While I applaud the concept of bittorrent, please tell me how I'm supposed to explain opening a hole in our firewalls to allow uploading unknown data to the security auditors checking our compliance with federal privacy regulations... And not uploading is not in the "spirit" of bittorrent. Quoting the official FAQ about blocking uploading:
You could hack the source to not upload, but then your download rate would suck. BitTorrent downloaders engage in tit-for-tat with their peers, so leeches have very little success downloading.
Ours might not be the most common circumstance, since most internet users aren't bound by HIPAA and other regulations to tightly control what leaves their networks. How many web programmers do you know that have (or should have) the official government Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act home page bookmarked, for assistance in deciding what can and can not be displayed under what security circumstances? Probably not that many, but, for those of us who do, it means that certain popular distribution methods are not kosher at this point in time.
Jigdo is compliant, since it uses established protocols, and is inbound-only. Bittorrent may or may not be compliant, and I'm not in the mood to be the one who tries to get it approved.
If someone HAS the ISOs, they can make and post the.jigdo and.template files required. And the load on the servers now hosting the ISOs would be lowered significantly, since any mirror that has the basic files for the distribution can be a "jigdo ISO mirror", using either FTP or HTTP.
Sorry, but I don't do IRC. The sites I work from would not tolerate the security concerns of allowing IRC to be run. This is the same reason I don't do bittorrent, the officially-listed way of getting the install ISO; if I want more than dial-up access speeds, it's from sites where privacy is either a corporate or federal requirement, and neither fit those requirements.
If that seems a bit paranoid, it is. We don't trust Flash, because we can't seem to find any independent security analysis of the scripting language used. Macromedia's word that it is safe isn't good enough...
[no, we don't use Microsoft-based servers, and use of Internet Explorer is limited to testing our websites for things that break IE.]
Yes, I tried linuxiso.org, but found that the mirror site they pointed to limits anonymous connections to 15... and I've never found a time when there were 14 or fewer connected. And, of course, the other mirrors pointed to by linuxiso.org didn't have them.
My friend was going to order the 9.1 4-disk set instead.
I've been trying to find someone who has the Slackware 9.1 ISO files for a friend with no luck. All the mirror sites in the U.S. seem to have removed them, and I don't REALLY want to abuse the bandwidth of sites outside North America if I don't have to. It would be nice if distributions that don't want to do ISOs for downloads would adopt Jigsaw Download (jigdo), like Debian uses...
In the purchase of a business, "goodwill" is valued at about USD 1.00. This is because that goodwill is transient... it does not transfer to the new entity, simply because it isn't the old company, even if it has the same name. Loyalty to, say, Chrysler products does not guarantee loyalty to Daimler-Chrysler products, unless D-C maintains the same level of support and quality that the Chrysler loyalist expects.
If you doubt this, please note how much the "goodwill" of Caldera is worth today.
The zone file might be simple, but getting to the point of USING the zone files isn't - which is what I commented upon.
If DJB allowed distributors to bundle working copies of his program on their disks, all would be fine and dandy... but I don't want to spend time searching for the proper group of tools needed to get it to compile before I can use it, and most others don't, either. I've never had to compile BIND to put a DNS server up... And I'm not afraid of doing so, if I had to, but I don't want to.
What needs updating with DJBDNS is DJB's attitude. If he'd allow binary distributions, I'm sure several major Linux distros would make it the DEFAULT DNS server for workstation installs, and optional for server installs.
As it is, I read the "quick how-to" files on setting your system up to work with djbdns, and find them far more confusing than BIND zone files and configuration files ever were. You don't just have to worry about one program - unless you're ONLY running the caching server.
This doesn't mean I'm not looking at alternatives... I dislike having to restart all the servers every time I add a domain, and having to restart the master every time I modify a domain, with BIND.
If it temporarily locked up, that's one thing, but, if it is permanently screwed, then the way to get back at someone is to borrow their card long enough to enter 4 random PINs, then put it back... You've locked them out of their account until they buy a new card!
Perhaps there's a misstatement in your message... You first say that "Legislation requires agreement from all three" pillars, then go on to state that, if two agree (the commission and the ministers), the third (parliament) has to have majority DISAPPROVAL, or it passes?
