Your argument would hold, if business wasn't so busy getting involved in the politics of communications(to drive up profits) instead of trying to get involved into actually competing for customers "fairly".
Most carriers are more active on the legal stage, to legislate away competition, than they are trying to improve their products. You'll also note that many of those companies were built with subsidised funds, and they owe us at least the effort of apearing to compete.
Smaller companies compete, larger companies only seem to be able to legislate away competition.
I find it funny that Microsoft owns a technology(Virtual PC) where such jails/more restrictive permissions/virtualization is made to work, over a POSIX operating system, and yet the same Microsoft can't apply the concept to it's own, also somewhat POSIX compliant(with an addon) operating system. It can buy software to make third parties's software work with the restrictions, but not impose the restrictions to the third parties, even 2-3 years in the future. YMMV
it's bit their users in the ass you mean. Did Microsoft had to reimburse anyone due to the security of their software? And how do you measure lost sales over something like this?
Is the new license only available in Massachusetts, or did the State work on Microsoft to get them to open the formats for everyone? If it's a state-only thing, then Microsoft knows it already lost, and is just doing damage control, no?
Let's take a random, faceless group of people. It's human nature that if someone can be blamed, instead of taking an inconvenient action, one will try to blame the "other", especially in a group where anonymity is high. It's rather intuitive that a place with a password policy has "some form" of security officer. It's also intuitive that this some form of security officer is somehow responsible for security at some degree. It's seldom happened that the rule "you share your password with someone you're both responsible for whatever happens with that password" was applied. This a) encourages convenient, insecure, anonymity-fostering "I'm lending you my password while on vacation" and "I forgot to change my password when I came back from vacation" b) Depending on mental discipline, 3 8 letter passwords might be too much to ask of a person to dedicate to just their job(considering most people will spend about half their "memory budget" on work applications, if that much) c) The security officer is likely to be blamed, simply because in an anonymous group, whoever shared their passwords just decreased their chances of getting caught, not increased them d) Two-token authentication and other methods have not gotten enough mindshare yet to be considered "easy" e) This kind of discussion on slashdot and other places often starts on the premise of "why can't people who don't understand the distinction between authentication and authorization act in a secure manner". It's been my experience that until someone understands the difference between the two, security is very hard to come by. An example: Marissa is going on vacation next week Marissa gives her password(authentication) to Joey, so joey can do payroll while Marissa is on vacation Marissa doesn't understand that she should have called it, and told them to authorize Joey for her tasks, for the duration of the vacation. She may or may not remember to reset her password after. m She might also know that she should call IT, but IT will require she list everything she wants to authorize Joey for, instead of copying her privileges(there might be technical reasons behind this, or they just might not have a trustee system of sufficient power to do it). This means that for a while, Joey can do things, and safely think the waters are muddled, it's hard to prove Marissa didn't do it. If Joey happens to be a good enough actor, he could say he shared the password with someone else, and that someone else would get the blame. If there is some other security event, involving the outside world, after Marissa's return, so much the better.
Now this will seem like killing baby seals, or something equally cruel, but the only real security response to this, is to punish equally everyone involved in the "password trade" since you can't prove, after the fact, what in fact occured.
Most security policies assume you can outline a procedure to follow, about passwords, without outlining this kind of consequence, and without spending sufficient effort making sure people understand the issues involved.
This makes the environment ripe for anonymity(which is good, when you are in a group with equal responsabilities, like the Internet, but bad, when you're in an environment where someone authorized a money transfer to an employee's spouse's third cousin's bank account in switzerland in an untraceable, anonymous manner).
In the absence of traceability, public opinion will impute blame to the most visible level of responsability. Hence the security officer will be reprimanded(but perhaps not fired), for three employees sharing a password, since firing all three would be inconvenient to the company, and politically unsound in some places as well.
They probably treated cross-state wiretaps seperately because this is spying on TWO people, in different states, and that's a pretty rare case when thinking about non-telco forms of spying(unless you're talking about a meet across a border line).
Because (presumably) different privacy laws apply to both parties, you would need a federal warrant just to prevent the jurisdiction clash inherent in this situation. Since the keylogger was only spying on one person, in one state, how could it claim to need the extreme measure of falling under conflicting regulations, needing to appeal to federal court? (The feds probably confused the keylogger with a sniffer, which would spy on both sides of the conversation, and would probably pass muster in terms of cross-state jurisdiction).
