The problem is that you can't measure processor performance with one number. There's just no way to do so.
Before, AMD and Intel used to use clock rates. They didn't pretend to actually be summing up their chip's performance with the metric they slap on the box. It was even okay when just AMD had a performance number, because there was no sense of putting an industry-wide metric on a box. Now, one of two things will happen:
Possibility 1) AMD and Intel will decide upon a standard benchmark suite to determine "performance" and processors will be optimized around that benchmark instead of around real world software (i.e. consumer loses).
Possibility 2) AMD and Intel will come up with *different* measurements to determine their "equivalency number". AMD will focus on chip feature X and Intel on chip feature Y, each probably choosing the one that best supports their case. Both will accuse the other one of using an inaccurate and artificial metric. Each one focuses on improving their score in their chosen test. The performance profiles of the two chips diverges more. Since most software must be least-common-denominator, all developers except those few that choose to include custom-compiled or assembly bits and processor-specific support will make software that runs slower on average. (i.e. consumer loses).
I liked it much more when Intel and AMD's marketing departments stuck with slapping stupid stickers on boxes and making deals with OEMs -- neither one directly affected me.
If you have good and decent people serving as judges, you have nothing to worry about.
For that matter, if you have good and decent people serving as police, you have nothing to worry about.
If you have good and decent citizens, you have no reason not to use communism, or another similar system.
Hoover made it pretty clear that it's quite possible for law enforcement officials to abuse their power, given the opportunity.
Abstractions like the Fourth Amendment are only as good as the people who are sworn to uphold them, i.e. our constitution is really a state of heart, not a state of semantics.
To a certain degree. By the same logic, there is no reason to have a written code of law if all people are "good".
If an ISP is served with a warrant to monitor his activities, then somebody [the ISP? the FBI? the NSA/Echelon?] will have to have a repository to store those hundreds of gigabytes [terabytes?] of child porn that he's downloading. This is not at all a trivial problem in and of itself, especially when you think of the excess storage capacity that will be needed so as to have the capability to monitor this sort of activity in a nation of 300 million people.
I don't buy it. What's this guy going to be downloading, 500GB of content? Half a terabyte each month? If a movie is 700MB, that's 700 movies a month. He'd have to be watching something like 24 movies a day to keep up.
That's only if the society is approximated by reality to the extent that
(a) the democratic process is not being manipulated (by, say, intimidation of voters).
(b) the changes that need to be made are not incredibly urgent.
When Martin Luther King was running around, both of these two things were issues. Civil disobedience was, one could say, pretty darn justified.
That being said, I really don't think that "freedom to give out copies of MP3s of a CD that I own" is the greatest point to start fighting if you *really* have a legitimate issue with IP.
While I don't like any of those things, I don't think fighting for a world dominated by a programmer elite where any end-user or HCI person who expresses grievances with the usability of the FOSS software forced upon them is covertly "silenced" is hardly an improvement.
If and when someone manages to silence ESR, come tell me, because I will be truly amazed.
As for "forced upon them"...there are very few products, open or closed, that I consider "forced upon me". Perhaps Office, if I do a job that requires absolutely perfect.doc compatibility.
If you're uncomfortable with the state of FOSS usability, let me breathe a bit of reality into this thread. I started using Linux about five years ago, with Red Hat Linux 5.2. At that point in time, we didn't have GTK apps. We didn't have GNOME. We didn't have KDE or Qt apps. We had systems that were wildly insecure out-of-box, a crabby XFree86 configuration system that frequently required manual editing of the config file. We didn't have little "themes" that you could activate by just downloading them from "themes.org" and choosing them in a menu -- you wanted to customize your environent, you sat your butt down and spent a couple weeks reading through AfterStep documentation and figured out what config file entries were outdated or didn't work -- and little niceties like a window "close" button that you could move the mouse off of to cancel a close didn't exist. We didn't get a color prompt -- you wanted one, you sat down with the bash man page and started reading. We didn't get color ls output without a lot of poking around. Nautilus didn't exist, nor did Konqueror -- you wanted an easy-to-use filebrowser, you used mc and appreciated it. An out-of-box Red Hat system didn't start up to XFree86 -- it gave you a blinking text prompt, and if you knew the magic command "startx", you could get a graphical environment. We didn't have any of those "Windows-like" editors like gedit -- you used nedit, and if you didn't like it, that was tough, because that was all there was. Evolution wasn't around -- you used pine or maybe Netscape Communicator. You remember what Athena looked like? The desktop looked pretty much like the black-and-white Athena widget set with a smattering of Tk and the AfterStep menus. You learned config files and rc files and you learned your system. People didn't even dream of antialiased fonts or of plug-n-play USB configuration. OpenOffice wasn't around, nor was Abiword, nor was gnumeric, and Microsoft Office compatibility was just a glint in someone's eye. The really "idiot-proof" stuff was some TCL scripts hacked up (like printtool and Control Panel) that let you configure things from a GUI instead of learning the format of various config files to make the slightest change. Oh, and that was the *easy* distribution -- the real Linux nuts used Slackware.
That was only five years ago. Five.
That was about the same time that Microsoft was getting ready to release Windows 2000 and Windows ME. The standard on the way out was NT4 and Windows 98. I ask you to compare NT4/Windows 98 with the current Windows XP and then compare the Linux desktop of five years ago to the Linux of today. Can you honestly say that Linux usability has been "ignored"? I don't think that I could straight-facedly say that *Windows* usability has been improving anywhere nearly as quickly as Linux usability.