Sounds like your elected parliament is a rather ineffectual body of people, with nothing but conditional veto power over the appointed portions of your government.
I've used both, and I've found that Knoppix finds more of the hardware on my systems, but Mandrake Move is MUCH faster on the same hardware.
Granted, my test is disk-related... I use both Knoppix and MM to run badblocks on drives before I install their final OS. But, on the same hardware, Mandrake Move will run 'badblocks -svw/dev/hda' to completion (4 write/read passes with different patterns) in less time than the first pass in Knoppix 3.3 or 3.4. That's a significant time savings when you're checking 8 250GB drives for a RAID array!
Which portions of the PATRIOT Act, had they been in force in early 2001, would have prevented the 9/11 attack?
None of them. Just like our then-current airport security didn't stop the attack. Airport security didn't fail - none of the weapons used were illegal at the time.
In general, US citizens would not have tolerated any of the security measures that would have stopped the terrorists from boarding the airplanes with common household items and using them as weapons. Not because of violations of rights it might pose; it simply was unheard of to have hours-long delays boarding planes for security. And policies in effect at the time would have allowed the hijackers to simply threaten to break the neck of a couple of passengers to ensure 100% cooperation by the crews of the airliners.
Prior to the attacks, it was all but illegal to "connect the dots" necessary to have prevented the attacks, because someone had decided that terrorism was a criminal matter. That put up walls between the various agencies, because sharing information would have "tainted" any criminal cases, or required that classified information be revealed in open court.
Before you ask your follow-up question, the Patriot Act doesn't fix that problem, either. It mostly codified in one place things that were already being done... things which no specific laws addressed one way or another. Things that people didn't think about complaining against until they were written down...
The world needs is a DMCA compliant method to copyright something that lawyers/politicians need real bad.
Check out WestLaw. The base data is public domain, i.e., court records. WestLaw and its competitors charge big bucks, though, for collecting it, cross-referencing it, plugging in who cites what it in their cases, which rulings have been overturned or or narrowed by later case law, etc.
In the case of the National Electrical Code, the situation is reversed. A private organization codifies "best practices" for its membership in a number of areas, and publishes these as copyrighted works, available to those members. It also makes those available to the general public, although at what some consider an inflated price. The NEC and other "reference publications" of the National Fire Prevention Association aren't laws or regulations themselves. And they don't start out in the public domain.
It's when every damn little town in America (that includes the U.S. and Canada) uses those publications as references within their laws that things get sticky. If they wrote their own regulations, THOSE should be in the public domain, but they usually don't. Should the private organization lose its rights because the city council of Balderdash Springs votes to "incorporate, by reference, the standards of the [insert year here] National Electical Code" into its building codes, rather than writing their own set? I don't think so. But, this may be a case in which having a (reasonably) consistant national standard for compliance would override the interests of the copyright holder...
... there are so many convoluted twisted laws added every day that you have little hope of understanding without a paying a lawyer, and even then it's a crapshoot who wins...
Just today, I was re-reading a commentary on a 2001 case involving work place law. The case involved a claim that a company's work place rule prohibited employees from using abusive or sexually suggestive language (put in place in order to comply with regulations holding employers for the actions of employees that might cause a "hostile work environment") constituted an "Unfair labor practice", in that preventing racial and sexual slurs had a "chilling effect" upon labor negotiations. This charge was brought by a union trying to nullify the results of an unsuccessful unionization vote at the company, using the claim that, because many union organizers have difficulty speaking to management without calling management "bitches" (one company rep was a woman) and a slew of other names offensive to just about any ethnic, sexual, or religious minority.
The National Labor Relations Board agreed, and nullified the election, as well as imposing fines for the ULP.
It was, of course, appealed by the company. The judges reviewing the case were perplexed; could the NLRB representative come up with a work place rule that would comply with both the regulations and the NLRB's rulings on those regulations? He was unable to... because the rulings made no sense.
The regulations themselves aren't really in conflict. But they're so vague as to make it possible for conflicting rulings, which happened. The NLRB seems (according to the author) to rule whichever way favors current labor interests on the "hostile" vs. "unfair" issues.
