So borders set by international treaty are evil. But ones set by local wars are a good thing?
Hardly. I'm just saying that might makes right is basically how just about every border on the planet got drawn. It is a bit naive to think that it will work any differently in Gaza.
Yup. Are the brakes actually controllable via CAN though? If the pedal just operates a transducer which relays instructions via CAN, that seems a bit risky to me. I wouldn't want even a single PHYSICAL linkage as a point of failure for the brakes, let alone an electronic one.
Granted, even if they have a cable backup, having a trojan apply full brakes without warning at highway speed would not be a fun experience (especially if it could disable ABS - which might or might not be possible but since ABS has self-diagnostics that need to report back to the dash it seems plausible that it could be tampered with). A cable backup would only prevent software from disabling your brakes - not prevent it from applying brakes.
Really, something like a radio should not be on the same network as safety-critical devices. Heck, do you really want to even do the necessary rigor to ensure that a faulty radio design doesn't cause a safety issue? Nothing should be plugged into a safety-critical bus without serious testing and design controls.
Test subjects with an artificially enhanced testosterone level generally made better, fairer offers than those who received placebos, thus reducing the risk of a rejection of their offer to a minimum.
I'd think that you could only study the effects of testosterone on behavior in an accurate way by modifying levels starting at conception. It is possible that elevated testosterone levels during development cause different behaviors than simply giving an adult a shot of testosterone. The brain of an adult is fully-developed already. Of course, no ethics panel would ever let you run such an experiment.
This kind of study seems like giving a shot of growth hormone to a 40 year old and concluding that growth hormones don't have any effects.
There are other groups that support a Palestinian state that aren't crazed religious fanatics. Don't pretend that you have to support Hamas to support the Palestinian plight.
A big problem is that for whatever reason the locals tend to elect folks like Hamas. This is a problem, as are the idiots who keep electing crusaders in the US.
Democracy doesn't work well when huge segments of the population have no respect for individual liberty, especially religious liberty. It turns into two wolves and a sheep voting over what is for dinner.
Actually, the US isn't all that far off from apartheid with the whole red-state/blue-state thing (in which case 52% of the state population is happy, and 48% disagrees with just about everything being done). A proportional democracy would probably go a long way towards fixing that.
The US/Canada or US/Mexico borders are also hardly the result of some kind of UN-like peace process. Wars were fought and the border ended up where it ended up. There certainly were foreign powers involved (especially with Canada), but they weren't so overwhelmingly powerful compared to the local nations that they could just draw up a border in a smoke-filled room and force everybody to abide by it.
Actually, the US war of 1812 isn't too far off from Israel vs Palestine. The UK certainly outclassed the US back then in every way, but they didn't care to exterminate the US citizens and they knew they couldn't govern them long-term, so they fought a limited war, all the while being constrained by the need to spend the bulk of their military resources against more serious threats.
Propaganda notwithstanding the Israeli army has no desire to kill all the Palestinians, and they know they can't really govern them either, so they generally try to contain them and avoid doing much more despite their being able to do so, in part out of a desire to avoid foreign intervention.
So I can move into your house while you are at work. You "historical" claim to that land is invalid, as I got there since then.
I get the argument, but this is basically how every national border on Earth was drawn. I doubt a single parcel of land has clear title back to the first human who slept on it.
If you can move into somebody's house while they're away at work and hold off the government's attempts to return it to them for long enough, you'll be recognized as the owner of that property. It is pretty hard to make this work for a single home though - it works better if you take over a piece of land the size of Missouri - then your entire army isn't within the kill radius of a single hand grenade.
Ahhhh, yes, the pesky subject of 'who fired what' first. I'm pretty sure that dealing with rocket attacks, which miraculously start to increase whenever Israel conducts a 'military' operation, does not justify the genocide of innocent civilians and children.
This thing is a mess on both sides, but how can you call shells that land on a school "genocide" and not apply the same label to rockets fired on Israeli cities?
Genocide is the systematic extinction of people on the basis of some trait like race. I can't imagine that too many Israelis live in Gaza, so if they really wanted to do Genocide they'd just bombard the whole place until nothing was moving.
This is a tit-for-tat artillery war between two powers using weapons that have poor accuracy and basically just kill whoever is standing by where they land. The only real difference is that the Israelis are better at shooting down rockets than Hamas is at shooting down shells.
