What happened to the days when conservatives had the balls to just say "centralism sucks, so we're cancelling these programs and lowering taxs"?
They were largely replaced by RINOs (Republicans In Name Only) - liberals and middle-of-the-roaders claiming to be conservatives. Actual conservatives are only a fraction of the so-called "conservative" office holders.
Prime example: The current immigration "reform" legislation. An actual conservative would get the borders under control FIRST. "Guest worker" programs and modifications to the naturalization process and quotas would wait until it had been PROVED that the executive branch was willing and able to enforce the immigration law. Look at the voting records of the Republican senators (excluding those who are up for election THIS year and might face a voter backlash while the issue is fresh) to see the proportion of conservatives to RINOs.
(This deal was made once before for (supposedly) a bit over a million illegals (turned out to be far more) - and the "no more" part was replaced by "ten times as many". Why should real conservatives, or anyone else, believe the second half would happen this time? Actual conservatives aren't going for it until the previous deal is enforced - which would take the pressure off if it actually happened.)
Of course the legacy news media is so far off in left field that office holders only slightly to the right of Joe Stalin are portrayed as being slightly to the left of Attila the Hun.
It's also smaler. (Haven't checked whether it's because it overrode my overrides or what.)
It's literally painful to try to read it. Eyestrain in seconds. Have to switch to my reading glasses when my distant galsses worked fine with the old one.
If slashdot is serious about the mildly visually handicapped (which includes pretty much everybody over 30) they should avoid that like the plague.
If they're only interested in serving the young and healthy they might as well clone Wired.
Can't even comment on the rest of the new look (which might be OK or might have other problems) since the ache is too distracting.
The thing that made silicon valley was neither money nor nerds. In fact, when it started out it didn't have much of either. The thing that really made silicon valley was Non Proprietary Technology. That is what made it. That is All that made it. The rest followed naturally.
But you can do "Non Proprietary Technology" anywhere. So why is there only one Silicon Valley?
Because there's another (related) item - and it's a BIG one:
Callifornia law - then and now - had a zinger on inventions:
If you invent something that is NOT in your employer's current or forseeable line of business, do it on your own time, and don't use company equipment and materials, it's YOURS.
No matter WHAT your employment agreement says: It's "against public policy" to let your employer grab your idea and sit on it if you wnat to develop it. And California interprets this VERY much in favor of the employee - so even if it's in the same field (sometimes even if it enables direct competition only a little while later) - the employer is S.O.L.
Write up a business plan, move across the street, and hang out your shingle.
Which key people do all the time - sometimes repeatedly, until one of their ideas catches fire.
THAT is the "Engine of Creation" behind the explosion of startups in California, and why Silicon Valley hasn't been successfully cloned in any of several other sites that have all of its other desirable characteristics.
Want to try to clone up a Silicon Valley in YOUR state? (Tried a few times with no success?) Start by cloning that law.
Because for many people schools aren't about education, they are about control.
Public schools ALWAYS WERE about control - specifically, about indoctrinating children with a government/elite - prescribed culture.
Which amounts to teaching the next generation to be good serfs.
Look at the original debates on setting up and funding public schools. Actually educating the kids was hardly ever mentioned. The big push was to indoctrinate them with a common culture.
(Of course nowdays it's to indoctrinate them with a perversion of the culture of their ancestors' ethnic group that makes them easy to manipulate, in good old divide-and-conquer style. Segregation - and substandard education for the designated underclasses - was banned half a century ago. So get them to DEMAND it. But the principle of government-prescribed social indoctrination {and let learning go hang} is the same.)
Kick you off the teams (and other extra activities that look good on college admission forms). Kick you out of AP classes. Suspend or expell you. Put black marks in your record (and otherwise interfere with earning decent grades) that will blight your carreer and reduce your earning and marriage prospects for the rest of your life.
It's precicely the same model as mp3.com started with:
- make you prove you had a CD by inserting it in your drive and letting their software examine it, then
- allow you to download (as often as you like) a copy of a single, centrally stored, MP3 rip of it.
This provided a "rip" and transport service for music you'd already bought, but only required one copy at the server.
They lost the suit against RIAA.
As far as the courts are concerned, a for-profit company whose business model includes making copies for you that you are allowed to make yourselves, or providing an equivalent service that includes copymaking, goes beyond fair use.
I've been expecting this ever since the cable companies started noising the idea around. IANAL, but IMHO they'll lose this one just like MP3.com lost theirs.
In fact, since the MP3.com case I've been surprised that the MPAA hasn't gone after the "rent DVR functionality in your cable/satelite box" service add-ons. How that would go would depend on whether the copying issue in the MP3.com case was over "doing it for a fee" or "sharing a single copy rather than making per-user copies".
Of course the whole point of virtual DVR is the economy of sharing a single copy, so the service has both aspects of the MP3.com problem.
