Anyone who is aware of the situation knows that there is a definite environmental crisis looming. This isn't just about global warming and resource depletion, but about eliminating our forests and converting nature into a wasteland.
Anyone who watches the media would think that the world will end somewhere between 30 years from now (due to resource depletion) and next year or next week (due to the latest imminent catastrophe).
And anyone aware of the actual data knows that, in North America at least, there is significantly more forested land now, and more trees on it, than when the Europeans arrived.
In California and Oregon, for instance, indians practiced a form of low-effort farming. One of their techniques was to burn off the trees in certain valleys every hundred years or so.
It turns out that a climax forest is a ROTTEN place for species diversity - both animal and plant. Deer, for instance, do best on the boundary between a forest and an open field.
(Spotted owls, too, by the way: They nest in the trees and hunt in the fields, where the rodents have a hard time finding cover and there are no obstructions to flight. That's -why they did so well in the K-mart sign. (Sign === tree, parking lot === field, rodents out of luck.) B-) )
By burning off part of the forest (a low-effort management technique somewhere between a patch cut and a clearcut) they created open fields, field/forest boundaries, and a multi-decade sequence of species succession as the land worked its way through the stages preceeding the enviromental disaster that is a climax forest. The result was population explosions of useful and/or edible plant and easily-hunted animal species.
These techniques were abandoned at about the time the Spanish conquest of the west coast upset the traditional culture. And for the last six decades or so the forests have been overgrowing as a result of "management" policies of the US government, driven mainly by voters in the cities whose entire knowlege of forest and wildlife management comes from campling trips and the propaganda of political activists.
The first phenomenon to be noticed in this trend was christened "The Smokey The Bear Effect". This was the overgrowth of forests caused by firefighting and firebreak cutting reducing the amount of timber burned to a level far below what is natural in the absense of human activity. (Forests burn intermittently - ignited by lightning or sometimes spontaneous combustion. In the absense of firebreaks these fires cover enormous areas.
Some plants - especially certain pines and eucalyptus - have evolved to use this as part of their reproductive cycle, reproducing when the fire kills off the competition from hardwoods, dropping tinder and storing oils that encourage the start of fires and their spread, or even exploding in a fire to scatter their seeds. Others have evolved to survive fires, and depend on them to clear out underbrush and other competition. The Smokey the Bear effect actually got so bad that the jackpine (AKA "firepine"), whose cones only release their seeds when burned, became endangered in much of its range.
But lately it's gotten horrendously worse. Environmentalists have managed to block most brush-hogging, burning, logging, thinning, and offroading, and even vehicular travel in much of the national forests (which, unlike national PARKS, are not parks but tree farms!) The result is that some areas have as much as two orders of magnitude more trees than they normally would support, along with thick underbrush and years of accumulation of dead leaves and annual plants (i.e. "wildflowers" / weeds). Such fuel loads create a situation where, once the fire catches, it burns hot enough to kill everything and leave a nearly sterile area that may take centuries to repopulate. (Or which may not repopulate for geologic time, if erosion removes the soil once the plants aren't anchoring it.)
"Roadless areas" are firebreak-less areas, and firefighting equipment
Why do you assume the tax revenue-tax rate function is unimodal?
1) Raising taxes increases revenue by collecting a higher percentage of the circulating money on each pass.
2) Raising taxes decreases the circulation of money by draining resources from the economy.
3) Effect 1) is dominant at low rates, effect 2) at hight rates.
In the absense of any other mechanism, or any reason to believe that the effects are not monotonic, continuous, and reasonably smooth (except for discontinuites at the extremes such as the jump from no tax at all to some tax), the result is a curve with exactly one hump, with a location dependent on the shape of the functions responsible for 1) and 2).
Can you postulate an additional mechanism (or wild nonlinearity) that would produce an additional hump?
It's easy to claim that there might BE one (or more) additional hump(s). But until you can come up with a plausable reason FOR aonther, I'm going to continue to assert this camel is a dromedary rather than a bactrian.
On the other hand he seems a credible source of insight, being the author of the best seller "The Unix Guide to Defenestration".
The book is NOT a how-to about using Unix as a tool for completely purging Windows from your IT operation. He grabs the term "Defenistration" and defines it to mean something else - something unrelated to windows. So IMHO a significant part of the book's reason for existence is to co-opt the word and the book title.
AT&T had nice clean code that worked well was efficient but didn't do networking very well at all. So they hopped into bed with Sun who had real good networking stuff from BSD. The result was the two of them spawned SVR4. The read system call in the old unix was short and sweet and fit on a vt100 screen. The new one took pages even when printed out and didn't do anything new. It was a rewrite for the sake of a rewrite.
My impression of the SystemV series was that the proprietary status of Unix was in doubt and SystemV was intended to fix that.
Unix was written before the US copyright law was were extended to apply to software, and before the "program as component of patentable invention" hack was invented and debugged. So the only IP protection AT&T had on it was trade secret. Trade secret goes "poof!" when the secret is out, and AT&T had distributed several generations of source and documentation to universities around the world.
(This was also before the breakup of the Bell System, and there was some mandate on them publishing releasing certain telephone-related work as part of their monopoly mandate which, separately, might have imperiled its IP status. I don't recall the details. But it was probably made moot by the court-mandated breakup later.)
Unix had been a back-room project by a team that had been explicitly forbidden, at least initially, from building an OS. (Indeed, one factor driving the kernel's simplicity and the design goal of pushing as much out to the application layer as possible was the creation of plausable deniability: "An OS does X, Y, and Z and this doesn't. So it's not an OS. Right?")
