Supposedly the High Energy Radio Frequency (HERF) burst will disrupt all the electronic components in an engine. My understanding is that the Coast Guard is already using these to stop fleeing motor boats (sorry no link) and the air force is researching a HERF weapon to knock all the electronics in a area USAF Detachment 8 Continues US Research Into EMP-Microwave Weapons
I think the public utility comparison that you make is somewhat valid currently because of artificial monopolies, but the situation is rapidly changing as the difference between telephone and cable dissolves. Monopolies should be crushed, because they interfere with a proper market. In most places that I am familiar with (large US cities), cable companies have artificial monopolies via government "franchises". In this case, the government is the problem because they created the artificial scarcity. Notice how cable companies are fighting tooth-and-nail via regulation to keep telephone companies out of the video market. If and when the telephone and cable companies all start offering the same services (voip, pots, television, internet, etc), you will see more market forces in the data delivery market. As the monopolies break up because of the new technology, competition will cause supply (i.e. bandwidth and physical cable) to meet the demand, because the artificial barriers will be gone. The only thing standing in the way is the use of regulations to enforce artificial monopolies.
So we should allow the highest bidder to choke off the bandwidth from their less wealthy competitors
Did you sleep through Econ 101? That's called Allocative_efficiency via the Free Price System. The market price allocation of goods and services is the best that humankind has come up with in the last 4,000 years of recorded history, and the only one that matches production to demand, because it is the only scheme that accounts for human nature and motivations. Price allocation means people will pay for a good if the good is worth the price and other people will produce the good if the selling price is worth their efforts. Every other type of allocation scheme has brought woe and shortages.
If your content is "worthy", people will pay what it is worth to see it. The installed bandwidth will increase to meet the demand (absent any non-competative tinkering like monopolies or goverment franchises, which may be the problem here).
The people of this nation pay my research bills, it should be their data. However, if I innovate something, I am free to file a patent.
That may be the system now, but I think that is morally wrong. If the research leading to the "innovation" is publically funded, then the innovation should be publically owned.
IMHO, any of the following should apply:
patents resulting from publically funded research should never be granted (i.e. its free and open tech)
drug companies with publically funded patents should be forbidden from including "R&D" cost in the prices of their drugs as a condition of their patent grants, because the taxpayer has already paid once. The price would be regulated to contain only operational production cost, limited overhead, and a limited "fair" profit (nte 10%)
a special class of patent (say 5 years) for partial public funding to allow the company to recoup their portion of the costs
I am hesitant to advocate direct price controls because I am a economic libertarian, but patents are a special case since they are a government granted monopoly. If the research leading to the invention was funded by the government to begin with, the government has a extraordinary moral right to the end result.
No, because when you shoot a projectile, you're putting it into a orbit that intersects the earth. You need some other impulse source to circularize the orbit.
Or, the rail gun could just be used as the first stage, second stage would be a solid chemical rocket which would take it the rest of the way and shape the orbit. The hard part then is getting the rocket engine, fuel, and nav-instruments to take the inital g-force of the rail-launch. The article mentions this:
"When this thing leaves, it's [under] hundreds of thousands of g 's, and the electronics of today won't survive that," he said. "We need to develop something that will survive that many g 's."
From the above, I'm assuming they have a reasearch project underway that would directly translate into launch survivability for the hardware. I'm not a electrical or mechanical engineer, but I'm going to guess that electronics embedded in high-impact composite ceramics (a la tank armor) might be the ticket here. The rocket engine and the fuel are another story. My understanding is that solid rockets are relatively simple construction (compared to liquid) so they would be the best candidate for survial. Pretty much every weld or joint I can think of would come apart under those kind of forces, so the fewer parts the better.
(2) This is really just a back-door attempt to squelch a format where liberals have been unsuccessfully trying to penetrate for years: talk radio. The idea is to FORCE radio stations to pick up the next "Air America" if they're going to continue to broadcast Rush Limbaugh. But, (going back to #1), if nobody listens, is there a benefit? To Liberals there is -- by forcing "fairness," a Radio station will have to silence about half of its conservative voices..... Did any candidate run on the Fairness Doctrine?
If nobody listens, is there a benefit? - Yes, to the "progressive" investors in bankrupt Air America. The syndication fees would instantly put them into profitability, even though few people really want to buy what they are selling. What better way to profit than to have the government force people to buy your stuff?
