Oh come now. I will point to this link instead of retyping the same data, but this is all well known now. I've seen the Glaspie tape, and leaving it out of your previous chronology was either a mistake or biased apologism on your part.
Your case would be stronger if you included the data that does not perfectly fit your views. You sound like you are just parroting the American Spectator.
The US goverment purposely demonized Reagan's former bosom-buddy Saddam Hussein (which was easy, he's pretty demonic after all) and refused to allow him any options that would preserve his sovereignty and also prevent American invasion. He's just a ugly, pathetic little whipping boy for the US like Noriega was; so, what purpose does toying with him serve?
I continue to believe that US attacks on Iraq are driven by economic and political issues in the USA. You haven't shown me any explanations that are more likely.
The US will make whatever moves guarantee maximum profitability for the President and his cronies. Papers and treaties mean nothing to Bush, and there was never any chance that a declaration from Iraq would be accepted by the US.
However, neither of us has any proveable claim to infallibility, so this is just "he says, she says" and not worth either of us debating further.
That's what we call ad-hominem attack, Misty. I had thought you were a bit more resourceful than that! How disappointing.
The principle of parsimony states that the simplest answer that fits observed data is most likely to be correct. You propose exquisitely baroque explanations for situations more easily accounted for by simple human greed and bigotry - characteristics frequently displayed by the Bush presidents, purveyors of "crusades" and "voodoo economics".
Dr. Malthus said war is a result of population and economic pressures. You disagree?
As for cites, sorry, I don't believe popular news articles are based on rigorous research. Here's a few papers you might want to read, though:
* Price of Oil and Conflict in OPEC, by Ali M. Reza, 1984
* Historical Causes of Postwar Oil Shocks and Recessions, by James D. Hamilton, 1985
Or, you could simply look at the US Government's tracking of oil prices (unfortunately, the data tend to split at 1990/1991 so you might have to do a little math to resolve any graph rescaling across page breaks) and see that the US President and his confidantes have been in an excellent position to predict global oil futures during our periodic anti-iraqi frenzies.
How do US attempts to destabilize the legitimate government of Venezuala fit in with the theory of market manipulation by the President? Quite nicely, thank you.
I'm "just making stuff up" you say. Right, I suppose I am making up the price I pay at the pump, hmmm? I must be hallucinating the rise in oil prices that has preceded each American invasion of Iraq. I suppose buying my Prius was a stupid idea, I should have bought some gas-guzzling Detroit iron and counted on Smilin' George Bush to keep those gas prices low!
Incidentally, this is not to defend Iraq, but I don't think the US Government has ever produced a 12,000 page document that was both complete and correct.
I mean, seriously, the documentation is another straw man. It's not worth your time, and nobody really cares one way or another about it except possibly the inspection team members themselves.
No major player has substantially switched their position based on that document, and there was no realistic expectation that anyone would.
At this point, unless God himself rides down from the heavens on a shining chariot and strikes George Bush on the forehead with a thunderbolt, the US policy is "war, red war we'll give 'em".
You left out the part where US Ambassador April Glaspie gave Saddam Hussein the green light to attack the nasty little slave-trafficking dictatorship of Kuwait. Kind of a key moment I think.
You left out Bush's refusal of Iraq and Russia's peace offers, too, but that's not quite as bad.
The gulf war was about removing Hussein's army from Kuwait. That was all that was authorized by the UN.
No, the Gulf War was about using the military to artificially manipulate the price of domestic oil.
It is vitally important to the current regime that US citizens believe the war is to "keep the oil flowing" or "keep the cost of oil down". Joe Sixpack is perfectly willing to have a lot of brown people in a foreign country die for cheap gas, and the administration cannot be unaware of this.
However, the obvious and demonstrable result of attacking Iraq is higher profits for US oil companies due to greatly increased market value of their product. Attack Iraq -> Gas costs more -> Texans make more money. This isn't theory, it's a historical fact.
Both President Bushes have demonstrated a willingness to sacrifice the economic well-being of the US citizenry by enacting what the elder Bush called "Voodoo Economics"; purposely driving portions of the middle class into poverty in order to further the social agendas of the ultra-rich.
Sir William of Occam thus concludes that they are most likely quite willing to drive up the price of oil by fleecing the American consumer, even if it means killing a bunch of heathens far away.
$200 per hamburger is a vegan fantasy derived from bogus mathematics and wishful thinking.
Calculating the cost of hamburger on the price of non-existent wood is ludicrous. The land has been cleared, there is no wood there to harvest. The cattle are there, they are available to market.
The figures you cite could be valid in a single specialized context - that is, when a decision must be made whether or not to clear-cut a rainforest that is accessible to sustainable logging practioners. In that context, that's great - I don't want anybody to cut down rainforests, and we certainly can create grazing land without cutting forest (especially if we stop farming European cattle in inappropriate environments like the American west, and switch to locally adapted species like bison. Mmmm, bison-burgers).
To relate this back to the original subject, the hog farmers already exist, and they aren't going to go away just because you don't like them. The US economy is going to ensure that they stay around for the forseeable future - US shoppers like their pork chops and bacon, and they like them cheap.