The Expendables is hardly art and definitely not science
Well, you're basically arguing that it shouldn't be copyrightable at all then. That is the purpose of copyright - the promotion of science and the useful arts.
Art is whatever people thing it is. I have no problem with movies being copyrightable. Maybe if the copyright term wasn't infinite companies might try to release things a bit faster so as to recoup the maximum profit during the period it was copyrighted? You don't see drug companies just sitting on new drugs - they usually have only a decade to make money off of them and there is every incentive to hit the ground running.
Breeders blow up pretty often so you don't want to use those.
Citation? I am not aware of any breeder reactors blowing up. I did find what amounts to a blog article or two talking about the possibility, but nothing from any reputable source.
Fixating on that one point is an extremely simplistic argument that seeks to ignore the real issues. Nuclear is extremely expensive, and only appears cheap in the US because of massive subsidy.
I'm all for having energy sources bear their own costs (aside from early blue-sky R&D), but this really needs to be across-the-board.
Oil should be taxed to pay for all the bombing of civilians (and the occasional terrorist) in Iraq. Coal should be taxed for whatever it costs to extract CO2 from the atmosphere and fix it, and for the pollution control costs as well. Nuclear power should be taxed to pay for the military units which keep the breeder reactors secure so that they aren't proliferation risks (but we can stop burying perfectly good fuel at tremendous expense).
See above, basically if a company "verifies" the debt you are boned without getting the courts involved.
They all will. They just produce whatever document the company sends them in the first place. That is a meaningless projection, but it can get you off the hook if the collector completely drops the ball.
A big problem is the way we treat everybody at a hospital as if they were direct service providers. You spend a week in the hospital and you get 47 different bills.
I have insurance and it is still a major hassle to keep track of what has and hasn't been paid. I routinely get bills that are incorrect, and I have to tell the provider to straighten things out with the insurer. It isn't uncommon to end up with a "late" bill and I've even had one go to collections - which got canceled after a bunch of calls.
A bill in collections is nothing more than a company claiming that you owe them money. That doesn't make it true.
Except that this is civil war and nobody invaded eastern Ukraine cities; the one at fight are usual city residents.
Well, any nonuniform Russian special operations forces in Ukraine would be invaders, for sure. There have been pictures of heavy military equipment in cities as well - so this isn't a purely door-to-door operation. In just about every war in modern history significant troop concentrations in cities get bombed or attacked using artillery. So, this is just par for the course. If you see a bunch of soldiers deploy in the house across the street, it would be wise to find someplace else to live. Sure, you don't deserve to die for living in the wrong place, but you'll die all the same.
The only time armies spare cities from general bombardment is when they have such an overwhelming advantage in a war that they can afford to fight with a handicap. Ukraine does not seem to have such a decisive advantage - this isn't the UN vs Iraq/etc (not that the usual US/UK/France/Germany coalition is shy about dropping bombs in cities). This is more like Kosovo, or WWII - a battle between near-equals, and that generally means the whole country gets turned into rubble.
Well, I do miss my old G2 keyboard when I do things like ssh, but I have to admit that this is a REALLY niche application. You are correct that swype-style keyboards are just as fast these days for general use. Plus, android voice recognition has gotten to the point where I'm starting to talk to my phone more and more even in public.
Piss off India and your labor supply will come to an end!
Get with the times. My employer just hired Cognizant for a project. The managers are Indians, but the development has all been outsourced to Shanghai. Must be too expensive to hire Indians...
You're jumping from Russia trying to annex Ukraine to Russia trying to invade Alaska. They're more likely to send the tanks rolling into Germany first, and they'll probably annex China long before then.
Wow. Just wow. That was the most stupid statement ever on slashdot. And that's saying something.
Russia annex China? I'm surprised you actually can remember to breathe.
Where did I say that Russia would annex China?
I only said that they'd do that before they invaded Alaska.
what would you do if you were a disabled and mentally retarded orphan?
That is one of the few cases where I agree that programs like Social Security are required. Those programs shouldn't be available to the general populus, only those that really need them - the exceptions instead of the rule. This would also make such programs more easily fundable and solvent.
The only thing we're arguing about here, then, is what qualifies as "disabled" or "retarded."
We need to come up with a national approach to retirement/etc benefits that works for everybody - not just those who are both good at earning money AND good at investing it.
