As somebody else pointed out with the sparrow bit this isn't really a communist problem per-se.
However, I would add that communism does tend to lead to very powerful and centralized governments, whose mandate is anything that might serve the public good. That does tend to lead to stuff like this - the government is inherently interventionalist in all kinds of domains. Contrast that with something like libertarianism where in an idealized implementation the government probably wouldn't even kill a sparrow nest to build a highway, since they wouldn't build highways at all (on the other hand, the government would be less inclined to act when a corporation dumps toxic waste in a local river - leaving matters up to the civil tort system).
I recall in freshman biology learning about parasitic cycles, and China was used as an example. Schistosomiasis is a serious problem in the developing world, and part of the fluke's life cycle takes place in snails. The Chinese government undertook an effort to eliminate the snails, and consequently the disease rate dropped tremendously.
Strong central governments can accomplish all kinds of good - but they can also wreak all kinds of havoc. Panopticon technology could be used to capture kidnapers, terrorists, and other criminals that are a detriment to society. It can also be used to ensure that political dissidents are suppressed. It isn't the power that is inherently bad - it is people that are inherently prone to corruption (which I believe makes too much government power a bad thing).
I think I've heard that after a certain number of keys are cracked there is an opening for an attack on the master key. However, as you indicate if you pick some very popular players (preferably one without good support for firmware updates) you're going to make the studios look very bad if they revoke them.
Hmm - here in the united states I went camping in Canada a few years ago and was introduced to the Black Fly.
I was ready to head back home after all of about one minute after stepping out of the car. Imagine mosquitos that tear hunks of flesh out of your skin, and which crawl under any exposed opening in your clothing.
The only good thing was that for some reason they hated being inside cars - so if you dove into a car they'd fly to the windows where you could let them out. Trying to squish them would just render the windows opaque fairly quickly.
Oh yeah - they did just fine pursuing you on bike. You could look back and literally see a cloud of the little monsters...
I haven't read the bill, but one thing that you need to watch out for based on loopholes I've seen in constitutional protections is using one method for screening people, and another for officially excluding them.
For example, it is illegal for the police to just do infrared imaging of random houses looking for suspicious activities - which in practice just means any evidence gathered in this manner is excluded from a trial. However, what the police can do is go looking for criminals using this illegal search method, and then when they find something suspicious they can send an officer to patrol the block on foot, and they can happen to notice that your tree branches aren't properly trimmed in accordance with some ordnance nobody has heard of, and then when they go to your door to point this out to you they can happen to hear suspicious shouting inside, and so on...
So, insurance companies might be officially unable to use genetic information to make decisions. However, they could still screen genetic information looking for people they'd like to exclude, and then go through their files with a fine-tooth comb looking for any other legitimate excuse to exclude them. "Sorry, Joe - we just noticed that in 1992 you paid your phone bill two months late and a 60-day late bill is cause for terminating your policy as clearly stated in page 17, subclause 4.b.2.c.5.i in your policy..."
Basically, these sorts of tactics take advantage of the fact that most modern consumer contracts are so complex that NOBODY truly follows them to the letter, and the books contain so many laws that EVERYBODY is violating something all the time. So, these conditions can be used as legitimate excuses for doing what would be otherwise illegitimate behavior.
This has already been answered well a few times, but I'll add a few notes that most have missed.
First, I'm not a big fan of socialized medicine at all. I really think it is probably going to decrease the overall quality of medicine in the US, although it will redistribute it which may have a net overall benefit for the average human living in the US. I'm not convinced that this is reason enough to enact it.
All that said, I think socialized medicine is inevitable - for exactly the reason you are touching on here. As others have pointed out, the problem with this bill is that it allows consumers to choose to purchase insurance based on genetic information, but it doesn't allow those selling it to use this information. So, if I find out that I have virtually no chance of dying of cancer I can save a few bucks and buy a policy that doesn't cover cancer. If I find out that I'm virtually certain to have diabetes then I'll pay extra to get the best diabetes coverage I can get. The net result - the diabetes plan goes bankrupt because everybody buying it is just like me and costs more than they pay, and the cancer plan goes bankrupt because people like me who would pay in and not collect don't buy it.
Essentially we're treating health insurance as a way to redistribute wealth and not as a risk-management plan. That just doesn't work with private insurance. Private insurance can only do two things - allow each person to pay for only their statistical portion of risk, and act like a buyers club of sorts to take advantage of negotiated pricing.
I'm not sure what the best solution is, but I do think that the availability of genetic information is going to steadily turn so many people into an expensive class of some sort that it will destroy the ability for private insurance to work. On one level I'd support socialism - while I can certainly afford to pay my own way it isn't like I ever did anything to deserve an IQ so many standard deviations above the norm, and it isn't like the homeless guy down the street did anything to deserve to be born without the ability to earn well. The problem with socialism is twofold - government operations tend to be inefficient and unaccountable, and socialism discourages people like me from working as hard as I could. It also amounts to being charitable with other people's money - since it depends on taxes.
