I think we're arguing semantics at this point. Define "good" and "evil".
If evil is a course of action which has tragic outcomes, then just about everything is evil. Having a kid is evil since it results in their eventual tragic death. Of course, most people would consider this a trivial argument, and not very useful.
Most people would argue that in all decisions people should do good and avoid evil. So, good is a decision which is the best possible one on moral grounds. Evil would be varying degrees of not complying with the good decision.
Sure, war will undoubtedly lead to tragedy, and I agree that it should be avoided at almost any cost. Now, there is a question as to whether the moral cost of going to war is EVER less than the moral cost of not going to war. If the cost of war is always higher, then war is always evil. If the cost of going to war is sometimes lower, then it is sometimes the right decision, and that by definition makes it "good".
Now, you can make all kinds of conclusions about the injustices of life itself in that a decision like going to war is sometimes the best moral decision. And you can talk about how in general that is a great "evil", but this is a different definition of evil which has no relevance to individual moral decisions. You can say that life itself is "evil" I suppose, but that doesn't help anybody run their day to day lives.
For morality to be of any use it must be practical. For it to be practical it must deal with the environment that we must make a decision and not simply wish for our decisions to be easier ones. If we're confronted with a beligerant agressor who is out to harm a great many people, then sometimes we must be compelled out of love for the victims of aggression to stand up for what is right, and sometimes that means war. Now, we could wish that we could have some magical ability to only take out the enemy leadership, or that the bad guys would see the error of their ways and shape up, and if those things happened then war would be wrong. However, we live in the real world, and we must make decisions based on what we have, not what we'd like to have.
I'm not trying to blur the lines of right and wrong. I'm simply pointing out that when a decisoin is the right decision we don't need to pretend that it is "evil" simply because we wish things were otherwise.
Laboratory-scale lyophilizers are not all that expensive, and would probably be adequate (if you really do just want to freeze-dry them).
There are two steps to freeze-drying:
1. Freeze 2. Dry
Step 1 is accomplished by putting the object in a pile of dry ice (ok, there are faster ways, but this will work for tapes).
Step 2 is accomplished by putting the object in a vacuum. The vacuum should be equiped with a cold trap to capture water vapor. Not much to this - a plumbing trap made of glass in a dry-ice-antifreeze bath would do the trick (better still would be something designed to maximize interaction between the vapor inside and the walls).
A vac pump only costs a few thousand dollars, the rest costs a few hundred dollars.
Of course, you could probably buy a nice machine to take care of it all for a few 10k's.
I have this nagging concern that data integrity of digital media will not last the thousands of years that printed material lasted for future generations
How many pieces of paper have actually lasted thousands of years? You're talking about a handful.
The examples you used, like the Quran or the Torah were preserved only becaused thousands of copies existed back in their time, and they were generally handled with care, and as a result a few made it intact.
Likewise, documents like the US or EU Constitution will make it through intact - in some format (might be paper, might be electronic). Documents like IRS publication 87 in PDF may not - simply because they aren't well-distributed. And that is fine, since nobody from the future would care to read it - at least not in comparison to the proceedings of the British Parliament.
In general, if something is important today, it will get preserved into the future - somehow. I can virtually guarantee that the AOL CD will make it into somebody's historical archives - at least one intact CD will have to survive even a global catastrophe, and any archaeologist would be dying to know what is on this CD that seems to be found in every garbage dump on the planet...
While the parent poster does provide some valid arguments in favor of retaining data on hardcopy, the real problem is data overload -- how do you separate the "wheat from the chaff"?
Clearly my job is the most important one in the world. I'm sure that 10,000 years from now arcaeologists will be clamoring over each other to read my code documentation for the functions I'm working on today, and as an added bonus they might even dig up a test script that verifies that it works correctly...:)
If they're lucky they might dig up about 50,000 other similar pieces of paper and they'd be able to reconstruct some middleware which converts one non-standard binary data stream format into another...
I got the impression that this was largely due to the tactical use of the navajo code. I believe the code talkers were mainly used to do unit-level communication to coordinate attacks at a tactical level - since they were more portable than all kinds of cipher gear and they were less useful if captured as the code was locked in their brains.
I don't believe that navajo code was used for strategic-level planning, such as coordination of supplies and convoys for the purpose of attacks that would take place days or weeks in the future.
The result is that cryptanalysts are confronted with a barrage of tons of messages, but no context associated with any of them (two units in the jungle chat with each other - nobody knows whether they marched 1 mile east or west as a result). With strategic-level codes you can see what large-scale events occurred after the transmission of various messages.
The navajo code also benefitted from some ambiguity, from what I understand, as many different words could be used for the same cleartext word.