National programs that are extended to the general populus will never be sustainable and will result in either insolvency or the destruction of the nation and/or currency.
I would only extend benefits to those who are incapable of work, or to supplement those who cannot earn a decent basic income. Today that would be a fairly insignificant portion of the GDP.
With steady advances in technology and increased specialization in the workforce we just keep raising the bar for the kinds of skills and talents somebody needs to have to earn their own way. Eventually, not even you would have been able to hold down a job.
False. Advanced in Technology does not necessitate increased specialization. The only thing that really drives the "raising the bar" issue here is inflation and the long held beliefs that you have to have inflation - you can't keep the currency stable or have deflation.
The US has barely any inflation at all, and for anybody who works for a living a little inflation isn't a big deal. Prices go up, but so do wages. Their retirement funds might have problems, but most people don't have those anyway.
When I look around me I see tons of specialization as a result of technological advances. Nobody works as a general laborer these days.
Once upon a time anybody willing to dig ditches could earn a living wage. These days nobody wants to hire people to dig ditches - machines can do the job far more effectively. The same is true of most assembly-line jobs. Eventually I would expect machines to replace the majority of labor, including the designing of the machines themselves, the design of the products they manufacture, and the marketing/sale of those products to people or to machines that make purchasing decisions.
In the long-term the only real question is who owns the machines.
Good point. You'd think that after the fact this could have been escalated so that the military could have heavy-lifted whatever they could into the area.
I'm not surprised about the lack of venting though. You're talking about somebody having to make the call about deliberately venting what was probably contaminated air into the environment. For whatever reason society tends to favor allowing a huge disaster over causing a smaller one - just the trolley problem in another form.
One of the problems with surrounding yourself with yes-men is that you start to think that the lines you feed them will actually work with others...
Hard to say whether this will push the EU over the edge, but if they hadn't shot down the airliner I think there was a good chance Putin would have gotten what he wanted.
The problem is that bugs like these can be incredibly hard to spot. This particular one was fixed before he went on his tirade from what I understand - so it was whoever that was compiling his kernel that wasn't using the latest patch set. Plenty of bugs make it into production kernels - I've got a btrfs bug driving me nuts with compress=lzo enabled in the current stable branch. I'm not going to gripe at the volunteers trying to fix it - this stuff is hard to get right and I knew I was dealing with something cutting-edge when I started using it.
EVERY new gcc release has bugs in it, or if nothing else it will expose bugs in whatever you're using it to compile. I run Gentoo and we run into them all the time since everybody and their uncle is independently compiling everything with 47 bazillion slightly-different configurations.
And pandering to only your current community is unwise because of selection bias. I can argue that I don't need a lawnmower because my slaves have been doing fine with scythes for the last 100 years, but that doesn't mean that a lawnmower wouldn't make the job easier.
The problem for the terrorist is that they still have to communicate. Who looks at their blog or whatever?
After they blow up their target, you can ID the participants. Then you can go pull up the logs and see every person they've communicated with. You see they viewed a log. You note that 12 other foreigners have had something to do with that log. Now you go track down what they're up to now.
The idea of mass surveillance is that once somebody messes up and you get a lead you can pursue that lead far further. You don't try to identify suspicious activity when it happens - you look at it after the fact. The only way this can happen is if you collect data on everybody all the time.
The next step is to actually monitor individuals individually - look at the totality of every individual's activity and assess what sort of person they are. If you can correlate enough info to determine what human being every new Facebook account or whatever belongs to, you can do that. If you walk up to a library to create an account, maybe there is a traffic camera that snapped your plate as you drove up, and maybe a camera will notice that you walked out without any books. If you can automate this sort of thing then you can track everything done by everybody, and that makes it a lot harder to commit a crime.
I'm not saying any of this is right. I just think it is a bit much to say that it can't work. That just seems like a matter of technology, which makes it a matter of time.
Perhaps, but I'm less convinced of the orthogonality of aggressiveness and managing the contributions of geeks with large egos.
Many corporations are governed by aggressive managers. For some reason people equate assertiveness and competence - it probably has to do with some part of our brain we share in common with wolves. Many have argued that this sort of thing is what causes many established companies to fail.
