It isn't even education and intelligence. We have lots of well-educated and intelligent people. They just don't go into science, since as a society we've decided that science isn't priority #1.
Start paying NASA engineers double what the NASA lawyers make and we'll get better engineers. Hire more than 10 of them and maybe people would see it as a viable career option.
Most of us reading this site are pretty smart. We know where the money is. Now, we'd probably take a job that pays less if it was a great job, but we wouldn't spend 8 years studying to try to get a job where there are only three openings in the entire country and it pays mediocre.
Uh, the gentoo ebuilds almost always download from gentoo mirrors. The only common exceptions are:
1. Non-free software with restrictions on distribution (java used to fall into this category). 2. Files downloaded REALLY soon after the ebuild is made. The gentoo mirrors are updated automatically but it can take a few hours before they all notice the new package in the portage tree. So, if you fetch the files quickly enough you might beat the mirrors, in which case the ebuild will eventually fall back to the upstream repository.
Go ahead and try fetching the openoffice source now - you'll find that it uses your gentoo mirrors. The gentoo mirroring system is fairly impressive - as soon as an ebuild goes into the tree the mirrors start noticing and begin retrieving the distribution files. When an ebuild leaves the tree the mirrors notice and purge the distribution files (probably after some delay). The gentoo mirrors also handle files that are manually pushed out.
Too bad their business model was to undercut everybody else and then offer $+n to the subcontractors.
That doesn't work too well if you actually plan on paying your bills. If you want to be a legitimate broker you suddenly need to compete against all those other commodity legitimate brokers.
That's like opening up a hardware store across from Home Depot.
Yeah - but make sure you print out the website and bring it with you. After reading the site I went ahead and brought a bottle of nearly full solution with me (figure $6 value). The first goon in the line said that he didn't think it was allowed, and I politely explained about the website. He decided to defer to a supervisor later in line, who didn't question it so it went through.
Then, on the way home the first goon told me I had to toss it, and no amount of pleading availed (I wasn't about to make a big scene and get detained or anything). At least that was on the return trip so I was only out the money and didn't have to try to get more on a business trip.
Bottom line - it isn't the rules that matter - it is what the big guy with the gun says that matters.
Yup - I've heard that even major corporations resort to smuggling stuff like laptops opportunistically via business travelers (the traveler just brings a "personal" laptop and leaves it there). The issue isn't the cost of tariffs but the red tape and delay. Sure, if they need to deploy 1000 laptops to employees they just buy them domestically and avoid the issue, but if they need to get some demo software deployed it is far easier to just smuggle it in.
China takes the practice to new heights - where bribery is often part of the equation as well. In the 1990s it wasn't uncommon for companies to unload entire container ships or supertankers and pay a huge bribe to whoever ran the shipyard (who distributed it appropriately). The Chinese regulations essentially encouraged the practice by putting cargo in limbo for weeks or longer with arcane customs regulations. None of this stuff was contraband, and I wouldn't be surprised if all the appropriate tariffs were still paid. The bribes basically amounted to paying government workers to not hold up the works.
No idea if the practice continues today, but China still has a reputation for corruption. When you basically encourage your customs inspectors to take money to look the other way when perfectly harmless material flows in, is it any surpise that they also take money to look the other way when somebody adds melamine to infant formula?
No question that the corporatizing of research can lead to conflicts of interest, but what are the alternatives?
You mention drugs that kill people. Well, that would be all of them - including sugar pills. In fact, if you created two groups of 1000 people and gave half of them purple sugar pills, and the other half green sugar pills, you'd find that one group vs the other would have a statistically significant increase in heart attack rates some percentage of the time. If you consider the green pills placebos then you'd erroneously prove that purple sugar pills are dangerous. Statistics with 95% confidence are wrong one time in 20...
The same applies to efficacy - especially in stuff like antidepressants where we have almost no understanding of the physiology of the brain. A psychiatrist I was chatting with speculated that it is like treating "cough" back in the 1400s - even if you had penicillian back then it wouldn't be effective against "cough" since doctors of the time had no way of evaluating what the cause of "cough" was and consequently what the appropriate treatment was. It would be a complete mystery to them why one person might miracuously recover with an antibiotic and another would not benefit at all.
I'm all for having independantly-funded clinical trials to test the safety/efficacy of pharmaceuticals, but that would cost taxpayers a fortune. Also - how do you decide what drugs are to be tested? Will we see lobbyists briging congressmen to make sure their companies products get tested before their competitors (leading to huge profits for them)? The problem with publicly funded R&D is that it politicizes research. The private R&D system combined with patents at least prioritizes research that will lead to the largest number of people using a drug/device/procedure (even if affordability becomes an issue).
