do we really want our elections to be for sale to the highest bidder (more so than they already are, that is)?
And that's what "campaign finance" laws do: Keep opposing voices silenced by red tape, while the deep-pockets specialists have the time and resources to build the infrastructure, map the minefield, and get their message out despite the laws.
Did you notice that the main effect of the last round was to eliminate most of the non-internet-based grass roots campaigning and leave the field to the likes of the billionaire Soros (moveon.org), the unions, AARP, and the establishment news media?
An unlimited amount of money poured into a campaign can effectively buy a certain outcome, given how susceptible the general population is to advertising.
And that's utterly false - as long as hordes of SHALLOW-pockets folk can talk to each other freely, without having to jump through government hoops and file red-tape forms or risk jail.
Did you notice that, despite moveon.org and their ilk, the side they're supporting is still losing? Or that one of the main things that scuttled some of their propaganda barrages was grassroots truth-squad activity, such as the blogosphere's lightning-fast analysis and trumpeting of the forged documents - which eventually took out Rather and blackened the CBS eye?
Undisclosed political contributions (above a very low level) are absolutely inexcusable.
Want to have to file a form with the fed declaring how much you spent on your home computer and ISP services - or go to jail - because you once made a posting about a candidate during an election cycle?
That's what "disclosed spending" is.
The "Internet Loophole" exists solely to keep the internet unregulated.
A little regulation is like a little loss of virginity, or a little fire in a fireworks plant. Let the "campaign finance" restrictions TOUCH the internet and the match is lit.
The result will be the same sort of red tape that keeps you from effectively campaigning for your preferred candidate in any other medium. And the same sort of internet free-speech arms race as you are now seeing in China.
The consensus in Washington, so far, is that the Internet is more valuable while it's free. That will change if enough NEARLY effective campaign attemps occur on it, leading to sitting politicians who believe internet free speech is their enemy. Then they will use "campaign finance" laws against it as they have always been intended to be used - to suppress grass-roots campaigns. And we'll be in the fight of our lives. Or forced once again to knuckle under.
Ideally, I would like to have a device that is: cheap (I only want to spend more than $300), small (limited space near TV), quiet (I don't like to have noisy devices on all the time), and extensible (I like adding neat stuff like weather, games or my own custom programs).
Ideally, I would like a small, quiet computer that runs MythTV, which is incredibly extensible. However, building a small, quiet computer that runs MythTV takes lots of money to buy the small form factor equipment and the quiet power supplies, CPUs, hard drives, etc.
And there are lots of other applications where a low-noise, always-on, low power (except when crunching hard - so make that variable clock), GP platform would fit - at the right price point.
which could be achieved by volume production and a bit of marketing - like one or two stock configurations with the right I/O options and .
Which suggests a market opportunity.
The price point could be achieved by volume production and a bit of marketing - like one or two stock configurations with the right I/O options and installed free software to be a canned application, in addition to the bare platform for user configuration of other applications.
I find that Tivo, which is cheaper, provides everything except the extensibility.
Proof of concept: The technical issues aren't insoluble. Making the tuners pluggable options and providing additional slots for more simultaneous option instalation may raise the cost of goods a bit, but not prohibitively.
Followon revenue from service subscriptions could be reproduced by selling such a service - starting with one that works out-of-the-box for the stock configuration and perhaps a version with a published interface so others could subscribe to use with non-stock configs and/or homebrew software. Optionally bundling a subscription committment could lower the entry price point, too.
Living in the southern US, everyone down here likes to refer to generic products by their brand name. Every soda in the word becomes a "Coke" even if its a Pepsi, every portable mp3 player becomes an "iPod" even if it's an "iPlay" and now ever PVR device is being referred to as a "TiVo" when it's really a Comcast PVR (which is probably made by Motorola or some other company).
Coca Cola has (or used to have) its own trademark police that would bring infringement suit threats (or suits) to bear on any restaurant that served them another cola when they asked for a "Coke". Are they slipping up down your way? (I'm sure they'll be very interested in where, down south, this is going on, so they can come stamp it out.)
Xerox, Kleenex, and a number of other brands have to do something similar. To maintain a valuable trademark you have to make a show of defending it when it threatens to become a generic. (Otherwise it BECOMES a generic and anybody else can use your former brand to describe their similar product.)
If this is happening to TiVo and iPod I wouldn't be surprised if we see similar (if not so extreme) action from them.
You notice that media companies are squeeky-clean about this issue. That's NOT just to keep potential sponsors happy or fish for placement revenue. Misusing a brand name as a generic on a multitrillion dollar media conglomerate could let the brand name holder cut a BIG hole in their deep pockets - and pretty much require him to try, or lose his mark.
IMHO a trademark/service mark or similar branding uniqueness enforcement is one place where a government-enforced monopoly is appropriate.
Even - especially - for open-source stuff: When reputation (and/or resulting perks from it, like job offers or consulting work) is your main benefit for your efforts, letting somebody else file the serial numbers off your work and deprive you of those benefits to his own gain is the closest thing to actual theft you can find in the Intellectual Property field.
They should just put DVD burners in the Cable Boxes and save postage.
In addition to being more expensive and prone to breakage, burners would have lower functionality.
- Burned CDs/DVDs have a shorter lifetime than pressed ones.
- Mailed CDs can include the ancilary stuff - including program material that didn't make it and commercial packaging with its artwork. (Plus the coupons, advertising, etc. which makes it a better deal for the movie company.)
Main upside to having a burner is you get the hardcopy right away. But storing a softcopy in the machine until the mail arrives will do almost as well for repeated viewing - you just don't get to port it to another set until the hardcopy arrives.
How would you feel if you were an IT technician, and a big corporation started supplying IT services in your home town for $5 an hour.. then after you were driven into bankruptcy, started raising its prices back to industry norms?
And how is this different from K-Mart, Walgrens, McDonalds, Taco Bell, Circuit City, Kroger, Ace Hardware, 7-Eleven, Costco, Smart & Final,... ?
Been to a little mom-and-pop store lately?
When was the last time you got your latest home computer from a little guy who assembled it in the backroom of his storefront?
(I imagine most of the current generation has no idea how retail USED to be before the advent of the branded discount store chains. Or of the anti-chain-store legislation that led to the "membership buying club warelhouse" stores as a workaround.)
Meanwhile, if the accusation is selling "below market price" rather than "below production cost" they've got a hard road to hoe. For starters they need to show what the "market price" IS for orders that size. How many of them are there? Samsung can defend simply by publishing the same price they gave Apple as "list" for orders at the nearest round number less than what they shipped to Apple. B-) (And you get your place in the allocation list right behind their existing customers.)
Dark matter always seemed like it was in the honored high school chemistry tradition of adding a fudge factor. There was o direct observational evidence for it, but tossing it in there made the numbers fit.
But that's how you usually discover things: Make predictions from your current theories, collect data and compare it to the predictions, make up new theories that explain it better, use the data to chose between theories and tell you where to look for more data to make better choices, and iterate.
Sometimes people take shortcuts or make errors in calculation and you have to check their work. And there's valuable science to be done there. But it's more "scientist fun" (and funding) to come up with "George's theory of dark matter" than "George's proof that Sam blew his calculations and Einstien was right after all". So sometimes it takes a while.
Now we wait for "Larry's proof that George blew HIS calculations and Sam was closer to the real world" or "Larry's confirmation that George's model has fewer/smaller holes than Sam's."
Who gives a toss? They can all destroy each other as far as I'm concerned.
That might actually be a good solution.
The whole argument the lobbyists have been using to push for DRM-enforcement laws is the claim that LACK of DRM stifles innovation and threatens the commercial infrastructure. (Our counter argument is that it is DRM that is stifling innovation, to the benefit only of the existing players and the detriment of new players and consumers.)
If DRM turns around and stifles innovation by the old players, to the point that it starts taking them down, it's not just poetic justice. It proves our point AND takes out the companies that have become "blood clots in the arteries of commerce" (to misuse a Bucky Fuller quote).
It might not get the law repealed. But at least it would leave the congresscritters wondering where their next campaign contributions will come from. B-)
Also it would shut up the lobbyists, once nobody is paying them to talk on this subject.