A barrel of Iraqi oil seems cheaper than the equivalent in US nuclear/wind/solar power production because: 1. Taxpayers pay to subdue the Iraqis so that they'll sell us oil to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars so that oil importers don't have to pay to do it themselves. 2. The US generally ignores the impact of burning oil on the world climate, so everybody else gets to foot the bill for rising tides, poor growing conditions, etc. 3. To the extent that the US does pay for climate change, it again gets handled by taxpayers and not as an excise tax on burning oil/coal/etc.
The correct economic solution to these problems is to just pass the costs of obtaining/cleaning/etc the power source into the cost of buying it. Then consumers can buy whatever makes sense. People who feel bad about bombing civilians in Iraq can just buy solar-charged electric cars and rest assured that not a single dime of their taxes are going to bombing Iraq. People who are afraid of nuclear power can buy solar and know that their taxes aren't going to Yucca Mountain, and so on.
Oh, and for heaven's sake just reprocess the spent nuclear fuel and stop burying it. If you're worried about proliferation just put the breeder reactors in the middle of military bases - we manage to guard nuclear warheads without losing them, we can certainly deal with a reactor core submerged in boiling water which you can't go anywhere near without dropping dead and which is a much less attractive theft target to begin with.
It sounds like you've been won over by the facade of corrupt spending and wealth in touristy areas (the only bits of Russia anyone would want to live in) and are completely oblivious to the other 99.99% of the country.
Yup. When it comes to tourism and landmarks dictatorships tend to do far better than democracies/etc. In the US it took a massive fundraising effort just to accept the donation of the statue of liberty - France was almost told thanks-but-no-thanks since the government didn't want to pay to site the massive statue that was an outright gift. On the other hand, if you look at places like North Korea the statue of the dictator is maintained free of bird droppings year round, likely burnished in gold, and they talk about things like satellite launches and other public displays of power.
If you want to gauge how healthy a government is, look at how much they spend on things like roads and bridges and healthcare for the poor. That isn't nearly as glamorous as St. Basil's but a heck of a lot more expensive. Even the US hasn't been doing all that great of late in this regard.
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So borders set by international treaty are evil. But ones set by local wars are a good thing?
Hardly. I'm just saying that might makes right is basically how just about every border on the planet got drawn. It is a bit naive to think that it will work any differently in Gaza.
Yup. Are the brakes actually controllable via CAN though? If the pedal just operates a transducer which relays instructions via CAN, that seems a bit risky to me. I wouldn't want even a single PHYSICAL linkage as a point of failure for the brakes, let alone an electronic one.
Granted, even if they have a cable backup, having a trojan apply full brakes without warning at highway speed would not be a fun experience (especially if it could disable ABS - which might or might not be possible but since ABS has self-diagnostics that need to report back to the dash it seems plausible that it could be tampered with). A cable backup would only prevent software from disabling your brakes - not prevent it from applying brakes.
Really, something like a radio should not be on the same network as safety-critical devices. Heck, do you really want to even do the necessary rigor to ensure that a faulty radio design doesn't cause a safety issue? Nothing should be plugged into a safety-critical bus without serious testing and design controls.
Test subjects with an artificially enhanced testosterone level generally made better, fairer offers than those who received placebos, thus reducing the risk of a rejection of their offer to a minimum.
I'd think that you could only study the effects of testosterone on behavior in an accurate way by modifying levels starting at conception. It is possible that elevated testosterone levels during development cause different behaviors than simply giving an adult a shot of testosterone. The brain of an adult is fully-developed already. Of course, no ethics panel would ever let you run such an experiment.
This kind of study seems like giving a shot of growth hormone to a 40 year old and concluding that growth hormones don't have any effects.
There are other groups that support a Palestinian state that aren't crazed religious fanatics. Don't pretend that you have to support Hamas to support the Palestinian plight.
A big problem is that for whatever reason the locals tend to elect folks like Hamas. This is a problem, as are the idiots who keep electing crusaders in the US.
Democracy doesn't work well when huge segments of the population have no respect for individual liberty, especially religious liberty. It turns into two wolves and a sheep voting over what is for dinner.
Actually, the US isn't all that far off from apartheid with the whole red-state/blue-state thing (in which case 52% of the state population is happy, and 48% disagrees with just about everything being done). A proportional democracy would probably go a long way towards fixing that.
