Are you suggesting that the best RTS strategy is to not have an army at all? Then the enemy doesn't need to develop the perfect counter to your forces - they just need to have forces of any kind.
The US should be prepared to stop infiltrators at its borders. It should also be prepared to fight a large scale conventional war (aka NATO-Warsaw). It should be prepared to turn satellites into slag. You should have a balance of forces, so that you deter any avenue of attack.
As far as your question regarding how do you stop 1000 infiltrators with backpack nukes goes - that's easy. You announce in advance that if somebody nukes 1 of your cities, you'll nuke 5 of theirs. Agents with backpack nukes climbing tall buildings aren't going to do nearly as much damage as ICBMs set to airburst. At best china could wipe out a few cities with such a strategy - and 20 minutes later most of their population would be eradicated. Their best use of those backpack nukes is as a deterrant - once they use them, there really is no reason for anybody to hold forces in reserve. However, those backpack nukes are the reason the US would never launch a first strike on China with nuclear weapons.
If the US got into a war with China, it would be entirely conventional. China's best bet would be to attrit US forces to discourage an end to the war. If they launched attacks on US soil they would be conventional and probably not terror-based. Blowing up civilians only serves to unite the enemy - China would do better to blow up military bases. And using weapons of mass destruction on the US population would give them a very strong resolve.
China can make arguments identical to yours about enlightened self-interest. They could make the same argument about WMDs -- and Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong Il, and the regime in Iran have all done just that. Deterrence, etc.
Well, sure, which is of course why the US wants to make sure they're the ones on top. I'm sure anyone in their place would take the same course of action.
Personally, I think China is far more likely to invade a secular democratic nation than the US is (how many Canadians vs Taiwanese lose sleep over the thought of missles coming across the border?).
No surprise there - it probably didn't use challenge-response, but rather a simple transmission of a static code. The former can be made impossible to crack (well, not in the lifetime of this universe anyway), but the latter is trivial.
If they were smart they'd put an SSL cert on the keyfob and have it hash/sign the date/time and transmit that. A replay attack would not work.
Well, there really doesn't need to be any shortcut-to-citizenship or anything like that. Once we get the new immigration policies set up we would simply grant amnesty to anybody who registers within some period of time - anybody who registers would become identical to status to anybody who immigrates legally. The citizenship process doesn't really need to change much at all to acomadate this.
If after a period of time people are unwilling to register than summary deportation is probably appropriate (with a last-chance-to-sign-up-offer). They can always do a U-turn at the border and walk up to the line and register and come right back in. Likewise, anybody who doesn't follow any regular check-in procedures is essentially violating their visas and should probably be expelled for some period of time (maybe a year or two). There need not be any particular requirements for the check-in - just a measure of keeping tabs on people who are essentially guests of the American people. Businesses would be required to ensure their workers have active visas at all times. This would help with deporting criminals/etc, and need not be onerous for those who are law-abiding. You would not even need to have a job to stay - just a reasonably clean record.
Of course, once citizenship is granted these measures would cease immediately.
By the way, the "ILLEGAL" you are talking about is not a felony, it is not even a misdemeanor--it is on the same level as the run-of-the mill traffic ticket. Why don't we yank the cars and licenses from everyone who has ever gotten a traffic ticket? After all, it's "ILLEGAL" to speed, and they made that choice.
Perhaps it should be classified as a serious crime then... I would imagine that most people would support such a measure.
There is a problem with the "children are starving" argument - and that is that there will ALWAYS be children starving, and the reason isn't for lack of care by the developed world. One could argue that it is immoral to own a TV, computer, etc, since somewhere some child is starving and that money could have fed them for a week/month/year/whatever. The problem is that if we all lived in huts then there would still be children starving, and most likely some of our own children would be starving as well.
The solution to staving children isn't to move the entire world population into the borders of the US/France/UK/Canada/etc.
What is the point of having borders at all if you don't control them. When travellers get off of a plane should they simply stampede through immigration without bothering to identify themselves and obey local customs laws? Should a nation not care whether known criminals are violating its borders, or if somebody has 25kg of TNT in their backpack?
I'm actually all for liberalization of immigration policy, but I'm still for VERY STRONG enforcement of the border. Let lots of people in, but require them to go into the front door, and if they violate a law of any consequence it should be trivial to deport them, with a ban on re-entry. Known (serious) criminals are not to be allowed in at all. Immigrants would not qualify for social programs, and would be fully taxed (they'd be issued taxpayer IDs, and tax witholding would be strongly enforced - or we'd use a system like Fairtax which would make taxes impossible to dodge anyway - in fact the only thing they could dodge would be the rebate checks).