There is no downside to recovering some of our pork production waste, and there is a considerable social benefit to making this recovery profitable - not just because of the obvious boon to biodiesel production (and corresponding decreases in air pollution and foreign warmongering that might ensue) but because the hog farmers that can sell their waste products will be able to sell pork cheaper, and thus the free market will push all hog farmers to manage their waste streams better.
Your objections seem like pure contrarianism. You cast aspersions on a good thing because it's not the thing you consider the best possible - even though your best possible thing is not achievable.
How much energy and resources does it take to do the conversion? Has that been factored in?
Less energy than it takes to effectively manage the waste through any other means. Seriously, the pig farmers aren't doing this because they are dancing california flower-child wannabees. They are doing it because they have a serious waste disposal problem, that is costing them titanic amounts of money, and this is a way to sell the nastiest, most volatile fraction of their waste products.
You can rant about industrialized meat all you want, but as long as an ever-increasing number of humans want to eat meat, somebody will step up to produce that meat as cheaply as possible. That's how the capitalist system works, when it does work. Managing the waste of that industry with less harmful pollution and less discarded resources is an admirable thing, as is helping to make the US more energy-efficient.
But there are creationists that believe in the theory of evolution by natural selection; when I worked in Natural Science (been almost a decade since I was writing taxonomic database management code, I admit) there were plenty of knowledgeable scientists who believe in both divine creation and evolution.
Some of them were even Christians, although mainstream Christian beliefs are pretty rare among evolutionists. Most scientists don't like the paradoxes engendered by trying to resolve observed reality with the biblical creation fables.
Pretty awful article, really.
on
Evolution in Action
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I guess it does hit the important point, that the York Groundsel has been identified as a species. But other than that, it's a pretty sloppy piece of science reporting.
For example,
the first new species to have been naturally created in Britain for more than 50 years.
Yeah, right. There are probably dozens if not thousands more; the only way to prove this statement is to catalog every single living organism in Britain. It may be the first new species known to have been created by unintentional hybridisation.
The discovery of the York groundsel shows that species are created as well as made extinct, and that Charles Darwin was right and the Creationists are wrong.
It shows nothing of the sort. There are many flavors of creationism, and some believe that creation is ongoing through divinely ordained natural processes such as hybridisation. Further, Charles Darwin believed that women were mentally inferior to men - how exactly does this new plant species prove or disprove that part of his belief system?
The creation of new species can takes thousands of years, making it too slow for science to detect.
No, new species typically are created in a single breeding cycle. Think about it, does the first member of a new species stay in the womb for millenia? The generally accepted doctrine of "Punk Eke" or punctuated equilibrium (for which the late S.J. Gould can claim half of the credit) states that species evolve in rapid bursts due to strong environmental pressures such as geologic upheavals, overpopulation, human destructiveness, population isolation or mass extinction events, etc. etc. etc.. This bit about "creation of new species taking thousands of years" is straight out of Darwin, and it's one of the things that this discovery could be said to disprove.
Hybrids are normally sterile, and cannot breed and die out.
No, hybrids are often sterile, and many of those that are not often de-hybridise and revert to parent forms in the wild. Nonetheless, fertile hybrids abound.
Most "scientific" articles written for non-scientists sacrifice some precision for accessibility. But this article has more false statements than real information, by a rather large margin.
I use DNS as a locator service all the time. For example, if I wanted to find General Motors, I'd type "gm.com" in mozilla... wait a sec, I'll spawn a new tab and try it... Hey, worked like a charm!
Nearly instantly I found what I was looking for - it was slightly slow because they seem to have a flash front-end. Most of the time I can find what I want this way. If I want BIND or DHCP, I know those come from Vixie and Lemon over at ISC, and I know ISC is not a conventional profit-making organization, so I type "isc.org"... hey, that worked too!
Let's try something more generic - I'll look for a new job at "jobs.net" - well, they threw a cookie at me, but now I'm on a global job search network. On the rare occasions that this doesn't work, or if I want more options, I schlep on over to Google (or search.com probably works too) and do a more thorough lookup.
I know that's not directly addressing your concerns, but it does point out that DNS is a better "real world" locator than you believe.
If I had done those lookups without the.com,.net,.org bits on the end, would there have been more requests made or more bandwidth spent? No. But there would have been a smaller, faster response from the root nameservers, because gm.org and gm.net are being squatted, and thus there are two useless and space-wasting entries in the root tables.
The economics of running high-bandwidth sites will always ensure that lower-level names like *.net.dhis.org are cheap (free, actually in that example) and TLDs are expensive. This alone will prevent the total flattening of the name space.
Not that I think flattening the DNS namespace would necessarily mean the end of the world as we know it, I just don't think it would happen.
Eventually, we'll probably wind up with a system where a certifying authority (not necessarily centralized, it could be a "web of trust") accredits TLD servers through the use of DNSSEC (signed zones) and TSIG (signed DNS requests) or some similar crypto tech. But that's not going to happen right away because DNS goes all the way down to individual client boxes, representing a titanic installed base of technology that we have to support for the forseeable future.
