Yup - I've had cases like that. I was downgraded because my notes weren't photocopies of what was put up on the overhead. Yes, the teacher essentially wanted us to be 12th century scribes copying verbatim what was posted on an overhead projector.
I had also made the mistake of challenging her assertion that her aneroid barometer was indicating pressures in millibars (with a displayed range of ~28-32). Since it didn't actually contain mercury she insisted that it couldn't actually display pressures in inches of mercury.
I had not yet learned the art of dealing with tyrannical teachers. Suffice it to say I didn't do all that well in science that year. Now if somebody wants to live in ignorance and teach ignorance I just figure it will be that many fewer people competing effectively with me for a paycheck someday.:)
The main issue with X-plane is that nobody actually uses it (comparitively). The flight model is clearly superior in most situations. However, it lacks quite a bit of polish (voices sound robotic, graphics aren't as nice, flight-planning/etc isn't user-friendly, etc). It also lacks the MASSIVE library of add-ons. Many people stuck with FS2004 just so that they wouldn't have to give up their $500 libraries of add-ons (there was some compatibility, but generally not with super-advanced expensive payware aircraft). Granted, FSX also had serious performance issues on anything but the newest hardware, but from what I've seen as long as your equipment isn't too old you can turn down every graphics setting and end up with something that performs like 2004 while looking slightly better. I suspect the upgrades to FSX have tended to follow hardware upgrades as a result.
There is no question that X-plane could overtake MSFS if it wanted to, but I get the impression that the X-plane crowd doesn't want to "bow" to those who want the polished experience. If that remains the case I wouldn't be surprised if another simulator springs up from nothing and overtakes both X-plane and MSFS (unless MS gets back into the game).
Somehow I don't think the solution is to make it easier for poor people to have even more children. Great prenatal and childhood health care isn't going to do them much good when they get shot up trying to sell drugs.
I'm actually in favor of maybe a bit more socialization of medicine than exists currently. However, spending money on people who are going to go ahead and waste it just isn't the answer. Most poor people are that way for a reason - and it isn't because nobody has just handed them a 6-figure job. Now, some poor people are hard workers who have genuinely been out on their luck, and we need to do a better job helping these people out...
Yup - these kinds of practices are common on this side of the pond as well...
My favorite is the "National Electric Code" (TM). It is a copyrighted set of codes governing electrical work, which is essentially made a statue in most areas of the USA. The problem is that it is a copyrighted work that you can't obtain freely (as in speech - you can get some limited access to it free of charge under certain conditions). Sure, for $100 I'm sure you can buy a copy of it somewhere. What I object to is the idea that the law has essentially become copyrighted.
If I wanted to I could make an annotated copy of the Federal Register or the Constitution or whatever and explain how the folks running the show are a bunch of clowns. That would be completely legal and a form of free speech and protest. If I were to do the same thing with the National Electric Code (TM) then I could be sued, because it isn't public property. And yet, it has the standing of law in most jurisdictions.
Legislative bodies should be forbidden from incorporating copyrighted works into laws by reference. If they want to codify the NEC then they should just quote the whole thing verbaitim in a bill, and then it becomes public domain.
Ok, if oil were taxed per its impact on the environment, and electricity were taxed per its impact on the environment, then all you would need to do is whatever is cheapest.
If it is truly more expensive to ship the item then just pay for the electricity and know that you're going it in a manner that is sustainable. If it is cheaper to ship the item, then do it, and know that the jet fuel is less harmful than the coal you're burning right now.
We don't need millions of per-item regulations. We just need the cost of energy to reflect what it really costs mankind. If a barrel of oil costs $100 to sequester the carbon and clean the soot off of buildings, then charge a $100/bbl tax. If it only costs a nickel then charge a nickel and stop worrying about it. This will have a double effect:
1. It will encourage consumers to make choices that are less harmful to the enviornment. 2. It will fund cleanup so that the harmful activities are only harmful in the short term.
Add in the costs related to invading middle eastern countries to secure oil and you'll address the taxes-for-oil-barons problem as well.
The problem is that right now those who benefit from certain forms of energy aren't the ones paying the full price for its use.
In fact, if you want people to "do the right thing" then you should make it MORE profitable to do so.
If you can make a billion dollars in profit from strip-mining farmland for coal, but you are cast as the devil incarnate if you charge patients for medical care, then you're going to have more strip-miners than doctors in your society.
The problem isn't that doing good costs money - it is just making sure that the costs are appropriately split up. The problem with doctors isn't that they cost money, but rather that the people who need care can't afford it. And so on...
I hate to nitpick, but do those high energy cosmic rays actually come from the sun?
I thought that they were considered extrasolar (and possibly extragalactic) in origin. I'm sure they come from a number of different phenomena, but my understanding is that we're talking about really high energy suff like supernovas or quasars.
And of course the stirrers themselves just become more radioactive waste. I heard about that project maybe 15 years ago - there was some concern that these stirrers would just break down over a few years, and they would be unservicable since they were immersed in a million gallons of highly radioactive sludge. I wonder how it is working out...?
I knew a guy who had some involvement with their cleanup efforts. I heard some scary stuff.
