Actually - Capitalism can solve this problem rather readily. The problem is that the US government subsidized Helium so that it is dirt cheap, so it is used in situations where it isn't essential.
Natural gas producers throw it away because it costs more to make than you can sell it for. The only reason for that is the US used to pay $5/liter for it and sells it for $1/liter and no longer buys it. (I made up those numbers - they're just illustrative but reflect the problem.)
Assuming there is a decent amount left underground once the shortage becomes acute people will be willing to pay more for helium. Once the market value raises above the cost to produce it people who dig it up will stop throwing it away. At that part the market would regulate its own helium supply/demand.
There really aren't any externalities in this market that I can see (unlike with fossil fuels - where pollution/CO2 needs to be accounted for) - so there is no reason the market wouldn't work. The main reason it isn't working now is because somebody messed with the market for the last 50 years and it will take some time to correct...
I dunno - you're thinking about haves and have-nots in terms of cash. But I'm thinking in terms of genetics. Why should some girls be "prettier" than others, and some guys able to run faster, think smarter, play piano better, or be born without what we'd consider "mental defects"? This way in theory anybody could participate in the Tour de France, or marry an old rich guy.
In any case, I think its inevitable - so there is not much point in arguing about it. Everybody uses their strengths to make up for their weaknesses. The fact that humans are much better in brains than just about anything else just means that the brains will figure out a way to make up for the rest.
What's the difference between having a few extra heart chambers vs wearing eyeglasses or a hearing aid?
I think that one big problem is that much of the gentoo leadership is technical. If a debate opens up over how some aspect of the project is managed, the usual rallying cry to bring everybody together is for all the project leads to talk about what positive things are going on with various technical aspects of the distro.
Now, that is very good in one sense - since we do need to remember the big picture. However, stuff like having a newsletter and all that isn't entirely unimportant. Not having a functional board of directors is a big problem. However, I've been reading the -dev group for months (and on and off for years) and I had just assumed (probably like many others) that this part of gentoo was just going along fine.
To the 20-year-old coder who just wants to create some nifty installer or bootup routine having a board of directors may seem a bit silly. However, if some domain squatter grabs gentoo.org because it didn't get renewed and you can't sue for it back because you don't have any legal standing in any court worldwide then there is a problem. I think that gentoo just tends not to appeal to the sorts of people who like taking care of this stuff - largely because it emphasizes pragmatism and technical achievement - while other distros like debian have an appeal to the kinds of folks who love to read licenses since they make a big deal about that kind of stuff.
I think that the criticality of this "crisis" is a bit overblown. Yes, its a problem and it really does need to be taken care of - expeditiously. However, the world isn't about to end. I'd probably call for rapid trustee elections to fill slots (I'm sure lots of people with half-decent qualifications would be willing to step up), and then have the trustees take action. Since legally gentoo is in quasi-existence it might be possible to not have as much process around all of that - since you can't violate bylaws that aren't binding and all that. But I'm not a lawyer (and the trustees would do well to talk to one).
As others have pointed out, while I think that a lot of reforms are needed I don't think you can just get rid of copyright.
Sure, live performances will always make money for certain kinds of artists. However, the amount of money that can be spent on production will be greatly limited.
How would you handle movies? Anything that takes more than a camcorder and maybe 100 hours on a PC editing to produce would never recoup its costs under your proposed system. You might argue that $100M movies aren't worth the money, but consumers voting with their wallets say otherwise. If you eliminated copyright an industry of digital movie reproduction would be created overnight. Why see LOTR for $10 on day 1 when if you wait until day 3 it will open in the $2 theater down the street with full digital reproduction in super-high resolution from the original prints? If it is completely legal to operate such a business it will be created, it will be of very high quality, and it won't contribute a cent to the development costs.
Ditto for patents. We need reform - not total elimination.
The act of creation/invention isn't worth three generations of monopoly, but it isn't worth "take your chances" either. If anything it might need to be tailored per industry. One way of doing it is to look at various industries and levels of creation/invention and adjust durations/enforcement within that industry until it reaches what people might consider a balance. It might need to be done slowly in certain industries - especially where product cycles are slow. Maybe software will end up having 3 years of monopoly, while car engines might have 8. Maybe drugs would last 10 years instead of 17 - or maybe the duration would be based on revenue to encourage creation of orphan drugs. Maybe the patents should be much shorter but bounties should be offered for key technologies in certain industries (they'd have to be big in some cases - the cure for cancer isn't worth a mere million dollars), and maybe stepping-stone technologies should have bounties to encourage incremental progress (right now stumbling on the cure for cancer would be more a result of luck than progress - so offer rewards for incremental gains on understanding the cell cycle and its controls / etc).
With the increases in technology/science everything progresses far faster. That means we don't need as many protections as we used to - but it doesn't mean they're totally unneeded either...
Ok, if you log into the database using end-user-supplied credentials then I agree that you're safe.
However, this will only work for certain types of sites. A store, for example, probably wouldn't want to use per-user credentials to create entries in the items-to-ship-out table. However, individual purchases would trigger a write to this table. And if they did then the hacker could just register an account and use their own credentials. You could use other tricks though - like having users write to some table that is polled by a separate system. However, you still need to scrub your data regardless...
Heh - the general welfare bit isn't half as overused as the commerce clause!
Still - the intent of the constitution was to have the federal government focus primarily on national issues - not issues that need not be handled at that level.
