Great way for everyone to get out of the office and still get work done.
Get out of the office I can believe. Still get work done? I doubt it. Unless ``work'' is just having a good time together, it just isn't going to happen. Too many distractions, like the cars honking and zipping by, the smell from that cow orker who wouldn't have needed deodorant if you weren't all sweating in the hot sun, and on and on.
This sounds like a silly, expensive gimmick, so I'm not surprised to hear a business is buying one. Let me guess: it's a fair-sized corp, and the purchaser has pointy hair?
Maybe this tool only needs a warning message to the install user.
Or maybe a message to all users on the machine? Since it's not just the installing user's stuff that will be exposed by MS's idiotic security settings which assume that all machines are single user.
Second, this just lets any user find anything that he has read permission on. As usual, Windows default settings are suitable only for single-user machines.
Third, it could only be ``spyware'' if it phoned home. Even the silly article didn't suggest that it does that.li>
Just another sensationalist/. headline. Nothing to see here....
Sorry, that's too wrong to let pass. In a Democracy, the government is controlled by the demagogues, the few who are able to get the many riled up. In a constitutional republic, such as the U.S. used to be, the government was controlled by the honest elected representatives, who were in turn controlled by the constitution (that's why I specified ``honest''). In a modern ``democracy'', the government is controlled by the apparatchiks, the people who are permanently part of the system, as the politicians and demagogues come and go. In the U.S. we call them bureaucrats. In every form of government, the government is the people who staff it. Only in an anarchy could your statement be accurate.
... as long as there is equality under the law, you have just as many rights backed by the same authority as the rest of us.
That's true, even as ``just as many rights'' asymptotically approaches zero. Therefore, I'd say it's irrelevant.
If good government was less government, we would have never developed the modern state.
The second phrase doesn't follow from the first. You seem to have assumed that ``modern state'' equates to ``good government'', or that the change in our government has been for the better during the last 100 years. Neither assumption seems defensable to me.
Good government is good government, size is irrelevant.
Again, too wrong to allow to pass unchallenged. Good government is unknown, a myth. All government eventually becomes bad government, though the better examples of government can be better than no government. Lord Acton said it best: ``Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.'' Small government, with little power, has little scope for the inevitable corruption and malfeasance. Every government will sooner or later go sour. It happened in Rome, and it is happening here. The difference between Rome and here is that (so far) we have enough social and legal checks in place to constrain the powermad[1]. Those legal and social restraints are definitely wearing thin.
[1] The powermad are mostly good, conscientious people, who have been given a job, like searching little old ladies at airports or looking for assets to steal for the government. Being good, conscientious people, they work hard to accomplish their allotted task, and they are tireless in asking for additional resources to do it better. If their task is destructive of a free society, we have an example of bad government, despite their good intentions and personal honesty.
Governments don't have to control the net
on
The Empires Strike Back
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Governments don't have to control the net, they control you. They can simply outlaw anonymity if the net becomes a problem.
We don't often think of governments cooperating, but the one thing that is a bigger threat than another government is freedom. Anyone's freedom, anywhere, is a threat to the idea that nobody can be free anywhere.
You bet they're going to gang up on the internet. The more effectively the internet routes around damage, the more effectively they'll damage it, for their own survival.
... "statement Wednesday by 368 economists, including six Nobel laureates: Gary Becker, James Buchanan, Milton Friedman, Robert Lucas, Robert Mundell, and -- the winner of this year's Nobel Prize in Economics -- Edward C. Prescott.... warned that Sen. Kerry's policies 'would, over time, inhibit capital formation, depress productivity growth, and make the United States less competitive internationally. The end result would be lower U.S. employment and real wage growth.'"
That's some pretty heavy artillery. Becker, Buchanan, Mundel, Friedman, Prescott... if those guys agree on something, there's probably fire behind the smoke.
It's no surprise to hear that from Friedman, but some of the others on that list aren't so consistantly against government involvement in the economy. Here is the statement itself, with a list of the folks who signed it. There are a few names I recognize, but the noticable thing is these guys are from all over.
Quote of the letter itself, since it's likely to get/.ed.:
To whom it may concern:
We, the undersigned, strongly oppose key aspects of the economic agenda that John Kerry has offered in his bid for the U.S. presidency.
