> What about five people working together to destroy (read as rm -rf/) the e-mails servers of the Department of Justice and the Internal Revenue Service. Maybe trash a personnel computer too. People might not die, but it could cause some serious problems. If the tax refund checks of 50,000 people never got sent...
...then somewhere on the Hill, a politician gets his wings?:-)
Sen. "Watch me block another tax cut bill" Daschle probably has wet dreams about your scenario.
> Is the only kind I would ever want, for just this reason. If you have the source code you can make sure that scummy networks, or scummy politicians can't shut you down by sending commands or "updating" the software.
What you said. The hardware's available for peanuts. (A cheap-azz Duron or P3 or P4-Northwood box, plus an older ATI-Rage-128-based capture card is all that's really needed here.)
The only thing missing from the open alternatives today is the software. (If I were a good enough designer/coder, I'd do it myself. Sadly, I've gotta wait 'till others, with madder sk1llz than I, get around to it.)
Any of you coder-d00dz wanna brew up an "embedded" Linux distro? Ideally, this could even be a turnkey solution -- "Buy hard drive. Buy supported video card. Boot from floppy. Insert CD-ROM with disk image. Reboot. Done."
If I buy a box, the hard drive is mine, not the advertiser's.
(I'd be very interested in knowing, from Tivo owners, if the advertiser-mandated download pushed off any content you were archiving. I'm disgusted by, but could tolerate, a Tivo recording stuff without my knowledge or consent, so long as programs I wanted to keep were preserved. If I owned a Tivo, I would never tolerate an advertiser overwriting a show I'd recorded on my Tivo's hard drive in favor of its own content.)
And since Tivo execs are reading this -- if your advertising (which is what "records a show when the show's owners pay you enough" really means) does overwrite user-saved content, I'll never purchase your product, for any reason whatsoever.
> I'd like to play a Simcity game where I could build a car-free city. I want a button for bicycle paths. I want to mix residential, commercial, and industrial without zoning. I think the fire department should operate without trucks. I want a city with 95% green open space, and a community-supported agricultural belt. Where's the button for farm? In Simcity, it is assumed that farms are "over there", far from the glorious car temple you are constructing.
You can do all those things. But as you pointed out, if you do, nobody will want to live there.
As for farming, considering the number of acres of arable land required to serve the food needs of a million people, that's why it's called SimCity, not SimCountry:)
> All you have to do is tell the BIOS not to boot from a floppy, and then put a password on the BIOS. The BIOS password has to be a good one though. Make it a strong random sequence of letters. Then, to remember it, put it on a sticky note on your monitor.
Doesn't matter. A black hat will ignore the sticky note and just use the default or
backdoor BIOS password.
> IANAL, so could someone explain why this case is called Eldred v. Ashcroft? Ashcroft wasn't the attorney general when the act was passed. Is it just common practice to use the name of the attorney general when suing for unconstitutionality?
Yes, that's the established practice. The individual holding the office of Attorney General is representative of the state's laws - and it's the law that's being challenged - so it's the AG's name that appears on the docket.
Apart from Friedman, Hal Roach Studios, and Intel, the words "Coalition" and "Public" and "Foundation" appear too frequently in that list. We need more corporations and industry associations to file amicus briefs.
But Friedman - wow. If anyone can convince the Supremes of the economic harm wrought by indefinite copyright, it'll be him. You go, Milt! (And happy birthday!)
> If something IS so awe-inspiring that it'll really stand the test of time for ninety years, *shrug* I don't have a problem with that, especially with purely artistic works -- there's less public harm in, say, having a nigh-indefinitely copyrighted Mickey Mouse flick than there is in having an indefinitely-patented hypothetical rhinoviral cold vaccine.
Which raises an interesting question.
How come our laws are structured so that the guy who cures cancer has to make back his entire investment in 14 years, but RIAA and MPAA get to sponge for 90 years plus the life of the creator?
If the rationale for these intellectual property "protections" is that they somehow promote innovation and investment, how did we conclude that a fucking cartoon mouse is deserving of 90+ years of protection, but a cure for cancer, only 14?
> I wish I had an accelerometer to know how many positive Gs were in that turn.