In any case, given enough material to work with and enough context to examine it using, the code could have been broken. Possibly even by the WWII Japanese - certainly by the Germans or Russians of that day. The problem is that to crack codes it is better to have a few messages with a lot of context than a ton of them with virtually no context - unless you have a computer, which nobody but the allies had at the time. These days the reverse may actually be advantageous since it is better automated.
My question was: how good a job are we doing preserving the records and data for those cases that take 30 or 50 years, like tobacco or asbestos. I'm looking ahead to the lawsuits on global warming.
Uh, why would a coal company want to preserve records on how they might have caused global warming? It would serve no business purpose except to guarantee the demise of the company in the event that LA ends up underwater. In the event that global warming turns out to be a farse the company gains nothing for preserving their documents.
If the government wants to make sure documents are around 100 years from now in the event of a lawsuit, then they'll need to collect these documents today and invest in the preservation and indexing technology themselves. People don't tend to wholeheartedly impelement technologies that will only work against them.
Note - I'm not commenting on the validity of global warming, corporatism, globalism, or any other -ism. I'm just pointing out that nobody should be surprised when data goes missing when the people who are handling it have a vested interest in the data going missing...
There has always been a standard doctrine in military conflict - give the enemy incentive to surrender.
In ancient days when the army rode up to the city walls, the people inside had the choice of opening the gates or leaving them closed. Either way they would lose, but the attacking army would take huge losses storming the city. The standing policy as a result was that if the city was taken by force, few if any would survive. Cities quickly learned to think twice before resisting.
Japan demonstrated a willingness to kill thousands of soldiers over what was essentially a trivial principle. The Americans demonstrated that they were willing to kill thousands of civilians over the same principle. It is hard to say that one was right, and the other was wrong. Neither side put much value on the lives of its opponents (as seen in both the Japanese treatment of the Chinese and POWs, and the American treatment of its own Japanese-decended citizens).
Stuff like this always happens in big wars. They start out nice, but they get ugly real fast. Once you've paid in blood it is hard to back down...
I think that people today lack the understanding of what war was like back then.
These days we send a few reservists off to war, and maybe everybody knows somebody at their workplace that they otherwise barely know, or they might have a cousin in the armed forces. A few of them (a few dozen per state) die in really bloodly conflicts like Iraq. In most of these conflicts a few dozen people die total.
In WWII - everybody had brothers/sons/neighbors/etc in the war. Everybody personally knew somebody who died, or close to it. We're talking deaths in the millions. People weren't just concerned about some war on the other side of the planet - they were concerned that sooner or later if left unchecked they'd be watching tanks drive down their own streets - particularly in Europe, but even in America.
A bombing run back then might target a several block radius with some degree of precision - but certainly nothing more surgical than that. If a squad of bombers was off course at night when they dropped their bombs then some random village in the middle of nowhere would be wiped off the map. Nobody was talking restraint since the factories being targetted were running triple shifts and then some churning out tanks which were being used to shoot at people the average voter could identify with.
By the time the war had gone on for a few years, and everybody was getting tired of losing cousins/brothers/sons/etc, people were willing to do whatever it took to end the war.
The nature of war is to continue until one side loses the will to fight. When a 30-year-old is fighting a 5-year-old, you find restricted combat where the adult basically pins the kid down until he stops squirming and behaves, and nobody is hurt. When two 30-year-olds are fighting for their lives you find gouged eyes, missing hair, bruised organs, etc. Likewise, the US vs Iraq allows for restricted use of arms since the US can bide its time knowing with certainty that it will win without resorting to leveling cities.
People always play fair unless they stand to lose. Even somebody prone to cheat won't do so if they don't need to. The same goes for war.
Most people have no experience with unrestricted warfare, so it becomes difficult to understand the end of major wars. McCarthur was famous for his "keep on killing japs" line - which seems horrific by today's standards, but he would have been ticker-tape paraded in any US, European, or Asian city (aside from those in Japan) in his day.
War is not a good thing, and it is to be avoided at all costs. Hiroshima only illustrates the reason why it is not wise to toy with war. There is nothing different between the people who flew the Enola Gay and your next door neighbors.
Back in the day people used to actually repair telephones. Probably because they cost the equivalent of a few hundred dollars today, or more.
Now they cost $14.95 at Walmart and you just toss them when they die (after 15 years). Which is the better use of resources?
You know, the parts in the computer aren't the only resource there is. When you recycle you expend other resources, and in some cases these actually deplete the environment more than just tossing the thing.
There is also a reliablity factor. Once parts start going you either have to replace them en masse or live with them failing every few weeks/months. If downtime is expensive, then you end up replacing the whole thing anyway, albeit in parts. If downtime isn't expensive you end up burning gass every time you drive to the computer store to recycle another part. Neither is good for the environment.
I'm a fan of recycling - don't get me wrong. However, if you want to benefit mankind you have to look at all the costs - not just the mass of plastic in the part that is about to get tossed.
