I doubt they're scratching itches. They're probably just bored and looking for something small to code.
I doubt that anybody would just design a whole new firefox unless they had a very specific reason behind it. Stuff like epiphany and konqueror are written for specific reasons with different requirements than a generic web browser.
Well, my ISP permits outbound 25, but that doesn't help much when 85% of the world bounces email that comes from a dynamic IP.
Don't get me wrong, spam is really bad. However, I'll be happy once something like SPF is available for dynamic DNS users, and when recipients start allowing SPF-tagged mail through even if it is coming from a dynamic IP.
I realize I'm paying for consumer-grade service, but you shouldn't have to pay $100 per month simply to have an IP not automatically-associated with spam...
It most certainly does. The Geneva convention specifically prohibits putting civilians in harm's way, and using forbidden targets for military purposes.
The problem is that in most of the recent wars the US was the only side which bothered to follow the conventions.
In a serious war (that is, one the US could lose) the stops would get pulled and everybody would be bombing hopitals on both sides. Maybe at that point everybody would scratch their heads and realize the Conventions aren't all that unreasonable and return to the days of not mounting guns on ambulences...
(This is not meant as a criticism of the US. Clearly the US at least tries to follow the Conventions. They just follow them so well that the other side is encouraged to abuse them.)
Bottomline: a war between the two is inevitable and will surely damage our economy.
Taiwan is more valuable to the Chinese leadership as an enemy than as a conquered land. As long as the tension exists nationalism will serve the Chinese leaders.
In any case, what is worth fighting for in Taiwan? Sure, there are lots of well-educated people there and good industrial development, but how much of that would survive a full-scale war? How useful will those motherboard factories be after China fires off all those ballistic missles they have massed across the sea?
Does China really want to tick off its biggest customer right when their economy is primed to become probably the largest in the world? They just need to sit back and they'll be a major power in a matter of years. Why tick everybody off before then?
Then again, China is basically a dictatorship, and you can't always predict how dictators will act. However, the status quo is clearly more valuable to China than a war over Taiwan.
follow pre-programmed orders (probably something like "blow up the sorce of jamming").
Depends on how cheap the jammers are. If they're cheaper than bombs then they just need to deploy a lot of them, and put them on top of hospitals and schools.
I understand that microwave ovens were employed as anti-radition-missle decoys in Kosovo. Most armies don't mind trading $40 microwaves for $100,000 missles.
It's hard to reverse engineer a mind becuase unlike reverse engineering a BIOS or widget, we don't really understand how a mind works, is put together, or even what it's really comprised of.
Well, we know many aspects of how the mind works, but I think the biggest stumbling point is the inability to do reverse engineering.
If you're given an engine and asked to figure out how it works, you take it apart piece by piece.
When you're given a person and told to figure out how they work, you can't just start removing pieces and see what that does.
Our knowlege of psychology and the physiology of the brain are limited to what you can figure out by doing non-ivasive work on living people, or invasive work on dead people. You can't just cut a nerve and ask the subject how that makes them feel...
Frankly - I'd be more likely to trust media accounts than anything that comes out of a courtroom.
Courtroom evidence is often suppressed for any number of reasons. As a juror I'd be mainly interested in whether the person committed the crime, and whether the prosecution of the crime were handled in line with the defendants rights. I could care less about whether a particular piece of evidence is considered too inflamatory for me to handle.
Now, I'd certainly pay attention to all the facts brought out in a courtroom. And if something in the court refutes something I heard outside I'd probably give the court much higher credibility. On the other hand, if something covered in the media was completely neglected in the trial I'd suspect that information was being intentionally witheld, and being a human being rather than a sheep I'd probably be inclined to wonder just why that was so.
Juries are an indepsensible part of justice - they make all law enforcement accountable to the common man. If you can't convince 12 people that somebody did something worth jailing them over, then I'd question any system that would send that person to jail regardless.
Personally, I think that juries should be a right in all criminal trials from speeding tickets on up. Perhaps then cops would spend more time going after people who are endangering the public rather than filling their quotas with people going 65 in a 55MPH zone. Good luck ever getting a jury conviction on that offence...
Uh, let's try doing a little substitution on that:
End-user license agreements (EULAs), on the other hand, are very simple. The entire text of the MS XP EULA, comprising all relevant restrictions on use and copying is only 289 pages long. That's the entire contract, everything.
That's very easy to understand in relative terms.
I'm sorry - what exactly is in it that takes so much space to write? I could summarize copyright in a paragraph or two...