Since they weren't writing something viewed as productizable or proprietary, they were at Bell Labs (where publishing was the usual route for most work), and software in those days wasn't productized anyhow, they felt no need to keep it under their hats.
The broad circulation of source and docs spawned the era of the commodity unix box. A new hardware vendor, rather than writing his own OS, could just port Unix to the box - a matter of hacking a couple thousand lines of hardware-interface code. AT&T would look the other way as long as they weren't selling it. Once they got it working, AT&T would cut a licensing deal on very good terms. (For them it was free money.)
This continued until the University of New South Wales built a course around System 6 (i.e. release 6 of the documentation set, which was how System N was named). They printed a two-volume coursebook - volume 1 being the kernel source pretty-formatted, while volume 2 was a textbook walking you through the guts. This immediately became an underground classic, and finally got onto the administrative radar screen at AT&T. The lawyers "Cease and Desist"ed the University.
The SystemV project, if I recall correctly, started shortly after the CONTU (Committee On New Technological Uses - charged with studying and proposing to Congress whether/how software should receive copyright protection) reported and Congress explicitly extended copyright to cover software. Now that IP protection was available, AT&T got together with several of the big Unix players and together they reimplemented the kernel from scratch, and tried to move everybody to the result.
They gave a number of plausable-sounding reasons for the work - claiming it was a great improvement on the previous stuff. But they didn't include the Berkeley work (especially noticible: no Berkeley Signals) which had its own proprietary issues. The resulting functionality of SystemV was both incompatible with and lower than both BSD and some other System N derivatives. So the general consensus (at least among the people I hung out with at the time) was that the whole exercise was to clean up the IP status of Unix for its future as a product.
Sigh. I had merely assumed it came from "google"
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Google Tidbits
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· Score: 1
[several stories credited to founder interviews deleted]
Sigh.
I had assumed it came directly from "google" (to stare at, especially if through glasses), which came from "ogle" perhaps via "googles" (glasses - a corruption of goggles with a bit of "ogle" thrown in). Both were slang terms in use in the '50s, at least in southern Michigan.
the law of conservation of r's also states to place them where they do not normally exist, such as idea->ide'ar
As I understand it, the issue with Rs is that the accent associated with the east-coast ivy leaguers actually has a single phoneme midway between "ah" and "ar" that serves the function of both. As a result, people from places where the distinction is made perceive the divergence and thus hear the phoneme as its opposite number rather than the one intended. For instance, midwesterners heard "Cuba" as "Cuber" in Kennedy's speeches during the missile crisis.
The same thing happens with R and L when adult Chinese learn English as a second language.
No I did not misunderstand the lesson. I find it interesting having no knowledge of it, you'd choose to argue about it. Regardless, the very simple point that is stressed quite clearly is that if you are drawing your gun, you have decided to shoot, immediately. Period. End of story
As I said, while that may be what they're teaching in Texas (where, by the way, it is legal to shoot in defense of property), that is neither the general rule taught by the NRA in their personal protection classes (which my wife, the NRA instructor, confirms), nor is it the rule taught in the mandatory CCW courses as approved by Nevada, Utah, and Florida (which I have taken).
Texas honors Florida CCWs. So I find it hard to believe that the Texas mandated curriculum would diverge so blatantly from a Florida-approved curriculum on this important issue.
There the rule is that you draw when you are in reasonable fear of death or great bodily harm. Drawing does NOT commit you to fire.
Though Texas has a mandated curriculum supplied by the state I have not been able to find a copy online. (I have found a TX-approved instructor and fired off an email to him, in the hope that he will clarify how this is taught there, either in a return email or by posting directly here.)
It is not "will use the gun if necessary" as you allude to (before contradicting yourself later by saying "you will do so"). That directly contradicts the point.
I'm sorry, tyrantnine. Your claim that the two statements I made contridict each other doesn't support your argument. Instead it provides evidence that you sometimes misunderstand what you are told.
One thing stressed heavily in every single class is that one does not pull out a gun with no intention of using it. Pulling out a gun in hopes that it will defuse or get a situation under control is beyond irresponsible. You are taught explictily that if you pull out your gun, you are going to fire it. Period. Pulling a gun on someone is going to enhance the severity of any situation you're in, not calm it down.
I believe that either you misunderstood the lesson or the State of Texas law on the training program has done a slight tweak on the course for their permit requirements.
The rule is that you make the decision that you ARE AREADY JUSTIFIED in using the gun and WILL use the gun if necessary before you pull and point it. This is for several reasons:
- If you actually have to use it you aren't fatally delayed by making the decision on-the-fly.
- If you weren't already legally justified in using deadly force, pulling it is "brandishing", pointing it is "assault with a deadly weapon", firing it "aggravated assault with...", "attempted murder", "improper discharge of a firearm",..., and the list grows further if you hit and injure or kill him.
It is not a requirement that you actually fire if you draw. In the real world the usual result is that the crook turns and runs (perhaps yelling "House shoots! House shoots!" to his buddies) as soon as the gun is visible. (Once he's turned you may NOT shoot in most jurisdictions, although Texas MAY be one where you still can.) And even if the crook is armed only with a knife, club, or a strong arm and is six feet away you may have to draw/aim/fire as nearly one motion to avoid being disarmed or having your gun hand knocked off-aim.
But the point is that you made the decisions that you are legally (and morally) justified to shoot, and you will do so, before you drew. You do NOT draw in the hope that the show will scare him off. (You just take that as a welcome bonus if it occurs - and occurs quickly enough that you can abort firing.)
When a computer, iPod, etc. fails--even at the worst possible time--at most you are severely inconvienced. When your firearm fails at an inopportune time--say, I dunno, when a knife- or dumb gun-wielding intruder breaks into your bedroom maybe?--you are dead.