The problem with illegal immigration is that it often results in lawbreakers (and I'm talking about serious lawbreaking here - assault, theft, rape, etc) entering the country (sometimes repeatedly). It can also be used to smuggle terrorists into the country, smuggling, etc. Now, when there is a sea of people crossing the borders the real problems can slip right by. The key is to regulate but not close the borders, so that anybody who actually bothers to sneak around at night stands out and is captured.
My guess is that if these measures were put into effect, the problem would sort itself out. Employers would hire immigrants, but they would not be able to pay them under the table, they would not be able to exploit them due to their fear of going to the police, etc. Wages would be higher, and the number of jobs might drop a little. Those willing to work would move to the US, but those who are just hoping to leach off of social systems would stay home (since this would be prohibited).
For those who feel bad about people starving in Mexico - there are a few solutions. One is to go over to Mexico and try to clean things up (good luck). If you just want to throw money at the starving people you're welcome to donate it to whatever relief agency works best. In fact, if your goal is to feed children, the last thing you want to do is to drag them into the US - keep them in Mexico where you can feed them for a dollar per day and not $5 per McD's cheeseburger.
However, the reality is that there will ALWAYS be starving children. The only way you'll prevent that is to require a license to breed, and I doubt most are willing to accept that...
I would blacklist/whitelist by domain. Then when somebody wants to give me mail I would make sure they are allowed to send mail for that domain. If not I'd very negatively score, if so I'd base the score on the domain.
The idea of SPF is that it lets you safely associate IPs with domains, and greatly reduces the amount of whack-a-mole with your filters.
You could also negatively score domains that are new, or which appear to be owned by spammers based on WHOIS. Basically, it opens a whole new arena of checking.
single-payer plans are cheaper to run, so overall health costs go down - that includes YOUR health costs
Hardly. Lots of people who aren't insured at all will become more insured, which will greatly increase costs. The increase in insurance without any associated personal cost or competition will increase the consumption of services, often wastefully. More people are likely to go to the doctor in Canada than in the US.
costs in other parts of the system go down, as people aren't forced onto the street, onto welfare roles, etc., because of bankruptcy by medical bills. Remember, 75.5% of all the people who went bankrupt because of medical bills had insurance, and half of all bankruptcies involve medical costs.
Medical bills don't tend to put people on welfare (they might put people on the streets) - can somebody who makes $50,000/year go on welfare because of medical bills? My guess is that having medical insurance isn't going to result in much of a decrease in other programs.
In any case, the solution to huge welfare bills is to reduce the size of the welfare program, not to just move them to a different program.
by spreading the "risk pool" to cover everyone, the state-run system has a better funding base than it currently does, where it has to cover those who use state plans as a plan of last resort
Well, the increase in funding isn't really a result of increasing the risk pool, but rather due to progressive taxation. In a standard health plan everybody pays the same (rich or poor). With government care the rich pay more, and hence there are more dollars to fund the program (until the rich move out).
state-run plans are better able to look at the true cost/benefit trade-off of long-term prevention programs, and better positioned to implement them to the general populace. HMOs have no incentive to help improve the health of the general population, because that would mean spending their money to help competitors, who would not have similar expenses, and thus enjoy a higher profit margin
In other words, the government has more power to tell you what you can and can't do with your own body. If somebody wants to kill themselves with cigarettes more power to them - they just shouldn't ask me to pay for it. The solution isn't to ban cigarettes at home, levy a tax on anybody who is overweight, tax people who don't walk two miles per day, and lock up anybody who crosses the street without looking both ways.
no more situations like GM, where they traded off wage concessions for future health-care benefits, and are probably going to default on those, so the taxpayer ends up on the hook anyway. Net result is a $100 Billion subsidy to GM over the last 3 decades.
The taxpayer need not end up on the hook. There are a couple of solutions:
1. Require escrow of retirement or other future benefits of any kind. This is merely truth-in-advertising - somebody shouldn't be able to put something in my contract and not deliver on it.
2. The government could just choose not to help out people who are double-crossed by their employer. Might not sound compassionate, but it does eliminate your concern for the taxpayers.
3. People could work someplace else where the company is more likely to be able to keep its promises.
The big problem with public health is that it takes money from those who could otherwise afford their own healthcare, and gives it to people who couldn't. So, the high-wage workers get no net benefit. Also, it usually eliminates choice in health providers since the government abhors competition. This also leads to depression in pay for doctors/pharma/etc, and leads all the smart people to become congressmen instead of MDs, since that is where the power is.
