Well, if a site is vulnerable to exploits that give an attacker almost complete control over the content of the site, then the ability of an attacker to get an SSL certificate for that site isn't much of an additional concern. They can already have the site in question serving up viruses or whatever to all their customers. They can also have the site in question redirect their login screen to the attacker's own servers (which might be on a different domain that the attacker would have no difficulty obtaining an SSL cert for in the first place).
My argument is that certificates should be linked to whoever controls a domain (for a lengthy period of time). That person is the de-facto domain owner in any case. If your domain is completely open to hacking then forged SSL certs are the least of your troubles.
Right now browsers don't complain at all when you submit all kinds of personal information to who-knows-who when SSL is not in use. I'm suggesting that at the very least we ought to be able to encrypt these connections.
Basically I see several layers of security: 1. Well-confirmed certificate issuance that protects an SSL connection. 2. Encryption, but without a well-confirmed certificate. 3. No encryption at all.
I'd suggest that these are ordered in accordance with the security provided. However, many browsers complain about #2, but not about #3 (which is LESS secure). My proposal is that browsers treat #2 as less secure than #1, but more secure than #3. What's wrong with that?
I've been following the mozilla cacert bug for years. They've held off on including them as a trusted root because they haven't passed an expensive audit. However, their automated checks at least ensure that you have control of the domain that you're requesting a certificate for.
I've always thought that this would be a good approach for issuing free or dirt cheap certificates: When somebody applies for a certificate they are given some file to serve up from their webroot. Every week for three weeks a new file is provided. The domain is randomly checked over that period of three weeks to ensure that all the provided files are being served. After this, the certificate is issued. Renewals would follow a similar process (but with a reminder sent out well in advance so that the checks could take place well before expiry).
It is unlikely that somebody could exercise this level of control for an extended period of time simply via DNS spoofing or advertising bad routes. However, the issued certificate would only include the domain, and would not certify owner details (name/address/phone/etc). To obtain a cert with these credentials I think that a more intensive check would be prudent.
The current system basically amounts to a tax on SSL, and little more. If you pay some money to some auditor you can get into the SSL certificate business.
Also - SSL should allow certificate-less operation. Sure, that is vulnerable to MITM, but at least it is better than unencrypted http. Perhaps we should have more than two tiers of security (completely insecure, and "completely" secure).
It is in the interest of all organizations of any kind to provide the least service for the greatest cost - as far as they can get away with it. That applies to corporations and governments alike. The reason insurance companies can't just provide zero service is that nobody would bother with insurance in such a circumstance.
The problem with health care in my opinion is that the one person who is least involved in everything is the patient. The patient doesn't pick his insurer (his employer does), he doesn't pick what plans are available (his employer does), he doesn't have much say in his treatment (his doctor does), and he doesn't agree to the financial charges associated with a procedure (if he isn't conscious he might not even consent to the procedure at all).
Imagine if a car lease was typically an employer benefit - everybody got a car as part of their job. Nobody bought cars privately (well, maybe a few people do). There would be no car dealers (well, maybe one per city - with little selection). There would be no car reviews (since everybody just takes what their employer gives them). The employers incentive is to give you something with four wheels so that they can claim to provide the benefit. Most people don't choose a job based on the company car offering - in fact you might not even find out what the car was until you got it. Employees would pay some percentage of maintenance costs. You'd drop off your car, and then pick it up in a couple of days (whenever they got around to it), and would receive 14 bills in the mail over the next six months. You'd try hard to get your leasing company to pay its share, and would fork out the $75 copay for an annual inspection (which would be itemized as costing $2000 list, with the employer paying $200 and you paying $75 and the rest being written off). If you're even consulted on the repairs, you'd get a rushed call from the mechanic, and when you question any part of the proposed work you'd get major attitude - "Look, I've studied cars for years, and have fixed thousands of them. Who do you think you are to question my approach? If you don't go with what I'm proposing the car could explode and kill your whole family any day now. Look, if you don't just accept everything I proposed you're going to just have to find yourself some other mechanic - I'll just bill you for my time so far." If you want a second opinion prepare to wait two months to get another appointment and leave your car for a few more days - chances are you'll get a different set of expensive repair proposals, and an equally snotty attitude. It will be illegal to repair cars without substantial licensing requirements, and it would be illegal to sell parts or tools to anybody not licensed. Oil and wiper fluid would require a prescription from your mechanic to obtain, for a modest $25 copay per bottle.
In such a world driving a car would be about as pleasant as going to the hospital is today. The fix is to get patients more involved in their care, and create more competition among providers. Some kind of support for the indigent would also be reasonable, but it shouldn't be first-class care (when you get first-class food, clothing, shelter, and medical without working, then why work at all?). Providers should have fixed fee schedules, and everybody should pay the same rate (no billing people w/o insurance 10X more). Fees should be disclosed prior to treatment. Patients ought to have the abiltiy to comparison shop for services at other providers, and request transport to another provider. Patients should have access to the medicines and equipment needed to treat themselves (insurers might require a prescription to pay for it, but people ought to be able to buy medicine for cash no questions asked). Patients should also be free to see lower-tier providers like triage nurses - just as people have the freedom to take their car to the guy down the street to have the brakes replaced.
This will create competition and incentives to provide service that differentiates
I think that was the parent's point - they can fly like an airplane at those altitudes, but they can't hover.
When a VTOL craft flies like an airplane it relies on its full wing surface - at a considerable forward airspeed - probably at least 200mph relative to the ground. The faster you move forward, the faster a wing works.
When it converts to hover mode, a rotary wing craft like the Osprey is just a big ugly helicopter (and less than a great one at that - it is a design compromise). Those blades have a lot less surface area than the wing, and they can only rotate so fast.
A thrust-direction system like the F35 can only hover when its maximum engine power is greater than the weight of the aircraft. The problem is that the power output of a jet decreases with altitude. Normally this is more than compensated by the lower atmosphere density which reduces drag, but that only helps if you're trying to move the airframe through the air.