The difference is that the code in slamd64 is optimized for Athlon64/Opteron, a feat which is entirely doable by anybody who knows how to compile a kernel and their own software.
Well, it is a little more painful than that since quite a few packages don't compile or run cleanly on AMD64 without patching.
all I had to do was compile a kernel and recompile Apache/PHP/MySQL/Sendmail/UW-IMAP
I notice you didn't put java anywhere on that list. I have had no end of java pains on AMD64 - half the packages sort-of-work on blackdown, the other half on sun 1.5, but sun 1.5 messes up all kinds of dependencies in general. For what should be the most portable language there is, it certainly gives me lots of pain...
Too often short-sighted management tries to save $1 million at the cost of slight employee inconvenience. The initiative is bound to failure as the employees have no incentive to play along.
On the other hand, if the company is open about the savings and gives $500k in bonuses back to the employees they suddenly don't have such a big problem with the change.
My pet-peeve is when companys save a bundle by centralizing IT, and then they save $50k by cutting the central group to the bone so that quality of service drops. Suddenly every department is spawning their own IT groups as a result, and now the company is losing more than they were at the start. If they had just been satisfied with the huge savings they originally obtained then the company would be running leaner, and quality would actually be higher...
Re:the code of conduct for free software distribut
on
Drafting GPL3
·
· Score: 1
The same holds true for GPL software.
True but only if I license my code under the GPL. With private code, this is not so. When Microsoft partners, they don't say "You must use our EULA". They may not permit them to redistribute their code but that is not the same.
Not true. With permission from the original copyright holder you can license any way you want.
Don't believe me - call up the mysql folks. You can use mysql in any non-GPL project you'd like - for a price.
Now, you do need permission from all the copyright holders, and they do not need to agree to non-GPL publication.
If you want to publish under the GPL you don't need anybody's permission - the GPL already gives you this right. However, with the additional approval of the copyright holders you can relicense at will. Publishing under the GPL does not remove the ability to dual-license the work.
I agree, but there is no reason you can't keep both.
We don't need self-destructing recordings or any of that nonsense. However, if DirecTV wants to require that you rent a decoder card to view their service that isn't really a big deal.
Otherwise, a real easy way of getting rid of DRM is to just ban the sale of music and video altogether. Viola - no more DRM. The volunteer-driven stuff that you can get online won't go anyware.
The problem is that we have two camps with extreme positions and not many people willing to make small compromises. There is some ground between "information wants to be free" and "if you sing our tune in the shower there should be a microphone present to assure you are charged the appropriate license fee." You just wouldn't get that impression talking to either the recording studios or slashdotters...
I don't think that anybody is debating the fact that anybody CAN (in theory) become a millionare.
Of course, for every one of those self-made millionares, there are probably three more who are in tons of debt because their businesses failed.
Don't get me wrong - hard work CAN make you a millionare. However, most likely hard work WON'T make you a millinoare. Hard work plus luck is a better recipie.
Well, at some point you have to have protection, or nobody would sign up for service.
Are you suggesting that anybody who puts a satellite dish on their house should be able to receive most of DirecTV's programming lineup? Why would anybody actually pay for it then? And if nobody pays, how long do you think that satellite will be broadcasting? So, in the end we actually reduce customer choice.
Don't get me wrong - I'm against DRM and a number of other technologies which treat paying customers like crooks. On the other hand, at some point you do need to differentiate between paying customers and leeches. If you don't you just go out of business...
Actually, my understanding is that declassifying media is a fairly intense process.
You take your files on some form of media. You then take a PC and wipe it completely clean - some insane number of overwrite cycles with random data. Then you image it using a controlled image. You then load the classified data, and save it into some file format which is guaranteed not to drag along undesired material (such as a word document where deleted text is just marked as deleted but still stays in the file, or where some of the bytes in the file were never written to and contain the previous centents of the physical media sectors). That file is then saved to the new media. The PC is wiped again.
Other options are print and scan, and stuff like that.
My understanding is that the precautions taken for officially classified material are beyond paranoid - you aren't going to find holes unless the procedures are not followed. However, defence work is not underfunded, so there are plenty of people around to handle the extra hoops that must be jumped through...
That is one thing I never understood about the US post-911. Europeans were calling for the US to drop the death penalty before they would extradite suspects.
I can't understand why the US didn't just say "fine, keep them?" It isn't like they'd just let them go loose - the Eurpoeans would suddenly be stuck with the burden of trying and jailing them indefinitely.
I've actually been paranoid enough to worry about that.
One solution is to click on the padlock every time you connect to verify the cert was not signed by your company. Otherwise, I'm not aware of any easy ways to prevent this...
I built a AMD64-3200 system for a fraction of what a Dell with comparable benchmarks would have cost. Granted, I didn't get a fancy graphics card, but Dell isn't a whole lot cheaper than newegg even there.