(Subject line says it all.)
Replaced by: My gun didn't know me so I got killed
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Smart Guns are Coming
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· Score: 3, Informative
Well, so long as it's non-trivial to bypass, it will stop the problem of "I got shot with my own gun by an intruder" or "my kid shot his friend when they got into my sock drawer."
To be replaced by "I got shot/knifed/clubed/stomped by the intruder when my gun didn't recognize me." (A false-negative error.)
And by "My kid shot his friend when they got into my sock drawer after I trusted the new 'smart gun' and didn't lock it in the safe like I do the 'dumb' ones." (A false-positive error.)
Maybe once in eight average lifetimes only a gun will protect you from murder. Maybe several times in an average lifetime a gun will protect you and/or yours from death or serious bodily harm from criminal activity. (Your mileage WILL vary greatly.) In each of these situations, maybe nineteen times in twenty showing the gun is enough, one time in twenty your "bluff gets called" and you actually have to FIRE the gun.
For people in some locations (such as rural) and/or some occupations (such as stockraising), a gun may be needed as often as several times a year to defend livestock, family, or self against predators (which, even if they're after livestock, will often switch to being after the stockman once challenged). People who work on horseback may need to use a pistol to shoot the horse if they are being dragged.
When one of these things happens, if you need your gun to fire it MUST fire.
If, in such a situation, a "smart gun" decides, in its electronic wisdom, that you're really joe blow non-owner and refuses to fire, you're very likely to become a casualty.
While these incidents are rare, in a country of 300 million people they add up to very large number per year.
Uniformed police officers are the main victims of "gun taken away and used on owner". It happens to them a lot. They wear their guns in exposed holsters. They get into altercations with lawbreakers - sometimes with groups of them - where it's their job to maintain contact and subdue the wrongoers. When they're focused on one perpetrator, another may come up behind them, grab their gun, and perhaps fire it at them. Police have the MOST to be gained by making their guns refuse to fire in unauthorized hands.
Several "smart gun" systems have already been devised for them - systems much less likely to make mistakes than a biometric device. Typically these are enabled by something worn by the officer, such as a ring or bracelet containing a magnet or an ID chip.
But because of the risk of the gun refusing to fire when needed by the duly authorized officer, police departments have so far resisted enormous political pressure and refused to use such systems.
If even the police won't deploy an extremely reliable 'smart gun' device when its usefulness is so great, due to the risk from even a small number of misidentifications, why should a civillian purchase something less reliable?
Given that ATT/Cingular doesn't intend even to upgrade the base station serving my house - and several hundred others, and a major highway intersection - to GPS (even though they keep insisting I turn in my TDMA phone and "upgrade") I have little hope that my corner of Nevada will have a WiMAX WISP any time soon.
Unless I put in one myself. B-) But then I'd have to rent some T1s or better out into the boonies. B-(
Google for it, dude, or check a wiki, before you sound off.
It's the industry's own terminology.
And trust me, as someone who has to deal with them professionally: There's a LOT of oddball terminology distinctions that can become VERY important when you're dealing with them. Like DS1 vs. T1 for instance.
Actually I'm not sure about that. Keep in mind that we're talking about a broadcast, and I'm fairly certain part of the DMCA clarified what was established as a broadcast on-line. If it's a broadcast, then the notion of suing the listener is equivalent to suing the citizens of a city because the local FM station didn't pay their license. That doesn't make sense.
Hmmm...
Perhaps the user can get off on the ISP's exemption on the claim that, like an ISP, they're only forwarding, not controlling what is in the packets that they forward.
They'd still have to stop participating in a stream if they were notified that the stream is systematically infringing. (But wouldn't THAT be a game of whack-a-mole: Trying to identify, and give legal notice to, everybody listening to a stream.)
The tricky part is, if you listen, and you're part of the P2P network, then I suppose you are also a broadcaster technically.
I think they'd have to show you knew the stream was infringing to actually hang you. Might be a difficult thing to prove - especially if there are legitimate streams on the net using the same mechanism.
VOIP unlimited calling plan: $19.99/mo 2-phone cell plan with unlimited mobile-to-mobile minutes: $49.99/mo
Connect one cell to your computer and leave it at home; take the other with you. Use PBX software to rig up a bridge between your VOIP and the home cell. Use the home cell as a gateway between your roaming cell and the VOIP number, abusing the free mobile-to-mobile minutes.
I think there's already a company doing something like this - a VoIP company with banks of cellphones for their side of the call. With them you have the VoIP subscription and use your ONE-cellphone sub to call into their cellphone bank to bridge to your VoIP subscription.
What if BitTorrent added multicast capability? Would backbone ISPs race to cut the 35% of their traffic that is BitTorrent by finally implementing usable multicast?
If they don't the local ISPs might go around them with M-bone like tunneling. The backbones bill the little guys by connection size, so they might fight at first.
I think what we need is:
- Software features from the equipment manufacturers so the local ISPs (which sometimes ARE backbone providers too) can do it easily once they chose to.
- An incentive structure that makes it be in the ISPs' interest to enable the feaures.
Think about it: If YOU were an ISP and YOU could make 35% of your backbone traffic (which you pay for) almost go away by throwing a switch (while IMPROVING service to your customers), and thowing the switch wouldn't more than compensate for it by bringing in more traffic than it eliminated, what would YOU do?
With Comcast owning the network that the voice calls will traverse (until it gets to POTS, if needed), will Comcast's VoIP quality be better [...]
PSTN, not POTS, please.
POTS = Plain Old Telephone Service. It's an electrical and signaling specification: Two wire, 24v DC supplies, ringing, pulse/tone dialing, cabling and line impedence standards (typically CAT3), etc. RJ and other connectors. POTS, and customers attached to the PSTN by POTS, are a (large) subset of the PSTN but far from all of it.