The VTOL aircraft would be aided slightly by the fact that they do have fixed wings that could be pointed into the relatively high winds up there - that would give them extra lift. However, I doubt these winds are uniform near the mountain so now you add all kinds of crazy stalls as your orientation changes.
I'm not aware of any non-rocket engine technology that can reliably handle hovering at 29k feet. Rockets would certainly work - you'd still need to deal with eratic winds but the rocket engine does not vary much in power as a function of external atmospheric conditions (in fact, it might perform better the closer you get to vacuum - not sure how significant an effect the air around the rocket has). Of course, a rocket-powered aircraft is going to have to carry a lot of oxidizer - I guess a really clever design could utilize atmospheric air to reduce oxidizer requirements (kind of like an O2-injected turbojet).
Hmm - am I showing my age by commenting that the only Mac I ever owned was 1-bit monochrome, while a PC I used from the same era actually had 2-bit CGA? Granted, Macs got color not long afterwards and I'll concede your points regarding desktop publishing / etc.
Sometimes I wonder what the relationship is with dark matter. One might consider that dark matter had some mass distribution, and the ordinary matter just got pulled into match. Perhaps a supermassive dark matter "black hole" of some sort existed all along and then formed an ordinary black hole in the same place. Then again, a "black hole" formed by dark matter would behave identically to an ordinary matter black hole for all intents and purposes (a black hole's only attributes are its mass and angular momentum, and presumably dark matter could have both of those).
And, if an ordinary black hole forms, wouldn't it then tend to concentrate dark matter around it (since it would seem logical that dark matter would be as attracted to normal matter as normal matter is attracted to dark matter). Would that potentially prevent Hawking radiation from being emitted, since presumably those virtual particles with negative energy wouldn't have any impact on the dark matter in the black hole? Could all the ordinary matter in a black hole evaporate, and yet there is still a dark matter black hole in the same position?
There is a big chicken-and-egg issue around galaxy formation. Did the galaxies form and then the black holes formed in their cores with all that extra mass concentration? Did the black holes form first and nucleate the galaxy? Did a dark matter concentration form first and nucleate the rest of the galaxy?
Then you have some string theory variants that suggest that gravity can travel between branes in a multiverse of sorts. Perhaps a galaxy in this universe forms because the region of space is "close" to a galaxy that already exists in some other universe. Dark matter might just be galaxies in other universes. The recent dark matter observations in the bullet cluster might be a case of four galaxies semi-colliding - two in our universe and one in each of two different other universes. (The observation was that most of the mass was non-visible and non-interacting, but the visible matter did interact. If the visible matter was all in our universe, and the non-visible matter was in each of two other universes, then that might explain why they passed through each other with only gravitational interaction since within their universes there was only one galaxy present.)
Obviously none of this is easy to measure - I'd be interested in the opinion of somebody more versed in astrophysics than I am. I'm always amazed by how little we know about gravity on these scales and the large-scale structure of the universe.
And hence the reason that all successful IT companies have marketing and PR departments that do the talking...
Very rarely is social change made on the basis of its inherent rightness or wrongness. Usually social change comes about because charismatic leaders inspire others to adopt it. For every Thomas Jefferson you have an Adolf Hitler. One was clearly in the right and one was clearly in the wrong, but both were followed by many. Linux advocates won't change the world simply by being right.
Maybe this teacher is a lost cause. However, the harsh response will likely tick off not only the teacher but her 10 colleagues who might otherwise have been on the fence. The superintendent is also less likely to intervene since he'll feel like he's stuck in a war between two zealots.
If the response stuck to the facts and how linux can be used to the advantage of education, he'd have done better. He could have pointed to the many careers that use linux, and the fact that it freely and legally gives student access to many professional-quality tools (compilers, servers, math packages, scientific simulation software, etc). Its ability to run on older hardware could enable parents to pick up a cheap computer at a thrift store and get decent word/spreadsheet/etc capabilities out of it. He could point to many educational initiatives both in the US and abroad that make use of linux. He could also point out how the free software community cares greatly about copyright - they developed alternatives to commercial software precisely so that they wouldn't need to violate the law, and they also use copyright law to enforce their own legal rights.
I agree with many of his points, but not the degree to which they were stated. I don't think that bringing the NEA into this was particularly helpful either - as much as I hate the NEA I doubt they'd have all that much interest in mounting an official anti-MS-competitor campaign for a few million dollars. the NEA might allow MS to present at teacher educational forums on the dangers of software piracy, but that is probably about it.
When you communicate you should communicate for a purpose. When you communicate with an adversary you should communicate even more deliberately. That purpose generally shouldn't be to "vent" - communicate with your spouse or your pillow or something other than your entire world or the person you are angry with if you want to vent. Or type up an email to yourself and then delete it (do NOT populate the TO line in such emails - I've seen them accidentally sent far too often).
Yeah, but how much current would the atmosphere and ground be able to sustain? The atmosphere might have a lot of negative charge, but it is just as separated from the elevator as it is from the ground. The air molecules that immediately strike the elevator would potentially transfer their charge, but that would be about it unless a thunder cloud drifed by (which has much more concentrated potential energy).
As an analogy, put an identical static charge on a doorknob, and a ballon. If you touch the ballon nothing happens (maybe hairs on your arm might stand up). If you touch the doorknob - zap! The conductivity of your hand is the same, and the charge on the object you touch is the same.
The elevator would obviously need to withstand lightning strikes, however.
How many records in each table? If both address and range have 2000 records then that is 4M combinations, which it might be running through (and discarding the ones that don't meet the join criteria). That isn't the smart way to do it, but I could see how it could happen.
Yes, but the face value of those securities was a fantasy. If they had so much value, why doesn't anybody other than Uncle Sam want to buy them? It is like going to the mall, coming home with a bunch of junk you don't need, and then talking about how much money you "saved" while there.
Most analysts think those securities have very little value - otherwise they'd be out buying them on their own.
Then, when Uncle Sam becomes the nation's primary landlord we'll suddenly see a reluctance to foreclose, which makes those securities worth even less.