According to a groups.google.com search, between 3.9 and 4.5Gs. Many rides pull those kinds of Gs, but Goliath is unusual in that the Gs are sustained throughout the helix.
After reading this thread, I have only one thing to say:
> > "We can hope that like previous expensive luxuries, e.g. jet travel and ocean cruises,
the wealthy will pull the prices down to a level reachable by the rest of us." > >
I'd like to buy the nicest house in town, but the price just keeps going up, year after year. Many
millions of people would like to eat regularly and have an adequate supply of drinking water. For years,
rich people have been enjoying fine dining and knocking back Perriers to little or no avail.
Right now, that cheap little $100K clapboard outfit - with cable TV, central air, central heating, fiberglass insulation, electric stove, flush toilets, and water from a tap that doesn't need boiling, provides anyone with about a $25K/year burger-flipping job with a standard of living better than anything available to billionaire John D. Rockefeller in 1878.
The evidence indicates that it is your grasp of economic progress that is flawed.
> So, if you're 40 years old and in that situation [$1M in the bank], I'd say GO FOR IT. By the time retirement comes at 75 years of age, you'll have had 35 years to make back what you spent on the trip of your life.
Ah, but a more frugal use of that money would be to invest it for ten years.
You're still only 50, but your $100K gets you an hour in zero-G instead of a 10-minute suborbital hop.
The early bird catches the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.
> Hell, I'd volunteer for a one-way mission to Mars. I'd be accomplishing more on this suicidal mission than most people accomplish in their whole life, so it'd be worth it.
Ditto. Strap me into the ship with a bunch of DVD-ROMs full of geology textbooks. By the time I land, I'll be a decent enough geologist to know what rocks to look for. One human with a pick-axe and a week's supply of oxygen could accomplish the work of a hundred probes.
Heck, build two or three identical ships (the cost is in designing the ships, not building the parts). Lob the ships into orbit via unmanned boosters, and fuel them in orbit from tanks filled at ISS. Lob the contestants up on a Shuttle flight for a week of media interviews on ISS. Then detach the ships from ISS and head for mars en masse.
Defray the cost of the additional ships by selling advertising space on a 1-year series called "Survivor: Mars".
> In 1994 I happened to encounter a group of school children during a partial eclipse. The clouds parted, and on cue from their teacher, all of them whipped out little pinhole cameras they had made from sheets of paper! Now that was a sight I won't forget.
I will never forgive the high school teacher who drew the drapes in my class during an eclipse because some st00pid-azz kid convinced said ignoramus of a "teacher" that "eclipse rays can blind you, you've gotta close the drapes!"
At least my high school physics teacher, who, when I told him the story, gave the aforementioned luzer a righteous chewing-out in the staff lounge (regrettably, after-the-fact, and even more regrettably, I couldn't listen to it), will never have to pay for a beer if he's ever in the same bar I am.
I had to wait another 10 years before I got to see a near-total eclipse again.
If you see a teacher and a group of kids with pinhole cameras during an eclipse, thank him/her for doing the right thing.
> P.S. rather than a rack, why not just get a firewire drive? Your compatibility odds go up significantly.
Actually - that's a damn good idea. With Firewire and USB2.0 (not sure which will win, I prefer Firewire, but there's big Intel momentum behind USB2.0 and a large USB1.0 installed base) coming into widespread use, the issue of removable media will soon be solved.
The other drawback with the racks is that when serial ATA takes over, you'll probably have to replace the drives and racks anyways.
(Racks are, however, still fantastic for people with lots of "old small drives" who want to play with various operating systems, but hey, that's what they were designed for, and we're talking about turning 'em into copyright circumvention technologies. It's a wonder Jack and Hilary haven't tried to get the racks banned. I mean, imagine you h4x0r3d a space for a rack in a TiVO:-)
> Why dont you bring your hard drive over to my house so I can copy your music collection? Oh wait, that'd require shutting down my computer, taking a hard drive out, plugging yours in, and then hoping itll boot again. Maybe if you had a removable disk we'd be able to share our data.
As for "hope it boots" - not an issue. Boot from primary, have a "racked" drive as secondary on the IDE chain. Your PC will never attempt to boot from the "racked" drive.
If Windows, your drive letters may be temporarily fux0r3d depending on whether the first partition of your friend's "racked" drive was bootable or not (and if it matches what you did on your "racked" drive). (Who cares, you're only copying files.) The problem goes away when you reboot.