It's easy to underappreciate how incredibly rapidly FOSS usability has improved.
With robots sponsored by Microsoft, IBM, Apple, etc. going head to head, man, that would be awsome to watch!
Microsoft's robot would break down frequently and require human maintenance.
IBM's would work well, but would have an obscurely-shaped fuel system that requires expensive IBM Fuel Cells(tm). The racing team would all be wearing suits.
Apple would produce a shiny, glossy, and reasonably reliable robot that scratched incredibly easily and had bits of the body break off when traveling along. The sound system would be an iPod.
A number of those folks are going to other platforms like OS X for security reasons, convenience, management and hardware infrastructure like Altivec which can speed up cryptography significantly. Of course some of the older guys know Nextstep quite well and were fans of the NeXT boxes when they were de-rigeur at the NSA and places in the CIA and are quite happy with OS X.
Unfortunately, I don't have the guy who'd know handy at the moment, but I'm pretty sure that a P4 can do RSA faster than a PowerPC, Altivec be damned. Dunno about other algorithms.
I may be quietly working with OLED technology for civilian marine use, but I'm sitting down the street from the guy working on the missle systems, and I grew up with Russian missles pointed at me, just because I'm here, and for all I know have Chinese and Korean missles pointed at me right now.
I doubt that industrial targets are a significant target in modern strategic nuclear warfare. From what I've heard, the first goal of an initial nuclear strike is to eliminate the other side's nuclear capability. It's really the only thing you *can* do and not lose -- anything else and you're dead. I would expect that the second set of targets would be actual military targets -- naval battle groups, bases, anything that can be used to fight. Third would be weapon stockpiles and energy production facilities -- "support" targets, and only then production facilities. The thing is, when you have aircraft with ranges capable of covering your adversary, wars aren't likely to *take* the years that let US industry play such a big role in World War II.
Technology, eh? So the US should be able to kick China's arse?
Yup. I'd be comfortable betting on the US in a US-China conflict. of course, since both sides are nuclear powers, there probably wouldn't *be* any conventional warfare anyway.
Note that "kick China's arse" is different from "invade and occupy China", which would be nearly impossible for anyone in the world.
That court decision was made in 1981. The primary justification for that decision was rules banning women from engaging in combat, and the findings of a board that the people most needed by a draft would be combat troops.
While some combat roles may be still banned to women (as in, I'm not sure whether this is the case), others are definitely not. As of 1991, the Navy lifted this ban with respect to air combat. I suspect all of the military branches, allow women to engage in combat in at least this capacity, since I know that there were combat helicopter units with female members way back in Gulf War I.
I'm sure that lawsuits would be filed if the draft was re-instituted again, and I'm not sure that the ruling would not be changed.
Frankly, I think that women should either face the same possibility of a draft that men do, or be faced with losing the ability to vote. If a woman wants be an 1800s-style protected housewife instead of a full member of society, fine, but neither should she be accorded the privileges of said member of society.
The government _is_ "us". If we see "us" as "them" and disengage then it is a self-fulfilling prophesy. If we engage "them", become involved, vote, write letters, campaign, hold public office, serve in the armed forces, etc. then the government becomes "us." Isn't that how it works?
Close. I'd say that "the government begins to approximate 'us'".
Being a soldier means as much about loving war as being a firefighter does about loving fire.
This is an absolutely beautiful quote. Is it from somewhere in particular?
giving something back to the country that makes your way of life possible
I am the country -- I and 300 million other Americans. The country is not some capricious god that we dump offerings on.
When you can clearly demonstrate to me how blowing up chunks of Iraq has significantly benefitted We The People, then I'll happily join up.
A draft takes place when people don't care about something enough to want to risk dying for it, but do want to force someone else (who feels the same way) to do something about it. Since there are a number of ways of avoiding the draft, and since money and political influence played a role in avoiding Vietnam, I would say that a draft is a stunningly divisive and politically unsound way of achieving that goal.
If there were a horde of Bush's stereotypical black-swathed turban-wearning terrorists mowing down innocent people outside my front door, would I shoot back and risk my life? I'd at least give it serious consideration. That's a cause that's worth fighting for. Attacking a bunch of Iraqis for political goals that are at best extremely unclear and perhaps poorly chosen, and at worst downright corrupt and evil is not something that I am interested in dying for. Frankly, given a choice between firing a shot at either Ashcroft or a random Iraqi citizen, I can tell you right now who I'd be aiming at.
While I don't want to be drafted to fight in Iraq, also I don't feel that anyone else should be drafted to fight there. As a matter of fact, I feel very strongly that we should not be involved in Iraq at all. I think that US actions in Iraq have caused political and social repercussions that hurt the United States more than help it. So, no. I would not be "fighting for the the country", I would be fighting against it.
Quit crying. CMU also has an "insane amount" of Windows and Macintosh workstations that can play back QuickTime. They're not switching to DivX or Xvid (the poor man's DivX) just to pacify a few dozen whiny Linux users like yourself.
This is not H&SS -- this is SCS. I suspect that most of the people working in the Robotics Institute use Linux on a daily basis, at work or at home. It is a legitimate point of frusteration.
You know, for a school that has an insane amount of Linux emphasis, I'm terribly disappointed that CMU chose to use *QuickTime* for the streaming format. Yeah, let me just grab my copy of Codeweaver's product, why don't I? Hell, CMU's cluster machines don't have Crossover. There are a zillion ways to stream data to mplayer, and sure enough, they choose the single way that can't be used on Linux short of buying something.