I've seen Tivos attached to DirecTV over serial. I've seen those owners switch to integrated DirecTivo. There is no comparison.
Every time you flip channels there is a few second lag (in addition to the normal few-second lag) as the Tivo switches the channel on the receiver. It is very noticable. With a DirecTivo it just changes channels like a TV should.
There really should be a cablecard standard for satellite TV. The content should be the service - not the box that decodes it.
Conditional Access is all closed-standards and for good reason.
Uh, what reason is that?
Good cryto does not require the protocols to be secret to work.
If you want to use crypto to keep receivers from decoding content that isn't paid for, then put your decryption key on a smartcard. The smartcard would be issued an encrypted session key for a segment of encrypted video, and if the viewer paid for that channel it would output the decrypted session key. Encrypted messages could be passed in and out of the smartcard to tell it to enable or disable channels, or to find out what PPV shows were bought.
The interface to the smartcard could be completely open, and a PCI-based interface card could be made available for MythTV/MediaCenter/whatever users.
Viola - a system that is reasonably hack-proof which lets paying users watch/record video, and which blocks non-paying users. And the only part of the standard that is closed is the private key on the smartcard.
Back when video scrambling meant playing tricks like messing with the analog video signal in a fairly easily-reversed way, keeping the algorithm secret was important. With decent modern cryptography, the algorithm is not important as long as it is strong.
If I were making a cable box I'd just stream video with a changing AES session key every 30 seconds or so, and then encrypt the session key with either AES or RSA so that it could be decrypted only within the hardware of a smartcard. The session key is not sensitive and can be shared with the MythTV box. The master key is very sensitive and should never leave the smartcard.
That computer systems need to be validated is a clear requirement of the Barr decision and 21CFR11 - no argument there. That they need to have audit trails is also reasonable based on Part 11 as well as comparable standards for paper-based data.
All I really want to know is where the retention period is specified for this data. I won't claim to be an expert on the GCP side of the business, but there is certainly no requirement in the GMP side to hold data for decades. I believe (offhand) the longest mandated retention is life of batch + 3 years. Most batches only live about 3 years themselves. So, in accordance with FDA regs just about everything can be tossed out in as little as 6 years.
Now, there may be a business reason to keep stuff around longer. However, that gets into business concerns and not regulatory concerns, and data held beyond retention periods is probably not subject to audit, so stuff like validation is less critical unless you want to use the data as evidence or in later filings.
Don't get me wrong. There may be something in the GCP regulations or in court interpretations of those regs which requires keeping clinical data around for 30+ years. I'd just be curious to see it spelled out.
Usually when I hear "the sky is falling" in regards to pharmaceutical computer system validation it is coming from a validation services consultant. Validation is important work which all pharma companies should be experts at, but it isn't going to the moon. Some processes are truly critical, and mistakes could kill people. Those need to be very well-controlled. Many processes are important, but minor mistakes won't harm anybody. That isn't to say we should be sloppy - just that we don't need to spend millions of dollars just to make sure there are no uncrossed t's in the paperwork...
People who don't drive at all would be free from paying these costs directly, even though they reap the benefits created by the use of oil for transportation.
They'd pay through prices of goods they buy, and otherwise indirectly - to the degree that they benefit from oil.
You have no clue how outrageously expensive solar power is compared to using fossil fuels, do you?
I don't care how expensive it is. I'm just saying all the options should reflect their true costs. I'm not religiously devoted to any particular technology once that is factored in. If solar is more expensive still, then nobody will use it.
Why is it when people go off on a rant about the costs of oil use on our society, and start proposing alternatives, they never mention fission?
Again, as long as each option reflects the true costs (in this case waste disposal), I could care less whether the power plant down the street is spewing coal-fired smog or steam into the air. Of course, in the former case I'd expect strong environmental controls and fees used to offset the cost of acid-rain, and in the latter case I'd expect good oversight so that I don't end up next to Chernobyl.
While this is terrible, it's not clear that these people are worse off than they would have been if their desert countries had no valuable natural resource, or if that resource were something other than oil.
Ok, there are two issues here. #1 is should Americans be over there killing people to ensure the oil supply. #2 is should Americans be over there killing people to try to prevent them from killing each other. Most people would agree that #1 is less than ideal. #2 in my opinion is not the role of the US government. If the UN wants to police the world let them do it. If somebody in the US feels strongly about Iraqi freedom or something like that they are free to buy a ticket to Iraq and join the Iraqi people's liberation army, or whatever it is called.