I'm not actually convinced that corporate malfeasance is the reason for the recent string of drug safety problems. I think a few issues are more significant:
1. Existing drugs work moderately well - so it raises the bar for new drugs in terms of efficacy. 2. Clincial trials are becoming more and more effective at detecting side effects. 3. Doctors tend to assume that well-established drugs are safe. So, even a tiny increase in risk with a new drug leads doctors to avoid it (even if there isn't any strong evidence that older drugs are any better). 4. The tort system ensures that doctors are better off undertreating a disease than risking a side effect. When a patient dies of cancer due to less aggressive treatment it is the cancer's fault. When a patient dies from a side-effect it is the doctor's fault or the drug companies. This neglects the risk/reward tradeoffs that all treatment decisions involve. 5. All the "easy" drugs have already been discovered. This leads to increasing costs for drug R&D and less selectivity for drugs that enter trials. 6. The large number of drugs in development creates enormous demand for clinical trial subjects. This leads to doctors inappropriately enrolling patients and massive costs. Doctors are basically paid by the subject so that have incentive to commit fraud, and more demand means higher fees which means more expensive drugs.
I'm not sure what the solutions to these problems are. Industry consolidation would probably help - fewer companies competing mean that clinical trial costs would drop, there would be less rush, and drug prices would rise so companies have less need to cut corners. Government funding of drug development might not hurt (from start to finish) - the patent issues go away if government just picks up the tab (with all the issues of politicized medical research).
There really are no easy answers though. Sure, people offer easy answers to the pharmaceutical problem, but they don't seem any better than the easy answers to crime, world peace, and all those other things taht people oversimplify...
And yet, the interest rate the US government pays on its debts is lower than any other nation on earth (as far as I'm aware - counterexamples welcome). So, lots of people have a great deal of confidence in the ability of the US to pay its debts - which is why they lend the money almost interest-free.
Look, this isn't some contest over who has the best economy. I'm actually the first in line when it comes to having government protection for pensions. If anything they should be the property of the employee held in trust, and there should be standards regarding reserves/etc. Government should also guarantee pensions with an insurance premium charged to companies (and massive penalties for failing to meet obligations). Pensions are part of salary - and as such they are due to an employee every payday.
The reason that treasury bonds are soaring is that you have thousands of mutual fund managers who have trillions of dollars of investments to manage. What do they do with all that money? The financial sector is looking bad, so they sell off their investments in that sector. But what do they do with the resulting money? They can't just fill warehouses with thousand dollar bills, and when you have a billion dollars in cash you can't put it in a million different FDIC-insured bank accounts (and how exactly are those safer than US treasuries anyway - both are backed by a promise from the exact same government).
So, you buy US treasuries. Those are probably the safest investments around. Oh sure, you can diversify and go with other governments, but which governments look any better than the US at the moment? The crisis is global, and it isn't like the european banks are doing any better - and the US can weather a storm a lot better than France, or wherever.
And China is very new - I'm not sure their government even borrows that kind of money, and being a semi-dictatorship I'm not sure that anybody would trust them with a trillion dollars for an IOU.
At a few points during the selloffs treasuries actually had negative yields. That just shows how desperate fund managers were to do something with their cash. They were willing to spend $10,100 dollars for an IOU that says the US government would pay them $10k in a few years. But, if the alternative is to hold onto shares of some bank on the brink it is a good deal - lose a percent or lose everything.
Sure, the market will sort itself out and those treasuries will drop in value to more normal levels - as money gets diversified. However, in a crunch it is a lot easier to find a trillion dollars worth of US bonds than it is to find the equivalent from someplace overseas.
The fact is that the US didn't even default on bonds during the great depression - and even the current crisis needs to be taken in perspective. A trillion dollars isn't an unmanageable sum for the US government, and it isn't a 100% loss either (I'm not so naive to think that US will make cash on the deal, but they probably won't lose most of it either).
I think the real problem is policies that let private institutions essentially print money. The fractional reserve system essentially does this - if nothing else it would be reigned in a bit. Naked shorts do the exact same thing - people are essentially selling stock they don't even have. If you or I did that we'd be locked up for fraud. I'm not sure what can be done about mass stupidity - but that is nothing limited to just the stock market. At work we all deal with arbitrary deadlines - optimistic plans without any grounding in reason but which all managers accept because to do otherwise would be to believe that they can't make x% of a return on their investments. Well, you can't make 20% earnings on the traditional mortgage market, so money managers invent a game where they can make more (in theory).
I have a swap file of about 5X RAM - I certainly don't use it all but I do sometimes use quite a bit of it.
