Does anyone else see the irony in the fact that this discussion, which generally appears to ignore the vast majority of science done on the subject, and the story titled"Top Advisory Panel Warns Erosion of U.S. Science" appear on the/. homepage at the same time?
Can anyone recommend a good community site for those interested in knowledge and science rather than politically motivated propaganda? Where have all the geeks gone?
Their arguments strike me as rather unconvincing. There is no reason that the existing SAML profiles could not be used in an AJAX application, and I'm very interested to hear how they are going to securely exchange identity tokens without using SSL or duplicating its functionality. These are their only two arguments against SAML. You are correct that I have not read further to understand the whole spec which may indeed answer these questions.
Call me perverse, but anytime someone tells me not to argue a point I just can't resist. ]=D
SAML has been widely adopted, just not in the use case you're imagining. For B2B scenarios it is actually taking off quite well, and the US federal government is standardizing on it.
Now, it hasn't caught on in the world of consumer focused web sites, which is understandable given the architecture - no consumer authenticates at an authority before accessing sites, so it only makes sense for co-ordination between business partners who are providing services to the same users right now. Until a commercial site becomes an identity authority accepted by most consumer sites this will continue to be true. LiveJournal could have attempted to become this authority using existing standards far more easily than tackling the creation of new protocols and implementation platforms at the same time they try to build the business structure. But like most of us, they appear eager to reinvent the wheel.
I find it interesting though that on the one hand every techy's complaint about Passport et al was the monopolistic, centralized model, with all the very appropriate concerns about putting your eggs in one basket - and then when a decentralized model comes along, people wonder why it only catches on in small pockets. What exactly did you think decentralized meant? If you truly want a global SSO mechanism then you are asking for an identity monopoly. If you want different identity providers, you are going to have to deal with trust issues from each provider to whichever resources you want to access. This is a business problem, not a techical one. The standards and technologies to implement whatever world we want to create are there, we just need to figure out what we are really asking for.
Well, there's always the Sun-Microsoft joint proposal for a meta-protocol that allows the access platform to select between all of these SSO options. Of course, that just means everyone needs to support everything and results in far more complexity than simply agree to use the standards that already solved the problem nicely, but hey, nobody ever accused Sun or Microsoft of doing the reasonable thing.
This problem is best solved using standards, not by supplying a new software platform. SAML, Shibboleth, and Liberty have all been around quite a while, fill this need quite nicely and a number of different implementations of each protocol exist, including FOSS and commercial options. Features like pseudonyms and selective information sharing are already there. Why do we need another way to do this?
This particular one was disputed by the United States Defense Intelligence Agency, and while I hardly believe everything they say without checking facts they are also pretty far from a random internet blogger.
By 'order of magnitude too high' you meant that there could easily have been only 99,999 casualties, right?;-) If you were using the more common usage and meant that there might have only been 10,000 take a look at the Iraq Body Count site. They have been tracking all confirmed media reports of casualties, and the current minimum is 15,671.
Actually, Al Jazeera is no more biased than Fox or CNN. Different bias of course...
The 100,000 figure does not come from them however, it is from a study led by Les Roberts of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health which was released last October. It was covered in the media, more in the international media of course.
You bringing up the Geneva Convention is interesting given the large number of violations of that same convention committed by America and the UK since the invasion of Iraq. In fact, this is yet another form of what I was trying to convey with the comment about battlefields: war is wrong. As Donald Rumsfeld has reminded us over and over again, bad things happen in war. Whether Saddam actually ordered those Kurds gassed is questionable, but regardless of the truth using Saddam's violations and the killing of 5,000 civilians to justify our own violations, killing 100,000+ and counting just makes no sense. Two wrongs do not make a right. What does continuing the misdeeds of a tyrant at a larger scale make us?
And actually even the claim that Saddam gassed his own people in the 80s has been disputed. It may well have been Iran, and in either case it happened on a battlefield. We've managed to kill 100,000 civilians with our advanced "smart" bombs - is it surprising that primitive mortars would kill 5,000?