Apparently they just dumped stuff in tanks and only kept the loosest records of what it was. Then they pumped stuff around from tank to tank. According to the paper trail some tanks once contained 10X their total volumes or more (which is obviously an error).
Most of the stuff by volume is just chemical sludge of various kinds - most of which could probably be safely incinerated. The problem is that it is laced with all kinds of nasty isotopes, and it is very hard to separate them. The tanks were subject to all kinds of chemistry (which is why chemists don't normally mix thousands of gallons of various waste streams into million gallon tanks without a care for what was already in the tank). A big risk is just chemical explosions that could send radioactive materials flying everywhere.
On top of that much of the cleanup work (such as chemical analysis of the tank contents) was done in a shoddy way.
Somebody really needs to just start going through the mess one tank at a time with a huge budget and start cleaning things up...
Just to warn you - HD with Myth works fine, but make sure you do your homework. Even modern CPUs have a lot of difficulty with software rendering of HD, so you need to make sure whatever hardware you run can handle whatever you are throwing at it. Don't take an old desktop with an old graphics card and load it up with 3 high def tuners and a 5400 RPM hard drive with 256MB of RAM and expect it to record 3 HD streams and play one back at the same time, while commercial-flagging and transcoding 2 others.
The thing I like about Myth is that it scales. You can have 5 backends with 3 HD tuners each recording video and storing it on a SAN, and then have 10 front-ends hooked up to HD TVs across your mansion, and everything would work fine. You might need to carefully plan if you want to run a media server for a hotel or something, but you shouldn't have any issues with your house. You can also just run the whole thing on a single PC - possibly an older one if you're not doing HD. A common scenario would be a single backend with all the tuners and storage, and some small set-top boxes with either a network boot or a small flash drive for the OS/software.
I don't think the stairs were on the pre-NES versions of the game. Instead you just had a goofy bouncing marshmellow man that you had to run underneath. Once you got two guys past him they'd run into the building, cross their streams, and end the game.
Not a whole lot less campy, but at least slightly less annoying.
This applies to any contract. Regardless of what is written in the agreement, no party to a contract may make a material change to an agreement after the fact without the other parties (possibly implied) consent. A material change is any change impacting the substance of the agreement - ie it might have impacted your decision to enter into the agreement in the first place. Money of any kind is almost always considered material. Maybe if we're talking a 50 cent error in a $100M real estate deal it might not be - but nobody would even bother to try to extract an extra 50 cents on such a deal anyway.
Is your credit card company raising interest rates (outside of the variable terms already set forth)? Just tell them no. They can choose to close your account, but you can pay off the remaining balance under the original terms. Or, they could choose to continue under the original terms (which is fair).
Anything to the contrary in any contract you sign of any kind simply isn't enforcable. Any court would throw out terms allowing unilateral changes after the fact. They might be able to imply consent if they clearly warn you of the changes and then give you a reasonable time and reasonable means to inform them of your intent to not accept the change.
Uh, this is easier on linux than you think - if you assume the user is as clueless as the typical windows user who owns a PC controlled by a botnet.
Make a program that starts up every boot / login for a particular user (or all users) on a standard home PC (Windows: Easy, Linux: Hard),
Easy - cat >> ~/.bash_profile. When was the last time you checked one of the half-dozen files that runs every time a shell spawns in your home directory?
that is difficult to stop booting up (Windows: Easy, Linux: Hard),
Ok, that is hard. But bots don't rely on being hard to remove so much as not being noticed. If you brought either a linux or a windows PC in for service and it was known to be part of a botnet, it would almost certainly be reimaged from scratch in either case. What linux admin would just trust their ability to "remove it all?"
that distributes itself via email (Windows: Easy unless there's a third-party firewall, Linux: Depends very much on the system configuration but in general harder),
Uh, just use/usr/bin/sendmail - or just implement SMTP. Very few linux systems are configured to block outgoing TCP connections. If anything your typical windows personal firewall is more secure since it will bring up the annoying allow/deny pop-up. Who configures their linux desktop system to block outgoing connections on a per-process basis?
or samba to non-passworded shares (Windows: Easy, Linux: Easy?),
Smbclient is your friend...:)
that opens up an IRC *server* on a port (Windows: Easy unless there's a third party firewall, Linux: Easy but only on allowed ports and probably inaccessible remotely),
Yup - but the high port number is hardly a limitation. Incoming connections are an issue if the desktop is running iptables, but I wouldn't be surprised if many aren't. Does ubuntu/etc block incoming connections out-of-the-box?
that hides itself in the process list (Windows: Easy, Linux: Almost impossible),
Yup - it will be in the process list (barring a root escalation). But if the executable is named "bash" or something else that sounds innocuous that won't be of much help unless the full path is displayed.
that ignores termination requests (Windows: Easy, Linux: Almost impossible),
Uh, I don't know that this is trivial in windows (assuming you're not installing a device driver or something like that). On linux ignoring SIGKILL or SIGSTOP or SIGCONT is generally not possible (unless you get root and install a kernel module), ignoring any other signal is simple.
and that doesn't attract the attention of an administrator or other user who uses the same PC (Windows: Easy, Linux: Hard).
