rates for doctors, you are going to have to find a way to force the bad doctors out of the profession. There are many excellent physcians paying the price for their inept collegues and of course all of us patients pay for such doctors with our increased fees, limbs, and sometimes our lives.
The fact is that politicians, regardless of party, work purely on two principles which we can call the "squeaky wheel" and "big bucks" principles. They sponser and vote for legistlation that answers whatever the current hot topic is. The hot topic is usually driven by those people who are upset enough to call and write letters. That means that most of us, who are more concerned with just getting through the day in one piece than spending all our time lobbying our representatives, are under represented. There is no "sanity" lobby.
The legislators also respond to the people who give them big checks, like the RIAA. That is because it costs a lot of money to win an election and most of them are in hock to their eyeballs when they take office.
Most of us know that worrying about explicit lyrics is silly. Most of us find some sort of lyrics somewhere offensive, but we do have the option to not listen to music we don't like.
Any parent that is so out of touch with their kids that they don't know what their kid is listening to has bigger problems than any that could be caused by explicit lyrics. The government has always made a very poor parent.
If you want to live in a more rationale world, there is something you can do. Don't buy stuff from the RIAA if you don't like the way they behave. Educate yourself about the issues and candidates and vote in every election. Don't vote for you party, vote based on issues that matter to your daily life. Finally, take a moment to squeak a bit yourself and write, or even better call, your representatives and tell them how you want them to better represent you. They are supposed to be working for you.
Democracy isn't free. It cost lives to win it and keep it. One thing we should all realize is that the cost of keeping our democracy is far lower when we participate in it than if we fail to act until we find it is slipping away.
Hmmm, sheep runs on the grass it eats, nibbles all day and is not particularly noisy. Better still, unless it is a Ram, it's unlikely to chase the neighbors.:)
We had a cheap ATI Wonder VE, six weeks afeter we got it there were problems. The sound was breaking up and the picture would go dark about 3/4 of the way through hour long recordings. I wasn't impressed.
I've now purchased a PVR-250 and a PVR-350, made by Hauppauge. No problems with those cards and the picture is much better. It's worth the extra money so I don't have to throw away the cards and get new ones.
I wrote up my experience on my website, if you want to hear the details. Just look for the MythTV articles.
Land fills are indeed a problem. Toxic materials accumulate in land fills. Contrary to what Penn & Teller would have you believe, not all land fills are run like the pristine example they showed. Many of them leak. Some of those contaminate water supplies.
The toxic elements that accumulate at land fills are materials like lead, cadmium and mercury. Unlike radioactive materials, these substances NEVER become less toxic. The land fill has to work perfectly FOREVER if you want to safeguard the water supply.
Penn & Teller did raise some relevant points on recycling, but their comments on land fills were, as the name implies, Bullshit.
There is a silver lining to this story. If you go back 30-40 years, you will see a host of complaints about these new-fangled patents on biotechnology - many claims that allowing inventors to patent novel organisms, gene sequences, proteins, and research techniques posed a horrific threat to biotech research and product development. These claims assumed the same basis as many of today's complaints against software patents: examiners were hopelessly lacking in technical skill in these areas; the subject matter qualitatively differed from conventionally patentable fields of art; a 17-year monopoly (pre-1995) represented a calamity to rapidly-evolving technology and typically-cooperative research. History has shown that those fears were hugely outweighed by the overall benefits of biotech patents - as evidenced by a thousand, wonderfully effective therapies and drugs (many of which, like prozak, are now expired, transferring the technology to the public domain.) Biotechnology and medicine are experiencing a huge upsurge in the pace of technical development - thanks in large measure to the willingness of corporations to invest in (potentially patentable) biotech R&D.
There are extensive problems with allowing companies and individuals to patent biotechnology and there is little evidence to suggest that all the patents were necessary.
The genetic information within natural organisms should be part of the common property shared among everyone. Allowing some individual to claim ownership of the genetic code of a natural organism is obviously absurd.