Ok, so the hacker finds out a user has a password "hardtoguess24". At the end of the month they find the password no longer works.
No problem - they type in "hardtoguess25", and now they're in again. The typical user response to password expiry is to add an incremented field to their password. The hackers know this as well.
I'm with you on the scoring bit - I score dynamic IPs myself, but the key is that it is only one component of the filter.
SPF tells you what servers are allowed to send mail for the domain - so if you get mail from yahoo.com, and none of the SPF servers resolve to that IP, then you can safely trash it.
In my domain's SPF I use a and mx records - so if somebody gets a connection from some computer claiming to have mail from me, and its IP is not listed in my domain's A or MX records, then it should get bounced.
So, this essentially prevents domain spoofing. SPF has no real point if you just leave the settings wide open (ie setting any to pass).
Well, when you think about it, you're really just outsourcing. If I were doing small business IT consulting, I'd probably set up a standard image, and buy all my hardware from Dell. The systems work, and if they don't work they take care of the hardware.
The software/service, on the other hand, I'd manage myself (in terms of having an image with antivirus, office suite, etc). Then you can take advantage of volume licensing, etc, and basically be a reseller.
There is definitely no money in building PCs. I do it at home because I care about the motherboard/ chipset/ peripherals I get - not because it saves much in the way of cash. However, no business has these kinds of requirements - better to go commodity...
However, SPF would give you the ability to blacklist/whitelist domains instead of IPs - domains change less often. You could whitelist yahoo.com and not have to update the database every time yahoo adds a server to their cluster.
Somebody like spamhous could run a DNS-based database that determines whether a domain is spammy, non-spammy, or unknown based on complaint data (much as they currently do for IPs now).
Individuals could obviously make up their own minds regarding unknown domains, but if a domain has a reputation for not sending spam, why block it just because they don't own a T1?
What's wrong with allowing the mail through if the SPF record is valid? Not all PCs on dynamic netblocks are zombies. However, some basic checks are only sensible...
I'm pretty sure abortion laws predate the war on drugs.
Murder is a federal crime and has been for a long time - probably long before the commerce clause went out of control.
Something as fundamental as the right to not be killed will always be an appropriate federal matter. If Iowa passes a law legalizing the murder of union organizers does that mean that said organizers should not be able to sue for relief in federal courts?
I think most libertarians wouldn't argue with having some level of federal civil rights protections.
Well, that's the whole thing - proportional representation really only works in a unitary system of government, not a federal one. There aren't a lot of federal governments actually out there (can anybody think of any other than the US that are big?). In the UK, I believe even the local school board in some sense reports to parliament. In the US they would report to the state, and would not be accountable to the US congress. This is because state governments are not fully subordinate to the national government.
I guess a workaround would be to have a proporational house of reps, and perhaps go back to the state-appointed senate model. Each state house would be proportional within the state and could appoint two senators in whatever manner it chose.
One advantage of proportional democracy is that there are no local reps - everybody is elected on a national scale. Therefore, there is no single constituency that you can shower with money to buy votes. Thus, no local pork-barrel spending.
On the other hand, you don't have a local rep to talk to per se when you have an issue you want raised. Then again, how many people really have access to their federal reps in the current system?
Well, sure, which is why it is legal right now. However, that doesn't change the fact that there have been political fights over the last 20 years as to whether such a law should exist, and in various states laws are on the books to varying degrees.
Obviously this isn't an issue that is going to go away anytime soon. I was just pointing out that you can't just wave your hands and say "government shouldn't do anything but prevent theft and murder" and expect all of politics to go away as a result...
Once you make the basics like murder and theft and fraud illegal, what else is there for a full-time legislature to do but fight over the budget and assume that all of the world needs their "help"?
Uh, without wanting to open this can of worms any further, you do realize that the folks who want to ban abortion want to do so because they think it is murder?
Unfortunately, this debate is rightly one which government should take an interest in. Now, you can question whether in fact embryo's are covered by "life, liberty, pursuit of happiness" or not, but this is very much a constitutional issue.
1. Ok, I took the time to look it up. This was a very big deal when it came out, and the list of applications that required patching on that bulletin was on the MS ones - a bunch of other vendors had issues as well. Of course the solution is to bug the developers - but that is only because there are no other options, since most windows software is distributed binary-only. On linux most distros would have striped out the local copies of the libs.