The reason is tmpfs. Junk that I don't need to persist always goes in tmpfs - which speeds up lots of stuff. At worst it gets swapped out to disk opportunistically, but the fact that the kernel knows that I don't really care about it at all means that it can take full advantage of ordered writes / caching / etc.
I also run gentoo - which means that I'm often doing compilations, which generate tons of files that I don't care about long-term. Those go in the tmpfs. For most software it probably never hits disk, but if I'm compiling firefox or whatever the swap comes into play. Performance is better than just compiling on disk - since a file that gets created and deleted 60 seconds later may never hit the disk at all.
But, gentoo users are a bit of a special case there. Most people don't generate large numbers of transient files.
Agreed - I didn't advance the original argument. However, if you can postpone a problem safely into the distant future it isn't necessarily a bad thing when the alternatives aren't good. Kind of like cryogenicially preserving bodies...
It doesn't actually seem like an unreasonable assumption - over long timeframes.
What was the cost of 1kWh of energy 10,000 years ago? 1000 years ago? 100 years ago?
Sure, fossil fuels have gone up in cost in the last 50 years, but that is just a recent trend. There is no reason to think that the fusion power of 2050 won't be cheaper than the coal of 1900.
It might also be more expensive, but technology in general has tended to make everything cheaper with time historically. This is just one more thing.
And unless you start doing transmutation you still have carbon to dispose of somewhere.
This sort of technology could be used to help clean up diffuse carbon emissions. Sure, smoke stacks are best cleaned up at the stack - but what about lawn mowers, volcanoes, and forest fires?
I don't think this attack is nearly as bad as it seems.
The attack requires the attacker to reveal their IP address (unlike pre-cookie SYN floods). That means you can limit the number of connections per IP and blacklist IPs to effectively block the attack. You can also track down the attacking machines and do something about them.
Basically the attack is just a way to create huge numbers of connections in a way that is optimized to cope with syn-cookies. It doesn't sound like it defeats the cookies, but rather it allows clients to maintain connections without needing as much local memory to track connection states.
All a server owner needs to do is blacklist attacking IPs and none of the connections will get through. ISPs would rapidly cut off zombies sending out this junk when they get complaints (the only reason they didn't do it before is that nobody knew who to complain to (or sue) due to IP-spoofing - which doesn't work with this attack).
Yup - as the previous owner of two different prorpietary DVRs I'll never go back now that I'm on MythTV. My first Tivo had a hard drive failure. The second DVR was pretty nice except for the software bugs that caused it to tend to not actually record shows. Now I have a device that will tolerate drive failures, will hold tons of shows, and when something goes wrong I can actually fix it and not just toss it in the trash.
I don't really have to play with it much, either. Sure, software updates take some effort, but that happens maybe once every 18 months - I don't just upgrade for the sake of upgrading.
This isn't univerally true, but it isn't far from the truth. When I have a lousy day at work I just stop and think about the fact that I could be digging ditches for $12/hr. Then death by paperwork doesn't seem so bad...:)
Option One: Five years hard labor for possession of any amount, and TWENTY at hard labor for dealing of any amount.
That is about as likely to stop drug use as the death penality is likely to stop murder. That isn't a knock against the death penalty - only a statement that even the harshest deterrant won't eliminate crime. If you beheaded students on the spot when they are caught passing notes in clasess, I guarantee that notes would still get passed around.
That doesn't mean that the justice system is futile or unneeded. However, no justice system can eliminate crime. And any real justice system administers injustice as well as justice - so we ought to consider that when deciding what the laws should be.
Some greedy people make $50M per year. Some make $50k per year. Some make $5k per year. And some don't make a dime. They're all part of the problem. For every greedy exec lending money to somebody who can't afford the payments there is some greedy poor person who wants a bigger house than they can afford.
Who gets scammed by the nigerian scam artist - that's right - greedy people.
There is no excuse for greed - plain and simple. I don't have a lot of stuff that other people have, but I enjoy the things I have and provide for those who depend on me. I have better things to do than worry about whether I deserve a bigger TV set and whether it is my boss or my wife that is holding me back from having it.
Handing money to a greedy person only makes them greedier.
Perhaps the bailout is needed to avoid having all those greedy people start robbing our houses. However, these people do need to feel some economic pain. It is like putting somebody who is overweight on a diet. I have nothing but compassion for the poor and I realize they're subjected to advertising 24x7. However, that doesn't change the fact that we don't help them out simply by throwing them cash. Sure, spend some money on consumer education if that helps, and make sure their kids have basic food on the table - but don't just start mailing out checks and expect that to make people start acting responsibly.
I use Rockbox and I've noticed that a large number of Rockbox users are blind (I am not). Rockbox has supported voice prompts for quite a long time now - obviously the word has gotten out since many of these users are not the sorts of people who would be flashing custom firmware onto an mp3 player otherwise. A fair amount of effort has been devoted to accessibility on the project, and I don't think that many other mp3 players can make that claim.