That's the current estimate. It's based on two things:
- The number allowed by the proposed legislation
- The number of illegals estimated to be here now (about 12 million), assuming they bring in the same proportion of relatives that those legalized in the first amnesty did.
The US is estimated to have about 10% of the working-age population of Mexico and the same percentage of non-working dependents (which is what 12 million comes out to by that same set of Mexican population figures) already over here as illegals in the current round of illegal immigration. If they all bring in their brothers, wives, children (many of working age but NOT here), parents, grandparents, etc. you could easily end up with half of Mexico migrating to the US.
And why wouldn't they come, if their relative's lawbreaking and the US congress got them moved to the head of the line? Mexico is a corrupt hell-hole with a permanent depression and a standard of living so low that low-level white collar workers in the US can retire there and live like minor nobility. Why SHOULDN'T the serfs want to move here, where even taking the bottom tier jobs - or living on the social safety hammock - is a massive step up in quality of life?
I'm sure I'm not the only one here who has wondered why we haven't seen wider circulation of this story and why immigration laws are suddenly the thing to discuss.
Domestic wiretap abuse is ancient news. Been going on since there were wires to tap. Look at the COINTELPRO stuff from half a century back to see some real dirty tricks.
The immigration thing, on the other hand, got 'WAY big when congress decided a fair "compromise" solution would be to add maybe 60 million Mexicans to the 300 million population of the US over the next 20 years - giving them full citizenship (including the vote).
Adding one new voter for every five now present - when the two major parties are so evenly matched that the presidency gets decided by a few hundred votes - sounded to a lot of citizens like an invasion.
Then consider that the people in question grew up in a country where the government is totally corrupt and the laws deserving of contempt, most of them came here, stay here, and work in violation of OUR laws (while our own politicians refuse to enforce them and reward the immigrants for breaking them), and are being educated by a system that keeps them isolated from the general culture. So they started to worry about what will happen to respect for law over the next few decades.
They pushed the congress critters and got ignored. Then they got mad.
The immigration issue is a reboot of US politics on the banana repulic model. If you thought you've seen government corruption in the last couple decades you ain't seen NOTHING yet.
And if it continues in the same vein for even a couple more years it could, in the opinion of many, literally start an avalanche that will lead to the second civil war.
So, yes, it's significantly more "the in thing to discuss" than a little traffic analysis on phone calls by the NSA.
As one slashdotter pointed out a couple weeks ago, the NSA makes Nixon look like an amateur.
Compared to the NSA Nixon's plumbers WERE amateurs. Heck - compared to the NSA the KGB were a garage shop (and NOT the hi-tek startup kind, either.)
The space application doesn't guarantee immunity from a big time lag--just the opposite.
The problem isn't just the lag.
The problem is lag VARIABILITY and GAPS in data transmission.
A space application has a fixed time lag and very low packet loss (through forward error correction - to an extreme degree if necessary). In the absense of jitter and the virtual absense of dropped packets, some degree of fixed lag can be taken into account.
But removing jitter means enough buffering that your resulting fixed lag becomes larger than the worst-case lag. And filling in dropped packets means multiplying the round trip time - and the resulting latency - by a factor of several, or accepting sudden loss of connection at a critical moment. Either can increase the lag to the point that it can no longer be worked around.
There's no real mention of what exactly they will be using, but I'd bet that "advanced telecommunications technology" doesn't mean internet.
A QoS-enabled Internet would work just fine. And it's coming - unless misguided "Net Neutrality" laws throw the baby out with the bathwater.
There are two aspects to "neutrality" and tiered bandwidth.
- One is using it to distinguish services that need different levels of support - giving them what they need (and perhaps charging extra if appropriate), but treating all services requiring a particular QoS level (including your own) equally.
- The other is using the tools to implement anticompetive practices, such as penalizing your competitors' packets or charging some customers extra just because they have deep pockets to be picked.
The first lets a network provider combine guaranteed-QoS and best-effort traffic on a single network and give the best-effort traffic all the remaining bandwidth once the high-QoS stuff is serviced. This is massively cheaper than either of the alternatives: Separate networks, or a permanent bandwidth split on a single one, with the high-QoS partition large enough to handle the maximum load and its unused bandwidth left idle. This saving ends up going mainly to the network users, in the form of lower rates.
The second is an anti-competitive practice and a worthy target of suppression - by "the invisible hand" if possible, perhaps by law if not.
Only if they're a TDM point-to-point or switched connection, or a virtual one using something like ATM. In which case it's not the Internet.
It's connection-oriented, not packet-oriented (even if it's packets being carried,and they're being switched one at a time.) Connection-oriented networks give you a fixed(-maximum)-bandwidth connection with guaranteed delivery and guaranteed limits on latency and jitter.
