If Mayday can't support term limits, then I can't support it. In fact I may feel compelled to fight against it.
Term limits simply shift power to those who can continue to operate outside those limits. The bureaucrat. The lobbyist. The fund-raiser. Historically, term limits have been shaped by the political impotence of those who would impose them. It's not a cure for their disease, it is a symptom.
Why do you believe it is a precondition of a constitutional-amendment path?
By the numbers:
The Constitution provides that an amendment may be proposed either by the Congress with a two-thirds majority vote in both the House of Representatives and the Senate or by a constitutional convention called for by two-thirds of the State legislatures. None of the 27 amendments to the Constitution have been proposed by constitutional convention.
A proposed amendment becomes part of the Constitution as soon as it is ratified by three-fourths of the States* (38 of 50 States).
If you can't get an ordinary bill through the House and Senate, you haven't a prayer of getting the super-majorities needed for a constitutional amendement.
[*note:
State ratifying conventions are one of the two methods established by Article V of the United States Constitution for ratifying proposed constitutional amendments. Ratifying conventions have only been used on one occasion, that being for the ratification of the Constitution's 21st Amendment in the year 1933. {Repeal of Prohibition] All other proposed constitutional amendments have been offered to the state legislatures for ratification.
The United States Supreme Court has ruled that a popular referendum is not a substitute for either the legislature or a ratifying convention --- nor can a referendum approve of, or disapprove of a state legislature's, or a convention's, decision on an amendment. (Hawke v. Smith, 253 U.S. 221, [1920]).
With MEGA giving 50G for free with client side encryption, I don't understand why you would use any other service.
Set for a July launch.
When a Fort Knox file is stored in Azure, it is split in several fragments. Each fragment is encrypted (using AES 256 bits encryption) with its own key. Each of these fragments are stored in separate Azure containers that are generated on demand.
This shredding architecture allows for massive scalability of storage and more importantly, very strong security at the file level. Imagine the challenge of having to reconstruct a set of fragments spread across dozens of containers, each encrypted with its own key.
These keys are also regenerated every day, making it even more difficult to gain access to the raw storage.
A master key is used to encrypt keys used to encrypted each of the fragments. These encrypted keys are stored in the content database, and the master key is stored in a separate key store.
With a master key stored online in Microsoft's key store, this still allows someone with access to this master key to decrypt all the fragment keys and then use these keys to decrypt the underlying storage. This is less of an issue for a hacker scenario (although possible, given the level of fragmentation between tiers tougher to accomplish) but more of an issue of an NSA style ''request'' for your data. Assuming Microsoft were to comply with the request, they could ultimately still provide them access to your master key and decrypt the information.
The only real solution is to have master keys generated off the grid so that they could not be requested at all and not be in your cloud providers hands to hand over on request.... however this would be difficult to implement and still have a useable business productivity portal because you would still need the master key to decrypt the files.
Ballistic missile submarines regularly spend 80+ days underwater, even during peacetime. How is 30 days a record?
The submarine keeps you underwater. The Aquarius lab puts you in the water.
Aquarius consists of three compartments. Access to the water is made via the 'wet porch', a chamber equipped with a moon pool, which keeps the air pressure inside the wet porch the same as the water pressure at that depth ('ambient pressure'), about 2.6 atmospheres, through hydrostatic equilibrium. The main compartment is strong enough, like a submarine, to maintain normal atmospheric pressure, and can also be pressurized to ambient pressure, and is usually held at a pressure in between. The smallest compartment, the Entry Lock, is between the other two and functions as an airlock in which personnel wait while pressure is adjusted to match either the wet porch or the main compartment.
Because Aquarius allows saturation diving, dives from the habitat can last for up to nine hours at a time; by comparison, surface dives usually last between one to two hours. These long dive times allow for observation that would not otherwise be possible. Way stations on the reef outside Aquarius allow aquanauts to refill their scuba tanks during dives.