Can we agree about shutting them up about the risks of Free/Open Source software, because "The risks of FOSS doing that are greater", when they are doing it themselves? I'm also wondering when soundforge will be suing them, and I hope they include exemplary damage in there. This is exactly the kind of risks Microsoft says you are running open source software, can we buy the frontpage of the new york times and a few other newspaper to spread the news too? This isn't just a case of "Do as I say, not as I do.", it's a "I'm not a lousy, shifty dubious character, like this other guy." When the speaker gets caught doing underhanded things, first. It's not exactly defamation of character(since Microsoft did not flat out say Open Source coders would do this, it just said your risks of this kind of thing happening(distribution of code whose ownership was called to legal question, can someone confirm if wav is a Microsoft executable? I stopped checking in disgust when I found out a TTF was a binary executable, if it is, that makes it code, and not just a data file made with code.) was higher with open source code, so (IANAL) it's my understanding that they were vague enough not to slander anyone(well not without whoever tries to sue them triggering "if the shoe fits" remarks that would turn it into a major PR win for Microsoft.
I wonder though just what would happen if someone turned to civil disobedience with regards to IP law until Microsoft is chastised over its monopoly position and shady trade practices. One could argue(and it's been done on slashdot before) that no corrective punishment was leveled at Microsoft's monopoly position. By corrective I mean some regulation aimed at controlling the price of the infringing product(windows), or using some of the fines to finance the competitors who were wronged, and try to remove the monopoly. Nor was any regulatory commission set to regulate the price of windows. For Microsoft it was business as usual.
I'd be very surprised if this doesn't turn into more of the same, and I eagerly await Microsoft's explanation of how much or how little tort what they did caused to SoundForge. For ideological grounds, I expect them to settle out of court, just not to have to explain this particular part. i.e. If they did do a great deal of tort, they would have a large fine to pay, etc... But if they didn't do any tort to SoundForge, that means any other pirate wouldn't do any tort to them by breaking the Eula on their product. I expect MSFT's lawyers to do anything they to prevent a substantive public debate on this issue.
Let's see: The scientists are in search of verifiable, scientific truth, which is contained in repeatable experimentation and proven theorems. The media are in the business of reporting truth, in all its interpretations(including what may be truth for one person, but not for others) Balanced journalism can report the opinions as truth(provided they properly qualify it, which they do inaccurately far too often, when they bother to at all)
If the media only reported scientific truth, they might as well just translate the original scientific paper into plain english(it's closer to technical writing, not reporting) since the original paper is a report... It reports what happened in the experiment, and the theory behind it, and what conclusions one can draw within the constraints of the margins of error.
There's not much room for scientific reporters anymore, simply because they become translators. And it's a very very unexciting aspect of science, once all the theories get proven(after all, most proven theories take decades to be disproved, the ones that do get disproved at all).
It could theoretically be exciting to report on the process of "proving" a theory, provided you jazzed it up, and that can lead to all sorts of adverse consequences for the truth that just got proven. After all, when you jazz up the consequences/corollary of a theorem that just got proven, you can change its "truth value" from true to false.
The garden variety journalists seem to have a very hard time with that concept, the fact that if a theorem is true, given an exacting set of conditions/details(which get erased by the process of transforming to english) it can become false if those conditions are relaxed(after all, it's scientific truth, how could it be false?). But science only works with "whole truths" and "detailed truths" and those don't always translate well into modern languages.
I was mentioning all these questions being a problem, because they are asked all at the same election, presumably on the same ballot.
I agree with you that the "National" elections should be seperated from the local matters, on several grounds, first of which is generation/validation of the ballots themselves. Having to generate a valid ballot for 50 states, and I don't know how many counties, cannot be cost-effective if they can change per-county(think schoolboards). Having several types of ballots all being cast at the same time is almost as bad, since if one forgets one of the pages of the ballot, or if one page gets damaged somehow, that would pollute the process. And all accidents won't happen on just the "local pages". Now after that, who is to say, since there are only two parties, and party affiliation is usually a matter of record, that "statistical anomalies"(missing ballot page, misstapled/presumed lost ballot page, etc...) won't happen more often to ballots cast from people "known to vote" for a particular candidate.