Packet switched networks can emulate this, but ONLY with QoS guarantees - guarantees on delivery, latency, and latency variation. That means some packets take precedence over others. They go to the head of the line. When there are too many packets these privileged ones get forwarded while others are dropped. And so on.
This is NOT something you can build out of best-effort delivery and retransmission, as you build reliable (but variable speed and latency) connections out of unreliable ones using protocols like TCP.
Technically, it should be no different than driving the rovers on Mars.
You take everything as a single indivisible step and don't rush until you know the outcome of the previous one.
That doesn't work when you're doing surgery. The patient is under stresses that increase the damage to his body and the risk of unsatisfactory outcome (failure of the operation's goal, post-op infection, temporary or permanent impairment, or death) increase with every extra minute the operation takes.
If you lose packets RCing the orbiter you might delay its operation. If you lose packets in an operation - even if it just slows it - you might maim or kill the patient.
This is a very strong argument for tiered bandwidth - so ISPs can guarantee that surgical waldo packets take priority over, say, downloads of the latest release of an OS or a new movie.
It's one thing to hiccup when you're handling a VoIP packet. It's quite another when you're handling the content of a feedback loop including a video camera, a surgeon, a scalpel, and a vital organ.
A few years back a mailing list on a controversial topic was hosted on one of my home site's computers.
I made it a rule that NO encrypted traffic would run through that site - and no illegal activity (including confessions of wrongdoing) would be allowed on the mailing list. (Had to shut it down for a few days once to drive that point home.)
Reason?
If the traffic was in the clear, should the cops become suspicious they could tap it and check. And they'd prefer to do that, since it would avoid tipping off the hypothetical bad guys and let them collect more information and evidence.
If the traffic was encrypted they couldn't tap it effectively. But if they could get a warrant to tap the line they could easily get a warrant to break in, sieze the computer, and anything else they could find. Then they could examine any in-the-clear archives of the list on the computer - which they would expect they might find - or hunt down any keying information that might be stored, at their leisure. And, having established probable cause for the initial search, they could use anything ELSE they found as evidence, even if it was unrelated to the original search. Meanwhile they'd have shut down the "suspect operation" and greatly inconvenienced its operators.
(Since then the mailing list has been replaced by a successor hosted elswhere by others. I still don't encrypt my email in general. But now I'm free to use SSH or VPN to connect to my employer's machines - along with all the other employees, since it's company policy.)
Using encryption to "seal" envelopes is a good idea - if lots of people do it. The more it's used on ordinary stuff, the less it serves as a flag that there's something interesting behind it. But even if it's common you should be aware of the potential downsides and take them into account when deciding whether to encrypt.
(Given that the police are saying this one may be unrelated to spamming, it may take at least two MORE.)
Hiroshima showed Japan that the US COULD make and deliver a nuclear bomb.
The Japanese generals knew what it was, because they were working on one themselves. At that point, many of them thought the war was lost, and were prepared to surrender. But some of them argued that collecting and processing the necessary materials was such an effort that the US probably only HAD one and wouldn't have a second for a long time.
Nagasaki showed Japan that we had more than one. This left open the possibility that the US might be able to keep this up - once a month, once a week, once a day, once an hour - until Japan was all rubble and slag. So enough of the rest threw in the towel, too, for Japan to submit without total loss of honor - and thus drastically cut the loss of life on both sides.
A deterrent doesn't deter until there is reasonable expectation that it may occur. One dead spammer - who may be dead for other reasons than spamming - might make them think a little. But it will take at least two dead spammers - unambiguously dead because of their spamming - to provide enough datapoints for the intelligent among the pack to start including it in their cost-benefit analyses.
Please note that I'm NOT advocating the wholesale and gory murder of spammers. I'm just noting that, if that DOES end up being the solution (or even a component of it), it won't be limited to one bloody corpse.
[raised specter of attacking a non-spammer victim by] whip[ping] whole populations into a literally murderous frenzy by getting someone tarred as a spammer?
Criminal justice STARTS from vigilantism and revenge: In the absense of effective law enforcement and the presence of repeat offenders, people will act individually or in groups to hunt down the repeat offenders and punish or kill them, to create a disincentive to commission of more offenses (at least in that area and to those victime), or eliminate the offender.
(Note that this is distinct from self-defense resistance to a crime in progress. Self-defense becomes vigalantism once the perpetrator is out of sight.)
But such do-it-yourself activity has downsides. Sometimes the wrong person is targeted - especially if the crime was heinous and emotions are high. Sometimes penalties are excessive. Sometimes some "leader" uses the mechanism to commit crimes of his own. And always there's an uncertainty about exactly what constitutes enough of a "crime" t0 rouse the hue and cry.