Turning a blind eye to suffering is one thing. Sending in thousands of troops is another. Armies don't save people - they kill people. Some wars may be just, but I'd be hesitant to order the deaths of thousands of people as part of a social-engineering experiment. If somebody bombs New York they'll do so knowning that most Americans will support serious retaliation - and that is a good deterrant. On the other hand, the power of that deterrant drops if a nation thinks the US will be bombing them no matter what, and their best bet is to initiate a little deterrance of their own.
Also, the cost of taking and saving forensic image is fairly cheap.
Not nearly as cheap as corporate budgets.
I'm always amused to get emails from our Exchange server about how I'm over-quota, when gmail is offering 20x as much space to anybody who cares to sign up for free.
Corporations should simply create a forensic image before reimaging PCs. This could be done in a networked fashion to a central file server. In theory whatever script they use to do the imaging could probably take care of it.
Arguably this doesn't capture all the forensic data (such as data between tracks that require pulling the disks out in a clean room). However, at some point you have to draw a line between preventing corporate malfeasance and just needlessly raising the cost of doing business.
We don't make regular people keep a detailed record of everywhere they do so that in the event of a crime we can determine where they were. Corporations should probably be subject to a little more scrutiny, but do we really need to save everything forever?
Uh, I think I'd like to see a reg quoted on that one. I'm not aware of any regulations that require holding any kind of data for 25+ years.
Now, many companies do hold onto their data for that long and longer for a variety of business reasons, but they do not have to do so. Some reasons for voluntarily holding onto their data might be:
1. The ability to use the data in R&D for other compounds.
2. The ability to use the data as a basis for comparison for other compounds.
3. The ability to use the data in extended uses for the same compound.
4. The ability to use the data as evidence on behalf of the company in some lawsuit that asserts that somebody taking a pill 25 years ago developed cancer as a result.
Legally, nothing could happen to a company that just decided to burn that data after any mandated retention periods expire. The company just loses the side benefits of keeping the data around.
Big pharma companies just love to hang onto data forever just for the heck of it, but often this is the result of overconservatism. Most big pharma workers are shocked to find out that you can legally toss all documentation regarding the manufacture of a lot of product only a few years after the lot expires. Clinical data is probably not subject to retention at all since it gets shipped to the FDA (who can presumably retain it themselves for as long as they care to have access to it). Batch-production data is subject to retention since companies don't have to submit it to the FDA - instead they have to have it available for inspection.
Research-based companies often like to toss out retention periods like 25-50-100 years, which works just fine for paper (if you have a big budget), but requires far more work for digital media. Even if you have archival-quality CDs you might be hard-pressed to find a CD-reader 100 years from now, let alone a program that understands such ancient technology as ASCII or XML/HTML, let alone proprietary file formats. I'm sure the data formats used on punch-cards were completely standardized, but that doesn't mean that it lasted forever...
I remember when games used to ship on one floppy. And not be full.
I remember when the installer for MS Office asked for disk 23...
And that was with MS's high-density floppy distribution format, or whatever they called it.
I also remember when a neighbor got a CD-ROM drive full of shareware/freeware, and we realized that we had to actually pick and choose what we installed off of it (I think I had a monstrous 80MB hard drive at the time).
I think that if you polled most people (and I hope that you would agree with this yourself), you'd find that most people would agree that people have human rights regardless of whether any constitution, law, or governing body states that they do.
It is wrong to walk up to somebody and just kill them without provocation no matter what the Constitution says. Now, people may argue about where the lines get drawn on war, capital punishment, etc, but I think fairly few people would agree that it is right for government to be able to impose any set of standards whatsoever, without regard to "natural law".
Without getting into theology can we at least agree that while the Constitution enumerates human rights that it is not the reason that we have them, and that people had them long before it was written? The Constitution says as much in the Bill of Rights.
Uh, wouldn't that be deprivation of the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?
The constitution doesn't grant anybody rights. People obtain them from their Creator. The constitution states this explicitly, and enumerates certain rights to ensure that they are guaranteed.
Of course, if the rights that are enumerated in the constitution are maintained, no government would ever be able to get away with instituting 100% taxes in the first place - at least not on people.
Note that the Constitution nowhere grants rights to corporations. That is a matter of law and judicial interpretation. As a result, corporations have "rights" only to the extent that the public believes these "rights" are beneficial. They can be revoked if they cease to be such.