This design enables personnel to return to the surface without the need for a decompression chamber when they get there. Personnel stay inside the main compartment for 17 hours before ascending as the pressure is slowly reduced, so that they do not suffer decompression sickness after the ascent.
I pay for my bandwidth. What I do with it once I've paid for it is none of my ISP's goddamned business. They aren't my parents, they aren't the government, they aren't the police.
You signed a contract.
One of many contracts you have signed which insist that you play by the rules --- and no less enforceable when push comes to shove.
To learn from the Ars article how all his movements were synced up on a master audio tape was interesting. Amazing tech for the time.
Disney's animatronics were the central attraction of five pavilions at the 1964 New York World's Fair.
Ford's Magic Skyway, a time travel trippy mix of Mustangs and Dinosaurs, GE's Carousel of Progress, which ended in a real-life demonstration of atomic fusion, Illinois's Meet Mr Lincoln and Pepsi's It's A Small World.
If software patents were around back in the 80's then IBM would have patented the hell out of the PC and its BIOS. Only IBM would be making them to this day and they'd cost $5000 for a base model
IBM needed product on retail shelves at a price point that would appeal to small business.
The IBM PC hardware platform was almost entirely exposed and unprotected COTS technology --- leaving the generic MS-DOS PC on track to take a significant share of the market before the cloning of the IBM PC BIOS.
The crude prototype they designed barely worked when Lowe demonstrated it to the committee in August [1980], but he presented a detailed business plan that proposed that the new computer have an open architecture, use non-proprietary components and software, and be sold through retail stores, all contrary to IBM tradition.
The many Apple II owners on the team influenced its decision to design the computer with an open architecture and publish technical information so others could build expansion slot peripherals.
Because of the [use of] off-the-shelf parts only the system unit and keyboard had unique IBM industrial design elements, and the IBM copyright appeared in only the ROM BIOS and on the company logo.
Code should be copyright-able as are words in a book. Just because you write a clever whodunit does not mean that no one can ever write another!
It does mean your work will be reviewed at a higher level of abstraction than a patent. "If it looks like his duck, quacks like his duck and swims like his duck, it probably is his duck."
Somewhere in the last 100 years the role of the government changed from uphold the constitution to bribe as many people as possible to bring as much federal money back to ones home district.
The federal government has been in the business of building a national infrastructure since 1806. The National Road
The infant Republican party of the 1850s was built on two principles --- "internal improvements" and opposition to the expansion of slavery into the new American territories.
The language and the beneficiaries changed over the years, but the nineteenth century politician understood perfectly well that he was expected to bring home the bacon.
Back in my day, the former was a 'drone' and the latter was a 'remote controlled plane.'
Back in day, the R/C plane was a flyweight model aircraft, with very little range or endurance in the air, flown over open ground and only within direct line-of-sight of the operator.
Another necessary change is term limits for all of Congress so that we can replace career politicians with civilian public servants, as it was meant to be.
The "civilian public servant" of 1790 was the gentleman, the man of independent means, who was expected to take command of things out of a sense of civic duty and to give his life some greater purpose.
The problem is that not every southern planter is a Thomas Jefferson or every New York banker an Alexander Hamilton.
representatives should come out of the private sector to serve their term, and then leave and return to the private sector
In the Progressive Era of the 1880s-1890s, the Robber Baron, or his right-hand man, gravitated naturally to the US Senate. The Senator for Sugar. Cotton. Silver. Steel. Petroleum. The Railroad. Names and faces as familiar then as Henry Ford would become in the next generation. Bill Gates in our own.
The career politician probably won't have any grand design for the future of the country, But neither will he have the tunnel vision of the single-issue man.
According to these stats for Canada in 2009, car drivers suffered about 1173 deaths and 5393 serious injuries while among motorcyclists there were 194 deaths and 1271 serious injuries.