I wonder if a fix for the buffer overflow (besides languages that make it harder) would be to separate the stacks used for local variables and return addresses.
The problem is that when a call is made to a function the compiler pushes the return address onto the stack. Then the function allocates space for its own variables on top of the same stack. If one of those variables overflows it can hit the return address. That essentially is a mixing of code and data. If you had two stacks then the processor could trigger an exception if anything writes to one of them except via a call or return. You could probably accomplish this via changes to the compiler without a processor change - the processor will always use the regular stack but a compiler could be designed to maintain a separate stack for local variables. You wouldn't have that read-only protection on the regular stack, but the two would be in different segments making an overflow impossible.
Other tricks that are used are things like canarys - values written onto the stack and then checked before a return - if there was an overflow the canary would not be intact. GCC has an option to do this which works most of the time.
Well, if something like this took off programs could come with execution fingerprint files or whatever containing this information. However, that just means that instead of downloading a virus-infected executable you'll just end up downloading the virus-infected executable and its infected fingerprint.
The issue with any scanner like this is that you need to start from a known-good state. If you take all the time to maintain it a system like tripwire is virtually impenetrable - even if there is a break-in it is a trival matter to identy any compromised files.
You could also just have a CD-ROM full of MD5 sums mounted and have the kernel checksum any file before executing it. I can't see how that would be any less secure - or inconvenient.
Where I see this being useful is in an enviornment like a server with infrequent updates (running debian stable or the like). That's the same enviornment where tripwire (or an in-kernel equivalent) is useful.
Cameras aren't best used for realtime monitoring in some big room.
They're best used for retroactive analysis. Somebody becomes a person of interest, and now once you know where they were at any point in history you can find out everywhere they've ever been, everybody they've ever talked to, everywhere anybody they've ever talked to has been, and where they are right now.
I'm sure the first place we'll see these abused is in civil cases. Divorce cases come to mind very quickly.
I've been using rockbox on that hardware for a year or two and I've been very happy with it. I actually bought this player only for the purpose of using Rockbox (a step of faith considering I'd never used it previously).
Using the original firmware to copy files is fairly transparent. If the device is on and you plug in the USB port, it powers on and automatically boots to the original firmware. Then when you unplug it the system automatically reboots to the Rockbox firmware. I'm sure they'll set it to just boot to Rockbox once it supports USB syncing.
About the only time it would seem to be inconvenient is if you wanted to listen to music while having it plugged into USB. That never happens for me - I can just play music on my PC if I want to.
Stock price is based on market value, just because the owner of the stock changes doesnt mean you can void it. A company has to purchase its stock back from shareholders to reduce the amount on the market (see treasury stock)
Sure - but I did in fact state that the stockholders would be paid for their shares - in accordance with the true company value (which is the assets-liabilities - including the liability owed to the government for fixing everything).
Of course stockholders should not owe money for purchasing stock beyond the initial investment.
When did I say otherwise. I said that stockholders should consider themselves fortunate that they don't owe money. I didn't say that they actually would. However, major stockholders might be liable if they in any way conspired in illegal activity - fraud is grounds for piercing the corporate veil.
Costing taxpayers billions of dollars is not a crime.
I never said it was. I said that it needs to be MADE a serious crime. That means changing the laws. Then, it is a crime.
Your method of a bailout would screw taxpayers, the new shareholders, into paying for the illegal jailing of corporate executives while costing original shareholders more than their investment (also illegal).
I never proposed the illegal jailing of executives, but rather changing the laws so that it is legal to jail them. Sure, maybe it is too late to jail the current execs, but you could at least tie them up in Federal lawsuits so they don't see the outside of a courthouse for 50 years. That would be a tiny expense compared to what those execs caused. And I never proposed costing shareholders more than their investment. I thought it was obvious that if the sum came out negative (a virtual certainty) that simply no dividend would be paid.
And, I don't agree that just because nobody prevented the execs from running the economy into the ground that they bear no responsibility whatsoever. When you run a country there are two basic philosphies. One is that you can pass a bazillion laws to keep people from taking advantage of each other. The other is that you can have laws that generally accomplish this, but which are broad enough to punish those who fail to use discretion. We need to get away from the "well, technically what I did wasn't illegal even though I know that for personal gain I cost half the country six months pay" excuses.
Slashdot Mirror
It isn't even education and intelligence. We have lots of well-educated and intelligent people. They just don't go into science, since as a society we've decided that science isn't priority #1.
Start paying NASA engineers double what the NASA lawyers make and we'll get better engineers. Hire more than 10 of them and maybe people would see it as a viable career option.
