Two suggestions for Japan if they would like to save energy.
1) Start using daylight savings time -- right now, Japan uses the standard time all year.
2) Join an appropriate time zone in the first place. Tokyo is in the same zone (UTC+9) as Korea.
As a result of this, in Tokyo during summer, it starts getting light out before 4AM, and the actual sunrise is before 4:30. I live in Tokyo and can tell you this is almost as traumatic as the summer humidity.
The sun never almost never sets later than 7:00 and seemingly everyone here stays up under lots of electric light pollution until the last train rush around 11:30-12.
So additional ways for Japan to save energy and be less reliant on imported oil do present themselves imho.
murder
n. the killing of a human being by a sane person, with intent, malice aforethought (prior intention to kill the particular victim or anyone who gets in the way) and with no legal excuse or authority...
1. Abolish the binary-only registry and go back to text files for configuration, it has proven over the years to be an overwhelming net-negative for the platform. XML files might be worthwhile and they could be cached in memory for speed if necessary, but the master location of this should be fixable, like WIN.INI in the old 3.1 days.
2. Implement some sort of Mandatory Access Control (MAC) system similar to BSD's systrace, as well as network egress filtering, in order to cut down on the platform being such a virus, spambot and scumware haven.
3. The endless install-patch, reboot, install driver, reboot, install service pack, reboot, reboot, reboot. method of bringing a system up to date is very tiresome. It takes sometimes hours to bring a system up to date after the initial OS install. Linux is install once, update whevener but force a reboot only if there is a new kernel.
How to improve Linux:
1. Adopt Mac OS X concept of application bundles (all required files / libraries for an app appear as one 'Icon' in the UI) instead of making us fight with package management systems like RPM to get all dependencies.
2. Developers to be more conservative about the libraries they require (back to last major release version (whatever that would be) instead of forcing huge dependencies to bleeding edge libraries, which causes fighting with package system.
3. Also, I look forward cessation of further development of glibc except for bugfixes, so there is a stable platform for third-party development for a decent amount of time for once. (combines nicely with 1)
In some ways, these Free Software Foundation "enforcement actions" can be more dangerous than a typical copyright spat, because usually copyright holders seek money--say, royalties on the product that infringing companies are selling. But the Free Software Foundation doesn't want royalties--it wants you to burn down your house, or at the very least share it with cloners.
If you are corrupt and want to be bought off with money great, but standing up for principles you believe in is offensive to us in principle.
What an excellent idea for making matters even worse.
Then you would create a dynamic where the engineers would be motivated to pretend everything is fine, and would not dare even bring up problems for fear for their careers.
The only problem your proposal would solve is the 'problem' of managers being shown as incompetent after the fact. CYA paper trails are invaluable. Making the entire organization stupid (and even less safe) to prevent loss of face by those that should be responsible for decisions is not the answer.
If managers cannot be bothered to filter through the information coming through their underlings and make sound decisions, then what are they (the managers) for?
If you shift decision-making responsibility down to the underlings, why even have managers?
Guns don't actively encourage people to kill (unless the killer is seriously schizophrenic), nor do guns tend to derive far more benefit from the murder than the killer does.
And in whose face, other than a pirate (i.e. someone trying to get something for free), would such a boobietrap blow up? I doubt existing warez conduits are much safer.
I myself don't generally deal with warez, largely because there is free software to do almost everything I want to. I wouldn't have any problem with the boobietrap you suggest, since it wouldn't ensnare me or any other 'honest' users of the system.
It draws parallels between the present and the RailRoad Land Grab era after reconstruction. (the greatest flourishing of Robber Barony before the internet came along)
By the way, this guy serves as counsel for the FSF and has argued on the EFF side in the California DVD-CCA case.
Unix was created by Ken Thompson, Brian Kernighan, Dennis Ritchie and various other hackers who happened to work at AT&T at the time.
AT&T 'IS' a legal incorporation document, the original of which probably sits in a safe somewhere. So is Microsoft. So is Intel. So is RedHat.
Nearly all of the intellectual and material property of the world is owned by documents, which, due to their inherent inertness, are incapable of 'creating' anything.
