All the versions of linux I use have both, but many of the kernel developers consider them to be problems and not desirable features. That's what I meant by "does not enshrine" but I guess I was pretty vague - sorry!
Ted Tso's work on capabilities, and the related work that the NSA and HP are doing in the kernel, has already produced "secure" versions of linux that sharply limit the power of root. Eventually root may be eliminated (a man can dream, can't he?).
I believe Linus has proposed a resource fork in the linux filesystem API, which would make it possible to lose the rwxrwxrwx nonsense and open up linux to filesystems it currently cannot fully accomodate - like those found on Novell, VMS or Macintosh systems.
It's interesting to note that while mainstream commercial unices are way behind in both these two key areas, the BSDs have started to evolve useable ACLs that can be integrated via samba with NT and 2K ACLs.
One might easily argue that it's a partial reimplementation (partial = sans cruft) of UNIX, and that there is some semantic distinction between a clone/reimplementation and a variant/fork.
The important distinction for me, personally, is that linux does not enshrine the really horrific aspects of UNIX (such as the existence of root, and the hideous rwxrwxrwx protection system, etc) so it has the potential to become something far better than UNIX.
Linux is better than UNIX, because linux development is motivated by real-world usefulness and not philosophy/religion. RMS's rant about BitKeeper illustrates one aspect of this; Linus only cares if BK works for his needs, and if not he'll use something else.
FORMAT YOUR HARD DRIVE and reinstall.
on
Stopping NetBIOS Spam?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
OK, please do not regard this as bashing. It's just the correct answer to anyone with this problem - if you don't like it, the problem is not in the answer.
NETBIOS CANNOT BE SECURED. If you leave your netbios ports open, you can be cracked to such a degree that it will be impossible for anyone other than a forensic analyst (who will boot from a linux or BSD boot disk) to detect. Netbios is only a viable solution on TRUSTED networks, which the Internet isn't, by definition.
YOU ARE PROBABLY OWNED. Your machine is most likely already completely compromised, and is happily working on cracking RC5 ciphers for somebody you've never met. See the honeynet project for more information (incidentally, one of the founders of honeynet reportedly got cracked by el8; everybody can make mistakes).
YOUR BEST OPTION IS TO FORMAT YOUR HARD DRIVE. The fastest, most reliable way to remove any possibility of a problem is to reload your system from a read-only media - i.e. your windows distribution disk. You must scrub the hard drive first, though; there are programs that can survive windows reinstallation unless this step is taken. You must also disconnect your Internet connection until you have a firewall running, to be absolutely safe; you should buy the firewall or get a friend with a more secure system to download one for you, since anything you download with your machine is suspect.
I don't know where in the hell I'm going to find a case to happily hold 30hd's though.
I've been running lots of SCSI drives under linux for a long time now. I started out with a single Adaptec SCSI controller, changed over to a pair of DPTs, then went back to Adaptec when I figured out that the Adaptec boards need lots of extra cooling. The drives have been scavenged from dumpsters of local companies; over the last eight years the insatiable corporate hunger for server disk space has driven them to denser platters, so they toss out the older 1 and 2 GB drives.
Then a friend gave me a case of 9 GB IBM ultra-SCSI drives (new, unused) he got as a going-away prezzie when the dot-bomb he worked for collapsed. Like you, I couldn't figure out how to case 'em.
Then I went to the local Mega-Mart (Where Shopping Is A Baffling Ordeal (tm!) ) and got some of that heavily perforated sheet metal that people pop-rivet to their screen doors to keep dogs from busting them. It comes in several patterns; if you choose carefully, you can get something that folds easily along straight lines, and has holes that line up reasonably well with hard drive mounting points.
I use tin snips and old case screws to make what I call "drive blocks", which are seven drives sitting vertically separated by half-inch gaps. I attach old screen-door handles to the top middle, and I make power cables with one female and eight male connectors. I have a bunch of large surplus 12 vdc fans that are ganged together two fans per power connector, and I repin them from 12v to 5v and attach them so they blow through the slots in the drive blocks.
Nowadays I am running linux soft RAID (RAID 5 across six drives with one spare, except for the boot partition which is just mirrored) on two drive blocks. I have CPU coolers on the Adaptec controllers, though, because they run so damn hot.