2. Windows has embedded versions in filenames in a few cases, as you've pointed out. However, this has problems. What happens when a new version of the DLL works 90% of the time, but not 100% of the time? In theory all apps should use the newer DLL (so you don't want to put the version in the name), but maybe a stubborn app might need to link to the specific version. On unix the solution is to have libabc-1.2.3.so with symlinks from libabc-1.2.so, libabc-1.so, and libabc.so - then you can link against whichever of the 4 is most appropriate (the last one working with any installed version). The problem with the windows technique of forcing the version in the filename is that it only works if you planned on breaking compatibility from the start - if somebody discovers the incompatibility later then you're up the creek.
I believe recent versions of windows have used a few tricks to let each application think it has its own set of dlls, which partially solves this problem, but it still results in having a lot of extra versions floating around that may or may not be necessary, and which could contain security holes.
Basically the windows model is much more distributed, while the linux package model is more top-down. The latter is better for getting all your security patches from one source, although the windows model scales better (with its flaws), since each vendor carries its own weight - the only problem is that if the vendor drops the ball nobody is around to clean up.
Well, the big players pushing LSB tend to be companies that don't want to let anybody see their source.
I'm sure RedHat/SUSE/Debian/Mandrake/Gentoo/etc would be more than happy to build and package Oracle and Websphere so that they work perfectly on every version of their OS. However, to do that they would need to have the source, and Oracle and IBM don't want to give that up.
For open-source software LSB isn't really a big deal. If they install their netscape plugins in the wrong place, then Debian will just move them to the right place before packaging them up, and Gentoo will patch their Makefile.
I agree wholeheartedly that distro-managed packages are far superior to proprietary apps. I can run one command on my linux install and find out if EVERY binary on the system has any security updates available, and automatically upgrade them all. On a windows PC I can run one check to see if the core OS is OK. I can run another to find out if MS Office is OK. I can download a bunch of 3rd-party apps to scan for other problems, or run nessus on my network to get a half-decent idea of what vulnerabilities exist - however fixing them is a mostly manual process.
With most distros you can even check your binary hashes and ensure that every binary on the system is OK. For windows this requires a bunch of add-ons (and thus more risk of breakage).
Which isn't to say that windows couldn't go the same route. But, windows is oriented around proprietary software, and so a package manager isn't going to be super-effective. Besides, MS can barely keep track of its own bugs - let alone everybody else's...
There are a few reasons why LSB compliance and the like isn't considered critical by many devs:
1. Most distros use package managers - which let you put all of an applications files wherever you want, and thus the application doesn't need to know where the right place to install itself is.
2. Most distros compile their own binaries from source. So, if the original developer linked his binary version against glibc-2.0, and RedHat has v2.3, they'll just recompile it themselves, and distribute their own version.
It works just fine 99% of the time. Really, the only people who need to have all kinds of standards that are locked down are folks who distribute closed-source apps - since the distros can't help them out by rebuilding their application in 47 different ways. Then it matters what versions of various libraries are installed, and where everything can be found (no automake/configure/etc directly on the target platform).
As a result, many volunteer distro developers find it hard to care - why should they donate a ton of their time just to increase the incentive for companies to not release their source code? They do linux for fun/satisfaction, and it doesn't really matter to them whether name-your-favorite-software-vendor provides closed-source apps for their distro - they'll just write free competing versions of the same.
1. On windows the bundled DLLs definitely cause problems. I'm sure I still have PCs in my home which are vulnerable to that gif/jpg/whatever vulnerability that came out a year ago or so (the one where the flaw was in a series of DLLs that got bundled and repackaged with just about everything). On linux you use shared libs (which support multiple installed versions) and you can dodge this mess.
2. The.so setup on linux is designed so that you can have multiple versions of the same library installed (thus discouraging every app from just keeping their own private copies). In theory if two verisons are compatible you can just symlink them. In any case, as long as you run configure it should link the app against the appropriate library version - the problem only comes when you go to install binary software without using a packaging system of some sort.
Ok, I get burned by accesskeys in konqueror, and somebody mods it funny?
Ok, this is offtopic, but does ANYBODY know how to disable accesskeys in konqueror? I bump the ctrl key and then the next button I hit sends me off to who knows where...
Only if you're assuming that your linux is powering a $10k webserver for some major operation, and you went ahead and spent $500 on RAM.
If, on the other hand, it is running on a $500 desktop PC with 1GB of RAM, then copying a 500M application "in RAM" doesn't go nearly as fast, when you have 400M of other stuff in memory at the same time.
Sure, RAM is cheap, but it isn't free. And COW works fine in many cases - especially if RAM is in more demand than CPU.
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Are you suggesting that the best RTS strategy is to not have an army at all? Then the enemy doesn't need to develop the perfect counter to your forces - they just need to have forces of any kind.