In any case - I'm not bound to a piece of paper - government is what we make of it. However, I'd rather see a government where I am more likely to actually know the people who make laws that impact me (as in personally) than one where the guy in charge is inaccessible by anybody without a briefcase full of cash.
I'm not necessarily for completely gutting the Federal government, but I think it needs to get a lot smaller than it is currently...
Well, you're obfuscating the credentials which probably would help to defeat an automated attack (unless of course your software becomes common - in which case the exploit would know where to find everything it needs). You still have the credentials accessible to the webserver - they're just encrypted now. The decryption keys must also be accessible to the webserver - so the hacker has everything they need at hand. Reminds me of DRM...
Ok, it didn't involve execution of code by the webserver (at least, not code that selinux would protect against). The compromised server did put out exploit data that infected end-user PCs - which probably did ultimately execute code. However, unless you get EVERYBODY to run selinux it wouldn't help.
How is trusting the stored procedure to scrub data any different from trusting the application to do it? The only advantage I can see to this technique is that you put all your writing routines into one place where they might be easier to audit. But if you end up with a ton of procedures I don't think this will continue to be an advantage.
Uh - this attack didn't involve the execution of any "code" - at least nothing that selinux/etc would recognize as such. SQL Server was hit exclusively not because of any particular vulnerability - but because the attack used syntax specific to that server only.
This is an SQL injection attack. That is when a poorly-written application does not sanitize its input, and passes it onto a database server as part of a SQL script. The malicious input terminates the command the application was running and starts some other command running. It has no access to anything in the system other than the data in the database - which is all this attack compromised. However, that data in tht database was then used by the application to render html output, which then passed the exploit scripts onto web clients.
This is analogous to a trojan that wipes out all of a user's files in ~ in unix. Simply running as non-root will do nothing to prevent it from working - the user has access to delete their own files already.
The attack merely used the applications write-access to its own database to modify the database contents - something that is nearly impossible to automatically protect against at the database server level. However, almost all database servers (including SQL Server I'm sure) does offer a semi-manual form of protection - a parametized query. If you prepare a query and put parameters in it, and then pass on user-input data in the parameters, the server will refuse to use the user-input data as anything other than data. Application authors just need to use this feature...
Regarding your contention that these issues are best handled by the state: why? Why are they better than the federal government?
A few reasons:
1. There is no need to have these handled at the federal level. The whole idea of a "Federal" government (as opposed to a unitary government) is that unless something really has to be handled at the national level it is best left to the state level.
2. State governments are naturally closer to the people they represent.
3. You also get a choice of 50 of them to live in while still benefiting from being a US citizen. If you strongly object to a law at the state level you can probably move 50 miles and no longer be subject to it.
4. It's the law of the land - at least in theory. The constitution reserves any powers not explicitly granted to the national government for the states. This of course has largely been ignored for about 100 years...
As far as marriage goes - I still don't think it should be given special recognition by the government (and I'm very much a believer in marriage - part of my motivation for wanting to get the government out of it). If you want to define rules for medical decisions guidelines could be set by the government (anybody who has lived with the patient for x years would work), and those could be overriden by legal agreements where necessary. I'd envision that in this sort of system there would be a variety of boilerplate agreements available that meet various groups definitions of what marriage should be like - and couples would be free to sign one of them if they wanted to.
Or better still just talk about it and get everybody to spend $50B on anti-missile systems. When they're done with that talk about using $10 worth of steel and an arc-welder to derail trains and we'll be spending $100B putting monitored cameras on every inch of rail in the country.
Then you could just spend $10 and blow up a bus while everybody is celebrating the invincible transportation system...
I'm actually a big fan of the wall idea. I'm fine with fairly liberal immigration laws, but I'd still like the border to be protected. Actually, we might not even need a wall if you can stem all the people running across the border. If just about anybody can walk into the country via a checkpoint then fewer people will go running across 50 miles of desert.
Even so - I don't think a wall is necessarily impractical - you just need sufficient monitoring and people on the ground to intercept those who trip the wall. People laughed at Israel's wall through the middle of some highly populated areas, but when it was done they went from being in the news for the daily bombing to being largely forgotten. The fact is that a 20 foot high wall is not trivially easy to get around if you take any care at all to monitor it. Build it 10 miles inside the border and you can stop any vehicles that approach it for 10 miles on either side.
But indeed the bigger issue is getting rid of the hiring of illegals/etc. If there is no incentive to cross the border then people won't do it so much.
Regarding many of the other issues brought up here - most are best handled by states - not the federal government. Marriage is a particular pet-peeve of mine - why exactly are there laws concerning marriage AT ALL? It shouldn't be the basis for determining taxes, or anything like that. Marriage is better implemented as a religious institution, with any civil aspects of it being handled by contract (ie before you have a kid/house decide what happens to them if you part ways). If the state takes no official position on marriage then it need not take any official position on who can marry. Religious bodies can then issue proclamations that some other group's marriages are bunk, and people who don't care can ignore them, and everybody is happy...:)
Not to mention that the economic costs of everybody deciding not to fly wouldn't be all that high - to the NATION. Sure - it would devestate the airline industry - but it isn't the job of the government to prop up one industry over another. The dollars currently spent on airlines would just go to trains/etc. The bigger impact would be loss of efficiency to the economy due to slower transportation in general - but unless planes are dropping every day I doubt Fedex would change tactics.
However, I don't think that a shootdown of one plane per year would have that big an impact even on passenger travel. Most people fly because they have to - they're not likely to drive from Boston to Madrid or take a boat.
