The thing I don't like about these seasteading projects is that they only work out to be "cheap" because of unpaid externalities:
They assume that the seas are fundamentally safe. Rarely do these ships have the equipment needed for serious self defense against somebody determined to capture them. Basically they let existing countries pay to control piracy.
They don't truly pay for a law enforcement system. If somebody misbehaves on the boat they just arrest them and drop them off at the next port of call, or maybe shuttle them back to their nation of origin. They might or might not even hold a trial. They certainly don't pay to incarcerate them for 10 years or try to rehabilitate them.
If somebody gets really sick or whatever they'd be pawned off on some other nation's socialized medical system.
Basically these kinds of operations aim to take advantage of the benefits of other's tax dollars without having to contribute into the pool themselves. I lean fairly libertarian, but some of these purely-libertarian paradises can only work because they just ignore the less desirable aspects of running a government.
While I agree that it is crazy that a parliamentary body wouldn't have some kind of rule on quorums and annoucement of decision making, I don't think you can compare this to insurance policies.
The last time you negotiated an insurance policy, how much of a negotiation was it? The last time I checked these documents are almost always take-it-or-leave-it propositions, and it isn't like just anybody can start their own insurance company to compete (it requires billions of dollars in reserves, and often political connections to get away with less reserves than are truly needed hence the CDS mess on Wall Street).
This is a legitimate area for regulation. So is democracy (in the form of constitutional controls).
And this is why my linux pet peeves have never been more than pet peeves.:)
drm, btrfs, etc - steady progress continues to be made...
Re:You should look into linuxhaters
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Linux Needs Critics
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My pet peeve is why should I have to run X11 as root?
Isn't the whole point of the kernel to handle device abstraction? So, why does X11 talk directly to the hardware? Shouldn't it just open a new virtual console, put it in graphics mode, and go to town with rendering a display? None of those operations need be root - if the kernel actually abstracted the display device.
Why is it bad to directly access the UARTs on my motherboard to write data to a COM port, but it is fine to directly access video memory/etc? This kind of stuff doesn't belong in userspace!
Pretty sure if the fire department is coming in to throw water lines around, they are going to cut the power to the building and not to just the circuit on the datacenter floor.
Yes, but if they cut the power to the building the server room will still be fully energized thanks to all those huge batteries running the place. That's why they have the big red buttons - they kill all the power in the room so that there is no electrocution danger.
As another posted indicated, commercial UPS systems typically have an input for the big red button so that they cut off. Your $80 home UPS probably doesn't have this.
There are a lot of safety concerns with UPS devices in large datacenters - you're talking about a LOT of power in a semi-industrial setting. Among other things it is important to make sure that the hardware doesn't leak much power to ground. Without a UPS power leaking to ground isn't a big deal - it goes out the plug and isn't much of a shock hazard (within reason). However, if you have a UPS and somebody disconnects the plug then the whole rack is isolated from ground (until you touch it and the rack next to it). If you have 100 devices each leaking a few mA of power to the chasis that is a potentially dangerous situation.
And 12V DC isn't automatically safe - I don't know enough to say for sure one way or another, but lead acid batteries can produce fairly high current levels. Do you think that turning over the engine in your car requires a trivial amount of power? An arc welder only requires a few volts of potential difference - although it relies on more than just batteries. A room full of 12V batteries capable of each running a 500W power supply isn't a trival matter.
I'm sure Google has thought this out. Probably by wiring every server to that big red button...
When you walk up to a PIN device to swipe your ATM card, do you know how it got there? Do you know that it is a genuine Visa-certified device or whatever? If I got a janitor to let me into the local grocery store and add a keylogger and stripe reader to the physical hardware nobody would ever know. In fact, this kind of stuff happens from time to time with ATM machines. The only reason banks don't care much is that they're not the ones who are liable for ATM fraud.
If you put the authenitcation into the actual card then you don't need to trust every terminal you walk up to - and neither does your bank.
HTML (combined with CSS, etc) and decent design should not be mutually exclusive.
Absolutely. Just put your document text inside the appropriate header/table/list tags and the browser will render it just great using a VERY decent design.
The problem comes when what you're using a content markup language to desribe an appliction GUI. HTML is about content - not presentation. If I'm reading a news article I don't see why it needs to take up 30% of the screen with the other 70% occupied with navigation devices and related items and all that other junk. Just give me the article I asked for! Put all that other stuff in a simple list at the bottom of the page. If you must have another navigation bar at the top of the page.
I'm fine with hinting so that browsers can enhance presentation. I'm not a fan of just outright laying out a page at a pixel level. Is that boring - absolutely - just like a book. And, just like a book, it is completely functional.