Unbelievably fast disk storage, and I have all the drive LEDs hooked up so it looks really cool when you do a large file copy or an fsck. The blocks sit happily on any flat surface, with their own small AT-style power supply, connected by SCSI and a ground wire to the rest of the server.
By the time it is done, there won't be any 'naughty non-free' software that anyone actually needs.
This is already true for utilities and commodity services; you don't need proprietary *anything* to run a web server, or provide infrastructure.
GNOME, KDE, and their many stepchildren are well on their way to filling in the remaining blanks.
Soon, it'll just be a few large highly specialised apps (like 1200-user collection management systems, for example) that remain proprietary. And that stuff gets run on dedicated machines anyway.
Since Hurd's not even close to being done yet, there is plenty of time for freeware to finish catching up.
If you actually read the linked story, you will find that the college is willing to pay the bill to give students a better OS.
Unfortunately, the increased hardware requirements of XP over earlier windows versions may become a problem for some students. Hopefully, the college has recognized this and will provide win98 assistance also (not that win98 is better than XP Pro, but it's not much worse than XP Home (NEVER NEVER buy XP Home, regardless of what the school says).
I don't think I'm a cracker... I'm not from Georgia, Alabama, or Mississippi (Southerners note that was a weak attempt at a JOKE).
Under BIND 4.x it was easy to have multiple DNS roots. Under BIND 8.x it was harder; I had to implement some fairly serious hacks that the average sysadmin might find daunting. Under BIND 9, I haven't figured out how to do it. If anyone else has, please post! I'll be eternally grateful, since I want the user-friendly TLDs back.
I'm willing to go to DJBDNS or something, also, if that's a better route. I find Dr. B. a bit prickly and difficult, but so's Vixie (ISC hackers note here that I respect and appreciate their efforts, esp. Ted Lemon's marvelous work on the dhcpd).
There's no technical reason not to allow multiple roots, really; even naming conflicts can be allowed as long as a configurable system of trust is supported. For example, trust verisign-rooted DNS first for the.com and.net domains, trust the AlterNIC first for the.med and.porn domains, and so forth. It's not the big deal single-root people are insisting it is, it's not like building a heavier-than-air aircraft (which is obviously impossible, right?).
The BIND daemon itself doesn't support/etc/hosts, but you're right that most systems (which generally use the NSS and the BIND resolver library code, these days) still do.
So, sure, your corporate network isn't tied to the root nameservers by anything other than convenience.
But the point of the Internet is *global* connectivity. That means support for millions of clueless AOhell users and their ilk too... and they are utterly dependent on a single naming authority - Verisign.
> I thought the Internet was already decentralized, so I'm curious about what exactly they're fixing.
Since every release of BIND ties us more thoroughly to ICANN-dominated centralised name control, I'd guess that DNS would be what they are fixing.
It used to be easy to use alternative roots in conjunction with the "authoritative" (authoritarian?) roots... but now it's one or the other. Caveat - I haven't tried the BIND alternatives yet, there are only so many hours in the day.
The namespace of the Internet is hosed, even USENET's namespace.namespace.namespace is more useful. And the geographic separation of the root nameservers doesn't matter much when all change authority is vested in a single entity.
The Southern Policy Law Center helps victims of hate crimes (such as the relatives of blacks brutally tortured and murdered by Neo-Nazi and "Aryan" groups) obtain legal representation.
The SPLC sponsors the Intelligence Report, which monitors the activities of violent hate groups - most of which are religious and/or racist. They also run the Teaching Tolerance project, which supplies school teaching materials to help fight entrenched racism through peaceful means.
The previous poster (who likes to post numbers that attempt to contradict the generally accepted view that fiscal irresponsibility was the hallmark of US President Reagan's administration) has characterized the SPLC as a "hate group" promoting "hatred of the rich" - which is, apparently, "politically correct".
Many (if not most) of the SPLC's contributors and lawyers are quite rich; especially when compared to the people the SPLC is typically trying to help.
So the only question in my mind is - Moron or Nazi?
One of them ended at this mysterious door that had polished stone leading up to it... (Polished stone was reserved for important areas of the pyramid.) The door also had some metal like handles. (Wasnt this stone age construction?)
Bronze age. Not that those terms are as meaningful as you might think!
The energy costs of lifting waste out of the gravity well (assuming you are going to at least try to do it safely and accurately) are too high. You won't get enough payback to compete with more readily available sources like solar or coal.