Keep in mind that we need to compare apples to apples here. If a typical windows user is running ubuntu and they manage to get a worm installed in their bash profile, they'll never notice it.
You can't compare linux kernel hackers running linux to your grandmother running windows. I'm sure the average windows device driver developer doesn't have many problems with botnets. The average grandmother running linux would probably be happy to follow instructions in an email to "Choose File-save as, then enter ~/runme, then hit Alt-F2 and type xterm, then type chmod a+x ~/runme, and then type ~/runme". Just make sure it runs some kind of flash game while it installs the worm, and they'll go around telling all their friends to run it since it only takes a few steps to do. If linux were ubiquitous then everybody would know how to execute an email attachment as they would become as common for linux as they are for windows currently. Sure, it is horrible practice, but turn the masses loose and that is what will happen.
Linux certainly does a much better job with security/etc than windows. However, you can do an awful lot of damage with just an ordinary user account on linux. You don't need raw sockets to engineer most worms.
I'm left wondering how they managed to get those astronauts off the moons surface. No construction, no launch facilities, no assembly needed.
Uh, the moon's gravity is significantly lower than that of Mars. The moon also lacks an atmosphere - the lunar landar had skin the thickness of aluminum foil at points which made it very light (it would have disintegrated if you tried to launch it from earth). The lack of atmosphere meant zero drag, and they could basically boost above the craters and immediately accellerate into an orbit. On a planet with an atmosphere you need to expend quite a bit of fuel just getting your ship above the bulk of the atmosphere before accellerating into orbit. The command module could also hang out very close to the lunar surface - in theory it could have been in orbit a few hundred feet off the ground as long as it cleared the craters. A Mars orbiter needs to be dozens of miles up at least.
While Mars is easier to launch from than Earth in terms of mass and atmosphere, it isn't nearly as easy as the moon. The atmosphere does make it easier to land on, however (you don't need to use fuel to completely decellerate like you do on the moon).
Now, you could park the return ship in orbit so that you only need to shuttle the crew itself up to Martian orbit. That would keep the size of the shuttle to a minimum (the only payload is the crew and any samples brought home - conceivably the samples could be taken in a different craft if they were heavy enough to warrant it). However, the rocket taking off from Mars is going to look a lot more like a Mercury capsule than the LEM.
So the Obama camp is already starting to learn some lessons of how it can be manipulated to promote greed based corporate ideals. Of how it's message can be hijacked to promote some deceitful corporations agenda.
Ok, look - I prefer Obama to Bush no doubt. However, the guy doesn't walk on water.
When the Bush administration awards contracts to Haliburton we don't hear about how special interests are manipulating the administration to serve their own ideals - we hear about how Bush is corrupt. Either a president is responsible for his administration, or he isn't. If the president can appoint political cronys, and then not be held responsible for their action, then what exactly has Bush done that's all that bad? Half of his horrible policies were originally thought up and promoted by somebody who worked for him. I hold him accountable, because ultimately he signed on the line, and he chose the people working for him.
News flash - Obama isn't perfect either. His administration is going to grant favors/etc to their own special interests. I didn't see Obama voting against the copyright czar or anything.
Now, compared to gitmo I think I can deal with silverlight. However, I see this as just business as usual in Washington, and I'm expecting to see another 4-80 more years of that based on what I've seen to date. I think a lot of under-25-year-old bubbles are going to get burst...
If taxpayers are going to spend a trillion dollars one way or another, I'd rather see there be tangible infrastructure improvements that are too heavy to be flown to china, than money in random corporate coffers.
Build better roads, bridges, nuclear plants, solar plants, rockets, whatever. That lowers the cost of doing business in the US, and it employs the sorts of folks who are hardest hit by the recession. Those folks buy TVs/etc, which employs the white collar jobs designing said consumer gadgets. When things stabilize at least you have bridges, roads, and power plants to show for your effort. You've bought "things" that you can touch and feel.
If you just give a boatload of money to some random corporation, what stops them from using it to build better infrastructure in Indonesia where their manufacturing plant is, thus raising the relative cost of doing business in the US even further.
The danger in supporting corporations per se is that they aren't tied to the US. The average large corporation is very much an international affair. At my fortune 500 company I've noticed diversity initiatives that are geared to making the company seem very much non-US-centric. Now, to the extent that this is more inclusive of overseas employees, I'm fine with that. However, the problem is that it also means that when there is a problem with the US economy the company isn't interested in helping to fix it - they're more interested in seeing whether this creates some opportunity elsewhere. During WWII the company used to put out weekly publications on things being done to aid with the war effort. Post 9/11 about the only thing I saw was a notice not to donate anything to rescue efforts without talking to senior management first. If a war broke out today, I'm sure the company would be eager to protect its reputation on both sides of the conflict...
I agree with aspects of what you've written. However, corporate crime can be a tricky thing to punish.
Typically you've got some managers who are committing outright fraud. They should be punished personally for their actions. If you just hit the corporation hard you end up putting a lot of people out of work, disrupting various supply lines, and hurting shareholders who may or may not have been complicit. On the other hand, shareholders need to stop being so bottom-line focused that they are detrimental to the national economy and they elect directors who will appoint officers who will break the law. The problem is that when you punish a corporation the shareholders at the time may have no relationship at all to the shareholders who comitted the crime.