The problem isn't in allowing LEA access to what they want. It's making sure there's a process they have to go through to get them, which prevents them from getting the information when they shouldn't be.
We have one. It's called "the current system", where if you want to tap someone's VoIP connection you have to stick someone out by their house with a parabolic mic or plant a bug in their house. This makes for a wonderful check on the system -- LEAs simply can't *afford* to monitor each and every person, do fishing expeditions, or do the sort of thing the French claim in the form of Echelon. I rather like this system. It means that if the police *really* want to bug someone, like a mob boss, they can, but they can't just wildly run out and monitor huge swaths of society.
Man, I wish some hacker would grab email from a couple of important figures in the Netherlands and post said data all over.
This worked nicely in the United States when protesting "trash rights". Theoretically, when you throw something out, you no longer lay claim to it, and it isn't yours. That means that anyone (even without a warrant) can come along and root through your trash for interesting information. The police force of some town busted someone for marijuana-growing or something after monitoring their garbage for a long time without a warrant. The local paper ran an editorial criticizing them. The mayor and police chief both bashed the editor of the paper, saying that the paper didn't know what it was talking about and should shut up. The police chief sent a letter in to the paper saying that the ability to monitor garbage wasn't an invasion of privacy and was perfectly acceptable. The editors of the paper ran out and collected the *mayor's* and *police chief's* trash for two weeks (using the same argument of legality that the police chief used), then published a rather embarassing dossier on each.
1. The FBI is only "asking" the FCC which, anyway, lacks jurisdiction to tell IRC programmers how to program.
Currently, this is the case. I think that no matter what, there will be pragmatic issues. However, the FCC's role in regulating Internet-based things is very much up in the air, and conflicting opinions have been taken.
The Clinton administration, barring a few moves, took a very federal-hands-off approach to the Internet (taxes, especially, were a big sticking point). Bush largely continued that. At some point, though, it's a good bet that someone's going to try regulating the Internet in various ways, and the FCC is the most obvious choice to designate as a starting point.
2. The Internet is becoming more decentralzed (e.g. anonymous wireless LANS,P2P networks, etc.) so there will be too many small time non compliant ISPs to go after. And the government, not for want of trying, has so far shown only futile attempts at regulating the Internet.
Not necessarily. For certain major systems, like VoIP, there will likely be a few large ones due to network effect. Think of AIM and ICQ today. If you don't play by the rules, you can't interoperate. These services are centralized, so it's easy to monitor and pick up on noncompliant systems.
3. The only people for this are the FBI and a few conservative politicians. They're going up against the communications giants and equipment manufacuters -- financially secure industries with campaign contributions, lobby groups, and lots of lawyers.
Now this is a damn good point, but I can think of a couple of legitimate counterarguments. The first is that telcos are scared of the VoIP. It breaks down barriers to entry that have existed for a long time to nothing. They have a *lot* of overhead and costs that have cropped up over years, and they're looking for a way out. If VoIP systems required key escrow and *federal approval* before they can be rolled out, it makes for a *very* nice barrier to entry. You just have to donate some money to the appropriate politicians, and you've good a good reason for companies to want to play along.
4. Besides all that, they just don't get it. Any two connected nodes communicating by pulses (ones and zeros) can always encrypt their conversation. Language is a secret handshake.
In theory, yes. In practice, there are only so many easy-to-use mass-market clients out there. It would be difficult but feasible to go after noncompliant types. For techies, this is a non-issue, since it's easy to whip something else new up each day. For Joe Blow, this is very effective.
I first realized the "Joe Blow"-"techie" separation when the Feds stopped going after Zimmerman for PGP. It didn't *matter* that a couple of security nuts with the dedication to get gpg and a wrapper and mutt set up. There aren't many people who were willing to copy and paste text in and out of Eudora each thime they wanted to encrypt or decrypt a message. As a result, the masses did not use PGP, so PGP was not a huge issue. The hard-core security nuts and cryptographers are kept shut up, because they *can* set up PGP, and the Fed is happy because the masses *don't* use PGP.
However, with VoIP, the issue came up again. Email is generally read on a computer, where you can add PGP on, and hence software vendors don't bundle PGP support. However, if you start selling VoIP embedded devices, you probably need to bundle native encryption support for it to be used. It will be easy-to-use and probably automatic. This is unacceptable, because the masses will start *using* end-to-end encryption.
The thing is, I can't work up much dislike by the FBI, because they're getting displaced by the OHS, which is ever so much more nasty and has ever so much less oversight. At this point, the FBI is the lesser of two evils -- by a long, long, long shot.
The problem that I have doesn't derive from their technical illiteracy.
It's the fact that they consider it politically acceptable for a complete log of everything everyone does on their computer to be kept. Forever. Seriously, *what* the *fuck*.
I wish to God I could send encrypted email to people, but they refuse to use PGP (probably because it's a fucking pain in the ass to use with most clients -- mutt and *perhaps* Mozilla are the only clients I've seen that are acceptably usable, and both requires a fair amount of technical configuration work that Joe Blow cannot do). The front ends really suck. The only time I ever found someone that I wanted to send an email to (a major open source author) that also provided a PGP key, I got a "sorry, I only keep my key at work -- can you send this again in plaintext unless it's confidential?". Sigh.
If PGP were idiot-proof, easy-to-use, and bundled with email clients, it would be *everywhere*. However, PGP is *useless* if the only person I know of that regularly uses it is me (and since I'm the only one that can do so, I can just sign emails).
I wish people would set up PGP and use it. They don't have to encrypt their emails, just sign them. People will start picking up on the fact that PGP is being used, and then will start encrypting emails to them....