Its not about if they "ran" on it as part of their platform, its about politicians paying back the people who put them into power. This is just a way to pay off another special interest group (their's) with other people's money. There is an added bonus because it detracts from the opposing side, who are sucessful all on their own without an unofficial goverment subsidy. Double points to Kucinich for grandstanding about "fairness" while lining his buddys' pockets with other people's money. I think my cynicism of "fairness" rhetoric just increased exponentially.
Just because he has some _other_ strange ideas, doesn't exclude the possibility that he could have brilliant insights in this area. Issac Newton dabbled in Alchemy, the Occult, and fringe theology far more often than he did with physics or math. Perhaps the ability to think differently (and frequently wrongly) leads to the occasional brilliant insight that would never occur to others.
However I have been using metric system all my life and it is intuitive for me.....There is nothing special about imperial or metric system for daily use. You just have to be accustomed to it.
I agree, there is nothing wrong with either. Because you were raised from birth using SI metric, you are conversant with it. Because I was raised from birth using the english foot-pound system, I am conversant with that. I also know SI from school and the military.
SI Metric is like the English language. It is standard in international science and business. When doing scientific work or international business, use English language and SI Metric. But that doesn't mean that Italians need to use English Language at the local green grocer in Italy or that I have to use SI at home in America.
There is nothing wrong with America having its own culture and using the foot-pound systems, as long as people are taught the standard for science.
The problem is that so many neophyte progrrammesr jump into PHP to create something visible and useful. Which they succeed in doing, more often that not, I guess. But without a proper background in security and proper practice, there's a ton of vulnerabilities that get created, accidentally, over and over again by every new PHP programmer.
A few years back (circa 2002), I whipped up a rapid application prototype with PHP while working off from some on-line tutorials and using Beginning Php 4 (Programmer to Programmer). I think the book and the tutorials were good a teaching the basic language features and syntax, but they taught me how to use PHP dangerously because they did not teach good practices. My application worked but never got out of the prototype/demo stage back then. Recently, I went back to it on my own time to try to clean it up, move it to PHP5, and make it deployable. I now cringe with horror at the extremely bad practices I was using back then. Granted, it was just a prototype, but I thought I was doing it "right" because I was following the examples in the book and the tutorials. I was doing stuff like accepting form data and passing it to the DB with out validation, outputing user submitted variables without checking for XSS, registering globals, etc, etc, etc.
So here is my point, all the tutorials, examples, and books that the neophytes are using to learn are _WRONG_. They are teaching _BAD_PRACTICES_. Because php is necessarily in a network environment (excluding the rarely used cli) and exposed to potential maliciousness, secure practices should be taught markedly at the beginning, not as an aside. So as part of teaching how to pass form parameters they should include validation code, even if they have to comment that section as "/* trust us on this part for now, we'll show you how this part works latter, just remember you always have to validate the input before you use it */".
I think PHP is a great language for its purpose, which is simple web-apps. Lots of the criticism about its brain-dead defaults is correct, but they can be overcome with good pratices by the application developer. PHP can be great, but it is typically taught wrong at the beginning and that just snowballs.
The editors and authors all the PHP books and tutorials out there need to make sure the new editions encasulate good practice at the beginning of the learning process.
Beside the annoying trial crap that fills up diskspace, the worst stuff is the boot-time startup crap that cripples the machine and adds another 45 seconds to boot time. I'm not talking about system or server services here, but the third-party consumer applications like iTunes or Real-player. Msconfig is good for dianostics, but sometimes you have to hunt down offending start-up programs in the registry to permanantly turn them off at boot-time. MS should remove the "run" option from the registry for those sorts of things and require them to go into the old "start up" folder. That way, they will be easy to find, and a normal user can delete them without hosing the entire machine.
The article didn't specify if the RFID chips were adhered to the surface of the coin or somehow implanted in the coin itself. An internally implanted chip would be nefarious, but a surface adhesion could be accidental. In the case of an internal implant, since the reading would be local, they would most likely be used to figure out the coming-and-goings of a few locations (i.e. stake out a building and see how many readings you get during certain hours), or perhaps to tell when somebody is NOT in their hotel room, so the place could be searched or laptop with sensitive information pilfered.