If Linux, who cares, just as long as you know what type of filesystem's on the "racked" drive. Just mount and copy.
Drive racks rock. The only problem is that there are they're not all physically compatible
with each other. But if you and your friends can get together and buy a bunch of identical racks at the same time, "sneakernet" can be a cheap way to transfer
gigs of data within minutes.
> I wonder what good 100 Gig is good for except having a HUGE music collection.
Why, a huge pr0n collection!
Seriously, you're right - we're now at the point where (rule of thumb = 10 hours per gigabyte for 192kbps MP3) you can store weeks of music on a hard drive.
Assuming no revolutionary holographic projection technology, about the only practical consumer use for removable media >100GB is gonna be editing video or archiving uncompressed WAV files.
> I'm curious: does that mean I didn't pay into the unemployment system, since I had no hope of getting anything out?
No, it means you did pay into the unemployment system, even though you have no hope of getting anything out. UI, as presently structured, is glorified welfare, but it doesn't have to be.
While welfare can't be privatized (there's no money to be made), genuine, risk-based, unemployment "insurance" can, and IMHO, should be privatized.
At present - and as you've found out - UI isn't insurance, it's merely a tax. Most people pay more premiums, but are ineligible to collect. (And guess how much of the UI "premiums" collected actually get paid out to the few workers poor enough to collect, as opposed to skimmed off into the sinkhole of general tax revenue?)
But UI could be privatized. The cyclical conditions that precipitate payouts (high unemployment) coincide with cyclical conditions in the economy (recession) that coincide with cyclical movements in interest rates (Greenspan:-)
This means that a private insurer could anticipate periods when payouts are likely to be high or low, and adjust an investment portfolio to take advantage of anticipated interest rate movements.
The portfolio would be funded from premiums. Just as medical insurance costs more for smokers, unemployment insurance would be more expensive for seasonal workers like fishermen (who, on the East Coast, are likely to be unemployed in winter), and less expensive for workers in fields in high demand.
The beauty is that (unlike the current system, based on coercion - everyone pays a tax, by force of law, but not everyone can claim) participation in a genuine unemployment insurance plan would be optional.
Are you a really good fisherman? Skip UI, and use the money to improve your gear, allowing you to catch more fish, to tide you over during the winter freeze.
Are you a really lazy fisherman? Pay for the deluxe UI package. Work 10 weeks a year, get paid 52. (The cost of this package would probably exceed what you can catch in your 10 weeks. That's your problem, though.)
Are you a really lazy programmer? In a hot industry, but think the good times might end? Worried about them H-1Bs takin' your job away? Buy a fat UI policy - just in case. Pay 5% of your salary in premiums, and in the 1-in-10 chance that your employer shows up on FuckedCompany next week, collect 50% of your salary until you find another employer with a foosball table and Aeron chairs at every cube.
Are you a really good programmer? Think you'll never be out of work? Skip UI altogether. Save the money for a rainy day, just in case you're wrong, or go buy a Ti4600 and hope you're right.
A privatized UI company would be incredibly motivated to get its out-of-work insurance claimants back into the job market, because it would drastically cut its expenses. It would want you to get a good job, because having a good job reduces the probability that you'll need to claim against your UI policy in the future. You could get your MCSE or other industry-recognized certifications as part of UI. Your insurance company would gladly give you placement assistance.
Contrast this with Government, who has zero motivation to get you back on the job (it's not their money), and every motivation to use their "back-to-work training" programs as ways to reward friends and campaign donors. ("You have my campaign $10000 last year. Here's a $1.5M contract to build a computer literacy center for UI recipients in our district. Sure, 386s running Win3.1 are fine. They're 'computers', aren't they? It's not it's any money out of either of our pockets if they ever work again.")
> Have you ever even met someone receiving government assistance?
Lived across the hall from one. Found out she was on welfare because she went "out" at 10pm, and her 3yo sprog got spooked, somehow managed to open the door, and was wandering the halls shrieking in horror/fear at being abandoned.
Roommate went to investigate a possible injury, and found the door open and an infant asleep in a cradle.