I'm not sure the current system in the US is fair - but I don't think that socialized medicine is a bed of roses either...
But, not totally, TPM modules can be used for security purposes as well which help the owner of the hardware out.
Agree completely. What is needed is legislation that requires that any time a computer is sold the purchaser gets a copy of any keys embedded in it, and any associated related keys (ie RSA/etc).
Then, the TPM module becomes a tool for a computer owner to control access to their own machine. It can't be used by others as a tool to restrict what the legal owner can do - because the owner could choose to falsify TPM assurances with the knowledge of the chip's key.
software engineering has a lot in common with circuit design and should borrow and modify principles and concepts from hardware side in terms of expressing their programming and math in a format akin to electricity flowing through a circuit
Ironically the hardware side has been going in the opposite direction. How many transistors in a modern dual-core processor do you think were actually put there by hand with manual checking of voltage/resistance/heat/etc? Somebody writes up some code essentially and a program creates millions of gates to do what the algorithm dictates.
The problem with this visual rendering of software you suggest is that any non-trivial program is going to turn into a monstrosity of flow charts that would probably require tens of thousands of pages to print on paper. A single line of code could potentially be a few different boxes in a language like C.
The reason software engineering isn't like civil engineering is that while a bridge has maybe a few tens of thousands of parts, a computer program has the equivalent of hundreds of millions of parts (if you were to express the software as the equivalent machine). The best you can do is at least develop libraries that can have some level of specifications and testing around them so that you minimize the amount of code that is unique to a particular application. Software is just a different kettle of fish...
The fact remains that there are any number of sci-fi horror movies that are more suited to his abilities, could benefit from better special effects, and are screaming for remakes.
I dunno - sometimes I wonder if things are tested at all.
I just had to reboot my server because a USB drive was disconnected while it was mounted. I'm not sure what caused the disconnect (it wasn't a cable detach), but it froze the whole usb subsystem. Anything accessing the mounted device or even just running lsusb ended up in the dreaded D state. I couldn't even forcibly unload the usb_storage module (as risky as that would be). Now, otherwise the computer was just fine (ignoring the loads pegged in the 10s-20s - with no noticeable loss in responsiveness), but I couldn't get the usb drive to show up again until after the reboot.
I absolutely love linux, but I have to be honest and say that it has one really big design weakness - it fails badly. The emphasis seems to be on preventing failures, and not on dealing with failures. I think this is where a mircokernel approach would help - more containment means less mess when something goes wrong. Sure, do all you can to prevent failure, but plan for everything...
Those were the first things I tried - none worked, and as you pointed out they don't explain why all the other tabs froze.
Note that I haven't tried to reproduce this behavior recently. After banging my head against a wall for a while I just ended up using konqueror. I'm sure if I searched long and hard I could find either bug or list postings describing the problem - but again, this was a while ago.
I haven't had too many problems with crashes, but I still don't run firefox on linux. The biggest issue I've had with it is a tendency for tabs to just take a VERY long time to load.
The behavior I've seen is this:
1. Go to a site with lots of links - such as a news site or RSS aggregator. 2. Start middle-clicking on links to open them in tabs.
Inevitably one of the early ones just doesn't load - it sits and looks like it is loading and does nothing for a minute or two. All subsequent tabs do the same thing. As soon as the first one actually does load and render the others instantly load and rendor. Obviously something is blocking the loading/rendering in all open tabs when this is happening.
Everything works just fine in konqueror, so that is what I tend to use all the time. I'd actually prefer firefox for its plugins/etc, but it just isn't reliable for me. Now the only time I use it on linux is when a page doesn't render correctly in konqueror.
I'd also like to comment that I'm very concerned with the keep-piling-on-features mentality in Firefox. I want a web browser - not an OS/desktop-in-a-window. The whole reason that firefox was born was that everybody was tired of Mozilla having 47 huge features that nobody needed. Let's stick to the basics and do them right. If they want to come out with a few other apps that can tightly integrate with firefox, that's great - but let's let the stand-alone browser be a stand-alone browser...
I doubt it would come to this. European leaders would most likely cooperate with the US if asked, and then publicly condemn whatever is going on for the sake of the masses. And if asked nicely by a European leader the US would probably go ahead and selectively degrade GPS in some region if that were strategically necessary for a European state.
While there is a lot of political posturing going on, the fact is that Europeans and Americans have a lot more in common than they have in opposition.
However, if the US were involved in World War III and nobody wanted to flip the switch on commercial navigation/recon/etc sats then they'd probably go ahead and start shooting them down. After the first 100M dollars/euros worth of investment become scrap metal the corporate interests running the show in space would fall in line pretty quickly. And yes, in a very serious war the US satellites would start falling from the sky as well - there's a reason US ships still stock astrolabes.
I don't see any sign of bureaucracy for compiz. There is a 0.7.4 ebuild in bugzilla. There isn't any kind of conspiracy to keep it out of portage - but nobody has committed it.
I suspect the maintainer is inactive since he hasn't chimed in at all. That means that anybody else who wants to step up to maintain it can potentially volunteer to do so.