The proper strategy would have been to offer eminent-domain bailouts. Instituations that can't be allowed to fail wouldn't be, but the government would take over and buy shares for the company's net value (which might be zero after deducting any cash the government needs to infuse to fix things). Then the company is no longer a profit-making concern and there are no shareholders to worry about - the government can do with the execs as needed and run the company. Once everything is stabilized the government can issue an IPO and the taxpayers recover their costs.
When a company is mismanaged the solution isn't to hand more money to the people that are mismanaging it. I don't want the government in the financial services business, but I'd rather see that than massive spending of public funds on private ventures with no accountability.
but it was before we had computers with enough RAM to handle it IMHO.
IMHO, we still don't have computers with enough RAM to handle it.:) I can pretty much count on runnning anything java-based to eat up 50X as much RAM as the equivalent done in C (or anything else).
In fact, I normally run with ulimit -v 1200000 (for all non-root or init.d processes) so that I don't have to worry about a swap-storm when a process goes out of control. I never notice the limit except when I go to launch some java app. Then I have to raise the limit and watch my swap go nuts (and this is on a system that otherwise does fine with apache, mysql, mythbackend, and smbd all running at once with maybe a compile job or two running - granted, with appropriate (io)niceness set on everything).
Sure, I could add an extra GB or two of RAM just so that java would behave, but why would I want to?
Uh, sure. Just like the last Rhodes scholar educated the populace so well that we ended up with Republican control of both houses and the executive branch?:)
Obama isn't really raising my hopes much. I'd love to be wrong, but I've my share of American political "revolutions" to know better...
Now that is marketing genius! Make a device that lacks 90% of the feature set of everything else on the market, charge more than a typical device of the same class (which doesn't lack features like a display with the ability to pick what song you want to listen to), and then market it as an improvement.
Make sure that you are tied to a particular piece of software on the PC just to load songs on it as well.
And some people buy it!
For the cost of a shuffle you could have bought any number of competing players where you could actually pick what you want to listen to, and have FM radio as well. Not to mention drag-and-drop loading of files as a USB storage device (sure, you could use itunes or some other GUI if you wanted to as well).
"But those other players aren't as easy to use as a shuffle..." Ok, then just pretend they don't have any buttons other than FF/REW and +/- - and suddenly they work exactly the same.
I'm sure Apple's next invention will be a 36" LCD HDTV for $9k that only has a volume control and is permanently tuned to Apple TV (with a $20/month subscription charge). As an added feature it will include a mic so that Apple can figure out what kind of household you are and apply programming specific to your household. Maybe they'll call it the Telescreen and people will buy it in droves (hey, it is cheaper than cable!)...:)
The realization that another Bush could rise up and trample on our ideals and flout the law with little real consequence and even get enthusiastic support from a substantial minority of the population.
Substantial minority? You mean a 50.001% minority? (Or a 49.999% minority if you thought Gore should have won?) For most of his time in office Bush had a great deal of the country behind him (just maybe not your circle of friends).
The thing that scares me about Bush is that a MAJORITY of Americans supported him. I didn't see the Democrats lining up to put a stop to the Patriot Act. I'm generally a conservative and I scares me to see how many of my conservative friends supported him. I didn't think there was anything conservative about him.
The problems this country faces have nothing to do with a "minority" of people taking control. The problem is that the majority of Americans believe in authoritarian government. They might disagree as to some details of policy that this government should enact, but just about everybody agrees that it shouldn't be up to people to run their own lives.
Frankly, most computer science programs train people to be software engineers. Most computer scientists, simply aren't.
I'm sorry, I have to agree with the parent post - doctors are essentially technicians, or perhaps engineers. That isn't meant to be demeaning - when I have a medical problem I want somebody to apply the principles of ENGINEERING - not SCIENCE to fixing it.
Science is about understanding the unknown. Engineering is about rigorously solving a particular instance of an understood problem. You don't want a scientist designing a manned spaceship, and you don't want an engineer coming up with a novel propusion technology.
To be honest, there isn't much solid science in medical research. The problem is ethics - you can't conduct controlled experiments on people (or even to varying degrees on most advanced mammals). That is why you can have 3 clinical trials that each come to opposing conclusions with "95% confidence." They're the best we can do, so we need to make the most of them, but we shouldn't be shocked if we find out we're really wrong about a lot of things.
"Real science" doesn't really happen with anything more advanced than mice. It isn't a matter of skill or anything - just the limitations of the field. But, that's ok - even without ethical constraints we still don't understand 80% of what there is to know about a bacterium.
I still advocate swap when you have tons of RAM so that RAM can be used for disk cache. Unless, of course, your RAM is larger than your disk-based storage (in which case you don't need any more cache).:)
If you are having trouble with swapping I'd adjust your swappiness accordingly. (Assuming you're using a progressive OS.)
You see, if you've got a ton of physical RAM, then the assumption is that much of it is already just sitting there unused.
If that is the case, then you wasted money by buying too much RAM. You should have spent more of it on your CPU or whatever else is rate-limiting.
I love posts by folks who say "just buy more RAM." Sure, and while you're at it buy a 16-processor mainframe to type email on - you won't have any performance issues of any kind. However, the whole point of a well-written OS is that it allows you to do work on a $500 machine that a lesser OS would require a $1000 machine for. If I wanted to go out and spend $50k on a desktop I'd run Vista.:)
If I were to buy more RAM for my PC I'd have to go without something else. So, I make the most efficient choices of how to spend my money, and then maximize the benefit of the resources I have available. Linux runs most efficiently with at least moderate use of swap.
The meaningful benchmark isn't performance, but performance per dollar of hardware. Any computer can be made faster with unlimited budget.
Agreed - a bypass surgery should just have a fixed price.
I'm normally in favor of freedom to negotiate prices, but in medicne there are some problems with this. When care is needed it is typically needed urgently - shopping aroud can be dangerous due to delay and transport risks. Also - a patient is typically under duress and might not even be competant (or conscious) to negotiate. And even if they were the doctor treating them probably doesn't even know what the procedure costs.