I want those fucking Islamic extremists killed on the spot.
I suspect many of them would like to see people like you wiped out on the spot for suppressing their religion, intimidating and screwing with their country and economy, etc.
9/11 al Queda members didn't wake up one day and decide, for no reason at all, to spend their own lives to try to hurt people they saw as oppressors. There was a reason that they feel the way they do, and I doubt that trying to use force and intimidation is going to work all that well. It didn't work for the Soviets (and they could be awfully brutal). It just makes more people that hate you enough to die to hurt you.
But, whatever. Bush doesn't need to solve the terrorist problem to get votes. He needs to make people feel good to get votes. And beating the crap out of someone makes people feel good.
Legal experts said the 85-page filing includes language that could be interpreted as forcing companies to build back doors into everything from instant messaging and voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) programs to Microsoft's Xbox Live game service. The introduction of new services that did not support a back door for police would be outlawed, and companies would be given 15 months to make sure that existing services comply.
I am going to keep in mind that this is seen through the filter of cnet, which tends to be somewhat Slashdottish -- kind of liberal, pro-tech, anti-regulation. I really need to see the "85-page document" to decide.
That being said, this is possibly the most disturbing thing I have heard proposed from the federal government yet. Besides the obvious issues of holding back innovation, I find the privacy issues unacceptable. If you want to wiretap someone, fine. Go to wherever they are, and use a parabolic mic or physical bug or something similar. Yes, it doesn't let you tap the population en-masse. There is no justifiable reason for this request. The only thing it does is make cheap, easy, and hard-to-detect-abuse-of wiretapping much more feasible and tempting. I *want* it to be a pain in the ass to wiretap people. It's worked well for hundreds of years, and I see no reason to change this.
I also want to make it clear that I will not follow any such directives requiring programs to including monitoring backdoors. If I have to, I will develop anonymously, through Freenet or similar (no, I'm not brave enough to do something like this openly as a protest and get hammered for it), but I will not begin inserting backdoors into the software I work on.
I am absolutely appalled that something like this would be suggested. It is the sort of thing that people that I considered "tin foil hatters" were worrying about for a long time. I would like to see an EFF analysis of this. If this is as bad as the article makes it out to be, this will be the thing that tips me over the edge to sending money to the EFF.
I would like to know what evidence cnet has for claiming that the Bush administration backs this. If they really are, they are going well beyond even what I thought Ashcroft's most tyrannical police-state aspirations were.
Among other things, I claim that this will:
* Limit innovation. This is a *real* issue, not a "we can't bundle Internet Explorer and now innovation is being suppressed" whine. Putting backdoors in protocols is a serious issue.
* Damage US credibility internationally when it comes to secure software. The cryptographic export restrictions did a phenomenal amount of damage to the US computer security industry, and let foreigners take over the market. When you want smartcard systems, you don't go to a US company. This is absolutely unacceptable, as computer security is becoming ever more important as more and more people are using it.
* Provide an impediment to international software projects. The United States is not the world, nor is it even "effectively universal" on the Internet. If you ban something like development of a VoIP system without key escrow, development will simply move overseas. Sure, you could make *using* software without escrow a federal offense (thank you Britain, which has set the path for this wonderfully stupid approach). It will do *nothing* to stop propagation of software. The last time the FBI tried to meddle with the Internet via legislation like this was when they arrested Mr. Zimmerman for releasing PGP. It *didn't work*, and wouldn't have protected their ability to snoop on people. We have come up with many approaches to deal with US laws limiting computer security, and can be used again in this case.
* Is stunningly short-sighted. You can't make a single effective law like this. What if I ssh to a system and use an IM system there to talk to someone else on the same system (and I *have* sshed in and used talk or phone on a Unix or VMS system before).
Okay, I'm sure this comes off as a terribly silly question, but this has been a "pet problem" of my own. I've spent some time trying to figure out a easy way to make a house rewireable (just a mind game, not actually doing it at the moment), and figured that the best bet would be PVC or something similar in the wall with about a quarter removed and hid behind a waist-high panel running through all the rooms in the house.
Once you have a bunch of cables already in conduit, how do you thread more? Wouldn't they get snagged? Or is there something like a plumber's snake for running cable? Do you just ensure that all junctions are in user-accessable boxes, so that you can ensure that the cable goes in the right direction?
I know that *I* would certainly value a house that could be reasonably rewired without construction work more than one that couldn't, and am kind of frusterated that this kind of thing isn't par for the course.
3) Blowing out the window of an airplane. Result: Buster's arm was sucked through the opening, and probably would have dismembered a real human being. However, the hole did not expand, and the other passengers probably would have been fine.
Okay, I didn't watch this segment. However, my guess is that they had some story -- a tiny hole results in the entire airplane being torn apart. (This is the problem with that show -- they "bust" a very specific story, which is usually much more ridiculous than any varient that I've ever heard.) This is not what "explosive decompression" means. Blowing out a window or two and opening a big hole that rapidly cuts the pressure faster than people can comfortably deal with -- unlike, say, a bullet hole in the aluminum skin -- is what explosive decompression entails.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that you can't measure processor performance with one number. There's just no way to do so.
Before, AMD and Intel used to use clock rates. They didn't pretend to actually be summing up their chip's performance with the metric they slap on the box. It was even okay when just AMD had a performance number, because there was no sense of putting an industry-wide metric on a box. Now, one of two things will happen:
Possibility 1) AMD and Intel will decide upon a standard benchmark suite to determine "performance" and processors will be optimized around that benchmark instead of around real world software (i.e. consumer loses).