Duh, propaganda of course. We call it Public Relations or Marketing, but we are really just the Masters of Mind Control. The frightening part is that even those who make the advertising machine work are completely under its control (at least all the marketing drones I know are.) Which begs the question, "Who is driving?"
This whole culture of official lies is how we can simultaneously have among the worst education and medical systems in the industrialized world and yet have a consistent majority of our population believe we are among the best.
For those who believe that there is a trade imbalance in the globalization movement, think again. The real jobs in America have migrated from manufacturing and IT to Propaganda. There are far fewer jobs in this category, but only those fluent in Newspeak are allowed on television, so they are all that exists anyway. Join, or become irrelavent!
While watching your recent debate with Libertarian candidate Michael Badnarik, I was struck by the fact that you seemed to agree with each other more often than not, and while there were some fundamental differences of opinion, you were both able to have a friendly, honest discussion on substantive issues, completely unlike the mainstream candidates' foaming rages against each other that seem orchestrated to cover up the fundamental lack of difference between their positions.
While I'm sure this at least partially stems from neither of you having entrenched political positions to protect, it also mirrors my recent experience. I lean towards the Green platform, and I have many friends who are Libertarians. Our political discussions, while spirited, show some fundamental agreement on the kinds of urgent systemic change required in this country.
My question to you is, do you see an opportunity to build consensus among those of us who see through the corporate oligarchy masquerading as democracy and focus on our areas of agreement rather than our differences? Specifically, would you support the Green party and the Libertarian party running joint drives in support of campaign finance reform, control of corporatism, ballot access and voting system reform?
You may not have noticed, but US oil production peaked in 1970 and has dropped off to an incredibly small fraction of our usage. This was not done deliberately (can you imagine the screams if big government tried to tell corporations not to drill or pump?) but simply because we've used up the vast majority of our feasibly extractable supplies. So, quite the reverse of the plan you describe, America used our oil first and then began forcing everyone else to sell us theirs.
From one perspective you may be right about the outcome, the millionaires may be able to salvage something when the house of cards comes tumbling down, but unless we (and the rest of the world including Europe!) get a lot more serious about alternative energy very very soon, there aren't going to be many havens to run to.
You've bought into the big lie. The cost of producing a great album with modern technology doesn't have to be more than $100,000 - and many great indy records are made for much less. The reason the majors will spend up to a million on production usually has to do with pure waste and greed. (See the Adventures of Mixerman if you'd like an insider's view.)
Since selling digital music requires no manufacturing and only moderate amounts of hosting and bandwidth, the ongoing costs should be as minimal as the initial production costs.
Anyone who tells you they can't make money selling you digital music at $0.50 each is lying. Movies cost between 10-100 times as much to make as any album of music, yet the studios all recoup their costs (including manufacturing and distribution) from a measly $20 charge.
This is the really scary part of enacting hate-speech control laws.
I have been getting called a hate-monger and an anti-semite over at the John Kerry Forums quite a bit lately for saying that the Israeli Defence Forces should not be allowed to gun down civilians and bulldoze their homes, and that furthermore I'm sick of paying for it. I really have a hard time seeing how disagreeing with the military actions of the current political regime in Tel Aviv has anything to do with my personal feeling towards Jews (quite warm actually) but I can easily see how I will lose my ability to say such things shortly after laws like this one are passed.
Political dissent can virtually always be classified as hate speech (raise your hand if you don't hate either Dubya or Kerry) and it's next to impossible to set up hard and fast guidelines that can be interpreted objectively. Leaving interpretation in the realm of subjectivity makes it a political question, and I for one am extremely leary of allowing governments to limit political speech. Even if it means we have to let the Neonazis have the say too.
Ha! You call that performance with fuel economy? Check out this hybrid-diesel concept car spun off from SDSU research: 80 mpg, 250 HP, 315ft-LB of torque, 0-60 in under 7 seconds. Did I mention 80 mpg?