Hospitals should be required to publish a fee schedule for all services rendered. The hospital can set its own fees, but it cannot deviate from them for anybody. Individuals could look up hospital fees while they are healthy and then they'd know where they want to be treated if they get sick. People paying cash would get the same rate as those with insurance.
Obviously at least some dems must have voted with the repubs.
I really hope that the dems take 80% of the senate. Then at least people won't be blaming the repubs for hampering progress when the dems go and do more of the same. I'm sick of both parties. Maybe they'll surprise me - nothing would make me happier...
How do "I" share responsiblity with the "other two"? I'm not any of the three items you listed - I'm a poor schmo who has to pay his doctor bills and insurance preimiums like everybody else. I'm not a doctor, an insurance company, or a pharmaceutical company.
I just don't think that getting rid of drug patents is going to fix the problem. It just makes the most recently developed drugs cheaper than they would otherwise be for 5-10 years, and cuts off the supply of new drugs (unless government R&D takes over - which just shifts the costs). It is a quick short-term savings at a longer-term cost and not much of a savings at that.
I agree wholeheartedly that doctors, hospitals, and insurance are also responsible for the current mess. I'd also add in the tort system - one problem with healthcare is that it is not acceptable to provide somebody with 80% care - you either need to give them 100% care or make sure they don't get into your hospital. A hospital can't just have a wing for the indigent where one doctor takes care of 100 patients with some volunteer triage nurses to help out (which is better care than most poor people get now, but which would get the hospital and doctor sued into bankruptcy). A poor person with a major heart condition gets stabilized with the best medicine that money can buy (but doesn't actually pay for in this case), and then as soon as they can walk they're sent home in the hope that they drop dead before making it to the hospital next time. It isn't an option to have a bunch of interns do a bypass operation on them to at least give them a chance at a longer life at the risk of a lower success rate than if a top-notch surgeon did it.
I have a fair amount of experience with the healthcare system owing to having some loved ones who have had some serious health problems. I've seen everything from nurses administering heavy medication and walking away (with the unmonitored patient coding a few minutes later - they'd be dead if I weren't in the room visiting most likely), to doctors spending an hour making calls and reading charts and then only stopping by to talk to the patient for about 30 seconds the whole day. I've had the pleasure of getting 475 separate bills after a hospitalization - and even with good insurance coverage having to make 47 calls when a doctor's office and an insurer can't be bothered to talk to each other.
I'm not a big fan of government healthcare - it just takes the patient further out of the equation. Right now the patient is connected to an employee who is connected to an employer who is connected to an insurer who is the customer of the doctor. Even that tenuous connection is stronger than if you put Uncle Sam in the mix. However, I do think it is inevitable that socialized medicine will take over - if nothing else genetic testing will make this mandatory by eliminating the uncertainty of medical costs. When either patients are free to decline insurance because they know they'll be healthy, or insurers are free to decline likely sick patients the insurance system won't work (unless it is compulsary for everybody to buy insurance and for all insurers to provide coverage to everybody).
A lot of things need to be fixed in the current US healthcare system. However, a lot of "stick it to them" solutions that are suggested just won't work in the long term. The problems are very systematic, and while drastic change is needed what we need to do is figure out how the system should work (in detail) and slowly move in that direction.
And if you don't have access to drugs discovered over 100 years ago, what reason do you have to care about the preservation of intellectual property rights on drugs invented in the distant future? That was my question and you've given no answer.
Well, if you're going to start out by assuming the patient can't get drugs of any kind, then why do intellectual property rights make a difference one way or another? Why get rid of them - it won't make a difference. If you can't get drugs that aren't patented now, then what will getting rid of patents on all drugs do for you?
I'm all for increasing the supply of doctors. I'm actually all for getting rid of the requirement that one have a prescription to get access to drugs. I'm all for having a tiered health systems where less-educated workers can work under the supervision of a doctor in a triage system. Of course, the current legal tort climate would probably keep that from happening.
However, while this would greatly improve the situation, the fact is that there will still be haves and have-nots in healthcare. If you doubled the life expectancy of every person on the planet you'll hear about people complaining that poor people only live to 120 while rich people live to 170 on average. And that farmer in Tibet will still do worse than a middle-class US citizen.
Is the goal to improve healthcare for everyone, or to ensure that nobody gets better care than anybody else? I don't know of a healthcare system on the planet that accomplishes the latter - even in socialist countries people with connections get better care.
Well, if folks said that back in the 80s, then half of the cheap generic medicines available today wouldn't be available.
The way the current system works, drugs that are state-of-the-art are expensive, and drugs that are 10 years old are cheap. That is true in any decade.
So, back in 1995 if you needed lisinopril for blood pressure reduction you would have paid quite a bit for it, and today it is very affordable. Today you might spend a fortune to buy Crestor, but you could get simvastatin cheap.
Many argue that older cheaper drugs are just as good as the newer drugs. So, what is the problem with just using the cheap drugs? If people want the expensive drugs, they should be free to pay for them, and if they don't want them then don't be so worried about what you might be missing out on.
Those with money have ALWAYS gotten preferential treatment over those without money. That applies to cars, houses, food, and healthcare. That doesn't mean that we can't do a better job providing for the poor - but it isn't reasonable to expect a poor person to get the same level of care as Donald Trump. Sure, poor people can resent that just like they can resent not owning a plasma TV. That doesn't change reality - nor will legislation. Do you think that Tony Blair would wait in the same organ donation waiting line as the average Brit (NHS policies notwithstanding)?
As far as drug R&D goes - the average drug costs hundreds of millions of dollars to develop. Literally thousands of scientists and doctors end up being involved. Sure, that can be funded under different models than what is currently happening, but the cost doesn't magically go away because you ban drug patents. Like I said - go ahead and fund some public-domain drugs from soup to nuts and see how it works out. However, just eliminating drug patents is going to end up destroying an industry that would be hard to put back together if it doesn't work out so well.