After herding 3yo back into the apartment, we basically kept watch outside the apartment (to make sure nothing else went wrong - now aware of what was going on, it would have been criminally negligent of us to walk away) for about half an hour until "mom" came back with groceries.
(I guess "mom" couldn't leave 'em while they were awake, and she "thought" they'd stay asleep, for values of "mom" and "think" approaching epsilon.)
"Mom" was also pregnant with #3. "Dad", of course, didn't live there.
We considered the issue closed - a sad way to live, but in this particular instance, no immediate harm, no signs of abuse or malnutrition, so no foul. (And since calling the authorities wouldn't solve the long-term harm their lifestyle is doing to their sprog, no point.)
Our landlord must have received complaints from other tenants, though, because "mom" decided to pack up her brood and move to another apartment a few weeks later. One day, out of the blue, he said "Section 8. I can't do anything about it. But thanks for doing what you could."
Welfare is slavery - not just for the taxpayer, but for the recipient - and it must end.
> I can't honestly think of a widespread common library that allowed roots recently; but the zlib thing was scary to a sysadmin like me - even though it didn't look like it was exploitable if it were we'd have had a whole world of pain...
Agreed. On the other hand - at least zlib's a lot simpler to deal with than the HTML-rendering libraries.
Ultimately, it probably comes down to the UNIX (lots of poorly-integrated small things that do one thing well, and nothing else at all) and the Windows (a few big and tightly-integrated things that do lots of stuff) design philosophies.
> Boy, do I hope nobody tries to r00t my 98 box. After plugging in my shiny new cable modem it probably looks real attractive now.
I'll take that bet -- what services is your 98 box running? Let's look at the currently-popular remote Winbloze exploits:
Code Red: Requires unpatched IIS running. Most vulnerabilities are from W2K/NT install CDs that activate IIS upon installation. 98SE doesn't "give" you IIS. No problem.
That remote device ident bug that was shipped out-of-the-box: Are you running Win2K/XP? No, this is Win9x, which doesn't support the feature out-of-the-box. No problem.
All the outleak bugs: Are you using Outbreak as your mail client? No? Good! No problem.
All the IE bugs: Are you using IE as your browser? No? Good! No problem.
All the Netscape/Mozilla bugs: Are you regularly surfing untrustworthy sites with Javashit enabled? Don't Do That, Then. (Rarely a problem on any Windows config.)
OK, you might get bit by an obscure bug like downloading a JPG that exploits a buffer overrun in some version of Nutscrape, but that's pushing it.
Bottom line - a Win9x box with a fresh install doesn't do enough to make it easily-r00table.
Win98SE is no longer the "new hot thing" in operating systems, so relatively few cr4x0rz are designing new exploits for it.
If I had to choose a Microsoft operating system for an always-on net.connection for home use, I'd go with 98SE, install Netscape for web browsing, a third-party mail client from the days before HTML mail (gotta avoid the IE rendering engine), spend a day downloading/installing the DiVX codec and Windoze Media Player 6.2, and some basic MP3 utilities, and voila.
For bonus points, after installation, verify that File/Print sharing is still off, set the OS to display all file extensions and full path names, put some ad-blocking in the HOSTS file, install Junkbuster, and maybe a "personal firewall" to block incoming traffic to port 80, 137, etc... and throw in a copy of AdAware as an early warning system. If the user's clueless, maybe some antivirus software. (Remember, we're not using a remotely-exploitable mail client, so the user has to be pretty clueless to get r00ted.)
Such a box does everything the home user wants (movies, music, web, email) and has very few remote exploits even without the "defensive" software addon.
Granted, because it's Win9x, everything runs as root, so it's not protected from internal error (like dumbasses running untrusted executables), but it's pretty secure against external threats.
Over 1-year timeframe, and given the prototypical "enclued, but lazy, home user" who can't be bothered to suck a 60M "Windows Update" every weekend through his 28.8K dialup, (or risk his system's stability even if he can be bothered to download everything), I'd bet this 98SE box stands up better over a 1-year timeframe in the wild than a Win2K or XP install.
What I've said isn't revolutionary -- it's just the old rule of "Don't run services you don't need. If you subsequently find you do need them, turn them on later." Is there any valid reason a "home Linux user" should default to turning on an FTP server, BIND, a web server, and Sendmail? Hell, no. There's no reason for a generic home user to have services listening on any of these ports.