Sure, high speed rail would be nice to see, but if anything it is even more susceptible to terrorist attacks. All you need to do is walk up to a track and weld on a derailer in an area that trains travel at 100MPH in - just about everybody on the train and in the general facility will be seriously injured or killed. Any type of rapid mass-transit is susceptible to attack. Just a guy with a sniper rifle on top of a high building with a view of a major highway could probably kill a hundred people easily and cause a massive pile-up.
Like anything you need to pick and choose what you'll be afraid of. Panic just results in wasteful spending. I'm not a big fan of socialized healthcare but I'd rather see $40B spent on primary care than this. Better still I'd rather see it not spent at all unless it will have a larger return...
The terrorists that target civilian aircraft DO NOT make their own missiles. They just buy them from the black market. Generally the cheap, old tech missiles and guns.
And where do they get these things? They don't build those either. They're commodity military hardware that can be procured from any number of nations. Most of the shoulder-launched missiles that everybody is concerned about were probably built in one of two places - the US or Russia. Both of these nations DO make their own missiles and will likely build new ones that will defeat these countermeasures.
Today's "old tech" missiles are simply yesterday's state-of-the-art missiles. By the time all US commercial airliners are equipped with these fancy anti-missile lasers the standard manportable SAM sold to countries like Pakistan will probably be able to defeat it. If not an upgrade kit for older missiles like Stingers probably will be widely available.
The US government excels at selling off its technological advantages almost as fast as develops them. Perhaps the expense of the F-22 wouldn't have been needed so quickly if the US hadn't sold F-15s to almost anybody willing to buy them. Sure, other nations have their own development programs, but they'd probably get less funding if US military hardware weren't fielded by half of the planet (the other half of the planet wouldn't be buying new jets just to maintain parity). Sure, selling jets helps the US offset a small part of the development costs - but that seems to be a bit short-sited since it directly contributes to the need for the next uber-expensive project...
I actually do have some knowledge of how missiles work - but not in detail. I couldn't find details in the original article about how the laser functions. I'm not quite sure how the laser manages to hit the missile on the edge (if it hits it in the middle it wouldn't steer away). My "random" guess succeeded in my goal - getting somebody to actually explain how the thing works. Where did I go wrong exactly?:)
I would classify this as exploiting a weakness in current missile design. I don't see why it wouldn't be possible to detect an incoming laser and home on it. A laser is highly colimated and directional - so if you have two layers of detectors you could pinpoint exactly where it is coming from. You could also prevent a laser from ahead hitting the side of your sensor by putting a shade over the very edge of your sensor. Or you could have two sets of sensors - one for detecting stuff in front of you and one for detecting stuff two the sides. Each would be shaded to reject inputs from the other. A laser would be easily detected as a conflicting report from the two sets of sensors - the ahead sensor picks up a huge reading to the side, and the side sensor picks up nothing. The missile could then take appropriate steps to defeat the countermeasure. A simple scanning shade could detect the origin of the laser.
Any jamming system that involves active transmission is vulnerable to home-on-jam techniques. It is just a matter of a little engineering to make it work. If this anti-IR countermeasure becomes commonplace you can bet that nearly all IR missiles will compensate for it.
Actually - even if the accident rate wasn't proportional to miles travelled it might still be a useful statistic - but not for current space flight.
If I HAVE to travel 2,000,000 miles the accident rate per mile would certainly be of interest to me. A travel method that has a moderate risk for any distance travelled but nearly zero risk per-mile would be better in that case than one with no per-instance risk and a small risk per-mile.
However, generally speaking people do not undertake spaceflight to cover some number of miles in distance - unless it is extraterrestrial travel. Most spaceflight takes place simply to get into space. And in the cases where spaceflight is currently used there are no alternatives (well - you can debate the need for manned spaceflight at all - but if you decide you need a man in space there is no other way to do it). If spaceflight ever becomes practical for terrestrial transport then the per-mile stats would be very useful, but I'd expect the per-mile fatality rates to go way up in that case since most trips would no longer consist of launching and then whizzing around the Earth 3000 times before landing - most flights would be short duration.
Like all metrics - the intended use for the data has a big impact on what you measure...
I could only see that being hard to defeat if the laser-firing device is dropped from the plane. Otherwise - if the missile identifies the source of the laser and homes on it, why would it steer out of the sensor FOV? It could really only work that way due to some assumption in the guidance software that is being exploited.
Now, if the laser is dropped from the plane then homing on it obviously won't get you very far, and it would likely be difficult to avoid its blinding effects. Then again, if the missile just maintains course or angles upward slightly, then it is likely to lose the laser from its FOV before the target - in which case it can re-acquire (and it hasn't lost much useful energy if it gains altitude).
This is of course a win-win for arms manufacturers. With this technology becoming mainstream it can be safely assumed that enemy aircraft will be quickly equipped with it. That means that you need to upgrade all your missiles to defeat this tactic. That means that the anti-missile system is now useless and it needs an upgrade as well.
Kind of like selling good-quality combat jets to "friendly" nations - it just means that you lose your technological edge and need yet another generation of jets to replace them...
If you buy a stock with the expectation of its price rising, you're gambling, not investing.
Stock growth and dividends are both perfectly acceptable forms of investment appreciation, and they both have a solid basis in reality (ie tangible wealth).
If a company has money they don't have anything better to do with, they can return it to investors in a dividend. That's cash in your pocket - it doesn't get more tangible than that.