John Kerry says he "is committed to balancing the budget," but he has proposed additional spending that some analysts have estimated could cost as much as $226.1 billion annually ($2.261 trillion over ten years). He promises to "end corporate welfare as we know it" by implementing the "McCain-Kerry commission on corporate welfare," but he also proposes to provide additional "tax credits and subsidies to manufacturers" that meet his criteria.
Entitlement reform is the most important fiscal challenge facing the country, yet Kerry's approach has been to deny that any fix is needed. Indeed, Kerry criticized the recent Medicare expansion for not being large enough.
John Kerry has proposed tax increases that threaten to sap the economy's vitality and reduce long-term growth. Specifically, Kerry proposes to "restore the top two [income] tax rates to their levels under President Clinton." He would also, among other things, "restore the capital gains and dividend rates for families making over $200,000 on income earned above $200,000 to their levels under President Clinton." Kerry's stated desire to balance the budget and to boost federal spending substantially would almost certainly require far higher and broader tax increases than he has proposed.
John Kerry boasts that his economic policies will lead to the creation of 10 million jobs in his first term as president. As Martin Sullivan wrote last April in the strictly non-partisan Tax Notes, no one "has presented any analysis to relate the Kerry plan to the creation of 1 million jobs, much less 10 million jobs." In fact, we believe Kerry's proposals would, over time, inhibit capital formation, depress productivity growth, and make the United States less competitive internationally. The end result would be lower U.S. employment and real wage growth.
John Kerry has expressed a general reluctance to reduce trade barriers. He has promised, if elected, to "review existing trade agreements." He vows not to "sign any new trade agreements until the review is complete and its recommendations [are] put in place." That's a prescription for political gridlock. Given the widespread benefits of unfettered trade, Kerry's trade policies would harm U.S. producers and consumers alike.
All in all, John Kerry favors economic policies that, if implemented, would lead to bigger and more intrusive government and a lower standard of living for the American people.
Note : Affiliations are provided for identification purposes only. The organizations listed below should in no way be considered as endorsing the views of the individual.
... Intel says they are going to rely on approaches besides faster clock speed to improve the performance of chips.
About stinkin' time. How much of the typical users' workload is CPU-bound? Let's work on some of the other parts, like through-put to RAM and to disks.
... stop thinking of it as a full-feature camera being shoe-horned into a product and start thinking of it as the equivalent of those disposable cameras... only without having to buy anything...
Well, if the camera adds one ounce to the weight (could be low) and adds a measly $2.00 to the manufacturer's cost (I'm sure that's low) and sucks half an hour from the battery life, then I pay about $8 extra for a heavier, fatter box with shorter battery life. That's not free.
I guess there must be something wrong with me: I've never needed a crappy camera at work, and rarely needed one anywhere else, for that matter. I have three decent cameras, one mid-range digital and two older prosumer SLRs, and I use them quite a bit, so it isn't just a matter of not having the photo bug.
A usable digital camera has let me experiment with composition far more freely than I could afford to with film, but other than that, it really hasn't changed my life. I can't imagine that I'd ever willingly spend $5 extra to get a crappy digital in my walkman, of all places.
I guess the bright side of this is that not having a camera is a feature for me, and I bet I'll pay less for that extra feature.
I don't see a browser plugin doing a good job of it.
I could imagine EULAs having a ``metafield'' which would have values like: GPL, BSD, Unknown Proprietary, Not Specified. You could set your browser to click through known, approved licenses. I'm not sure that would be valuable, though; those that are generally known and widely regarded as innocuous are the ones that don't usually hassle you in the first place.
I'd rather see some effort put into enforcing the first sale doctrine, and invalidating EULAs and clickthroughs in court, myself.
If you believe in global warming, or if you don't, you need to read this page. There are problems with the data analysis that is used to justify the Chicken Little scenarios. This paper documents them.
Some of the biology is outside my field, but the parts which I can follow (the statistical arguments) seem well done.
Some of this work has been published in Energy and Environment. Interestingly, after a ``revise and resubmit'' at Nature, Nature turned them down, saying the subject was ``too technical''. The referee reports suggest that it may yet make it into that journal.
Where I lived, a return to the long-term global average temperature (about 5C warmer than now) would be great. It might turn North Africa into a greenbelt again, too, just like it used to be. That would really help with the famines there! I know change is rough on everyone, but the poor dirt farmers would be a lot better off with an extra growing season. I really think that global warming is just too good to be true.