From a deterrance standpoint, I don't think that punishing corporations does much to deter crime. A bunch of officers executed some criminal action, and made a boatload of money. Then their corporation's coffers are cleaned out by the government. The officers just retire or move on, and a lot of employees are stuck with the layoffs, bankruptcy, and raided pensions. Sure, shareholders worldwide might in theory look to more carefully monitor their CEOs so that the same thing doesn't happen to them. However, most typical shareholders do not have the kind of access needed to actually perform these kinds of audits.
I think that in general punishment is best directed at individual human beings. Ultimately it is humans who make decisions that have bad outcomes for society. And humans can be easily held accountable for their actions. That isn't to say that I don't support punishment at the corporate level. However, I think that injunctive relief of some kind might be a better approach (set up some government oversight committee to steer the corporation back into the right and clean house - don't just have them write up a check as the cost of doing business). A corporation can't "learn from its mistakes" - it is just a paper entity.
Couldn't agree more. Why should single roommates be at a tax disadvantage compared to a married couple? Why should an estranged spouse have some kind of priority over a devoted child in an inheritance dispute?
People should be free to govern their own lives as they see fit. Government should only step in to the extent necessary to protect third parties (particularly children). I'm not sure why the nuclear family needs to be a matter of law.
And why shouldn't a material breach be grounds for dissolving a marriage? If I enter into a marriage with fraudulent intent, shouldn't my spouse be entitled to soem kind of legal relief?
I'm not sure why marriage is such a special case. You could write up boilerplate contracts as is done in all kinds of industries like real estate, and then people could pick the contract that fits their needs.
There is a simple solution to that. Don't have so many laws that provide all kinds of loopholes to people because they are married.
If you want to have joint taxes / etc, fine. However, let it be between any assemblage of people who want to combine their incomes. Don't make the tax law such that a rich person can pay 1000 poor people $1000 each and then claim $50M in deductions.
Why do we need marriage codified into so many laws? Why should spouses get particular standing in an inerhitance hearing? Why should employers be required to offer benefits to spouses, but not roommates?
If the laws were simplified so that they focus on what they were trying to accomplish without making cultural/religious assumptions then we wouldn't be in a mess arguing over the definition of "marriage."
Yup. I'm a proponent of striking the word "marriage" and "spouse" from every law out there. The laws should be written in a way that they don't depend on what is fundamentally a cultural and religious institution to operate.
Why should "spouses" benefit at all from Social Security when somebody dies? Why not just write it to cover any adult living at the same address who meets certain qualifications for financial dependence? If somebody doesn't pursue career opportunities so that they can care for their sick single father, and depends on their social security income to help bridge the gap, then why shouldn't they get whatever would otherwise go to his wife when he dies?
Do not have the government recognize marriages or civil unions. Why does the government need to care about whether I'm married.
As far as taxes/benefits/etc go - just refer to adults living at the same mailing address. For things like custody/etc, why not have standard contractual agreements that individuals can choose to enter into, and also legal conventions. If two people live together without getting married and comingle their finances, and then have a child together - it isn't like the courts don't know how to handle the situation just because they weren't "married."
I don't think we need government regulating marriage any more than we need government regulating baptism, confession, or whatever other religious ceremony individuals might choose to participate in.
Yup. Torture is clearly wrong - the US should not stoop to this level.
However, the Geneva Convention actually spells out what should happen. A competant tribunal should assess the status of each prisoner. Those who are designated POWs should be treated accordingly and be repatriated upon cessation of hostilities (which would be immediately - since the wars against the states of Iraq and Afganistan are over). Those who are designated as unlawful combatants should be given a speedy trial and sentenced accordingly. Typically such prisoners tend to fall under military jurisdiction (spies caught behind allied lines and all that).
Certainly in past wars the status of a person engaged in hostile activities not wearing a uniform was not much of an open question. If convenient they would be captured, but typically they'd be hung within a week. They might be offered better deals if it suited the captor from an intelligence value. How do you think the Brits managed to turn just about every spy the Nazi's sent over in WWII? Every one realized they were facing a very speedy execution. A uniformed german pilot who bailed out over the UK would have been detained and repatriated at the close of WWII - they generally didn't become double agents since they knew they had nothing to fear. That's just how it works, and why fighting is best left to those in uniform...
True, I've seen some of these issues on Windows as well.
However, it doesn't require AD to address the security issues on Windows. An NT4 domain also works fine (I'm running one over Samba for my windows machines at home).
Oh, and it would be nice if MS had implemented roaming profiles in a more sane way. Actually, half the problem is stuff like Firefox that dumps 100MB of cache in the wrong profile folder so that it roams.
If I could get openafs working better I'd seriously consider using it across my network. If I could get my roaming profiles to work over it that would be even better - I wouldn't mind having 100MB of cache in my roaming profile if it replicated across all the machines on the network more efficiently. However, getting both linux and windows to play nice with krb5 sounds like a real pain.
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Yup - I've had cases like that. I was downgraded because my notes weren't photocopies of what was put up on the overhead. Yes, the teacher essentially wanted us to be 12th century scribes copying verbatim what was posted on an overhead projector.