Most of us reading this site are pretty smart. We know where the money is. Now, we'd probably take a job that pays less if it was a great job, but we wouldn't spend 8 years studying to try to get a job where there are only three openings in the entire country and it pays mediocre.
Huh?
We use car analogies around here. Talk cars with me...
Uh, the gentoo ebuilds almost always download from gentoo mirrors. The only common exceptions are:
1. Non-free software with restrictions on distribution (java used to fall into this category).
2. Files downloaded REALLY soon after the ebuild is made. The gentoo mirrors are updated automatically but it can take a few hours before they all notice the new package in the portage tree. So, if you fetch the files quickly enough you might beat the mirrors, in which case the ebuild will eventually fall back to the upstream repository.
Go ahead and try fetching the openoffice source now - you'll find that it uses your gentoo mirrors. The gentoo mirroring system is fairly impressive - as soon as an ebuild goes into the tree the mirrors start noticing and begin retrieving the distribution files. When an ebuild leaves the tree the mirrors notice and purge the distribution files (probably after some delay). The gentoo mirrors also handle files that are manually pushed out.
Too bad their business model was to undercut everybody else and then offer $+n to the subcontractors.
That doesn't work too well if you actually plan on paying your bills. If you want to be a legitimate broker you suddenly need to compete against all those other commodity legitimate brokers.
That's like opening up a hardware store across from Home Depot.
Yeah - but make sure you print out the website and bring it with you. After reading the site I went ahead and brought a bottle of nearly full solution with me (figure $6 value). The first goon in the line said that he didn't think it was allowed, and I politely explained about the website. He decided to defer to a supervisor later in line, who didn't question it so it went through.
Then, on the way home the first goon told me I had to toss it, and no amount of pleading availed (I wasn't about to make a big scene and get detained or anything). At least that was on the return trip so I was only out the money and didn't have to try to get more on a business trip.
Bottom line - it isn't the rules that matter - it is what the big guy with the gun says that matters.
Yup - I've heard that even major corporations resort to smuggling stuff like laptops opportunistically via business travelers (the traveler just brings a "personal" laptop and leaves it there). The issue isn't the cost of tariffs but the red tape and delay. Sure, if they need to deploy 1000 laptops to employees they just buy them domestically and avoid the issue, but if they need to get some demo software deployed it is far easier to just smuggle it in.
China takes the practice to new heights - where bribery is often part of the equation as well. In the 1990s it wasn't uncommon for companies to unload entire container ships or supertankers and pay a huge bribe to whoever ran the shipyard (who distributed it appropriately). The Chinese regulations essentially encouraged the practice by putting cargo in limbo for weeks or longer with arcane customs regulations. None of this stuff was contraband, and I wouldn't be surprised if all the appropriate tariffs were still paid. The bribes basically amounted to paying government workers to not hold up the works.
No idea if the practice continues today, but China still has a reputation for corruption. When you basically encourage your customs inspectors to take money to look the other way when perfectly harmless material flows in, is it any surpise that they also take money to look the other way when somebody adds melamine to infant formula?
No question that the corporatizing of research can lead to conflicts of interest, but what are the alternatives?
You mention drugs that kill people. Well, that would be all of them - including sugar pills. In fact, if you created two groups of 1000 people and gave half of them purple sugar pills, and the other half green sugar pills, you'd find that one group vs the other would have a statistically significant increase in heart attack rates some percentage of the time. If you consider the green pills placebos then you'd erroneously prove that purple sugar pills are dangerous. Statistics with 95% confidence are wrong one time in 20...
The same applies to efficacy - especially in stuff like antidepressants where we have almost no understanding of the physiology of the brain. A psychiatrist I was chatting with speculated that it is like treating "cough" back in the 1400s - even if you had penicillian back then it wouldn't be effective against "cough" since doctors of the time had no way of evaluating what the cause of "cough" was and consequently what the appropriate treatment was. It would be a complete mystery to them why one person might miracuously recover with an antibiotic and another would not benefit at all.
I'm all for having independantly-funded clinical trials to test the safety/efficacy of pharmaceuticals, but that would cost taxpayers a fortune. Also - how do you decide what drugs are to be tested? Will we see lobbyists briging congressmen to make sure their companies products get tested before their competitors (leading to huge profits for them)? The problem with publicly funded R&D is that it politicizes research. The private R&D system combined with patents at least prioritizes research that will lead to the largest number of people using a drug/device/procedure (even if affordability becomes an issue).