Meant to check into how it was resolved... The commentary (from 2001) was written while it was still being reviewed.
I take it you either don't operate a mail server, or you don't monitor it. At the present time, over 90% of the spam attempts against our servers come from open proxies around the world, most likely home machines that have been infected by SoBig, Netsky, or whatever worm-of-the-day is installing proxy software at the moment. The spam is coming with envelope senders not associated with spam, in general, because it's forged - heck, lately, nearly 5% of it is coming in with the envelope sender forged to match the mail to address!
The percentage of spam that comes through a server that is associated with the domain cited in the envelope sender field is very low, even those "throwaway" domains you mention. Granted, if SPF catches on, some of the more savvy spammers will use throwaways to associate some of those proxies with, but that increases their cost in time quite a bit, and you can block proxies by other means (dial-up and open proxy lists are available from several sources).
If any domain owner out there specifies "+all" in their SPF record, they deserve the reputation they'll get as a spam-friendly outfit. It would be better to NOT publish SPF records at all than to specifically authorize anyone in the world to claim to be from your domain.
What SPF does is say, "For mail claiming to be from our domain, if it came from one of the following locations, we have vetted it's authenticity to the extent that we feel appropriate." The domain owner can then figure out how they want to enforce their authentication - we make sure that people sending under our domains have logged into the server if they want to send, even if they're sending from within our network. No log-in, no SMTP...
Publishing a wild-card SPF record would be saying "We don't give a damn about mail claiming to be from us." Personally, if I were writing the SPF verification code, I'd tag any domain with "+all" in their SPF record for rejection...
True, SPF would break this cludged-up solution to the wrong problem. The problem would seem to be that joe@small.biz can't properly access his mail server while on the road, and fixing that would be the "proper" solution.
Mobile access to a mail server isn't the big deal it was 5 years ago. If you can tolerate a web-mail interface like HOTMAIL, you're 90% of the way there; I have found over a dozen web interfaces that will work with arbitrary mail server, and the resulting mail comes FROM joe@small.biz, rather than joe12342233123@hotmail.com, confusing his customers.
Chosing the right mail server software is another method - our postfix+dbmail system will accept outbound mail from our customers from any routable IP in the world (even ones on our block lists), so long as they authenticate themselves, which is as simple as access their POP3 account prior to sending. That starts a timer for approved access. And there are more sophisticated ways of doing it, such as TLS, that have wide client support.
SPF isn't a perfect solution. It is a piece of an imperfect puzzle, and it doesn't hurt to publish the records, unless you fall into one of the narrowly-defined exceptions that others have pointed out... And, in my reading of one long piece on why it is better to replace SMTP than to implement SPF, I saw a long list of "SPF breaks this" problems that were also imperfect solutions to the problem they addressed...
How will I be able to send mail using my own business' domain, as I do today, when it is going out via an ISP server?
Under SPF, that's simple - you list all servers that can handle your domain's mail in the SPF record. Take a look at the SPF home page for more details, including a link to a wizard to "calculate" the proper SPF DNS entry for situations such as yours. You should be using some form of certification of who you are when sending mail via any server, so that you can tell people "that wasn't me!" when someone forges a message from you. SPF is simply one method to aid in that.
That said, I don't like the MS scheme - it's yet another demand on bandwidth that doesn't provide the benefits claimed in any way better than less intensive methods (like SPF).
See.. they had a whole lot of land they couldn't use profitably under then current government farm subsidies, so they came up with a way to grow corn and turn it in to an automotive fuel required by law.
Still doesn't change the fact that there isn't enough land under cultivation to replace fossil fuels.
Alcohol based or enhanced fuels are a convenient stop-gap, but not a solution. OK, technically, they ARE solutions, but not they don't solve the problem. The original Ford cars were designed to run on home-produced alcohol, the only widely-distributed fuel of their time. But it would have taken today's farming methods and turn-of-the-20th-century acreage to have fueled any significant fraction of the transportation revolution, and many of those methods rely upon cheap fuels to drive them... a bit of a stumbling block.