Change your plan to injecting the waste into the center of the Earth and you'll have a better (though still titanically expensive) idea. And once you get far enough down, you can generate electricity from the temperature differential, as Nikola Tesla proposed.
Use nuclear-powered mohole machines and it all ties up into a nice tidy blue-sky project. I'll donate twenty bucks to the effort! Hell, set it up as tax deductible and I'll give you $100 every year!
In your quote from my post, you'll note that I said "It can be argued".
In English, this is a commonplace rhetorical construct that indicates the author takes no stand on the credibility of the argument, merely relates it as being of possible interest to the reader.
If you want to know my opinion, I think that humans will either wipe themselves out, evolve into something more robust, or come up with a way to reconvert nuclear waste into less harmful elements long before the stuff degrades into non-radioactive (but still toxic) material.
I'm not particularly interested in what will be going on more than 12,000 years from now, though; I already have enough to worry about when I restrict my plans to the next thirty years or so.
The fridge is a bad example. Until NASA developed the motor controllers that are used to regulate the current draw of the compressors in all modern refrigerators, home refrigerators were on a trend of increasing inefficiency due to the makers reducing the amount of insulation (to get that "modern, slim look"). Recently a small research outfit found that the most efficient fridge they could obtain commercially was made in the 1940s - it had walls almost a foot thick.
But your main point is still valid, of course; incremental advances in efficiency combined with research in all areas of power production and management makes more sense than the extreme legal and technological "quick fixes" that people keep proposing - most of which are unworkable anyway.
It's nice to see someone post something that reflects independent thought, rather than parroting the propaganda of one side or the other. I don't know many pro-nuke people who are in favor of increased energy efficiency - most of 'em seems to be either drones of the power companies or surly contrarians.
I stopped and checked 'em out this year when I saw the huge (over 200') towers along route 76 (the Pennsy Turnpike).
No dead birds under the towers.
No "annoying noise" as someone else claimed. Of course, annoying is a relative term - I am annoyed by large trucks and trainloads of coal passing by my community, and I am really annoyed by the way refineries in my area keepblowing up. (I regret that I can't find a link to the deadly 1981 explosion that literally shook three counties). But I'm not annoyed by the sights and sounds of the big modern windmills.
It's part of the trade off. Sure, one pass might not kill a bird. It's a statistical thing, many passes by many birds kills a few. The more windmills you make, the more birds you kill. There are dead birds in California and other nutty places where people are willing to pay 4 cents per kilowatt hour to generate electricity. Go visit the windmill FAQ where they tell you that windmills cost as much as "scrubbed" coal. Barf, nuclear power costs half that and natural gas is less on average.
It can be argued that nuclear waste containment costs are essentially infinite. You will spend money literally forever keeping terrorists and generic knuckleheads out of the waste piles, and monitoring them for leakage. The cost gets higher infinitely too - look at operating costs at Hanford and you will see concrete evidence of this.
Geologically tapped natural gas is a finite resource, unlike wind. But certainly we could produce fuel methane (i.e. natural gas) quite cheaply if we were more efficient in disposal of human and animal waste products. Modern composting toilets, properly installed and maintained, produce fertilizer rather than pollution (raw sewage is NOT good fertilizer, as has been repeatedly demonstrated, and it ruins groundwater resources). It is within the abilities of modern engineers to design a waste processing plant that produces both clean methane and sterile, fertile compost from human wastes.
Wind is an underutilized resource and it can be exploited with less environmental damage than fossil fuels. That being said, you can also set up high-speed egg-beaters in rare bird migration paths... anything that can be done, can be done wrong.
I guess what it comes down to is that a power generating facility needs to be properly designed and implemented as well as suited to the local environmental conditions. Wind seems to be highly appropriate for the Danes, and they should be commended if they pull this off.
But they probably don't care what you or I think. They are doing what is right for their own people.
The conventional view of historians is that the US has historically supported Israel because there is a huge Zionist block vote in this country. Truman made some remarks to that effect - he said there were lots of Jewish votes and damn few Arab ones. (Falling into the classic trap of equating Judaism with Zionism, when the two are actually quite distinct - Judaism is not intrinsically tied to killing people for their land, after all).
However, this guy is claiming that the earlier poster is right, that Truman initiated his policies based on his Judeo-Christian beliefs.