Possibility 2) AMD and Intel will come up with *different* measurements to determine their "equivalency number". AMD will focus on chip feature X and Intel on chip feature Y, each probably choosing the one that best supports their case. Both will accuse the other one of using an inaccurate and artificial metric. Each one focuses on improving their score in their chosen test. The performance profiles of the two chips diverges more. Since most software must be least-common-denominator, all developers except those few that choose to include custom-compiled or assembly bits and processor-specific support will make software that runs slower on average. (i.e. consumer loses).
I liked it much more when Intel and AMD's marketing departments stuck with slapping stupid stickers on boxes and making deals with OEMs -- neither one directly affected me.
AWD and redundant systems? Wow! :-)
If you have good and decent people serving as judges, you have nothing to worry about.
For that matter, if you have good and decent people serving as police, you have nothing to worry about.
If you have good and decent citizens, you have no reason not to use communism, or another similar system.
Hoover made it pretty clear that it's quite possible for law enforcement officials to abuse their power, given the opportunity.
Abstractions like the Fourth Amendment are only as good as the people who are sworn to uphold them, i.e. our constitution is really a state of heart, not a state of semantics.
To a certain degree. By the same logic, there is no reason to have a written code of law if all people are "good".
If an ISP is served with a warrant to monitor his activities, then somebody [the ISP? the FBI? the NSA/Echelon?] will have to have a repository to store those hundreds of gigabytes [terabytes?] of child porn that he's downloading. This is not at all a trivial problem in and of itself, especially when you think of the excess storage capacity that will be needed so as to have the capability to monitor this sort of activity in a nation of 300 million people.
I don't buy it. What's this guy going to be downloading, 500GB of content? Half a terabyte each month? If a movie is 700MB, that's 700 movies a month. He'd have to be watching something like 24 movies a day to keep up.
That's only if the society is approximated by reality to the extent that
(a) the democratic process is not being manipulated (by, say, intimidation of voters).
(b) the changes that need to be made are not incredibly urgent.
When Martin Luther King was running around, both of these two things were issues. Civil disobedience was, one could say, pretty darn justified.
That being said, I really don't think that "freedom to give out copies of MP3s of a CD that I own" is the greatest point to start fighting if you *really* have a legitimate issue with IP.
While I don't like any of those things, I don't think fighting for a world dominated by a programmer elite where any end-user or HCI person who expresses grievances with the usability of the FOSS software forced upon them is covertly "silenced" is hardly an improvement.
.doc compatibility.
If and when someone manages to silence ESR, come tell me, because I will be truly amazed.
As for "forced upon them"...there are very few products, open or closed, that I consider "forced upon me". Perhaps Office, if I do a job that requires absolutely perfect
If you're uncomfortable with the state of FOSS usability, let me breathe a bit of reality into this thread. I started using Linux about five years ago, with Red Hat Linux 5.2. At that point in time, we didn't have GTK apps. We didn't have GNOME. We didn't have KDE or Qt apps. We had systems that were wildly insecure out-of-box, a crabby XFree86 configuration system that frequently required manual editing of the config file. We didn't have little "themes" that you could activate by just downloading them from "themes.org" and choosing them in a menu -- you wanted to customize your environent, you sat your butt down and spent a couple weeks reading through AfterStep documentation and figured out what config file entries were outdated or didn't work -- and little niceties like a window "close" button that you could move the mouse off of to cancel a close didn't exist. We didn't get a color prompt -- you wanted one, you sat down with the bash man page and started reading. We didn't get color ls output without a lot of poking around. Nautilus didn't exist, nor did Konqueror -- you wanted an easy-to-use filebrowser, you used mc and appreciated it. An out-of-box Red Hat system didn't start up to XFree86 -- it gave you a blinking text prompt, and if you knew the magic command "startx", you could get a graphical environment. We didn't have any of those "Windows-like" editors like gedit -- you used nedit, and if you didn't like it, that was tough, because that was all there was. Evolution wasn't around -- you used pine or maybe Netscape Communicator. You remember what Athena looked like? The desktop looked pretty much like the black-and-white Athena widget set with a smattering of Tk and the AfterStep menus. You learned config files and rc files and you learned your system. People didn't even dream of antialiased fonts or of plug-n-play USB configuration. OpenOffice wasn't around, nor was Abiword, nor was gnumeric, and Microsoft Office compatibility was just a glint in someone's eye. The really "idiot-proof" stuff was some TCL scripts hacked up (like printtool and Control Panel) that let you configure things from a GUI instead of learning the format of various config files to make the slightest change. Oh, and that was the *easy* distribution -- the real Linux nuts used Slackware.
That was only five years ago. Five.
That was about the same time that Microsoft was getting ready to release Windows 2000 and Windows ME. The standard on the way out was NT4 and Windows 98. I ask you to compare NT4/Windows 98 with the current Windows XP and then compare the Linux desktop of five years ago to the Linux of today. Can you honestly say that Linux usability has been "ignored"? I don't think that I could straight-facedly say that *Windows* usability has been improving anywhere nearly as quickly as Linux usability.
It's easy to underappreciate how incredibly rapidly FOSS usability has improved.
I wonder.
What *is* their bang-for-the-buck? Remember that government grant processes involve a certain amount of overhead...
With robots sponsored by Microsoft, IBM, Apple, etc. going head to head, man, that would be awsome to watch!
Microsoft's robot would break down frequently and require human maintenance.