At the moment they're still too clueful. The realize that a vote for such a law would take away something many of their consituents do regularly, and they'd be seen as bad guys and bounced.
Unfortunately, new applications don't have an entrenched constituency. So groups like the RIAA can convince congresscritters they can get away with passing draconian laws for them and collect the contributions and other fringes with impunity.
Potential solution: Start tracking and publishing the voting records of any congresscritters on these issues - in places where voters who care (your way) will see them.
Don't wait for the media to do it for you. They're the same guys paying the new laws.
Instead take a lesson from successful organizations like the AARP, NRA, and so on. Study what they do and repeat it in your context.
OK, so Cogent and Level 3 don't want to talk. Fine. That's their business agreement between each other.
But what about the business agreements between them and their customers?
Have they violated their contracts with their customers? Do they owe them a refund for the full time the Cogent/Level 3 link is down? That could be a lot more expensive to both than accepting a more painful peering agreement, or buying transit from a third party for the duration.
Have they written the TOS so that they can do this without violating it? Then the customers are SOL. But in that case the customers have a strong incentive to hunt up another provider with better contract terms. So this could lead to a major, and ongoing, erosion of the customer base for both companies.
I suspect the invisible hand is about to give them both a MAJOR spanking. And give the net a push toward avoiding recurrences of this sort of "failure".
Internet service customers aren't paying to be pawns in this game. They're paying for connection to the internet - ALL of it. To the extent that Cogent and/or Level 3 convinced their customers that internet service was what they were buying, if they entered the contract while willing to take this move they engagaged in fraud.
Smart move for whomever DIDN'T initiate the line cut would be to cut a deal with a third party to pay them to carry their packets and deliver them TO the other. (The other can follow suit or not as it choses - but the willing player can't suck out packets the unwilling won't route.)
Then the willing player can say to its customers "I'm keeping my contract with you. I'm getting your packets delivered to their routers. Whether they go the rest of the way or not is the other guys operation. I'm accepting packets for you from his customers wherever they hit my routers - if they ever do - and delivering them to you. If the other guys won't deliver them to me there's nothing more I can do technically. I've tried to maintain a direct connection with him but he won't budge on reasonable contract terms so I'm paying extra to do everything I can without that to give you the service I sold you."
A solution of that form would keep a single bully from taking down anything but his own customers - and do it in a way that would be visible to any customers of the company he's fuding with: A traceroute would show that their packets go to the third party and stop at their peering router with the kermudgeon (which will probably be named appropriately) the first kermudgeon router, further in where filtering takes place if inbound packets are cut off, or all the way to the target. Meanwhile a traceroute from the target would show the packets never leave the kermudgeon's net. B-)
Of course if the kermudgeon decides to pay for the third party transport to keep from looking bad, the net is back up, while both sides have an extra cost of business that gives them an incentive to cut a cheaper deal.
What they can't do is use any code contributed by anyone outside the company. That code they'll have to re-write since it's licensed under the GPL and doesn't belong to them.
Even easier than that: They can go to the authors/copyright holders of that code and obtain or buy an additional (non-exclusive) license from them - to use it in their closed follow-on product or what-have you.
Then they only need to strip out and replace any stuff for whichthey can't identify the copyright owner or that is owned by somebody who refuses to give the extra license.
If I were in the position of such an author, I'd say "Sure. Price is what you'd have paid me to write it as a closed-source work for hire under a T&M consulting contract. Call it $xxx. Be sure to clean-room it if you decide to replace it." And I'd give them a reasonable price, best-guess for how long it actually took me. Then they can decide to pay that, bargan me down, or try to write a replacement for less. Since they get proven code and no hassles, paying up would be a bargain even at my closed-source consulting rates. B-)
Seems fair: They want to play a closed source game, they pay closed-source prices for closed-source code written externally.
... an industry which shows so readily all the worst tendencies of big business
Try "organized crime".
RIAA is just getting back to its roots - the jukebox protection rackets.
("Hire our jukebox service for your diner - where we collect the money and give you a small cut. By the way, have you noticed that a lot of diners have been smashed up or torched lately? Seems they all either had no jukebox, their own, or some other services'. Tisk, tisk! What's become of kids these days?")
From there to here - an alliance with the number one protection racket: the government - happened in in several easy steps. But intimidation to extract payoffs has always been the name of the game.
I write software to spec. In theory, that should work.
Depends on the theory, and IMHO any theory that says it SHOULD work is incorrect.
In practice it often does. But often there are gaps in the specification that the guy spec'ing should have seen, but didn't. Perhaps, his kids woke him up 20 times last night, perhaps someone made a bad pot of coffee.
My experience is that many of the gaps or flat-out errors in the spec occur, not because the author should ahve seen them but had a braino, but because the author shouldn't necessarily have seen them.
Writing a detailed spec up front and expecting to get it correct (without the growing program and its testbench in hand) is the same as writing a whole program in an editor without compiling it once and expecting the completed program to compile, run, and be error-free the first time.
These gaps in the spec become glaringly obvious when writing the code and in the iterative component testing. That's the practice.
Precicely. And that's what MY theory says should happen.
As the design procedes problems with the spec are exposed along with problems of the design. For each mismatch you examine the difficulty: Usually it's a bug in the design and you fix it. Sometimes it's a bug in the design (or its rendering into spec). Then you fix THAT (perhaps after a meeting to examine the issue and proposed solution and approve the change.)
The same is true in the design of digital hardware, such as ASICs, where design complexity often compares with an OS or application.
Hardware - both digital and otherwise - SEEMS to involve design up front. But that's not really true.
In the case of digital systems the final rendering into silicon and assemblies may be by-the-numbers. But the design of the components was an iterative process much like programming, with the design "crashing" in simulation hundreds or thousands of times before it's good enough to go to production.
In the case of other things, like aircraft and spacecraft, bridges, dams, it sometimes SEEMS like things have been reduced to design-then-build with no trial and error. But that misses a lot.
First: In many cases the function of the structures has been well defined for many product generations, with new designs often minor fit-and-cosmetic variations on something already built. Somebody designing his 30th house or 15th bridge might be able to do it with no major errors for the contractor to work around. (But somebody doing his 30th implementation of the same algorithm or the same hardware module might be able to do the same. How often does such a situation arise?)
Second: These days bridges and buildings designed by well-debugged rules don't collapse and aircraft and spacecraft normally don't come apart or fall out of the sky unless there was an exceptional event or a negelect or error in prescribed maintainence. But a lot of buildings, bridges, aircraft, and spacecraft DID do so in the past - producing data that led to design rule changes which now prevent such problems. Film is available for many of the early aircraft failures, and many of us were around to watch news footage of some of the rocket oopsies. The film of the Tacoma Narrows bridge collapse is required viewing in engineering school, and so on. But this goes back a LONG way - clear into the archaeological record. (Early Egyptian pyramids had a steep slope. There was one that collapsed partially built. Pyramids built after that were standardized at a somewhat lower slope.)
Third: When something new is attempted in these other fields it is simulated out the wazoo, just like a new chip, during the design phase. So again you get the co-evolution of design and debug.
The reason you see a qualitative difference with software is that THE PROGRAM IS THE DESIGN. When you get your "final design" done and debugged in "simulation", you're DONE.
The "spec" for software is somewhat of another animal than the "spec" for a bridge,
Which brings up the point, do you really WANT to live 300 years? We already tend to go downhill after our 20's, and each ecade after is compounded by more health problems. Now some people will claim that uber-nano technology, and some franken-science will keep us in great shape, but simply put; every part in our body wears out with time.
And every part of your body is subject to repair. It's all just matter in a pattern: When a particular piece of it deviates - breaks, accumulates junk, accumulates geneic error, etc. - remove/fix/replace it.
Yes, just avoiding death in a progressively more decrepit body is not all that attractive a prospect for many. But it seems to me that the most likely way to achieve extended life span is to eliminate the degeneration and reverse it when it has happened, rather than just to stave off total collapse.
A decade or so ago some people in the Cryonics movement ran stats on how long lifespan could be expected to last if aging and disease were eliminated and repair after accidents. If I recall it correctly, they assumed:
- vigor and accident rates approximating those of late teens,
- deaths only from accidents that were fatal with the tech of the time, followed by total repair if the victim survived. The number came out to something like an expected median lifespan of 850 years.