Stock price growth is a little more nebulous, but it is fundamentally based in reality (even if it is subject to bubbles/speculation/etc). Here's an analogy:
I start a company and take it public from day 1. Based on my reputation alone I sell 10M shares for $10 each. Those shares at that moment in time have a book value of $10 each - as the company holds $100M in cash, and in the event the company is dissolved that gets split amongst the shareholders (minus obvious inefficiencies like lawyer bills/etc).
Now, I buy a factory and raw materials and make some products and sell them. I spend $50M and in a year I make back $150M. Now I have maybe $30M in tangible assets, and about $200M in cash. I could spend $100M and give all the shareholders $10 each in dividends. However, even if I don't the book price of the company is about $24/share - so that part of the stock price is 100% backed by assets. In fact, if I do give out a $10 dividend the book price of the stock falls instantly by that $10.
Dividends really just give back to stockholders money they already own - just in a different form. An ideal company wouldn't pay any dividends since it could probably make better use of the money itself - and stockholders would get the same value from their appreciating shares. The dividend can actually be a cost to sharedholders, since it FORCES them to realize a gain that they might have wanted to defer and which they could have deferred if the money went back into the company.
Dividends really ought to be used only for money that companies don't have a better use for. However, it seems like they've become more of a symbol of blue-chip stability and so companies pay them - even if they could use the cash themselves.
Tell me about that wonderful adobe flash plugin after browsing the web on konqueror on an amd64... They still don't make a 64-bit plugin, and even their 32-bit plugin using nspluginwrapper doesn't work on recent versions of konqueror (after the latest security release).
What's wrong with using HTML for content, anyway? Sure, if you want a fancy flash applet in the corner of the page have fun with it - but why not make at least a basic HTML version of the page? Oh, and please provide plain mpeg files (or even wmv) so that I don't have to rip your flvs..
Actually - any intercontinental tourist would meet these qualifications - being able to spot any passport in a nation where people don't usually carry them would be useful to thieves. Maybe not as much in Europe where you don't need much money to travel between countries - but in areas where political borders are further apart or harder to cross a passport would equal money...
Keep in mind that having a lot of money essentially means that you've given others lots of stuff that they want. You only get money when others give it to you of their own free will - usually in exchange for something they prefer to the money (a big exception would be tax-based socialism - where the money is not given voluntarily). The other big exception would be inheritance - I'm a fairly free-market capitalist but I'm not a big fan of inheritance as it is very inefficient at getting money in the hands of people who will spend it well and giving people incentive to produce.
Money is just a convenient form of barter. If I did custom car paint jobs in exchange for mint-condition pennies many people would be happy to give me their pennies, and as measured in pennies I would be rich. It would have nothing to do with exploitation, and everything to do with providing a valuable service. Now, charge serious bucks instead of pennies and you have the present state - but suddenly the business owner is a money-grubbing capitalist...
Well, generically economics is just the study of how resources get allocated and trade occurs in general.
There are many different economic systems out there, and most have the goal of spending money where it will do the most good. The only difference is the algorithms and the outcome.
Socialism is basically a government-centric system with the goal of a somewhat-egalitarian allocation of resources for basic necessities.
Capitalism is more of an anything-goes system that posits that the most good will come out of everybody basically acting in their own interests. In many areas this actually results in the largest net-benefit for everyone, but it does have limitations. Its main advantage over socialism is that it is very efficient in most cases. Often it is better for the poor to have a $1B economy distributed non-uniformly than a $10M economy distributed uniformly. It doesn't always work, and there is consequently endless debate over whether any particular area of the economy would be better served by a different system. However, almost everybody has accepted the basic principles of capitalism. Arguably all nations are capitalistic when it comes down to it - however some nations don't measure prices in hard currency. The soviet union, for example, tended to measure its currency in terms of political power - the powerful didn't have a lot of money - but they didn't need it either...
Couldn't agree more - the licensing and education process for doctors is in major need of reform. So is the whole work environment - lots of smart people avoid going into medicine because they don't want to work 20 hour shifts. Sure, I understand that some surgeries will always require a significant time to complete, but there is no reason that medical staffing works the way it does other than tradition, and keeping out the non-workaholics.
Profit motive is just human nature - in megacorps like insurance carriers it just happens at a bigger scale.
When you buy stock - do you invest in companies that do the most good, or companies that have the highest return on your investment? Most people opt for the latter, and companies act accordingly.
When you got out of school and got two job offers, did you pick the place that looked like it would be enjoyable to work at, or the one where you might have had the biggest impact on helping out the poor? Most people opt for the former, with pay being a big priority.
Medicine is very manpower-intensive. Medical research is very manpower-intensive. Sure, you'd get volunteers even if you didn't pay anything, but not enough of the kinds of people you need to run a state-of-the-art hospital. If doctors want to be paid, is it any more immoral for insurance carriers to want to be paid?
Sure, life might be priceless, but somebody still has to pay the price to keep it going when you're seriously ill. That person might rather spend their money on something else. And even if you went into total communism and put 100% of all money not needed for food into medicine, people would still die, and at about the same rate as they do now (perhaps at an average older age). Most of the living would probably wish for death - as they would be literally be working solely to survive. At some point your health isn't the only thing that matters.
Again, there are no easy solutions, and there are no easy answers. 1000 years from now people will be likely be having similar debates - as even cyborgs would fall prey to entropy. Keeping people alive has to be balanced with giving them stuff to do while they're alive...