Assuming that it was adhered, I could conceive how it could be accidental.
spill coffee on pants on way to conferece
stop at chain store to buy new pants
chain store uses RFID to track inventory, puts small tag in pants pockets of stock
tag seperates from cloths and adhers to pocket contents
I disagree "free-desktop efforts have created a total monoculture around developing and promoting Linux" because KDE, Blackbox, XFCE, etc, etc.. all compile on pretty much any implementation of Unix, of which Linux is just a clone. Solaris now runs Gnome (branded as Java Desktop System) as the prefered desktop.
Unix is probably popular with developers because it is "open" and standardized in the specifications and widely know and taught in computer science departments.
So the "failure" to catch on is wider than Linux. Solaris/SunOS alone has been deployed in probably every large corporation in America and Western Europe since the '80s, but has never broken out of the specialist server/workstation market and into the general desktop market. And during all that time, SunOS/Solaris has gone from OpenLook, to CDE, to Gnome. The various X-Windows desktops really didn't get off the ground in a meaningful way until the mid-1990's with CDE (which was announced in 1993, I first saw it myself in 1996 on HP-UX), by which time Win3.1 and Win95 were already entrenched. Also, compare Win95 and FVWM circa 1995, and you'll see why Windows was the only desktop game in town at the time.
Windows owes it sucess to the ubiquity of MS-DOS in the 1980s-early 1990s. MS-DOS owed its ubiquity to the "street-credit" granted to it by IBM's endorsement. Had IBM implemented their PC with Xenix or some flavor of Unix capable of running on an 8088, then we would all have unix desktops.
Didn't understand what they bought from Santa Cruz (i.e. they thought they "owned" Unix, when they really didn't).
Didn't read the Santa Cruz - Novell APA, in which case they are morons for not reading the fine print in a multi-million dollar deal.
Understood the APA, but were greedy/crooked enough to try to get away with 'converting' Novell's royalties.
After Novell smacks down SCO/Caldera into bankruptcy, I would bet to see a lawsuit from Caldera's investors against Sun (now owners of the old Tarantella/Santa Cruz) claiming that Tarantella/Santa Cruz mislead them and misrepresented the nature of what they were buying when Caldera bought the Unix assets.
How soon before being required to show ID when checking into Hotels/Motels? How soon before being required to check in with the local police station when you intend to stay somewhere more than a few hours?
My understanding is that these are actual requirements that have been standard procedure in France for decades. They used to do it with a card that you filled out when you registered at the hotel desk and the local prefecture of police picked up the cards every night to check against lists of fugitives. Now I think they do it by computer.
So do Frenchmen or Europeans feel that infringes on their freedom or makes France a police state? Any Frenchmen care to answer?
Good point. But, when you wipe and re-install, at least you'll know that the hardware is supported on Linux versus random-unsupported laptop from Dell.
So you're too lazy to log in as Admin a few times a week to run updates? You should be "flogged in public" for having an unpatched machine on the internet.
I think the Cable and DSL companies need to be held responsible for what is coming and going on their own networks. These boxes are on *their* networks, so it is their problem. These companies
Provide the hardware to connect (i.e. the cable or dsl modem)
route all the traffic
provide e-mail service to their customers
get paid money to do the above responsibly
Those facts make this the Cable/DSL providers problem. The security threats just don't fall from the sky, they come in (and go out) through a wire. That wire belongs to the ISP, so this the ISP's problem.
Here are some fixes:
The cable/dsl companies should provide a hardware firewall along with the modem. The 'blue box' fireware/nat router is super cheap wholesale, sometimes you can even pick one up retail for about $30. Last time I was in Best Buy, I saw a Moterola surfboard modem with a built-in router/firewall. There is absolutely no reason (beside shortsightedness) that these should not be automatically provided to customers. The cost savings from customer service and few complaints would more than make up for the initial extra hardware costs.
Aggressively filter ports. I just got converted (today, in fact) from adelphia to comcast. Comcast routes smtp through port 587, not 25. I was scratching my head for a minute to figure out why, but then it dawned on my that it was to prevent bots from spewing spam on port 25. Granted, now I will no longer be able to occasionally dabble with a my own mail server, but you can get Speakeasy if you seriously want to run you own servers.