Biodiesel is an excellent option for a few smart individuals who follow this general plan. However, trying to convert a large portion of the national fleet to biodiesel is simply unworkable.
First, the amount of land required to grow enough oil for all the cars currently operating has been estimated to be about the same amount of land contained in the continental US, and I believe there are a couple of other uses people had in mind for that land too. I've seen similar estimates for the UK fleet vs. UK landmass.
Second, our current style of agri-business uses large quantities of fossil fuels in the production of crops. Fertilizers, herbicides, and pestidcides are all produced using fossil fuels, and actually require more than a gallon of oil input to generate a gallon of vegetable oil. This isn't really a problem if you're using oil that was already purchased by McDonalds since the oil would have been produced and consumed anyway, but producing biodiesel as the primary aim of the operation is simply counter-productive. Unless you're buying organic biodiesel, and let's face it, there's only so much manure to go around.
Bush has not yet reached the scale of the Nazis circa 1944, but he is on precisely the same path that they were on around 1935. I for one would like to stop him before he scales up.
And of course the First Nazi Party also used the excuse that Jews were "potential terrorists" to enrage the German populace after the Reichstag was set aflame. Some (conspiracy theorists no doubt) claim that Hitler ordered the arson himself to set the right political tone for his own PATRIOT act to be introduced.
But who wants to talk about history -- it's both boring and irrelavant.
My 2004 Prius got 45 MPG on the very first tank and 2000 miles later it's getting in the 50s consistantly. Current tanks avg = 54.7.
Check out this thread on a Prius users group to get some first hand, real world drivers experiences with the best car being manufactured right now!
Safety Cap is exactly right, you need to invest enough time and mental capacity to learn how to drive a hybrid (this is after all a very different system - it's not your father's Oldsmobile) but with just a little effort it is possible to beat the EPA figures.
That is rather amusing! Sorry, Mr. I Know What I'm Talking About, I should definitely have refered to myself as a "Longhorn M4 Tester". I certainly didn't mean to imply that the product is farther along than it really is. As for M$ getting "beta" testers at this early stage, they happen to be one of the best companies around for getting customer feedback early and often. I had been playing with earlier builds for a while before then, but M$ gave out thousands of copies of Longhorn at their Professional Developers Conference last October, so it's actually in fairly public "beta". They don't like to refer to these early preview releases as betas, because it actually implies a much higher level of support and liability than they are ready for at this stage, but this is also the best stage to give real criticism that can still be incorporated before release.
I really don't see how Longhorn could use so much disk space
They aren't saying that installing Longhorn will consume a terabyte, they're saying that the average new machine available for purchase will have a terabyte available. Completely different.
People who don't do music and movies (such as office workers) have no use for large hard drives.
You don't own a digital camera, do you? I personally have over 140GB of mp3/oggs (many ripped at low bitrates before I knew what I was doing) and my digital picture library will soon pass it. I'm ahead of the curve, but not by much - your grandma will be giving me a run for my money by 2008.
Slashdot Mirror
Does anyone else see the irony in the fact that this discussion, which generally appears to ignore the vast majority of science done on the subject, and the story titled"Top Advisory Panel Warns Erosion of U.S. Science" appear on the /. homepage at the same time?
Can anyone recommend a good community site for those interested in knowledge and science rather than politically motivated propaganda? Where have all the geeks gone?
Their arguments strike me as rather unconvincing. There is no reason that the existing SAML profiles could not be used in an AJAX application, and I'm very interested to hear how they are going to securely exchange identity tokens without using SSL or duplicating its functionality. These are their only two arguments against SAML. You are correct that I have not read further to understand the whole spec which may indeed answer these questions.
SAML has been widely adopted, just not in the use case you're imagining. For B2B scenarios it is actually taking off quite well, and the US federal government is standardizing on it.