All distros are subject to manpower - it isn't like packages just fall from the sky. There has been some talk about finding better ways to allow for packages to be made available with possibly a lower level of QA so that more users can contribute (right now a developer with commit access has to take personal responsibility for anything they put in portage - as a result fringe packages just don't make it in at all or get very rare updates). Right now the manpower level for Gentoo has fallen a little, so if a package isn't mainline or of interest to a volunteer developer it is less likely to stay current.
So what are you waiting for? Sign up and be part of the solution!:)
Time shifting is not a right, it's a defense. It means that you cannot be found guilty of copyright infringement if you time-shift some TV shows.
Try using that defense after selling a DVR with an HD tuner that ignores the flag.
However, it does *NOT* mean that networks cannot implement measures, such as the Broadcast Flag, that prevent you from time-shifting.
The problem is that it isn't the networks implementing these measures - but the FCC. It is illegal to manufacture a DVR that does not respect the flag...
Interesting - this seems to be something that is true of teaching in almost any setting.
I was sitting in church thinking about how just about any sermon topic geared for mass-consumption has probably been explained far better at least 100 times in the last 10 centuries (I mean, how many different sermons can you dig out of a book that is 2000+ years old on average?). And yet, congregations expect their pastors to come up with original teaching - as if that is more divinely inspired than playing a video of somebody more qualified to talk on the same subject. Perhaps the time of the local pastor would be better spent actually working with the needs of the congregation rather than outlining sermons.
In the same way - why not have the NSF create a series of REALLY good videos with a well-coordinated curriculum and make them free to local schools. Class would consist of watching the video in combination with Q&A with a local teacher. Everything could be standardized - and the overall process could steadily improve at a fraction of the cost of the current system. At the lower grades you could probably have one strong science teacher for a whole school district - they wouldn't need to teach the whole class and creative use of scheduling could allow 30 minutes to watch a video and 15 minutes of discussion with the teacher moving from room to room as video segments end. Perhaps on certain days some classes would get more interactive teaching that is completely moderated - in more of a collegiate style of teaching.
And there is no reason the same model couldn't be applied in a number of subjects.
Actually - it wasn't always this way, although this technology was deployed fairly early in the space program.
I remember reading an article about one of the earliest Mars probes. Both the US and the USSR launched probes around the same time. However, when the probes began to approach Mars a huge dust storm ensued obscuring most of the surface for quite a while. The US probe was reprogrammable, while the Russian probe was not. The US was able to put their probe into hiberation during the storm, while the Russian probe expended its energy relaying photos of haze.
So, the value of this ability was proven fairly early in the space program. I'm not sure what the timing was relative to Pioneer but it almost certainly predated Voyager.
Don't forget the part where the defense attourney's reputation depends solely on people being found innocent (or at least getting reduced charges/sentences). The prosecutor's reputation depends solely on how many person-years of prison sentences are dispensed by the time he runs for governor or whatever.
Neither is particularly interested in actual justice. If the prosecutor suspected the defendant was innocent but knew he could get a conviction, how many would seriously consider dropping the case?
There is a really good frontline that you can watch online on the impact of plea bargaining on the justice system. Scary stuff...
Ok, if you work for Sun, maybe you can point me in the right direction.
I'd like to try out OpenSolaris. I'm a pretty experienced linux user.
So, is there ANYWHERE (for free) that has a bunch of steps that you can follow to put Solaris through its paces? I've gotten it working in vmware just fine, but now I'm in this really foreign environment where just about everything is other than what I'm used to. I take my out-of-the-box config and type in df at the command prompt and see about a dozen devices mounted that seem to be all really storing data on the same filesystem (I read about this ZFS feature - but it isn't really obvious what it is doing).
I'm really interested in playing with zones, dtrace, etc. So, how do you do it?
I found a guide online but it left out a lot of steps and died not long after I started creating a zone because the ethernet device it instructed me to configure it with didn't exist, and not knowing anything about solaris I couldn't figure out what the correct interface is. Ifconfig yielded nothing - perhaps it doesn't like the vmware ethernet card.
I'd be really interested in a simple step-by-step tour of solaris where you maybe setup apache and a mail server and just play around with the system. That would go a long way to introducing those who are already familiar with linux to this foreign OS...
Comparing the Prius to the Tesla car is apples and oranges, the Tesla roadster is MUCH more advanced in every aspect than the Prius.
Not in terms of cost to drive per mile it isn't...
Oh, and I'm talking total cost per mile - including depreciation. Being able to make a car for under $100k is an advance that is all too important in this market...:)
If the plant was slated for 10yrs of usage and due to idle time that 10yrs will still occur but be spread out over 50yrs only a moron insists the burners be fired during the first 10yrs just because that happens to be when the checks are being written.
Nobody fires up the burners simply for the sake of firing them up if nobody needs the electricity.
Instead, the plant doesn't get built in the first place.