Anyway, I find it interesting that the post that initiated this debate is missing. Anti-Zionist posts, and posts that criticise Israel's continuing campaign of international terrorism, seem to get edited out of Slashdot rather frequently.
I fried a dozen uVAX 3100e motherboards (back when they were cutting edge and majorly expensive) with static electricity. We had a maintenance contract with DEC, and they kept coming out to replace 'em.
We tried conductive floor materials, jumpering all the machines in the room together, stringing tinsel across all the paper trays, etc. etc. etc. ad nauseum but we kept frying motherboards every time a jumper wire slipped off or a floor mat got insulated by shoe crud.
Eventually I put a bunch of spider plants in the room and watered them every day. Humidity in the room went up to a reasonable level immediately from aspiration of water through the plant leaves.
Never burnt a single board after that. The plants were still on the job five years later when I visited the site again.
I've had a limited amount of experience with AS/400 shops, but all that I've visted have been the same.
IBM likes to sell this box as a "no geeks required" system. They tell the business owner that the AS400's menu-driven system administration is so simple, he won't need expensive computer expertise on staff - the mail room guy can be the sysadmin.
Consequently, there are usually no real professional computer people on the site at all. Instead, consultants from the local IBM biz partners are hired whenever the system needs more than trivial care.
This is a gamble that sometimes works for the business - if they have a cleanly defined and implemented application, and a hardware support contract that includes regularly scheduled preventive maintenance (i.e. VACUUMING) they may save money over having a competent computer expert on salary.
However, even when the gamble doesn't pay off - say, for example, that the business applications are poorly written and require constant tweaking by the consultants - the decision to use AS400 was often made by someone who is in a position to cover up the financial mistake; mid- to low-upper- level executives will usually do so to avoid damage to their chances of promotion (top-level executives, such as CEOs and COOs, are usually more practical).
Situations like those I've described are booby traps for linux geeks. All general-purpose linux systems (including X-based systems) require some training and expertise to use efficiently. If there is nobody on-site with any "computer knack" at all, you can end up spending months customizing the system into useability (because the users may not be able to specify what they want, and you could easily end up using "trail of errors" to get a workable system that will satisfy them).
It's easy to get frustrated by the apparent blockheadedness of people who honestly just don't *know* how to use the computer. Also, managers who have been engaged in subterfuge to hide bad computing decisions are usually suspicious and easily angered. Try to keep your cool and play it by ear.
Your first step will be to explain what a filesystem is and how to manage storage of information in a hierarchical filesystem. You will be hampered in this task by the strange nomenclature used in OS/400, but hopefully most of the users will have some familiarity with PC filesystems and you can start from there.
HIPAA is the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, which is a regulatory nightmare that we will eventually be thankful for.
HIPAA is designed to accomplish three things:
1) Provide employers and employees with a standardized, useable system for transferring health insurance coverage (and/or the payment arrangement associated with that coverage)from one party to another. This would mostly be used to prevent gaps in insurance coverage when switching jobs.
2) Force all medical service providers (such as hospitals and analytical labs) and insurance providers to conform to a single strongly defined set of transaction codes and formats.
3) Mandate proper security for sensitive medical records (defined as ANY medical records of ANY sort that could be used to identify an individual's state of health or medical treatments received).
HIPAA is a nightmare because most hospital data management systems have totally ineffective security. Meditech, for example, is appalling, and homegrown systems are usually worse (I know of one world-famous Oncology Centre where the passwords have not been changed in seven years - hundreds of ex-employees know them all). The most secure is probably SMS (which is slow, cumbersome, mainframe-based, and tremendously expensive) or possibly HBOC (same comments apply).
Adding to the futility is the unbelievably lame way the government has handled the specification, dissemination, and revision of the standards. All the transaction stuff is fine, but the security standards are vague and constantly changing.
We will eventually be happy because HIPAA's transaction standards will vastly decrease costs in the health care and insurance industries - currently millions of man-hours are wasted doing simple reformatting tasks, because medical software companies generally refuse to use anything but government-mandated (HL7, UB92, etc) or proprietary data formats, in order to prevent customers from easily switching vendors.
I am currently searching for a new job because I do not wish to be involved in HIPAA any more. I am a scientist, not a lawyer, and I find all this stuff tedious, especially the intransigence of vendors who simply don't care if their products are HIPAA-compliant.
Slashdot Mirror
"When your site it gets no linkage
and your hit count shows some shrinkage
dig for 209.217.135.144
send a ping!