As part of the filtering, aggressively disconnect obvious spam bots. If one of their clients is sending 10,000 mails between 3AM and 3:15 AM, that machine needs to be taken offline. Notify the client and help him clean the machine. Don't let him back on the network until he demonstrates (like by providing a scan log, store receipts) that he has installed anti-virus software, clean up his box, and installed a hardware firewall.
Scan and add headers to suspicious incoming bulk mail. Spam, mail-borne trojans, and virii rarely come as singletons. They come in bulk, so they should be fairly easy to identify at the server. (Just got identical messages for 10,000 customers?- oh, we might want to scan those or at least add a spam header). It might take some horsepower, but these messages can be marked as spam and/or scanned at the destination server before they are delivered to the client.
Another nice touch would be providing free anti-virus service to the customer. When I was moving my account to comcast this morning, I noticed they provided a free subscription to McAfee for their customers. Very nice and responsible. I already had a subscription, but still very nice.
You are confusing "peace activism" with pacifism. There is a big difference between a pacifist (for instance the Amish) saying "all killing is wrong, so I won't bear arms" and a peace activist wearing a Che t-shirt while demonstrating against "imperialist war and globalist exploitation". Those are two very different ideas. One is a moral stand, the other is a political stand thinly masquerading as a moral stand.
As an example, take the "United for Justice with Peace" (www.justicewithpeace.org), which is a leading "peace" activism group in the Washington, DC area. Or another similarly named "United for Peace" http://unitedforpeace.org/article.php?type=66&list =type . Read their web-pages yourself. You'll see that they go far far beyond pacifism to over-the-edge left-wing advocacy. These two example groups are fairly typical of the overall movement. You'll notice groups like this don't protest against all war, just "imperialist" wars. For instance, I've yet to see a "peace" group protest against the wars waged by Columbia's FARC or the Philippines New People's Army (both leftist groups), even though both conflicts are over 30 years old, are still on-going, and have killed tens of thousands. Their "peace" activism is very selective. They are much more against "our side" fighting, than being against fighting in general.
So when I say, that UCS and Greenpeace are tied to the left with its "peace" and environmental agendas, you can take it to the bank. These are not a bunch of pacifists, they are people with a political agenda beyond pacifism.
Here is the wikipedia on Union of Concerned Scientists. They are basically ideological twins of Greenpeace - hard-line peace activists and hard-line environmentalist. All the standard left-wing stuff. The main difference between the two are their tactics - UCS cloaks itself in scientific respectability and issues whitepapers while Greenpeace pulls protest stunts to gain publicity. The other difference is that UCS tolerates nuclear energy while Greenpeace is totally opposed to it. UCS is based in the "People's Republic of Cambridge"
Mod Parent AC post Up. Kudos for Debian. If only the other distros enacted the same policy for their package maintiners to follow, then alternate desktops would work properly.
Have you tried installing those packages that RH and SuSe distribute for those alternate desktops? They are distributed and they install, but they often have empty menus. Rarely do the companies take the effort to really integrate those alternates desktops/WMs into their distro. It's been a while since I've used Redhat (or rather CentOS), but the last time I tried fluxbox, XFCE, or WindowMaker there were a bunch of empty menus or broken links and none of the distro-specific tools were in the menus. The exception being Debian (yes, I know I was down on Debian a few days ago for having too many packages). This is an area where Debian excels. They are absolutely fanatical about getting the stuff properly configured and well integrated. When I installed Fluxbox and WindowMaker on Debian (Sarge and Etch), all the menus were populated with *working* items. Ofcourse, the packages were a little older, but they worked well and were integrated properly into the distro (that's the tradeoff with debian). (I also sometimes find myself coming back to Gnome, because of familiarity or because I'm using GTK/Gnome apps anyway - gEdit is my favorite X editor).
Paradoxically, with Sun, CDE seems to be better supported. I have a few ancient sparc-II systems. They have Solaris 10, but I still use CDE because, even now (or rather 1/2006 edition of Solaris 10), Sun does a better jobs of integrating some of their tools into CDE than their newer Gnome Java Desktop thingy, even though Sun is making a big push to move everthing over to Gnome. (Besides, Gnome runs dog slow on those ancient boxes). I could install fluxbox or WindowMaker on those boxes too, but the menus would be empty.
Well, I do appreciate both Debian and Ubuntu. I run Sarge on my home server, Etch on my laptop, and recently statued using Ubuntu on my desktop (switched from etch on that because multi-media support seemed to be better with Ubuntu).