No doubt a trade war with china would be messy. However, if the US targeted tarrifs mainly to achieve parity on basic workers rights issues and environmental issues, chances are they'd get support from the rest of the first world and it would go OK. This would be a fairly moderate level of tarrifs - not a pure buy-american spree.
This would never come to blows in an actual war. China wouldn't provoke it - at least not now. The Chinese lack any serious ability to project power right now. They have a huge army, so if the US tried to invade it would be VERY messy. However, if the US just bombed away at buildings and bridges there wouldn't be much the Chinese could do about it. They might shoot down a few planes here and there, but the war would be entirely over Chinese territory and the damage to the Chinese economy would be incredible and far greater than the damage to the US. Just look in history at any war fought exclusively in one's own territory - you're just looking to lose. You can win a few battles tactically, but strategically every battle you win just prolongs the war, and every battle you lose degrades your ability to sustain the war. In a US-China war the US infrastructure would be almost entirely free from risk - and in the long term it is bridges and factories that win wars - not bombs. The Chinese do have a nuclear deterrant, but they're not going to use that unless their sovereignty is at risk, and the US would have no need or desire to seriously invade.
However, this would never come down to a shooting war. The US wouldn't start one - once the tarrifs are in place they already have achieved their objectives so there is nothing to gain from bombs. The Chinese wouldn't start a war - they're still on a fairly level playing field even with the tarrifs and aside from attacking some US ships at sea or some overseas base, they'd be hard pressed to actually launch any kind of a serious attack in the first place.
If parents actually cared about the cost-effectiveness of education they'd be sending their kids to some community college with the kids living at home. Then they might finish up in a small state-funded college for a few thousand dollars a year.
College is as much a badge of honor for the parents as the student. Buying expensive toys for the kids makes them feel like they're doing something important.
The beauty of a liberal society is that you're entitled to think those people are idiots, and they're entitled to act like idiots as long as nobody gets hurt. Welcome to America!
That's OK - they probably think the same of you. And I seriously hope you're not lobbying that this kind of stuff is truly a legitimate area for government to regulate - you'll find that the folks you're opposed to are going to muster far more power at the polls than you ever will.
Not every country has the same ideals of free speech as the US. I think that many nations have improved on US democracy, but not in this area - I've never seen anything good come out of regulating speech. The amazing thing is that the US STILL has one of the best set of free speech laws out there, and that is despite the ways we've gone downhill in this area in the last 20 years.
Used game sales aren't good for the original developer. If a game is bought for $50, then resold four times for $10-30 each time, how much does the original developer make? $50. Epic Games has voiced their opinion on the issue, and has taken measures to discourage the practice (unlocks/DLC).
Yes, but people are more likely to pay more for it if they know they can turn around and sell it and get some of that money back when they get tired of it.
My concern isn't that killing the used market is better for devs. My concern is that it shouldn't be legal whether it is better or not. There needs to be a balance between consumers and publishers. TPB probably isn't it, but neither is Spore...
Additionally, Visa/MC have some anticompetitive provisions. If you issue cards under one of these labels you're not allowed to issue cards on any label other than the other one. So, a bank could issue a Visa and a MC card, but they couldn't issue a Visa and a Discover card.
I think that this control over the financial transaction market really is becoming a barrier to progress. It wouldn't be hard to design credit cards using RSA that would make fraud on the part of both the consumer and the merchant almost impossible. Just have the merchant perpare a transaction request and transmit it to the card. The card then displays the amount of the transaction and asks for a PIN (entered directly into the card via a keypad - not into some untrusted device). The card signs the transaction and gives it to the merchant, who submits it to the bank. You'd still have chargebacks over failure to deliver service, but not over stolen cards/etc. Double-charges or incorrect charges would be impossible - the card would issue a unique ID to every signoff and it could only be used once for the indicated amount. Recurring transactions could be handled with an appropriate transaction request, and the cardholder would have access to a bank website that lists all open authorizations for such charges that they could revoke at will.
It isn't hard to design stuff like this. The problem is that the people running the show do just fine under the status quo, so why would they want to change? They actually profit from stolen cards.
If they were it was probably a mile away from the blast site.
500 lbs of high explosive isn't something that anybody sets off while in the general vicinity. You'd need a hardened bunker to withstand that kind of pressure - preferably underground. Even then a direct hit could be dangerous. 500 pound bombs are pretty common in arial bombardment - they're not the biggest bombs out there but I'm sure they do quite a bit of damange - especially against civilian buildings.