I had also made the mistake of challenging her assertion that her aneroid barometer was indicating pressures in millibars (with a displayed range of ~28-32). Since it didn't actually contain mercury she insisted that it couldn't actually display pressures in inches of mercury.
I had not yet learned the art of dealing with tyrannical teachers. Suffice it to say I didn't do all that well in science that year. Now if somebody wants to live in ignorance and teach ignorance I just figure it will be that many fewer people competing effectively with me for a paycheck someday. :)
The main issue with X-plane is that nobody actually uses it (comparitively). The flight model is clearly superior in most situations. However, it lacks quite a bit of polish (voices sound robotic, graphics aren't as nice, flight-planning/etc isn't user-friendly, etc). It also lacks the MASSIVE library of add-ons. Many people stuck with FS2004 just so that they wouldn't have to give up their $500 libraries of add-ons (there was some compatibility, but generally not with super-advanced expensive payware aircraft). Granted, FSX also had serious performance issues on anything but the newest hardware, but from what I've seen as long as your equipment isn't too old you can turn down every graphics setting and end up with something that performs like 2004 while looking slightly better. I suspect the upgrades to FSX have tended to follow hardware upgrades as a result.
There is no question that X-plane could overtake MSFS if it wanted to, but I get the impression that the X-plane crowd doesn't want to "bow" to those who want the polished experience. If that remains the case I wouldn't be surprised if another simulator springs up from nothing and overtakes both X-plane and MSFS (unless MS gets back into the game).
Somehow I don't think the solution is to make it easier for poor people to have even more children. Great prenatal and childhood health care isn't going to do them much good when they get shot up trying to sell drugs.
I'm actually in favor of maybe a bit more socialization of medicine than exists currently. However, spending money on people who are going to go ahead and waste it just isn't the answer. Most poor people are that way for a reason - and it isn't because nobody has just handed them a 6-figure job. Now, some poor people are hard workers who have genuinely been out on their luck, and we need to do a better job helping these people out...
Yup - these kinds of practices are common on this side of the pond as well...
My favorite is the "National Electric Code" (TM). It is a copyrighted set of codes governing electrical work, which is essentially made a statue in most areas of the USA. The problem is that it is a copyrighted work that you can't obtain freely (as in speech - you can get some limited access to it free of charge under certain conditions). Sure, for $100 I'm sure you can buy a copy of it somewhere. What I object to is the idea that the law has essentially become copyrighted.
If I wanted to I could make an annotated copy of the Federal Register or the Constitution or whatever and explain how the folks running the show are a bunch of clowns. That would be completely legal and a form of free speech and protest. If I were to do the same thing with the National Electric Code (TM) then I could be sued, because it isn't public property. And yet, it has the standing of law in most jurisdictions.
Legislative bodies should be forbidden from incorporating copyrighted works into laws by reference. If they want to codify the NEC then they should just quote the whole thing verbaitim in a bill, and then it becomes public domain.
Ok, if oil were taxed per its impact on the environment, and electricity were taxed per its impact on the environment, then all you would need to do is whatever is cheapest.
If it is truly more expensive to ship the item then just pay for the electricity and know that you're going it in a manner that is sustainable. If it is cheaper to ship the item, then do it, and know that the jet fuel is less harmful than the coal you're burning right now.
We don't need millions of per-item regulations. We just need the cost of energy to reflect what it really costs mankind. If a barrel of oil costs $100 to sequester the carbon and clean the soot off of buildings, then charge a $100/bbl tax. If it only costs a nickel then charge a nickel and stop worrying about it. This will have a double effect:
1. It will encourage consumers to make choices that are less harmful to the enviornment.
2. It will fund cleanup so that the harmful activities are only harmful in the short term.
Add in the costs related to invading middle eastern countries to secure oil and you'll address the taxes-for-oil-barons problem as well.
The problem is that right now those who benefit from certain forms of energy aren't the ones paying the full price for its use.
In fact, if you want people to "do the right thing" then you should make it MORE profitable to do so.
If you can make a billion dollars in profit from strip-mining farmland for coal, but you are cast as the devil incarnate if you charge patients for medical care, then you're going to have more strip-miners than doctors in your society.
The problem isn't that doing good costs money - it is just making sure that the costs are appropriately split up. The problem with doctors isn't that they cost money, but rather that the people who need care can't afford it. And so on...
I hate to nitpick, but do those high energy cosmic rays actually come from the sun?
I thought that they were considered extrasolar (and possibly extragalactic) in origin. I'm sure they come from a number of different phenomena, but my understanding is that we're talking about really high energy suff like supernovas or quasars.
And of course the stirrers themselves just become more radioactive waste. I heard about that project maybe 15 years ago - there was some concern that these stirrers would just break down over a few years, and they would be unservicable since they were immersed in a million gallons of highly radioactive sludge. I wonder how it is working out...?
I knew a guy who had some involvement with their cleanup efforts. I heard some scary stuff.
Apparently they just dumped stuff in tanks and only kept the loosest records of what it was. Then they pumped stuff around from tank to tank. According to the paper trail some tanks once contained 10X their total volumes or more (which is obviously an error).