The US should be prepared to stop infiltrators at its borders. It should also be prepared to fight a large scale conventional war (aka NATO-Warsaw). It should be prepared to turn satellites into slag. You should have a balance of forces, so that you deter any avenue of attack.
As far as your question regarding how do you stop 1000 infiltrators with backpack nukes goes - that's easy. You announce in advance that if somebody nukes 1 of your cities, you'll nuke 5 of theirs. Agents with backpack nukes climbing tall buildings aren't going to do nearly as much damage as ICBMs set to airburst. At best china could wipe out a few cities with such a strategy - and 20 minutes later most of their population would be eradicated. Their best use of those backpack nukes is as a deterrant - once they use them, there really is no reason for anybody to hold forces in reserve. However, those backpack nukes are the reason the US would never launch a first strike on China with nuclear weapons.
If the US got into a war with China, it would be entirely conventional. China's best bet would be to attrit US forces to discourage an end to the war. If they launched attacks on US soil they would be conventional and probably not terror-based. Blowing up civilians only serves to unite the enemy - China would do better to blow up military bases. And using weapons of mass destruction on the US population would give them a very strong resolve.
China can make arguments identical to yours about enlightened self-interest. They could make the same argument about WMDs -- and Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong Il, and the regime in Iran have all done just that. Deterrence, etc.
Well, sure, which is of course why the US wants to make sure they're the ones on top. I'm sure anyone in their place would take the same course of action.
Personally, I think China is far more likely to invade a secular democratic nation than the US is (how many Canadians vs Taiwanese lose sleep over the thought of missles coming across the border?).
No surprise there - it probably didn't use challenge-response, but rather a simple transmission of a static code. The former can be made impossible to crack (well, not in the lifetime of this universe anyway), but the latter is trivial.
If they were smart they'd put an SSL cert on the keyfob and have it hash/sign the date/time and transmit that. A replay attack would not work.
Well, there really doesn't need to be any shortcut-to-citizenship or anything like that. Once we get the new immigration policies set up we would simply grant amnesty to anybody who registers within some period of time - anybody who registers would become identical to status to anybody who immigrates legally. The citizenship process doesn't really need to change much at all to acomadate this.
If after a period of time people are unwilling to register than summary deportation is probably appropriate (with a last-chance-to-sign-up-offer). They can always do a U-turn at the border and walk up to the line and register and come right back in. Likewise, anybody who doesn't follow any regular check-in procedures is essentially violating their visas and should probably be expelled for some period of time (maybe a year or two). There need not be any particular requirements for the check-in - just a measure of keeping tabs on people who are essentially guests of the American people. Businesses would be required to ensure their workers have active visas at all times. This would help with deporting criminals/etc, and need not be onerous for those who are law-abiding. You would not even need to have a job to stay - just a reasonably clean record.
Of course, once citizenship is granted these measures would cease immediately.
By the way, the "ILLEGAL" you are talking about is not a felony, it is not even a misdemeanor--it is on the same level as the run-of-the mill traffic ticket. Why don't we yank the cars and licenses from everyone who has ever gotten a traffic ticket? After all, it's "ILLEGAL" to speed, and they made that choice.
Perhaps it should be classified as a serious crime then... I would imagine that most people would support such a measure.
There is a problem with the "children are starving" argument - and that is that there will ALWAYS be children starving, and the reason isn't for lack of care by the developed world. One could argue that it is immoral to own a TV, computer, etc, since somewhere some child is starving and that money could have fed them for a week/month/year/whatever. The problem is that if we all lived in huts then there would still be children starving, and most likely some of our own children would be starving as well.
The solution to staving children isn't to move the entire world population into the borders of the US/France/UK/Canada/etc.
What is the point of having borders at all if you don't control them. When travellers get off of a plane should they simply stampede through immigration without bothering to identify themselves and obey local customs laws? Should a nation not care whether known criminals are violating its borders, or if somebody has 25kg of TNT in their backpack?
I'm actually all for liberalization of immigration policy, but I'm still for VERY STRONG enforcement of the border. Let lots of people in, but require them to go into the front door, and if they violate a law of any consequence it should be trivial to deport them, with a ban on re-entry. Known (serious) criminals are not to be allowed in at all. Immigrants would not qualify for social programs, and would be fully taxed (they'd be issued taxpayer IDs, and tax witholding would be strongly enforced - or we'd use a system like Fairtax which would make taxes impossible to dodge anyway - in fact the only thing they could dodge would be the rebate checks).