PSTN = Public Switched Telephone Service. It's the whole telephone ball of wax. Customers attached by POTS, ISDN (basic or primary rate), Tn with SS7, and several cellular standards, etc. Common numbering plan. Division of effort between long-haul, local, and cellular system providers. International carriers and standards. I could go on.
POTS is a wire connection standard. PSTN is The Telephone Network.
They don't have to worry too much yet. I think the answer to the question posed in the article title is "No." The one station on peercast.org at this time with more than 20 listeners skips like crazy.
Part of the problem is that both the backbone and the ISPs are only delivering "best effort" Quality of Service (QoS) to their clients. This makes for dropped packets, which means either holes in the stream or retransmissions and stuttering. In a peercast environment such interruptions add up with every hop. (And you have to use retransmission-based protocol, accepting the jitter, to get any significant amount of the stream to the later-generatoin clients.)
Another issue is that they vastly oversubscribe their backhauls. Like 100-to-1 or more. This isn't all that big a deal when you're downloading web pages - things just get slower if everybody hits a button at once. And it's not a killer for VoIP, which is still relatively low-bandwidth. But if a number of customers are all trying to peercast even a low-res video stream simultaneously it totally blows their provisioning model.
They also don't enable multicast for anything but their own "value added" services. (That would enable low-budget broadcast applications without peercasting, which would then explode, chewing up their backhaul bandwidth without giving them any added revenue to pay for it.)
About a year ago I was proposing (to my colleagues at a router company) the idea that deploying a peercast-like application which would use multicast when available and unicast otherwise, would change the incentive structure: ISPs would quickly become flooded - but could drastically cut their traffic by enabling multicasting for ordinary users.
I don't know if this peercast software has opportunistic multicast capability. (I sure hope it does.) Without that the incentive on the ISPs is PURELY to try to eliminate the traffic by blocking the application, rather than achieve a win-win by improving the service.
One of the main checkboxes for the next generation of networking equipment is the ability to identify and deny (or enhance) certain applications' protocols and connections. As thees abilities become more available, watch for ISPs to write terms of service that only allow you do participate in things like peercast if you buy an extra-cost "enhanced" service package.
Of course this will lead to an arms race, as new applications attempt to disguise themselves from the filtering. But even if successful, cloaking approaches lead to reduced functionality and user base. Meanwhile, their explicit violation of terms of service that forbid them lead to legal action, more legislation and penalties, and other nastyness.
This brings an interesting question: how to anonymize the stream source, the initial node. How to make impractically difficult to trace down the originator of the stream. Once this is solved, no more paperwork for hobbyists.
If you do that, they can still go after the listeners.
Peercast software clones and retransmits the stream - so every listener is also making unlicensed copies in the process of forwarding. All they have to do is subscribe themselves, see where the packets are coming from, and go after that guy. Rinse and repeat to collect enough listeners to make a big show trial.
People attempting to circumvent this will also have to figure out how to anonymize the forwarding - including the IP address. That's tough.
(Recently a court decided the DMCA doesn't let them get the IP address to subscriber info for peer-to-peer application users. But that is just because the DMCA is worded to let them get such info from ISPs only to identify users who posted unauthorized copies and STORED them on the ISP's servers. Congress can easily "correct this oversight" to allow them to find out who's serving copies stored on their own mahcines or making copies on the fly - and likely will now that a court has spoken and the RIAA is on notice that they need more legislation to continue their attacks.)
Imagine the reaction if senior Chinese officials started calling for the internal laws of the US to be altered to suit Chinese business interests.
Like the Kyoto treaty?
Or GATT, which is already ratified, and is being used by Asian interests in an attempt to force changes in US laws. Among them: changing hunting laws to allow commercial hunting. (Among other things, there's a brisk trade in bear bile, which has medical applications in Asian medicine.)
Not to mention NAFTA which is forcing similar changes in other US and state laws. Among them traffic laws - to allow Mexican truckers to drive US highways with equipment and driver training far below the normal standards of most US states.
Some years ago Glen Roberts got hold of the IRS' manual for auditors under the FOIA and published it. (At the time he was running a newspaper and selling books, essentially all based on info he got via the FOIA or his experiences in getting it. It included a "how to" manual for using the FOIA.)
The IRS got him enjoined from distributing the auditor's handbook. (And some agency also got him enjoined from distributing the FOIA "how to".)
I think fallout from that episode ended up limiting how much stuff you could get from the IRS under the FOIA.
Umm, if I publish a recipe for crack that uses 2 less ingredients than the normal recipe and takes only half the time to make, why would that be a valid argument for making crack legal?
Actually, yes, if the simplification of the method makes the law significantly less enforcable.
Unenforcable laws should be removed from the books and moved from the province of laws to the province of morals. If you can't stop them when they do it, or have a good chance to catch them when they do, it's time to stop policing and start preaching voluntary behavior change.
Leaving such laws on the books leads to selective enforcement (down the slippery slopes toward a police state and/or discrimination), massive civil disobedience, disrespect for laws in general (by both the population and the law enforcement perdonnel), more violation of IMPORTANT laws, and more strain on enforcement resources.
The government should stick to trying to control only those things that meet three criteria:
They CAN be controlled in a fair manner,
the general population agrees they SHOULD be controlled, and
the Constitution gives government the POWER to control them.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone who is aware of the situation knows that there is a definite environmental crisis looming. This isn't just about global warming and resource depletion, but about eliminating our forests and converting nature into a wasteland.
Anyone who watches the media would think that the world will end somewhere between 30 years from now (due to resource depletion) and next year or next week (due to the latest imminent catastrophe).