I'm not actually convinced that corporate malfeasance is the reason for the recent string of drug safety problems. I think a few issues are more significant:
1. Existing drugs work moderately well - so it raises the bar for new drugs in terms of efficacy.
2. Clincial trials are becoming more and more effective at detecting side effects.
3. Doctors tend to assume that well-established drugs are safe. So, even a tiny increase in risk with a new drug leads doctors to avoid it (even if there isn't any strong evidence that older drugs are any better).
4. The tort system ensures that doctors are better off undertreating a disease than risking a side effect. When a patient dies of cancer due to less aggressive treatment it is the cancer's fault. When a patient dies from a side-effect it is the doctor's fault or the drug companies. This neglects the risk/reward tradeoffs that all treatment decisions involve.
5. All the "easy" drugs have already been discovered. This leads to increasing costs for drug R&D and less selectivity for drugs that enter trials.
6. The large number of drugs in development creates enormous demand for clinical trial subjects. This leads to doctors inappropriately enrolling patients and massive costs. Doctors are basically paid by the subject so that have incentive to commit fraud, and more demand means higher fees which means more expensive drugs.
I'm not sure what the solutions to these problems are. Industry consolidation would probably help - fewer companies competing mean that clinical trial costs would drop, there would be less rush, and drug prices would rise so companies have less need to cut corners. Government funding of drug development might not hurt (from start to finish) - the patent issues go away if government just picks up the tab (with all the issues of politicized medical research).
There really are no easy answers though. Sure, people offer easy answers to the pharmaceutical problem, but they don't seem any better than the easy answers to crime, world peace, and all those other things taht people oversimplify...
And yet, the interest rate the US government pays on its debts is lower than any other nation on earth (as far as I'm aware - counterexamples welcome). So, lots of people have a great deal of confidence in the ability of the US to pay its debts - which is why they lend the money almost interest-free.
Look, this isn't some contest over who has the best economy. I'm actually the first in line when it comes to having government protection for pensions. If anything they should be the property of the employee held in trust, and there should be standards regarding reserves/etc. Government should also guarantee pensions with an insurance premium charged to companies (and massive penalties for failing to meet obligations). Pensions are part of salary - and as such they are due to an employee every payday.
The reason that treasury bonds are soaring is that you have thousands of mutual fund managers who have trillions of dollars of investments to manage. What do they do with all that money? The financial sector is looking bad, so they sell off their investments in that sector. But what do they do with the resulting money? They can't just fill warehouses with thousand dollar bills, and when you have a billion dollars in cash you can't put it in a million different FDIC-insured bank accounts (and how exactly are those safer than US treasuries anyway - both are backed by a promise from the exact same government).
So, you buy US treasuries. Those are probably the safest investments around. Oh sure, you can diversify and go with other governments, but which governments look any better than the US at the moment? The crisis is global, and it isn't like the european banks are doing any better - and the US can weather a storm a lot better than France, or wherever.
And China is very new - I'm not sure their government even borrows that kind of money, and being a semi-dictatorship I'm not sure that anybody would trust them with a trillion dollars for an IOU.
At a few points during the selloffs treasuries actually had negative yields. That just shows how desperate fund managers were to do something with their cash. They were willing to spend $10,100 dollars for an IOU that says the US government would pay them $10k in a few years. But, if the alternative is to hold onto shares of some bank on the brink it is a good deal - lose a percent or lose everything.
Sure, the market will sort itself out and those treasuries will drop in value to more normal levels - as money gets diversified. However, in a crunch it is a lot easier to find a trillion dollars worth of US bonds than it is to find the equivalent from someplace overseas.
The fact is that the US didn't even default on bonds during the great depression - and even the current crisis needs to be taken in perspective. A trillion dollars isn't an unmanageable sum for the US government, and it isn't a 100% loss either (I'm not so naive to think that US will make cash on the deal, but they probably won't lose most of it either).
I think the real problem is policies that let private institutions essentially print money. The fractional reserve system essentially does this - if nothing else it would be reigned in a bit. Naked shorts do the exact same thing - people are essentially selling stock they don't even have. If you or I did that we'd be locked up for fraud. I'm not sure what can be done about mass stupidity - but that is nothing limited to just the stock market. At work we all deal with arbitrary deadlines - optimistic plans without any grounding in reason but which all managers accept because to do otherwise would be to believe that they can't make x% of a return on their investments. Well, you can't make 20% earnings on the traditional mortgage market, so money managers invent a game where they can make more (in theory).
I have a swap file of about 5X RAM - I certainly don't use it all but I do sometimes use quite a bit of it.
The reason is tmpfs. Junk that I don't need to persist always goes in tmpfs - which speeds up lots of stuff. At worst it gets swapped out to disk opportunistically, but the fact that the kernel knows that I don't really care about it at all means that it can take full advantage of ordered writes / caching / etc.