For install-time r00t holes, the difference is that most Linux distros have realized this, and aren't turning this crap on at install-time. Most Windoze distros haven't.
For run-time r00t holes, the biggest hole is that everyone uses IE's DLL to render HTML, even when the application (email, USENET, MP3 player) doesn't really need to render web content. It's so easy to hook into IE that most apps "just do it", and thus a hole in the engine exposes dozens of apps to exploits, not just the web browser.
> > I thought the worst part was the kiss between Jar Jar and Yoda. I just about hurled. > > I really hope that's a joke. >
Of course, clones are kinda like twins, aren't they... >
"Queen Amidala, meet, Queen Amidala" then start with the bad music...
Hey, they did it in an episode of Star Trek:DS9 in the mirror universe where we got to see mirror-Kira make a pass at herself.
Now... two bi Natalie Portman clones. Hubba hubba! I could go for that, even without grits!
Slashdot Mirror
Sen. "Watch me block another tax cut bill" Daschle probably has wet dreams about your scenario.
~peering into the crystal ball~
"265,000 state workers receive campaign donation solicitations from Gray Davis re-election campaign: Davis officials deny link to Oracle scandal"
Your call ;-)
>
> *caugh Toms Hardware caugh*
Don't you mean:
Next -->
*cough*
Next -->
Tom's
Next -->
Hardware
Next -->
?
Next -->
What you said. The hardware's available for peanuts. (A cheap-azz Duron or P3 or P4-Northwood box, plus an older ATI-Rage-128-based capture card is all that's really needed here.)
The only thing missing from the open alternatives today is the software. (If I were a good enough designer/coder, I'd do it myself. Sadly, I've gotta wait 'till others, with madder sk1llz than I, get around to it.)
Any of you coder-d00dz wanna brew up an "embedded" Linux distro? Ideally, this could even be a turnkey solution -- "Buy hard drive. Buy supported video card. Boot from floppy. Insert CD-ROM with disk image. Reboot. Done."
If I buy a box, the hard drive is mine, not the advertiser's.
(I'd be very interested in knowing, from Tivo owners, if the advertiser-mandated download pushed off any content you were archiving. I'm disgusted by, but could tolerate, a Tivo recording stuff without my knowledge or consent, so long as programs I wanted to keep were preserved. If I owned a Tivo, I would never tolerate an advertiser overwriting a show I'd recorded on my Tivo's hard drive in favor of its own content.)
And since Tivo execs are reading this -- if your advertising (which is what "records a show when the show's owners pay you enough" really means) does overwrite user-saved content, I'll never purchase your product, for any reason whatsoever.
You can do all those things. But as you pointed out, if you do, nobody will want to live there.
As for farming, considering the number of acres of arable land required to serve the food needs of a million people, that's why it's called SimCity, not SimCountry :)
Doesn't matter. A black hat will ignore the sticky note and just use the default or backdoor BIOS password.
Yes, that's the established practice. The individual holding the office of Attorney General is representative of the state's laws - and it's the law that's being challenged - so it's the AG's name that appears on the docket.
Apart from Friedman, Hal Roach Studios, and Intel, the words "Coalition" and "Public" and "Foundation" appear too frequently in that list. We need more corporations and industry associations to file amicus briefs.
But Friedman - wow. If anyone can convince the Supremes of the economic harm wrought by indefinite copyright, it'll be him. You go, Milt! (And happy birthday!)
Which raises an interesting question.
How come our laws are structured so that the guy who cures cancer has to make back his entire investment in 14 years, but RIAA and MPAA get to sponge for 90 years plus the life of the creator?
If the rationale for these intellectual property "protections" is that they somehow promote innovation and investment, how did we conclude that a fucking cartoon mouse is deserving of 90+ years of protection, but a cure for cancer, only 14?
According to a groups.google.com search, between 3.9 and 4.5Gs. Many rides pull those kinds of Gs, but Goliath is unusual in that the Gs are sustained throughout the helix.
After reading this thread, I have only one thing to say:
"Fuck, I've got to ride that thing!"