Now, it hasn't caught on in the world of consumer focused web sites, which is understandable given the architecture - no consumer authenticates at an authority before accessing sites, so it only makes sense for co-ordination between business partners who are providing services to the same users right now. Until a commercial site becomes an identity authority accepted by most consumer sites this will continue to be true. LiveJournal could have attempted to become this authority using existing standards far more easily than tackling the creation of new protocols and implementation platforms at the same time they try to build the business structure. But like most of us, they appear eager to reinvent the wheel.
I find it interesting though that on the one hand every techy's complaint about Passport et al was the monopolistic, centralized model, with all the very appropriate concerns about putting your eggs in one basket - and then when a decentralized model comes along, people wonder why it only catches on in small pockets. What exactly did you think decentralized meant? If you truly want a global SSO mechanism then you are asking for an identity monopoly. If you want different identity providers, you are going to have to deal with trust issues from each provider to whichever resources you want to access. This is a business problem, not a techical one. The standards and technologies to implement whatever world we want to create are there, we just need to figure out what we are really asking for.
Well, there's always the Sun-Microsoft joint proposal for a meta-protocol that allows the access platform to select between all of these SSO options. Of course, that just means everyone needs to support everything and results in far more complexity than simply agree to use the standards that already solved the problem nicely, but hey, nobody ever accused Sun or Microsoft of doing the reasonable thing.
Ummm, this is intended for use over the Internet... 'nuff said.
This problem is best solved using standards, not by supplying a new software platform. SAML, Shibboleth, and Liberty have all been around quite a while, fill this need quite nicely and a number of different implementations of each protocol exist, including FOSS and commercial options. Features like pseudonyms and selective information sharing are already there. Why do we need another way to do this?
This particular one was disputed by the United States Defense Intelligence Agency, and while I hardly believe everything they say without checking facts they are also pretty far from a random internet blogger.
By 'order of magnitude too high' you meant that there could easily have been only 99,999 casualties, right? ;-) If you were using the more common usage and meant that there might have only been 10,000 take a look at the Iraq Body Count site. They have been tracking all confirmed media reports of casualties, and the current minimum is 15,671.
The 100,000 figure does not come from them however, it is from a study led by Les Roberts of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health which was released last October. It was covered in the media, more in the international media of course.
Guardian
NYT
International Herald Tribune
Washington Post
What are you basing your assertion that the gas was VX on? The DIA investigation determined that the Kurds had been killed by a cyanide-based gas that Iran, but not Iraq, had at time.
You bringing up the Geneva Convention is interesting given the large number of violations of that same convention committed by America and the UK since the invasion of Iraq. In fact, this is yet another form of what I was trying to convey with the comment about battlefields: war is wrong. As Donald Rumsfeld has reminded us over and over again, bad things happen in war. Whether Saddam actually ordered those Kurds gassed is questionable, but regardless of the truth using Saddam's violations and the killing of 5,000 civilians to justify our own violations, killing 100,000+ and counting just makes no sense. Two wrongs do not make a right. What does continuing the misdeeds of a tyrant at a larger scale make us?
And actually even the claim that Saddam gassed his own people in the 80s has been disputed. It may well have been Iran, and in either case it happened on a battlefield. We've managed to kill 100,000 civilians with our advanced "smart" bombs - is it surprising that primitive mortars would kill 5,000?
Surely you are not suggesting that fascism has retreated since then, are you?
This whole culture of official lies is how we can simultaneously have among the worst education and medical systems in the industrialized world and yet have a consistent majority of our population believe we are among the best.
For those who believe that there is a trade imbalance in the globalization movement, think again. The real jobs in America have migrated from manufacturing and IT to Propaganda. There are far fewer jobs in this category, but only those fluent in Newspeak are allowed on television, so they are all that exists anyway. Join, or become irrelavent!
While I'm sure this at least partially stems from neither of you having entrenched political positions to protect, it also mirrors my recent experience. I lean towards the Green platform, and I have many friends who are Libertarians. Our political discussions, while spirited, show some fundamental agreement on the kinds of urgent systemic change required in this country.