According to the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), in 2006, 13.10 cars out of 100,000 ended up in fatal crashes. The rate for motorcycles is 72.34 per 100,000 registered motorcycles. Motorcycles also have a higher fatality rate per unit of distance travelled when compared with automobiles. Per vehicle mile traveled, motorcyclists' risk of a fatal crash is 35 times greater than a passenger car. In 2004, figures from the UK Department for Transport indicated that motorcycles have 16 times the rate of serious injuries compared to cars, and double the rate of bicycles.
Additional data from the United States reveals that there are over four million motorcycles registered in the United States. Motorcycle fatalities represent approximately five percent of all highway fatalities each year, yet motorcycles represent just two percent of all registered vehicles in the United States. One of the main reasons motorcyclists are killed in crashes is because the motorcycle itself provides virtually no protection in a crash. For example, approximately 80 percent of reported motorcycle crashes result in injury or death; a comparable figure for automobiles is about 20 percent.
I can always print a copy and have it delivered to them, but is there any way to share this sort of information electronically? There are lots of things to secure transmission of data, but once it arrives on the recipients' desktop, you run the risk of their system being compromised and exposing the data.
Put an envelope and its contents in a UL rated fire safe and it will most likely survive any household disaster you could name. The diaries, account books, and letters of family members active in the early nineteenth century remain perfectly legible after close on to 200 years.
Any piece of software developed by US citizens, companies, foundations, etc. is no longer trustworthy. The US is dead as far as secure software is concerned.
The geek's insistence that the US is hopelessly corrupt and salvation is to found elsewhere is ridiculous.
Every country keeps watch over its, neighbors, friends and enemies alike. Alliances are never permanent, only interests.
Schools are probably teaching it because their staff knows how and they have the equipment. Not because it's a useful, saleable, or even particularly interesting skill.
Allow me to introduce you to one of the great masters of the darkroom and analog photography:
I have 1 ISP in my region that provides cable internet.
In my home county alone, with a population of 216,000, there are at least 25 geographical and political entities that can negotiate deals for broadband service, including an Indian reservation.
The choice is between DSL or cable. I don't see any motivation for a third entrant here.
We've had electric cars since the late 1800s they were even more popular than gas until cost outweighs the benefit.
The electric car of the late 1890s and beyond was most likely to be a literal horseless carriage or coach-and-four, and, with handcrafted body work priced in the thousands, unadjusted for inflation. City cars with a maximum range of 25 miles at speeds of 5 to 15 mph.
In the states, you don't see anything like mass production and a middle class market for the electric.
"innovation" is often no more than repackaging something that was done 20+ years ago that people forgot about.
Most likely because the tech was then too immature, impractical, or expensive for commercial development. The first (analog) videophone demonstrations, for example, were staged in the 1920s. It was a long way from there to Skype.
There is a school in Harlem that offers stunning success to low income kids and the way they do it is allowing the kids to visit their homes on Sundays only.
I am having a very hard time locating the school you describe. Searches through Google lead nowhere,
Mining pools and custom hardware do make it possible for a large enough group to get over 50% We'll see whether they decide it's more useful to stay over 50% and cheat, stay over 50% and not cheat, or split the pool into two or more pieces to keep the value of their Bitcoins higher than they would be if the market abandons Bitcoin because of perceptions of cheating.
do you need a large group or simply raw computational horsepower?
and if they --- whoever "they" are ---- don't give a damn about the value of their holdings and are simply out to topple the inverted pyramid the geek has created, what then?
The Internet was such a wonderful place as long as it was purely academic network.
I don't think it's the primordial academic network that the geek remembers with affection but rather a time when the Internet was his personal playground.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a bit like those crystal ball con artists.
Remember Levi and his jeans?
Mining the miners has always been more profitable in the long run than working a mine.
If Mayday can't support term limits, then I can't support it. In fact I may feel compelled to fight against it.
Term limits simply shift power to those who can continue to operate outside those limits. The bureaucrat. The lobbyist. The fund-raiser. Historically, term limits have been shaped by the political impotence of those who would impose them. It's not a cure for their disease, it is a symptom.
To me, a millionaire donating is own money is somehow less problematic than unions taking money from their members to donate.