>
> I'd like to buy the nicest house in town, but the price just keeps going up, year after year. Many millions of people would like to eat regularly and have an adequate supply of drinking water. For years, rich people have been enjoying fine dining and knocking back Perriers to little or no avail.
Right now, that cheap little $100K clapboard outfit - with cable TV, central air, central heating, fiberglass insulation, electric stove, flush toilets, and water from a tap that doesn't need boiling, provides anyone with about a $25K/year burger-flipping job with a standard of living better than anything available to billionaire John D. Rockefeller in 1878.
The evidence indicates that it is your grasp of economic progress that is flawed.
Ah, but a more frugal use of that money would be to invest it for ten years.
You're still only 50, but your $100K gets you an hour in zero-G instead of a 10-minute suborbital hop.
The early bird catches the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.
Ditto. Strap me into the ship with a bunch of DVD-ROMs full of geology textbooks. By the time I land, I'll be a decent enough geologist to know what rocks to look for. One human with a pick-axe and a week's supply of oxygen could accomplish the work of a hundred probes.
Heck, build two or three identical ships (the cost is in designing the ships, not building the parts). Lob the ships into orbit via unmanned boosters, and fuel them in orbit from tanks filled at ISS. Lob the contestants up on a Shuttle flight for a week of media interviews on ISS. Then detach the ships from ISS and head for mars en masse.
Defray the cost of the additional ships by selling advertising space on a 1-year series called "Survivor: Mars".
Read between the lines. The guy says he works for a chip manufacturer with 500 employees, and the company earns all its revenue by suing people.
In that case, about half the IP comes from the ANSI standards group, not the company's own engineers. ;-)
I will never forgive the high school teacher who drew the drapes in my class during an eclipse because some st00pid-azz kid convinced said ignoramus of a "teacher" that "eclipse rays can blind you, you've gotta close the drapes!"
At least my high school physics teacher, who, when I told him the story, gave the aforementioned luzer a righteous chewing-out in the staff lounge (regrettably, after-the-fact, and even more regrettably, I couldn't listen to it), will never have to pay for a beer if he's ever in the same bar I am.
I had to wait another 10 years before I got to see a near-total eclipse again.
If you see a teacher and a group of kids with pinhole cameras during an eclipse, thank him/her for doing the right thing.
Actually - that's a damn good idea. With Firewire and USB2.0 (not sure which will win, I prefer Firewire, but there's big Intel momentum behind USB2.0 and a large USB1.0 installed base) coming into widespread use, the issue of removable media will soon be solved.
The other drawback with the racks is that when serial ATA takes over, you'll probably have to replace the drives and racks anyways.
(Racks are, however, still fantastic for people with lots of "old small drives" who want to play with various operating systems, but hey, that's what they were designed for, and we're talking about turning 'em into copyright circumvention technologies. It's a wonder Jack and Hilary haven't tried to get the racks banned. I mean, imagine you h4x0r3d a space for a rack in a TiVO :-)
You mean one of theseor any other removable drive rack you care to buy?
As for "hope it boots" - not an issue. Boot from primary, have a "racked" drive as secondary on the IDE chain. Your PC will never attempt to boot from the "racked" drive.
If Windows, your drive letters may be temporarily fux0r3d depending on whether the first partition of your friend's "racked" drive was bootable or not (and if it matches what you did on your "racked" drive). (Who cares, you're only copying files.) The problem goes away when you reboot.
If Linux, who cares, just as long as you know what type of filesystem's on the "racked" drive. Just mount and copy.
Drive racks rock. The only problem is that there are they're not all physically compatible with each other. But if you and your friends can get together and buy a bunch of identical racks at the same time, "sneakernet" can be a cheap way to transfer gigs of data within minutes.
Why, a huge pr0n collection!
Seriously, you're right - we're now at the point where (rule of thumb = 10 hours per gigabyte for 192kbps MP3) you can store weeks of music on a hard drive.
Assuming no revolutionary holographic projection technology, about the only practical consumer use for removable media >100GB is gonna be editing video or archiving uncompressed WAV files.
No, it means you did pay into the unemployment system, even though you have no hope of getting anything out. UI, as presently structured, is glorified welfare, but it doesn't have to be.
While welfare can't be privatized (there's no money to be made), genuine, risk-based, unemployment "insurance" can, and IMHO, should be privatized.