Corporations have been rapidly patenting genetic information from crops that have been developed over thousands of years by indigenous populations in third-world countries. The thousands of years of cultivation apparently entitles those people to nothing, while using an automated machine to decode the genetic code entitles the corporation to ownership of the genetic code of the plant? How is this reasonable or equitable? These patents are robbing people in third world countries.
The explosion of development in bio-technology has more to do with the available technology and automation than allowing patents on natural organisms. There is plenty of profit to be made in developing medicines from natural genetic codes without granting ownership of those codes to corporations. Rightfully, the ownership of the genetic information should be held in common trust. There is nothing to stop businesses from patenting and profiting from treatments and therapies developed from that knowledge.
It seems that the current trend in the U.S. is to rush to grant ownership of everything, including knowledge, to some single individual or corporation. This headlong rush is being done largely without regard to the consequences of eliminating the public commons and the benefits which it provides. All knowledge and progress builds on what came before. If there is a price tag on every bit of knowledge, it won't be long before progress in the sciences slows dramatically.
There is nothing wrong with the idea of patents for novel inventions. I think it is an appropriate way to reward and spur invention. We need to make sure, though, that it's invention that we are rewarding and not political lobbying skills.
Java is one of the best languages you can learn programming on right now. It's useful, there are good tools available, and there are lots of books and tutorials.
Taxes tend to have a negative effect on the growth of the economy. You have to have some taxes or you can't run a government at all, and there are certainly important programs that must be funded, but governements should try to save money wherever possible. If I'm not giving my money to the governement, I'll spend it myself, and I'll spend it on things that will drive the economy towards making more goods that I want to purchase.
I'm no economist, but I believe that when governments decide where the money gets spent, you create artificial economies that can collapse when political tides change. There are buying fads as well, but I believe they have less of a deterimental effect on the economy.
By investing in Open Source solutions for software, governments help create a body of software that can be used by all other governments. Keeping it open gives us a way to directly help governments in smaller countries by making top quality software available for them. This is all done without any extra cost. It's sort of foriegn aid as a by-product of smart shoping on our governments part. Since most governments face similar organizational problems, there is bound to be tremendous overlap in the software requirements they all have.
Open Source software is more secure, in general, than commercial softare because it is open to public scrutiny and analysis. I think it's frightening to imagine viruses taking over government computers and opening them up to manipulation by criminals. It seems that creates all sorts of potential problems that are best avoided.
In summary, I think that the best decision any government can make is to use Open Source Software whenever it meets the requirements of the situation. It's the best thing for the economy and for the taxpayers.
...until there is a lot more pressure by voters to do something and it's very unlikely that will happen.
At the end of the 70's we had the Oil Crisis and the U.S. started the Department of Energy which began many programs designed to free the U.S. from dependance on foreign oil and find alternative energy supplies. That program has been dismantled by conservative governments beholden to oil interests. Our current president certainly isn't going to do anything to harm the industry that gave his family it's wealth.
Over the past 30 years, I've seen a fundementally sensible environmental movement painted in the colors of radicalism by special interests. Tell someone that you are pro-conservation and you are instantly labeled a "Tree Hugger", "Hippy", or the catch-all, "Communist." Lately, if you express concern that our actions may be making irreversable changes in the climate, you are an alarmist or you are trying to scare people in order to gain political advantage."
The planet Earth doesn't need saving, humanity does. The planet and life will most likely survive the comming changes just fine, but there is no guarantee that humanity will. A species that destroys it's habitat will go extinct.
There is no simple answer to the problems we face. A lot needs to be done. We need, first and foremost, to raise educational standards around the world, because our children will ultimately pay the price for our folly. They need to be prepared. Next, we need to reverse the world population growth. There are too many people. Every additional person means a greater energy requirement and that energy means waste heat which will contribute to the problem. We need to conserve the resources we have. That means using ALL the means that have been developed to replace our dependence on fossil fuels: wind, solar, tidal, geothermal... the list goes on.