Ironically, on the issue of encryption, big multi-national corporations are more-or-less on OUR side. They do not want their critical business data compromised by some corrupt agency entrusted with key escrow. If privacy is completely outlawed, that means that they can't legally have any privacy either.
The conflict is pretty national security interests against absolutely everyone else. Statism is worse than corporatism in this case. (Admitting that the State-Corporate relationship has become rather incestuous)
Corporations operate within the law. Usually when we rail at them it is for some erosion of our liberties that they have successfully lobbied the GOVERNMENT to enact.
Corporations mechanistically seek the benefit of those they serve (shareholders) within limits imposed on them by the state (laws). Moral Good/Bad doesn't have much to do with it -- they are playing by game rules. I think the reason that capitalism has been so successful an economic engine is that it does not require moral 'goodness' of its participants to function.
The institution which constrains corporate actions is the state, which in rhetoric serves all the people, particularly the non-powerful, for the principles of fairness and justice. This is the institution that has failed in its mission as well as the institution that is depriving us of freedom now.
It is a shame that since we do not have a functioning democracy things have gotten to this point. Institutionalized corruption (i.e. campaign finance + media campaigns) masquerading as democracy has predictably failed to insure us our liberties.
The appalling lack of vigilance in defending their liberties by an apathetic people definitely gets a big heaping serving of blame, though.
Corporations serve those that own them. The government is supposed to serve the people. When corporations end up owning everything in sight it is the government that has failed.
On encryption, I'm pretty sure it is not evil corporations lobbying for restrictions on encryption because they pretty much think said restrictions are stupid and make things more difficult for them. The only people lobbying for fascist encryption laws are the police/national security interests.
A world in which information can be effectively and easily be hidden from subpoenas and spooks is a world in which these agencies cannot be effective and needn't continue to exist. (Gee, what a horrible thing that would be;-)).
Nations are becoming paranoic because they have realized, correctly, that they are no longer needed.
Slashdot Mirror
Two suggestions for Japan if they would like to save energy.
1) Start using daylight savings time -- right now, Japan uses the standard time all year.
2) Join an appropriate time zone in the first place. Tokyo is in the same zone (UTC+9) as Korea.
As a result of this, in Tokyo during summer, it starts getting light out before 4AM, and the actual sunrise is before 4:30. I live in Tokyo and can tell you this is almost as traumatic as the summer humidity.
The sun never almost never sets later than 7:00 and seemingly everyone here stays up under lots of electric light pollution until the last train rush around 11:30-12.
So additional ways for Japan to save energy and be less reliant on imported oil do present themselves imho.
from a legal dictionary.
murder
n. the killing of a human being by a sane person, with intent, malice aforethought (prior intention to kill the particular victim or anyone who gets in the way) and with no legal excuse or authority...
No worries, spammers don't qualify as human.
How to improve windows:
1. Abolish the binary-only registry and go back to text files for configuration, it has proven over the years to be an overwhelming net-negative for the platform. XML files might be worthwhile and they could be cached in memory for speed if necessary, but the master location of this should be fixable, like WIN.INI in the old 3.1 days.
2. Implement some sort of Mandatory Access Control (MAC) system similar to BSD's systrace, as well as network egress filtering, in order to cut down on the platform being such a virus, spambot and scumware haven.
3. The endless install-patch, reboot, install driver, reboot, install service pack, reboot, reboot, reboot. method of bringing a system up to date is very tiresome. It takes sometimes hours to bring a system up to date after the initial OS install. Linux is install once, update whevener but force a reboot only if there is a new kernel.
How to improve Linux:
1. Adopt Mac OS X concept of application bundles (all required files / libraries for an app appear as one 'Icon' in the UI) instead of making us fight with package management systems like RPM to get all dependencies.
2. Developers to be more conservative about the libraries they require (back to last major release version (whatever that would be) instead of forcing huge dependencies to bleeding edge libraries, which causes fighting with package system.
3. Also, I look forward cessation of further development of glibc except for bugfixes, so there is a stable platform for third-party development for a decent amount of time for once. (combines nicely with 1)
If you are corrupt and want to be bought off with money great, but standing up for principles you believe in is offensive to us in principle.