I always us the net-install cd myself and apt-get the rest. The first thing I do after install, is edit the source list to add my favorite repositories and comment out the cd, so all future updates come off the wire instead of having to juggle the CD.
Perhaps I didn't say clearly enough, so lots of folks are getting the wrong impression. I'm not saying that obscure packages should be banished completely, I'm saying they shouldn't be a reason to hold up the release. I'm saying base the release on the the packages that 95% of us use in common (things like the kernel, the basic gnu environment, X, Gnome, KDE, OpenOffice). The maintiners of obscure packages can futz around all they want, but there is no reason to hold up the entire release for them. Put their stuff in a semi-official "contributed but not core" repository. When the maintiners get around to releasing the package, you'll be able to apt-get it.
I think that what's really great about Debian is that it has such wide support for everything. If there's a distro capable of being anything to anyone, and still doing everything pretty well, it's probably Debian. There are plenty of other projects that do just what you're talking about. They take Debian, reduce the number of packages to what makes sense for a particular purpose, and that allows more work to be done on fewer packages in less time, creating a distro that's more specialized. Why would you want Debian to do that, too?
You can turn that argument on its head. Maintain a high quality core, and let specialized users add their special packages on top as they please in contributed respositories. I'd do that to make the core better. You could still apt-get gObscureFoo.deb after it was moved into a contributed repository. It just means that delays in gObscureFoo isn't holding back the core OS.
I think the apt-cache search function will work on any repository (official or not) in your apt sources list. My point is to let the maintainers do what they want, but don't let them act as a drag on the whole project.
Slashdot Mirror
see Build Your Own HERF Gun
and
HERF Gun: Make it in your basement
Supposedly the High Energy Radio Frequency (HERF) burst will disrupt all the electronic components in an engine. My understanding is that the Coast Guard is already using these to stop fleeing motor boats (sorry no link) and the air force is researching a HERF weapon to knock all the electronics in a area USAF Detachment 8 Continues US Research Into EMP-Microwave Weapons
I think the public utility comparison that you make is somewhat valid currently because of artificial monopolies, but the situation is rapidly changing as the difference between telephone and cable dissolves. Monopolies should be crushed, because they interfere with a proper market. In most places that I am familiar with (large US cities), cable companies have artificial monopolies via government "franchises". In this case, the government is the problem because they created the artificial scarcity. Notice how cable companies are fighting tooth-and-nail via regulation to keep telephone companies out of the video market. If and when the telephone and cable companies all start offering the same services (voip, pots, television, internet, etc), you will see more market forces in the data delivery market. As the monopolies break up because of the new technology, competition will cause supply (i.e. bandwidth and physical cable) to meet the demand, because the artificial barriers will be gone. The only thing standing in the way is the use of regulations to enforce artificial monopolies.
If your content is "worthy", people will pay what it is worth to see it. The installed bandwidth will increase to meet the demand (absent any non-competative tinkering like monopolies or goverment franchises, which may be the problem here).
IMHO, any of the following should apply:
- patents resulting from publically funded research should never be granted (i.e. its free and open tech)
- drug companies with publically funded patents should be forbidden from including "R&D" cost in the prices of their drugs as a condition of their patent grants, because the taxpayer has already paid once. The price would be regulated to contain only operational production cost, limited overhead, and a limited "fair" profit (nte 10%)
- a special class of patent (say 5 years) for partial public funding to allow the company to recoup their portion of the costs
I am hesitant to advocate direct price controls because I am a economic libertarian, but patents are a special case since they are a government granted monopoly. If the research leading to the invention was funded by the government to begin with, the government has a extraordinary moral right to the end result.From the above, I'm assuming they have a reasearch project underway that would directly translate into launch survivability for the hardware. I'm not a electrical or mechanical engineer, but I'm going to guess that electronics embedded in high-impact composite ceramics (a la tank armor) might be the ticket here. The rocket engine and the fuel are another story. My understanding is that solid rockets are relatively simple construction (compared to liquid) so they would be the best candidate for survial. Pretty much every weld or joint I can think of would come apart under those kind of forces, so the fewer parts the better.