In union there is strength, a lesson the geek never seems to learn. How else do you suppose a day laborer can out-match the billionaire in politics?
Why do you believe it is a precondition of a constitutional-amendment path?
By the numbers:
The Constitution provides that an amendment may be proposed either by the Congress with a two-thirds majority vote in both the House of Representatives and the Senate or by a constitutional convention called for by two-thirds of the State legislatures. None of the 27 amendments to the Constitution have been proposed by constitutional convention.
A proposed amendment becomes part of the Constitution as soon as it is ratified by three-fourths of the States* (38 of 50 States).
The Constitutional Amendment Process
If you can't get an ordinary bill through the House and Senate, you haven't a prayer of getting the super-majorities needed for a constitutional amendement.
[*note:
State ratifying conventions are one of the two methods established by Article V of the United States Constitution for ratifying proposed constitutional amendments. Ratifying conventions have only been used on one occasion, that being for the ratification of the Constitution's 21st Amendment in the year 1933. {Repeal of Prohibition] All other proposed constitutional amendments have been offered to the state legislatures for ratification.
The United States Supreme Court has ruled that a popular referendum is not a substitute for either the legislature or a ratifying convention --- nor can a referendum approve of, or disapprove of a state legislature's, or a convention's, decision on an amendment. (Hawke v. Smith, 253 U.S. 221, [1920]).
State ratifying conventions
With MEGA giving 50G for free with client side encryption, I don't understand why you would use any other service.
Set for a July launch.
When a Fort Knox file is stored in Azure, it is split in several fragments. Each fragment is encrypted (using AES 256 bits encryption) with its own key. Each of these fragments are stored in separate Azure containers that are generated on demand.
This shredding architecture allows for massive scalability of storage and more importantly, very strong security at the file level. Imagine the challenge of having to reconstruct a set of fragments spread across dozens of containers, each encrypted with its own key.
These keys are also regenerated every day, making it even more difficult to gain access to the raw storage.
A master key is used to encrypt keys used to encrypted each of the fragments. These encrypted keys are stored in the content database, and the master key is stored in a separate key store.
With a master key stored online in Microsoft's key store, this still allows someone with access to this master key to decrypt all the fragment keys and then use these keys to decrypt the underlying storage. This is less of an issue for a hacker scenario (although possible, given the level of fragmentation between tiers tougher to accomplish) but more of an issue of an NSA style ''request'' for your data. Assuming Microsoft were to comply with the request, they could ultimately still provide them access to your master key and decrypt the information.
The only real solution is to have master keys generated off the grid so that they could not be requested at all and not be in your cloud providers hands to hand over on request.... however this would be difficult to implement and still have a useable business productivity portal because you would still need the master key to decrypt the files.
Technical Details on Office 365 Fort Knox Encrypted Storage
Ballistic missile submarines regularly spend 80+ days underwater, even during peacetime. How is 30 days a record?
The submarine keeps you underwater. The Aquarius lab puts you in the water.
Aquarius consists of three compartments. Access to the water is made via the 'wet porch', a chamber equipped with a moon pool, which keeps the air pressure inside the wet porch the same as the water pressure at that depth ('ambient pressure'), about 2.6 atmospheres, through hydrostatic equilibrium. The main compartment is strong enough, like a submarine, to maintain normal atmospheric pressure, and can also be pressurized to ambient pressure, and is usually held at a pressure in between. The smallest compartment, the Entry Lock, is between the other two and functions as an airlock in which personnel wait while pressure is adjusted to match either the wet porch or the main compartment.
Because Aquarius allows saturation diving, dives from the habitat can last for up to nine hours at a time; by comparison, surface dives usually last between one to two hours. These long dive times allow for observation that would not otherwise be possible. Way stations on the reef outside Aquarius allow aquanauts to refill their scuba tanks during dives.
This design enables personnel to return to the surface without the need for a decompression chamber when they get there. Personnel stay inside the main compartment for 17 hours before ascending as the pressure is slowly reduced, so that they do not suffer decompression sickness after the ascent.