When you're building a huge capital project you first determine what the utilization will be. If the utilization doesn't justify building the plant, then you don't build the plant. Maybe you build peakers instead, or maybe you just let the state have blackouts. That's how private capital works - if you want people to pay for their own power plants, then you need to make sure they can make back enough money that they'll want to build them in the first place.
The grandparent is correct - depreciation is one of the largest expenses on something like this. Just look at your car - half the cost of operating it is probably depreciation. If you buy a new car and let it sit and rust for 20 years, does it cost nothing simply because you didn't have to buy gas? Of course not - you paid the biggest expense of all the day you bought it - nobody of ordinary means would buy an expensive car if they only needed to drive one day per month.
If we'd judge everything on financial grounds we'd live in a world that is as boring as the shitty projects most of us work on. (Yeah sure, your work of course is exciting and you come home filled with joy and pleasure every day.)
Let's not throw away money. But OTOH, let's NOT die "sad but rich".
The only problem with this logic is that you want to compel under threat of force individuals to contribute to the building of Colosseums. That's what taxes are - they're not some kind of charity. Choose not to pay them and you'll see the not-so-nice side very quickly.
I'm not some kind of anti-tax nut - taxes are certainly essential to run the primary functions of government which are essential. I'm not entirely opposed to some aspects of social justice as well within reason. However, when you're talking about building sports megacomplexes why not let those who make the money spend the money? Just have the International Olympic Organization fund the construction of the facilities they use (or choose to use existing facilities). They can recoup those costs through ticket sales and television rights. They'll need to regulate their spending so that they break even.
As soon as you make the organization that runs the olympics pay for the olympics you'll start to see them question whether we need events that nobody actually watches, and whether the facilities REALLY need to be built to a given standard. You'll also see them asking questions like - why do all the events have to be held at the same time in the same place? Why not just host them all over the place at various times durning the year and just use existing facilities?
As always, it boils down to who has the biggest guns.
That may be the case now, but we had better move past that mentality if we want to survive.
Unfortunately, at least this part of the argument simply reflects reality. Whoever has the biggest guns is essentially in charge - nobody else has the power to enforce anything else. Government is that body which has an effective monopoly on the use of force.
I think one of the things that society is struggling with is the escalation of technology and the resulting empowerment of the individual. Today one man can drive a truck full of improvised explosive and destroy an entire building. One kid with a gun can wipe out a good part of a school. If the nanotech assemblers of sci-fi become reality then anybody who wanted to could probably manufacture a howitzer or an atomic weapon (or just turn the region into gray goo). In order to maintain a monopoly on the use of force government must increase its powers - not only conventionally but also in terms of surveillance and control of trade in some technologies.
The alternative is to not permit governments to maintain a monopoly on the use of force - which is essentially anarchy. The command from your local police officer becomes a suggestion - without force the government cannot impose its will. If you simply tell the cop that you have a friend that will wipe out a nearby city if they don't let you off without a ticket, and things of this nature are commonplace occurrences, then what is the cop to do?
Sure, this isn't the reality of today, but this is just an illustration to demonstrate that monopoly on the use of force is a necessary condition of government. Now, you simply need to decide what government(s) you want to have power of what areas. A government without nuclear arms is at a considerable disadvantage to one that does, so it isn't surprising that those with them don't want to give them up or allow proliferation, and those without them want to obtain them.
How would you propose to make them give them up? You're going to have to convince them because the 5 leading world powers can't be compelled to do anything (otherwise they wouldn't be the 5 leading powers). How will you convince them that after they've given up their nukes that somebody else won't develop them and hold them at a strategic disadvantage?
It isn't like those who aren't calling for nuclear disarmment LIKE sleeping with the thought that in the middle of the night the world as we know it could come to an end. There just isn't any alternative at the present. Create an alternative that works and you could end up with the peace prize...:)
Ok, so suppose somebody posts the encryption key used by the VPN into the water supply system?
Or the 10-digit code used to unlock the front door?
Even if the example is imperfect there are things that shouldn't be posted online. Then again, arguably if something like this were critical to protect there should be a mechanism to change it quickly. If something like this got posted online my first goal wouldn't be unposting it so much as changing it - once it is out you can't assume that taking it down eliminates the vulnerability when anybody could have copied it elsewhere.
What if Spain finds out a group is using MySpace to plan bombings in Spain or a group is using MSN to track German troop movement for an attack? Why shouldn't they be allowed to request the same censorship? Why should it be okay for us to censor these things but illegal for other countries to censor them?
They can and do have laws of this nature. Basically it comes down to sovereignty and jurisdiction. If you are in a country you must obey its laws or face the consequences. The US is simply saying that they don't want US-based countries censoring data in other countries. That leaves companies a choice - pick what country they want to have a physical presence in. If you want to make the Chinese happy then just give you your US-based operations and there would be no conflict.
Somebody commented the other day that the former CEO of Union Carbide has an outstanding arrest warrant in India for murder (Bhopal) - so they just don't go there.
International law doesn't always need to agree - you just have to decide whether doing business in a particular country matters to you, or if you ever care to vacation there.