The most important element that we have to have to succeed, though, is a willingness to badger our politicians and make our own personal sacrifices to help. We need to use less hot water in the shower. We need to buy fuel efficient vehicles, or better yet, use the train; or better yet, ride a bicycle and convert some of your own mass to energy. We should be using solar energy where feasible and trying to find ways to efficiently store electrical power for the power grids so that power plants can be run at energy conserving rates rather than constantly varying there output to match demand, something that wastes a tremendous amount of energy.
All of the developed countries should be investing in research on new ways to attack these problems as if our very survival depends on it. It may.
Finally, we need to remove the hysteria and fear politics from the issue. We need to look at what needs to be done with clear calm eyes and make the choices that are sensible. We need to tell people the truth rather than scaring them with inflated stories or telling them placating lies. This last part demands a lot more of the world's press than seems likely.
One of the reasons politicians are already to easy to buy is that the cost of living in D.C. and mounting re-election campaigns is so high that there is no way they can survive without all the "fund raisers".
If we want our representatives to represent us, then we have to make it possible for them to do their jobs without constantly begging for money.
I think we need a two pronged approach. First we need to truely reward service to the country. Our congressional representatives should be finacially secure. Second of all, we should prohibit any other source of income.
We can far better afford to make every congressional representtive in this country a millionaire than we can afford for them to continue to make laws based upon who writes them the biggest campaign contribution check.
If you look at history, you'll find that most of the people who have betrayed their country have done it because they were financially strapped and someone gave them a way out. Underpaying the people who we trust with the purse strings to the U.S. treasury is foolhardy.
A company that is convicted of being a monopoly can't be sued into behaving. It has to be dismantled. This is a perfect example of why that's the case.
The fines that are awarded, alternatively, could be secured by seizing the companies assets and either placing them in the public domain, where IP is concerned, or auctioning them to pay some recompense to the people hurt by the company. But even so, if you leave the company intact, it will just do the same thing again. I know of no example of any monopolistic company giving up it's bad behavior if it could continue to break the law and still make a profit.
Slashdot Mirror
This has been thought of before but NASA is a very very conservative organization that has been putting people "in the loop" as a matter of policy ever since the first astronauts won the argument about having a joy stick in the Mercury capsule.
Of course, when you consider the kind of bone headed things that have happened, like failing to convert between metric and english measurements, which caused us to lose one of the Mars orbiters, you can see why some think that it would be good if the software was smart enough to do some things for itself.
The longevity of the current rovers has allowed NASA to upload increasingly autonomous programming, giving NASA more experience and feedback on how the software works. This has made them more confident.
The unexpected longevity of these rovers has also created another problem for NASA. When you have to program everything in by hand and send it to Mars, it takes a LONG time to do anything. That might be fine for a mission that lasts only a few weeks, but these rovers might actually last an entire Martian year. Even discounting the time in hibernation waiting for springtime, that's a lot of people hours to keep things running.
Oh, no, there you just paid for your own police interrogation.
The Olympics stopped being about amateur atheletics a long time ago. Now it's just about money. The committees that pick the locations take bribes, the atheletes use steriods, blood transfusions and any other method to get ahead, and it's all done in pursuit of more money for the broadcast rights. What passes for the Olympics now doesn't deserve the name.
If you want to have a proper Olympics you would have to prohibit endorsement contracts, broadcast the games for free all over the world, etc. It will never happen. The games have gotten so disgustingly commercial that I certainly won't be watching them this time around.
...with the people who made the decision that they didn't need to inspect the orbiter using satellites before having it return. If the extent of the damage had been properly evaluated, perhaps we'd still have seven brave talanted people and one very expensive piece of equipment.
It's good to know what caused the problems with the insulation in the first place, but unless there are procedures in place that insure that the orbiter is properly inspected if there are problems during launch we'll see this happen again. The shuttles are incredibly complicated machines that are quickly reaching the end of their design life because of procrastination on designing replacements. We need to make sure that we take that into consideration when evaluating problems in the future.