Of course the assumptions were deliberately conservative: The accident rate of teens is notoriously high due to attitude and inexperience (especially with driving), and at least skills would be gained with time. And medical tech has made astounding advances in keeping traumatized people alive since then.
Now I, for one, would welcome a millineum or more of life in prime condition.
That depends on how you define the words. The way I define them it's neither.
Art: Creation of compositions that, as a significant intentional goal, have an emotional impact on a huma observer/participant/user/occupier which is significantly greater than that expected from mere communication, representation, or functional usage.
Science: Progressive refinement of understanding of some aspect of the objective universe, accomplished by devising theories that explain known data and testing them by performance of experiments to collect new data which can detect falsity of the theories or chose between theories which diverge.
"Hacking" can occasionally USE some aspect of either. But neither is primary.
IMHO hacking is a "craft" - a skillful use of a coherent set of technologies to make new constructions which advance a goal. This is one of the secondary meanings of "Art", as in the title of Knuth's _The Art of Computer Programming_. But a particular hack need not meet the primary meaning of "Art" to be "a GOOD hack".
Hacking, or any other computer programming, like any other work of craft, can be a good piece of art as an independent matter. Example: A "beautiful" program can be a work of art independent of its function. In some crafts (by my definition) art is considered a necessary part of the toolkit used to create a good work: Architecture, city planning, and software interface design are three examples.
A hack can often have a strong emotional impact on those who come in contact with it as a side-effect of its primary activity. Hacks can be used as components of art works - but so can tin cans. Hacks can be works of art in themselves - but so can cars (or tin cans B-) ). That still doesn't make hacking ITSELF an "Art" in the way I use the term.
I think the effect of the ruling might be to give law enforcement the power to:
- demand tapping of your pipes at your ISP
- demand backdoors be included in publicly distributed VoIP software and the firmware in hardware products.
How will they prevent people from removing backdoors from SOURCE-destributed products, or finding ways to defeat mandated ISP-level block-VoIP-if-backdoor-disabled? We'll have to wait and see what they come up with. (But I expect it will be obtrusive, draconian, and ultimately futile.)
There's not much they can do against those who build their own software from scratch. But such software has considerablely reduced utility, since it must be built and distributed to ALL the users of the new network.
This rasies the bar for the amount of organization and funding/manpower necessary to use it - from "download a free application" or "buy a common, cheap, commercial product" to "develop your own and distribute it to your minions". The software itself becomes contraband, and can be used as evidence of wrongdoing. The distribution network for the software provides an additional opportunity to discover the clandestine organization. The software, once identified, will also almost certainly have an identifiable signature, which can be used to identify the users (silently, by internet surveilence) and do traffic analysis on their communication even before the software itself is cracked or captured and analyzed.
All this is enabled by the FCC adding "subject to the needs of law enforcement" to a document that, otherwise, would have been a bill of rights for ISP customers.
I keep hearing about these "IE Only" sites for a long time already. However, I yet have to find one.
How about the FEMA site section for online claims requests, which explicitly requred IE 6.x. Slashdot article here.
This was particularly a problem since the volunteer-provided internet access tended to be donated older computers running free software, often from a "live CD". But not being able to use it to fill out the aid forms massively reduced its usefulness.
The telephone alternative to online signup was even worse: It didn't let you sign up, only triggered the mailing of the form - to your address in the flood zone.
"In the United States, punctuation marks are always put inside of the quotation marks. It's different in some other countries, like Britain, but for American English the GP had it right."
That rule is from "Standard English", an attempt by the education establishment to standardize the language across the US.
(Some people, however, consider it an attempt by the power elites in the eastern urban establishment to depriciate the regional variants of the language and brand their speakers as unintelligent or lower class, thus depriciating their arguments in political debate.)
Other examples: The crusade against both "ain't" and the use of the double negative for emphasis (rather than in the mathematical sense of two inversions canceling).
But (unlike French) American English does not have a standards body empowered to enforce their usages by power of law. Instead the US has free speech. As dictionary authors have known since Webster published the first one, the language is what the speakers and writers speak and write, and their job is to research and document what they're actually saying, not invent and impose something of their own construction.
Educators do have a responsibility to teach their students a version of the language that maximizes their chance for social and economic success. But that's a different issue. Their classroom technique of claiming the desired dialect is somhow the only correct version of the language should not be mistaken for fact.
Meanwhile the roll-your-own aspect of the language speeds its evolution, empowering it for expressing thought in the face of rapidly advancing science and technology and rapidly changing social issues.
The "(American) Standard English" punctuation rules may have been convenient for typesetting. But technical people, especially those who deal with math or computer languages, gravitate to the use of balanced punctuation rules in their ordinary writing, as well as when writing programs or mathematical expressions.
And what sort of people do we have a lot of here on Slashdot? B-)
Punctuation flames against the balanced forms will fall on deaf ears here.
That's already illegal - after a similar flood of advertising faxes back when fax machines were becomming common in businesses but were not yet so cheap as to be common in residences.
Unlike the old "do not call" lists the "take me off your fax" number generally works. (I've only had to do it once at work and twice at home to get the bogosity to stop.) Meanwhile I hear you can get a couple hundred bux per fax if you want to take 'em to small claims court. Search the web for the procedure.
If you really work outdoors, you want a tractor or a rangerover. Not an SUV.
Obviously posted by someone who doesn't "really work outdoors" and has no clue. Talk to some of the people who do sometime.
There are jobs for which a tractor is more appropriate. There are also jobs for which a bulldozer is more appropriate. This does not in any way reduce the jobs for which an SUV is either the best fit or the most practical choice for a single vehicle to do a diverse SET of jobs.
As for the Range Rover: There are a number of different designes in the SUV class, with different characteristics. The Range Rover has its uses - such as safaris. But ranchers, for instance, may want a vehicle with a different combination of cost, repair requirements and frequency, size, fuel consumption, and capacity. (A multimillionaire plains rancher, for instance, might go for a Grand Cherokee - and many of them do. Someone with a handfull of acres in a mountainous region might go for something smaller.)
Plus the demographics show that a vast mayority (90%+) of SUV's are never used off-road at all (which isn't much of a surprise, as they drive like shit off road).
So what?
With the herds of urbanites buying SUVs, most of them are now used for things other than their original purpose. And the auto companies have reacted to them, and their complaints about the handling of a "real" SUV, by doing things like redesigning the suspensions or even switching to passenger car chassis to give a more car-like ride, padding the interior, lowering the clearance, and hanging on all sorts of smashable doodads where a rock will remove them within the first hour of off-road driving. (Back in 2000 we had to argue for hours with a salesman to get the "upcountry suspention" option - which had to be special ordered - when we bought one from an urban area dealer.)
What fad-following urbanites buy has NOTHING to do with the needs of the people who actually use them for their original purpose. Which was the point of my original post.
But I tell you what: Why don't you wait and see what $3.00/galon gas prices (or whatever Rita drives it up to) does to the relative popularity of SUVs and subcompacts among urban shoppers in the next couple model years.
I think you'll find that consumers have a clue, and that the market will do a much more effective job at switching them SUVs to pipmobiles than any groupthink posturing or government "message-sending by restrictive legislation" program.
The vanadium oxidation-state fuel cell looks like a better candidate than the hydrogen/oxygen/water cycle. Seems to be under development currently.
The problem with solar cars is that the amount of sunlight striking them isn't adequate: A square yard is only getting about 1 1/3 HP worth of power in direct noon sunlight, BEFORE conversion inefficiencies (which lose maybe 4/5 of it just for starters).
Now you CAN get to freeway speeds with an ultrastreamlined vehicle, on a nearly level surface, running under the clear skys and on the dry pavement of the driest continent on the planet. But that's not going to haul loads up mountain passes in a forest, or do much of ANYTHING in northern lattitude, perpetually-cloudy, often wet or snow-covered places like Washington, Oregon, Michigan, Wisconsin,...
Solar powered cars - with the solar cells ON the car - are an interesting toy. They might advance some parts of vehicle technology significantly, and possibly lead to practical stored-power alternative-energy powered vehicles. But don't expect a sun-car as practical transportation in the future.