So governments formalize the process. They establish a list of what's permitted and what's not. They establish rules for identifying and accusing perpetrators. The may designate people to do this, and/or define how much of the process designated and ordinary people may do. They establish mechanisms for determining guilt or innocense - and may designate people to perform this. They establish schedules of punishments.
And they generally claim a monopoly on this, forbidding the freelance form.
People will generally go along with this as long as it's working at least moderately well. Though a particluar government's version of this formalized vigilantism may have any or all the problems of the ad-hoc sort, it tends to have less of them - and it's out in the open so it can be debugged.
But when someone is repeatedly imposing damage on others, government refuses to do anything about it, and the problem keeps recurring and escalating, people will fall back on the informal form of "justice".
That's the situation we have now, with spam.
Now government is apparently keeping its hands off mainly to try to avoid regulating the internet - because it has recognized that this flock of geese is laying a MOUNTAIN of golden eggs and they don't want to risk killing it. So the regulators are foot-dragging as much as possible, to see if some non-regulatory solution can be achieved.
Unfortunately, the organized spam/malware gangs are a pack of predators that are starting to decimate the flock.
So don't be surprised if a continued governmental hands-off of this problem leads to vigilantism - in increasing amounts and number of forms - first in the virtual world, then in the real one.
This is yet another example of the...Supreme Court, now stacked... No checks and balances, controlling all three branches of govern...
Your statement is yet another example of the abysmal state of education in the US, and the misunderstanding of the governments' functions that has resulted.
"Checks and Balances" has NOTHING to do with anything INTERNAL to one branch of government. It refers to interactions between the three of them. (Details vary, but the running theme is that any two can rein in the third.)
In particular, it has NOTHING to do with the two major parties having roughly equal participation in any branch, or with some hypothetical prohibition on all three branches being controlled by members of the same party.
What it is about is keeping a single person or a handful of people in one branch from getting out of the control of the people themselves and running wild. The Checks and Balances create various requirements that one branch must obtain cooperation from others to act, or that some consensus of members of two branches can override the actions of a third, remove its personnel or funding, or directly intervene in its actions.
It's been done before. Back in the '60s or early '70s or so.
A language-acquisition researcher recorded her daughter's waking activities continuously for several years as she developed language.
One interesting thing to come out of this was that, as one point (I think about the three-word utterance stage) the kid started using this word that sounded something like "ehWIDdeh". (I don't recall exactly how the researcher spelled it but that's about what it sounded like.) It was never really clear what she meant by it, but she seemed to understand it and use it consistently herself. Eventually she stopped using it.
Interestingly, after the experiment was over, momma showed the films to daughter and asked her if she knew what she had meant back then. Daughter had no clue, either.
(Last I heard the leading speculation was that it was a placeholder, for when kid knew she wanted to emit a particular syntax but didn't have the word she wanted to put in that place yet. But everybody knows they're just guessing.)
Doing the experiment again with another kid, better equipment, and computer aid should be valuable. In fact, doing it several times would be even more valuable. But let's not treat it like it's something brand new.
Refers to things like assigning censors to pre-screen your publications before you print them, or having cops pull you off your podium and haul you downtown as soon as you start talking about forbidden subjects or opinions. Also to puntitive taxes on publications and public speech.
There's lots of protection there. Especially for people trying to make an anti-establishment political point, which is what it's really all about.
Remember that the founders had just fought a war to overthrow their legal government, and wanted to insure that if the new, home-grown government got out of hand its subjects would be able to do the same. Among the things that ticked them off were the "stamp act", requiring an expensive tax stamp be affixed to every printed item, and various censorship provisions of the colonial law.
First Amendment doesn't guarantee 100% free speech in all situations. It protects you from the government censoring your opinion,
Actually, what it does is protect you from the government blocking your speech BEFORE you emit it.
Once you've said something it does just about zero to protect you from legal repercussions for any harm your speech may have caused.
(There are a few subjects where it does give SOME coverage For instance: Truth is an absolute defense against claims of libel - though not against claims of extortion. Political speech is especially well protected, slippery slope arguments bias in favor of speech in some cases, and so on. IANAL so don't take this as legal advice or absolute truth.)
Crude oil pulls carbon from fossils to the air, releasing carbon that has not been in the atmosphere for geologic time, increasing the atmospheric carbon.
Crop ethanol pulls carbon from the air - most of which is released back to the air. The carbon in the air is unchanged, except for the reduction by the amount that goes into the inventory of ethanol and plant materials in the fuel cycle, plus a tiny leak that leaves the fuel cycle without being put back into the air.
Slashdot Mirror
What happened to the days when conservatives had the balls to just say "centralism sucks, so we're cancelling these programs and lowering taxs"?
They were largely replaced by RINOs (Republicans In Name Only) - liberals and middle-of-the-roaders claiming to be conservatives. Actual conservatives are only a fraction of the so-called "conservative" office holders.