Honestly, it isn't good for government to interfere too much in business. However, it isn't all that good for government to stay out of it completely either, and it certainly isn't good for business to be running government...
Arguably, a bankrupt corporation is already dead. Corporations are basically huge masses of capital, and once that is gone what is left?
Corporations just have a right to burial. Same as anybody else.
Oh, and if the concern was viable in the first place the consituents of the corporation just create a enw one. When was the last time that the cells of a dying person slithered over and formed a new body?
As long as we obtain enough gas tax to pay for wars, who cares if people waste gas?
I don't care if my next door neighbor spends $1000 on gas and dumps it into a swimming pool and sets it on fire. As long as it doesn't cost me anything I could care less. The neighbor paid for the gas, they paid for the wars necessary to obtain it, they paid for the loss of goodwill with other nations which raises the cost for US industry and lowers employment, and they paid for environmental cleanup for the exhaust. The same goes for milk. If my neighbor wants to take 10% of his income and buy milk with it and just pour it down the drain, why should I care?
Note that I'm not suggesting that the current gas taxes are sufficient to pay for all the costs to society of using gas. The price of gas could easily double if all the true costs were factored in. But as long as the true costs are recovered from gas use, then why should I care how much of it is "wasted"? It isn't costing me a dime.
If gas price doesn't deter driving behavior then obviously it is the opinion of the majority of Americans that their time is more valuable than their money. Who are we to say they are wrong?
The road infrastructure, and the cost of providing fuel.
Roads provide all the benefits you mention.
The fuel (gasoline) does not - there are many alternatives that could be used in its place. The alternatives, however, cost much more in retail value.
However, this neglects the fact that gasoline has hidden costs - such as wars in the middle east. Right now those are paid for out of income taxes for the most part, or via debt.
The costs of the road should be subsidized via some kind of toll-based system (which could be a fuel-based tax, but if alternate fuels sprung up you'd have to keep adjusting the tax rates to account for market share/efficiency). The costs of providing gas should be imposed in a fuel tax on gas alone.
A hydrogen-based car where hydrogen was produced by solar or coal power would not require middle-east wars to sustain it. Even if the cost of this fuel were an extra $500 per year per car it would probably still be cheaper than having to keep troops stationed in the middle east and having to deal with terrorists from that region, etc.
The government doesn't need to subsidize alternative fuels. They just need to stop subsidizing the oil industry...
However, there are plenty of good reasons to enforce a speed limit. 65 mph is as fast as you want to go for fuel economy.
How about asking drivers to pay for their fuel - then they can decide whether it is worth more to get to their destination faster, or whether it is worth more to save the gas. Oh wait, that is how it already works. What was the problem again?
You can't set reasonable fuel-conservation policies as blanket laws that have stiff penalties. At least, not without increasing the cost to society in some cases. The cost of gas should incorporate all true costs associated with delivering it - including wars in the middle east and enviornmental cleanup. Once that is done - then people can decide for themselves whether it is worth the cost.
If I'm driving to the store I might decide that ten more minutes of my time spent on the road is worth saving 50 cents worth of gas.
On the other hand, if I'm driving my family halfway across the country then I might decide that getting to my destination two hours earlier in a single trip for an extra $15 worth of gas is perferable to the options of either paying for a hotel stay or driving while exhausted increasing the risk of an accident.
Sometimes you just need laws to efficiently run society, but sometimes you can get away with just creating incentives and letting society run itself. In this case, a gas tax takes care of all the environmental issues (if it is sufficiently high).
Now, if you want to argue safety, that is a different matter, but even then it can be debatable. We don't need speed restrictions for the sake of fuel, however...
I don't think you need to chuck the disk. I think there is an ATA command which tells the disk to clear the password - after erasing the contents of the disk.
So, the hard drive doesn't become useless - but the data on it does...
Huge power plants are tremendously efficient. The utilities don't care about the fact that uncombusted fuel creates smog - but they do care that uncombusted fuel is money down the drain.
You can't get nearly the efficiency in a small car as in a major power plant. It makes a lot more sense to be generating power centrally (using wind, water, nuclear, coal, whatever), than burning gasoline in a million tiny engines.
I think that supplementing hybrids with grid power is a win/win. I'd still be curious to see a real cost breakdown on it, however. To be really economical you'd need the ability to meter off-peak grid usage at the house.
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I doubt they're scratching itches. They're probably just bored and looking for something small to code.
I doubt that anybody would just design a whole new firefox unless they had a very specific reason behind it. Stuff like epiphany and konqueror are written for specific reasons with different requirements than a generic web browser.