The problem here is how can any of us trust our data to an online application, especially if it's not open souce, after the bad behavior we've seen with so many supposedly "free" programs that turn out to be spyware?
It's just a shame that Microsoft doesn't let their people compete using their full talents and insists on using bully tactics.
I've met lots of bright people that work at Microsoft and I've no doubt that MS could make loads of money letting them do their thing. Instead any project that threatens the MS Office/Windows cash cow is put on the back burner indefinately.
This is one of the reasons that monopolies are so bad for the economy and even the people who work for them. Even the stockholders of Microsoft would be better off, IMHO, if the company was split into several different units, say Operating Systems, Applications, Games, Hardware, and Languages. The areas in which these seperate units would compete would just result in more innovation and better products.
Look at how much the Internet has slowed down since IE "won". The progress we all expected in multimedia and innovative interfaces has been slowed to a crawl.
I can only hope that some brave soul in the Justice department of the next administration will take his job seriously and work to break up monopolies instead of seeking some kind of accomodation with them. We'll all be better off for it.
Your opinions are suspect, however, and the validity of your information is uncertain. As I mentioned on a previous occasion, I wonder if you are a MS employee working to offer favorable comments about MS and unfavorable comments about FOOS. Who knows?
Not everyone who says something good about Microsoft if some kind of schill or plant. Microsoft is a big company. They do some things right, they do some things wrong. Personally, I believe that the harm they do greatly outweighs the good, but others are entitled to their own opinions without being insulted because they express them.
It seems to me that women are just more pragmatic about career choices. With all the news about computing jobs going overseas and jobs being cut right and left in the industry, maybe it's become apparent to women that other engineering fields are better choices.
I won't argue that computing has been portrayed as a boy's world and that it can be hostile to women, but then lots of other fields have been hostile and that didn't keep women from fighting their way in. Look at the medical field, law, and other engineering disciplines for examples.
Being good at computer science requires a significant commitment from most of us. There are some who are so good that they can breeze on by, but for most of us, it's a constant effort to stay current with the technology. Computer science is still probably one of the most self-taught of potential careers. In order to be successful you have to commit to the same hours as a new lawyer at a high priced law firm, but without nearly the same pay. It's not the best choice if you want a balanced life.
I would not be at all surprised if we see these numbers turn right back around when the economic situation for programmers gets better. Perhaps this is just a case of women being the wiser gender.
You say that you want to supply IE at a minimum, and that is understandable since there are many websites that don't work properly with Mozilla and other browsers because those sites don't follow standards. The only place you will find IE is on Microsoft Windows. This is a fundemental part of the Microsoft stragegy.
If you still want to consider an OS like Linux, you'll need to find one that can run IE under some kind of emulation. I don't know if that is possible.
You may also be at a disadvantage when it comes to NetNanny type programs, if you intend to use them to limit Internet access. Hopefully someone else here can supply more information about that.
I would suggest you place the actual boxen in a locked enclosure that prevents access to the floppy drive, CD/DVD drives and USB drives, since most modern machines will allow you to boot from any of these devices and thus gain complete control over the computer. A BIOS password might let you limit booting to a floppy so that you can expose CDs and USB ports
It occurs to me that this problem has probably been faced before by other libraries or organizations with similar needs, so you may be able to find some kind of open source project that is dealing with such problems.
Good luck. Know that your efforts are appreciated.
If they had pointed out that copyright terms have been extended to the point where they are ridiculous and that maybe that trend needs to be reversed.
If IBM really doesn't intend to use it's patents against Linux, IBM should take the necessary legal steps to make it impossible for it to do so, such as giving a non-revokable perpetual license to Linux to use the specified patents. If IBM is serious than this will only cost them some lawyer time to draw up the necessary papers. It will also protect them from someone else saying "Well, they didn't object to Linux using their patent, so it shouldn't apply to me either.
