The Nazi's were never building a bomb, they didn't even think it was possible
Not strictly true. The Nazis had a significant nuclear-weapons research program, using the intellectual powers of such notable physicists as Werner Heisenberg (of "Uncertainty Principle" fame). However, they were convinced that an exploding nuclear bomb was impractical, because Dr. Heisenberg had grossly mis-estimated the critical mass of uranium. Because of this, the most likely form of Nazi nuclear weapon was a subcritcal reactor-bomb which would "detonate" through a mechanism more like the Chornobyl meltdown than a runaway complete fission reaction.
That said, the commando raids on the various plants supporting this reasearch definitely helped guarantee that Nazi Germany never attained nuclear weapons. We can be fairly grateful for that, I think.
There is some archaeological evidence of the tragedy of the commons in the Mediterranean and Mesopotamia. The general tenor of this evidence is that much of Mankind's earliest cradles were well forested with coniferous or deciduous trees. Since these trees were a common resource, everyone cut them freely for fuel and building materials. Now, these regions of the world are scrubland with only tended crop trees (nuts, olives) and very few stands of wild wood.
No. It's not inevitable. Shared resources do not inevitably die.
Without intervention--the goodwill and self-restraint of the participants, or externally-imposed restraints, or a change of resource costing--it is inevitable. However, you're quite right in that there are restraining factors. The net, as a commons, has fences and gates which are guarded by the ISPs. They can impose pricing changes and enforce use restrictions (d/l caps, for instance) that can extend the life of the shared resource.
So your point, that the "social stability" of the net is guarded by some of its users (ISPs), is well made. In engineering speak, the net degrades more gracefully than a complete collapse (which is why I was attempting to mock the whole "end of the net" line of thought, even as I used it as an extreme example).
Finally, however, comes the day of reckoning, that is, the day when the long-desired goal of social stability becomes a reality.
Herein lies the inherent limit of the tragedy of the commons: The ability to load the common resource correlates with the trust the users feel in the common's stability. As long as I can drive another cow onto the pasture without fear that the neighbor will shoot the cow or me, I will. But once I feel I can't trust the shared resource--once the social stability is gone--I'll stop using the common and find some other way, because the cost (to me) of the common is no longer a fraction of the value I derive from it, but possibly total loss.
Alternately, if social stability deteriorates radically, it may catch the users of the common off-guard before they can do their subconscious value calculations. If I drive one more cow onto the commons and it starts a stampede, killing many of the cattle (mine and my neighbors), and killing some of those neightbors, and starting violent feuds and vendettas among us who used the common, the cost of the common maximizes.
Either way, the tragedy of the commons is eventually fulfilled, and everyone stops using the shared resource. Self-limiting, at least until the next time.
What does this mean for the net? It will get progressively worse until "death of the net (mpegs at 11!)", after which we survivors will crawl out of our IPv6 bomb shelters and rule the Earth.
Yesterday's article was about RH 8 AS getting DISA (Defense Information Systems Agency) DII (Defense Information Infrastructure) COE (Common Operating Environment) certification. Todays' certification article-o-the-day is about RH 8 AS getting Common Criteria EAL (Evaluation Assurance Level) 2.
Yeah, to the uninformed, it looks the same. But (A) DII COE is specifically a US DoD certification, whereas CC EAL is an international certification (administered in the US by NIST--National Institute of Standards and Technology); and (B) The article about RH's EAL certification also extensively yatters on about Oracle 9i, whereas the RH COE article doesn't.
So in conclusion, this is an erroneous dupe sighting. Nothing to see here, move along.
If you can support the risk. (FTP is possibly more risky, because you're allowing access to something approaching the interactivity of a shell session in the FTP command session.)
HTTP "upload" is trickier than FTP upload, if that's a factor.
FTP is full of security holes
Computers are full of security holes. Both webservers and FTP daemons have the risk (and history) of 'sploitable holes. As to configuration-related risk, there's more inherent in the default configuration of an FTP server, since its original concept of ops is browsing a physical directory tree, but most current FTP servers can be locked down as tight as any webserver.