If self-collecting sun powered vehicles were practical I'd think evolution would already have produced sun-powered ambulatory beings above the level of the flatworm/algae symbiosis.
About the only justification for a SUV is either having a pet elefant to feed or having an incredibly big ass in which case you indeed have better things to worry about.
A city person shows his elitist provincialism.
The main purpose for SUVs is to provide taansport and cargo carrying capacity for people living in, working in, or having to travel to - a site outside a city, especially if off the paved road network - or the road network at all - but also if weather is a problem (mud, snow, ice, mountainous terrain,...). These regions can be inaccessable to other vehicles for months at a time, and require prohibitive transport time and risk (vehicular damage or disablement, "getting stuck", injurious or fatal accidents such as off-a-cliff/into-the-river/getting-stuck-with-no-h elp) when they ARE accessable.
Some specialized areas: Doctors in rural areas, firefighting in wilderness areas, etc.
The "sports" part is because they're also useful for transport to wilderness areas for recreation or food gathering: fishing, hunting, camping, hiking. (Of course some of these are things left-wind elitists would like to ban altogether, others things they would restrict to people who hike in, making them inaccessable to the handicapped, infirm, or those who have full-time jobs and can't spare the extra time to make the hike. Forests and wildlife are only the rich and body-beautiful ubermensch, right?)
A big use: The "small truck" for farms and ranches. For many things it's better than even a pickup: gets into smaller places, less expensive to run, etc.
It's also much more fuel efficient than a pickup, van, or a compact "sporty" car. (Our Cherokee - the only one of our vehicles that can make the trip from our townhouse to our rural house - does as well in mountains with two passengers and a full cargo load as the little Eagle Talon with no load and one passenger - and beats an unloaded Aerostar with just the driver on level freeways by 6 MPG.
The main reason SUVs are so popular in cities ("Mall Terrain Vehicles"), though, is an unintended consequence of the governments' attempts to improve auto mileage and move people onto inadequate mass transit.
The CAFE standards killed the station wagon - the most efficient of the large-family utility vehicle classes. (i.e. take the kids to school or the scout troop on an outing, cary a weeks groceries home, tote appliances and small amounts of home-improvement construction material, haul larger amounts in a trailer, or a recreational trailer such as a travel trailer or boat trailer.) The things masquerading as a station wagon these days are NOT the same thing, and nowhere near as capable.
With a REAL station wagon no longer available, people with kids and a week's shopping to haul and/or trailers to tow switched to the next bigger vehicle type: The SUV. (It's a "truck" for the mileage regulations - the smallest and most fuel efficient of the commercial-cargo rated vehicles.)
Meanwhile the highways in many cities have been deliberately allowed to deteriorate to try to push people onto mass transit systems. (Yes, they even admitted it publicly in at least one place: The SF Bay area, when LA got their freeways back up in months after a big quake while SF was still twiddling their thumbs years after their own.)
A (classic) SUV has a suspension designed for off-road and can handle a potholed freeway just fine, when a compact car would be in the shop for a realignment (at a minimum) after hitting one of these irregularities, and has a hard time maintaining speed and lane position if the road is bad.
(Of course once the practical thinkers among the city people - often successful types that are trend-setters - started using them, it became a status symbol and a fad. These days lots of city people use them who don't "need" them - but prefer them and vote with their dollars.)
But now there's a big push by the elitists self-proclaimed social engineers to get
If you have a significant amount of something as deadly as anthrax... there MUST be some trace... some papers, some empty cans, some people. If after 2 years of free inspections in Iraq, the Americans did not discover a SINGLE TRACE -- the answer is obvious. There were no such weapons in the first place.
Then what did he use to kill all those Kurds? What about that chemical bomb that went off (improperly, thank [insert your preference], when the terrorists thought it was an explosive bomb and detonated it the wrong way)? What about the pieces of the nuclear bomb project the scientist dug up from his garden and turned in, along with the story about how he'd been ordered to hide it.
What about the list of WMDs he GAVE THE UN INSPECTORS?
(I could go on with a litany of what evidence they DID find, both before and after. But I suspect you'll then claim it was all made up.)
Now maybe he really DID destroy it all (or tried to and got most of it) - but then tried to keep up the appearance he'd hit it to keep his neighbors on rebellious provinces in check, thinking the western powers would never attack. (If so he grossly underestimated the risk the West perceived and the resolve to eliminate, once 9/11 convinced the new US administration that terrorists would use WMDs if they got some. And he didn't realize that Junior would learn from Daddy's mistake - wouldn't stop short of deposing him because he thought his UN mandate had run out and again leave him in power to slaughter our allies among Iraq's population.)
And maybe he never had as many as he thought, because his department heads might have inflated results rather than risking his wrath.
But if you truly believe he NEVER had ANY and NO paper trail was EVER discovered, one thing is clear: You've been duped by somebody's propaganda, and now refuse to accept the actual evidence.
In those places whose layout make rail-type mass-transit practical, standard-guage rail gives enormously better price-performance than the alternatives.
The technology has been heavily debugged over 1 1/2 centuries. The important components are in mass production. (Even custom rolling stock - if built in the standard way - gets much of the cost and functionality benefit.)
Standard guage also lets the line use heavy rail rights-of-way opportunistically - with no or only minor upgrades if the stock is self-powered, relatively minor upgrades if trolley or third-rail power must be added. Old rights-of-way are the right width and can be reactivated or re-railed. City streets ditto: You can put standard guage down a freeway median, convert a lane or two of an existing street or closed-to-traffic pedestrian mall, or even run rails IN a street and share the lane with vehicular traffic. You can bring intercity passenger lines to the same stations and platforms as your intra-city mass transit. In an industrial area or over bridges you can also do shared projects with freight lines.
Each of these factors can produce savings in the tens-of-millions to multiple billions ranges, both for the mass transit projects and sometimes for heavy rail partners.
Contrast that to non-standard systems:
BART: Deliberately designed with a non-standard guage track (using concrete railbed so it can't be changed later) so it could never be shared with freight. Custom cars designed by aeronautical engineers - whose expertese with aerodynamics and structure relates more to free-space flight than rolling rapidly on a surface within inches of structures, and whose experience with ROLLING involves only rubber-shod landing gear used for only minutes per flight at any speed greater than a crawl. Result: Abysmal ride. Cars with a replacement cost of $6 million EACH, currently only available from a manufacturer in France. No opportunity to share right-of-way with anything: Expansion requires purchase (or siezure) of a string of contiguous lots through the San Francisco Bay Area - perhaps still the most expensive real estate in the US.
Amtrack made the aeronautical-engineer new-design mistake on one generation of their passenger rolling stock, with similar results.
People-mover: A rubber-tired horizontal elevator. A dreadfully expensive toy for inner city entertainment/business districts. Useful mainly for inter-terminal transport in airports. Like Bart, the right-of-way can't be shared with anything.
Monorails also can't share their trackage with other services, or recycle existing structures (other than the space over existing rights-of-way such as freeway medians - and even there the supporting structures consume ground space). So you have to build the entire line and pay for the whole thing out of the project - making the fees you must charge (or the taxes you must steal) prohibitively high. The main advantage over railroads is their relative quiet and their lack of interference with traffic at crossings.
(I could go on with bullet trains and other inter-urban items, and comparison with air and water transit. But this thread is about urban mass transit.) Main point is that, for urban mass transit, standard guage rail for the long hops is a better deal than monorail or the other alternatives.
With one exception: The private automobile is usually a far better price/performance tradeoff than even trains or busses - even if you don't count the costs of lost passenger time from waiting for scheduled runs or transfer connections, or taking a non-optimal route due to lack of availability of a direct run. Even in those cities where the transit system is pervasive enough that it beats cars for some trips, there are always plenty of others where a private car beats the pants off public transportation on a cost/ride basis. A car goes from where you are to where you want to be, with many convenient route options, at a very low cost per mile traveled (even counting the cost of
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do we really want our elections to be for sale to the highest bidder (more so than they already are, that is)?
And that's what "campaign finance" laws do: Keep opposing voices silenced by red tape, while the deep-pockets specialists have the time and resources to build the infrastructure, map the minefield, and get their message out despite the laws.