IBM might currently be one of the good guys, but it wasn't so long ago that IBM was the big computer company we all loved to hate. Management and business models change. When they do, as we've seen with SCO, companies past promises get thrown out the window.
Here's hoping that IBM makes good on this promise and sets a real example for other companies to follow.
This is a wonderful idea if you want to make it nearly impossible for small groups or individuals to develop and maintain Linux distributions. Has Linus now joined Microsoft in it's contempt for the small developer?
The great advantage Linux has had over Windows and several other operating systems is it's stability. Now that stability is going to be placed in the hands of those maintaining the distributions rather than those who have made Linux into what it is today. Instead of being assured that every even-numbered kernel is solid, anyone using Linux will have to pay careful attention to reviews from each distribution to figure out which ones are really stable and which ones aren't.
I'm a great fan of Linux and of Linus Torvalds, but I feel this is a huge mistake and I hope that either I'm convinced that my fears are unfounded or that this decision is reversed quickly.
The purpose of the legislature is to pass the laws. The executive branch MUST enforce them. Most people do not know that Reagan originally refused to enforse a law passed by congress and came close to being impeached. It was handled very quietly. The Executive branch does not have the ability to enforce selectively. The Judiciary is supposed to rule on the constitutionality of law. This is based on the Constitution itself and the body of cases that have been decided by the Supreme and lower courts since the founding of the nation. The Supreme Court can't throw out a "bad" law unless it violates the constitution. The only way to get rid of bad laws that are not unconstitutional is to get congress to repeal those laws. The only way that will happen is if people petition their representatives in such numbers that the representatives fear they might lose an election over it.
Here's the important point. We are responsible for the bad laws like the DMCA because we voted the jokers in who think that the checks from the RIAA are more important than our votes. They think that way because they know that most of us don't vote and of those who do, most vote the party line rather than voting based on the record of the representative. Most of our congressional representatives can take for granted that they will be automatically re-elected. We have the government we deserve.
If you want better laws, vote, call your representative, run for office yourself, get involved, educate your kids about how our system "works." Do something other than bitch.
I seems to me that if power companies want to use power lines for data transmission they should find some way to shield them. Perhaps this is too expensive. If so, run fiber or coax.
Perhaps as power lines are replaced or upgraded they could be replace with shielded lines suitable for data transmission use. I suspect that it would be cheaper just to run addtitional fiber when doing the replacement, but perhaps not.
You know, part of the reason that doctors have problems with malpractice insurance is because you can't really fix a life that has been destroyed. The "real damages" can't be accurately measured. It's more than the salary lost when you can't work anymore. How to you measure the loss of quality of life?
The fact is that the medical profession is very protective of doctors, not of patients. One doctor in Tampa who made the mistake of cutting off the wrong foot of one patient was still found practicing six months later when he did exactly the same thing on another patient. Both times he blamed the nurses.
If a doctor gets in trouble in one place, he can always move to another state and start all over again.
If you want to see lower insurance rates for doctors, you are going to have to find a way to force the bad doctors out of the profession. There are many excellent physcians paying the price for their inept collegues and of course all of us patients pay for such doctors with our increased fees, limbs, and sometimes our lives.
The fact is that politicians, regardless of party, work purely on two principles which we can call the "squeaky wheel" and "big bucks" principles. They sponser and vote for legistlation that answers whatever the current hot topic is. The hot topic is usually driven by those people who are upset enough to call and write letters. That means that most of us, who are more concerned with just getting through the day in one piece than spending all our time lobbying our representatives, are under represented. There is no "sanity" lobby.
The legislators also respond to the people who give them big checks, like the RIAA. That is because it costs a lot of money to win an election and most of them are in hock to their eyeballs when they take office.
Most of us know that worrying about explicit lyrics is silly. Most of us find some sort of lyrics somewhere offensive, but we do have the option to not listen to music we don't like.
Any parent that is so out of touch with their kids that they don't know what their kid is listening to has bigger problems than any that could be caused by explicit lyrics. The government has always made a very poor parent.