Well, my ISP permits outbound 25, but that doesn't help much when 85% of the world bounces email that comes from a dynamic IP.
Don't get me wrong, spam is really bad. However, I'll be happy once something like SPF is available for dynamic DNS users, and when recipients start allowing SPF-tagged mail through even if it is coming from a dynamic IP.
I realize I'm paying for consumer-grade service, but you shouldn't have to pay $100 per month simply to have an IP not automatically-associated with spam...
Agreed. War is not always a rational decision. Taking on the world never is...
It most certainly does. The Geneva convention specifically prohibits putting civilians in harm's way, and using forbidden targets for military purposes.
The problem is that in most of the recent wars the US was the only side which bothered to follow the conventions.
In a serious war (that is, one the US could lose) the stops would get pulled and everybody would be bombing hopitals on both sides. Maybe at that point everybody would scratch their heads and realize the Conventions aren't all that unreasonable and return to the days of not mounting guns on ambulences...
(This is not meant as a criticism of the US. Clearly the US at least tries to follow the Conventions. They just follow them so well that the other side is encouraged to abuse them.)
Bottomline: a war between the two is inevitable and will surely damage our economy.
Taiwan is more valuable to the Chinese leadership as an enemy than as a conquered land. As long as the tension exists nationalism will serve the Chinese leaders.
In any case, what is worth fighting for in Taiwan? Sure, there are lots of well-educated people there and good industrial development, but how much of that would survive a full-scale war? How useful will those motherboard factories be after China fires off all those ballistic missles they have massed across the sea?
Does China really want to tick off its biggest customer right when their economy is primed to become probably the largest in the world? They just need to sit back and they'll be a major power in a matter of years. Why tick everybody off before then?
Then again, China is basically a dictatorship, and you can't always predict how dictators will act. However, the status quo is clearly more valuable to China than a war over Taiwan.
follow pre-programmed orders (probably something like "blow up the sorce of jamming").
Depends on how cheap the jammers are. If they're cheaper than bombs then they just need to deploy a lot of them, and put them on top of hospitals and schools.
I understand that microwave ovens were employed as anti-radition-missle decoys in Kosovo. Most armies don't mind trading $40 microwaves for $100,000 missles.
It's hard to reverse engineer a mind becuase unlike reverse engineering a BIOS or widget, we don't really understand how a mind works, is put together, or even what it's really comprised of.
Well, we know many aspects of how the mind works, but I think the biggest stumbling point is the inability to do reverse engineering.
If you're given an engine and asked to figure out how it works, you take it apart piece by piece.
When you're given a person and told to figure out how they work, you can't just start removing pieces and see what that does.
Our knowlege of psychology and the physiology of the brain are limited to what you can figure out by doing non-ivasive work on living people, or invasive work on dead people. You can't just cut a nerve and ask the subject how that makes them feel...
Frankly - I'd be more likely to trust media accounts than anything that comes out of a courtroom.
Courtroom evidence is often suppressed for any number of reasons. As a juror I'd be mainly interested in whether the person committed the crime, and whether the prosecution of the crime were handled in line with the defendants rights. I could care less about whether a particular piece of evidence is considered too inflamatory for me to handle.
Now, I'd certainly pay attention to all the facts brought out in a courtroom. And if something in the court refutes something I heard outside I'd probably give the court much higher credibility. On the other hand, if something covered in the media was completely neglected in the trial I'd suspect that information was being intentionally witheld, and being a human being rather than a sheep I'd probably be inclined to wonder just why that was so.
Juries are an indepsensible part of justice - they make all law enforcement accountable to the common man. If you can't convince 12 people that somebody did something worth jailing them over, then I'd question any system that would send that person to jail regardless.
Personally, I think that juries should be a right in all criminal trials from speeding tickets on up. Perhaps then cops would spend more time going after people who are endangering the public rather than filling their quotas with people going 65 in a 55MPH zone. Good luck ever getting a jury conviction on that offence...
Uh, let's try doing a little substitution on that:
End-user license agreements (EULAs), on the other hand, are very simple. The entire text of the MS XP EULA, comprising all relevant restrictions on use and copying is only 289 pages long. That's the entire contract, everything.
That's very easy to understand in relative terms.
I'm sorry - what exactly is in it that takes so much space to write? I could summarize copyright in a paragraph or two...
Why can't we have question period in the US? This sounds like such fun!