How much CO2 did Mt. St. Helens vent last eruption? How does that compare to the CO2 from power generation? This link claims that human CO2 inputs are at least an order of magnitude smaller than the natural output of CO2, and that that tips the balance towards increasing CO2 levels.
I really don't believe that idea, but just in case there is something to it, I say: go burn something. I'm sick of shivering!
Why are the majority of these new anti-terrorism laws targeting American citizens?
It's all about control, in two senses: they're desparate to control everyone, and they can only tighten the screws on those of us they already have some control over. So, today they turn the U.S. into a police state, tomorrow the world.
If there is a fulltime sysadmin to set it up and keep it going, there is no reason not to have a Unix desktop, and it might as well be Linux. The few must-have applications that are Windows only can be run from a Windows server in the basement. I've seen that done, and it worked.
At home, where there isn't a system administrator to take responsibility for everything, something like OSX might make more sense for some people. For a business large enough to have that fulltime system administrator, it seems hard to justify not going with Linux.
In Alaska, we vote on bubble sheets. Fill in the oval next to the candidate you want (or dislike least). A machine reads the ballots and counts the votes, giving the instant, error-free [1] readout everyone says they want, and the bubblesheets are still there, to be audited at leisure. It seems like the best of both worlds.
It should be error-free, but, in our local election last week, the machines somehow managed to count 11 more ballots than were cast. That's where the paper ballots come in: they're human readable, and humans are auditing and handcounting them right now.
The shell vulnerability only allows code execution as the user viewing the malicious web site. Aren't you glad your shell is web-enabled?
Aren't you glad you need admin privileges for day-to-day operations on too many windows boxes?
Aren't you glad that even if you can get by without admin privileges, you can still completely hose your own files just be visiting the wrong website? Aren't you glad the only files that you can infect are the only files that you really care about?
You bet I'm glad my shell is web-enabled! After all, this Windows box belongs to my employer... its his time that will be wasted.
It's from Sony, so of course it has nasty DRM. The question is: how nasty? As long as we can burn our own stuff to it, and distribute that, then it could be useful to me, and a whole lot of other people.
Sending friends and family home movies on a DVD is going to be great for the folks who like that sort of thing. As long as these are ``real DVDs'', not some crippled substitute, they'll be great.
For the slightly longer term... there are garage bands today, and maybe someday there will be garage movie producers. Another ten years of Moore's law will make something like Toy Story possible on a few desktop PCs. I'm really looking forward to that.
so instead the "enemy" sells the "infringed" patents to a shell company (*cough: IP company) that itself makes no use of any patents Novell has.
That accomplishes nothing. Novell enforces the patents against the infringer; that's their only choice, in any event. So, the shell company presses its suit, Novell defends itself in court and launches a separate suit, alleging patent infringement, against the infringing parent company which is behind it all. The outcome is indistinguishable from the situation in which there is no shell company created.
That's not GM posing a threat, that's patent law and patent enforcement getting out of hand again.
Yep. Until we get the patent laws fixed, GM plants carry that very real threat. It's not the plant's fault, and not the fault of the techniques which created it, but the threat is no less real for all that, and it definitely goes with the plant..
GM plants would be great, except for the threat they pose to farmers. That link takes you to a site about a farmer who could lose his farm because Monsanto carelessly allowed their patented GM canola to contaminate his fields.
Monsanto's GM canola has also crossbred with Canadian canola strains, making it impossible for Canadian farmers to guarentee that their canola crops are GM free, thus locking them out of the EU markets. Now, they want to do the same thing with wheat.
Leaving aside the fears and marketability problems surrounding GM plants, we still have the problem that patented plants are a huge threat to farmers. You can get in big, expensive trouble if you didn't license the genes that are growing in your field, even if you didn't plant them. If you save your own seed, and that seed gets contaminated by someone's patented, GM genes, you could loose a lifetime of work.
I used to religously read computer shopper, just for Don Lancaster'shardware hacker column. That's where I learned about Postscript programming. [Those last two links are to PDFs.]
Slashdot Mirror
Hard science hasn't caught on, so hard science programming won't either, though programming labled hard science might, if it wasn't hard or science.