IBM's would work well, but would have an obscurely-shaped fuel system that requires expensive IBM Fuel Cells(tm). The racing team would all be wearing suits.
Apple would produce a shiny, glossy, and reasonably reliable robot that scratched incredibly easily and had bits of the body break off when traveling along. The sound system would be an iPod.
A number of those folks are going to other platforms like OS X for security reasons, convenience, management and hardware infrastructure like Altivec which can speed up cryptography significantly. Of course some of the older guys know Nextstep quite well and were fans of the NeXT boxes when they were de-rigeur at the NSA and places in the CIA and are quite happy with OS X.
Unfortunately, I don't have the guy who'd know handy at the moment, but I'm pretty sure that a P4 can do RSA faster than a PowerPC, Altivec be damned. Dunno about other algorithms.
I may be quietly working with OLED technology for civilian marine use, but I'm sitting down the street from the guy working on the missle systems, and I grew up with Russian missles pointed at me, just because I'm here, and for all I know have Chinese and Korean missles pointed at me right now.
I doubt that industrial targets are a significant target in modern strategic nuclear warfare. From what I've heard, the first goal of an initial nuclear strike is to eliminate the other side's nuclear capability. It's really the only thing you *can* do and not lose -- anything else and you're dead. I would expect that the second set of targets would be actual military targets -- naval battle groups, bases, anything that can be used to fight. Third would be weapon stockpiles and energy production facilities -- "support" targets, and only then production facilities. The thing is, when you have aircraft with ranges capable of covering your adversary, wars aren't likely to *take* the years that let US industry play such a big role in World War II.
Technology, eh? So the US should be able to kick China's arse?
Yup. I'd be comfortable betting on the US in a US-China conflict. of course, since both sides are nuclear powers, there probably wouldn't *be* any conventional warfare anyway.
Note that "kick China's arse" is different from "invade and occupy China", which would be nearly impossible for anyone in the world.
That court decision was made in 1981. The primary justification for that decision was rules banning women from engaging in combat, and the findings of a board that the people most needed by a draft would be combat troops.
While some combat roles may be still banned to women (as in, I'm not sure whether this is the case), others are definitely not. As of 1991, the Navy lifted this ban with respect to air combat. I suspect all of the military branches, allow women to engage in combat in at least this capacity, since I know that there were combat helicopter units with female members way back in Gulf War I.
I'm sure that lawsuits would be filed if the draft was re-instituted again, and I'm not sure that the ruling would not be changed.
Frankly, I think that women should either face the same possibility of a draft that men do, or be faced with losing the ability to vote. If a woman wants be an 1800s-style protected housewife instead of a full member of society, fine, but neither should she be accorded the privileges of said member of society.
The government _is_ "us". If we see "us" as "them" and disengage then it is a self-fulfilling prophesy. If we engage "them", become involved, vote, write letters, campaign, hold public office, serve in the armed forces, etc. then the government becomes "us." Isn't that how it works?
Close. I'd say that "the government begins to approximate 'us'".
Being a soldier means as much about loving war as being a firefighter does about loving fire.
This is an absolutely beautiful quote. Is it from somewhere in particular?
giving something back to the country that makes your way of life possible
I am the country -- I and 300 million other Americans. The country is not some capricious god that we dump offerings on.
When you can clearly demonstrate to me how blowing up chunks of Iraq has significantly benefitted We The People, then I'll happily join up.
A draft takes place when people don't care about something enough to want to risk dying for it, but do want to force someone else (who feels the same way) to do something about it. Since there are a number of ways of avoiding the draft, and since money and political influence played a role in avoiding Vietnam, I would say that a draft is a stunningly divisive and politically unsound way of achieving that goal.
If there were a horde of Bush's stereotypical black-swathed turban-wearning terrorists mowing down innocent people outside my front door, would I shoot back and risk my life? I'd at least give it serious consideration. That's a cause that's worth fighting for. Attacking a bunch of Iraqis for political goals that are at best extremely unclear and perhaps poorly chosen, and at worst downright corrupt and evil is not something that I am interested in dying for. Frankly, given a choice between firing a shot at either Ashcroft or a random Iraqi citizen, I can tell you right now who I'd be aiming at.
While I don't want to be drafted to fight in Iraq, also I don't feel that anyone else should be drafted to fight there. As a matter of fact, I feel very strongly that we should not be involved in Iraq at all. I think that US actions in Iraq have caused political and social repercussions that hurt the United States more than help it. So, no. I would not be "fighting for the the country", I would be fighting against it.
Quit crying. CMU also has an "insane amount" of Windows and Macintosh workstations that can play back QuickTime. They're not switching to DivX or Xvid (the poor man's DivX) just to pacify a few dozen whiny Linux users like yourself.
This is not H&SS -- this is SCS. I suspect that most of the people working in the Robotics Institute use Linux on a daily basis, at work or at home. It is a legitimate point of frusteration.
You know, for a school that has an insane amount of Linux emphasis, I'm terribly disappointed that CMU chose to use *QuickTime* for the streaming format. Yeah, let me just grab my copy of Codeweaver's product, why don't I? Hell, CMU's cluster machines don't have Crossover. There are a zillion ways to stream data to mplayer, and sure enough, they choose the single way that can't be used on Linux short of buying something.
The problem isn't in allowing LEA access to what they want. It's making sure there's a process they have to go through to get them, which prevents them from getting the information when they shouldn't be.