And anyone aware of the actual data knows that, in North America at least, there is significantly more forested land now, and more trees on it, than when the Europeans arrived.
In California and Oregon, for instance, indians practiced a form of low-effort farming. One of their techniques was to burn off the trees in certain valleys every hundred years or so.
It turns out that a climax forest is a ROTTEN place for species diversity - both animal and plant. Deer, for instance, do best on the boundary between a forest and an open field.
(Spotted owls, too, by the way: They nest in the trees and hunt in the fields, where the rodents have a hard time finding cover and there are no obstructions to flight. That's -why they did so well in the K-mart sign. (Sign === tree, parking lot === field, rodents out of luck.) B-) )
By burning off part of the forest (a low-effort management technique somewhere between a patch cut and a clearcut) they created open fields, field/forest boundaries, and a multi-decade sequence of species succession as the land worked its way through the stages preceeding the enviromental disaster that is a climax forest. The result was population explosions of useful and/or edible plant and easily-hunted animal species.
These techniques were abandoned at about the time the Spanish conquest of the west coast upset the traditional culture. And for the last six decades or so the forests have been overgrowing as a result of "management" policies of the US government, driven mainly by voters in the cities whose entire knowlege of forest and wildlife management comes from campling trips and the propaganda of political activists.
The first phenomenon to be noticed in this trend was christened "The Smokey The Bear Effect". This was the overgrowth of forests caused by firefighting and firebreak cutting reducing the amount of timber burned to a level far below what is natural in the absense of human activity. (Forests burn intermittently - ignited by lightning or sometimes spontaneous combustion. In the absense of firebreaks these fires cover enormous areas.
Some plants - especially certain pines and eucalyptus - have evolved to use this as part of their reproductive cycle, reproducing when the fire kills off the competition from hardwoods, dropping tinder and storing oils that encourage the start of fires and their spread, or even exploding in a fire to scatter their seeds. Others have evolved to survive fires, and depend on them to clear out underbrush and other competition. The Smokey the Bear effect actually got so bad that the jackpine (AKA "firepine"), whose cones only release their seeds when burned, became endangered in much of its range.
But lately it's gotten horrendously worse. Environmentalists have managed to block most brush-hogging, burning, logging, thinning, and offroading, and even vehicular travel in much of the national forests (which, unlike national PARKS, are not parks but tree farms!) The result is that some areas have as much as two orders of magnitude more trees than they normally would support, along with thick underbrush and years of accumulation of dead leaves and annual plants (i.e. "wildflowers" / weeds). Such fuel loads create a situation where, once the fire catches, it burns hot enough to kill everything and leave a nearly sterile area that may take centuries to repopulate. (Or which may not repopulate for geologic time, if erosion removes the soil once the plants aren't anchoring it.)
"Roadless areas" are firebreak-less areas, and firefighting equipment
Long time no see, dude!
Why do you assume the tax revenue-tax rate function is unimodal?
1) Raising taxes increases revenue by collecting a higher percentage of the circulating money on each pass.
2) Raising taxes decreases the circulation of money by draining resources from the economy.
3) Effect 1) is dominant at low rates, effect 2) at hight rates.
In the absense of any other mechanism, or any reason to believe that the effects are not monotonic, continuous, and reasonably smooth (except for discontinuites at the extremes such as the jump from no tax at all to some tax), the result is a curve with exactly one hump, with a location dependent on the shape of the functions responsible for 1) and 2).
Can you postulate an additional mechanism (or wild nonlinearity) that would produce an additional hump?
It's easy to claim that there might BE one (or more) additional hump(s). But until you can come up with a plausable reason FOR aonther, I'm going to continue to assert this camel is a dromedary rather than a bactrian.
On the other hand he seems a credible source of insight, being the author of the best seller "The Unix Guide to Defenestration".
The book is NOT a how-to about using Unix as a tool for completely purging Windows from your IT operation. He grabs the term "Defenistration" and defines it to mean something else - something unrelated to windows. So IMHO a significant part of the book's reason for existence is to co-opt the word and the book title.
AT&T had nice clean code that worked well was efficient but didn't do networking very well at all. So they hopped into bed with Sun who had real good networking stuff from BSD. The result was the two of them spawned SVR4. The read system call in the old unix was short and sweet and fit on a vt100 screen. The new one took pages even when printed out and didn't do anything new. It was a rewrite for the sake of a rewrite.
My impression of the SystemV series was that the proprietary status of Unix was in doubt and SystemV was intended to fix that.
Unix was written before the US copyright law was were extended to apply to software, and before the "program as component of patentable invention" hack was invented and debugged. So the only IP protection AT&T had on it was trade secret. Trade secret goes "poof!" when the secret is out, and AT&T had distributed several generations of source and documentation to universities around the world.
(This was also before the breakup of the Bell System, and there was some mandate on them publishing releasing certain telephone-related work as part of their monopoly mandate which, separately, might have imperiled its IP status. I don't recall the details. But it was probably made moot by the court-mandated breakup later.)
Unix had been a back-room project by a team that had been explicitly forbidden, at least initially, from building an OS. (Indeed, one factor driving the kernel's simplicity and the design goal of pushing as much out to the application layer as possible was the creation of plausable deniability: "An OS does X, Y, and Z and this doesn't. So it's not an OS. Right?")
Since they weren't writing something viewed as productizable or proprietary, they were at Bell Labs (where publishing was the usual route for most work), and software in those days wasn't productized anyhow, they felt no need to keep it under their hats.