I have to admit that last Harper line was just so good - I can't remember the last time I heard such a brilliant ad-hoc line in politics...
I've seen Tivos attached to DirecTV over serial. I've seen those owners switch to integrated DirecTivo. There is no comparison.
Every time you flip channels there is a few second lag (in addition to the normal few-second lag) as the Tivo switches the channel on the receiver. It is very noticable. With a DirecTivo it just changes channels like a TV should.
There really should be a cablecard standard for satellite TV. The content should be the service - not the box that decodes it.
Conditional Access is all closed-standards and for good reason.
Uh, what reason is that?
Good cryto does not require the protocols to be secret to work.
If you want to use crypto to keep receivers from decoding content that isn't paid for, then put your decryption key on a smartcard. The smartcard would be issued an encrypted session key for a segment of encrypted video, and if the viewer paid for that channel it would output the decrypted session key. Encrypted messages could be passed in and out of the smartcard to tell it to enable or disable channels, or to find out what PPV shows were bought.
The interface to the smartcard could be completely open, and a PCI-based interface card could be made available for MythTV/MediaCenter/whatever users.
Viola - a system that is reasonably hack-proof which lets paying users watch/record video, and which blocks non-paying users. And the only part of the standard that is closed is the private key on the smartcard.
Back when video scrambling meant playing tricks like messing with the analog video signal in a fairly easily-reversed way, keeping the algorithm secret was important. With decent modern cryptography, the algorithm is not important as long as it is strong.
If I were making a cable box I'd just stream video with a changing AES session key every 30 seconds or so, and then encrypt the session key with either AES or RSA so that it could be decrypted only within the hardware of a smartcard. The session key is not sensitive and can be shared with the MythTV box. The master key is very sensitive and should never leave the smartcard.
I'm not sure I saw a reference in there.
That computer systems need to be validated is a clear requirement of the Barr decision and 21CFR11 - no argument there. That they need to have audit trails is also reasonable based on Part 11 as well as comparable standards for paper-based data.
All I really want to know is where the retention period is specified for this data. I won't claim to be an expert on the GCP side of the business, but there is certainly no requirement in the GMP side to hold data for decades. I believe (offhand) the longest mandated retention is life of batch + 3 years. Most batches only live about 3 years themselves. So, in accordance with FDA regs just about everything can be tossed out in as little as 6 years.
Now, there may be a business reason to keep stuff around longer. However, that gets into business concerns and not regulatory concerns, and data held beyond retention periods is probably not subject to audit, so stuff like validation is less critical unless you want to use the data as evidence or in later filings.
Don't get me wrong. There may be something in the GCP regulations or in court interpretations of those regs which requires keeping clinical data around for 30+ years. I'd just be curious to see it spelled out.
Usually when I hear "the sky is falling" in regards to pharmaceutical computer system validation it is coming from a validation services consultant. Validation is important work which all pharma companies should be experts at, but it isn't going to the moon. Some processes are truly critical, and mistakes could kill people. Those need to be very well-controlled. Many processes are important, but minor mistakes won't harm anybody. That isn't to say we should be sloppy - just that we don't need to spend millions of dollars just to make sure there are no uncrossed t's in the paperwork...
People who don't drive at all would be free from paying these costs directly, even though they reap the benefits created by the use of oil for transportation.
They'd pay through prices of goods they buy, and otherwise indirectly - to the degree that they benefit from oil.
You have no clue how outrageously expensive solar power is compared to using fossil fuels, do you?
I don't care how expensive it is. I'm just saying all the options should reflect their true costs. I'm not religiously devoted to any particular technology once that is factored in. If solar is more expensive still, then nobody will use it.
Why is it when people go off on a rant about the costs of oil use on our society, and start proposing alternatives, they never mention fission?
Again, as long as each option reflects the true costs (in this case waste disposal), I could care less whether the power plant down the street is spewing coal-fired smog or steam into the air. Of course, in the former case I'd expect strong environmental controls and fees used to offset the cost of acid-rain, and in the latter case I'd expect good oversight so that I don't end up next to Chernobyl.
While this is terrible, it's not clear that these people are worse off than they would have been if their desert countries had no valuable natural resource, or if that resource were something other than oil.
Ok, there are two issues here. #1 is should Americans be over there killing people to ensure the oil supply. #2 is should Americans be over there killing people to try to prevent them from killing each other. Most people would agree that #1 is less than ideal. #2 in my opinion is not the role of the US government. If the UN wants to police the world let them do it. If somebody in the US feels strongly about Iraqi freedom or something like that they are free to buy a ticket to Iraq and join the Iraqi people's liberation army, or whatever it is called.