Yeah, but the HF options (which easily cross oceans) are generally limited to very low baud rates. The whole amatuer specrum allocation at those frequencies is probably less than 1MHz - how much bandwidth are you going to get sharing that with everybody within 500 miles?
Once you get into the 10s of GHz frequency ranges then there is some real bandwidth available, but you're well into microwaves at that point and you're not going to be sending that over oceans unless it is via a satellite.
Of course, if you can get enough mesh traffic to an endpoint the economics would make it possible to sell conventional terrestrial bandwidth - you've solved the last mile problem.
I suspect this problem was the result of outsourcing of some kind.
Companies figure that there is no way they could possibly get backups right, and don't want to pay to have somebody run them or set them up with an automated solution.
So, they outsource. Of course, they pick the CHEAPEST vendor out there. That vendor probably helps them punch some holes in their firewall so that they can remotely connect, log into servers using administrative passwords, and copy off data. That cheap vendor probably doesn't have robust internal security, and they have access of some kind into every one of their clients (who are too cheap to have decent security of their own). This sort of situation is just a disaster waiting to happen.
Bottom line is that you get what you pay for. Hire the admin willing to work for the lowest salary and you don't get a very good admin. Pay the cheapest rate available for outsourcing and you get cheap service. Cheap stuff can be a way to save money - but usually only when you have somebody competant to figure out when you can and can't get away with it. Hire cheap staff and cheap services and mix that with cheap stuff and you're going to get what you paid for.
Typical approach used to circumvent democracy. Make almost EVERYTHING a crime. Then when you want to punish somebody for a behavoir which isn't illegal you can instead get them with some statute nobody has ever heard of.
Get a random tip that somebody's home is being used to manufacture drugs? Too flimsy for a warrant? No problem - just walk down the street and notice they have a crack in their sidewalk (violation of local ordnance). Then knock on their door to let them know about it. Once their door is open you notice something inside (maybe what looks like a copied DVD, or a DVD player that might play region-unlocked disks, or maybe you "smell solvents," or whatever). Then you continue to expand your invasion one step at a time until you've searched the entire house.
Likewise - maybe full thermal imaging of houses isn't legally admissable without a warrant. No problem - just do the imaging and find out where the homes of interest are. Then you go up to the house and follow the process above to find admissible evidence. You don't even bring up the thermal imaging in court.
Unfortunately, search and seizure seems more like a game these days than a real protection of privacy. Authorities are constantly stretching the bondaries of what they can get away with...
Wouldn't that only be an issue if the data is written to space owned by a file? If you write to unallocated space then no user should be able to access it unless they have direct access to the underlying device (which of course bypasses all security of any kind anyway).
If you create a new file that happens to use the same allocated space the OS will wipe the block before allowing it to be read. Actually, I'm guessing that the blocks won't even be allocated until they are actually written to, and if you order the data write first then the sensitive data will be overwritten before anybody could read the file.
Not that I'm aware of. This has been discussed on the lists. I suspect the devs consider it a "feature". The buffer sizes can be adjusted to taste - 32MB seemed like a good compromise between memory use and disk thrashing. I suspect you could get by with much less once you get rid of the sync - you can dump lots of data into the cache and as long as the kernel can reorder writes it should be able to keep up.
Ok, I see your argument - companies should be free to do whatever they want and we're free to do business with however we want.
However, before we allow ATT to take these kinds of actions, shouldn't we first repeal any laws restricting who is allowed to string fiber optic cables on telephone poles, or put telephone poles up in the first place?
In most areas it is illegal to start up your own ISP (and I mean a true end-to-end solution - not just renting lines from ATT/etc which doesn't solve the problem). If that is to be the case, then it seems reasonable for society to be allowed to regulate how the monopoly providers behave.
Also - because telecom is a natural monopoly you're still going to need regulation to get companies to play nicely. That theoretical right to string your own wires is worthless if the Tier-1 providers refuse to route your traffic. Due to technical issues with routing I can even see why they might do so for semi-legitimate reasons.
The problem is that ATT wants libertarian policies when it benefits them, and a command economy where competition is concerned.
This is more of a response to the 5 other replies to this comment - but rather than post it 5 times I'll just stick it here...
What everybody else has proposed is the obvious solution, which is essentially copy-on-write. When you modify a block, you write a new block and then deallocate the old block. This is the way ZFS works, and it will also be used in btrfs. Aside from the obvious reliability improvement, it also can allow better optimization in RAID-5 configurations, as if you always flush an entire stripe you don't need to do a read-before-write to update the checksum data. The algorithm is also very amenable to snapshotting - you just hold off on deallocating the old blocks. In fact, snapshots perform better than normal writes since there are fewer steps (of course you do waste disk space - but you usually don't keep snapshots around forever).