I think we're in agreement that seperating the presidential ballot and setting it aside, because of its importance, and putting the federal machine behind streamlining the process might improve it(simply because 50 different organisations with varying levels of funding, varying levels of motivation, seperated by sometimes very large distances, can hardly be "effective" at working together for a common goal when the stakes are this high.
On the other hand, I'm going to start by trying to get direct vote for the prime minister back on the ballots in Canada, this "national leader is the leader of the majority of parlament" doesn't produce minority governments often enough.
Because only the right one could have come up? They are globally unique(GU) for a reason, the other ones cannot appear in the system, since you can only vote once, and they all belong to you. Of course, that presumes your guid's, appearing on the paper, can be verified for unicity, etc...
The problem it solves is that a paper ballot is great when you're only asking a few questions, but not when it's used to ask all the questions your government wants to ask you all at the same time.
I saw earlier(trying to remember where it was exactly) a pretty reasoned explanation as to why the Canadian paper ballot solution couldn't be applied to the states. The consensus was that until the vote tally for the presidential election(and perhaps house/senate) became a federal responsability, it was unpractical, after that maybe.
I'm wondering why so few people are interested from "Decoupling" the presidential elections from the local school board, any opinions?
Are you sure something is given up? If as you surmise it's just spending effort over time, perhaps. But I would say it's equally likely you're flexing the appropriate areas of your brain more, a sort of intellectual "bodybuilding" that makes learning more languages easier. Since you're not just learning the language itself, but also evolving a greater capacity to learn, you might end up taking a lot more time, learning the basic framework common to both languages, say, and those common to learning a language, both written and spoken, but once you have those roots, learning an individual language would become faster. Of course, it doesn't show for the initial languages, because you're timesharing your brain between learning the language, and learning to learn.
Once you try a third language, it appears easier, because you invested all that time in brain architecture structure work. It's probably why you often hear people who learn 4 languages or more being surprised at people having trouble learning one or two, they've started on two(or three, one of my relatives' household is a three-language zone)
Disclaimer: I'm not a neurolinguist, just a SysAdmin, but I did grow up in a two-language household, and several of my friends/relatives did too.
Ones that haven't been mentioned would be dtc (domain technology control) gpl serverworx ( a new one I believe) starflow (an european product, built on the hsphere model)
cpanel and hsphere seem to be easiest for newbie clients to pick up, so far. But directadmin has some very nice conceptual features that make me wish I had a copy to play with)
The excuse most heard in graphics drivers is that having a driver would allow a rival company to reverse engineer the special magic that makes the hardware special. I'm not sure it applies here, but the pointy-haired mentality is known to be aggregative.
Noone really uninterested in the topic has ever bothered to do the research, on either side. If they don't have an agenda, they usually tend to do something else. People who regularly use Netscape or Zeus on Solaris don't tend to write about Linux OR Windows, just as an example. Oddly enough, most campaigns to set things straight fall into much of the same caveats as the articles they fight, since: 1) security is NOT simple 2) security is a multi-faceted topic
Most in-depth security analysis falls onto a case by case scenario, "this is better for these X reasons, but not as good for Y reasons " where X is greater than 6 and Y is greater than 4(and even I'm generalizing more than I should).
Sumarizing that in an article is hard, especially a forward looking article(looking at the way Linux vs Windows is now, and projecting that into the next year or so), which is what most "you should switch" articles end up becoming.
Except for the fact that the overwhelming wealth of society is a myth, you might have a point there.
The wealth of society is the sum of the wealth of the individuals, period. Adding to that the inefficiencies of scale due to corruption, bureaucracy, inertia and other factors, means that the society is less rich than the sum of it's parts, not more. Having that agent in a transaction might make sense(at least from the point of view of impartiality) but society isn't richer than the rest of us, it's just more amenable to helping everyone, because we each have a vote.
While it's good that we all get enough to eat, and don't go bankrupt trying to keep our families healthy and all those other good things, we have to keep in mind that these things are paid by us anyways, as a collective(no, not the borg kind, go back to your tv little trekkie). When politicians manipulate us into believing we don't need to do the math, and find out what things really cost, and what things we can really afford(or when our own laziness as citizens makes us let them get away with it) is when our society gets worse.
I for one can't wait for a responsible democracy.
Responsible democracy: When something bad happens it's all our faults for letting it happen, and when something good happens, it's thanks to nobody because the system's made to work, and it's working as advertised.