Its not about if they "ran" on it as part of their platform, its about politicians paying back the people who put them into power. This is just a way to pay off another special interest group (their's) with other people's money. There is an added bonus because it detracts from the opposing side, who are sucessful all on their own without an unofficial goverment subsidy. Double points to Kucinich for grandstanding about "fairness" while lining his buddys' pockets with other people's money. I think my cynicism of "fairness" rhetoric just increased exponentially.
Just because he has some _other_ strange ideas, doesn't exclude the possibility that he could have brilliant insights in this area. Issac Newton dabbled in Alchemy, the Occult, and fringe theology far more often than he did with physics or math. Perhaps the ability to think differently (and frequently wrongly) leads to the occasional brilliant insight that would never occur to others.
However I have been using metric system all my life and it is intuitive for me.....There is nothing special about imperial or metric system for daily use. You just have to be accustomed to it.
I agree, there is nothing wrong with either. Because you were raised from birth using SI metric, you are conversant with it. Because I was raised from birth using the english foot-pound system, I am conversant with that. I also know SI from school and the military.
SI Metric is like the English language. It is standard in international science and business. When doing scientific work or international business, use English language and SI Metric. But that doesn't mean that Italians need to use English Language at the local green grocer in Italy or that I have to use SI at home in America.
There is nothing wrong with America having its own culture and using the foot-pound systems, as long as people are taught the standard for science.
A few years back (circa 2002), I whipped up a rapid application prototype with PHP while working off from some on-line tutorials and using Beginning Php 4 (Programmer to Programmer). I think the book and the tutorials were good a teaching the basic language features and syntax, but they taught me how to use PHP dangerously because they did not teach good practices. My application worked but never got out of the prototype/demo stage back then. Recently, I went back to it on my own time to try to clean it up, move it to PHP5, and make it deployable. I now cringe with horror at the extremely bad practices I was using back then. Granted, it was just a prototype, but I thought I was doing it "right" because I was following the examples in the book and the tutorials. I was doing stuff like accepting form data and passing it to the DB with out validation, outputing user submitted variables without checking for XSS, registering globals, etc, etc, etc.
So here is my point, all the tutorials, examples, and books that the neophytes are using to learn are _WRONG_. They are teaching _BAD_PRACTICES_. Because php is necessarily in a network environment (excluding the rarely used cli) and exposed to potential maliciousness, secure practices should be taught markedly at the beginning, not as an aside. So as part of teaching how to pass form parameters they should include validation code, even if they have to comment that section as "
I think PHP is a great language for its purpose, which is simple web-apps. Lots of the criticism about its brain-dead defaults is correct, but they can be overcome with good pratices by the application developer. PHP can be great, but it is typically taught wrong at the beginning and that just snowballs.
The editors and authors all the PHP books and tutorials out there need to make sure the new editions encasulate good practice at the beginning of the learning process.
Beside the annoying trial crap that fills up diskspace, the worst stuff is the boot-time startup crap that cripples the machine and adds another 45 seconds to boot time. I'm not talking about system or server services here, but the third-party consumer applications like iTunes or Real-player. Msconfig is good for dianostics, but sometimes you have to hunt down offending start-up programs in the registry to permanantly turn them off at boot-time. MS should remove the "run" option from the registry for those sorts of things and require them to go into the old "start up" folder. That way, they will be easy to find, and a normal user can delete them without hosing the entire machine.
The crazy dude on the corner...screaming about how the birds are spying on him makes a bit more sense now.....
So, that's why the call it the "Loonie"!.
Assuming that it was adhered, I could conceive how it could be accidental.
I disagree "free-desktop efforts have created a total monoculture around developing and promoting Linux" because KDE, Blackbox, XFCE, etc, etc.. all compile on pretty much any implementation of Unix, of which Linux is just a clone. Solaris now runs Gnome (branded as Java Desktop System) as the prefered desktop.
Unix is probably popular with developers because it is "open" and standardized in the specifications and widely know and taught in computer science departments.
So the "failure" to catch on is wider than Linux. Solaris/SunOS alone has been deployed in probably every large corporation in America and Western Europe since the '80s, but has never broken out of the specialist server/workstation market and into the general desktop market. And during all that time, SunOS/Solaris has gone from OpenLook, to CDE, to Gnome. The various X-Windows desktops really didn't get off the ground in a meaningful way until the mid-1990's with CDE (which was announced in 1993, I first saw it myself in 1996 on HP-UX), by which time Win3.1 and Win95 were already entrenched. Also, compare Win95 and FVWM circa 1995, and you'll see why Windows was the only desktop game in town at the time.