Aquarius (laboratory)
I pay for my bandwidth. What I do with it once I've paid for it is none of my ISP's goddamned business. They aren't my parents, they aren't the government, they aren't the police.
You signed a contract.
One of many contracts you have signed which insist that you play by the rules --- and no less enforceable when push comes to shove.
To learn from the Ars article how all his movements were synced up on a master audio tape was interesting. Amazing tech for the time.
Disney's animatronics were the central attraction of five pavilions at the 1964 New York World's Fair.
Ford's Magic Skyway, a time travel trippy mix of Mustangs and Dinosaurs, GE's Carousel of Progress, which ended in a real-life demonstration of atomic fusion, Illinois's Meet Mr Lincoln and Pepsi's It's A Small World.
If software patents were around back in the 80's then IBM would have patented the hell out of the PC and its BIOS. Only IBM would be making them to this day and they'd cost $5000 for a base model
IBM needed product on retail shelves at a price point that would appeal to small business.
The IBM PC hardware platform was almost entirely exposed and unprotected COTS technology --- leaving the generic MS-DOS PC on track to take a significant share of the market before the cloning of the IBM PC BIOS.
The crude prototype they designed barely worked when Lowe demonstrated it to the committee in August [1980], but he presented a detailed business plan that proposed that the new computer have an open architecture, use non-proprietary components and software, and be sold through retail stores, all contrary to IBM tradition.
The many Apple II owners on the team influenced its decision to design the computer with an open architecture and publish technical information so others could build expansion slot peripherals.
Because of the [use of] off-the-shelf parts only the system unit and keyboard had unique IBM industrial design elements, and the IBM copyright appeared in only the ROM BIOS and on the company logo.
IBM Personal Computer
Code should be copyright-able as are words in a book. Just because you write a clever whodunit does not mean that no one can ever write another!
It does mean your work will be reviewed at a higher level of abstraction than a patent. "If it looks like his duck, quacks like his duck and swims like his duck, it probably is his duck."
Somewhere in the last 100 years the role of the government changed from uphold the constitution to bribe as many people as possible to bring as much federal money back to ones home district.
The federal government has been in the business of building a national infrastructure since 1806. The National Road
The infant Republican party of the 1850s was built on two principles --- "internal improvements" and opposition to the expansion of slavery into the new American territories.
The language and the beneficiaries changed over the years, but the nineteenth century politician understood perfectly well that he was expected to bring home the bacon.
Back in my day, the former was a 'drone' and the latter was a 'remote controlled plane.'
Back in day, the R/C plane was a flyweight model aircraft, with very little range or endurance in the air, flown over open ground and only within direct line-of-sight of the operator.
Another necessary change is term limits for all of Congress so that we can replace career politicians with civilian public servants, as it was meant to be.
The "civilian public servant" of 1790 was the gentleman, the man of independent means, who was expected to take command of things out of a sense of civic duty and to give his life some greater purpose.
The problem is that not every southern planter is a Thomas Jefferson or every New York banker an Alexander Hamilton.
representatives should come out of the private sector to serve their term, and then leave and return to the private sector
In the Progressive Era of the 1880s-1890s, the Robber Baron, or his right-hand man, gravitated naturally to the US Senate. The Senator for Sugar. Cotton. Silver. Steel. Petroleum. The Railroad. Names and faces as familiar then as Henry Ford would become in the next generation. Bill Gates in our own.
The career politician probably won't have any grand design for the future of the country, But neither will he have the tunnel vision of the single-issue man.
According to these stats for Canada in 2009, car drivers suffered about 1173 deaths and 5393 serious injuries while among motorcyclists there were 194 deaths and 1271 serious injuries.