I agree. What we need is a mechanism for an application to indicate to the OS what kind of data is being written (in terms of criticality/persistance/etc). If it is the gimp swapfile chances are you can optimize differently for performance than if it is a file containing innodb tables.
Right now app developers are having to be concerned with low-level assumptions about how data is being written at the cache level, and that is not appropriate.
I got burned by this when my mythtv backend kept losing chunks of video when the disk was busy. Turns out the app developers had a tiny buffer in ram, which they'd write out to disk, and then do an fsync every few seconds. So, if two videos were being recorded the disk is contantly thrashing between two huge video files while also busy doing whatever else the system is supposed to be doing. When I got rid of the fsyncs and upped the buffer a little all the issues went away. When I record video to disk I don't care if when the system goes down that in addition to losing the next 5 minutes of the show during the reboot I also lose the last 20 seconds as well. This is just bad app design, but it highlights the problems when applications start messing with low-level details like the cache.
Linux filesystems just aren't optimal. I think that everybody is more interested in experimenting with new concepts in file storage, and they're not as interested in just getting files reliably stored to disk. Sure, most of this is volunteer-driven, so I can't exactly put a gun to somebody's head to tell them that no, they need to do the boring work before investing in new ideas. However, it would be nice if things "just worked".
We need a gradual level of tiers ranging from a database that does its own journaling and needs to know that data is fully written to disk to an application swapfile that if it never hits the disk isn't a big deal (granted, such an app should just use kernel swap, but that is another issue). The OS can then decide how to prioritize actual disk IO so that in the event of a crash chances are the highest priority data is saved and nothing is actually corrupted.
And I agree completely regarding transaction support. That would really help.
Yes, but he wasn't talking about you buying fire insurance for your house. He was talking about YOU buying fire insurance for HIS house. If his house burns down you don't lose a dime, but even so you're buying insurance on it. This is pure speculation.
And I agree - the real problem is that people were selling trillions of dollars of insurance without even a small fraction of that in reserves. They were HIGHLY leveraged, and that seems to be the root of every financial collapse (it certainly caused the Great Depression).
Leverage is basically taking risks to make big money when you don't have anything to invest. I'd love ot own a corporate jet, but I work a normal salaried job so that isn't going to happen - legitimately. Suppose I decide I'd like to make ten million dollars a year. That isn't hard to do, but I need maybe $200 million in assets to invest to do it. So, instead of saving up $200 million on a normal salary I do what the big banks did. I start selling insurance.
So, I pick something that is "risk-free" like meteor impacts. If your house or building is blown up by meteor impacts I'll pay you $10,000 for a monthly premium of only $1. I then promote fear over meteor crashes so that investors are nervous about putting money in to companies that aren't insured against it. Suddenly everybody is paying me $20 per month for insurance and I'm raking it in. The only problem is that I don't have anything of substance in the bank while being on the hook to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars if a meteor takes out a city.
Then people start getting speculative. A person with a $200k house who already has it insured says - you know - I bet a meteor is going to land somewhere in the next few years. So, they buy $40k worth of insurance in 50 different cities worldwide against random homes there. I'm really raking in the dough now - I've effectively insured every house in the world 2 or 3 times by the time this is all over and I'm making millions per month in permiums (and I'm on the hook for billions in losses potentially).
Then guess what, a meteor takes out New York City. Lots of people are now at my door asking for their cut. Many are of course from NYC and want to rebuild their homes with the insurance money. However, even more people have never even been to NYC and they just were betting on a meteor taking out the Big Apple. I politely explain that I don't have billions of dollars to pay the claims, but I do have a few hundred thousand dollars left from all those premiums (the rest were paid out in bonuses to my family/etc). Now lots of people have lost all their savings and the government offers to just pay them for me. This comes with onerous restrictions on how much I get paid for the next few years - but of course they don't ask for any of the money I took frauduently back. After all, how could anybody know that a meteor would actually hit?
What I thought was even worse about this mess was that regulators actually lifted restrictions on the fractional reserve system so that in the future banks could even be more leveraged than they are now. Additionally NY state was looking to allow AIG to dip into reserves set aside for ordinary homeowners insurance policyholders to pay off its CDS debts. So, now if there is a big fire AIG we're going to have to bail out the homeowners since AIG spent that money helping out its gambling buddies.