Windows owes it sucess to the ubiquity of MS-DOS in the 1980s-early 1990s. MS-DOS owed its ubiquity to the "street-credit" granted to it by IBM's endorsement. Had IBM implemented their PC with Xenix or some flavor of Unix capable of running on an 8088, then we would all have unix desktops.
- Didn't understand what they bought from Santa Cruz (i.e. they thought they "owned" Unix, when they really didn't).
- Didn't read the Santa Cruz - Novell APA, in which case they are morons for not reading the fine print in a multi-million dollar deal.
- Understood the APA, but were greedy/crooked enough to try to get away with 'converting' Novell's royalties.
After Novell smacks down SCO/Caldera into bankruptcy, I would bet to see a lawsuit from Caldera's investors against Sun (now owners of the old Tarantella/Santa Cruz) claiming that Tarantella/Santa Cruz mislead them and misrepresented the nature of what they were buying when Caldera bought the Unix assets.My understanding is that these are actual requirements that have been standard procedure in France for decades. They used to do it with a card that you filled out when you registered at the hotel desk and the local prefecture of police picked up the cards every night to check against lists of fugitives. Now I think they do it by computer.
So do Frenchmen or Europeans feel that infringes on their freedom or makes France a police state? Any Frenchmen care to answer?
Good point. But, when you wipe and re-install, at least you'll know that the hardware is supported on Linux versus random-unsupported laptop from Dell.
So you're too lazy to log in as Admin a few times a week to run updates? You should be "flogged in public" for having an unpatched machine on the internet.
- Provide the hardware to connect (i.e. the cable or dsl modem)
- route all the traffic
- provide e-mail service to their customers
- get paid money to do the above responsibly
Those facts make this the Cable/DSL providers problem. The security threats just don't fall from the sky, they come in (and go out) through a wire. That wire belongs to the ISP, so this the ISP's problem.Here are some fixes:
- The cable/dsl companies should provide a hardware firewall along with the modem. The 'blue box' fireware/nat router is super cheap wholesale, sometimes you can even pick one up retail for about $30. Last time I was in Best Buy, I saw a Moterola surfboard modem with a built-in router/firewall. There is absolutely no reason (beside shortsightedness) that these should not be automatically provided to customers. The cost savings from customer service and few complaints would more than make up for the initial extra hardware costs.
- Aggressively filter ports. I just got converted (today, in fact) from adelphia to comcast. Comcast routes smtp through port 587, not 25. I was scratching my head for a minute to figure out why, but then it dawned on my that it was to prevent bots from spewing spam on port 25. Granted, now I will no longer be able to occasionally dabble with a my own mail server, but you can get Speakeasy if you seriously want to run you own servers.
- As part of the filtering, aggressively disconnect obvious spam bots. If one of their clients is sending 10,000 mails between 3AM and 3:15 AM, that machine needs to be taken offline. Notify the client and help him clean the machine. Don't let him back on the network until he demonstrates (like by providing a scan log, store receipts) that he has installed anti-virus software, clean up his box, and installed a hardware firewall.
- Scan and add headers to suspicious incoming bulk mail. Spam, mail-borne trojans, and virii rarely come as singletons. They come in bulk, so they should be fairly easy to identify at the server. (Just got identical messages for 10,000 customers?- oh, we might want to scan those or at least add a spam header). It might take some horsepower, but these messages can be marked as spam and/or scanned at the destination server before they are delivered to the client.
Another nice touch would be providing free anti-virus service to the customer. When I was moving my account to comcast this morning, I noticed they provided a free subscription to McAfee for their customers. Very nice and responsible. I already had a subscription, but still very nice.You are confusing "peace activism" with pacifism. There is a big difference between a pacifist (for instance the Amish) saying "all killing is wrong, so I won't bear arms" and a peace activist wearing a Che t-shirt while demonstrating against "imperialist war and globalist exploitation". Those are two very different ideas. One is a moral stand, the other is a political stand thinly masquerading as a moral stand.
t =type . Read their web-pages yourself. You'll see that they go far far beyond pacifism to over-the-edge left-wing advocacy. These two example groups are fairly typical of the overall movement. You'll notice groups like this don't protest against all war, just "imperialist" wars. For instance, I've yet to see a "peace" group protest against the wars waged by Columbia's FARC or the Philippines New People's Army (both leftist groups), even though both conflicts are over 30 years old, are still on-going, and have killed tens of thousands. Their "peace" activism is very selective. They are much more against "our side" fighting, than being against fighting in general.