FTP is a crumbling legacy protocol and will make you look a dinosaur. HTTP is amateur and will make you look a wimp.
Just can't win, can you? Only posers worry that their choice of protocol might look bad. It's not fashion, folks.
If you had to support only one, pick HTTP, since I bet you're already running a webserver. And if it's really about fashion, run an exotic protocol like CORBA or SCP or something.
Does this all mean we need an Open-Source law index?
Volunteer expertise? (IANAL, but the thing has precedent: "Pro Bono" legal work.)
Eventually, we WILL see some sort of national public initiative to do this, and the resource will be taken for granted as the public library. Wasn't it Gingrich who promised to get gov't online? Well, it's not a new idea, it just needs someone behind it.
Dear Holy Jebus, NO! Please, not a federally-funded federally-managed mishmash! (And I speak as a member of the Federal Gubmint, mind you.)
Re:Pedantic explanation of Scrapheap/Junkyard
on
Junkyard Wars Wants You!
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Just to confuse things though, when Discovery Channel in Europe shows the programmes the use Scrapheap Challenge as the title regardless of which version the programme originally came from.
And, conversely, it's all "Junkyard Wars" on the US version of Discovery Channel, regardless of the original program.
There was a link off a story here (ages ago) which did that. Claimed to be an on-topic link supporting poster's point, but was actually an indirect to goatse.cx and the audio effect you were talking about.
Is it? Am I the only person who says 'Sequel' for SQL? I heard a guy say 'Squil' once, that was really odd.
"Sequel" seems to be a very popular pronounciation, but I don't like it because it collides with the name of an old commercial DBMS (which,if I recall correctly, supported SQL).
I tried pronouncing it "squeal", which I though was appropriate with most of the DBMSs I worked with. (Some made the system squeal in pain; the others made me squeal.) I gave up on that pronounciation, though; I got tired of explaining it.
An Internet connection is the water cooler of the future, so to speak.
In other news, HydroSequre (NAWSDOC:HSQ) announced today groundbreaking new water-cooler monitoring technology. The system, called "Chiller", incorporates microphones, video cameras, and electrically-charged floor plates to ensure that the water cooler is not a source of productivity loss.
"Employers provide water to employees to meet critical business-related hydration needs, not as a source of titillation and gossip-mongering. Corporations can't afford to subsidize the time-wasting chit-chat about last night's hockey game or who's schtupping whom in HR." commented Lloyd Getalife, Executive VP of Productivity Marketing.
Note to the humor-impaired: It's a joke. Successful or not, it's supposed to be funny. And God forbid if I should accidentally stomp on someone's trademark, securities listing, or business plan. In that case, it's accidental parody and protected by what little is left of fair use doctrine.
before the substance and its application process trickle down to amateur telescopy?
Nigel Fox, who heads the optics group at NPL, said: "When you look at the black, it is an incredibly beautiful surface. It's like black velvet."
Who'll be the first schmuck to paint Jesus or Elvis onto this surface?
YRO Needs an annual public cluefulness award...
on
NARAS vs. the RIAA
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
and I nominate John Snyder for the next one. He clearly gets it.
NARAS is a more technical organization than RIAA, right? (More audio engineers, etc., than executives.) And regarding executives...
Record companies are not logical, righteous entities. They are ramshackle, profit-driven enterprises. They act in their perceived best interests, and they act ruthlessly and, in many cases, irrationally. The people who run them still have their e-mail printed out by their secretaries.
Did anyone else visualize Dilbert's PHB sitting at the desk of President of the RIAA? Scary and yet strangely compelling.
My Deskstar is good for up to 100. You might dent the outer case, but it'll probably still work.
The irony approaches LD50 concentrations. Toss a Deskstar off a 3-storey building onto macadam and it'll keep working like Grandpa's Timex, but leave it in the comfort and stability of your computer's case and it'll self-destruct like Jim Phelps' tape recorder.