Get out of the office I can believe. Still get work done? I doubt it. Unless ``work'' is just having a good time together, it just isn't going to happen. Too many distractions, like the cars honking and zipping by, the smell from that cow orker who wouldn't have needed deodorant if you weren't all sweating in the hot sun, and on and on.
This sounds like a silly, expensive gimmick, so I'm not surprised to hear a business is buying one. Let me guess: it's a fair-sized corp, and the purchaser has pointy hair?
Or maybe a message to all users on the machine? Since it's not just the installing user's stuff that will be exposed by MS's idiotic security settings which assume that all machines are single user.
First of all, most Windows PCs are single-user.
Second, this just lets any user find anything that he has read permission on. As usual, Windows default settings are suitable only for single-user machines.
Third, it could only be ``spyware'' if it phoned home. Even the silly article didn't suggest that it does that.li>
Just another sensationalist /. headline. Nothing to see here ....
Sorry, that's too wrong to let pass. In a Democracy, the government is controlled by the demagogues, the few who are able to get the many riled up. In a constitutional republic, such as the U.S. used to be, the government was controlled by the honest elected representatives, who were in turn controlled by the constitution (that's why I specified ``honest''). In a modern ``democracy'', the government is controlled by the apparatchiks, the people who are permanently part of the system, as the politicians and demagogues come and go. In the U.S. we call them bureaucrats. In every form of government, the government is the people who staff it. Only in an anarchy could your statement be accurate.
That's true, even as ``just as many rights'' asymptotically approaches zero. Therefore, I'd say it's irrelevant.
If good government was less government, we would have never developed the modern state.
The second phrase doesn't follow from the first. You seem to have assumed that ``modern state'' equates to ``good government'', or that the change in our government has been for the better during the last 100 years. Neither assumption seems defensable to me.
Good government is good government, size is irrelevant.
Again, too wrong to allow to pass unchallenged. Good government is unknown, a myth. All government eventually becomes bad government, though the better examples of government can be better than no government. Lord Acton said it best: ``Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.'' Small government, with little power, has little scope for the inevitable corruption and malfeasance. Every government will sooner or later go sour. It happened in Rome, and it is happening here. The difference between Rome and here is that (so far) we have enough social and legal checks in place to constrain the powermad[1]. Those legal and social restraints are definitely wearing thin.
[1] The powermad are mostly good, conscientious people, who have been given a job, like searching little old ladies at airports or looking for assets to steal for the government. Being good, conscientious people, they work hard to accomplish their allotted task, and they are tireless in asking for additional resources to do it better. If their task is destructive of a free society, we have an example of bad government, despite their good intentions and personal honesty.
We don't often think of governments cooperating, but the one thing that is a bigger threat than another government is freedom. Anyone's freedom, anywhere, is a threat to the idea that nobody can be free anywhere.
You bet they're going to gang up on the internet. The more effectively the internet routes around damage, the more effectively they'll damage it, for their own survival.
That's some pretty heavy artillery. Becker, Buchanan, Mundel, Friedman, Prescott ... if those guys agree on something, there's probably fire behind the smoke.
It's no surprise to hear that from Friedman, but some of the others on that list aren't so consistantly against government involvement in the economy. Here is the statement itself, with a list of the folks who signed it. There are a few names I recognize, but the noticable thing is these guys are from all over.
Quote of the letter itself, since it's likely to get /.ed.:
About stinkin' time. How much of the typical users' workload is CPU-bound? Let's work on some of the other parts, like through-put to RAM and to disks.
Well, if the camera adds one ounce to the weight (could be low) and adds a measly $2.00 to the manufacturer's cost (I'm sure that's low) and sucks half an hour from the battery life, then I pay about $8 extra for a heavier, fatter box with shorter battery life. That's not free.
I guess there must be something wrong with me: I've never needed a crappy camera at work, and rarely needed one anywhere else, for that matter. I have three decent cameras, one mid-range digital and two older prosumer SLRs, and I use them quite a bit, so it isn't just a matter of not having the photo bug.
A usable digital camera has let me experiment with composition far more freely than I could afford to with film, but other than that, it really hasn't changed my life. I can't imagine that I'd ever willingly spend $5 extra to get a crappy digital in my walkman, of all places.
I guess the bright side of this is that not having a camera is a feature for me, and I bet I'll pay less for that extra feature.