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As somebody else pointed out with the sparrow bit this isn't really a communist problem per-se.
However, I would add that communism does tend to lead to very powerful and centralized governments, whose mandate is anything that might serve the public good. That does tend to lead to stuff like this - the government is inherently interventionalist in all kinds of domains. Contrast that with something like libertarianism where in an idealized implementation the government probably wouldn't even kill a sparrow nest to build a highway, since they wouldn't build highways at all (on the other hand, the government would be less inclined to act when a corporation dumps toxic waste in a local river - leaving matters up to the civil tort system).
I recall in freshman biology learning about parasitic cycles, and China was used as an example. Schistosomiasis is a serious problem in the developing world, and part of the fluke's life cycle takes place in snails. The Chinese government undertook an effort to eliminate the snails, and consequently the disease rate dropped tremendously.
Strong central governments can accomplish all kinds of good - but they can also wreak all kinds of havoc. Panopticon technology could be used to capture kidnapers, terrorists, and other criminals that are a detriment to society. It can also be used to ensure that political dissidents are suppressed. It isn't the power that is inherently bad - it is people that are inherently prone to corruption (which I believe makes too much government power a bad thing).
I think I've heard that after a certain number of keys are cracked there is an opening for an attack on the master key. However, as you indicate if you pick some very popular players (preferably one without good support for firmware updates) you're going to make the studios look very bad if they revoke them.
Hmm - here in the united states I went camping in Canada a few years ago and was introduced to the Black Fly.
I was ready to head back home after all of about one minute after stepping out of the car. Imagine mosquitos that tear hunks of flesh out of your skin, and which crawl under any exposed opening in your clothing.
The only good thing was that for some reason they hated being inside cars - so if you dove into a car they'd fly to the windows where you could let them out. Trying to squish them would just render the windows opaque fairly quickly.
Oh yeah - they did just fine pursuing you on bike. You could look back and literally see a cloud of the little monsters...
I haven't read the bill, but one thing that you need to watch out for based on loopholes I've seen in constitutional protections is using one method for screening people, and another for officially excluding them.
For example, it is illegal for the police to just do infrared imaging of random houses looking for suspicious activities - which in practice just means any evidence gathered in this manner is excluded from a trial. However, what the police can do is go looking for criminals using this illegal search method, and then when they find something suspicious they can send an officer to patrol the block on foot, and they can happen to notice that your tree branches aren't properly trimmed in accordance with some ordnance nobody has heard of, and then when they go to your door to point this out to you they can happen to hear suspicious shouting inside, and so on...
So, insurance companies might be officially unable to use genetic information to make decisions. However, they could still screen genetic information looking for people they'd like to exclude, and then go through their files with a fine-tooth comb looking for any other legitimate excuse to exclude them. "Sorry, Joe - we just noticed that in 1992 you paid your phone bill two months late and a 60-day late bill is cause for terminating your policy as clearly stated in page 17, subclause 4.b.2.c.5.i in your policy..."
Basically, these sorts of tactics take advantage of the fact that most modern consumer contracts are so complex that NOBODY truly follows them to the letter, and the books contain so many laws that EVERYBODY is violating something all the time. So, these conditions can be used as legitimate excuses for doing what would be otherwise illegitimate behavior.
This has already been answered well a few times, but I'll add a few notes that most have missed.
First, I'm not a big fan of socialized medicine at all. I really think it is probably going to decrease the overall quality of medicine in the US, although it will redistribute it which may have a net overall benefit for the average human living in the US. I'm not convinced that this is reason enough to enact it.
All that said, I think socialized medicine is inevitable - for exactly the reason you are touching on here. As others have pointed out, the problem with this bill is that it allows consumers to choose to purchase insurance based on genetic information, but it doesn't allow those selling it to use this information. So, if I find out that I have virtually no chance of dying of cancer I can save a few bucks and buy a policy that doesn't cover cancer. If I find out that I'm virtually certain to have diabetes then I'll pay extra to get the best diabetes coverage I can get. The net result - the diabetes plan goes bankrupt because everybody buying it is just like me and costs more than they pay, and the cancer plan goes bankrupt because people like me who would pay in and not collect don't buy it.
Essentially we're treating health insurance as a way to redistribute wealth and not as a risk-management plan. That just doesn't work with private insurance. Private insurance can only do two things - allow each person to pay for only their statistical portion of risk, and act like a buyers club of sorts to take advantage of negotiated pricing.
I'm not sure what the best solution is, but I do think that the availability of genetic information is going to steadily turn so many people into an expensive class of some sort that it will destroy the ability for private insurance to work. On one level I'd support socialism - while I can certainly afford to pay my own way it isn't like I ever did anything to deserve an IQ so many standard deviations above the norm, and it isn't like the homeless guy down the street did anything to deserve to be born without the ability to earn well. The problem with socialism is twofold - government operations tend to be inefficient and unaccountable, and socialism discourages people like me from working as hard as I could. It also amounts to being charitable with other people's money - since it depends on taxes.
I'm not sure the current system in the US is fair - but I don't think that socialized medicine is a bed of roses either...