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Well, if a site is vulnerable to exploits that give an attacker almost complete control over the content of the site, then the ability of an attacker to get an SSL certificate for that site isn't much of an additional concern. They can already have the site in question serving up viruses or whatever to all their customers. They can also have the site in question redirect their login screen to the attacker's own servers (which might be on a different domain that the attacker would have no difficulty obtaining an SSL cert for in the first place).
My argument is that certificates should be linked to whoever controls a domain (for a lengthy period of time). That person is the de-facto domain owner in any case. If your domain is completely open to hacking then forged SSL certs are the least of your troubles.
And this is different from regular http how?
Right now browsers don't complain at all when you submit all kinds of personal information to who-knows-who when SSL is not in use. I'm suggesting that at the very least we ought to be able to encrypt these connections.
Basically I see several layers of security:
1. Well-confirmed certificate issuance that protects an SSL connection.
2. Encryption, but without a well-confirmed certificate.
3. No encryption at all.
I'd suggest that these are ordered in accordance with the security provided. However, many browsers complain about #2, but not about #3 (which is LESS secure). My proposal is that browsers treat #2 as less secure than #1, but more secure than #3. What's wrong with that?
I've been following the mozilla cacert bug for years. They've held off on including them as a trusted root because they haven't passed an expensive audit. However, their automated checks at least ensure that you have control of the domain that you're requesting a certificate for.
I've always thought that this would be a good approach for issuing free or dirt cheap certificates: When somebody applies for a certificate they are given some file to serve up from their webroot. Every week for three weeks a new file is provided. The domain is randomly checked over that period of three weeks to ensure that all the provided files are being served. After this, the certificate is issued. Renewals would follow a similar process (but with a reminder sent out well in advance so that the checks could take place well before expiry).
It is unlikely that somebody could exercise this level of control for an extended period of time simply via DNS spoofing or advertising bad routes. However, the issued certificate would only include the domain, and would not certify owner details (name/address/phone/etc). To obtain a cert with these credentials I think that a more intensive check would be prudent.
The current system basically amounts to a tax on SSL, and little more. If you pay some money to some auditor you can get into the SSL certificate business.
Also - SSL should allow certificate-less operation. Sure, that is vulnerable to MITM, but at least it is better than unencrypted http. Perhaps we should have more than two tiers of security (completely insecure, and "completely" secure).
It is in the interest of all organizations of any kind to provide the least service for the greatest cost - as far as they can get away with it. That applies to corporations and governments alike. The reason insurance companies can't just provide zero service is that nobody would bother with insurance in such a circumstance.
The problem with health care in my opinion is that the one person who is least involved in everything is the patient. The patient doesn't pick his insurer (his employer does), he doesn't pick what plans are available (his employer does), he doesn't have much say in his treatment (his doctor does), and he doesn't agree to the financial charges associated with a procedure (if he isn't conscious he might not even consent to the procedure at all).
Imagine if a car lease was typically an employer benefit - everybody got a car as part of their job. Nobody bought cars privately (well, maybe a few people do). There would be no car dealers (well, maybe one per city - with little selection). There would be no car reviews (since everybody just takes what their employer gives them). The employers incentive is to give you something with four wheels so that they can claim to provide the benefit. Most people don't choose a job based on the company car offering - in fact you might not even find out what the car was until you got it. Employees would pay some percentage of maintenance costs. You'd drop off your car, and then pick it up in a couple of days (whenever they got around to it), and would receive 14 bills in the mail over the next six months. You'd try hard to get your leasing company to pay its share, and would fork out the $75 copay for an annual inspection (which would be itemized as costing $2000 list, with the employer paying $200 and you paying $75 and the rest being written off). If you're even consulted on the repairs, you'd get a rushed call from the mechanic, and when you question any part of the proposed work you'd get major attitude - "Look, I've studied cars for years, and have fixed thousands of them. Who do you think you are to question my approach? If you don't go with what I'm proposing the car could explode and kill your whole family any day now. Look, if you don't just accept everything I proposed you're going to just have to find yourself some other mechanic - I'll just bill you for my time so far." If you want a second opinion prepare to wait two months to get another appointment and leave your car for a few more days - chances are you'll get a different set of expensive repair proposals, and an equally snotty attitude. It will be illegal to repair cars without substantial licensing requirements, and it would be illegal to sell parts or tools to anybody not licensed. Oil and wiper fluid would require a prescription from your mechanic to obtain, for a modest $25 copay per bottle.
In such a world driving a car would be about as pleasant as going to the hospital is today. The fix is to get patients more involved in their care, and create more competition among providers. Some kind of support for the indigent would also be reasonable, but it shouldn't be first-class care (when you get first-class food, clothing, shelter, and medical without working, then why work at all?). Providers should have fixed fee schedules, and everybody should pay the same rate (no billing people w/o insurance 10X more). Fees should be disclosed prior to treatment. Patients ought to have the abiltiy to comparison shop for services at other providers, and request transport to another provider. Patients should have access to the medicines and equipment needed to treat themselves (insurers might require a prescription to pay for it, but people ought to be able to buy medicine for cash no questions asked). Patients should also be free to see lower-tier providers like triage nurses - just as people have the freedom to take their car to the guy down the street to have the brakes replaced.
This will create competition and incentives to provide service that differentiates
I think that was the parent's point - they can fly like an airplane at those altitudes, but they can't hover.
When a VTOL craft flies like an airplane it relies on its full wing surface - at a considerable forward airspeed - probably at least 200mph relative to the ground. The faster you move forward, the faster a wing works.
When it converts to hover mode, a rotary wing craft like the Osprey is just a big ugly helicopter (and less than a great one at that - it is a design compromise). Those blades have a lot less surface area than the wing, and they can only rotate so fast.
A thrust-direction system like the F35 can only hover when its maximum engine power is greater than the weight of the aircraft. The problem is that the power output of a jet decreases with altitude. Normally this is more than compensated by the lower atmosphere density which reduces drag, but that only helps if you're trying to move the airframe through the air.
The VTOL aircraft would be aided slightly by the fact that they do have fixed wings that could be pointed into the relatively high winds up there - that would give them extra lift. However, I doubt these winds are uniform near the mountain so now you add all kinds of crazy stalls as your orientation changes.