Plus, I don't have a just-barely-ok power supply and motherboard, and a BIOS which supports overclocking should I desire to do so. I have a load of USB ports, firewire, various audio formats, etc.
You can't beat Dell for the price of an Intel chip, base RAM config (but not upgrades), and a no-name motherboard, power supply, and standard peripherals. On the other hand, the RAM upgrades at Dell are often more expensive than what you could buy from newegg, and you can't get decent brand-name components either. You can save a bundle by going AMD as well.
You'll never beat the $350 Dell PC. However, $600-700 at newegg will get you a lot more than $600 at Dell, let alone $1000.
HP does it a smarter (albeit similarly devious) way. Make your cartridges incompatible by constantly releasing new printer models with new cartridge interfaces.
All that does is delays the onset of generic competition. Unless they put serious levels of obfuscation into the cartridges (smartcards with challenge/response designed to resist reverse-engineering, for instance) it won't take long to duplicate any design. Sure, the generic company now has to support 100 models of cartridges instead of 10, but that works against HP as well. If HP has to raise their prices to support all those cartridges, then the generic companies can raise their prices to recover their costs and not lose market share. The only result of HPs decision would be more people buying from Epson since the entire cartridge market is cheaper (unless Epson does the same thing).
Unless they want to spend $40 per cartridge on smartcard technology, there are only so many limits manfuacturers can put on reverse-engineering. It is always cheaper to copy something than it is to design in the first place. Even smartcards can be defeated - they're made of matter and so they can be taken apart by somebody with sufficient determination...
Customer: I'm here to claim the value of my lost package.
UPS: Wait - it says here $100 billion - what was in that box!?
Customer: The private data of 3.5 million people.
UPS: But what was really in that box? You know, physically.
Customer: A couple of $25 tapes.
UPS: Ok, here is a nice fresh ben franklin for you. Thanks for doing business.
I don't believe that any shipping company actually insurces anything other than the physical value of the objects shipped. You can't claim damages for loss of business as a result of delay/loss, or anything like that.
Our whole legal system considers personal information to have no value at all...
Given a replicator, I would be amazed to find a drug that cost billions to develop.
Actually, most of the cost of drug development goes into clinical trials. In order to test a drug, you need 10,000 volunteers. They are not paid. However, their doctors are paid - handsomely. You see, for every company trying to recruit patients, there are three other companies also trying to recruit patients. Doctors sign patients up for the highest bidder (which is to say - the company paying them the most - not the one offering the largest benefit to their patients).
Unless you start replicating the sick people, you won't save much money here. This is one of the biggest problems in the drug industry - the trials are very expensive, and now we're talking about making them bigger to prevent the next Vioxx disaster. The cost of trials really isn't even within the control of pharmaceutical companies - it is up to doctors, who serve as gateways to sick people, who are the only people who can participate in most of these trials.
Sure, it might be reverse engineered on one person's PC - but that won't help anybody else. Every computer will have a unique private key embedded in it, and you'll need your own key to do anything useful. Kind of like trying to play a game online with a CD-key that you shared around the entire apartment complex - it will get banned.
The problem is that the reverse engineering procedure won't involve a few lines of code - it will involve hardware probes. That means expensive equipment and clean rooms - for each pc that is to be cracked.
This is the problem with hardware-enabled DRM.
It all depends on what you're trying to bypass. If it is just installing the latest game, then you can defeat the system since only one person needs to crack their PC, decrypt the game, and redistribute it. On the other hand, if your ISP blocks packets from non-DRM machines, then you're up the creek.
When you install a cisco router, or a PC, or a computer into your car, do you demand the source code for that because you don't trust it to work? Not bloody likely.
It depends on the consequences of failure. If we're talking about a heart monitor in the hospital, the manufacturer is required by law to make the source code available for FDA inspection, and is required to have a ton of testing done to ensure quality.
On the other hand, if the consequence of failure is that you can't web browse until you can drive to the store and buy a new router, then we really don't need all the expense of government oversight.
In this case, the consequence of failure is an innocent person rotting in jail for some number of years, and it becoming much harder for them to ever get a job. Sounds pretty serious to me. Anybody can get subjected to a breath test. I would hope that it would show me to be innocent when I haven't had a drink, but to me it is just a black box.
In any case, the source code doesn't need to be released to the public per-se. However, it should be made available to the state for auditing, and the state should have to defend the operation of the equipment. If they say that they audited the code, and calibrated it last Tuesday, then now the burden is on the defence to shoot holes in that. The defence should be allowed to retain an expert who can sign an NDA and inspect the operation of the instrument. As long as the defence is paying for it, what public interest is there in interfering?
The burden is on the state to prove that the person was drunk beyond a reasonable doubt. That doesn't mean proof to mathematical certainty, but it does mean that if the defence casts doubt on the instrumentation that the state should be obligated to offer enough evidence to convince an average citizen.