But, not totally, TPM modules can be used for security purposes as well which help the owner of the hardware out.
Agree completely. What is needed is legislation that requires that any time a computer is sold the purchaser gets a copy of any keys embedded in it, and any associated related keys (ie RSA/etc).
Then, the TPM module becomes a tool for a computer owner to control access to their own machine. It can't be used by others as a tool to restrict what the legal owner can do - because the owner could choose to falsify TPM assurances with the knowledge of the chip's key.
software engineering has a lot in common with circuit design and should borrow and modify principles and concepts from hardware side in terms of expressing their programming and math in a format akin to electricity flowing through a circuit
Ironically the hardware side has been going in the opposite direction. How many transistors in a modern dual-core processor do you think were actually put there by hand with manual checking of voltage/resistance/heat/etc? Somebody writes up some code essentially and a program creates millions of gates to do what the algorithm dictates.
The problem with this visual rendering of software you suggest is that any non-trivial program is going to turn into a monstrosity of flow charts that would probably require tens of thousands of pages to print on paper. A single line of code could potentially be a few different boxes in a language like C.
The reason software engineering isn't like civil engineering is that while a bridge has maybe a few tens of thousands of parts, a computer program has the equivalent of hundreds of millions of parts (if you were to express the software as the equivalent machine). The best you can do is at least develop libraries that can have some level of specifications and testing around them so that you minimize the amount of code that is unique to a particular application. Software is just a different kettle of fish...
The fact remains that there are any number of sci-fi horror movies that are more suited to his abilities, could benefit from better special effects, and are screaming for remakes.
Yes - I think that Santa Claus Conquerors the Martians would be more up Keanu's alley.
I dunno - sometimes I wonder if things are tested at all.
I just had to reboot my server because a USB drive was disconnected while it was mounted. I'm not sure what caused the disconnect (it wasn't a cable detach), but it froze the whole usb subsystem. Anything accessing the mounted device or even just running lsusb ended up in the dreaded D state. I couldn't even forcibly unload the usb_storage module (as risky as that would be). Now, otherwise the computer was just fine (ignoring the loads pegged in the 10s-20s - with no noticeable loss in responsiveness), but I couldn't get the usb drive to show up again until after the reboot.
I absolutely love linux, but I have to be honest and say that it has one really big design weakness - it fails badly. The emphasis seems to be on preventing failures, and not on dealing with failures. I think this is where a mircokernel approach would help - more containment means less mess when something goes wrong. Sure, do all you can to prevent failure, but plan for everything...
Those were the first things I tried - none worked, and as you pointed out they don't explain why all the other tabs froze.
Note that I haven't tried to reproduce this behavior recently. After banging my head against a wall for a while I just ended up using konqueror. I'm sure if I searched long and hard I could find either bug or list postings describing the problem - but again, this was a while ago.
I haven't had too many problems with crashes, but I still don't run firefox on linux. The biggest issue I've had with it is a tendency for tabs to just take a VERY long time to load.
The behavior I've seen is this:
1. Go to a site with lots of links - such as a news site or RSS aggregator.
2. Start middle-clicking on links to open them in tabs.
Inevitably one of the early ones just doesn't load - it sits and looks like it is loading and does nothing for a minute or two. All subsequent tabs do the same thing. As soon as the first one actually does load and render the others instantly load and rendor. Obviously something is blocking the loading/rendering in all open tabs when this is happening.
Everything works just fine in konqueror, so that is what I tend to use all the time. I'd actually prefer firefox for its plugins/etc, but it just isn't reliable for me. Now the only time I use it on linux is when a page doesn't render correctly in konqueror.
I'd also like to comment that I'm very concerned with the keep-piling-on-features mentality in Firefox. I want a web browser - not an OS/desktop-in-a-window. The whole reason that firefox was born was that everybody was tired of Mozilla having 47 huge features that nobody needed. Let's stick to the basics and do them right. If they want to come out with a few other apps that can tightly integrate with firefox, that's great - but let's let the stand-alone browser be a stand-alone browser...
I doubt it would come to this. European leaders would most likely cooperate with the US if asked, and then publicly condemn whatever is going on for the sake of the masses. And if asked nicely by a European leader the US would probably go ahead and selectively degrade GPS in some region if that were strategically necessary for a European state.
While there is a lot of political posturing going on, the fact is that Europeans and Americans have a lot more in common than they have in opposition.
However, if the US were involved in World War III and nobody wanted to flip the switch on commercial navigation/recon/etc sats then they'd probably go ahead and start shooting them down. After the first 100M dollars/euros worth of investment become scrap metal the corporate interests running the show in space would fall in line pretty quickly. And yes, in a very serious war the US satellites would start falling from the sky as well - there's a reason US ships still stock astrolabes.
Uh, according to the RIAA it is more like $100k per song. He must have had a 20 second teaser clip on there...
I don't see any sign of bureaucracy for compiz. There is a 0.7.4 ebuild in bugzilla. There isn't any kind of conspiracy to keep it out of portage - but nobody has committed it.