My question to you is, do you see an opportunity to build consensus among those of us who see through the corporate oligarchy masquerading as democracy and focus on our areas of agreement rather than our differences? Specifically, would you support the Green party and the Libertarian party running joint drives in support of campaign finance reform, control of corporatism, ballot access and voting system reform?
From one perspective you may be right about the outcome, the millionaires may be able to salvage something when the house of cards comes tumbling down, but unless we (and the rest of the world including Europe!) get a lot more serious about alternative energy very very soon, there aren't going to be many havens to run to.
Let alone a space program!
Since selling digital music requires no manufacturing and only moderate amounts of hosting and bandwidth, the ongoing costs should be as minimal as the initial production costs.
Anyone who tells you they can't make money selling you digital music at $0.50 each is lying. Movies cost between 10-100 times as much to make as any album of music, yet the studios all recoup their costs (including manufacturing and distribution) from a measly $20 charge.
I have been getting called a hate-monger and an anti-semite over at the John Kerry Forums quite a bit lately for saying that the Israeli Defence Forces should not be allowed to gun down civilians and bulldoze their homes, and that furthermore I'm sick of paying for it. I really have a hard time seeing how disagreeing with the military actions of the current political regime in Tel Aviv has anything to do with my personal feeling towards Jews (quite warm actually) but I can easily see how I will lose my ability to say such things shortly after laws like this one are passed.
Political dissent can virtually always be classified as hate speech (raise your hand if you don't hate either Dubya or Kerry) and it's next to impossible to set up hard and fast guidelines that can be interpreted objectively. Leaving interpretation in the realm of subjectivity makes it a political question, and I for one am extremely leary of allowing governments to limit political speech. Even if it means we have to let the Neonazis have the say too.
The L3 Enigma
First, the amount of land required to grow enough oil for all the cars currently operating has been estimated to be about the same amount of land contained in the continental US, and I believe there are a couple of other uses people had in mind for that land too. I've seen similar estimates for the UK fleet vs. UK landmass.
Second, our current style of agri-business uses large quantities of fossil fuels in the production of crops. Fertilizers, herbicides, and pestidcides are all produced using fossil fuels, and actually require more than a gallon of oil input to generate a gallon of vegetable oil. This isn't really a problem if you're using oil that was already purchased by McDonalds since the oil would have been produced and consumed anyway, but producing biodiesel as the primary aim of the operation is simply counter-productive. Unless you're buying organic biodiesel, and let's face it, there's only so much manure to go around.
You can also get your source oil from Krispy Kreme... Mmmm, donuts!
Bush has not yet reached the scale of the Nazis circa 1944, but he is on precisely the same path that they were on around 1935. I for one would like to stop him before he scales up.
But who wants to talk about history -- it's both boring and irrelavant.
Check out this thread on a Prius users group to get some first hand, real world drivers experiences with the best car being manufactured right now!
Safety Cap is exactly right, you need to invest enough time and mental capacity to learn how to drive a hybrid (this is after all a very different system - it's not your father's Oldsmobile) but with just a little effort it is possible to beat the EPA figures.
That is rather amusing! Sorry, Mr. I Know What I'm Talking About, I should definitely have refered to myself as a "Longhorn M4 Tester". I certainly didn't mean to imply that the product is farther along than it really is. As for M$ getting "beta" testers at this early stage, they happen to be one of the best companies around for getting customer feedback early and often. I had been playing with earlier builds for a while before then, but M$ gave out thousands of copies of Longhorn at their Professional Developers Conference last October, so it's actually in fairly public "beta". They don't like to refer to these early preview releases as betas, because it actually implies a much higher level of support and liability than they are ready for at this stage, but this is also the best stage to give real criticism that can still be incorporated before release.
They aren't saying that installing Longhorn will consume a terabyte, they're saying that the average new machine available for purchase will have a terabyte available. Completely different.
You don't own a digital camera, do you? I personally have over 140GB of mp3/oggs (many ripped at low bitrates before I knew what I was doing) and my digital picture library will soon pass it. I'm ahead of the curve, but not by much - your grandma will be giving me a run for my money by 2008.