Slashdot Mirror
I think we're arguing semantics at this point. Define "good" and "evil".
If evil is a course of action which has tragic outcomes, then just about everything is evil. Having a kid is evil since it results in their eventual tragic death. Of course, most people would consider this a trivial argument, and not very useful.
Most people would argue that in all decisions people should do good and avoid evil. So, good is a decision which is the best possible one on moral grounds. Evil would be varying degrees of not complying with the good decision.
Sure, war will undoubtedly lead to tragedy, and I agree that it should be avoided at almost any cost. Now, there is a question as to whether the moral cost of going to war is EVER less than the moral cost of not going to war. If the cost of war is always higher, then war is always evil. If the cost of going to war is sometimes lower, then it is sometimes the right decision, and that by definition makes it "good".
Now, you can make all kinds of conclusions about the injustices of life itself in that a decision like going to war is sometimes the best moral decision. And you can talk about how in general that is a great "evil", but this is a different definition of evil which has no relevance to individual moral decisions. You can say that life itself is "evil" I suppose, but that doesn't help anybody run their day to day lives.
For morality to be of any use it must be practical. For it to be practical it must deal with the environment that we must make a decision and not simply wish for our decisions to be easier ones. If we're confronted with a beligerant agressor who is out to harm a great many people, then sometimes we must be compelled out of love for the victims of aggression to stand up for what is right, and sometimes that means war. Now, we could wish that we could have some magical ability to only take out the enemy leadership, or that the bad guys would see the error of their ways and shape up, and if those things happened then war would be wrong. However, we live in the real world, and we must make decisions based on what we have, not what we'd like to have.
I'm not trying to blur the lines of right and wrong. I'm simply pointing out that when a decisoin is the right decision we don't need to pretend that it is "evil" simply because we wish things were otherwise.
Laboratory-scale lyophilizers are not all that expensive, and would probably be adequate (if you really do just want to freeze-dry them).
There are two steps to freeze-drying:
1. Freeze
2. Dry
Step 1 is accomplished by putting the object in a pile of dry ice (ok, there are faster ways, but this will work for tapes).
Step 2 is accomplished by putting the object in a vacuum. The vacuum should be equiped with a cold trap to capture water vapor. Not much to this - a plumbing trap made of glass in a dry-ice-antifreeze bath would do the trick (better still would be something designed to maximize interaction between the vapor inside and the walls).
A vac pump only costs a few thousand dollars, the rest costs a few hundred dollars.
Of course, you could probably buy a nice machine to take care of it all for a few 10k's.
I have this nagging concern that data integrity of digital media will not last the thousands of years that printed material lasted for future generations
How many pieces of paper have actually lasted thousands of years? You're talking about a handful.
The examples you used, like the Quran or the Torah were preserved only becaused thousands of copies existed back in their time, and they were generally handled with care, and as a result a few made it intact.
Likewise, documents like the US or EU Constitution will make it through intact - in some format (might be paper, might be electronic). Documents like IRS publication 87 in PDF may not - simply because they aren't well-distributed. And that is fine, since nobody from the future would care to read it - at least not in comparison to the proceedings of the British Parliament.
In general, if something is important today, it will get preserved into the future - somehow. I can virtually guarantee that the AOL CD will make it into somebody's historical archives - at least one intact CD will have to survive even a global catastrophe, and any archaeologist would be dying to know what is on this CD that seems to be found in every garbage dump on the planet...
While the parent poster does provide some valid arguments in favor of retaining data on hardcopy, the real problem is data overload -- how do you separate the "wheat from the chaff"?
:)
Clearly my job is the most important one in the world. I'm sure that 10,000 years from now arcaeologists will be clamoring over each other to read my code documentation for the functions I'm working on today, and as an added bonus they might even dig up a test script that verifies that it works correctly...
If they're lucky they might dig up about 50,000 other similar pieces of paper and they'd be able to reconstruct some middleware which converts one non-standard binary data stream format into another...
I got the impression that this was largely due to the tactical use of the navajo code. I believe the code talkers were mainly used to do unit-level communication to coordinate attacks at a tactical level - since they were more portable than all kinds of cipher gear and they were less useful if captured as the code was locked in their brains.
I don't believe that navajo code was used for strategic-level planning, such as coordination of supplies and convoys for the purpose of attacks that would take place days or weeks in the future.
The result is that cryptanalysts are confronted with a barrage of tons of messages, but no context associated with any of them (two units in the jungle chat with each other - nobody knows whether they marched 1 mile east or west as a result). With strategic-level codes you can see what large-scale events occurred after the transmission of various messages.
The navajo code also benefitted from some ambiguity, from what I understand, as many different words could be used for the same cleartext word.