As an example, take the "United for Justice with Peace" (www.justicewithpeace.org), which is a leading "peace" activism group in the Washington, DC area. Or another similarly named "United for Peace" http://unitedforpeace.org/article.php?type=66&lis
So when I say, that UCS and Greenpeace are tied to the left with its "peace" and environmental agendas, you can take it to the bank. These are not a bunch of pacifists, they are people with a political agenda beyond pacifism.
Here is the wikipedia on Union of Concerned Scientists. They are basically ideological twins of Greenpeace - hard-line peace activists and hard-line environmentalist. All the standard left-wing stuff. The main difference between the two are their tactics - UCS cloaks itself in scientific respectability and issues whitepapers while Greenpeace pulls protest stunts to gain publicity. The other difference is that UCS tolerates nuclear energy while Greenpeace is totally opposed to it. UCS is based in the "People's Republic of Cambridge"
Mod Parent AC post Up. Kudos for Debian. If only the other distros enacted the same policy for their package maintiners to follow, then alternate desktops would work properly.
Have you tried installing those packages that RH and SuSe distribute for those alternate desktops? They are distributed and they install, but they often have empty menus. Rarely do the companies take the effort to really integrate those alternates desktops/WMs into their distro. It's been a while since I've used Redhat (or rather CentOS), but the last time I tried fluxbox, XFCE, or WindowMaker there were a bunch of empty menus or broken links and none of the distro-specific tools were in the menus. The exception being Debian (yes, I know I was down on Debian a few days ago for having too many packages). This is an area where Debian excels. They are absolutely fanatical about getting the stuff properly configured and well integrated. When I installed Fluxbox and WindowMaker on Debian (Sarge and Etch), all the menus were populated with *working* items. Ofcourse, the packages were a little older, but they worked well and were integrated properly into the distro (that's the tradeoff with debian). (I also sometimes find myself coming back to Gnome, because of familiarity or because I'm using GTK/Gnome apps anyway - gEdit is my favorite X editor).
Paradoxically, with Sun, CDE seems to be better supported. I have a few ancient sparc-II systems. They have Solaris 10, but I still use CDE because, even now (or rather 1/2006 edition of Solaris 10), Sun does a better jobs of integrating some of their tools into CDE than their newer Gnome Java Desktop thingy, even though Sun is making a big push to move everthing over to Gnome. (Besides, Gnome runs dog slow on those ancient boxes). I could install fluxbox or WindowMaker on those boxes too, but the menus would be empty.
Well, I do appreciate both Debian and Ubuntu. I run Sarge on my home server, Etch on my laptop, and recently statued using Ubuntu on my desktop (switched from etch on that because multi-media support seemed to be better with Ubuntu).
I always us the net-install cd myself and apt-get the rest. The first thing I do after install, is edit the source list to add my favorite repositories and comment out the cd, so all future updates come off the wire instead of having to juggle the CD.
Perhaps I didn't say clearly enough, so lots of folks are getting the wrong impression. I'm not saying that obscure packages should be banished completely, I'm saying they shouldn't be a reason to hold up the release. I'm saying base the release on the the packages that 95% of us use in common (things like the kernel, the basic gnu environment, X, Gnome, KDE, OpenOffice). The maintiners of obscure packages can futz around all they want, but there is no reason to hold up the entire release for them. Put their stuff in a semi-official "contributed but not core" repository. When the maintiners get around to releasing the package, you'll be able to apt-get it.
You can turn that argument on its head. Maintain a high quality core, and let specialized users add their special packages on top as they please in contributed respositories. I'd do that to make the core better. You could still apt-get gObscureFoo.deb after it was moved into a contributed repository. It just means that delays in gObscureFoo isn't holding back the core OS.
I think the apt-cache search function will work on any repository (official or not) in your apt sources list. My point is to let the maintainers do what they want, but don't let them act as a drag on the whole project.