Turning a blind eye to suffering is one thing. Sending in thousands of troops is another. Armies don't save people - they kill people. Some wars may be just, but I'd be hesitant to order the deaths of thousands of people as part of a social-engineering experiment. If somebody bombs New York they'll do so knowning that most Americans will support serious retaliation - and that is a good deterrant. On the other hand, the power of that deterrant drops if a nation thinks the US will be bombing them no matter what, and their best bet is to initiate a little deterrance of their own.
Also, the cost of taking and saving forensic image is fairly cheap.
Not nearly as cheap as corporate budgets.
I'm always amused to get emails from our Exchange server about how I'm over-quota, when gmail is offering 20x as much space to anybody who cares to sign up for free.
Corporations should simply create a forensic image before reimaging PCs. This could be done in a networked fashion to a central file server. In theory whatever script they use to do the imaging could probably take care of it.
Arguably this doesn't capture all the forensic data (such as data between tracks that require pulling the disks out in a clean room). However, at some point you have to draw a line between preventing corporate malfeasance and just needlessly raising the cost of doing business.
We don't make regular people keep a detailed record of everywhere they do so that in the event of a crime we can determine where they were. Corporations should probably be subject to a little more scrutiny, but do we really need to save everything forever?
Uh, I think I'd like to see a reg quoted on that one. I'm not aware of any regulations that require holding any kind of data for 25+ years.
Now, many companies do hold onto their data for that long and longer for a variety of business reasons, but they do not have to do so. Some reasons for voluntarily holding onto their data might be:
1. The ability to use the data in R&D for other compounds.
2. The ability to use the data as a basis for comparison for other compounds.
3. The ability to use the data in extended uses for the same compound.
4. The ability to use the data as evidence on behalf of the company in some lawsuit that asserts that somebody taking a pill 25 years ago developed cancer as a result.
Legally, nothing could happen to a company that just decided to burn that data after any mandated retention periods expire. The company just loses the side benefits of keeping the data around.
Big pharma companies just love to hang onto data forever just for the heck of it, but often this is the result of overconservatism. Most big pharma workers are shocked to find out that you can legally toss all documentation regarding the manufacture of a lot of product only a few years after the lot expires. Clinical data is probably not subject to retention at all since it gets shipped to the FDA (who can presumably retain it themselves for as long as they care to have access to it). Batch-production data is subject to retention since companies don't have to submit it to the FDA - instead they have to have it available for inspection.
Research-based companies often like to toss out retention periods like 25-50-100 years, which works just fine for paper (if you have a big budget), but requires far more work for digital media. Even if you have archival-quality CDs you might be hard-pressed to find a CD-reader 100 years from now, let alone a program that understands such ancient technology as ASCII or XML/HTML, let alone proprietary file formats. I'm sure the data formats used on punch-cards were completely standardized, but that doesn't mean that it lasted forever...
I remember when games used to ship on one floppy. And not be full.
I remember when the installer for MS Office asked for disk 23...
And that was with MS's high-density floppy distribution format, or whatever they called it.
I also remember when a neighbor got a CD-ROM drive full of shareware/freeware, and we realized that we had to actually pick and choose what we installed off of it (I think I had a monstrous 80MB hard drive at the time).
I think that if you polled most people (and I hope that you would agree with this yourself), you'd find that most people would agree that people have human rights regardless of whether any constitution, law, or governing body states that they do.
It is wrong to walk up to somebody and just kill them without provocation no matter what the Constitution says. Now, people may argue about where the lines get drawn on war, capital punishment, etc, but I think fairly few people would agree that it is right for government to be able to impose any set of standards whatsoever, without regard to "natural law".
Without getting into theology can we at least agree that while the Constitution enumerates human rights that it is not the reason that we have them, and that people had them long before it was written? The Constitution says as much in the Bill of Rights.
Uh, wouldn't that be deprivation of the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?
The constitution doesn't grant anybody rights. People obtain them from their Creator. The constitution states this explicitly, and enumerates certain rights to ensure that they are guaranteed.
Of course, if the rights that are enumerated in the constitution are maintained, no government would ever be able to get away with instituting 100% taxes in the first place - at least not on people.
Note that the Constitution nowhere grants rights to corporations. That is a matter of law and judicial interpretation. As a result, corporations have "rights" only to the extent that the public believes these "rights" are beneficial. They can be revoked if they cease to be such.