Most of the stuff by volume is just chemical sludge of various kinds - most of which could probably be safely incinerated. The problem is that it is laced with all kinds of nasty isotopes, and it is very hard to separate them. The tanks were subject to all kinds of chemistry (which is why chemists don't normally mix thousands of gallons of various waste streams into million gallon tanks without a care for what was already in the tank). A big risk is just chemical explosions that could send radioactive materials flying everywhere.
On top of that much of the cleanup work (such as chemical analysis of the tank contents) was done in a shoddy way.
Somebody really needs to just start going through the mess one tank at a time with a huge budget and start cleaning things up...
Just to warn you - HD with Myth works fine, but make sure you do your homework. Even modern CPUs have a lot of difficulty with software rendering of HD, so you need to make sure whatever hardware you run can handle whatever you are throwing at it. Don't take an old desktop with an old graphics card and load it up with 3 high def tuners and a 5400 RPM hard drive with 256MB of RAM and expect it to record 3 HD streams and play one back at the same time, while commercial-flagging and transcoding 2 others.
The thing I like about Myth is that it scales. You can have 5 backends with 3 HD tuners each recording video and storing it on a SAN, and then have 10 front-ends hooked up to HD TVs across your mansion, and everything would work fine. You might need to carefully plan if you want to run a media server for a hotel or something, but you shouldn't have any issues with your house. You can also just run the whole thing on a single PC - possibly an older one if you're not doing HD. A common scenario would be a single backend with all the tuners and storage, and some small set-top boxes with either a network boot or a small flash drive for the OS/software.
Uh, mythtv already does #1 on your list (using a half dozen different algorithms, including blank screen and logo detection).
It doesn't do #2 - probably because #1 works great 95% of the time...
I don't think the stairs were on the pre-NES versions of the game. Instead you just had a goofy bouncing marshmellow man that you had to run underneath. Once you got two guys past him they'd run into the building, cross their streams, and end the game.
Not a whole lot less campy, but at least slightly less annoying.
This applies to any contract. Regardless of what is written in the agreement, no party to a contract may make a material change to an agreement after the fact without the other parties (possibly implied) consent. A material change is any change impacting the substance of the agreement - ie it might have impacted your decision to enter into the agreement in the first place. Money of any kind is almost always considered material. Maybe if we're talking a 50 cent error in a $100M real estate deal it might not be - but nobody would even bother to try to extract an extra 50 cents on such a deal anyway.
Is your credit card company raising interest rates (outside of the variable terms already set forth)? Just tell them no. They can choose to close your account, but you can pay off the remaining balance under the original terms. Or, they could choose to continue under the original terms (which is fair).
Anything to the contrary in any contract you sign of any kind simply isn't enforcable. Any court would throw out terms allowing unilateral changes after the fact. They might be able to imply consent if they clearly warn you of the changes and then give you a reasonable time and reasonable means to inform them of your intent to not accept the change.
Disclaimer, IANAL...
Uh, this is easier on linux than you think - if you assume the user is as clueless as the typical windows user who owns a PC controlled by a botnet.
Make a program that starts up every boot / login for a particular user (or all users) on a standard home PC (Windows: Easy, Linux: Hard),
Easy - cat >> ~/.bash_profile. When was the last time you checked one of the half-dozen files that runs every time a shell spawns in your home directory?
that is difficult to stop booting up (Windows: Easy, Linux: Hard),
Ok, that is hard. But bots don't rely on being hard to remove so much as not being noticed. If you brought either a linux or a windows PC in for service and it was known to be part of a botnet, it would almost certainly be reimaged from scratch in either case. What linux admin would just trust their ability to "remove it all?"
that distributes itself via email (Windows: Easy unless there's a third-party firewall, Linux: Depends very much on the system configuration but in general harder),
Uh, just use /usr/bin/sendmail - or just implement SMTP. Very few linux systems are configured to block outgoing TCP connections. If anything your typical windows personal firewall is more secure since it will bring up the annoying allow/deny pop-up. Who configures their linux desktop system to block outgoing connections on a per-process basis?
or samba to non-passworded shares (Windows: Easy, Linux: Easy?),
Smbclient is your friend... :)
that opens up an IRC *server* on a port (Windows: Easy unless there's a third party firewall, Linux: Easy but only on allowed ports and probably inaccessible remotely),
Yup - but the high port number is hardly a limitation. Incoming connections are an issue if the desktop is running iptables, but I wouldn't be surprised if many aren't. Does ubuntu/etc block incoming connections out-of-the-box?
that hides itself in the process list (Windows: Easy, Linux: Almost impossible),
Yup - it will be in the process list (barring a root escalation). But if the executable is named "bash" or something else that sounds innocuous that won't be of much help unless the full path is displayed.
that ignores termination requests (Windows: Easy, Linux: Almost impossible),
Uh, I don't know that this is trivial in windows (assuming you're not installing a device driver or something like that). On linux ignoring SIGKILL or SIGSTOP or SIGCONT is generally not possible (unless you get root and install a kernel module), ignoring any other signal is simple.
and that doesn't attract the attention of an administrator or other user who uses the same PC (Windows: Easy, Linux: Hard).