:)
I suspect the maintainer is inactive since he hasn't chimed in at all. That means that anybody else who wants to step up to maintain it can potentially volunteer to do so.
All distros are subject to manpower - it isn't like packages just fall from the sky. There has been some talk about finding better ways to allow for packages to be made available with possibly a lower level of QA so that more users can contribute (right now a developer with commit access has to take personal responsibility for anything they put in portage - as a result fringe packages just don't make it in at all or get very rare updates). Right now the manpower level for Gentoo has fallen a little, so if a package isn't mainline or of interest to a volunteer developer it is less likely to stay current.
So what are you waiting for? Sign up and be part of the solution!
Time shifting is not a right, it's a defense. It means that you cannot be found guilty of copyright infringement if you time-shift some TV shows.
Try using that defense after selling a DVR with an HD tuner that ignores the flag.
However, it does *NOT* mean that networks cannot implement measures, such as the Broadcast Flag, that prevent you from time-shifting.
The problem is that it isn't the networks implementing these measures - but the FCC. It is illegal to manufacture a DVR that does not respect the flag...
Interesting - this seems to be something that is true of teaching in almost any setting.
I was sitting in church thinking about how just about any sermon topic geared for mass-consumption has probably been explained far better at least 100 times in the last 10 centuries (I mean, how many different sermons can you dig out of a book that is 2000+ years old on average?). And yet, congregations expect their pastors to come up with original teaching - as if that is more divinely inspired than playing a video of somebody more qualified to talk on the same subject. Perhaps the time of the local pastor would be better spent actually working with the needs of the congregation rather than outlining sermons.
In the same way - why not have the NSF create a series of REALLY good videos with a well-coordinated curriculum and make them free to local schools. Class would consist of watching the video in combination with Q&A with a local teacher. Everything could be standardized - and the overall process could steadily improve at a fraction of the cost of the current system. At the lower grades you could probably have one strong science teacher for a whole school district - they wouldn't need to teach the whole class and creative use of scheduling could allow 30 minutes to watch a video and 15 minutes of discussion with the teacher moving from room to room as video segments end. Perhaps on certain days some classes would get more interactive teaching that is completely moderated - in more of a collegiate style of teaching.
And there is no reason the same model couldn't be applied in a number of subjects.
Actually - it wasn't always this way, although this technology was deployed fairly early in the space program.
I remember reading an article about one of the earliest Mars probes. Both the US and the USSR launched probes around the same time. However, when the probes began to approach Mars a huge dust storm ensued obscuring most of the surface for quite a while. The US probe was reprogrammable, while the Russian probe was not. The US was able to put their probe into hiberation during the storm, while the Russian probe expended its energy relaying photos of haze.
So, the value of this ability was proven fairly early in the space program. I'm not sure what the timing was relative to Pioneer but it almost certainly predated Voyager.
Don't forget the part where the defense attourney's reputation depends solely on people being found innocent (or at least getting reduced charges/sentences). The prosecutor's reputation depends solely on how many person-years of prison sentences are dispensed by the time he runs for governor or whatever.
Neither is particularly interested in actual justice. If the prosecutor suspected the defendant was innocent but knew he could get a conviction, how many would seriously consider dropping the case?
There is a really good frontline that you can watch online on the impact of plea bargaining on the justice system. Scary stuff...
Ok, if you work for Sun, maybe you can point me in the right direction.
I'd like to try out OpenSolaris. I'm a pretty experienced linux user.
So, is there ANYWHERE (for free) that has a bunch of steps that you can follow to put Solaris through its paces? I've gotten it working in vmware just fine, but now I'm in this really foreign environment where just about everything is other than what I'm used to. I take my out-of-the-box config and type in df at the command prompt and see about a dozen devices mounted that seem to be all really storing data on the same filesystem (I read about this ZFS feature - but it isn't really obvious what it is doing).
I'm really interested in playing with zones, dtrace, etc. So, how do you do it?
I found a guide online but it left out a lot of steps and died not long after I started creating a zone because the ethernet device it instructed me to configure it with didn't exist, and not knowing anything about solaris I couldn't figure out what the correct interface is. Ifconfig yielded nothing - perhaps it doesn't like the vmware ethernet card.
I'd be really interested in a simple step-by-step tour of solaris where you maybe setup apache and a mail server and just play around with the system. That would go a long way to introducing those who are already familiar with linux to this foreign OS...
Comparing the Prius to the Tesla car is apples and oranges, the Tesla roadster is MUCH more advanced in every aspect than the Prius.
:)
Not in terms of cost to drive per mile it isn't...
Oh, and I'm talking total cost per mile - including depreciation. Being able to make a car for under $100k is an advance that is all too important in this market...
If the plant was slated for 10yrs of usage and due to idle time that 10yrs will still occur but be spread out over 50yrs only a moron insists the burners be fired during the first 10yrs just because that happens to be when the checks are being written.
Nobody fires up the burners simply for the sake of firing them up if nobody needs the electricity.