Mr. Google is a loser,
And I think he is a boozer,
So you better make that call to the Search King!"
Hey Barney, what about a Spanish version:
"Senor Google no es macho,
Es solamente un borracho..."
--Linda
All the versions of linux I use have both, but many of the kernel developers consider them to be problems and not desirable features. That's what I meant by "does not enshrine" but I guess I was pretty vague - sorry!
Ted Tso's work on capabilities, and the related work that the NSA and HP are doing in the kernel, has already produced "secure" versions of linux that sharply limit the power of root. Eventually root may be eliminated (a man can dream, can't he?).
I believe Linus has proposed a resource fork in the linux filesystem API, which would make it possible to lose the rwxrwxrwx nonsense and open up linux to filesystems it currently cannot fully accomodate - like those found on Novell, VMS or Macintosh systems.
It's interesting to note that while mainstream commercial unices are way behind in both these two key areas, the BSDs have started to evolve useable ACLs that can be integrated via samba with NT and 2K ACLs.
One might easily argue that it's a partial reimplementation (partial = sans cruft) of UNIX, and that there is some semantic distinction between a clone/reimplementation and a variant/fork.
The important distinction for me, personally, is that linux does not enshrine the really horrific aspects of UNIX (such as the existence of root, and the hideous rwxrwxrwx protection system, etc) so it has the potential to become something far better than UNIX.
Linux is better than UNIX, because linux development is motivated by real-world usefulness and not philosophy/religion. RMS's rant about BitKeeper illustrates one aspect of this; Linus only cares if BK works for his needs, and if not he'll use something else.
OK, please do not regard this as bashing. It's just the correct answer to anyone with this problem - if you don't like it, the problem is not in the answer.
NETBIOS CANNOT BE SECURED. If you leave your netbios ports open, you can be cracked to such a degree that it will be impossible for anyone other than a forensic analyst (who will boot from a linux or BSD boot disk) to detect. Netbios is only a viable solution on TRUSTED networks, which the Internet isn't, by definition.
YOU ARE PROBABLY OWNED. Your machine is most likely already completely compromised, and is happily working on cracking RC5 ciphers for somebody you've never met. See the honeynet project for more information (incidentally, one of the founders of honeynet reportedly got cracked by el8; everybody can make mistakes).
YOUR BEST OPTION IS TO FORMAT YOUR HARD DRIVE. The fastest, most reliable way to remove any possibility of a problem is to reload your system from a read-only media - i.e. your windows distribution disk. You must scrub the hard drive first, though; there are programs that can survive windows reinstallation unless this step is taken. You must also disconnect your Internet connection until you have a firewall running, to be absolutely safe; you should buy the firewall or get a friend with a more secure system to download one for you, since anything you download with your machine is suspect.
Hope this helped!
I've been running lots of SCSI drives under linux for a long time now. I started out with a single Adaptec SCSI controller, changed over to a pair of DPTs, then went back to Adaptec when I figured out that the Adaptec boards need lots of extra cooling. The drives have been scavenged from dumpsters of local companies; over the last eight years the insatiable corporate hunger for server disk space has driven them to denser platters, so they toss out the older 1 and 2 GB drives.
Then a friend gave me a case of 9 GB IBM ultra-SCSI drives (new, unused) he got as a going-away prezzie when the dot-bomb he worked for collapsed. Like you, I couldn't figure out how to case 'em.
Then I went to the local Mega-Mart (Where Shopping Is A Baffling Ordeal (tm!) ) and got some of that heavily perforated sheet metal that people pop-rivet to their screen doors to keep dogs from busting them. It comes in several patterns; if you choose carefully, you can get something that folds easily along straight lines, and has holes that line up reasonably well with hard drive mounting points.
I use tin snips and old case screws to make what I call "drive blocks", which are seven drives sitting vertically separated by half-inch gaps. I attach old screen-door handles to the top middle, and I make power cables with one female and eight male connectors. I have a bunch of large surplus 12 vdc fans that are ganged together two fans per power connector, and I repin them from 12v to 5v and attach them so they blow through the slots in the drive blocks.
Nowadays I am running linux soft RAID (RAID 5 across six drives with one spare, except for the boot partition which is just mirrored) on two drive blocks. I have CPU coolers on the Adaptec controllers, though, because they run so damn hot.