I'm not aware of any non-rocket engine technology that can reliably handle hovering at 29k feet. Rockets would certainly work - you'd still need to deal with eratic winds but the rocket engine does not vary much in power as a function of external atmospheric conditions (in fact, it might perform better the closer you get to vacuum - not sure how significant an effect the air around the rocket has). Of course, a rocket-powered aircraft is going to have to carry a lot of oxidizer - I guess a really clever design could utilize atmospheric air to reduce oxidizer requirements (kind of like an O2-injected turbojet).
With or without the use of ANSI.SYS? And what graphics adaptor (if any)? :)
With an EGA you cold have 16-color glory in DOS...
Hmm - am I showing my age by commenting that the only Mac I ever owned was 1-bit monochrome, while a PC I used from the same era actually had 2-bit CGA? Granted, Macs got color not long afterwards and I'll concede your points regarding desktop publishing / etc.
Sometimes I wonder what the relationship is with dark matter. One might consider that dark matter had some mass distribution, and the ordinary matter just got pulled into match. Perhaps a supermassive dark matter "black hole" of some sort existed all along and then formed an ordinary black hole in the same place. Then again, a "black hole" formed by dark matter would behave identically to an ordinary matter black hole for all intents and purposes (a black hole's only attributes are its mass and angular momentum, and presumably dark matter could have both of those).
And, if an ordinary black hole forms, wouldn't it then tend to concentrate dark matter around it (since it would seem logical that dark matter would be as attracted to normal matter as normal matter is attracted to dark matter). Would that potentially prevent Hawking radiation from being emitted, since presumably those virtual particles with negative energy wouldn't have any impact on the dark matter in the black hole? Could all the ordinary matter in a black hole evaporate, and yet there is still a dark matter black hole in the same position?
There is a big chicken-and-egg issue around galaxy formation. Did the galaxies form and then the black holes formed in their cores with all that extra mass concentration? Did the black holes form first and nucleate the galaxy? Did a dark matter concentration form first and nucleate the rest of the galaxy?
Then you have some string theory variants that suggest that gravity can travel between branes in a multiverse of sorts. Perhaps a galaxy in this universe forms because the region of space is "close" to a galaxy that already exists in some other universe. Dark matter might just be galaxies in other universes. The recent dark matter observations in the bullet cluster might be a case of four galaxies semi-colliding - two in our universe and one in each of two different other universes. (The observation was that most of the mass was non-visible and non-interacting, but the visible matter did interact. If the visible matter was all in our universe, and the non-visible matter was in each of two other universes, then that might explain why they passed through each other with only gravitational interaction since within their universes there was only one galaxy present.)
Obviously none of this is easy to measure - I'd be interested in the opinion of somebody more versed in astrophysics than I am. I'm always amazed by how little we know about gravity on these scales and the large-scale structure of the universe.
And hence the reason that all successful IT companies have marketing and PR departments that do the talking...
Very rarely is social change made on the basis of its inherent rightness or wrongness. Usually social change comes about because charismatic leaders inspire others to adopt it. For every Thomas Jefferson you have an Adolf Hitler. One was clearly in the right and one was clearly in the wrong, but both were followed by many. Linux advocates won't change the world simply by being right.
Maybe this teacher is a lost cause. However, the harsh response will likely tick off not only the teacher but her 10 colleagues who might otherwise have been on the fence. The superintendent is also less likely to intervene since he'll feel like he's stuck in a war between two zealots.
If the response stuck to the facts and how linux can be used to the advantage of education, he'd have done better. He could have pointed to the many careers that use linux, and the fact that it freely and legally gives student access to many professional-quality tools (compilers, servers, math packages, scientific simulation software, etc). Its ability to run on older hardware could enable parents to pick up a cheap computer at a thrift store and get decent word/spreadsheet/etc capabilities out of it. He could point to many educational initiatives both in the US and abroad that make use of linux. He could also point out how the free software community cares greatly about copyright - they developed alternatives to commercial software precisely so that they wouldn't need to violate the law, and they also use copyright law to enforce their own legal rights.
I agree with many of his points, but not the degree to which they were stated. I don't think that bringing the NEA into this was particularly helpful either - as much as I hate the NEA I doubt they'd have all that much interest in mounting an official anti-MS-competitor campaign for a few million dollars. the NEA might allow MS to present at teacher educational forums on the dangers of software piracy, but that is probably about it.
When you communicate you should communicate for a purpose. When you communicate with an adversary you should communicate even more deliberately. That purpose generally shouldn't be to "vent" - communicate with your spouse or your pillow or something other than your entire world or the person you are angry with if you want to vent. Or type up an email to yourself and then delete it (do NOT populate the TO line in such emails - I've seen them accidentally sent far too often).
Yeah, but how much current would the atmosphere and ground be able to sustain? The atmosphere might have a lot of negative charge, but it is just as separated from the elevator as it is from the ground. The air molecules that immediately strike the elevator would potentially transfer their charge, but that would be about it unless a thunder cloud drifed by (which has much more concentrated potential energy).
As an analogy, put an identical static charge on a doorknob, and a ballon. If you touch the ballon nothing happens (maybe hairs on your arm might stand up). If you touch the doorknob - zap! The conductivity of your hand is the same, and the charge on the object you touch is the same.
The elevator would obviously need to withstand lightning strikes, however.
How many records in each table? If both address and range have 2000 records then that is 4M combinations, which it might be running through (and discarding the ones that don't meet the join criteria). That isn't the smart way to do it, but I could see how it could happen.
Yes, but the face value of those securities was a fantasy. If they had so much value, why doesn't anybody other than Uncle Sam want to buy them? It is like going to the mall, coming home with a bunch of junk you don't need, and then talking about how much money you "saved" while there.
Most analysts think those securities have very little value - otherwise they'd be out buying them on their own.
Then, when Uncle Sam becomes the nation's primary landlord we'll suddenly see a reluctance to foreclose, which makes those securities worth even less.