What an excellent idea for making matters even worse.
Then you would create a dynamic where the engineers would be motivated to pretend everything is fine, and would not dare even bring up problems for fear for their careers.
The only problem your proposal would solve is the 'problem' of managers being shown as incompetent after the fact. CYA paper trails are invaluable. Making the entire organization stupid (and even less safe) to prevent loss of face by those that should be responsible for decisions is not the answer.
If managers cannot be bothered to filter through the information coming through their underlings and make sound decisions, then what are they (the managers) for?
If you shift decision-making responsibility down to the underlings, why even have managers?
> Lawyers don't sue people, people sue people.
Yes but,
Guns don't actively encourage people to kill (unless the killer is seriously schizophrenic), nor do guns tend to derive far more benefit from the murder than the killer does.
And in whose face, other than a pirate (i.e. someone trying to get something for free), would such a boobietrap blow up? I doubt existing warez conduits are much safer.
I myself don't generally deal with warez, largely because there is free software to do almost everything I want to. I wouldn't have any problem with the boobietrap you suggest, since it wouldn't ensnare me or any other 'honest' users of the system.
On the subject of Robber Barons, you might want to check out
The Invisible Barbecue by Eben Moglen.
It draws parallels between the present and the RailRoad Land Grab era after reconstruction. (the greatest flourishing of Robber Barony before the internet came along)
By the way, this guy serves as counsel for the FSF and has argued on the EFF side in the California DVD-CCA case.
# cat anthrax_leprosy_pi.dna > /dev/splicer0
This would be funny, if it weren't soon to be true.
Unix was created by Ken Thompson, Brian Kernighan, Dennis Ritchie and various other hackers who happened to work at AT&T at the time.
AT&T 'IS' a legal incorporation document, the original of which probably sits in a safe somewhere. So is Microsoft. So is Intel. So is RedHat.
Nearly all of the intellectual and material property of the world is owned by documents, which, due to their inherent inertness, are incapable of 'creating' anything.
#define LONG_WINDED_MEANDERING_RANT
;-)).
Ironically, on the issue of encryption, big multi-national corporations are more-or-less on OUR side. They do not want their critical business data compromised by some corrupt agency entrusted with key escrow. If privacy is completely outlawed, that means that they can't legally have any privacy either.
The conflict is pretty national security interests against absolutely everyone else. Statism is worse than corporatism in this case. (Admitting that the State-Corporate relationship has become rather incestuous)
Corporations operate within the law. Usually when we rail at them it is for some erosion of our liberties that they have successfully lobbied the GOVERNMENT to enact.
Corporations mechanistically seek the benefit of those they serve (shareholders) within limits imposed on them by the state (laws). Moral Good/Bad doesn't have much to do with it -- they are playing by game rules. I think the reason that capitalism has been so successful an economic engine is that it does not require moral 'goodness' of its participants to function.
The institution which constrains corporate actions is the state, which in rhetoric serves all the people, particularly the non-powerful, for the principles of fairness and justice. This is the institution that has failed in its mission as well as the institution that is depriving us of freedom now.
It is a shame that since we do not have a functioning democracy things have gotten to this point. Institutionalized corruption (i.e. campaign finance + media campaigns) masquerading as democracy has predictably failed to insure us our liberties.
The appalling lack of vigilance in defending their liberties by an apathetic people definitely gets a big heaping serving of blame, though.
Corporations serve those that own them. The government is supposed to serve the people. When corporations end up owning everything in sight it is the government that has failed.
On encryption, I'm pretty sure it is not evil corporations lobbying for restrictions on encryption because they pretty much think said restrictions are stupid and make things more difficult for them. The only people lobbying for fascist encryption laws are the police/national security interests.
A world in which information can be effectively and easily be hidden from subpoenas and spooks is a world in which these agencies cannot be effective and needn't continue to exist. (Gee, what a horrible thing that would be
Nations are becoming paranoic because they have realized, correctly, that they are no longer needed.
#undef LONG_WINDED_MEANDERING_RANT