We have one. It's called "the current system", where if you want to tap someone's VoIP connection you have to stick someone out by their house with a parabolic mic or plant a bug in their house. This makes for a wonderful check on the system -- LEAs simply can't *afford* to monitor each and every person, do fishing expeditions, or do the sort of thing the French claim in the form of Echelon. I rather like this system. It means that if the police *really* want to bug someone, like a mob boss, they can, but they can't just wildly run out and monitor huge swaths of society.
I've got a shitlist here:
China: Repressive government with deep love for monitoring citizens and harsh penalties for political dissent.
Australia: Extremely socially conservative government with love for censoring Internet.
Britain: Anti-gun, laws forcing people to hand over passwords/keys upon request, leader has mouth firmly glued to Bush's cock.
Netherlands: Apparently anti-encryption government?
Man, I wish some hacker would grab email from a couple of important figures in the Netherlands and post said data all over.
This worked nicely in the United States when protesting "trash rights". Theoretically, when you throw something out, you no longer lay claim to it, and it isn't yours. That means that anyone (even without a warrant) can come along and root through your trash for interesting information. The police force of some town busted someone for marijuana-growing or something after monitoring their garbage for a long time without a warrant. The local paper ran an editorial criticizing them. The mayor and police chief both bashed the editor of the paper, saying that the paper didn't know what it was talking about and should shut up. The police chief sent a letter in to the paper saying that the ability to monitor garbage wasn't an invasion of privacy and was perfectly acceptable. The editors of the paper ran out and collected the *mayor's* and *police chief's* trash for two weeks (using the same argument of legality that the police chief used), then published a rather embarassing dossier on each.
IIRC, a bit before its retirement, some security guru analyzed it and found a number of nasty holes. (Gutmann or something like that?)
1. The FBI is only "asking" the FCC which, anyway, lacks jurisdiction to tell IRC programmers how to program.
Currently, this is the case. I think that no matter what, there will be pragmatic issues. However, the FCC's role in regulating Internet-based things is very much up in the air, and conflicting opinions have been taken.
The Clinton administration, barring a few moves, took a very federal-hands-off approach to the Internet (taxes, especially, were a big sticking point). Bush largely continued that. At some point, though, it's a good bet that someone's going to try regulating the Internet in various ways, and the FCC is the most obvious choice to designate as a starting point.
2. The Internet is becoming more decentralzed (e.g. anonymous wireless LANS,P2P networks, etc.) so there will be too many small time non compliant ISPs to go after. And the government, not for want of trying, has so far shown only futile attempts at regulating the Internet.
Not necessarily. For certain major systems, like VoIP, there will likely be a few large ones due to network effect. Think of AIM and ICQ today. If you don't play by the rules, you can't interoperate. These services are centralized, so it's easy to monitor and pick up on noncompliant systems.
3. The only people for this are the FBI and a few conservative politicians. They're going up against the communications giants and equipment manufacuters -- financially secure industries with campaign contributions, lobby groups, and lots of lawyers.
Now this is a damn good point, but I can think of a couple of legitimate counterarguments. The first is that telcos are scared of the VoIP. It breaks down barriers to entry that have existed for a long time to nothing. They have a *lot* of overhead and costs that have cropped up over years, and they're looking for a way out. If VoIP systems required key escrow and *federal approval* before they can be rolled out, it makes for a *very* nice barrier to entry. You just have to donate some money to the appropriate politicians, and you've good a good reason for companies to want to play along.
4. Besides all that, they just don't get it. Any two connected nodes communicating by pulses (ones and zeros) can always encrypt their conversation. Language is a secret handshake.
In theory, yes. In practice, there are only so many easy-to-use mass-market clients out there. It would be difficult but feasible to go after noncompliant types. For techies, this is a non-issue, since it's easy to whip something else new up each day. For Joe Blow, this is very effective.
I first realized the "Joe Blow"-"techie" separation when the Feds stopped going after Zimmerman for PGP. It didn't *matter* that a couple of security nuts with the dedication to get gpg and a wrapper and mutt set up. There aren't many people who were willing to copy and paste text in and out of Eudora each thime they wanted to encrypt or decrypt a message. As a result, the masses did not use PGP, so PGP was not a huge issue. The hard-core security nuts and cryptographers are kept shut up, because they *can* set up PGP, and the Fed is happy because the masses *don't* use PGP.
However, with VoIP, the issue came up again. Email is generally read on a computer, where you can add PGP on, and hence software vendors don't bundle PGP support. However, if you start selling VoIP embedded devices, you probably need to bundle native encryption support for it to be used. It will be easy-to-use and probably automatic. This is unacceptable, because the masses will start *using* end-to-end encryption.
The thing is, I can't work up much dislike by the FBI, because they're getting displaced by the OHS, which is ever so much more nasty and has ever so much less oversight. At this point, the FBI is the lesser of two evils -- by a long, long, long shot.
The problem that I have doesn't derive from their technical illiteracy.
It's the fact that they consider it politically acceptable for a complete log of everything everyone does on their computer to be kept. Forever. Seriously, *what* the *fuck*.
I wish to God I could send encrypted email to people, but they refuse to use PGP (probably because it's a fucking pain in the ass to use with most clients -- mutt and *perhaps* Mozilla are the only clients I've seen that are acceptably usable, and both requires a fair amount of technical configuration work that Joe Blow cannot do). The front ends really suck. The only time I ever found someone that I wanted to send an email to (a major open source author) that also provided a PGP key, I got a "sorry, I only keep my key at work -- can you send this again in plaintext unless it's confidential?". Sigh.