Thursday, the Chicago news gave great coverage to a promotion by 8 gas stations and the ILEPA, selling E85 fuel for $.85 a gallon, instead of its normal ten cent discount over regular. Sure, it burns pretty clean, and it's only 15% fossil fuel... but it's limited in supply, and gives lower fuel economy figures. But, its main purpose is to allow the government to make us think that something useful is being done.
Without the government pushing for corn-based alcohol through subsidies, maybe the push would have been towards crops that are efficient at producing oils which would fuel more efficient diesel-cycle engines?
With the amount of agricultural waste in the U.S., and many more of these plants, we could possibly reduce our need for foreign oil.
I still want to know where this vast amount of agro waste is... U.S. farmers, in general, make use of everything they possibly can, to reduce their costs. What some classify as "waste" is reincorporated into the soil to replace nutrients that would otherwise require use of chemical fertilizers, which cause money. Farms don't have manure spreaders just because the farmers don't want a large trash bill! There have been farmers working with municipalities for decades to recycle our post-sewage-treatment crap as fertilizer, when the goverment will allow it.
That's not to say there isn't bio waste that could be recycled. Consumer food waste, for example, after you separate out the inorganics that don't fit municipal recycling rules. But that isn't free - someone (i.e., consumers) is going to have to pay the additional cost to do the separation, or make sure that those costs are less than what landfills charge to accept the waste. The aforementioned output of sewage plants, when blocked by government regulation from being incorporated into the soil, is another source.
The fact is, we don't have enough farm land under tillage in the world to supply both our food and energy needs. And I doubt environmentalists would enthusiastically support any efforts to correct that. This article describes an interesting side note in energy history, and it does point a way towards a way to truly incorporate "solar energy" into our current environment that does not require repaving our world with solar cells.
But (and this is where my hotbutton is triggered) the source of the "waste" used isn't going to be farms as we think of them today. Unless, of course, we find (or design!) a fast-growing plant that doesn't leach away the nutrients needed for food plants in the process, preferably one that can be used to reclaim land by breaking up "bad" soils, and working like legumes to reduce land erosion and add nitrogen to the soil for later food crops, yet provide plenty of biomass for production of fuel. Maybe something socially acceptable enough to turn any vacant city lot into a "fuel farm", rather than using grass. Oh, and it can't kill off any exotic bugs or slugs in the process!
Gee, I wonder if the future biomass fuel companies will make it worth my time and money to take my 3+ acres of grass clippings for fuel production, rather than me just composting them?
The problem with tarpitting is that it only ties up ONE PROCESS in the spammer server. A good server will have multiple delivery threads, and you'd have to tarpit all (or most) of them to affect the server significantly.
That said, our system takes 2 minutes to ACK requests after the first error, expanding to 10 minutes/error, just before it hangs up at 20 errors. It isn't much, but it makes ME feel better.
One of my clients called today asking me about home-brew STMs. There's a site that we found that covers where to find research papers on building them for around $2K...
In that scenario, company A is passing its taxes on to customers, and company B is paying them out of its profits. See?
I think you're the one that doesn't see. Company A might be pricing closer to the bone than Company B, and can't afford not to pass their increased costs on.
Or, perhaps B is running at no profit... Since corporate taxes are based upon profit, a rate increase of 5% would not affect B, since 15% of zero is the same as 20% of zero. Since I run 2 corporations affected by such taxes, I am intimately familiar with their effects when profitable or not profitable.
Umm... just where do you think the "profits" come from, if not the money charged consumers? With the trivial exception of the money used to start a business, you can not take any money from a business that didn't come from some consumer somewhere. It's a cost of doing business, and it will be passed on to the consumer in some form, or the business will die.
Thanks for the link - I'll check it out. The primary application that needs large file support is MySQL. We've got a work-around (Innodb support), but I'm looking at long-term, and a few 64-bit systems would be nice to have, in any case!
Slashdot Mirror
Ours might not be the most common circumstance, since most internet users aren't bound by HIPAA and other regulations to tightly control what leaves their networks. How many web programmers do you know that have (or should have) the official government Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act home page bookmarked, for assistance in deciding what can and can not be displayed under what security circumstances? Probably not that many, but, for those of us who do, it means that certain popular distribution methods are not kosher at this point in time.