Prime example: The current immigration "reform" legislation. An actual conservative would get the borders under control FIRST. "Guest worker" programs and modifications to the naturalization process and quotas would wait until it had been PROVED that the executive branch was willing and able to enforce the immigration law. Look at the voting records of the Republican senators (excluding those who are up for election THIS year and might face a voter backlash while the issue is fresh) to see the proportion of conservatives to RINOs.
(This deal was made once before for (supposedly) a bit over a million illegals (turned out to be far more) - and the "no more" part was replaced by "ten times as many". Why should real conservatives, or anyone else, believe the second half would happen this time? Actual conservatives aren't going for it until the previous deal is enforced - which would take the pressure off if it actually happened.)
Of course the legacy news media is so far off in left field that office holders only slightly to the right of Joe Stalin are portrayed as being slightly to the left of Attila the Hun.
It's also smaler. (Haven't checked whether it's because it overrode my overrides or what.)
It's literally painful to try to read it. Eyestrain in seconds. Have to switch to my reading glasses when my distant galsses worked fine with the old one.
If slashdot is serious about the mildly visually handicapped (which includes pretty much everybody over 30) they should avoid that like the plague.
If they're only interested in serving the young and healthy they might as well clone Wired.
Can't even comment on the rest of the new look (which might be OK or might have other problems) since the ache is too distracting.
The thing that made silicon valley was neither money nor nerds. In fact, when it started out it didn't have much of either. The thing that really made silicon valley was Non Proprietary Technology. That is what made it. That is All that made it. The rest followed naturally.
But you can do "Non Proprietary Technology" anywhere. So why is there only one Silicon Valley?
Because there's another (related) item - and it's a BIG one:
Callifornia law - then and now - had a zinger on inventions:
If you invent something that is NOT in your employer's current or forseeable line of business, do it on your own time, and don't use company equipment and materials, it's YOURS.
No matter WHAT your employment agreement says: It's "against public policy" to let your employer grab your idea and sit on it if you wnat to develop it. And California interprets this VERY much in favor of the employee - so even if it's in the same field (sometimes even if it enables direct competition only a little while later) - the employer is S.O.L.
Write up a business plan, move across the street, and hang out your shingle.
Which key people do all the time - sometimes repeatedly, until one of their ideas catches fire.
THAT is the "Engine of Creation" behind the explosion of startups in California, and why Silicon Valley hasn't been successfully cloned in any of several other sites that have all of its other desirable characteristics.
Want to try to clone up a Silicon Valley in YOUR state? (Tried a few times with no success?) Start by cloning that law.
Why is this marked as a troll?
Maybe a school administrator had mod points?
Because for many people schools aren't about education, they are about control.
Public schools ALWAYS WERE about control - specifically, about indoctrinating children with a government/elite - prescribed culture.
Which amounts to teaching the next generation to be good serfs.
Look at the original debates on setting up and funding public schools. Actually educating the kids was hardly ever mentioned. The big push was to indoctrinate them with a common culture.
(Of course nowdays it's to indoctrinate them with a perversion of the culture of their ancestors' ethnic group that makes them easy to manipulate, in good old divide-and-conquer style. Segregation - and substandard education for the designated underclasses - was banned half a century ago. So get them to DEMAND it. But the principle of government-prescribed social indoctrination {and let learning go hang} is the same.)
Here's a wild guess:
Kick you off the teams (and other extra activities that look good on college admission forms). Kick you out of AP classes. Suspend or expell you. Put black marks in your record (and otherwise interfere with earning decent grades) that will blight your carreer and reduce your earning and marriage prospects for the rest of your life.
It's precicely the same model as mp3.com started with:
- make you prove you had a CD by inserting it in your drive and letting their software examine it, then
- allow you to download (as often as you like) a copy of a single, centrally stored, MP3 rip of it.
This provided a "rip" and transport service for music you'd already bought, but only required one copy at the server.
They lost the suit against RIAA.
As far as the courts are concerned, a for-profit company whose business model includes making copies for you that you are allowed to make yourselves, or providing an equivalent service that includes copymaking, goes beyond fair use.
I've been expecting this ever since the cable companies started noising the idea around. IANAL, but IMHO they'll lose this one just like MP3.com lost theirs.
In fact, since the MP3.com case I've been surprised that the MPAA hasn't gone after the "rent DVR functionality in your cable/satelite box" service add-ons. How that would go would depend on whether the copying issue in the MP3.com case was over "doing it for a fee" or "sharing a single copy rather than making per-user copies".
Of course the whole point of virtual DVR is the economy of sharing a single copy, so the service has both aspects of the MP3.com problem.
That's the current estimate. It's based on two things:
- The number allowed by the proposed legislation
- The number of illegals estimated to be here now (about 12 million), assuming they bring in the same proportion of relatives that those legalized in the first amnesty did.