Agreed. All the technical issues are solveable, and in fact have been solved at some level; and the namespace would not significantly change in size regardless of structure (unless it shrinks majorly, as name-squatting becomes far less profitable).
The problems are non-technical. One is the FUD being spread about the technical issues (I am *really* tired of hearing all this nonsense about a supposed technical need for artificially scarce namespace) and another is the problem of rule creation and enforcement.
ICANN and the Department of Commerce control the rule-making and enforcement process (by holding the root nameservers hostage). It seems that they will not allow a better system to evolve.
Internet users' best bet is probably to end-run ICANN. Just as we can use samba and samba-tng to defeat Microsoft's attempt to dominate our networks, we can use OpenNIC and friends to obviate ICANN.
PS: I included the definition of obviate because I got savaged for using it in a post once. I can use the most arcane networking terms imaginable and nobody complains, but use a slightly offbeat non-technical word and everyone's suddenly too busy flaming me to look it up.;^>
Why would anyone want to register a second-level domain when they can register a top-level one?
You're missing the point. People with top-level domains should run the name services for that domain.
This restricts the availability to those technically capable of performing the role, or rich enough to pay for both technically capable people and high-bandwith links.
A TLD that was run incompetently or which had insufficent pipes would not get used. Problem solved by the economists' "invisible hand".
DNS is there to provide alphanumeric labels to Internet hosts, **NOT** to link company names and trade marks to web sites.
I am old enough to remember the implementation of DNS - before that we used/etc/hosts, downloaded daily from RS.INTERNIC.NET - and I can assure you that "DNS is there" to solve a bandwidth problem, and your belief is revisionist history at best. DNS is designed to be an extensible and multi-functional lookup service, and was never intended to be limited to a single record type.
You are correct that this is the biggest problem with socially responsible naming systems; greed drives humans to sociopathic actions.
Some say that this is good, and worship greed. They are typically very shallow people who lack inner peace. Think Donald Trump.
Some say this is bad, and that greedy people must be punished. They are typically even more shallow, and see all things as absolutes. Think Torquemada.
Some people just say "Hey, greed exists, and greedy people will always covet and accumulate power, so let's design a system so that each greedy individual's actions will serve the community as a whole". Since that is where's I'm coming from, obviously these people are correct!:^P
Eventually, the cost of maintaining spaces like pepsi.com and pepsi.org will outstrip any profit garnered from their existence, because it will be more cost-effective to advertise http://pepsi rather than the others and people will get used to it.
However, in the short run you are right. They won't give up their redundant names for decades unless forced to.
Any suggestions for a solution? The obvious one is to cut a deal - tell 'em they can't have any other names with "pepsi" in them if they want.pepsi, and arrange for a few years of forwarding. But that solution means the creation of another powerbroker like ICANN to enforce these rules... then we're back to square one.
I personally would be willing to put up with the short-term problems for the long-term good... but what I do now is encourage people to use OpenNIC. If we all use OpenNic, ICANN's power-trip becomes unimportant.
Errr... But how would you find the IP address of PepsiCo's nameserver? This sounds like a boot strapping problem.
Excellent question! The current method entails pre-seeding each DNS server with a copy of named.root which is available from hoary old RS.INTERNIC.NET, the site that used to distribute/etc/hosts back in my misspent youth. This will have to be maintained for the forseeable future in order to provide backwards compatibility.
But, if we free the namespace, we will greatly increase the number of root nameservers (a good thing) which will make the named.root file unmanageably long (at least at first, until things shake out) and very dynamic (a bad thing).
There are several solutions to this available using existing technology. A truly distributed, robust system (that doesn't eat bandwidth like Maddog drinks beer) is probably not attainable (yet), but system of meta-servers no less reliable than the current system, compatible with existing clients, would be fairly simple to engineer. Implementation would not be trivial, but it could be made to pay for itself - Ford Motor Company would probably just LOVE to be able to have an address of http://ford and they've got money (Well, they had money before the Bush economic miracle, anyway).
Take a look at the work the much-maligned AlterNic and more reputable OpenNic have done over the years - these people are proving that it *can* be done.
It's far less of an engineering problem than the ICANN would have you believe.
And while we're at it, let's just get rid of the useless www. as well... http://pepsi/ is the way to go!
Certainly, that's what wildcard DNS A records are for. Or at least that's how I use them... perhaps you haven't noticed that http://slashdot.org resolves just fine without any www?
We can even save us the slowlyness of the DNS, let's just distribute a file with all the name/IP mappings to anyone.
We do. It's called named.root and I always pick up a fresh copy by FTP when I'm configuring DNS servers.
You can't get away from the need to distribute the root nameserver hints with any of the software I'm familiar with. If we didn't distribute a file with the meta-server addresses how would we find them? Not by name, obviously; chickens and eggs come to mind.
What you're recommending is basically a flat DNS namespace, where 90% or more of the present-day DNS traffic is moved directly to the root servers.
No, I'm not. You are assuming that 90% of the current name-holders are willing and capable of running their own root TLDs, which is not the case.