If PGP were idiot-proof, easy-to-use, and bundled with email clients, it would be *everywhere*. However, PGP is *useless* if the only person I know of that regularly uses it is me (and since I'm the only one that can do so, I can just sign emails).
I wish people would set up PGP and use it. They don't have to encrypt their emails, just sign them. People will start picking up on the fact that PGP is being used, and then will start encrypting emails to them....
I want those fucking Islamic extremists killed on the spot.
I suspect many of them would like to see people like you wiped out on the spot for suppressing their religion, intimidating and screwing with their country and economy, etc.
9/11 al Queda members didn't wake up one day and decide, for no reason at all, to spend their own lives to try to hurt people they saw as oppressors. There was a reason that they feel the way they do, and I doubt that trying to use force and intimidation is going to work all that well. It didn't work for the Soviets (and they could be awfully brutal). It just makes more people that hate you enough to die to hurt you.
But, whatever. Bush doesn't need to solve the terrorist problem to get votes. He needs to make people feel good to get votes. And beating the crap out of someone makes people feel good.
Legal experts said the 85-page filing includes language that could be interpreted as forcing companies to build back doors into everything from instant messaging and voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) programs to Microsoft's Xbox Live game service. The introduction of new services that did not support a back door for police would be outlawed, and companies would be given 15 months to make sure that existing services comply.
I am going to keep in mind that this is seen through the filter of cnet, which tends to be somewhat Slashdottish -- kind of liberal, pro-tech, anti-regulation. I really need to see the "85-page document" to decide.
That being said, this is possibly the most disturbing thing I have heard proposed from the federal government yet. Besides the obvious issues of holding back innovation, I find the privacy issues unacceptable. If you want to wiretap someone, fine. Go to wherever they are, and use a parabolic mic or physical bug or something similar. Yes, it doesn't let you tap the population en-masse. There is no justifiable reason for this request. The only thing it does is make cheap, easy, and hard-to-detect-abuse-of wiretapping much more feasible and tempting. I *want* it to be a pain in the ass to wiretap people. It's worked well for hundreds of years, and I see no reason to change this.
I also want to make it clear that I will not follow any such directives requiring programs to including monitoring backdoors. If I have to, I will develop anonymously, through Freenet or similar (no, I'm not brave enough to do something like this openly as a protest and get hammered for it), but I will not begin inserting backdoors into the software I work on.
I am absolutely appalled that something like this would be suggested. It is the sort of thing that people that I considered "tin foil hatters" were worrying about for a long time. I would like to see an EFF analysis of this. If this is as bad as the article makes it out to be, this will be the thing that tips me over the edge to sending money to the EFF.
I would like to know what evidence cnet has for claiming that the Bush administration backs this. If they really are, they are going well beyond even what I thought Ashcroft's most tyrannical police-state aspirations were.
Among other things, I claim that this will:
* Limit innovation. This is a *real* issue, not a "we can't bundle Internet Explorer and now innovation is being suppressed" whine. Putting backdoors in protocols is a serious issue.
* Damage US credibility internationally when it comes to secure software. The cryptographic export restrictions did a phenomenal amount of damage to the US computer security industry, and let foreigners take over the market. When you want smartcard systems, you don't go to a US company. This is absolutely unacceptable, as computer security is becoming ever more important as more and more people are using it.
* Provide an impediment to international software projects. The United States is not the world, nor is it even "effectively universal" on the Internet. If you ban something like development of a VoIP system without key escrow, development will simply move overseas. Sure, you could make *using* software without escrow a federal offense (thank you Britain, which has set the path for this wonderfully stupid approach). It will do *nothing* to stop propagation of software. The last time the FBI tried to meddle with the Internet via legislation like this was when they arrested Mr. Zimmerman for releasing PGP. It *didn't work*, and wouldn't have protected their ability to snoop on people. We have come up with many approaches to deal with US laws limiting computer security, and can be used again in this case.
* Is stunningly short-sighted. You can't make a single effective law like this. What if I ssh to a system and use an IM system there to talk to someone else on the same system (and I *have* sshed in and used talk or phone on a Unix or VMS system before).
The problem is of what is considered reproduction and what is considered part of the transmission process.
For example, Web caching is considered acceptable. I don't know whether it's been tested in court, but at the least people do it without worries.
Okay, I'm sure this comes off as a terribly silly question, but this has been a "pet problem" of my own. I've spent some time trying to figure out a easy way to make a house rewireable (just a mind game, not actually doing it at the moment), and figured that the best bet would be PVC or something similar in the wall with about a quarter removed and hid behind a waist-high panel running through all the rooms in the house.
Once you have a bunch of cables already in conduit, how do you thread more? Wouldn't they get snagged? Or is there something like a plumber's snake for running cable? Do you just ensure that all junctions are in user-accessable boxes, so that you can ensure that the cable goes in the right direction?
I know that *I* would certainly value a house that could be reasonably rewired without construction work more than one that couldn't, and am kind of frusterated that this kind of thing isn't par for the course.
3) Blowing out the window of an airplane. Result: Buster's arm was sucked through the opening, and probably would have dismembered a real human being. However, the hole did not expand, and the other passengers probably would have been fine.
Okay, I didn't watch this segment. However, my guess is that they had some story -- a tiny hole results in the entire airplane being torn apart. (This is the problem with that show -- they "bust" a very specific story, which is usually much more ridiculous than any varient that I've ever heard.) This is not what "explosive decompression" means. Blowing out a window or two and opening a big hole that rapidly cuts the pressure faster than people can comfortably deal with -- unlike, say, a bullet hole in the aluminum skin -- is what explosive decompression entails.