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Actually - Capitalism can solve this problem rather readily. The problem is that the US government subsidized Helium so that it is dirt cheap, so it is used in situations where it isn't essential.
Natural gas producers throw it away because it costs more to make than you can sell it for. The only reason for that is the US used to pay $5/liter for it and sells it for $1/liter and no longer buys it. (I made up those numbers - they're just illustrative but reflect the problem.)
Assuming there is a decent amount left underground once the shortage becomes acute people will be willing to pay more for helium. Once the market value raises above the cost to produce it people who dig it up will stop throwing it away. At that part the market would regulate its own helium supply/demand.
There really aren't any externalities in this market that I can see (unlike with fossil fuels - where pollution/CO2 needs to be accounted for) - so there is no reason the market wouldn't work. The main reason it isn't working now is because somebody messed with the market for the last 50 years and it will take some time to correct...
I dunno - you're thinking about haves and have-nots in terms of cash. But I'm thinking in terms of genetics. Why should some girls be "prettier" than others, and some guys able to run faster, think smarter, play piano better, or be born without what we'd consider "mental defects"? This way in theory anybody could participate in the Tour de France, or marry an old rich guy.
In any case, I think its inevitable - so there is not much point in arguing about it. Everybody uses their strengths to make up for their weaknesses. The fact that humans are much better in brains than just about anything else just means that the brains will figure out a way to make up for the rest.
What's the difference between having a few extra heart chambers vs wearing eyeglasses or a hearing aid?
I think that one big problem is that much of the gentoo leadership is technical. If a debate opens up over how some aspect of the project is managed, the usual rallying cry to bring everybody together is for all the project leads to talk about what positive things are going on with various technical aspects of the distro.
Now, that is very good in one sense - since we do need to remember the big picture. However, stuff like having a newsletter and all that isn't entirely unimportant. Not having a functional board of directors is a big problem. However, I've been reading the -dev group for months (and on and off for years) and I had just assumed (probably like many others) that this part of gentoo was just going along fine.
To the 20-year-old coder who just wants to create some nifty installer or bootup routine having a board of directors may seem a bit silly. However, if some domain squatter grabs gentoo.org because it didn't get renewed and you can't sue for it back because you don't have any legal standing in any court worldwide then there is a problem. I think that gentoo just tends not to appeal to the sorts of people who like taking care of this stuff - largely because it emphasizes pragmatism and technical achievement - while other distros like debian have an appeal to the kinds of folks who love to read licenses since they make a big deal about that kind of stuff.
I think that the criticality of this "crisis" is a bit overblown. Yes, its a problem and it really does need to be taken care of - expeditiously. However, the world isn't about to end. I'd probably call for rapid trustee elections to fill slots (I'm sure lots of people with half-decent qualifications would be willing to step up), and then have the trustees take action. Since legally gentoo is in quasi-existence it might be possible to not have as much process around all of that - since you can't violate bylaws that aren't binding and all that. But I'm not a lawyer (and the trustees would do well to talk to one).
As others have pointed out, while I think that a lot of reforms are needed I don't think you can just get rid of copyright.
Sure, live performances will always make money for certain kinds of artists. However, the amount of money that can be spent on production will be greatly limited.
How would you handle movies? Anything that takes more than a camcorder and maybe 100 hours on a PC editing to produce would never recoup its costs under your proposed system. You might argue that $100M movies aren't worth the money, but consumers voting with their wallets say otherwise. If you eliminated copyright an industry of digital movie reproduction would be created overnight. Why see LOTR for $10 on day 1 when if you wait until day 3 it will open in the $2 theater down the street with full digital reproduction in super-high resolution from the original prints? If it is completely legal to operate such a business it will be created, it will be of very high quality, and it won't contribute a cent to the development costs.
Ditto for patents. We need reform - not total elimination.
The act of creation/invention isn't worth three generations of monopoly, but it isn't worth "take your chances" either. If anything it might need to be tailored per industry. One way of doing it is to look at various industries and levels of creation/invention and adjust durations/enforcement within that industry until it reaches what people might consider a balance. It might need to be done slowly in certain industries - especially where product cycles are slow. Maybe software will end up having 3 years of monopoly, while car engines might have 8. Maybe drugs would last 10 years instead of 17 - or maybe the duration would be based on revenue to encourage creation of orphan drugs. Maybe the patents should be much shorter but bounties should be offered for key technologies in certain industries (they'd have to be big in some cases - the cure for cancer isn't worth a mere million dollars), and maybe stepping-stone technologies should have bounties to encourage incremental progress (right now stumbling on the cure for cancer would be more a result of luck than progress - so offer rewards for incremental gains on understanding the cell cycle and its controls / etc).
With the increases in technology/science everything progresses far faster. That means we don't need as many protections as we used to - but it doesn't mean they're totally unneeded either...
Ok, if you log into the database using end-user-supplied credentials then I agree that you're safe.
However, this will only work for certain types of sites. A store, for example, probably wouldn't want to use per-user credentials to create entries in the items-to-ship-out table. However, individual purchases would trigger a write to this table. And if they did then the hacker could just register an account and use their own credentials. You could use other tricks though - like having users write to some table that is polled by a separate system. However, you still need to scrub your data regardless...
Heh - the general welfare bit isn't half as overused as the commerce clause!
Still - the intent of the constitution was to have the federal government focus primarily on national issues - not issues that need not be handled at that level.