I posit that responsible democracy is even more a utopia than anything that's been written in books in the last century or so.
I find it disturbing that Federal autorities of any Nation can act on behalf of other Nations without having to declare what Nation they are acting on behalf of, especially in cases like this where several national jurisdictions are involved.
Am I the only one who thinks "become self employed" doesn't stop someone from being a programmer? Or does that mean that accountants/lawyers/doctors/etc without partners(cabinet of one, i.e. becoming self-employed) aren't accountants/lawyers/doctors anymore?
Please, the workforce is evolving towards more self-employment, for the same reason that off-shoring is popular. The reasons are thusly: 1) Self-employed, and off-shored, are directly tied to the work, and to work performance 2) Much less employment rules, and with much less income-related paperwork. Mostly, it's the contracted party's problem more than the contractual's problem(and if the US wants to fight offshoring so much, why don't they just mandate parity of work conditions between contracted and non-contracted, you'll see the contracted ranks shrink like butter in sunshine) 3) Self-employed are never unioned after all. And firing a contractual when your budget runs out is certainly easier than firing an employee. That gives employers flexibility. Contractuals also work from anywhere with a lot less fuss than an employee, you ever seen a contractual need relocation assistance?
It's the future, unless the governments actually get their act together, and realize offshoring, and self-employments, are being used to route around inflexible(and not-so-advantageous too) workplace regulations. Just like tax shelters are used to route around tax laws.
You seem to confuse the RIAA needing artists with the RIAA being interested in individual artists' well being. Most RIAA members extort so much money from artists, several artists either start their own company, or have tried to get the system rebuilt from the ground up, since the original basis for the system, record production, is now only one aspect of the marketing and success of an individual artist. That the RIAA members act as much as a bank loaning money to the artist for everything, and yet ultimately decides what the money is used for makes a strong case for a large push for change in the system.
When RIAA members say they are protecting the artists, it's a large joke, because the one actor in this field from whom the artist should be protected, at least until the artist is a multimillionaire himself, is the RIAA member.
because not all consumers want to buy all the peripherals? And if they don't buy the peripheral, they aren't likely to buy a game that supports it either, therefore making a pressure towards lowest common denominator?
Just like with external SCSI, I wonder how much the external drive pricing is due to manufacturers fearing it encourages people to buy less, since you can have a device only on the computer you need it at a time?
Maybe what mysql will be doing between mysql and maxdb(compatibility proxy) would be a better fit for compatibility reasons? Especially with oracle's cluster features? I can just imagine someone taking the code from sqlrelay and hacking something similar.
Just how legacy are they? Now there are some free(as in DFSG) smartcard libraries you can get with any debian system, and I'm sure those libraries can be used with the smartcards at a pretty low fee. (I realize you meant perhaps a SSO without tokens, then you might look at the lasso libraries from http://freshmeat.net/redir/lasso/47082/url_homepag e/lasso.entrouvert.org
However, thinking that rewriting those legacy apps as anything but expensive is not very realistic, and my definition of "Legacy" starts with "no source code" so you'd be really screwed in that situation.
If you can rewrite the auth libraries to inbclude something like lasso, you can be fine.
The only problem is that it's either legal to parody, and you can do it, and you can slap down Lucas for trying to stop this, or you agree with them, and all parodies have to stop, because they aren't fair use.
You can't exactly say all parodies have to be reviewed prior to, especially live parodies.
I'll go back to dreaming my country actually reinforces fair use to slap down the RIAA. Right now fair use is coming under attacks from basically all big-media content producers, but noone has actually gone the other direction, that means we will lose fair use, in the sense that all these attacks aimed at making fair use smaller and lesser. While fair use itself is not being defended by any one group(it's not a political or legal issue as of yet, and only seems to concern a bunch of isolated geeks). While the attacks on fair use are not being counteracted and fair use itself is not being reinforced, it will act like a worn down dam, finally disappearing.
On that note, I'm very worried that there's a lot of large-company lobbying, but we haven't heard any group interested in fair use has sued Lucas or the RIAA or any other large media conglomerate for not allowing the fair use that's a legal right of the citizens. Are we really all sheep?
Slashdot Mirror
Your argument would hold, if business wasn't so busy getting involved in the politics of communications(to drive up profits) instead of trying to get involved into actually competing for customers "fairly".