I also run gentoo - which means that I'm often doing compilations, which generate tons of files that I don't care about long-term. Those go in the tmpfs. For most software it probably never hits disk, but if I'm compiling firefox or whatever the swap comes into play. Performance is better than just compiling on disk - since a file that gets created and deleted 60 seconds later may never hit the disk at all.
But, gentoo users are a bit of a special case there. Most people don't generate large numbers of transient files.
Agreed - I didn't advance the original argument. However, if you can postpone a problem safely into the distant future it isn't necessarily a bad thing when the alternatives aren't good. Kind of like cryogenicially preserving bodies...
It doesn't actually seem like an unreasonable assumption - over long timeframes.
What was the cost of 1kWh of energy 10,000 years ago? 1000 years ago? 100 years ago?
Sure, fossil fuels have gone up in cost in the last 50 years, but that is just a recent trend. There is no reason to think that the fusion power of 2050 won't be cheaper than the coal of 1900.
It might also be more expensive, but technology in general has tended to make everything cheaper with time historically. This is just one more thing.
And unless you start doing transmutation you still have carbon to dispose of somewhere.
This sort of technology could be used to help clean up diffuse carbon emissions. Sure, smoke stacks are best cleaned up at the stack - but what about lawn mowers, volcanoes, and forest fires?
I don't think this attack is nearly as bad as it seems.
The attack requires the attacker to reveal their IP address (unlike pre-cookie SYN floods). That means you can limit the number of connections per IP and blacklist IPs to effectively block the attack. You can also track down the attacking machines and do something about them.
Basically the attack is just a way to create huge numbers of connections in a way that is optimized to cope with syn-cookies. It doesn't sound like it defeats the cookies, but rather it allows clients to maintain connections without needing as much local memory to track connection states.
All a server owner needs to do is blacklist attacking IPs and none of the connections will get through. ISPs would rapidly cut off zombies sending out this junk when they get complaints (the only reason they didn't do it before is that nobody knew who to complain to (or sue) due to IP-spoofing - which doesn't work with this attack).
Yup - as the previous owner of two different prorpietary DVRs I'll never go back now that I'm on MythTV. My first Tivo had a hard drive failure. The second DVR was pretty nice except for the software bugs that caused it to tend to not actually record shows. Now I have a device that will tolerate drive failures, will hold tons of shows, and when something goes wrong I can actually fix it and not just toss it in the trash.
I don't really have to play with it much, either. Sure, software updates take some effort, but that happens maybe once every 18 months - I don't just upgrade for the sake of upgrading.
This isn't univerally true, but it isn't far from the truth. When I have a lousy day at work I just stop and think about the fact that I could be digging ditches for $12/hr. Then death by paperwork doesn't seem so bad... :)
Option One: Five years hard labor for possession of any amount, and TWENTY at hard labor for dealing of any amount.
That is about as likely to stop drug use as the death penality is likely to stop murder. That isn't a knock against the death penalty - only a statement that even the harshest deterrant won't eliminate crime. If you beheaded students on the spot when they are caught passing notes in clasess, I guarantee that notes would still get passed around.
That doesn't mean that the justice system is futile or unneeded. However, no justice system can eliminate crime. And any real justice system administers injustice as well as justice - so we ought to consider that when deciding what the laws should be.
Who created this mess? Greedy people.
Some greedy people make $50M per year. Some make $50k per year. Some make $5k per year. And some don't make a dime. They're all part of the problem. For every greedy exec lending money to somebody who can't afford the payments there is some greedy poor person who wants a bigger house than they can afford.
Who gets scammed by the nigerian scam artist - that's right - greedy people.
There is no excuse for greed - plain and simple. I don't have a lot of stuff that other people have, but I enjoy the things I have and provide for those who depend on me. I have better things to do than worry about whether I deserve a bigger TV set and whether it is my boss or my wife that is holding me back from having it.
Handing money to a greedy person only makes them greedier.
Perhaps the bailout is needed to avoid having all those greedy people start robbing our houses. However, these people do need to feel some economic pain. It is like putting somebody who is overweight on a diet. I have nothing but compassion for the poor and I realize they're subjected to advertising 24x7. However, that doesn't change the fact that we don't help them out simply by throwing them cash. Sure, spend some money on consumer education if that helps, and make sure their kids have basic food on the table - but don't just start mailing out checks and expect that to make people start acting responsibly.
The patent that invents itself.
I wonder if IBM's next innovation will be programs that write themselves.
Does a black hole get created when this happens? It seems like the universe would suffer a stack-overflow.
Interesting.
I use Rockbox and I've noticed that a large number of Rockbox users are blind (I am not). Rockbox has supported voice prompts for quite a long time now - obviously the word has gotten out since many of these users are not the sorts of people who would be flashing custom firmware onto an mp3 player otherwise. A fair amount of effort has been devoted to accessibility on the project, and I don't think that many other mp3 players can make that claim.