If you want to live in a more rationale world, there is something you can do. Don't buy stuff from the RIAA if you don't like the way they behave. Educate yourself about the issues and candidates and vote in every election. Don't vote for you party, vote based on issues that matter to your daily life. Finally, take a moment to squeak a bit yourself and write, or even better call, your representatives and tell them how you want them to better represent you. They are supposed to be working for you.
Democracy isn't free. It cost lives to win it and keep it. One thing we should all realize is that the cost of keeping our democracy is far lower when we participate in it than if we fail to act until we find it is slipping away.
Hmmm, sheep runs on the grass it eats, nibbles all day and is not particularly noisy. Better still, unless it is a Ram, it's unlikely to chase the neighbors. :)
We had a cheap ATI Wonder VE, six weeks afeter we got it there were problems. The sound was breaking up and the picture would go dark about 3/4 of the way through hour long recordings. I wasn't impressed.
I've now purchased a PVR-250 and a PVR-350, made by Hauppauge. No problems with those cards and the picture is much better. It's worth the extra money so I don't have to throw away the cards and get new ones.
I wrote up my experience on my website, if you want to hear the details. Just look for the MythTV articles.
Land fills are indeed a problem. Toxic materials accumulate in land fills. Contrary to what Penn & Teller would have you believe, not all land fills are run like the pristine example they showed. Many of them leak. Some of those contaminate water supplies.
The toxic elements that accumulate at land fills are materials like lead, cadmium and mercury. Unlike radioactive materials, these substances NEVER become less toxic. The land fill has to work perfectly FOREVER if you want to safeguard the water supply.
Penn & Teller did raise some relevant points on recycling, but their comments on land fills were, as the name implies, Bullshit.
There are extensive problems with allowing companies and individuals to patent biotechnology and there is little evidence to suggest that all the patents were necessary.
The genetic information within natural organisms should be part of the common property shared among everyone. Allowing some individual to claim ownership of the genetic code of a natural organism is obviously absurd.
Corporations have been rapidly patenting genetic information from crops that have been developed over thousands of years by indigenous populations in third-world countries. The thousands of years of cultivation apparently entitles those people to nothing, while using an automated machine to decode the genetic code entitles the corporation to ownership of the genetic code of the plant? How is this reasonable or equitable? These patents are robbing people in third world countries.
The explosion of development in bio-technology has more to do with the available technology and automation than allowing patents on natural organisms. There is plenty of profit to be made in developing medicines from natural genetic codes without granting ownership of those codes to corporations. Rightfully, the ownership of the genetic information should be held in common trust. There is nothing to stop businesses from patenting and profiting from treatments and therapies developed from that knowledge.
It seems that the current trend in the U.S. is to rush to grant ownership of everything, including knowledge, to some single individual or corporation. This headlong rush is being done largely without regard to the consequences of eliminating the public commons and the benefits which it provides. All knowledge and progress builds on what came before. If there is a price tag on every bit of knowledge, it won't be long before progress in the sciences slows dramatically.
There is nothing wrong with the idea of patents for novel inventions. I think it is an appropriate way to reward and spur invention. We need to make sure, though, that it's invention that we are rewarding and not political lobbying skills.
Java is one of the best languages you can learn programming on right now. It's useful, there are good tools available, and there are lots of books and tutorials.
Taxes tend to have a negative effect on the growth of the economy. You have to have some taxes or you can't run a government at all, and there are certainly important programs that must be funded, but governements should try to save money wherever possible. If I'm not giving my money to the governement, I'll spend it myself, and I'll spend it on things that will drive the economy towards making more goods that I want to purchase.
I'm no economist, but I believe that when governments decide where the money gets spent, you create artificial economies that can collapse when political tides change. There are buying fads as well, but I believe they have less of a deterimental effect on the economy.
By investing in Open Source solutions for software, governments help create a body of software that can be used by all other governments. Keeping it open gives us a way to directly help governments in smaller countries by making top quality software available for them. This is all done without any extra cost. It's sort of foriegn aid as a by-product of smart shoping on our governments part. Since most governments face similar organizational problems, there is bound to be tremendous overlap in the software requirements they all have.