In any case, given enough material to work with and enough context to examine it using, the code could have been broken. Possibly even by the WWII Japanese - certainly by the Germans or Russians of that day. The problem is that to crack codes it is better to have a few messages with a lot of context than a ton of them with virtually no context - unless you have a computer, which nobody but the allies had at the time. These days the reverse may actually be advantageous since it is better automated.
My question was: how good a job are we doing preserving the records and data for those cases that take 30 or 50 years, like tobacco or asbestos. I'm looking ahead to the lawsuits on global warming.
Uh, why would a coal company want to preserve records on how they might have caused global warming? It would serve no business purpose except to guarantee the demise of the company in the event that LA ends up underwater. In the event that global warming turns out to be a farse the company gains nothing for preserving their documents.
If the government wants to make sure documents are around 100 years from now in the event of a lawsuit, then they'll need to collect these documents today and invest in the preservation and indexing technology themselves. People don't tend to wholeheartedly impelement technologies that will only work against them.
Note - I'm not commenting on the validity of global warming, corporatism, globalism, or any other -ism. I'm just pointing out that nobody should be surprised when data goes missing when the people who are handling it have a vested interest in the data going missing...
There has always been a standard doctrine in military conflict - give the enemy incentive to surrender.
In ancient days when the army rode up to the city walls, the people inside had the choice of opening the gates or leaving them closed. Either way they would lose, but the attacking army would take huge losses storming the city. The standing policy as a result was that if the city was taken by force, few if any would survive. Cities quickly learned to think twice before resisting.
Japan demonstrated a willingness to kill thousands of soldiers over what was essentially a trivial principle. The Americans demonstrated that they were willing to kill thousands of civilians over the same principle. It is hard to say that one was right, and the other was wrong. Neither side put much value on the lives of its opponents (as seen in both the Japanese treatment of the Chinese and POWs, and the American treatment of its own Japanese-decended citizens).
Stuff like this always happens in big wars. They start out nice, but they get ugly real fast. Once you've paid in blood it is hard to back down...
I think that people today lack the understanding of what war was like back then.
These days we send a few reservists off to war, and maybe everybody knows somebody at their workplace that they otherwise barely know, or they might have a cousin in the armed forces. A few of them (a few dozen per state) die in really bloodly conflicts like Iraq. In most of these conflicts a few dozen people die total.
In WWII - everybody had brothers/sons/neighbors/etc in the war. Everybody personally knew somebody who died, or close to it. We're talking deaths in the millions. People weren't just concerned about some war on the other side of the planet - they were concerned that sooner or later if left unchecked they'd be watching tanks drive down their own streets - particularly in Europe, but even in America.
A bombing run back then might target a several block radius with some degree of precision - but certainly nothing more surgical than that. If a squad of bombers was off course at night when they dropped their bombs then some random village in the middle of nowhere would be wiped off the map. Nobody was talking restraint since the factories being targetted were running triple shifts and then some churning out tanks which were being used to shoot at people the average voter could identify with.
By the time the war had gone on for a few years, and everybody was getting tired of losing cousins/brothers/sons/etc, people were willing to do whatever it took to end the war.
The nature of war is to continue until one side loses the will to fight. When a 30-year-old is fighting a 5-year-old, you find restricted combat where the adult basically pins the kid down until he stops squirming and behaves, and nobody is hurt. When two 30-year-olds are fighting for their lives you find gouged eyes, missing hair, bruised organs, etc. Likewise, the US vs Iraq allows for restricted use of arms since the US can bide its time knowing with certainty that it will win without resorting to leveling cities.
People always play fair unless they stand to lose. Even somebody prone to cheat won't do so if they don't need to. The same goes for war.
Most people have no experience with unrestricted warfare, so it becomes difficult to understand the end of major wars. McCarthur was famous for his "keep on killing japs" line - which seems horrific by today's standards, but he would have been ticker-tape paraded in any US, European, or Asian city (aside from those in Japan) in his day.
War is not a good thing, and it is to be avoided at all costs. Hiroshima only illustrates the reason why it is not wise to toy with war. There is nothing different between the people who flew the Enola Gay and your next door neighbors.
I agree - I just found the situation rather ironic...
Back in the day people used to actually repair telephones. Probably because they cost the equivalent of a few hundred dollars today, or more.
Now they cost $14.95 at Walmart and you just toss them when they die (after 15 years). Which is the better use of resources?
You know, the parts in the computer aren't the only resource there is. When you recycle you expend other resources, and in some cases these actually deplete the environment more than just tossing the thing.
There is also a reliablity factor. Once parts start going you either have to replace them en masse or live with them failing every few weeks/months. If downtime is expensive, then you end up replacing the whole thing anyway, albeit in parts. If downtime isn't expensive you end up burning gass every time you drive to the computer store to recycle another part. Neither is good for the environment.
I'm a fan of recycling - don't get me wrong. However, if you want to benefit mankind you have to look at all the costs - not just the mass of plastic in the part that is about to get tossed.