Unbelievably fast disk storage, and I have all the drive LEDs hooked up so it looks really cool when you do a large file copy or an fsck. The blocks sit happily on any flat surface, with their own small AT-style power supply, connected by SCSI and a ground wire to the rest of the server.
Remember, the Hurd's not done yet.
By the time it is done, there won't be any 'naughty non-free' software that anyone actually needs.
This is already true for utilities and commodity services; you don't need proprietary *anything* to run a web server, or provide infrastructure.
GNOME, KDE, and their many stepchildren are well on their way to filling in the remaining blanks.
Soon, it'll just be a few large highly specialised apps (like 1200-user collection management systems, for example) that remain proprietary. And that stuff gets run on dedicated machines anyway.
Since Hurd's not even close to being done yet, there is plenty of time for freeware to finish catching up.
If you actually read the linked story, you will find that the college is willing to pay the bill to give students a better OS.
Unfortunately, the increased hardware requirements of XP over earlier windows versions may become a problem for some students. Hopefully, the college has recognized this and will provide win98 assistance also (not that win98 is better than XP Pro, but it's not much worse than XP Home (NEVER NEVER buy XP Home, regardless of what the school says).
I don't think I'm a cracker... I'm not from Georgia, Alabama, or Mississippi (Southerners note that was a weak attempt at a JOKE).
.com and .net domains, trust the AlterNIC first for the .med and .porn domains, and so forth. It's not the big deal single-root people are insisting it is, it's not like building a heavier-than-air aircraft (which is obviously impossible, right?).
Under BIND 4.x it was easy to have multiple DNS roots. Under BIND 8.x it was harder; I had to implement some fairly serious hacks that the average sysadmin might find daunting. Under BIND 9, I haven't figured out how to do it. If anyone else has, please post! I'll be eternally grateful, since I want the user-friendly TLDs back.
I'm willing to go to DJBDNS or something, also, if that's a better route. I find Dr. B. a bit prickly and difficult, but so's Vixie (ISC hackers note here that I respect and appreciate their efforts, esp. Ted Lemon's marvelous work on the dhcpd).
There's no technical reason not to allow multiple roots, really; even naming conflicts can be allowed as long as a configurable system of trust is supported. For example, trust verisign-rooted DNS first for the
The BIND daemon itself doesn't support /etc/hosts, but you're right that most systems (which generally use the NSS and the BIND resolver library code, these days) still do.
So, sure, your corporate network isn't tied to the root nameservers by anything other than convenience.
But the point of the Internet is *global* connectivity. That means support for millions of clueless AOhell users and their ilk too... and they are utterly dependent on a single naming authority - Verisign.
Since every release of BIND ties us more thoroughly to ICANN-dominated centralised name control, I'd guess that DNS would be what they are fixing.
It used to be easy to use alternative roots in conjunction with the "authoritative" (authoritarian?) roots... but now it's one or the other. Caveat - I haven't tried the BIND alternatives yet, there are only so many hours in the day.
The namespace of the Internet is hosed, even USENET's namespace.namespace.namespace is more useful. And the geographic separation of the root nameservers doesn't matter much when all change authority is vested in a single entity.
For anyone joining us late in the broadcast!
The Southern Policy Law Center helps victims of hate crimes (such as the relatives of blacks brutally tortured and murdered by Neo-Nazi and "Aryan" groups) obtain legal representation.
The SPLC sponsors the Intelligence Report, which monitors the activities of violent hate groups - most of which are religious and/or racist. They also run the Teaching Tolerance project, which supplies school teaching materials to help fight entrenched racism through peaceful means.
The previous poster (who likes to post numbers that attempt to contradict the generally accepted view that fiscal irresponsibility was the hallmark of US President Reagan's administration) has characterized the SPLC as a "hate group" promoting "hatred of the rich" - which is, apparently, "politically correct".
Many (if not most) of the SPLC's contributors and lawyers are quite rich; especially when compared to the people the SPLC is typically trying to help.
So the only question in my mind is - Moron or Nazi?
I'm thinking Moron.
Do your ideas come from any place on my planet?
(That would be Terra, third orbit out from the star Sol.)
Perhaps you could elaborate on your characterization of the Reagan economy, or explain your defamation of the SPLC?
Quite an accomplishment, displaying unbounded ignorance in only three lines of text.
Everybody knows that the Great Pyramid was a water pump, right?