Most carriers are more active on the legal stage, to legislate away competition, than they are trying to improve their products. You'll also note that many of those companies were built with subsidised funds, and they owe us at least the effort of apearing to compete.
Smaller companies compete, larger companies only seem to be able to legislate away competition.
I find it funny that Microsoft owns a technology(Virtual PC) where such jails/more restrictive permissions/virtualization is made to work, over a POSIX operating system, and yet the same Microsoft can't apply the concept to it's own, also somewhat POSIX compliant(with an addon) operating system. It can buy software to make third parties's software work with the restrictions, but not impose the restrictions to the third parties, even 2-3 years in the future. YMMV
it's bit their users in the ass you mean. Did Microsoft had to reimburse anyone due to the security of their software? And how do you measure lost sales over something like this?
Is the new license only available in Massachusetts, or did the State work on Microsoft to get them to open the formats for everyone?
If it's a state-only thing, then Microsoft knows it already lost, and is just doing damage control, no?
Let's take a random, faceless group of people.
It's human nature that if someone can be blamed, instead of taking an inconvenient action, one will try to blame the "other", especially in a group where anonymity is high.
It's rather intuitive that a place with a password policy has "some form" of security officer.
It's also intuitive that this some form of security officer is somehow responsible for security at some degree.
It's seldom happened that the rule "you share your password with someone you're both responsible for whatever happens with that password" was applied.
This a) encourages convenient, insecure, anonymity-fostering "I'm lending you my password while on vacation" and "I forgot to change my password when I came back from vacation"
b) Depending on mental discipline, 3 8 letter passwords might be too much to ask of a person to dedicate to just their job(considering most people will spend about half their "memory budget" on work applications, if that much)
c) The security officer is likely to be blamed, simply because in an anonymous group, whoever shared their passwords just decreased their chances of getting caught, not increased them
d) Two-token authentication and other methods have not gotten enough mindshare yet to be considered "easy"
e) This kind of discussion on slashdot and other places often starts on the premise of "why can't people who don't understand the distinction between authentication and authorization act in a secure manner". It's been my experience that until someone understands the difference between the two, security is very hard to come by. An example:
Marissa is going on vacation next week
Marissa gives her password(authentication) to Joey, so joey can do payroll while Marissa is on vacation
Marissa doesn't understand that she should have called it, and told them to authorize Joey for her tasks, for the duration of the vacation. She may or may not remember to reset her password after. m She might also know that she should call IT, but IT will require she list everything she wants to authorize Joey for, instead of copying her privileges(there might be technical reasons behind this, or they just might not have a trustee system of sufficient power to do it).
This means that for a while, Joey can do things, and safely think the waters are muddled, it's hard to prove Marissa didn't do it. If Joey happens to be a good enough actor, he could say he shared the password with someone else, and that someone else would get the blame. If there is some other security event, involving the outside world, after Marissa's return, so much the better.
Now this will seem like killing baby seals, or something equally cruel, but the only real security response to this, is to punish equally everyone involved in the "password trade" since you can't prove, after the fact, what in fact occured.
Most security policies assume you can outline a procedure to follow, about passwords, without outlining this kind of consequence, and without spending sufficient effort making sure people understand the issues involved.
This makes the environment ripe for anonymity(which is good, when you are in a group with equal responsabilities, like the Internet, but bad, when you're in an environment where someone authorized a money transfer to an employee's spouse's third cousin's bank account in switzerland in an untraceable, anonymous manner).
In the absence of traceability, public opinion will impute blame to the most visible level of responsability. Hence the security officer will be reprimanded(but perhaps not fired), for three employees sharing a password, since firing all three would be inconvenient to the company, and politically unsound in some places as well.
They probably treated cross-state wiretaps seperately because this is spying on TWO people, in different states, and that's a pretty rare case when thinking about non-telco forms of spying(unless you're talking about a meet across a border line).
Because (presumably) different privacy laws apply to both parties, you would need a federal warrant just to prevent the jurisdiction clash inherent in this situation. Since the keylogger was only spying on one person, in one state, how could it claim to need the extreme measure of falling under conflicting regulations, needing to appeal to federal court? (The feds probably confused the keylogger with a sniffer, which would spy on both sides of the conversation, and would probably pass muster in terms of cross-state jurisdiction).