I understand the need for financial derivatives. I don't really have problems with them in general. My problem is that when somebody promises to pay you $10 if Y happens, they ought to have $10 to pay you with. Financial companies are WAY too leveraged - we're talking about being on the hook for $100 for every $1 they have in the bank - or more.
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The thing I don't like about these seasteading projects is that they only work out to be "cheap" because of unpaid externalities:
Basically these kinds of operations aim to take advantage of the benefits of other's tax dollars without having to contribute into the pool themselves. I lean fairly libertarian, but some of these purely-libertarian paradises can only work because they just ignore the less desirable aspects of running a government.
While I agree that it is crazy that a parliamentary body wouldn't have some kind of rule on quorums and annoucement of decision making, I don't think you can compare this to insurance policies.
The last time you negotiated an insurance policy, how much of a negotiation was it? The last time I checked these documents are almost always take-it-or-leave-it propositions, and it isn't like just anybody can start their own insurance company to compete (it requires billions of dollars in reserves, and often political connections to get away with less reserves than are truly needed hence the CDS mess on Wall Street).
This is a legitimate area for regulation. So is democracy (in the form of constitutional controls).
And this is why my linux pet peeves have never been more than pet peeves. :)
drm, btrfs, etc - steady progress continues to be made...
My pet peeve is why should I have to run X11 as root?
Isn't the whole point of the kernel to handle device abstraction? So, why does X11 talk directly to the hardware? Shouldn't it just open a new virtual console, put it in graphics mode, and go to town with rendering a display? None of those operations need be root - if the kernel actually abstracted the display device.
Why is it bad to directly access the UARTs on my motherboard to write data to a COM port, but it is fine to directly access video memory/etc? This kind of stuff doesn't belong in userspace!
Pretty sure if the fire department is coming in to throw water lines around, they are going to cut the power to the building and not to just the circuit on the datacenter floor.
Yes, but if they cut the power to the building the server room will still be fully energized thanks to all those huge batteries running the place. That's why they have the big red buttons - they kill all the power in the room so that there is no electrocution danger.
As another posted indicated, commercial UPS systems typically have an input for the big red button so that they cut off. Your $80 home UPS probably doesn't have this.
There are a lot of safety concerns with UPS devices in large datacenters - you're talking about a LOT of power in a semi-industrial setting. Among other things it is important to make sure that the hardware doesn't leak much power to ground. Without a UPS power leaking to ground isn't a big deal - it goes out the plug and isn't much of a shock hazard (within reason). However, if you have a UPS and somebody disconnects the plug then the whole rack is isolated from ground (until you touch it and the rack next to it). If you have 100 devices each leaking a few mA of power to the chasis that is a potentially dangerous situation.
And 12V DC isn't automatically safe - I don't know enough to say for sure one way or another, but lead acid batteries can produce fairly high current levels. Do you think that turning over the engine in your car requires a trivial amount of power? An arc welder only requires a few volts of potential difference - although it relies on more than just batteries. A room full of 12V batteries capable of each running a 500W power supply isn't a trival matter.
I'm sure Google has thought this out. Probably by wiring every server to that big red button...
Uh, wouldn't men have an advantage due to nozzles being mounted on gimbals (of a sort)?
I trust a device if I know where it came from.
When you walk up to a PIN device to swipe your ATM card, do you know how it got there? Do you know that it is a genuine Visa-certified device or whatever? If I got a janitor to let me into the local grocery store and add a keylogger and stripe reader to the physical hardware nobody would ever know. In fact, this kind of stuff happens from time to time with ATM machines. The only reason banks don't care much is that they're not the ones who are liable for ATM fraud.
If you put the authenitcation into the actual card then you don't need to trust every terminal you walk up to - and neither does your bank.
HTML (combined with CSS, etc) and decent design should not be mutually exclusive.
Absolutely. Just put your document text inside the appropriate header/table/list tags and the browser will render it just great using a VERY decent design.
The problem comes when what you're using a content markup language to desribe an appliction GUI. HTML is about content - not presentation. If I'm reading a news article I don't see why it needs to take up 30% of the screen with the other 70% occupied with navigation devices and related items and all that other junk. Just give me the article I asked for! Put all that other stuff in a simple list at the bottom of the page. If you must have another navigation bar at the top of the page.
I'm fine with hinting so that browsers can enhance presentation. I'm not a fan of just outright laying out a page at a pixel level. Is that boring - absolutely - just like a book. And, just like a book, it is completely functional.
No doubt a trade war with china would be messy. However, if the US targeted tarrifs mainly to achieve parity on basic workers rights issues and environmental issues, chances are they'd get support from the rest of the first world and it would go OK. This would be a fairly moderate level of tarrifs - not a pure buy-american spree.