The US is estimated to have about 10% of the working-age population of Mexico and the same percentage of non-working dependents (which is what 12 million comes out to by that same set of Mexican population figures) already over here as illegals in the current round of illegal immigration. If they all bring in their brothers, wives, children (many of working age but NOT here), parents, grandparents, etc. you could easily end up with half of Mexico migrating to the US.
And why wouldn't they come, if their relative's lawbreaking and the US congress got them moved to the head of the line? Mexico is a corrupt hell-hole with a permanent depression and a standard of living so low that low-level white collar workers in the US can retire there and live like minor nobility. Why SHOULDN'T the serfs want to move here, where even taking the bottom tier jobs - or living on the social safety hammock - is a massive step up in quality of life?
I'm sure I'm not the only one here who has wondered why we haven't seen wider circulation of this story and why immigration laws are suddenly the thing to discuss.
Domestic wiretap abuse is ancient news. Been going on since there were wires to tap. Look at the COINTELPRO stuff from half a century back to see some real dirty tricks.
The immigration thing, on the other hand, got 'WAY big when congress decided a fair "compromise" solution would be to add maybe 60 million Mexicans to the 300 million population of the US over the next 20 years - giving them full citizenship (including the vote).
Adding one new voter for every five now present - when the two major parties are so evenly matched that the presidency gets decided by a few hundred votes - sounded to a lot of citizens like an invasion.
Then consider that the people in question grew up in a country where the government is totally corrupt and the laws deserving of contempt, most of them came here, stay here, and work in violation of OUR laws (while our own politicians refuse to enforce them and reward the immigrants for breaking them), and are being educated by a system that keeps them isolated from the general culture. So they started to worry about what will happen to respect for law over the next few decades.
They pushed the congress critters and got ignored. Then they got mad.
The immigration issue is a reboot of US politics on the banana repulic model. If you thought you've seen government corruption in the last couple decades you ain't seen NOTHING yet.
And if it continues in the same vein for even a couple more years it could, in the opinion of many, literally start an avalanche that will lead to the second civil war.
So, yes, it's significantly more "the in thing to discuss" than a little traffic analysis on phone calls by the NSA.
As one slashdotter pointed out a couple weeks ago, the NSA makes Nixon look like an amateur.
Compared to the NSA Nixon's plumbers WERE amateurs. Heck - compared to the NSA the KGB were a garage shop (and NOT the hi-tek startup kind, either.)
Actually they COULD use ATM. B-)
The space application doesn't guarantee immunity from a big time lag--just the opposite.
The problem isn't just the lag.
The problem is lag VARIABILITY and GAPS in data transmission.
A space application has a fixed time lag and very low packet loss (through forward error correction - to an extreme degree if necessary). In the absense of jitter and the virtual absense of dropped packets, some degree of fixed lag can be taken into account.
But removing jitter means enough buffering that your resulting fixed lag becomes larger than the worst-case lag. And filling in dropped packets means multiplying the round trip time - and the resulting latency - by a factor of several, or accepting sudden loss of connection at a critical moment. Either can increase the lag to the point that it can no longer be worked around.
There's no real mention of what exactly they will be using, but I'd bet that "advanced telecommunications technology" doesn't mean internet.
A QoS-enabled Internet would work just fine. And it's coming - unless misguided "Net Neutrality" laws throw the baby out with the bathwater.
There are two aspects to "neutrality" and tiered bandwidth.
- One is using it to distinguish services that need different levels of support - giving them what they need (and perhaps charging extra if appropriate), but treating all services requiring a particular QoS level (including your own) equally.
- The other is using the tools to implement anticompetive practices, such as penalizing your competitors' packets or charging some customers extra just because they have deep pockets to be picked.
The first lets a network provider combine guaranteed-QoS and best-effort traffic on a single network and give the best-effort traffic all the remaining bandwidth once the high-QoS stuff is serviced. This is massively cheaper than either of the alternatives: Separate networks, or a permanent bandwidth split on a single one, with the high-QoS partition large enough to handle the maximum load and its unused bandwidth left idle. This saving ends up going mainly to the network users, in the form of lower rates.
The second is an anti-competitive practice and a worthy target of suppression - by "the invisible hand" if possible, perhaps by law if not.
Isn't that What T1, OC3, etc. are for?
Only if they're a TDM point-to-point or switched connection, or a virtual one using something like ATM. In which case it's not the Internet.
It's connection-oriented, not packet-oriented (even if it's packets being carried,and they're being switched one at a time.) Connection-oriented networks give you a fixed(-maximum)-bandwidth connection with guaranteed delivery and guaranteed limits on latency and jitter.
Packet switched networks can emulate this, but ONLY with QoS guarantees - guarantees on delivery, latency, and latency variation. That means some packets take precedence over others. They go to the head of the line. When there are too many packets these privileged ones get forwarded while others are dropped. And so on.