The problem with illegal immigration is that it often results in lawbreakers (and I'm talking about serious lawbreaking here - assault, theft, rape, etc) entering the country (sometimes repeatedly). It can also be used to smuggle terrorists into the country, smuggling, etc. Now, when there is a sea of people crossing the borders the real problems can slip right by. The key is to regulate but not close the borders, so that anybody who actually bothers to sneak around at night stands out and is captured.
My guess is that if these measures were put into effect, the problem would sort itself out. Employers would hire immigrants, but they would not be able to pay them under the table, they would not be able to exploit them due to their fear of going to the police, etc. Wages would be higher, and the number of jobs might drop a little. Those willing to work would move to the US, but those who are just hoping to leach off of social systems would stay home (since this would be prohibited).
For those who feel bad about people starving in Mexico - there are a few solutions. One is to go over to Mexico and try to clean things up (good luck). If you just want to throw money at the starving people you're welcome to donate it to whatever relief agency works best. In fact, if your goal is to feed children, the last thing you want to do is to drag them into the US - keep them in Mexico where you can feed them for a dollar per day and not $5 per McD's cheeseburger.
However, the reality is that there will ALWAYS be starving children. The only way you'll prevent that is to require a license to breed, and I doubt most are willing to accept that...
I think we're on the same page.
I would blacklist/whitelist by domain. Then when somebody wants to give me mail I would make sure they are allowed to send mail for that domain. If not I'd very negatively score, if so I'd base the score on the domain.
The idea of SPF is that it lets you safely associate IPs with domains, and greatly reduces the amount of whack-a-mole with your filters.
You could also negatively score domains that are new, or which appear to be owned by spammers based on WHOIS. Basically, it opens a whole new arena of checking.
A few problems with this:
single-payer plans are cheaper to run, so overall health costs go down - that includes YOUR health costs
Hardly. Lots of people who aren't insured at all will become more insured, which will greatly increase costs. The increase in insurance without any associated personal cost or competition will increase the consumption of services, often wastefully. More people are likely to go to the doctor in Canada than in the US.
costs in other parts of the system go down, as people aren't forced onto the street, onto welfare roles, etc., because of bankruptcy by medical bills. Remember, 75.5% of all the people who went bankrupt because of medical bills had insurance, and half of all bankruptcies involve medical costs.
Medical bills don't tend to put people on welfare (they might put people on the streets) - can somebody who makes $50,000/year go on welfare because of medical bills? My guess is that having medical insurance isn't going to result in much of a decrease in other programs.
In any case, the solution to huge welfare bills is to reduce the size of the welfare program, not to just move them to a different program.
by spreading the "risk pool" to cover everyone, the state-run system has a better funding base than it currently does, where it has to cover those who use state plans as a plan of last resort
Well, the increase in funding isn't really a result of increasing the risk pool, but rather due to progressive taxation. In a standard health plan everybody pays the same (rich or poor). With government care the rich pay more, and hence there are more dollars to fund the program (until the rich move out).
state-run plans are better able to look at the true cost/benefit trade-off of long-term prevention programs, and better positioned to implement them to the general populace. HMOs have no incentive to help improve the health of the general population, because that would mean spending their money to help competitors, who would not have similar expenses, and thus enjoy a higher profit margin
In other words, the government has more power to tell you what you can and can't do with your own body. If somebody wants to kill themselves with cigarettes more power to them - they just shouldn't ask me to pay for it. The solution isn't to ban cigarettes at home, levy a tax on anybody who is overweight, tax people who don't walk two miles per day, and lock up anybody who crosses the street without looking both ways.
no more situations like GM, where they traded off wage concessions for future health-care benefits, and are probably going to default on those, so the taxpayer ends up on the hook anyway. Net result is a $100 Billion subsidy to GM over the last 3 decades.
The taxpayer need not end up on the hook. There are a couple of solutions:
1. Require escrow of retirement or other future benefits of any kind. This is merely truth-in-advertising - somebody shouldn't be able to put something in my contract and not deliver on it.
2. The government could just choose not to help out people who are double-crossed by their employer. Might not sound compassionate, but it does eliminate your concern for the taxpayers.
3. People could work someplace else where the company is more likely to be able to keep its promises.
The big problem with public health is that it takes money from those who could otherwise afford their own healthcare, and gives it to people who couldn't. So, the high-wage workers get no net benefit. Also, it usually eliminates choice in health providers since the government abhors competition. This also leads to depression in pay for doctors/pharma/etc, and leads all the smart people to become congressmen instead of MDs, since that is where the power is.