It makes less sense than a coffee mill in your gun stock.
Oh, well, I suppose it doesn't hurt the battery life much, if they can still claim 8 hours.
I could imagine EULAs having a ``metafield'' which would have values like: GPL, BSD, Unknown Proprietary, Not Specified. You could set your browser to click through known, approved licenses. I'm not sure that would be valuable, though; those that are generally known and widely regarded as innocuous are the ones that don't usually hassle you in the first place.
I'd rather see some effort put into enforcing the first sale doctrine, and invalidating EULAs and clickthroughs in court, myself.
Some of the biology is outside my field, but the parts which I can follow (the statistical arguments) seem well done.
Some of this work has been published in Energy and Environment. Interestingly, after a ``revise and resubmit'' at Nature, Nature turned them down, saying the subject was ``too technical''. The referee reports suggest that it may yet make it into that journal.
Where I lived, a return to the long-term global average temperature (about 5C warmer than now) would be great. It might turn North Africa into a greenbelt again, too, just like it used to be. That would really help with the famines there! I know change is rough on everyone, but the poor dirt farmers would be a lot better off with an extra growing season. I really think that global warming is just too good to be true.
How much CO2 did Mt. St. Helens vent last eruption? How does that compare to the CO2 from power generation? This link claims that human CO2 inputs are at least an order of magnitude smaller than the natural output of CO2, and that that tips the balance towards increasing CO2 levels.
I really don't believe that idea, but just in case there is something to it, I say: go burn something. I'm sick of shivering!
It's all about control, in two senses: they're desparate to control everyone, and they can only tighten the screws on those of us they already have some control over. So, today they turn the U.S. into a police state, tomorrow the world.
At home, where there isn't a system administrator to take responsibility for everything, something like OSX might make more sense for some people. For a business large enough to have that fulltime system administrator, it seems hard to justify not going with Linux.
If we're going to have election/political reform, I think making that a ballot option would be a great start.
If you're not in a swing state, vote for any third party candidate.
Sure it wasn't Stef Murkey?
It should be error-free, but, in our local election last week, the machines somehow managed to count 11 more ballots than were cast. That's where the paper ballots come in: they're human readable, and humans are auditing and handcounting them right now.
It's not enough to write de fencepost, ya gotta drive it through de heart of da monster. An' I t'ink it gotta be a wooden fencepost.
Aren't you glad you need admin privileges for day-to-day operations on too many windows boxes?
Aren't you glad that even if you can get by without admin privileges, you can still completely hose your own files just be visiting the wrong website? Aren't you glad the only files that you can infect are the only files that you really care about?
You bet I'm glad my shell is web-enabled! After all, this Windows box belongs to my employer ... its his time that will be wasted.
Sending friends and family home movies on a DVD is going to be great for the folks who like that sort of thing. As long as these are ``real DVDs'', not some crippled substitute, they'll be great.
For the slightly longer term ... there are garage bands today, and maybe someday there will be garage movie producers. Another ten years of Moore's law will make something like Toy Story possible on a few desktop PCs. I'm really looking forward to that.
That accomplishes nothing. Novell enforces the patents against the infringer; that's their only choice, in any event. So, the shell company presses its suit, Novell defends itself in court and launches a separate suit, alleging patent infringement, against the infringing parent company which is behind it all. The outcome is indistinguishable from the situation in which there is no shell company created.
Yep. Until we get the patent laws fixed, GM plants carry that very real threat. It's not the plant's fault, and not the fault of the techniques which created it, but the threat is no less real for all that, and it definitely goes with the plant..
Monsanto's GM canola has also crossbred with Canadian canola strains, making it impossible for Canadian farmers to guarentee that their canola crops are GM free, thus locking them out of the EU markets. Now, they want to do the same thing with wheat.
Leaving aside the fears and marketability problems surrounding GM plants, we still have the problem that patented plants are a huge threat to farmers. You can get in big, expensive trouble if you didn't license the genes that are growing in your field, even if you didn't plant them. If you save your own seed, and that seed gets contaminated by someone's patented, GM genes, you could loose a lifetime of work.
I used to religously read computer shopper, just for Don Lancaster's hardware hacker column. That's where I learned about Postscript programming. [Those last two links are to PDFs.]