At present - and as you've found out - UI isn't insurance, it's merely a tax. Most people pay more premiums, but are ineligible to collect. (And guess how much of the UI "premiums" collected actually get paid out to the few workers poor enough to collect, as opposed to skimmed off into the sinkhole of general tax revenue?)
But UI could be privatized. The cyclical conditions that precipitate payouts (high unemployment) coincide with cyclical conditions in the economy (recession) that coincide with cyclical movements in interest rates (Greenspan :-)
This means that a private insurer could anticipate periods when payouts are likely to be high or low, and adjust an investment portfolio to take advantage of anticipated interest rate movements.
The portfolio would be funded from premiums. Just as medical insurance costs more for smokers, unemployment insurance would be more expensive for seasonal workers like fishermen (who, on the East Coast, are likely to be unemployed in winter), and less expensive for workers in fields in high demand.
The beauty is that (unlike the current system, based on coercion - everyone pays a tax, by force of law, but not everyone can claim) participation in a genuine unemployment insurance plan would be optional.
Are you a really good fisherman? Skip UI, and use the money to improve your gear, allowing you to catch more fish, to tide you over during the winter freeze.
Are you a really lazy fisherman? Pay for the deluxe UI package. Work 10 weeks a year, get paid 52. (The cost of this package would probably exceed what you can catch in your 10 weeks. That's your problem, though.)
Are you a really lazy programmer? In a hot industry, but think the good times might end? Worried about them H-1Bs takin' your job away? Buy a fat UI policy - just in case. Pay 5% of your salary in premiums, and in the 1-in-10 chance that your employer shows up on FuckedCompany next week, collect 50% of your salary until you find another employer with a foosball table and Aeron chairs at every cube.
Are you a really good programmer? Think you'll never be out of work? Skip UI altogether. Save the money for a rainy day, just in case you're wrong, or go buy a Ti4600 and hope you're right.
A privatized UI company would be incredibly motivated to get its out-of-work insurance claimants back into the job market, because it would drastically cut its expenses. It would want you to get a good job, because having a good job reduces the probability that you'll need to claim against your UI policy in the future. You could get your MCSE or other industry-recognized certifications as part of UI. Your insurance company would gladly give you placement assistance.
Contrast this with Government, who has zero motivation to get you back on the job (it's not their money), and every motivation to use their "back-to-work training" programs as ways to reward friends and campaign donors. ("You have my campaign $10000 last year. Here's a $1.5M contract to build a computer literacy center for UI recipients in our district. Sure, 386s running Win3.1 are fine. They're 'computers', aren't they? It's not it's any money out of either of our pockets if they ever work again.")
Lived across the hall from one. Found out she was on welfare because she went "out" at 10pm, and her 3yo sprog got spooked, somehow managed to open the door, and was wandering the halls shrieking in horror/fear at being abandoned.
Roommate went to investigate a possible injury, and found the door open and an infant asleep in a cradle.
After herding 3yo back into the apartment, we basically kept watch outside the apartment (to make sure nothing else went wrong - now aware of what was going on, it would have been criminally negligent of us to walk away) for about half an hour until "mom" came back with groceries.
(I guess "mom" couldn't leave 'em while they were awake, and she "thought" they'd stay asleep, for values of "mom" and "think" approaching epsilon.)
"Mom" was also pregnant with #3. "Dad", of course, didn't live there.
We considered the issue closed - a sad way to live, but in this particular instance, no immediate harm, no signs of abuse or malnutrition, so no foul. (And since calling the authorities wouldn't solve the long-term harm their lifestyle is doing to their sprog, no point.)
Our landlord must have received complaints from other tenants, though, because "mom" decided to pack up her brood and move to another apartment a few weeks later. One day, out of the blue, he said "Section 8. I can't do anything about it. But thanks for doing what you could."
Welfare is slavery - not just for the taxpayer, but for the recipient - and it must end.
D'oh! I knew I'd forgotten that.
> I can't honestly think of a widespread common library that allowed roots recently; but the zlib thing was scary to a sysadmin like me - even though it didn't look like it was exploitable if it were we'd have had a whole world of pain...
Agreed. On the other hand - at least zlib's a lot simpler to deal with than the HTML-rendering libraries.