The US/Canada or US/Mexico borders are also hardly the result of some kind of UN-like peace process. Wars were fought and the border ended up where it ended up. There certainly were foreign powers involved (especially with Canada), but they weren't so overwhelmingly powerful compared to the local nations that they could just draw up a border in a smoke-filled room and force everybody to abide by it.
Actually, the US war of 1812 isn't too far off from Israel vs Palestine. The UK certainly outclassed the US back then in every way, but they didn't care to exterminate the US citizens and they knew they couldn't govern them long-term, so they fought a limited war, all the while being constrained by the need to spend the bulk of their military resources against more serious threats.
Propaganda notwithstanding the Israeli army has no desire to kill all the Palestinians, and they know they can't really govern them either, so they generally try to contain them and avoid doing much more despite their being able to do so, in part out of a desire to avoid foreign intervention.
So I can move into your house while you are at work. You "historical" claim to that land is invalid, as I got there since then.
I get the argument, but this is basically how every national border on Earth was drawn. I doubt a single parcel of land has clear title back to the first human who slept on it.
If you can move into somebody's house while they're away at work and hold off the government's attempts to return it to them for long enough, you'll be recognized as the owner of that property. It is pretty hard to make this work for a single home though - it works better if you take over a piece of land the size of Missouri - then your entire army isn't within the kill radius of a single hand grenade.
Ahhhh, yes, the pesky subject of 'who fired what' first. I'm pretty sure that dealing with rocket attacks, which miraculously start to increase whenever Israel conducts a 'military' operation, does not justify the genocide of innocent civilians and children.
This thing is a mess on both sides, but how can you call shells that land on a school "genocide" and not apply the same label to rockets fired on Israeli cities?
Genocide is the systematic extinction of people on the basis of some trait like race. I can't imagine that too many Israelis live in Gaza, so if they really wanted to do Genocide they'd just bombard the whole place until nothing was moving.
This is a tit-for-tat artillery war between two powers using weapons that have poor accuracy and basically just kill whoever is standing by where they land. The only real difference is that the Israelis are better at shooting down rockets than Hamas is at shooting down shells.
The Expendables is hardly art and definitely not science
Well, you're basically arguing that it shouldn't be copyrightable at all then. That is the purpose of copyright - the promotion of science and the useful arts.
Art is whatever people thing it is. I have no problem with movies being copyrightable. Maybe if the copyright term wasn't infinite companies might try to release things a bit faster so as to recoup the maximum profit during the period it was copyrighted? You don't see drug companies just sitting on new drugs - they usually have only a decade to make money off of them and there is every incentive to hit the ground running.
The geek wants to share the unlicensed movies he has downloaded with 10,000 of his closest friends on the P2P nets.
But when his own IP is threatened he will be the first to call the cops.
Uh, care to cite any cases where DHS has stepped into pursue a GPL-violation case?
Breeders blow up pretty often so you don't want to use those.
Citation? I am not aware of any breeder reactors blowing up. I did find what amounts to a blog article or two talking about the possibility, but nothing from any reputable source.
Fixating on that one point is an extremely simplistic argument that seeks to ignore the real issues. Nuclear is extremely expensive, and only appears cheap in the US because of massive subsidy.
I'm all for having energy sources bear their own costs (aside from early blue-sky R&D), but this really needs to be across-the-board.
Oil should be taxed to pay for all the bombing of civilians (and the occasional terrorist) in Iraq. Coal should be taxed for whatever it costs to extract CO2 from the atmosphere and fix it, and for the pollution control costs as well. Nuclear power should be taxed to pay for the military units which keep the breeder reactors secure so that they aren't proliferation risks (but we can stop burying perfectly good fuel at tremendous expense).
See above, basically if a company "verifies" the debt you are boned without getting the courts involved.
They all will. They just produce whatever document the company sends them in the first place. That is a meaningless projection, but it can get you off the hook if the collector completely drops the ball.
A big problem is the way we treat everybody at a hospital as if they were direct service providers. You spend a week in the hospital and you get 47 different bills.
I have insurance and it is still a major hassle to keep track of what has and hasn't been paid. I routinely get bills that are incorrect, and I have to tell the provider to straighten things out with the insurer. It isn't uncommon to end up with a "late" bill and I've even had one go to collections - which got canceled after a bunch of calls.
A bill in collections is nothing more than a company claiming that you owe them money. That doesn't make it true.