Open Source software is more secure, in general, than commercial softare because it is open to public scrutiny and analysis. I think it's frightening to imagine viruses taking over government computers and opening them up to manipulation by criminals. It seems that creates all sorts of potential problems that are best avoided.
In summary, I think that the best decision any government can make is to use Open Source Software whenever it meets the requirements of the situation. It's the best thing for the economy and for the taxpayers.
...until there is a lot more pressure by voters to do something and it's very unlikely that will happen.
At the end of the 70's we had the Oil Crisis and the U.S. started the Department of Energy which began many programs designed to free the U.S. from dependance on foreign oil and find alternative energy supplies. That program has been dismantled by conservative governments beholden to oil interests. Our current president certainly isn't going to do anything to harm the industry that gave his family it's wealth.
Over the past 30 years, I've seen a fundementally sensible environmental movement painted in the colors of radicalism by special interests. Tell someone that you are pro-conservation and you are instantly labeled a "Tree Hugger", "Hippy", or the catch-all, "Communist." Lately, if you express concern that our actions may be making irreversable changes in the climate, you are an alarmist or you are trying to scare people in order to gain political advantage."
The planet Earth doesn't need saving, humanity does. The planet and life will most likely survive the comming changes just fine, but there is no guarantee that humanity will. A species that destroys it's habitat will go extinct.
There is no simple answer to the problems we face. A lot needs to be done. We need, first and foremost, to raise educational standards around the world, because our children will ultimately pay the price for our folly. They need to be prepared. Next, we need to reverse the world population growth. There are too many people. Every additional person means a greater energy requirement and that energy means waste heat which will contribute to the problem. We need to conserve the resources we have. That means using ALL the means that have been developed to replace our dependence on fossil fuels: wind, solar, tidal, geothermal... the list goes on.
The most important element that we have to have to succeed, though, is a willingness to badger our politicians and make our own personal sacrifices to help. We need to use less hot water in the shower. We need to buy fuel efficient vehicles, or better yet, use the train; or better yet, ride a bicycle and convert some of your own mass to energy. We should be using solar energy where feasible and trying to find ways to efficiently store electrical power for the power grids so that power plants can be run at energy conserving rates rather than constantly varying there output to match demand, something that wastes a tremendous amount of energy.
All of the developed countries should be investing in research on new ways to attack these problems as if our very survival depends on it. It may.
Finally, we need to remove the hysteria and fear politics from the issue. We need to look at what needs to be done with clear calm eyes and make the choices that are sensible. We need to tell people the truth rather than scaring them with inflated stories or telling them placating lies. This last part demands a lot more of the world's press than seems likely.
One of the reasons politicians are already to easy to buy is that the cost of living in D.C. and mounting re-election campaigns is so high that there is no way they can survive without all the "fund raisers".
If we want our representatives to represent us, then we have to make it possible for them to do their jobs without constantly begging for money.
I think we need a two pronged approach. First we need to truely reward service to the country. Our congressional representatives should be finacially secure. Second of all, we should prohibit any other source of income.
We can far better afford to make every congressional representtive in this country a millionaire than we can afford for them to continue to make laws based upon who writes them the biggest campaign contribution check.
If you look at history, you'll find that most of the people who have betrayed their country have done it because they were financially strapped and someone gave them a way out. Underpaying the people who we trust with the purse strings to the U.S. treasury is foolhardy.
A company that is convicted of being a monopoly can't be sued into behaving. It has to be dismantled. This is a perfect example of why that's the case.
The fines that are awarded, alternatively, could be secured by seizing the companies assets and either placing them in the public domain, where IP is concerned, or auctioning them to pay some recompense to the people hurt by the company. But even so, if you leave the company intact, it will just do the same thing again. I know of no example of any monopolistic company giving up it's bad behavior if it could continue to break the law and still make a profit.