Can we agree about shutting them up about the risks of Free/Open Source software, because "The risks of FOSS doing that are greater", when they are doing it themselves?
I'm also wondering when soundforge will be suing them, and I hope they include exemplary damage in there.
This is exactly the kind of risks Microsoft says you are running open source software, can we buy the frontpage of the new york times and a few other newspaper to spread the news too? This isn't just a case of "Do as I say, not as I do.", it's a "I'm not a lousy, shifty dubious character, like this other guy." When the speaker gets caught doing underhanded things, first. It's not exactly defamation of character(since Microsoft did not flat out say Open Source coders would do this, it just said your risks of this kind of thing happening(distribution of code whose ownership was called to legal question, can someone confirm if wav is a Microsoft executable? I stopped checking in disgust when I found out a TTF was a binary executable, if it is, that makes it code, and not just a data file made with code.) was higher with open source code, so (IANAL) it's my understanding that they were vague enough not to slander anyone(well not without whoever tries to sue them triggering "if the shoe fits" remarks that would turn it into a major PR win for Microsoft.
I wonder though just what would happen if someone turned to civil disobedience with regards to IP law until Microsoft is chastised over its monopoly position and shady trade practices. One could argue(and it's been done on slashdot before) that no corrective punishment was leveled at Microsoft's monopoly position. By corrective I mean some regulation aimed at controlling the price of the infringing product(windows), or using some of the fines to finance the competitors who were wronged, and try to remove the monopoly. Nor was any regulatory commission set to regulate the price of windows. For Microsoft it was business as usual.
I'd be very surprised if this doesn't turn into more of the same, and I eagerly await Microsoft's explanation of how much or how little tort what they did caused to SoundForge. For ideological grounds, I expect them to settle out of court, just not to have to explain this particular part.
i.e. If they did do a great deal of tort, they would have a large fine to pay, etc... But if they didn't do any tort to SoundForge, that means any other pirate wouldn't do any tort to them by breaking the Eula on their product. I expect MSFT's lawyers to do anything they to prevent a substantive public debate on this issue.
Let's see:
The scientists are in search of verifiable, scientific truth, which is contained in repeatable experimentation and proven theorems.
The media are in the business of reporting truth, in all its interpretations(including what may be truth for one person, but not for others)
Balanced journalism can report the opinions as truth(provided they properly qualify it, which they do inaccurately far too often, when they bother to at all)
If the media only reported scientific truth, they might as well just translate the original scientific paper into plain english(it's closer to technical writing, not reporting) since the original paper is a report... It reports what happened in the experiment, and the theory behind it, and what conclusions one can draw within the constraints of the margins of error.
There's not much room for scientific reporters anymore, simply because they become translators. And it's a very very unexciting aspect of science, once all the theories get proven(after all, most proven theories take decades to be disproved, the ones that do get disproved at all).
It could theoretically be exciting to report on the process of "proving" a theory, provided you jazzed it up, and that can lead to all sorts of adverse consequences for the truth that just got proven. After all, when you jazz up the consequences/corollary of a theorem that just got proven, you can change its "truth value" from true to false.
The garden variety journalists seem to have a very hard time with that concept, the fact that if a theorem is true, given an exacting set of conditions/details(which get erased by the process of transforming to english) it can become false if those conditions are relaxed(after all, it's scientific truth, how could it be false?). But science only works with "whole truths" and "detailed truths" and those don't always translate well into modern languages.
I was mentioning all these questions being a problem, because they are asked all at the same election, presumably on the same ballot.
I agree with you that the "National" elections should be seperated from the local matters, on several grounds, first of which is generation/validation of the ballots themselves. Having to generate a valid ballot for 50 states, and I don't know how many counties, cannot be cost-effective if they can change per-county(think schoolboards).
Having several types of ballots all being cast at the same time is almost as bad, since if one forgets one of the pages of the ballot, or if one page gets damaged somehow, that would pollute the process. And all accidents won't happen on just the "local pages". Now after that, who is to say, since there are only two parties, and party affiliation is usually a matter of record, that "statistical anomalies"(missing ballot page, misstapled/presumed lost ballot page, etc...) won't happen more often to ballots cast from people "known to vote" for a particular candidate.