This is NOT something you can build out of best-effort delivery and retransmission, as you build reliable (but variable speed and latency) connections out of unreliable ones using protocols like TCP.
Technically, it should be no different than driving the rovers on Mars.
You take everything as a single indivisible step and don't rush until you know the outcome of the previous one.
That doesn't work when you're doing surgery. The patient is under stresses that increase the damage to his body and the risk of unsatisfactory outcome (failure of the operation's goal, post-op infection, temporary or permanent impairment, or death) increase with every extra minute the operation takes.
If you lose packets RCing the orbiter you might delay its operation. If you lose packets in an operation - even if it just slows it - you might maim or kill the patient.
... QoS hooks are in and solid.
This is a very strong argument for tiered bandwidth - so ISPs can guarantee that surgical waldo packets take priority over, say, downloads of the latest release of an OS or a new movie.
It's one thing to hiccup when you're handling a VoIP packet. It's quite another when you're handling the content of a feedback loop including a video camera, a surgeon, a scalpel, and a vital organ.
A few years back a mailing list on a controversial topic was hosted on one of my home site's computers.
I made it a rule that NO encrypted traffic would run through that site - and no illegal activity (including confessions of wrongdoing) would be allowed on the mailing list. (Had to shut it down for a few days once to drive that point home.)
Reason?
If the traffic was in the clear, should the cops become suspicious they could tap it and check. And they'd prefer to do that, since it would avoid tipping off the hypothetical bad guys and let them collect more information and evidence.
If the traffic was encrypted they couldn't tap it effectively. But if they could get a warrant to tap the line they could easily get a warrant to break in, sieze the computer, and anything else they could find. Then they could examine any in-the-clear archives of the list on the computer - which they would expect they might find - or hunt down any keying information that might be stored, at their leisure. And, having established probable cause for the initial search, they could use anything ELSE they found as evidence, even if it was unrelated to the original search. Meanwhile they'd have shut down the "suspect operation" and greatly inconvenienced its operators.
(Since then the mailing list has been replaced by a successor hosted elswhere by others. I still don't encrypt my email in general. But now I'm free to use SSH or VPN to connect to my employer's machines - along with all the other employees, since it's company policy.)
Using encryption to "seal" envelopes is a good idea - if lots of people do it. The more it's used on ordinary stuff, the less it serves as a flag that there's something interesting behind it. But even if it's common you should be aware of the potential downsides and take them into account when deciding whether to encrypt.
So how do I get a job in that division of AT&T??? :-D
Join the NSA
That's one. It will take at least two.
(Given that the police are saying this one may be unrelated to spamming, it may take at least two MORE.)
Hiroshima showed Japan that the US COULD make and deliver a nuclear bomb.
The Japanese generals knew what it was, because they were working on one themselves. At that point, many of them thought the war was lost, and were prepared to surrender. But some of them argued that collecting and processing the necessary materials was such an effort that the US probably only HAD one and wouldn't have a second for a long time.
Nagasaki showed Japan that we had more than one. This left open the possibility that the US might be able to keep this up - once a month, once a week, once a day, once an hour - until Japan was all rubble and slag. So enough of the rest threw in the towel, too, for Japan to submit without total loss of honor - and thus drastically cut the loss of life on both sides.
A deterrent doesn't deter until there is reasonable expectation that it may occur. One dead spammer - who may be dead for other reasons than spamming - might make them think a little. But it will take at least two dead spammers - unambiguously dead because of their spamming - to provide enough datapoints for the intelligent among the pack to start including it in their cost-benefit analyses.
Please note that I'm NOT advocating the wholesale and gory murder of spammers. I'm just noting that, if that DOES end up being the solution (or even a component of it), it won't be limited to one bloody corpse.
[raised specter of attacking a non-spammer victim by] whip[ping] whole populations into a literally murderous frenzy by getting someone tarred as a spammer?
Criminal justice STARTS from vigilantism and revenge: In the absense of effective law enforcement and the presence of repeat offenders, people will act individually or in groups to hunt down the repeat offenders and punish or kill them, to create a disincentive to commission of more offenses (at least in that area and to those victime), or eliminate the offender.
(Note that this is distinct from self-defense resistance to a crime in progress. Self-defense becomes vigalantism once the perpetrator is out of sight.)
But such do-it-yourself activity has downsides. Sometimes the wrong person is targeted - especially if the crime was heinous and emotions are high. Sometimes penalties are excessive. Sometimes some "leader" uses the mechanism to commit crimes of his own. And always there's an uncertainty about exactly what constitutes enough of a "crime" t0 rouse the hue and cry.