Keep in mind that we need to compare apples to apples here. If a typical windows user is running ubuntu and they manage to get a worm installed in their bash profile, they'll never notice it.
You can't compare linux kernel hackers running linux to your grandmother running windows. I'm sure the average windows device driver developer doesn't have many problems with botnets. The average grandmother running linux would probably be happy to follow instructions in an email to "Choose File-save as, then enter ~/runme, then hit Alt-F2 and type xterm, then type chmod a+x ~/runme, and then type ~/runme". Just make sure it runs some kind of flash game while it installs the worm, and they'll go around telling all their friends to run it since it only takes a few steps to do. If linux were ubiquitous then everybody would know how to execute an email attachment as they would become as common for linux as they are for windows currently. Sure, it is horrible practice, but turn the masses loose and that is what will happen.
Linux certainly does a much better job with security/etc than windows. However, you can do an awful lot of damage with just an ordinary user account on linux. You don't need raw sockets to engineer most worms.
I'm left wondering how they managed to get those astronauts off the moons surface. No construction, no launch facilities, no assembly needed.
Uh, the moon's gravity is significantly lower than that of Mars. The moon also lacks an atmosphere - the lunar landar had skin the thickness of aluminum foil at points which made it very light (it would have disintegrated if you tried to launch it from earth). The lack of atmosphere meant zero drag, and they could basically boost above the craters and immediately accellerate into an orbit. On a planet with an atmosphere you need to expend quite a bit of fuel just getting your ship above the bulk of the atmosphere before accellerating into orbit. The command module could also hang out very close to the lunar surface - in theory it could have been in orbit a few hundred feet off the ground as long as it cleared the craters. A Mars orbiter needs to be dozens of miles up at least.
While Mars is easier to launch from than Earth in terms of mass and atmosphere, it isn't nearly as easy as the moon. The atmosphere does make it easier to land on, however (you don't need to use fuel to completely decellerate like you do on the moon).
Now, you could park the return ship in orbit so that you only need to shuttle the crew itself up to Martian orbit. That would keep the size of the shuttle to a minimum (the only payload is the crew and any samples brought home - conceivably the samples could be taken in a different craft if they were heavy enough to warrant it). However, the rocket taking off from Mars is going to look a lot more like a Mercury capsule than the LEM.
So the Obama camp is already starting to learn some lessons of how it can be manipulated to promote greed based corporate ideals. Of how it's message can be hijacked to promote some deceitful corporations agenda.
Ok, look - I prefer Obama to Bush no doubt. However, the guy doesn't walk on water.
When the Bush administration awards contracts to Haliburton we don't hear about how special interests are manipulating the administration to serve their own ideals - we hear about how Bush is corrupt. Either a president is responsible for his administration, or he isn't. If the president can appoint political cronys, and then not be held responsible for their action, then what exactly has Bush done that's all that bad? Half of his horrible policies were originally thought up and promoted by somebody who worked for him. I hold him accountable, because ultimately he signed on the line, and he chose the people working for him.
News flash - Obama isn't perfect either. His administration is going to grant favors/etc to their own special interests. I didn't see Obama voting against the copyright czar or anything.
Now, compared to gitmo I think I can deal with silverlight. However, I see this as just business as usual in Washington, and I'm expecting to see another 4-80 more years of that based on what I've seen to date. I think a lot of under-25-year-old bubbles are going to get burst...
If taxpayers are going to spend a trillion dollars one way or another, I'd rather see there be tangible infrastructure improvements that are too heavy to be flown to china, than money in random corporate coffers.
Build better roads, bridges, nuclear plants, solar plants, rockets, whatever. That lowers the cost of doing business in the US, and it employs the sorts of folks who are hardest hit by the recession. Those folks buy TVs/etc, which employs the white collar jobs designing said consumer gadgets. When things stabilize at least you have bridges, roads, and power plants to show for your effort. You've bought "things" that you can touch and feel.
If you just give a boatload of money to some random corporation, what stops them from using it to build better infrastructure in Indonesia where their manufacturing plant is, thus raising the relative cost of doing business in the US even further.
The danger in supporting corporations per se is that they aren't tied to the US. The average large corporation is very much an international affair. At my fortune 500 company I've noticed diversity initiatives that are geared to making the company seem very much non-US-centric. Now, to the extent that this is more inclusive of overseas employees, I'm fine with that. However, the problem is that it also means that when there is a problem with the US economy the company isn't interested in helping to fix it - they're more interested in seeing whether this creates some opportunity elsewhere. During WWII the company used to put out weekly publications on things being done to aid with the war effort. Post 9/11 about the only thing I saw was a notice not to donate anything to rescue efforts without talking to senior management first. If a war broke out today, I'm sure the company would be eager to protect its reputation on both sides of the conflict...
I agree with aspects of what you've written. However, corporate crime can be a tricky thing to punish.
Typically you've got some managers who are committing outright fraud. They should be punished personally for their actions. If you just hit the corporation hard you end up putting a lot of people out of work, disrupting various supply lines, and hurting shareholders who may or may not have been complicit. On the other hand, shareholders need to stop being so bottom-line focused that they are detrimental to the national economy and they elect directors who will appoint officers who will break the law. The problem is that when you punish a corporation the shareholders at the time may have no relationship at all to the shareholders who comitted the crime.