Kunkel expounds his astonishing theories.
Give this guy some money, please, so we can either be amazed or have a jolly good laugh at his expense.
The energy costs of lifting waste out of the gravity well (assuming you are going to at least try to do it safely and accurately) are too high. You won't get enough payback to compete with more readily available sources like solar or coal.
Change your plan to injecting the waste into the center of the Earth and you'll have a better (though still titanically expensive) idea. And once you get far enough down, you can generate electricity from the temperature differential, as Nikola Tesla proposed.
Use nuclear-powered mohole machines and it all ties up into a nice tidy blue-sky project. I'll donate twenty bucks to the effort! Hell, set it up as tax deductible and I'll give you $100 every year!
In your quote from my post, you'll note that I said "It can be argued".
In English, this is a commonplace rhetorical construct that indicates the author takes no stand on the credibility of the argument, merely relates it as being of possible interest to the reader.
If you want to know my opinion, I think that humans will either wipe themselves out, evolve into something more robust, or come up with a way to reconvert nuclear waste into less harmful elements long before the stuff degrades into non-radioactive (but still toxic) material.
I'm not particularly interested in what will be going on more than 12,000 years from now, though; I already have enough to worry about when I restrict my plans to the next thirty years or so.
The fridge is a bad example. Until NASA developed the motor controllers that are used to regulate the current draw of the compressors in all modern refrigerators, home refrigerators were on a trend of increasing inefficiency due to the makers reducing the amount of insulation (to get that "modern, slim look"). Recently a small research outfit found that the most efficient fridge they could obtain commercially was made in the 1940s - it had walls almost a foot thick.
But your main point is still valid, of course; incremental advances in efficiency combined with research in all areas of power production and management makes more sense than the extreme legal and technological "quick fixes" that people keep proposing - most of which are unworkable anyway.
It's nice to see someone post something that reflects independent thought, rather than parroting the propaganda of one side or the other. I don't know many pro-nuke people who are in favor of increased energy efficiency - most of 'em seems to be either drones of the power companies or surly contrarians.
I stopped and checked 'em out this year when I saw the huge (over 200') towers along route 76 (the Pennsy Turnpike).
No dead birds under the towers.
No "annoying noise" as someone else claimed. Of course, annoying is a relative term - I am annoyed by large trucks and trainloads of coal passing by my community, and I am really annoyed by the way refineries in my area keep blowing up. (I regret that I can't find a link to the deadly 1981 explosion that literally shook three counties). But I'm not annoyed by the sights and sounds of the big modern windmills.
See this site for more info.
It can be argued that nuclear waste containment costs are essentially infinite. You will spend money literally forever keeping terrorists and generic knuckleheads out of the waste piles, and monitoring them for leakage. The cost gets higher infinitely too - look at operating costs at Hanford and you will see concrete evidence of this.
Geologically tapped natural gas is a finite resource, unlike wind. But certainly we could produce fuel methane (i.e. natural gas) quite cheaply if we were more efficient in disposal of human and animal waste products. Modern composting toilets, properly installed and maintained, produce fertilizer rather than pollution (raw sewage is NOT good fertilizer, as has been repeatedly demonstrated, and it ruins groundwater resources). It is within the abilities of modern engineers to design a waste processing plant that produces both clean methane and sterile, fertile compost from human wastes.
Wind is an underutilized resource and it can be exploited with less environmental damage than fossil fuels. That being said, you can also set up high-speed egg-beaters in rare bird migration paths... anything that can be done, can be done wrong.
I guess what it comes down to is that a power generating facility needs to be properly designed and implemented as well as suited to the local environmental conditions. Wind seems to be highly appropriate for the Danes, and they should be commended if they pull this off.
But they probably don't care what you or I think. They are doing what is right for their own people.
Oops, you're right. (L)user error. I humbly apologize to the Slashdot staff for impugning their journalistic integrity. Thanks.
The conventional view of historians is that the US has historically supported Israel because there is a huge Zionist block vote in this country. Truman made some remarks to that effect - he said there were lots of Jewish votes and damn few Arab ones. (Falling into the classic trap of equating Judaism with Zionism, when the two are actually quite distinct - Judaism is not intrinsically tied to killing people for their land, after all).
However, this guy is claiming that the earlier poster is right, that Truman initiated his policies based on his Judeo-Christian beliefs.