Ah, well, back on-topic. We in the US military know about remanence security. (I think institutional paranoia is closer to the truth, but at least for once it works to our benefit.) The default behavior in our illustrious organization is "purge it completely (NSA-grade multiple overwrites) before it leaves your office."
You can buy used US hardware (commercial-off-the-shelf-stuff, o' course) at auction, and it's really unlikely you'll find anything on the hard drive. Not even an OS, let alone someone's performance rating or sensitive Powerpoint slides.
I'm still waiting for SOMEONE to correct the GLARING errors in the PWD-HOWTO, as well as properly internationalize it and pick a cooler font for the PDF and TeX versions.
And what about my quite spiffy feature requests for a "distributed PWD" which can print the working directory of any user on any system (universe-wide) at any time? That's innovative, but NO ONE seems wants to take that up. Geez, are we gonna wait until M$ introduces it in Intarweb Exploder 7?
Re:That's not gonna work.
on
Computer Room Hot?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
And recirculate all that heat in the summer?
How about installing house-wide central evacuation plumbing (like the central vacuum system mentioned up-thread) but vent it outside like another exhaust flue or bathroom vent?
Yeah, no single item I mentioned is novel, but the combination! Demand to have this built into your next custom-built house!
Yup, that's what I thought of. Just overclock and load Win XP and that sucker will be completely ready to fly around raising zombies and transporting Den from a world of/. geekness to ultimate heavy metal muscledudeness.
"Hmmm.... big!"
Mildly amusing side note
on
Euro DMCA Fails
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· Score: 5, Funny
" "It's a bit disappointing," Francisco Mingorance, European policy director for the Business Software Alliance (BSA) trade group told Reuters on Monday."
At a quick glance, you could read the BSA mouthpiece's name as "Ignorance".
No, I don't have anything useful to add to the discussion; I just wanted to mock the name of the Mouth of Sauron.
...but the world we reclaim is a post-nuclear nightmare, brother! No sun, no fun, no food, no nice clothes, no new comics every Wednesday or Thursday. Imagine everything and everyone you know suddenly switching off as you open your eyes in your little special effects pod....
AAAH! NO SLASHDOT!
Where's that blue pill, gimmeitgimmeitgimmeit!
Dude...
You've got a sound card on your PC, no? That and an impedance-match transformer and you're golden.
Better yet, if you have a voicemail-capable modem, you have a PCM wave device built in. That would work OK with nothing more than software.
1) Acquire U.S. national do-not-call list.
2) Leave the country.
3) Set up in some spam-friendly Bumcrackovia
3) Start spam-calling everyone on the do-not-call list
4) ???
5) Profit!
Here's all the discussion about geek ingenuity I need to know, courtesy of Scott Adams:
Marketing manager: "So, Dilbert, I understand this is the prototype you have been working on for the last six months."
Dilbert: "Yes, Sir. - This little baby can convert worthless pocket lint into a valuable parsley substitute!" Marketing manager: "Well, this looks absolutely brilliant and completely unmarketable." Dilbert: "Thanks. I'm technology driven"
Slashdot Mirror
Not strictly true. The Nazis had a significant nuclear-weapons research program, using the intellectual powers of such notable physicists as Werner Heisenberg (of "Uncertainty Principle" fame). However, they were convinced that an exploding nuclear bomb was impractical, because Dr. Heisenberg had grossly mis-estimated the critical mass of uranium. Because of this, the most likely form of Nazi nuclear weapon was a subcritcal reactor-bomb which would "detonate" through a mechanism more like the Chornobyl meltdown than a runaway complete fission reaction.
That said, the commando raids on the various plants supporting this reasearch definitely helped guarantee that Nazi Germany never attained nuclear weapons. We can be fairly grateful for that, I think.
There is some archaeological evidence of the tragedy of the commons in the Mediterranean and Mesopotamia. The general tenor of this evidence is that much of Mankind's earliest cradles were well forested with coniferous or deciduous trees. Since these trees were a common resource, everyone cut them freely for fuel and building materials. Now, these regions of the world are scrubland with only tended crop trees (nuts, olives) and very few stands of wild wood.