The difference is that the code in slamd64 is optimized for Athlon64/Opteron, a feat which is entirely doable by anybody who knows how to compile a kernel and their own software.
Well, it is a little more painful than that since quite a few packages don't compile or run cleanly on AMD64 without patching.
all I had to do was compile a kernel and recompile Apache/PHP/MySQL/Sendmail/UW-IMAP
I notice you didn't put java anywhere on that list. I have had no end of java pains on AMD64 - half the packages sort-of-work on blackdown, the other half on sun 1.5, but sun 1.5 messes up all kinds of dependencies in general. For what should be the most portable language there is, it certainly gives me lots of pain...
Good point.
Too often short-sighted management tries to save $1 million at the cost of slight employee inconvenience. The initiative is bound to failure as the employees have no incentive to play along.
On the other hand, if the company is open about the savings and gives $500k in bonuses back to the employees they suddenly don't have such a big problem with the change.
My pet-peeve is when companys save a bundle by centralizing IT, and then they save $50k by cutting the central group to the bone so that quality of service drops. Suddenly every department is spawning their own IT groups as a result, and now the company is losing more than they were at the start. If they had just been satisfied with the huge savings they originally obtained then the company would be running leaner, and quality would actually be higher...
True but only if I license my code under the GPL. With private code, this is not so. When Microsoft partners, they don't say "You must use our EULA". They may not permit them to redistribute their code but that is not the same.
Not true. With permission from the original copyright holder you can license any way you want.
Don't believe me - call up the mysql folks. You can use mysql in any non-GPL project you'd like - for a price.
Now, you do need permission from all the copyright holders, and they do not need to agree to non-GPL publication.
If you want to publish under the GPL you don't need anybody's permission - the GPL already gives you this right. However, with the additional approval of the copyright holders you can relicense at will. Publishing under the GPL does not remove the ability to dual-license the work.
I agree, but there is no reason you can't keep both.
We don't need self-destructing recordings or any of that nonsense. However, if DirecTV wants to require that you rent a decoder card to view their service that isn't really a big deal.
Otherwise, a real easy way of getting rid of DRM is to just ban the sale of music and video altogether. Viola - no more DRM. The volunteer-driven stuff that you can get online won't go anyware.
The problem is that we have two camps with extreme positions and not many people willing to make small compromises. There is some ground between "information wants to be free" and "if you sing our tune in the shower there should be a microphone present to assure you are charged the appropriate license fee." You just wouldn't get that impression talking to either the recording studios or slashdotters...
I don't think that anybody is debating the fact that anybody CAN (in theory) become a millionare.
Of course, for every one of those self-made millionares, there are probably three more who are in tons of debt because their businesses failed.
Don't get me wrong - hard work CAN make you a millionare. However, most likely hard work WON'T make you a millinoare. Hard work plus luck is a better recipie.
Well, at some point you have to have protection, or nobody would sign up for service.
Are you suggesting that anybody who puts a satellite dish on their house should be able to receive most of DirecTV's programming lineup? Why would anybody actually pay for it then? And if nobody pays, how long do you think that satellite will be broadcasting? So, in the end we actually reduce customer choice.
Don't get me wrong - I'm against DRM and a number of other technologies which treat paying customers like crooks. On the other hand, at some point you do need to differentiate between paying customers and leeches. If you don't you just go out of business...
Actually, my understanding is that declassifying media is a fairly intense process.
You take your files on some form of media. You then take a PC and wipe it completely clean - some insane number of overwrite cycles with random data. Then you image it using a controlled image. You then load the classified data, and save it into some file format which is guaranteed not to drag along undesired material (such as a word document where deleted text is just marked as deleted but still stays in the file, or where some of the bytes in the file were never written to and contain the previous centents of the physical media sectors). That file is then saved to the new media. The PC is wiped again.
Other options are print and scan, and stuff like that.
My understanding is that the precautions taken for officially classified material are beyond paranoid - you aren't going to find holes unless the procedures are not followed. However, defence work is not underfunded, so there are plenty of people around to handle the extra hoops that must be jumped through...
That is one thing I never understood about the US post-911. Europeans were calling for the US to drop the death penalty before they would extradite suspects.
I can't understand why the US didn't just say "fine, keep them?" It isn't like they'd just let them go loose - the Eurpoeans would suddenly be stuck with the burden of trying and jailing them indefinitely.
I've actually been paranoid enough to worry about that.
One solution is to click on the padlock every time you connect to verify the cert was not signed by your company. Otherwise, I'm not aware of any easy ways to prevent this...
You can often do better on the higher end.
I built a AMD64-3200 system for a fraction of what a Dell with comparable benchmarks would have cost. Granted, I didn't get a fancy graphics card, but Dell isn't a whole lot cheaper than newegg even there.