In any case - I'm not bound to a piece of paper - government is what we make of it. However, I'd rather see a government where I am more likely to actually know the people who make laws that impact me (as in personally) than one where the guy in charge is inaccessible by anybody without a briefcase full of cash.
I'm not necessarily for completely gutting the Federal government, but I think it needs to get a lot smaller than it is currently...
Well, you're obfuscating the credentials which probably would help to defeat an automated attack (unless of course your software becomes common - in which case the exploit would know where to find everything it needs). You still have the credentials accessible to the webserver - they're just encrypted now. The decryption keys must also be accessible to the webserver - so the hacker has everything they need at hand. Reminds me of DRM...
Ok, it didn't involve execution of code by the webserver (at least, not code that selinux would protect against). The compromised server did put out exploit data that infected end-user PCs - which probably did ultimately execute code. However, unless you get EVERYBODY to run selinux it wouldn't help.
Context!
How is trusting the stored procedure to scrub data any different from trusting the application to do it? The only advantage I can see to this technique is that you put all your writing routines into one place where they might be easier to audit. But if you end up with a ton of procedures I don't think this will continue to be an advantage.
Uh - this attack didn't involve the execution of any "code" - at least nothing that selinux/etc would recognize as such. SQL Server was hit exclusively not because of any particular vulnerability - but because the attack used syntax specific to that server only.
This is an SQL injection attack. That is when a poorly-written application does not sanitize its input, and passes it onto a database server as part of a SQL script. The malicious input terminates the command the application was running and starts some other command running. It has no access to anything in the system other than the data in the database - which is all this attack compromised. However, that data in tht database was then used by the application to render html output, which then passed the exploit scripts onto web clients.
This is analogous to a trojan that wipes out all of a user's files in ~ in unix. Simply running as non-root will do nothing to prevent it from working - the user has access to delete their own files already.
The attack merely used the applications write-access to its own database to modify the database contents - something that is nearly impossible to automatically protect against at the database server level. However, almost all database servers (including SQL Server I'm sure) does offer a semi-manual form of protection - a parametized query. If you prepare a query and put parameters in it, and then pass on user-input data in the parameters, the server will refuse to use the user-input data as anything other than data. Application authors just need to use this feature...
Regarding your contention that these issues are best handled by the state: why? Why are they better than the federal government?
A few reasons:
1. There is no need to have these handled at the federal level. The whole idea of a "Federal" government (as opposed to a unitary government) is that unless something really has to be handled at the national level it is best left to the state level.
2. State governments are naturally closer to the people they represent.
3. You also get a choice of 50 of them to live in while still benefiting from being a US citizen. If you strongly object to a law at the state level you can probably move 50 miles and no longer be subject to it.
4. It's the law of the land - at least in theory. The constitution reserves any powers not explicitly granted to the national government for the states. This of course has largely been ignored for about 100 years...
As far as marriage goes - I still don't think it should be given special recognition by the government (and I'm very much a believer in marriage - part of my motivation for wanting to get the government out of it). If you want to define rules for medical decisions guidelines could be set by the government (anybody who has lived with the patient for x years would work), and those could be overriden by legal agreements where necessary. I'd envision that in this sort of system there would be a variety of boilerplate agreements available that meet various groups definitions of what marriage should be like - and couples would be free to sign one of them if they wanted to.
Or better still just talk about it and get everybody to spend $50B on anti-missile systems. When they're done with that talk about using $10 worth of steel and an arc-welder to derail trains and we'll be spending $100B putting monitored cameras on every inch of rail in the country.
Then you could just spend $10 and blow up a bus while everybody is celebrating the invincible transportation system...
I'm actually a big fan of the wall idea. I'm fine with fairly liberal immigration laws, but I'd still like the border to be protected. Actually, we might not even need a wall if you can stem all the people running across the border. If just about anybody can walk into the country via a checkpoint then fewer people will go running across 50 miles of desert.
:)
Even so - I don't think a wall is necessarily impractical - you just need sufficient monitoring and people on the ground to intercept those who trip the wall. People laughed at Israel's wall through the middle of some highly populated areas, but when it was done they went from being in the news for the daily bombing to being largely forgotten. The fact is that a 20 foot high wall is not trivially easy to get around if you take any care at all to monitor it. Build it 10 miles inside the border and you can stop any vehicles that approach it for 10 miles on either side.
But indeed the bigger issue is getting rid of the hiring of illegals/etc. If there is no incentive to cross the border then people won't do it so much.
Regarding many of the other issues brought up here - most are best handled by states - not the federal government. Marriage is a particular pet-peeve of mine - why exactly are there laws concerning marriage AT ALL? It shouldn't be the basis for determining taxes, or anything like that. Marriage is better implemented as a religious institution, with any civil aspects of it being handled by contract (ie before you have a kid/house decide what happens to them if you part ways). If the state takes no official position on marriage then it need not take any official position on who can marry. Religious bodies can then issue proclamations that some other group's marriages are bunk, and people who don't care can ignore them, and everybody is happy...
Not to mention that the economic costs of everybody deciding not to fly wouldn't be all that high - to the NATION. Sure - it would devestate the airline industry - but it isn't the job of the government to prop up one industry over another. The dollars currently spent on airlines would just go to trains/etc. The bigger impact would be loss of efficiency to the economy due to slower transportation in general - but unless planes are dropping every day I doubt Fedex would change tactics.
However, I don't think that a shootdown of one plane per year would have that big an impact even on passenger travel. Most people fly because they have to - they're not likely to drive from Boston to Madrid or take a boat.