This would never come to blows in an actual war. China wouldn't provoke it - at least not now. The Chinese lack any serious ability to project power right now. They have a huge army, so if the US tried to invade it would be VERY messy. However, if the US just bombed away at buildings and bridges there wouldn't be much the Chinese could do about it. They might shoot down a few planes here and there, but the war would be entirely over Chinese territory and the damage to the Chinese economy would be incredible and far greater than the damage to the US. Just look in history at any war fought exclusively in one's own territory - you're just looking to lose. You can win a few battles tactically, but strategically every battle you win just prolongs the war, and every battle you lose degrades your ability to sustain the war. In a US-China war the US infrastructure would be almost entirely free from risk - and in the long term it is bridges and factories that win wars - not bombs. The Chinese do have a nuclear deterrant, but they're not going to use that unless their sovereignty is at risk, and the US would have no need or desire to seriously invade.
However, this would never come down to a shooting war. The US wouldn't start one - once the tarrifs are in place they already have achieved their objectives so there is nothing to gain from bombs. The Chinese wouldn't start a war - they're still on a fairly level playing field even with the tarrifs and aside from attacking some US ships at sea or some overseas base, they'd be hard pressed to actually launch any kind of a serious attack in the first place.
If parents actually cared about the cost-effectiveness of education they'd be sending their kids to some community college with the kids living at home. Then they might finish up in a small state-funded college for a few thousand dollars a year.
College is as much a badge of honor for the parents as the student. Buying expensive toys for the kids makes them feel like they're doing something important.
Help, help - I'm being oppressed!
The beauty of a liberal society is that you're entitled to think those people are idiots, and they're entitled to act like idiots as long as nobody gets hurt. Welcome to America!
That's OK - they probably think the same of you. And I seriously hope you're not lobbying that this kind of stuff is truly a legitimate area for government to regulate - you'll find that the folks you're opposed to are going to muster far more power at the polls than you ever will.
Not every country has the same ideals of free speech as the US. I think that many nations have improved on US democracy, but not in this area - I've never seen anything good come out of regulating speech. The amazing thing is that the US STILL has one of the best set of free speech laws out there, and that is despite the ways we've gone downhill in this area in the last 20 years.
Used game sales aren't good for the original developer. If a game is bought for $50, then resold four times for $10-30 each time, how much does the original developer make? $50. Epic Games has voiced their opinion on the issue, and has taken measures to discourage the practice (unlocks/DLC).
Yes, but people are more likely to pay more for it if they know they can turn around and sell it and get some of that money back when they get tired of it.
My concern isn't that killing the used market is better for devs. My concern is that it shouldn't be legal whether it is better or not. There needs to be a balance between consumers and publishers. TPB probably isn't it, but neither is Spore...
Additionally, Visa/MC have some anticompetitive provisions. If you issue cards under one of these labels you're not allowed to issue cards on any label other than the other one. So, a bank could issue a Visa and a MC card, but they couldn't issue a Visa and a Discover card.
I think that this control over the financial transaction market really is becoming a barrier to progress. It wouldn't be hard to design credit cards using RSA that would make fraud on the part of both the consumer and the merchant almost impossible. Just have the merchant perpare a transaction request and transmit it to the card. The card then displays the amount of the transaction and asks for a PIN (entered directly into the card via a keypad - not into some untrusted device). The card signs the transaction and gives it to the merchant, who submits it to the bank. You'd still have chargebacks over failure to deliver service, but not over stolen cards/etc. Double-charges or incorrect charges would be impossible - the card would issue a unique ID to every signoff and it could only be used once for the indicated amount. Recurring transactions could be handled with an appropriate transaction request, and the cardholder would have access to a bank website that lists all open authorizations for such charges that they could revoke at will.
It isn't hard to design stuff like this. The problem is that the people running the show do just fine under the status quo, so why would they want to change? They actually profit from stolen cards.
If they were it was probably a mile away from the blast site.
500 lbs of high explosive isn't something that anybody sets off while in the general vicinity. You'd need a hardened bunker to withstand that kind of pressure - preferably underground. Even then a direct hit could be dangerous. 500 pound bombs are pretty common in arial bombardment - they're not the biggest bombs out there but I'm sure they do quite a bit of damange - especially against civilian buildings.
Yeah, but the HF options (which easily cross oceans) are generally limited to very low baud rates. The whole amatuer specrum allocation at those frequencies is probably less than 1MHz - how much bandwidth are you going to get sharing that with everybody within 500 miles?