Plus, I don't have a just-barely-ok power supply and motherboard, and a BIOS which supports overclocking should I desire to do so. I have a load of USB ports, firewire, various audio formats, etc.
You can't beat Dell for the price of an Intel chip, base RAM config (but not upgrades), and a no-name motherboard, power supply, and standard peripherals. On the other hand, the RAM upgrades at Dell are often more expensive than what you could buy from newegg, and you can't get decent brand-name components either. You can save a bundle by going AMD as well.
You'll never beat the $350 Dell PC. However, $600-700 at newegg will get you a lot more than $600 at Dell, let alone $1000.
HP does it a smarter (albeit similarly devious) way. Make your cartridges incompatible by constantly releasing new printer models with new cartridge interfaces.
All that does is delays the onset of generic competition. Unless they put serious levels of obfuscation into the cartridges (smartcards with challenge/response designed to resist reverse-engineering, for instance) it won't take long to duplicate any design. Sure, the generic company now has to support 100 models of cartridges instead of 10, but that works against HP as well. If HP has to raise their prices to support all those cartridges, then the generic companies can raise their prices to recover their costs and not lose market share. The only result of HPs decision would be more people buying from Epson since the entire cartridge market is cheaper (unless Epson does the same thing).
Unless they want to spend $40 per cartridge on smartcard technology, there are only so many limits manfuacturers can put on reverse-engineering. It is always cheaper to copy something than it is to design in the first place. Even smartcards can be defeated - they're made of matter and so they can be taken apart by somebody with sufficient determination...
Fast forward one month:
Customer: I'm here to claim the value of my lost package.
UPS: Wait - it says here $100 billion - what was in that box!?
Customer: The private data of 3.5 million people.
UPS: But what was really in that box? You know, physically.
Customer: A couple of $25 tapes.
UPS: Ok, here is a nice fresh ben franklin for you. Thanks for doing business.
I don't believe that any shipping company actually insurces anything other than the physical value of the objects shipped. You can't claim damages for loss of business as a result of delay/loss, or anything like that.
Our whole legal system considers personal information to have no value at all...
Given a replicator, I would be amazed to find a drug that cost billions to develop.
Actually, most of the cost of drug development goes into clinical trials. In order to test a drug, you need 10,000 volunteers. They are not paid. However, their doctors are paid - handsomely. You see, for every company trying to recruit patients, there are three other companies also trying to recruit patients. Doctors sign patients up for the highest bidder (which is to say - the company paying them the most - not the one offering the largest benefit to their patients).
Unless you start replicating the sick people, you won't save much money here. This is one of the biggest problems in the drug industry - the trials are very expensive, and now we're talking about making them bigger to prevent the next Vioxx disaster. The cost of trials really isn't even within the control of pharmaceutical companies - it is up to doctors, who serve as gateways to sick people, who are the only people who can participate in most of these trials.
Sure, it might be reverse engineered on one person's PC - but that won't help anybody else. Every computer will have a unique private key embedded in it, and you'll need your own key to do anything useful. Kind of like trying to play a game online with a CD-key that you shared around the entire apartment complex - it will get banned.
The problem is that the reverse engineering procedure won't involve a few lines of code - it will involve hardware probes. That means expensive equipment and clean rooms - for each pc that is to be cracked.
This is the problem with hardware-enabled DRM.
It all depends on what you're trying to bypass. If it is just installing the latest game, then you can defeat the system since only one person needs to crack their PC, decrypt the game, and redistribute it. On the other hand, if your ISP blocks packets from non-DRM machines, then you're up the creek.
When you install a cisco router, or a PC, or a computer into your car, do you demand the source code for that because you don't trust it to work? Not bloody likely.
It depends on the consequences of failure. If we're talking about a heart monitor in the hospital, the manufacturer is required by law to make the source code available for FDA inspection, and is required to have a ton of testing done to ensure quality.
On the other hand, if the consequence of failure is that you can't web browse until you can drive to the store and buy a new router, then we really don't need all the expense of government oversight.
In this case, the consequence of failure is an innocent person rotting in jail for some number of years, and it becoming much harder for them to ever get a job. Sounds pretty serious to me. Anybody can get subjected to a breath test. I would hope that it would show me to be innocent when I haven't had a drink, but to me it is just a black box.
In any case, the source code doesn't need to be released to the public per-se. However, it should be made available to the state for auditing, and the state should have to defend the operation of the equipment. If they say that they audited the code, and calibrated it last Tuesday, then now the burden is on the defence to shoot holes in that. The defence should be allowed to retain an expert who can sign an NDA and inspect the operation of the instrument. As long as the defence is paying for it, what public interest is there in interfering?
The burden is on the state to prove that the person was drunk beyond a reasonable doubt. That doesn't mean proof to mathematical certainty, but it does mean that if the defence casts doubt on the instrumentation that the state should be obligated to offer enough evidence to convince an average citizen.