Sure, zaibatsus like IBM and Coca-Cola will run their own, but they do not represent 90% of the present DNS traffic. Most people will still rent namespace from the registrars just as they do today. But the big bullies - the megacorps that have the bribe money and legal muscle to push the registrars around - will run their own TLDs.
The DNS today is crippled by the insistence that hierarchies of naming must reflect existing hierarchies of control. To put it another way, the intransigence of the US Department of Commerce and ICANN has prevented the DNS system from reaching its potential.
If they don't manage, this will be the first gTLD to go bankrupt. I guess that will put a damper on any plans to introduce more new TLDs.
Hopefully it will only put a damper on plans to introduce stupid TLDs that perpetuate the expensive stranglehold on naming that ICANN enjoys.
TLDs should be available to anyone who can run a secure, reliable root - this connects profit to performance, so we don't have to rely on the innate goodness of the root nameserver operators. The first thing that'd happen would be that pepsi.com, pepsi.net, and pepsi.org would be obsolete since.pepsi would be run by PepsiCo.
With the widespread popularity of search engines, nobody would have any trouble finding anything even if some temporary chaos were engendered.
Spare me the FUD about nameservices not scaling for this; I believe DNS and BIND are quite capable of it.
I'm confused on what your point is or if its any different than what I said:
It's a matter of emphasis. In your world, I suppose everything bad that happens is the fault of these awful liberal conspiracies. For you, I suspect phrases like "reverse discrimination" and "giving in to multiculturalism" and "liberal media" have some meaning.
But LIBERAL means open-minded or free-thinking. And CONSERVATIVE is related to CONSERVATION; it means one is unwilling to change things that already work. But that's only the dictionary definition, by those definitions one could easily be strongly in favor of both!
It seems that for most Americans CONSERVATIVE means "willing to go along with whatever radical agenda the wealthy plutocrats are currently backing" and LIBERAL means "willing to go along with whatever impractical scheme the bleeding heart do-gooders are currently preaching".
Both sides put up straw-men for you to fear and hate. Fearful, hateful people are easily manipulated.
First of all, whoever told you that "it takes more energy to manufacture one than they ever generate in their useful life" was incorrect.
Perhaps you should try to figure out if it is because that person needs education, or because (s)he has a vested interest in deceiving you.
Second, the point of solar panels is not always lifetime efficiency anyway, it is often control of power generation by the person(s) needing the power - intelligent people act to secure the resources they need to survive, and the power grid (in California, at least) is not reliable and cannot be secured by consumers.
There is a wealth of data available online from the IPP and Sandia that will refute your claim. Or you could directly contact a vendor such as Siemens (German) or AstroPower (Delaware, USA).
The proposed tax is simply the latest move in the long-running war between the centralised dirty energy producers (championed by GWB and Cheney, among others) and the promoters of distributed clean renewable energy production (a grassroots movement championed principally by the Home Power crew).
This war is primarily being fought in and around California; mostly because of the high availability of sunshine and engineering talent in that area. The recent fake energy crisis that the Enron crowd purposely created was the most effective offensive in the same war so far.
Hopefully, the decentralized nature of grassroots opposition will prevent the current administration's attempt to crush distributed renewable energy producers. The "Solar Guerilla" movement was started for just this reason.
#1) Your 20/20 hindsight is not useful. Live in the now.
#2) He didn't contact slashdot, as far as I can see; rather, somebody at/. picked up on his cry for help and presented it to the community, because wider exposure may lead to resolution - or to put it another way, "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow".
Incidentally, I too have failed to get Linux running on a disk-on-chip. I was trying it in my basement on salvaged equipment, and eventually I shelved the project after a few weeks of frustration.
I suspect the ltsp guys might be the most accessible experts on this. I'm going to forward the link to them...
But thank you for your information which will likely confuse many admins and get them thinking about LDAP in the wrong way.
If you actually read the two posts preceding your own, you might notice that the question was"but.. what is openldap?"
Despite what you seem to think, the question was NOT"but.. what is LDAP?"
OpenLDAP is a software suite composed of clients and servers that use the LDAP protocol. As I said. Your comments pertain to LDAP, which is not what the previous poster was asking about!
But thank you for your display of illiteracy and fatheadedness.
It's a client and server suite that uses the LDAP protocol to talk to a simple database (typically the Berkeley DB) which is usually used to hold user identification and authentication data.
It's intended to be OS-independent free software, but it reportedly runs best on linux at this time.
LDAP stands for Lightweight Directory Access Protocol which is a IETF standard for accessing data stored in a hierarchical directory structure such as that used by Microsoft's Active Directory, Novell's Netware Directory Services, and X.500.
X.500 was an ambitious attempt to create a network-accessible data store that would hold all possible data pertaining to humanity in a hierarchical format. The original DAP protocol the X.500 droogies developed was too big and unwieldy, and posited X.500 as the directory. LDAP was born to serve the functions people actually need in real life, and is a trimmed-down version of the original X.500 DAP that is actually useable by people in the trenches.