I think we're in agreement that seperating the presidential ballot and setting it aside, because of its importance, and putting the federal machine behind streamlining the process might improve it(simply because 50 different organisations with varying levels of funding, varying levels of motivation, seperated by sometimes very large distances, can hardly be "effective" at working together for a common goal when the stakes are this high.
On the other hand, I'm going to start by trying to get direct vote for the prime minister back on the ballots in Canada, this "national leader is the leader of the majority of parlament" doesn't produce minority governments often enough.
Because only the right one could have come up?
They are globally unique(GU) for a reason, the other ones cannot appear in the system, since you can only vote once, and they all belong to you.
Of course, that presumes your guid's, appearing on the paper, can be verified for unicity, etc...
The problem it solves is that a paper ballot is great when you're only asking a few questions, but not when it's used to ask all the questions your government wants to ask you all at the same time.
I saw earlier(trying to remember where it was exactly) a pretty reasoned explanation as to why the Canadian paper ballot solution couldn't be applied to the states. The consensus was that until the vote tally for the presidential election(and perhaps house/senate) became a federal responsability, it was unpractical, after that maybe.
I'm wondering why so few people are interested from "Decoupling" the presidential elections from the local school board, any opinions?
Are you sure something is given up?
If as you surmise it's just spending effort over time, perhaps. But I would say it's equally likely you're flexing the appropriate areas of your brain more, a sort of intellectual "bodybuilding" that makes learning more languages easier.
Since you're not just learning the language itself, but also evolving a greater capacity to learn, you might end up taking a lot more time, learning the basic framework common to both languages, say, and those common to learning a language, both written and spoken, but once you have those roots, learning an individual language would become faster. Of course, it doesn't show for the initial languages, because you're timesharing your brain between learning the language, and learning to learn.
Once you try a third language, it appears easier, because you invested all that time in brain architecture structure work. It's probably why you often hear people who learn 4 languages or more being surprised at people having trouble learning one or two, they've started on two(or three, one of my relatives' household is a three-language zone)
Disclaimer: I'm not a neurolinguist, just a SysAdmin, but I did grow up in a two-language household, and several of my friends/relatives did too.
Ones that haven't been mentioned would be
dtc (domain technology control) gpl
serverworx ( a new one I believe)
starflow (an european product, built on the hsphere model)
cpanel and hsphere seem to be easiest for newbie clients to pick up, so far. But directadmin has some very nice conceptual features that make me wish I had a copy to play with)
The excuse most heard in graphics drivers is that having a driver would allow a rival company to reverse engineer the special magic that makes the hardware special. I'm not sure it applies here, but the pointy-haired mentality is known to be aggregative.
You bring an interesting point up, I wish each book on the topic of clusters mentioned which type(s) of clusters it dealt with...
Looking for a good book on High-Availability clusters would be so much simpler
Noone really uninterested in the topic has ever bothered to do the research, on either side.
If they don't have an agenda, they usually tend to do something else.
People who regularly use Netscape or Zeus on Solaris don't tend to write about Linux OR Windows, just as an example.
Oddly enough, most campaigns to set things straight fall into much of the same caveats as the articles they fight, since:
1) security is NOT simple
2) security is a multi-faceted topic
Most in-depth security analysis falls onto a case by case scenario, "this is better for these X reasons, but not as good for Y reasons " where X is greater than 6 and Y is greater than 4(and even I'm generalizing more than I should).
Sumarizing that in an article is hard, especially a forward looking article(looking at the way Linux vs Windows is now, and projecting that into the next year or so), which is what most "you should switch" articles end up becoming.
Except for the fact that the overwhelming wealth of society is a myth, you might have a point there.
The wealth of society is the sum of the wealth of the individuals, period. Adding to that the inefficiencies of scale due to corruption, bureaucracy, inertia and other factors, means that the society is less rich than the sum of it's parts, not more. Having that agent in a transaction might make sense(at least from the point of view of impartiality) but society isn't richer than the rest of us, it's just more amenable to helping everyone, because we each have a vote.
While it's good that we all get enough to eat, and don't go bankrupt trying to keep our families healthy and all those other good things, we have to keep in mind that these things are paid by us anyways, as a collective(no, not the borg kind, go back to your tv little trekkie). When politicians manipulate us into believing we don't need to do the math, and find out what things really cost, and what things we can really afford(or when our own laziness as citizens makes us let them get away with it) is when our society gets worse.
I for one can't wait for a responsible democracy.