The broad circulation of source and docs spawned the era of the commodity unix box. A new hardware vendor, rather than writing his own OS, could just port Unix to the box - a matter of hacking a couple thousand lines of hardware-interface code. AT&T would look the other way as long as they weren't selling it. Once they got it working, AT&T would cut a licensing deal on very good terms. (For them it was free money.)
This continued until the University of New South Wales built a course around System 6 (i.e. release 6 of the documentation set, which was how System N was named). They printed a two-volume coursebook - volume 1 being the kernel source pretty-formatted, while volume 2 was a textbook walking you through the guts. This immediately became an underground classic, and finally got onto the administrative radar screen at AT&T. The lawyers "Cease and Desist"ed the University.
The SystemV project, if I recall correctly, started shortly after the CONTU (Committee On New Technological Uses - charged with studying and proposing to Congress whether/how software should receive copyright protection) reported and Congress explicitly extended copyright to cover software. Now that IP protection was available, AT&T got together with several of the big Unix players and together they reimplemented the kernel from scratch, and tried to move everybody to the result.
They gave a number of plausable-sounding reasons for the work - claiming it was a great improvement on the previous stuff. But they didn't include the Berkeley work (especially noticible: no Berkeley Signals) which had its own proprietary issues. The resulting functionality of SystemV was both incompatible with and lower than both BSD and some other System N derivatives. So the general consensus (at least among the people I hung out with at the time) was that the whole exercise was to clean up the IP status of Unix for its future as a product.
I'd prefer to build an open source panty sniffer.
Start by obtaining a beagle.
[several stories credited to founder interviews deleted]
Sigh.
I had assumed it came directly from "google" (to stare at, especially if through glasses), which came from "ogle" perhaps via "googles" (glasses - a corruption of goggles with a bit of "ogle" thrown in). Both were slang terms in use in the '50s, at least in southern Michigan.
the law of conservation of r's also states to place them where they do not normally exist, such as idea->ide'ar
As I understand it, the issue with Rs is that the accent associated with the east-coast ivy leaguers actually has a single phoneme midway between "ah" and "ar" that serves the function of both. As a result, people from places where the distinction is made perceive the divergence and thus hear the phoneme as its opposite number rather than the one intended. For instance, midwesterners heard "Cuba" as "Cuber" in Kennedy's speeches during the missile crisis.
The same thing happens with R and L when adult Chinese learn English as a second language.
No I did not misunderstand the lesson. I find it interesting having no knowledge of it, you'd choose to argue about it. Regardless, the very simple point that is stressed quite clearly is that if you are drawing your gun, you have decided to shoot, immediately. Period. End of story
As I said, while that may be what they're teaching in Texas (where, by the way, it is legal to shoot in defense of property), that is neither the general rule taught by the NRA in their personal protection classes (which my wife, the NRA instructor, confirms), nor is it the rule taught in the mandatory CCW courses as approved by Nevada, Utah, and Florida (which I have taken).
Texas honors Florida CCWs. So I find it hard to believe that the Texas mandated curriculum would diverge so blatantly from a Florida-approved curriculum on this important issue.
There the rule is that you draw when you are in reasonable fear of death or great bodily harm. Drawing does NOT commit you to fire.
Though Texas has a mandated curriculum supplied by the state I have not been able to find a copy online. (I have found a TX-approved instructor and fired off an email to him, in the hope that he will clarify how this is taught there, either in a return email or by posting directly here.)
It is not "will use the gun if necessary" as you allude to (before contradicting yourself later by saying "you will do so"). That directly contradicts the point.
I'm sorry, tyrantnine. Your claim that the two statements I made contridict each other doesn't support your argument. Instead it provides evidence that you sometimes misunderstand what you are told.
You know what'd be crazy ?
A new movie. Like with new ideas. That'd be crazy.
Or perhaps better yet, a movie version of an old but precient and still topical story.
Like, for instance, Vernor Vinge's _True Names_?
Now THERE's a cyberspace masterpiece. (And unless I'm mistaken it's the FIRST cyberspace masterpiece.)
One thing stressed heavily in every single class is that one does not pull out a gun with no intention of using it. Pulling out a gun in hopes that it will defuse or get a situation under control is beyond irresponsible. You are taught explictily that if you pull out your gun, you are going to fire it. Period. Pulling a gun on someone is going to enhance the severity of any situation you're in, not calm it down.
...", "attempted murder", "improper discharge of a firearm", ..., and the list grows further if you hit and injure or kill him.
I believe that either you misunderstood the lesson or the State of Texas law on the training program has done a slight tweak on the course for their permit requirements.
The rule is that you make the decision that you ARE AREADY JUSTIFIED in using the gun and WILL use the gun if necessary before you pull and point it. This is for several reasons:
- If you actually have to use it you aren't fatally delayed by making the decision on-the-fly.
- If you weren't already legally justified in using deadly force, pulling it is "brandishing", pointing it is "assault with a deadly weapon", firing it "aggravated assault with
It is not a requirement that you actually fire if you draw. In the real world the usual result is that the crook turns and runs (perhaps yelling "House shoots! House shoots!" to his buddies) as soon as the gun is visible. (Once he's turned you may NOT shoot in most jurisdictions, although Texas MAY be one where you still can.) And even if the crook is armed only with a knife, club, or a strong arm and is six feet away you may have to draw/aim/fire as nearly one motion to avoid being disarmed or having your gun hand knocked off-aim.
But the point is that you made the decisions that you are legally (and morally) justified to shoot, and you will do so, before you drew. You do NOT draw in the hope that the show will scare him off. (You just take that as a welcome bonus if it occurs - and occurs quickly enough that you can abort firing.)
When a computer, iPod, etc. fails--even at the worst possible time--at most you are severely inconvienced. When your firearm fails at an inopportune time--say, I dunno, when a knife- or dumb gun-wielding intruder breaks into your bedroom maybe?--you are dead.