I wonder if a fix for the buffer overflow (besides languages that make it harder) would be to separate the stacks used for local variables and return addresses.
The problem is that when a call is made to a function the compiler pushes the return address onto the stack. Then the function allocates space for its own variables on top of the same stack. If one of those variables overflows it can hit the return address. That essentially is a mixing of code and data. If you had two stacks then the processor could trigger an exception if anything writes to one of them except via a call or return. You could probably accomplish this via changes to the compiler without a processor change - the processor will always use the regular stack but a compiler could be designed to maintain a separate stack for local variables. You wouldn't have that read-only protection on the regular stack, but the two would be in different segments making an overflow impossible.
Other tricks that are used are things like canarys - values written onto the stack and then checked before a return - if there was an overflow the canary would not be intact. GCC has an option to do this which works most of the time.
Well, if something like this took off programs could come with execution fingerprint files or whatever containing this information. However, that just means that instead of downloading a virus-infected executable you'll just end up downloading the virus-infected executable and its infected fingerprint.
The issue with any scanner like this is that you need to start from a known-good state. If you take all the time to maintain it a system like tripwire is virtually impenetrable - even if there is a break-in it is a trival matter to identy any compromised files.
You could also just have a CD-ROM full of MD5 sums mounted and have the kernel checksum any file before executing it. I can't see how that would be any less secure - or inconvenient.
Where I see this being useful is in an enviornment like a server with infrequent updates (running debian stable or the like). That's the same enviornment where tripwire (or an in-kernel equivalent) is useful.
Cameras aren't best used for realtime monitoring in some big room.
They're best used for retroactive analysis. Somebody becomes a person of interest, and now once you know where they were at any point in history you can find out everywhere they've ever been, everybody they've ever talked to, everywhere anybody they've ever talked to has been, and where they are right now.
I'm sure the first place we'll see these abused is in civil cases. Divorce cases come to mind very quickly.
I've been using rockbox on that hardware for a year or two and I've been very happy with it. I actually bought this player only for the purpose of using Rockbox (a step of faith considering I'd never used it previously).
Using the original firmware to copy files is fairly transparent. If the device is on and you plug in the USB port, it powers on and automatically boots to the original firmware. Then when you unplug it the system automatically reboots to the Rockbox firmware. I'm sure they'll set it to just boot to Rockbox once it supports USB syncing.
About the only time it would seem to be inconvenient is if you wanted to listen to music while having it plugged into USB. That never happens for me - I can just play music on my PC if I want to.
And yet, they can't actually stop you from doing it (unless you say that you're doing it).
Basically, it is don't ask, don't tell. Or in some cases, ask, but don't tell.
As long as you offer a reasonable prima facie reason for your verdict, nothing can be done about it - or about you.
Stock price is based on market value, just because the owner of the stock changes doesnt mean you can void it. A company has to purchase its stock back from shareholders to reduce the amount on the market (see treasury stock)
Sure - but I did in fact state that the stockholders would be paid for their shares - in accordance with the true company value (which is the assets-liabilities - including the liability owed to the government for fixing everything).
Of course stockholders should not owe money for purchasing stock beyond the initial investment.
When did I say otherwise. I said that stockholders should consider themselves fortunate that they don't owe money. I didn't say that they actually would. However, major stockholders might be liable if they in any way conspired in illegal activity - fraud is grounds for piercing the corporate veil.
Costing taxpayers billions of dollars is not a crime.
I never said it was. I said that it needs to be MADE a serious crime. That means changing the laws. Then, it is a crime.
Your method of a bailout would screw taxpayers, the new shareholders, into paying for the illegal jailing of corporate executives while costing original shareholders more than their investment (also illegal).
I never proposed the illegal jailing of executives, but rather changing the laws so that it is legal to jail them. Sure, maybe it is too late to jail the current execs, but you could at least tie them up in Federal lawsuits so they don't see the outside of a courthouse for 50 years. That would be a tiny expense compared to what those execs caused. And I never proposed costing shareholders more than their investment. I thought it was obvious that if the sum came out negative (a virtual certainty) that simply no dividend would be paid.
And, I don't agree that just because nobody prevented the execs from running the economy into the ground that they bear no responsibility whatsoever. When you run a country there are two basic philosphies. One is that you can pass a bazillion laws to keep people from taking advantage of each other. The other is that you can have laws that generally accomplish this, but which are broad enough to punish those who fail to use discretion. We need to get away from the "well, technically what I did wasn't illegal even though I know that for personal gain I cost half the country six months pay" excuses.