Without intervention--the goodwill and self-restraint of the participants, or externally-imposed restraints, or a change of resource costing--it is inevitable. However, you're quite right in that there are restraining factors. The net, as a commons, has fences and gates which are guarded by the ISPs. They can impose pricing changes and enforce use restrictions (d/l caps, for instance) that can extend the life of the shared resource.
So your point, that the "social stability" of the net is guarded by some of its users (ISPs), is well made. In engineering speak, the net degrades more gracefully than a complete collapse (which is why I was attempting to mock the whole "end of the net" line of thought, even as I used it as an extreme example).
Herein lies the inherent limit of the tragedy of the commons: The ability to load the common resource correlates with the trust the users feel in the common's stability. As long as I can drive another cow onto the pasture without fear that the neighbor will shoot the cow or me, I will. But once I feel I can't trust the shared resource--once the social stability is gone--I'll stop using the common and find some other way, because the cost (to me) of the common is no longer a fraction of the value I derive from it, but possibly total loss.
Alternately, if social stability deteriorates radically, it may catch the users of the common off-guard before they can do their subconscious value calculations. If I drive one more cow onto the commons and it starts a stampede, killing many of the cattle (mine and my neighbors), and killing some of those neightbors, and starting violent feuds and vendettas among us who used the common, the cost of the common maximizes.
Either way, the tragedy of the commons is eventually fulfilled, and everyone stops using the shared resource. Self-limiting, at least until the next time.
What does this mean for the net? It will get progressively worse until "death of the net (mpegs at 11!)", after which we survivors will crawl out of our IPv6 bomb shelters and rule the Earth.
Yesterday's article was about RH 8 AS getting DISA (Defense Information Systems Agency) DII (Defense Information Infrastructure) COE (Common Operating Environment) certification. Todays' certification article-o-the-day is about RH 8 AS getting Common Criteria EAL (Evaluation Assurance Level) 2.
Yeah, to the uninformed, it looks the same. But (A) DII COE is specifically a US DoD certification, whereas CC EAL is an international certification (administered in the US by NIST--National Institute of Standards and Technology); and (B) The article about RH's EAL certification also extensively yatters on about Oracle 9i, whereas the RH COE article doesn't.
So in conclusion, this is an erroneous dupe sighting. Nothing to see here, move along.
HTTP "upload" is trickier than FTP upload, if that's a factor.
Computers are full of security holes. Both webservers and FTP daemons have the risk (and history) of 'sploitable holes. As to configuration-related risk, there's more inherent in the default configuration of an FTP server, since its original concept of ops is browsing a physical directory tree, but most current FTP servers can be locked down as tight as any webserver.Just can't win, can you? Only posers worry that their choice of protocol might look bad. It's not fashion, folks.If you had to support only one, pick HTTP, since I bet you're already running a webserver. And if it's really about fashion, run an exotic protocol like CORBA or SCP or something.
Volunteer expertise? (IANAL, but the thing has precedent: "Pro Bono" legal work.)
Eventually, we WILL see some sort of national public initiative to do this, and the resource will be taken for granted as the public library. Wasn't it Gingrich who promised to get gov't online? Well, it's not a new idea, it just needs someone behind it.
Dear Holy Jebus, NO! Please, not a federally-funded federally-managed mishmash! (And I speak as a member of the Federal Gubmint, mind you.)
And, conversely, it's all "Junkyard Wars" on the US version of Discovery Channel, regardless of the original program.
Am I the saddest man on /. for knowing all this?
No, just a true /.er.
That, of course, was not funny.
"Sequel" seems to be a very popular pronounciation, but I don't like it because it collides with the name of an old commercial DBMS (which ,if I recall correctly, supported SQL).
I tried pronouncing it "squeal", which I though was appropriate with most of the DBMSs I worked with. (Some made the system squeal in pain; the others made me squeal.) I gave up on that pronounciation, though; I got tired of explaining it.