Ultimately, it probably comes down to the UNIX (lots of poorly-integrated small things that do one thing well, and nothing else at all) and the Windows (a few big and tightly-integrated things that do lots of stuff) design philosophies.
I'll take that bet -- what services is your 98 box running? Let's look at the currently-popular remote Winbloze exploits:
Code Red: Requires unpatched IIS running. Most vulnerabilities are from W2K/NT install CDs that activate IIS upon installation. 98SE doesn't "give" you IIS. No problem.
That remote device ident bug that was shipped out-of-the-box: Are you running Win2K/XP? No, this is Win9x, which doesn't support the feature out-of-the-box. No problem.
All the outleak bugs: Are you using Outbreak as your mail client? No? Good! No problem.
All the IE bugs: Are you using IE as your browser? No? Good! No problem.
All the Netscape/Mozilla bugs: Are you regularly surfing untrustworthy sites with Javashit enabled? Don't Do That, Then. (Rarely a problem on any Windows config.)
OK, you might get bit by an obscure bug like downloading a JPG that exploits a buffer overrun in some version of Nutscrape, but that's pushing it.
Bottom line - a Win9x box with a fresh install doesn't do enough to make it easily-r00table.
Win98SE is no longer the "new hot thing" in operating systems, so relatively few cr4x0rz are designing new exploits for it.
If I had to choose a Microsoft operating system for an always-on net.connection for home use, I'd go with 98SE, install Netscape for web browsing, a third-party mail client from the days before HTML mail (gotta avoid the IE rendering engine), spend a day downloading/installing the DiVX codec and Windoze Media Player 6.2, and some basic MP3 utilities, and voila.
For bonus points, after installation, verify that File/Print sharing is still off, set the OS to display all file extensions and full path names, put some ad-blocking in the HOSTS file, install Junkbuster, and maybe a "personal firewall" to block incoming traffic to port 80, 137, etc... and throw in a copy of AdAware as an early warning system. If the user's clueless, maybe some antivirus software. (Remember, we're not using a remotely-exploitable mail client, so the user has to be pretty clueless to get r00ted.)
Such a box does everything the home user wants (movies, music, web, email) and has very few remote exploits even without the "defensive" software addon.
Granted, because it's Win9x, everything runs as root, so it's not protected from internal error (like dumbasses running untrusted executables), but it's pretty secure against external threats.
Over 1-year timeframe, and given the prototypical "enclued, but lazy, home user" who can't be bothered to suck a 60M "Windows Update" every weekend through his 28.8K dialup, (or risk his system's stability even if he can be bothered to download everything), I'd bet this 98SE box stands up better over a 1-year timeframe in the wild than a Win2K or XP install.
What I've said isn't revolutionary -- it's just the old rule of "Don't run services you don't need. If you subsequently find you do need them, turn them on later." Is there any valid reason a "home Linux user" should default to turning on an FTP server, BIND, a web server, and Sendmail? Hell, no. There's no reason for a generic home user to have services listening on any of these ports.
For install-time r00t holes, the difference is that most Linux distros have realized this, and aren't turning this crap on at install-time. Most Windoze distros haven't.
For run-time r00t holes, the biggest hole is that everyone uses IE's DLL to render HTML, even when the application (email, USENET, MP3 player) doesn't really need to render web content. It's so easy to hook into IE that most apps "just do it", and thus a hole in the engine exposes dozens of apps to exploits, not just the web browser.
From the Top-10 Lines for Jedi Master Mace Windu:
#1. Hand me my lightsaber... it's the one that says, "Bad Motherfucker" on it.
>
> I really hope that's a joke.
> Of course, clones are kinda like twins, aren't they...
> "Queen Amidala, meet, Queen Amidala" then start with the bad music...
Hey, they did it in an episode of Star Trek:DS9 in the mirror universe where we got to see mirror-Kira make a pass at herself.
Now... two bi Natalie Portman clones. Hubba hubba! I could go for that, even without grits!
Actually, the best ad wouldn't be the "Find an annoying guy to talk about the product" one I mentioned a few minutes ago.
The best ad would cost $20 to produce:
30 seconds of a 1000-hz tone at loud volume, and in big block letters:
"If you owned a PVR, you could press 'skip ad' and never have to sit through another annoying ad again."