According to the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), in 2006, 13.10 cars out of 100,000 ended up in fatal crashes. The rate for motorcycles is 72.34 per 100,000 registered motorcycles. Motorcycles also have a higher fatality rate per unit of distance travelled when compared with automobiles. Per vehicle mile traveled, motorcyclists' risk of a fatal crash is 35 times greater than a passenger car. In 2004, figures from the UK Department for Transport indicated that motorcycles have 16 times the rate of serious injuries compared to cars, and double the rate of bicycles.
Additional data from the United States reveals that there are over four million motorcycles registered in the United States. Motorcycle fatalities represent approximately five percent of all highway fatalities each year, yet motorcycles represent just two percent of all registered vehicles in the United States. One of the main reasons motorcyclists are killed in crashes is because the motorcycle itself provides virtually no protection in a crash. For example, approximately 80 percent of reported motorcycle crashes result in injury or death; a comparable figure for automobiles is about 20 percent.
Motorcycle safety
Someone has been out in the sun too long.
I can always print a copy and have it delivered to them, but is there any way to share this sort of information electronically? There are lots of things to secure transmission of data, but once it arrives on the recipients' desktop, you run the risk of their system being compromised and exposing the data.
Put an envelope and its contents in a UL rated fire safe and it will most likely survive any household disaster you could name. The diaries, account books, and letters of family members active in the early nineteenth century remain perfectly legible after close on to 200 years.
Any piece of software developed by US citizens, companies, foundations, etc. is no longer trustworthy. The US is dead as far as secure software is concerned.
The geek's insistence that the US is hopelessly corrupt and salvation is to found elsewhere is ridiculous.
Every country keeps watch over its, neighbors, friends and enemies alike. Alliances are never permanent, only interests.
Schools are probably teaching it because their staff knows how and they have the equipment. Not because it's a useful, saleable, or even particularly interesting skill.
Allow me to introduce you to one of the great masters of the darkroom and analog photography:
Ansel Adams, "The Tetons - Snake River"
I have 1 ISP in my region that provides cable internet.
In my home county alone, with a population of 216,000, there are at least 25 geographical and political entities that can negotiate deals for broadband service, including an Indian reservation.
The choice is between DSL or cable. I don't see any motivation for a third entrant here.
We've had electric cars since the late 1800s they were even more popular than gas until cost outweighs the benefit.
The electric car of the late 1890s and beyond was most likely to be a literal horseless carriage or coach-and-four, and, with handcrafted body work priced in the thousands, unadjusted for inflation. City cars with a maximum range of 25 miles at speeds of 5 to 15 mph.
In the states, you don't see anything like mass production and a middle class market for the electric.
"innovation" is often no more than repackaging something that was done 20+ years ago that people forgot about.
Most likely because the tech was then too immature, impractical, or expensive for commercial development. The first (analog) videophone demonstrations, for example, were staged in the 1920s. It was a long way from there to Skype.
It seems like Ikea Hackers actually adds value to the Ikea brand and probably encourages traffic to their stores.
Until a project goes wrong in a really big way and IKEA takes the blame.
There is a school in Harlem that offers stunning success to low income kids and the way they do it is allowing the kids to visit their homes on Sundays only.
I am having a very hard time locating the school you describe. Searches through Google lead nowhere,
Mining pools and custom hardware do make it possible for a large enough group to get over 50%
We'll see whether they decide it's more useful to stay over 50% and cheat, stay over 50% and not cheat, or split the pool into two or more pieces to keep the value of their Bitcoins higher than they would be if the market abandons Bitcoin because of perceptions of cheating.
do you need a large group or simply raw computational horsepower?
and if they --- whoever "they" are ---- don't give a damn about the value of their holdings and are simply out to topple the inverted pyramid the geek has created, what then?
The Internet was such a wonderful place as long as it was purely academic network.
I don't think it's the primordial academic network that the geek remembers with affection but rather a time when the Internet was his personal playground.
Opera is a dieing art form
and so, it would appear, is correct spelling.
It probably won't be a success. But it may draw new audience members in.
Why would new audiences be drawn in by a mechanistic note-by-note MIDI performance of a Wagnerian score?