Ok, so the hacker finds out a user has a password "hardtoguess24". At the end of the month they find the password no longer works.
No problem - they type in "hardtoguess25", and now they're in again. The typical user response to password expiry is to add an incremented field to their password. The hackers know this as well.
I'm with you on the scoring bit - I score dynamic IPs myself, but the key is that it is only one component of the filter.
SPF tells you what servers are allowed to send mail for the domain - so if you get mail from yahoo.com, and none of the SPF servers resolve to that IP, then you can safely trash it.
In my domain's SPF I use a and mx records - so if somebody gets a connection from some computer claiming to have mail from me, and its IP is not listed in my domain's A or MX records, then it should get bounced.
So, this essentially prevents domain spoofing. SPF has no real point if you just leave the settings wide open (ie setting any to pass).
Well, when you think about it, you're really just outsourcing. If I were doing small business IT consulting, I'd probably set up a standard image, and buy all my hardware from Dell. The systems work, and if they don't work they take care of the hardware.
The software/service, on the other hand, I'd manage myself (in terms of having an image with antivirus, office suite, etc). Then you can take advantage of volume licensing, etc, and basically be a reseller.
There is definitely no money in building PCs. I do it at home because I care about the motherboard/ chipset/ peripherals I get - not because it saves much in the way of cash. However, no business has these kinds of requirements - better to go commodity...
However, SPF would give you the ability to blacklist/whitelist domains instead of IPs - domains change less often. You could whitelist yahoo.com and not have to update the database every time yahoo adds a server to their cluster.
Somebody like spamhous could run a DNS-based database that determines whether a domain is spammy, non-spammy, or unknown based on complaint data (much as they currently do for IPs now).
Individuals could obviously make up their own minds regarding unknown domains, but if a domain has a reputation for not sending spam, why block it just because they don't own a T1?
What's wrong with allowing the mail through if the SPF record is valid? Not all PCs on dynamic netblocks are zombies. However, some basic checks are only sensible...
I'm pretty sure abortion laws predate the war on drugs.
Murder is a federal crime and has been for a long time - probably long before the commerce clause went out of control.
Something as fundamental as the right to not be killed will always be an appropriate federal matter. If Iowa passes a law legalizing the murder of union organizers does that mean that said organizers should not be able to sue for relief in federal courts?
I think most libertarians wouldn't argue with having some level of federal civil rights protections.
Well, that's the whole thing - proportional representation really only works in a unitary system of government, not a federal one. There aren't a lot of federal governments actually out there (can anybody think of any other than the US that are big?). In the UK, I believe even the local school board in some sense reports to parliament. In the US they would report to the state, and would not be accountable to the US congress. This is because state governments are not fully subordinate to the national government.
I guess a workaround would be to have a proporational house of reps, and perhaps go back to the state-appointed senate model. Each state house would be proportional within the state and could appoint two senators in whatever manner it chose.
One advantage of proportional democracy is that there are no local reps - everybody is elected on a national scale. Therefore, there is no single constituency that you can shower with money to buy votes. Thus, no local pork-barrel spending.
On the other hand, you don't have a local rep to talk to per se when you have an issue you want raised. Then again, how many people really have access to their federal reps in the current system?
Well, sure, which is why it is legal right now. However, that doesn't change the fact that there have been political fights over the last 20 years as to whether such a law should exist, and in various states laws are on the books to varying degrees.
Obviously this isn't an issue that is going to go away anytime soon. I was just pointing out that you can't just wave your hands and say "government shouldn't do anything but prevent theft and murder" and expect all of politics to go away as a result...
I'm sure verizon et al aren't complaining - makes more a market for "legitimate" providers...
Once you make the basics like murder and theft and fraud illegal, what else is there for a full-time legislature to do but fight over the budget and assume that all of the world needs their "help"?
Uh, without wanting to open this can of worms any further, you do realize that the folks who want to ban abortion want to do so because they think it is murder?
Unfortunately, this debate is rightly one which government should take an interest in. Now, you can question whether in fact embryo's are covered by "life, liberty, pursuit of happiness" or not, but this is very much a constitutional issue.
1. Ok, I took the time to look it up. This was a very big deal when it came out, and the list of applications that required patching on that bulletin was on the MS ones - a bunch of other vendors had issues as well. Of course the solution is to bug the developers - but that is only because there are no other options, since most windows software is distributed binary-only. On linux most distros would have striped out the local copies of the libs.