So governments formalize the process. They establish a list of what's permitted and what's not. They establish rules for identifying and accusing perpetrators. The may designate people to do this, and/or define how much of the process designated and ordinary people may do. They establish mechanisms for determining guilt or innocense - and may designate people to perform this. They establish schedules of punishments.
And they generally claim a monopoly on this, forbidding the freelance form.
People will generally go along with this as long as it's working at least moderately well. Though a particluar government's version of this formalized vigilantism may have any or all the problems of the ad-hoc sort, it tends to have less of them - and it's out in the open so it can be debugged.
But when someone is repeatedly imposing damage on others, government refuses to do anything about it, and the problem keeps recurring and escalating, people will fall back on the informal form of "justice".
That's the situation we have now, with spam.
Now government is apparently keeping its hands off mainly to try to avoid regulating the internet - because it has recognized that this flock of geese is laying a MOUNTAIN of golden eggs and they don't want to risk killing it. So the regulators are foot-dragging as much as possible, to see if some non-regulatory solution can be achieved.
Unfortunately, the organized spam/malware gangs are a pack of predators that are starting to decimate the flock.
So don't be surprised if a continued governmental hands-off of this problem leads to vigilantism - in increasing amounts and number of forms - first in the virtual world, then in the real one.
This is yet another example of the ...Supreme Court, now stacked ... No checks and balances, controlling all three branches of govern...
Your statement is yet another example of the abysmal state of education in the US, and the misunderstanding of the governments' functions that has resulted.
"Checks and Balances" has NOTHING to do with anything INTERNAL to one branch of government. It refers to interactions between the three of them. (Details vary, but the running theme is that any two can rein in the third.)
In particular, it has NOTHING to do with the two major parties having roughly equal participation in any branch, or with some hypothetical prohibition on all three branches being controlled by members of the same party.
What it is about is keeping a single person or a handful of people in one branch from getting out of the control of the people themselves and running wild. The Checks and Balances create various requirements that one branch must obtain cooperation from others to act, or that some consensus of members of two branches can override the actions of a third, remove its personnel or funding, or directly intervene in its actions.
It's been done before. Back in the '60s or early '70s or so.
A language-acquisition researcher recorded her daughter's waking activities continuously for several years as she developed language.
One interesting thing to come out of this was that, as one point (I think about the three-word utterance stage) the kid started using this word that sounded something like "ehWIDdeh". (I don't recall exactly how the researcher spelled it but that's about what it sounded like.) It was never really clear what she meant by it, but she seemed to understand it and use it consistently herself. Eventually she stopped using it.
Interestingly, after the experiment was over, momma showed the films to daughter and asked her if she knew what she had meant back then. Daughter had no clue, either.
(Last I heard the leading speculation was that it was a placeholder, for when kid knew she wanted to emit a particular syntax but didn't have the word she wanted to put in that place yet. But everybody knows they're just guessing.)
Doing the experiment again with another kid, better equipment, and computer aid should be valuable. In fact, doing it several times would be even more valuable. But let's not treat it like it's something brand new.
Refers to things like assigning censors to pre-screen your publications before you print them, or having cops pull you off your podium and haul you downtown as soon as you start talking about forbidden subjects or opinions. Also to puntitive taxes on publications and public speech.
There's lots of protection there. Especially for people trying to make an anti-establishment political point, which is what it's really all about.
Remember that the founders had just fought a war to overthrow their legal government, and wanted to insure that if the new, home-grown government got out of hand its subjects would be able to do the same. Among the things that ticked them off were the "stamp act", requiring an expensive tax stamp be affixed to every printed item, and various censorship provisions of the colonial law.
First Amendment doesn't guarantee 100% free speech in all situations. It protects you from the government censoring your opinion,
Actually, what it does is protect you from the government blocking your speech BEFORE you emit it.
Once you've said something it does just about zero to protect you from legal repercussions for any harm your speech may have caused.
(There are a few subjects where it does give SOME coverage For instance: Truth is an absolute defense against claims of libel - though not against claims of extortion. Political speech is especially well protected, slippery slope arguments bias in favor of speech in some cases, and so on. IANAL so don't take this as legal advice or absolute truth.)
Remember the slogan "Don't trust anyone over 30!"?
I understand the guy who coined it was over 30 at the time.
So the slogan says you shouldn't trust the slogan.
And this sentence is false. B-)
Happy birthday, C.T.
(And wish me one in return... Sigh. I have almost twice as many to try to forget. B-( )
Nope.
Crude oil pulls carbon from fossils to the air, releasing carbon that has not been in the atmosphere for geologic time, increasing the atmospheric carbon.
Crop ethanol pulls carbon from the air - most of which is released back to the air. The carbon in the air is unchanged, except for the reduction by the amount that goes into the inventory of ethanol and plant materials in the fuel cycle, plus a tiny leak that leaves the fuel cycle without being put back into the air.