Sure, high speed rail would be nice to see, but if anything it is even more susceptible to terrorist attacks. All you need to do is walk up to a track and weld on a derailer in an area that trains travel at 100MPH in - just about everybody on the train and in the general facility will be seriously injured or killed. Any type of rapid mass-transit is susceptible to attack. Just a guy with a sniper rifle on top of a high building with a view of a major highway could probably kill a hundred people easily and cause a massive pile-up.
Like anything you need to pick and choose what you'll be afraid of. Panic just results in wasteful spending. I'm not a big fan of socialized healthcare but I'd rather see $40B spent on primary care than this. Better still I'd rather see it not spent at all unless it will have a larger return...
The terrorists that target civilian aircraft DO NOT make their own missiles. They just buy them from the black market. Generally the cheap, old tech missiles and guns.
And where do they get these things? They don't build those either. They're commodity military hardware that can be procured from any number of nations. Most of the shoulder-launched missiles that everybody is concerned about were probably built in one of two places - the US or Russia. Both of these nations DO make their own missiles and will likely build new ones that will defeat these countermeasures.
Today's "old tech" missiles are simply yesterday's state-of-the-art missiles. By the time all US commercial airliners are equipped with these fancy anti-missile lasers the standard manportable SAM sold to countries like Pakistan will probably be able to defeat it. If not an upgrade kit for older missiles like Stingers probably will be widely available.
The US government excels at selling off its technological advantages almost as fast as develops them. Perhaps the expense of the F-22 wouldn't have been needed so quickly if the US hadn't sold F-15s to almost anybody willing to buy them. Sure, other nations have their own development programs, but they'd probably get less funding if US military hardware weren't fielded by half of the planet (the other half of the planet wouldn't be buying new jets just to maintain parity). Sure, selling jets helps the US offset a small part of the development costs - but that seems to be a bit short-sited since it directly contributes to the need for the next uber-expensive project...
I actually do have some knowledge of how missiles work - but not in detail. I couldn't find details in the original article about how the laser functions. I'm not quite sure how the laser manages to hit the missile on the edge (if it hits it in the middle it wouldn't steer away). My "random" guess succeeded in my goal - getting somebody to actually explain how the thing works. Where did I go wrong exactly? :)
I would classify this as exploiting a weakness in current missile design. I don't see why it wouldn't be possible to detect an incoming laser and home on it. A laser is highly colimated and directional - so if you have two layers of detectors you could pinpoint exactly where it is coming from. You could also prevent a laser from ahead hitting the side of your sensor by putting a shade over the very edge of your sensor. Or you could have two sets of sensors - one for detecting stuff in front of you and one for detecting stuff two the sides. Each would be shaded to reject inputs from the other. A laser would be easily detected as a conflicting report from the two sets of sensors - the ahead sensor picks up a huge reading to the side, and the side sensor picks up nothing. The missile could then take appropriate steps to defeat the countermeasure. A simple scanning shade could detect the origin of the laser.
Any jamming system that involves active transmission is vulnerable to home-on-jam techniques. It is just a matter of a little engineering to make it work. If this anti-IR countermeasure becomes commonplace you can bet that nearly all IR missiles will compensate for it.
Actually - even if the accident rate wasn't proportional to miles travelled it might still be a useful statistic - but not for current space flight.
If I HAVE to travel 2,000,000 miles the accident rate per mile would certainly be of interest to me. A travel method that has a moderate risk for any distance travelled but nearly zero risk per-mile would be better in that case than one with no per-instance risk and a small risk per-mile.
However, generally speaking people do not undertake spaceflight to cover some number of miles in distance - unless it is extraterrestrial travel. Most spaceflight takes place simply to get into space. And in the cases where spaceflight is currently used there are no alternatives (well - you can debate the need for manned spaceflight at all - but if you decide you need a man in space there is no other way to do it). If spaceflight ever becomes practical for terrestrial transport then the per-mile stats would be very useful, but I'd expect the per-mile fatality rates to go way up in that case since most trips would no longer consist of launching and then whizzing around the Earth 3000 times before landing - most flights would be short duration.
Like all metrics - the intended use for the data has a big impact on what you measure...
I could only see that being hard to defeat if the laser-firing device is dropped from the plane. Otherwise - if the missile identifies the source of the laser and homes on it, why would it steer out of the sensor FOV? It could really only work that way due to some assumption in the guidance software that is being exploited.
Now, if the laser is dropped from the plane then homing on it obviously won't get you very far, and it would likely be difficult to avoid its blinding effects. Then again, if the missile just maintains course or angles upward slightly, then it is likely to lose the laser from its FOV before the target - in which case it can re-acquire (and it hasn't lost much useful energy if it gains altitude).
This is of course a win-win for arms manufacturers. With this technology becoming mainstream it can be safely assumed that enemy aircraft will be quickly equipped with it. That means that you need to upgrade all your missiles to defeat this tactic. That means that the anti-missile system is now useless and it needs an upgrade as well.
Kind of like selling good-quality combat jets to "friendly" nations - it just means that you lose your technological edge and need yet another generation of jets to replace them...
If you buy a stock with the expectation of its price rising, you're gambling, not investing.
Stock growth and dividends are both perfectly acceptable forms of investment appreciation, and they both have a solid basis in reality (ie tangible wealth).
If a company has money they don't have anything better to do with, they can return it to investors in a dividend. That's cash in your pocket - it doesn't get more tangible than that.