Jigdo is compliant, since it uses established protocols, and is inbound-only. Bittorrent may or may not be compliant, and I'm not in the mood to be the one who tries to get it approved.
If someone HAS the ISOs, they can make and post the .jigdo and .template files required. And the load on the servers now hosting the ISOs would be lowered significantly, since any mirror that has the basic files for the distribution can be a "jigdo ISO mirror", using either FTP or HTTP.
If that seems a bit paranoid, it is. We don't trust Flash, because we can't seem to find any independent security analysis of the scripting language used. Macromedia's word that it is safe isn't good enough...
[no, we don't use Microsoft-based servers, and use of Internet Explorer is limited to testing our websites for things that break IE.]
My friend was going to order the 9.1 4-disk set instead.
I've been trying to find someone who has the Slackware 9.1 ISO files for a friend with no luck. All the mirror sites in the U.S. seem to have removed them, and I don't REALLY want to abuse the bandwidth of sites outside North America if I don't have to. It would be nice if distributions that don't want to do ISOs for downloads would adopt Jigsaw Download (jigdo), like Debian uses...
If you doubt this, please note how much the "goodwill" of Caldera is worth today.
If DJB allowed distributors to bundle working copies of his program on their disks, all would be fine and dandy... but I don't want to spend time searching for the proper group of tools needed to get it to compile before I can use it, and most others don't, either. I've never had to compile BIND to put a DNS server up... And I'm not afraid of doing so, if I had to, but I don't want to.
As it is, I read the "quick how-to" files on setting your system up to work with djbdns, and find them far more confusing than BIND zone files and configuration files ever were. You don't just have to worry about one program - unless you're ONLY running the caching server.
This doesn't mean I'm not looking at alternatives... I dislike having to restart all the servers every time I add a domain, and having to restart the master every time I modify a domain, with BIND.
If it temporarily locked up, that's one thing, but, if it is permanently screwed, then the way to get back at someone is to borrow their card long enough to enter 4 random PINs, then put it back... You've locked them out of their account until they buy a new card!
Sounds like your elected parliament is a rather ineffectual body of people, with nothing but conditional veto power over the appointed portions of your government.
Granted, my test is disk-related... I use both Knoppix and MM to run badblocks on drives before I install their final OS. But, on the same hardware, Mandrake Move will run 'badblocks -svw /dev/hda' to completion (4 write/read passes with different patterns) in less time than the first pass in Knoppix 3.3 or 3.4. That's a significant time savings when you're checking 8 250GB drives for a RAID array!
None of them. Just like our then-current airport security didn't stop the attack. Airport security didn't fail - none of the weapons used were illegal at the time.
In general, US citizens would not have tolerated any of the security measures that would have stopped the terrorists from boarding the airplanes with common household items and using them as weapons. Not because of violations of rights it might pose; it simply was unheard of to have hours-long delays boarding planes for security. And policies in effect at the time would have allowed the hijackers to simply threaten to break the neck of a couple of passengers to ensure 100% cooperation by the crews of the airliners.
Prior to the attacks, it was all but illegal to "connect the dots" necessary to have prevented the attacks, because someone had decided that terrorism was a criminal matter. That put up walls between the various agencies, because sharing information would have "tainted" any criminal cases, or required that classified information be revealed in open court.
Before you ask your follow-up question, the Patriot Act doesn't fix that problem, either. It mostly codified in one place things that were already being done... things which no specific laws addressed one way or another. Things that people didn't think about complaining against until they were written down...
For those interested, I did pull up the information on Adtranz ABB Daimler-Benz Transportation, N.A., Inc. v. National Labor Relations Board, and the employer won.
Check out WestLaw. The base data is public domain, i.e., court records. WestLaw and its competitors charge big bucks, though, for collecting it, cross-referencing it, plugging in who cites what it in their cases, which rulings have been overturned or or narrowed by later case law, etc.
In the case of the National Electrical Code, the situation is reversed. A private organization codifies "best practices" for its membership in a number of areas, and publishes these as copyrighted works, available to those members. It also makes those available to the general public, although at what some consider an inflated price. The NEC and other "reference publications" of the National Fire Prevention Association aren't laws or regulations themselves. And they don't start out in the public domain.