Except that this is civil war and nobody invaded eastern Ukraine cities; the one at fight are usual city residents.
Well, any nonuniform Russian special operations forces in Ukraine would be invaders, for sure. There have been pictures of heavy military equipment in cities as well - so this isn't a purely door-to-door operation. In just about every war in modern history significant troop concentrations in cities get bombed or attacked using artillery. So, this is just par for the course. If you see a bunch of soldiers deploy in the house across the street, it would be wise to find someplace else to live. Sure, you don't deserve to die for living in the wrong place, but you'll die all the same.
The only time armies spare cities from general bombardment is when they have such an overwhelming advantage in a war that they can afford to fight with a handicap. Ukraine does not seem to have such a decisive advantage - this isn't the UN vs Iraq/etc (not that the usual US/UK/France/Germany coalition is shy about dropping bombs in cities). This is more like Kosovo, or WWII - a battle between near-equals, and that generally means the whole country gets turned into rubble.
Well, I do miss my old G2 keyboard when I do things like ssh, but I have to admit that this is a REALLY niche application. You are correct that swype-style keyboards are just as fast these days for general use. Plus, android voice recognition has gotten to the point where I'm starting to talk to my phone more and more even in public.
Piss off India and your labor supply will come to an end!
Get with the times. My employer just hired Cognizant for a project. The managers are Indians, but the development has all been outsourced to Shanghai. Must be too expensive to hire Indians...
You're jumping from Russia trying to annex Ukraine to Russia trying to invade Alaska. They're more likely to send the tanks rolling into Germany first, and they'll probably annex China long before then.
Wow. Just wow. That was the most stupid statement ever on slashdot. And that's saying something.
Russia annex China? I'm surprised you actually can remember to breathe.
Where did I say that Russia would annex China?
I only said that they'd do that before they invaded Alaska.
what would you do if you were a disabled and mentally retarded orphan?
That is one of the few cases where I agree that programs like Social Security are required. Those programs shouldn't be available to the general populus, only those that really need them - the exceptions instead of the rule. This would also make such programs more easily fundable and solvent.
The only thing we're arguing about here, then, is what qualifies as "disabled" or "retarded."
We need to come up with a national approach to retirement/etc benefits that works for everybody - not just those who are both good at earning money AND good at investing it.
National programs that are extended to the general populus will never be sustainable and will result in either insolvency or the destruction of the nation and/or currency.
I would only extend benefits to those who are incapable of work, or to supplement those who cannot earn a decent basic income. Today that would be a fairly insignificant portion of the GDP.
With steady advances in technology and increased specialization in the workforce we just keep raising the bar for the kinds of skills and talents somebody needs to have to earn their own way. Eventually, not even you would have been able to hold down a job.
False. Advanced in Technology does not necessitate increased specialization. The only thing that really drives the "raising the bar" issue here is inflation and the long held beliefs that you have to have inflation - you can't keep the currency stable or have deflation.
The US has barely any inflation at all, and for anybody who works for a living a little inflation isn't a big deal. Prices go up, but so do wages. Their retirement funds might have problems, but most people don't have those anyway.
When I look around me I see tons of specialization as a result of technological advances. Nobody works as a general laborer these days.
Once upon a time anybody willing to dig ditches could earn a living wage. These days nobody wants to hire people to dig ditches - machines can do the job far more effectively. The same is true of most assembly-line jobs. Eventually I would expect machines to replace the majority of labor, including the designing of the machines themselves, the design of the products they manufacture, and the marketing/sale of those products to people or to machines that make purchasing decisions.
In the long-term the only real question is who owns the machines.
Good point. You'd think that after the fact this could have been escalated so that the military could have heavy-lifted whatever they could into the area.
I'm not surprised about the lack of venting though. You're talking about somebody having to make the call about deliberately venting what was probably contaminated air into the environment. For whatever reason society tends to favor allowing a huge disaster over causing a smaller one - just the trolley problem in another form.
One of the problems with surrounding yourself with yes-men is that you start to think that the lines you feed them will actually work with others...
Hard to say whether this will push the EU over the edge, but if they hadn't shot down the airliner I think there was a good chance Putin would have gotten what he wanted.