Modules are available to integrate LDAP into most user authentication schemes. Google for nss_ldap, pam_ldap, pGina, that sort of thing. Sendmail can use ldap, as can ssh, and OpenLDAP readily integrates with Kerberos and TLS for state-of-the-art security.
OpenLDAP itself doesn't actually do the things you mentioned. It uses whatever backend you select (such as Sleepycat) to store the data, and you need pams or nss_switches or the equivalent to authenticate users. OpenLDAP just provides the protocol glue to bind such LDAP-capable gadgets to the backend database of your choice.
You still have to build the database the old-fashioned way, unless your end-users have plugs in their heads and you can suck their ID information directly out of their brains.
You just inadvertently proved the first guy's point by giving him bad and incomplete advice from Google.
Don't use tools that default to LDAP v2, use v3 only.
Never bulkload with ldapxxxx tools, they are too slow and may run into server limitations on how many LDAP operations can be performed per client connection.
ldif2db and friends are derived from the umich distribution and have been superseded by the slapxxx family of tools. The IBM code fork may still use ldifxxx tools, though, and there are no doubt others in the Sun, HP and Netscape code forks. I recommend not using any of these with linux, use current OpenLDAP. Use Sun and HP tools only on those systems and don't use Netscape LDAP stuff at all if you can avoid it.
Don't use Microsoft or Novell LDAP tools on other platforms either, unless you can't avoid it. You should definitely use their native utilities if you must support AD and NDS, but try to keep from getting strangled by their "embrace and extend" philosophy. NDS is better than AD if you have to choose.
Use the current OpenLDAP doco, such as it is, and experiment, experiment, experiment. That's the ticket.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh come now. I will point to this link instead of retyping the same data, but this is all well known now. I've seen the Glaspie tape, and leaving it out of your previous chronology was either a mistake or biased apologism on your part.
Your case would be stronger if you included the data that does not perfectly fit your views. You sound like you are just parroting the American Spectator.
The US goverment purposely demonized Reagan's former bosom-buddy Saddam Hussein (which was easy, he's pretty demonic after all) and refused to allow him any options that would preserve his sovereignty and also prevent American invasion. He's just a ugly, pathetic little whipping boy for the US like Noriega was; so, what purpose does toying with him serve?
I continue to believe that US attacks on Iraq are driven by economic and political issues in the USA. You haven't shown me any explanations that are more likely.
I disagree.
The US will make whatever moves guarantee maximum profitability for the President and his cronies. Papers and treaties mean nothing to Bush, and there was never any chance that a declaration from Iraq would be accepted by the US.
However, neither of us has any proveable claim to infallibility, so this is just "he says, she says" and not worth either of us debating further.
That's what we call ad-hominem attack, Misty. I had thought you were a bit more resourceful than that! How disappointing.
The principle of parsimony states that the simplest answer that fits observed data is most likely to be correct. You propose exquisitely baroque explanations for situations more easily accounted for by simple human greed and bigotry - characteristics frequently displayed by the Bush presidents, purveyors of "crusades" and "voodoo economics".
Dr. Malthus said war is a result of population and economic pressures. You disagree?
As for cites, sorry, I don't believe popular news articles are based on rigorous research. Here's a few papers you might want to read, though:
* Price of Oil and Conflict in OPEC, by Ali M. Reza, 1984
* Historical Causes of Postwar Oil Shocks and Recessions, by James D. Hamilton, 1985
Or, you could simply look at the US Government's tracking of oil prices (unfortunately, the data tend to split at 1990/1991 so you might have to do a little math to resolve any graph rescaling across page breaks) and see that the US President and his confidantes have been in an excellent position to predict global oil futures during our periodic anti-iraqi frenzies.
How do US attempts to destabilize the legitimate government of Venezuala fit in with the theory of market manipulation by the President? Quite nicely, thank you.
I'm "just making stuff up" you say. Right, I suppose I am making up the price I pay at the pump, hmmm? I must be hallucinating the rise in oil prices that has preceded each American invasion of Iraq. I suppose buying my Prius was a stupid idea, I should have bought some gas-guzzling Detroit iron and counted on Smilin' George Bush to keep those gas prices low!
Incidentally, this is not to defend Iraq, but I don't think the US Government has ever produced a 12,000 page document that was both complete and correct.
I mean, seriously, the documentation is another straw man. It's not worth your time, and nobody really cares one way or another about it except possibly the inspection team members themselves.
No major player has substantially switched their position based on that document, and there was no realistic expectation that anyone would.
At this point, unless God himself rides down from the heavens on a shining chariot and strikes George Bush on the forehead with a thunderbolt, the US policy is "war, red war we'll give 'em".
You left out the part where US Ambassador April Glaspie gave Saddam Hussein the green light to attack the nasty little slave-trafficking dictatorship of Kuwait. Kind of a key moment I think.
You left out Bush's refusal of Iraq and Russia's peace offers, too, but that's not quite as bad.
It is vitally important to the current regime that US citizens believe the war is to "keep the oil flowing" or "keep the cost of oil down". Joe Sixpack is perfectly willing to have a lot of brown people in a foreign country die for cheap gas, and the administration cannot be unaware of this.