It's when every damn little town in America (that includes the U.S. and Canada) uses those publications as references within their laws that things get sticky. If they wrote their own regulations, THOSE should be in the public domain, but they usually don't. Should the private organization lose its rights because the city council of Balderdash Springs votes to "incorporate, by reference, the standards of the [insert year here] National Electical Code" into its building codes, rather than writing their own set? I don't think so. But, this may be a case in which having a (reasonably) consistant national standard for compliance would override the interests of the copyright holder...
Just today, I was re-reading a commentary on a 2001 case involving work place law. The case involved a claim that a company's work place rule prohibited employees from using abusive or sexually suggestive language (put in place in order to comply with regulations holding employers for the actions of employees that might cause a "hostile work environment") constituted an "Unfair labor practice", in that preventing racial and sexual slurs had a "chilling effect" upon labor negotiations. This charge was brought by a union trying to nullify the results of an unsuccessful unionization vote at the company, using the claim that, because many union organizers have difficulty speaking to management without calling management "bitches" (one company rep was a woman) and a slew of other names offensive to just about any ethnic, sexual, or religious minority.
The National Labor Relations Board agreed, and nullified the election, as well as imposing fines for the ULP.
It was, of course, appealed by the company. The judges reviewing the case were perplexed; could the NLRB representative come up with a work place rule that would comply with both the regulations and the NLRB's rulings on those regulations? He was unable to... because the rulings made no sense.
The regulations themselves aren't really in conflict. But they're so vague as to make it possible for conflicting rulings, which happened. The NLRB seems (according to the author) to rule whichever way favors current labor interests on the "hostile" vs. "unfair" issues.
Meant to check into how it was resolved... The commentary (from 2001) was written while it was still being reviewed.
The percentage of spam that comes through a server that is associated with the domain cited in the envelope sender field is very low, even those "throwaway" domains you mention. Granted, if SPF catches on, some of the more savvy spammers will use throwaways to associate some of those proxies with, but that increases their cost in time quite a bit, and you can block proxies by other means (dial-up and open proxy lists are available from several sources).
What SPF does is say, "For mail claiming to be from our domain, if it came from one of the following locations, we have vetted it's authenticity to the extent that we feel appropriate." The domain owner can then figure out how they want to enforce their authentication - we make sure that people sending under our domains have logged into the server if they want to send, even if they're sending from within our network. No log-in, no SMTP...
Publishing a wild-card SPF record would be saying "We don't give a damn about mail claiming to be from us." Personally, if I were writing the SPF verification code, I'd tag any domain with "+all" in their SPF record for rejection...
Mobile access to a mail server isn't the big deal it was 5 years ago. If you can tolerate a web-mail interface like HOTMAIL, you're 90% of the way there; I have found over a dozen web interfaces that will work with arbitrary mail server, and the resulting mail comes FROM joe@small.biz, rather than joe12342233123@hotmail.com, confusing his customers.
Chosing the right mail server software is another method - our postfix+dbmail system will accept outbound mail from our customers from any routable IP in the world (even ones on our block lists), so long as they authenticate themselves, which is as simple as access their POP3 account prior to sending. That starts a timer for approved access. And there are more sophisticated ways of doing it, such as TLS, that have wide client support.
SPF isn't a perfect solution. It is a piece of an imperfect puzzle, and it doesn't hurt to publish the records, unless you fall into one of the narrowly-defined exceptions that others have pointed out... And, in my reading of one long piece on why it is better to replace SMTP than to implement SPF, I saw a long list of "SPF breaks this" problems that were also imperfect solutions to the problem they addressed...
Under SPF, that's simple - you list all servers that can handle your domain's mail in the SPF record. Take a look at the SPF home page for more details, including a link to a wizard to "calculate" the proper SPF DNS entry for situations such as yours. You should be using some form of certification of who you are when sending mail via any server, so that you can tell people "that wasn't me!" when someone forges a message from you. SPF is simply one method to aid in that.