Did you notice that the main effect of the last round was to eliminate most of the non-internet-based grass roots campaigning and leave the field to the likes of the billionaire Soros (moveon.org), the unions, AARP, and the establishment news media?
An unlimited amount of money poured into a campaign can effectively buy a certain outcome, given how susceptible the general population is to advertising.
And that's utterly false - as long as hordes of SHALLOW-pockets folk can talk to each other freely, without having to jump through government hoops and file red-tape forms or risk jail.
Did you notice that, despite moveon.org and their ilk, the side they're supporting is still losing? Or that one of the main things that scuttled some of their propaganda barrages was grassroots truth-squad activity, such as the blogosphere's lightning-fast analysis and trumpeting of the forged documents - which eventually took out Rather and blackened the CBS eye?
Undisclosed political contributions (above a very low level) are absolutely inexcusable.
Want to have to file a form with the fed declaring how much you spent on your home computer and ISP services - or go to jail - because you once made a posting about a candidate during an election cycle?
That's what "disclosed spending" is.
The "Internet Loophole" exists solely to keep the internet unregulated.
A little regulation is like a little loss of virginity, or a little fire in a fireworks plant. Let the "campaign finance" restrictions TOUCH the internet and the match is lit.
The result will be the same sort of red tape that keeps you from effectively campaigning for your preferred candidate in any other medium. And the same sort of internet free-speech arms race as you are now seeing in China.
The consensus in Washington, so far, is that the Internet is more valuable while it's free. That will change if enough NEARLY effective campaign attemps occur on it, leading to sitting politicians who believe internet free speech is their enemy. Then they will use "campaign finance" laws against it as they have always been intended to be used - to suppress grass-roots campaigns. And we'll be in the fight of our lives. Or forced once again to knuckle under.
Ideally, I would like to have a device that is: cheap (I only want to spend more than $300), small (limited space near TV), quiet (I don't like to have noisy devices on all the time), and extensible (I like adding neat stuff like weather, games or my own custom programs).
Ideally, I would like a small, quiet computer that runs MythTV, which is incredibly extensible. However, building a small, quiet computer that runs MythTV takes lots of money to buy the small form factor equipment and the quiet power supplies, CPUs, hard drives, etc.
And there are lots of other applications where a low-noise, always-on, low power (except when crunching hard - so make that variable clock), GP platform would fit - at the right price point.
which could be achieved by volume production and a bit of marketing - like one or two stock configurations with the right I/O options and .
Which suggests a market opportunity.
The price point could be achieved by volume production and a bit of marketing - like one or two stock configurations with the right I/O options and installed free software to be a canned application, in addition to the bare platform for user configuration of other applications.
I find that Tivo, which is cheaper, provides everything except the extensibility.
Proof of concept: The technical issues aren't insoluble. Making the tuners pluggable options and providing additional slots for more simultaneous option instalation may raise the cost of goods a bit, but not prohibitively.
Followon revenue from service subscriptions could be reproduced by selling such a service - starting with one that works out-of-the-box for the stock configuration and perhaps a version with a published interface so others could subscribe to use with non-stock configs and/or homebrew software. Optionally bundling a subscription committment could lower the entry price point, too.
Living in the southern US, everyone down here likes to refer to generic products by their brand name. Every soda in the word becomes a "Coke" even if its a Pepsi, every portable mp3 player becomes an "iPod" even if it's an "iPlay" and now ever PVR device is being referred to as a "TiVo" when it's really a Comcast PVR (which is probably made by Motorola or some other company).
Coca Cola has (or used to have) its own trademark police that would bring infringement suit threats (or suits) to bear on any restaurant that served them another cola when they asked for a "Coke". Are they slipping up down your way? (I'm sure they'll be very interested in where, down south, this is going on, so they can come stamp it out.)
Xerox, Kleenex, and a number of other brands have to do something similar. To maintain a valuable trademark you have to make a show of defending it when it threatens to become a generic. (Otherwise it BECOMES a generic and anybody else can use your former brand to describe their similar product.)
If this is happening to TiVo and iPod I wouldn't be surprised if we see similar (if not so extreme) action from them.
You notice that media companies are squeeky-clean about this issue. That's NOT just to keep potential sponsors happy or fish for placement revenue. Misusing a brand name as a generic on a multitrillion dollar media conglomerate could let the brand name holder cut a BIG hole in their deep pockets - and pretty much require him to try, or lose his mark.
IMHO a trademark/service mark or similar branding uniqueness enforcement is one place where a government-enforced monopoly is appropriate.
Even - especially - for open-source stuff: When reputation (and/or resulting perks from it, like job offers or consulting work) is your main benefit for your efforts, letting somebody else file the serial numbers off your work and deprive you of those benefits to his own gain is the closest thing to actual theft you can find in the Intellectual Property field.
They should just put DVD burners in the Cable Boxes and save postage.
In addition to being more expensive and prone to breakage, burners would have lower functionality.
- Burned CDs/DVDs have a shorter lifetime than pressed ones.
- Mailed CDs can include the ancilary stuff - including program material that didn't make it and commercial packaging with its artwork. (Plus the coupons, advertising, etc. which makes it a better deal for the movie company.)
Main upside to having a burner is you get the hardcopy right away. But storing a softcopy in the machine until the mail arrives will do almost as well for repeated viewing - you just don't get to port it to another set until the hardcopy arrives.
How would you feel if you were an IT technician, and a big corporation started supplying IT services in your home town for $5 an hour.. then after you were driven into bankruptcy, started raising its prices back to industry norms?
... ?
And how is this different from K-Mart, Walgrens, McDonalds, Taco Bell, Circuit City, Kroger, Ace Hardware, 7-Eleven, Costco, Smart & Final,
Been to a little mom-and-pop store lately?
When was the last time you got your latest home computer from a little guy who assembled it in the backroom of his storefront?
(I imagine most of the current generation has no idea how retail USED to be before the advent of the branded discount store chains. Or of the anti-chain-store legislation that led to the "membership buying club warelhouse" stores as a workaround.)
Meanwhile, if the accusation is selling "below market price" rather than "below production cost" they've got a hard road to hoe. For starters they need to show what the "market price" IS for orders that size. How many of them are there? Samsung can defend simply by publishing the same price they gave Apple as "list" for orders at the nearest round number less than what they shipped to Apple. B-) (And you get your place in the allocation list right behind their existing customers.)
Dark matter always seemed like it was in the honored high school chemistry tradition of adding a fudge factor. There was o direct observational evidence for it, but tossing it in there made the numbers fit.
But that's how you usually discover things: Make predictions from your current theories, collect data and compare it to the predictions, make up new theories that explain it better, use the data to chose between theories and tell you where to look for more data to make better choices, and iterate.
Sometimes people take shortcuts or make errors in calculation and you have to check their work. And there's valuable science to be done there. But it's more "scientist fun" (and funding) to come up with "George's theory of dark matter" than "George's proof that Sam blew his calculations and Einstien was right after all". So sometimes it takes a while.
Now we wait for "Larry's proof that George blew HIS calculations and Sam was closer to the real world" or "Larry's confirmation that George's model has fewer/smaller holes than Sam's."
Who gives a toss? They can all destroy each other as far as I'm concerned.
That might actually be a good solution.
The whole argument the lobbyists have been using to push for DRM-enforcement laws is the claim that LACK of DRM stifles innovation and threatens the commercial infrastructure. (Our counter argument is that it is DRM that is stifling innovation, to the benefit only of the existing players and the detriment of new players and consumers.)
If DRM turns around and stifles innovation by the old players, to the point that it starts taking them down, it's not just poetic justice. It proves our point AND takes out the companies that have become "blood clots in the arteries of commerce" (to misuse a Bucky Fuller quote).
It might not get the law repealed. But at least it would leave the congresscritters wondering where their next campaign contributions will come from. B-)
Also it would shut up the lobbyists, once nobody is paying them to talk on this subject.
Congress could void Betamax, too, by legislation.
At the moment they're still too clueful. The realize that a vote for such a law would take away something many of their consituents do regularly, and they'd be seen as bad guys and bounced.