From a deterrance standpoint, I don't think that punishing corporations does much to deter crime. A bunch of officers executed some criminal action, and made a boatload of money. Then their corporation's coffers are cleaned out by the government. The officers just retire or move on, and a lot of employees are stuck with the layoffs, bankruptcy, and raided pensions. Sure, shareholders worldwide might in theory look to more carefully monitor their CEOs so that the same thing doesn't happen to them. However, most typical shareholders do not have the kind of access needed to actually perform these kinds of audits.
I think that in general punishment is best directed at individual human beings. Ultimately it is humans who make decisions that have bad outcomes for society. And humans can be easily held accountable for their actions. That isn't to say that I don't support punishment at the corporate level. However, I think that injunctive relief of some kind might be a better approach (set up some government oversight committee to steer the corporation back into the right and clean house - don't just have them write up a check as the cost of doing business). A corporation can't "learn from its mistakes" - it is just a paper entity.
Couldn't agree more. Why should single roommates be at a tax disadvantage compared to a married couple? Why should an estranged spouse have some kind of priority over a devoted child in an inheritance dispute?
People should be free to govern their own lives as they see fit. Government should only step in to the extent necessary to protect third parties (particularly children). I'm not sure why the nuclear family needs to be a matter of law.
And why shouldn't a material breach be grounds for dissolving a marriage? If I enter into a marriage with fraudulent intent, shouldn't my spouse be entitled to soem kind of legal relief?
I'm not sure why marriage is such a special case. You could write up boilerplate contracts as is done in all kinds of industries like real estate, and then people could pick the contract that fits their needs.
There is a simple solution to that. Don't have so many laws that provide all kinds of loopholes to people because they are married.
If you want to have joint taxes / etc, fine. However, let it be between any assemblage of people who want to combine their incomes. Don't make the tax law such that a rich person can pay 1000 poor people $1000 each and then claim $50M in deductions.
Why do we need marriage codified into so many laws? Why should spouses get particular standing in an inerhitance hearing? Why should employers be required to offer benefits to spouses, but not roommates?
If the laws were simplified so that they focus on what they were trying to accomplish without making cultural/religious assumptions then we wouldn't be in a mess arguing over the definition of "marriage."
Yup. I'm a proponent of striking the word "marriage" and "spouse" from every law out there. The laws should be written in a way that they don't depend on what is fundamentally a cultural and religious institution to operate.
Why should "spouses" benefit at all from Social Security when somebody dies? Why not just write it to cover any adult living at the same address who meets certain qualifications for financial dependence? If somebody doesn't pursue career opportunities so that they can care for their sick single father, and depends on their social security income to help bridge the gap, then why shouldn't they get whatever would otherwise go to his wife when he dies?
Easier solution.
Do not have the government recognize marriages or civil unions. Why does the government need to care about whether I'm married.
As far as taxes/benefits/etc go - just refer to adults living at the same mailing address. For things like custody/etc, why not have standard contractual agreements that individuals can choose to enter into, and also legal conventions. If two people live together without getting married and comingle their finances, and then have a child together - it isn't like the courts don't know how to handle the situation just because they weren't "married."
I don't think we need government regulating marriage any more than we need government regulating baptism, confession, or whatever other religious ceremony individuals might choose to participate in.
Yup. Torture is clearly wrong - the US should not stoop to this level.
However, the Geneva Convention actually spells out what should happen. A competant tribunal should assess the status of each prisoner. Those who are designated POWs should be treated accordingly and be repatriated upon cessation of hostilities (which would be immediately - since the wars against the states of Iraq and Afganistan are over). Those who are designated as unlawful combatants should be given a speedy trial and sentenced accordingly. Typically such prisoners tend to fall under military jurisdiction (spies caught behind allied lines and all that).
Certainly in past wars the status of a person engaged in hostile activities not wearing a uniform was not much of an open question. If convenient they would be captured, but typically they'd be hung within a week. They might be offered better deals if it suited the captor from an intelligence value. How do you think the Brits managed to turn just about every spy the Nazi's sent over in WWII? Every one realized they were facing a very speedy execution. A uniformed german pilot who bailed out over the UK would have been detained and repatriated at the close of WWII - they generally didn't become double agents since they knew they had nothing to fear. That's just how it works, and why fighting is best left to those in uniform...
True, I've seen some of these issues on Windows as well.
However, it doesn't require AD to address the security issues on Windows. An NT4 domain also works fine (I'm running one over Samba for my windows machines at home).
Oh, and it would be nice if MS had implemented roaming profiles in a more sane way. Actually, half the problem is stuff like Firefox that dumps 100MB of cache in the wrong profile folder so that it roams.
If I could get openafs working better I'd seriously consider using it across my network. If I could get my roaming profiles to work over it that would be even better - I wouldn't mind having 100MB of cache in my roaming profile if it replicated across all the machines on the network more efficiently. However, getting both linux and windows to play nice with krb5 sounds like a real pain.