That said, I don't like the MS scheme - it's yet another demand on bandwidth that doesn't provide the benefits claimed in any way better than less intensive methods (like SPF).
Still doesn't change the fact that there isn't enough land under cultivation to replace fossil fuels.
Alcohol based or enhanced fuels are a convenient stop-gap, but not a solution. OK, technically, they ARE solutions, but not they don't solve the problem. The original Ford cars were designed to run on home-produced alcohol, the only widely-distributed fuel of their time. But it would have taken today's farming methods and turn-of-the-20th-century acreage to have fueled any significant fraction of the transportation revolution, and many of those methods rely upon cheap fuels to drive them... a bit of a stumbling block.
Thursday, the Chicago news gave great coverage to a promotion by 8 gas stations and the ILEPA, selling E85 fuel for $.85 a gallon, instead of its normal ten cent discount over regular. Sure, it burns pretty clean, and it's only 15% fossil fuel... but it's limited in supply, and gives lower fuel economy figures. But, its main purpose is to allow the government to make us think that something useful is being done.
Without the government pushing for corn-based alcohol through subsidies, maybe the push would have been towards crops that are efficient at producing oils which would fuel more efficient diesel-cycle engines?
I still want to know where this vast amount of agro waste is... U.S. farmers, in general, make use of everything they possibly can, to reduce their costs. What some classify as "waste" is reincorporated into the soil to replace nutrients that would otherwise require use of chemical fertilizers, which cause money. Farms don't have manure spreaders just because the farmers don't want a large trash bill! There have been farmers working with municipalities for decades to recycle our post-sewage-treatment crap as fertilizer, when the goverment will allow it.
That's not to say there isn't bio waste that could be recycled. Consumer food waste, for example, after you separate out the inorganics that don't fit municipal recycling rules. But that isn't free - someone (i.e., consumers) is going to have to pay the additional cost to do the separation, or make sure that those costs are less than what landfills charge to accept the waste. The aforementioned output of sewage plants, when blocked by government regulation from being incorporated into the soil, is another source.
The fact is, we don't have enough farm land under tillage in the world to supply both our food and energy needs. And I doubt environmentalists would enthusiastically support any efforts to correct that. This article describes an interesting side note in energy history, and it does point a way towards a way to truly incorporate "solar energy" into our current environment that does not require repaving our world with solar cells.
But (and this is where my hotbutton is triggered) the source of the "waste" used isn't going to be farms as we think of them today. Unless, of course, we find (or design!) a fast-growing plant that doesn't leach away the nutrients needed for food plants in the process, preferably one that can be used to reclaim land by breaking up "bad" soils, and working like legumes to reduce land erosion and add nitrogen to the soil for later food crops, yet provide plenty of biomass for production of fuel. Maybe something socially acceptable enough to turn any vacant city lot into a "fuel farm", rather than using grass. Oh, and it can't kill off any exotic bugs or slugs in the process!
Gee, I wonder if the future biomass fuel companies will make it worth my time and money to take my 3+ acres of grass clippings for fuel production, rather than me just composting them?
That said, our system takes 2 minutes to ACK requests after the first error, expanding to 10 minutes/error, just before it hangs up at 20 errors. It isn't much, but it makes ME feel better.
One of my clients called today asking me about home-brew STMs. There's a site that we found that covers where to find research papers on building them for around $2K...
I think you're the one that doesn't see. Company A might be pricing closer to the bone than Company B, and can't afford not to pass their increased costs on.
Or, perhaps B is running at no profit... Since corporate taxes are based upon profit, a rate increase of 5% would not affect B, since 15% of zero is the same as 20% of zero. Since I run 2 corporations affected by such taxes, I am intimately familiar with their effects when profitable or not profitable.
Umm... just where do you think the "profits" come from, if not the money charged consumers? With the trivial exception of the money used to start a business, you can not take any money from a business that didn't come from some consumer somewhere. It's a cost of doing business, and it will be passed on to the consumer in some form, or the business will die.
Thanks for the link - I'll check it out. The primary application that needs large file support is MySQL. We've got a work-around (Innodb support), but I'm looking at long-term, and a few 64-bit systems would be nice to have, in any case!