The proper strategy would have been to offer eminent-domain bailouts. Instituations that can't be allowed to fail wouldn't be, but the government would take over and buy shares for the company's net value (which might be zero after deducting any cash the government needs to infuse to fix things). Then the company is no longer a profit-making concern and there are no shareholders to worry about - the government can do with the execs as needed and run the company. Once everything is stabilized the government can issue an IPO and the taxpayers recover their costs.
When a company is mismanaged the solution isn't to hand more money to the people that are mismanaging it. I don't want the government in the financial services business, but I'd rather see that than massive spending of public funds on private ventures with no accountability.
but it was before we had computers with enough RAM to handle it IMHO.
IMHO, we still don't have computers with enough RAM to handle it. :) I can pretty much count on runnning anything java-based to eat up 50X as much RAM as the equivalent done in C (or anything else).
In fact, I normally run with ulimit -v 1200000 (for all non-root or init.d processes) so that I don't have to worry about a swap-storm when a process goes out of control. I never notice the limit except when I go to launch some java app. Then I have to raise the limit and watch my swap go nuts (and this is on a system that otherwise does fine with apache, mysql, mythbackend, and smbd all running at once with maybe a compile job or two running - granted, with appropriate (io)niceness set on everything).
Sure, I could add an extra GB or two of RAM just so that java would behave, but why would I want to?
Uh, sure. Just like the last Rhodes scholar educated the populace so well that we ended up with Republican control of both houses and the executive branch? :)
Obama isn't really raising my hopes much. I'd love to be wrong, but I've my share of American political "revolutions" to know better...
The scary thing is that when AI is finally invented it will be for the sole purpose of sending spam.
Just think, our first artificial sentient being will be a salesman peddling Vigora!
Now that is marketing genius! Make a device that lacks 90% of the feature set of everything else on the market, charge more than a typical device of the same class (which doesn't lack features like a display with the ability to pick what song you want to listen to), and then market it as an improvement.
Make sure that you are tied to a particular piece of software on the PC just to load songs on it as well.
And some people buy it!
For the cost of a shuffle you could have bought any number of competing players where you could actually pick what you want to listen to, and have FM radio as well. Not to mention drag-and-drop loading of files as a USB storage device (sure, you could use itunes or some other GUI if you wanted to as well).
"But those other players aren't as easy to use as a shuffle..." Ok, then just pretend they don't have any buttons other than FF/REW and +/- - and suddenly they work exactly the same.
I'm sure Apple's next invention will be a 36" LCD HDTV for $9k that only has a volume control and is permanently tuned to Apple TV (with a $20/month subscription charge). As an added feature it will include a mic so that Apple can figure out what kind of household you are and apply programming specific to your household. Maybe they'll call it the Telescreen and people will buy it in droves (hey, it is cheaper than cable!)... :)
The realization that another Bush could rise up and trample on our ideals and flout the law with little real consequence and even get enthusiastic support from a substantial minority of the population.
Substantial minority? You mean a 50.001% minority? (Or a 49.999% minority if you thought Gore should have won?) For most of his time in office Bush had a great deal of the country behind him (just maybe not your circle of friends).
The thing that scares me about Bush is that a MAJORITY of Americans supported him. I didn't see the Democrats lining up to put a stop to the Patriot Act. I'm generally a conservative and I scares me to see how many of my conservative friends supported him. I didn't think there was anything conservative about him.
The problems this country faces have nothing to do with a "minority" of people taking control. The problem is that the majority of Americans believe in authoritarian government. They might disagree as to some details of policy that this government should enact, but just about everybody agrees that it shouldn't be up to people to run their own lives.
Frankly, most computer science programs train people to be software engineers. Most computer scientists, simply aren't.
I'm sorry, I have to agree with the parent post - doctors are essentially technicians, or perhaps engineers. That isn't meant to be demeaning - when I have a medical problem I want somebody to apply the principles of ENGINEERING - not SCIENCE to fixing it.
Science is about understanding the unknown. Engineering is about rigorously solving a particular instance of an understood problem. You don't want a scientist designing a manned spaceship, and you don't want an engineer coming up with a novel propusion technology.
To be honest, there isn't much solid science in medical research. The problem is ethics - you can't conduct controlled experiments on people (or even to varying degrees on most advanced mammals). That is why you can have 3 clinical trials that each come to opposing conclusions with "95% confidence." They're the best we can do, so we need to make the most of them, but we shouldn't be shocked if we find out we're really wrong about a lot of things.
"Real science" doesn't really happen with anything more advanced than mice. It isn't a matter of skill or anything - just the limitations of the field. But, that's ok - even without ethical constraints we still don't understand 80% of what there is to know about a bacterium.
I still advocate swap when you have tons of RAM so that RAM can be used for disk cache. Unless, of course, your RAM is larger than your disk-based storage (in which case you don't need any more cache). :)
If you are having trouble with swapping I'd adjust your swappiness accordingly. (Assuming you're using a progressive OS.)
You see, if you've got a ton of physical RAM, then the assumption is that much of it is already just sitting there unused.
If that is the case, then you wasted money by buying too much RAM. You should have spent more of it on your CPU or whatever else is rate-limiting.
I love posts by folks who say "just buy more RAM." Sure, and while you're at it buy a 16-processor mainframe to type email on - you won't have any performance issues of any kind. However, the whole point of a well-written OS is that it allows you to do work on a $500 machine that a lesser OS would require a $1000 machine for. If I wanted to go out and spend $50k on a desktop I'd run Vista. :)
If I were to buy more RAM for my PC I'd have to go without something else. So, I make the most efficient choices of how to spend my money, and then maximize the benefit of the resources I have available. Linux runs most efficiently with at least moderate use of swap.
The meaningful benchmark isn't performance, but performance per dollar of hardware. Any computer can be made faster with unlimited budget.
Agreed - a bypass surgery should just have a fixed price.
I'm normally in favor of freedom to negotiate prices, but in medicne there are some problems with this. When care is needed it is typically needed urgently - shopping aroud can be dangerous due to delay and transport risks. Also - a patient is typically under duress and might not even be competant (or conscious) to negotiate. And even if they were the doctor treating them probably doesn't even know what the procedure costs.