However, the obvious and demonstrable result of attacking Iraq is higher profits for US oil companies due to greatly increased market value of their product. Attack Iraq -> Gas costs more -> Texans make more money. This isn't theory, it's a historical fact.
Both President Bushes have demonstrated a willingness to sacrifice the economic well-being of the US citizenry by enacting what the elder Bush called "Voodoo Economics"; purposely driving portions of the middle class into poverty in order to further the social agendas of the ultra-rich.
Sir William of Occam thus concludes that they are most likely quite willing to drive up the price of oil by fleecing the American consumer, even if it means killing a bunch of heathens far away.
$200 per hamburger is a vegan fantasy derived from bogus mathematics and wishful thinking.
Calculating the cost of hamburger on the price of non-existent wood is ludicrous. The land has been cleared, there is no wood there to harvest. The cattle are there, they are available to market.
The figures you cite could be valid in a single specialized context - that is, when a decision must be made whether or not to clear-cut a rainforest that is accessible to sustainable logging practioners. In that context, that's great - I don't want anybody to cut down rainforests, and we certainly can create grazing land without cutting forest (especially if we stop farming European cattle in inappropriate environments like the American west, and switch to locally adapted species like bison. Mmmm, bison-burgers).
To relate this back to the original subject, the hog farmers already exist, and they aren't going to go away just because you don't like them. The US economy is going to ensure that they stay around for the forseeable future - US shoppers like their pork chops and bacon, and they like them cheap.
There is no downside to recovering some of our pork production waste, and there is a considerable social benefit to making this recovery profitable - not just because of the obvious boon to biodiesel production (and corresponding decreases in air pollution and foreign warmongering that might ensue) but because the hog farmers that can sell their waste products will be able to sell pork cheaper, and thus the free market will push all hog farmers to manage their waste streams better.
Your objections seem like pure contrarianism. You cast aspersions on a good thing because it's not the thing you consider the best possible - even though your best possible thing is not achievable.
See here, boy.
You can rant about industrialized meat all you want, but as long as an ever-increasing number of humans want to eat meat, somebody will step up to produce that meat as cheaply as possible. That's how the capitalist system works, when it does work. Managing the waste of that industry with less harmful pollution and less discarded resources is an admirable thing, as is helping to make the US more energy-efficient.
You are correct.
But there are creationists that believe in the theory of evolution by natural selection; when I worked in Natural Science (been almost a decade since I was writing taxonomic database management code, I admit) there were plenty of knowledgeable scientists who believe in both divine creation and evolution.
Some of them were even Christians, although mainstream Christian beliefs are pretty rare among evolutionists. Most scientists don't like the paradoxes engendered by trying to resolve observed reality with the biblical creation fables.
For example, Yeah, right. There are probably dozens if not thousands more; the only way to prove this statement is to catalog every single living organism in Britain. It may be the first new species known to have been created by unintentional hybridisation. It shows nothing of the sort. There are many flavors of creationism, and some believe that creation is ongoing through divinely ordained natural processes such as hybridisation. Further, Charles Darwin believed that women were mentally inferior to men - how exactly does this new plant species prove or disprove that part of his belief system? No, new species typically are created in a single breeding cycle. Think about it, does the first member of a new species stay in the womb for millenia? The generally accepted doctrine of "Punk Eke" or punctuated equilibrium (for which the late S.J. Gould can claim half of the credit) states that species evolve in rapid bursts due to strong environmental pressures such as geologic upheavals, overpopulation, human destructiveness, population isolation or mass extinction events, etc. etc. etc.. This bit about "creation of new species taking thousands of years" is straight out of Darwin, and it's one of the things that this discovery could be said to disprove.
No, hybrids are often sterile, and many of those that are not often de-hybridise and revert to parent forms in the wild. Nonetheless, fertile hybrids abound.
Most "scientific" articles written for non-scientists sacrifice some precision for accessibility. But this article has more false statements than real information, by a rather large margin.
I use DNS as a locator service all the time. For example, if I wanted to find General Motors, I'd type "gm.com" in mozilla... wait a sec, I'll spawn a new tab and try it... Hey, worked like a charm!
.com, .net, .org bits on the end, would there have been more requests made or more bandwidth spent? No. But there would have been a smaller, faster response from the root nameservers, because gm.org and gm.net are being squatted, and thus there are two useless and space-wasting entries in the root tables.
Nearly instantly I found what I was looking for - it was slightly slow because they seem to have a flash front-end. Most of the time I can find what I want this way. If I want BIND or DHCP, I know those come from Vixie and Lemon over at ISC, and I know ISC is not a conventional profit-making organization, so I type "isc.org"... hey, that worked too!
Let's try something more generic - I'll look for a new job at "jobs.net" - well, they threw a cookie at me, but now I'm on a global job search network. On the rare occasions that this doesn't work, or if I want more options, I schlep on over to Google (or search.com probably works too) and do a more thorough lookup.
I know that's not directly addressing your concerns, but it does point out that DNS is a better "real world" locator than you believe.