2. Windows has embedded versions in filenames in a few cases, as you've pointed out. However, this has problems. What happens when a new version of the DLL works 90% of the time, but not 100% of the time? In theory all apps should use the newer DLL (so you don't want to put the version in the name), but maybe a stubborn app might need to link to the specific version. On unix the solution is to have libabc-1.2.3.so with symlinks from libabc-1.2.so, libabc-1.so, and libabc.so - then you can link against whichever of the 4 is most appropriate (the last one working with any installed version). The problem with the windows technique of forcing the version in the filename is that it only works if you planned on breaking compatibility from the start - if somebody discovers the incompatibility later then you're up the creek.
I believe recent versions of windows have used a few tricks to let each application think it has its own set of dlls, which partially solves this problem, but it still results in having a lot of extra versions floating around that may or may not be necessary, and which could contain security holes.
Basically the windows model is much more distributed, while the linux package model is more top-down. The latter is better for getting all your security patches from one source, although the windows model scales better (with its flaws), since each vendor carries its own weight - the only problem is that if the vendor drops the ball nobody is around to clean up.
Well, the big players pushing LSB tend to be companies that don't want to let anybody see their source.
I'm sure RedHat/SUSE/Debian/Mandrake/Gentoo/etc would be more than happy to build and package Oracle and Websphere so that they work perfectly on every version of their OS. However, to do that they would need to have the source, and Oracle and IBM don't want to give that up.
For open-source software LSB isn't really a big deal. If they install their netscape plugins in the wrong place, then Debian will just move them to the right place before packaging them up, and Gentoo will patch their Makefile.
I agree wholeheartedly that distro-managed packages are far superior to proprietary apps. I can run one command on my linux install and find out if EVERY binary on the system has any security updates available, and automatically upgrade them all. On a windows PC I can run one check to see if the core OS is OK. I can run another to find out if MS Office is OK. I can download a bunch of 3rd-party apps to scan for other problems, or run nessus on my network to get a half-decent idea of what vulnerabilities exist - however fixing them is a mostly manual process.
With most distros you can even check your binary hashes and ensure that every binary on the system is OK. For windows this requires a bunch of add-ons (and thus more risk of breakage).
Which isn't to say that windows couldn't go the same route. But, windows is oriented around proprietary software, and so a package manager isn't going to be super-effective. Besides, MS can barely keep track of its own bugs - let alone everybody else's...
There are a few reasons why LSB compliance and the like isn't considered critical by many devs:
1. Most distros use package managers - which let you put all of an applications files wherever you want, and thus the application doesn't need to know where the right place to install itself is.
2. Most distros compile their own binaries from source. So, if the original developer linked his binary version against glibc-2.0, and RedHat has v2.3, they'll just recompile it themselves, and distribute their own version.
It works just fine 99% of the time. Really, the only people who need to have all kinds of standards that are locked down are folks who distribute closed-source apps - since the distros can't help them out by rebuilding their application in 47 different ways. Then it matters what versions of various libraries are installed, and where everything can be found (no automake/configure/etc directly on the target platform).
As a result, many volunteer distro developers find it hard to care - why should they donate a ton of their time just to increase the incentive for companies to not release their source code? They do linux for fun/satisfaction, and it doesn't really matter to them whether name-your-favorite-software-vendor provides closed-source apps for their distro - they'll just write free competing versions of the same.
Couple of things -
.so setup on linux is designed so that you can have multiple versions of the same library installed (thus discouraging every app from just keeping their own private copies). In theory if two verisons are compatible you can just symlink them. In any case, as long as you run configure it should link the app against the appropriate library version - the problem only comes when you go to install binary software without using a packaging system of some sort.
1. On windows the bundled DLLs definitely cause problems. I'm sure I still have PCs in my home which are vulnerable to that gif/jpg/whatever vulnerability that came out a year ago or so (the one where the flaw was in a series of DLLs that got bundled and repackaged with just about everything). On linux you use shared libs (which support multiple installed versions) and you can dodge this mess.
2. The
Ok, I get burned by accesskeys in konqueror, and somebody mods it funny?
Ok, this is offtopic, but does ANYBODY know how to disable accesskeys in konqueror? I bump the ctrl key and then the next button I hit sends me off to who knows where...
Only if you're assuming that your linux is powering a $10k webserver for some major operation, and you went ahead and spent $500 on RAM.
If, on the other hand, it is running on a $500 desktop PC with 1GB of RAM, then copying a 500M application "in RAM" doesn't go nearly as fast, when you have 400M of other stuff in memory at the same time.
Sure, RAM is cheap, but it isn't free. And COW works fine in many cases - especially if RAM is in more demand than CPU.
Only if you assume you're using linux to power a web