Once you get into the 10s of GHz frequency ranges then there is some real bandwidth available, but you're well into microwaves at that point and you're not going to be sending that over oceans unless it is via a satellite.
Of course, if you can get enough mesh traffic to an endpoint the economics would make it possible to sell conventional terrestrial bandwidth - you've solved the last mile problem.
I suspect this problem was the result of outsourcing of some kind.
Companies figure that there is no way they could possibly get backups right, and don't want to pay to have somebody run them or set them up with an automated solution.
So, they outsource. Of course, they pick the CHEAPEST vendor out there. That vendor probably helps them punch some holes in their firewall so that they can remotely connect, log into servers using administrative passwords, and copy off data. That cheap vendor probably doesn't have robust internal security, and they have access of some kind into every one of their clients (who are too cheap to have decent security of their own). This sort of situation is just a disaster waiting to happen.
Bottom line is that you get what you pay for. Hire the admin willing to work for the lowest salary and you don't get a very good admin. Pay the cheapest rate available for outsourcing and you get cheap service. Cheap stuff can be a way to save money - but usually only when you have somebody competant to figure out when you can and can't get away with it. Hire cheap staff and cheap services and mix that with cheap stuff and you're going to get what you paid for.
Typical approach used to circumvent democracy. Make almost EVERYTHING a crime. Then when you want to punish somebody for a behavoir which isn't illegal you can instead get them with some statute nobody has ever heard of.
Get a random tip that somebody's home is being used to manufacture drugs? Too flimsy for a warrant? No problem - just walk down the street and notice they have a crack in their sidewalk (violation of local ordnance). Then knock on their door to let them know about it. Once their door is open you notice something inside (maybe what looks like a copied DVD, or a DVD player that might play region-unlocked disks, or maybe you "smell solvents," or whatever). Then you continue to expand your invasion one step at a time until you've searched the entire house.
Likewise - maybe full thermal imaging of houses isn't legally admissable without a warrant. No problem - just do the imaging and find out where the homes of interest are. Then you go up to the house and follow the process above to find admissible evidence. You don't even bring up the thermal imaging in court.
Unfortunately, search and seizure seems more like a game these days than a real protection of privacy. Authorities are constantly stretching the bondaries of what they can get away with...
Wouldn't that only be an issue if the data is written to space owned by a file? If you write to unallocated space then no user should be able to access it unless they have direct access to the underlying device (which of course bypasses all security of any kind anyway).
If you create a new file that happens to use the same allocated space the OS will wipe the block before allowing it to be read. Actually, I'm guessing that the blocks won't even be allocated until they are actually written to, and if you order the data write first then the sensitive data will be overwritten before anybody could read the file.
See this.
Not that I'm aware of. This has been discussed on the lists. I suspect the devs consider it a "feature". The buffer sizes can be adjusted to taste - 32MB seemed like a good compromise between memory use and disk thrashing. I suspect you could get by with much less once you get rid of the sync - you can dump lots of data into the cache and as long as the kernel can reorder writes it should be able to keep up.
However, here is a patch:
Ok, I see your argument - companies should be free to do whatever they want and we're free to do business with however we want.
However, before we allow ATT to take these kinds of actions, shouldn't we first repeal any laws restricting who is allowed to string fiber optic cables on telephone poles, or put telephone poles up in the first place?
In most areas it is illegal to start up your own ISP (and I mean a true end-to-end solution - not just renting lines from ATT/etc which doesn't solve the problem). If that is to be the case, then it seems reasonable for society to be allowed to regulate how the monopoly providers behave.
Also - because telecom is a natural monopoly you're still going to need regulation to get companies to play nicely. That theoretical right to string your own wires is worthless if the Tier-1 providers refuse to route your traffic. Due to technical issues with routing I can even see why they might do so for semi-legitimate reasons.
The problem is that ATT wants libertarian policies when it benefits them, and a command economy where competition is concerned.
This is more of a response to the 5 other replies to this comment - but rather than post it 5 times I'll just stick it here...
What everybody else has proposed is the obvious solution, which is essentially copy-on-write. When you modify a block, you write a new block and then deallocate the old block. This is the way ZFS works, and it will also be used in btrfs. Aside from the obvious reliability improvement, it also can allow better optimization in RAID-5 configurations, as if you always flush an entire stripe you don't need to do a read-before-write to update the checksum data. The algorithm is also very amenable to snapshotting - you just hold off on deallocating the old blocks. In fact, snapshots perform better than normal writes since there are fewer steps (of course you do waste disk space - but you usually don't keep snapshots around forever).