The problem is that bugs like these can be incredibly hard to spot. This particular one was fixed before he went on his tirade from what I understand - so it was whoever that was compiling his kernel that wasn't using the latest patch set. Plenty of bugs make it into production kernels - I've got a btrfs bug driving me nuts with compress=lzo enabled in the current stable branch. I'm not going to gripe at the volunteers trying to fix it - this stuff is hard to get right and I knew I was dealing with something cutting-edge when I started using it.
EVERY new gcc release has bugs in it, or if nothing else it will expose bugs in whatever you're using it to compile. I run Gentoo and we run into them all the time since everybody and their uncle is independently compiling everything with 47 bazillion slightly-different configurations.
And pandering to only your current community is unwise because of selection bias. I can argue that I don't need a lawnmower because my slaves have been doing fine with scythes for the last 100 years, but that doesn't mean that a lawnmower wouldn't make the job easier.
The problem for the terrorist is that they still have to communicate. Who looks at their blog or whatever?
After they blow up their target, you can ID the participants. Then you can go pull up the logs and see every person they've communicated with. You see they viewed a log. You note that 12 other foreigners have had something to do with that log. Now you go track down what they're up to now.
The idea of mass surveillance is that once somebody messes up and you get a lead you can pursue that lead far further. You don't try to identify suspicious activity when it happens - you look at it after the fact. The only way this can happen is if you collect data on everybody all the time.
The next step is to actually monitor individuals individually - look at the totality of every individual's activity and assess what sort of person they are. If you can correlate enough info to determine what human being every new Facebook account or whatever belongs to, you can do that. If you walk up to a library to create an account, maybe there is a traffic camera that snapped your plate as you drove up, and maybe a camera will notice that you walked out without any books. If you can automate this sort of thing then you can track everything done by everybody, and that makes it a lot harder to commit a crime.
I'm not saying any of this is right. I just think it is a bit much to say that it can't work. That just seems like a matter of technology, which makes it a matter of time.
Perhaps, but I'm less convinced of the orthogonality of aggressiveness and managing the contributions of geeks with large egos.
Many corporations are governed by aggressive managers. For some reason people equate assertiveness and competence - it probably has to do with some part of our brain we share in common with wolves. Many have argued that this sort of thing is what causes many established companies to fail.
The problem here is externalities.
A barrel of Iraqi oil seems cheaper than the equivalent in US nuclear/wind/solar power production because:
1. Taxpayers pay to subdue the Iraqis so that they'll sell us oil to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars so that oil importers don't have to pay to do it themselves.
2. The US generally ignores the impact of burning oil on the world climate, so everybody else gets to foot the bill for rising tides, poor growing conditions, etc.
3. To the extent that the US does pay for climate change, it again gets handled by taxpayers and not as an excise tax on burning oil/coal/etc.
The correct economic solution to these problems is to just pass the costs of obtaining/cleaning/etc the power source into the cost of buying it. Then consumers can buy whatever makes sense. People who feel bad about bombing civilians in Iraq can just buy solar-charged electric cars and rest assured that not a single dime of their taxes are going to bombing Iraq. People who are afraid of nuclear power can buy solar and know that their taxes aren't going to Yucca Mountain, and so on.
Oh, and for heaven's sake just reprocess the spent nuclear fuel and stop burying it. If you're worried about proliferation just put the breeder reactors in the middle of military bases - we manage to guard nuclear warheads without losing them, we can certainly deal with a reactor core submerged in boiling water which you can't go anywhere near without dropping dead and which is a much less attractive theft target to begin with.
It sounds like you've been won over by the facade of corrupt spending and wealth in touristy areas (the only bits of Russia anyone would want to live in) and are completely oblivious to the other 99.99% of the country.
Yup. When it comes to tourism and landmarks dictatorships tend to do far better than democracies/etc. In the US it took a massive fundraising effort just to accept the donation of the statue of liberty - France was almost told thanks-but-no-thanks since the government didn't want to pay to site the massive statue that was an outright gift. On the other hand, if you look at places like North Korea the statue of the dictator is maintained free of bird droppings year round, likely burnished in gold, and they talk about things like satellite launches and other public displays of power.
If you want to gauge how healthy a government is, look at how much they spend on things like roads and bridges and healthcare for the poor. That isn't nearly as glamorous as St. Basil's but a heck of a lot more expensive. Even the US hasn't been doing all that great of late in this regard.