(Subject line says it all.)
Well, so long as it's non-trivial to bypass, it will stop the problem of "I got shot with my own gun by an intruder" or "my kid shot his friend when they got into my sock drawer."
To be replaced by "I got shot/knifed/clubed/stomped by the intruder when my gun didn't recognize me." (A false-negative error.)
And by "My kid shot his friend when they got into my sock drawer after I trusted the new 'smart gun' and didn't lock it in the safe like I do the 'dumb' ones." (A false-positive error.)
Maybe once in eight average lifetimes only a gun will protect you from murder. Maybe several times in an average lifetime a gun will protect you and/or yours from death or serious bodily harm from criminal activity. (Your mileage WILL vary greatly.) In each of these situations, maybe nineteen times in twenty showing the gun is enough, one time in twenty your "bluff gets called" and you actually have to FIRE the gun.
For people in some locations (such as rural) and/or some occupations (such as stockraising), a gun may be needed as often as several times a year to defend livestock, family, or self against predators (which, even if they're after livestock, will often switch to being after the stockman once challenged). People who work on horseback may need to use a pistol to shoot the horse if they are being dragged.
When one of these things happens, if you need your gun to fire it MUST fire.
If, in such a situation, a "smart gun" decides, in its electronic wisdom, that you're really joe blow non-owner and refuses to fire, you're very likely to become a casualty.
While these incidents are rare, in a country of 300 million people they add up to very large number per year.
Uniformed police officers are the main victims of "gun taken away and used on owner". It happens to them a lot. They wear their guns in exposed holsters. They get into altercations with lawbreakers - sometimes with groups of them - where it's their job to maintain contact and subdue the wrongoers. When they're focused on one perpetrator, another may come up behind them, grab their gun, and perhaps fire it at them. Police have the MOST to be gained by making their guns refuse to fire in unauthorized hands.
Several "smart gun" systems have already been devised for them - systems much less likely to make mistakes than a biometric device. Typically these are enabled by something worn by the officer, such as a ring or bracelet containing a magnet or an ID chip.
But because of the risk of the gun refusing to fire when needed by the duly authorized officer, police departments have so far resisted enormous political pressure and refused to use such systems.
If even the police won't deploy an extremely reliable 'smart gun' device when its usefulness is so great, due to the risk from even a small number of misidentifications, why should a civillian purchase something less reliable?
Given that ATT/Cingular doesn't intend even to upgrade the base station serving my house - and several hundred others, and a major highway intersection - to GPS (even though they keep insisting I turn in my TDMA phone and "upgrade") I have little hope that my corner of Nevada will have a WiMAX WISP any time soon.
Unless I put in one myself. B-) But then I'd have to rent some T1s or better out into the boonies. B-(
And what about Bush fixing the digital divide?
He can barely the handling digital subtract
And since the IQs of both were published, and Bush's was higher than Kerry's, does that mean Kerry can't even handle the digital add?
I would suggest perhaps you made it up yourself.
Google for it, dude, or check a wiki, before you sound off.
It's the industry's own terminology.
And trust me, as someone who has to deal with them professionally: There's a LOT of oddball terminology distinctions that can become VERY important when you're dealing with them. Like DS1 vs. T1 for instance.
Actually I'm not sure about that. Keep in mind that we're talking about a broadcast, and I'm fairly certain part of the DMCA clarified what was established as a broadcast on-line. If it's a broadcast, then the notion of suing the listener is equivalent to suing the citizens of a city because the local FM station didn't pay their license. That doesn't make sense.
Hmmm...
Perhaps the user can get off on the ISP's exemption on the claim that, like an ISP, they're only forwarding, not controlling what is in the packets that they forward.
They'd still have to stop participating in a stream if they were notified that the stream is systematically infringing. (But wouldn't THAT be a game of whack-a-mole: Trying to identify, and give legal notice to, everybody listening to a stream.)
The tricky part is, if you listen, and you're part of the P2P network, then I suppose you are also a broadcaster technically.
I think they'd have to show you knew the stream was infringing to actually hang you. Might be a difficult thing to prove - especially if there are legitimate streams on the net using the same mechanism.
VOIP unlimited calling plan: $19.99/mo 2-phone cell plan with unlimited mobile-to-mobile minutes: $49.99/mo
Connect one cell to your computer and leave it at home; take the other with you. Use PBX software to rig up a bridge between your VOIP and the home cell. Use the home cell as a gateway between your roaming cell and the VOIP number, abusing the free mobile-to-mobile minutes.
I think there's already a company doing something like this - a VoIP company with banks of cellphones for their side of the call. With them you have the VoIP subscription and use your ONE-cellphone sub to call into their cellphone bank to bridge to your VoIP subscription.
What if BitTorrent added multicast capability? Would backbone ISPs race to cut the 35% of their traffic that is BitTorrent by finally implementing usable multicast?
If they don't the local ISPs might go around them with M-bone like tunneling. The backbones bill the little guys by connection size, so they might fight at first.
I think what we need is:
- Software features from the equipment manufacturers so the local ISPs (which sometimes ARE backbone providers too) can do it easily once they chose to.
- An incentive structure that makes it be in the ISPs' interest to enable the feaures.
Think about it: If YOU were an ISP and YOU could make 35% of your backbone traffic (which you pay for) almost go away by throwing a switch (while IMPROVING service to your customers), and thowing the switch wouldn't more than compensate for it by bringing in more traffic than it eliminated, what would YOU do?
With Comcast owning the network that the voice calls will traverse (until it gets to POTS, if needed), will Comcast's VoIP quality be better [...]