I agree. What we need is a mechanism for an application to indicate to the OS what kind of data is being written (in terms of criticality/persistance/etc). If it is the gimp swapfile chances are you can optimize differently for performance than if it is a file containing innodb tables.
Right now app developers are having to be concerned with low-level assumptions about how data is being written at the cache level, and that is not appropriate.
I got burned by this when my mythtv backend kept losing chunks of video when the disk was busy. Turns out the app developers had a tiny buffer in ram, which they'd write out to disk, and then do an fsync every few seconds. So, if two videos were being recorded the disk is contantly thrashing between two huge video files while also busy doing whatever else the system is supposed to be doing. When I got rid of the fsyncs and upped the buffer a little all the issues went away. When I record video to disk I don't care if when the system goes down that in addition to losing the next 5 minutes of the show during the reboot I also lose the last 20 seconds as well. This is just bad app design, but it highlights the problems when applications start messing with low-level details like the cache.
Linux filesystems just aren't optimal. I think that everybody is more interested in experimenting with new concepts in file storage, and they're not as interested in just getting files reliably stored to disk. Sure, most of this is volunteer-driven, so I can't exactly put a gun to somebody's head to tell them that no, they need to do the boring work before investing in new ideas. However, it would be nice if things "just worked".
We need a gradual level of tiers ranging from a database that does its own journaling and needs to know that data is fully written to disk to an application swapfile that if it never hits the disk isn't a big deal (granted, such an app should just use kernel swap, but that is another issue). The OS can then decide how to prioritize actual disk IO so that in the event of a crash chances are the highest priority data is saved and nothing is actually corrupted.
And I agree completely regarding transaction support. That would really help.
Yikes - 82 degree roll. That must have been something else! You're walking across a cabin and suddenly the wall is the floor.
Yes, but he wasn't talking about you buying fire insurance for your house. He was talking about YOU buying fire insurance for HIS house. If his house burns down you don't lose a dime, but even so you're buying insurance on it. This is pure speculation.
And I agree - the real problem is that people were selling trillions of dollars of insurance without even a small fraction of that in reserves. They were HIGHLY leveraged, and that seems to be the root of every financial collapse (it certainly caused the Great Depression).
Leverage is basically taking risks to make big money when you don't have anything to invest. I'd love ot own a corporate jet, but I work a normal salaried job so that isn't going to happen - legitimately. Suppose I decide I'd like to make ten million dollars a year. That isn't hard to do, but I need maybe $200 million in assets to invest to do it. So, instead of saving up $200 million on a normal salary I do what the big banks did. I start selling insurance.
So, I pick something that is "risk-free" like meteor impacts. If your house or building is blown up by meteor impacts I'll pay you $10,000 for a monthly premium of only $1. I then promote fear over meteor crashes so that investors are nervous about putting money in to companies that aren't insured against it. Suddenly everybody is paying me $20 per month for insurance and I'm raking it in. The only problem is that I don't have anything of substance in the bank while being on the hook to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars if a meteor takes out a city.
Then people start getting speculative. A person with a $200k house who already has it insured says - you know - I bet a meteor is going to land somewhere in the next few years. So, they buy $40k worth of insurance in 50 different cities worldwide against random homes there. I'm really raking in the dough now - I've effectively insured every house in the world 2 or 3 times by the time this is all over and I'm making millions per month in permiums (and I'm on the hook for billions in losses potentially).
Then guess what, a meteor takes out New York City. Lots of people are now at my door asking for their cut. Many are of course from NYC and want to rebuild their homes with the insurance money. However, even more people have never even been to NYC and they just were betting on a meteor taking out the Big Apple. I politely explain that I don't have billions of dollars to pay the claims, but I do have a few hundred thousand dollars left from all those premiums (the rest were paid out in bonuses to my family/etc). Now lots of people have lost all their savings and the government offers to just pay them for me. This comes with onerous restrictions on how much I get paid for the next few years - but of course they don't ask for any of the money I took frauduently back. After all, how could anybody know that a meteor would actually hit?
What I thought was even worse about this mess was that regulators actually lifted restrictions on the fractional reserve system so that in the future banks could even be more leveraged than they are now. Additionally NY state was looking to allow AIG to dip into reserves set aside for ordinary homeowners insurance policyholders to pay off its CDS debts. So, now if there is a big fire AIG we're going to have to bail out the homeowners since AIG spent that money helping out its gambling buddies.
I understand the need for financial derivatives. I don't really have problems with them in general. My problem is that when somebody promises to pay you $10 if Y happens, they ought to have $10 to pay you with. Financial companies are WAY too leveraged - we're talking about being on the hook for $100 for every $1 they have in the bank - or more.