Unfortunately, new applications don't have an entrenched constituency. So groups like the RIAA can convince congresscritters they can get away with passing draconian laws for them and collect the contributions and other fringes with impunity.
Potential solution: Start tracking and publishing the voting records of any congresscritters on these issues - in places where voters who care (your way) will see them.
Don't wait for the media to do it for you. They're the same guys paying the new laws.
Instead take a lesson from successful organizations like the AARP, NRA, and so on. Study what they do and repeat it in your context.
OK, so Cogent and Level 3 don't want to talk. Fine. That's their business agreement between each other.
But what about the business agreements between them and their customers?
Have they violated their contracts with their customers? Do they owe them a refund for the full time the Cogent/Level 3 link is down? That could be a lot more expensive to both than accepting a more painful peering agreement, or buying transit from a third party for the duration.
Have they written the TOS so that they can do this without violating it? Then the customers are SOL. But in that case the customers have a strong incentive to hunt up another provider with better contract terms. So this could lead to a major, and ongoing, erosion of the customer base for both companies.
I suspect the invisible hand is about to give them both a MAJOR spanking. And give the net a push toward avoiding recurrences of this sort of "failure".
Internet service customers aren't paying to be pawns in this game. They're paying for connection to the internet - ALL of it. To the extent that Cogent and/or Level 3 convinced their customers that internet service was what they were buying, if they entered the contract while willing to take this move they engagaged in fraud.
Smart move for whomever DIDN'T initiate the line cut would be to cut a deal with a third party to pay them to carry their packets and deliver them TO the other. (The other can follow suit or not as it choses - but the willing player can't suck out packets the unwilling won't route.)
Then the willing player can say to its customers "I'm keeping my contract with you. I'm getting your packets delivered to their routers. Whether they go the rest of the way or not is the other guys operation. I'm accepting packets for you from his customers wherever they hit my routers - if they ever do - and delivering them to you. If the other guys won't deliver them to me there's nothing more I can do technically. I've tried to maintain a direct connection with him but he won't budge on reasonable contract terms so I'm paying extra to do everything I can without that to give you the service I sold you."
A solution of that form would keep a single bully from taking down anything but his own customers - and do it in a way that would be visible to any customers of the company he's fuding with: A traceroute would show that their packets go to the third party and stop at their peering router with the kermudgeon (which will probably be named appropriately) the first kermudgeon router, further in where filtering takes place if inbound packets are cut off, or all the way to the target. Meanwhile a traceroute from the target would show the packets never leave the kermudgeon's net. B-)
Of course if the kermudgeon decides to pay for the third party transport to keep from looking bad, the net is back up, while both sides have an extra cost of business that gives them an incentive to cut a cheaper deal.
What they can't do is use any code contributed by anyone outside the company. That code they'll have to re-write since it's licensed under the GPL and doesn't belong to them.
Even easier than that: They can go to the authors/copyright holders of that code and obtain or buy an additional (non-exclusive) license from them - to use it in their closed follow-on product or what-have you.
Then they only need to strip out and replace any stuff for whichthey can't identify the copyright owner or that is owned by somebody who refuses to give the extra license.
If I were in the position of such an author, I'd say "Sure. Price is what you'd have paid me to write it as a closed-source work for hire under a T&M consulting contract. Call it $xxx. Be sure to clean-room it if you decide to replace it." And I'd give them a reasonable price, best-guess for how long it actually took me. Then they can decide to pay that, bargan me down, or try to write a replacement for less. Since they get proven code and no hassles, paying up would be a bargain even at my closed-source consulting rates. B-)
Seems fair: They want to play a closed source game, they pay closed-source prices for closed-source code written externally.
... an industry which shows so readily all the worst tendencies of big business
Try "organized crime".
RIAA is just getting back to its roots - the jukebox protection rackets.
("Hire our jukebox service for your diner - where we collect the money and give you a small cut. By the way, have you noticed that a lot of diners have been smashed up or torched lately? Seems they all either had no jukebox, their own, or some other services'. Tisk, tisk! What's become of kids these days?")
From there to here - an alliance with the number one protection racket: the government - happened in in several easy steps. But intimidation to extract payoffs has always been the name of the game.
I write software to spec. In theory, that should work.
Depends on the theory, and IMHO any theory that says it SHOULD work is incorrect.
In practice it often does. But often there are gaps in the specification that the guy spec'ing should have seen, but didn't. Perhaps, his kids woke him up 20 times last night, perhaps someone made a bad pot of coffee.
My experience is that many of the gaps or flat-out errors in the spec occur, not because the author should ahve seen them but had a braino, but because the author shouldn't necessarily have seen them.
Writing a detailed spec up front and expecting to get it correct (without the growing program and its testbench in hand) is the same as writing a whole program in an editor without compiling it once and expecting the completed program to compile, run, and be error-free the first time.
These gaps in the spec become glaringly obvious when writing the code and in the iterative component testing. That's the practice.
Precicely. And that's what MY theory says should happen.
As the design procedes problems with the spec are exposed along with problems of the design. For each mismatch you examine the difficulty: Usually it's a bug in the design and you fix it. Sometimes it's a bug in the design (or its rendering into spec). Then you fix THAT (perhaps after a meeting to examine the issue and proposed solution and approve the change.)
The same is true in the design of digital hardware, such as ASICs, where design complexity often compares with an OS or application.
Hardware - both digital and otherwise - SEEMS to involve design up front. But that's not really true.
In the case of digital systems the final rendering into silicon and assemblies may be by-the-numbers. But the design of the components was an iterative process much like programming, with the design "crashing" in simulation hundreds or thousands of times before it's good enough to go to production.
In the case of other things, like aircraft and spacecraft, bridges, dams, it sometimes SEEMS like things have been reduced to design-then-build with no trial and error. But that misses a lot.
First: In many cases the function of the structures has been well defined for many product generations, with new designs often minor fit-and-cosmetic variations on something already built. Somebody designing his 30th house or 15th bridge might be able to do it with no major errors for the contractor to work around. (But somebody doing his 30th implementation of the same algorithm or the same hardware module might be able to do the same. How often does such a situation arise?)
Second: These days bridges and buildings designed by well-debugged rules don't collapse and aircraft and spacecraft normally don't come apart or fall out of the sky unless there was an exceptional event or a negelect or error in prescribed maintainence. But a lot of buildings, bridges, aircraft, and spacecraft DID do so in the past - producing data that led to design rule changes which now prevent such problems. Film is available for many of the early aircraft failures, and many of us were around to watch news footage of some of the rocket oopsies. The film of the Tacoma Narrows bridge collapse is required viewing in engineering school, and so on. But this goes back a LONG way - clear into the archaeological record. (Early Egyptian pyramids had a steep slope. There was one that collapsed partially built. Pyramids built after that were standardized at a somewhat lower slope.)
Third: When something new is attempted in these other fields it is simulated out the wazoo, just like a new chip, during the design phase. So again you get the co-evolution of design and debug.
The reason you see a qualitative difference with software is that THE PROGRAM IS THE DESIGN. When you get your "final design" done and debugged in "simulation", you're DONE.
The "spec" for software is somewhat of another animal than the "spec" for a bridge,
Which brings up the point, do you really WANT to live 300 years? We already tend to go downhill after our 20's, and each ecade after is compounded by more health problems. Now some people will claim that uber-nano technology, and some franken-science will keep us in great shape, but simply put; every part in our body wears out with time.
And every part of your body is subject to repair. It's all just matter in a pattern: When a particular piece of it deviates - breaks, accumulates junk, accumulates geneic error, etc. - remove/fix/replace it.
Yes, just avoiding death in a progressively more decrepit body is not all that attractive a prospect for many. But it seems to me that the most likely way to achieve extended life span is to eliminate the degeneration and reverse it when it has happened, rather than just to stave off total collapse.
A decade or so ago some people in the Cryonics movement ran stats on how long lifespan could be expected to last if aging and disease were eliminated and repair after accidents. If I recall it correctly, they assumed:
- vigor and accident rates approximating those of late teens,
- deaths only from accidents that were fatal with the tech of the time, followed by total repair if the victim survived. The number came out to something like an expected median lifespan of 850 years.