Anyway, I find it interesting that the post that initiated this debate is missing. Anti-Zionist posts, and posts that criticise Israel's continuing campaign of international terrorism, seem to get edited out of Slashdot rather frequently.
I fried a dozen uVAX 3100e motherboards (back when they were cutting edge and majorly expensive) with static electricity. We had a maintenance contract with DEC, and they kept coming out to replace 'em.
We tried conductive floor materials, jumpering all the machines in the room together, stringing tinsel across all the paper trays, etc. etc. etc. ad nauseum but we kept frying motherboards every time a jumper wire slipped off or a floor mat got insulated by shoe crud.
Eventually I put a bunch of spider plants in the room and watered them every day. Humidity in the room went up to a reasonable level immediately from aspiration of water through the plant leaves.
Never burnt a single board after that. The plants were still on the job five years later when I visited the site again.
I've had a limited amount of experience with AS/400 shops, but all that I've visted have been the same.
IBM likes to sell this box as a "no geeks required" system. They tell the business owner that the AS400's menu-driven system administration is so simple, he won't need expensive computer expertise on staff - the mail room guy can be the sysadmin.
Consequently, there are usually no real professional computer people on the site at all. Instead, consultants from the local IBM biz partners are hired whenever the system needs more than trivial care.
This is a gamble that sometimes works for the business - if they have a cleanly defined and implemented application, and a hardware support contract that includes regularly scheduled preventive maintenance (i.e. VACUUMING) they may save money over having a competent computer expert on salary.
However, even when the gamble doesn't pay off - say, for example, that the business applications are poorly written and require constant tweaking by the consultants - the decision to use AS400 was often made by someone who is in a position to cover up the financial mistake; mid- to low-upper- level executives will usually do so to avoid damage to their chances of promotion (top-level executives, such as CEOs and COOs, are usually more practical).
Situations like those I've described are booby traps for linux geeks. All general-purpose linux systems (including X-based systems) require some training and expertise to use efficiently. If there is nobody on-site with any "computer knack" at all, you can end up spending months customizing the system into useability (because the users may not be able to specify what they want, and you could easily end up using "trail of errors" to get a workable system that will satisfy them).
It's easy to get frustrated by the apparent blockheadedness of people who honestly just don't *know* how to use the computer. Also, managers who have been engaged in subterfuge to hide bad computing decisions are usually suspicious and easily angered. Try to keep your cool and play it by ear.
Your first step will be to explain what a filesystem is and how to manage storage of information in a hierarchical filesystem. You will be hampered in this task by the strange nomenclature used in OS/400, but hopefully most of the users will have some familiarity with PC filesystems and you can start from there.
Good luck!
HIPAA is the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, which is a regulatory nightmare that we will eventually be thankful for.
HIPAA is designed to accomplish three things:
1) Provide employers and employees with a standardized, useable system for transferring health insurance coverage (and/or the payment arrangement associated with that coverage)from one party to another. This would mostly be used to prevent gaps in insurance coverage when switching jobs.
2) Force all medical service providers (such as hospitals and analytical labs) and insurance providers to conform to a single strongly defined set of transaction codes and formats.
3) Mandate proper security for sensitive medical records (defined as ANY medical records of ANY sort that could be used to identify an individual's state of health or medical treatments received).
HIPAA is a nightmare because most hospital data management systems have totally ineffective security. Meditech, for example, is appalling, and homegrown systems are usually worse (I know of one world-famous Oncology Centre where the passwords have not been changed in seven years - hundreds of ex-employees know them all). The most secure is probably SMS (which is slow, cumbersome, mainframe-based, and tremendously expensive) or possibly HBOC (same comments apply).
Adding to the futility is the unbelievably lame way the government has handled the specification, dissemination, and revision of the standards. All the transaction stuff is fine, but the security standards are vague and constantly changing.
We will eventually be happy because HIPAA's transaction standards will vastly decrease costs in the health care and insurance industries - currently millions of man-hours are wasted doing simple reformatting tasks, because medical software companies generally refuse to use anything but government-mandated (HL7, UB92, etc) or proprietary data formats, in order to prevent customers from easily switching vendors.
I am currently searching for a new job because I do not wish to be involved in HIPAA any more. I am a scientist, not a lawyer, and I find all this stuff tedious, especially the intransigence of vendors who simply don't care if their products are HIPAA-compliant.