PSTN, not POTS, please.
POTS = Plain Old Telephone Service. It's an electrical and signaling specification: Two wire, 24v DC supplies, ringing, pulse/tone dialing, cabling and line impedence standards (typically CAT3), etc. RJ and other connectors. POTS, and customers attached to the PSTN by POTS, are a (large) subset of the PSTN but far from all of it.
PSTN = Public Switched Telephone Service. It's the whole telephone ball of wax. Customers attached by POTS, ISDN (basic or primary rate), Tn with SS7, and several cellular standards, etc. Common numbering plan. Division of effort between long-haul, local, and cellular system providers. International carriers and standards. I could go on.
POTS is a wire connection standard. PSTN is The Telephone Network.
They don't have to worry too much yet. I think the answer to the question posed in the article title is "No." The one station on peercast.org at this time with more than 20 listeners skips like crazy.
Part of the problem is that both the backbone and the ISPs are only delivering "best effort" Quality of Service (QoS) to their clients. This makes for dropped packets, which means either holes in the stream or retransmissions and stuttering. In a peercast environment such interruptions add up with every hop. (And you have to use retransmission-based protocol, accepting the jitter, to get any significant amount of the stream to the later-generatoin clients.)
Another issue is that they vastly oversubscribe their backhauls. Like 100-to-1 or more. This isn't all that big a deal when you're downloading web pages - things just get slower if everybody hits a button at once. And it's not a killer for VoIP, which is still relatively low-bandwidth. But if a number of customers are all trying to peercast even a low-res video stream simultaneously it totally blows their provisioning model.
They also don't enable multicast for anything but their own "value added" services. (That would enable low-budget broadcast applications without peercasting, which would then explode, chewing up their backhaul bandwidth without giving them any added revenue to pay for it.)
About a year ago I was proposing (to my colleagues at a router company) the idea that deploying a peercast-like application which would use multicast when available and unicast otherwise, would change the incentive structure: ISPs would quickly become flooded - but could drastically cut their traffic by enabling multicasting for ordinary users.
I don't know if this peercast software has opportunistic multicast capability. (I sure hope it does.) Without that the incentive on the ISPs is PURELY to try to eliminate the traffic by blocking the application, rather than achieve a win-win by improving the service.
One of the main checkboxes for the next generation of networking equipment is the ability to identify and deny (or enhance) certain applications' protocols and connections. As thees abilities become more available, watch for ISPs to write terms of service that only allow you do participate in things like peercast if you buy an extra-cost "enhanced" service package.
Of course this will lead to an arms race, as new applications attempt to disguise themselves from the filtering. But even if successful, cloaking approaches lead to reduced functionality and user base. Meanwhile, their explicit violation of terms of service that forbid them lead to legal action, more legislation and penalties, and other nastyness.
This brings an interesting question: how to anonymize the stream source, the initial node. How to make impractically difficult to trace down the originator of the stream. Once this is solved, no more paperwork for hobbyists.
If you do that, they can still go after the listeners.
Peercast software clones and retransmits the stream - so every listener is also making unlicensed copies in the process of forwarding. All they have to do is subscribe themselves, see where the packets are coming from, and go after that guy. Rinse and repeat to collect enough listeners to make a big show trial.
People attempting to circumvent this will also have to figure out how to anonymize the forwarding - including the IP address. That's tough.
(Recently a court decided the DMCA doesn't let them get the IP address to subscriber info for peer-to-peer application users. But that is just because the DMCA is worded to let them get such info from ISPs only to identify users who posted unauthorized copies and STORED them on the ISP's servers. Congress can easily "correct this oversight" to allow them to find out who's serving copies stored on their own mahcines or making copies on the fly - and likely will now that a court has spoken and the RIAA is on notice that they need more legislation to continue their attacks.)
Imagine the reaction if senior Chinese officials started calling for the internal laws of the US to be altered to suit Chinese business interests.
Like the Kyoto treaty?
Or GATT, which is already ratified, and is being used by Asian interests in an attempt to force changes in US laws. Among them: changing hunting laws to allow commercial hunting. (Among other things, there's a brisk trade in bear bile, which has medical applications in Asian medicine.)
Not to mention NAFTA which is forcing similar changes in other US and state laws. Among them traffic laws - to allow Mexican truckers to drive US highways with equipment and driver training far below the normal standards of most US states.
I don't know if it's related but...
Some years ago Glen Roberts got hold of the IRS' manual for auditors under the FOIA and published it. (At the time he was running a newspaper and selling books, essentially all based on info he got via the FOIA or his experiences in getting it. It included a "how to" manual for using the FOIA.)
The IRS got him enjoined from distributing the auditor's handbook. (And some agency also got him enjoined from distributing the FOIA "how to".)
I think fallout from that episode ended up limiting how much stuff you could get from the IRS under the FOIA.
Umm, if I publish a recipe for crack that uses 2 less ingredients than the normal recipe and takes only half the time to make, why would that be a valid argument for making crack legal?
Actually, yes, if the simplification of the method makes the law significantly less enforcable.
Unenforcable laws should be removed from the books and moved from the province of laws to the province of morals. If you can't stop them when they do it, or have a good chance to catch them when they do, it's time to stop policing and start preaching voluntary behavior change.
Leaving such laws on the books leads to selective enforcement (down the slippery slopes toward a police state and/or discrimination), massive civil disobedience, disrespect for laws in general (by both the population and the law enforcement perdonnel), more violation of IMPORTANT laws, and more strain on enforcement resources.
The government should stick to trying to control only those things that meet three criteria:
They CAN be controlled in a fair manner,
the general population agrees they SHOULD be controlled, and
the Constitution gives government the POWER to control them.