Of course the assumptions were deliberately conservative: The accident rate of teens is notoriously high due to attitude and inexperience (especially with driving), and at least skills would be gained with time. And medical tech has made astounding advances in keeping traumatized people alive since then.
Now I, for one, would welcome a millineum or more of life in prime condition.
So in your opinion, is hacking art or science?
That depends on how you define the words. The way I define them it's neither.
Art: Creation of compositions that, as a significant intentional goal, have an emotional impact on a huma observer/participant/user/occupier which is significantly greater than that expected from mere communication, representation, or functional usage.
Science: Progressive refinement of understanding of some aspect of the objective universe, accomplished by devising theories that explain known data and testing them by performance of experiments to collect new data which can detect falsity of the theories or chose between theories which diverge.
"Hacking" can occasionally USE some aspect of either. But neither is primary.
IMHO hacking is a "craft" - a skillful use of a coherent set of technologies to make new constructions which advance a goal. This is one of the secondary meanings of "Art", as in the title of Knuth's _The Art of Computer Programming_. But a particular hack need not meet the primary meaning of "Art" to be "a GOOD hack".
Hacking, or any other computer programming, like any other work of craft, can be a good piece of art as an independent matter. Example: A "beautiful" program can be a work of art independent of its function. In some crafts (by my definition) art is considered a necessary part of the toolkit used to create a good work: Architecture, city planning, and software interface design are three examples.
A hack can often have a strong emotional impact on those who come in contact with it as a side-effect of its primary activity. Hacks can be used as components of art works - but so can tin cans. Hacks can be works of art in themselves - but so can cars (or tin cans B-) ). That still doesn't make hacking ITSELF an "Art" in the way I use the term.
They charge a "sales tax" on things purchased inside the state.
They charge a "use tax" - of the same amount - on things USED in the state - but exempt items on which a sales tax was already paid.
See. "It isn't REALLY a tax on interstate commerce." (Yeah, right...)
I think the effect of the ruling might be to give law enforcement the power to:
- demand tapping of your pipes at your ISP
- demand backdoors be included in publicly distributed VoIP software and the firmware in hardware products.
How will they prevent people from removing backdoors from SOURCE-destributed products, or finding ways to defeat mandated ISP-level block-VoIP-if-backdoor-disabled? We'll have to wait and see what they come up with. (But I expect it will be obtrusive, draconian, and ultimately futile.)
There's not much they can do against those who build their own software from scratch. But such software has considerablely reduced utility, since it must be built and distributed to ALL the users of the new network.
This rasies the bar for the amount of organization and funding/manpower necessary to use it - from "download a free application" or "buy a common, cheap, commercial product" to "develop your own and distribute it to your minions". The software itself becomes contraband, and can be used as evidence of wrongdoing. The distribution network for the software provides an additional opportunity to discover the clandestine organization. The software, once identified, will also almost certainly have an identifiable signature, which can be used to identify the users (silently, by internet surveilence) and do traffic analysis on their communication even before the software itself is cracked or captured and analyzed.
All this is enabled by the FCC adding "subject to the needs of law enforcement" to a document that, otherwise, would have been a bill of rights for ISP customers.
I keep hearing about these "IE Only" sites for a long time already. However, I yet have to find one.
How about the FEMA site section for online claims requests, which explicitly requred IE 6.x. Slashdot article here.
This was particularly a problem since the volunteer-provided internet access tended to be donated older computers running free software, often from a "live CD". But not being able to use it to fill out the aid forms massively reduced its usefulness.
The telephone alternative to online signup was even worse: It didn't let you sign up, only triggered the mailing of the form - to your address in the flood zone.
"In the United States, punctuation marks are always put inside of the quotation marks. It's different in some other countries, like Britain, but for American English the GP had it right."
That rule is from "Standard English", an attempt by the education establishment to standardize the language across the US.
(Some people, however, consider it an attempt by the power elites in the eastern urban establishment to depriciate the regional variants of the language and brand their speakers as unintelligent or lower class, thus depriciating their arguments in political debate.)
Other examples: The crusade against both "ain't" and the use of the double negative for emphasis (rather than in the mathematical sense of two inversions canceling).
But (unlike French) American English does not have a standards body empowered to enforce their usages by power of law. Instead the US has free speech. As dictionary authors have known since Webster published the first one, the language is what the speakers and writers speak and write, and their job is to research and document what they're actually saying, not invent and impose something of their own construction.
Educators do have a responsibility to teach their students a version of the language that maximizes their chance for social and economic success. But that's a different issue. Their classroom technique of claiming the desired dialect is somhow the only correct version of the language should not be mistaken for fact.
Meanwhile the roll-your-own aspect of the language speeds its evolution, empowering it for expressing thought in the face of rapidly advancing science and technology and rapidly changing social issues.
The "(American) Standard English" punctuation rules may have been convenient for typesetting. But technical people, especially those who deal with math or computer languages, gravitate to the use of balanced punctuation rules in their ordinary writing, as well as when writing programs or mathematical expressions.
And what sort of people do we have a lot of here on Slashdot? B-)
Punctuation flames against the balanced forms will fall on deaf ears here.
Lastly, I think we need a "Do-Not-Fax" list, ...
That's already illegal - after a similar flood of advertising faxes back when fax machines were becomming common in businesses but were not yet so cheap as to be common in residences.
Unlike the old "do not call" lists the "take me off your fax" number generally works. (I've only had to do it once at work and twice at home to get the bogosity to stop.) Meanwhile I hear you can get a couple hundred bux per fax if you want to take 'em to small claims court. Search the web for the procedure.
If you really work outdoors, you want a tractor or a rangerover. Not an SUV.
Obviously posted by someone who doesn't "really work outdoors" and has no clue. Talk to some of the people who do sometime.
There are jobs for which a tractor is more appropriate. There are also jobs for which a bulldozer is more appropriate. This does not in any way reduce the jobs for which an SUV is either the best fit or the most practical choice for a single vehicle to do a diverse SET of jobs.
As for the Range Rover: There are a number of different designes in the SUV class, with different characteristics. The Range Rover has its uses - such as safaris. But ranchers, for instance, may want a vehicle with a different combination of cost, repair requirements and frequency, size, fuel consumption, and capacity. (A multimillionaire plains rancher, for instance, might go for a Grand Cherokee - and many of them do. Someone with a handfull of acres in a mountainous region might go for something smaller.)
Plus the demographics show that a vast mayority (90%+) of SUV's are never used off-road at all (which isn't much of a surprise, as they drive like shit off road).
So what?
With the herds of urbanites buying SUVs, most of them are now used for things other than their original purpose. And the auto companies have reacted to them, and their complaints about the handling of a "real" SUV, by doing things like redesigning the suspensions or even switching to passenger car chassis to give a more car-like ride, padding the interior, lowering the clearance, and hanging on all sorts of smashable doodads where a rock will remove them within the first hour of off-road driving. (Back in 2000 we had to argue for hours with a salesman to get the "upcountry suspention" option - which had to be special ordered - when we bought one from an urban area dealer.)
What fad-following urbanites buy has NOTHING to do with the needs of the people who actually use them for their original purpose. Which was the point of my original post.
But I tell you what: Why don't you wait and see what $3.00/galon gas prices (or whatever Rita drives it up to) does to the relative popularity of SUVs and subcompacts among urban shoppers in the next couple model years.
I think you'll find that consumers have a clue, and that the market will do a much more effective job at switching them SUVs to pipmobiles than any groupthink posturing or government "message-sending by restrictive legislation" program.
The vanadium oxidation-state fuel cell looks like a better candidate than the hydrogen/oxygen/water cycle. Seems to be under development currently.
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The problem with solar cars is that the amount of sunlight striking them isn't adequate: A square yard is only getting about 1 1/3 HP worth of power in direct noon sunlight, BEFORE conversion inefficiencies (which lose maybe 4/5 of it just for starters).
Now you CAN get to freeway speeds with an ultrastreamlined vehicle, on a nearly level surface, running under the clear skys and on the dry pavement of the driest continent on the planet. But that's not going to haul loads up mountain passes in a forest, or do much of ANYTHING in northern lattitude, perpetually-cloudy, often wet or snow-covered places like Washington, Oregon, Michigan, Wisconsin,
Solar powered cars - with the solar cells ON the car - are an interesting toy. They might advance some parts of vehicle technology significantly, and possibly lead to practical stored-power alternative-energy powered vehicles. But don't expect a sun-car as practical transportation in the future.