Stock price growth is a little more nebulous, but it is fundamentally based in reality (even if it is subject to bubbles/speculation/etc). Here's an analogy:
I start a company and take it public from day 1. Based on my reputation alone I sell 10M shares for $10 each. Those shares at that moment in time have a book value of $10 each - as the company holds $100M in cash, and in the event the company is dissolved that gets split amongst the shareholders (minus obvious inefficiencies like lawyer bills/etc).
Now, I buy a factory and raw materials and make some products and sell them. I spend $50M and in a year I make back $150M. Now I have maybe $30M in tangible assets, and about $200M in cash. I could spend $100M and give all the shareholders $10 each in dividends. However, even if I don't the book price of the company is about $24/share - so that part of the stock price is 100% backed by assets. In fact, if I do give out a $10 dividend the book price of the stock falls instantly by that $10.
Dividends really just give back to stockholders money they already own - just in a different form. An ideal company wouldn't pay any dividends since it could probably make better use of the money itself - and stockholders would get the same value from their appreciating shares. The dividend can actually be a cost to sharedholders, since it FORCES them to realize a gain that they might have wanted to defer and which they could have deferred if the money went back into the company.
Dividends really ought to be used only for money that companies don't have a better use for. However, it seems like they've become more of a symbol of blue-chip stability and so companies pay them - even if they could use the cash themselves.
Tell me about that wonderful adobe flash plugin after browsing the web on konqueror on an amd64... They still don't make a 64-bit plugin, and even their 32-bit plugin using nspluginwrapper doesn't work on recent versions of konqueror (after the latest security release).
What's wrong with using HTML for content, anyway? Sure, if you want a fancy flash applet in the corner of the page have fun with it - but why not make at least a basic HTML version of the page? Oh, and please provide plain mpeg files (or even wmv) so that I don't have to rip your flvs..
Actually - any intercontinental tourist would meet these qualifications - being able to spot any passport in a nation where people don't usually carry them would be useful to thieves. Maybe not as much in Europe where you don't need much money to travel between countries - but in areas where political borders are further apart or harder to cross a passport would equal money...
Keep in mind that having a lot of money essentially means that you've given others lots of stuff that they want. You only get money when others give it to you of their own free will - usually in exchange for something they prefer to the money (a big exception would be tax-based socialism - where the money is not given voluntarily). The other big exception would be inheritance - I'm a fairly free-market capitalist but I'm not a big fan of inheritance as it is very inefficient at getting money in the hands of people who will spend it well and giving people incentive to produce.
Money is just a convenient form of barter. If I did custom car paint jobs in exchange for mint-condition pennies many people would be happy to give me their pennies, and as measured in pennies I would be rich. It would have nothing to do with exploitation, and everything to do with providing a valuable service. Now, charge serious bucks instead of pennies and you have the present state - but suddenly the business owner is a money-grubbing capitalist...
Well, generically economics is just the study of how resources get allocated and trade occurs in general.
There are many different economic systems out there, and most have the goal of spending money where it will do the most good. The only difference is the algorithms and the outcome.
Socialism is basically a government-centric system with the goal of a somewhat-egalitarian allocation of resources for basic necessities.
Capitalism is more of an anything-goes system that posits that the most good will come out of everybody basically acting in their own interests. In many areas this actually results in the largest net-benefit for everyone, but it does have limitations. Its main advantage over socialism is that it is very efficient in most cases. Often it is better for the poor to have a $1B economy distributed non-uniformly than a $10M economy distributed uniformly. It doesn't always work, and there is consequently endless debate over whether any particular area of the economy would be better served by a different system. However, almost everybody has accepted the basic principles of capitalism. Arguably all nations are capitalistic when it comes down to it - however some nations don't measure prices in hard currency. The soviet union, for example, tended to measure its currency in terms of political power - the powerful didn't have a lot of money - but they didn't need it either...
Couldn't agree more - the licensing and education process for doctors is in major need of reform. So is the whole work environment - lots of smart people avoid going into medicine because they don't want to work 20 hour shifts. Sure, I understand that some surgeries will always require a significant time to complete, but there is no reason that medical staffing works the way it does other than tradition, and keeping out the non-workaholics.
Profit motive is just human nature - in megacorps like insurance carriers it just happens at a bigger scale.
When you buy stock - do you invest in companies that do the most good, or companies that have the highest return on your investment? Most people opt for the latter, and companies act accordingly.
When you got out of school and got two job offers, did you pick the place that looked like it would be enjoyable to work at, or the one where you might have had the biggest impact on helping out the poor? Most people opt for the former, with pay being a big priority.
Medicine is very manpower-intensive. Medical research is very manpower-intensive. Sure, you'd get volunteers even if you didn't pay anything, but not enough of the kinds of people you need to run a state-of-the-art hospital. If doctors want to be paid, is it any more immoral for insurance carriers to want to be paid?
Sure, life might be priceless, but somebody still has to pay the price to keep it going when you're seriously ill. That person might rather spend their money on something else. And even if you went into total communism and put 100% of all money not needed for food into medicine, people would still die, and at about the same rate as they do now (perhaps at an average older age). Most of the living would probably wish for death - as they would be literally be working solely to survive. At some point your health isn't the only thing that matters.
Again, there are no easy solutions, and there are no easy answers. 1000 years from now people will be likely be having similar debates - as even cyborgs would fall prey to entropy. Keeping people alive has to be balanced with giving them stuff to do while they're alive...