If I had done those lookups without the
The economics of running high-bandwidth sites will always ensure that lower-level names like *.net.dhis.org are cheap (free, actually in that example) and TLDs are expensive. This alone will prevent the total flattening of the name space.
Not that I think flattening the DNS namespace would necessarily mean the end of the world as we know it, I just don't think it would happen.
Eventually, we'll probably wind up with a system where a certifying authority (not necessarily centralized, it could be a "web of trust") accredits TLD servers through the use of DNSSEC (signed zones) and TSIG (signed DNS requests) or some similar crypto tech. But that's not going to happen right away because DNS goes all the way down to individual client boxes, representing a titanic installed base of technology that we have to support for the forseeable future.
Agreed. All the technical issues are solveable, and in fact have been solved at some level; and the namespace would not significantly change in size regardless of structure (unless it shrinks majorly, as name-squatting becomes far less profitable).
;^>
The problems are non-technical. One is the FUD being spread about the technical issues (I am *really* tired of hearing all this nonsense about a supposed technical need for artificially scarce namespace) and another is the problem of rule creation and enforcement.
ICANN and the Department of Commerce control the rule-making and enforcement process (by holding the root nameservers hostage). It seems that they will not allow a better system to evolve.
Internet users' best bet is probably to end-run ICANN. Just as we can use samba and samba-tng to defeat Microsoft's attempt to dominate our networks, we can use OpenNIC and friends to obviate ICANN.
PS: I included the definition of obviate because I got savaged for using it in a post once. I can use the most arcane networking terms imaginable and nobody complains, but use a slightly offbeat non-technical word and everyone's suddenly too busy flaming me to look it up.
This restricts the availability to those technically capable of performing the role, or rich enough to pay for both technically capable people and high-bandwith links.
A TLD that was run incompetently or which had insufficent pipes would not get used. Problem solved by the economists' "invisible hand".
I am old enough to remember the implementation of DNS - before that we used
You are correct that this is the biggest problem with socially responsible naming systems; greed drives humans to sociopathic actions.
:^P
.pepsi, and arrange for a few years of forwarding. But that solution means the creation of another powerbroker like ICANN to enforce these rules... then we're back to square one.
Some say that this is good, and worship greed. They are typically very shallow people who lack inner peace. Think Donald Trump.
Some say this is bad, and that greedy people must be punished. They are typically even more shallow, and see all things as absolutes. Think Torquemada.
Some people just say "Hey, greed exists, and greedy people will always covet and accumulate power, so let's design a system so that each greedy individual's actions will serve the community as a whole". Since that is where's I'm coming from, obviously these people are correct!
Eventually, the cost of maintaining spaces like pepsi.com and pepsi.org will outstrip any profit garnered from their existence, because it will be more cost-effective to advertise http://pepsi rather than the others and people will get used to it.
However, in the short run you are right. They won't give up their redundant names for decades unless forced to.
Any suggestions for a solution? The obvious one is to cut a deal - tell 'em they can't have any other names with "pepsi" in them if they want
I personally would be willing to put up with the short-term problems for the long-term good... but what I do now is encourage people to use OpenNIC. If we all use OpenNic, ICANN's power-trip becomes unimportant.
But, if we free the namespace, we will greatly increase the number of root nameservers (a good thing) which will make the named.root file unmanageably long (at least at first, until things shake out) and very dynamic (a bad thing).
There are several solutions to this available using existing technology. A truly distributed, robust system (that doesn't eat bandwidth like Maddog drinks beer) is probably not attainable (yet), but system of meta-servers no less reliable than the current system, compatible with existing clients, would be fairly simple to engineer. Implementation would not be trivial, but it could be made to pay for itself - Ford Motor Company would probably just LOVE to be able to have an address of http://ford and they've got money (Well, they had money before the Bush economic miracle, anyway).
Take a look at the work the much-maligned AlterNic and more reputable OpenNic have done over the years - these people are proving that it *can* be done.
It's far less of an engineering problem than the ICANN would have you believe.
Certainly, that's what wildcard DNS A records are for. Or at least that's how I use them... perhaps you haven't noticed that http://slashdot.org resolves just fine without any www?
We do. It's called named.root and I always pick up a fresh copy by FTP when I'm configuring DNS servers.
You can't get away from the need to distribute the root nameserver hints with any of the software I'm familiar with. If we didn't distribute a file with the meta-server addresses how would we find them? Not by name, obviously; chickens and eggs come to mind.
Sure, zaibatsus like IBM and Coca-Cola will run their own, but they do not represent 90% of the present DNS traffic. Most people will still rent namespace from the registrars just as they do today. But the big bullies - the megacorps that have the bribe money and legal muscle to push the registrars around - will run their own TLDs.
The DNS today is crippled by the insistence that hierarchies of naming must reflect existing hierarchies of control. To put it another way, the intransigence of the US Department of Commerce and ICANN has prevented the DNS system from reaching its potential.
TLDs should be available to anyone who can run a secure, reliable root - this connects profit to performance, so we don't have to rely on the innate goodness of the root nameserver operators. The first thing that'd happen would be that pepsi.com, pepsi.net, and pepsi.org would be obsolete since
With the widespread popularity of search engines, nobody would have any trouble finding anything even if some temporary chaos were engendered.