If self-collecting sun powered vehicles were practical I'd think evolution would already have produced sun-powered ambulatory beings above the level of the flatworm/algae symbiosis.
About the only justification for a SUV is either having a pet elefant to feed or having an incredibly big ass in which case you indeed have better things to worry about.
...). These regions can be inaccessable to other vehicles for months at a time, and require prohibitive transport time and risk (vehicular damage or disablement, "getting stuck", injurious or fatal accidents such as off-a-cliff/into-the-river/getting-stuck-with-no-h elp) when they ARE accessable.
A city person shows his elitist provincialism.
The main purpose for SUVs is to provide taansport and cargo carrying capacity for people living in, working in, or having to travel to - a site outside a city, especially if off the paved road network - or the road network at all - but also if weather is a problem (mud, snow, ice, mountainous terrain,
Some specialized areas: Doctors in rural areas, firefighting in wilderness areas, etc.
The "sports" part is because they're also useful for transport to wilderness areas for recreation or food gathering: fishing, hunting, camping, hiking. (Of course some of these are things left-wind elitists would like to ban altogether, others things they would restrict to people who hike in, making them inaccessable to the handicapped, infirm, or those who have full-time jobs and can't spare the extra time to make the hike. Forests and wildlife are only the rich and body-beautiful ubermensch, right?)
A big use: The "small truck" for farms and ranches. For many things it's better than even a pickup: gets into smaller places, less expensive to run, etc.
It's also much more fuel efficient than a pickup, van, or a compact "sporty" car. (Our Cherokee - the only one of our vehicles that can make the trip from our townhouse to our rural house - does as well in mountains with two passengers and a full cargo load as the little Eagle Talon with no load and one passenger - and beats an unloaded Aerostar with just the driver on level freeways by 6 MPG.
The main reason SUVs are so popular in cities ("Mall Terrain Vehicles"), though, is an unintended consequence of the governments' attempts to improve auto mileage and move people onto inadequate mass transit.
The CAFE standards killed the station wagon - the most efficient of the large-family utility vehicle classes. (i.e. take the kids to school or the scout troop on an outing, cary a weeks groceries home, tote appliances and small amounts of home-improvement construction material, haul larger amounts in a trailer, or a recreational trailer such as a travel trailer or boat trailer.) The things masquerading as a station wagon these days are NOT the same thing, and nowhere near as capable.
With a REAL station wagon no longer available, people with kids and a week's shopping to haul and/or trailers to tow switched to the next bigger vehicle type: The SUV. (It's a "truck" for the mileage regulations - the smallest and most fuel efficient of the commercial-cargo rated vehicles.)
Meanwhile the highways in many cities have been deliberately allowed to deteriorate to try to push people onto mass transit systems. (Yes, they even admitted it publicly in at least one place: The SF Bay area, when LA got their freeways back up in months after a big quake while SF was still twiddling their thumbs years after their own.)
A (classic) SUV has a suspension designed for off-road and can handle a potholed freeway just fine, when a compact car would be in the shop for a realignment (at a minimum) after hitting one of these irregularities, and has a hard time maintaining speed and lane position if the road is bad.
(Of course once the practical thinkers among the city people - often successful types that are trend-setters - started using them, it became a status symbol and a fad. These days lots of city people use them who don't "need" them - but prefer them and vote with their dollars.)
But now there's a big push by the elitists self-proclaimed social engineers to get
If you have a significant amount of something as deadly as anthrax ... there MUST be some trace ... some papers, some empty cans, some people. If after 2 years of free inspections in Iraq, the Americans did not discover a SINGLE TRACE -- the answer is obvious. There were no such weapons in the first place.
Then what did he use to kill all those Kurds? What about that chemical bomb that went off (improperly, thank [insert your preference], when the terrorists thought it was an explosive bomb and detonated it the wrong way)? What about the pieces of the nuclear bomb project the scientist dug up from his garden and turned in, along with the story about how he'd been ordered to hide it.
What about the list of WMDs he GAVE THE UN INSPECTORS?
(I could go on with a litany of what evidence they DID find, both before and after. But I suspect you'll then claim it was all made up.)
Now maybe he really DID destroy it all (or tried to and got most of it) - but then tried to keep up the appearance he'd hit it to keep his neighbors on rebellious provinces in check, thinking the western powers would never attack. (If so he grossly underestimated the risk the West perceived and the resolve to eliminate, once 9/11 convinced the new US administration that terrorists would use WMDs if they got some. And he didn't realize that Junior would learn from Daddy's mistake - wouldn't stop short of deposing him because he thought his UN mandate had run out and again leave him in power to slaughter our allies among Iraq's population.)
And maybe he never had as many as he thought, because his department heads might have inflated results rather than risking his wrath.
But if you truly believe he NEVER had ANY and NO paper trail was EVER discovered, one thing is clear: You've been duped by somebody's propaganda, and now refuse to accept the actual evidence.
In those places whose layout make rail-type mass-transit practical, standard-guage rail gives enormously better price-performance than the alternatives.
The technology has been heavily debugged over 1 1/2 centuries. The important components are in mass production. (Even custom rolling stock - if built in the standard way - gets much of the cost and functionality benefit.)
Standard guage also lets the line use heavy rail rights-of-way opportunistically - with no or only minor upgrades if the stock is self-powered, relatively minor upgrades if trolley or third-rail power must be added. Old rights-of-way are the right width and can be reactivated or re-railed. City streets ditto: You can put standard guage down a freeway median, convert a lane or two of an existing street or closed-to-traffic pedestrian mall, or even run rails IN a street and share the lane with vehicular traffic. You can bring intercity passenger lines to the same stations and platforms as your intra-city mass transit. In an industrial area or over bridges you can also do shared projects with freight lines.
Each of these factors can produce savings in the tens-of-millions to multiple billions ranges, both for the mass transit projects and sometimes for heavy rail partners.
Contrast that to non-standard systems:
BART: Deliberately designed with a non-standard guage track (using concrete railbed so it can't be changed later) so it could never be shared with freight. Custom cars designed by aeronautical engineers - whose expertese with aerodynamics and structure relates more to free-space flight than rolling rapidly on a surface within inches of structures, and whose experience with ROLLING involves only rubber-shod landing gear used for only minutes per flight at any speed greater than a crawl. Result: Abysmal ride. Cars with a replacement cost of $6 million EACH, currently only available from a manufacturer in France. No opportunity to share right-of-way with anything: Expansion requires purchase (or siezure) of a string of contiguous lots through the San Francisco Bay Area - perhaps still the most expensive real estate in the US.
Amtrack made the aeronautical-engineer new-design mistake on one generation of their passenger rolling stock, with similar results.
People-mover: A rubber-tired horizontal elevator. A dreadfully expensive toy for inner city entertainment/business districts. Useful mainly for inter-terminal transport in airports. Like Bart, the right-of-way can't be shared with anything.
Monorails also can't share their trackage with other services, or recycle existing structures (other than the space over existing rights-of-way such as freeway medians - and even there the supporting structures consume ground space). So you have to build the entire line and pay for the whole thing out of the project - making the fees you must charge (or the taxes you must steal) prohibitively high. The main advantage over railroads is their relative quiet and their lack of interference with traffic at crossings.
(I could go on with bullet trains and other inter-urban items, and comparison with air and water transit. But this thread is about urban mass transit.) Main point is that, for urban mass transit, standard guage rail for the long hops is a better deal than monorail or the other alternatives.
With one exception: The private automobile is usually a far better price/performance tradeoff than even trains or busses - even if you don't count the costs of lost passenger time from waiting for scheduled runs or transfer connections, or taking a non-optimal route due to lack of availability of a direct run. Even in those cities where the transit system is pervasive enough that it beats cars for some trips, there are always plenty of others where a private car beats the pants off public transportation on a cost/ride basis. A car goes from where you are to where you want to be, with many convenient route options, at a very low cost per mile traveled (even counting the cost of