Honestly, it isn't good for government to interfere too much in business. However, it isn't all that good for government to stay out of it completely either, and it certainly isn't good for business to be running government...
Arguably, a bankrupt corporation is already dead. Corporations are basically huge masses of capital, and once that is gone what is left?
Corporations just have a right to burial. Same as anybody else.
Oh, and if the concern was viable in the first place the consituents of the corporation just create a enw one. When was the last time that the cells of a dying person slithered over and formed a new body?
As long as we obtain enough gas tax to pay for wars, who cares if people waste gas?
I don't care if my next door neighbor spends $1000 on gas and dumps it into a swimming pool and sets it on fire. As long as it doesn't cost me anything I could care less. The neighbor paid for the gas, they paid for the wars necessary to obtain it, they paid for the loss of goodwill with other nations which raises the cost for US industry and lowers employment, and they paid for environmental cleanup for the exhaust. The same goes for milk. If my neighbor wants to take 10% of his income and buy milk with it and just pour it down the drain, why should I care?
Note that I'm not suggesting that the current gas taxes are sufficient to pay for all the costs to society of using gas. The price of gas could easily double if all the true costs were factored in. But as long as the true costs are recovered from gas use, then why should I care how much of it is "wasted"? It isn't costing me a dime.
If gas price doesn't deter driving behavior then obviously it is the opinion of the majority of Americans that their time is more valuable than their money. Who are we to say they are wrong?
Actually, there are two sets of costs.
The road infrastructure, and the cost of providing fuel.
Roads provide all the benefits you mention.
The fuel (gasoline) does not - there are many alternatives that could be used in its place. The alternatives, however, cost much more in retail value.
However, this neglects the fact that gasoline has hidden costs - such as wars in the middle east. Right now those are paid for out of income taxes for the most part, or via debt.
The costs of the road should be subsidized via some kind of toll-based system (which could be a fuel-based tax, but if alternate fuels sprung up you'd have to keep adjusting the tax rates to account for market share/efficiency). The costs of providing gas should be imposed in a fuel tax on gas alone.
A hydrogen-based car where hydrogen was produced by solar or coal power would not require middle-east wars to sustain it. Even if the cost of this fuel were an extra $500 per year per car it would probably still be cheaper than having to keep troops stationed in the middle east and having to deal with terrorists from that region, etc.
The government doesn't need to subsidize alternative fuels. They just need to stop subsidizing the oil industry...
However, there are plenty of good reasons to enforce a speed limit. 65 mph is as fast as you want to go for fuel economy.
How about asking drivers to pay for their fuel - then they can decide whether it is worth more to get to their destination faster, or whether it is worth more to save the gas. Oh wait, that is how it already works. What was the problem again?
You can't set reasonable fuel-conservation policies as blanket laws that have stiff penalties. At least, not without increasing the cost to society in some cases. The cost of gas should incorporate all true costs associated with delivering it - including wars in the middle east and enviornmental cleanup. Once that is done - then people can decide for themselves whether it is worth the cost.
If I'm driving to the store I might decide that ten more minutes of my time spent on the road is worth saving 50 cents worth of gas.
On the other hand, if I'm driving my family halfway across the country then I might decide that getting to my destination two hours earlier in a single trip for an extra $15 worth of gas is perferable to the options of either paying for a hotel stay or driving while exhausted increasing the risk of an accident.
Sometimes you just need laws to efficiently run society, but sometimes you can get away with just creating incentives and letting society run itself. In this case, a gas tax takes care of all the environmental issues (if it is sufficiently high).
Now, if you want to argue safety, that is a different matter, but even then it can be debatable. We don't need speed restrictions for the sake of fuel, however...
I don't think you need to chuck the disk. I think there is an ATA command which tells the disk to clear the password - after erasing the contents of the disk.
So, the hard drive doesn't become useless - but the data on it does...
Another factor is efficiency.
Huge power plants are tremendously efficient. The utilities don't care about the fact that uncombusted fuel creates smog - but they do care that uncombusted fuel is money down the drain.
You can't get nearly the efficiency in a small car as in a major power plant. It makes a lot more sense to be generating power centrally (using wind, water, nuclear, coal, whatever), than burning gasoline in a million tiny engines.
I think that supplementing hybrids with grid power is a win/win. I'd still be curious to see a real cost breakdown on it, however. To be really economical you'd need the ability to meter off-peak grid usage at the house.