Hospitals should be required to publish a fee schedule for all services rendered. The hospital can set its own fees, but it cannot deviate from them for anybody. Individuals could look up hospital fees while they are healthy and then they'd know where they want to be treated if they get sick. People paying cash would get the same rate as those with insurance.
Obviously at least some dems must have voted with the repubs.
I really hope that the dems take 80% of the senate. Then at least people won't be blaming the repubs for hampering progress when the dems go and do more of the same. I'm sick of both parties. Maybe they'll surprise me - nothing would make me happier...
How do "I" share responsiblity with the "other two"? I'm not any of the three items you listed - I'm a poor schmo who has to pay his doctor bills and insurance preimiums like everybody else. I'm not a doctor, an insurance company, or a pharmaceutical company.
I just don't think that getting rid of drug patents is going to fix the problem. It just makes the most recently developed drugs cheaper than they would otherwise be for 5-10 years, and cuts off the supply of new drugs (unless government R&D takes over - which just shifts the costs). It is a quick short-term savings at a longer-term cost and not much of a savings at that.
I agree wholeheartedly that doctors, hospitals, and insurance are also responsible for the current mess. I'd also add in the tort system - one problem with healthcare is that it is not acceptable to provide somebody with 80% care - you either need to give them 100% care or make sure they don't get into your hospital. A hospital can't just have a wing for the indigent where one doctor takes care of 100 patients with some volunteer triage nurses to help out (which is better care than most poor people get now, but which would get the hospital and doctor sued into bankruptcy). A poor person with a major heart condition gets stabilized with the best medicine that money can buy (but doesn't actually pay for in this case), and then as soon as they can walk they're sent home in the hope that they drop dead before making it to the hospital next time. It isn't an option to have a bunch of interns do a bypass operation on them to at least give them a chance at a longer life at the risk of a lower success rate than if a top-notch surgeon did it.
I have a fair amount of experience with the healthcare system owing to having some loved ones who have had some serious health problems. I've seen everything from nurses administering heavy medication and walking away (with the unmonitored patient coding a few minutes later - they'd be dead if I weren't in the room visiting most likely), to doctors spending an hour making calls and reading charts and then only stopping by to talk to the patient for about 30 seconds the whole day. I've had the pleasure of getting 475 separate bills after a hospitalization - and even with good insurance coverage having to make 47 calls when a doctor's office and an insurer can't be bothered to talk to each other.
I'm not a big fan of government healthcare - it just takes the patient further out of the equation. Right now the patient is connected to an employee who is connected to an employer who is connected to an insurer who is the customer of the doctor. Even that tenuous connection is stronger than if you put Uncle Sam in the mix. However, I do think it is inevitable that socialized medicine will take over - if nothing else genetic testing will make this mandatory by eliminating the uncertainty of medical costs. When either patients are free to decline insurance because they know they'll be healthy, or insurers are free to decline likely sick patients the insurance system won't work (unless it is compulsary for everybody to buy insurance and for all insurers to provide coverage to everybody).
A lot of things need to be fixed in the current US healthcare system. However, a lot of "stick it to them" solutions that are suggested just won't work in the long term. The problems are very systematic, and while drastic change is needed what we need to do is figure out how the system should work (in detail) and slowly move in that direction.
And if you don't have access to drugs discovered over 100 years ago, what reason do you have to care about the preservation of intellectual property rights on drugs invented in the distant future? That was my question and you've given no answer.
Well, if you're going to start out by assuming the patient can't get drugs of any kind, then why do intellectual property rights make a difference one way or another? Why get rid of them - it won't make a difference. If you can't get drugs that aren't patented now, then what will getting rid of patents on all drugs do for you?
I'm all for increasing the supply of doctors. I'm actually all for getting rid of the requirement that one have a prescription to get access to drugs. I'm all for having a tiered health systems where less-educated workers can work under the supervision of a doctor in a triage system. Of course, the current legal tort climate would probably keep that from happening.
However, while this would greatly improve the situation, the fact is that there will still be haves and have-nots in healthcare. If you doubled the life expectancy of every person on the planet you'll hear about people complaining that poor people only live to 120 while rich people live to 170 on average. And that farmer in Tibet will still do worse than a middle-class US citizen.
Is the goal to improve healthcare for everyone, or to ensure that nobody gets better care than anybody else? I don't know of a healthcare system on the planet that accomplishes the latter - even in socialist countries people with connections get better care.
Well, if folks said that back in the 80s, then half of the cheap generic medicines available today wouldn't be available.
The way the current system works, drugs that are state-of-the-art are expensive, and drugs that are 10 years old are cheap. That is true in any decade.
So, back in 1995 if you needed lisinopril for blood pressure reduction you would have paid quite a bit for it, and today it is very affordable. Today you might spend a fortune to buy Crestor, but you could get simvastatin cheap.
Many argue that older cheaper drugs are just as good as the newer drugs. So, what is the problem with just using the cheap drugs? If people want the expensive drugs, they should be free to pay for them, and if they don't want them then don't be so worried about what you might be missing out on.
Those with money have ALWAYS gotten preferential treatment over those without money. That applies to cars, houses, food, and healthcare. That doesn't mean that we can't do a better job providing for the poor - but it isn't reasonable to expect a poor person to get the same level of care as Donald Trump. Sure, poor people can resent that just like they can resent not owning a plasma TV. That doesn't change reality - nor will legislation. Do you think that Tony Blair would wait in the same organ donation waiting line as the average Brit (NHS policies notwithstanding)?
As far as drug R&D goes - the average drug costs hundreds of millions of dollars to develop. Literally thousands of scientists and doctors end up being involved. Sure, that can be funded under different models than what is currently happening, but the cost doesn't magically go away because you ban drug patents. Like I said - go ahead and fund some public-domain drugs from soup to nuts and see how it works out. However, just eliminating drug patents is going to end up destroying an industry that would be hard to put back together if it doesn't work out so well.