Responsible democracy: When something bad happens it's all our faults for letting it happen, and when something good happens, it's thanks to nobody because the system's made to work, and it's working as advertised.
I posit that responsible democracy is even more a utopia than anything that's been written in books in the last century or so.
I find it disturbing that Federal autorities of any Nation can act on behalf of other Nations without having to declare what Nation they are acting on behalf of, especially in cases like this where several national jurisdictions are involved.
Am I the only one who thinks "become self employed" doesn't stop someone from being a programmer?
Or does that mean that accountants/lawyers/doctors/etc without partners(cabinet of one, i.e. becoming self-employed) aren't accountants/lawyers/doctors anymore?
Please, the workforce is evolving towards more self-employment, for the same reason that off-shoring is popular. The reasons are thusly:
1) Self-employed, and off-shored, are directly tied to the work, and to work performance
2) Much less employment rules, and with much less income-related paperwork. Mostly, it's the contracted party's problem more than the contractual's problem(and if the US wants to fight offshoring so much, why don't they just mandate parity of work conditions between contracted and non-contracted, you'll see the contracted ranks shrink like butter in sunshine)
3) Self-employed are never unioned after all. And firing a contractual when your budget runs out is certainly easier than firing an employee. That gives employers flexibility. Contractuals also work from anywhere with a lot less fuss than an employee, you ever seen a contractual need relocation assistance?
It's the future, unless the governments actually get their act together, and realize offshoring, and self-employments, are being used to route around inflexible(and not-so-advantageous too) workplace regulations. Just like tax shelters are used to route around tax laws.
You seem to confuse the RIAA needing artists with the RIAA being interested in individual artists' well being.
Most RIAA members extort so much money from artists, several artists either start their own company, or have tried to get the system rebuilt from the ground up, since the original basis for the system, record production, is now only one aspect of the marketing and success of an individual artist. That the RIAA members act as much as a bank loaning money to the artist for everything, and yet ultimately decides what the money is used for makes a strong case for a large push for change in the system.
When RIAA members say they are protecting the artists, it's a large joke, because the one actor in this field from whom the artist should be protected, at least until the artist is a multimillionaire himself, is the RIAA member.
because not all consumers want to buy all the peripherals? And if they don't buy the peripheral, they aren't likely to buy a game that supports it either, therefore making a pressure towards lowest common denominator?
Just like with external SCSI, I wonder how much the external drive pricing is due to manufacturers fearing it encourages people to buy less, since you can have a device only on the computer you need it at a time?
Maybe what mysql will be doing between mysql and maxdb(compatibility proxy) would be a better fit for compatibility reasons?
Especially with oracle's cluster features?
I can just imagine someone taking the code from sqlrelay and hacking something similar.
Just how legacy are they?g e/lasso.entrouvert.org
Now there are some free(as in DFSG) smartcard libraries you can get with any debian system, and I'm sure those libraries can be used with the smartcards at a pretty low fee. (I realize you meant perhaps a SSO without tokens, then you might look at the lasso libraries from http://freshmeat.net/redir/lasso/47082/url_homepa
However, thinking that rewriting those legacy apps as anything but expensive is not very realistic, and my definition of "Legacy" starts with "no source code" so you'd be really screwed in that situation.
If you can rewrite the auth libraries to inbclude something like lasso, you can be fine.
The only problem is that it's either legal to parody, and you can do it, and you can slap down Lucas for trying to stop this, or you agree with them, and all parodies have to stop, because they aren't fair use.
You can't exactly say all parodies have to be reviewed prior to, especially live parodies.
I'll go back to dreaming my country actually reinforces fair use to slap down the RIAA. Right now fair use is coming under attacks from basically all big-media content producers, but noone has actually gone the other direction, that means we will lose fair use, in the sense that all these attacks aimed at making fair use smaller and lesser. While fair use itself is not being defended by any one group(it's not a political or legal issue as of yet, and only seems to concern a bunch of isolated geeks). While the attacks on fair use are not being counteracted and fair use itself is not being reinforced, it will act like a worn down dam, finally disappearing.
On that note, I'm very worried that there's a lot of large-company lobbying, but we haven't heard any group interested in fair use has sued Lucas or the RIAA or any other large media conglomerate for not allowing the fair use that's a legal right of the citizens. Are we really all sheep?