Instead, the plant doesn't get built in the first place.
When you're building a huge capital project you first determine what the utilization will be. If the utilization doesn't justify building the plant, then you don't build the plant. Maybe you build peakers instead, or maybe you just let the state have blackouts. That's how private capital works - if you want people to pay for their own power plants, then you need to make sure they can make back enough money that they'll want to build them in the first place.
The grandparent is correct - depreciation is one of the largest expenses on something like this. Just look at your car - half the cost of operating it is probably depreciation. If you buy a new car and let it sit and rust for 20 years, does it cost nothing simply because you didn't have to buy gas? Of course not - you paid the biggest expense of all the day you bought it - nobody of ordinary means would buy an expensive car if they only needed to drive one day per month.
If we'd judge everything on financial grounds we'd live in a world that is as boring as the shitty projects most of us work on. (Yeah sure, your work of course is exciting and you come home filled with joy and pleasure every day.)
Let's not throw away money. But OTOH, let's NOT die "sad but rich".
The only problem with this logic is that you want to compel under threat of force individuals to contribute to the building of Colosseums. That's what taxes are - they're not some kind of charity. Choose not to pay them and you'll see the not-so-nice side very quickly.
I'm not some kind of anti-tax nut - taxes are certainly essential to run the primary functions of government which are essential. I'm not entirely opposed to some aspects of social justice as well within reason. However, when you're talking about building sports megacomplexes why not let those who make the money spend the money? Just have the International Olympic Organization fund the construction of the facilities they use (or choose to use existing facilities). They can recoup those costs through ticket sales and television rights. They'll need to regulate their spending so that they break even.
As soon as you make the organization that runs the olympics pay for the olympics you'll start to see them question whether we need events that nobody actually watches, and whether the facilities REALLY need to be built to a given standard. You'll also see them asking questions like - why do all the events have to be held at the same time in the same place? Why not just host them all over the place at various times durning the year and just use existing facilities?
Unfortunately, at least this part of the argument simply reflects reality. Whoever has the biggest guns is essentially in charge - nobody else has the power to enforce anything else. Government is that body which has an effective monopoly on the use of force.
I think one of the things that society is struggling with is the escalation of technology and the resulting empowerment of the individual. Today one man can drive a truck full of improvised explosive and destroy an entire building. One kid with a gun can wipe out a good part of a school. If the nanotech assemblers of sci-fi become reality then anybody who wanted to could probably manufacture a howitzer or an atomic weapon (or just turn the region into gray goo). In order to maintain a monopoly on the use of force government must increase its powers - not only conventionally but also in terms of surveillance and control of trade in some technologies.
The alternative is to not permit governments to maintain a monopoly on the use of force - which is essentially anarchy. The command from your local police officer becomes a suggestion - without force the government cannot impose its will. If you simply tell the cop that you have a friend that will wipe out a nearby city if they don't let you off without a ticket, and things of this nature are commonplace occurrences, then what is the cop to do?
Sure, this isn't the reality of today, but this is just an illustration to demonstrate that monopoly on the use of force is a necessary condition of government. Now, you simply need to decide what government(s) you want to have power of what areas. A government without nuclear arms is at a considerable disadvantage to one that does, so it isn't surprising that those with them don't want to give them up or allow proliferation, and those without them want to obtain them.
How would you propose to make them give them up? You're going to have to convince them because the 5 leading world powers can't be compelled to do anything (otherwise they wouldn't be the 5 leading powers). How will you convince them that after they've given up their nukes that somebody else won't develop them and hold them at a strategic disadvantage?
It isn't like those who aren't calling for nuclear disarmment LIKE sleeping with the thought that in the middle of the night the world as we know it could come to an end. There just isn't any alternative at the present. Create an alternative that works and you could end up with the peace prize...
Ok, so suppose somebody posts the encryption key used by the VPN into the water supply system?
Or the 10-digit code used to unlock the front door?
Even if the example is imperfect there are things that shouldn't be posted online. Then again, arguably if something like this were critical to protect there should be a mechanism to change it quickly. If something like this got posted online my first goal wouldn't be unposting it so much as changing it - once it is out you can't assume that taking it down eliminates the vulnerability when anybody could have copied it elsewhere.
What if Spain finds out a group is using MySpace to plan bombings in Spain or a group is using MSN to track German troop movement for an attack? Why shouldn't they be allowed to request the same censorship? Why should it be okay for us to censor these things but illegal for other countries to censor them?
They can and do have laws of this nature. Basically it comes down to sovereignty and jurisdiction. If you are in a country you must obey its laws or face the consequences. The US is simply saying that they don't want US-based countries censoring data in other countries. That leaves companies a choice - pick what country they want to have a physical presence in. If you want to make the Chinese happy then just give you your US-based operations and there would be no conflict.
Somebody commented the other day that the former CEO of Union Carbide has an outstanding arrest warrant in India for murder (Bhopal) - so they just don't go there.
International law doesn't always need to agree - you just have to decide whether doing business in a particular country matters to you, or if you ever care to vacation there.