In other news, HydroSequre (NAWSDOC:HSQ) announced today groundbreaking new water-cooler monitoring technology. The system, called "Chiller", incorporates microphones, video cameras, and electrically-charged floor plates to ensure that the water cooler is not a source of productivity loss.
"Employers provide water to employees to meet critical business-related hydration needs, not as a source of titillation and gossip-mongering. Corporations can't afford to subsidize the time-wasting chit-chat about last night's hockey game or who's schtupping whom in HR." commented Lloyd Getalife, Executive VP of Productivity Marketing.
Note to the humor-impaired: It's a joke. Successful or not, it's supposed to be funny. And God forbid if I should accidentally stomp on someone's trademark, securities listing, or business plan. In that case, it's accidental parody and protected by what little is left of fair use doctrine.
Nigel Fox, who heads the optics group at NPL, said: "When you look at the black, it is an incredibly beautiful surface. It's like black velvet."
Who'll be the first schmuck to paint Jesus or Elvis onto this surface?
NARAS is a more technical organization than RIAA, right? (More audio engineers, etc., than executives.) And regarding executives...
Record companies are not logical, righteous entities. They are ramshackle, profit-driven enterprises. They act in their perceived best interests, and they act ruthlessly and, in many cases, irrationally. The people who run them still have their e-mail printed out by their secretaries.
Did anyone else visualize Dilbert's PHB sitting at the desk of President of the RIAA? Scary and yet strangely compelling.
The irony approaches LD50 concentrations. Toss a Deskstar off a 3-storey building onto macadam and it'll keep working like Grandpa's Timex, but leave it in the comfort and stability of your computer's case and it'll self-destruct like Jim Phelps' tape recorder.
Ah, well, back on-topic. We in the US military know about remanence security. (I think institutional paranoia is closer to the truth, but at least for once it works to our benefit.) The default behavior in our illustrious organization is "purge it completely (NSA-grade multiple overwrites) before it leaves your office."
You can buy used US hardware (commercial-off-the-shelf-stuff, o' course) at auction, and it's really unlikely you'll find anything on the hard drive. Not even an OS, let alone someone's performance rating or sensitive Powerpoint slides.
The old saw goes "When someone says it wasn't about the money, but a matter of principle, it was really about the money."
Yes, but it's enough to get you an MC{SE|P}.
What's that tell you about most OS vendor certifications? (I think you already know the answer.)
And what about my quite spiffy feature requests for a "distributed PWD" which can print the working directory of any user on any system (universe-wide) at any time? That's innovative, but NO ONE seems wants to take that up. Geez, are we gonna wait until M$ introduces it in Intarweb Exploder 7?
How about installing house-wide central evacuation plumbing (like the central vacuum system mentioned up-thread) but vent it outside like another exhaust flue or bathroom vent?
Yeah, no single item I mentioned is novel, but the combination! Demand to have this built into your next custom-built house!
Think of it as an uber casemod.
"Hmmm.... big!"
At a quick glance, you could read the BSA mouthpiece's name as "Ignorance".
No, I don't have anything useful to add to the discussion; I just wanted to mock the name of the Mouth of Sauron.
AAAH! NO SLASHDOT!
Where's that blue pill, gimmeitgimmeitgimmeit!
Dude...
You've got a sound card on your PC, no? That and an impedance-match transformer and you're golden.
Better yet, if you have a voicemail-capable modem, you have a PCM wave device built in. That would work OK with nothing more than software.
Crap.
I think item "4" should be "Learn to count."
1) Acquire U.S. national do-not-call list.
2) Leave the country.
3) Set up in some spam-friendly Bumcrackovia
3) Start spam-calling everyone on the do-not-call list
4) ???
5) Profit!
Marketing manager: "So, Dilbert, I understand this is the prototype you have been working on for the last six months."
Dilbert: "Yes, Sir. - This little baby can convert worthless pocket lint into a valuable parsley substitute!"
Marketing manager: "Well, this looks absolutely brilliant and completely unmarketable."
Dilbert: "Thanks. I'm technology driven"