Spare me the FUD about nameservices not scaling for this; I believe DNS and BIND are quite capable of it.
But LIBERAL means open-minded or free-thinking. And CONSERVATIVE is related to CONSERVATION; it means one is unwilling to change things that already work. But that's only the dictionary definition, by those definitions one could easily be strongly in favor of both!
It seems that for most Americans CONSERVATIVE means "willing to go along with whatever radical agenda the wealthy plutocrats are currently backing" and LIBERAL means "willing to go along with whatever impractical scheme the bleeding heart do-gooders are currently preaching".
Both sides put up straw-men for you to fear and hate. Fearful, hateful people are easily manipulated.
Free your mind.
First of all, whoever told you that "it takes more energy to manufacture one than they ever generate in their useful life" was incorrect.
Perhaps you should try to figure out if it is because that person needs education, or because (s)he has a vested interest in deceiving you.
Second, the point of solar panels is not always lifetime efficiency anyway, it is often control of power generation by the person(s) needing the power - intelligent people act to secure the resources they need to survive, and the power grid (in California, at least) is not reliable and cannot be secured by consumers.
There is a wealth of data available online from the IPP and Sandia that will refute your claim. Or you could directly contact a vendor such as Siemens (German) or AstroPower (Delaware, USA).
The proposed tax is simply the latest move in the long-running war between the centralised dirty energy producers (championed by GWB and Cheney, among others) and the promoters of distributed clean renewable energy production (a grassroots movement championed principally by the Home Power crew).
This war is primarily being fought in and around California; mostly because of the high availability of sunshine and engineering talent in that area. The recent fake energy crisis that the Enron crowd purposely created was the most effective offensive in the same war so far.
Hopefully, the decentralized nature of grassroots opposition will prevent the current administration's attempt to crush distributed renewable energy producers. The "Solar Guerilla" movement was started for just this reason.
#1) Your 20/20 hindsight is not useful. Live in the now.
/. picked up on his cry for help and presented it to the community, because wider exposure may lead to resolution - or to put it another way, "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow".
#2) He didn't contact slashdot, as far as I can see; rather, somebody at
Incidentally, I too have failed to get Linux running on a disk-on-chip. I was trying it in my basement on salvaged equipment, and eventually I shelved the project after a few weeks of frustration.
I suspect the ltsp guys might be the most accessible experts on this. I'm going to forward the link to them...
Despite what you seem to think, the question was NOT "but.. what is LDAP?"
OpenLDAP is a software suite composed of clients and servers that use the LDAP protocol.
As I said.
Your comments pertain to LDAP, which is not what the previous poster was asking about!
But thank you for your display of illiteracy and fatheadedness.
It's intended to be OS-independent free software, but it reportedly runs best on linux at this time.
LDAP stands for Lightweight Directory Access Protocol which is a IETF standard for accessing data stored in a hierarchical directory structure such as that used by Microsoft's Active Directory, Novell's Netware Directory Services, and X.500.
X.500 was an ambitious attempt to create a network-accessible data store that would hold all possible data pertaining to humanity in a hierarchical format. The original DAP protocol the X.500 droogies developed was too big and unwieldy, and posited X.500 as the directory. LDAP was born to serve the functions people actually need in real life, and is a trimmed-down version of the original X.500 DAP that is actually useable by people in the trenches.
Modules are available to integrate LDAP into most user authentication schemes. Google for nss_ldap, pam_ldap, pGina, that sort of thing. Sendmail can use ldap, as can ssh, and OpenLDAP readily integrates with Kerberos and TLS for state-of-the-art security.
OpenLDAP itself doesn't actually do the things you mentioned. It uses whatever backend you select (such as Sleepycat) to store the data, and you need pams or nss_switches or the equivalent to authenticate users. OpenLDAP just provides the protocol glue to bind such LDAP-capable gadgets to the backend database of your choice.
You still have to build the database the old-fashioned way, unless your end-users have plugs in their heads and you can suck their ID information directly out of their brains.
You just inadvertently proved the first guy's point by giving him bad and incomplete advice from Google.
Don't use tools that default to LDAP v2, use v3 only.
Never bulkload with ldapxxxx tools, they are too slow and may run into server limitations on how many LDAP operations can be performed per client connection.
ldif2db and friends are derived from the umich distribution and have been superseded by the slapxxx family of tools. The IBM code fork may still use ldifxxx tools, though, and there are no doubt others in the Sun, HP and Netscape code forks. I recommend not using any of these with linux, use current OpenLDAP. Use Sun and HP tools only on those systems and don't use Netscape LDAP stuff at all if you can avoid it.
Don't use Microsoft or Novell LDAP tools on other platforms either, unless you can't avoid it. You should definitely use their native utilities if you must support AD and NDS, but try to keep from getting strangled by their "embrace and extend" philosophy. NDS is better than AD if you have to choose.
Use the current OpenLDAP doco, such as it is, and experiment, experiment, experiment. That's the ticket.